Swamp Thing: Family Tree

Scott Snyder, Yanick Paquette, Marco Rudy & others
Swamp Thing: Family Tree (2013)
I sort of enjoyed the first seven issues of the revived Swamp Thing comic as assembled in Raise Them Bones, but somewhere in this collection it just seemed to stop doing whatever it was doing that worked for me. The artwork is beautiful, at least for the first half and very much in the vein of John Totleben; but then we whizz off somewhere else to reinvent Anton Arcane and it turns into something which looks like it's sort of trying to not resemble cutesy big-eyed manga shite with Alec Holland as a blue-eyed Kurt Cobain variation from some sappy 1990s autobiographical comic, but not trying very hard; and it isn't quite so bum-violatingly agonising as the Camden-Archieisms of Philip Bond or Jamie Hewlett, but it's closer than I would like. Annoyingly this particular weak-link exposes the other one, namely that the writing probably could have used a bit more elbow grease. The horror aspect is fine, and all very Alan Moore up to a missed point, said missed point being that Moore's horror worked in his version of Swamp Thing because it was played off the contrast with a well-written prosaic reality, scenes focussing on the minutiae of the every day and familiar so as to root the story in something we vaguely recognise. This version of Swamp Thing is, on the other hand, just one horror scenario after another tooled so as to resemble some kind of narrative. It lacks the aforementioned contrast and is, after a while, unsatisfying, reading much as though referring only to previous comics, films, or - shudder - games in the same genre.

The drooling abomination that is Anton Arcane bursts into the shack. 'What, no hug for your Uncle Anton, Abigail?' he slobbers.

'I've got your hug right here,' she growls just like Sigourney Weaver, levelling her shotgun at the monster. By hug she means two barrels of hot leaden death, you see.

Clever.

Maybe I'm just too old for this, but I don't think so. I can read the earlier issues of Swamp Thing without wincing - the issues which came out when I was roughly somewhere within the age group at which they were aimed. This is just lazy writing, media which refers almost exclusively to previous versions of itself.

Animal Man: Animal vs. Man / Rotworld - the Red Kingdom

Jeff Lemire, Scott Snyder, Steve Pugh, Travel Foreman etc.
Animal Man: Animal vs. Man (2012)
Animal Man: Rotworld - the Red Kingdom (2013)
China Miéville's Perdido Street Station opens wonderfully and is beautifully written, but by page two-hundred I was bored shitless and sorely in need of something a little more immediate and enjoyable by way of a palate cleanser before committing to the remaining forty-fucking-million chapters. Further instalments of the revived Animal Man comic seemed to fit the bill, not least because of my having two whole unread volumes in which to immerse myself. Interestingly enough, the thematic shift is probably not that pronounced, given the emphasis on biological horror in Perdido Street Station.

Anyway, the continuation of the story which began with The Hunt holds up generally well, and is at least as good as anything from the Vertigo incarnation of the title, regarding which, it was nice to note the narrative assimilation of the Grant Morrison iteration, and even those yellow extraterrestrials from which our hero derived his amazing animal powers back in a 1965 issue of Strange Adventures. Slightly stranger was finding Buddy Baker back in a version of the regular DC universe as populated by Superman, Batman, Beast Boy, and a bunch of other faintly ludicrous characters with whom I am only distantly familiar. I say a version of the DC universe, because this is the one in which most of the costumed types are dead and have been revived as zombie-like soldiers of the Rot, so it's obvious there's going to be one massive fuck-off sized reset button popping up at some point, which sort of diminishes the integrity of the whole for me, as does the sheer spectacle of all those zombie superheroes flying into battle - ludicrous and as such all well and good in Marshal Law, but it seems an uncomfortable fit here.

Well, Animal Man is still fairly enjoyable regardless, if occasionally reading like it can't really decide on whether it's a post-Vertigo comic book or a 1980s issue of Firestorm the Nuclear Man. The art is mostly spectacular, although Andrew Belanger seems a bit out of place with his cute manga faces and everything looking as though he hasn't quite got all of the Teen Titans Go! out of his system.

Oh well, back to boring China Miéville, I guess.

Animal Man: The Hunt

Jeff Lemire & Travel Foreman Animal Man: The Hunt (2012)
Sufficiently impressed with Scott Snyder's revived Swamp Thing, I continue my cautious return to the DC universe with Animal Man on the grounds that it apparently crosses over with the aforementioned vegetable-based title and might therefore aid my appreciation of the same even if it turns out to be shit. I suppose given how many times Animal Man continuity has been subject to the reset button during previous runs means that one more revision isn't such a big deal. Most of the stuff introduced by Grant Morrison and Jamie Delano remains in the recipe, mostly just off camera so we don't have to get ourselves too bogged down in who or what B'wana Beast was supposed to be. It probably helps that the previous version of the comic came to such a terrible end with a storyline I had trouble remembering even as I was reading it and some of the worst art I've ever seen in a mainstream comic book - the stuff of superheroes drawn with leaky biro on the back of an exercise book during an unusually sucky history class. That thing really looked like shit by the end, and I felt dirty each time I bought an issue like the loyal completist moron that I was.

