If the shirt fits...

I find it interesting that while Bissette/Totleben inside have our favorite muck monster becoming much more leafy/vine/plant like it, is still the Yeates/Wrightson version being placed on the cover. Is this a case of marketing strategy at the time? Likely done in the hopes of not losing sales with the unproven team inside of Moore/Bissette/Totleben as most readers knew and bought the Wrightson version... 

Bissette and Totleben drew both the cover and the interior of Saga of the Swamp Thing #25.

Swamp Thing #26 “…a Time of Running…” (July 1984)



Creative Team: Writing by Alan Moore. Pencils by Stephen Bissette. Ink by John Totleben.

The Story: Jason Blood warns Abigail Cable about “bad craziness” about to strike her workplace, Elysium Lawns home for autistic children. When she gets to work, all the kids are going nuts and drawing pictures of evil monkeys. Paul the student may be the conduit of the evil power; he has odd green eyes a stuffed monkey on his bed. That night, Abby and Matt have another argument about sex when she feels the need to return to the school to watch over the children. I can't think of other comic books of the era that broach such subjects once, let alone repeatedly as Moore does here.



She takes Swamp Thing with her, and they find the children beset by manifestations of their worst experiences: Roberta fears her doll, Michael is beset by a monster representing cancer, while Jessica cringes beneath a ghoulish father-figure who moans, “Mommy needn’t know.” Etrigan the Demon bursts onto the scene, rhyming his intention to help out. Matt Cable decides to come help his wife too, but in his drunken stupor he misjudges a curve and runs his car into a tree.



My Two Cents: This act of the drama is all mood, intercut with pages of Swamp Thing leading Abby from his lair to Elysian Lawns. As with last issue, he doesn’t have a lot to do but watch the horror unfold.



Bissette reports that the Elysian Lawn group home for autistic children was “a setting based on the now-defunct Green Meadows School, a structured living facility for autistic children in Wilmington, Vermont, where my first wife, Marlene O’Connor, worked in the 1980s; Alan visited Green Meadows during his visit to our Vermont home.” Autism was not nearly as familiar a topic to the public thirty years ago as it is today; only the most severe cases, the ones meriting institutionalization as depicted here, were recognized. Today only the most violent autistics are removed from their homes.

The first page contains an extended quotation from “The Night of the Hunter,” a 1955 film based on a 1953 book based on the 1930s crimes of Harry Powers, who swindled and murdered lonely women he found through “looking for love” classified ads. The plot of the film doesn’t mirror our story here, but the quotation’s dark theme does: “There is no word for a child’s fear.” Moore shows his flair for words again and again in this series. I love his metaphor of having moved from the “suburbs of fear” into the “big city.”



Moore likes writing songs and poems into his comic books, so The Demon is a natural character for him to rope into his story, even if Etrigan weren’t supernaturally themed, which of course he is as well. Jason Blood is the human form of Etrigan, but this issue doesn’t tell us that, though last issue did call Blood "the devil."



But in America, we use poetry for commerce, for jingles. The last page is a rhyme tipping its hat to the rhyming signs of the Burma Shave company that dotted America’s highways for decades. Would Moore have known to include that element? I bet the artists suggested it.

Swamp Thing #27 “…By Demons Driven!” (August 1984)



Creative Team: Writing by Alan Moore. Pencils by Stephen Bissette. Ink by John Totleben.

The Story: First Etrigan tangles with the Monkey King, allowing Abby Cable to run with the child Paul to safety. But then Etrigan thinks Paul’s death is the solution to the demonic invasion, and Swamp Thing is obliged to defend Paul from The Demon next. The Monkey King torments Abby in the form of Matt, and Paul in the form of his mother. Paul faces his fears and squishes the Monkey King down to bite size; The Demon obligingly eats him. Swamp Thing walks Paul back to his home at Elysium Lawns, and Abby has a chat with Jason Blood, the human form of Etrigan, who feels he is losing ground in his internal balance with his demonic counterpart.



As Matt Cable lies dying in his wrecked car, some evil spirit in the form of a bug offers to save his life, crawling inside his mouth to seal the bargain. His car is restored as well. He finds Abby walking in the rain and gives her a ride home.



My Two Cents: “This story is dedicated with awe and affection to Jack Kirby,” creator of Etrigan. This issue once again gives Moore plenty of opportunity to write poetry for The Demon to recite. This is a pretty simple issue overall, culminating the horror theme of the last two issues with a big ol’ slugfest. The most interesting element is the symmetry of demon-eating. It’s obviously a bad thing in Matt’s case. For Etrigan, it’s the solution to the immediate problem at hand but perhaps is part of the reason the Jason Blood is getting progressively lost. Paul gets a nice line in which he is comforted that even Swamp Thing can get scared.

Which of Moore's various team books is most JLA-like?