chapter eight

If you were expecting comics reviews today, they went up last night.

This is the nineteenth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the fifth volume. This volume is available in the US here and the UK here, as well as being obtainable at your local bookstore or comic shop. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

“I feel that I have become an essential part of some incomprehensible biological process. The house is an organism hungry for madness. It is the maze that dreams.” – Grant Morrison, Arkham Asylum

It is not fair, however, to frame this as a failing on Moore’s part. For all that he was rapidly becoming the golden boy of DC Comics, Moore was never going to be allowed to fundamentally and irrevocably alter the nature of the DC Universe, and he was certainly not naive enough to think otherwise. He had, after all, by this point, already had his plans for a story called Who Killed the Peacemaker? This story would provide sweeping and transformative take on some obscure superheroes that DC acquired when it bought out the failing Charlton Comics in 1983, vetoed by DC on the grounds that it would render the characters unusable, resulting in the proposal being reworked as Watchmen with original characters that could be cordoned off from DC continuity, with the first issue coming out the month after Swamp Thing #50. The idea that he was going to get away with destroying heaven and letting the primordial darkness reign once more was unlikely to have seriously crossed his mind.

Figure 518: Swamp Thing #51 marked a change of direction for the series, with Swamp Thing seeking to rescue Abby from prison.

Indeed, his next story arc, a three-issue tale that brings Swamp Thing into conflict with Batman, is largely about reiterating this precise point. It is easy and tempting to draw a dividing line between Swamp Thing #50 and the story that commences with Swamp Thing #51. DC does exactly that in the collected editions of Moore’s Swamp Thing, ending the fourth volume, A Murder of Crows, with issue #50, and commencing the fifth, Earth to Earth, with #51. And there is a marked shift in tone between the apocalyptic battle on the shores of hell itself that takes place in issue #50 and the much smaller scale story of Swamp Thing attempting to rescue an imprisoned Abby that follows it.

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This is the eighteenth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the fourth volume. It’s available in the US here and UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

“We all woke up, the day after the world ended, and we still had to feed ourselves and keep a roof over our heads. Life goes on, y’know?” – Alan Moore, Promethea

Figure 508: Judith’s transformation is a triumph of psychedelic body horror. (Written by Alan Moore, art by John Totleben, from Swamp Thing #48, 1986)

The unleashing of this horror, in “A Murder of Crows,” in Swamp Thing #48, comes when one of Constantine’s allies, Judith, betrays him to the Brujería and agrees to serve as their messenger. This involves a ritual in which Judith vomits out her intestines and allows her body to shrivel until only her severed but still talking head remains. The Brujería then place a black pearl in her mouth, at which point her head steadily transforms into a bird, a process that is laboriously and disturbingly described, at which point the bird is released to summon the nameless dark power by delivering a pearl held in its mouth to a distant destination. Although this transformation is presented as a physical corruption ripe with body horror, the fact that it is brought about via Judith ingesting an unnamed root places it in the larger thematic tradition of psychedelic plants within Moore’s Swamp Thing. It is, in other words, inexorably linked with the bad trip – the negative, monstrous aspect of the spiritual plane. 

Figure 509: Swamp Thing meets his ancestors in the Parliament of Trees. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Stan Woch and Ron Randall, from Swamp Thing #47, 1986)

But the summoning of this dark power is the third issue of the arc. The second, coming between it and the Crisis tie-in, presents a second, equally important aspect of this setup. In it, before journeying to the Brujería’s cave, Constantine takes Swamp Thing to the Parliament of Trees, also located in South America, in this case at the source of the River Tefé in the Amazon. Here Moore pays off the idea introduced in “Abandoned Houses,” revealing the resting place of all the past plant elementals of the world and allowing Swamp Thing to seek communion with them.

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Last War in Albion will now be running on Wednesdays, with TARDIS Eruditorum moved to Mondays and Fridays for the remainder of its run. 

This is the seventeenth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the fourth volume. It’s available in the US here and UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

“This is an IMAGINARY Story… Aren’t they all?” – Alan Moore, Whatever Happened to the man of Tomorrow

Figure 499: The first issue of John Byrne’s Superman reboot carried an ad for Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run on its cover.

