You know who else likes Swamp Monsters? Peter Rawlik

The inimitable Peter Rawlik is an author and colleague who's prolific and worth reading every time. He has contributed to World War Cthulhu: A Collection of Lovecraftian War Stories, Kaiju Rising, Dorian Gray Darker Shades and several dozen other anthologies. If there's been an anthology I wanted to get into, but didn't, you'll likely find Peter's name in the published table of contents. He's also a swamp creature enthusiast, and took the time to answer a couple of questions. Thanks, Peter!

What’s your favorite swamp monster in comics?

It has to be Man-Thing (Though The Lizard might come in a close second)

Why?

Man-Thing represents something unusual in the world of monsters (or did at the time). Like the Blob, Man-Thing was mindless, its motives were unfathomable. It couldn’t be reasoned with or talked to or negotiated with. It was more a force of nature than a man or even an animal.

How old were you when you picked up your first swamp monster comic?

I would have been about 12 when I bought Micronauts #7, though I may have picked up a few issues of Creepy, Eerie or similar magazines. I do remember picking up a mag with an adaption of Brennan’s Slime or Sturgeon’s It.

Tell me about the person you were at that point.

I was an average child. Growing up outside of Philadelphia. I spent my summers on boats in Ocean City Maryland, fishing, crabbing and clamming. Even by this point I was collecting Lovecraftian fiction and I had a large collection of paperbacks.

What other comics were you reading then?

X-Men and Guardians of the Galaxy, occasionally other Marvel comics. I recall picking up so issues of Swamp Thing featuring the Un-Men.


What resonated with you in that first issue? What drew you to that comic?
I was regularly reading Micronauts back then and the Man-Thing was the villain of the month. But afterwards I began seeking out back issues and his appearances. Man-Thing was an enigma, not a hero, not an anti-hero, but still somehow a force for good in the world. It suggested that things might be more complicated than with other super-heroes. In many ways the stories weren’t really about Man-Thing but rather other people who would eventually have to deal with the monster one way or another.

Is there a specific writer whose muck monster work stands above all others?

Len Wein did an outstanding job.

Why?

Wein seemed to understand that the swamp and the things in it were not just dangerous and frightening, but also beautiful as well, and that living on the edge of the swamp was like living on the edge of another world, a fantastic world that was’t like the land or the sea, but was a little of both.

Did reading this swamp monster lead you to other swamp monsters?

Man-Thing led to Swamp Thing and Kolchak’s Pere Malfait. I’ve become obsessed with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the things that haunted the swamp in The Call of Cthulhu. Frog monsters are ubiquitous in lots of the things I read, as are slugs, snails and the like. All of these seem straight out of the swamp.

Best artist?

Bernie Wrightson

Why?

Wrightson’s lines were always clean and clear, but the images he drew were anything but. His monsters, all his monsters were complex, detailed creations that thrilled the eye. He was also a master of backgrounds knowing just how much to put in, and how much to leave out.

Have you considered writing comics?

I have, I’ve outlined a few things set in the Marvel and DC Universes.


Would you be interested in writing a comic-book swamp monster?

I would, and oddly enough I kind of want to write Solomon Grundy, but get him back to his swamp monster roots.

Anything else that really needs saying?

For the last 27 years I’ve worked in the Everglades, studying and trying to understand what was portrayed in those comics I read so many years ago. Its very different than what was presented back then, and I’ve come to realize that many writers and artists just don’t understand the Everglades. Its more beautiful and more frightening than they even know. Someday I hope to change that.

Image of the Everglades courtesy of the National Park Foundation

Pasko And Yeates: Better Than You Remember

Martin Pasko and Tom Yeates were the team that resurrected the Swamp Thing. According to the Len Wein interview in Swamp Creatures, he suggested bringing the book back after Wes Craven had purchased the movie rights. Why not have a comic to give readers something to latch onto after the film whet their appetites?

Swamp Thing hadn’t completely disappeared from the DC universe, but he was scarce enough to be legendary. As mentioned in the previous Swamp Thing entry, he guest starred in Challengers of the Unknown, written by Gerry Conway, the writer of the first Man-Thing story. This was followed by an appearance in The Brave and the Bold 122 (October 1975) when he again teamed up with Batman to defeat a super plant that threatened to take over Gotham. Alan Moore would use a similar plot, only with Swamp Thing as Batman’s antagonist instigating the plant growth. In DC Comics Presents #8, (April,1979) the Swamp Thing assisted Superman in defeating some sixty Solomon Grundies in a more superhero than horror story Steve Englehardt. Compared to Man-Thing, or any second-tier superhero, four years without an appearance is virtual character death.

I have, perhaps arbitrarily decided to mark the beginning of Swamp Thing volume 2 with The Brave and the Bold issue 176, from July 1981. It’s written by Martin Pasko, who would, one year later, take on the recrudescence of the Swamp Thing in May 1982. Before this story, Swamp Thing hadn’t been seen for two years.

Pasko’s “The Delta Connection” is a straightforward Batman story from the early eighties; more Darknight Detective than Batgod, involving no other superpowered individuals. A man is murdered, and the search for the culprit takes Batman into the swamps of Louisiana. The Swamp Thing is coincidentally present, and a random shotgun blast allows the two to meet. Again. More likely to attract a Batman fan than a Swamp Thing fan, the story includes a one-page recapitulation of the Swamp Thing’s origin, and Pasko references their two previous encounters. In keeping with the Gothic atmosphere, and the resurgence of the weird in the eighties, Swamp Thing is given a vital but mysterious clue by a ghost. Later, the Swamp Thing concocts a rational explanation for this, but there’s definitely room to believe either way. Which is the strength of Pasko’s writing. The two solve the mystery and the criminals are brought to justice. It’s an atmospheric mystery, everything wrapped up. Pasko’s writing sets an excellent mood for the piece, and legendary Batman artist Jim Aparo artist does an excellent job with the swampy setting so distant from Gotham’s concrete jungles.

I don’t know if Pasko was handed the Swamp Thing assignment because of this story, but it’s more than a coincidence that he was chosen to write the new Swamp Thing book.

The paradigm shifted slightly when Swamp Thing got its own series again. Pasko’s ideas were now very divorced from the mainstream DC Universe. No superheroes, not even Batman appear during his tenure. Only the Phantom Stranger, a mystical hero, appears, and those two stories are fill-ins written by Dan Mishkin. But there was a good reason for not including superheroes. Pasko set out to not write a kids’ book. His tenure on Swamp Thing deals with some very heavy psychological issues and current events, in the more or less direct way that Steve Gerber did in Man-Thing. This for-mature-readers approach was one of the stepping stones that eventually led DC to ditch the Comics Code Authority. Pasko deals with demons, child murder, Nazis, fanaticism, Vietnam, the aftereffects of electroconvulsive therapy, shady governmental-corporate partnerships, and the coming of the antichrist. It’s a heavy for a comic, especially one from the early eighties.

Len Wein was chosen as the editor. It must have been a strange sensation, editing another writer’s take on a character he had created. Even stranger to see Pakso update the character from Wein’s classic Gothic stories to neo-noir.

In the first issue, Swamp Thing rescues a mute girl in an act of kindness. Although young, she later proves to be anything but innocent. Her character arc is a beautiful inversion of the usual rescue of a child. What harm could come from saving a young girl, Karen Clancy from a father who is about to shoot her because he thinks she is some sort of witch spawn? It’s a familiar story, two outcasts bonding with each other. Pakso slowly transforms that initial rescue into a fantastic inversion of the story the readers expected. The issue also introduces “Harry Kay” an agent for the Sunderland Corporation. Kay turns out to have a lot of layers. Nobody is wholly good in Pasko’s Swamp Thing. And nobody is completely devoid of sympathetic qualities, either.

In the very next issue the Swamp Thing and Karen are separated. They will never manage to truly get together again until the last two issues of the story arc, allowing for a diversity of stories as each character can be the protagonist on their own. When these other characters are the focus of a story, the Swamp Thing often plays the role the Heap did in the Hillman comics: arriving at the end to resolve the story. Pasko is too savvy to have the Swamp Thing administer justice, because there is no justice in these stories. The status quo is too flawed for anyone to desire a return to it.

Other characters, often initially antagonistic to Swamp Thing or at odds with the rest of the cast, filter in. Liz Tremayne appears, a tough, no-nonsense reporter fighting for recognition as well as justice in the stories she reports. Helmut “Harry Kay” Kripptmann, a Jewish doctor and former Nazi collaborator, is morally ambiguous. Dr. Barclay starts as a naive “psychic” healer who doesn’t know he is the conduit transferring wounds from people onto captive clones. They are not heroes, but rather people with checkered pasts, attempting do to what is right by what they know. The frisson between the well-rounded characters makes the stories complex and interesting, and slowly layer after layer of the onion peels away until each character is exposed in all their complexity.

