Swamp Thing #6 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (writer), Marco Rudy (artist), Val Staples & Lee Loughridge (colorist)

The Story: Getting schooled by a kid a third your age—you’ve really hit a low, huh, Alec?

The Review: It takes a certain skill to build up comic book tension convincingly.  Plot twists and cliffhangers can get the job done, in a rough kind of fashion, but use them a too liberally and pretty soon they roll off the reader’s back with little impact.  At a certain point, you just become too aware of the “twist” or “cliffhanger” as literary devices, rather than part of the story.

Probably the best way to keep the suspense going is to keep the odds consistently against the hero, while giving him enough victories and moments of hope so that both he and you don’t despair of success.  So far, Snyder’s done just that on this series.  By last issue, he had made out the Rot as such a hulking menace that Alec and Abby’s capture of William Arcane felt like a very underwhelming triumph; they essentially only succeeded in preventing an impossible threat from becoming more impossible—that is, until the Parliament of Trees receive a direct attack in the heart of the Amazon.

The point is Snyder always laid the groundwork to these wrenches in the plot before setting them in play, so they felt natural to the flow of the story.  This issue is the first where he pulls the rug from under you and makes you stumble, compared to the smooth tablecloth tricks he’s done up till now.  The revelation that it’s—spoiler alert—Abby the Rot wants, not William, works, but has the sense of a last-minute plot change.  We’ve spent a long time putting our expectations in this twisted little boy, only for him to turn around and contradict us.

Anyway, it doesn’t seem like the general direction of the title has veered off course by more than inches.  Although William refers to her as a “queen” (accompanied by all sorts of disturbing expressions of admiration), and she does exert some control over their minions, her brother continues to act like he calls the shots and has the most knowledge of what’s going on.  That kind of relationship fits with his whole spiel about playing chess and missing the most powerful weapon: William as the game-master, Abby as his prize piece.

And now Alec is completely bereft of allies, now that the Parliament has perished and Abby joins the other side (albeit unwillingly).  And if that’s not hopeless enough, Snyder throws one last shocker at Alec just so you’re left with no illusions that our underdog can somehow make this work.  Over in Animal Man, Buddy’s been instructed to seek out Alec for help, but it looks like now Alec is no condition to provide it.  By the end of the issue, you’d count Earth as doomed, if not for the fact this is still an ongoing series.

On his last fill-in job, Rudy did a pretty impressive job stepping up to Yanick Paquette’s style of art, but now that he doesn’t have the support of Michel Lacombe’s inks, his thin lines tend to mesh together, becoming distorted, messy, and confusing the more the POV zooms out.  Rudy also has less of Paquette’s realism, making the horror elements look more gratuitous and over-the-top.  To take a disgusting example, while Paquette made the Rot’s twisted-head minions look anatomically correct so their disfigurement sickened you, Rudy’s has this excess baggage of skin representing the twist that gets in the way and distorts the figures.  Also, it was much more haunting when Paquette would make their facial expressions blank, whereas Rudy gives them more of a raging zombie type look.

Conclusion: Still a solid read, but weaker art and slightly clumsier writing renders this issue less exceptional than the others.

Grade: B

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: – I imagine those environmental nuts will be at a loss to explain why the Amazon natives saw fit to burn down their own sacred home.