SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING: BOOK 1

By: Jason Henderson
Date: Wednesday, December 27, 2000

What on Earth can I say about Alan Moore's historic run on Saga of the Swamp Thing that hasn't been said a thousand times already? What critical observation can I make that has not been made by far more capable pens than mine? Picking up the trade paperback Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book 1 is like walking into a comic book store in 1984 it's still that fresh, and it's still that different from anything else before or since. Except that this is the new millennium, and by now not only is everyone aware that the Moore run began with Saga #21, but the seeds lain by Moore and artists Steve Bissette and John Totleben has borne memorable fruit several generations over. By now it must seem almost passe to be amazed at how poetic and haunting Swamp Thing is. But it's really still that good.

Saga of the Swamp Thing was the second comic series starring the Swamp Thing, a more intellectual version of the Marvel Comics creature Man-Thing. The story went that Alec Holland, a botanist with a government contract, was researching a strange regenerative compound for plants when he died in a horrible terrorist attack that also killed his wife. Holland's body, torched and doused in his mysterious chemicals, went into the swamps, from which he emerged as a new creature: the Swamp Thing. The plot early on chiefly dealt, as might be expected, with Holland's search for a cure for his condition.

Ho-hum, really, although there were a few weird angles thrown in once writer Marty Pasko and artist Tom Yeates came along. Pasko and Yeates took Holland's best friends, a married couple named Abby and Matt Cable, and made them weirdprivate investigator Matt became a sorcerer and started having a drunken affair with conjured demons. You could see the germ of something wonderful and still unformed, like the millions of creatures in the fecund swamp itself. But it didn't lastPasko and Yeates' run ended with the army and Holland's billionaire enemy Sunderland blasting the Swamp Thing's head off.

That's where Alan Moore came in, and the fecund green swarmed with unnamable slithering creatures, and the Saga of the Swamp Thing made history.

Alan Moore, a British writer who had recently made waves with his wonderful run on the comic known here as Miracleman, had an instinctive grasp of something that had eluded other writers for mainstream comics. He knew these worlds were magical, full of growing, warping myth, ripe for plucking to make bizarre, horrific, satiric, even romantic fiction. He didn't even have to add muchthe pieces, Moore saw, were there already. You just had to look at (in this case) the DC Universe and squint.


Moore's run opens with a story called 'Anatomy Lesson,' narrated by a long-existing minor villain of the DCU, Jason Woodrue, the Floronic Man. Woodrue is fascinated by the plant world and is losing his grasp on human reality, but as a scientist he's been hired to autopsy the body of the Swamp Thing, Alec Holland. What he learns was Alan Moore's most shocking conceit, and God love the guy for throwing this card down in his first issue on the book: the Swamp Thing wasn't Alec Holland at all. He was an accident, an earthly alien, born of chemically altered plant life that wanted desperately to be something more and had tried to copy the body of a dead botanist. He had no humanity to regainhe was the Swamp Thing.

At first this discovery drives the Swamp Thing insane, and he suicidally roots himself to the floor of the swamp, seeking to kill his own consciousness and re-integrate with the green around him. But a couple of things bring him around again: one is Abby Cable, the wife of Swamp Thing's friend Matt, who needs a friend to lean on as her marriage slowly falls apart. The other is Woodrue himself, who is about to go stark raving mad and threaten the survival of the human race.

In fact, one of the first tasks Moore has the Swamp Thing perform is saving the Earth from a most ingenious attack of the plants. This plot, in which Woodrue, acting as the voice of the angry, fed-up trees, threatens to pump so much oxygen into the air that we'll all die if we light a match, allows Moore to show us how the DCU looks through Swamp Thing's odd little lens.

And what a place it is. We meet none other than the JLA in their satellite above the Earth, and Moore re-introduces them without changing a hair. Yet they're completely fresh: 'There is a house above the world,' Moore tells us, 'where the Overpeople gather. There is a man with wings like a bird...there is a man who can see across the planet and wring diamonds from its anthracite. There is a man who moves so fast that his life is an endless gallery of statues. In the house above the world, the Overpeople gather, and sit, and listen.'

Well, heck yeah, that's the JLA all right. Like unto Gods.

But the most astounding offering of this cycle of Saga of the Swamp Thing is its use of vegetation as a narrative device, such as we had never seen before. In page after page of Bissette and Totleben's sketchy, dreamy work, every corner bursts and sprawls with roots, vines, saplings, buds and leaves, while mysterious gases rise and strange insects slither. Moore's swamp is a universe larger than that which we inhabit, and his Swamp Thing is the walking embodiment of that world, a plant elemental who can form and re-form from the green around him, rising again and again from the gassy, mired swamps, speaking for the untold teeming voices therein.

Moore gives us a Lovecraftian vision that surprises us with its daring at the same time that it comforts us by remaining respectfully in the comic world from which it springs. Because this is still a DC comic, just one where the world is a little sprung from its axis. The stories move at a more luxurious pace, because Moore wants us to feel the green fecundity of the world he's made. So that when he shows us lovesuch as the Swamp Thing and Abby Cable lounging in the swamp like characters out of A Summer Place, we not only accept it, but we feel it. Moore is so clever he can create a story about a giant plant man and make us care more about the sadness of the love triangle the plant man is involved in.

On page 103 of Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book 1, the Swamp Thing takes a moment to acknowledged and accept his world and who he is. 'Almost dawn,' he says.

'A bird speaks...barely awake...another answers...soon...all the birds...are talking, telling...each other...their dreams. Why? Why did...I ever leave this place? I want...to walk here...forever. I want...to struggle...with the alligators...turning over...in the mud...I want to...be alive...and grow...and rise up.'

And the Swamp Thing spreads his arms, at home in the green, speaking to all those of us who would walk here forever.

Trade Paperback from DC Comics. Written by Alan Moore. Art by Steve Bissette and John Totleben.

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