Animal Man #18 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Steve Pugh (art), Lovern Kindzierski (colors)

The Story: And this is why you never teach your children to be heroes.

The Review: I’ve always seen Swamp Thing and Animal Man as two loving but competitive brothers.  While their bond with each other is undeniable, you can always tell each secretly wants to be seen as the better, cooler, smarter brother to the rest of the world.  The friendly rivalry between the two series has ebbed and flowed in terms of who comes out the superior.  One will win your favor for a few months, then the other will overtake for the next few months.

Lately, however, Lemire’s title has fallen behind its sibling in a way that makes me wonder if it’ll catch up again.  Though it and Swamp Thing have shared an arc and told similar stories of heroism, somehow Animal Man just feels weaker across the board, even when neither title is particularly strong.  Scott Snyder has simply made wiser writing choices and executed them with more integrity than Lemire has.

Swamp Thing #15 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (story), Marco Rudy (art), Val Staples & Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: For once, Gotham’s got some competition for worst place in the world.

The Review: An interesting difference I’ve noticed between Animal Man and Swamp Thing is that each hero, despite their common enemy, doesn’t have the same amount of purpose as the other.  You know how in Lord of the Rings, all the action centered on Aragon and his last company, but it was Frodo who had any chance of making a difference?  That’s the sense you get out of Buddy and Alec’s respective parts in this storyline.

Undoubtedly, Jeff Lemire will give Buddy a crucial role in toppling the Rot, but at the end of the day, you just know that it’s Alec who really holds the fate of the world in his hands.  Buddy fights the Rot out of duty, both as agent of the Red and as guardian of its avatar.  Facing the Rot is more like a part of Alec’s destiny; whichever way the battle turns out, whoever else lives or dies in the process, Alec must reach the point where he can confront the enemy.

Animal Man #15 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Steve Pugh (art), Timothy Green II (pencils), Joseph Silver (inks), Lovern Kindzierski (colors)

The Story: So it seems like the monster has become the master—of the monsters.

The Review: Being an ardent follower of both Animal Man and Swamp Thing can be, to use a well-worn cliché, a double-edged sword.  The sharp, shiny side is you have a plot enriched by two titles working together.  The dull, blunted side is dealing with moments where the two books cover the same terrain.  And let’s face it: if you’re reading either one of these series, you’re probably reading both.

That meant dealing with a lot of the same kind of exposition for the early issues of this arc.  Animal Man particularly suffered because Lemire doesn’t have quite the fleetness of language that his writing buddy does and he hasn’t been quite as aggressive with the pacing as he could have been.  Last issue felt like an especially low point for this series as a whole, burdened with more talk than action, and only the barest exploration of what’s left of the Rot-infested world.

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 #6 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (writer), Marco Rudy (artist), Val Staples & Lee Loughridge (colorist)

The Story: Getting schooled by a kid a third your age—you’ve really hit a low, huh, Alec?

The Review: It takes a certain skill to build up comic book tension convincingly.  Plot twists and cliffhangers can get the job done, in a rough kind of fashion, but use them a too liberally and pretty soon they roll off the reader’s back with little impact.  At a certain point, you just become too aware of the “twist” or “cliffhanger” as literary devices, rather than part of the story.

Probably the best way to keep the suspense going is to keep the odds consistently against the hero, while giving him enough victories and moments of hope so that both he and you don’t despair of success.  So far, Snyder’s done just that on this series.  By last issue, he had made out the Rot as such a hulking menace that Alec and Abby’s capture of William Arcane felt like a very underwhelming triumph; they essentially only succeeded in preventing an impossible threat from becoming more impossible—that is, until the Parliament of Trees receive a direct attack in the heart of the Amazon.

The point is Snyder always laid the groundwork to these wrenches in the plot before setting them in play, so they felt natural to the flow of the story.  This issue is the first where he pulls the rug from under you and makes you stumble, compared to the smooth tablecloth tricks he’s done up till now.  The revelation that it’s—spoiler alert—Abby the Rot wants, not William, works, but has the sense of a last-minute plot change.  We’ve spent a long time putting our expectations in this twisted little boy, only for him to turn around and contradict us.

Anyway, it doesn’t seem like the general direction of the title has veered off course by more than inches.  Although William refers to her as a “queen” (accompanied by all sorts of disturbing expressions of admiration), and she does exert some control over their minions, her brother continues to act like he calls the shots and has the most knowledge of what’s going on.  That kind of relationship fits with his whole spiel about playing chess and missing the most powerful weapon: William as the game-master, Abby as his prize piece.

Swamp Thing #5 – Review

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

The Story: People really need to take those “Save the Amazon” slogans more seriously.

