Swamp Thing #9 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (story), Yanick Paquette & Marco Rudy (art), Nathan Fairbairn & Val Staples (colors)

The Story: Abby hasn’t learned that it’s rarely a good idea to trust canned food of any kind.

The Review: One thing that’s become obvious about Snyder’s writing is he loves to take his time.  I don’t mean his pacing is slow; I mean that every issue feels like a clear stepping-stone to the next, and all of them together form a path through the woods to some great destination only Snyder knows about.  In short, Snyder is very much a student of the decompression school of comic book writing, which is not a bad thing if you’re diverted enough along the way.

Snyder’s sprightly writing ability will keep you occupied most of the time—how can you not appreciate lines like, “You like the way the foxfire makes the bayou glow at night”?  But great prose can’t always disguise the fact that there’s not a whole lot going on.  This series has always struggled to fill the pages with its tiny cast (with only two regular characters and perhaps the same number of recurring ones) and its one plotline.  Unlike the hive of activity over in its sister title, Animal Man, you rarely get an opportunity to break away from the main event.

Swamp Thing #8 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (writer), Marco Rudy & Yanick Paquette (artists), Nathan Fairbairn (colorist)

The Story: The Badlands—now, with even fewer reasons to visit!

The Review: Both Jeff Lemire and Snyder have explored the notion that the Rot, for all its grotesque manifestations, is simply a force akin to the Red or the Green.  All three have their place in the natural world (though the Rot signals the ends of the others), and all three have an innate desire to spread and conquer the earth as far they possibly can.  In some ways, this has made the Rot less intriguing as an antagonist, because it’s simply doing what it’s meant to do.

Lemire and Snyder always manage to cover up the Rot’s less-than-subtle villainy by making it not so much the driving point of interest in the story, but rather an interesting context for their heroes to work through some common conflicts.  For Animal Man, that means the pressures of weighing family versus duty; for Swamp Thing, it’s more of a Romeo and Juliet-type situation: boy and girl from opposing forces fall in love and encounter tragedy for it.

To be honest, Snyder has been a little less successful in his choice of core relationships than Lemire.  While Alec and Abby shared a bond and weight on their shoulders, the romantic attraction between them always felt a little forced, a lingering obligation from their “past” association than genuine chemistry.  From a storytelling point of view, their pairing is logical, poetic, and ripe with tension, but somehow unearned, destined rather than natural.

That’s why it feels a bit unconvincing that Alec would go so far to save this woman, to the point where he literally flies, solo, into enemy territory to free her.  You have to admit, though, it makes for some majorly high stakes, especially for Alec’s first official outing as warrior-king Swamp Thing—which sounds catchier to me every time I say it, I must say.  The bulk of the issue involves Alec tearing through Sethe’s seemingly endless army, and it looks quite as bloody and epic as anything you’d expect from such impossible odds.

Animal Man #7 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), Steve Pugh & Travel Foreman (artists), Jeff Huet (inker), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist)

The Story: No rest stops on this family trip—we’re on the lam from killer beasts, remember?

The Review: Practically every superhero comic on the stands bears some kind of peril within.  When our heroes are fighting to save their cities or fellow man, they’re also fighting to save themselves.  Theirs is a high-stakes business, where failure often means the loss of their lives.  What makes the danger in Animal Man feel so much more potent and real is the fact that Buddy’s not the only one at risk here; it’s his whole family that is being threatened.

More than anything else, the constant risk to the Bakers maintains the series’ choking tension.  It gives the Rot not one, but several targets to lurk after, so any time a Baker goes off anywhere on his or her own, your wariness increases for their sake.  When Buddy leaves Cliff to his own devices in this nowhere, desert town, everything takes on an ever-so-slightly sinister aspect, as if you expect at any moment some stranger’s good-natured smile will burst out with fangs and seize the boy in his grip.  No doubt this paranoia got instilled into you by the Hunters’ body-snatching tricks from previous issues.

Besides the multitude of physical dangers in play, perhaps there are even greater ones closing in on the Bakers’ spiritual well-being.  The tension within the family grows more intense with each harrowing episode.  Ellen’s mom finally airs her feelings about the whole situation, and while telling her daughter that Buddy “was trouble from the moment you first started dating” seems a bit unfair, she has a point.  Lemire has crafted a bit of a double-edged sword in creating such a strong family unit for this series, because it does make you think how insane it is to even attempt to do your superhero thing if you have loved ones to fear for.

