BHOC: DC SPECIAL SERIES #17

One of the benefits that came with my new Stationery Store outlet that stocked a wider variety of comic books than the town 7-11 did was exposure to a broad range of material. The 7-11 had stopped carrying any oversized comics (which is how I had missed FANTASTIC FOUR #200 some months earlier) including all of DC’s Dollar Comics releases. But the Stationery Store took pretty much everything. Which is how, on my first visit to it, I wound up coming across this Dollar Comics edition reprinting early SWAMP THING stories. I was still not a horror or monster comics fan, but I’d read the in-house editorials and heard the legends of the greatness of the first few issues of the series. And so, having the spare cash on me that trip, I decided to take the plunge and see what all the chatter was about.

I wasn’t always the sharpest tool in the shed in those days (let alone now) so despite the fact that I knew that there had been earlier ORIGINAL SWAMP THING SAGA releases, gleaned from house ads and Daily Planet promotional pages, I assumed that the three issues collected in this Dollar Comic were the first three. So I was surprised when I eventually sat down to read it that it instead collected issues #5-7. Had I realized that at the outset, I never would have picked it up–starting in the middle and not having the complete set was irritating to me as a collector an a reader. But I’d already paid my dollar, so I was going to read and attempt to enjoy this strange beast of a book, even if I was coming into the story in the middle somewhat. Honestly, given the stories in this issue, that was probably for the best anyway.

A quick bit of backstory to start with. Swamp Thing had started life as a one-off story produced by writer Len Wein and artist Bernie Wrightson for the pages of HOUSE OF SECRETS #92, one of DC’s ongoing weird suspense magazines. It was a spooky and heartfelt tale, expertly illustrated by Wrightson, and it got a lot of notices across fandom. What’s more, that issue of HOUSE OF SECRETS sold really well, which led editor Joe Orlando to ask Wein and Wrightson about doing a sequel. The pair resisted these overtures for about a year before Wein realized that, rather than producing a straight-up sequel, they could instead invent a modern day version of the character with a series in mind (the one-off story had been set close to the turn of the century.) And so, SWAMP THING #1 was born, and from there Wein and Wrightson expanded on the mythos of their original story about a man, Alec Holland (Alex Olsen in the initial story) who had been transformed into a mossy plant-monster after he was killed in the swamp, and who came back to life to get revenge on those who’d wronged him. For the series, the creators added extra tragedy in the form of Holland’s wife Linda, who had been killed in the accident that transformed him so.

As a guiding principle throughout the early part of their run, Wein and Wrightson started out doing riffs on the assorted tropes of the horror/monster field. They’d already put their own spin on the Frankenstein’s Monster and the werewolf by this point, and so the first story in this issue was about witchcraft. The titular monster winds up intervening when he comes across Rebecca Ravenwind and her brother Timothy being pursued by pitchfork- and torch-carrying villagers who insist that Rebecca is a witch, and who intend to burn her at the stake. In a cool sequence, especially for a comic book of this vintage, early in Swamp Thing gets his arm cut off by one of the villagers. But later on, it simply grows back, the bio-regenerative formula responsible for Alec Holland’s resurrection restoring his form. (A few years later, writer Gerry Conway would pen a tale that revealed that the discarded arm had itself grown back an entirely separate mindless Swamp Thing). and in the end, it turns out that young Timothy is actually the witch, rather than his persecuted sister. It’s a good story, and Wrightson’s artwork was a bit of a revelation to me, ultra-detailed and lush and just creepy enough to sell the scariness of the material. It had texture, it felt tactile.

What I found reading through this issue was that it wasn’t markedly different from the super hero titles that I had been enjoying. And in the case of something like INCREDIBLE HULK, it was right in the same ballpark, with a persecuted monster hero battling other evil monsters and aliens and evil scientists and the like. The fact that it was set in the here-and-now (and in the recognizable DC Universe I was familiar with, as one of the later stories in this issue would illustrate) made it feel less alien to me. And the quality of the work that Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson were doing was impossible to refute. These were good looking stories, well-written and well-told. So this book helped me to expand my comic book horizons, at least slightly, making me a bit more open to material that wasn’t mainstream super hero adventures. Too, I was beginning to grow older, and so was perhaps more receptive to such stories that I might have been a year or two earlier.

While they weren’t featured in the first story, the second story introduced me to regular supporting characters Matt Cable and Abigail Arcane. Cable had been the government agent assigned to protect the Hollands, and he’s been hunting the Swamp Thing across the world since that failure, believing him to have been responsible for the Hollands’ deaths. The true perpetrators were agents of the Conclave, a secret villainous agency who resurfaced in this story. But the crux of it involved a clockmaker named Hans Klochmann who had built himself a quaint storybook small town made entirely of clockwork robots cast in the images of the recently-deceased, including Alec and Linda Holland. Swamp Thing freaks out when he first comes across the Linda robot, and he battles the Conclave when they move in, desiring Kolchmann’s innovations for their own criminal purposes. There’s a bunch of tragedy as first the robotic Alec and Linda both die again, followed by Klochmann and the entire town, and Swamp Thing gets busy destroying a nifty-looking Conclave robot nicely designed by Wrightson. By the end of the story, Cable and Abby have been captured by the Conclave and taken to Gotham City, so that’s where Swamp Thing heads off to next.

It was probably seeing this third story in the issue as I flipped through it at the Stationery Store that convinced me to part with my dollar, as it guest-starred Gotham’s famous Masked Manhunter, Batman, thus indicating tome that these stories were a part of the larger DC continuity. I cared about stuff like that back then. Anyway, Swampy follows the Conclave to Gotham City, intent on rescuing his friends. He walks the Gothan streets in a huge overcoat and hat in the manner of Ben Grimm in the FANTASTIC FOUR. But he of course runs afoul of the city’s dark protector along the way. Wrightson’s interpretation of Batman was pretty awesome. It was in the established Neal Adams dark style, but Bernie’s version was somehow more fluid, lither, with ears a foot tall and a sense of power and presence to him. Gotham itself suited his interpretation, covered in concealing shadows and baroque architecture. This third story was well-regarded and well-remembered for a reason.

By the end of the adventure, Cable and Abby have been liberated, and Mister E, the sinister mastermind behind the Conclave, has fallen to his death, though not deliberately killed by the Swamp Thing. And in the end, Swamp Thing is forced to move on again, as cable renews his efforts to hunt him down. Batman, though, has come to suspect that there’s more to the mossy creature than meets the eye, but this wouldn’t be followed up on until years later when the two would again meet in the pages of BRAVE AND THE BOLD.

I was clearly not detail-minded when looking at comics to buy, or I might have noticed the blurb at the upper right of this back cover (which otherwise reproduced the cover artwork to SWAMP THING #6) indicating that the issue reprinted issues #5-7. But it was my own good fortune that I didn’t see that while perusing the book, because it turned out that I liked it a hell of a lot, and that probably would have been enough to get me to put it back. Score one for being a bit dim.