So even had all-new Animal Man been illustrated through the magic of the potato print, it still would have been ahead of the game. Happily it isn't illustrated by potato print, but rather by someone called Travel Foreman. Travel was a verb rather than the name of a person last time I looked, but I don't really care because the art is mostly great, probably better than it has ever been on this book. Foreman contrasts large areas of flat colour with scrabbly ink drawings achieving an effect - to well and truly nail my colours to the mast here - not unlike that of the cartoon strips in the 1976 Dr Who Annual or thereabouts. It manages to seem both ugly and beautiful at the same time, and doesn't really suggest comic book so much as illustration.

I'm still not sure about the actual story, or what's going on as yet, but it seems decent and has done nothing to annoy me, so I'll probably stick with it on the understanding of it most likely getting better as it continues over subsequent collections. I loved Morrison's run on this title, but the art always seemed a bit basic and crappy to me; and what followed Morrison was generally great, although I've never been that wild about Steve Dillon's art - it always felt competent, but somehow phoned-in and lacking feeling; so it feels like Animal Man has at least been done some justice, or at least has no significantly underwhelming links in its chain for more or less the first time; and, without making too much in the way of a massive statement, it feels like the book at last knows what it's trying to do.

Swamp Thing: Raise Them Bones

Scott Snyder, Yanick Paquette & others
Swamp Thing: Raise Them Bones (2012)
Following on from my finding Peter Milligan's Red Lanterns borderline unreadable, it was proposed to me that I might direct my gaze elsewhere in DC Comics' newly reinvented cosmology, specifically to the Scott Snyder version of Swamp Thing.

'It's not as good as Alan Moore's Swamp Thing,' my informant told me, 'but it's better than the Mark Millar version.'

So here we are.

In case anyone missed the memo, DC Comics have been doing this sort of thing for a while, regularly rebooting its entire cast of characters back to their own year zero so as to avoid the ludicrous situation of anyone finding themselves required to draw Batman falling asleep in front of Countdown and not shitting himself before he's made it to the lavatory. I'm still not sure what to make of this development, although as I barely read the things these days my opinion would in any case probably be worthless. I was a massive fan of the version of this title which ran throughout the eighties and some of the nineties as written by Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, Doug Wheeler and others, and I can't really see that anything is likely to improve upon those issues. Apparently Swamp Thing has been revived twice since then, by which point I'd wandered off in another direction; and now here we all are, back to the beginning once more. Except it isn't exactly back to the beginning because it tells a story at the same sort of tangent to its earlier self as tends to arise from Hollywood adaptations. Similar situations and characters emerge seeming less like reinvention than someone playing with Alan Moore's toy box - the parliament of trees, the defender of the green as foretold by prophecy, broken necked chaps with their heads facing backwards, and so on. So it all feels at least a little familiar, even referencing what went before in obtuse acknowledgement of everything having returned to year zero, but all joined together in an unfamiliar configuration. Abigail Arcane has had a haircut, and she turns up on a motorbike with a shotgun which she points at the bad guy whilst growling you don't have to do this. Somehow it feels like a bad fit, given that Abigail Arcane probably isn't quite so essential to the founding mythology of Swamp Thing as, for example, is Lois Lane to that of Superman; but maybe I'm just too ingrained with the previous version of the story. Maybe I need to let go.

Actually, the story as spread across the seven issues of the comic collected here does seem to have a pace and dynamic closer to certain Hollywood conventions than was the case with the previous incarnation - just to squeeze out my penultimate winnet of objection-poo; but, for what it is, taking the new Swamp Thing on its own terms and ignoring the recycling, this is a more than decent effort. Excepting the intermittently wonky faces drawn by Marco Rudy for the fourth issue, the art is mostly fucking fantastic, and the writing is mostly pretty darn great, despite my reservations regarding some of the plot across which that writing is draped. I suppose, most importantly, the horror is at least as horrible as anything from Moore's run, which is after all the point of this title.

So yes, possibly better than Mark Millar's Swamp Thing - which I liked a great deal as it happens - and not quite up to Alan Moore standards, and whilst I have some minor reservations, this is a very respectable effort and an absolute pleasure to read.