Taking out Batman with a Single Punch!

The Swamp Thing story I reviewed last week did end with an unresolved plot point--government agent Matt Cable and his unofficial assistant Abby Arcane had been captured by the criminal organization known as the Conclave. So it only seemed right to review the next issue as well, so we don't leave Matt and Abby forever imprisoned.

Swamp Thing #7 (November-December 1973) was also written by Len Wein and drawn by Bernie Wrightson. It opens with Swamp Thing riding the rails to Gotham City, accompanied by a dog that had been in the company of Cable. What S.T. doesn't know is that the dog is an undercover agent for the Conclave. Well, sort of. The poor little guy is microchipped, which had allowed the head of the Conclave to listen in on Cable's conversations.

Anyway, it's hard for an 8-foot-tall plant monster to go unnoticed, even in a city where weird stuff like that seems to be a daily occurance.  While he's outfitting himself in something he hopes will be inconspicious, the cops show up. The cops, though, soon discover that bullets don't do him much harm. Swamp Thing avoids hurting anyone, but he does trash a couple of police cars, creating enough confusion to allow him to getaway.

In the meantime, Bruce Wayne is heading up a meeting that is also attended by a businessman named Nathan Ellery, who at first seems to be a nice guy, but is in reality the head of the Conclave. Of course, Ellery would have no idea Bruce is Batman, but why he would set up the headquarters for an international crime organization in a city protected by Batman is a bit of a mystery.

After the meeting, Bruce puts on the costume and goes on patrol. The story here is nicely paced, with the action switching back and forth between Batman (as he takes out some smugglers and finds clues about the Conclave) and Swamp Thing (who is also tracking down clues about the conclave).

The Swamp Thing scenes are a bit on the contrived side. He hangs out at a bar, depending on his hat and coat to hide the fact that he's a monster, and listens in on the conversations of nearby thugs. Eventually, someone just happens to mention he's been hired by the Conclave as he waves around a piece of paper with an address written on it.

Wein was a great writer and I'd bet real money he knew this was contrived, but he only had 20 1/2 pages in which to tell the story, so was obligated to move the plot along quickly. He probably had no choice. This is, overall, a great one-issue story and stretching it out to two issues to make Swamp Thing's investigation less contrived would not have worked. Besides, the story involves an almost-mute plant monster trying to track down a super-scientific criminal cartel. There's only so much realism you can jam into it.

Anyway, Swamp Thing eventually finds out where Matt and Abigail are being held. He frees them and also overhears a phone call that tells him the Conclave is responsible for his wife's death (and the explosion that turned him into a monster). So now he really wants to find the Conclave's leader.

In the meantime, Ellery has sent a signal to the dog's microchip to recall the animal. Batman spots the dog and, recognizing it as the animal seen earlier with Swamp Thing, follows him. This brings the two heroes together near the building in which Ellery lives. Naturally, there's a fight.

And Swamp Thing manages to do something that every villain in Batman's Rogue's Gallery has dreamed about on a nightly basis. He knocks out the Dark Knight with a single punch.

The dog ends up giving away Ellery's status as a criminal. Swamp Thing confronts the villain, but is unable to bring himself to kill him, even to avenge his wife's death. It's an epic moment for the character--after all he's gone through, he still retains his true humanity and an understanding of right and wrong.

Ellery, though, stumbles into his pet baboon, which reacts in fear, bites him and sends him tumbling off the balcony to his death. (Well, his supposed death. Like most comic book villains, he's not quite dead yet and returns in a later issue.) Swamp Thing leaves Gotham and Batman calls the night a wrap, sensing that the monster is done mucking about his city.

As I said, this is a great issue. The contrived nature of Swamp Thing's "investigation" is a bump in the road, but Wrightson's art and Wein's script hit the right emotional notes to make it work anyways.

Next week, I think we'll travel into the future to visit Dr. Magnus, Robot Fighter.

Good Robots, Evil Robots and Swamp Thing

Swamp Thing #6 (Sept-Oct. 1973) begins with the titular character falling out of the back of a truck while traveling through Vermont (after, in previous issues, making an unplanned and rather adventurous tour of Europe and Scotland). And, because Swamp Thing's life is what it is, he tumbles directly into yet another adventure.

He's found by Alec and Linda Holland. Which is a bit weird, because Swamp Thing is Alec Holland--or rather he was before that pesky lab explosion turned him into a monster. And Linda was dead.

(Yes, I know that Alan Moore later retconned this into Swamp Thing being a seperate entity who had absorbed Alec's memories when the human died and thus just thought he was Alec for a time. I've never read Moore's run and do not have an opinion on that--though its a perfectly sound idea. But for me, "real" DC Universe history all took place before 1986, so I'm just sticking with Swampy literally being Alec.)

Anyway, it's understandable that Swamp Thing is a bit confused when he meets both himself and his dead wife, but the human pair continue to treat him with kindness and eventually take him into town. Here, he meets the mayor, Hans Klochmann.

Klochmann, it turns out, is a genius in robotics. He came to what was once an abandoned mining town and populated it with robots, all designed to look like people he'd seen in the obituaries. He's happy running a town full of "people" who are incapable of feeling jealousy, hatred or greed. It's not a bad place to live, though Swamp Thing is having some understandable trouble in adjusting to the "resurrection" of his wife as a robot.

Len Wein's script and Bernie Wrightson's superb art set all this up perfectly. The plot unfolds smoothly, with those of us reading finding out what's going on along with Swamp Thing, allowing us to emphasize with the confusing emotions this is generating in him. The story thus captures the proper atmosphere for the story perfectly, giving a lot of emotional punch to the violent conclusion.

