‘Saga of the Swamp Thing’ and the Horror of Humanity
Every comic book hero undergoes a transformation, whether it be internal or external. Spider-Man was bitten by a radioactive spider, Superman disguises himself as Clark Kent, Batman was fundamentally changed by witnessing the murder of his parents as a child. Some heroes, and even more villains, undergo more extreme changes, becoming monsters as the result of an accident. Exposure to a bomb blast turned Bruce Banner into the Hulk, other scientific accidents resulted in characters like The Thing, The Lizard, Man-Bat and countless others. When Swamp Thing was first created, and for several years afterward, he fit perfectly into that category. Swamp Thing was the very definition of a man tragically transformed into a monster after a horrific accident. That origin was immortalized on screen in the 1982 Wes Craven film. That was the established canon, nothing changed until the mid-‘80s, when writer Alan Moore (alongside artists John Totleben and Steve Bissette) came along and took over the title and turned what was already a stellar old-school horror comic into one of the best comic book series ever written.
The aesthetic of Swamp Thing remained largely unchanged. Totleben and Bissette were both phenomenal at making sure the comic still looked like an old-school horror comic, from not only the titular creature himself to the bog and vines and exaggerated trees. It looked like a natural extension of not only the original Bernie Wrightson art, but even further back than Swamp Thing himself, an extension of classic EC Comics like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. That classically nightmarish imagery is updated with intricately detailed, purely horrific creatures perfect for the mid-eighties that only these artists could have designed. It’s important to keep that visual element roughly the same, because that is the only way that Moore and company’s plans for the title were ever going to work.
When Alan Moore came in and took over writing Saga of the Swamp Thing he changed the series fundamentally, he completely reimagined the mythology and he did it not by rebooting the title, but by organically leading Swamp Thing himself to discover this information for himself and earnestly deal with the ramifications of it. From his opening arc on the comic, Moore dropped the bombshell reveal that when Alec Holland had his accident, he fell into the swamp and died. The living plant matter created by the accident absorbed Holland’s memories. Thus, Swamp Thing learns for the first time that he was never Alec Holland, he was never human, he was only ever Swamp Thing, and he had been holding onto a human identity, one that he believed to be tragically stolen from him, that he had never actually had. This information is delivered as clinically as possible, too, during a literal autopsy when Swamp Thing is believed to be dead, it’s dished out as candidly as a coroner, and yet Swampy is forced to listen to all of it.
In those early issues of Moore’s run, Swamp Thing has a deeply interesting period of what would typically be considered self-mourning, except that he’s not mourning himself. He’s mourning the man he believed himself to be. He retreats into his own consciousness, walking back through Holland’s life, picking the memories and emotions he can continue to carry and the ones he feels he needs to leave behind. In one of the most impactful comic book panels ever illustrated, Swamp Thing hauls Alec Holland’s bones out of the swamp to hold a makeshift funeral for the man he thought he was. As he does this, the narration of his inner monologue remarks, “…down here… in the cold… all those… dark years… you must… have been… lonely.” That line is essential, and not simply for its poetic tragedy. That is truly the moment that Swamp Thing begins to think of Alec Holland as a being completely separate from himself.
Initially, the reveal that he was never Alec Holland seems like just one more devastating truth that Swamp Thing is forced to live with. The genius of Alan Moore’s run is that it’s not. Most monstrous hero stories are about the innate concept of “holding onto humanity.” The Incredible Hulk is very much about that, at least in the early decades. The Hulk has a child’s rage and strength far beyond his own capacity to control, but he simply wants to be left alone. He has an inherent love of things, of nature, but he is relentlessly pursued by those who fear him. The X-Men famously stand up to and for a world that hates and fears them. Mary Shelley’s iconic creation, the monster of Frankenstein, largely the inspiration for this entire genre of anti-hero was in many ways more deeply human, more feeling, caring, more profoundly in love with the world around him, than his creator. That’s the crux of almost all stories about lonely, empathetic monsters.
Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing is a masterful subversion of that entire concept.
