More Moore part 13: The Ballad of Halo Jones Book I

The Ballad of Halo Jones Book I (1984)

Like the previous year's "Skizz", The Ballad of Halo Jones was brought to us from the pages of boy's sci-fi mag 2000 AD, where Moore had previously given us 1- and 2-page 'future shocks' by the truckload. Also like "Skizz", Halo Jones was nothing at all like the publication's usual offerings; while both works have a definite sci-fi flavor to it, they examine concepts far beyond what you would get from other 2000 AD works like "Judge Dredd" and "Meltdown Man". And like "Skizz", Halo Jones is nowhere near Moore's best work, but it has a certain ramshackle charm that makes it work, at least as far as Book I is concerned.

The Ballad of Halo Jones Book I follows the life and times of Halo Jones, teen girl of the 50th century, as she and her friend Rodice set out for the mall with their robot dog companion. The first of the problems with the book crop up rather quickly: maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon but the girls Clockwork Orange-esque slang is grating from their very first appearance, spouting off lines like "Oobliay to Clara Pandy! The Rumble-Jacks'll be here for a Hoop-Scoop any minute now..." for page after page after page. The plot is mostly a comedy of errors, with Halo and Rodice missing the tram back home by mere minutes (the first time it's ever been early, of course) as having to sleep on the streets with a chatty alien hobo before they can make it back home. Though the slang never goes away, it does become more tolerable as the book goes on, simply because the situations get more interesting, or at least more entertaining: Rodice accidentally gasses herself with a 'zenade' which causes her personality to temporarily shift to that of a tripped out hippie, leading to probably the funniest lines in the entire book, at least for someone who grew up within reach of Santa Cruz, California's hippie Mecca:

"Beautiful, because Halo, you see, the inside IS the outside. It's so obvious!"

The book also does a fairly deft job at mixing comedy with tragedy, similarly to Terry Gilliam's own future-fable Brazil, when Halo and Rodice finally make it home to find Halo's roomie/mother-figure Brinna murdered by nihilistic street gang the Different Drums. Halo resolves to leave town, finds a stewardess job on luxury spaceliner the Clara Pandy, and takes off for parts unknown as Book I closes.

The story is almost painfully slight after Swamp Thing, but it's also written for an entirely different audience, so I'm trying to judge it on its own terms. And on its own terms it's...alright. Not Bad. Like "Skizz", Halo Jones is an attempt to ground a sci-fi story by giving it a familiar setting: really if we cut out the robodogs and the aliens and the 50th century lingo, Halo Jones is the story of a young woman growing up, leaving home, and staking out on her own for the first time. The novel is well-loved by those who dig a little deeper in Moore's catalog because Halo is relatable, she's an everywoman and we can all see ourselves in her situation. That said...ehh. It's a unique story, especially in the hyper-macho pages of 2000 AD, but it's really not anything special, especially not compared to what Moore's done before, and certainly not compared to what he'll do soon after. The dialogue and characters were better in "Skizz", tighter and more interesting, the first few chapters of Halo Jones are monotonous and made me fear for having to slog through the rest of it. Ian Gibson's art is alright, when he pencils large panoramas stuffed with people it looks great, but his faces only have a couple different expressions, and Halo and Rodice get stuck with 'pouty' for about 3/4 of the book. The Ballad of Halo Jones Book I is a decent start, and it did pick up enugh at the end to make me curious as to what Halo will get into next, but in the end the story is merely average, much like its protagonist.

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Best quote: "You know what it is with you, Toby? You know why your personality's so hostile and twisted? It's because you've got cybernetic rabies..."

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Up next: To infinity and further in The Ballad of Halo Jones Book II

Go Read Poisoned Chalice!

Looking back at the articles I wrote for Marvelman, one of the things I have wished I mentioned since almost the beginning was more about the novel's legal woes; outside of a brief mention that it's unavailable, I didn't delve at all into the mind-bending story of copyright wars being battled even today for the contents of the book. Luckily, someone has done it for me, and done it much better than I could ever dream of: incomparable Alan Moore historian Pádraig Ó Méalóid has written a 100,000 word book entitled Poisoned Chalice: The Extremely Long and Incredibly Complex Story of Marvelman, and being an altruistic sort in these tough times is serializing the book for your perusal on wonderful comic resource The Beat. The book is amazingly in-depth and brought to light several things I had never even thought of, and if you have any interest in the real-life story of Marvelman, which has enough epic moments and exciting battles to make a pretty damn good comic series in and of itself, you would be well-off giving it a read.

Here's everything that's been put on The Beat so far:

Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7 
Chapter 8

Keep an eye on The Beat for forthcoming chapters, and keep an eye here: The Ballad of Halo Jones Book I coming soon!