To reach that conclusion, I'm afraid the town will have to stop being a nice place to live. Government investigator Matt Cable has been pulled off the Swamp Thing case to investigate the town, where no one has ever registered with the governement or paid taxes.

That by itself wouldn't be so bad. But a criminal organization called the Conclave (the same guys who killed Linda and supposedly killed Alex) also find out about the town. Soon, a gang of machine gun-toting henchmen led by a killer robot arrive. Matt and his assistant Abigail Arcane are captured and flown in a helicopter to be questioned about his organization.

The Conclave plans on taking Klochmann as well to force him to use his robotics skills for their nefarious purposes. When Klochmann objects to this, a few of his robots are shot down. This includes the Linda Holland Robot.

Well, that doesn't sit well with Swamp Thing. And you don't want to be on the wrong side of an angry Swamp Thing. He destroys the robot in a brief but brutal fight. The henchmen then get ready to open first on him.

By this point in the series, Swamp Thing had been shown to be immune to most physical damage and had even had a severed arm grow back. So there's a brutal irony involved when Klochmann jumps in front of Swamp Thing and sacrifices his life to take the bullets instead. Was Swamp Thing actually in danger? Perhaps concentrated machine gun fire would have shredded him. But its also possible the fire power might have been insufficient to kill him.

But Klochmann does die for him. The robots--supposedly unable to feel vengeance--rush the henchman. The robots are destroyed, but they take the henchmen with them.

So Klochmann's dream of a town untouched by violence and hatred comes to a violent and hate-filled end.

This is one of my favorite stories from the Wein/Wrightson run. As I mentioned above, it does an excellent job of setting up the story and generating just the right emotions to give the climax a sense of real tragedy and loss. Wrightson was an artist who could infuse comic book panels with an extraordinary level of emotion. That talent is definetly on hand here.

Well, there is a dangling plot thread left at the end of this issue, with Matt and Abigail still prisoners of the Conclave. So next week, we'll continue to travel to with Swamp Thing into the next issue as he tracks the Conclave to....Gotham City?

Gee whiz, off all the places in the world to set up the headquarters of your international crime syndicate, Batman's home town seems like a very poor choice.

Cover Cavalcade

Even Swamp Thing endorses the view that Everything is Better with Dinosaurs. From 1974.

Swamp Thing

 Swamp Thing--or at least an early version of him/it--first appeared in 1970 in a one-shot story in House of Secrets #92. The story, anchored on Bernie Wrightson's creepy art, was a hit and the higher-ups at DC wanted more.

Wrightson and writer Len Wein both felt the original story was complete in of itself, but Wein eventually hit on the idea of creating another Swamp Thing, with an almost identical visual design linked to a different origin. So was born Alec Holland, whose laboratory in the swamp was destroyed by saboteurs, dosing the poor scientist with chemicals, setting him on fire and sending him running screaming in agony into the swamps.

To the surprise of not a single reader, he is transformed into a swamp thing. (As I understand it, this was later retconned into Holland actually being dead with his memories overlaid onto Swamp Thing. I haven't read those stories, so can't pass judgement on them. In my mind, Swamp Thing is still Alec Holland.)

Anyway, in his efforts to find those responsible for destroying his lab (and soon after murdering his wife), Swamp Thing had a serious of adventures that took him out of the swamp to various locations (including Gotham City and a team-up with Batman). Eventually, though, he returns to the swamp that "birthed" him. This story, titled "The Man Who Would Not Die," is told in Swamp Thing #10 (May-June 1974).

Swamp Thing encounters an extremely old black woman being threatened by an escaped prisoner. The friendly monster saves her, Unperturbed by his appearance, she tells him a story.

There was once a rich plantation here. But the owner was a vicious man who treated his slaves with sadistic cruelty. At one point, he has a one-armed slave named Black Jubal burned at the stake. The owner had threatened to take Jubal's attractive woman for himself. Jubal had strenuously objected.

By the way, this is the 1970s, when it was apparently still required by law to put the word "Black" in front of the name of pretty much every black character. Otherwise, how would we know?

Soon after Jubal was killed, he apparently returned from the dead to take final vengeance on the plantation owner.

Well, that's a nicely spooky story, but its just a story, right? Swamp Thing soon finds his hands full with a more realistic problem. An old enemy named Arcane--whose brain was transplanted into a hideous artificial body after his supposed recent death--wants to capture Swamp Thing and trade bodies once again. With his brain in Swamp Thing's powerful body, he can easily enslave the world. Unlike that silly ghost story, this is the sort of thing that happens to people all the time.

Unfortunately for Arcane, he uses the world "slave" in a sentence at least one too many times. Just when it seems that Swamp Thing is going to be captured, Jubal and a bunch of other ghosts of former slaves show up to smack down Arcane and his artificial "Un-Men."

Len Wein is an excellent writer, but in one way this is not one of his best works--the ending is far too predictable. But the story holds up despite this. It is otherwise well-structured and Bernie Wrightson's art work is perfect. Gee whiz, Wrightson knows how to be creepy when he wants to be. So despite telegraphing the ending far too obviously, the story definitely succeeds in being creepy. "The Man Who Would Not Die" literally drips with atmosphere, with every detail in it enhancing the sense of horror inherent in the story. It's a case in which a writer produces a pretty good story and then can watch it be elevated into something better by the right artist.

Cover Cavalcade

 I always thought that the best Swamp Thing stories took place when he was kept separate from the rest of the DC Universe, but this is a cool cover nonetheless.