Review by Win Wiacek

The final stories in Volume One saw new Nestor Redondo take over a feature definitively associated with Bernie Wrightson, and his artistic delicacy features on most stories here, covering Swamp Thing’s appearances from 1975 to 1981.

David Michelinie writes most content, with Gerry Conway responsible for almost everything else, the exceptions being three team-ups. Michelinie introduces the concept of Cable, Abby, Bolt and miserable misshapen Alec Holland roving America during a period of political instability tainted by cultural hedonism and paranoia. They continually stumble into weird and deadly situations, opening here with ‘The Tomorrow Children’. It concerns an isolated Bayou community of simple folk persecuting a family of freakish kids. Swamp Thing drives off one murderous mob, but stories of the outcast kids’ uncanny powers and the plain facts of strange accidents and mysterious disappearances won’t go away.

Michelinie’s subsequent threats include Father Bliss, a seemingly serene and benign cleric with demonically disturbing notions on how to restore faith to his disinterested flock; High Priestess Laganna, who has a direct line to zombie gods; and mysteriously resurrected Conclave chief Nathan Ellery. The maniac’s mercenaries, mechanical myrmidons and global mind-control contraption ‘The Destiny Machine’ at first appear to be an unbeatable opposition.

‘The Hour of the Beast!’ by Bob Haney and Jim Aparo details the awesome spectacle of Swamp Thing’s return to Gotham City and efforts to save it from a monstrous vegetable infestation. When Holland then becomes a target for a profit crazed showman, it needs all Batman’s ingenuity to save his ally and his city.

Indicating tides were turning against horror comics, Michelinie’s final stories are SF romps with Swamp Thing abducted by an alien slaver, then encountering rogue scientists battling contagion in a secret weapons base.

Conway’s first story shows a barely sentient big green monster befriended by an elderly Seminole hermit, and the last issues of Swamp Thing’s original series make the mistake of introducing Alec Holland’s long-lost – and never before mentioned – smarter brother Edward Holland. Redondo’s replacement by Ernie Chan was hardly a selling point. The cliffhanger clash wasn’t completed in 1975, but this collection ends with the pencilled pages from the never published conclusion by David Antony Kraft and Chan.

With his series cancelled, Swamp Thing hung around until a prolonged guest shot with the Challengers of the Unknown. They’re first seen solo defeating old foe Multi-Man before life-threatening circumstances have the team heading to Perdition, Pennsylvania, where Holland first defeated a Lovecraftian horror (see Volume One). The result is a dramatic seven chapters drawn by Mike Nasser, then Keith Giffen, featuring several other DC greats rescued from obscurity, but the fate was once again abrupt cancellation mid-story.

This compendium closes with a brace of superhero team-ups beginning with Steve Englehart and Murphy Anderson pairing bog beast with the Man of Steel. Still believing he was a transformed human and not an enhanced plant, Swamp Thing here searches the sewers of Metropolis for a cure to his condition, only to stumble onto a battle between Superman and Solomon Grundy. Then Batman and Swamp Thing are reunited by Martin Pasko and Aparo in a convoluted tale of Bayou-based murder and frame-ups.

Volume Three picks up with Swamp Thing’s late 1980s revival, but this collection is old-fashioned comics wonderment, from a less cynical and sophisticated age, but passion and intensity. And, ooh, that Redondo artwork…