Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 44

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Popular Culture Review

Thing does physical battle only twice, once against an alligator and once against
Arcane, who has by now been clearly revealed as the creature’s psychic obverse:
the male scientist gone mad with power and hatred, determined to use his
technological know-how to subordinate nature’s forces to his will. On one level, at
least, Swamp Thing’s encounters with Arcane are means toward exorcising those
very traits that Alec Holland potentially shared. Before they fight, for example,
Arcane insists on calling his opponent “Holland,” just as he did in Dark Genesis.
But this time, the creature challenges that label: “I am not Holland. I am Swamp
Thing. I am of the clean earth. I am in my place of power . . . and you should not
have come here!” (Moore 89). These words reflect an environmentalist thread that
travels through much of the later Swamp Thing stories, and they suggest how much
the creature has changed since the early episodes. Not only is Arcane a polluting
influence, but Alec Holland himself was not of the clean earth. In fact, Swamp
Thing tells Arcane, “You have never encountered me before” (90) and then,
outraged, cries, “You claim the earth for your own, Arcane . . . yet you have not
one tenth of the earth’s power . . . You mock God! You make the world worthless
with your lies! How .. . dare .. . you??” (91). This battle occurs almost halfway
through Love and Death, which begins with Swamp Thing’s decision to find and
bury Alec Holland’s skeletal remains once and for all, after he admonishes Arcane’s
niece Abby, “Don’t keep calling me Alec! I’m not Alec Holland . . . Alec Holland
i s < W ’ (14).
In the hands of writer Alan Moore and artists Stephen Bissette and John
Totleben, Swamp Thing has begun the transformation only hinted at before. He
has tapped into the earth’s power in a way Arcane can only lust after, and will
gradually become that “earth elemental” because of his new-found awareness of
his place in the whole. No longer the smooth green monster of Dark Genesis, he
has now become a shaggy creature of leaves, tubers, roots and flowers, a kind of
miniature earth smelling (in Abby’s words) of “life and loam and autumn” (37).
He is now, as he tells Abby, “in touch with the seasons” (12), a creature of connection
rather than conflict, gentleness rather than aggression, love rather than alienation—
in short, a creature more female than male.7If Dark Genesis had little or no structure,
Love and Death is highly structured, beginning in autumn, recounting parallel
journeys into darkness, evil and death, and ending in spring, with a return to the
light and a celebration of life. Swamp Thing and Abby must accomplish harrowing
odysseys, in the name of love and knowledge. But not that masculine, scientific
knowledge traditionally revered in comic books; rather, a recognition of the
complexities of the world (the gradations of good and evil, woman and man) and
a bleak lesson in just how destructive gender definitions can be.8
To set the scene: Arcane has cast Abby’s soul into hell (a place he has lately
returned from) as a challenge to Swamp Thing and a demonstration of his power.