swamp thing

Ten Favorite Scary Swamp Thing Moments.

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Now this is hardly a definitive list…perhaps all of these aren’t the absolutely scariest moments from Swamp Thing, but these are the ones that have stuck in my head all these years. There are a lot more on top of these as well…I could easily have done 100 scary moments, most of which would have been with Arcane, but I think this is a pretty good variety of choice creepy scenes.

Needless to say, SPOILERS ahead:

Arcane opens his big mouth one too many times (Swamp Thing #10, May/June 1974, by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson):

After his apparent death in Swamp Thing #2, the mad scientist Arcane has returned in his misshapen, reconstructed body, intending to possess Swampy’s body and use its power to conquer the world! Fighting on a forgotten slave graveyard in the middle of Louisiana swampland, Arcane’s repeated claims that he’s going to “enslave” the world and be its “master” wakes the spirits of the departed slaves, who exact a terrible and deserved punishment on Swampy’s arch-nemesis.

Swamp Thing casts out a demon (Saga of the Swamp Thing #12, April 1983, by Marty Pasko and Tom Yeates):

Swamp Thing had been tricked: the young girl he’d been protecting was in fact harboring a powerful demonic force, which has since taken over Swampy’s body. However, as the captions tell us:

“Something struggles beneath the misshapen surface that is Alec Holland: a will to live. For what else could have kept him alive this long, against so many odds?”

And thus, through his own sheer force of will, Swamp Thing casts the demon out of his own body. Corny? Sure, but 22 years after its initial publication, that scene still sticks with me.

Swamp Thing turns into a big jerk (Swamp Thing #168, July 1996, by Mark Millar, Phillip Hester and Kim DeMulder):

Swamp Thing was already Earth’s plant elemental, a champion of the Green. However, at this point in his ongoing evolution, he had also gained mastery over the other elemental powers of the world: fire, water, air, stone…making him the most powerful and dangerous creature on the planet, his sympathy for humanity long gone. This becomes readily apparent when Arcane (yes, Arcane, seeking his own salvation) tries to appeal to Swamp Thing’s better nature by reminding him of his wife, Arcane’s own niece, Abby — Swamp Thing’s great love. Swampy’s response? “She was the one with the long white hair, right?”

Judith turns into a bird (Swamp Thing #48, May 1986, by Alan Moore and John Totleben):

Well, yeah, that’s pretty much what happens. Judith is one of John Constantine’s “army” of assistants, invading the caves of the Brujeria, who plan to wage war on Heaven. However, Judith betrays Constantine, promised wonders by the Brujeria is she just does their bidding. And as part of that bidding, the Brujeria…well, turn her into a bird, basically, in order to carry the message to begin the war. Part of the creepiness of this scene is that the transformation is mostly off-panel, with the occasional shot of intermediary steps of Judith’s changes, as the Brujeria provide narration:

“To commence, you must let the new legs grow down from the stump of the throat. They will scratch and hurt as they push through….”

Demons are just plain mean (Swamp Thing #144, July 1994, by Mark Millar, Phillip Hester and Kim DeMulder):

Swamp Thing is on the run, disguised as a human (his old, deceased, friend Matt Cable), and at the lowest point of his despair, Father Kelly arrives to lend him some support. Who is Father Kelly? A good and kind priest, dragged bodily into Hell to remove his positive influence on the community around him…thus tipping the world’s balance closer to evil. Father Kelly was let out of Hell for an hour, supposedly in answer to his prayers that he be allowed to help Swamp Thing…but after he’s sent back, the demon reveals to Swampy that he was only released to make Kelly’s suffering worse, by giving him a brief taste of freedom. It’s such a despairing view, that good people would be allowed to suffer in Hell, with no hope of reprieve, through no fault of their own. Upsetting stuff.

Swamp Thing gets all Lovecraftian on us (Swamp Thing #8, Jan/Feb 1974, by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson):

A secret horror lurks beneath the city of Perdition, a horrible, tentacled mass (called “M’nagalah”) that tells Swamp Thing that it created life on Earth, gave man the ability to do violence, and, having been brought to Earth against its will from the distance place in the stars where it lived, it seeks to build sufficient mass in order to rise to power when the cosmos is aligned to the perfect position. C’mon, this is Lovecraft all over…he’s even name-dropped in the story, for Pete’s sake.

Makes one wish Wrightson did more with the Cthulhu Mythos stuff. Oh, and M’nagalah returns during Swampy’s Challengers of the Unknown tenure in the late ’70s, as well as in the ’90s Trenchcoat Brigade mini-series.

It’s not the Winchester House, we swear (Swamp Thing #45, February 1986, by Alan Moore, Stan Woch and Alfredo Alcala):

This is a simpler scene, taking place in the Cambridge House, a house when the heir to the Cambridge Rifle fortune insisted that construction on the house never be stopped in order to keep the spirits of the weapon’s victims at bay. Of course, the project was long since abandoned, and, this being a Swamp Thing comic, there are ghosts all over the place…and in one room are two gunslingers having got into a shooting match over a game of cards. After a while, there’s not much left of the bodies….

Roy Raymond returns to comics (Swamp Thing #69-#74, Feb-July 1988, by Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala):

Television show host Roy Raymond is in his limo, complaining to his assistant Lipchitz that he needs something spectacular to get his show back on top on the heap again. At the same time, Swamp Thing, having abandoned his role as the Green’s protector, has wreaked havok on Earth, with new, flawed Swamp Things being generated as replacements. Raymond and Lipchitz encounter one such flawed creature, and Raymond becomes convinced that this is what he needs to make a splash.

Oh, splashes are made, but not what they were planning. The creature takes control of the limo, trapping Raymond and Lipchitz in the back, and over the next few issues we watch as the situation deteriorates…every last bit of food and drink is consumed, Raymond is delirious, cutting TV deals on a phone that doesn’t work, and the floor of the limo is flooded with human waste. Grotesque, horrible, sadistic, and just a tad bit dark-humored…Rick Veitch’s forte.

Arcane possesses Matt Cable (Saga of the Swamp Thing #27, August 1984, by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and John Totleben):

Matt Cable, who has a problem with the drink, finds himself almost certainly mortally injured in a car wreck. Upside down, bleeding to death, he finds himself face to face with…a giant yellow fly. At this point, we don’t know who the fly is or where it came from…but c’mon, we know it’s Arcane. He’s returned from Hell, and needs a human body to work his evil in the mortal world. Particularly Cable’s body, what with his strange powers given to him from secret scientific experiments…which will give you the powers, as you all know.

And there’s only one way for the fly to get into Cable’s body…now, perhaps you’ve accidentally swallowed a plain ol’ regular fly before, by accident. It’s really gross, you cough and you choke, and you’re just plain ol’ disgusted, since you know for a fact that fly was just on some dog poop mere minutes ago. And that’s just a tiny little thing. Now imagine swallowing a foot-long fly, especially one that’s talking to you the whole time. Ew, ick.

Swamp Thing encounters Arcane in Hell (Saga of the Swamp Thing Annual #2, 1985, by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and John Totleben):

Arcane has been defeated by Swamp Thing, his evil soul sent back to the hell from were it came. However, Arcane has had a measure of triumph, as he had cast his niece Abby’s soul down to hell previously, leaving Swamp Thing no choice but to go to hell himself to retrieve it. While there, he encounters his old enemy, his body massively swollen with hatching insect eggs. As Swamp Thing turns to continue his search for Abby’s soul, Arcane cries out “how many years have I been here?” Swampy’s reply, delivered, it seems, with no small measure of satisfaction:


The other entries in this list weren’t in any particular order, but this scene is the one that sticks with me the most, which is in my opinion the most scary and disturbing sequence in the whole of Swamp Thing‘s many issues.

Any favorite scary Swampy scenes of your own? Drop ’em in the comments section…I’d love to see them.

Happy Halloween!

Definitely not “-tone.”

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from Swamp Thing #73 (June 1988) by Rick Veitch & Alfredo Alcala



I thought this was a little amusing…Chester apparently pronounces Constantine’s name incorrectly, with the last bit as “-teen,” causing John to correct him. However, it’s Chester’s pronunciation that’s being used in the film, according to the movie trailers.

I think this was the only time the pronunciation of Constantine’s name was addressed in the comics…pal Cully mentioned to me on Sunday that he thought he came across a similar scene in Hellblazer, but I haven’t yet tracked it down.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn into “that guy” (“They said his name wrong! This film is a debacle, a debacle!”), and for all I know Veitch was the one guy at DC who thought John’s name should be said this way, but I just thought I’d point it out. It amused me, anyway.

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My brush with role playing games was brief, and several years ago…during my junior high school days in the early 80s. Dungeons & Dragons was the game of choice among my friends in the neighborhood, at least until one of the busybody neighbors whipped out a tape from a radio show with testimonials from RPG “victims.” The one example I remember from this show was someone claiming that his copy of the Dark Tower game would talk to him from his closet at night, which should tell you the level of prevailing discourse in this program. Anyway, my friends, God love ’em, were a little on the “gullible” side of the scale and fully bought into this bullshwa, and thus ended our role playing escapades.

Even though I never really played role playing games after that (beyond the occasional computer game, but that’s hardly the same), I still maintained an interest in gaming, but mostly on a technical level – game design, gameplay balance, et al. It wasn’t an obsession or anything, but I’d enjoy reading instruction manuals for games, interviews with game designers, and so on, much more than actually playing the games themselves. Yeah, that may be a little weird, but there you go.

As a result of this particular interest in gaming, I would occasionally buy gaming books and supplements that tie in to other things I enjoy. For example, I have the GURPS Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon supplement, based on the books by Spider Robinson, and somewhere around here I have the DC Heroes Role Playing Game supplements based on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen.

Another DC Heroes supplement I own, and the one I plan on discussing here, is (it should come as no surprise) the Swamp Thing Sourcebook/Adventure published by Mayfair Games in 1991. The book comes in two parts…the main 32-page booklet details the characters and places prevalent in the Swamp Thing comics, both from the Len Wein/Berni(e) Wrightson era and from the later Alan Moore era. It opens (after reprinting, uncredited, Alan Moore’s “this is the place” passage used to advertise Swamp Thing during his run) with a fairly detailed summary of events beginning with the very first issue in 1972, and running all the way up to the aborted end of Rick Veitch’s tenure.

The first actual gaming information you see in the book are for Swamp Thing, of course, with a chart of numbered stats that may have meant something to me at one point, but don’t mean a lot now, beyond “higher is better.” The first character detailed is Swamp Thing’s human…”alter ego” isn’t exactly right, but you know what I mean. In addition to the stats, there are notes on the character’s Skills (Alec’s is Gadgetry and Scientist), Advantages (Alec has low connections to the U.S. Secret Service, but high connections to the Scientific Community), Drawbacks (being Married is a drawback, apparently…it sounds funny, but in superhero/adventure stories, I suppose that would make sense), and Motivation (“Upholding the Good”).



You also get stats for Swamp Thing as he first appeared in the 1970s, and a second set of stats for Moore’s Earth Elemental Swamp Thing (shown to the right). Listed under Equipment for the Moore version is “Psychogenic Tubers,” which gets its own sidebar description. A whole section of the book is devoted to Swamp Thing’s mindset, with section headings such as “Why Doesn’t Swamp Thing Chase Supercriminals?” (because he’s more concerned with the condition of humanity and the world as a whole, rather than individual wrongdoers). Additional stats and role-play information are provided for several other characters, including Alec’s wife Linda Holland (so you can role-play, um, the whole half-issue she appears in, I guess), John Constantine, and, of course, the various permutations of arch-nemesis Arcane.

The main book wraps up with a map of Houma, Louisiana, along with a brief description of the climate and special events (apparently the Blessing of the Shrimp Fleet occurs in April, so adjust your Swamp Thing role playing game accordingly).

So, after reading up on Swamp Thing, and all his powers, abilities, and “equipment,” you should be ready for a little adventuring. Luckily, this package includes a second 32-page booklet, featuring a solo adventure. Solo adventures are a little unusual in the role-playing field, as most RPGs require at minimum two people to play: one to actually run the game as the “game master” (or the more familiar “dungeon master”), and one (ideally, more) to run characters through the game. A solo RPG has more in common with the old Choose Your Own Adventure books, and this Swamp Thing adventure is no exception: it’s divided up into 134 numbered sections, and as you read through the adventure, each section ends with a series of choices which direct you to another numbered section…and so on and so on until you reach one of the endings. For example:

If you want to look around the office to get your bearings, go to Passage 52. If you want to have Miss Tremayne call the repair people to look at the copier, go to Passage 27. If you want to try and fix the copier yourself, go to Passage 33. If you want to go see Mr. Green, go to Passage 8. If you want to play your answering machine message, go to Passage 71.

The “role playing” aspect in this sort of solitaire game is generally reduced to having some decisions made for you by your stats and random dice rolls:

Make an Action Check using your WILL/WILL as the AV/EV against an OV/RV of 12/12. If you succeed, go to Passage 54. If you fail, go to Passage 121.

Oh, and in case you were wondering what all that business was about copiers and answering machines in that preceding example…yes, that’s actually out of the Swamp Thing adventure. You know all that cool stuff you learned about Swamp Thing’s abilities in the first 32-page booklet? Well, forget it, because you don’t use any of that stuff in the adventure, which has you trapped in the delusion that you are once again in the human form of Alec Holland. You go to work, you wander around town, you work out an advertising budget(!)…I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s fine as an adventure, but I think the game may have been better served with an example adventure that demonstrates just how to use the Swamp Thing’s abilities in a role playing game.

I should also mention that the book features several black and white illustrations, mostly taken from Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala’s work on the comics, though some Steve Bissette/John Totleben work is present as well (most notably a sequence with Swampy facing off against a werewolf from Swamp Thing #40).

I was going to wrap up my look at Swamp Thing gaming with a discussion of the Heroclix figures, but I really don’t know a whole lot about the game beyond that some of the figures are pretty neat:


Heroclix images borrowed from this well-done site.



I just got ’em on top of my desk, staring back at me even as I write this.

Stick ’em if you got ’em.

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What can you really say about the Swamp Thing puzzle (from RoseArt, a company that’s gone on to license slightly more profitable characters)? It’s got a hundred “fully interlocking” pieces (I know I’d be pretty steamed if none of the pieces fit together), and you get that great picture you see on the box lid once you’ve assembled it. (And before you ask…yes, I once spent about 15 minutes or so assembling the puzzle. I’m a lonely, lonely man.) I’m fairly certain that not once in the comic did Swamp Thing fire a weapon even remotely like that, um, log-lasso cannon-thing. And I’m sure giving the Native American chararacter (who’s already saddled with the name “Tomahawk”) a giant crossbow-gun that shoots huge Indian arrowheads isn’t demeaning at all.

The Swamp Thing Colorfo…er, “Presto Magix” set (also from RoseArt) lets kids create their own exciting Swamp Thing adventures with a whole seven different Colorf plastic removeable stickers. Now, I don’t really see the potential for a whole lot of exciting adventures in combining the stickers they give you:

Quite frankly, they all look like they’re dancing. That Swampy in the lower left corner is “raising the roof” or something, as you kids say.

Here’s the equally-exciting background:


Ah, yes, the ever-popular “Romantic Swampland at Dusk” setting, certain to fire children’s imaginations with visions of action and derring-do. However, maybe I’m being a little hard on the “Presto-Magix” set…when I was a kid, one of my favorite toys was the Evel Knievel Colorforms set, and I played with that thing until it fell apart. Maybe I’m too old to appreciate the play-potential for the Swamp Thing Presto-Magix set.

But then again, just look at the Evel Knievel Colorforms:


(image totally stolen from this eBay auction)

That thing comes with a ton more stickers, with a lot more variety…you could have Evel completely dismembered, flaming pieces strewn across the track in the aftermath of some horrible motorcycle-stunt mishap! (Er…not that I ever did that.) What does the Swamp Thing set get you? A bunch of characters waving their hands around and pointing things at each other. Feh…today’s (well, 1991’s) kids got rooked.

Yes, I really own all these things.

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This is one of the very first things I’d ever bought on eBay, over six years ago now. In fact, I think this may be the very item that inspired me to get an eBay account in the first place. Let me distract you from that highly embarrassing and very sad bit of personal information and draw your attention to the ballyhooing of “ACTION! Movable arms” blurbed on the package. While, yes, the arms do appear to move, I would have had a hard time attributing any kind of exciting “action” to that. Maybe you could pretend to move his arms around as if he were writhing in pain as you jab a pencil into his hip. Also, there were apparently three different designs in the exciting Swamp Thing pencil sharpener line:

…but that was the only one I’ve found.

This piece of merchandise boldly tells you, the consumer, just what exactly you’re getting. “I’M CHALK!” exclaims the package, and by God, chalk is exactly what you get. Chalk carved in the general likeness of Swamp Thing and colored green, perhaps, but that, my friends, is Washable, Dustless chalk in its purest form. According to the back of the package, some of the suggested uses for Swamp Thing chalk are “Do Your Homework,” “Play Games,” and “Draw Funny Pictures” – yes, Swamp Thing chalk can cover the full spectrum of life. Also, according to the package, the Swamp Thing chalk “works great on chalk boards” which must come as great relief to someone.

Okay, seriously, I’m sure the “I’M CHALK!” legend on the front is some kind of warning that this item isn’t candy, just in case having “CHALK” in orange letters on the front, and having pictures of kids drawing things with chalk on the back, weren’t clue enough.

Measuring a whopping 34 inches tall when fully erec…er, inflated, the Swamp Thing bop bag is certainly something to behold. At last, we now have something to punch in order to work out our frustrations over the poor quality of the Swamp Thing movies. (“This is for the saggy-bottomed costume! And this is for the annoying kids in the films! And this is for topless Adrienne Barbeau…oh, wait….”)

Additional linkage:

I’d not seen the French Swamp Thing movie poster before.

And what the heck…The Offical Adrienne Barbeau Webpage.

File under "What Did I Expect?"

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I finally got it in my hot little hands, and believe you me, it’s only because I’m The World’s Biggest Swamp Thing Fan™ that I ordered this DVD in the first place. The cartoon is not good by any measure…well, it’s colorfu…no, no, there’s nothing good about it. And God help you if you hear the theme song, done to the tune of “Wild Thing.” (“Swamp Thing / You are amazing” is the opening, and it doesn’t get any better than that.)

The video quality is about as good as you can stand, given that the preferred alternative would be no picture at all. The color does seem to be a little washed out, but I don’t think that’s a problem with the transfer…I think that’s how the cartoon originally looked. The cartoons themselves were created solely to sell toys, so the characters tool around in vehicles with grasping claws, and Swamp Thing regularly performs actions that could be duplicated in the various Swampy figures from the toy line, and so on…they might as well have shown giant animated kids’ arms moving the vehicles and characters around.

Another thing with this DVD is how they padded out the description of what you get on the disc. Okay, there were only five episodes of this cartoon produced. And yet, this is how they indicated the DVD’s contents on the back of the package:

Three regular episodes, and two bonus episodes? In what way are they “bonus?” I’m pretty sure all the episodes actually aired, so it’s not like these are previously unseen shows (well, aside from no one watching them when they aired in the first place). Besides, it’s not as if they were originally planning on holding back those extra two episodes for a second DVD of this turkey, then decided, as a special gift to all of us loyal Swamp Thing fans, to somehow find the space to squeeze on these “bonuses” at no extra cost to us.

And here’s something else that’s always bothered me about DVD feature listings:

“Interactive menus?” If you couldn’t interact with the menu, what good is it? Okay, I’m sure what they mean is that the DVD actually has a menu, as opposed to some older DVDs that don’t (like my Aeon Flux DVD, where you have to manually skip ahead to any episode you’d like to watch, or some of those no-frills Universal DVDs that only had a scene-select function, like the 1980 Flash Gordon or Mystery Science Theatre 3000: The Movie).

And I don’t know what they mean by “BONUS EPISODE,” unless they mean “BONUS EPISODES,” which I’ve already discussed above. Unless there’s some kind of Easter egg on here, and a sixth episode is hidden somewhere on the disc. Oh, the humanity.

