In 1940, Theodore Sturgeon published an atmospheric, highly
unsettling story about a murderous mass of swamp vegetation called “It” in Unknown magazine. Sturgeon’s career
would continue to blossom, adding such achievements as the script for the
classic “Star Trek” episode “Amok Time” and inspiring Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore
Trout to his résumé. The
swamp creature would go on to have an even more flourishing life. Shortly after
the publication of “It”, The Heap oozed across patriotic Airboy comics. In
the sixties, seventies, and eighties, muck monsters like the Lurker in the
Swamp, Bog Beast, Marvin the Dead-Thing, Man-Thing, a revived Heap, and
especially, Swamp Thing were sprouting up in every comic brand worth its salt.
Swampmen:
Muck-Monsters and Their Makers!, the sixth installment of The Comic Book
Creator series, doesn’t get too deeply into why swamp monsters caught on the
way they did (I think it has to do with both our fear of primordial swamp
environments and the way such isolated places serve as pathways to exploring
our own feelings of isolation), but it doesn’t skimp on anything else about
these unique creatures. This text-thick, completely illustrated edition features
a detailed and critical timeline of muck monsters in the comics, full-color
pin-ups, the full text of Sturgeon’s “It”, biographies of the half-dozen-or-so major muckers, and a series of
very in-depth interviews with monster makers such as Len Wein, Alan Moore, and
Bernie Wrightson (Swamp Thing), Steve
Gerber and Val Mayerik (The Man-Thing).
Rather than being mere page-filler, these interviews are consistently
fascinating, whether Wein offers his brief but thought-provoking take on the
appeal of swamp monsters, Wrightson gets into his Monster Kid childhood, or
Moore waxes philosophical about his Swamp
Thing contributions and handles some no-punches-pulled questions graciously (although it is off topic, I was hoping he’d discuss The Killing Joke a bit too, but he doesn’t). While Swampmen
doesn’t hesitate to take its bizarre topic seriously, there is almost always a
sense of fun purveying this colorful, informative, artful, and intelligent
volume.
