Alan Moore's run on The Saga of the Swamp Thing is another one of those comics that reshaped how I viewed comics. I picked up issue 21 as a recent back issue in the summer 1984 and fell in love with everything about the book. Way back in 1984, horror usually meant slashers to me. Somebody in a mask, a body count, roll credits. But this, this was something else. This is a horror comic, and not at all what I expected.
The setup is simple. Swamp Thing is Alec Holland, a scientist caught in a lab explosion, soaked in his own formula, and turned into a plant monster. That's the character for years. Then Moore takes it apart. In "The Anatomy Lesson," they cut the body open and find out Alec Holland is dead. Swamp Thing isn't a man who turned into a plant. It's a mass of plant life that absorbed Holland's memories and thinks it's him.
In one single issue everything that came before gets turned on its head. Alan Moore not only captured the mood of horror but brought a literary quality to the writing that was not known, at least to me at that age.
The book stretched what I thought comics were about. The scary stuff wasn't the monsters that jumped out at you, it came from what Swamp Thing learns about himself and humanity.
Recommended, even now.
