Comics Review: American Flagg!: The Definitive Collection, Volume 1, Howard Chaykin

This review was originally published, with minor copy revisions, in The Comics Journal #299.

With American Flagg!, Howard Chaykin created one of the great adventure-comics series. After a long wait, it's back in print--and it reads better than ever.

Sexy, smart and smashingly well executed, Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! made just about every other adventure comic in the 1980s look like drivel. Originally intended as a futuristic take-off on the TV series Gunsmoke, Chaykin created a satirical pop dystopia that cut to the heart of the Reagan-era zeitgeist. He exaggerated various cultural trends--the emphasis on style over substance, the feeling of information overload in a media-driven culture, the lionizing of ruthless opportunism for its own sake--and took them to hilarious and sometimes chilling extremes. Unfortunately, due to the original publisher’s bankruptcy, the series has been out of print for close to 20 years. But after innumerable delays, the most recent due to the challenges of restoring the detailed art, the first 14 issues have finally been collected in a handsome hardbound volume. (Two trade paperbacks featuring the same material have also been released.) Rereading it, one finds that Flagg! hasn’t dated at all. If anything, it reads better now than it did in 1983 and ‘84.

The story takes place in 2031. Thirty-five years earlier, after a series of domestic and international calamities, the political and business leadership of the United States relocated to a colony on Mars, reconstituting themselves as a political-corporate-media combine called the Plex. They govern what’s left of the United States—both east and west coasts have been devastated—and provide all legitimate broadcast media. The remaining earth-side communities in the U.S. are centered around massive commercial-residential malls, which also serve as the headquarters for the resident Plexus Rangers, the Plex’s law-enforcement wing. Their principal responsibilities are to maintain the peace in the malls and protect the Plex’s remaining agricultural and industrial operations from the impoverished outside populace, many of whom have reorganized themselves into gangs and militias.

The Rangers’ newest recruit is Reuben Flagg, an actor who was drafted after being replaced by CGI technology on his television series. He’s assigned to the Chicago Plexmall, where he serves as a deputy under Chief Ranger Hilton “Hammerhead” Krieger. It’s the first time he’s ever been to Earth, and he’s disgusted by what he finds. The more benign militias have sold broadcast rights to their turf battles—fought with with rifles, howitzers and tanks—in exchange for weapons and money. The more extreme ones will kill themselves and their families rather than be captured after running afoul of the Plex. The most horrifying moment for Flagg comes when he sees a teenage girl murder her brother and commit suicide rather than face arrest. The more affluent mall residents are appalling in their own way. All that seems to matter to them is casual sex, recreational drugs and vegging out on the steady diet of porno, animated cartoons and reality TV broadcast by the Plex. Flagg was brought up with an idealistic view of America by his parents on Mars, but having his blinders torn off leaves him with little choice but to acquiesce. At least the casual sex is fun. However, after Krieger is murdered, Flagg finds himself promoted to Chief Ranger and made the unexpected heir of a pirate TV station Krieger operated. Armed with his new authority and the station’s resources, he vows to do his modest part to undermine the Plex and return America to something more like the country he imagined.

That final, hopeful note notwithstanding, Flagg! sounds almost unbearably grim, but it’s anything but. The darkness of the milieu is leavened by the irreverently witty atmosphere Chaykin provides. Parodies of advertising and the media abound—absurdist catchphrases like “The Geopragmacrats—manifest is the only destiny we acknowledge” echo across the pages. There's also plenty of promo imagery for the various TV shows, including “White Sluts on Dope,” “Firefight—All Night Live!” and “Interspecies Romances.” (“Tonight—a man, a woman… and a duck.”) The news media specializes in fawning over visiting VIPs, crime-scene sensationalism, and laying odds on the various wars that erupt from the whacked-out geopolitical scenarios Chaykin has dreamed up. A healthy share of the dialogue is smartass banter, and Chaykin thankfully doesn’t handle the sex with dead-earnest seriousness. He likes the humor in flirtatious foreplay, and he certainly gives himself plenty of opportunities to indulge in it—Flagg gets laid in almost every episode, with Chaykin often keeping the reader on the scene up until the bodies hit the bed. One character says that life in 2031 is “like a funhouse—without the fun.” One wouldn’t want to live in Flagg’s world, but when it comes to reading about it, sorry, one can’t agree.

Beyond the humor, a reader is also carried along by the dynamism of Chaykin’s storytelling. He plays words and images off each other like no one else. He’ll use a panel as a static tableau for the dialogue, which he breaks up into strings of alternating balloons in an extremely successful rendering of the rhythms of human speech. The dialogue is often used to lead one’s eye across the page to where it joins with an emphatically visual element—examples include a close-up of a character’s face, a full-page action pose, or even a logo, sound-effects banner or some other kind of advertising-style graphics. Chaykin’s pages don’t look like anyone else’s, either. Most cartoonists’ pages, no matter how sophisticated the construction, rarely look like more than collections of panels. Chaykin’s pages often resemble posters, with the panels and other visual elements layered in a way that creates a coherent design whole. He makes everything he puts on a page function both dramatically and decoratively, creating a balance between storytelling and visual flash in which the sum is greater than the parts.