More Moore part 12: Swamp Thing Book VI

Swamp Thing Book VI: Reunion (1987)

And here we are, at last: The final book of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, collecting last eight chapters and wrapping up his saga of the plant elemental and the woman he loves. Except of course that, when we last left Swamp Thing, he was light years away from Earth and the arms of his lady love, his biorhythmns out of sync with our planet, seemingly unable to return. What's an Earth guardian to do when he can't make it back to Earth?

According to John Totelben's forward to Book V, around issue 55 or so Moore was looking to take Swamp Thing into a new direction, which meshed well with new artist Rick Veitch's love of classic sci-fi and gave us a shift in tone for the end of the saga from pulp horror to something akin to Silver Age sci-fi. This, coupled with the more freewheeling, experimental style adopted by Moore in terms of plotting for the last book, seems to have split opinions: witness the user comments on Goodreads to see that people don't really know what to make of Swamp Thing's zipping around the galaxy, befriending carrot people and Flash Gordon pastiches. Really though, Reunion functions more of an extended epilogue to the last five Books: the real conflicts, brought to a head in Books IV and V, are long over. All that's left is to get Swamp Thing back here he belongs.

The chapters in Reunion, more than any other Book in Moore's run (with the possibility of The Curse), function less as an overarching story and more of a collection of small adventures, with Swamp Thing landing on a planet, assisting its inhabitants with any problems they may have, and departing for the next adventure. The first story is probably the best, with Swamp Thing interacting with the mythology of Adam Strange, a sort of combination John Carter and Flash Gordon. Swamp Thing lands on the planet of Rann and assists Strange and the Rannians in fixing the planet's botched ecosystem, with a brief antagonistic interlude with a pair of Thanagarians, the same race which beget Hawkman. The story is a classic sci-fi tale, pulpy and fun, and the invented Rannian language will be done again, to much greater effect, in the opening of Moore's much later League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Book II.

I had said earlier that Reunion is a more experimental book compared to the earlier parts, and that comes through mostly in the mercurial teams working on it, not just in art, but in writing as well. The first example of this is the eponymous next chapter, where former Swamp Thing artist Stephen R. Bissette pens a story which Moore, Bissette, Rick Veitch, and John Totelben collaborated on. Sad to say, this does not work well at all, and 'Reunion' might very well take the prize as my least favorite chapter in the entire novel. The problem is that it is absolutely all over the place, possibly as a result of too many 'conceptualizers' initially. It cuts back and forth between Anton Arcane in Hell, Abby Cable in present day, and young Abby with her father Gregori sometime in the past. As far as I can tell, Anton killed, or experimented on, or did something to Gregori, and now Anton is being punished in the afterlife because of it. Meanwhile, Gregori emerges in present day looking like, and I swear I'm not making this up, Frankenstein's monster. He runs into Abby and they share a tearful farewell, or maybe it's a dream, or something, because the story is so muddled and schizophrenic that anything could be happening. It's a poor mark on a Book that already needs as many good points as it can get, and easily one of the weaker moments in the entirety of Moore's 80s work.

The next chapter continues the experimental bent of the material, but with Moore back at the helm, 'Loving the Alien' comes off as much stronger, and even with it's sci-fi trappings it manages to be very disturbing. John Totelben does the art, and his dark, Ridley-Scott-esque sci-fi blends with mixed-media collage to tell a story of a sentient, planetlike machine speaking to her children to be. Swamp Thing becomes trapped in the machine's endless, labyrinthine interior as her inner being chases him and melts down his essence to fertilize her mechanical ovaries. It's pure sexual horror, Swamp Thing is raped with shards of steel in jagged blacks and burgundies, trapped in a clockwork body while the planet devours his sexual energy for its own hybrid children. Alan Moore gets a bad rap now and then for how often rape is used in his stories, and while 'Loving the Machine' certainly can make readers uncomfortable, it's also a tremendous success in storytelling. There's nothing pulpy about it, this is pure science-horror in the same way Alien is, and the visuals, along with the soothing words of the planet-machine to her unborn daughters, will stay with you long after you've closed the book.

After the mechanical body-horror of 'Loving the Alien', the rest of Swamp Thing's travels in space are slight and simple. Swamp Thing ends up on a planet of sentient plant-people, first running afoul of, and then assisting, a floronic Green Lantern. Rich Veitch writes a story about Swamp Thing's interactions with the Celestial Metron, ending with Metron seeing the whole of Earth's history in an instant. He reports this discovery back to perennial DC supervillain Darkseid, which leads to some cringe-worthy hokey writing:

"An element that had escaped me until now.../One which Darkseid was not capable of anticipating./Love."

Ug...

