Swamp Thing, Vol. 2: Love and Death

My reading through Alan Moore's oeuvre comes, ironically enough, with one of his earliest North American works, and one of the ones he's best known for. I'm actually surprised that it took me this long to get to reading it, due to how influential it is compared to a lot of his other work - it's been argued that without Swamp Thing, Vertigo Comics would never have coalesced, which I think would have had a huge impact on how comics are formatted and marketed today (especially regarding the now-routine collection of comics into trade collections) as well as the types of stories being told. Reading this volume it's easy to spot how some of my favourite Vertigo series were influenced by it, like Jamie Delano's Animal Man run (which, criminally, remains uncollected) and Gaiman's Sandman (I had no idea that making Cain and Abel part of The Dreaming predated Gaiman).

One of the things that I've always liked about Moore's work is that it's very personal, and you can often see him using the story he's telling as a vehicle of self-discovery, like he's trying to figure out his attitude towards something by telling a fantasy story with it. I got that feeling with this book – Swamp Thing is a vessel for him to study the mind-body relationship, and what part of a person is truly ‘them'. Because of the nature of this as a series, rather than a single GN, he's not quite finished figuring that out, but it's already being taken in some interesting directions.

In terms of story, we get something that was unique at the time but now seems like standard Vertigo, if such a thing exists; Swamp Thing journeys to Hell to rescue the soul of the woman he loves, after her demented uncle condemned her there, meeting the likes of Etrigan, the Phantom Stranger, and Deadman along the way. After his eventual rescue of her, they explore what exactly their relationship can be, given that he's not technically human but a sentient plant. This exploration includes a fascinating scene involving hallucinogenic yams, and from there we lead into the next GN in the series.

One of the pleasant surprises here is that, given how much Moore is (rightfully) associated with long-form comics, the story I enjoyed most was the standalone “Pog”, which is a blend of Swamp Thing, Walt Kelly, and A Clockwork Orange. It's a 22-page short story, told between two rather heady storylines, that is bizarre, simple, and moving in a beautiful way that serves to sharpen the emotional impact of the stories that surround it.