“It’s raining in Washington tonight.”
With those five words a story began that changed everything we knew about the Swamp Thing.
When you’ve read approximately a gajillion comics, it’s hard to narrow down that one favorite comic. Storylines start flickering across your mind like a possessed card catalogue at a haunted library. It’s hard . . . but not impossible because there’s always going to be that one comic that continues to pull you back, that one story you read and then reread again and again through the decades. Maybe a decent amount of time passes and you haven’t read it in a while, so that old familiar burn you felt upon first reading it has passed. By now you know the story by heart, so you pick it up intending on giving it a quick skim to refresh yourself. Of course, you end up reading it word for word and find it every bit as fulfilling as it was on the first read.
“He’ll be pounding on the glass right about now . . .”
The Swamp Thing has always been an odd character, and his comic stories have always kept one foot just outside of traditional superheroics. Once a man named Alec Holland, an unfortunate explosion and some rare chemicals merged man and vegetation creating a bizarre inhuman hybrid. This curious vegetation man went on to have a number of strange adventures, all the while hoping to find a way to restore the humanity that was lost to him in that explosion.
It’s a familiar story. The history of literature is plagued with monsters that only want to be human once more.
But despite that being the story we believed we were reading . . . that was not the story of the Swamp Thing.
The Saga of the Swamp Thing was one of the better-written titles at the beginning of the ’80s. Under Martin Pasko’s hand, the Swamp Thing was a contemplative creature yearning for a lost humanity. He spoke little and yet affected the world around him in many ways, letting the buried humanity inside the mossy shell guide his actions. Pasko’s run ended with issue 19 of The Saga of the Swamp Thing. A little known British writer named Alan Moore took over writing duties with issue 20. It was a transitional issue, wrapping up plot threads of the previous run while setting up his own storylines.
There was little there to prepare for issue 21.
In “The Anatomy Lesson,” everything we had known about the Swamp Thing was stripped to the root and regrown. After seemingly being shot and killed in the previous issue, the Swamp Thing is now a corpse that has been taken to a lab by a very powerful old man who wants to know the secrets behind the chemicals that turned Alec Holland into the Swamp Thing. An expert is brought in to examine the Swamp Thing’s body. The main character himself is reduced to a secondary role, as the entire story is told through that expert, himself another plant-man: Jason Woodrue, also known as the Floronic Man.
An autopsy follows, where plant-simulacrum versions of actual organs are found in the Swamp Thing’s husk. As he ponders the mystery behind its existence, Woodrue finally realizes the truth.
Unable to grasp the fullness of Woodrue’s discovery, the old man fires Woodrue, intent on continuing the research on his own. This obviously leaves a very bad taste in Woodrue’s mouth. His last act before leaving is to turn off the cryogenics that kept Swamp Thing’s body frozen. But that shouldn’t make any difference, because the Swamp Thing is dead, right?
“. . . you can’t kill a vegetable by shooting it through the head.”
The rest of what happens is a mixture of supposition on the Floronic Man’s behalf from the comfort of his own home as he narrates what he believes will happen, mixed with the actual events that occur as the Swamp Thing awakens. But are they the real events, or are we just shown the Floronic Man’s fantasies? We don’t know for sure. We can’t know.
Here the gloomy mood of the comic thickens, as black panels consume the pages. The book we knew and the character we know are all undergoing a metamorphosis, shucking off the past and changing into something vastly different.
The Swamp Thing is not dead, of course. It was just . . . hibernating. When a new version grows from the old shell, it is wet, raw, and green; this is a Swamp Thing unlike any we have seen before.
The old man meets this new version of the Swamp Thing in his office. The creature is hunched over Woodrue’s file, which details the new truths learned about Alec Holland . . . or at least a creature that believes himself to be Alec Holland. But now the Swamp Thing knows the truth about himself, and it has driven him just a little insane.
The old man asks he creature standing before him if he’s read the file. The old man knows if the creature has read the file, the creature now knows exactly what he is. The Swamp Thing utters the only words he says in the entire book, in his signature stilted, slow speech:
“Yes. I . . . have . . . read . . . the . . . file.”
He knows the truth. It knows the truth.
“He isn’t Alec Holland
He never will be Alec Holland
He never was Alec Holland
He’s just a ghost.
A ghost dressed in weeds.”
Imagine learning that everything you’ve hoped and believed will never happen. There will be no return to humanity, because there is no humanity to return to.
He was a ghost dressed in weeds.
Those words resonate through the entire book, and upend everything we’ve believed about all the adventures we’ve read with the Swamp Thing before. The word “reinvention” get tossed around all the time with comic characters, but this time the word wasn’t hollow. Alan Moore’s run on the Swamp Thing was career-making and altered the way comic books were perceived, but this one issue was the catalyst for all of it. The book is laid out masterfully, with the nonstop buildup of tension and horror superbly rendered by sparse, evocative imagery.
Due to moving to a new area and having to stop collecting comics for a brief transitional period, I stopped my collection of Saga of the Swamp Thing at issue 19, one issue before Alan Moore took over, so I unfortunately didn’t read this when it first came out. Number 21 came out in November of 1983, but my first time reading it was in the digest size The Best of DC :Year’s Best Comics and stories a full two years after it had hit the newsstands. That collection had issues from Green Lantern, Action Comics, Sgt. Rock, and others, but “The Anatomy Lesson” is the one that kept dragging me back again and again, almost against my will. I’d read the slow, giallo phrasing of the words, and I’d linger over the dark and disgusting images of the brand new Swamp Thing. It dug itself into my not-yet-10-year-old brain and plucked at my nervous system.
I’ve since bought a copy of the original comic, and if I had to pick just one, it would have to be my favorite single issue of any comic.