Then it's back to Earth for a chapter titled 'Loose Ends (Reprise)', hearkening back to the very first chapter Moore wrote, where Swamp Thing was killed by agents of the Sunderland corporation. This time the tables are turned, and our hero destroys those responsible for sending him off this planet to begin with, each in clever ways (buried in peach blossoms, stabbed to death by rose thorns, a leafy lunch expanding and exploding a thug from the inside). With his 'loose ends' most assuredly cleaned up, there's just enough time for the finale, and after a whole book apart Swamp Thing has Abby Cable in his arms again, leading to the very last chapter, 'Return of the Good Gumbo'.

I said that Reunion mostly functions as an epilogue, and 'Return of the Good Gumbo' is an epilogue to that epilogue. There aren't any villains left, there's no conflict, no meetings with cosmic beings or demonspawn; instead we have a narrator in the form of Gene LaBostrie, a Cajun skip-operator who looks suspiciously (and most assuredly intentionally) like Moore himself, watching at a distance as Swamp Thing and Abby build a beautiful, verdant home for themselves. Swamp Thing has realized that if he keeps assisting in human affairs, we'll never grow to not need him, so our happy couple leave the human world, and LaBostrie/Moore bids farewell to the hero he had worked with so closely for the past four years. So long, friend.

Swamp Thing is unreal. Prior to this read-through I had never even considered it, and now I can't imagine being without it. Even if there are no more hidden gems in Moore's oeuvre, my eyes have been opened to one of the sweetest, most disturbing, most beautiful stories in the medium. It's a true literary epic in the purest sense of the word, and anyone interested in what potential comics have as storytelling devices owe it to themselves to pick it up. It took me 2 1/2 months to complete Swamp Thing (admittedly with a pretty rotten illness in the middle) and I don't regret it for a second. Absolutely essential.

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Best quote: "They'd run toward each other, kissed, embraced, then he had burned as if the arc-flash of their contact had transformed him into a thing of ash, incinerated by his love, by his desire, condemned to a mad afterlife beyond the further stars.../Amongst the keels of rocks he thinks of her, and of them men who'd kept her from him.../Of a love too long unconsummated and unfinished wars."

...

Up next: Not Watchmen. The Ballad of Halo Jones, Book I

More Moore part 11: Swamp Thing Book V

Swamp Thing Book V: Earth to Earth (1986)

Since the beginning of Alan's work on Swamp Thing, the work has been at its core a love story. There have been deviations of course, the biggest being in Book IV where Swamp Thing and Abby Cable barely interact at all, but even in Book I, when Abby and her husband Matt were still together and Swamp Thing was grappling with his humanity, Mrs. Cable was the lynchpin for Swamp Thing to return to the human world. She was a princess to rescue, a wife to protect, a lover to caress, to the point where Swamp Thing abandoned his swamp to descend to Hell itself and save her soul. Even when Swamp Thing was busy teaming up with the mystics of DC Comics to save the universe from unending darkness in Book IV, his relationship with Abby still bubbled up through the cracks in the form of a paparazzo snapping a few lewd pictures of the happy couple, and it is these pictures which kick off Book V, the end of which will see Swamp Thing and his world changed permanently.

Earth to Earth starts with the pictures sold to a newspaper, Abby hauled into court for consorting with "A genuine non-human organism", losing her job, and being hounded by the intolerant masses of Houma, Louisiana while her viridian lover is heading back home from the shores of the netherworld. Unable to cope with the abuse when Swamp Thing is so far away, she flees, jumping bail and taking the next bus out of town, heading up the coast to the dark, grimy, criminal-filled Gotham City...anywhere is better than Louisiana, I guess. She doesn't even make it a day before she's picked up by Batman mainstay Detective Harvey Bullock, ready to be extradited back to Houma.

The first thing to notice is the completely different aesthetics in Book V: Stephen Bissette and John Totelben are gone, and though John would return for a single chapter later on in the book, Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala are to be the primary artists for the rest of the novel. The new art team does things differently than the old one, more traditional, more solid: Bissette and Totelben's Swamp Thing looked like a shambling vine monster, in the hands of Veitch and Alcala, he looks more leathery and firm. While I prefer Bissette and Totelben, it's a personal choice, and Rick Veitch will continue working on Swamp Thing for a long time, even taking over writing after Moore leaves.

