Culture is a series of wheels upon which to be broken.
Some of the wheels (like school and the workplace) are explicit in both their acts of domination and the quid pro quo that invites supplication in the first place: Accept these alterations, receive these benefits. Other wheels are more subtle and implicit in their demands… they do not so much request submission as present you with a set of potential pleasures and leave you to do the breaking in your own time. Most cultural product exists within this latter category: Nobody’s forcing you to sit through the plays of Samuel Beckett or the films of Tarkovsky but loads of people have done so and they seemed to get something out of it sooooooo…. maybe you might want to take another run at them?
Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, like most canonical works, is initially quite inaccessible. Moore doesn’t really do the traditional hero thing and quite a few issues are thin on conventional narrative structure and so nothing you will have read or experienced is likely to have helped you acquire the skills required to parse the ideas that Moore is trying to communicate. Like abstract art, contemporary music, and the dank memes of Zoomer culture, you’re going to have to break yourself on this wheel before you gain access to the benefits that come from fitting it to your cart.
The story says that Moore was given Swamp Thing when he first started writing for American comics. Inspired by matinee pulps and born of an age before comic book codes, nobody expected very much of Swamp Thing until Moore took over the writing, blew up the plot, and turned it into a stone cold classic. Without Swamp Thing there would have been no Hellblazer, no Lucifer, and no Sandman. Without Swamp Thing, American comics and literary fantasy would most likely have passed as ships in the night and mainstream comics would probably have remained the kind of bleak cultural wasteland that Marvel and Disney are currently forcing down the throats of the cinema-going public.
Swamp Thing is a work of literary fantasy in that it is fuelled by the recognition that our world is made from stories and that exerting control over these stories is an act of ontological sabbotage so profound that it borders on the downright magical.
Continue reading “On Swamp Thing”