chapter eight

This is the ninth 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. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. Finding volume 3-6 are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Figure 435: Swamp Thing and Arcane meet again in hell. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Steve Bissette and John Totleben, from Swamp Thing Annual #2, 1984)

After its initial splash of controversy the Arcane trilogy resolved more or less predictably, albeit with the substantial wrinkle of Arcane killing Abby. Ultimately Matt Cable wrests control of his body back and casts Arcane back down to hell before using the last of his lingering superpowers to bring Abby back from the dead. Unfortunately, Matt is only able to revive her body, leaving Swamp Thing to journey into the afterlife to rescue her soul from hell, where Arcane cast it down. This journey is depicted in Swamp Thing Annual #2, a forty-page saga called “Down Among the Dead Men.” Moore has described the story as an attempt to provide “a preliminary map – a rough map – of the DC supernatural territories,” which is as good a description as any for a spiritual journey into the DC Universe versions of heaven and hell. Structurally speaking, the story is intensely episodic – Swamp Thing allows his consciousness to sink into the Earth, and then further into the realms of death. There he proceeds to meet a series of minor supernatural characters from DC history alongside a series of short encounters with various entities in the realms he explores. The two most notable of these are a scene where he meets Alec Holland in heaven, finally getting to exchange words with the man he thought he was, and a scene in which he meets Arcane, who is being tortured by vast numbers of insect eggs hatching inside his body.

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This is the eighth 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. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. The second is available in the US here and the UKhere. Finding volume 3-6 are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Figure 427: The issue ends with Black Canary saying, “liberated ladies aren’t supposed to say things like this, Batman, but you know what? You’re my hero!” as she kisses him. (Written by Michael Fleischer, art by Dick Giordano and Terry Austin, from The Brave and the Bold #166, 1980)

Moore, after all, had already criticized the depiction of sexual violence in comics back in his “Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies” essay in The Daredevils, where he blasted the tendency for comics to “start dishing up evil, sordid little adult fantasies,” particularly highlighting the use of bondage. In that essay, Moore recalls “a particularly charming Michael Fleischer story that appeared in DC’s Brave and Bold [sic] during which the usually quite capable Black Canary spent almost the entire issue tied to a chair wearing only her underwear, while the villain of the piece delivered such memorable and sensitive dialogue as ‘you squirm so prettily, my dear.’” In the face of the use of sexual violence as a form of overt entertainment in which the reader is meant to take the same sort of pleasure as the sadist who is tying up nearly naked women, Moore’s decision to use rape to produce one of the single most horrific moments in his entire Swamp Thing run can, for all its genuine flaws, still reasonably be seen as a form of progress. 

The bigger problem, and one that hangs over every individual instance of Moore writing about rape without quite connecting directly with any of them, is that Moore’s commercial success would eventually lead to a wave of imitators who embraced his more explicit style while discarding trifling things like the underlying commitment to feminism that led Moore to want to depict rape as a serious and genuine object of horror.

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This is the seventh 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. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. The second is available in the US here and the UK here. Finding volume 3-6 are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

“The toys about the nursery are set, for idiot chaos to arrange at whim. He drools and ruins lives, his chin is wet and old or young, it matters not to him. The gracious lady and her root-choked beast have come to save the innocents from harm, to spare them from the monkey’s dreadful feast. What noble souls they have! What charm! And see! The children’s uproar brings to life their guardians: that most dedicated breed! Yet she betrays her husband, he his wife, though both of them are kind to babes in need. Should innocence be mollycoddled thus? I fail to see the reason for the fuss,” he says, before continuing with a few more stanzas. It is perhaps no surprise that Moore would excel at writing Etrigan, given that his speech patterns allowed Moore to slip into the iambic rhythm he usually relies on to make a passage bigger and more portentous. 

Figure 421: Matt Cable, dying from a drunken car crash, is possessed by a demonic force in the form of a housefly. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Steve Bissette and John Totleben, from Saga of the Swamp Thing #27, 1984. Click to enlarge.)

The second arc introduced other sizable elements of Moore’s run as well, however. On a story level, it continues a plot that Moore inherited from Pasko regarding Matt Cable and his descent into alcoholism. Moore has Cable get into a drunken car crash that kills him, allowing a mysterious spirit appearing in the form of a fly that offers to save him and that then crawls into his mouth, seemingly possessing him. On a practical level, it introduced a new editor for Moore in the form of Karen Berger, who would edit the remainder of his Swamp Thing run before going on to oversee the recruitment of other British writers and artists to create comics in a similar vein.