Swamp Thing returns to Louisiana to find his lady love gone, her windows smashed with bricks, and a copy of The Houma Daily Courier with the whole sordid tale on the front page. For the next two issues we get Swamp Thing in a 'force of nature' mood, racing through the undergrowth to Gotham to exact vengeance on the populace. On the way, he inhabits some moss on the side of Arkham Asylum and we get a couple amusing brief captions on the inhabitants:

"Elsewhere, a disfigured killer irritably flips a disfigured coin, roaring threats at his lawyer before crossing the cell to answer himself in calm, reasonable tones, his handsome profile lined with understanding"

As Swamp Thing causes the plant world to take over the city, two antagonists appear: one is the remains of the Sunderland Corporation, who we haven't seen since the second chapter, hiring Lex Luthor to eliminate their nemesis. Outside of Lex's admitted expertise in this situation ("We need to destroy an indestructible being. My contact is a specialist in that area.") there's hardly any reason to include him in the story other than to placate fans, his thoughts on Swamp Thing's invulnerability could have come from anyone, and the inclusion just feels cheap. This isn't the case with our second antagonist though, because when Gotham is threatened, who but the Batman will come to defend it? All of these elements tie together into the novel's second double-length chapter, the apocalyptic 'Garden of Earthly Delights', where John Totelben reappears one last time to draw one of my top chapters for the novel, along with 'The Anatomy Lesson' and 'The End'...and one more we haven't quite gotten to.

During the course of 'Garden of Earthly Delights', Swamp Thing attacks Gotham with nature itself: vines clogging streets, subway tunnels choked with foliage, roots strangling buildings. Chester Williams reappears after sitting out nearly all of Book IV, leading the people of Gotham into a kind of worship of Swamp Thing, shedding their clothes, partaking of the hallucinogenic tubers, and creating a modern-day Eden. Batman's attempts to defeat Swamp Thing (using some Bat-defoliant...clever!) are brushed aside, Swamp Thing using the full force of his connection with The Green to demand the safe return of his lover.In the end, the law in Gotham can't take much more of Swamp Thing's green assault, and they broker a truce to send Abby back to her lover's arms.

I want to make a special mention of the use of Batman here, as well as the Justice League appearing in the pages of Swamp Thing in general. Twice before, in Books I and II, Moore his shown the Justice League to be cold, dispassionate Gods in Swamp Thing's universe, watching as Jason Woodrue and Anton Arcane ravage the country with a detached air similar to how Moore presented Marvelman in the last Book of his story. Moore mirrors and adds allusion to his own work, time and time again showing that superheroes are not as benevolent as we hope they would be.

Not that the supervillains are any better, of course. With the hatchet buried and Abby running to her lover's arms, Luthor enacts his plan, disorienting Swamp Thing and frying him with napalm. Totelben's broad strokes illustrate the scene, Abby recoiling in horror as our hero burns, and is unable to retract into the Green, dead...again.

Of course this might have worked better when these chapters were single issues, as we still have a third of the Book to go. But Swamp Thing doesn't appear in the next chapter, focusing on Abby grieving her loss and trying to protect a friend from a disturbed, abusive husband. Nor does he show in the next, which is Swamp Thing's funeral, in which Abby, Chester, Batman, Bullock, and Commissioner Gordon eulogize the fallen warrior, while The Stranger and Constantine stay a distance away to watch. The camera pans out as we listen to Abby's internal monologue, wishing a goodbye to her lover...while incalculable light years away, on a barren blue planet, a single shoot sprouts, and grows. Separated from his love and his life, Swamp Thing is reborn in alien blues, leading into the final issue of the Book, the gorgeous 'My Blue Heaven.'

Moore again plays with convention in 'My Blue Heaven', not only is there no villain, no action...there is nothing but Swamp Thing and his thoughts, time passing on this unknown blue planet, alone with his monologue as he builds a blue mirror of Houma with the flora of the planet, populating it with plant-fiber automatons of people he remembers. He makes love to a homunculus Abby, controlling the words and movements of every being in the town. It's incredibly tragic, Swamp Thing torturing himself with his memories of a past he will never see again, making a purgatory of his own mind, and finally he destroys it, jumping off into the unknown, the last panel the head of the false Abby smiling blankly at the camera. The chapter is existential and horrific, showing that even thought Swamp Thing is a God in his own right, his mind is a gallery of love, loss, and regret. It's another of the really great, special chapters in this incredible novel, proof that Moore in the mid-80s was on top of his game to an extent that is almost incalculable. And there's still one book to go.

And as an aside...where else have we seen a blue, Godlike being, exiled to a barren planet, build and then destroy a home made from the component parts of the planet, all while reflecting on the life and humanity he left behind? Soon, ladies and gentlemen, soon...

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Best quote: "The planet turned away from you, at the end, shutting you out from its warm green bosom, and where else could you go?/The Earth rejected her elemental, delivering him into the fire.../And the wind and rain placed dice for his ashes."

Up Next: The Adventures of Space Thing in Swamp Thing Book VI.

More Moore part 10: Swamp Thing Book IV

Swamp Thing Book IV: A Murder of Crows (1985-86)

Huge thanks to Sally of Mordant Airhead for directing me where to find a copy of Book IV, which is currently retailing for about $150 on Amazon. Thanks!

