Swamp Thing: Warrior Poet

Spring came

and everything

in the world

woke up...

My hand shatters

the pool, a hundred

glass beads exploding out between my fingers.

A brief anti-gravity

necklace settlesagainst my throat,

collapsing, dissolving,

warm as it trickles

away...

Below the water the

sudden cold frottage

of fish skin, slick and

silver against my instep...

It twists,

flickers,

disappears.

The bubbles

rise...

The

threadlights,

a blazing cat's

cradle inside me, inside him...

Where we touch, the fibers merge

and intertangle

Okay, 8 pages of this makes for classic comics? Maybe this is the sort of thing some people are into, but I don't care for a car-wreck cacophony of words that are supposed to express a feeling of connection that can't really be described in words.

For the uninitiated, this comes at a point in Swamp Thing when Swamp Thing and his girlfriend discuss the fact that they can't have sex. So then Swamp Thing grows this fruit out of himself, which his girlfriend eats. THEN, she spends the next eight pages tripping balls and describing this crazy cosmic connection they are having. The art is very bizarre and something you would expect in the background of a KMFDM concert.

To me, it all feels very loose, very uncontrolled. It's hard to write about a few things, especially being drunk, being high, and having sex. A lot of people use that as an excuse to write nonsensically, saying that they are trying to use their words to create a feeling of confusion in the reader. But I call bullshit on that. Marilynne Robinson said, "Freedom is the illusion created by control" or something to that effect. I think that's very true. I don't believe that you could write well about being on shrooms while you are on shrooms, just like I think it's tough to write about being drunk while you're drunk. Or at least it's difficult to do so in a compelling way that helps a reader understand what's going on without repulsing them.

When you write this way, you are making your reader do all the work. Rather than having a dialogue, you are making them slog through a one-way conversation where they are doing most of the talking. I hate that.

Swamp Thing didn't really do much for me. It mostly reminded me of the worst issues of Sandman, the ones where you didn't really know what the fuck was going on, waited until the end for a payoff, then just decided to move on because it doesn't really matter anyway.

There are some really novel things going on in parts of Swamp Thing. The idea of a guy who has his essence separated from his physical form is interesting, but I would say that revisiting the idea for 8 issues gets a little old. Sure, if I were reborn as a plant man, it would take me more than a year to get over it. But maybe he should learn to jerk off with plant powers before getting with a lady. Walk before you can run, plant man.