Swamp Thing: Dark Genesis

By Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson (Vertigo/DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-044-4

The first fan-sensation of the modern age of comics (or perhaps the last of the true Silver Age?), Swamp Thing has powerful popular fiction antecedents and in 1972 was seemingly a concept whose time had come again. Prime evidence was the fact that Marvel were also working on a man-into-mucky, muddy mess character at the very same time.

Both Swampy and Man-Thing were thematic revisions of Theodore Sturgeon’s classic novella It and bore strong resemblances to the immensely popular Hillman character The Heap, who slurped his way through the back of Airboy Comics (née Air Fighters) from1943. My fan-boy radar suspects that Roy Thomas’ marsh-monster the Glob (from Incredible Hulk #121- Nov 1969 and again in #129 – Jun 1970) either inspired both DC and Marvel’s creative teams, or was part of that same zeitgeist, and it should also be remembered that Skywald (a very minor player with big aspirations) released a black-&-white magazine in their Warren Comics knock-off line entitled The Heap in the Autumn of 1971.

For whatever reason, by the end of the 1960s superhero comics had started another steep sales decline, once again making way for a horror/mystery boom: a sea-change augmented by a swift rewriting of the specific terms of the Comics Code Authority. At DC, House of Mystery and its sister title House of Secrets returned to short story anthology formats and gothic mystery scenarios, taking a lead from such TV successes as Twilight Zone and Rod Serling’s Night Gallery with EC veteran Joe Orlando as editor.

Referencing the sardonic narrator/storyteller format of the EC horror titles, Orlando created Cain and Abel to shepherd readers through brief, sting-in-the-tail yarns produced by the best creators, new and old, that the company could hire. Artists Neal Adams, Mike Kaluta, and especially Berni Wrightson undoubtedly produced their best work for these two titles and the vast range of successors the horror boom generated at DC.

The twelfth anthology issue of House of Secrets cemented the genre into place as the industry leader. In it writer Len Wein and Wrightson produced a throwaway gothic thriller set at the turn of the 19th century, wherein gentleman scientist Alex Olsen is murdered by his best friend and his body dumped in a swamp. Years later his beloved bride, now the unsuspecting wife of the murderer, is stalked by a shambling, disgusting beast that seems to be composed of mud and muck…

‘Swamp Thing’ cover featured in HoS #92 (June-July 1971), and it struck an immediate chord with the buying public. The issue was the best selling DC comic of that month, and reader response was fervent and persistent. By all accounts the only reason there wasn’t an immediate sequel or spin-off was that the creative team didn’t want to produce one.

Eventually however, bowing to interminable pressure, and with the sensible idea of transplanting the concept contemporary America, the first issue of Swamp Thing appeared on newsstands in the Spring of 1972. It was an instant hit and an instant classic.

Wein and Wrightson produced ten issues together, crafting an extended, multi-chaptered tale of justice/vengeance and a quest for answers that was at once philosophically typical of the time and a prototype for the story-arc and mini-series formats that dominate modern comicbook production. They also used each issue/chapter to pay tribute to a specific sub-genre of timeless horror story whilst advancing the major plot.

The origin ‘Dark Genesis’ finds Alec and Linda Holland deep in the Bayou Country, working on a “bio-restorative formula” that will revolutionise World Farming. They are working in isolation, protected by Matt Cable, a Secret Service agent, when representatives of an organisation called The Conclave, demand that they sell their research to them – or else. Obviously the patriotic pair refuse, and the die is cast when their lab is bombed. Linda dies instantly but Alec, showered with his own formula and blazing like a torch hurtles to a watery grave in the swamp.

But he does not die.

Transformed by the formula (and remember, please, that this is prior to Alan Moore’s landmark re-imagining of the character) he is transformed into a gigantic man-shaped monster, immensely strong, unable to speak, and seemingly made from living plant matter. Holland’s brain still functions however, and he vacillates between finding his wife’s killers and curing his own monstrous condition. Cable, misinterpreting the evidence, also wants revenge, but he thinks that the monster is the cause of death of his two charges…

Over the next nine issues, Swamp Thing travelled the world, encountering the black sorcerer Anton Arcane and his artificial homunculi, The Un-Men (recently the subject of their own Vertigo series), Abigail Arcane and her tragic Frankensteinian father The Patchwork Man, and a werewolf on the moors of Scotland, before returning to America and finding ‘The Last of the Ravenwind Witches’. In the wilds of Vermont he encounters Paradise on Earth, care of an old clockmaker but is attacked by the voracious Conclave, leading to one of the most evocative and revered team-ups of the 1970s.

Swamp Thing #7’s ‘Night of the Bat!’ featured the final showdown with remorseless robber-barons of The Conclave in Gotham City, and a landmark collaboration with the resurgent Batman, himself finally recovering from the hyper-exploitation of the “Campy” TV show era. Wrightson’s rendering of the superhero through the lens of a horror artist inspired a whole generation of aspiring comics professionals and firmly set the caped crusader to rest, replacing him with a Dark Knight.

Somewhat at a loss after the end of his quest (Swamp Thing came out bi-monthly, so the tale had taken well over a year to tell – unprecedented at a time when most comics still had two or more complete stories per issue) the Moss Monster shambled through America’s hinterlands encountering a Lovecraftian horror in the New England town of Perdition, a ghastly but misunderstood alien and finally the unquiet ghosts of slaves and plantation-owners. This grim and powerful closing tale also featured the return of Arcane and the grotesque Un-Men.

The initial series staggered on under some very capable and talented hands (up until #24), but the fever of inspiration was never re-kindled, meaning that the very best of that iconic saga can be easily contained in one volume. This is a superb slice of old-fashioned comics wonderment, from a less cynical and sophisticated age, but with a passion and intensity that cannot be matched. And, ooh, that artwork…

© 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 2002 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.