“Swamp Thing in comics is a little like Batman in movies: Do we need ANOTHER origin?
I think there’s meant to be something new or unique about this Swamp Thing because he’s Indian(?), but other than having roots (plant pun #1) in India, there’s nothing about this guy that’s…there’s nothing about this guy.
Levi has zero character other than being confused about whether or not he’s Swamp Thing. How he became Swamp Thing seems to also be 100% unknown. None of this seems to really make sense, and if we’re going to spend time with the Bruce Banner side of things, that’s cool, but that should affect the person, the Swamp Thing, or both. Ideally, it’d be both.
And the book, like a lot of Swamp Thing books, has the Ghostbusters Afterlife problem: How, after the Statue of Liberty came to live from magic goo, did everyone sort of forget that ghosts are real? That would be far and away the most significant discovery of human existence, that there is some form of afterlife, and yet it took about 20 years for everyone to be like, “Wait…that happened?”
How has everyone forgotten that Swamp Thing took over the entire city of Gotham? I mean, maybe comics get more of a pass than Ghostbusters movies because in comics, shit like this happens all the time, who can keep track?
Wouldn’t it be pretty easy for science-y people to be like, “Okay, I don’t know the mechanism at play here, but clearly you’re Swamp Thing.”
But the real friction comes between the reader and the book: The reader has selected a book called Swamp Thing. This is a character we’re familiar with. And we spend a few issues watching a guy bumble through the discovery of what the fuck Swamp Thing is, whether he’s real, and meanwhile, we know THE WHOLE TIME.
It’s like a vampire movie where it’s called Vampires Aplenty, and a guy gets turned into a vampire, and we spend 45 minutes with the guy being confused about just what he’s turning into.
It’s reasonable for a real-life person to be confused, deeply, by turning into a Swamp Thing. But there needs to be balance, because the existence of Swamp Thing is not something that’s a question mark for readers. It breaks the reality of the book a little, but I do think it’s worthwhile to speed up the discovery process, because if the discovery process is most of what the writer’s got in mind, I’m SO BORED.
And we have a storyline with some weird other elemental kind of dude haunting the desert, and again, I’m like, “Is this really all that crazy? In a world with a literal Superman, would it be totally outrageous that there’s some weird guy who has some form of superpowers?
I’m going to expose a personal sensitivity: Sometimes this feels like a thing from comics writers who come from big cities: They seem to have this assumption that people from rural areas would not have any experience with superheroes, therefore would immediately assume something like a desert monster man was probably not real and couldn’t possibly exist.
At its worst, this sometimes feels to me like the worst of big city mentality, that city folks feel people who live in rural areas are not just less cultured, but that they are completely unaware of what is going on in the world at-large.
I will admit, I feel like I’m probably less cultured than someone in a big city, but it’s not like I’ve never heard of the Puerto Rican Day Parade, you know? I’m aware of things that exist in big cities. I’ve HEARD of Hamilton, even if I never saw it on Broadway. I’m aware of the Guggenheim. I’ve heard the same coastal rappers you have.
I think, if there was a Justice League, I’d be aware of it, even if I’d never seen any of the members in person.
It feels like a way to have a monsterman or introduce a new character: If he’s in the sticks, supervillains can still be new!
Barf.
I guess I feel like a lot of people misunderstand what makes Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing work, and they’re like, “An origin, that’s the ticket! The Green! Bad guys, we’re set!”
What makes Moore’s books work is that they have a push/pull between Alec Holland and Swamp Thing, and we spend time with Holland coming to realize that he’s not Alec Holland anymore, and perhaps he’s in no way human. And in some ways that’s good (he has powers and abilities way beyond any human), and in others, it’s bad (he begins to lose touch with humanity). Or, maybe it’s not bad because losing touch with humanity is neither good nor bad, it’s just change.
Can a being travel through infinite space and return unchanged? Probably not.
Can a being replicate a physical experience with a human by growing a hallucinogenic tuber and feeding it to a human? Maybe?
Does “doing good” mean anything remotely like the same thing it meant to a human?
Do human concerns mean anything to an elemental force?
Moore left some things mysterious while also putting enough of the puzzle together to write coherent stories. And while a lot of it was floaty and too psychedelic for me, I could respect what he was doing, and I think he did a damn good job making a character that was often a Creature from the Black Lagoon ripoff into something more interesting.
But this version of Swamp Thing is now doing the same thing previous ones were: being a copy of something that came before without adding much of interest.
THEN we get into a story in a post-apocalyptic future that I have to assume is part of some DC crossover bullshit, and I’m like, “Guys, you need to stop putting your crossovers smack in the middle of your collected trade paperback editions of shit.” I’m like 4 issues into this origin, then we fast-forward to an alternate future like a billion years, there are only the dregs of humanity left alive because…because?
What’s weird is I LIKED the future story better than the other stuff. I didn’t totally know what happened, but it was cool because SOMETHING happened.”