Chaykin’s style, ahead of its time in the 1980s, may have finally found its moment. When Flagg! was first published, a number of people complained that it was too difficult to read. Chaykin was fond of beginning dialogue scenes with the speakers off-panel or buried in the background of a panoramic drawing, and he often mixed the conversations with background chatter from the TV broadcasts. People have since become far more used to multi-tasking in their experience of the media, and the layering of unrelated information in a single space has become so common that it’s now the standard in television news programming. One no longer has to point to Robert Altman movies and their use of overlapping sound to explain what Chaykin is doing; all that’s needed is to turn on cable news.

Chaykin’s influence on other creators is also being recognized. In his introduction to this collection, author Michael Chabon rightly mentions Flagg!’s contribution to cyberpunk style, and he takes care to note how much landmark adventure comics like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen and Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns are indebted to Flagg!’s concepts and tone. If one is making a list, the film RoboCop definitely belongs, as it appropriated a great deal of Chaykin’s satirical vision and flourishes. (The film’s producers apparently agree; they included Chaykin in the film’s acknowledgements.) There’s also Miller and Gibbons’ Martha Washington series, which is unimaginable without Flagg! It features a similar mix of dystopian adventure and political and media satire, with the most conspicuous debt being the character of Martha herself. She’s a dead ringer for Flagg! supporting character Medea Blitz, and despite the superficial differences in their backgrounds, their personalities are virtually the same.

Flagg! falters at times. Its most conspicuous weakness is Chaykin’s handling of the women. Male characters like Flagg and Hammerhead have distinctive personalities from the get-go, but Chaykin can’t manage a memorable female character unless, like Hammerhead’s daughter Mandy and the businesswoman Ester Maria de la Cristo, she’s a manipulative, opportunistic bitch. Chaykin tries to give the women some complexity to counterpoint his cheesecake visual treatment, but he can’t seem to flesh out the outlines. Several female characters, such as Medea Blitz and the Jewish Nazi Titania Weis, behave one way when they’re introduced and another way during later episodes. The shifts are deliberate, but Chaykin can’t reconcile the contrasts. Medea goes from being an incorrigible bad-girl brat to a straight-arrow, take-charge leader, but one can’t see the seeds of the later character in the earlier one or feel the remnants of her old self after she’s changed. Chaykin’s superficial handling of another female character also undermines a significant plot twist in the later episodes. A woman the others thought had left their lives years earlier turns out, thanks to amnesia and a case of mistaken identity, to have been living among them for some time. Chaykin doesn’t seem particularly interested in the character in the early episodes, so he neglects to give the twist much foreshadowing. The other members of the cast show no signs of being even unconsciously aware of the truth, and so, when the revelation comes, it carries no punch.

However, flaws aside, Flagg! is an exhilarating piece of pop entertainment. At the top of his game while working on the feature, Chaykin poured more into it than any reader expected, and sometimes more than they wanted. He left us with a dense, witty rollercoaster ride that carved out its own stylistic niche and then saw the rest of the media to catch up with it years later. The excesses of ‘80s culture that he satirized have only become more pronounced as time has gone by, so his satirical touches, which one might expect to have become dated, seem more relevant than ever. It’s good to finally have American Flagg! back in print, and here’s hoping it takes its rightful place as a comics classic.

Comics Review: The Alack Sinner Stories, José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Looking back on the 1970s generation of European cartoonists, it seems like the stars epitomized their own particular genres of potboiler fiction. Jean Giraud was the Western cartoonist. Vittorio Giardino was the master of espionage thrillers. Historical adventure stories were defined by the work of Hugo Pratt. A couple of genres had competing masters, like Milo Manara and Guido Crepax with erotica, and Giraud (under his Moebius pseudonym) and Philippe Druillet with science-fiction/fantasy.

Hard-boiled crime fiction was the province of the Argentina-born, Europe-based artist-writer team of José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo. (Well, Jacques Tardi, too.) Muñoz and Sampayo’s signature character, Alack Sinner, was a lonely, cynical private detective whose experiences invariably exposed the corruption of the world around him. But Sinner ultimately proved too compelling a character for the crime genre to comfortably contain. The stories never lost their detective-fiction trappings--particularly their noir look and their hard-boiled tone--but they gradually moved away from the mystery-story format in favor of creating a remarkable character study. Seven of the Alack Sinner stories have been published in English--the first four in sequence, and three others from various points in the feature’s run. (Sinner is also a featured character in Muñoz and Sampayo’s Billie Holiday graphic novel, but the book is not primarily a Sinner story.) Even in this incomplete form, Muñoz and Sampayo’s achievement shines through. The crime genre, famous for its terse superficiality, became the setting for the sort of complex characterization typical of literature. The Alack Sinner stories are an accomplished example of crime fiction in comics, but that's not all they are.