In the background looms Sunderland Corporation. Sunderland would be a standard evil corporation, similar to OCP, Weyland-Utani, Umbrella Corporation, or Abstergo, but these stories were written before any of these other companies were invented. Sunderland is always a shadowy presence with its filthy fingers in a large number of very dirty pies. In the Reagan/Thatcher area, Pasko also made sure that he reader knew that Sunderland had government ties, allowing it access to information and material it might not otherwise. The revelation that many large companies had government contacts was a shock to us in the eighties. It is understood to be a matter of course now.

Issue three introduces us to Rosewood, Illinois. The town has been taken over by vampires, and only a desperate family is left to resist them. But those who fight evil are not necessarily good people. Larry Childress blows up a local dam to flood the town, dissolving the vampires under running water. But he does so taking his son with him, where he could have left the boy out of harm’s way. His nihilism is not praised.

Issue four, “In the White Room” presents us with another complex situation. “Uncle Barney” a local kids TV show host, has been caught murdering children. His show’s catchy song “Give the benefit of the doubt/When you trust it all works out” is implied to have contributed to the murders, since kids trust Uncle Barney. That said, Barney made a pact with demons, which brought out his murderous desires. The demon escapes Barney and finds other hosts, Liz Tremayne is caught in the middle of the supernatural struggle. And though the demon is defeated, by the end of the issue, Uncle Barney has been replaced with “Aunt Polly” who has the same catchy tune about trust. Pineboro hasn’t learned anything.

Issue Five “The Screams of Hungry Flesh” brings us Dennis Barclay, a doctor who is part of Sunderland. He’s a naive psychic healer working with Kripptmann. He discovers that he’s just transferring wounds onto semiconscious clones. Once the truth is revealed, he flees Sunderland and his clinic, adding another character to the Swamp Thing and Liz Tremayne party.

The next story, a two parter “Sins on the Water” and “I Have Seen the Splintered Timbers of a Hundred Shattered Hulls” is the most bizarre and comic-book story yet, starting with an alien invasion on a Sunderland corporate cruise, and ending up with isolated psychically-enhanced Vietnam vets who can alter reality. At its heart, “Here’s Looking at You, Kid” has a back and forth discussion about the treatment of those veterans. Pasko is canny enough not to let the story take sides. In the background, Casey is seen to be more dangerous, and Kripptmann is unable to apprehend her.

With issue nine, "Prelude to Holocaust", the series now shifts full-time to the Karen Clancy story. I suppose there’s a little bit of Stephen King’s Carrie in the little psychic girl, but Karen isn’t an innocent cursed with psychic abilities she can’t control. The little girl the Swamp Thing saved is the herald of the Antichrist. She’s an evil person, growing and developing her psychic powers, using them get what she wants. And to make sure we know she’s evil, Pasko shows her looting a Nazi collector’s stash for a particular item. Kripptmann is shown to have a larger agenda, using what resources he can glean from Sunderland to pursue Karen. And he is ruthless, even murdering Sunderland employees to get what he needs. He is not a good person, even though he stands opposed to both Sunderland and Clancy.

The coming of the Antichrist is very similar to the Nazi Holocaust. In fact, the Holocaust was a prelude to what Karen and the Antichrist are going to bring about. Neither Pasko or artist Tom Yeates sugar coat this. When Karen pulls the memories of an extermination camp out of Kripptmann’s head, we see Nazis pulling the gold fillings out of dead prisoners, Nazi doctors about to inject gasoline in a hapless prisoner’s veins. They are absolutely not fucking around with this story line. This is the motivation behind Kripptmann, and these two pages of terrible memories hammer home the reason he seeks personal redemption for his previous actions. It’s a fascinating drive for the character.

The Swamp Thing is ultimately the agent that foils Hell's plan. Not the religious, not the powerful, but the swamp man who was once intervened to save a young girl, using power siphoned from Clancy. Even Kripptmann finds some measure of redemption by killing the man who would be the Antichrist. After the build-up, it’s a little unsatisfying, but the journey was well worth pursuing.

After this are two fill-in issues from Dan Mishkin, crossing over with the Phantom Stranger. It’s an mediocre, comic-booky technothriller, in which Nat Broder turns himself into pure silicon. Initially he goes on a rampage, turning many things, including Swamp Thing, into crystalline versions of themselves. Swamp Thing, fortunately, is still soaked with the bio-restorative formula, so he able to re-convert back to his mucky self. Broder turns out to also have power over computers, and in a few moments, takes over the world's computers. Eventually he is stopped by the combined forces of the Swamp Thing and the Stranger.

Issue sixteen “Stopover In a Place of Secret Truths” introduces a few changes to the book. Abby Arcane from the original series returns. The story is a bit of a Twilight Zone style stand-alone, about a community that wears masks to hide hideous deformities. It also adds Kripptmann to the Swamp Thing’s traveling cast.

