Swamp Thing #14 “Crystal Visions, Shattered Dreams!” (June 1983)



Creative Team: Dan Mishkin writing. Bo and Scott Hampton on art.

The Story: A laboratory accident causes scientist Nat Broder to live a long, fulfilling life surrounded by his beautiful wife and adoring children. Just kidding! Actually it drowns him in silicon, and the Phantom Stranger must intervene from out of nowhere to prevent Broder’s wife Sally from being victim #2 in the tragedy.



His employees fill several steel drums with the spilled silicon containing Broder’s dissolved body, and dump it all illegally in some swamp which I’m sure will have nothing to with our story.



Swamp Thing is done “vegetating” in his Louisiana bog following the Karen Clancy incident. What now? He finds a huge lake of silicon, and an alligator turned to crystal, and a crystalline man who uses his hand as a lens to direct concentrated sunlight as a heat ray against him. After some back and forth, Broder the silicon man eventually succeeds at turning both Swamp Thing and Phantom Stranger into crystal, to the horror of his watching wife.



My Two Cents: OK, the science part is obviously wonky. “The growth of silicon crystals” doesn’t involve changing other elements into silicon; it’s about silicon falling out of solution into solid form, as in making “Magic Rocks” like we all did as kids. Just put that bit aside. You’ll also have to accept the notion that Nat’s body is not just a silicon crystal, but in particular a giant microprocessor, as if that’s all that a computer chip was made of.

I assume this fill-in story is to give Pasko and Yeates a break. The saga of Karen Clancy took Swamp Thing so far away from his home base that there was no good place to put in a fill-in story until now. It’s fine, giving Swamp Thing the plant elemental a tussle with a sand elemental who is in a sense his equal and opposite, and there’s a good line about whether the crystalized Swamp Thing should be considered “animal, vegetable, or mineral.”



I don’t know much about Bo and Scott Hampton who handle the art, but they turn in some decent panels. The stories in Swamp Thing expand to a full 23 pages now; no more Phantom Stranger back-up stories.

Swamp Thing #15 “Empires Made of Sand” (July 1983)



Creative Team: Dan Mishkin writing. Bo and Scott Hampton on art.

The Story: Nat Broder takes crystallized Swamp Thing back to his lab for days of analysis. When left alone, Swamp Thing eventually turns back to plant form and begins stalking the halls. Phantom Stranger is also not so “crystallized and then turned to powder” as he seemed last issue, for reasons never explained. Broder's partner Murdock and wife Sally realize that he’s gone mad. After some dinking around with a squad of rent-a-cops, Swamp Thing and Phantom Stranger run interference while Sally plays her electronic synthesizer at frequencies which vibrate Nat to pieces. She takes the madness and death of her husband pretty well, all things considered!





My Two Cents: As soon as Nat mentioned that his crystal structure was atuned to his wife’s synthesizer on page six, the rest of the issue was a foregone conclusion. It would have been nice if Swamp Thing’s recovery had involved more of a story than “Oh, I guess I am recovered from being turned to crystal now,” or if Phantom Stranger’s even more miraculous recovery had been more than just “I do these things.”

Swamp Thing #16 “Stopover in a Place of Secret Truths” (August 1983)



Creative Team: Martin Pasko is back writing and… introducing the art team of Stephen Bissette and John Totleben! The cover is still by Tom Yeates, though.

The Story: Amidst seven pages of recap and self-loathing internal monologue, Swamp Thing digs up his wife’s coffin and finds it empty, then flees a hotel maid who sees him and freaks out.

He saves a boy from falling off a cliff and is surprisingly accepted by the people of Peaksville, who don’t seem to notice his swampitude at all. An old man offers him a domino mask from a costume shop, and by wearing it, he transforms back to human form. Time passes unusually quickly in this town, and before Alec Holland knows it, he’s deep in a romance with beautiful Mallory, to the consternation of her previous boyfriend Frank.



Turns out that everybody in this town is really a hideously deformed freak, but wearing similar masks that make them look normal. They were testing Alec to see whether he was worthy to join their community, and he passed the test, but he declines to stay, citing the need to help defend his friends against the Sunderland Corporation. (This makes little sense, because being near the hunted Swamp Thing is the main thing putting his friends in danger, so staying here is a good way to protect them.) As Swamp Thing leaves Peaksville, it fades away behind him into mist…



Not far away as Dennis Barclay and Liz Tremayne have breakfast at a diner, Dennis complains about the thick accent of their waitress, who is none other than Abigail Arcane, in her first appearance in this new series. She’s not named yet, so you’d have to be a reader of the previous Len Wein series to recognize her.



My Two Cents: The lengthy recaps at the beginning of each issue are getting annoying. This issue was basically a stand-alone Twilight Zone/House of Mystery episode anyway; the Sunderland part could have been omitted if there had been enough story to fill 23 pages without it. And quite a good House of Mystery story it is too.

