The organizing principle seems to be all of the Swamp Thing comics that writer (and Swamp Thing co-creator) Len Wein did with artist Kelley Jones, which consists of some nine issues between 2015 and 2018. But also included are all of Jones' other Swamp Thing work, which means 1990's Swamp Thing #94 and Swamp Thing #100 and 1995's Batman #521-522. Plus Jones covers for other book's featuring Swamp Thing, like a couple that he did for Justice League Dark and that for 2018's Young Monsters in Love anthology, depicting Swampy stealing Frankenstein's girl.
Also included are some interesting looking Wein/Jones Swamp Thing collaborations that could have been, like notes for an ongoing continuing from their six-issue 2016 series and, more intriguingly still, what was to be a 1989 three-issue, fully-painted, prestige format series by Swamp Thing creators Wein and Bernie Wrightson. (In that particular case, Wein had written it and Wrightson did rough pencil layouts for some of it, but the latter eventually left the project. Wein apparently suggested Jones draw it, but DC decided to cancel it; so here we to see what the late Wrightston had managed to complete.)
Having become an ardent and devoted Kelley Jones fan during the artist's nineties run on Batman, I have already read most of the stories contained in this collection (and own them in singles). In fact, I had bought and read everything in here except the two 1990 issues of Swamp Thing, so...11 out of the 13 issues within...?
Despite my relative miserliness, I went ahead and dropped $50 on this anyway though, as it is of course nice to have so much Kelley Jones art so easily accessible in one place.
Let's look at the features in order, shall we?
Foreword by M. Christina Valada
M. Christina Valada, her bio says, is a photographer, lawyer, writer and podcaster, although she writes this substantial foreword as Len Wein's wife. As such, she played a substantial role in finding the materials that are presented in this book, as she has looked through his computer and office for much of what ends up in the back matter.
She shares Wein's medical difficulties over the course of the last few years of his life, which included heart surgery and being on dialysis, a toe amputation, neck surgery and more. In fact, Valada said that, in the last 13 months of his life, Wein was in constant pain, and "had more surgeries in the last year than I can actually count."
Nevertheless, he kept working, mostly on Swamp Thing comics and other projects and, from what Valada said, made some truly heroic efforts to attend conventions.
The piece is also full of touching personal anecdotes, and even some advice that Wein shared with Kelley Jones about making comics...and, I suppose, is here being shared with everyone: "Remember, this is supposed to be fun."
Introduction by Kelley Jones
Kelley Jones' piece is far shorter than Valada's and begins with a fun anecdote: Upon first reading Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's Swamp Thing as an 11-year-old child in 1972, Jones hated it.
It was issue #2.
From cover to last panel, it was just disturbing and creepy and sad. It featured a mad doctor/sorcerer named Arcane and his awful creations, the Un-Men, and Swamp Thing...who was supposed to be the hero of the book and a monster! "Monsters can't be heroes!" my still-unrotted brain screamed. Remember, I was 11.And, when I was done, like I said, I hated. it.
But it stayed with me. I thought about it and turned it over and over in my mind. As with all things taboo. I had to look into the abyss that was Swamp Thing again.
And then I loved it. I mean, really, really loved it.
In just two hours, I went from disgust to joy.
As many of you know, Jones is one of my all-time favorite comics artists, and it was an unparalleled delight to hear so much so directly from him here.
This is hardly the point of his introduction, but in recounting his history with the Swamp Thing character, he of course mentions his Batman two-parter with Dough Moench (which we'll get to in more detail below). This was, of course, part of the pair's1995-1998, 40-ish issue run, and he notes that Moench "would always ask me who I wanted to draw." That certainly explains something about that run.
Like a lot of modern Batman runs, this one covered a fair amount of Batman's rogues gallery, including some of the bigger characters: The Joker, The Penguin, Two-Face, The Scarecrow, Man-Bat, Clayface, Killer Croc, Mister Freeze, even Black Mask (a Moench creation) and Black Spider (In addition to several original creations, although none that caught on). But the run also included a bunch of guest-stars, which was then a bit more unusual, and those guest-stars seemed specifically chosen for the fact that it would be cool to see Kelley Jones draw them. And so Batman found himself either teaming-up or at odds with Deadman, The Spectre, Etrigan, Ragman and, of course, Swamp Thing.
