On Swamp Thing Halloween Horror Giant #1

I finally gave in and bought myself one of those DC Walmart exclusive 100-page giants last weekend, which, based on the number of stories The Beat has devoted to the subject, is one of the biggest stories in comics right now. This one was the Swamp Thing Halloween Horror Giant #1, which appears to be a holiday special, as opposed to the four ongoing series devoted to Superman, Batman, the Justice League and the Teen Titans. It had its own little cardboard display case set up right next to the usual one that I see on my biweely-ish trips to the Ashtabula County Walmart.

Unlike the other Walmart giants, I wasn't immediately sure I had read all of the reprint stories within this (although it turned out that I had), and I wasn't as confident that the all-new Swamp Thing story advertised on the cover would show up in a collection, as I am confident the Brian Michael Bendis-written Batman story and the Tom King-written Superman story will. And hell, it's only $5--that's significantly less than most of the magazines they shelve near check out aisles in supermarkets to entice impulse buys.

I don't want to get too deep into the logic and ethics of these things again, nor to play armchair publisher regarding them, although I think in general that extremely cheap, mostly reprint comics marketed to a mass audience of civilians is a pretty good idea, especially around holidays like Halloween and, even more so, Christmas. I remain a little baffled as to who exactly these are meant for, though. As with the Batman one I had previously read, this seemed to be geared toward an adult--or at least older teen--audience, rather than an all-ages one. There's some blood, some unnecessary swearing, a particularly gratuitous dark and an oddly out of place story from the 1970s with barely veiled drug humor (Unlike the comics DC sells to the direct market, there's no rating on this one).

And the contents are extremely haphazard, although, in general, the idea seems to be popular-ish DC characters with one foot in the world of horror and the other in the traditional world of DCU superheroics. Off the top of my head, I feel like I could come up with 100-pages of better Halloween comics to fill this thing with, and I got the sense that after the new Swampy story that kicks off the anthology and the Swamp Thing-related reprint that closes it out, the stories were chosen more for the characters featured or their ability to hit the pre-determined page count than for their quality or their accessibility to new readers or their likelihood of selling brand-new readers on particular characters, concepts or comics.

So here's what we've got.

*Swamp Thing in "Hollow" This 12-page short is the "Brand-New Swamp Thing Story! Written by Brian Azzarello and Art by Greg Capullo!" That...doesn't sound, right, and makes me suspect that story selection is hardly the only issue with editing that went into this thing. Anyway, if people who ever visit comic book shops by this, chances are this is the reason they will be buying it. The story itself is kind of simple, and echoes one that appears later in the collection, as well as dozens or even scores of other comics stories. The basic idea is that there are good monsters that fight bad monsters, and that there are places in this world where bad things from other dimensions try to enter when the veil between the worlds is weak enough, and some noble, self-sacrificing types must endlessly keep a lonely vigil for the good of all.

Swamp Thing fights a giant, eye-less, albino crocodile-monster from hell, and there's a pretty neat reveal regarding some other monsters. Azzarello does his usual cute word play, which is either clever or annoying depending on the generosity of the reader, but I imagine Capullo is the big draw here. Indeed, it's the art that sells the reveal, and it was fun seeing his big, scary Swamp Thing, which is much bigger than usual, although I did find myself a little disappointed by one of his entrances (There's a bunch of dead leaves that seem to stir from the wind, and then form into Swamp Thing, but he just looks like he always does, rather than being made out of fall leaves; I've always liked when artists tweaked his design to reflect the type of plants he made his body from in a particular appearance).

*The Enchantress and Blue Devil in "The Pumpkin Sinister" This is the first of the four shorts taken from either the 2007 DC Universe Infinite Halloween Special #1 or 2008's DCU Halloween Special #1. The premise for those was that various villains all sat around telling scary stories starring DC heroes, and so when you remove an individual story from those books and present it by itself, it doesn't quite make sense, as each includes at least a panel of a supervillain, who then serves as narrator (To be honest, DC probably could have just reprinted one of these in their entirety here behind the Swamp Thing stories, and it would have made for a smooth and more comprehensible read). The Scarecrow narrates two of them, and he also appears in them, so those mostly work, but this one is particularly weird in that the villain narrator isn't someone I recognize by sight and never gets named, and he's awkwardly introduced, so the first panel of the story seems to include a giant in goofy '90s Image Comics-style armor, sitting near a house that he dwarfs with his immense size, and then the story begins (In actuality, he's regular-sized, by the creative team of Dan DiDio and Ian Churchill weren't exactly masters of comics storytelling, and it reads much worse removed from its original context).

I actually sighed out loud when I saw this was included, as it is one of the few stories I remember from either of those specials...not because it was good, but because it was so bad. Blue Devil and The Enchantress, who were back then both co-starring in pre-Justice League Dark Justice League Dark book Shadowpact, are giving out candy to trick-or-treaters while, across town, grown-up Peanuts characters Linus and Charlie Brown have just sacrificed Snoopy in a pumpkin patch in order to raise The Great Pumpkin The Pumpkin Sinister, which Charlie Brown sics on Blue Devil because, long ago, BD kissed The Little Red-Haired Girl.

I suppose there's a way to read this in which DiDio was parodying his own direction for the DCU line, which was progressively darker, gorier and more violent, despite the fact that the characters were all created to entertain children, but it is so clumsily executed that there's no textual basis to make that argument.

*Zatanna in "Kcirt ro Taert" Get it? That's "trick or treat" spelled backwards! And Zatanna casts spells by saying words backwards! Another short from the Infinite Halloween special, this one was written by Paul Dini and arted by Dustin Nguyen. The Scarecrow's head appears at the beginning--Nguyen draws a nice Scarecrow head--and he proceeds to tell of a recent Halloween in which he tried terrorize children by putting his chemical concoctions in candy, only to have Zatanna track him down and take her revenge. Nguyen's art is nice on a panel by panel basis, but the story's flow is difficult to read, and I honestly would have had no idea what the fuck was happening at the climax if I haven't read a dozen Scarecrow stories before (So not only can I recognize him without his costume, but they all tend to end the same way). It's an unusual case of great art not quite working right.

*Superman in "Strange Cargo" The last of the Infinite Halloween shorts, this one is a pretty simple Superman vs. Zombies story by horror comic writer Steve Niles and artist Dean Ormston, as told by Poison Ivy (who only appears in the first panel). Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane are at the docks, as they suspect Lex Luthor has just imported something illegal. They open the shipping crates to find a bunch of zombies, and when Superman arrives to fight them, he finds that they are infused with magic or Kryptonite, as they are kicking his ass. When the reporters point out that they are already dead and thus Superman doesn't have to go easy, he rallies and says, "So, they are...Well that changes everything." But rather than pulverizing them all or burning them to ash with his heat vision, he tosses them back in their shipping containers and flies them to the moon, where they are free to stagger around harmlessly. So, it changes nothing, I guess. Those two lines of dialogue really bugged me, because they have no impact on what is otherwise a pretty strong story that would demonstrate how much Superman respects life/abhors killing and violence...and that he's so powerful he never actually has to resort to it. Also, Poison Ivy's presence feels sort of random. It's frustrating because it's almost a perfect Superman story, but makes a few unfortunate unforced errors that keep it from reaching perfection.

*Batman and The Scarecrow in "The Ballad of Jonathan Crane" This is the last of the villains-telling-stories stories, and the only one from the DCU Halloween Special. Once again it's The Scarecrow's turn to tell a story--it occurs to me that there are at least 100 pages worth of solid Scarecrow short stories that DC could have easily done an all-Scarecrow Scarecrow Halloween Horror Giant #1 had they so chosen--and he basically just remixes "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" with himself as Ichabod Crane and Batman as The Headless Horseman. I do love the latter.

Plus, you know, Batman on a horse.

In fact, I love that image so damn much that I was thinking I wouldn't mind seeing a whole Elseworlds-like tale of a Batmanified Legend of Sleepy Hollow, although I guess writer Mikey Way and artist Mateus did the whole thing in just eight pages...the page of which reveals just how it is that what looks so Elseworldsy is actually canonical.

