Swamp Thing
- Score
- 1.5
I might need to watch this again. Maybe. It is loosely based on some great work, pre-Moore, but a product of it's time.
How to reduce Wein & Wrightson to formula junk.
By Tym Stevens
Len Wein and Berni Wrightson raised horror comics to fine art, and all they got for it was a B-movie.
Though there had been swampsters before like The Heap (40's) and Man-Thing (1971), the duo lifted the medium with their variation. By 1973, DC comics was in its early 70's renaissance fueled by edgy writers and fine illustrators, with the acclaimed relevancy of O'Neill and Adams' Green Lantern/ Green Arrrow, the realism of their Batman, the eeriness of O'Neill and Kaluta's The Shadow, and the brutal flair of Goodwin and Simonson's Manhunter. Len Wein filtered Swamp Thing through Shelley's soulful and tortured creature in Frankenstein, a noble heart shunned by a reflexive world judging his appearance, a resonance that rung hard with the struggles of youth activists of the era. Berni Wrightson distilled all the fine craft of famed EC Comics illustrators like Frazetta, Krigstein, Davis, and Wood into his own cauldron, and produced some of the finest graphix art of the decade. Though the experiment was brief, its legend kept it alive in reprints until cult love became universal acclaim.
There's also a B-movie in 1982 that conveys none of this and so that's been said, on to next.