Even for a guy who lost his wife in a bomb set up to kill him, was burned alive during the explosion and reemerged as a man whose primary fear should be Weed-B-Gon, the [debatably] “former” Alec Holland has it pretty rough. All the while, during his transformation, his wife was shot to death. Fast forward and we have a similar scenario occurring just a few years later. He’s been run out of his home, cornered down and shot, only to be left for the dead (again) but then cryogenically frozen by some G-Men, only to be dissected by Jason Woodrue (aka the Floronic Man, whom the Feds have on loan from prison). Woodrue, like Holland, is a botanist and has a plant form. The difference is that the Floronic Man has a believable and easily achievable human appearance. He literally sprays on artificial skin and shaves the facial hair-reminiscent wooden protusions from his face.

As if my introduction to the Swamp Thing could not get any more depressing, the pathos that – from what I’ve come to comprehend is at the core of Moore’s version – gets magnified when Woodrue discovers that the Swamp Thing is not Holland at all; he is just a collection of plant cells that think they’re Alec Holland, fused with his memories and therefore human. While conducting an autopsy on our hero, Woodrue (being as highly regarded a genius as Holland was), discovers that all of Swamp Thing’s organs are merely non-functioning replicas of human versions. He concludes that all human traces of Holland are gone! Continue reading “Swamp Thing Vol 1: Saga of the Swamp Thing”