Comics Review: Alec: The Years Have Pants, Eddie Campbell

This is a revised version of the review of Alec: The Years Have Pants that appeared in The Comics Journal #301. It was originally published at The Hooded Utilitarian on October 10, 2011. There are several changes from the TCJ version. The most notable is the removal of an erroneous reference to Campbell's use of assistants in the book's latter sections. Although Campbell has employed assistants on his projects, he produced all the artwork for Alec by himself.

Critics must have their categories for artists and works, and where does one place Eddie Campbell, particularly the Campbell one finds in the massive (600+ pages), three-decades-of-work compendium, Alec: The Years Have Pants? The category is easy: autobiography/memoir. But Campbell doesn’t really fit in with other cartoonists in this area of comics. Alec doesn’t have the studied narrative craftsmanship one finds in works like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and David B.’s Epileptic. Campbell also doesn’t have the entertainingly outsize personality that creators like Harvey Pekar, Robert Crumb, and Dori Seda give themselves on the page. He’s a different breed altogether: a cartoonist who embraces the intuitive, spontaneous approach of the latter group while maintaining the cool, cerebral tone of the first. He isn’t interested in hammering his narratives into a shape designed for a pedestal, and he doesn’t use them to provide an emotional outlet for himself or play the clown.

The rambling, offhand quality of the Alec material gives it a surface humility that is disarming; it often seems to have a take-it-or-leave-it quality--the sort of thing one finds either charming or negligible. And truth be told, a good portion of it is trifling; about half of The Years Have Pants collection is comprised of anecdotal strips that don’t aspire to anything more than pleasant diversion. But Campbell has his ambitious side. The Years Have Pants also contains three major sequences--“The King Canute Club,” “Graffiti Kitchen,” and “How to Be an Artist”--that have a power and occasional incisiveness that rank them among the strongest memoir work comics have to offer. Their casual manner only enhances their impact. They are vibrant explorations of friendship, self-criticism, and the anxieties of career. Each expands the formal language of comics in dazzlingly effective ways.

The first few episodes of “The King Canute Club,” the first Alec effort, may have one wondering if Campbell was the harbinger of the memoir-comics plague of the 1990s. (The “King Canute” strips were produced between 1981 and 1987.) It’s clearly the work of a tyro narrative imagination--one that’s extremely aware that the freshest story material is rooted in real-life experience, but doesn’t seem to know much beyond that. The immediate subjects are also quite similar: recountings of conversations that were probably far more amusing to participate in than to read. One is grateful that Campbell, unlike some of the autobiographical cartoonists who followed, doesn’t regale us with extended nose-picking sequences or accounts of his masturbation habits, but one still wants to tell him to get more of a life if he’s going to write from it.

But those opening episodes contain the seeds of a greater narrative sophistication. Campbell understands the necessity of counterpoint in building a narrative. His protagonist isn’t just Alec MacGarry, his alter ego; it’s also Danny Grey, a co-worker of Alec’s who becomes his best friend. Both in their twenties, they meet working alongside each other in low-level industrial jobs, and they make quite a contrast. Their backgrounds and temperaments are very different. Alec clearly comes from a bourgeois upbringing: he’s educated, intellectual, and he uses his erudition to socialize with others. (One character says to him, “You only know books. You don’t know anything for yourself, do you?”) Danny, on the other hand, is working class. He’s not book-smart (although he can name-drop classic philosophers as well as Alec can), and his attitude is devil-may-care. Unlike Alec, he’s not inclined to stand back and contemplate his place in the world; he is always looking for opportunities to enjoy himself, usually in carousing at the King Canute, a local pub. Alec says of him, “He lives his life to the full. No part is saved like a slice of birthday cake going stale.” And Alec can’t help but idealize him to a degree; he sees Danny as the center of his world. The two make for an intriguing study in contrasts, and it’s frustrating that Campbell initially can’t do more than play them off each other for anemic bits of humor.

Campbell’s artwork only emphasizes the weakness of the early episodes. It’s by no means inept; Campbell handles his panels skillfully. The compositional elements are nicely balanced, the details are well observed, and Campbell even finds an equivalent for the flourish of brushstrokes in the idiosyncratic, fragmentary areas of mechanical tone. But this is a painter’s thinking transposed to comics; one’s eye is meant to wander the composition taking in details, with the subject matter always at a remove. The approach is very different from what is traditionally associated with cartoonists, which is to make the image as immediate and dramatically concise as possible. Campbell’s art doesn’t create emotional identification or otherwise hold the reader’s hand in dramatic terms--he objectifies everything he shows--and it functions like an icepack on his material. An even, uninflected tone can make even the best humor fall flat.

The solution Campbell found to this problem was not to change his visual style, but to create a new dynamic to guide his treatment of the material. If the characters can’t create rhythm and melody effectively within their scenarios, then use the scenario itself as a contrapuntal element. Campbell’s new rhythm and melody became the visual moment of the panel played off Alec’s prose narration. And in a brilliant move, Campbell expanded the traditional relationship of text and image, which is for the text to follow the image’s lead. Campbell uses the text as both starting point and end point; the visuals enhance the prose exposition and are used to create a springboard for prose commentary. The shift also uses the art to best effect; the dense, sophisticated visuals take on a new authority. Autobiographical drama is left behind to create the comics equivalent of the personal essay.

It’s a form that appears more in keeping with his concerns. Campbell never seems particularly interested in mining his experience for moments of conflict and catharsis. His attitude is far more exploratory. As “The King Canute Club” proceeds, we see Alec getting increasingly caught up in Danny’s way of life. The day is always centered on drinking and hanging out at the pub. Jobs, lovers, places to live--everything else comes and goes. The reader is never asked to identify with Alec’s circumstances, only with his attitudes. One can’t help but smile as he moves from statements like “I just don’t feel at home in the world,” to “The nicest thing in this life is just to be with your friends. No big story need come of it.” Alec’s friendship with Danny eventually collapses, and though it's easy to see the tensions building before they explode, the poignancy doesn’t come from things ending so much as it comes from Alec’s confusion over what went awry. He can’t judge or reach a conclusion; he can only move on. “The King Canute Club” starts as a story about a friendship and develops into a meditation on the role it plays in one’s life. What’s most refreshing about it is that Campbell doesn’t even pretend to have the answers to the questions the material raises. The only things that are certain are the happiness when things are good and the pain when they unravel.

A master of the personal essay in prose is Henry Miller, whose work Campbell openly acknowledges as a model. There are similarities and some key differences. Both embrace a vivre-sa-vie attitude, but Campbell doesn’t share Miller’s misanthropy or propensity for caricature. With Campbell, people’s flaws and idiosyncrasies are beside the point. Aesthetically, Campbell’s principal debt to Miller is with the structural tricks both use to keep the reader from feeling adrift in the free-form narratives. When Miller launches into his digressions and commentaries, he often seizes on a repeated motif-word or motif-phrase to anchor both himself and the reader. (Examples include “fifteen francs” from one of Tropic of Cancer’s best passages, “this is better than reading Vergil” from Black Spring’s “A Sunday Afternoon,” and the great “money” sentence from Tropic of Capricorn. Virginia Woolf structures the short story “The Mark on the Wall” with much the same technique.) Campbell first tries his hand with this method in “The King Canute Crowd’s third section, which opens with a burst of obviously Miller-inspired language. (“...I saw humanity all pasted together with semen. It was running down legs at bus stops after early morning quickies.”) References to a dream of drowning, a quilt, and the phrase “the Glaswegian on the floor” show up repeatedly in an effort to unify the narrative. They don’t quite work, largely because they remain motifs; Miller’s graduate into tropes that create a host of absurdist and satirical effects. But Campbell masters the technique in “Graffiti Kitchen,” Alec’s second sequence, which he (with considerable justification) once called his single finest work.

Campbell began “Graffiti Kitchen” in 1988 and completed it in 1992. It takes place before and during the events of “The King Canute Club.” The focus is on Alec’s affairs with a teenage girl and then her mother, and how his continuing desire for the teenager complicates his relationship with both. The piece is an extraordinary balancing act in terms of tone. Alec goes through the entire story disgusted at his impulses and actions; one feels sympathy for his turmoil. But one can’t help but laugh at Campbell’s mocking perspective as he looks back on his alter ego’s conduct. The action’s pathos and the absurdist commentary play off each other marvelously well. The story is masterfully paced; Campbell plays his melody and discords with perfect timing.

His extraordinary use of the repeated trope is the icing on the cake. It all but defines the narrator’s commentaries. Campbell begins the piece by introducing a personification of his animal urges. He takes his skinny, bespectacled avatar and shows him stomping forward, fists clenched, and bellowing a beast-like “Garooga!” He can’t help but make fun of himself; he shows us his id-creature, and it’s a feral nerd on the rampage. Campbell quickly establishes the image’s capacity for multiple meanings. One hasn’t turned the page before it shows up again as a metaphor for jealousy. He also spins metonymies out of it, such as the paw prints that track across a number of panels. These first show up to signify Alec’s lust for the teenage girl. They then mark his disgust at himself for wanting her. (The prints track across a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita). They finally represent disgust at himself for all compulsions, including intellectual ones. (The tracks appear across a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses). The id-creature, in its various forms, ultimately encompasses almost all expressions of Alec’s emotional identity, from amused disdain to moments of narcissism to feelings of violent anger. The only thing more remarkable than the various meanings he gives the trope is the deft wit he shows with incorporating them.

“Graffiti Kitchen” often gives the impression one is seeing Campbell’s thoughts erupt spontaneously onto the page. It’s appropriate to a critique of drive and desire; if thoughts don’t match the impulses’ speed, they’ll never catch them. Campbell certainly deserves applause for the changes he adopted in the art style. He abandons the studied, painterly panels of “The King Canute Crowd” in favor of a scribbled sketchiness; “Graffiti Kitchen” often looks as if he wasn’t sure whether word or image would flow from his pen until he applied it to the art board. As a result, it has an energy and drive the earlier piece lacked. The feeling of spontaneity also makes the humor more forceful and the poetic moments seem effortless. Form and content come together beautifully.

As accomplished as it is as a stand-alone piece, “Graffiti Kitchen” also gains from being considered alongside “The King Canute Crowd”--just as one’s reading of “King Canute” gains from it. Together the pieces highlight that at any given time, one’s role in one’s personal narrative shifts with the circumstances. “King Canute,” Alec’s commentaries notwithstanding, presents Campbell’s alter ego as just one member of a larger ensemble, while “Graffiti Kitchen” finds him as the central actor in the story. The pieces also highlight that a story can only present an aspect of one’s existence, with the others disregarded to a greater or lesser degree. “King Canute” has Campbell looking outward on his friendships; “Graffiti Kitchen” has him looking inward at himself.

Alec’s third major sequence, “How to Be an Artist,” has him looking at both. It’s an account of his rise in comics’ artistic and professional community, and it also serves as an informal history of the field’s renaissance in the 1980s and ‘90s. The most compelling section is probably Campbell’s treatment of the ebb that followed the period’s climax in 1986 and 1987. He captures what a lively time it was, although few who lived through it would look back on it fondly. The field seemed torn apart by one controversy after another, and every charge for glory on the part of artists and publishers seemed to crash and burn like Icarus’ flight towards the sun.

The most powerful moments are the poignant ones: a creatively paralyzed Stephen Bissette sitting at his drawing board as the years go by; Alan Moore looking out the window sighing after his Big Numbers magnum opus collapses for the final time; the final indignity suffered by veteran newspaper-strip artist Stan Drake, whose obituary was accompanied by the misattributed work of another cartoonist. (The sadness is heightened by the irony of that cartoonist being Bill Sienkiewicz, whose conduct as related in “How to Be an Artist” makes him the closest thing the piece has to a villain.)

What gives these artists’ forlorn moments their power is that they’re metaphors for Campbell’s anxieties about himself. “How to Be an Artist” was composed between 1997 and 2000, when Campbell was in the latter stages of work on From Hell, his decade-in-the-making, 500+ page graphic novel with Alan Moore. One can easily imagine the doubts running through his mind: What if I hit a creative wall before I finish? What if the rug gets pulled out from under me in terms of getting my work to the public? (From Hell’s first two publishers went out of business before it was completed. The third collapsed shortly thereafter.) Will I be remembered and given my due after I’m gone? The last is probably the deepest and most unspoken fear an ambitious artist can have, as their work is their bid for immortality. When discussing From Hell, Campbell likens his situation to Odysseus’s exile at sea, writing “Odysseus ain’t home yet.” The tension is only leavened by the reader’s knowledge that From Hell was completed to success, and that our Odysseus did indeed arrive home. He also assumed his throne without killing a single suitor.

