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| SWAMP THING No. 40, May 2015 |
As encouragements
to cause a comic book collector to make an impulse buy go, the Jesus Saiz front
page illustration to the fortieth and final issue of “Swamp Thing” ‘The New
52’ really does ‘tick all the boxes’. It is a tremendous piece of artwork by the
“DC Comics” penciller and inker, which portrays all of the Avatars of the past,
even those from Prehistoric times, grimly marching alongside the current
incarnation of Len Wein and Berni Wrightson’s co-creation. Unfortunately though the
hopes for the enthralling read such an impressive piece of cover art creates in
the mind’s eye are disappointingly dashed, once the first few pages of
Charles Soule’s writing have been digested and the elemental entity leads his
band of followers out from the watery depths of the Green back to our World.
Admittedly without a cumbersome ‘foreword’ at least providing the reader with a
brief summary of past events, picking up the story during the last instalment
of such a long-running series is always going to be a tough ask. But actually
the New York Times best-selling author manages to do a reasonably good job of
‘naturally’ bringing everyone ‘up to speed’ as Swamp Thing is forced to brief
his former selves as to what has previously occurred in order to convince some
of them to accompany him in the grand battle against the mechanical Rithm.
Surprisingly
it is the American attorney’s haphazard pacing of the climatic confrontation
between vegetation and metal itself which causes this book to become so bitter
an experience. One moment the “muck-encrusted mockery of a man” is telling his
predecessors that they must fly to the North “near the Pole” in order to face
the Machine Queen, and then a turn of the page later the reader is faced with a
double-splash in the Gobi Desert as the Green’s army charges into that of both the
Machine Kingdom and the Rot? Worse there is little in the way of explanatory
dialogue provided by the characters concerned for the remainder of the comic,
just a lot of flowery poetic prose, which is delivered almost as if it were a
soliloquy.
The plot also abruptly halts mid-way through the battle, as Swamp
Thing, close to being overpowered by a horde of robots, is suddenly and bizarrely sent crashing through the window of a library in Philadelphia? Besides this turn of
events allowing the humanoid plant to become composed entirely of written
pages, and the story be progressed by way of a double-page spread consisting of plain text,
it isn’t really clear what is going on.
Yet somehow “the Swamp Thing,
strengthened by his strange sojourn”, is suddenly transported back to “the
battle in the desert against the forces of the Rithm”, allowing Soule to then
narrate the briefest and hastiest of conclusions for the fight… as well as the
purification of the Rot’s poison from the Grove.
Incomprehensibly, the
material’s madness does not end there as having defeated and dismantled the
Machine Queen, Alec Holland leaves the remainder of the Rithm’s essence
contained within a small robot cat and simply plugs it into a shed wall socket
before departing for one hundred years of solitude…
Equally as confounding is a
similar departure in quality regarding the artwork of Saiz, who’s standard of
pencilling seems to noticeably drop, along with the writing, as soon as the
battle starts. Indeed by the time Swamp Thing has inexplicably been whisked
away to the Paper Kingdom mid-fight, the artist’s panels have dishearteningly
become little more than a pale shadow of the wonderfully rich and detailed drawing style found on the magazine’s attractively illustrated front cover.
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| Writer: Charles Soule, Penciller: Jesus Saiz, and Inks: Jesus Saiz with Javi Pina |
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