Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Volume One

The roots of Swamp Thing, to make use of an appropriate metaphor, are in horror comics. This first Bronze Age collection actually gives us two origin stories though, with the creature’s first slightly hang-dog appearance in the DC horror/dark fantasy/mystery comic House of Secrets and then the reworked version when he was given his own series a little over a year later.

But even after rebranding as a superhero, the world he inhabited would continue to be that of genre horror. After the first issue of the regular series he’s immediately whisked away to a castle with “Caligarian corridors” that’s located in Transylvania (or Universal’s backlot, or somewhere thereabouts) where he meets the mad scientist Arcane, his Plasticine creations the Un-Men, and a Frankenstein’s monster called the Patchwork Man. Then it’s off to the Scottish moors and a date with a werewolf. Still to come are a killer robot, an alien, and even a Lovecraftian Ancient One called M’Nagalah. Somehow they skipped vampires.

That probably sounds terribly derivative, and it is, but I thought the stories were all pretty interesting, and Len Wein isn’t averse to lathering up some of that purple comic-book prose to paint a scene with. Get a load of this scene setting: “The darkness cries – a long mournful wail that writhes through the gnarled cypress branches like a breath of Hades’ wing, skipping over the placid surface of the stagnant mire below . . .” And Bernie Wrightson’s art also has a feel for the grotesque that sets the right note.

The Swamp Thing himself makes a great hero. At least he’s always been a favourite of mine. Blown up in a lab experiment, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Alec Holland runs into the swamp, where his bio-restorative formula brings him back to life as an anthropomorphic moss-man, 89 inches tall and 547 pounds – “apparently all muscle!” Bullets don’t have any effect on him and if a limb gets sliced off it grows back in no time. I liked the idea of him not being able to communicate and so being mistaken as the monster that killed Alec Holland who then gets hunted by the series Ahab, Matt Cable, even though this later gets tossed away.

As for the wild, globe-hopping adventures, I don’t think sales were very strong and they may have just been trying to find something that would stick. There’s even a Batman cameo thrown in with one of the less fanciful episodes. You’ve always gotta work the crossovers.

In sum it’s a crazy and colourful mix of the surreal with a whack of different genre tropes, from horror to SF to dark fantasy to your standard superhero fare. You can see why so many different creators have been drawn to such a protean figure over the years, without ever being able to pin him down.

Graphicalex