The first two Sinner stories, “The Webster Case” and “The Fillmore Case,” are probably the least interesting. They are most notable for the contrast between them and the strip in its mature phase. The stories are conventional private-eye procedurals. The story elements are familiar: intrigue and decadence among the wealthy, the beautiful young woman to be saved, the sarcastic tough-guy detective hero. “The Fillmore Case” is the more compelling of the two. Muñoz and Sampayo originally conceived Sinner as a private detective in the Sam Spade mold. In “The Fillmore Case,” they begin breaking him away from this hackneyed characterization. The story’s opening sequence, which shows Sinner beginning his day, quietly highlights an alienated, depressed aspect to the character. We see him drag himself out of bed and force himself to make coffee and get cleaned up before heading to his office. The clutter of the apartment is emphasized--the overflowing ashtrays, the piled-up dirty dishes, the newspapers and magazines strewn all over the floor. The scene provides a counterpoint to the depiction of Sinner as an ultra-competent man-of-action. He may be extremely capable on the job, but his personal life is a barely maintained shambles.

It’s with the third story, “Viet Blues,” that Muñoz and Sampayo break free of mystery-story conventions and turn the feature into an exploration of Sinner’s character. It tells of his friendship with John Smith III, a young African-American jazz pianist (and Vietnam veteran) who has gotten on the wrong side of the Harlem mob. Sinner and Smith are contrasting studies in loneliness. Sinner’s man-of-action behavior is revealed as an escapist compulsion. He’s looking for trouble as a way to escape his disappointment with his life, whether it’s breaking up a mugging, telling off his clients, or mixing it up with the mobsters who are targeting Smith. Escapist compulsions dog Smith as well: he’s a heroin addict, he plays music to forget, and he hangs out with a pair of black militants for protection, even though he couldn’t care less about their views or their cause. Sinner acts out to escape; Smith retreats inward, although he finally lands on his feet. The story ends on a disturbing note. It’s pointed out to Sinner that his self-righteousness is borne of an impotent sense of justice. He tries to make things right in modest ways, but he’s doomed to disappointment because he inevitably acquiesces to society’s power structure--one in which the law is used as a weapon. In the story’s view, success only comes from making--and finding fulfillment in--one’s rules for oneself.

“Viet Blues” is also a leap forward in terms of the art. Muñoz’s early style clearly shows him to be among the comic-book heirs of Milton Caniff: rich blacks, detailed deep-space compositions, and loose (although highly knowledgeable) draftsmanship. In “Viet Blues,” he sheds the stiffness of his work in the feature’s first two episodes; almost every panel feels more energetic and intense. Muñoz also shows a greater dramatic range. He handles the violence in a Vietnam flashback with a virtuosity that would make the storied war-adventure cartoonist Joe Kubert envious, but he’s equally at home in the somber, understated pathos of the scene in which John Smith III goes cold turkey on his heroin habit. The Muñoz of “Viet Blues” is not yet the expressionistic master of the Joe’s Bar stories, but he’s a first-rate comics dramatist.

Muñoz’s mature style is on dazzling display in “Talkin’ with Joe,” a story from much later in the feature’s run. Longtime comics fans would probably consider “Talkin’ with Joe” the Alack Sinner origin story, but it is probably best viewed as the story in which the Joe’s Bar and Alack Sinner material converged. We first see Sinner as another denizen of the bar, drinking away his troubles into the night. After closing, the owner sits down with him, and he relates the story of how he became a private detective. It’s nothing suspenseful, much less glamorous. Sinner was a Manhattan beat cop who became so demoralized by the self-righteous thuggery of the police force that he quit in disgust. It’s a portrait of a conscience in crisis; the story’s turning point occurs when Sinner has to decide whether to go along with the department’s brutality after his sister is attacked by a gang. Muñoz’s visuals are brilliant. His expressionistic rendering of New York gives the reader the city of one’s worst nightmares: a dark, crowded urban swampland of garbage. Every character besides Sinner and those he confides in is a monstrous grotesque. His fellow police officers are like a chorus of jeering gargoyles. The hallucinatory intensity of this milieu is only heightened by the calm in the scenes of Sinner with those he trusts, such as the bar owner and his sister. Alienation and loneliness have never been dramatized so effectively. It’s a piece that fits seamlessly with the character portraits in the Joe’s Bar series.

The masterpiece of the Sinner stories in English is “Memories,” another story from a later point in the series. It begins with Sinner getting up and looking at some pet fish he bought the day before. He ends up thinking back on various times in his life. The memories are all moments of helplessness. Some are mild, such as his teenage self not knowing what to tell his sister when she first gets her period. Others, though, are horrific, like when Fairfax, one of Sinner’s partners on the police force, murders his family in despair. Muñoz and Sampayo use the pet fish to dramatize Sinner’s emotional state. At first, their faces are benign and their markings harmonious. However, the panels featuring them bookend each new flashback, and the fish become gradually more grotesque. By the end, they’re monstrous, and Sinner imagines them as his dead parents, inviting him to join them, presumably through suicide. Muñoz and Sampayo build the story to a fever pitch, and they end it with an apt metaphor for Sinner’s rejection of despair: he flushes the creatures down the toilet. Muñoz’s expressionistic bravura is superbly used as a narrative counterpoint; the images of the fish provide the beat for the melodies of the flashback scenes, and they gradually heighten the story’s pitch as it progresses. Form and content are inseparable here; “Memories” is a story that would be impossible to execute in any medium besides comics.

