In late 1983, in an office in midtown Manhattan, DC Comics editor Len Wein had to find a new writer for a series about a plant monster called Swamp Thing. Wein had created the series along with artist Berni Wrightson, but sales were declining and Wein couldn’t keep his friend Marty Pasko writing the series any longer. Wein decided to try a new guy—an English writer called Alan Moore—though God only knew what that would mean. Everyone knew that only Americans could write American comics.
Wein and the rest of the comics world found out very quickly what Moore could do. Th writer’s run on Swamp Thing (1983-1987) is considered a groundbreaking moment in American comics, opening the door to the industry for other acclaimed British writers and changing the expectations for what comics could be about. Everything from Moore’s writing to his powerful human themes have been cited as influences by the generation of comics writers and artists that followed. Indeed Moore’s successful run on Swamp Thing was instrumental to the founding of Vertigo, the DC Comics imprint that brought in a wave of non-superhero genre comics in the 1980s. Now, to mark the enduring influence and importance of the series, early next year Vertigo will publish a revised series of hardcover editions collecting the early years of the acclaimed series.
But in the early 1980s, Moore—writer of the superhero epic Watchmen and now considered one greatest comics writers of all time—was considered a crapshoot. While he wasn’t well known in the U.S., Moore was doing impressive work on a new British sci-fi weekly, Warrior and on the other Brit anthology, actually—2000 A.D. He was also writing for Marvel U.K. as well as contributing stories to the UK Star Wars series; prose shorts here and there and backup stories at Doctor Who Magazine. In fact, at the time, Moore was everywhere except in the U.S.
Wein gave him a shot and “sales more than doubled,” recalls Karen Berger, who took over editorial duties from Wein six issues into Moore’s 45-issue run and continued on to the end. “I don’t think they tripled. But you know, comics were still so superhero-oriented that as groundbreaking as Swamp Thing was, we only had the smart, progressive readers and the smart superhero readers reading the book.”
For his first U.S. work in the comics medium, Moore produced heartrending stories about sin and redemption for one of DC’s lowest-selling superheroes, referencing Dante’s Divine Comedy while his main character—a swamp dwelling mass of vegetation in human form described by Moore as “Hamlet covered in snot”—listens to Jack Kirby’s Demon speak to him exclusively in Shakespearean quatrains. References to classics flourished. Other demons appear to speak in Petrarchan meter; a late encounter in which someone eats the fruit of our hero lifts an eyebrow to Proust; and everywhere there is gorgeously-rendered foliage that threatens to engulf the rest of the scenery.
Swamp Thing went from a post-Wein/Wrightson decline and an increasingly ridiculous premise, to the book that everyone had to read, especially if they were hoping to write comics in the future. From the beginning, starting with issue #21 and “The Anatomy Lesson,” Berger says everyone at DC was thrilled with Moore’s work. “People thought, ‘This is the second coming!’” she recalls. “'He’s amazing, this is what comics should be like!’” At “Rite of Spring” (from issue 34), Berger says, “people really started paying attention.”
For years, DC kept in print two volumes containing roughly the first year’s worth of the series, starting with Saga of the Swamp Thing in 1987. In 2000, after Moore had ended a long absence to work for a DC/Wildstorm sub-imprint called “America’s Best Comics,” the company decided to reprint the entire run of the Swamp Thing book, repackaging the first two books and working forward through the rest of the series.
The results were mixed: Tatjana Wood’s colors were touched up for the new reprints but artists Steve Bissette and John Totleben’s covers were occasionally reprinted at a quarter their original size. Moore’s first issue, in which he ties up Pasko’s run on “Loose Ends,” has never been reprinted; and there’s a page that should appear between pages 86 and 87 of the second volume (Love and Death) but doesn’t. It features characters from DC’s huge intra-company crossover Crisis and nobody thought the reading public would be interested enough in the crossover issues of the book to warrant a reprinting. When, over a decade later, that proved to be the opposite of the case, DC had forgotten about the cut page.
Now, DC is giving the series its due: hardcover reissues of the series will be out starting in February. The first volume will contain the original covers at full size and the “Loose Ends” story from issue #20. DC says they don’t yet know if they’ll be reinserting the lost page from Love and Death—it would be a shame if they didn’t—but the editions will finally give fans of the series a chance to see the work reprinted on high-quality paper in a deluxe format.
One of the reasons Swamp Thing stands the test of time has to do with the series’ artistic team of Bissette and Totleben. The series remains Totleben’s largest continuous body of work, and now that the artist is fighting a debilitating eye disease called Usher Syndrome II, it may remain that way for some time. Comics writers from Kevin Smith to Neil Gaiman have paid homage to the series in their own work, with Gaiman going so far as to reincarnate one of the characters as a raven to follow Morpheus, the Dream character, around in The Sandman.
The book broke ground in other ways. In issue #29, Swamp Thing became the first DC book to run regularly without the now-defunct Comics Code Authority seal of approval, an industry self-regulatory commission with roots in the anti-comics hysteria of the late 1950s. When sales continued to increase unabated, DC was emboldened to start producing work with a more grown-up feel and Berger went abroad to look for more British writers, finding Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Peter Milligan along the way. The end result was Vertigo, the DC imprint that gave a home to The Sandman, Preacher, The Invisibles, and Fables.
“In the late 1980’s I started going over to England and specifically getting writers who had a similar sensibility to mine—who were trying to break open the doors of what could be done in the medium,” Berger says. “I purposely went there to say, ‘Hey, let’s tap into a new talent pool and see what will happen out of that.’”