It is worth highlighting the degree to which this is, within the context of 1986 DC Comics, actually controversial. Certainly John Byrne, who was inheriting the Superman books after this, did not like it, complaining years later about how he cannot hear the phrase “imaginary story” “without a snide and ennui soaked voice whispering in my ear ‘but aren’t they all?’” Indeed, he suggests that Moore’s preface to the story “goes most deeply to the root” of “the many things that can be seen to have gone wrong with American superhero comics.” His reason for this remarkable claim is that “when we ask ‘Aren’t they all?’ we are looking behind the curtain. We are seeing that the Emperor has no clothes.” While Byrne’s concern about the prospect of readers looking behind the curtain at that particular moment is wholly understandable, given that what they’d see was Byrne taking the job of an acclaimed thirty year veteran of the industry who had just been unceremoniously fired, it stands in marked and, more to the point, ideologically grounded contrast with Alan Moore, who noted that when he first got into comics at the age of seven he “was probably preoccupied with the characters themselves.

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This is the sixteenth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the fourth volume. It’s available in the US here and UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

“In the beginning there was only one. A single black infinitude, so cold and dark for so very long that even the burning light was imperceptible. But the light grew, and the infinitude shuddered, and the darkness finally screamed, as much in pain as in relief.” -Marv Wolfman, Crisis on Infinite Earths

Figure 491: The cover of the debut issue of Crisis on Infinite Earths.

This story, published as a twelve-issue limited series, was a watershed moment in the history of comics. It came about due to the confluence of two seemingly unrelated things: the fact that DC Comics took place in a multiverse consisting of infinitely many parallel universes, and the fact that over the course of the 1970s and 80s American comic book retailing had steadily transitioned from being dominated by newsstands and other magazine vendors to being dominated by shops focusing exclusively on comic books. 

This tendency began in 1972 when a bookshop owner and comics convention organizer named Phil Seuling created East Coast Seagate Distribution after negotiating deals with most of the major comics publishers to allow him to buy comics at a deep discount in exchange for the comics purchased being nonreturnable. Because this dramatically decreased the risk for publishers (who were, as ever, facing declining sales), this proved acceptable to the companies. Seagate then arranged to ship those comics to specialty shops. Over the course of the ensuing decade, this eclipsed newsstands as the primary means of distributing comics, in no small part because Seagate could routinely get comics to shops a week faster than the newsstands got them, a fact that comics fans quickly picked up on, bringing more traffic towards the specialty shops and away from newsstands. In 1973, the direct market consisted of approximately 25% of comics sales. A decade later, it was newsstands that made up only 25% of the market, and the industry was awash in regional distributors all in competition with one another. 

One consequence of this was a fundamental shift in the nature of comics readers. Whereas in their early days American comic books were read by a wide and general audience, the direct market sold entirely to people who were dedicated enough comics fans to go to a shop stocking specifically comics, as opposed to people who happened to pick them up from a magazine rack at the supermarket.

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This is the fifteenth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the fourth volume. It’s available in the US here and UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Figure 484: Chester picks up a fallen tuber. Note the implied face of Swamp Thing in the tree behind him. (From Swamp Thing #43, 1985)

In many ways, “Windfall” is a sequel to “Rite of Spring.” Like “Rite of Spring,” it engages explicitly with psychedelia, telling the story of two people who come into possession of one of the tubers that grow on Swamp Thing’s back. What is perhaps most notable about “Windfall,” however, is that the story’s protagonist is a drug dealer. Swamp Thing himself only appears in the first four panels of the strip, which show one of the tubers dropping off his back. At that point it’s picked up by an aging hippie named Chester (complete with Grateful Dead shirt) who may or may not be physically modeled off of Bryan Talbot’s Chester P. Hackenbush. Although at the time of the story Chester is, as he puts it, “doin’ ten days brown rice, tryin t’clean my system out, y’know,” he’s clearly a man with an extensive interest in ethnobotanicals and psychedelics, such that two separate people come to him looking for drugs.

The first is a man called Dave, whose wife Sandy is dying of cancer with only a day or two left to live, and is in excruciating pain. Although Chester is not sure what (if anything) the tuber does yet, besides suspecting that it might be somehow related to datura (which, in some forms is, notably, a rhizome), he offers Dave a piece. Immediately after Dave leaves Chester gets his second visitor: a boorish guy named Milo who declares bluntly that “I feel like getting screwed up tonight” before simply taking the biggest piece of the tuber without paying for it.