In April of 1985, in the fifty-first year of the existence of DC Comics, there began a maxi-series entitled Crisis on Infinite Earths, implicitly designed as a reboot to clean up fifty years of continuity madness among DC's various intellectual properties. The series, written by Marv Wolfman and penciled by George Perez, addressed and solved this issue with the grace of a sledgehammer by compressing every one of DC's myriad plot threads into one simple, easy-to-handle universe, starting over from square one. That here we are 28 years later and DC has rebooted itself three more times since then isn't an issue for today, this little introduction is a question of dates: not only did our friend Mr. Moore pen the final Superman story before the Crisis in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, which we'll get to...eventually, the dates that Crisis was running, April '85 to March '86, coincide well with the fourth book of Swamp Thing, entitled A Murder of Crows. In it, Moore will lend his pen to the Crisis in his own idiosyncratic way, and create an arc that has been hinted at since Book III and considered by many to the the absolute apex of the whole novel.

But not in the first chapter. We start off with 'Windfall', which barely features Swamp Thing himself at all. The protagonist when we first crack open Book IV is Chester Williams, an aging hippie who would be more at home in San Fransisco than Baton Rouge. Chester finds one of Swamp Thing's psychedelic tubers on the ground (not a fruit, like I had thought before) and, in giving a slice to acquaintances of two different temperaments, discovers that its effects serve to amplify that which is already present within each person emotionally: a kindly cancer patient is filled with the warmth of life and love, leading to the novel's second psychotropic sex scene which comes across as surprisingly tender, the cancer victim passing away during the waves of love and ecstasy, dying in the rain in her husband's arms. The second imbiber, an overweight cretin with a bad combover who basically bullies Chester into giving a slice up, descends into a hellish 'bad trip', lighting aflame and becoming a swamp monster himself while ghouls taunt and harass him until he runs in front of an 18-wheeler. Chester himself, unsure of what his true colors are inside, abstains from trying the tuber as the chapter ends. It may be setting up for something (we don't see Chester again during the events of the book) but even if it's just a one-off it gives Moore and his artists a chance to explore Swamp Thing's physiology and his effect on the human psyche. Even if Chester doesn't return, the lessons he learned will.

Swamp Thing returns, along with Bissette and Totelben, with chapter two, 'Boogeymen', continuing the one-and-done nature of Book III though thankfully without the heavy-handed moralizing that typified that unfortunate volume. In the next couple chapters Swamp Thing and Constantine take on serial killers and ghosts, fighting back against the darkness encroaching that is setting the whole world insane. Monitor, the protagonist of Crisis on Infinite Earths, summons the heroes of the world to his fortress, and in Swamp Thing we see that includes our street warlock and his verdant pal, giving Crisis fans a different angle of the events that they would already be familiar with from that concurrent volume, and giving Moore fans some more wonderfully evocative prose in his always-entertaining captions:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and it was all of them at once./It was the end.../...And in the end, there were not words enough to encompass it."

But even Swamp Thing among the shattering timelines of Crisis is not the main event, and the chapter moves on without Kal-El, or Monitor, or Barry Allen or any of the main players of that continuity-shifting saga, and it's there that Constantine reveals what he and Swamp Thing have been working toward since Book III, the Brujeria, a coven of male witches, are awakening the primal Darkness to smash the throne of heaven and usher in a world free of life. And with that begins the second half of Book IV, with Constantine recruiting DC's mystical movers and shakers, including Zatanna, The Spectre, Deadman, Mento, Etrigan (again!), Sargon the Sorcerer, and a score of others, to beat back the Darkness and save the universe. Let me say that the buildup to this confrontation is awe-inspiring, with Swamp Thing and Constantine each dealing with their own circle of friends, Constantine especially calling in favors and making deals, his character showing its fast-talking power convincing these uninterested warlocks to band together for a common cause. The forward momentum is tangible, I was unable to stop reading as Moore gives us his own Crisis, using these characters who didn't get anywhere near Monitor or his space station, very Swamp Thing allies moving to destroy a very Swamp Thing enemy. The battle itself is entirely collected in the oversized chapter fittingly titled 'The End', and if the chapter isn't quite as good as 'The Anatomy Lesson' it is broader in scope and it probably the novel's greatest moment of pure epic bombast. The battle shifts back and forth between Swamp Thing and his allies on the front lines, with Constantine and his allies observing the action telepathically in some kind of superhero seance. The Darkness removes Etrigan, Dr. Fate, and The Spectre from the action, Zatanna's father bursts into flames as the Darkness asks the assembled beings questions on the nature of evil and existence:

"And what of the tortured eons I endured, unable to broach this maddening brilliance and quiet the pain it woke in me? Do they not demand retribution? Little thing, you have taught me only vengeance.../Be gone that I might savor it in solitude."