Yet Buddy seems oblivious to the problems eating away at his own family.  You can’t deny that he’s tops in the “cool dad” department (“Cliff, we gotta go…that was the Justice League, they need us!”), but when it comes to the more deeply-rooted issues, he’s a bit too lax.  It’s not just that he dismissively asks, “What’s her problem?” when Ellen’s mom storms out.  By this point, Buddy’s had two dreams of impending doom, and while he reacts with appropriate dismay at the evil portents for Maxine, he doesn’t quite seem as attuned to the equally dark signs for Cliff.  Remember Cliff’s spilt guts in #1?  Doesn’t it seem foreboding that here, in Buddy’s vision of the “future,” you see a grown-up Maxine, a geriatric yet spry Buddy and Ellen, yet no Cliff?

Swamp Thing #7 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (writer), Yanick Paquette (artist), Nathan Fairbairn (colorist)

The Story: From the ashes he’ll rise again—yes, I said “he.”  Look for Phoenix elsewhere.

The Review: I know as a reviewer, I should approach everything with as much of an open mind as possible, but I’m only human; I get affected by biases and prejudices as much as anyone else.  Though I like to think I’m pretty forgiving when it comes to this stuff, once a writer has lost my faith, it takes a lot more to earn my good opinion the next time around.  Conversely, a writer who impresses me gets some leeway, even when he’s not at his best.

That’s a foreboding intro if I ever wrote one, but don’t get too worried; I’m not saying Snyder has fallen off the clipper ship of quality he’s been steering for the past six months.  It only feels like this issue doesn’t quite break new ground for the story, even in spite of the dramatic ending.  If anything, Snyder spends the bulk of the issue going over the same plot points he’s been emphasizing and re-emphasizing all along: the Parliament of Trees’ martyred accusations of Alec’s betrayal; their I-told-you-so’s about Abby; the notion of the plant world as being more hostile than peaceful; the value of human restraint to Swamp Things.  Without exception, we’ve covered this territory quite thoroughly before.

But that’s the kind of thing that separates a skilled writer from one who’s merely competent.  Snyder’s one of those few storytellers who can deliver every bit of exposition he’s thrown at you before without coming across as redundant, boring, or stale.  If you want to lock it down, that gift comes from the rhythm of his writing, something that can only be honed over years of literary experience.  The Parliament describes their end to Alec thusly: “We are dying, the Parliament of Trees.  Having stood for thousands of years, we are dying.  You will watch us die from here, from inside the Green, while your body is protected by us…so you can know our pain, feel it as we do.  And then you, too, will die.”  Not to get my English major on, but the use of conduplicato in that passage is a thing of beauty.

Swamp Thing #2 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (writer), Yanick Paquette (artist), Nathan Fairbairn (colorist)

The Story: Watch Alec become one with nature.

The Review: Swamp Thing has a vast, complex history, written by some incredibly brilliant, but also ambitiously complicated folks: Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar.  What you wind up getting is some incredibly rich, spellbinding stories, but also ones that take quite a lot of explaining for the reader completely new to the character.  The Parliament of Trees alone deserves its own Wiki page—and actually does have one.

So it should come to the surprise of no one that Snyder uses this issue as one massive info-dump, narrated by none other than Swamp Thing himself, albeit the one preceding the Swamp Thing we all know and love.  Even though his narration does effectively gives us most of the necessary mythology behind the boggy “knight,” it’s also incredibly long, rather wordy, and somewhat rambling, making you wonder if all this exposition could have been handled a little differently.

During S. Thing’s speech, Snyder uses a fancy bit of retroactive maneuvering to tweak the character’s origins over so slightly, just to explain Alec’s current status and connection to the Green.  He continues to play with the idea of Alec as fated to be the greatest of all Green avatars, a kind of messiah with foliage.  All very mystical and foreboding, and of course Alec resists the idea with the usual “Why me?” bit, but not much meat to sink your teeth into, plot-wise.

Snyder’s no fool.  Instead of relegating the whole sequence as a series of talking panels, he also takes the opportunity to revisit the enemy at hand, one with just as much abstract history as either the Red or the Green.  Named Sethe, this baddie’s army has grown pretty quickly from the three unfortunate archaeologists of last issue, and unlike his earlier, disease-focused visits to humanity, the carnage he leaves and draws in his wake are far more animated and dramatic.