The Mute and the Monster

Swamp Thing wasn't my favorite comic book character as a kid. By the time I'd started picking up comics on a semi-regular basis (around 8 years old) I'd already drunk deeply of the superhero Kool-Aid, and Swamp Thing wasn't a superhero. To my elementary aged self, comic books were a superhero medium, and in those days Saga of the Swamp Thing never even mentioned the superheroes and villains of the DC universe (this was a couple of years before Alan Moore would have the Justice League monitoring Swampy's battle with the Floronic Man). 

Regardless, Saga of the Swamp Thing was one of my favorite comics as a kid. When perusing the magazine rack at the convenience store up the street from my grandpa's neighborhood, my strategy for picking comics at the time was "Ooo!  This looks cool!"  As such, my "collection​" in those days largely consisted of one, maybe two, issues of lots of different titles: Avengers, Defenders, Justice League of America, Legion of Superheroes, etc. Saga of the Swamp Thing was the only title I made an effort, based on opportunity and availability, to pick up on something resembling a regular basis, regardless of how cool the cover looked (and it usually looked pretty cool anyway).

I'd felt a strong affection for these early Saga of the  Swamp Thing issues as I grew older. Having missed the boat on the mature readers/Vertigo years, this was my Swamp Thing.

As I prepared to buy digital copies of SotST to reread for this blog (my floppies having gone missing or having been read over and over to shreds long ago), I began to have misgivings. Len Wein's Swamp Thing was a straight up horror comic in the vein of the old EC stories. The New 52 Swamp Thing was a supernatural superhero story. Alan Moore's work was a brilliant examination of love and human frailty through the filter of the occult. Martin Pasko's work on SotST is... something else: a modern day (for the early 80s) science fiction adventure with horror elements.  How would these stories, now over thirty years old, hold up to the test of time? 

As I began reading them, however, I fell in love with them all over again. No, Pasko's stories aren't the poetry of Moore's Swamp Thing, and they don't have the visceral action of the New 52 series, but they're just damn fun. The main arc of Pasko's run, issues 1 through 13, revolving around three intertwining subplots, reads like a conspiracy thriller, albiet one laced heavily with the occult. It also incorporates the sense of foreboding that was prevalent in the horror films of that era, specifically from directors like John Carpenter and David Cronenberg. 

In this installment of Avatar of the Green we'll be covering Saga of the Swamp Thing  1 and 2 from 1982, by Martin Pasko and Tom Yeates. One of the things that is immediately striking as issue 1 unfolds is how much of a love letter it is to the original series from ten years prior. The opening scene appears to be a homage to the opening scene of its predecessor, with a peaceful swamp teaming with life, it's calm shattered by the Swamp Thing erupting from the surface of the placid water. The narration also has a great pulpy feel to it, reminiscent of that laid out by Wein in the 70s.

Issue 1 also reiterates Swamp Thing's origin in the first few pages. From there, though, Pasko makes it clear that he will be taking this series in his own direction. The first issue alone introduces several concepts and new characters that would be central to the main story arc of the first twelve issues and Pasko's run as a whole. The first of these themes revolves around Swamp Thing's health. After unintentionally running afoul a group of hunters, he has his hand sliced off by a hunting knife. Shortly after, Holland reflects with concern that the hand has not grown back like it should. We find out in issue 2 that this is because he is slowly dying of cellular decay as the bio-restorative formula is breaking down within his body, an theme that gets brought up repeatedly through issue 12.

Studying that degeneration, on behalf of the nefarious paramilitary Sunderland Corporation, is a man first presented to us as "Harry Kay". Short, overweight, and looking to be at least in his late fifties, "Harry" does not present a physically imposing figure. What he is willing to do to obtain is goals, however, as well as the resources he is willing to employ, make him a substantial threat to the Swamp Thing. It's shown in the first issue that he knows the connection between Swamp Thing and Alec Holland, as well as of Holland's bio-restorative formula. By issue 2 we learn that Kay is not above threatening, even killing, children to get his way. We'll learn more about the unsettling things Sunderland, and by extension Harry Kay, are involved in as we discuss later issues.

In the operation to capture and study via dissection the Swamp Thing, Kay was just the observe and report man. The actual hands on operative, introduced initially only as "Mister G" is the agent codenamed Grasp. His hands having been severed in an industrial accident years ago and replaced with cybernetic appendages, Grasp serves as kidnapper, saboteur, interrogator/torturer, assassin, and doer of whatever devious deeds are needed by Sunderland.

Most importantly, however, we are introduced to "Casey". Upon arrival in the small town of Limbo, North Carolina, Swamp Thing comes across a man who has just shot his wife in the head and plans to do so to himself after murdering his own young daughter. When Swamp Thing intervenes the man accidentally shoots himself first, leaving the girl orphaned. 

While trying to get her to safety, Alec (if calling him Alec was good enough for Abby....) gets the impression that the girl's name is Casey, that the idea just "popped into [his] head". Alec begins to suspect that the girl, who is either unable or unwilling to speak, have some sort of psychic bond, a suspicion exacerbated by his sense of protectiveness toward her that he cannot understand, a protectiveness that goes beyond responsibility stemming from her rescue.

 When he and Casey are kidnapped by Grasp, Alec's intuition about her supernatural potential is confirmed (at least to the reader), when she telepathically/telekinetically nearly forces Harry Kay to shoot himself in the head.

These three subplots - Swamp Thing's fatal condition, the Sunderland Corporation's obsession with our hero, and compulsion to protect the mysterious"Casey" - will continue to twist about each other as we explore more of Martin Pasko's run on Saga of the Swamp Thing. When next we return to those days of pre-Crisis occult, we see how those threads through the larger world that Pasko created in Saga of the Swamp Thing issues 3, 4, and 5.

In our next installment of Avatar of the Green, however, we'll again be visiting the New 52 Swamp Thing, and finishing out that series' second trade "Family Tree". Until then, Parliamentarians, think Green and be epic!