From what Jones said here, using a character from the Vertigo line in a Batman comic then required permission from both Batman group editor Denny O'Neil and Vertigo editor Karen Berger, but both gave their blessing on Swamp Thing appearing in Batman at the time.
Which is how we got one of my favorite Batman comics ever, I guess...!
DC's Convergence event series was long on page count, with some 80 issues of tie-in issues published, but short in terms of how long it went on for, the entire thing running between April and May of 2015. The main Convergence mini-series ran for nine weekly issues, and was written by Dan Jurgens, Jeff F. King and Scott Lobdell and drawn by a bunch of different artists. There were 40 (That's right, 40!) two-issue tie-in miniseries, but most of these were pretty inconsequential to the event, which meant readers could basically just pick up those featuring characters and/or creators they like, and ignore the others.
The premise involved cosmic being Telos (who I think was a version of Brainiac, maybe?) collecting cities from throughout various DC timelines in impenetrable domes, kinda like how classic Brainiac had collected cities like Kandor in bottles. During the events of the series, the domes came down, and Telos ordered the heroes of various cities to fight one another.
In the miniseries, this basically translated into an issue spent establishing the cast and setting, and then a second issue pitting them against antagonists from entirely different world or timeline. (The one I remember best, for example, was the John McCrea-drawn Plastic Man and The Freedom Fighters, which featured Plas and other old Quality Comics heroes fighting robots from The New 52: Futures End.)
Having only read the main series that once 10 years ago, I don't remember it too terribly well at this point. I think it's main lingering effect was the birth of Jonathan Kent to a Superman and Lois from within one of the domed cities—delivered, if I recall correctly, by Batman Thomas Wayne from the world of Flashpoint—and the child somehow made it into the pages of the Superman books going forward.
I think there was also a cosmic reboot of continuity of sorts, but, coming between 2011's New 52 reboot and 2017's Dark Nights: Metal, I'll be damned if I know what it changed. At the time, I just read it as another example of random, unenumerated changes to continuity, which future writers would make up as they went along anyway. (Oh, and the logo, which you can see on the cover I grabbed from comics.org above, has stuck with me, as I always thought it looked like a coffee ring from someone using a comic as a coaster.)
You won't find any of this background in the pages of Convergence: Swamp Thing; this trade collection refers to the storyline as "Blood Moon" and then gives a title for each of the two chapters, the actual name of the comic these stories occurred in appearing below those. And, because the Jones-drawn covers are presented sans logos and credits, they're not labeled as Convergence tie-ins. (A page featuring a paragraph of text explaining the basics of the event might have been a helpful inclusion in the collection.)
This sure made me wonder what a reader encountering this story for the first time here would make of it. Divorced from the event it ties into, it's not very good, as Len Wein doesn't attempt to explain the premise of Convergence to readers (And, to be fair, anyone reading it off the racks when these issues were originally published wouldn't have needed him to), and, if that premise is left unexplained, then the events feel rather random and unmoored from anything else.
I also wasn't sure the when and where of the Swamp Thing and Abby that star in the book; the big event of Alan Moore's run is mentioned (That is, that Swamp Thing is actually a new and unique plant being that thought it was Alec Holland, rather than Holland himself transformed), and there is talk of The Green and Swampy's Moore-era powers), so I assume they were trapped by Telos maybe sometime after that...? Although the pair are also just friends, rather than lovers or husband and wife, so maybe it's from sometime during the Moore run...? I don't know; I suppose we could ask Mike Sterling; he surely knows.
At any rate, during the first issue/chapter of the story, the Swampy and Abby notice that the skies have turned red, and, seeking to find out what might be going on, Swamp Thing decides to visit Gotham City and ask Batman what's up. He's about to dive into the dirt to travel there by growing a new body there and transferring his consciousness, when Abby says she wants to go along, and so the pair arrive there via bus, Swamp Thing wearing a trenchcoat and wide-brimmed hat as a disguise.
