Tree Pulp: Swamp Thing #16 Review

Editor’s Note: And one last quick review of the comics of 1/9/2013 before the comic stores open with this week’s new books…

I’m not gonna lie to you: the Rotworld crossover between Swamp Thing and Animal Man hasn’t really been grabbing me in the way that I’d originally hoped. I’ve found it to be relatively engaging, but at this point, it feels like it’s been going on damn near forever, with one overriding problem that’s been tickling me through the whole thing: where’s the rest of the DC Universe while all of this is going on? We’ve seen the world in ruins, and Superman, Batman and other ancillary superheroes afflicted by the Rot in these titles, and yet over in Detective Comics last week, Batman was happily battling Joker gangs while a new Penguin sets up shop.

So being isolated, the stakes of Rotworld have felt smaller than they should… but I really don’t want to hold that against Rotworld, because I really do want to see more isolated storylines, regardless of a publisher’s greater continuity, if only so I can stop hearing so many sighs from my co-editor Amanda when we walk into our local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop announcing, “Attention, patrons! In a moment, I will be giving myself an event… and then I will become fatigued!”

So on its own, Rotworld has been entertaining, if dragged out a little longer than it probably needed to be… and taken on its own, Swamp Thing #16 is the biggest, pulpiest, most fun piece of it so far.

The world continues to deteriorate under the influence of The Rot, with Anton Arcane seeking to eliminate Abby as the last impediment to his final victory, when Swamp Thing enters Gotham. He finds Batman having been corrupted by The Rot, with Batgirl immune ,thanks to an injection of Man-Bat’s transformative serum, and the leader of a colony of survivors holed up in Arkham Asylum behind a laser dome powered by green technology, meaning not only that it is connected enough to The Green to be safe against The Rot, but that, by using that logic, ever pothead with a gro-lite will also have survived the Rot Apocalypse. Batman, before succumbing to The Rot, left Swamp Thing his research, which includes Alec Holland’s original biorestorative formula along with some extra ideas, when the minions of The Rot mount an assault against Arkham, apparently forgetting that Swampy has access to the Batcave, and Batman has some pretty cool toys…

I can’t totally recommend picking up Swamp Thing #16 if you haven’t read any piece of Rotworld yet, but with that said: if you feel you must, you’re still going to have some fun with this book. If you can take on faith that you’re looking at a zombie-style apocalypse and just ride from there, you’re gonna get one hell of a pulp story full of monsters, evil masterminds, damsels in distress, and all the cool toys you’d expect from an old pulp story, including retro robots, power packs, exotic weapons, and the surgical “fixing” of criminals to form an army. This could be, for all intents and purposes, an old Doc Savage story, provided the Good Doctor picked up a particularly aggressive strain of crotch fungus somewhere in Siberia and left it grossly untreated.

And it’s that old pulp feeling that makes the story so much fun. With the underground caves and the inhuman monsters wandering around, the look could come straight from an old Doc Savage story. And, if this were a standard comic story involving Batman, Batman’s giant robot would be a sleek, billion-dollar Transformer-looking thing with a Lamborghini nameplate on it somewhere, but this is a pulp, so of course it’s a big, squat, headless brute with exposed bolts and hoses; it’s a chimney away from being a steampunk automaton. And in a standard Swamp Thing comic story, Swamp Thing would use the increased power of the biorestorative formula to get in touch with The Green and overwhelm the enemy using the environment, but in a pulp? Of course he uses it to become Conan The Barbarian. This whole book oozes the feel of a 1940s men’s adventure magazine, and if you like that kind of thing, this issue is a joy to read.

Yanick Paquette’s art is a great match to an old pulp, while he clearly still remembers that he’s doing a Swamp Thing comic, which means it should contain certain expected visual elements. Paquette’s regular people are drawn realistically, with a fine, detailed line… but there are precious few “regular” people in this book. So it’s a good thing that Paquette gives good monster, with grotesque features, asymmetric bodies, and a variety of just plain weirdness. He delivers shattered backgrounds, with a good mix of Giger-style biomechanics to the buildings and structures that lead to the general alienating wrongness of Rotworld. However, his layouts are, as they often are in a Swamp Thing comic post Vietch and Totelben, heavily stylized. His layouts are most decidedly not standard, with ragged and asymmetric panel borders and a dark bleed that can sometimes mask where panels end, and at least one double-paged spread with a panel border near the book’s spine that makes it difficult to tell how to read it (one page at a time, or across the spine?). The effect makes every page it’s own individual work of art, but it can be confusing to follow at times, and I would not recommend handing this book to someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time reading and decoding comics pages.

Rotworld as a whole has been interesting, if a little disappointing to me. However, Swamp Thing #16 is a pure joy to anyone who ever liked old pulp stories. It’s like Allan Quartermain porked a begonia and their son fought against the mole men. And if that sounds like fun to you? You should pick up this book along with this week’s new comics.

And you should introduce yourself to your neighbors and tell them about it. Because there’s probably already a court order that compels you to, anyway.