Mike Sterling's Progressive RuinAlone, unmourned, and unloved since 1969

SPOILER ALERT: I’m deliberately wasting your time.

§ November 12th, 2012 § Filed under swamp thing § 6 Comments

So blogging brother Tim O’Neil tried to kill me with the following question:

…Is there any chance in the near future you could go into a bit more detail on all the discrepancies between pre-Flashpoint and Nu52 Swamp Thing continuity?

Well, good gravy.

I went into some detail about that here, in which I discuss the new status quo of Swampy’s arch-nemesis, but even now, it’s hard to say what is still “in continuity” and what isn’t.

Some of the big details are the same…Holland is still killed by sabotage of his lab, his memories are incorporated into a Swamp Thing that thinks it’s Alec Holland, Holland is eventually resurrected, and finally actually is transformed into Swamp Thing himself. And along the way, Swampy (the original one) has a romance with Abby Arcane.

Some of the specifics are different…Holland meets Abby and Arcane before becoming Swamp Thing, Arcane is the one who sabotages the lab and prevents Holland from initially, directly becoming Swamp Thing, necessitating the Parliament of Trees’s creation of an ersatz Holland-mind to inhabit the Swamp Thing body.

And I’m still not 100% certain how the resurrection of Holland even happened in this new post-Flashpoint continuity. I mean, Holland was brought back at the end of the Brightest Day series, resurrected by the White Lantern’s power to become the new Swamp Thing in order to defeat the old Swamp Thing, who had been corrupted by evil or…hell, something like that. I don’t know if “Brightest Day” even happened in this New 52 continuity…I guess Green Lantern continuity is pretty much as it always was, or at least recent events carried through into the new series without too many hiccups or revampings, and the White Lantern thing was tied into GL’s adventures, so maybe the Brightest Day event still happened in one form or another.

However, there’s that whole business with Holland and Swamp Thing being two separate beings at the beginning of the New 52 series, and the point of the early issues of this series was to transform Holland into Swamp Thing, so in the new continuity, I guess this is taking the place of the reintegration of Holland and Swampy from the end of Brightest Day. So maybe Brightest Day didn’t happen. Or it ended differently. Or something.

I think, as time permits, I’m going to sit down and reread all the “return of Swamp Thing” stuff from the end of Brightest Day, to that terrible Search for Swamp Thing mini, to the current series, and try to figure out what continuity “plugs” may exist to explain the new status quo that I’m either not remembering or even don’t exist in the first place. Probably should have done that before writing this post, but I started late Sunday night and frankly, I’m tired.

Anyway, I’ll get back to you on this. I’m sure you can’t wait.

In the meantime, Timothy T. had this to say about the end of Hellblazer:

I hope they give him a good sending off. But I have no idea what sort of ending would fit, he’s done so much crazy stuff that any finale will disappoint. Maybe it’d be best if they ended it like Cerebus or maybe just having a beer with his mates (or himself).

I’m hoping for a “THE DEATH OF CONSTANTINE,” which will be packaged in a black plastic bag with a big bloody “H” (or perhaps a pentagram) on the front. …And then a few months later, they can publish a comic in which a bunch of replacement Hellblazers show up, so DC can finally reuse a lot of those Constantine-a-likes that used to pop up now and again.