Figure 485: Sandy’s psychedelic death evokes the imagery of the famed “Rite of Spring” issue. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Stan Woch and Ron Randall, from Swamp Thing #43, 1985)

At this point the comic begins a ten page section in which it alternates between a page telling Dave’s story and a piece telling Milo’s.

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This is the fourteenth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the third and fourth volumes. The third is available in the US here and the UK here. The fourth is in the US here and UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

“The Curse,” however, was not an uncontroversial story. Indeed, it generated so much response that the letter pages of both Swamp Thing #45 and #46 were devoted entirely to letters regarding the story. For the most part, however, these letters were in favor of the story. The only outright critical letter in Swamp Thing #45 comes from a gentleman in (ironically) Northampton, Massachusetts, and complains that Moore repeats the phrase “hungry for the moon” too often, objects to the story’s generality in speaking for all women, and complains that the display of steak knives is unrealistic (“no market worth its liabilities would ever, ever, never-ever display its cutlery so dangerously”). Of these three complaints it is, in an idiosyncrasy typical of the sorts of comics readers who wrote in to DC letters pages in the 1980s, the steak knives that seem to be the biggest problem. Another letter, however, takes issue with the ending of the story, while still generally praising it. 

Figure 478: Phoebe lying dead under the howling moon. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Steve Bissette and John Totleben, from Swamp Thing #40, 1985)

This sentiment is shared by one of the two letters presented in Swamp Thing #46. This letter, by Mindy Newell, takes up most of a page, and Moore offers an equally long response in the letter page. Newell’s objection is straightforward – that Moore’s decision to have Phoebe kill herself is a weak cop-out of an ending. Newell writes, “I also understand that you were trying to point out to our male audience that women don’t deserve to be treated in such a horrific manner… that you were striking a blow, not just for equal rights, but for equal understanding.

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This is the thirteenth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the second and third volumes. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. The third is available in the US here and the UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

This serves as the beginning of the so-called “American Gothic” arc (the name was never actually used in the comics), a storyline in which Constantine leads Swamp Thing on a tour of the United States to confront various classic horror tropes like vampires and werewolves. The timing is apropos – Moore had taken his first trip to the United States in August of 1984, midway through the Arcane arc of Swamp Thing, and the same month that Marvelman ceased publication in Warrior. There he had hobnobbed with DC executives and gotten variously praised and treated as a bit of a golden boy. He hit it off some of the DC staff – particularly with his editor, Karen Berger, and with Julius Schwartz, a long time DC editor, who impressed Moore by having the signature of H.P. Lovecraft in a scrapbook, having served as his literary agent late in Lovecraft’s life. Others proved chillier – Paul Levitz, a fanzine writer who had steadily ascended into upper management at DC, referred to Moore as his “greatest mistake,” a line that, whatever was meant by it in 1984, has bottomless depths of iciness in hindsight. 

Figure 470: The aquatic vampires of Rosewood Illinois. (From Swamp Thing #38, 1985)

And so it was hardly a surprise that Moore would opt to explore the American-ness of his newfound success. And, given that his success was proving as a horror writer, a tribute to American horror must have seemed wholly appropriate. And on target – Levitz’s words perhaps ringing in his ear, Moore started the arc with a strangely barbed story. The choice of Rosewood, Illinois was not an arbitrary setting. Martin Pasko, early in his Swamp Thing run, wrote a story set in a town called Rosewood that featured Swamp Thing fighting vampires, with a father and son sacrificing themselves to flood the town and drown the vampires.

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This is the twelfth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the second and third volumes. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. The third is available in the US here and the UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Figure 463: The protagonist of Phonogram: Rue Britannia, David Kohl, is an authorial analogue not unlike John Constantine. (Written by Kieron Gillen, art by Jamie McKelvie, from Phonogram #1, 2006)

Essentially every significant figure in the War has written the character at one point or another. Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, and Warren Ellis all wrote issues of Hellblazer, as have most of the more marginal powers: Garth Ennis and Peter Milligan both have sizable runs, for instance. The only major figure not to have actually written Constantine is Kieron Gillen, who reacted to DC’s 2012 cancellation of Hellblazer by noting that “part of me also thinks ‘you’re not a real British Comics Writer unless you’ve written Hellblazer.’ So that’s me doomed,” although as Gillen has also noted, his first arc of Phonogram, “Rue Britannia may as well be Hellblazer, of course,” which is accurate enough, and applies equally well to his run on Journey into Mystery. Beyond merely having a long running comic with an impressive array of writers, however, Constantine has also proven a profitable character for DC’s larger corporate owners, who spun out a quasi-successful movie version and, in 2014, a television series based on the character.