In the end it is only Swamp Thing, entering into the Darkness by his own will, floating in the endless void, that can give it a satisfactory answer: that darkness begets life, that the fallen tree provides nutrients so a young sapling may live, that Darkness can not exist without Light. And with that, a golden, glowing hand of Light clasps the Darkness like a forgotten brother, and they depart. All of this before before Watchmen, before The Long Halloween, before Kingdom Come or Starman or Hellboy or The Invisibles or anything that we could regard as one of the Greatest Graphic Novels Of All Time (with the exception of The Dark Knight Returns, which started concurrently but ended a little earlier). The message is one that has been done to death by now, the darkness and light need each other, but in a comic series just coming out of Crisis on Infinite Earths this is amazing stuff and once again Swamp Thing shows how much comics have matured since the days of The Joker making his own utility belt full of gags to stop Batman.

Thus ends the most beloved book of Swamp Thing, and it's easy to see why there are those out there who think A Murder of Crows represents the best moments in the saga: the excitement is palpable, the danger is limitless, and the band that Moore chooses to defend the universe are fleshed out  and damn interesting: I would read a hundred stories about Team Swamp Thing and Team Constantine if they existed, much quicker than I would read about Superman defeating Luthor yet again. Personally I still find the sweeping epic romance of Book II to be the untopped moment, but Book IV's apocalyptic designs, which sees the undervalued contingent of DC's pantheon joining together to stop a force of utter nihilism, is a close second.

And of course it's not the end of the story, no matter what the title of the last chapter is: just before Swamp Thing goes out to save the world from Darkness itself, a sleazy photographer catches Abby Cable in the embrace of her shrubby love and sells the photos to the local newspaper. And it seems the residents of Lousiana in 1986 are not quite as understanding of alternative couples as comic readers are.

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Best quote: "I have helped...one community...destroy another...because it was different...and because it posed a threat.../And afterwards...I thought...did history's vilest butchers...do any worse?/Is evil...unavoidable?"

Up next: Swamp Thing vs. Batman? in Swamp Thing Book V

More Moore part 9: Swamp Thing Book III

Swamp Thing Book III: The Curse (1985)

It seems appropriate that we find ourselves here, with me still fighting whatever illness has gripped me for the past week and a half, at Book III of Swamp Thing, thus far the weakest of an otherwise-incredible saga. Luckily that means that I won't have as many paragraphs full of praise, so I can get back on the mend sooner. So what's wrong with The Curse, especially after the one-two punch of Saga and Love and Death, two of my favorite comic collections, period? Let's find out.

The main issue with The Curse, which permeates the entirely of the book, is a lack of direction; after the crawling chaos of Saga and the grand Alighierian design of  Love and Death, The Curse feels like Moore scaling back his sights, returning Swamp Thing to the monster-vs.-monster one-shots of the Len Wein days, with our green hero battling some ghoul and then skulking back to the swamps, ready for another day. There's nothing wrong with this in and of itself, and unlike Captain Britain one can hardly charge Moore with wasting valuable pagetime on these skirmishes since we still have about 800 pages to go, but it feels like the team is spinning its wheels after the grotesque beauty of Book II. The stories aren't bad, but don't expect any crystalline story structure like we got in the last two books.

And then there are times when the stories aren't even that good. The Curse suffers most when Alan feels like he needs to use his comic as a platform to get the dreaded 80s Socially-Conscious Message across. The book kicks off with 'The Nukeface Papers', a two-parter about the danger of nuclear waste anthropomorphized into some kind of waste-obsessed hobo. It's no exaggeration when I say that the character, and his subsequent battle with Swamp Thing, feel like Moore was doing a test-run for what would become Captain Planet and the Planeteers. The danger from nuclear waste was, and still is, very real and disheartening, but the way Moore handles it here is ham-fisted and preachy to the point that it takes you out of the story. After that we get a brief sojourn with some underwater vampires, a woman who turns into a werewolf when she menstruates (and goes on the prowl for men to murder...seriously), and a bunch of racist ghosts possessing actors on a plantation. All of these stories have the same embarrassing moralistic preaching that Nukeface got (except the underwater vampires...I don't think they represent anything, at least) which takes an already-weak set of stories and makes them weaker. It's a bad sign for the memorability of the book (or possibly that I'm still hazy from my illness) that during this review I've had to go back and reread passages to remember if they were in Swamp Thing or the first book of Sandman.

