Swamp Thing (2019), we hardly knew ye

The 'cancelled before it finished production' 2019 TV show SWAMP THING is a curious sort of warning on how not to adapt a comic book (or other long-running source material).

Note that I enjoy the show and that it's mostly well-made, well-written, and well-acted. However...

It shares a major problem with the 2011 GREEN LANTERN movie insofar as it tries to throw a huge amount of comic-book 'mythology' that the original comic accumulated over decades into a relatively small package. 

So much so that the 'Big Reveal' of episode 9 took 11 years to come about in the comics -- and was thus actually a Big Reveal when we learned that Everything We Knew Was Wrong. Nine episodes in, we barely know Alec Holland/Swamp Thing. The Big Reveal is just another plot point without much tragedy or shock behind it.

The show also invents new stories for many of the main characters which are not really an improvement on the original stories.

Then, for reasons I really don't understand, it throws two non-Swamp-Thing-related DC characters into prominent roles, Dan Cassidy (aka Blue Devil) and Madame Xanadu.

Though I do love Blue Devil

And an all-new ghost story plot. And at least three completely new, major supporting characters.

Did I say ten episodes? It actually does all this by the end of episode 5. There's still half a season to go and even more mythology to process. 

Then it throws in this very odd bit in which several episodes bear the titles of Bruce Springsteen songs. If the whole thing were set in New Jersey, I could maybe understand this. But it's set in Louisiana. Jarringly, the show switches from Springsteen titles back to titles from the comic-book series with episodes 9 and 10.

I do give the series a pass on its relative lack of Swamp Thing. It's a TV show, and the budget can't necessarily handle a partially and sometimes fully CGI Swamp Thing being the star of his own show, instead of a muck-encrusted cameo in many episodes. On the other hand, if you're going to make a show about Swamp Thing, maybe only do so if the budget is there.

One last thing that interests me is that the original Swamp Thing comic series, from the early 1970's, basically followed the rubric of The Fugitive. To wit: 

• Mysterious criminals kill Alec Holland's wife and accidentally turn him into Swamp Thing when they blow up his lab and saturate him with the 'Bio-restorative Formula' Linda and Alec Holland had been working on to increase plot yields. 
• Swamp Thing (a name given to him by the media -- he actually goes by 'Alec') sets off on a cross-country journey to find the people behind the murder and avenge his wife's death. 
• The government agent who failed to protect the Hollands pursues Swamp Thing across the country, initially because he believes that Swamp Thing may have played a role in the murders. 
• Each issue pits Swampy against a new supernatural menace.

Like I said, I enjoy the show but spend a lot of time agog. Even if we assume that the producers wanted to make a mythology-heavy, arc-intensive show out of Swamp Thing, they've simply overloaded the concept with too much information and way, way too many characters. I hope that its rapid cancellation means that a different version is on the way, or possibly a more faithful movie version.

But boy oh boy. Even in original works, watch that mythology. And watch out for too many characters introduced too quickly.

Also... how did Blue Devil get into the mix? Was the writers' room drunk that day?

The Mighty Mighty Swamp Things

Swamp Thing: The Root of All Evil (1994-95/Collected 2015): written by Grant Morrison and Mark Millar; illustrated by Phil Hester and Kim DeMulder: After a lengthy run by writer Nancy Collins, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar were tapped by DC to give Swamp Thing a jolt. And that they do, in the 'Everything You Know Is Wrong' tradition of beloved Swamp Thing writer Alan Moore.

Everything we know really does seem to be wrong in the opening pages of Morrison and Millar's collaboration (Morrison would leave Swampy in Millar's solo hands after six issues). Alec Holland and Swamp Thing now seem to exist separate from each other. Indeed, Holland's 22 years of Swampitude now seem to have been an elaborate hallucination. Meanwhile, Swamp Thing homicidally tears up the Louisiana swamps and bayous.

Of course, not everything is what it seems when not everything is what it seems. Nonetheless, like Alan Moore before them, Morrison and Millar dynamite an awful lot of Swamp Thing mythology, kill off a lot of long-term supporting characters, and introduce weird new quests, situations, and characters to the ongoing saga of our favourite muck-encrusted mockery of a man. Along the way, they also resurrect at least one supporting character who seemed to be irretrievably dead since Moore's days.

Phil Hester and Kim DeMulder do fine work throughout the volume. Hester's rough, sketchy linework works especially well in the swamps and dark corners of the Swamp Thing universe. This volume collects the first third of what would ultimately be the longest sustained story in Swamp Thing's career up until 1994, a 30-issue, 700-page quest with only a couple of standalone issues. Given Millar and Morrison's popularity, it's hard to understand how it took 20 years for DC Comics to collect this run in trade paperbacks. Oh, well -- it's here now. Recommended.

Swamp Thing: Darker Genesis (1995/Collected 2015): written by Mark Millar; illustrated by Phil Hester, Kim DeMulder, Phil Jiminez, Chris Weston, Jill Thompson, Brian Bolland, Tom Taggart, and John Totleben: Once upon a time, Swamp Thing was the mind and nearly-destroyed body of scientist Alec Holland, transmuted into a seven-foot-tall muck monster by an explosion, his own 'bio-restorative' formula, and the alchemical processes of the Louisiana swamp in which Holland's lab was located. 

Then Alan Moore revealed that Swamp Thing was really Earth's Plant Elemental, that Alec Holland had really been dead all those years, and that Swamp Thing was simply one in a long line of Plant Elementals with consciousnesses built on the framework of a human who died as part of their births. Over the Plant Kingdom reigned the Parliament of Trees, a South American grove containing all the plant elementals that ever were.