One of the most compelling aspects of “How to Be an Artist” is Campbell's visual treatment. He seems to have recognized the repeated tropes in “Graffiti Kitchen” not only enriched the story’s meanings and gave the readers an anchor, they heightened the piece’s rhythms as well. Campbell is never one to run a flourish into the ground, so he finds a way to repeat an aspect of the effect while giving it new elements. In “How to Be an Artist,” one doesn’t see much interjecting of a familiar trope at select points; Campbell instead interrupts panels of his own drawing with panels derived from xeroxes of photographs, clippings, and other artists’ work. This time around, the discords are visual, not textual. Not one feels arbitrary; they all advance the narrative, and they give it a documentary weight. The contrast with Campbell’s own drawings makes the reader more alert.

The only significant disappointment with Alec: The Years Have Pants is that once one reads beyond “The King Canute Club,” “Graffiti Kitchen,” and "How to Be an Artist<" the strips lose much of their intensity. Most are anecdotes involving Campbell’s life with family and friends in Australia, and they tend to be more cute than incisive. (The artwork also becomes considerably slicker.) What undercuts the strips is that Campbell appears to have found contentment. The anxieties over friendship, behavior, and career that fire the major sequences have fallen by the wayside. He occasionally tries to recapture a sense of urgency. For instance, in “After the Snooter,” he introduces the title character, a personification of his fears that he’s taken the wrong road in life, but there’s not much conviction behind it. The Snooter drops in and out of the strips every now and then, but Campbell can’t seem to figure out what to do with him. It’s never very long before Campbell returns to material about his family goofing around with the Internet, arguing about a new car with his wife, or attending the premiere of the From Hell movie. Happiness breeds frivolity.

One certainly can’t begrudge him that happiness. The glow of Alec’s major sections more than makes up for the flatness of the other material. Campbell’s achievements in Alec are considerable. No other cartoonist has made such accomplished use of the personal-essay narrative. Poetic techniques (Garooga!) are often unheard of in comics, much less used with the skill one finds in the better prose writers. Few cartoonists have ever been able to use painterly artwork or collage techniques to such brilliant narrative effect. And, as mentioned at the start of this review, Campbell doesn’t see his work as meant for a pedestal, which may make him more accessible for those impatient with the middlebrow acclaim greeting some of his peers. I close by noting that Campbell portrays himself as an oenophile. He deserves the tribute of a glass of 1980 Grange Hermitage (his preferred vintage) raised in his honor. Salud.

Comics Review: Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

This essay was written for The Hooded Utilitarian's 2011 International Best Comics Poll. The poll, which I organized and edited, was a survey of the comics press, comics authors, comics academics, and various comics-publishing personnel. Its purpose was to create a ranked list of the most notable efforts in the field's history. The project was explicitly modeled after Sight & Sound magazine's decennial effort to create such a list for film.

The article, which is still featured with the other poll material on The Hooded Utilitarian website, was published on August 3, 2011. It has been slightly revised for its publication below.

Those interested in the comics poll should click here. The link will take them to the poll's Introduction and Index post.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is no stranger to “best of” lists. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly looked across the entire landscape of book publishing--fiction and non-fiction, prose efforts and comics works--and put together a ranked list of the “100 Best Reads from 1983 to 2008.” Watchmen was listed at #13, which included it among the top ten works of fiction of the period. Three years earlier, Time magazine included Watchmen in its list of the 100 best English-language novels between 1923 and 2005. Time is an establishment publication, and it is certainly not prone to any radical pronouncement. The magazine put Watchmen in the company of such classics as The Great Gatsby, To the Lighthouse, and The Sound and the Fury. The book’s more contemporary peers included Beloved, American Pastoral, and Never Let Me Go. No other comics work was given this distinction.

When one reads Watchmen, whatever skepticism one has about such acclaim quickly falls away. It is a superb work that triumphs on multiple levels. Watchmen is simultaneously a first-rate adventure story, an incisive analysis of the superhero genre, and a brilliant meditation on how one’s sense of reality is defined by one’s perspective--knowledge and ignorance, hopes and fears, predispositions and agendas.

The book’s starting point is a mystery plot. The Comedian, a former costumed hero and now a covert government operative, is brutally murdered. It gradually becomes clear his murder is part of a larger conspiracy. Dr. Manhattan, the only one of the heroes with superpowers—and he is nearly omnipotent—is driven away from society by an elaborate smear. Rorschach, the last of the heroes to operate without government sanction, is framed for murder, captured, and imprisoned. Ozymandias, who retired from adventuring years earlier, foils a gunman’s attempt on his life. Someone is out to eliminate the heroes, but who, and why?