They go to the park, but, Wein's narration tells us, "And that was the moment when the dome came down-- --completely sealing off Gotham City from the rest of the world."
Kelley Jones' art, meanwhile, doesn't show us anything about a dome coming down, only Swamp Thing "AARRGGHH!!"-ing in pain as he is severed from The Green. He's unable to leave his body to travel outside the dome either, and so the pair are now trapped, Swampy more than Abby, as he is stuck in the park, slowly dying, with her occasional gifts of plant food and fertilizer just enough to keep him alive.
This is the state of affairs for a year; the most exciting thing that happens during that time being Batgirl Barbara Gordon chasing Poison Ivy through the park (The fact that Barbara is in-costume then would mean this Swamp Thing and Abby come from somewhere in time between Moore's "The Anatomy Lesson" and Moore's Batman: The Killing Joke, huh?).
The plot finally gets some foreword movement again around page 19, when the hexagonal pattern of the dome is visible in the sky for the first time, and a disembodied voice announces itself as Telos and explains that champions from each city must fight one another to save their respective cities.
And then our heroes are set upon by a horde of vampires. The champion Swampy will have to face won't be introduced until the next issue, then, but it's a perfect character from a particular DC reality for Jones to draw: The vampire Batman of Jones' own Batman & Dracula: Red Rain, Batman: Bloodstorm and Batman: Crimson Mist trilogy with writer Doug Moench.
The second issue is then devoted to vampire-fighting. Contrary to Telos' expressed wishes, Swamp Thing and Vampire Batman don't fight one another, though. First they fight off the vampires menacing Swampy and Abby, and then this Batman tells Swampy his Gotham isn't really worth fighting to save, since it's overrun with vampires. Instead, he asks the muck-encrusted mockery of a man to help him fight vampires with whatever time they might have left, and he does. In the end, they kill the main vampire, resulting in those she has turned becoming human again.
Vampire Batman, who was of course turned by Dracula himself, does not, and he voluntarily watches the sunrise with Swampy and Abby, sacrificing himself. I guess Swamp Thing's version of Gotham thus "wins", but I don't recall what that means for the state of either city/world, as I don't recall much about Convergence.
So, this 44-page story is basically just half set-up, half fight. Wein does make the bloodless Swampy into a formidable vampire-slayer, though, turning his fingers into oaken stakes that he can shoot along vines into their hearts and, later, emitting a cloud of raw garlic spray that dissolves his foes.
All of this obviously gives Jones lots to work with, as the two monster lead characters kill vampires in often spectacularly over-the-top images, as in a panel where a trio of vampire women melt into piles of collapsing bones.
I particularly like the sequence in which Swamp Thing kills his first wave of vampires though, Jones drawing skull encased in clouds in mid-air around a crouching, lumbering Swamp Thing, who explains to Abby the vampires were already dead, and he had "merely sent them...to their final rest...!"
I'm not 100% clear if these skulls are what remained of the vampires after Swamp Thing staked them, and they were in the process of falling to the ground, or if they are meant to represent the vampires' souls escaping their slain bodies, but it looks cool (In the panel immediately preceding this one, a spirit leaving a small pile of bones and viscera that was a vampire).
The second-to-last panel features a big, stylized "RRRUMMMBBBLLL" sound effect, and Swamp Thing remarking upon an earthquake, which seems pretty random, but was likely meant to be an acknowledgement of something that happened in the pages of the main Convergence series.
It is perhaps noting here how much Jones' Swamp Thing here resembles that from the original, 1970s comics, as designed and drawn by Bernie Wrightson. He's a big, hulking, lumbering brute of a humanoid figure, and is a fairly solid, uniform green most of the time, vines only appearing on his figure here and there.
It's a sharp contrast to the Swamp Thing Jones had drawn in Batman, and the more god-like version of the '80s and '90s Swamp Thing series, where the character increasingly transformed and borrowed elements from other plant-life to incorporate into his own appearance (Readers can see this contrast for themselves as they make their way through the book, Wein and Jones' 21st century Swamp Thing stories eventually giving way to '90s depictions of the character).