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This is the sixth 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. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. Finding volume 2-6 are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

She folded them up in care in silence & her brightening limbs / Bathd in the clear spring of the rock then from her darksom cave / Issud in majesty divine Urizen rose up from his couch / On wings of tenfold joy clapping his hands his feet his radiant wings / In the immense as when the Sun dances upon the mountains / A shout of jubilee in lovely notes responding from daughter to daughter / From son to Son as if the Stars beaming innumerable / Thro night should sing soft warbling filling Earth & heaven / And bright Ahania took her seat by Urizen in songs & joy.” For both Goya and Blake, in other words, some sense of balance is required – it is just that Goya fears the passions of man running unchecked, while Blake fears the prison of law and religion weaved by reason. 

Figure 414: Sullen fires glowing across the Atlantic to America’s shore. (America a Prophecy Copy A, Object 5, written 1793, printed 1795)

And in another sense, Blake is closer still to Goya, on an almost literal level. It is, after all, once Urizen has been bound by Los, the fallen, human form of Urizen’s opposite number, Urthona, that Los’s emanation, Enitharmon, is split from him and gives birth to the monstrous serpent Orc. Orc, within Blake’s mythology, is the spirit of revolution, and makes his most substantial appearance in America a Prophecy, the first of Blake’s three “continental prophecies,” in which Blake reworks the recent political history of the world into another iteration of his mythology.

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This is the fifth 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 is available here. 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. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. Finding volume 2-6 are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Figure 406: The contrast between the red and green worlds. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Steve Bissette and John Totleben, from Saga of the Swamp Thing #23, 1984)

But however much Swamp Thing may consider himself to be separate from Abby’s people, he is animate now, and accepts that his place is not to simply sink into the green, but to live in the swamps, experiencing the vibrant ecosystem, and the arc ends with a splash page of Swamp Thing standing, arms spread, greeting the rising sun. It is not, to be sure, a subtle ending. The didactic nature of Swamp Thing’s rhetorical defeat of the Floronic Man and his barbed question to Abby are in fact crashingly obvious, although in a way that productively flags the comic’s intentions going forward. Saga of the Swamp Thing, it is immediately clear, has become an ecologically minded comic. But what is subtler is the degree to which this stems out of Moore’s larger and more surprising decision, which is to spend quite a lot of effort sincerely exploring the question of what it would be like, from a psychological perspective, to be a walking plant. The entire ecology debate between Woodrue and Swamp Thing is framed as the practical applications of the more spiritual experiences both characters have within the Green. The second issue of the arc, entitled “Another Green World” (an homage to a Brian Eno song, as is relatively typical of Moore), demonstrates this well – it ends with Swamp Thing finally arriving to confront Woodrue, but this is ultimately framed as a response to and extension of Swamp Thing’s initial meditations on the fact that “there is a red and angry world.

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This is the fourth 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 is available here. 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. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. Finding volume 2-6 are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Figure 396: With Moore’s second issue, he announced himself unequivocally as one of the most important and creative figures in comics.

Saga of the Swamp Thing #21, also known as “The Anatomy Lesson,” is a regular on critics’ lists of the best single issues in the history of comics. This is entirely understandable. Upon release it was a revelation to the handful of readers who were actually buying Saga of the Swamp Thing, and its impact upon them (and upon DC editorial, who began aggressively promoting the title in the wake of Moore’s early issues) is largely responsible for how Moore took a book that was near cancellation and turned it into one of the gems of DC’s line. Beyond that, however, “The Anatomy Lesson” is simply a brilliant comic. Even over thirty years later, when almost every trick and device Moore employs has become every bit as much of a comic book cliche as the twenty-year-old Stan Lee style that Moore championed moving on from, the comic buzzes with power, its sense of freshness and originality undimmed by its countless imitators. It is visibly and transparently a work of genius – a shot across the bow at the precise moment in Moore’s career where he most needed to demonstrate just how good he was. 

Under the hood, of course, “The Anatomy Lesson” is simply “A Rag, a Bone, a Hank of Hair” wrapped in a Future Shock. Moore is in many ways straightforwardly repeating the start of his run on Captain Britain here, killing the main character in an initial story focused on wrapping up inherited plot lines and then reintroducing him in his second story. Like “A Rag, a Bone, a Hank of Hair,” “The Anatomy Lesson” spends much of its time paralleling a forensic and clinical analysis of the main character’s dead body with an account of the character’s origin and basic concept.

