Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume Five

I liked the introduction to this volume by artist Stephen Bissette where he talks about how Alan Moore’s interest in the grand cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil that ended the previous storyline had been waning and that a change in direction was necessary. As I’ve said before, I think Moore is at his best when he keeps his feet on the ground, and I didn’t like where the “American Gothic” story ended up.

So things start off on a slightly better foot here. But only slightly better because the new storyline is all about the romance between Abby Cable and Swamp Thing, which for some reason fascinated Moore but which I don’t care for at all. I don’t think of Saga of the Swamp Thing as a romance comic. The plot is also predicated on the absurd legal problems Abby gets into when it’s made public that she’s been getting physical with Swampy. It’s a real stretch to see why she’d be prosecuted for this to the degree she is, but you just have to take it as a given so that Swamp Thing can rocket through the Green to her rescue by turning Gotham into a botanical garden full of hippies. This is “the greening of Gotham,” which I take it is a nod to Charles Reich. But there’s a dark side to this too, suggested by the title of one issue as “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Bosch’s carnivals have an ambiguous colour to them.

Anyway, with Swamp Thing becoming “very nearly a god” there are a bunch of people who want to take him down. Batman tries using a Super Soaker filled with defoliant but that gets him nowhere. Then Lex Luthor figures out, somehow, that Swampy’s ability to zip away into the Green and regenerate himself whenever he’s in danger can be blocked by an electronic jammer. So after being tagged with one of those he then gets napalmed, which sends his spirit to a blue planet while a despairing Abby heads back to the bayou. They both dream of each other, in their different ways.

The “blue heaven” Swampy is exiled to looks interesting, with Rick Veitch giving us a different take on the sort of psychedelic otherworldliness you get in the Doctor Strange comics. But I also thought Moore’s writing went over-the-top again, with the shades of blue likened to “the color of saxophones at dusk . . . of orbiting police lights smeared across tenement windows . . . of a flame’s intestines . . . of the faint tracery of veins visible beneath the ghost-flesh of her forearm’s underside . . . of loneliness . . . of melancholy. The blues.” But this is the complete Moore, and you have to take him all together. I really wonder what the average comic reader thought of it though. In any event, Moore’s run with Swamp Thing was nearing the end. In fact, he was writing Watchmen at the same time as he was working on the stories collected here, which is both a sign of being in a particularly hot creative phase as well as an indication that his attention was starting to wander.

Graphicalex