Swamp Thing: Volume One

It’s called Swamp Thing but that character (the transformed Alec Holland) only briefly appears a couple of times, once in a flashback. Instead this is the Daughter of Swamp Thing, a teenage girl named Tefé, who has come about through – here I take a deep breath – Swampy temporarily possessing the body of John Constantine and having sex with his (Swampy’s) wife Abby and impregnating her with an elemental spirit known as the Sprout. After she’s born, Tefé inhabits the body of a girl named Mary Conway, who was terminally ill. Tefé loses her memory of being the Sprout when she becomes Mary, but it all comes back to her when she gets angry, leading to her shedding the body of Mary and being reborn as the platinum-haired Tefé Holland. With her hair she’s supposed to look like her mom Abby but I kept being reminded of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. She even operates a bit like a witch, as her super powers involve casting what amount to plant-based spells that kill or incapacitate people. In any event, now conscious of her powers she starts crisscrossing the U.S. having various adventures while different people (federal agents, a samurai-style killer from the Green) try to hunt her down.

There’s real talent on board here – from headline author Brian K. Vaughan, the distinctive art of Roger Peterson, and John Costanza’s lettering – but something about it wasn’t working for me. I didn’t mind changing the focus from Swamp Thing to his daughter, but she’s pretty much just a drifter here. At one point she has a mission to find the Tree of Knowledge (not the one from the Bible, at least I don’t think) but she doesn’t know where it is or what it does and by the end of this run she’s basically given up on it. Along the way she picks up a couple of (male) drifter friends: an ex-Marine named Pilate and an ex-smokejumper named Barnabas who’s had half his face burned off. Together they steal vehicles and crash in abandoned apartments or other temporary accommodations as they just . . . drift.

Basically, Tefé wanders into one bad situation after another and punishes evildoers. She’s on a lobster-trawling ship where one of the crew goes crazy, so she kills him. A girl gets raped by a band she’s a fan of, so Tefé fixes them (I think literally). A hobo tries to rape her so she skins his arms. A guy selling flowers at a roadside stand upsets her so she chokes him with pollen. A guy who killed the man in the apartment next to him is immobilized and handed in to the police.

You’ll note that none of the bad guys she punishes are supervillains or have any special powers at all. Either of her drifter friends could easily kick their asses, if she’d asked them. Her victims are certainly no match for Tefé, and she usually disposes of them in a couple of panels through her ability to manipulate the tissue of flora and fauna. After a while this started to not be very interesting. Meanwhile, the big story playing in the background isn’t moved along very quickly and we don’t really find out much more than the fact that certain people, some of them likeable and others not, are after Tefé.

So on the one hand I appreciate Vaughan and his team trying to go in a new direction, and I like the meatiness of the writing, which is very character-driven. I’m sure Vaughan must have been thinking of Alan Moore’s run with Saga of the Swamp Thing and what he did to basically re-invent the title and make it his own. But there is no larger compelling story being told here and no conflict either. Perhaps that was still to come in the series, but I have to say that after this first volume of the series I wasn’t enthusiastic about reading more.

Graphicalex