The strength of “Memories,” “Talkin’ with Joe,” and “Viet Blues” leave a reader eager for more, as well as willing to overlook the clunkers among the rest of the stories translated into English. (“The Fillmore Case” and “The Webster Case” are examples of the feature before it found its voice, while “Life Ain’t a Comic Strip, Baby” and “North Americans” find Muñoz and Sampayo spinning their wheels.) The knowledge that additional stories are out there untranslated is especially frustrating. The Alack Sinner stories have not done well by Fantagraphics Books, their principal English-language publisher. Low sales caused a Sinner reprint series to be cancelled after five issues, and they also presumably derailed plans for a promised trade-paperback translation of the extended Sinner story "Nicaragua." One hopes it was only because the comics market of the late 1980s and early 1990s wasn’t especially amenable to a serial reprinting of the material in magazine format. We’re in the age of the graphic novel now, and a thick book-length collection of the stories would be especially welcome.

The Alack Sinner stories published in English:

• "Memories," Prime Cuts #4, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, August 1987, p. 1-20.
• "Talkin' With Joe," Sinner #1, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, October 1987.
• "The Webster Case," Sinner #2, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, March 1988.
• "The Fillmore Case," Sinner #3, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, May 1988.
• "Viet Blues," Sinner #4, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, September 1989.
• "Life Ain't a Comic Strip, Baby," Sinner #5, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, September 1990.
• "North Americans," RAW, Volume Two, Number Three, New York: Penguin Books, 1991, p. 59-73.

Comics Review: The Joe's Bar Stories, José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo are, rather unfortunately, identified with what most Americans would consider the Heavy Metal generation of European cartooning. Their peers include such talents as Jean “Moebius” Giraud, Guido Crepax, Hugo Pratt, Vittorio Giardino, and others. These cartooning talents didn’t produce work intended for children, but, for the most part, they didn’t stray from such lowbrow genres as westerns, science fiction, or erotica. Their work was a step beyond material like Hergé’s Tintin or René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s Asterix, but no one would think of comparisons to Alberto Moravia, Marguerite Duras, or Michel Simon, either. The principal distinction of their work was the extraordinarily high level of the graphics; one often found the material was considerably more rewarding to look at than to read.

There were a few talents who had greater ambitions than their peers. One goal of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s comics anthology series RAW, published between 1980 and 1992, was to give these artists a context among English-language readers that distinguished them from the Heavy Metal bunch. The European talents featured in RAW included Jacques Tardi, Joost Swarte, and the José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo team. Their graphic abilities matched or exceeded those of the others, and their literary focus was more concerned with the human condition than with adventure or other sensationalist material.

The most accomplished work arguably came from Muñoz & Sampayo, an Argentinian artist-writer team who settled in Europe after fleeing the political unrest in their native country. Muñoz’s artwork synthesized the Expressionist approaches pioneered by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and George Grosz in the first half of the twentieth century. He integrated their techniques with a cinematic storytelling style that made narrative cartooning seem a natural progression from the painters’ work. Every aspect of a character’s inner life was suggested by Muñoz’s rendering, and Sampayo responded by providing stories that took advantage of this. The result was material that bore more resemblance to literary fiction than to pulp or juvenile entertainment. For those looking to break comics out of their lowbrow ghetto, Muñoz & Sampayo’s work pointed a way.

The two never abandoned their roots in pulp. Most of their work was in the crime/detective genre, and they made their name with a series of stories featuring Alack Sinner, a New York City private detective. But one gathers they also wanted to tell stories that couldn’t accommodate the Sinner character or otherwise fit comfortably into a crime-fiction format. They hit upon the idea of using Joe’s Bar, the Sinner character’s after-hours watering hole, as the connective for a series of character studies. The stories, published between 1979 and 1984, maintained the authors’ characteristic hard-boiled edge, but violent sensationalism was never the goal.

The first of the Joe’s Bar stories to see print in English was “Mister Wilcox, Mister Conrad,” which was published in the third issue of RAW, and later reprinted in the Read Yourself RAW collection. The story of a hitman who, in spite of himself, develops a close friendship with a fellow he's been contracted to kill, it's the easiest piece in the series to classify as crime fiction. But Muñoz & Sampayo don't exploit the scenario for melodramatic suspense. The story isn't a march towards a murder; it's about two lonely, middle-aged men and the rapport they discover. The story ends on a note of pathos. One realizes the hitman is so closed off from others that his targets provide his only opportunities for human contact.

Muñoz maintains an understated pace throughout. His panels emphasize characterization over action, and the moments of violence are staged in a detached, matter-of-fact way that deprives them of any visceral charge. The drama of Muñoz's visuals doesn't come from what he shows so much as how he shows it: the stark contrasts of black and white, the lines and shadows that seem gouged out of the characters' faces, and the contrast between the intimacy of the two protagonists and the alienating, almost nightmarish world around them.

Those settings are largely defined by Muñoz's depiction of peripheral characters, who generally resemble the grotesques in George Grosz's work. They're the reason Muñoz is often compared to Grosz, but the two artists' goals couldn't be more different. Grosz's art is misanthropic to the core; it all but drips with contempt for anything and everything that he shows. Muñoz sympathizes with his protagonists; the grotesques are used to render their states of mind through contrast. The reader's sense of the rapport between the main characters in "Mister Wilcox, Mister Conrad" is heightened by the their functioning visually as the eye of the storm in Muñoz's panels. He uses this technique to particularly powerful effect in the other Joe's Bar stories, where it dramatizes the protagonists' sense of isolation.

