To continue beating a dead horse, a lot of people have been irritated at the changes Geoff Johns brought to Swamp Thing in the pages of Brightest Day. Newer readers, however, have been asking the question “who cares?” I’ll tell you who: almost anyone who has read Alan Moore’s run on Saga of the Swamp Thing. Yes, that Alan Moore. Yes, you should read it. Yes, I’ll tell you more after the cut.
Now, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the guardian of Earth, Swamp Thing was created by Len Wein as a horror comic for DC, featuring a man-turned-plant-monster as the protagonist. After being passed around between various writers, and after the release of a more or less well-received film, the torch was passed to Alan Moore, then a rising star in the industry. What happened next was legendary.
I’m not saying that Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing was the first great comic. Anyone who visits this site regularly knows that I’m a huge fan of classic, 60s-era comics. Still, there was something new about Saga of the Swamp Thing that hadn’t been seen before: at the time, there had been a vast amount of highly imaginative comics in the mainstream, as well as a good deal of intelligent and mature ones. Saga of the Swamp Thing, however, was one of the first comics to not only merge these qualities that had been drifting in and out of comics into something incredibly deep and cerebral, but also be published by one of the big two. The stories in Saga of the Swamp Thing are fascinating, socially-conscious, and beautifully portrayed by artist Steve Bissette.
Saga of the Swamp Thing will always have a special place in my heart as the starting point of DC’s magic characters becoming part of one cohesive whole. Within its pages, Moore tied together the titular character, The Phantom Stranger, Deadman, Jack Kirby’s Etrigan, and the Spectre as members of a similar lifestyle, as well as introducing the Hellblazer, John Constantine. Over the years, these characters have grown even more intertwined, and other characters have been thrown into the mix (Zatanna, Madame Xanadu), or created from scratch (The Endless), and it’s a hell of a thing to see how much that setting has developed over time. Honestly, DC’s magic realm is on par for me with Cosmic Marvel, if not even better.
Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing has, in a sense, two starting points. If you read it in the older paperbacks, you will start with issue #21, “The Anatomy Lesson,” which is hands down one of my favorite single issues of all time. While it’s actually the second issue of Moore’s run, it’s honestly a better starting place than his first issue, and begins the radical changes that he brought to the character (and which Johns appears to have undone). If you want to shell out the extra cash for the hardcovers, though, you’ll get his first issue as well, which aims to completely wrap up the run prior to his. It’s a bit jarring to read if you haven’t read the preceding issues (which, as far as I know, haven’t been collected), but it’s a neat read just for the various meta-textual nods lurking within its pages.
In my experience as a comic fan, it seems this run’s popularity seems to wax and wane, when it should only wax. Saga of the Swamp Thing is not only a great comic to read, it is also incredibly significant to the history of the industry. When DC okayed Watchmen, it was because of Moore’s tenure on this title. No Saga of the Swamp Thing, no Watchmen. No Watchmen, and comics would never have been the same. Again, though, even if you don’t care much about the history behind your comics – even though I find that very important – there’s no reason to not read on of the best horror comics of all time.
