El: LWiA 4.2: Morrison/Millar Swamp Thing (Patreon)

The end of the chapter, following straight from Aztek. I'm out of town this weekend, but I'll hopefully sit down with Skrull Kill Krew come Tuesday or so, and I expect it to be pretty fast.

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In terms of the War, however, there is one Morrison/Millar project that plainly stands above the rest in importance: their run on Swamp Thing. Morrison and Millar disagree on precisely how this came about. As Millar tells it, “Grant, very generously, just came on board for the first four issues to make sure that DC selected me above anyone else pitching for the gig.” Morrison, however, claims that “they asked me to write the book but I said ‘Let’s get Mark in, let’s give him a job.’” What’s agreed in both of these accounts is that Morrison’s role was transitional—they would co-write the first arc with Millar before Millar took over the book for what would turn out to be the final twenty-seven issues of its run. But even this point has a significant difference of opinion, with Morrison asserting that they “consulted with [Millar] on the stories” for his solo run. This is certainly at all plausible—the arc’s structure of having Swamp Thing become the elemental not only of the Green but of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire as well certainly feels like something a practiced magus would come up with. Equally, it’s not as though magic has a monopoly on the classical elements.

What is perhaps most interesting is the way in which that initial four issue arc pulls against itself. On a macro level, its broad aesthetic goal is consistent. As Morrison put it in an interview hyping the run, they and Millar sought to pen an arc that “strips all the baggage away and returns Swamp Thing to his origins as a monster,” arguing that “everything since Alan Moore’s run has been barnacles on his yacht, so we scraped off the barnacles and then torpedoed the boat.” And the arc certainly accomplishes that. But on an issue by issue level things are far more uncertain. Morrison has described their writing process with Millar as beginning with the two of them getting drunk, Then “we sit there and we work the thing out, do a thumbnail sketch for it. Then we figure out the basics of the dialogue; we work out the plot together; then one or the other of us takes it away and just sends it in.” Within this process it’s generally accepted that Morrison wrote the actual script for Swamp Thing #140 and #142, the first and third installments of the arc, while Millar took the second and fourth. And there are clear differences between the two.

Morison’s opener begins with Alec Holland waking up in Peru from a dream of being Swamp Thing, the implication being that the entire preceding run of 139 issues, stretching back to Marty Pasko’s Saga of the Swamp Thing run, along with the original 70s Wein/Wrightson series, has just been part of a lengthy fever dream. The comic spends most of its page count exploring this seeming status quo; only at the issue’s end does the action move to Louisiana, where Abby Holland is having disturbing visions and, in the final couple of pages, a couple stoners are brutally murdered when a monstrous and bug-infested Swamp Thing bursts out of their joint. It’s a horror book, yes—especially within those final pages. But it’s plainly more interested in bigger ideas. Holland has, apparently, been in Peru researching hallucinogens, and Morrison takes advantage of the topic to give him a lengthy monologue about the wonders of DMT, including Terence McKenna’s hypothesis that the human brain is, as Holland puts it, “waiting for the messages from these plants.”

When Millar takes the reins in Swamp Thing #141, however, there’s a subtle but marked change in tone. It is not that issue #140 is sunshine and roses—the murder of the two stoners is downright mean spirited in its violence and general nastiness. But that’s nothing compared to Millar’s eight page opening sequence, which revisits Gene LaBostrie, the Cajun fisherman served as a viewpoint character for the narration in Moore’s final issue on the title, “Return of the Good Gumbo.” Here, in an issue tellingly called “Bad Gumbo,” LaBostrie and his family are attacked by the bestial wamp Thing, with LaBostrie being violently pummeled to death in the scene’s conclusion. What is particularly striking about this is that when Steve Bissette designed LaBostrie back in 1987 he modeled the character overtly on the writer whose sentimental departure the character was marking, meaning that Millar’s first issue of Swamp Thing ends up devoting a third of its length to seeing Alan Moore violently murdered by Swamp Thing.

The pattern continues over the next two issues. Morrison returns for an issue of high concept horror with Alec Holland aboard the “Soul Train,” a nightmarish train full of tormented spirits conducted by a puppet-like machine of metal and rags. Eventually Odin shows up and helps him realize that he actually is Swamp Thing, only the Green has severed his human consciousness from his body, turning the latter into a monster. It’s an efficient piece of work that ends with a cliffhanger of a fleeing Abby being caught in the desert by Swamp Thing. Millar’s conclusion to the arc, meanwhile, is little more than an issue long fight scene that culminates in Abby rejecting the now reunited Alec/Swamp Thing because, as she puts it, “I don’t belong in a world of monsters, Alec”—a beat that is as unearned as it is just sort of unpleasant and mean-spirited. 

