The Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume Five (2011)
Reprints Swamp Thing #51-56
Written by Alan Moore
Art by Rick Veitch, John Totleben, and Alfredo Alcala
Coming off an incredible piece of horror writing, Moore keeps things chugging along at full steam in the pages of Swamp Thing. Our hero has faced the ultimate evil and has been the only one to stop it. However, there was lots of trouble bubbling over in the land of the living that directly affected the Swamp Thing. While the Crisis on Infinite Earths seems to have little consequence in these pages, we begin to see our main character connect with traditional superheroes outside of Houma, Louisiana, with this particular volume including a clash in Gotham City with Batman.
While Swamp Thing faced the great darkness, Abby Cable was confronted with photographic proof that she was consorting with a non-human entity. A photographer in the swamp caught her on film, and now she’s lost her job working with autistic children & even gets arrested. The authorities aren’t sure what the crime is at first, but what Abby is doing must be illegal, right? She eventually gets charged with the broad “crimes against nature” while her lawyer tells her they might drop the charges if she pleads she was forced against her will. Abby won’t do that because she loves Swamp Thing so much and wouldn’t insult him like that. While her lover encounters his allies from this recent battle in an epilogue, Abby skips bail & hops a bus to Gotham City, hoping to get lost there.
From there, we have a really entertaining arc where Swamp Thing discovers why Abby is missing when he returns and rages straight into Gotham. Throughout the following issues, he transforms Batman’s city into an Eden, allowing the plants to overgrow and take the city. The Gotham authorities hire a man who worked for Sunderland, the main antagonist in Len Wein’s final arc on the title when Moore transitioned in. I liked this aspect of Moore’s run in that he changed the book radically from a stylistic perspective but didn’t shy away from reincorporating arcs & characters that Wein had been using. I also loved that many of the people in Gotham found Swamp Thing’s transformations to be preferable to the gothic mood the city typically has.
The visuals this storyline provides are pretty spectacular, with the highlight being Swamp Thing shaping a body out of giant sequoias and stomping through Gotham like a kaiju. Because he is a character with such primal, elemental powers, he can engage with the world & his enemies in a manner that is nothing like Superman or Batman. Of course, Batman, being who he is, shows up with a Batmobile that now has circular saw attachments designed for cutting through dense foliage.
I also loved the argument that gets Abby’s charges dropped. If consorting with Swamp Thing is a crime, what about the relationships of other non-humans & humans in the DC Universe? Superman & Lois, Metamorpho & Sapphire Stagg. When the authorities hear it from this angle, paired with the damage they see Swamp Thing is capable of causing, they back off. However, Sunderland’s man is already in place, and the gathered crowd witnesses the apparent death of the plant elemental. Moore doesn’t immediately address that and has Abby return to Houma forlorn, where she encounters another Wein supporting player, Liz Tremayne, in a great horror one-off. That’s followed by an issue of people mourning the death of Swamp Thing, especially Abby, who now feels so much more alone in the world.
However, Moore delivers one of the best issues of the whole run with the final entry in this collection. Issue 56 is titled “My Blue Heaven.” Now, there is a lot of conceptual similarity between this comic (published in January 1987) and Watchmen #4 “Watchmaker” (published in December 1986). Both comics feature a central character who is blue on an alien world using their powers to create but eventually feeling alone. It does seem that Moore had this concept floating around in his head and possibly gave us two versions appropriate for each of the respective series. I could see validity in complaints that he was being redundant, but I don’t think that diminishes how good this issue is.
We learn that Swamp Thing reflexively pushed his consciousness out of the Earth’s Green just before he was killed. His mind connected to this new planet’s Blue, its vegetative elemental realm. However, there is no sentient life in the alien world, so Swamp Thing creates constructs and splinters his consciousness to animate them. The way this story is told through the art is remarkable, showcasing Moore’s writing and Rick Veitch’s incredible pencils. So many unique ideas are communicated in these 24 pages that it puts a lot of modern writers to shame. If there is a comic as well written & illustrated as this on the market right now, please point me to it.
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