Swamps are nature’s haunted houses. They are oozing, rank,
shadowy spots, and who knows what lurks beneath their black, algae-shrouded
waters. A cottonmouth? An alligator? Or something worse?
Because of their superficial creepiness, swamps have been
among the favorite alfresco settings for horror-comics creators since the
form’s inception. IDW’s latest pre-code horror comics anthology collects tales
of frogmen, alligator women, and other beasts and blobs that emerge from bogs
to scare and devour folks. Like all horror comics devoid of vault and crypt
keepers and old witches, the tales in Swamp
Monsters are pretty second rate (and it doesn’t help that I just finished
rereading all my old EC comics before plunging into Steve Banes and Craig Yoe’s
latest compilation), but as is always the case with these collections, there’s
still a lot of fun to be had.
The stories in Swamp
Monsters stand out most when they differ radically from the kinds of things
EC published… and that difference is not a lack of quality. Basil Wolverton’s “Swamp
Monster” (Weird Mysteries #5) has the
look of an Underground Comix comic published 15 years ahead of schedule. The genuinely sad “I Am a Thing” (Out of the Night #12) takes the novel tack of seeing things from the misunderstood monster’s POV. EC’s
tightly plotted tales sharply contrast whimsically weird and delightfully
meandering stuff like “It Won’t Come Back Until Midnight” (Web of Mystery #16), “Demons of the Swamp” (Mysteries #3), “Nightmare Flight” (Baffling Mysteries #10), and “The Winged Spectres of Dismal Swamp” (The Beyond #5), which features
demonically possessed people trapped inside of butterfly wings or something. At
their worst, the stories in Swamp
Monsters are outrageously amateurish, such as the mercifully brief “The
Evil Eye” (Adventures into the Unknown
#39). At their best, they are as intoxicatingly strange as a midnight trudge
through the bayou.
