One of the problem with buying comics in graphic novel form is that you don’t get in the habit of buying them monthly, so occasionally you forget to buy new volumes. That’s precisely what happened with Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing vols. 5 and 6 ; I’d bought the first four years ago, read them, enjoyed them, and then forgot to check if any more were coming. Well, two more did, and I got to read them recently-ish.
I don’t seem to have written up the earlier volumes here (probably because I read them before I started this thing), so let me speak generally about Moore’s whole run on Swamp Thing when I say that these books — written in the early-to-mid ‘80s — are flat-out excellent. Obviously, Watchmen was Moore’s big breakout work, so there’s a tendency to think of the stuff he wrote before that as being just precursors of his later greatness, but that does a disservice to Swamp Thing, which takes a generic horror comic background and turns it in very unexpected directions — from the personal to the cosmic, back again, and then all mixed together.
It might not be Watchmen, but this is till above-average Alan Moore, better than just about any of his later stuff (which is still in its turn usually better than other writers’ best).
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