Unlikable women and shocking twists: Martin Pasko’s Swamp Thing

(Another repost from my own blog because it’s turned into a hectic week). In 1982, to correspond with the first Swamp Thing movie, DC revived the series with Martin Pasko’s and Thomas Yeates as the creative team. Coming right before the Alan Moore/Steve Bissette run that redefined the character forever, Saga of the Swamp Thing doesn’t get a lot of love, Nevertheless, this run, while not classic, was enjoyable, and it did boast a few truly outstanding elements.

First, there’s an outstanding twist. In the first issue, Swamp Thing saves a young mutant girl, Casey, from her deranged father. In a scene familiar from umptyzillion X-books, dad is trying to kill his telekinetic child, believing she’s a demon, a fiend from the pit who will drag the world to destruction. Swamp Thing saves Casey and she becomes his traveling companion.

The twist? Dad was right. Casey is a demon, a fiend from the pit, and she will drag the world to destruction if not stopped. Specifically she’s the Herald of the Beast, sent to usher in the Antichrist and ensure his rise to power. That’s such an unexpected development it completely floored me when I first read it. Though that said, Pasko explaining all this as parapsychological rather than supernatural, and doing it with air quotes — the “Antichrist” will free “Satan” and bring about the “end times” — didn’t work at all.

Next, we have an unconventional antihero. Kreuptmann, an agent for a shadowy corporation involved in all this, turns out to be working against both his employer and the Herald of the Beast. Initially “Mr. K” appears to be an out-and-out villain, then it appears he’s a Nazi, but it’s finally revealed that he’s a Jew and a Holocaust survivor. But he survived by collaborating with the camp authorities, assisting a Mengele-like scientist in his research. It’s an ugly and unusual background to give any character who’s not an outright villain, but it works.

Then there’s reporter Liz Tremayne. Like Mr. K and Casey, Liz winds up traveling along with Alec, as does Dennis Barclay, one of Kreuptmann’s protégés. In #8 they encounter a group of Vietnam veterans who went AWOL and retreated into a fantasy world created by their psi-powers. One of them tells Liz about the hell he went through in the war and the way people back home treated him. Liz tells him he’s a coward: if he opposed the war he shouldn’t have fought, if he supported the war he should have confronted the critics. Fleeing into his dreamworld makes him as cowardly as the draft dodgers who fled to Canada!

It’s an incredibly judgmental speech. Letter-writers gave Pasko a lot of flak, to which he replied Liz was not a mouthpiece for his views, she was her own character. As evidence of which she proves just as judgmental when she meets now-alcoholic Matt Cable, informing him he could totally quite drinking if he wasn’t a weakling. Liz simply has no comprehension of or sympathy for human weakness. Later, when she’s desperately craving sex to help herself feel better, she seduces Dennis, even though she knows he loves her and will feel like crap when she tells him it meant nothing (not that he didn’t consent, but it comes off very manipulative).

It’s not often I see writers willing to make a non-villain character so unlikable. I give the creative team points for that. I’d be curious what Pasko would have done with Liz down the road but Moore wrote her out of the strip (she returns later but she’s a completely different person) so we’ll never know.

#SFWApro. Covers by Yeates.