Once Swamp Thing buries the bones of Alec Holland, literally putting the entire notion of his human identity to rest, he undergoes a change in perspective and the series as a whole undergoes a dramatic shift in ideology. Learning that he was never Alec Holland is the very thing that winds up freeing Swamp Thing. He is unburdened by thoughts of humanity, he has no further image of himself as a being torn between two worlds, because he isn’t. He is not the hybrid he thought he was, like so many other comic characters. He’s not a half-man/half-plant, there is no man in him at all, and that firmly places him on the side of the plants. That’s where he stands, unwavering, for the remainder of Moore’s run and truly where he has remained ever since. While the series had certainly always existed in that realm, this new perspective firmly cemented Moore’s Swamp Thing as an environmental horror comic.
Humanity is not always a blessing, and does not always need to be depicted as such in art. In a comic so strongly tied to environmental issues, there is absolutely room to look at the negatives of humanity’s impact. In other monstrous hero stories, the heart and the soul and the inner life of human beings hold so much weight. Swamp Thing looks at the actions. The obvious truth is that humans have treated the environment terribly. In fact, the way humans have treated the world around them and their reasons for doing it embody the very worst traits of humankind. Deforestation and pollution are tragic evidence that greed cannot be stopped by empathy or even self-preservation. That corporations and the people behind them don’t cast a single thought about the natural resources they’re drying up or the ecosystems they’re flattening. Even more than that, they don’t hesitate for a second to consider the destruction of their own kind and themselves for the sake of another dollar. There is love and compassion in the human heart, but there is also this, and this rot is a thing from which Swamp Thing becomes wholly untethered.
Learning that he was never human is a profound and necessary transformation for Swamp Thing, because humanity simply can never care for nature the way that nature cares for itself. Swamp Thing was able to emerge from that transformation rebranded as the protector of the environment, and of The Green, an elemental force which binds all plant life. Humanity brings too much baggage, too many ideas, too much perceived separation from the natural world to ever be its voice. Swamp Thing is a plant with the intelligence, shape, and the voice of a man, but he is not one, and so he uses that voice and he uses his power to speak and stand up for an environment that cannot speak for itself. That is Swamp Thing’s power, and that is his crucial position within the world, the universe and yes, even the larger DC Universe, after Moore’s reimagining of the concept.
One would think that the romance at the heart of Swamp Thing would be at odds with these ideals, but it is anything but. The love story between Swamp Thing and Abby Arcane, at least in those early years, is one of the greatest in all of comics. It was an absolute precursor to things like The Shape of Water. Swamp Thing and Abby are from fundamentally different worlds. Even if she comes from magical heritage, she is a woman and he is a living mass of plant tissue. Ridding Swamp Thing of that humanity drastically widens that rift between them, at least at first, but it only strengthens that attraction.
Their love only cements Swamp Thing’s perspective as a lover of all life, only here it’s a bit more literal. The sentiment still stands that Swamp Thing cares for humanity, and Abby’s love anchors him into not totally giving up on or outright damning humankind altogether. She grounds him, and in loving her and giving humans a chance he is able to love them as a whole more than they will ever possibly love him or the world he has taken it upon himself to protect.
Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing is simply one of the greatest comic book series of all time. It is without a doubt my favorite thing he has ever written. He took a great concept and a great character and made it into one of the all-time best, and he did that by completely reshaping the perspective of the book while keeping the world around it intact. He redefined Swamp Thing as a character, and that has become the definitive version in the eyes of readers in the decades since. He did the unthinkable and wrote a deeply moving story about an utterly inhuman protagonist. Swamp Thing proved that a lack of humanity does not mean a lack of love. It means an ability to love the world itself in a wholly unselfish way, of which humanity is not always capable.
Swamp Thing could so easily have lost his ability to be a hero the moment he learned of his true origin. Instead, it was the thing that made him a hero, not for humanity, but for the world underneath humanity’s feet. He became the voice of nature itself, and in doing so, brought a perspective to the genre that almost no other characters have ever had, and cemented himself as one of the greatest comic characters of all time.