One sees this on dazzling display in "Fifth Story" and "Pepe, the Architect," which, along with "Rusty Stories" and "Ella," make up the contents of the Joe's Bar trade paperback. "Fifth Story," like "Mister Wilcox, Mister Conrad," uses the grotesque peripheral characters to highlight the rapport between Mike, the teenage protagonist, and his girlfriend. But as Mike's attention shifts from their relationship to his anxiety over the impending death of his father, Muñoz uses his carnival of grotesqueries to highlight Mike's desperation (which finds an outlet in overeating) and feelings that he's all alone in the world. In "Pepe, the Architect," the title character is an illegal immigrant who's fled his native country and is working as a janitor off the books. Muñoz's principal technique powerfully dramatizes the character's paranoia over eventually being arrested and deported. But he's also able to turn the technique inside out, such as the moment when Pepe sees a family on the street and vicariously shares in their happiness. Muñoz's expressionistic rendering can dramatize all the pain of contemporary life, but it can also capture the joys. Even more impressively, Muñoz is able to make it seem all of a piece.

He is occasionally poorly served by his collaborator. Sampayo has a tendency to be overly explicit in his scripting, such as the time he has Pepe think, "...I've got to keep the little sanity I've got left..." His biggest failing is his frequent reliance on hackneyed characters. "Rusty Stories," for example, features a broken-down ex-champion boxer who treats a final, rigged fight as his last chance for glory (shades of the 1949 film The Set-Up). "Ella" is about a young photographer who uses her art to keep life at a distance (think of Blow-Up or the Faye Dunaway character in Three Days of the Condor). Sampayo is also occasionally prone to sensationalistic excesses, such as an extraneous scene in "Fifth Story" in which a character is sodomized during a mugging. Sampayo is essentially a writer of potboiler fiction; one often sees him straining to create material worthy of Muñoz's visuals.

But Sampayo does have his moments, such as in "Tenochitlan," which appeared in RAW #6 and was the last of the translated Joe's Bar stories to be produced. His scenes and dialogue succinctly capture the personality of the protagonist, a megalomaniacal film director. The excesses of filmmakers such as Michael Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola, and John Landis were big news stories when the Joe's Bar stories were written. The piece has a ripped-from-the-headlines quality to it, but there's nary a false note even after 25 years. Everything that characterizes a Napoleonic artistic temperament run amok--the obsessiveness, the messianic pretentiousness, the criminal disregard for human safety--Sampayo gets it all into the characterization. He ends the piece with an effective bit of irony. At an awards ceremony, the director is shot by a man whose brother and father were killed as a result of the director's recklessness. Ironically, the director is so obsessed with capturing the drama of the moment that he ignores his own injury and screams for the cameramen to focus on the face of the gunman. The scene has to be just so, even in real life. Art trumps everything else.

One wishes it would trump the economics of comics publishing. The English translations of the various Joe's Bar stories have been out-of-print in North America for years. Muñoz & Sampayo's work is now largely known as a key inspiration for Frank Miller's art and storytelling in his Sin City comics. Muñoz's expressionistic rendering techniques have been cheapened into arbitrary chiaroscuro decoration, and his dramatic eloquence has been abandoned in favor of sensationalistic silliness. Miller can't even leave Muñoz's staging flourishes alone; techniques such as having the protagonists in one story appear as extras in another are lifted wholesale. One wishes one could respond to Miller's slick kitsch by saying, look, here's the original, it's still here. Unfortunately, unless one picked up Muñoz & Sampayo's work when it first appeared in English twenty-odd years ago, there's nowhere to point. Fantagraphics Books has announced their intention to publish the complete works of Jacques Tardi, who is one of Muñoz & Sampayo's most prominent peers. Here's hoping they can turn their attention to the complete works of Muñoz and Sampayo as well.

My thanks to Mike Hunter for providing xeroxes of the story "Tenochitlan" for this article.

Comics Review: Swamp Thing: Love and Death [Book 2], Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, John Totleben, et al.

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Rereading Alan Moore’s run on DC Comics' Swamp Thing series, one notices that the trade paperback collections aren’t ideally divided. The run is collected in six volumes, but in terms of thematic and other story concerns, there are only three overarching storylines: the revamping of the character featured in Saga of the Swamp Thing and Love and Death, the “American Gothic” story arc reprinted in The Curse and A Murder of Crows, and the homecoming travels in Earth to Earth and Reunion. I note this largely because, in retrospect, I should not have reviewed Saga by itself; it and Love and Death would have best been considered together. Both books are about discovering and embracing the joys of one’s present circumstances. It's an affirmative approach to life that necessitates accepting the past as the past and ultimately putting it behind one.

