Swamp Thing by Ram V

Swamp Thing by Ram V

I have a very deep love for Swamp Thing. He’s one of those characters that embody a writer’s worth. If you can write a good Swamp Thing, you can write anything. For me he is the pedestal of quality for DC, they only put their best and brightest on the title. I consider Daredevil to be the Marvel equivalent. However, I do feel a bit embarrassed when I try to explain the concept to the uninitiated.

Sometimes it’s dead easy to get across everything you need to know about a character to those unfamiliar with comic book tropes:

·       Superman – Alien, raised to be a good man, basically unstoppable, but always wants to be your friend.

·       Ironman – Billionaire playboy genius, trying to repent, but ultimately lost between ego and his demons.

·       Spider-Man – Teenage boy, bitten by a radioactive spider, driven by guilt and trying to find a father figure for himself or build one from himself.

·       Swamp Thing – err so all plants are connected through, like, the force from Star Wars, right, it’s called The Green. But animals have their own thing, called The Red. These are fundamental cosmic powers that generate life, also potentially physically manifested areas of space, or consciousness, definitely genetic memory. There is a fine balance between these two in order to keep all life moving, and there is also The Rot, for all things dead… but that’s not the point. The point is The Green selects a member of The Red, grants them all the powers of everything flora, and makes them its avatar to maintain the equilibrium. Like a big existential, omnipotent, perambulating shrub.

The general theme of most Swamp Thing arcs is a twisting of Zhuangzi’s poem: “Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a topiary, or whether I am now a topiary, dreaming I am a man.”

What am I reading? Swamp Thing: Becoming (Issues 1-4 and Future State: Swamp Thing issues 1-2) and Swamp Thing: Conduit (Issues 5-10). Written by Ram V, illustrated by Mike Perkins, John McCrea and Mike Spider.

What’s it about? The Green has chosen a new avatar: Levi Kami, a scientist from India, working for Prescot industries. Unlike previous incarnations, Levi is very much alive, and his world is uprooted by this newfound omniscience. Levi must learn to embrace The Swamp Thing and grow from his haunting past.

What’s good about it? Ram V clearly has an intense passion for ol’ Swampy. He does a fantastic job at laying out the large philosophical questions that are the core of the character. Levi has an engaging voice and gives the proper response to being used by an eldritch force of nature. His conflict is relatable. The idea of the avatar having tangible stakes in the human world on a personal level is genius. I love Alec Holland, but a corpse can only go so far.

The art in this is next level. The imagery is profound. There is a sequence in issue three of an MRI scan that will stay with me for a long time. Perkins gives an incredible level of depth to each page. When we are in The Green; It’s layers of delicious foliage and flowers, where the mundane feels alien, with outrageous stormy skies. Spicers’ colours are extraordinary. However, another massive shout out to McCrea’s issue, his art is of a very different style to Perkin’s, but the tone is eerily consistent. Usually when there is a guest/replacement artist for an issue, it gives me a bit of whiplash, but this really works.

I think that issue might be my favourite. Issue five. Where Swamp Thing is reunited with John Constantine. Together they investigate the influences of an unexploded Axis bomb buried beneath a London block of flats. It feels like good old-fashioned daring-do, but still deeply entrenched in the weirdness of a Swamp Thing comic.

What did I struggle with? It’s a little thing, but in a book so good looking, I would have appreciated a more unique style of lettering. There’s nothing wrong with Aditya Bidikar’s work at all. All the placements were great, the bubbles and boxes flowed well, and I always enjoy the colouring to match the characters. The thing that got me was the font. Everyone has the same font: Swamp Thing has a very different speech pattern to the rest of the cast, we have demons and unknowable horrors giving exposition, but they have the same font as office works or police officers… feels a little… I don’t know, lazy perhaps? I’m not in the industry so I don’t know. Maybe it would have made the pages too messy.

Here's the catch with reading Swamp Thing. If you are going to read any recent Swamp Thing comic, you will need to have read Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing comic. I don’t think you can point at any other run of the character and say, “that’s a good jumping on point.”. As a concept, I don’t think it really works if you haven’t read a lot of the history. Its just unapproachable to the average reader. It’s too weird. Its too established. Its too big. Reading Swamp Thing is like climbing a tree, you need to start at the bottom. I thought a new avatar would be a chance to rejuvenate the lore, however this is deeply rooted in the history.

Would I recommend? More Swamp Thing is always good. But this is impenetrable to the new reader.