While many of the virtues of the Convergence miniseries were likely only enjoyed by Swamp Thing fans who happened to be reading DC comics in the spring of 2015 (and/or Len Wein fans and/or Kelley Jones fans), the two-issue series lead to at least one positive development: It was successful enough that Wein and Jones got a six-issue mini-series out of it.
The collection lists this as "The Dead Don't Sleep", which is the title Wein gave the story of the first issue (And, when the mini was collected, that was the subtitle of the trade paperback doing so). It's a rather unusual mini-series, as, rather than one, complete story, it tells two different, distinct stories, as if these were the first few issues of an ongoing (I just double-checked the original comics covers though, and #1 has a big "1 of 6" in the upper righthand corner, as you can see above).
It seems to pick up...wherever Swamp Thing was left off in whatever comic preceded this, not necessarily the Convergence issues (Abby's MIA here, for example).
The first two issues tell one story, the last four are devoted to a different arc, and there's little in the way to connect them; The Phantom Stranger appears to Swampy in the first issue to give him cryptic warnings that, in retrospect, refer to the events of #3-6, but that's about all that ties the stories together. (Jones' Stranger, by the way, is obviously pretty cool. His coat and cape billow dramatically, of course, and while the top half of his face is usually in shadow, his eyes are two inscrutable white dots staring from out of that shadow; it looks an awful lot like how the filmmakers depicted the eyes of The Void in the Thunderbolts* movie.)
Oh, and a new local sheriff is introduced: Darcy Fox from Gotham City, the niece of Lucius Fox. She appears throughout the series. (If it seems like the Fox family is growing rather large, well, if anyone is entitled to invent a new relative for Lucius Fox, it's the character's co-creator, Len Wein.)
These first two issues are essentially Swamp Thing versus a zombie...not of the now common Night of The Living Dead sort, but here an undead guy who is incredibly strong (not only does he hold his own against Swamp Thing in their fights, but he rips him in half vertically at one point) and who also has rudimentary intelligence, enough to talk (although, like Swampy, he does so with lots of ellipses in his dialogue).
In this story, a couple with the unlikely surname of Wormwood come to the swamp seeking our hero's help. They tell him that their son was killed in an experiment at the unlikely named Cowley College that abuts the swamp (and thus makes it Swamp Thing's business...?)...and he then apparently came back from the dead to murder those he holds responsible for his death, in grisly fashion. ("Next morning, the custodial staff found the mutilated remains of Professor Crisp in the chemistry lab... ...and the gymnasium... ...and the bio lab... ...and the... Well, anyway, you get the point.")
Swamp Thing ultimately triumphs, thanks to some advice on re-killing zombies from Shade, one of the many spooky and/or magical characters to appear in this miniseries (He only appears in about a half-dozen panels though, and he spends those mostly in an armchair, so we don't see how Jones might have depicted his powers, or done much more with the character rather than treat him as a talking head...although the angles and shading are quite dramatic, given that this is Kelley Jones we're talking about.)
The last panel of issue #2 features a man giving his name standing before a window, with a rainstorm raging outside, a lightning bolt splitting the sky in half.
"The names Cable," he says, "Matt Cable."
Yeah, him! And if you're thinking hey, didn't Matt Cable die (He did! In 1989's Swamp Thing #84!) and then get resurrected as a raven in Morpheus' The Dreaming (Uh-huh, in the pages of The Sandman)....? Well, I can't explain what he's doing here. Both his death and en-ravening happened in those comics before they were labeled Vertigo comics, so the fact that the line was separated from the DCU at one point doesn't seem to explain it.
Of course, since 1989 DC had hard continuity reboots in Infinite Crisis and Flashpoint/The New 52, among other rejiggerings, so perhaps DC continuity was altered in such a way that Cable never died...?
Anyway, his presence is kind of important for the second story of the series. In it, Cable explains to Swamp Thing that he had retired from the FBI and devoted himself to searching the world for a "cure" to Swampy's condition, one that could return him to human being Alec Holland (The actually-a-plant-that-thought-it-was-Holland-who-is-actually-totally-dead doesn't come up here; if I recall correctly, I think Geoff Johns might have changed that during the climax of Brightest Day...?).
