As previously reported, there was much ado about Swamp Thing between the 1982 release of Wes Craven’s film adaptation and its belated 1989 sequel—on the back of that original movie, DC relaunched the comic series, and a year or two into that run, it was given to Alan Moore, John Totleben, Stephen Bissette, Rick Veitch, et. al., who reinvented the character through their journeys into “Sophisticated Suspense.” The opening credits for The Return of Swamp Thing features a montage of comics covers from the entire series run, showcasing striking images by Totleben, Bissette, Richard Corben, and character co-creator Bernie Wrightson, among others—playing over that montage is, of course, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Born on the Bayou”, indicating that the tone of this movie is probably nothing like those comics. Nor is it anything like Wes Craven’s movie, which was sincere to a fault, while, for better or for worse, this doesn’t have a sincere bone in its swamp debris body.
The last time I wrote about something in the orbit of UK comics writer Pat Mills, it was the seventies sharksterpiece Hook Jaw, and he wasn’t even the writer on that (although if you know anything about British comics of that time, you’d know that the editor could still be very, very hands on with the writing)—and there’s still plenty to mine from Mills’ own credited work inside and outside 2000 AD, the comic that he helped define. He has had an incredibly varied career in fifty-plus years, but his genre work specifically has a number of idiosyncrasies that give them a genuinely unique blend of unabashed over-the-top absurdity and thinly-veiled ideology. Comics like ABC Warriors and Nemesis The Warlock are sci-fi action stories that are also heavily anarchist in nature, contemptuous of authority and sympathetic towards the lower classes of society, but also feature morally ambiguous anti-heroes; there is also a strain of Mills’ work based on the conflict between nature and humanity where the story’s sympathies lie almost entirely with nature, as seen in the series Flesh, Shako, and of course, Hook Jaw. To Mills, the true nature of the animal world is sheer brutality, but that’s also what makes it fascinating, and also a fun subject to base comics around.
Mills’ comics also benefit from his close friendship with some of the UK’s best artists, particularly Kevin O’Neill, whose combination of baroque design and cartoon expressiveness/exaggeration makes him perfect for stories about robots and monsters, both subjects that Mills returns to quite frequently. After co-creating ABC Warriors and Nemesis (O’Neill would cede regular art duties on both after a while), the two produced the comic Metalzoic, originally published in 1986 as part of DC Comics’ original graphic novels line and reprinted as a serial in 2000 AD after that (it is currently out of print, as DC apparently nixed a reprint several years ago.) Metalzoic feels like a dedicated vehicle for O’Neill’s knowingly ridiculous design sensibility and Mills’ pet themes about nature (and his general disregard for actual science): here is a story where the machinery created by man is left to fill an ecological void, artificial life taking over for the biological kind in the most direct way possible—and it is very clearly a world that we are supposed to like on some level.
1982 turned out to be one of the most influential years in genre filmmaking, hosting movies that reverberated whether they were an initial box office success or not. In a time when ET, Blade Runner, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, and Poltergeist all premiered within weeks of each other, there was also John Carpenter’s The Thing, a critical and financial failure at the time that nonetheless ushered in a new wave of revisionist monster movies, taking the ideas from the classic creature features of the fifties and revitalizing them with dark humour and special effects that realized or exceeded people’s imaginations. Later that same year you also saw Q -The Winged Serpent, another movie in that vein, but the real kick-off for this trend was Wes Craven’s adaptation of Swamp Thing—and while just as indebted to the classic tropes of the old monster movies as The Thing (and was also a financial disappointment at release, leaving Craven in career doldrums until he started working on something called A Nightmare on Elm Street), it represents a very different sort of revisionist take. While The Thing took the paranoia and unknowable monstrosity of its fifties predecessor (and the short story it’s based on) to its utmost extreme, Swamp Thing is a movie about a tragic accident of science, as many of the classic monsters were, who then becomes a hero, playing into the sympathies of a whole generation who questioned why the Creature From the Black Lagoon and Frankenstein had to die before the movie ended.
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