The answer turns out to be horribly ironic, with the reasons a black joke on the puny, naively idealistic desire to make a better world by putting on a costume and beating up criminals. The conspiracy to eliminate the costumed heroes is revealed as a tangent in a greater plot that changes the world. Along the way, Moore and Gibbons treat the reader to one terrific suspense setpiece after another. And in marked contrast to Zack Snyder, the director of the horrid film adaptation, they understand that violence is made all the more effective by restraint.

One of the most common observations about Watchmen is that it is both a superhero adventure story and a critique of the genre. In the appreciation of the book he sent with his top-ten list, Francis DiMenno identifies this with critic Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence.” In DiMenno’s view, Alan Moore, the book’s scriptwriter and acknowledged mastermind, has such a relationship with the superhero genre. One can see his point, but I’m more inclined to identify Watchmen’s anxiety of influence with Harvey Kurtzman’s “Superduperman” and other superhero parodies in MAD. The theory argues that a younger artist feels belated relative to older ones whose work is admired. The only way to compete with the older work—and assert one’s own artistic identity—is to beat the earlier artist at his or her own game, which is accomplished by changing the rules. In works like “Superduperman,” Harvey Kurtzman exposed the fallacies of the genre with derision and exaggeration. In contrast, Moore, who acknowledges a large debt to Kurtzman, examines his own superhero characters with the acute eye of a first-rate prose novelist. He doesn’t mock them; he plays things entirely straight, and he presents the fanciful characters in as ruthlessly realistic a manner as possible. He reveals the grotesquely maladjusted attitudes that motivate the various superheroes, turning them into figures of pathos and horror. Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, and the others are among the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction.

Watchmen is an extraordinarily compelling read, but what makes it an extraordinarily compelling reread is its meditation on perspective and how it shapes one’s understanding. On its most profound level, the book is about interpretation and the act of reading itself. The work’s defining metaphor is the Rorschach blot, a psychiatric tool for teasing out a person’s attitudes and preoccupations. One is asked to look at a blob of ink and elaborate the associations and thoughts one projects onto it. One sees permutations of this throughout the book, such as when Dr. Manhattan, Ozymandias, and a third hero, Nite Owl, attend the Comedian’s funeral. They think back on him during the service, and it’s clear none had any significant relationship with him. They only see him as a metonymy for their own anxieties. Moore and Gibbons also dramatize the most extreme perspectives. In one chapter we are shown experience through the eyes of a psychopath. In another we see things through the eyes of eternity, and understand what it can mean to be aware of all times at once. The book almost always presents knowledge as incomplete. And when it is complete, it is skewed by other factors, so people fail to reach the correct conclusions. In one of the book’s subplots, the main female character knows everything necessary to recognize a certain man is her real father, but her dysfunctional relationship with her mother so distorts her view that she can't see it. And misunderstandings not only affect one’s personal life, they direct the tide of history. At the end of the book, the world has changed because everyone misinterprets a catastrophe. Will they accept the truth once they are told? The book ends on that question, and one is inclined to answer no.

Moore and Gibbons extend their treatment of interpretation and misinterpretation to the reader’s experience of the book. If one has read Watchmen before, go back and reread the first chapter. Details that seemed extraneous the first time around jump out at one. Others, such as the recurring image of the spattered smiley face, recede into the background. Dialogues take on a different meaning, such as the conversation between the two detectives in the opening scene. Is one of them sincere when he says a crime was probably random and not worth much investigation? Or consider this panel:

How was this image interpreted--i.e., what meaning was projected onto it--the first time around? Was the emotional resonance from an earlier scene with the Nite Owl character brought over to it? Did one see it as a pensive moment of doubt on Ozymandias’ part about how he has spent his life? Were the dolls in the foreground seen as a trope for this doubt? And how is it interpreted on the second reading, with knowledge of the entire book? Does one now see Ozymandias contemplating an unexpected problem, with the toys a trope for his distraction? This panel, like all of them, is a Rorschach blot for the reader; one sees what one projects onto it. The differing interpretations also bring to mind a quote Alan Moore was fond of in a later work, “Everything must be considered with its context, words, or facts.”