Anyway, he's here because he found it, in Deadman's Nanda Parbat: The Hand of Fatima (Again, an unlikely name, given Nanda Parbat's Himalayan setting and history as a fantastical exotic location, whereas the name "Fatima" is associated with Islam and a Portuguese Marian apparition). All they need is a powerful sorcerer to cast the spell to grant Cable's wish.
They find one in a scantily clad Zatanna (who actually literally disrobes in one scene, albeit off-panel), and the spell produces a result that surprises Swamp Thing: He is turned into Alec Holland, as promised, but, to his surprise, Cable has now become Swamp Thing. (He's distinguished from the Holland Swamp Thing by differently colored dialogue balloons, with fewer ellipses, as well as redder eyes, and more prominent, woody-looking spinal projections.)
Despite regaining his humanity, Alec faithfully hangs around, training Cable on how to use Swamp Thing's powers, but it quickly becomes apparent that this new Swamp Thing isn't going to be such a good guy, as seen when he uses his powers to cause roots to draw and quarter* a lippy poacher, a brutal, gory act that Alec seems a little too quick to forgive when Matt says, "I...I'm sorry, Alec...I guess I didn't know my own strength."
Eventually, the new Swamp Thing captures Alec, builds a huge throne in nearby Houma and tells the world via TV news camera they have to surrender to him or be destroyed. With the Justice League and Titans conveniently off-world, according to SHIELD's ARGUS' Steve Trevor and Etta Candy, it's decided to simply nuke Houma to take out Swamp Thing...unless Alec can gather sufficient spooky allies and formulate a plan to regain his powers from the bad Swamp Thing (There's a bit of a twist here regarding Cable's heel turn, which I won't spoil here).
He does so, giving us a chance to see Jones draw not only The Phantom Stranger and Zatanna (now in fishnets and top hat), but also The Spectre, who he did a pretty phenomenal version of (See 1997's Batman #540 and #541). There's a particularly great panel here in which a fiercely grinning Spectre says, "Yes...I know" when the bad Swamp Thing mentions something necessitating an "act of God."
The story also includes brief appearances by Etrigan The Demon and Deadman. The latter is notable in that Jones doesn't depict him in the corpse-like designs he gave him during his 1989 and 1992 miniseries devoted to the character, but as more ghostly, with a gauzy white ghost-like head, with black-rimmed bright white eyes in it and, in one panel, a black-rimmed set of teeth.
In addition to these characters, Mister E, Felix Faust and The Enchantress all make one-panel cameos, but aren't really around long enough that we get a feel of what Jones might have done with them, similar to the brief appearance of Shade.
This second story, and the miniseries, ends happily enough, restoring the status quo: Alec is Swamp Thing again...while Cable is in a coma in the hospital, and Abby makes a surprise, three-panel appearance.
Swamp Thing Winter Special #1 (2018)
Like the Convergence miniseries, the six-issue one seems to have done well enough that DC was going to have Len Wein and Kelley Jones keep going with the character, with the next story in the collection, "Spring Awakening!"
Editor Rebecca Taylor refers to this story as "a continuation of" Wein's "Dead Don't Sleep" miniseries in an "Editor's Note" that originally ran in 2018's Swamp Thing Winter Special. The table of contents for this collection refers to it as Swamp Thing #7. I wonder, was the mini going to keep it's numbering and turn into an ongoing, or would DC have relaunched the title with a new #1 when it became an ongoing...?
It's not entirely clear...but it's moot, as Wein died while working on this very issue. He had written the plot script for the issue, which is what Jones would draw his art based on, but not the "lettering script", so the exact words Wein wanted the characters to say were never written.
In what turned out to be a poignant move, Taylor and DC decided to print the story as it was, unlettered. The result? A silent issue, as if Swamp Thing's creator and writer was now "silenced", and readers get to see his last work...albeit without Wein's most obvious presence included, underscoring his absence.
