Roots Of The Swamp Thing: Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, The Un-Men And More—"On Swamp Thing:" An Essay by Joe Bongonrio

Roots of the Swamp Thing: Your Portal to the Universe of Swamp Thing, The Un-Men and John Constantine: Hellblazer

• Part 1: Before Year 1
• Part 2: Year 1 to 1899
• Part 3: 1900 to 1969
• Part 4: 1970 to 1979
• Part 5: 1980 to 1984
• Part 6: 1985 to 1988
• Part 7: 1989 to 1991
• Part 8: 1992 to 1994
• Part 9: 1995 to 1999
• Part 10: 2000 to Present

Born on the Bayou
A history and introduction

Creature Features
Articles and feature stories

Cover Gallery
Judge the books by the covers

In the Swamplight
Issue-by-issue breakdowns

Elemental Lineage
Past lives and other entities

Upcoming Releases
Coming to a bog near you

What's New Bayou?
Archived news updates

About Me
Portrait of a swamp-nerd

Homepage
Go back to the roots

Contact Me
Comments, corrections & tubers

Thanks to Joe Bongiorno, who first dragged me kicking and screaming into the mucky mythos of Swamp Thing, and to Paul Giachetti, who created the amazing header banner.

Thanks also to reader 'Alec Holland,' whose support has been invaluable; Mike Sterling, for promoting Swamp Thing and this site; and Kevin Church, for his excellent optimization advice.

And thanks to Len Wein, Bernie Wrightson, Alan Moore, John Totelben, Stephen Bissette, Jamie Delano, Garth Ennis and all the other creators whose work inspired this site.

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"On Swamp Thing:" An Essay by Joe Bongonrio

Some time back, I asked my friend Joe Bongiorno to write a guest editorial about Swamp Thing. Joe had first gotten me into the title, back in the late 1990s, so I thought it only fitting that he contribute to my site on the subject.

Knowing full well I'm not a fan of superhero books, Joe kept trying to coerce me into giving it a try, danging his copy of House of Secrets #92 in front of me as though it were a Twinkie and I were a 7-year-old kid who hadn't eaten sugar in a month. Eventually, I relented, just to get him to shut up.

Clearly, it worked, as this site illustrates. And yet, as you read Joe's essay, you'll notice an ironic twist: In the intervening years between when he'd handed me that first Swamp Thing tale and when I'd created the site, Joe had changed his mind about the series as a whole.

Joe's essay is fair, however. He has a lot to say about what's worked in the Swamp Thing universe, and about what he feels hasn't. And though I'm still a fan, I do have to grant that he has several valid points—and that he's extremely eloquent in making them. So in the interest of showcasing an opposing viewpoint, here's Joe's essay on his thoughts looking back nearly a decade after reading the first three series. Check it out, and be sure to visit Joe's amazing website, TimelineUniverse.net, when you're through.

On Swamp Thing

I must admit that seven years after reading it, I've come to have rather strong feelings of disregard for the Swamp Thing title. As a character, Swamp Thing himself is great: he's what turned me on to the series and ultimately what kept me there when things started turning sour. The character displays compassion, justice, love and courage; he's a champion of the earth, a noble protector and an altogether fun guy (pun intended) to boot. As a series, however, its a different story. Swamp Thing began life as an enjoyable post-EC monster title which Len Wein (and then roommate Gerry Conway) "borrowed" from the old Airboy comics in the character known as The Heap. The Heap was the forerunner for all marsh monsters to follow (note: The Heap himself may have been a borrowing from Theodore Sturgeon's short story "It," albeit Sturgeon's creature was no helper of Man), a bizarre-looking – but lovable – humanoid moss creature that aided Airboy (and in a later incarnation of the series his son) on various adventures and against a myriad of human and supernatural foes. Len took his version 'Swamp Thing' to DC and Gerry brought 'Man-Thing' to Marvel. Both started off as one-shots in horror anthology titles, and in time both were deemed worthy enough to warrant their own individual series. Wein's Swamp Thing soon followed the comic-book tradition of crossovers – and before too long – Batman and a few others were paying visits to the marsh. The decision to incorporate a horror/fantasy character into the greater DC Universe would prove to be part of the series' undoing in later years. Swamp Thing was eventually cancelled and the character was dragged over to the abysmal Challengers of the Unknown series for six mind-stultifying issues of stupidity as the character traveled millions of years through time with the abominable "Challs" (absurd as it now sounds in a few years another writer would attempt to take Swamp Thing through time with similar success)... Before long, Swamp Thing was back in his own series (it's second) with a more capable writer (Marty Pasko) and better days ahead.