But more importantly, this is the first issue with John Totleben and Steve Bissette as artists. Now Tom Yeates is an amazing artist, and I should have talked about his work before. His work is very clean, nuanced, and full of unexpected little details. Yeates drew grotesque and the weird of the Swamp Thing series extraordinarily well. His art is strong, and developed amazingly as the series progressed. The climax of the Karen Clancy storyline would have been much weaker in the hands of a less-talented artist.

This new team of Totleben and Bissette gave a frenetic, intricately detailed line art to the Swamp Thing that I fell in love with the instant I saw it. I love Bernie Wrightson’s art, but the Bissette/Totleben Swamp Thing art remains my favorite. The new team broke the art molds. No longer was the action confined to tidy boxes. Panels could be crystal-like shards that slashed diagonally across the page, sound effects could be reinforced with art, rather than being cartoonishly splashed across the page. In some ways, this is the punk element that appealed to me. While Yeates’ art is excellent the new team had a wild, uncontained, and unpredictable style. It didn’t march in staid array across the page but drew the eye in unexpected directions. This confrontational art style served Pasko's scripts very well, creating the atmosphere in which the words had more impact.

There is also a level of grotesquerie to Bissette and Totleben’s work that outstrips anything else I have seen in comics. Their monsters are carefully and patently impossible, with teeth that could never fit into their mouths. And they’re glorious. Art like this makes comics more effective than pure text, only a visual/text hybrid like comics could produce something that startling. Thankfully, we will get to see more of their art in Moore’s run.

With Abbey reestablished, issue seventeen brings Matthew Cable back. And he’s a mess. A drunk, suffering from the aftereffects of electroconvulsive therapy, his life has been burned to the ground. But somehoe he has managed to gain some sort of psychic power. Which is kind of interesting, since Abby had started to developing powers in the original series. This is also the re-introduction of Anton Arcane. His is powerful and creepy, and this return cemented his place as Swamp Thing’s best recurring villain.

Issue eighteen “The Man Who Would Not Die” is a few new pages bookending the original resurrection of Anton Arcane, from back in the original Swamp Thing #9, and recolored. This is the first time I’ve seen the “Auntie Bellum” change to the script, and this has remained in every subsequent release.

Issue nineteen “...And the Meek Shall Inherit...” is Pasko’s last, and it’s magnificent. Arcane and his un-men have taken on insect traits, making them even more grotesque than before. They capture Swamp Thing, Kripptmann, and Abby. Arcane still covets the Swamp Thing’s nearly-indestructable body. Kripptmann, a very gray and occasionally reprehensible character, redeems himself by destroying Arcane’s plans. At the cost of his life. His struggle, half-transformed into some sort of wasp or spider, is very small, but agonizingly illustrated by Totleben and Bissette. Pasko’s words are just right, giving the struggle a pathos seldom elicited in comics. With his sacrifice, Arcane is undone, and everyone separates. The stage is now set for Alan Moore’s tenure.

Pasko’s work on Swamp Thing has gone unrecognized for more than thirty years, and that’s a shame. It’s certainly overshadowed by Moore’s years on the book, but these are excellent, creepy comics that pull the reader into a shadowy realm of modern horror. He literally draws the Swamp Thing out of the Gothic and comic-book trappings that defined the character in the initial series and presents us with fully modern horror. Going back over these comics is a pleasure, because Pasko’s writing is subtle and complex, different from what was being written then, and different from what’s being written now. It’s absolutely worth re-visiting for modern readers or horror, for its mood, its complex characters, and refusal to tie the end of the story up in a bow. Personally, I love the way the stories do not let the reader off the hook, but force us to look at issues and ideas from which the stories germinated. This is comics at their best. Telling stories that do not condescend to the reader.

Next up, Roy Thomas once again pays homage to his favorite character. Somewhere I never would have expected it. Thanks for your patience, and I’ll write more soon.

Galgameth: Pulgasari Minus the Murderous Dictator-Producer

A footnote to the weird production that was North Korea's 1985 Pulgasari is that the director, Shin Sang-ok, eventually escaped his captors and remade that kaiju film in 1996 as The Adventures of Galgameth. Until recently, I haven't been able to find a decent version of it, and then one popped up on Youtube. How could I resist?

