By Charles Webb Welcome back, everyone, to a spooktacular 4th installment of Vertigo Spotlight. In today's column, we'll be looking at what's interesting on the very busy shelves this month, as well as exploring the horrors of being a man made of plants. That's right--we'll be checking out The Saga of Swamp Thing.  Human Target is getting a second life in January on the small screen with Simon West calling the shots (Con Air, anyone?). Some readers might recall that the book was first adapted for the small screen back in 1992 with a seven-episode run. DC and Fox are taking a second shot with TV vet Mark Valley (E.R., Fringe, The 4400) playing Christopher Chance. To coincide with that release, Vertigo is releasing Human Target: Chance Meetings which collects Peter Milligan's original four-issue mini as well as the 96-page Final Cut OGN. Strangely, this one doesn't have a date and is conspicuously absent from the Amazon listings. Expect more news as it comes along, though.  Reading the Saga of the Swamp Thing, or How I Stopped Hating and Learned to Love the Floronic ManUp until a couple of months ago I'd never read a single book featuring DC/Vertigo's fauna-based hero, Alec Holland. But thanks to the magic of the inexpensive, hardcover trade market (seriously, this thing is a decent), I decided to pick up the first Saga of the Swamp Thing hardcover. Like many of you out there, my introduction to the character was through the Wes Craven movie from 1982. Later, I watched the character go a bit camp in the Heather Locklear-starring sequel and then fell into the weird late-80's live-action series that moved the action from Louisiana to Florida and never really got beyond the limitations of its tight budget. (Sad fact: Dick Durock, the actor who played the character in both films and the short-lived USA Network series, passed away last month.) The character seemed to spring from the "this man, this monster" well of characters that gave us The Hulk, Wendigo, or any member of the Doom Patrol really. As originally conceived, Swamp Thing was a tortured monster with the mind of a man locked inside; however, instead of being pursued across the country by a gung-ho military, ala the Hulk, he spent his time lurking in the swamp and generally having a go at superheroics. In taking over the character, Alan Moore seems to have aimed at making "elemental" changes to the character and his situation, mixing horror and conservation into a strange and heady package. In this volume alone, Swamp Thing learns that he's not a human mind in a monster's body, but a monster that thinks it's still human. Moore actually uses his early issues in the run--which are collected in this volume--to literally deconstruct the character: he first "kills" Alec Holland and then has the quite mad Floronic Man dissect his very nature. His nemesis, Anton Arkane, is dispatched before the start of this volume, leaving the character, in effect, without a thematic and literal foil. Nature and narrative each abhorring an imbalance, and so Swamp Thing too must die in order for the story to go forward.  His very organs and shape are the vestiges of a dead man's spirit--constructs to make him feel more human until he finally learns that he isn't. It's only when the very balance of nature is disturbed that Swamp Thing is able to restore himself and defeat the Floronic man, himself a man who would be a monster (if only nature would let him). This handy mirroring allows us to watch the process of construction and deterioration in effect as one character goes on a local killing spree in the backwaters and parishes of the bayou while another succumbs to formlessness and inactivity. The prose is a bit purple for my liking but not overly so. The narration often feels like free verse poetry written by a dark Walt Whitman--at once exasperated and enchanted with the mystery and horror of nature. Nature becomes "the green"--a semi-conscious thing reactive to the passions of creatures like Swamp Thing. Even the villainous Floronic man has a creepily baroque voice (calling humanity "screaming meat"). This feels like the pessimistic Moore who brought us some of the meaner stories of the 80's. I wonder if he has disavowed this work much as he has in effect distanced himself from The Killing Joke and Watchmen. Even with the restoration of Swamp Thing and his elevation to something almost elemental (and I understand later explicitly elemental), it feels like there's a sad gulf, a tragic divide between him and Abby that made him a better protector but less competent at connecting with her on an emotional level. With Halloween quickly approaching, it's an interesting read. Besides the horror-tinged first arc, Jason Blood makes an appearance in a grotesque tale about fear in the second half. The art by Stephen Bissette, John Totleben, Dan Day, and Rick Vietch is appropriately moody, aided by the lurid colors by Tatjana Woods. Caveat emptor, though: the quality of the pages could be a bit better with the thin, newsprint-style paper making them feel a little cheap. This does have at least one weird positive effect: it makes the lurid imagery on display look even more so, so there's that. The second volume is available now, and of course I'm going to grab a copy. I'd recommend that any readers out there interested in some of Moore's early American work check it out. It represents a fascinating mixture of horror and philosophy with a kind of vividly-realized art that you don't quite see anymore. It makes me wonder, though: why don't we see Swamp Thing in the pages of DC/Vertigo any longer? It appears that 1998 was the last time he headlined his own book (in Aaron Hayley's "Roots"). I just can't help but feel that the character is--excuse the pun--rotting away in the back catalog. Until next time... |
