Alan Moore Month: A Little Moore Love Part One

So we're all writing about Alan Moore, here on his birth month, eh? Well, I wanna play too!

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I'll be writing about individual Moore comics that have had the biggest impact on me, beginning with...

Saga of the Swamp Thing #24 (cover date May 1984)
Confession time: I believe (although my memory is spotty) that this is the first Alan Moore comic that I ever read. I certainly don't recall reading any before this. Now, I had always liked Swamp Thing-- bought the original Wein/Wrightson and Michelinie/Redondo 70s issues right off the spinner racks, and while I was happy to see the character get his own book back in the early '80s, the creative team of Martin Pasko and Tom Yeates (who had done, and would go on to do, work I liked a lot) didn't really click as well as I hoped. By issue #15, I had stopped buying, and although I noticed they had changed the writer and artists by #20, I really didn't know who the heck this Alan Moore guy was, or Bissette and Totleben either for that matter, and for all I knew here was another case of replacing a creative team with new, unproven and green talent-- and it would only be a matter of time before the inevitable cancellation. As it turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong. One afternoon, and I still recall this vividly, I was standing in a nearby convenience store, checking out the comics rack (back when convenience stores still HAD comics racks), and happened to glance at the cover of Saga #24, noticing that depicted thereon were members of the Justice League-- but with a difference. Superman, Green Lantern and Co. were standing (in Hawkman's case, hovering in mid air) all around their monitor screen in an otherwise dark satellite, their figures and faces half obscured by darkness, watching Swampy in conflict with a strange looking fellow with leafy Chia-pet style "hair," brown wood-hued skin, and oh yeah- a chain saw. I was intrigued, certainly by the tableau on the screen, but also by Steve Bissette and Tom Yeates' decision to depict the League in this fashion. Paging through it, I was a bit surprised to see that the badguy was Jason Woodrue, The "Fluoronic Man"-- but a radically different one from the fella I was familiar with from the old Gardner Fox/Gil Kane Atom series that I had been collecting at the time. Hooked, I plunked down my three bits, and settled in at home to see what was going on.

Apparently, I saw, this was the conclusion of what (as it turned out) was a four-part story arc, which just happened to contain, two issues prior, the now-legendary "Anatomy Lesson" in #21. Botany expert Woodrue (who, I'm only now finding out, had transformed himself into the plant-guy in a mid-'70s issue of Flash, of all places) had been hired by Pasko's Sunderland Co. to find out the secret of the creation of the Swamp Thing, and by extension the bio-restorative formula that it was assumed had created the monster. Of course, we all know (as Moore conceived it) that wasn't the case at all, and the end result had left Sunderland dead at Swampy's hands, and the Thing himself in a comatose state. Woodrue had eaten one of Swampy's tubers, and suddenly found himself communicating with the plant world in such intense fashion that it drove him absolutely batshit insane, and caused him to set out to take the planet back for the plant world by killing all the "meat sticks", using his vegetation controlling abilities. Things look dire, and eventually it comes to the attention of the 1980's Justice League, consisting of Superman, Zatanna, Hawkman, Green Arrow, Flash, Wonder Woman, and Firestorm, whose hands, it seems, are tied. A standout scene from this issue involves the League throwing out, and dismissing, plans of action in dealing with the threat. Then, fortunately, Swampy emerges from his comatose state (he was really having a hard time dealing n' all), just in time to save Abigail Arcane (who Woody was menacing, dumb idea) and derail the F.M.'s plans...simply by, after resorting (unsuccessfully) to violence, stopping him dead in his tracks with the gravelly voice of reason: if Woodrue kills all the people, who will replenish the carbon dioxide plants need? Woody has been using his great power for his own blind, selfish purposes, and did not represent the Green after all. Almost 30 years later, this message about the abuse of power still rings true.

After putting this comic down, I was-- well, if not dumbstruck, certainly surprised as I recall...this was something that I didn't quite expect. Not so much the whole scenario and resolution of the Woodrue/Swampy conflict, clever and gratifying as it was, but the radically different way that Moore, Bissette and Totleben depicted the League: as near-omnipotent superbeings, grimly observing events in the Louisiana town down below, all wrapped in shadow and mystery...but exhibiting logical extrapolations of character traits we'd seen before. Superman, for instance, probably the most thoughtful rethinking (and Moore always did pretty well by the Man of Steel, actually)-- calmly calculating Woodrue's motivations, and the effect his heretofore unseen abilities were having on the Earth below. This was NOT the standard Len Wein/Gerry Conway/Dick Dillin/George Perez style. This was new, weird and fresh- and it's hard to get across to those versed in the sour superteam books of today exactly how odd it was. See below, and of course click to see all bigger 'n stuff:

You gotta love Bissette and Totleben's callow-looking Firestorm (who was still a teenager in DC continuity then, I believe), as well as Hawkman's placid fatalistic declaration at the end of the page-- Moore has never had more sympathetic collaborators than those two. Superman's response to Firestorm's idea (which many, lesser writers would probably have gone ahead and used if it had been a situation that came up in, say, Firestorm's own book), injects a little humor into what is an otherwise grim scenario. The equally downbeat finale was strong, as well, with Superman and Green Lantern calmly descending from on high in the wake of Swampy's victory to collect the quite obviously broken (in more ways than one) and disoriented Woodrue:

How often do you see, in superhero comics anyway, these characters that have put themselves through some sort of fantastic transformation, actually ponder and reflect on their state? Yet, here's Moore, giving us Woodrue (as he pathetically attempts to make himself "presentable" for his arriving "guests") fretting about how much his bark has grown out...and it's all the more pitiable (and telling about how shameful his defeat was) that he now wants them to think of him as one of the humans he so despised and sought to destroy just hours earlier.

All of this served notice, to me, anyway, that this Moore fella had a different way of approaching these super-beings than what I had become accustomed to seeing, and marked him, in my book, as a writer to watch.



Coming next: Top 10...but not one of the scenes you might be thinking of.