Then came Alan Moore. It's no exaggeration to say that Moore is among the best writers the comics world has ever known, if not the best. For a change, a comic book actually had a master storyteller on their hands – an artist who knew how to craft powerful and interesting tales, generate an atmosphere of palpable fear, and create believable flesh and blood characters that readers could care about. Now, the horror medium is not for everyone, and Swamp Thing contains more than its share of disturbing elements that some might rightfully find distasteful. Incest, child-exploitation, rape, mutilation, cannibalism, and other less than savory elements were backdrops for many of Swamp Thing's adventures. In the hands of Moore, however, they were at least handled with a sense of artistic care and propriety, and never sank into debasing exploitation (later writers and titles to emerge from the Vertigo label had no qualms about keeping to such standards). The series took off and became a literary masterpiece that proved to anyone paying attention that the comics medium could attain to far greater artistic heights than it had formerly aspired to. While Moore celebrated a long run on the series, eventually he decided it was time for him to move on to greener pastures.

Admittedly, few writers could have followed in the heels of Moore. Neill Gaiman would have done very well, and I can think of a handful of others that might have managed to at least maintain a certain level of integrity for the series. But that was not to be the case. Over the course of the next two writers Swamp Thing devolved into a series so absurd and riddled with plot holes you could move a forest through it.

Rick Veitch, the series' then current illustrator, thought to follow-up on Moore's space saga (in which Swamp Thing took a phantasmagoric tour of the universe) by taking Swampy through time. Time-travel stories are at best extremely difficult to write and even more difficult to make sense of, and even the most capable writers generally fall back on campy pseduo-science for the sake of enjoyable stories (the Back to the Future trilogy, Quantum Leap). Veitch's efforts proved time-travel was in fact a waste of time, as issue after issue became bogged down in absurdity. But the real problem was that the stories became increasingly difficult to follow and ultimately just not that interesting. Veitch departed the series due to DC's firm decision not to run a story he had written in which Swamp Thing travels back in time to the final days of Jesus' life. In Veitch's proposed tale, Swamp Thing and Etrigan the Rhyming Demon play direct roles in a blatant corruption of the Biblical account (Veitch apparently had no qualms placing what many consider a sacred historical event within the context of a fictional universe that embraces evolution, aliens and Greek and Roman deities). In an astonishingly unprofessional and bull-headed move, Veitch—unable to comprehend how such a story might be considered offensive to some abandoned the title mid-stream, forcing DC to come up with a writer on a moment's notice. Proving they could match one move of stupidity with another, DC decided to hire writer Doug Wheeler to pick up the strands of Veitch's now abandoned storyline.

Admittedly, Doug Wheeler had an unenviable task. He had to finish Veitch's barely comprehensible storyline, as well as come up with a new and interesting storyline of his own. While he may arguably have succeeded at the former, he failed miserably at the latter. So awful has the later run become that Wheeler's stint on Swamp Thing is regarded as its lowest point, incorporating some of the most inane, confusing and ill-conceived ideas of the series. By the time the multi-part 'Quest for the Elementals' storyline was over, Wheeler had mired the series in a dense web of perplexity and delirium that was further made atrocious by the ugliest interior artwork Swamp Thing had ever seen (which is ironic as the cover art was some of the finest to grace the series). The end result was so stultifyingly bad, few would be able to comprehend it.

Whatever straining sense of believability Swamp Thing might have gained under Moore as a Fantasy series was destroyed by shoddy storytelling and an impossible-to-follow narrative that hijacked its readers into nonsensical ideas including mushrooms from outer space, an incomprehensible plotline involving improbable lineages and kidnapped elementals with unpronounceable names. On top of it all was an dumb-as-nails conjoining of DC mythology, pagan religious beliefs, pseudo-science and Biblical concepts twisted (or misunderstood), all of which betrayed a complete lack of knowledge, care or research done on the parts of the authors and editors at DC (who must have been on an extended leave-of-absence to not see how low the series was sinking). In actuality, the problem began with allowing the absurdities of the DC Universe to infiltrate Swamp Thing in the first place, and one that Alan Moore himself perpetuated (although in his case the DC elements were at least made remarkable). The failings of the DC Universe with its myriad superheroes and freaks, and its well-intentioned but ultimately superfluous Crisis on Infinite Earths and other attempts to fix what was shamelessly destroyed by decades of absent continuity, became the failings of Swamp Thing as well.

