One of the channels we get on our digital antenna is Ion TV, channel 30.1. Ahh, free Television.
Usually we just watch one of the various PBS channels, but since Cass arrived we haven't watched much of anything. Ion TV tends to show blocks of certain shows, like 8 or 9 hours in a row of "Criminal Minds" or "Blue Bloods" or any number of similar police procedural.
Fridays used to be "Cold Case" day, where from 1 pm until ending at 3 am, Ion would show thirteen episodes in a row of that particular police procedural. That specific show had a novel cast, great period music, and hit the exact same beats over and over with their formulaic premise that turned it into something unusually stomach-able.
On Friday evenings we may have checked which episode it was before going to dinner, then checked hours later after getting home, maybe even from after heading to the movies. It was easy, entertaining, and the music---as it needs to be said multiple times---was great. Each episode was split between the events that lead to someone's murder (the Past) and the cops trying to solve the case (the Present). The period music from the Past was where the show spent its budget.
Nevermind how difficult it is to actually solve a cold case...
Ion changed their lineup more than a year ago, dropped "Cold Case" entirely, and we've yet to really watch anything there since.
Anyway, one Friday after getting home from the pizzeria, we checked which episode was on and immediately an actress fired off my recognition sensors. Since each episode has both Past and Present versions of characters, this guest star was the older version of one of the friends of the victim. "Ohh," I said, "That's, eh...Adrienne Barbeau!"
She was older than I remember, like from this picture (thanks IMdb!), but I was pretty sure.
"Who?" Corrie responded.
"She was in 'Swamp Thing' and...um...other stuff I'm sure..."
So then I spent some time checking it out. Why was the 1982 "Swamp Thing" the only thing I remembered? I remember being quite obsessed with bayous and swamps and the like as a kid. Movies like "The Rescuers," "Flecth Lives," and "Swamp Thing" totally had my attention.
I remember thinking that Adrienne Barbeau may have spent some time at Music Circus, and this is why I
really remember her. It turned our that she was from Sacramento, so it follows that she may have participated in Sacramento Light Opera Association's summer stock, Music Circus, theater in the round. I may have even texted my mom and asked her about it.
Adrienne Barbeau originated Rizzo in the first Broadway performance of "Grease."
Anyway, back to the swamp and Swamp Thing.
I can't remember the origin of my fascination, or how my obsession started, but it was strong for a while, tailing off as I hit puberty and started collecting comics, two events that weren't exactly simultaneous, but were in that strange time after the end of elementary school and before high school started, or I got my driver's license. In there sometime...
But, one of the last things I did with my swamp obsession/fascination was to purchase, for the ridiculously large sum of $19.95 (a small fortune for me, especially in 1992) the following graphic novel collection:
It's telling that I have no recollection of the inner turmoil I must have went through when deciding to finally buy it. I have scant memories from that hormone fueled era of my life, and it's not like alcohol and cannabis wiped these memories---they were mostly gone halfway through high school, and conspicuously so: I had conversations then about how I could barely remember the minutiae of 7th and 8th grade, whereas 4th and 5th grades were still fresh.
The Swamp Thing collection I had purchased collected the first 8 page story that appeared in a horror anthology owned by DC Comics. The story was a horror tale about a murdered man who was re-spawned by the swamp, only as a swampy monster. He returns to save his beloved from the same fate, but she doesn't recognize him, recoils in horror upon seeing him, and he slinks away into the bayou darkness.
It was so popular that the idea was turned into a monthly horror-themed comic. The story was changed as were the characters, but the idea was set.
This collection has the first story from 1971 and then reprints the first ten issues of the original series of Swamp Thing from 1972.
I purchased it in 1992, maybe read the first 8 page story, and then let it sit on my shelf.
For almost a quarter-century.
It has been in my possession for more than 20 years. I guess you could say it was in my brother's possession after I left California and only took a fraction of my comics with me, but it has been "mine" for that long, and
I never really attempted to read it.
For some reason lately, this summer specifically, as the number of books from my authors has dried up, and in between gifts from my mother, I got it in my head to power through it. What does it mean to be a monthly horror comic? Why were these ten issues (plus the OG 8 page story) so beloved?
Well, the reason it was the first ten issues is because it comprised the entirety of artist Bernie Wrightson's work on the character. That may have factored in to my decision back in '92, as Wrightson is a recognized horror master. That was more impressive to me 24 years ago than it is now.
It turns out it was
because of these ten issues that Wrightson was given more horror opportunities and became the "horror master" that I had heard of in 1992. He was just a kid in the early '70s.
Okay. So, I read the entire thing, and it is cheesy and definitely from the seventies. Bu it was also really weird, and totally different than I was expecting. It was set in the modern time (of the 1970s), yet it introduced reasons for many a horror-trope.
I took a bunch of pictures and cropped them accordingly to share some of the weirdness. What follows is a rehash of the important visuals from the first ten issues of Swamp Thing (Volume 1).
[[This Friday-night-Cold-Case-Adrienne-Barbeau-Swamp-Thing-Sacramento-Swamp-Thing-review post idea has been floating around my head for years now...]]
This iteration of Swamp Thing is Dr. Alec Holland, botanical scientist trying to save the world through development of plants that can grow anywhere. His ideas generate destructive desires from many quarters, and his lab is blown up with him inside. Covered in his secret regenerative chemicals and on fire, he jumps into the swamp for respite. He emerges bigger than Shaquille O'Neal (7'4", 490 lbs), ultra strong, and mostly unable to speak. He has become the (oft used descriptor) "moss-covered man-brute:"
He gets revenge by the end of issue 1, as the guys who blew him up also killed his wife. By issue 2, some weirdo has been watching ol' Swampy through some kind of looking glass, and sends his minions to get the creature:
Hypnotizing him and bringing him back to some Balkan castle. The image below, of Swamp Thing crucified and being flown away caused me to look at Corrie and say, "This comic just went off the rails!"