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This is the third of a currently unknown number of parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. Finding volume 2-6 are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Figure 388: Swamp Thing returns to capitalize on the Wes Craven film. (From Saga of the Swamp Thing #1, 1982)

It would not do, however, for DC to not have a Swamp Thing comic in publication to go along with the movie (despite onerous conditions related to the sale of the movie rights that meant that DC could not actually produce any merchandise related to Swamp Thing whatsoever), and so in 1982 a new title, Saga of the Swamp Thing, was started with scripts by Martin Pasko, an industry veteran with decades of experience, and art by relative newcomer Tom Yeates. Under Pasko the book was a horror anthology in the same general vein as the Wein/Wrightson issues, albeit with a seventeen-page cap on the stories due to backup stories featuring another cult DC horror character, the Phantom Stranger, and a rather convoluted metaplot involving a spooky child with supernatural powers, a villainous group called the Sunderland Corporation that was hunting Swamp Thing, a reporter named Elizabeth Tremayne and her partner, a doctor named Dennis, both of whom were also trying to find Swamp Thing, and a mysterious illness that was slowly killing Swamp Thing. 

Figure 389: Ramsey Campbell would go on to write an introduction to the first collection of Moore’s Swamp Thing stories where he proclaimed that “the new Swamp Thing can stand beside the finest works of contemporary horror fiction.”

Many, though not all of these plot points were resolved in the thirteenth issue of the title, the last by Tom Yeates. After two issues by a guest creative team, Pasko picked up his remaining plot lines, mostly focusing on the Sunderland Corporation, in Saga of the Swamp Thing #16, now joined by a new artistic team of Stephen Bissette and John Totleben. Almost immediately, however, tensions began to arise. Bissette had a lifelong love of drawing monsters, and so it was in many ways a natural fit for him, but he and Totleben also came onto the project with ideas for what they wanted to draw, which they sent to Pasko.

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This is the second of a currently unknown number of parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. Finding volume 2-6 are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Figure 382: Detective Comics gave DC Comics its name, was the reason Jack Liebowitz had a financial stake in the company, and, in its first issue, featured an appallingly racist cover.

The Time Warner subsidiary known as DC Comics has its origins in the merger between National Comics, itself a merger of two companies initially formed in the mid-1930s by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, a World War I veteran turned pulp writer, and All-American Publications, which, at the time of their merger was co-owned by Jack Liebowitz, who had also come to own National Comics after forcing Wheeler-Nicholson out. National Comics’ two major publications were Action Comics and Detective Comics, the latter of which was the title that had given Liebowitz a stake in the company, as he underwrote its publication. All-American Publications was a 1938 partnership between Liebowitz and Max Gaines, and published a number of other significant characters: the Flash, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman, most notably. The companies, due to the shared presence of Liebowitz, were always stablemates, but after Liebowitz bought Gaines out, leaving him free to create the competing EC Comics, they officially merged into one company in 1944 under the official name of National Perodical Publications, although they were by this time generally referred to as DC Comics, a name they’d officially adopt in 1977. 

During its early days, unlike what would eventually become its sole major competitor, DC invested hard in superheroes, churning out characters to follow its initial smash success with the adventures of Superman in Action Comics. This began with Batman, created by Bill Finger, with Bob Kane on art, which appeared in Detective Comics, and eventually expanded to a large and familiar stable of characters. The breadth and success of this line meant that when superheroes went out of fashion at the end of World War II, DC, unlike Marvel/Timely, did not entirely abandon superheroes, publishing title featuring Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman continually through the 1940s and 50s. And when the superhero comic proved a useful way of getting around the censorship imposed on the industry in the wake of psychologist and public intellectual Frederic Wertham’s 1954 attack on comic books, it was DC that jumped back upon that bandwagon, developing new versions of many of its old superhero properties and eventually, in 1960, teaming several of them up in the Justice League of America, a move that prompted Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to create the Fantastic Four for Marvel.

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This is the first of a currently unknown number of parts of Chapter Eight of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in six volumes. The first volume is available in the US here, and the UK here. Finding volume 2-6 are, for now, left as an exercise for the reader, although I will update these links as the narrative gets to those issues.

Not two years ago, in his very first interview, he’d seemingly summoned the Marvelman job out of thin air, expressing interest in the character at the exact moment that an opportunity to write it came up. So if he did intend to hook a fish out of the aether with his impish suggestion that what American comic books could really use was a creative genius to completely upend everything, he did a good job with it – the very next month he received a phone call offering him the opportunity to do just that. Specifically, Len Wein called him to offer him a job writing Saga of the Swamp Thing.

Figure 377: Brian Bolland’s art for Camelot 3000 was the first step of the so-called British Invasion of comics that eventually led to Len Wein hiring Alan Moore.

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