The Review: In my review of Animal Man #3, I talked about our instinctive fear of the unknown.  I think that’s why we tend to be on the lookout for clichés and signs of the predictable in horror movies; it’s a coping mechanism to limit the fear that comes from surprises.  A canny horror writer knows the only way to make his story work is to trick the audience into thinking they have a grasp on what’s going on, only to pull the rug from under them when least expected.

Case in point: last issue led you to believe that although a confrontation between Alec and Abby with William Arcane was inevitable, they still had some time on the road before that happened.  You have no reason to think otherwise as this issue gets going, as you see the odd couple stocking up on supplies for their presumed journey ahead.  And then little Billy himself appears right outside the abandoned storefront, riding on a herd of undead cattle and hogs.  Without fanfare or blinking an eye, he attacks.  Talk about your sudden twists.

The nice part of this unexpected attack is that it puts both Abby and Alec through a kind of trial by fire, forcing them to think and act fast, and allowing us to see what they’re made of.  Despite her edgier haircut, leather jacket, and guns, Abby’s not exactly an Amazon, and she attempts to reason with her brother rather than attacking him directly.  As you can see, she gets nowhere, proving that whether Billy’s possessed or truly deranged, it’ll take a lot more than well-intentioned words to move him.

Probably the most critical development of the issue is when Alec manages to exert his power over the Green and dispatch Billy’s Rot-driven minions with admirable finesse.  In fact, he disarms the boy so easily that you begin to wonder if perhaps he was right all along and he doesn’t need to become a monster to work as an avatar for the Green.  Still, a herd of ravenous beef and pork is, as we well know, only the tip of a titanic, undead iceberg.

Swamp Thing #4 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (writer), Marco Rudy (artist), Sean Parsons & Michel Lacombe (inkers), David Baron (colorist)

The Story: Swamp Dinosaurs versus Zombie Dinosaurs.  For real.

The Review: Honestly, once Snyder and Jeff Lemire made the connections between the Red and the Green, they were a conceptual hop, skip, and a jump away from developing a force for the non-living.  The Rot may be fairly intuitive as an idea, but its development both here and in Animal Man has been insidiously slow and steady, much as you’d expect any rot to be.  From the shock reactions it produced in the debut, the Rot has become ever more disturbing and darker.

Last time, we saw Billy put his rather nefarious powers to very effective, if gruesome, effect.  But watching a person choke on their own lung would be little more than a gross visual without context, and Snyder’s morbidly poetic explanation of Billy’s abilities leave you with a bit of a bitter taste in your mouth: “Everyone has a little death inside them.  A rotten tooth.  Dead skin cells, shattered veins…  Whatever death is in you, he can make it bloom.”

The real question is how much of this is really Billy’s doing.  Initially, he projected a sad, preyed-upon air, which only turned twisted after giving in to the insistent voices he heard in his head.  Seeing him ask for a vanilla milkshake here (only to wreak bloody havoc after the cook mistakes his order for chocolate) makes you think somewhere, Billy’s personality still exists.  So is he taking a back seat to inflicting this horror, or does he have his hand firmly on the wheel?

Most likely, Billy may have no control in all this.  The Green considers Abigail’s succumbing to the Rot as all but inevitable, even though she’s putting all her effort into making sure that never happens.  But Abby herself hinted that when push comes to shove, she may be unable to resist the fate that awaits her, which means a very ugly confrontation for Alec should he insist on sticking with her.  Right now he may think of her as “the closest thing I have to home,” but she won’t seem so homey once she pulls the same shenanigans as her brother on Alec.

Swamp Thing #3 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (writer), Yanick Paquette & Victor Ibáñez (artists), Nathan Fairbairn (colorist)

The Story: This time, Alec has a legit reason for barely remembering making out with you.

The Review: As recent issues have shown us, the world has become a much more dangerous, disturbing place, even for superheroes.  So it goes without saying that Alec, who still resists his supposed destiny as the Green’s greatest savior, will find himself in dire straits before long.  Unwilling to heed the warnings and calls of the plant kingdom, he’ll need a reliable guide he can trust if he wants to survive long enough to make the most of his second life.

Enter Abigail Arcane.  She may not have all the answers to what’s happening, but at least she can fill in the necessary blanks for Alec and for us, and thus serves a vital role to giving the series some direction, instead of letting events push the plot around.  Her know-how comes from her own connection to one of the world’s primal forces, the Rot, which fits in the grand scheme of her continuity (and explains her attraction to the prior Swamp Thing beyond a foliage fetish).

Although her experience and take-charge attitude will prove to be an invaluable resource to Alec, you learn that even in his non-monstrous state, he’s not as helpless as you might think.  Even so, it’s hard to tell if the exercise of his “green thumb” is something he innately controls or if it’s the Green going out of its way to protect its only hope against the Rot.  But even if it turns out he can wield this power over flora at will, that alone won’t overcome the powers he faces.