Remarkably, Wein was a good enough comics plotter and Jones a good enough comics artist that the story reads as fairly complete just as it is, almost as if it were always intended to be a silent issue. Even without narration or dialogue, you can make sense of the story and the intent of the conversations between characters (There was only one point I couldn't quite intuit, involving a bunch of rags on a train box car in the air; consulting Wein's plot script, which follows the story, I see this is meant to be a bundle of rags forming into Solomon Grundy, which wasn't a power of his I knew he had; perhaps it was even a new one...? The script also makes clear that, in the scene in which Cable meets with Sheriff Fox and her deputy, he is telling them he plans to stick around and set up a private investigator's business in Houma).
The story involves Solomon Grundy kidnapping a baby, the awakened Cable meeting with Swamp Thing and then the sheriff, a spectacularly awesome scene involving Swamp Thing water-skiing on a lily pad as he pursues bad guys with rifles riding on a pair of airboats, and an equally spectacular entrance by Batman, who defeats the bad guys and blows up their boats using well-aimed batagrangs before we seem him on-panel, crouched in the bough of a tree to confront Swamp Thing.
(The Special the story originally ran in also included a Tom King and Jason Fabok story, as well as a text article about Wein, some images by his fellow Swamp Thing creator Bernie Wrightson and a pin-up by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, none of which are reproduced here).
The next section of the book is labeled "Other Tales by Kelley Jones", and begins with a 2024 prose piece by Swamp Thing writer Doug Wheeler, in which he describes how Jones' work first came to his attention, how he advocated to DC to hire Jones to work with him, and how that went (Intriguingly, it was at Archie Comics' booth at a New York City comics convention, where they were showing off a Kelley-Jones drawn horror comic entitled The Hangman which, Wheeler writes, Archie "later chickened out of and never published." Does Archie Comics still have those pages in a drawer somewhere?! They should totally publish them! I can't imagine that anything Jones had drawn back then could be too scary, gory or offensive for the post-Afterlife With Archie version of Archie Comics to publish!)
Anyway, this issue is a done-in-one horror story written by Wheeler, with Jones credited as guest artist.
It's fairly gory, to the extent that Wheeler said he was told by some of those who saw the first pages early that the pair had "gotten away" with a panel featuring a serial killer's victim, chopped up into six pieces and strewn about a field, her bloody head resting atop a stump, an axe still embedded in it (As is often the case, the gore Jones draws is somewhat softened by his exaggerated style; here, there's something almost cartoonish about the chopped-up body, keeping it from looking like anything approaching real.)
Though fairly straight horror, the issue shows just how weird and trippy the post-Alan Moore Swamp Thing had gotten. The hero's first appearance in the story, for example, is as an alien-looking tree with some dozen eyes on its branching stalks (John Totleben's cover, above, shows this; notably, his eye-filled tree looks more realistic and less crazy than Jones' drawing within does).
This tree sees the result of an ax murder, and Swamp Thing investigates. The story involves an ax murderer who kills victims at the behest of an otherworldly entity and then loans the blood-stained ax to musicians as a percussion instrument.
The whys of the plot become clear during the story, which eventually involves a plot that is more fantasy or sci-fi than horror (or monster...or superhero), and Jones' depiction of that otherworldly entity elevates it into the truly insane.
We throw the word "Lovecraftian" around a lot these days, often to describe any weird monster with tentacles, but here Jones draws one of those horror and wonders that H.P. Lovecraft was always hinting around, calling them indescribable.
The creature, revealed in a huge, horizontal panel stretching across the top half of a two-page spread, is an elongated purple mass, it's head (?) a long, snake-like projection with no features save for a gigantic mouth, its gums and teeth stretching beyond its lips (?) as if trying to escape. It has a pair of big bat-like wings, too small to propel it, bizarre spines that look like jutting bones, a mass of writhing jellyfish-like tentacles, another mass of writhing tentacles that look like smaller version of its head, these nested in what look it might be human brain matter or might be intestines, probing black spikes that look a little like claws and a little like the fibrous "legs" of some insect-like creature or perhaps a microscopic organism.
I kind of wish Wheeler's script was included after this story, as I wonder to what degree he described the creature, or if he just wrote "draw the craziest, most upsetting looking monster you can imagine." Certainly some elements of this entity are familiar from other Jones monsters and supernatural horrors we've seen since.