Love and Death opens with “The Burial,” an episode that unambiguously dramatizes this theme. The story begins with Swamp Thing being haunted by the ghost of Alec Holland, the scientist whom he once believed himself to be. Knowing that, in absolute terms, he never was Holland, he angrily rejects any suggestion that he and Holland are the same person. He asks himself, “How deep? How deep do you need to bury the past before it will stay dead?” The answer is that, as he shares Holland’s memories, he can’t deny that past, and his wrestling with recollections of Holland’s dead wife and his murder only emphasize the dilemma. Swamp Thing ultimately realizes that denial cannot be a part of moving on; mourning is necessary. Moore dramatizes this in simple, effective terms: the story resolves itself by Swamp Thing locating Holland’s lost bones near where he was murdered, and giving those bones a proper, if humble, burial. The story closes with Swamp Thing thinking, “He [Holland]’s there. I know that he is there. And I know that he is smiling. But I don’t look back.” Swamp Thing’s personal account with the past is settled, and he can now go on with his own life. It’s a modest episode, with none of the spectacle one associates with adventure comics, but it is extremely affecting nonetheless.

The bulk of Love and Death is taken up with a four-episode sequence featuring Swamp Thing’s final battle with his most popular recurring nemesis prior to Moore’s run: the mad scientist Anton Arcane. Moore isn’t settling the character’s account with the past with this continuity; he’s settling the series’ account with its hackneyed recurring storylines and characters. The major goal seems to be to get rid of Arcane once and for all, and Moore’s disinterest in the character and his assorted schemes is obvious. This time around, Arcane’s worldbeating plot relates to having dead criminals rise from their graves and descend on the local community, but Moore spends so little space on it that he might as well skipped including it at all. Arcane’s defeat at Swamp Thing’s hands isn’t particularly interesting either--all Swamp Thing does is clobber him with his fists. The victory is notable only for its finality: Moore makes clear that this time Arcane is dead, and he isn’t coming back.

Arcane is a dull antagonist, but the episode arc featuring him isn’t dull at all. That’s because the drama doesn’t center around the conflict between him and Swamp Thing. Its focus is the crisis of well-being--both emotional and physical--for the Abby Cable character. Moore established her as a deeply sympathetic presence in the Saga of the Swamp Thing episodes, and he takes her conflicts to their limits in this sequence. As seen in the first volume, her marriage to the Matt Cable character is in its final stages. A once-promising intelligence official, he’s become a slothful drunk. He deeply resents any demand on Abby’s time that takes her away from him, specifically her job as a caregiver to autistic children. (One imagines that her friendship with Swamp Thing might be an issue as well, but it’s never highlighted.) The story begins with Abby finding hope that Matt and their marriage have turned around. He’s stopped drinking, he’s found a well-paying job, and he even moves them in to a beautiful new home. He’s become confident and supportive in every way. The rug is horribly pulled out from under her when she realizes that Matt has become possessed by Arcane's consciousness. (It's especially disturbing because she's had sex with him since he's been possessed; her uncle has used her husband to rape her.) Her dream becomes a nightmare, and Arcane ultimately uses her in an attack on Swamp Thing. He ostensibly murders her and damns her soul, and the only reason is to demoralize Swamp Thing over his inability to save her. Swamp Thing’s easy defeat of Arcane is ho-hum by itself, but the combination of that triumph with his failure to save Abby gives the sequence its power. He has won a Pyrrhic victory; it's an irony that invariably makes for powerful fiction, and this continuity is no exception.

Everything of course works out in the end, and Abby is returned to her old self, but Moore has put the final nails in the coffin of the series he originally found. Swamp Thing’s self-pitying quest to regain his human identity is past, the cheesy archenemy is gone, and Moore even clears the deck of the distraction of the Matt Cable character. Swamp Thing and Abby are the series protagonists, and the volume’s concluding episode shows their relationship taken to its logical conclusion: their rapport has gone beyond friendship and becomes love. Couples in adventure comics before Swamp Thing and Abby never really seemed to be in love with each other--the feelings always came across as mutual infatuation. There was lots of kissing and “I love you,” but there was never much of a rapport between the characters. (This can also be seen in the movie adaptations of the material; just look at the way the Peter Parker and Mary Jane characters interact in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films.) Swamp Thing and Abby come across as loving couples do in real life: they find comfort and a sense of security in each other’s presence. The outlandishness of a romance between the two aside--as Moore has Abby say, “I mean, it’s just so ridiculous, right? It’s impossible, it’s bizarre, it probably isn’t even legal”--the relationship Moore depicted rang truer than any shown in adventure comics when these episodes first saw print in the mid-1980s. It was a signal achievement in the field.

But like most innovations, its handling was imperfect. Moore has Swamp Thing and Abby consummate their relationship in a shared hallucinogenic trip, and he uses it to indulge the worst aspect of his writing: namely, the purple verbal incontinence he falls into whenever he writes descriptive prose. His ear for voices is terrific, and his expository prose is admirably concise--the dynamic he creates between it and the images is especially effective. But when Moore is called upon to be descriptive, he launches into a faux-poetic extravagance, and the reader gets passages like this:

A smear of platinum scales breaks the surface, rolling, resubmerging. There is a delicious ambiguity. Looking up through his eyes: The pale woman gazes down, a burning waterfall adrift on the milk waterfall of her hair. Its lank tips draw clear sable brushstrokes between the lichens engraving my chest.

There’s just one descriptive trope piled on one after another; Moore doesn’t develop them into a conceit, and he doesn’t create a dynamic between them. It’s rhapsodic blather. The context offers some justification, as the passage reflects perceptions while intoxicated, but that doesn’t make it enjoyable to read. It’s most reminiscent of song lyrics from ‘70s acid and progressive rock bands, and I find those embarrassingly indulgent as well.

