Lost in the Swamp

Welcome to the first installment of Avatar of the Green: a Swamp Thing blog. The Swamp Thing is an inarguably popular character, with at least half a dozen comic book series', two (awful) movies, one (equally bad) television series, a short lived animated series, a handful of action figures, and even a playable video game character. While a quick glance turned up only one result for a Swamp Thing podcast (Parlipod), other podcasts, such as Film and Water, Midnight the Podcasting Hour, Hero Heads, and Horrocast, have epidoses dedicated to the films and/or the comics, as well as at least a half a dozen Swamp Thing blogs and Facebook pages. What, then, is there to separate my newest niche of the interwebs from these others?  For that I'll have to go into my personal history with the character.

Those of you familiar with my article "We Are Controlling the Transmission" from the Unearthly Visions blog may remember that I've always had a thing for monsters. From the time I was four I used to stay up late with my mom on Friday nights to watch old Christopher Lee Dracula movies. On Saturdays I'd spend my afternoons watching the Wolfman, Frankenstein, the Mummy, and endless Japanese kaiju movies.

As I grew a little older, and comics developed from a casual interest to something resembling a hobby for me, I became preoccupied with the idea of the "monster hero". The heyday of Marvel's monster antiheroes, Man-Thing, Werewolf by Night, Morbius, and the original Ghost Rider, was a little before my time, but in the early 80s I was a fan of the Creature Commandos feature in DC's Weird War Tales, and I was fascinated by Man-Bat and Etrigan.

It was during this time that a friend brought his copy of Saga of the Swamp Thing #3 with him to school and let me read it on the bus. I was vaguely familiar with Swamp Thing from a few commercials for the first movie, but this was my first real introduction to him.

This would have been a much different Swamp Thing then what most readers of the Alan Moore period and beyond we're familiar with. This was Alec Holland, transformed by a lab accident into a "muck encrusted mockery of a man". He wasn't a sentient entity made of living plants at the time, but a man who's flesh had been transformed into a composite of plant matter and bog mud, who's blood had become an acidic sap, all draped over the form of a human skeleton. He didn't have the ability to control local flora, or to travel by transferring his consciousness to plants across the globe. He was simply strong. Not Hulk strong. Likely not Spider-Man strong either, but strong enough to smash a speeding hot rod on instinct in the first issue, as well as tough enough to take several bullets and have his hand chopped off without blinking.

The time, again, being the early 80s, and the place being rural to suburban Ohio, comic book shops were very few and far between. Forced to settle for whatever was available at any given moment at the rare grocery or convenience store might be carrying comics, my collection of SotST was far from complete. Between summer of 82 and fall of 83 I managed to pick up maybe five issues of Swamp Thing, so I never got a complete story arch, but it was all still good reading.

After that, though, the one convenience store where I got comics on a semi-regular basis stopped carrying Swamp Thing. For a few months whenever I'd stumble upon some random place that happened to be carrying comics at the moment, I'd look of SotST, but it was no where to be found. Something had happened.

That something, of course, was Alan Moore. When DC gave the writing chores to Moore, they removed the now-defunct Comics Code Authority from the title (the first mainstream comic book to hold that distinction since the CCA's inception) to allow him the creative freedom for the changes he wanted to implement. I knew none of this at the time though. My fourth grader self only knew that a title I enjoyed on a semi-regular basis was no longer available. I actually wouldn't find out about the drastic changes that the creature who thought it was Alec Holland had gone through for a few more years when I read the Swamp Thing entry in DC's Who's Who.

It would be another ten years before I would get access to a fully functioning comic book shop. During my time away the Saga of the Swamp Thing had evolved from a mainstream book about a plant monster who's arch nemesis was a necro-insect-cyborg to an exploration of love, identity, family, and environmentalism. It's with an only moderate amount of shame that I can admit that...

(deep breath)

... these stories were a little too intellectual for me at the time.

In my defense my teenage pop culture identity was largely forged by a steady diet of thrash metal and Jim Lee art. If it didn't have big boobs, big guns, bug knives, and lots of extraneous pouches it had trouble holding my Mtv ravaged attention span for long.

Now that I'm a couple decades older I have a hunger for those Swamp Thing stories I missed. Sure, I could just go on Comixology and buy them digitally, and I will I if I absolutely have to, but I want make this a more visceral quest. I want that thrill of scowering the back issue bins of the local comic book shop and finding just the right treasure. As such, this blog, as well as it's accompanying Facebook page, will also be a chronicle of my journey from being lost the the swamp that is my lack of a proper Swamp Thing library to being fully emersed in the lore of the Avatar of the Green.