Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Volume 3

After the initial run of Swamp Thing comics ended, along with Swampy’s brief sojourn with the Challengers of the Unknown (covered in The Bronze Age Volume 2), it looked as though the character was going to be left on the shelf for a while. Luckily, DC changed their mind and so we got a new series titled The Saga of the Swamp Thing, which was written by Martin Pasko. This omnibus edition presents #1-19 of that run, along with The Saga of the Swamp Thing Annual #1, which is a comic adaptation of Wes Craven’s 1982 movie and doesn’t really fit into the canon.

Because they were sort of starting over here we get a quick recap of the origin story. Which is understandable. What’s harder to get is why they keep coming back to retell this same bit (Alec Cross blowing up in his lab and then jumping into the swamp, where he’s transformed by his “biorestorative” formula). After a while, wouldn’t they think that regular readers knew how Swamp Thing came about? But perhaps there weren’t enough regular readers yet.

Immediately a depressing note is struck. Swampy is still mourning the loss of his beloved Linda, and wishing to God that he could join her in death. And as things proceed it seems as though that wish may be granted, not through mortal combat with the forces of evil but because we’re constantly being told that the mucky monster is “dying of some as-yet-unknown-ailment.” But why they keep making such a fuss over this is beyond me, for two reasons: (1) the ailment doesn’t seem to slow him down much, if at all; and (2) in the end it just turns out to be a bit of E. coli that’s quickly cured with a dip in his bio-restorative swamp. This seems to be the sort of thing that an editor should have been asking Pasko about. “Martin, where are we going with this disease angle?” And perhaps there was a point to it all in the beginning but things took a different direction. That happens.

The first 13 issues tell a single story, with a couple of minor digressions. This has Matt Cable and Abigail Arcane being replaced by Lizabeth Tremayne and Dennis Barclay as Swampy’s traveling companions. These three are opposed by the Sunderland Corporation, which is a generic bunch of baddies who basically run the U.S. military-industrial complex, and a “herald of the Antichrist” figure in the form of a fast-growing girl who is clearing a path for the coming of the Beast. She’s also tied in with Nazi occultism and such. Basically, she’s just everything bad. Her Van Helsing is a former concentration camp kapo named Dr. Helmut Kripptmann who soon joins the monster-hunting team.

It’s all wildly overwrought in a mythic kind of way (you can see what Alan Moore saw in the franchise), but I found it quite interesting and compelling on its own. My main problem with it is that Swamp Thing sort of became someone just along for the ride a lot of the time, especially since he was feeling poorly. And indeed I think this is a problem that all these early Swamp Thing titles had. They had good stories and well-drawn supporting casts, but Swampy himself keeps fading into the background. Maybe it’s because he has such trouble communicating, barely able to croak out a few words at a time. That’s quite a limitation for a leading man. Also, he’s obviously without any love interest (though one story here does play with the idea of him missing out on a woman who would understand him).

The digressions from the main storyline are also a lot of fun. The empaths who are used to absorb the injuries to Sunderland operatives were a neat idea, and the island of shipwreck survivors who reshape reality into classic old movies (King Kong, Casablanca) was a laugh. Things didn’t just fall apart after the initial 13-issue run either, as we then get a two-parter with Swampy facing off against a crystal man/living computer and then having to deal with the return of Arcane in a revolting insect form. There’s no keeping that guy down, even if he keeps coming back more damaged than ever.

A dark comic, what with the empaths, the town of vampires, and the child slayer storyline (dedicated, in 1982, to “the good people of Atlanta, that they may put the horror behind them . . . but not forget”). But it’s still full of the free-form imaginings that made Swamp Thing something just a bit different in the comic book canon. The outlier is the final comic, which, as mentioned already, is an adaptation of Wes Craven’s movie. It’s pretty standard stuff, and doesn’t connect well with the rest of the Swamp Thing mythology (Arcane, for starters, is a completely different sort of character), but fans will like having it in here anyway.

Graphicalex