The trip sequence is somewhat redeemed by the gorgeously hallucinatory art provided by Stephen Bissette and John Totleben, ably complemented by the work of colorist Tatjana Wood. Their work throughout the rest of the volume is superb as well, with their atmospheric handling of settings being particularly strong. I also was struck by their effective use of near-abstract rendering in facial close-ups. The weakest aspect of the art is the occasional use of fill-in talent. Rick Veitch does a seamless job of substituting for Bissette in one episode, but Alfredo Alcala’s collaboration with Bissette in another lacks the delicacy of the latter’s teamwork with Totleben. Shawn McManus and Ron Randall’s styles seem completely incompatible with that of the Bissette-Totleben team. McManus’s renderings have an exaggerated sculptural dynamism that comes on too strong in comparison, and Randall’s work is tacky in the manner of Hammer horror films: a woman in a nightgown is embarrassingly used for cheesecake fodder, and everything’s blowing in the wind. Bissette and Totleben have a sense of nuance and propriety that most of the substitute artists lack.

In Love and Death, Moore completes his redefining of the Swamp Thing series. The character’s new core is the fulfillment he finds, both in his acceptance of his circumstances and his relationship with Abby. It’s also clear that the foundation of the strip will be the tension between maintaining the happy aspects of his life and the demands on his sense of duty. Moore starts and ends with a self-centered hero, but he gives the character a self-centeredness that is admirable: Swamp Thing now has faith in the present rather than the past. And uniquely among superhero characters, he trusts the world around him. The effectiveness with which Moore and his collaborators bring it off clearly mark his Swamp Thing as one of the most noteworthy strips in the superhero genre.

Comics Review: Saga of the Swamp Thing [Book 1], Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, and John Totleben

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

It’s funny how time overtakes perceptions of things. Twenty-odd years ago, when Alan Moore first came to prominence, the Swamp Thing series he wrote between 1983 and 1987 was considered his signature work, with projects like Watchmen treated like tangential undertakings. There was even a concerted effort on the part of Moore’s principal publisher, DC Comics, to distinguish Moore from the renaissance in comics he spearheaded with creators such as Art Spiegelman and Frank Miller. With the help of journalists in the mainstream U.S. press--Rolling Stone's Mikal Gilmore is the name that immediately comes to mind--they tried to create the perception that Moore, like prose author Clive Barker, actually should be considered part of the avant-garde in horror fiction.

Today, Moore isn’t seen as a horror writer at all. He is firmly identified with comics and graphic novels in the publishing community, with Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell seen as his major efforts. Critics by and large view him as a versatile postmodernist who specializes in deconstructive treatments of the superhero genre. His reputation has all but entirely eclipsed that of figures like Clive Barker, and Swamp Thing’s stature has faded as well.

The ebbing of its reputation is not entirely undeserved. Swamp Thing was undertaken as a journeyman assignment by Moore, and the editorial demands of adventure-comics series demanded that he reconcile his material with the work of the writers and cartoonists who preceded him on the feature. The creative personnel who followed him were also free to modify the concepts he introduced as they saw fit. As such, Swamp Thing has less of a stand-alone quality than any major project he’s worked on. By his own account, it wasn’t even a job he was terribly enthused about at the time. But it still deserves to be considered a major work in the artistically modest superhero genre. (Swamp Thing is not what one would comfortably call horror fiction; it is best described as a superhero series that occasionally employs horror-genre elements.) The episodes are finely crafted suspense pieces, and in terms of its values, it is perhaps the warmest, most humanistic work ever seen in adventure comics.

Moore’s initial goal in taking over the series was to get out from under the conceptual baggage that had dogged it since its first publication in 1972. As created by writer Len Wein and illustrator Bernie Wrightson, Swamp Thing was originally a scientist named Alec Holland. He had been working with his wife Linda in a swamp laboratory on a "bio-restorative" formula that was intended to speed up rates of crop growth. Saboteurs shot Linda and attempted to kill Holland by blowing him up in his lab. Holland was doused with the formula during the explosion, and, on fire, he ran running into the swamp waters. Some time later, he emerged metamorphosed into a humanoid plant monster. The series followed his adventures while he sought the people responsible for his wife's murder. He was also looking for a way of metamorphosing back into Alec Holland's human body. Moore, by his own account, was not impressed by the premise. His opinion of it was best summed up during a 2005 BBC interview (transcript here):

The whole thing that the book hinged upon was there was this tragic individual who is basically like Hamlet covered in snot. He just walks around feeling sorry for himself. That's understandable, I mean I would too, but everybody knows that his quest to regain his lost humanity, that's never going to happen. Because as soon as he does that the book finishes.

Moore's first order of business in taking over the series was to find a way of writing the character's adventures that didn't rely on this pathos.

Saga of the Swamp Thing, the first of six volumes collecting Moore’s run on the series, begins by revising Swamp Thing’s origin. The character’s fixation on finding a way to turn back into his human incarnation is treated as denial of what happened. In Moore’s treatment, Swamp Thing was never physically Alec Holland. The doctor’s consciousness had been absorbed by plant-life mutated by his formula when it consumed his body. The Swamp Thing’s body was simply that consciousness’s effort to reconstitute itself as Holland. The volume’s seven episodes follow the character’s efforts to come to terms with this reality and embrace the happiness to be found in his present circumstances, particularly his friendship with a young woman named Abby Cable.

