The Saga of the Swamp Thing was one of a very few non-superhero books published by DC, the only remaining horror comic in its line-up (the venerable House of Mystery had been cancelled after 321 issues in October 1983). There had been horror comics since at least the fifties, when EC Comics set the standard for short tales with a nasty twist. A moral panic about the role of comics in inspiring juvenile delinquency had led to the introduction of the Comics Code Authority (CCA) in 1954. This saw the comics industry self-regulating by agreeing to abide by a draconian set of guidelines. Even after the Code was revised in 1971 to relax many of the restrictions it still decreed, among many other things:
1. No comic magazine should use the word ‘horror’ or ‘terror’ in the title …
2. All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted.
3. All lurid, unsavoury, gruesome illustration shall be eliminated.
…
5. Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead or torture shall not be used. Vampires, ghouls and werewolves shall be permitted to be used when handled in the classic tradition such as Frankenstein, Dracula and other high-calibre literary works written by Edgar Allen Poe, Saki (H.H. Munro), Conan Doyle and other respected authors whose works are read in schools throughout the world.
Although the code would be revised again in 1989, these were the standards a horror comic published in 1984 still had to follow. The production of horror comics continued, but under the aegis of the CCA the genre had been neutered and only ever traded in the same sort of tame trick-or-treat imagery as Scooby Doo.
It so happened that Alan Moore would have been perfectly suited to write EC-style stories. Thanks to his long interest in comics, he was very familiar with the original material. When Steve Moore came up with the Future Shocks format for 2000AD, it had owed a clear debt to those old EC stories, and Alan had mastered the form. There’s no indication, though, that Len Wein even knew about that part of Alan Moore’s CV. What interested him was Moore’s skilful revamping and reinvention of characters like Marvelman and Captain Britain. Wein sent Moore a set of recent Swamp Thing issues, and Moore drew up a fifteen-page document explaining what he thought the problems with the character were and how they might be addressed.
Moore decided that the key was to make it work as a ‘horror comic’ fit for the early eighties. There is no evidence he was an avid fan of the horror genre at the time, although he had read Dennis Wheatley and H.P. Lovecraft as a teenager. Steve Moore was however an aficionado, and a contributor to the Dez Skinn-edited House of Hammer, which had been running (under a number of variant titles and two publishers) since 1976. That magazine featured comic strips by artists like John Bolton and Brian Bolland, which might have piqued Alan’s interest. He would have been aware that in the late seventies a new style of horror novel had emerged, exemplified by the work of writers like Stephen King, Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell. Nor was the trend just a literary movement; in interviews, Moore contrasted the tame ‘horror comics’ of the time with movies like Alien, Poltergeist and John Carpenter’s The Thing – ‘I’m very conscious that we’re competing for kids’ money with video, with films, and with Stephen King books – not with Tomb of Dracula or Werewolf by Night.’ As with his Warrior work, the key was to ground the story in reality. It was a lesson learned from King, whose books had all the shocks and twists the genre demanded, located in a defamiliarised small-town America:
We’re going to try and actually focus upon the reality of American horror and see if we’ve got some good material there to turn horror comics out of … I tend to think that the horror that existed in the forties with the Universal films, it’s played out, it’s a different audience now. I mean what frightens people these days is not the idea of a werewolf jumping out at them, it’s the idea of a nuclear war or any of the sort of things that we have coursing through our society at the moment. I think that to really frighten people, you have to somehow ground the horror in their own experience, things that they’re frightened of.
Moore felt it was important to return Swamp Thing to his swamp, and took pains to emphasise the setting, although he never visited Louisiana and his method of establishing a sense of location was to buy maps and guidebooks. Someone sent him a copy of a phone directory from the state so that the names in the stories sounded local.
His artists were to be Stephen Bissette and John Totleben, two friends who had joined the book shortly before Moore, with #16 (August 1983). Swamp Thing had long been Totleben’s ‘all-time favourite comic book character’, but neither artist was keen on the direction the previous writer, Marty Pasko, had taken (Pasko later reported that he had been annoyed to receive story suggestions from them). The artists were fans of Warrior, and delighted to learn Moore would be their new writer. He sent them a four-page letter outlining his plans and inviting their contributions. Straight away, it was clear that writer and artists were on the same wavelength. Unlike Moore, Bissette was an avid horror fan and keen to make the book genuinely scary. They all agreed that the protagonist had to change his appearance. Swamp Thing had been depicted merely as a large, hunched man with green skin and some roots that looked like the veins of bulging muscles. He was redesigned to emphasise, particularly in close up, that he was a mass of moss, mud and living plants, with leaves, twigs, buds, roots, shoots and even flowers protruding from him. Bissette and Totleben found that Moore would eagerly adopt their ideas for individual visual sequences or character designs, while he had a strong sense of the ‘whole network’, the direction of the running stories.
Moore faced the same problem he had dealt with when taking over Captain Britain: he had been handed an existing series – not just one with a ‘dopey premise’, but with nineteen previous issues of accumulated story and supporting cast that he was simply not interested in. He solved it the same way: with a swift cull of the characters he didn’t think were working … and, as with Captain Britain, that included the protagonist. Alan Moore’s first issue of The Saga of the Swamp Thing ends with Swamp Thing shot through the head and killed.
