Books 28-30

Well the last three books have been a bit weird, or maybe not that weird at all. I finished Love In The Time Of Cholera, and Swamp Thing books 1 and 2.

Love In The Time Of Cholera was a wonderful story, but there's some confusing elements in describing reading it, this is a kind of hard response to write. The way it portrays love is simultaneously wonderful and depressing. The character toils away for years loving the same person with all of their heart, and everything about the love makes you feel hopeful and like dying.

To be fair, I have been rating some graphic novels as full books, while as others I have been counting as batches of books. In this case, Alan Moore's writing in his run on Swamp Thing is a bit heavier than Jeff Smith's writing in Bone. This is not to say anything poorly of the Bone stories, or any other comics I read that I counted as less than a full book, it just takes me roughly the same amount of time to read three Walking Dead books as it does to read anything else.
The first book of Swamp Thing is pretty classic as far as Swamp Thing stories go, it reestablishes the character after a long hiatus from publication, and still manages to introduce new characters and concepts, and exciting events. I am giving this book a shorter review to focus on the second one, but that's not to speak poorly of book one, clearly it gripped me enough to go out and buy and read the second book. Book one's events are familiar from the outset, even though I never read the original 17 issues from the 70s that technically precede it. With the exception of one event in the last chapter, everything in the story felt familiar and welcoming, or as welcoming as a horror/sci-fi comic book can feel, I suppose.
However, it's really in book two of Alan Moore's run that things hit their stride. The bulk of the stories within take place on a literal journey through Moore's interpretations of Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell, complete with different spiritual guides in each realm to aid Swamp Thing in his search of his loved one. These parts of the stories are where it earns its reputation as a horror story and a story for mature readers. Shit hits the fan pretty hard early on in the story and it doesn't really let up until the last chapter. Incidentally, in addition to going on a journey through the afterlife, the second book finds time to go over putting some finality on older storylines, establishing a deeper new history for Swamp Thing, and going on a hallucinogenic freak out love-song/love-scene. The third to last chapter is a tribute to an older comic, Pogo Possum, that is brilliant, sad, touching, and probably the most misanthropic thing DC ever printed. If you're aware of Pogo Possum (which you should be, really) the references are great, and clearly written with care by a devoted fan of those stories, who is not just giving adorations, but looking to leave his own mark on what he considers one of the greats. However, what makes this tribute even more wonderful, is even if you went into it with absolutely no knowledge of the comic he is referencing, the horror and sadness are still just as real, and the political points still strike just as harshly. As obvious as the surprise in this chapter is in retrospect, when it happened in the comic, I was genuinely shocked and dismayed. The emotional depth in these comics is perfect, and the great art only helps to make this more striking. This is easily my most recommended comic of the year, including all the Bone stories, including Maggots, Walking Dead, Capacity, and some of the shorter fun things I've read to fill the time.


Really, look at this shit, it's amazing: