By: Scott Snyder (writer), Yanick Paquette (artist), Nathan Fairbairn (colorist)
The Story: Watch Alec become one with nature.
The Review: Swamp Thing has a vast, complex history, written by some incredibly brilliant, but also ambitiously complicated folks: Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar. What you wind up getting is some incredibly rich, spellbinding stories, but also ones that take quite a lot of explaining for the reader completely new to the character. The Parliament of Trees alone deserves its own Wiki page—and actually does have one.
So it should come to the surprise of no one that Snyder uses this issue as one massive info-dump, narrated by none other than Swamp Thing himself, albeit the one preceding the Swamp Thing we all know and love. Even though his narration does effectively gives us most of the necessary mythology behind the boggy “knight,” it’s also incredibly long, rather wordy, and somewhat rambling, making you wonder if all this exposition could have been handled a little differently.
During S. Thing’s speech, Snyder uses a fancy bit of retroactive maneuvering to tweak the character’s origins over so slightly, just to explain Alec’s current status and connection to the Green. He continues to play with the idea of Alec as fated to be the greatest of all Green avatars, a kind of messiah with foliage. All very mystical and foreboding, and of course Alec resists the idea with the usual “Why me?” bit, but not much meat to sink your teeth into, plot-wise.
Snyder’s no fool. Instead of relegating the whole sequence as a series of talking panels, he also takes the opportunity to revisit the enemy at hand, one with just as much abstract history as either the Red or the Green. Named Sethe, this baddie’s army has grown pretty quickly from the three unfortunate archaeologists of last issue, and unlike his earlier, disease-focused visits to humanity, the carnage he leaves and draws in his wake are far more animated and dramatic.
With such a seemingly unstoppable enemy, it’s no wonder Alec has plenty of reservations of taking up the role of savior former-Swamp Thing pleads with him to consider. But like a lot of reluctant heroes, he soon finds himself placed into a position where he may have no choice but to follow the destiny laid out for him.
(Un)fortunately, he doesn’t have to worry about that right now. Enter someone who may turn out to be the first of Alec’s regular supporting cast, a character pulled and mildly redesigned from classic Swamp Thing mythology. Her guns-and-ammo approach to life doesn’t seem like a proper strategy for confronting the unspeakable, supernatural horror on Alec’s tail, but it’ll suffice when her only goal is “to watch you die.”
Burdened with a text-heavy script, Paquette has to put his storytelling skills to bear to bring some sense of movement to the issue, while at the same time not distracting from the relatively crucial information Snyder has to dispense. His beautiful paneling (love the plant-cell borders) pops out from the springy, neon greens Fairbairn gives them, in stark contrast to the often gruesome imagery found within the panels.
Conclusion: A pretty dense second issue, but it sets your footing firmly in the series’ history, leaving the path clear for pure plot development from now on.
Grade: B
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: – That poor waitress with the coffeepot. Elderly, in a dead-end job, and soon to be victim of the embodiment of decay.
– Here’s an interesting parallel. In Animal Man #2, you see flesh forming itself into the shape of a tree. Here, you see plants curling themselves into an egg for the birth of Swamp Thing. How soon before that crossover?
Grade
Conclusion