Review of 'Swamp Thing Vol. 2: Love and Death' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
When people talk about the genius of Alan Moore, the kind of writing in this volume is what they are referring to. He elevates his medium to a higher art both in his visual ideas as well as language. There are many ways I could gush about how fantastic this volume of work is: the story structure, the dazzling visual expressions (notably the drug/sex/nature commune scenes in issue #34), the deftly written lines of horror (is there a better example of genre writing than the Halo of Flies issue?).
My favorite spot here was actually a one-off issue involving a ship of innocent and presumably nature loving aliens who crash land on Earth and attempt to make a home for themselves. The themes Moore has been playing with all along are here. Life, as expressed on Earth, is violent and harsh. Humans have evolved from a swamp of horrors. That …
When people talk about the genius of Alan Moore, the kind of writing in this volume is what they are referring to. He elevates his medium to a higher art both in his visual ideas as well as language. There are many ways I could gush about how fantastic this volume of work is: the story structure, the dazzling visual expressions (notably the drug/sex/nature commune scenes in issue #34), the deftly written lines of horror (is there a better example of genre writing than the Halo of Flies issue?).
My favorite spot here was actually a one-off issue involving a ship of innocent and presumably nature loving aliens who crash land on Earth and attempt to make a home for themselves. The themes Moore has been playing with all along are here. Life, as expressed on Earth, is violent and harsh. Humans have evolved from a swamp of horrors. That stuff is all interesting, but the way Moore is able to lighten up this one-off with comic relief despite it's grim storyline is by creating an alien language of neologisms for these marooned creatures. As a result, the entire book is filled with a strange poetry that is both playful and poignant. Here's one of my favorite passages as an example. In this section, one of the cute, alligator-like aliens is describing how they were forced out of their own planet and burdened with finding a new home:
"But there was one solitribal breed of misanthropomorphs who refused to convivicate with elsefolk. They constricted their own uncivilization, and exclucified anykind else from joining it. They were the loneliest animals of all. They took our Lady away from us... and through all the long sincewhiles we've been questering for a new Lady... with tranquatic slakes deep enough to drowse our begreavements." - pg. 12
I just love that. "Tranquatic slakes deep enough to drowse our begreavements."
I highly recommend this volume to anyone but particularly if you are a literary fiction reader and would like to know what all this comic book fuss is about.