Now, Swamp Thing has been coerced into running a gantlet of four trials to gain the powers of the other Parliaments. In the previous volume, Root of All Evil, he reconciled the long-standing rift between the two Earth Elemental factions, Plant and Stone, thus gaining control over all aspects of rock on Earth. Here, Swamp Thing faces the Trial of the Parliament of Waves and then begins the Trial of the Parliament of Air.

Writer Mark Millar, regular artist Phil Hester, and guest artists Chris Weston and Jill Thompson seem to have a lot of fun in this volume taking Swamp Thing on a tour of alternate universes where he has different appearances and powers (including being trapped in the body of a Golem on an Earth where the Nazis won WWII). Classic characters that include perennial Swamp Thing nemesis Anton Arcane and forgotten 1970's sword-and-sorcery hero Nightmaster are resurrected in strange new ways and forms. A standalone visit to England brings us Swamp Dog and a story that seems more like an issue of John Constantine Hellblazer than Swamp Thing. 

All that and a recurring James Joyce reference. It all holds together for the most part, and towards the end of the issues here John Totleben, co-artist extraordinaire during the Alan Moore years, returns to Swamp Thing to draw the (splendid) covers. So there's that. Recommended.

Swamp Thing: Trial by Fire (1995-96/Collected 2016): written by Mark Millar; illustrated by Phil Hester, Kim DeMulder, Curt Swan, and John Totleben: Mark Millar and Phil Hester's run on Swamp Thing draws to an end after 30 issues, as does the book itself, cancelled with the final issue here so that it could be resurrected scant months later. 

One could view this as the finale to all the Swamp Things from his first appearance in 1972 to 1996. Certainly Millar writes that way, and subsequent revivals avoid the ramifications of the conclusion of Millar's run because they would make writing Swamp Thing nigh-impossible. In essence, they lived happily ever after. Sort of.

Swamp Thing tries to avoid completing the Trial of the Elemental Air for fear that his increasing power will cause him to lose his moral core of humanity and go on a world-wide killing spree. Alas,, if he doesn't face the Trial of Air, Earth will die screaming. So off he goes. And after that the Trial of Fire. And after that, the two magical factions struggling for world domination believe, the End of the World. Well, unless the one faction successfully summons The Word, a uber-powerful stand-in for uber-powerful 'hero' The Spectre. The Word is here because God is pissed off at Swamp Thing. Or maybe not. Maybe The Word is just a dick. 

In any case, if you're red-green colour-blind, The Word and The Spectre will look exactly alike!

In any case, this is an enjoyable end to this incarnation of Swamp Thing. Well, unless you were a fan of Tefe, Swamp Thing's part-human, part-elemental, part-demonic daughter conceived during Rick Veitch's first issue (#65) as both writer and artist and born during Doug Wheeler's brief stint as post-Veitch writer (#90). Her storyline just gets overwritten again. All this and Magic Wish Matches, complete with a Secret Origin. Hoo-ha! The conclusion of the Trial by Air section does suggest that Millar holds devoted readers of fantasy novels in contempt, so make of that what you will. Recommended.

Swamp Thing

DC Comics Classics Library: Roots of the Swamp Thing, written by Len Wein, illustrated by Bernie Wrightson, Nestor Redondo, Mike Kaluta and Luis Dominguez (1972-1974, 1991; collected 2009): Swamp Thing (who never calls himself that) is one of those DC characters with a loyal following that stretches back 40 years to his first appearances. That's mainly thanks to the spectacular artwork of Bernie Wrightson, with an assist to the melodramatic writing by Wein, who makes Swampy into a brooding, quasi-Byronic hero. Well, if Byron were a scientist who'd been changed by a lab accident into a 7-foot-tall "muck-encrusted mockery of a man."

DC was cooking with gas in the early 1970's, the result of an influx of astonishing new writing and artistic talent. Marvel, mostly moribund, was in the process of becoming what DC had been -- a conservative comic-book company with a highly controlled house style for both art and story. Meanwhile, DC seemed to keep stumbling and bumbling along into mostly short-lived by influential and critically revered series. Swamp Thing was one of those.

Wrightson was great at grotesques, at horror and the macabre, and Wein supplied him with a ten-issue run of horror tropes for Swamp Thing (really Alec Holland, or so he thought at the time) to shamble into battle against, including a Frankenstein's monster, a werewolf, a witch, and a Cthulhoid monstrosity living in a mineshaft in Maine. Here, of course, the misunderstood monster is the hero, as are some of the monsters he first battles and then befriends. It's a horror-tinged paean to outsiders. Wrightson also gave of one of the most interesting artistic imaginings of Batman up to the time.

Some moments clunk, of course -- Wein was a young writer, and his solutions to some of the problems he creates for Alec Holland can be a bit on the ridiculous side. I'm also not entirely convinced Wein knew what "brackish" meant. So it goes. Wrightson would leave after ten issues, followed by Wein three issues later after a capable but not Wrightsonesque artistic run by Nestor Redondo.

The book would go on for several more issues, be cancelled, and return in the early 1980's to accompany the release of the woeful Swamp Thing movie. Eventually would come writer Alan Moore (Watchmen), with his entry into American comic-book writing coming on Saga of the Swamp Thing. But that was still nearly a decade away. This stuff, though, is golden. Muck-encrusted gold, but still. Highly recommended.