Illustrator Dave Gibbons does a magnificent job of realizing his collaborator’s vision. Moore may be the mind behind Watchmen, but Gibbons is its extraordinarily deft hands. He was a seasoned adventure cartoonist when he began the project, and one sees his assurance in every panel. He handles the quiet scenes as effectively as the violent ones. There’s also an understated, almost laconic quality to his dramatization of the characters. He shows the reader what is happening; one is never told what to think about it. And the remarkable literalness of his style--clear compositions, fully realized deep-space perspectives, copious detail--is perfect for a work that at its core is about the unreliability of perception. Gibbons shows the reader everything, and it remains ambiguous anyway.

I could go on about the book. It does what the most impressive ones do; it makes you want to talk about its achievements forever. That’s why it deserves to be considered one of the finest novels of our era. Not to mention one of the best comics.

Note: The comments that accompanied the essay in its publication with the poll may be of interest. Click here to read.

Comics Review: Swamp Thing: Earth to Earth [Book 5] & Reunion [Book 6], Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, et al.

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Scriptwriter Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing is widely considered to be one of the best--some claim the best--continuing adventure-comics series of the 1980s. Fortunately for readers, it divides quite neatly into three parts.

In the first third, collected in Books One and Two, Moore moved the feature away from its original self-pitying premise. The Swamp Thing, who was once a research scientist named Alec Holland, abandoned his quest to regain his lost humanity. He accepted and embraced his life as it was, and, at the end of the second book, his friendship with the Abby Cable character blossomed into love. The first two books chronicle the character’s realization of himself as a well-adjusted individual.

The second third, known as the “American Gothic” storyline and collected in Books Three and Four, depicts the character’s growth from an individual to a citizen. Moore’s apparent view is that being exclusively preoccupied with one’s own circumstances, no matter how happy they are, is an inadequate engagement with life. One must recognize that one embodies a part that contributes to the whole of society, and that one has an obligation to make both the part and the whole as good as one can. The episodes have Swamp Thing encounter the various evils of human existence--racism, sexism, and environmental pollution, among others--and each contribute to the lesson that one cannot push evil away and compartmentalize it. The dangers it presents can only be minimized with direct engagement. One must also recognize that it is as much a part of any situation as the good.

The final third, which comprises Books Five and Six, is harder to pin down thematically. At times, Moore seems to be using Swamp Thing to tell modern fantasy versions of the Trojan War and the Odyssey. At others, he seems to want to explore the responsibilities of being a god. But it is hard to tell, as Moore repeatedly touches on these ideas and then backs away from them. He drops them entirely at points. This is not to say the collections are poor reads. Moore’s extraordinary sense of craft rarely falters, and the characterizations of Swamp Thing and Abby Cable remain vivid. However, Books Five and Six lack the richness of their predecessors. Moore doesn’t seem to have a strong sense of where he wants to go. It is hard to escape the feeling that he is coasting.

Book Five starts out with a bang. A subplot involving Abby in Book Four takes center stage. Her relationship with Swamp Thing has come to the attention of the local authorities, and she is arrested for breaking the laws against bestiality. The case becomes a media circus, Abby loses her job, and she becomes a pariah in the Louisiana community in which she lives. Disgusted by the way she is treated, she jumps bail and flees to Gotham City. (Swamp Thing is published by DC Comics, and it takes place in the same narrative universe as Batman and Superman.) The Gotham police arrest Abby by mistake, but before they release her, they receive a fugitive warrant from Louisiana. Swamp Thing returns from the “American Gothic” adventure just as she is about to face an extradition hearing. Now possessed of a god-like power to control the world’s vegetation, he demands Abby’s release and declares war on the city after they refuse. What follows is one of the most spectacular might-makes-right battles over a woman in all of storytelling. Agamemnon, Menelaus, and the fleet of a thousand ships are nothing compared to Swamp Thing.

The war on the city is awesomely imagined. Swamp Thing has vegetation overwhelm the city in a way that gives the term “urban jungle” a whole new meaning. (Picture the Manhattan of the film I Am Legend a few centuries down the road, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what is done.) As things progress, Swamp Thing ups the ante, such as heightening the vegetation’s scent to bring a plague of insects down on the city. Needless to say, Batman launches an offensive against Swamp Thing, and he gets put in his place as well.