Moore’s vision for the series really kicks in with #21, The Anatomy Lesson (February 1984). An autopsy is performed on Swamp Thing, during which the very idea that a human can be ‘turned into a plant’ is mocked as scientifically illiterate. Swamp Thing’s ‘brain’ and ‘lungs’ and so on are functionally useless vegetable structures that only physically resemble human organs. The pathologist deduces that this wasn’t Alec Holland’s body, that the man had died in the swamp, his memories somehow being imprinted on the plant life there. While it may seem like an obscure or minor change, the entire premise of the series to that point had been that Holland was on a quest to convert himself back to flesh and blood. Now it transpired that Swamp Thing had never been Alec Holland. If – it’s a big if – Swamp Thing really is ‘Hamlet covered in snot’, then the equivalent would be for Act Two to end with Old Hamlet showing up alive and well and wondering why his son is moping around so much. The doctor’s second conclusion is a punchline delivered with perfect timing: ‘You can’t kill a vegetable by shooting it in the head’. Swamp Thing revives, learns its true nature and, in an inhuman rage, kills the man who captured it. As Warren Ellis, then an eager regular reader of Warrior, soon to be an acclaimed British writer of American comics, would put it:
This story was the first hand grenade thrown by what you might call the British sensibility in American comics. In using the surgeon’s monologue as narration, it avoids all the purple prose that otherwise characterises much of the early British work in American comics (including some of Alan’s own). Miracleman predates it, but this was the first time a wide audience in modern comics had been shown a character they knew well, and told that everything they knew was wrong. Now, it’s a cliché. Then, it was explosive.
Structurally, it’s untouchable. Perfectly paced, a complete short story, powered by hate and Moore’s sudden grasp of the
possibility in the 24-page form. As a British writer, he’d been restricted to the 6 to 8-page form before now. It was like seeing a clever piccolo player suddenly get access to an orchestra.
Horror fans would gradually learn about Moore’s work on Swamp Thing, and he would manage the virtually unheard-of task of persuading older readers who were fresh to comics to buy a monthly ongoing series. Early on, though, Moore understood he needed to entice existing comics fans. He made a calculated attempt to locate the series in the wider DC Universe. An early story showed the Justice League of America – the team that includes all DC’s big names like Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Arrow – watching helplessly as the plant life of the Earth rebels, then demonstrating how Swamp Thing can fight that threat in a way that Superman and Green Lantern can’t. His stories were set in the same fictional space as all the DC superhero comics, but would be covering different territory. That point made, Moore would bring in as guest stars a large number of existing DC ‘supernatural’ characters, like the Demon, the Spectre, Dr Fate, Zatara and the Phantom Stranger. Some were well-known and were appearing in other comics at the time, like the magician Zatanna, a member of the Justice League; others, such as the minor demons Abnegazar, Rath and Ghast, were obscure to all but the most obsessive fan. Moore set about integrating the disparate characters, created over six decades by many different writers and artists, into a broadly consistent narrative framework.
Editors at DC were astonished by what Moore, Bissette and Totleben had managed to make out of such unpromising material. An editorial that ran across all DC comics in late 1984, ‘Spotlight on … Swamp Thing’, declared that ‘if any book could be called a sleeper or, in this case, a buried treasure, it’s The Saga of the Swamp Thing’. Bissette talked about the nature of the support DC were giving them: ‘Being more positive about the work. Letting Alan, John and me have this exchange of energy and letting it pretty much go. We’re free to work with each other and work these things out, and we’re pretty much trusted with what we’re doing. Plus, they’re putting the PR machine behind us now. We’re going to be doing some ads. They’re doing a new DC Sampler this year, that free comic with just double page ads for all their characters, and they gave us the centre spread which is a pretty choice position. So they’re really starting to showcase Swamp Thing.’ Another piece of evidence that the title was starting to make waves was that Bissette made those comments in The Comics Journal #93 (September 1984), the ‘Swamp Thing Issue!’ with a painted cover by himself and Totleben, and long interviews with the team. By the end of 1984, the efforts of the new team had led to a sales increase of about 50 per cent.
Len Wein met Moore when he visited England in early 1984. Wein was soon to move on, though, and Moore gained a new editor, Karen Berger, from #25 (June 1984). If anything, this proved to be an even more fruitful partnership. To Moore’s eternal delight, Berger defended his corner when Swamp Thing #29 (October 1984) fell foul of the CCA. As he explained when interviewed in 1986 by a young journalist called Neil Gaiman:
For anyone who doesn’t know what the Comics Code is, back in the Fifties, when America was in the throes of all kinds of witch hunts, a man called Frederick [sic] Wertham produced a book called The Seduction of the Innocents [sic]. He said that disturbed kids he had treated had all read comics at some time or another – he could probably have drawn the same conclusions about milk. He printed panels from comics out of context: one, for example, showed a tight close-up of Batman’s armpit, so it’s just a triangle of darkness – Wertham managed to imply that this was a secret picture of a vulva the artist had put in to titillate his younger readers. Reading Batman must have been an endlessly enriching erotic experience for Wertham … I mean, if you can get that much out of an armpit! Well … As a result of the book, the comic’s publishers imposed a code of practice on themselves.
