Rotworld: Prologue

We are back, Parliamentarians!  Before we get started I want to thank everyone for being patient with the delayed schedule while I'm on the mend, and I especially want to extend my appreciation to everyone who offered me well wishes through Facebook and Twitter.

In this installment of Avatar of the Green we'll be finally starting, after many unexpected delays, the New 52 mini-event "Rotworld", which crossed over between both Swamp Thing and Animal Man. We'll be talking specifically about the prologue to Rotworld, which encompasses Animal Man #12 and Swamp Thing #12. I'd be remiss, however, if I simply jumped straight into this issue of Animal Man and ignored the previous eleven, especially when they comprise one half of the build up to Rotworld.

Buddy Baker possesses a connection to the Red, the metaphysical force that connects all animal life, giving him the superhuman ability to mimic the abilities of any animal. Buddy uses these powers as both a movie stuntman and as the small time superhero Animal Man. Early in this series, though, Buddy learned from the Parliament of Limbs, the governing body of the Red, that he was given his powers to protect his daughter Maxine, who is destined to become the new Avatar of the Red.

Even at four years of age Maxine had begun to develop formidable powers, like the ability to heal human and other animals, to resurrect dead animals, and to partially transform other people into animals (she gives their neighbor who calls her a freak a chicken hand). As she matures and gains full access to the Red and more conscious control over her abilities she could easily become one of the most powerful metahumans on the planet. Realizing this, the Rot sent it's agents, the Hunters Three, to capture Maxine and corrupt her in preparation of their upcoming invasion.

The Rot infected the Red and, as a result, rapidly began infecting large groups of animals. When Buddy himself became infected he grew a new body, transfered his consciousness to it, and killed the corrupted doppleganger, though not before it could pass it on it's infection to Buddy's son Cliff.

Directed to Abby's mansion in the Louisiana swamps by Maxine and her talking cat Socks (actually a former Avatar of the Red who gave up it's place in the Parliament of Limbs to be Maxine's guide), the Baker family arrived only moments after Arcane disappears into the portal to the realm of the Rot.

Buddy's wife Ellen pleads with Swamp Thing to cure her son of the Rot's infection. Holland informs Buddy and Ellen that the only way to save Cliff, and by extension the rest of the world, is to venture into the Rot and stop the infection at it's source. After some debate, and after Maxine's vision of the apocalypse of physical corruption the world will become, it's decided that Alec and Buddy will enter the portal, and that Ellen and Abby will stay behind to guard the children and the portal's entrance.

After extending a vine tendril and anchoring it to a nearby tree, Swamp Thing leaps into the portal with Animal Man. The two soon find themselves in a land of bones and rotting flesh, surrounded by twisted abominations.

Meanwhile, Cliff slips away from the care of his grandmother at a nearby motel. We see him shambling half conscious down an empty road toward a shadowed figure covered in flies and tentacles, muttering over and over to himself, "Rotworld is coming. Rotworld is coming". As Cliff makes this proclamation, dozens of Rot-corrupted creatures burst forth from the portal and begin attacking Abby, Ellen, and Maxine.

They fight off the invaders - Abby with her Rot powers, Maxine with her Red powers, and Ellen with Abby's shotgun - though Abby is forced to use her powers to close the portal, leaving only an opening small enough to keep Alec's tethering vine intact.

On what I think of as the first level of the Rot, Alec and Buddy battle and destroy a smarm of things that used to be humans that served the Rot in life. Their foes defeated, they find a hole in ground with a seemingly endless set of bone steps leading deeper into the Rot.

As they descend, Animal Man quickly discovers that his connection to the Red has been severed, negating his powers. They soon find Anton Arcane crawling spider-like down the ladder toward them.
Arcane gloats that the unleashing of Sethe was a gambit by the Rot to get the Parliament of Trees into breaking the rules by resurrecting Holland, giving the Parliament of Decay the loophole they needed to resurrect Arcane. He then severs Alec's vine, sending Swamp Thing and Animal Man tumbling down the seemingly endless void of the Rot.

On Earth, Alec's vine withers, signifying that the mission into the Rot has failed.
"Socks" (it prefers the name Ignatius) tells Abby that the only way to stop the Rot is to destroy the Earthly manifestation of the Parliament of Decay, though no one knows where they are hidden. Abby states that she knows it's hiding place, and that she must go there alone. She offers the Baker family sanctuary in her mansion, though Ellen, understandably wary of the woman with powers that stem from the same source that has been plaguing her family, declines, saying they will be safer on the run.

Alec and Buddy fall for a seeming eternity and are eventually expelled, crashing to two separate locations on Earth. Time, however, moves differently in the Rot than it does on Earth. Though they have been in the Rot for a relatively short time, a year has passed on Earth. During that time, the Rot has completely corrupted the entire planet. Animal Man finds himself in a zoo filled with mutilated and corrupted animals, while Swamp Thing finds himself looking up at a very angry Poison Ivy, her sword pointed at his throat.

I'll be honest, I've been putting off covering Rotworld. By the time it came out a few years ago I'd lost interest in Animal Man, and only read a couple of issues of Swamp Thing's half of the story. It's not that I think it's poorly written. I'm just not a fan of the trope where the world or the timeline or whatever is screwed up and the heroes have to set it back to the way it was. I didn't enjoy it in the 90s with Age of Apocalypse, I didn't enjoy it in the early 00s with the Ultra Humanite story in Johns' JSA, and I didn't enjoy it in 2011 with Flashpoint. I ended up skipping the second half of Swamp Thing's Rotworld issues and jumped straight ahead to Charles Soule's run. As such, there's been a significant gap in my New 52 Swamp Thing reading, until now.

I found myself very pleasantly surprised, then, as I was reading Animal Man #12 for the first time and rereading Swamp Thing #12 for the first time in a few years, to be genuinely enjoying myself. Maybe my tastes in story tropes have changed. Maybe it's my having embraced all aspects of the Swamp Thing mythos. Whatever the reason, I'm looking forward to continuing with Rotworld, and I hope you'll join me for our next installment when we cover Animal Man #13 and Swamp Thing #13.

Before I wrap up this installment, however, I want to give a very special shout out to some friends mentioned briefly last post. The Poison Ivy League is the internet's most outspoken proponent of Poison Ivy and the movement for her to be written as as hero, positive environmental activist, and a respectfully represented LGBT character in official DC canon. While I wouldn't want to take the liberty of giving out their Twitter handles here, you can find them under the hashtag #PoisonIvyLeague, and you can see tweets from their most prominent members heavily seeded throughout my Twitter feed. Even if you're not necessarily a huge Poison Ivy fan I highly encourage any Swampy fan to give them your support out of plant power solidarity.

That's it for this installment of Avatar of the Green, Parliamentarians!  Until next time, think Green and be epic!