Scott Snyder, Yanick Paquette, and Marco Rudy wrapped up their “Swamp Thing” story in a neat little bow before leaving. What they left behind was, at its core, a pretty strong horror love story that was perhaps a bit hampered by drawn-out crossovers with “Animal Man.” Charles Soule picks the series up with a pretty clean slate to work from and if this issue is any indication, this is going to be a very different “Swamp Thing” moving forward. But it’s a more mainstream “Swamp Thing” and there may be some downside to that.
Written by Charles Soule
Illustrated by Kano• What could Swamp Thing possibly fear more than The Scarecrow?
Soule begins his run on “Swamp Thing” with a cold opening on the titular character dutifully trudging through the desert to destroy a jungle oasis that has cropped up seemingly at random. It seems that someone is messing with “The Green” again and disturbing the natural order of things by creating false biospheres of plant life. As a defender of The Green, Swamp Thing must keep the order of things in a natural state, regardless of the ramifications for the non-vegetative living beings in the area. Soule uses this opportunity to create some moral ambiguity for the character, but we are quickly swept away from this and to Metropolis, where Swampy means to search for answers regarding the mysterious “seeder” causing these disturbances.
By the end of Snyder’s run, Alec Holland was doomed to walk as Swamp Thing, unable to return to his human form. This runs him a little more closely to what Alan Moore was doing with him when he removed the human element. Holland narrates the issue in an informal conversational manner, which belies his physical appearance and the mythological nature of his pursuits as the Swamp Thing. We get some insightful bits throughout the story in which Alec is figuring out on the fly how he should use his form and his abilities against the obstacles in front of him. At its best, “Swamp Thing” was a horror book about living as a monster. There’s always been a sense of loneliness and isolation at the core of his character. Here, we get a character who speaks to all the plants on Earth, but is human at his core and therefore terribly lonely. Soule is following in the footsteps of Moore and Snyder by creating a mix of the two approaches to the character. This plays as a more mainstream and less challenging approach to the character. He plays with the storytelling trope of the internal conflict of man and monster, pits him against a Batman villain (for crying out loud), and throws in a very marketable cameo at the end of the issue. Soule writes an engaging script, especially in the early goings, but the plot loses steam once these familiar marks of a “marketable” story start showing up. Soule starts with a nicely focused take on the character on Swamp Thing, but then tenuously related elements start to get shoe-horned in and the issue starts to feel inherently different.
Paquette’s winding, sinuous panel structures in the first 18 issues of “Swamp Thing” defined Scott Snyder’s run, visually. It must be said that as Soule sets his run apart from Snyder’s, Kano also does not attempt to mimic the style of either the panel borders or the character designs of the previous creative team. This proves to be a smart choice, because possible comparisons to that signature style now become less prudent. Kano’s art is a fine fit for the character and a lot of his work here is absolutely gorgeous.
His design-work, in particular, is inspired. As Swamp Thing crosses into different climates with differing classes of vegetation, his form reflects the plantlife that would be most common there. The desert Swamp Thing looks different from the jungle Swamp Thing – it proves to be an elegantly executed concept. Kano keeps Swamp Thing’s appearance fresh by thinking about character organically. Just as Soule imagines what it would be like for a human man to relate more to plantlife than he does his own kind, Kano turns Swamp Thing’s appearance into a adaptive element that enriches the story. Paquette would often craft intricate double-page spreads that would wind his characters through the more fantastical elements of the plot. Kano chooses to go big with Swamp Thing, emphasizing his imposing size and malleability. As the character evolves from Snyder’s run, he is in control of the twisting forces of The Green, rather than pulled spiraling into them against his whims.
Soule and Kano are off to a fine start with “Swamp Thing” #19, but there is a clear effort to sell the character of Swamp Thing to readers that haven’t been interested in him yet. Trying to gain more of an audience (or keep an audience that could potentially have left with Snyder) is an understandable practice, but there are clear storytelling issues that are caused by this. Soule has a really strong grasp on the character of Swamp Thing, but somehow manages to whisk him into multiple cameos that do damage to the focus on character that Soule and Kano handled so well in the early stages and turns him into a more conventional superhero, where he doesn’t work as well.
Final Verdict: 6.8 – You won’t be mad if you bought it, but it’s a browse.