And as a Twilight Zone episode, there is one final twist, and it’s a doozy: When Mallory appeared as a freak, she was actually wearing a mask to look ugly; she alone in the town of Peaksville is beautiful in her natural form. She adopted the freak mask in hopes of driving Swamp Thing away from her, knowing he would not be happy forever in this town. It was a pretty cool revelation that raises all sorts of questions about whether we are as high-minded as we pretend. Can we truly ignore the outer person and see only the beautiful soul beneath? It sounds great, but it’s not so easy to do as to say. For dramatizing the question well, I give this issue a thumbs up.



Tatjana Wood’s colorist credit is on a box of crayons, while John Costanza’s letterer credit is on a letter. Cute!

Swamp Thing #17 “…And Things That Go Bump in the Night” (October 1983)



Creative Team: Martin Pasko writing. Stephen Bissette and John Totleben on art, with a Yeates/Bissette cover.

The Story: Swamp Thing encounters Abigail Arcane behind the diner from last issue, but she breaks the news that she is Abby Cable now, having married Matt Cable in the years since we last saw her. She seems broken and dispirited. On the way to her house, a very toothsome purple people eater attacks her truck, trying to murder Dennis Barclay. It throws Swamp Thing around, wrecks Abby’s truck, and runs off into the woods.

Matt Cable has become a worthless drunk since we last saw him, hanging around a spartan house with a wooden electrical cable spool (empty of cable, symbolic!) for his coffee table. The walls are crumbling, and the curtains are bedsheets.



Cue three pages recapping the original series, plus additional exposition detailing how Cable was fired from the military’s Swamp Thing hunt, then became a fugitive himself when the Sunderland Corporation took the project over. Worse yet, Barclay once administered electroshock therapy to Cable, back when Barclay was a Sunderland physician and Cable was an apparently delusional patient. So those two are on none too good terms.



A giant fluke-monster attacks the Cable home, severely injuring Abby before diving into the ground.



Out on an ill-considered hike, Helmut Kripptmann steps into a bear trap. Yowch! Even worse, a pair of giant insects carry him away, and one of them speaks of a plan for revenge against Alec Holland. It’s Arcane, re-entering the story!



My Two Cents: Totleben and Bissette have wasted no time offering the amazing art for which this series will be known for the next several years. Len Wein recalls their arrival:




Matt Cable has an alcohol-induced vision which is mis-described as “Delirium Tremens. Terrifying hallucinations suffered by the alcoholic during detoxification.” But Cable hasn’t stopped drinking, so this description makese no sense. Anyway, the art looks cool once again, and it also gives us a hint that Cable himself is somehow the source of these phantom creatures that keep wreaking havoc on his neighborhood.

Swamp Thing #19 “And the Meek Shall Inherit…” (December 1983)



Creative Team: Martin Pasko writing. Stephen Bissette and John Totleben on art, with a Yeates cover. Bissette gets a co-plotter credit, a la Byrne with Claremont on X-Men.

The Story: Matt Cable wills his imagination-fueled tormentors begone and speculates that his electroshock therapy awoke this power in him. He talks and talks to Swamp Thing for pages and pages, until Arcane shows up in his ornithopter and captures Abby and Swamp Thing, the latter of whom is stuck in his usual crucifixion pose, spread-eagle on a spiderweb.



Arcane once again begins the mystic transfer to switch bodies with Swamp Thing. Arcane’s prisoner Harry Kripptman has been metaphorphosed into a bug-man; he gives his life to interfere with the Swampy/Arcane transfer. Arcane’s mind is lost In the void, and his creatures devour his body. Swamp Thing and Abby bail out of the ornithopter as it careens into a copse of trees. They must have landed in a deep bog, as they emerge without a scratch, though two issues ago Abby was said to have some broken bones which don’t seem to be bothering her now. Swamp Thing resolves to go on the offensive against General Sunderland.



Liz Tremayne and Dennis Barclay are driving somewhere in Abby’s wrecked truck, which Swamp Thing threw against a tree two issues back. Liz fulfills Dennis’ longtime dream, offering him sex in the cramped cab of a pickup truck to soothe his pity over feeling bad about having administered shock therapy to Matt Cable. A caption describes this scene as “a moral loss;” we are to understand that Liz is making a bad call.



My Two Cents: This issue is the first time that Arcane has shown any awareness of Abby’s existence; she was not part of either of the two previous issues in which he appeared. Arcane spouts a little classical Latin at one point, saying “mirabile visu” (‘wonderful to see”) when he finds Matt Cable, Abby, and Swamp Thing all clustered together for him to attack.

