Saga of the Swamp Thing Book One

I’d read Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing titles years ago, but had remembered them, falsely, as being a standalone series or a reboot of the franchise. That’s not the case. In fact, Moore took over with issue #20, which is a direct continuation of the events that concluded Swampy’s battle with Arcane, and the latter’s death. Or “death.” That was the end of DC’s Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Volume 3 if you buy the collected editions.

After tying up the “loose ends” (the title of issue #20) to that storyline, Moore was off on his way, not really reinventing the character but subtly redefining him. It’s a new sort of origin story, being one that leaves the original in place. This is explained through the experiments of the Floronic Man on a frozen Swamp Thing in issue #21, which is a great comic and one that works well as a standalone.

Moore’s great theme in all his work is that of a powerful mind becoming unhinged, and he gets to indulge that a lot with the various characters  introduced here (Swamp Thing, the Floronic Man, Matt Cable . . . Jason Blood is already nutty). His writing is also in good form, with “plump, warm summer rain that covers the sidewalk with leopard spots,” and how “clouds like plugs of blooded cotton wool dab ineffectually at the slashed wrists of the sky.” I don’t want to go all in on comic writers being great poets because it’s a different game, but there are levels and Moore was usually operating at a higher one than most who have played it.

The crowded panels of Stephen Bissette and John Totleben’s artwork goes well with melting characters, wavy hair and mossy tendrils. There are also several glorious full-page drawings that are quite effective, especially since page layout is such a big part of the visual delight of the series. Nearly every page here is shattered in an interesting way.

I’m not a fan of all of Moore’s stuff, or even all of his Swamp Thing work, but as things kick off here you can tell why this has been recognized as a comic-book classic. Moore took an already established character and while keeping him very much the same in most important ways also made him his own.

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Daredevil: Dark Art

Dark Art. How dark? Very dark!

Dark Art is superhero title that reads a lot like a horror comic. Daredevil and Blindspot are on the trail of a serial/mass killer who makes grotesque art out of his victims. Like a giant wall mural painted with the blood of over a hundred different people, or a tableau of the bodies of individuals transformed via the Terrigen mist into bastard Inhumans and then into props. These atrocities have been perpetrated by a figure who calls himself the Muse, a clear descendant of the Joker villain tree. (I see he calls himself the Muse. The press has dubbed him Vincent Van Gore.) The Muse walks the walk and talks the talk of a rebel street artist. Meaning he says things like “Do you think the symbolism here is too overt?” and wears combat boots, a knit skullcap, and suspenders without a shirt. Plus he has a very punchable face, even with his bleeding eye sockets.

This series marked the debut of the Muse and though I was left unclear as to the nature of his powers, aside from having really quick reflexes, I was getting into the horror vibe. And the story just kept getting darker, with the climactic issue taking place in the Muse’s atelier, which is decorated with various corpses and body parts (heads, brains, hearts, etc.). Then (spoiler alert, sort of) things end up with the Muse gouging out Blindspot’s eyes! That just ain’t right.

I’d had mixed feelings on Charles Soule’s Back in Black Daredevil run before this. The Chinatown volume was good but I thought Supersonic was a big step back. I’m happy to say that things got back on track here though, as this was a tight story that was creepy and involving, without too many distractions. Among these: Matt Murdock’s new job as a D.A. isn’t going well, making me wonder why he was even bothering. Can’t he make a living doing something else, perhaps making surreptitious use of some of his powers? There’s a trip to New Attilan to try to enlist the help of the Inhumans in tracking down the Muse but that doesn’t go very far, and I can’t say I was too happy with their taking jurisdiction at the end. And finally Ron Garney’s art, while it has its own atmosphere that goes well with this version of DD, isn’t growing on me.

It gives these comics a distinctive look, which I give Garney credit for. The generic Marvel house style drives me crazy. You could replace it now, and probably for the better, with something done by AI. And Garney’s art does fit with the horror angle. But it’s not my thing.

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Crime and Punishment

There is a point in updating the classics. Sure we can make the argument, and a good argument too, that Shakespeare is our contemporary. But that isn’t always easy for everyone to grasp, which means there’s nothing wrong with adapting Shakespeare, or any author, into modern forms like film or the graphic novel. It’s not that different from just putting Shakespeare on stage in modern dress.

This is a subtly modernized adaptation of Crime and Punishment. We’re in Putin’s Russia, but we only know that because we can see Putin’s face on TV or in portraits in the police station. And that’s not jarring because Putin sees himself so much as a “new tsar.” Then there are ‘80s-style punks in the street of St. Petersburg and they don’t seem out of place either because if Dostoyevsky was writing at a period when Imperial Russia was in decline you could see that historical moment rhyming with the Soviet Empire’s final days.

Is Raskolnikov our contemporary though? The night before I wrote up these notes I was at dinner with friends and the subject came up as to whether having a conscience was something that was in decline. At one point in the evolution of our species a conscience probably served a purpose, but in more atomized societies like our own, where our most prominent and successful role models (individual and corporate) are psychopaths, it may be that a conscience is the psychological equivalent of a tailbone. Meanwhile, narcissism is seen as a superpower as often as it’s described as a plague.

All of this is sort of by the way though in discussing this graphic novel version of Crime and Punishment because it’s not really interested in Raskolnikov’s tortured conversion. In fact, I wasn’t even sure he had experienced a conversion. He’s flattened out quite a bit here by Alain Korkos, with spiky hair and hollowed-out or whirlpool eyes being made to do a lot of work in representing his madness. Snippets of his theory of the man who has risen above conscience get dropped into the mix, but I don’t think David Zane Mairowitz, who wrote the adaptation, wanted to go into that too deeply either.

Where I think this version of the story is strongest is in the presentation of some of the supporting characters. Raskolnikov’s sister Dunya is a fresh-faced hotty and we can feel there’s something more than a family attachment in some of the drawings. Luzhin is an ‘80s pimp in a three-piece suit, aviator shades, and a cigarette dangling from his lip. Svidrigailov is a cultured sugar daddy. Sonya is a goth pauper-princess. About the only interpretation I didn’t agree with was the police investigator Porfiry, who is a goateed fellow with round sunglasses. He looks threatening, but without any of the depth or humour that readers of the novel will recognize.

Of course reducing a brick of a novel into a 120-page comic necessarily means you’re losing a lot. What’s left is coherent in terms of the story and I think relatively faithful to the original, but it isn’t close to being a substitute or even a summary. Nor, despite the modern setting, does it have much of a new spin to put on things. Was Raskolnikov the equivalent of a punk? The kind of guy to have a Sex Pistols poster hanging in his room? Or was he more intellectual than that? It’s an interesting question to entertain, but it’s also a kind of dead end that I don’t think leads us any further into the sort of ideas Dostoyevsky was digging into. Or maybe we just live in a less serious time.

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