Moore had to develop this narrative idea in the context of adventure material, so he begins by treating the episodes’ antagonists as counterpoints to the personality-ideal he has devised for the hero. The initial episode, titled “The Anatomy Lesson,” is centered on the characters of General Sunderland and Dr. Jason Woodrue. In the episodes previous to Moore’s run, Sunderland’s interest in the alleged transformative aspects of Holland’s “bio-restorative” formula has led him to try to capture Swamp Thing for study. Just prior to the events of “The Anatomy Lesson,” Sunderland’s men had apparently killed Swamp Thing in a shoot-out, with the body being brought back to Sunderland's headquarters. Woodrue was then hired to determine exactly how Holland’s transformation occurred. Moore immediatey sets Woodrue and Sunderland up for conflict. They are both exceptionally unpleasant and self-absorbed egomaniacs who prefer to deal with other people as little as possible. They naturally can’t stand each other, and Woodrue ultimately decides to kill Sunderland in response to the older man's belittling treatment. Moore expertly orchestrates this narrative strand with that of Woodrue’s gradual discovery of Swamp Thing’s true origin. The tension he builds is extraordinary. When Sunderland’s murder finally comes, it hits with the force of a crescendo. But what’s most horrifying about the climax is not the circumstances of Sunderland’s death. It’s the realization of how vicious a personality Woodrue is. The story is ultimately a portrait of a genuinely evil person.

Moore expands on the negative ideal he creates with Woodrue in the subsequent episodes. Swamp Thing suffers a catatonic breakdown after learning the truth about himself. His metaphysical journey back to sanity runs parallel to the scenes of Woodrue’s descent into psychotic megalomania. Woodrue identifies himself more and more with what he sees as the concerns of the world’s plant life, and when he finally goes insane, he regards himself as “"Wood-rue, green messiah [...] annihilating agent of the thorns." He sees it as his calling to avenge humanity’s despoiling of the environment, and having the ability to control plant life, he goes on a murderous rampage through a local town. (In his climactic moment of madness, he threatens a woman with a chainsaw, telling her, “"Close your eyes and shout 'Timber.'") Woodrue's every action is guided by his need for self-aggrandizement and his willingness to subjugate others through violence. Like all real-life villains, he’s a hero in his own mind, and it’s satisfying to see him brought down when it’s impressed upon him that his actions are entirely selfish and work against the plant kingdom he thinks he's championing. Swamp Thing, in contrast, doesn’t view himself as a hero; he just acts like one. He is always shown as selflessly concerned about the needs of others, and he helps in any way he can. He’s oblivious to achieving glory. Moore highlights the difference between Woodrue and Swamp Thing with a pair of images. When Woodrue insanely believes he’s found his messianic calling, he reaches to the sky in triumph. Swamp Thing does the same after he comes to terms with the truth about himself. It signifies how happy he is with his circumstances now that he's accepted them. It's a potent reversal of meaning--an uplifting moment of fulfillment versus a sick, twisted one--and it makes for a fitting ending to the Woodrue story.

The collection’s final three episodes develop a complement to Swamp Thing's personality with the character of Abby Cable; she enhances the positive traits Moore is setting up for him. An easy rapport between the two is quickly established, and Abby's empathy and altruism spurs his own along. The depiction of Abby and Swamp Thing dramatizes how a friendship brings out the best in both people. One only wishes the thriller story that showcases their relationship was more imaginatively realized. It centers on the autistic children with whom Abby works being threatened by a supernatural force, and it follows the basic reactionary structure of most superhero and horror stories: a threat emerges, and then it is contained. Fantastic elements are ladled on, such as a demon ally against the threat who speaks in rhymes of iambic pentameter, but none of these feel particularly integral. The best part of the plot is its resolution: an autistic boy’s affection for Abby is what defeats the threat to the children. Evil is defeated by transcending oneself and reaching out through one’s regard for others.

Like virtually all of Moore’s work, this volume’s seven episodes are exceptionally well-crafted. He makes deft use of flashbacks, parallel plotting, and elliptical structures, and his pacing is nothing short of remarkable. He often uses narrative captions to move the story forward, but his use of them goes far beyond accompanying the pictures with text. He creates a dynamic interplay between the words and images, and the effect is like listening to a masterfully played duet between two musical instruments. Each makes the other's contribution more effective, and the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. The artwork, by Stephen Bissette and John Totleben (with occasional assistance from Rick Veitch) almost doesn’t need this heightening. The layouts create dynamic contrasts of their own, and the attention to detail in character gestures and facial expressions is exceptional. These strengths are only exceeded by their atmospheric realization of the swamp setting. Gorgeously rendered images of greenery and fauna abound, and they’re integrated seamlessly with the story’s action. Everything seems organic and interdependent, and given Moore’s emphasis on self-realization through embracing one’s circumstances, the art is ideal for the stories they illustrate. Saga of the Swamp Thing is modest in its goals, but it achieves many of them masterfully. And while it doesn't rate consideration as one of Moore's finest achievements, it does provide some of the most enjoyable reading out there for fans of the superhero genre.