By the time Nancy Collins came onboard to try and restore some dignity to the series, it was for many a case of too little, too late. Moore's departure had been the death knoll of a once great fantastic series. Collins, to her credit, did manage to return the series to its roots and give it an adult, dramatic element that proved extremely refreshing after the absurdity of the last two story-arcs, and had the prior two writers never gotten involved, Swamp Thing as a whole might have stayed on the top artistically (commercially it was never a great seller even under Moore). Her work shows a maturity and depth of understanding of the horror/fantasy genre, and she is clearly, next to Moore, the most adept writer on the series. Yet before long, it was time for Collins to part as well.

Despite some excellent writing and ideas by Collins, Swamp Thing was again ripped from his roots and dragged through the mud by its next author, Mark Millar, who apparently thought an excess of profanity and surprise plot twists without rhyme or reason would suffice for good stories and characters to care about. Millar must have imagined it would be amusing to take a character that was a perpetual child molester, torturer, rapist and mass murderer and magically transform him into a "kind old man." Conversely, he took established beneficent characters and suddenly twisted them into evil ones, all for the sake of giving readers a shock. His sole redeemable move was the direction in which he took the character of Swamp Thing himself. As a result the series somewhat managed to conclude on a high note. If I'm being extra harsh on Millar, it's because a lot of what he did was pretty amazing. Without eschewing what came before, Millar managed to give Swamp Thing a shot in the arm. Had he relied less on the aforementioned "modernization" and surprise-factors, his run might have even rivaled Moore's in popularity. Thematically, at least, Millar brought both the title and the character to where it needed to be. The saga of the Swamp Thing had drawn to an appropriate close and a rather poignant finish. No more appropriate ending could the series ask for. Or at least, so it should have been.

Years later, the title was resurrected again, only this time it was to follow the miserable career of Swamp Thing's miserable daughter. This third series was penned by Brian Vaughan – by no means a bad writer, but who turned the main character of Tefé into someone so repugnant and put her in a storyline so drenched in negativism, even long-time readers walked away feeling they had been dragged through a bog. Mercifully, the series was cancelled not long afterwards. But the shame of it is, having read Darko Macan's treatment for how he would have taken the series (you can find that here), it's clear to many that it would have made the perfect coda for the first two series. Macan's ideas incorporated not only the continuity of the former Swamp Thing tales, but the spirit, taking Tefé in a direction that was logical for her character, easy for new and old fans to jump onto, and good for the overall story. Yet for whatever reason, the powers-that-be at DC clearly thought Vaughn's trip to the funeral parlor every month would sell more than Macan's concept for mystery and adventure. It didn't and it was cancelled after a mere twenty issues. Of all the setbacks Swamp Thing ever faced, DC's decision to bypass Macan's proposal is one of the biggest.