There are also previews for other cartoon DVDs, totalling about 13 minutes, and none of these cartoons are any good either, except maybe the ones on the Tex Avery disc.

I really have no idea why this disc was produced…there can’t possibly be anyone else out there who wanted this…er, aside from me, that is.

 
 
(post updated 7/2016)

"SWAMP THING, defender of all good"

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“DR. ANTON ARCANE, the twisted scientist, is preparing to drain the bayou in order to gain access to the vegetation and sediments at the bottom of the swamp. He believes that a series of experiments will reveal the secret of the origin of SWAMP THING and that once he possesses that secret, he can rule the world.

“Your mission is to protect the bayou against the evil DR. ANTON ARCANE and his mutant partners the UN-MEN!

“In order to save the bayou, you must travel through the swamp and confront ARCANE. Your journey will be perilous. Along the way you will have to overcome the dreaded UN-MEN – SKIN MAN, WEED KILLER, and DR. DEEMO. At the journey’s end you must battle and defeat DR. ANTON ARCANE!”

“Never fear! Help is at hand. SWAMP THING, defender of all good, is joined by TOMAHAWK, a Native American game warden, and Bayou Jack, a former Medal of Honor combat soldier. Together, these heroes help you foil DR. ANTON ARCANE’s wicked plans.”

And so begins the instructions for this game from Rose Art Industries (1991), for 2 to 4 players, even though the game comes with 6 player pieces:

Sadly, the pieces are not in the shape of Swamp Thing, as one would have hoped.

This boardgame was part of the massive marketing onslaught* that accompanied the very short-run Swamp Thing cartoon series, but unlike the cartoon, this game is actually somewhat enjoyable.

The board itself is fairly attractive:

Here’s a little closer look at a segment of the board:

Movement in the game is determined by cards:

Each player starts the game with three of the “Swamp Thing”-backed cards, which you can play one per turn. The cards are either just pure movement cards (the Swamp Thing card, where you can move your piece – in either direction – the number of spaces indicated); the Anton Arcane cards, which allow you to move other player’s pieces, hopefully onto a space detrimental to them; and the Escape Cards, which allow you to bypass the spaces on the board where you do battle with one of the Un-Men.

Doing battle with the Un-Men requires using the die (AKA the “Battle Die,” according to the instructions), and you must roll a number higher than the one indicated in the space in order to continue movement.

The Hero Cards, which you get to draw if you land on one of the spaces that tell you to do so, allow you to do one of three things: you can play one of your opponent’s Swamp Thing cards in place of your own; you can add to the number of spaces a Swamp Thing card tells you to move (a typo on the cards says that you add the number to the Hero card); or you can increase your die roll by one during battles.

Swamp Thing’s ability to enter “the Green” and regrow his body in other locations is duplicated by the “Green Spaces.” By landing on the space by exact count, you can move your piece directly to another location on the board. There are also red spaces on the board (marked with things like “Oil Slick causes you to return to Start!”) that, well, return you to the starting square. These aren’t as tragic as they seem, as there’s only three of them, and they’re all no more than about a dozen spaces from the start square…the game’s designers probably anticipated problems with younger players getting too frustrated at having to start over from a point much later in the game.

The game ends when you get to the final square, where Arcane is waiting…you have to roll a 6 (or a 5 and play one of your Hero cards) in order to defeat the big purple-headed guy and get him outta your bayou.

Anyway, it’s not a bad little game, and it’s fun for kids or drunk adults. It does sorta make one wonder what a game based on the comic book version of Swamp Thing would be like (“Eat hallucinogenic tuber – wander around the board for a couple hours;” “Send Arcane to Hell – take another turn”).

* Perhaps I exaggerate slightly.

 
 
[updated 9/20]

Swamp Thingery.

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Here are a few DC characters (and a Marvel character) done in the Batman/Superman/Justice League animated style. The Swamp Thing seems a little light on the details (which is realistic, if it were to actually be animated), and the very existence of an animated-style King Mob hurts my head. The other pages on this site have some nice convention sketches as well. Look for the Swamp Thing sketch by Mark Millar!

Also, Swamp Things are apparently endangered.