We stared into the untempered schism and all we saw was this dodgy CSO effect

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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

16 Comments

  1. Daniel Tessier
    July 11, 2014 @ 3:43 am

    I'd suggest that Swamp Thing, Man-Thing and the Heap were all ultimately inspired by Ted Sturgeon's story IT! published in Unknown magazine in 1940.

    Reply

  2. BerserkRL
    July 11, 2014 @ 8:29 am

    I love the fact that Cain is wearing a DC button.

    Reply

  3. Matthew Blanchette
    July 11, 2014 @ 8:42 am

    " This began with Batman, created by Bill Finger, with Bob Kane on art,"

    I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE

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    Reply

  4. BerserkRL
    July 11, 2014 @ 8:44 am

    I would bet that Swamp Thing was influenced by the Silver Surfer comics; both involve a melancholy outsider wandering the Earth, helping people, and musing philosophically about how shit life is.

    Reply

  5. BerserkRL
    July 11, 2014 @ 8:46 am

    Phil even chose a picture of a deceitful Cain pointing a finger.

    Reply

  6. BerserkRL
    July 11, 2014 @ 8:58 am

    One of the things that happened toward the end of the original run was that Swamp Thing gets turned (temporarily) back to Alec Holland. This makes things a bit awkward for Alan Moore's revelation that Swamp Thing wasn't Holland anyway. The usual fix is to treat those late issues as retconned; they never happened. But no one ever mentions that Wein & Wrightson had already turned Swamp Thing (again temporarily) back to Alec Holland toward the beginning of their run. Is that supposed to be retconned too?

    By the way, why does the link at the top go to the Moore collection rather than the Wein/Wrightson collection (which is in print, though the stories between their tenure and Moore's still aren't)?

    Reply

  7. BerserkRL
    July 11, 2014 @ 9:11 am

    This was one of my favourite comics as a kid. I started reading with issue #15, so I'd already missed the Wein & Wrightson era; but their successors were pretty good.

    He also had a number of crossovers in other books; see e.g. here and here.

    Reply

  8. Unknown
    July 11, 2014 @ 9:34 am

    Having read It! recently, I thought large sections of It! could have been turned into a Man-Thing story with no or minimal changes.

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  9. Jack
    July 11, 2014 @ 10:42 am

    The very first comic book I ever read-someone had left it in a laundromat when I was very young, and I read it because I read everything I could get my hands on-was a Swamp Thing where he'd been turned back into Alec Holland. So when Moore came along, I was briefly amused by the changes, but the stories were so good, I just shrugged my shoulders and went along.

    Reply

  10. Lo-Fi Explosion
    July 11, 2014 @ 2:05 pm

    Moore was simply writing post-Crisis comics in the pre-Crisis universe.

    Reply

  11. encyclops
    July 11, 2014 @ 2:58 pm

    I have two strong childhood memories of Swamp Thing, which I otherwise (perhaps consequently) never read on a regular basis, though I've read and appreciated a few volumes of Moore's work on it.

    One was the Wes Craven movie, from which I somehow managed to see at least one scene, assuming I'm not confusing it with a different movie. In the scene, Swamp Thing grabs a man's head like he's palming a basketball and squeezes until blood gushes down between his fingers. I was young enough that it was terrifying. It still freaks me out a bit to think about it.

    The other is this issue, which showed up in one of those Archie Comics-sized digests, a best of the year for DC type of thing: http://www.comicvine.com/the-saga-of-swamp-thing-4-in-the-white-room/4000-253925/ It was really quite good, very adult, about a children's TV host turned child killer possessed by a demon. I'd love to read more of that stretch of the series, but I'm inferring from some of the comments above that it's out of print.

    Reply

  12. Kit
    July 12, 2014 @ 5:15 am

    #factcheck: Joe Orlando was a regular (if lesser) artist at EC, but not, AFAIK, an editor.

    Reply

  13. timber-munki
    July 12, 2014 @ 8:41 am

    Is your treatment of DC (the organisation currently residing in New York, about to move to LA) as some kind of gestalt entity in and of itself anything to do with Morrison's pronoucements a in the early 2010s (during the media launch of Supergods) that the DC Universe (the stories, characters, settings & concepts created by employees & contractors of said organisation) gaining sentience due to it's complexity?

    Reply

  14. Elizabeth Sandifer
    July 14, 2014 @ 8:31 pm

    This is almost certainly true. I left it out mostly because I wanted the circularity of The Heap finally ripping off Alan Moore under McFarlane.

    Reply

  15. Elizabeth Sandifer
    July 14, 2014 @ 8:32 pm

    Yes.

    Reply

  16. Daru
    February 18, 2015 @ 11:01 pm

    Man, great stuff Phil, loving this whole section as I catch up on reading your Swamp Thing posts. I missed this all when it came out as last year was full of family bereavement, so I just couldn't catch up.

    But Swamp Thing was massively formative for me as an artist when I was in my teens, and then at college studying design and illustration. I have never seen this section of the stories so loving the background.

    Reply

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