It is perhaps surprising, then, that Millar’s solo run on Swamp Thing is pretty good. Or perhaps not—for all Millar’s manifest problems, being a bad writer isn’t one of them. His run is uneven, to be sure—there’s a surfeit of mysterious super natural characters with a paucity of explanations, and more than one of the arcs are a bit lumpily plotted. But his (or Morrison’s) arc structure presented a number of challenges, and Millar largely rose to them. The rough concept is that Swamp Thing must confront the Parliament of Stones, the Parliament of Waves, the Parliament of Vapors, and the Parliament of Flames to gain their powers—a premise that could easily become repetitive. Instead, however, Millar manages to make each arc feel appreciably different from the others—no small task.

The first arc, unsurprisingly, is the most straightforwardly conventional one, as it has to do the bulk of the heavy lifting to set the larger concept up, and there’s an awful lot of moving parts. It’s the only one to work off of a premise whereby Swamp Thing has straightforward enemies to confront, first a big game hunter named Nelson Strong who’s been hired to take him down, then Sargon the Sorcerer. Both are DC deep cuts—Nelson Strong was a character in a short-lived Adventure Comics feature from the 70s, while Sargon was a golden age character who Alan Moore had killed off during the Crisis on Infinite Earths tie-in of Swamp Thing. The climax, inevitably, sees the defeated Nelson Strong revived as a stone elemental who Swamp Thing has to deal with at the same time as Sargon. It’s a capable imitation of post-Alan Moore Swamp Thing, notable mostly for Millar’s fondness for massive gushes of blood and over the top violence like having Swamp Thing kill Nelson Strong by smashing him with a tram car. 

Things take a swerve, however, with the second arc, which sees Swamp Thing recruited by a young woman who’s, in her account, trapped in her own unfinished book of short stories. (She is, it turns out, actually a water elemental.) The arc sees him moving through six of the stories, each of which are effectively an Elseworlds-style alternate world: a pulp horror world where monsters are common, one where Abby is evil, and one where Swamp Thing’s origin story plays out in the real, mundane world. The arc’s unexpected highlight, however, is the second issue, which sees Swamp Thing visit a fascist earth ruled by Hitler. Millar’s cynical misanthropy is, for once, proves entirely suited to the task before him—he writes fascists as a bunch of pathetic grotesques. Yes, he writes everyone like that, but at least with fascists it makes a reasonable point. And his plot is solid: Hitler’s puppet President of the United States summons the golem after finding the knowledge of how in a book about Kabbalah in the forbidden library, but gets Swamp Thing instead. He asks Swamp Thing to destroy the world, which he views as just in the face of all the horror of a Nazi regime. Swamp Thing declines, and the President allows him to depart this world, but foolishly leaves things so that the actual golem can arise, all too happy to destroy the world. It’s clever, cathartic, and an almost frustrating reminder that Mark Millar can, in fact, deliver the goods.

Millar’s third arc, meanwhile, pivoted to a “swords and sorcery on the streets of Manhattan” setup, while his (and the title’s) conclusion was a big epic that brought back Abby, John Constantine, and the Floronic Man for a story about whether Swamp Thing would destroy the world once he gained the power of all four elements. The climax comes when Constantine and Abby decide at the last second to defect from the vast and complicated plan to prevent Swamp Thing’s apotheosis because, at the end of the day, they trust him, a decision that proves well-founded when the now cosmically aware Swamp Thing decides to spare the world on the grounds that “I cannot erase mankind from the face of the earth when even the worst among them has potential.”

It’s a sweet ending—considerably more of one than Millar’s reputation or, for that matter, past work would have expected. Swamp Thing looks at the worst of humanity—“their holocausts and rape camps, their starving millions and intrinsic cruelty to their fellow man”—all the stuff that you’d expect Millar to highlight. But then he is kind and benevolent. It’s genuinely surprising, given that the writer was still tossing buckets of blood around just an issue before. Perhaps Millar is not the spiteful cynic he can appear, but rather someone who’s torn between the bleakness of his traumatic upbringing and a sense of hope.