That's not to say this book is without merit of course. The disparate stories have a purpose to serve, even if there was probably a better way to get the cogs of the plot moving; like when Anton Arcane reappeared back in Book II, something is approaching that is causing the evil of the world to well up, and Swamp Thing, even more divorced from his imagined humanity now, has to travel around the globe to put down these small fires before they coalesce into a raging inferno. He's gained new allies in the form of John Constantine and his posse, easily the best part of The Curse. I didn't even realize that Moore had created Constantine, but the sardonic British 'street warlock' is a blessing, snarky and irritating, his interaction with his worldwide web of contacts (all losers, freaks, and nobodies, naturally) and Swamp Thing himself elevate what could be a depressingly weak book to something at least enjoyable. Clearly, Constantine knows what's going on (though the reader doesn't, by the end of Book III at least) and he gives Swamp Thing the bare minimum of information to lead him to his next cleanup job while still keeping him (and us) in the dark about the larger picture. The Curse is far from Moore's best work, but I have faith that the second half of Swamp Thing will redeem what will be viewed as a hiccup in an overall stunning narrative, and Constantine's hints work in keeping the reader interested and reading ahead as much as it keeps Swamp Thing following the breadcrumbs.

One aside: As someone who has read Watchmen in the past but not Swamp Thing, it's interesting to see Moore basically doing a test-run for Dr. Manhattan in Swamp Thing's character in this book. Like the good Doctor, Swamp Thing rapidly begins to leave his humanity behind in these chapters, allowing his body to die and be regrown elsewhere in the world. He even has Abby Arcane playing the role of Laurie Juspeczyk, nervously seeing her inhuman beau becoming detached and Godlike. It just shows that Swamp Thing even had an influence on what is considered the Greatest Comic Book Of All Time.

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Best quote: "They're all going crackers y'know. Except Benjamin. He was crackers to start with. I suppose it'll all be left up to me in the end.../Bloody Americans. All mouth and trousers."

Up next: Crisis on Infinite Swamps in Swamp Thing book IV

More Moore part 8: Swamp Thing Book II

Swamp Thing, Book II: Love & Death (1984-85)

With the first book of Swamp Thing, Alan Moore proved that his handling of the ancient Marvelman story wasn't simply a fluke; he could take characters, whether they hadn't been touched for years or had been used as recently as the month before, and turn them into something far greater than the sum of their parts. Len Wein and Marty Pasko had made the Swamp Thing a misunderstood beast, a throwback to the pulp comics trope of the good-natured but reviled giant (beginning with Frankenstein's monster and echoed by another big, green comic book hero, The Incredible Hulk) and Moore took all of one issue to turn it into something poetic, something subtle, something intelligent. In his hands, Swamp Thing became a greater tragedy than ever before, a creature who thought it was human and only later discovered it wasn't, it never was, it could never be, and of course it was more human than ever for that very reason. And the most incredible thing was that, after such a home-run, Moore was just getting started: at six books, forty-four chapters, and 1,208 pages, Swamp Thing is among Moore's longest novels, and if each additional book builds on the previous as well as Love & Death does, Swamp Thing may even end up topping Watchmen and From Hell as Moore's most accomplished, greatest work.

That being said, Book II starts off strangely with the first chapter, "The Burial". In it, Swamp Thing digs a metaphorical (and literal) grave for the man who he never was, Alec Holland, the final act of freeing himself from his misplaced humanity and embracing his role as a nature elemental and protector. As he digs, he experiences flashbacks/hallucinations of Holland's last days on Earth, finally tossing the long-preserved skeleton into the grave and closing that chapter of his life forever. Sounds like a meaningful, well-drafted chapter, right? Subtle and exploratory, it could almost be the equal of "The Anatomy Lesson" in terms of Moore's grasp on the medium, so what's the problem? The problem is in the art: Stephen Bissette and John Totelben were unavailable to work on "The Burial", so the work went to DC workhorse Shawn McManus. Shawn has a long career in DC/Vertigo, working on Sandman, Tom Strong, Fables, and plenty more, but his presence feels amazingly out of place in the contemplative darkness of "The Burial". McManus' work makes for great action scenes, all bold gestures and declarations, but it wouldn't be hyperbole to say that there is not a single action scene in the entire chapter, and his exaggerated, rubbery style so clashes with Moore's Shakespearean ruminating that it turns what could be a chapter awash in pathos into something that doesn't quite click the way it should. Luckily, this is the only chapter in which the usual artists are away (with one exception, see below), and Bissette & Totelben jump right back into things for "Love and Death".