And it got better, as the creatures use the cruciform as a row-boat:
This is the introduction of Anton Arcane, an old guy who wants immortality. He's been experimenting with creating human forms, mostly unsuccessfully. He even tried to fix his own blown up brother, who becomes a pretty good facsimile of the Frankenstein Monster, here known as the Patchwork Man:
Thus begins the bizarre events that keep the storytelling in the horror universe while also in the normal DC universe.
The Patchwork Man can't speak, and he initially tries to help Swamp Thing. Later he sees his daughter, who's now grown, and can only remember that he wanted to save her before he was blown up initially. So he grabs her and takes off, thinking he's saving her. Swamp Thing wants to help save her from this "monster", and since neither of them speak, they end up fighting, while the townspeople show up to kill them both.
It's a recurring theme in these stories: people's inability or unwillingness to discuss their conflict.
In the next issue, because of course it is, the conflict is with a werewolf:
After that Swamp Thing ends up in Maine, in a backwater village that still wants to burn witches at the stake. Enter Rebecca Ravenwind:
She's not a witch, like she keep saying, but it's her feeble-minded little brother who uses her as a conduit for her magic.
Another theme here is that the true monsters are the humans. Check out peg-leg Gideon, who blames his entire familial lineage of birth defects of witchcraft:
The little brother turns the angry mob into flowers. It turns out all he ever turns anything into is flowers. Damn hippie.
Next Swampy makes it to very eerie Swiss village in New England with a creepy clock-maker/mayor:
He's been
making all the people who live in this village---very elaborate automatons that are more wind-up toy than robot. He uses people from the obituaries, which is very odd for Swamp Thing to be saved by Dr.s Alec and Linda Holland, himself and his former wife. There's a pretty cool scene where his "wife" is dying after being shot and Swamp Thing's holding her and watching her die for the second time, and losing his shit.
It was a little maudlin for this collection.
The real badguy from this issue is a giant robot:
Next, Swamp Thing makes it to Gotham, because it was the '70s and everything ran through either Metropolis or Gotham. He had another can't-explain-himself unfortunate encounter, this time with Batman:
But of course they're on the same side---they just don't know it. Here they are getting to the same place, a confrontation with a secret mob boss, the portly dude in frame three:
In the next issue Swamp Thing is on his way back to Louisiana, hears screams from a cave during a snow storm, and eventually has to kill a bear. Can't say I'm a big fan of that, but to his credit, neither is Swampy:
Eventually Swamp Thing is tricked into trying to save a kid in an abandoned mine, only to be sent to feed the monster there, a blobby-thing called, eh, M'Nagalah:
This thing wants to take over the universe, one galaxy at a time, one planet at a time, and Swamp Thing does it in by collapsing the mine. Powerful critter, that M'Nagalah.
Finally he makes it back to the swamp, back to his rebuilt lab, looking for a solution that may turn him back into a non-moss-encrusted human form again. His lab has been taken over by someone also searching for solutions:
That's an alien, in case you were wondering.
An entire political story plays out as the military crew sent to dispatch the alien captures it, but only because it was aghast at hurting a soldier, at its own strength. The soldiers discuss liberalism versus jingoism, and it devolves into fisticuffs. The alien has seen enough, and learned enough English to tell off the military group. It said it was going to leave great gifts, but has decided to just leave.
The ship crashes on its own. Bummer
The last of the ten issues is next, and it stars Arcane, the weirdo from the first and second issue, who has found a suitable body for the short term. He's tracked our green friend down to get his skin:
Who comes to save the day?
If you said an entire graveyard full of the ghosts of murdered slaves, you win!
Who knew Swamp Thing had such a varied collection guest stars in the first year: facsimile of Frankenstein's monster; a werewolf; a witch; a large robot in a town full of clockwork people; a mob-boss assist with Batman; the weird blob M'Nagalah; an alien; and full circle with Arcane's new body with an assist from a whole bunch of former slaves.
The sadness permeates throughout, and it is real, and it mostly makes up for the repetition of things like "moss-encrusted man-brute," people calling other things, "Hey, ugly!", and the super annoying plot device named Lt. Mike Cable, a federal investigator who thinks the swamp monster killed Alec and Linda Holland (Cable's only friends) along with the murderous mobsters (he only killed the mobsters). He's in every issue saying things like, "When I find that swamp monster, I'll make him pay!" at the end of, like,
every issue. That may be hyperbole, but it's because he's close-minded and annoying, and it grates on a reader.
I get the sense that writer Len Wein was trying to say something about society-at-large with these issues. He mostly succeeds.
It was time period when comics were not important pieces of art yet, and were not seen as respectable work. Are they those both those things now? Back at that time, in the early '70s, an editor needed to have a human element like Lt. Cable to keep audiences interested, as the companies hadn't yet grown to respect their readers enough.
But maybe the readers were more kids and less adults...still, I can't imagine kids giving a shit about that Cable guy.
There are comics that everyone can get behind, especially people interested in he artform who don't normally partake but may be interested in important artifacts. I would not suggest reading these: they may be
too cheesy and plodding. Consider this post is a highlight reel.
**
Considering the news on my grandfather today, this seems like an ill-timed project. It just happened that way, as I've been working on this for a time. And I know he would want us all to carry on with our lives and various projects.