*Aquaman and The Demon in "Night Gods" This unlikely team-up by writer J. Michael Straczynski and artist Jesus Saiz is from the 32nd issue of the 2007-2010 Brave and The Bold revival, long after the book stopped being very good (as it was the first year or so, when writer Mark Waid and artist George Perez, and then Scott Kolins, were using it to tell compelling team-up stories that served as chapters in an overarching, universe-spanning story arc). This isn't bad, though. It is basically the two unlikely allies fighting Cthullhu on the ocean floor with the same basic set-up as the Swampy story--monster hero, portal between two worlds, little-known guardians performing thankless task for an ignorant world--framed like so many of these stories as a story one character tells another. It's structured a bit like an old horror comic too, with a surprise ending that is anything but surprising. Saiz is a remarkably solid artist, and he does stately superheroics quite well, but his Demon looks a little...boring compared to so many other artists' takes on the character, and while I liked his (unnamed) Cthullhu design, in general the monsters and settings lacked the weirdness and expressionistic energy I would want in a story in which a guy who is caught in the middle of robbing a grave explains that he recently got magic gills and journeyed with Aquaman and a rhyming demon to the bottom of the ocean and watched an army of sea creatures do battle with undead aqua-zombies and Lovecraft mythos monsters.

*Batman and Robin in "Night of The Reaper!" This one is something of a Halloween classic, set as it is during the Rutland, Vermont annual Halloween parade and featuring the talents of a pretty all-star creative team: Writer Denny O'Neil and artists Neal Adams and Dick Giordano, "from an idea by Bernie Wrightson with an assist from Harlan Ellison." As you can probably guess by the credits and my use of the word "classic," it's an old one, originally appearing in Batman #237 from 1971...the year my father graduated from high school! So, it's that old.

Obviously that means the Robin in question is Dick Grayson, who, at the time, was a college student. He and some guys go to take in the parade and party scene, and one of them is stoned out of his mind from "gulping coffee and who-knows-what-else" to keep his eyes open while studying. In a strange running gag, he is obsessed with parade floats, and spends the rest of the story talking about them to anyone who will listen.

As likely happens to Dick Grayson a lot, he goes out to have fun and ends up stumbling into a strange murder plot by someone dressed as The Grim Reaper. Not The Reaper, but, like, the generic one, with a scythe. Kind of like a murderous Scooby-Doo plot. Involving Nazis. There's lots of rather strong Adams art in this fairly lengthy and substantial comic, showing off his abilities to draw incredibly realistic characters and dramatic Batman poses and action. It's also kind of neat to see so many Marvel superheroes appear in a DC Comic, as many of the revelers are dressed as superheroes from both sides of the DC/Marvel rivalry. There's at least one cameo by a comic book creator too, but I'll be damned if I can recognize who it's meant to be: I was like -7-years-old when this came out, after all.

*Swamp Thing in "The Origin of Swamp Thing!" Like the previous story, this is a decades-old story that I've read before--multiple times, actually--although I'd actually be hard-pressed to tell you where exactly I've encountered it. This is, of course, the original, eight-page Swamp Thing story by his creators Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, from 1971's House of Secrets, the one with the famous-ish cover (not included).

Rereading it today, after spending so much time looking so closely at Kelley Jones art in the past few weeks, it is really striking how evident Wrightson's influence on Jones was. Not just in certain elements of his rendering or style, but even in the layouts and storytelling. Jones' current style and Wrightson's from later in his career don't really look all that similar, but one can see how the Wrightson of the early 1970s influenced the Jones of the 1990s.

This one seems a bit out of place in this anthology, despite starring the title character. Those last two from 1971 are kinda sorta evergreen DCU Halloween story classics, ones that standalone, whereas so much of what preceded them begs a degree of familiarity with the characters, and tend to be fairly forgettable. Like, I've read all of them before, but don't really remember doing so...only that I fucking hated that Blue Devil/Peanuts comic. Just as it would be easy to imagine a DC Halloween 100-page giant that was all Swamp Thing stories or all Scarecrow stories, it's also easy to imagine one that is all short, "classic" scary stories by some of the greatest creators in DC history from the 1970s and '80s.