Naturally, Abby, Swamp Thing and their still-new baby Tefe are involved in the goings-on, but, ultimately, the malefactors all receive punishment for their actions.
It's a great story, and one that reads perfectly well in isolation from whatever else might have been going on in the title at the time.
This was still a few years before the Vertigo imprint, but the book's cover did have a "Suggested For Mature Readers" tag above the familiar DC bullet; given American weirdness about nudity vs violence and gore, one wonders what the publisher thought was the mature part...I am guessing the scene of a nude (but usually covered) Abby was of more concern than the chopped-up corpse.
This over-sized anniversary issue is written by Wheeler, and features art by two distinct art teams. One is, of course, Kelley Jones, here inking himself again, while the other is pencil artist Pat Broderick and inker Alfredo Alcala. The credits list page numbers for who drew what, but they styles are different enough that it is instantly obvious who drew what.
Unlike the previous Wheeler/Jones collaboration, this one isn't a standalone tale, but picks up on an ongoing storyline—baby Tefe has accidentally destroyed her body and plunged into The Green, and Swamp Thing doesn't know how to safely get her back, since he can't explain the process to a baby—and it involves the Parliament of Trees, and events like Swampy's past travels through space and time that seem to be references to events from Alan Moore's and Rick Veitch's runs on the book.
Essentially, a shaman gives Swamp Thing a quest he must complete to save his daughter: Seek out "a fountain whose waters allow the drinker to communicate with all living beings," which, the Parliament informs him, can be found in the Garden of Eden, which is now located in Antarctica, not an easy place for to grow a plant body, on top of being surrounded by a great wall and defended by angels.
While Broderick/Alcala draw the sections of Swampy with Abby, the shaman and ghost Tefe, as well as some flashbacks and his visits with the Parliament, Jones draws the journey to Eden. Given how little plant matter there is for Swampy to work with, the body grows there is emaciated and skeletal, Jones giving him skull-like visage with extremely sunken eyes and half-finished back from which juts a protruding spine.
There's a turn of a page that leads to a splash page that reveals an angel, an awesome (as in, inspiring awe) and terrifying creature that is partially Biblically accurate, partially Jones-ian flourishes and partially insane-looking. It's a tower of a creatures with multiple animal heads, a "torso" consisting of a coral-like network covered with eyeballs, with strange tentacles that seem as much plant as animal, one of which grips a flaming sword, this structure resing upon a burning fire, which emanates from a chaotic pink-black cloud of geometric shapes, which stands upon a single talon.
This is one angel, and the one Swamp Thing attempts to fight, before two of its fellows join it—one a golden, winged giant humanoid that looks like the "traditional" view of an angel, another a strange pink alien being that is mostly fangs or spikes and wings, more akin to an alien Neon Genesis Evangelion angel than what one might find in Christian art. By the time they join the fight, Swamp Thing must change strategies.
The Broderick-penciled passages involve a lot of conversation and a bit of continuity (and cameos by Etrigan and Abin Sur), but my major takeaway from reading this issue was just how strange a narrative Swamp Thing had become, and how far it had travelled from Wein and Bernie Wrightson's original conception of a monster playing hero in a milieu that would seesaw between a horror comic and a "universe" super-comic.
By 1990, it's...kind of a fantasy epic of sorts, and one that's sometimes far removed from the world of humans (this issue is, certainly), with the shaman the only human character with a speaking part in this tale full of bizarre entities. In fact, Swamp Thing has, by this point, essentially become its own unique mythology.
This two-issue story arc comes from fairly early in Doug Moench, Kelley Jones and John Beatty's run on Batman, which has always been neck-in-neck with the Alan Grant/Norm Breyfogle runs as my favorite chunk of Batman comics. (Whether Breyfogle or Jones is my favorite Batman artist can change by the day, and by whose work I had most recently read; in general, I usually say that I think Breyfogle was the best Batman artist, while Jones is my favorite Batman artist).