The drama matches the spectacle. One sympathizes with Swamp Thing’s anger over the small-mindedness and bureaucratic obstacles that keep Abby from him, but one also respects the city’s refusal to turn her over. Their view is that they can’t just circumvent the law and acquiesce to what amounts to terrorism, despite their doubts that Abby’s relationship with Swamp Thing was somehow criminal. And Moore goes out of his way to make the reader uneasy about Swamp Thing’s actions. He draws explicit parallels between Swamp Thing’s war on Gotham and the destructive, self-righteous rampage of the Woodrue character in Book One. He also emphasizes that Swamp Thing’s actions don’t really solve anything. Abby is freed only after a legal argument successfully points out the absurdity of the crime with which she was charged. (The argument is hilariously witty, and one of the highlights of the book.) Moore also points out that what goes around comes around. Federal agents use the occasion of Abby’s release to ambush Swamp Thing, and they nearly destroy him.

It’s at this point that the material seems to drift. Moore has Swamp Thing find himself far from home after the attack, and the remainder of the episodes are divided up between Abby’s life without him, and his adventures while trying to make his way back to her. (If the Gotham City section was Swamp Thing’s Trojan War, these stories are his Odyssey.) The episodes are well-crafted in themselves, but they don’t build any momentum; they often feel as if Moore was just marking time until his run was complete. He gives us an entire episode written from inside Abby’s grief over Swamp Thing’s apparent death, which is a cheat considering that Swamp Thing isn’t dead. Illustrators Stephen Bissette and Rick Veitch each script an episode in Moore’s stead that adds nothing to the overall. The only notable thing about Swamp Thing’s version of the Great Wanderings is that they begin with his Island of Calypso rather than end there. The most interesting aspect of the latter episodes are the supporting characters Moore introduces to Abby’s life, but he develops them only to kick them to the curb in his finale.

The feeling that Moore’s attention is wavering becomes quite conspicuous in the next-to-last episode. Those who familiar with the Odyssey know that Homer spent a good deal of time building suspense in preparation for Odysseus’ final battle with his wife’s suitors. It was the battle he needed to win in order to reclaim his throne and make his homecoming complete. Swamp Thing’s final clash with his enemies, specifically his revenge on the federal agents who ambushed him in Gotham, is nowhere as developed. It feels rushed, and parts of it seem truncated, as if scenes had to be cut in order to fit it into one issue.

Alan Moore and Swamp Thing wave good-bye to each other. From Swamp Thing: Reunion. Art by Tom Yeates, colored by Tatjana Wood. Copyright 1987, 2003 DC Comics.

The final episode is a shambles. Upon their reunion, Moore has Swamp Thing and Abby decide to abandon the outside world completely, which is a betrayal of the themes of engagement and responsibility that have driven the preceding series. Swamp Thing considers whether his capacity to end famine and hunger means he has a responsibility to do so, and he decides it isn’t his problem. One can’t help but feel that Moore is running away from the moral implications of what he has presented before. Moore’s sense of craft also seems to fail him. He frames the episode around having a stand-in for himself bid Swamp Thing good-bye, but he doesn’t integrate it with the main narrative. He also doesn’t do much to develop the metafictional conceit of giving himself a role in the story. One would only realize the character was a stand-in for Moore if one knows what he looks like. And if one doesn’t recognize him, the scenes featuring the character make little sense. The episode is an extremely disappointing conclusion to Moore’s run.

However, a bad final chapter certainly doesn’t undermine the entire series. Most of the disappointments of Books Five and Six come from considering them relative to what has come before. A similar dynamic affects one’s appreciation of the work of cartoonist/penciller Rick Veitch and inker Alfredo Alcala, who take over from Stephen Bissette and John Totleben. Veitch lacks Bissette’s intensity and command of detail, and Alcala’s rendering is nowhere as nuanced as Totleben’s, but the work is perfectly fine when considered on its own terms.

And that is ultimately what one comes away with. Even with its flaws, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing was perhaps the most humane and morally conscientious superhero series ever published. Books Five and Six are no exception. Moore may flirt here with questions about the responsibilities of godhood, and he may ultimately turn his back on the theme of the moral necessity of engagement with the world. But he never abandons the emotional heart of the material found in Abby and Swamp Thing’s relationship. One can fault him for not staying true to his themes in these closing episodes, but he always stays true to his characters. The moralist gives way to the storyteller, and if one has to choose between the two, isn't that how one would want it?