For those who care--given that one of the ways in which DC was trying to sell these at the time they were announced was that they would push the comic shop locator and be a way to herd Walmart shoppers into their local comic book shops--I'll mention the ad content. There are shockingly few, given how cheap this comic is. There's just two in the interior of the book, in fact: One for DC/Vertigo's series of Alan Moore-written, Stephen Bissette and John Totleben-drawn Swamp Thing collections and the Comicshoplocator.com one featuring an image of the Trinity drawn by Jason Fabok, which I recall seeing from the last Walmart exclusives I looked at. And then the back cover has an ad for Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp's upcoming Hal Jordan book, the one which is will be about Hal's core workout, based on his abs in that image.

I'm curious to see if there will be a #2 next year, and kind of excited to see what happens in December, as I kind of love Christmas comics. I'm not sure what they would call a Christmas giant though, as I can't think of a DC super-character associated with the holiday spirit in the same way that Swamp Thing (or a dozen or so other characters) is associated with horror/scary business...

"The traditional methods"...?

It was my understanding from every zombie movie I've ever seen and every zombie comic I've ever read that the way to kill a zombie was to destroy or severely damage its brain, usually by shooting or somehow smashing its head. Not so, according to The Shade in this week's Swamp Thing #2 by Len Wein and Kelley Jones. Filling a zombie's mouth with salt and then sewing it tightly shut sounds infinitely harder, even if we're talking about the slow, shambling zombies of Romero's movies or The Walking Dead, rather than the "fast" zombies of more modern movies.

I mean, I've never held a firearm, nor am I an expert in hand-to-hand combat or anything, but I'm pretty confident I could pull a trigger or swing a baseball bat or shovel in the general direction of a walking corpse's head. But sewing...? I mean, I can barely thread a needle, and I always forget how to tie off the other end once you're done stitching. Think how hard surviving the zombie apocalypse would be if The Shade is right!

Also, think how boring all those movies, TV shows and videogames premised on the killing of zombies would be...

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

This week at Robot 6 I wrote about TwoMorrows' Swampmen: Muck-Monsters and Their Makers, a book of features, interviews and tons of art edited by Jon B. Cooke and George Khoury (the above image is a title page, featuring a painting by Douglas Kaluba).

They "only" cover the swamp monster genre from a Golden Age prose short story to the end of the 1980s climax of Swamp Thing, not discussing the phenomenon's relationship with film (not even the based-on-the-comics swamp monster movies, like the Swamp Thing films and TV shows, except in passing during interviews), or of DC and Marvel's efforts to keep their respective 'Things ongoing concerns, despite no one ever quite being able to replicate what Alan Moore did for DC or Steve Gerber did for Marvel. It occurs to me there's probably a book about swamp monsters to be written—like, a book-book—and that this represents a hell of a head-start on it, with plenty of research and interviews done already, should Cooke or any of his collaborators want to sit down to set down the whole history of the swamp monster genre of horror.

In my review, I sort of mused on why it is that the weird little sub-genre became so popular and, given Moore's run on Swamp Thing, so important to comics history, and the best I could come up with was coincidence, although Swamp Thing co-creator Len Wein offered his own rather convincing theory, which I shared at the end of my piece.

Flipping through the book again, starting with the Frank Cho-drawn cover (see below), I noticed another pattern that could at least explain why so many of these comics were popular upon release, and perhaps helped sustain the genre.

1970

Neal Adams, 1971

Hector Varella, 1971

Tom Sutton and Jack Abel, 1971

Frank Brunner, 1973

Neal Adams, 1973

Bob Larkin, 1974

Nestor Redondo, 1974

Nestor Redondo, 1975

Phil Belbin, 1976

Jesse Santos, 1976

Tom Yeates, 1982

Hmmm...I think I detect a pattern.

