Swamp Thing by Rick Veitch: Volume One

4 weeks ago 15

Tom Shapira | October 22, 2024

A beginning and an end. Swamp Thing by Rick Veitch, the first what one would assume would be a three-collection series, is twice doomed.

At the beginning, this is the run that directly follows Alan Moore’s celebrated run on the muck monster title. Rick Veitch was an essential part of that run as an artist, and even wrote a single issue by himself ; but there’s a big difference between being one artist out of several and being the main writer-artist of a whole run, especially when following the bearded one himself. I believe it was Paul O’Brien who once wrote something to the effect of ‘Every person writing Swamp Thing appears to be volunteering to wear a sign saying “I am not Alan Moore – please kick me.”’ Being first out of the gate couldn’t be easy.

At the end – this is the run that didn’t end. At least, didn’t end well. Famously, Veitch went for time travel with issue #88 meaning to feature a certain famous religious icon. Jenette Kahn got cold feet, nixed the script, and Veitch was off the book in protest. Doug Wheeler and Tom Yeates were recruited as pinch-hitters and book shambled-on, as a swamp thing does, without much glory. They say Moore tried to put a hex on DC once, but the hex of Veitch appears much stronger. So, these picking this meaty (plant-y?) volume, going through 300 and so dense pages, know that whatever (plot) seeds being planted probably won’t reach full growth. Will future volumes in this series, assuming there would be more, include the rest of the story as originally printed, in all its fill-in glory, or would they try to print something closer to Veitch’s original vision? We are in a world in which Miracle Man has final reached its end, so everything is possible. Maybe next year Sonic Disruptors will get collected, and the dead shall walk the earth!

Still, if Swamp Thing by Rick Veitch is doomed, it’s doomed in a beautiful way. Much like its protagonist, a shaggy sort of beast, slouching towards the center of the comics industry to be reborn. This is a not simply a comic to be read, but a comic to behold. Veitch was always a superior penciler, not just in terms of character design but in his willingness to go full-formalist assault on the page layout without becoming bound by the experiment. With the inks of Alfredo Alcala, giving the whole thing a sense of mass and presence necessary for a story that often takes the characters beyond the edge of consciousness, and the colors of Tatjana Wood, one of the best to ever do it (certainly in the world of mainstream comics) giving the right atmosphere to every page. Yes, a lot of it is garish, bug-out colors leaving naturalism so far behind it becomes an invisible dot on the horizon; but it’s the right kind of garish. This comic swims in outward emotion.

Reading through this collection got me thinking about the more modern version of this type of visual styling, call it prog-rock comics. A lot this run has the feeling of self-imposed challenge: the entirety of issue #70 has a panel layout of three rows per page, with each row telling its own story. A long stretch in issue #72 in which stream-of-consciousness narration of a gradually revealing character is the one thing guiding us through the visual clutter. This type of art can easily become showiness for its own sake. Like these JH Williams III pages that are extremely pretty on the surface yet feel utterly weightless whenever one tries to perceive the characters upon the page. With this version of Swamp Thing these baroque structures have meaning, they serve to take you into the inner world of the characters, they set-up varying moods and varying atmospheres.

But… what the series gets so right on the art side it tends to fumble with the writing. Well, ‘fumble’ is too strong of a word. Rick Veitch’s isn’t badly-written; it’s not dull, it’s not uninspired, it’s not (the biggest sin in most superhero comics) gratified with playing old hits over and over. But it is this lumbering thing, without a strong grasp on the pacing of the overall storyline or its characters. Abby gets a center stage, a blessed decision in theory, for all the strength of the previous run it could still only define its main female character in relation to its male protagonist. Yet the story doesn’t really have anything interesting to do with her – Swamp Thing is off on yet another mind-bending adventure and she’s left behind to sulk. Veitch, to his credit, don’t go for the obvious melodramatic angles (she gets killed! She leaves him for another muck creature!); but without high melodrama or actual psychological depth there simply isn’t enough to this version of Abby.

The story’s other weak spot is how it keeps centralizing DC's concept; this is one of these times you remember Vertigo wasn’t really set-apart from the rest of the DC universe. Which is fine, Swamp Thing fought Batman and teamed-up with Etrigan, but those stories used these elements to better define the story of Swamp Thing. With Veitch it seems we are crossing that ‘Grant Morrison Line’ – the point in which superhero comics begins to be solely about superhero comics instead of engaging with the outside world. Never it is more clear than in Swamp Thing Annual, a story featuring all the major simian comics characters of this side of Detective Chimp, in a story that has nothing to do with character who’s name appears on the title, nor with his supporting cast, nor with any theme related to book. It’s just a load of guest stars doing things that shouldn’t be done with children’s characters (there’s a moment featuring Congorilla- you’ll know it when you reach it- which could’ve come straight from the pen of Mark Miller). It’s also present in the rest of the series, a long-running subplot concerns Superman supporting character Morgan Edge, Solomon Grundy gets a green makeover for an Hulk joke etc. This is the kind of stuff that makes me groan, I know Veitch is capable of being more interesting than that.

There is something to admire about Veitch choosing to focus on a character that adamantly refuses to follow its function: People, and other things, keep telling Swamp Thing that he has job to do as a protector of ‘The Green’ but as far as he’s concerned he did enough, that’s now someone else's problem. The narrative keeps trying to punish him for it, only for Swamp Thing to shrug his shoulders and reject celestial wisdom. This is probably what Veitch felt like when dealing with editorial.

Swamp Thing by Rick Veitch is a book of many faults, but I will be back for the next volume. For all of its faults, it is never dull. It isn’t a book that telegraphs what’s coming (sometimes you get the sense the creators themselves aren’t sure what’s to follow). Sure, it’s not Alan Moore, but it’s not trying to be. It’s trying to be Rick Veitch. In that – it succeeds.