Like a lot of people, I first got acquainted with Swamp Thing in the 80s when the older stuff was hard to find. Catching up with it now, it seems like something from way more than 10 years earlier, old-fashioned in both good and bad ways. The good: Wein had a solid grasp of several pulp genres and hit on a premise that could be adapted to any of them, while also being perfect for morbid young people who felt like monsters, and Wrightson's art (though it's sometimes a little clumsier than I expected—he was pretty young) has Gothic style to spare and also a great cartoony expressiveness that recalls some of the EC greats. The bad: Wein writes in a time-honored tradition of endless bombastic narration that's constantly telling you what you're looking at, and the recurring human characters are pretty forgettable. Although it would take a while for them to figure out what to make the story about besides a series of one-off monster encounters, Swamp Thing at this point is already obviously a great idea and you can see all kinds of weird notions being thrown on the wall to see what sticks.

For more thoughts, here's a blog post: https://alibi-shop.dreamwidth.org/9945.html ( )

For the last forty years, I go time travelling every half-decade or so. I chose this edition to review, but I'm actually re-reading the 10-issue Wein/Wrightson run collected in four issues that were released from the summer of 1977 to Feb of 1980.

In 1977, my family had literally uprooted our lives and moved three hours away to a very small town where I knew absolutely no one beside my immediate family. I was a shy, introverted 15-year-old kid who'd been bullied for the past four or five years and didn't make friends easily. My escape was reading. I read everything.

And that summer, as I waited for my mother to get something done in town, I grew bored and asked if I could get a dollar to grab a snack or something. I walked across the street to the variety store, a charming place with wooden plank floors and that wonderful small town smell of fresh bakery products, paperback books and...comics.

I checked out the spinner rack--remember those? --and I don't remember anything other than the comic I eventually picked up, which was the first collection. Sixty cents bought me 48 pages, a collection of issues 1 and 2 of the original Swamp Thing saga.

I went back to where I was waiting for my mother and sat down, opened the glossy cover and began reading a comic that would, over the next twenty minutes or so, blow my mind. Len Wein's wonderful words...yes, a little overwritten, a little overly earnest, but setting the perfect tone for Wrightson's murky--shall we say swampy? --images. I finished the issue, then immediately turned back to the front and re-read it, slower this time, savouring each image, rolling each word over and around on my tongue.

And over the next three years, I picked up the next three collections, wrapping the entire Wrightson run.

Are these stories a little corny? Hell yes. Do they rely on a ridiculous amount of coincidence? God, yes. But are they magical? My God, yes.

Each story, whether treading the gothic path of Frankenstein or werewolves or mad scientists, or slipping closer to the science fiction of aliens and clockmakers who fashion humans from mechanics, or dipping a toe into Lovecraftian horror, or even bringing Batman--the best looking Batman this side of Neal Adams, by the way--into the story, Wein ensures that each story is infused with a melancholy humanity, solidly backed up by Wrightson's moody, empathetic line work.

Every five years or so, I pull out those four collections and think, yeah, I'm too old for this now. I won't enjoy them this time. And every time, for a couple of glorious hours, I'm that fifteen-year-old kid, sitting in a strange store in a strange new town, discovering an entirely new world in the wonderful smelling pages of a 60-cent comic book.

Magic. ( )

‘Who really is the Monster?’ (p.69)

In this volume we read the eight pages of the Swamp Thing’s origin. And in the next first ten issues the Creature meets Arcane and his un-men, the Patchwork man (a creature who came from V. Frankenstein), a Werewolf, an unusual Witch, an Alien, Batman, M’Nagalah (a character from Lovecraft), and several Zombies.

In my opinion the best are the number 4 (with the Werewolf), 6 (a Swiss - clock - village), and 9 (an Alien who needs the Ama).

‘Rain: some say it cleanses the all-too-impure heart -- others proclaim it the sorrow of the Gods, regretting the tragedy their golden hands have wrought ... the tragedy that has long known as Man’ (p. 27)

‘You stayed in that mental shadowland, chained in your brother’s dungeon, refusing to accept what you’d become ... until the day the door opened ... and a more awesome horror stood framed in the light ...’ (p. 76)

‘But, as usual, the words are wrong! It’s never over! The end?’ (p. 198)

P.S. Two question: Where is the fourth plane’s engine? (see page 69). Why are the clocks wrong? (See pages 142 and 143). ( )

Hokey and dated as hell, but the birth of a great character and some memorable images. ( )

Len Wein's Swamp Thing offers two versions of the story - the first in this volume is the story of Alex Olsen, turned into Swamp Thing through the jealously of another who coveted his wife. It was a sweet few pages where a true love is saved, but not reunited and a trinket lost forever but unable to be cried over. Len Wein didn't want to continue it - he felt that he and Berni Wrightson done a perfect story and didn't want to continue it further. They were being noble!

And so the story of Alec Holland and his transformation into Swamp Thing was born. After all, there was nothing wrong with a new Swamp Thing. The story was better for it. Instead of a small tale of jealousy, a wide-sweeping tale of international espionage, secret scientific research and murder takes shape. Swamp Thing is created and immediately believed to be responsible for the death of the very man he is...and through a series of events must protect the person that has vowed to destroy him.

This is more than a simple comic book hero story, and yet all of the elements are happily there to lap up in full. We have our reluctant hero, protecting the weak and sacrificing himself for the greater good. At the same time, it's a story about monsters and their origins. It questions the monster within and without, believed and perceived.

Dark Genesis does have it's DC roots firmly on the ground. A trip to Gotham City does produce a cameo from Batman, so you're very aware of the Universe Swamp Thing inhabits. ( )