Speaking of which, here are two original pieces that appear in the book, Frank Cho's cover, here unencumbered by the title and text...

...and a pin-up by Pablos Marcos of Skywald's 1970s revival of The Heap, a much more grotesque and scary version of the original Golden Age comics muck-monster...

Sex sells...swamp monsters.

Artist Ryan Browne's Popcorn Swamp Thing from Swamp Thing Annual #3 is the best Swamp Thing.

Sure, Popcorn Swamp Thing—or should it just be Popcorn Thing?—only appears on two pages of the 38-page comic, and Brown is only one of the five artists who contribute work to the book, but man, those are two really great pages (So too are the two pages Dave Bullock draws, depicting the origin of The Demon Etrigan).

DC's May 2014 in dismemberments

Dystopian Future Captain Cold (drawn by Ethan Van Sciver) and Dystopian Future Batman (Jesus Merino and Dan Green), The New 52: Futures End FCBD Special Edition #0, May 3rd

Hawkman (Mike McKone), Justice League United #1, May 14th

Power Ring (Doug Mahnke and Scott Hanna), Justice League #30, May 21st

A polar bear (Dan Jurgens and Mark Irwin), The New 52: Futures End #3, May 21st

Frankenstein (Aaron Lopresti and Art Thibert), The New 52: Futures End #4, May 28th

Swamp Thing (Paul Pelletier and Sean Parsons), Aquaman #31, May 28th

Meanwhile...

Shouldn't Mr. Swampy's dialogue bubbles be orange...?

I reviewed the first issue of the new Tiny Titans series, Tiny Titans: Return To The Treehouse for Good Comics For Kids today. If you liked the previous 50 issues of Tiny Titans, when it was an ongoing monthly, you'll like it. Plus, Swamp Thing cameo, which means Mike Sterling has to buy it! I was pleased with Art Baltazar and Franco's return to the DC characters, but I have to admit, after Superman Family Adventures, I'd kinda like to see them subject more DCU grown-ups to their style, ala Swampy and a few of the other cameos seen in this issue (Metamorpho, for example, whose right leg I never realized was made out of wood). I sure wouldn't mind a Justice League Advetures or DC Universe Adventures or something by the pair in the future. Baltazar' draws everyone in the DC Universe really awesomely, as his illustrations in the DC Super-Pets Character Encyclopedia demonstrated (the sole exception being his Green Lantern John Stewart, who he draws with hair and a goatee, and who thus looks weird and wrong and evil for some reason).

And, over at Robot 6, I reviewed a quartet of books: Julie Delporte's Everywhere Antennas (excellent, but not for everyone), Pascal Girard's Petty Theft (excellent, for everyone), the new edition of Nicolas De Crecy's Glacial Period (must-read) and Enki Bilal's not-comics-but-similar-ballpark Phantoms of the Louvre (interesting enough).

While getting ready to write that, I went back and read Girard's Bigfoot, which, for reasons I can't comprehend in retrospect, I hadn't read before (And I love comics, Bigoot and Pascal Girard). It's pretty great stuff too; not as funny as Reunion or Petty Theft maybe, but still pretty funny. And in color. And featuring Bigfoot (in a way). Great end pages, too.

Review: Animal Man Vol. 3: Rotworld: The Red Kingdom

I thought Animal Man was supposed to be one of the good New 52 books, one of the best comics DC is currently publishing? It's probably the comic I see cited most often in the comments that occasionally attach themselves to pieces I write at Robot 6, or under articles on various blogs about some dumb editorial decision DC has made; you know, things like, "Ugh, DC is the worst, Animal Man is the only book I'm still reading" or "That it, I'm dropping everything but Animal Man" or "Wow, I guess I can drop Batwoman too now, so Animal Man is my last DC comic."

And it's written by Jeff Lemire, a very talented cartoonist and pretty decent super comics-script writer that everyone seems to like, in this volume occasionally collaborating with Scott Snyder, who seems to be the universally accepted Best Writer At DC.