But perhaps he’s just hitting old familiar beats. Swamp Thing being tempted by divine power but choosing humanity has been a fundamental theme of the book since Moore revolutionized it. Millar’s resolution is just the ending of Moore’s “Greening of Gotham” arc with some bits of the Crisis on Infinite Earths tie-in mashed in. And this is true of much of his arc. That swords and sorcery arc kicks off with a Conan the Barbarian clone from another dimension drawing his sword to try to fight an eighteen-wheeler and being killed instantly, which would feel considerably cleverer if it weren’t the most iconic moment of the first issue of A Game of You, complete with the Manhattan setting. Even the Parliament of Waves arc is just putting an Elseworlds spin on Moore’s old American Gothic arc, right down to the first issue being based around a fish monster. Most of Millar’s success comes from echoing the borrowed glories of what were, by the time of his run, already decade old comics. Where his own vision has been clear, it’s generally been the kind of vicious cynicism that’s been visible in his work since Maniac 5 and Big Dave.

And yet there is, unmistakably, a strand of mercy within this cynicism. One of the longest running subplots in Millar’s run concerns a priest, Father Kelly. His first solo issue opens with a scene in which the priest—described plainly as the cornerstone of his community—is tricked and kidnapped by a demonic magician and trapped in hell. The priest makes a variety of small appearances throughout the run—first he is temporarily allowed out of hell to help Swamp Thing (which, the demon makes clear later, was not an intercession from god as Father Kelly believes but a ploy on the part of hell to worsen his suffering), and then later a resurrected Anton Arcane explains that he’s a good guy now, having been ministered to by Father Kelly in hell. This turn proves a key beat in Swamp Thing’s decision not to destroy the world, which he specifically credits to the fact that even Arcane possesses hope. Father Kelly is an unmistakably Millar creation—a good man who exists only to have absolutely horrible things done to him for no reason. But there is a clear sense of grace to Father Kelly—an investment in the notion of human decency in extremis that cuts against the more uncharitable interpretations of Millar’s style.

But this is a fleeting grace note in Millar’s run. A more comprehensive sense of him is perhaps found in Swamp Thing #165, a standalone fill-in late in his run. He opens the issue with an essay addressing the reader. “I write sick stuff,” he says, quite accurately. “I am a sinner. I can’t help it. I just unzip my mind and it all comes pouring out onto the page. My stories are full of corrupt cops, perverted priests, and positive references to drugs.” This surprisingly cogent self-reflection is the setup to him explaining that he’s going to reform, citing the wonders of Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America and promising an issue that’s “in tune with the ideals of the good men waiting to remove the arch-Communist, Bill Clinton, from the White House.” The issue revisits Chester Williams, the Bryan Talbot-modeled hippie from Moore’s run, in an ostentatious satire. It opens with a party at his house in which he turns on one of his guests for hitting on an eighteen year old, ultimately decking him and proclaiming that he’s going to call the cops on everyone at the party, citing “how many kids die every day injecting Marijuana.” Two pages later Chester’s undergone a career change and is now himself a cop, spending the rest of the issue spouting right-wing rhetoric, including arguing to Swamp Thing that “big business is the backbone of America. Remove it and everything falls apart,” and declaring things like that “many common prejudices are rooted in the inherited, genetic wisdom of our race.” 

It’s plainly satirical, what with the “injecting marijuana” joke and over the top declarations like that “Life is just a seventy-year opportunity to get rich. Money is more important than life ever was. Why do you think there’s tougher laws against bank robbery than murder?” There’s no serious way to read this as anything other than mockery of the political right. And it is, in fact, a riotous delight of an issue, made better by the absolutely gonzo decision to put Curt Swan on art. Swan’s clean and plainly old-fashioned style makes the book tangibly feel conservative, but without actually making any sacrifices to the storytelling since Swan is, in point of fact, still great even just a few months before his death. 

But it’s still an issue that’s trading entirely on shock instead of substance. Sure, Millar is ruthless in his skewering of conservative politics, but his critique is entirely negative—there’s no sense, whether within it or, frankly, elsewhere in his run on an eco-horror book, of Millar having actual affirmative beliefs. Even before one considers Millar’s right-wing turn in his later career, there’s something faintly off and uncomfortable about the issue. It’s hilarious, cheeky, and fun. But in the end, like most of Millar’s career, it gives the sense that his only actual commitment is wanting to mockingly laugh at people. 

And yet this was who Grant Morrison had tied themself to—someone who seemed exclusively to bring out their worst instincts. Morrison is predisposed towards rebellion, yes—a fact that does trap them in Moore’s shadow in key ways. But in Millar they had a creative partner and influence who seemed to pull them towards staying there—to being nothing more than a tittering bad boy. Sure, they had by this point proven themself. But they still weren’t doing the work.