ciaraldi@rochester.UUCP (Mike Ciaraldi) (11/07/83)
From: Mike Ciaraldi <ciaraldi> I don't know about you, but I like Alan Moore as the new writer of Swamp Thing. He did a good job on several strips in "Warrior", the British black and white mag (also recommended). His first effort (#20) was about average, but the new issue makes a major change iin Swampy's life (so to speak). The whole issue is narrated by Jason Woodrue a.k.a. PlantMan and The Floronic Man, who has been hired to dissect Swampy and see what makes him tick. The answer is--NOTHING. The internal organs look something like heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, etc., but none of them actually work. His conclusion: (in Woodrue's wordds) "Alec Holland is already dead. His body goes into the swamp along with the formula that it is saturated with. And once there...it decomposes. A patch of swampland like that would be teeming with micro-organisms. It wouldn't take long, General. But what about the plants in the swamp? The plants that have been altered by the bio-restorrative formula? The plants whose hungry root systems are busily ingesting the mortal remains of Alec Holland? Those palnts eat him. They eat him as if he were a planarian worm, or a cannibal, or a wise man, or a genius on rye! They eat him...and they become infected by a powerful consciousness that does not realize it is no longer alive! ... It remembers having bones, and so it builds itself a skeleton of wood. It remembers having muscles and constructs muscles from supple plant fibers ... You see, we were wrong, General. We thought that the Swamp Thing was Alec Holland, somehow transformed into a plant. it wasn't. It was a plant that thought it was Alec Holland!" Neat idea, and one that expalins a lot, but it flatly contradicts the Gerry-Conway scripted stories wheere Swampy changes back to Holland, and later back to Swampy again. I also wonder whether it explains Swamp Thing's intelligence, which Moore had used the issue before. Comments: The Conway tales were being ignored anyway, they admitted that from issue #1. Moore did a similar (in spirit, anyway) revision of Marvelman in Warrior #12, revealing that most of his life and adventures had really been hallucibinations induced by the governmnment. Moore's grasp of scientific theory is probably well-illustrated by his reference earlier in ST #21 to a computerized alarm system as "siliicone sentries". That's SILICONE, not SILICON. Oh well. Speaking of ignoring Gerry Conway (probably a good idea, anyway), I hear that Jack Kirby is coming back to DC to finish up his Fourth World series. They will reprint the original trilogy (Mr. miracle, New Gods, Forever People, but not Jimmy Olsen), then Kirby will write and draw new issues that take up where the originals leave off. The other issues whivhich came out in the late '70's, scripted by Conway and Levitz, I seem to remember, will be ignored. Now all those people who read that "The Pact" was the greatest comics story ever printed (as some polls show) will have a chance to read it for themselves. Mike Ciaraldi ciaraldi@rochester