These comics changed everything for me. Took me right out of the super world and into a world of horror. A world where writing was king. They hold up incredibly well. I still loved every issue. ( )

‘You shouldn’t have come here.’ (from the back cover)

The first four chapters are the best of this volume; the last three tell events improved in the next volumes of the saga of Swamp Thing.

‘He isn’t Alec Holland. He never will be Alec Holland. He never was Alec Holland. He’s just a ghost. A ghost dressed in weeds.’ (p. 33)
The Swamp Thing becomes aware of his nature: in a previous life he was an human being called Alec Holland, now in this new form he is only weeds and mud.
‘Woodrue ... he took ... my humanity ... away from me ... caused so much agony ... and when I thought the agony was ... over, that I found ... peace ... he tainted that as well ... Woodrue.’ (p. 72)
The Swamp Thing refuses to live as half man / half tree and he / it rooted in the swamp, becoming a vegetable.

Jason Woodrue becomes part of the swamp, and grows like a plant. Woodrue: ‘I am come to announce the Green Millennium.’ (p. 79) But this Green Millennium means destruction, so the Swamp Thing wake up to put order, aware that he is not anymore Alec Holland.


( )

RITO DE PRIMAVERA!!!
Que história sensacional!!! ( )

I read good things about this and thought I’d give it a try. I enjoyed the weird plots and unusual hero, although I thought one of the villains was a bit silly.
I’m kind of obsessive about reading introductions; sometimes they have wonderful little gems of information. The ones for this book were like that. I finally learned why I’m so confused sometimes when I’m reading comics. In Alan Moore’s intro he says

The stories here don’t end—not in the way a movie ends or a book ends...Anyone picking up a comic book for the first time is almost certain to find themselves in the middle of a continuum that may have commenced before the reader’s birth, and will quite possibly continue long after his or her demise.

Swamp Thing was created in 1972 by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson, and in his intro, Moore kindly provides some background to the series before launching into the first story, “The Anatomy Lesson,” which I think is the best in the collection. I thought the stories where the Floronic Man was running amok were a bit too over-the-top, but the arc that started with “The Sleep of Reason” was more interesting and spooky.

I wasn’t a big fan of the artwork in this one, mainly how people were drawn, but I liked how Swamp Thing was drawn, especially on the pages when he’s filling an entire panel. I loved how benevolent the artists could make him look. And the cover art for this book is gorgeous. ( )

After having only read these on their own before, I recently read through from the start of the series, and enjoyed them just as much but in a different way. The references to other DC Comics stuff, which were a bit cryptic before but in an enjoyable way, now seem like artifacts of the obligation to fit everything into a shared universe, which I just don't enjoy the way I did when I was a kid—even though Moore clearly loved dredging through decades of ad-hoc pulp ideas and it's fun to see him put his own stamp on them. The clever way in which Swamp Thing's origin is reinvented is certainly clever, but its main significance is as a way of discarding narrative dead ends from the earlier series. But just on the level of pure craft and feeling, this all still holds up awfully well. Moore is great at sketching in character through dialogue, and building atmosphere and suspense through well-chosen details. He's also always been good at writing to the strengths of his illustrators, and Bissette and Totleben are doing stunning work here, with an approach to design and rendering that doesn't resemble anything in the series before, nor anything going on in superhero comics at the time. There isn't yet a sense of what the new series is really about, it's mostly trying out a couple of ideas for how it might balance action and horror, but it's clear that these people are on to something big.

For more thoughts, here's a blog post. ( )