And yet this comic is sort of awful. Granted, I started the series with volume 3 instead of volume 1 (my only previous encounter with New 52 Animal Man being this summer's annual), but what I found wanting about it had absolutely nothing to do with not being able to follow the plot or recognize and understand the characters and their conflicts (all of which were pretty similar to how I remember them from 1990s Vertigo stories); Lemire and Snyder do a fine job of making this volume stand on its own and serve as an easy enough entry point.

Rather, I just found the whole endeavor repetitive (of older, better comics I read as a teenager), and bloodless and cold. It was plain old generic superhero comics, without any interesting or fresh ideas boiling under the surface; the art was occasionally very creepy and weird, and kept my eyes from drifting up from the page to the carpet or wall paper, but it was inconsistent (seven artists were involved in the volume), and rarely inspired enough to make up for the overall deficiencies of the comic.

Steve Pugh's "Rot Queen Maxine" is scary as fuck. Good job, Steve Pugh!

This volume contains eight issues of Animal Man and two of Swamp Thing; despite the 200-page contents, a sizable chunk of the narrative seems to be missing, as the two DC-to-Vertigo-and-back heroes are separated when arriving in Rotworld and go on separate quests that converge; we see the start and climax of both, but Swamp Thing is otherwise MIA, returning with a bunch of characters that weren't introduced and with a deus ex machina not mentioned int his volume until it appears (Given the title, I suspect there's a volume of Swamp Thing out there with the sub-title "Rotworld: The Green Kingdom," but if issues of this aren't reprinted there as well, I have a hard time imagining how complete that story must read).

Buddy Baker, aka Animal Man, is on the run with his family: Wife Ellen, be-mulleted teenage son Cliff, power-sprouting young daughter Maxine, and his mother-in-law. Both she and Ellen are pretty unhappy with Buddy about all the dangerous craziness he brings into their lives, an unhappiness that ultimately culminates with Ellen leaving him. I read issues written by Jamie Delano featuring these very conflicts and events, some of which were drawn by artists Steve Pugh, who drew the lion's share of this volume, increasing the sense of deja vu (The greatest change is that Animal Man's costume is quite different, and he looks like a minor X-Men character. While these issues were being published, there are Animal Man collections written by one of the most popular writers to work with DC in the last twenty years for sale on bookstore shelves, and short cartoons featuring Animal Man on Cartoon Network; he looks completely different. Synergy!).

What they are running from are agents of The Rot, which is the equivalent of The Red, the mystical lifeforce web that binds all animals that Animal Man draws his powers from, and The Green (Replace "animals" with "plants" and "Animal Man" with "Swamp Thing").  Cliff has been injured and seems to be near death, and while the adults argue about how best to help him, ultimately Buddy convinces them they have to stop the problem at its root, by visiting the swamp with a talking cat and allying themselves with Swamp Thing and Abby Arcane, both of whom have slightly different haircuts, but seem to be otherwise immediately recognizable as their mid-nineties Vertigo selves.

The two character with books bearing their names dive into a fetid pool that is a portal into The Rot, and something something, Arcane is the Avatar of The Rot, they end up in a post-apocalyptic, possible, so-sure-to-be-immediately-reversed-this-might-as-well-be-an-Elseworlds-world future in which The Rot has conquered the world, save for a handful of heroes in need of Animal Man and Swamp Thing's leadership to win the day.

In this respect, it reads a lot like (what I've read of) Age of Ultron or sections of Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell's "Rock of Ages" storyline; there are no consequences, and thus no import, to anything that happens (In fact, a reset button is pushed by cosmic forces near the end, sending the characters back in time to prevent Rotworld from ever coming to pass.

But what it reminded me most of was Jeph Loeb's "Hush" story arc in Batman: A series of cameos, strung together like beads. Many of these are indeed cool, several are completely out-of-left-field (Would Medphyll be in many readers' list of The Top Ten Green Lanterns Most Likely To Appear In a crossover...?*). That is at least one virtue to the parade of Geoff Johns-like guest-star reveals; many of them are relatively minor characters, fan-favorites (as in, like, one fan likes them a whole lot) that probably don't appear as often as they should.