I am actually probably more familiar with these comics than just about any others. Like some of the earliest issues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, teenage Caleb spent a lot of time studying these, re-drawing various panels and elements, trying to figure out and replicate the way that Jones and/or Beatty drew reptile scales, tree bark, a tree line along the horizon, the moon, ripples on the surface of the water and so on.
The second issue, #522, is a particular issue of a comic book that I think it's fairly safe to say that I was, for a few months at least, obsessed with (And, for long afterwards, I would draw Jones-style snakes and trees in the margins of my notebooks in college).
Given that, I probably didn't need to re-read these two issues, but I did so anyway.
It makes for a pretty great "last" Killer Croc story (the second such "last" Killer Croc story published that decade, following Grant and Breyfogle's Batman #471). Swamp Thing is barely in the first issue; in fact, we simply see a part of him in a few panels.
In the new Arkham Asylum, an increasingly bestial Killer Croc is raging for his dinner. Unseen by the cooks, a vine has drown up out of the sink drain and shot—"SHLOOB"—some sort of spore onto his dinner plate. When he ingests it, Croc starts tripping balls, the words "the wet dark" and "home" repeating themselves in his mind.
He breaks out of his cell, fights his way outside, stomps around town, repeating his need to find the wet dark and repeatedly complaining about how he doesn't fit in with human society. He ultimately hijacks a steam train headed for Louisiana, Batman giving chase in the Batmobile he was using at the time, which was either the Golden Age one with the big Batman head on it, or a new version of it. (Amusingly, at one point Batman climbs onto its roof, his huge cape flaring behind him, and it's clear that there's no way that gigantic cape could ever fit in the little car. In fact, there's a couple of great cape panels in this sequence, two of which feature it spreading out like gigantic batwings.)
Swamp Thing finally makes his entrance on the cover of #522, which is still maybe one of my favorite Swamp Thing images.
Then, on a two-page splash on pages 17 and 18 of the story Swamp Thing finally makes his entrance, his broad, hunched back covered in all manner of flora and fauna, a snake wrapped around his forearm like a bracelet, a frog clinging to his triceps and a pair of turtles begin to clamber up his leg.
Ultimately, Swamp Thing takes Croc into the "custody" of the swamp and The Green, and Batman wanders off, kinda sorta defeated.
Almost every panel of this issue is a little masterpiece, and it's great fun seeing what Jones does with the swamp setting. I don't think his later (or, as it's collected in this book, earlier) stories depict the swamp or the Swamp Thing in quite the same way.
And, of course, I haven't discounted the possibility that I may prefer this art to the later art simply because of nostalgia.
The first of these is described in an unsigned prose piece, detailing how, in 1989, DC commissioned a three-issue, fully painted, prestige format series" by Swamp Thing's creators, Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson.
According to the piece,
"I thought it was going to be one of the best stories I'd ever written," said Wein at a 2015 WonderCon panel. "So I wanted to see it in print, and I kept suggesting: 'Use Kelley Jones. This kid. Kelley Jones! I think he'd be perfect for this. But Paul [Levitz] said, 'If Bernie can't do it, it won't get done.'"
That said, in her foreword, M. Christine Valada mentions that she's still looking for the script for this series. Perhaps if it is far enough along, there's enough for Jones to draw it after all...perhaps presenting it as a silent story, as DC did with "Spring Awakening!"...?
At any rate, after hearing Wein's story on a panel about the project, it's nice to know that the writer did finally get to work on Swamp Thing with Jones.
I mean not just Bigfoot, but Bigfoot and a Yeti, in two separate stories? Presumably off-brand versions of the Creature From The Black Lagoon and C.H.U.D. (WHAT?!). A/the Chupacabra. And...mysterious 19th century American writer Ambrose Bierce...?!
For what it's worth, we have seen Jones draw mummies and an Invisible Man before. He and Moench had Batman and Deadman fight mummies in 1996's Batman #530-532, which featured variant glow-in-the dark covers (in one, you could see a glow-in-the-dark Deadman inside Batman's body, in another you could see the skeletons within the bodies of the mummies). And in 2009-2010, Jones again teamed with Moench for the five-issue miniseries Batman: Unseen, featuring the Dak Knight vs. an invisible man.