The first part of the issue had lots of unnecessary exposition by Matt Cable. If they were going to claim that electroshock therapy unlocked mystical summoning powers, they could have said so in about two panels. But the last half of the story gave closure to both Arcane and Kripptmann, who has come a long way from the bad guy he seemed like in issue #1. Here he is being cocooned by Arcane’s creatures in preparation for his metamorphosis.



I don’t really understand where Liz Tremayne and Dennis Barclay are going in all this; there have been a couple of points in the plot that seemed like natural departure points for them. Marty Pasko didn’t seem to know what to do with them either. Whatever plans he may have had for this mismatched couple, and for the pot-boiler conspiracy helmed by sinister General Sunderland, were undone by Pasko’s departure from the book, and all three characters will be immediately written out of the book next issue by its new writer. Len Wein recalls Pasko’s departure:

Swamp Thing #21 “The Anatomy Lesson” (February 1984)



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

The Story: Jason Woodrue, the Floronic Man, is hired by General Sunderland, who has Swamp Thing in deep freeze.The autopsy on Linda Holland, surprisingly, has turned up nothing to explain her husband’s transformation; the serum doesn’t work on her. Maybe it will work on the Floronic Man? Woodrue begins his autopsy on Swamp Thing, finding plant simulacra of human organs, all completely nonfunctional, just a tangle of vegetation. Swamp Thing is not Alec Holland turned into a plant; Swamp Thing is the swamp itself imbued with the consciousness of dead Alec Holland.



When Woodrue passes this breakthrough information along to Sunderland, instead of being praised, he’s terminated (as in fired, not murdered) as no longer needed. Enraged at being cast aside, he turns off Swamp Thing’s freezer. Swamp Thing thaws out, comes to life, and terminates (as in murders, not fires) Sunderland, as Woodrue hoped.



My Two Cents: This issue gets a lot of talk for its revelation about the “true origin” of Swamp Thing. This isn’t the first time someone tried to upend the original story; for instance, Michelenie at one point had a story in which toxic chemicals dumped in the swamp were an important cause of the unrepeatable Swamp Thing genesis event. Three things about this retcon of Swamp Thing's origin:

1) Stephen Bissette reports that the idea did not originate with Alan Moore but rather (according to Bissette) was one of John Totleben’s “bigger ideas – including the notion of visualizing Swamp Thing as less of a pitiful man trapped in a monstrous body and more of a completely plant-based being.” A lot of co-plotting was going on between Moore, Bissette, and Totleben over the next two and a half years.

2) Totleben based his idea on actual scientific studies. A Sunderland scientist summarizes them as “When planaria (flatworms) were trained to run a maze and then cut in half, both regenerated halves could still run the maze – even the half not previously containing a brain.” In the actual studies, Dr. James McConnell trained planaria to flinch away from light (using electric shock) and found that this trait could be passed to both halves. No maze running worms, sorry! McConnell suggested that messenger RNA could be a vehicle of memory transmission. He even suggested that this mRNA could be transmitted cannibalistically – by feeding ground-up trained planaria to other naïve planaria. Other teams eagerly repeated McConnell’s work but could not duplicate his results, so the whole field has remained controversial.



3) Does this jibe with Swamp Thing’s history to date? Sorta. On two occasions, Swamp Thing has been turned back into a man. It happened in issue #2 of the original series thanks to Arcane’s magic cauldron, and with magic, anything goes. It also happened due to science alone in issue #23 of the original series, but those stories were retconned out of existence by the reboot. The only real plot hole is the bizarre sequence in Vol 2 #4 in which Swamp Thing is shot through the throat by an arrow, can’t breathe, and passes out. Jason Woodrue is very clear in this issue: Swamp Thing doesn’t need to breathe. He doesn’t need any organs. He is a creature of pure thought who can inhabit or discard discrete plant matter forms at will. So either we shrug our shoulders and say, “These things happen when writers change; it’s just a plot hole,” or else we earn our No-Prize by saying that Swamp Thing doesn’t need to breathe, but he didn’t know that, and the shock of getting shot through his (nonfunctional) trachea made him pass out anyway just as a vestigial reflex of his lost humanity. Good enough?

On to other matters. In this issue, Alan Moore is also trying to tie up Pasko’s conspiracy story with the death of Sunderland. But of course a large corporation doesn’t hang on one man, even its founder. There would be a board of directors setting the direction, and the murder of Sunderland by Swamp Thing would only double their resolve to capture, exploit, and eliminate Swamp Thing. Furthermore, Sunderland said at one point that he had actually taken on the Swamp Thing job as contract work on behalf of someone else who wanted Swamp Thing dead. Who would that be? We never find out, and Alan Moore would prefer we didn’t think about it, because he has other plans for the series anyway. So bye-bye to evil corporations trying to exploit plant-animal hybrids for profit. You’ve had your day in the sun, and this series is headed back to the shadows in a big way.