Why DC would want to resurrect Swamp Thing yet again is beyond anyone's guess, but this time they promised to return Swampy to his roots, only with more insanity, sickness and super-villains. By this point, however, a long time had passed since the second (and primary) series had ended. DC should have presented a story that would bring old and new readers up to speed. They didn't. Instead, they had Mike Carey churn up a storyline in Hellblazer that was every bit as convoluted as some of the most incomprehensible stories of Swamp Thing's past. Due to a mystical Beast from Eden, Sargon, and a ruby with strange powers (!?), Swamp Thing is somehow stripped of everything he gained in Millar's run, all so that they could have him once again roaming the Louisiana Bayou. If you've read that series, you might realize just how utterly wrong an idea that is, not just for the character or continuity, but for the story as a whole. Ah, but they didn't just invalidate over 30 issues of the series, its momentous climax and earth-changing denouement for nothing! No, not at all. See, for a twist, this time he's been split in half, with the primary focus of the series being on the half that's a mindless, blithering idiot (see apparently Swamp Thing has at last become like many of his former DC editors.) Not content to ruin the titular character alone, his family are also dragged through what amounts to a haphazard re-imagining. Abby, who barely resembles the strong heroine she once was is found dating abroad, and of course, missing her swamp-lover, and Tefe decides to stop being the cause of death for everything and everyone she comes across and is transformed into a lesbian in search of love. As with the last series, the story meanders in weirdness, with no one interesting to follow. The series soon emerges an exercise in phantasmagoria, and by the time Andy Diggle hands over the writing chores to Joshua Dysart, even the hardcore fans were perplexed as to what exactly was going on. To be fair, some have expressed enthusiasm for what Dysart had attempted (the run was finally cancelled again at issue #29.) I can't say as I don't know. Having lost interest, I'd stopped reading it early on. It seemed to me that the writers forgot what the series was about: a tragic creature called the Swamp Thing, who is dangerous but ultimately good-natured and heroic, fighting evil and maintaining the balance between Mankind who could be both innocent or destructive and cruel and Nature, which could be similarly destructive and cruel. More importantly, that second series had a true ending. Swamp Thing was no longer either of the swamp or a thing; he'd become what he'd meant to be all-along, the embodiment of the earth itself. The planet and its inhabitants were changed as the result. The entity Swamp Thing became was untouchable, beyond the Green, beyond anything John Constantine, Sargon or a mystical ruby could do. To suggest otherwise was both absurd redundant, and an invalidation of the first two series. In my eyes, at least Swamp Thing ended at issue #171.

Among the charms the first two series had was its wild abandon. Giant killer flowers, over-the-top villains who refuse to stay dead, a cabal of talking trees, monsters of every shape and size, trips to outer space and the underworld, hallucinogenic plant-sex, mind-blowing revelations, soap-opera styled melodrama, Machiavellian plots, evil cults, aliens, dinosaurs, pirates, a hippie doll-elemental, aquatic vampires, ecological warfare, magical transformations, multiverse hopping and even a visit from Walt Kelly's Pogo! These were some of the elements that kept the series fun (albeit in a mental-institution kind of way) and unpredictable. Moore's classic issues certainly contain darkness in them, but underscoring the horrific nature was also beauty and wit and humor and love. Moore's stories were only on the surface about monsters; underneath was a running commentary on the human condition. Those who came after him, excepting Collins and Millar, missed all of that, and from Vaughan on, it was nothing but darkness. And in so committing the series to that sole direction, DC betrayed its spirit and forged a counterfeit Swamp Thing.

But perhaps it was doomed even before then. Due to its inherent nature, fantasy has a more difficult job maintaining a willing suspension of disbelief. By placing Swamp Thing within the context of the DC Universe rather than its own separate realm, the title became mired in the inconsistency and irreconcilable contradiction of DC continuity. Introducing badly researched mythological, religious and pseduo-scientific concepts (not to mention the less-than-appropriate condoning of illicit drug use) further sank the series into a bad parody of itself, and reading it became an assault on one's moral equilibrium as well as on one's intelligence. The reason it's a shame and why this essay was even written in the first place is because Swamp Thing had risen to such heights. I remain ambivalent about Swamp Thing, but it's helped me to understand the concern for creator's rights that many had fought for in the industry some years back. I also understand now why it's called the comics industry.

It goes without saying that if I were put in charge of the license, Swamp Thing would be redone. No more infiltration of DC's out-of-control universe, no more silly science and false-religious trappings; gone would be Veitch's time-travel mumbo-jumbo and Wheeler's jaw-droppingly ridiculous Quest for the Elementals arch; also gone would be Vaughan's suicide-inducing Tefe stories and basically everything that came later. What would be left standing would be most of Wein, Pasko, Moore and Collins (with a smattering of the others) incorporated with new stories from Steve Bissette (who was going to be pen several Swamp Thing novels) and Darko Macan's Tefe storyline. And while I'm fantasizing out loud, I'd even solicit new stories from some of the first two series' writers.

So no, I can no longer recommend reading Swamp Thing as I once did. But I can recommend tracking down some of its highlights, including the work of Marty Pasko, Nancy Collins and even Mark Millar. But start off first by picking up the trade paperback reprints featuring the first series by Len Wein, the man who created the lovable muck-encrusted mockery in the first place, and then, of course, Alan Moore, the man who brought comics out from the nursery whilst penning some of the most creative and enjoyable issues of comic literature ever seen...

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