Moore’s generation of fans grew up regarding Frederic Wertham as the comics industry’s equivalent of Joe McCarthy and the Comics Code Authority as akin to the Hollywood Blacklist. Seduction of the Innocent had roughly the same connotations as Mein Kampf. This is not an exaggeration: comics historian Mark Evanier has described Wertham as ‘the Josef Mengele of funnybooks’; comics publisher Cat Yronwode claimed ‘probably the single individual most responsible for causing comic books to be so reviled in America is our good friend and nemesis Dr Fredric Wertham … We hate him, despise him … he and he alone virtually brought about the collapse of the comic book industry during the 1950s.’ The normally level-headed comics scholar Scott McCloud depicts Wertham as an almost demonic, bookburning figure (see right).
The spectre of a return to those dark days hung over the industry for decades, along with the nagging fear that any attempt to produce a comic an adult might be interested in would somehow fall foul of authority.
There are huge problems with this version of events, particularly with the depiction of Wertham, a non-practising Jew who had fled Nazi Germany and who was ahead of his time in raising issues like media depictions of the female body and racial stereotyping. An article he wrote criticising segregation in American schools was cited in Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 landmark case that found the practice unconstitutional. He was no foam-mouthed anti-comics zealot: his last book, The World of Fanzines (1973) praised the imagination and expertise of fandom, seeing the creativity and active engagement of the participants as a model for young people.
That said, there’s clearly some truth in the ‘standard account’ of the Seduction of the Innocent affair. The whole subject of censorship is complex and eternally sensitive, but we can generalise that freedom of speech is a good thing and that the urge to ban books is a bad thing. There was a moral panic in the mid-fifties around comic books and juvenile delinquency, and at its heart was an absurd confusion of correlation and causation: most teenage hoodlums had indeed read comics as children, but only because at the time 90 per cent of all children did. Articles by Wertham reached huge general audiences in Reader’s Digest, Collier’s and Ladies’ Home Journal. There were two Senate Sub-committee hearings run by Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver, an ambitious politician looking to pick opportunistic fights on ‘values’ issues. The Comics Code was established as a result and it did become all but impossible to sell crime or horror comics.
There were those in the comics industry who asserted that the Comics Code Authority stifled the industry’s creativity and it was therefore the prime reason the medium remained in a state of arrested adolescence. This reeks a little of scapegoating though. The CCA was not a vast government agency: in the early eighties it consisted of a man called J. Dudley Waldner and his wife. With hundreds of comics published every month, they could not carefully scrutinise every word and line. As Dick Giordano, vice-president of DC Comics, explained in 1987: ‘The two of them read the same things differently, because there are no real standards. It’s basically how they feel on that given day. So, for example, and this is what caused us to take Swamp Thing from the Code, one part of a two-part story that had bodies in it and flies flying around in it was approved, the second part of the two-part story which had the same elements in it was disapproved, simply because it had been read by two different people.’
What tipped them off was this double spread at the end of The Saga of Swamp Thing #29:
Once alerted, they went back and read the issue more carefully. The zombies in question were moving because their insides were masses of insects, which is pretty unpleasant. The real problem, though, was that the story involves the female lead, Abby Cable, learning that her husband Matt has been possessed by the spirit of the series’ arch-villain, Arcane. A casual glance at the comic would lead the reader to think that Abby was traumatised by that simple fact. A more careful reading would reveal that Arcane is Abby’s uncle, that Abby and Matt have recently slept together, and so the story is about a woman suffering a sexually abusive, incestuous relationship.
DC – initially in the form of Berger, then her boss Giordano – stood by the story
, and took the almost unprecedented step of publishing it without Code approval. Swamp Thing #29 appeared in comic shops and on news-stands alongside the other DC titles. When asked how he felt about that, Moore savoured his victory, answering, ‘Well, given the insufferable size of my ego, what do you think I think of it? It’s something that gives me immense pleasure and an overwhelming feeling of smugness every time it crosses my mind.’
From #31, the decision was made to publish The Saga of the Swamp Thing without Code approval. Moore, Bissette and Totleben didn’t look back. The series became a venue for crawling body horror and disturbing images, yoked to a political consciousness that, while mostly shared by Bissette and Totleben, was distinctly Alan Moore’s worldview. Swamp Thing became a champion of environmentalism, but that is a description that sells the content short. Moore and his artists did not adopt a simplistic approach to the material: it was difficult, personal work. As Douglas Rushkoff put it,
Swamp Thing was an ideal conduit for Moore’s memes … Swamp Thing is totally dependent on the condition of his environment, but maybe, as the comic implies, so are the rest of us who are just as dependent on the plant kingdom for food, air and a balanced biosphere. The psychedelic agenda is presented in equally bold strokes. Many psychedelic users believe that the drugs function by giving human beings access to ‘plant consciousness’ … in Alan Moore’s hands Swamp Thing became a media virus to promote this pro-psychedelic, pro-plant kingdom agenda.
Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore Page 18