Saga of the Swamp Thing Book Four

In my notes on Saga of the Swamp Thing Book Three I talked about how I preferred the back-to-basics Swamp Thing stories that played like X-Files “monster of the week” episodes to the epic storylines involving some grand cosmic battle between good and evil. I felt that way again here, as I really enjoyed the introductory stories about the druggies eating some sweet potato that has fallen off Swampy’s back and going on hallucinatory trips, and “Ghost Dance,” about the legacy of a gun manufacturer playing out in a haunted house (a story that was a personal favourite of Alan Moore’s). But once we get back into the preparation for a final battle between a newly awakened power of evil and the forces of light, I thought things weakened. Sticking with the comparison to the X-Files, you spend all this time building up the main storyline or “mytharc” about Fox’s missing sister and alien abductions and black oil, but when you finally go on board the mothership you know you’re going to be disappointed. I mean, where do you go from a build-up like what we get here: “This is ultimate dark, ultimate light. The forces and the stakes here are fundamental and absolute . . . and whichever side meets its final destruction this day, everything will be changed.”

That said, I thought the final battle was well choreographed. A host of characters are assembled. John Constantine is holding a completely useless séance with a group Neil Gaiman describes as “the detritus, the flotsam and jetsam of the DC occult universe.” Swampy is in hell (or thereabouts) and is joined by Deadman, Phantom Stranger, the rhyming demon Etrigan, and the Spectre. They’re trying to stop the aforementioned evil. Or maybe it isn’t evil. Maybe it’s just misunderstood. In any event, the glowing hand of God descends from heaven and the world just continues on its merry way. “Nothing has happened. Everything has happened.” Good and evil are necessarily linked, you see. Can’t have one without the other. According to Gaiman’s introduction, Moore thought this had something to do with the Manichaeism of American culture, and what happens is an answer to Swamp Thing’s questioning if there is “some truth . . . that may be divined . . . from the entrails of America.”

Well, colour me unimpressed with these flabby conclusions. Getting to them was a lot of fun though, even if Swampy himself remains a remarkably passive as well as ponderous figure throughout. I think maybe Moore came up with the character of John Constantine just to liven things up. I do like what Moore did with this series, but at the same time I don’t think he was ever as interested in Swamp Thing as he was in doing his own thing.

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