It is also notable that for all that Moore is known to spit occasional invective at his former employers for, as he memorably put it in one interview, “going through my trashcan like raccoons in the dead of the night” in lieu of actually coming up with new ideas, Moore has never demonstrated any particular animosity over the continual use of John Constantine. As Moore himself notes, “ I understood that when I had finished with [Constantine] that it would just be absorbed into the general DC stockpile,” and even provided a blurb for Brian Azzarello’s 2000 run on the title. “I’ve never objected to that,” he stresses, in an interview where he elsewhere rails against DC’s propensity for doing “crappy Green Lantern stories” that were “based upon an eight page story of mine from twenty years ago,” further highlighting that Constantine, at least, is a character he’s at relative peace with DC’s continual profit from.

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This is the eleventh of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the second and third volumes. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. The third is available in the US here and the UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Figure 451: Swamp Thing is mortally injured by the toxic touch of Nukeface (Written by Alan Moore, art by Steve Bissette and John Totleben, from Swamp Thing #35, 1985)

“The Nukeface Papers” provides an interesting split between its two installments. The first issue, when it was published, was basically a six-month old script, the story having originally been intended for publication in July of 1984. In many ways the first part shows this – it follows the basic structure Moore used for the first issues of his preceding three arcs, with the storyline’s threat intrudes upon and infects Swamp Thing’s world. In this case the threat is the eponymous Nukeface, a drunken derelict who has become deranged by and addicted to the nuclear waste buried in his hometown of Blossomville, Pennsylvania (a thinly veiled version of Centralia, Pennsylvania, a town destroyed by an underground fire in a coal mine that is expected to continue burning for the next quarter-millennium), and who has come to the bayou because his stash in Pennsylvania has been cemented over and new waste is being deposited in the swamp instead. Swamp Thing dreams of Blossomville as Nukeface approaches, seeing a place where “something bright and awful kissed the world, and left its smeared blue lipstick-print. The soil is curdled, and all that grows, grows wrong. In a skin of black cinder, puddles reflect fire, red and wet and glistening like sores.” Disturbed, he goes to investigate, only to be touched by Nukeface, leaving a blue and bubbling wound on Swmp Thing’s body as he collapses. By the time the issue saw print six months later, Moore had stretched his wings creatively, and so the second part, published in February of 1985, had an altogether different tone. 

Figure 452: Steve Bissette worked physical newspaper clippings into his pencils for “The Nukeface Papers.”

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This is the tenth of twenty-two parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. An omnibus of all twenty-two parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. This entry covers stories from the second and third volumes. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. The third is available in the US here and the UK here. Finding the other volumes are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Eventually the aliens encounter Swamp Thing (who, in this issue, speaks only in an incomprehensible string of symbols), and explain to him their origin, telling him how on their planet (which they call the Lady) “there was one solitribal breed of misanthropomorphs who refused to convivicate with elsefolk. They constructed their own uncivilization, and excluded anykind else from joining it. They were the loneliest animals of all. They took our lady away from us.” He goes on to explain the horrible things these animals did, running medical experiments and, worse, killing and eating the other creatures until Pog and his shipmates set forth in their ship Find-the-Lady to find a new Lady on which to live, which Pog believes that they have now done. 

Figure 444: In a surprisingly bleak twist, Pog’s crewmember Bartle is devoured by real gators. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Shawn McManus, from Swamp Thing #32, 1984)

In response, Swamp Thing sadly takes Pog to Baton Rouge to show him the nature of the planet on which they have landed – a silent sequence of humans cooking and eating meat, which Pog stares at in dumbstruck horror before weeping and crying out that “they can’t own this Lady too! We were going to be happy here!” Swamp Thing and Pog rush back to the swamp, but are too late to save one of Pog’s crew, a cute alligator-looking alien named Bartle, from being killed by attacking gators in the swamp. After a funeral for Bartle, Pog and his crew return to their ship and fly off, trying still to look for a planet unspoiled by man, giving the story a bleak finish that is both surprising and effective.

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