They get a chance to shine, and some cool stuff happens, like Frankenstein joining The Green Lantern Corps.

Black Orchid can morph her hands into big scary monster claws, just like her namesake flower

So Buddy teams up with New 52 Black Orchid, who wears purple cabbage leaves, can change shape and generally looks infinitely worse than the original DCU version or the later version reinvented by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean (And why would you want her to resemble the version of her appearing in that graphic novel by Neil Gaiman? It's not like millions of people like to read books that guy writes or anything); Beast Boy, who is now red and doesn't look anything like the version in Teen Titans, Young Justice or the new Teen Titans Go cartoons that are on television;  Steel, who is now a robot with his consciousness uploaded; and John Constantine, who apparently must appear in every single comic featuring more than two superheroes in it.

Together they pick up some more allies, like Frankenstein and his Patchwork Horde, an army of sewn together cavalry on sewn-together horses that the Rot can't rot and the aforementioned Medphyll, and fight some villains, like Blackbriar Thorn and Gorilla Grodd and his gorilla army (which Mallah and The Brain are in).

Pugh's cover to Animal Man #13, I think, featuring an awesome Rotworld Hawkman

At Arcane's castle, they meet Swamp Thing's team—a Batgirl who looks like a female Man-Bat, Mister Freeze, a giant Batman robot with the power to fix everything—and get in a big fight with the various forces of The Rot, most of which are corrupted, badly deformed versions of DC superheroes and villains behaving a bit like zombies, only much more fucked-up looking.

A lot of them die horribly, but who cares? It reboots at the end, as is clear from the pages.

In order to win the day, they have to get the Batman robot-thing up into the clouds, where it will make it green Fix Stuff juice, that will fix stuff. Because this is an Animal Man/Swamp Thing crossover, it falls on them to get it up into the sky, by having Swamp Thing grow wings made of plants (?) and fly it, while Animal Man fights Arcane atop it.

Artist Andrew Belanger takes over for the climax, because that's when you wanna see a different artist come in. I'm no botanist, so I don't know how much metal a pair of leaf wings can carry

This is sort of weird, since Green Lantern Frankenstein, who has a magic ring that specializes in allowing its bearer to fly and in lifting heavy objects, usually in green spheres or giant green hands, keep the hordes at bay. This would be a little like a Justice League story where Superman is like, "Batman, I'll keep these thugs off your back while you  fly that nuclear missile up into space where it won't hurt anyone when it goes off in thirty seconds!"

And then, back in the past, Cliff dies, which is actually more funny and sigh-inducing than tragic, given the fact that Grant Morrison, the writer who salvaged Animal Man from DC trivia obscurity and made him a character capable of supporting his own book (and serving as a pillar for DC's adult reader Vertigo imprint), a writer whose work apparently so inspired both Lemire and Snyder that they are here near-constantly echoing and quoting aspects of characters Morrison wrote, whether from Morrison's runs or from those that preceded or followed Morrison, did a whole story arc decrying cheap shock tactics like killing off Buddy Baker's family as pretty shitty things for writers to do.

I liked seeing so many characters I like—particularly Steel, whose presence isn't what I would have hoped in a rebooted DCU—and much of the artwork is fine, but it all felt quite soulless, like a plot for a comic book with a first-draft of a script that got illustrated, before the writers could work in any real drama, or any fresh, big, new ideas that can justify the otherwise generic Heroes Go To a Shitty Possible Future Then Avert It storyline.

If those Internet comment leavers are right, and this is the best DC Comic, than the publisher is in much greater creative trouble than I could have imagined.

Luckily, Internet comment-leavers are never, ever right about anything.**

*On the other hand, he has appeared in Swamp Thing before, so, again, we have that repetitive, recycling element.

**Um, except for all you guys who leave comments on EDILW, of course. You guys are the best. You've discerning taste in writing-about-comics, you smell divine and, is that a new shirt? Or did you lose weight? Something looks different about you.