"Love and Death" kicks off the remainder of the book's first arc, which gives us the return of Swamp Thing's nemesis, Anton Arcane, back from beyond the veil and wearing the thoroughly-posessed shell of Abby Cable's husband Matt. More than any other arc so far, Arcane's return and the subsequent battle with Swamp Thing wears the series' horror roots most proudly on its sleeve; as admitted before I haven't read the previous writer's takes on Swamp Thing, but here at least Arcane seems to have command over what can be broadly termed corruption: he summons hordes of insects, rotting corpses are his puppets, and his presence increases the evil in mens hearts throughout the country, increasing acts of depravity and malice. To this author, at least, this is an absolute goldmine of an idea: Arcane comes off as both wonderfully eloquent and disgustingly powerful, DC's very own Lord of the Flies in a most literal sense. He is also Abby Cable's uncle, something that I don't think was mentioned in the first book, but increases the disturbing quotient greatly (it's highly implied that he had sex with his niece while wearing her husband's skin). Even though the showdown between Swamp Thing and Arcane really only lasts a few pages, the tension is incredible, with the narrative moving into the past and back again, hints of Arcane's return brought up way back in Moore's first few issues coming to full bloom, small things behind the scenes that seem twitchy and decomposing coming to the forefront, all leading up to Arcane literally plucking his niece's soul from her body and throwing it to Hell, making sure that even if Swamp Thing wins the battle (and he does, of course) he loses his lady love.

It's with the stage set thus, Abby Cable alive but unthinking, her uncle seemingly destroyed for good, that Swamp Thing becomes something even greater than it was before. What was Moore's take on the slow-moving, contemplative Hamlet adds some Orpheus and Dante to its belt as Swamp Thing quite literally descends into the pits of Hell to rescue Abby's soul from the legions of the damned. The story suddenly becomes widescreen, its pulp horror augmented by an epic fantasy that other authors could only dream of, with Swamp Thing meeting more members of DC's fantasy pantheon: Deadman, The Stranger, and Etrigan all take turns playing the part of Virgil leading this Dante in reverse, from the lush gardens of Paradise (where Alec Holland is finally happy in an eternity with his wife) to the writhing walls of Pandemonium. There he witnesses the final fate of Arcane (which is really very satisfying) and quite literally carries Abby's immortal soul back to the surface. The arc is gorgeous in every way, and it shows that Moore can make his plots as grandiose as he can deconstruct them, ending with a single-panel page of a newly-revived Abby, clueless as to what her vegetable beau just did for her, questioning Swamp Thing's tears of happiness amidst the swamp in the dead of winter. It's short and sweet and a perfect way to end an arc that changes things up just as much as Moore's first few issues did.

The book ends with three remaining chapters, two of them fairly slight, and one of them anything but. Shawn McManus returns first for "Pog", an environmental fable set up as a sci-fi version of Walt Kelly's Pogo, for which both McManus and Moore won the Jack Kirby Award and I can't possibly imagine why. The plot is slight, and what little there is is hackneyed (aliens in the style of Pogo's swamp-dwellers land on Earth and are repulsed by humankind's polluting tendencies), and while McManus' art is certainly better suited for the slapstick of "Pog" than it was for "The Burial", honestly the whole story feels so out of place after Arcane's return and Swamp Thing's journey to Hell that I can't help but feel the book wouldn't have been any worse off if it wasn't included. They left Swamp Thing's goofy team-up with Superman out of the main narrative, they could have done the same with "Pog", even collected them together into their own book. After "Pog" is "Abandoned Houses", where Abby is visited in her dreams by Cain and Able of DC's old House of Mystery and House of Secrets anthology books, in which they retell Len Wein's very first issue of Swamp Thing and give a rather startling revelation: not only is Swamp Thing NOT Alec Holland, but there have been several Swamp Things before him, Moore giving the character a legacy to live up to and giving both himself and future writers nearly unlimited range to make Swamp Thing anyone and anything they wish. It's a clever twist, even if the chapter itself isn't anything terribly exciting.

Finally comes "Rite of Spring" which had to have been radical when it came out: it's an extended psychedelic sex sequence between Abby and Swamp Thing. She eats one of the fruits growing off of him and the art gets wild while the two lovebirds consummate their newfound relationship in ways that we humans couldn't possibly conceive. It's shamanic and paganistic, love of the Earth in the most literal sense. It's pretty damn weird, but it elevates Swamp Thing and Abby 's relationship past what we normally get from superhero comic love; like the birth scene is Marvelman it shows that Moore can take chances and make issues that would absolutely flounder in the hands of lesser writers, but that fit perfectly into the clockwork plots of his grand designs. And no doubt the love that Abby Cable (Abby Arcane? Abby Holland?) shares with her shambling swamp man will become a deeper plot later on.

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Best quote: Cheated by a pawn, a cypher, a thing no more signifigant than the most despised of beetles.../This bug, this worthless speck, had with his death displaced deathless Arcane.../Condemning me to the dusk latitudes.../To the cobwebbed lands.../To the dismal region of the bodiless men."

Up next: A girl and her vegetable in Swamp Thing Book III