The Adventures of Galgameth is what producers believe kids want in a film. It's mostly harmless pap, with virtually all the terrible things happening off-screen. It was also done on the cheap, for television. But so what? I've watched and discussed a lot of cheap kaiju films. The above connection to Pulgasari is enough to get me to write about the film, but the other impressive part of it is the cast. Among others, the film features Richard Horvitz,the voice of Invader Zim, Felix Silla, who played Cousin Itt in the Addams Family TV series, the body of Twikki in Buck Rodgers and many other sci-fil roles. Under the larger Galgameth suit is Doug Jones, memorable as the Gentlemen from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Abe Sapien in the Hellboy films, and the Amphibian Man in Shape of Water.


And it's kind of a good thing that cast is neat, because there really isn't much kaiju goodness to dig into with Galgameth. The plot is predictable. A hapless prince in medieval Donnigold Castle is learning to be a man. His enemy is El El, the king's best knight, who we know is evil because he dresses in black. The Good King shows his son a box with the true protector of the realm, a small idol. A few minutes later, on his deathbed, the dying king (poisoned by El El) begs the little statue to protect his son. El El, as regent, then begins his predictable reign of tyranny, raising taxes, conscripting everyone to be in the Royal Army, and burning books. And Galgameth, the guardian again is activated by tears. So it clearly is a loose adaption of Pulgasari


Seventeen minutes in, however, the film demonstrates its inability to hold am emotional note. Or at least shows it's willing to sacrifice its emotional tenor for amusing kids' stuff. The Prince, having not eaten for days, mourning his father, wakes up to discover Galgameth has been animated. The film immediately lauches into a cutesy sequence of wonder as the two interact. I mean, people were being tortured just a couple of minutes ago, but we don't want to remember that. Galgameth has big teeth and huge blue eyes. He can jump! He eats metal! He's not just a guardian of the kingdom, he'll also destroy the prince's sadness.



Galgameth and the prince join up with the local rebels. They feed the beast iron, and it grows. You can tell it's becoming a more serious monster because a horn begins to grow out of its head. It changes from Felix Silla in a suit to Doug Jones. As with Pulgasari, they trap it and try to burn it, only this time in a church rather than a cage. I am very pleased at this point that not all the news is delivered by weeping woman.

Much as I don't like the childish face of the initial, small Galgameth, I have to admit the expression is good. It grins seamlessly and charmingly. And it gets better as Galgameth turns into the more threatening, kaiju version of itself. The eyes blink, its brows and nose change and express mood.

During the initial assault on the castle, the defenders use some of the tactics seen in the first two Daimajin films. They dump carts of rocks, fire flaming catapults. But they also snare Galgameth, drag it to a pit, and then bury it. It didn't work in King Kong vs Godzillaand it doesn't work here, either. The assault on the castle resumes, and here we have some of both the best and the worst of Galgameth's miniature work.


Galgameth's weakness is not actually tears, but salt water, which causes it to burn like it's made of magnesium. Evil El El drags the prince out in a boat, times him to the mast, and then sets fire to the boat. And it feels again like Return of Daimajin, with the prince playing the part of Lady Sayuri, El El standing in for Lord Mikoshiba.


It would be a little complex for Galgameth to follow Pulgasari's ending, with the monster that was initiall;y so cute becoming becoming so large that it has to be destroyed. And admittedly, Galgameth doesn't have the burden of being a metaphor for capitalism. Galgameth, dying in the sea-water, is struck by lightning and conducts it to El El's ship, burning it. But Galgameth can't solve the human plotline, and the prince has to take care of business, killing El El, getting the pretty girl, and getting crowned.

It's not a horrible film. By the numbers certainly, but it doesn't loathe its audience the way the Atlantic Rim series does. If I had to scale it, I'd put closer to perfunctory film-making, more like Gargantua than Kraa or Zarkour. But the clumsy way in which some of the Kaiju action is handled does show that Shin Sang-ok, or possibly Kim Jong-il himself, did the right thing by hiring the Godzilla crew to do the miniatures work for Pulgasari. Galgameth's is pretty weak by comparison, even eleven years later. Galgameth has some good moments of Kaiju action, but it also has some really bad ones.

Rampage: American Kaiju

When I first saw the trailer for the Dwayne Johnson/Brad Oeyton Rampage, I wasn't sure it was going to be a Kaiju film. As I've said before, giant gorilla films don't automatically fall under the kaiju umbrella, and they often have problematic subtexts. Giant gorillas are just big animals. But when I saw this picture...



... I realized I'd been wrong. And I reluctantly contacted my good friend and we went to the IMAX show of Rampage. And I had an amazing time.

Rampage is truly an American kaiju film. It's really an action film that happens to include giant monsters. And that's not a criticism. The Host is a crime film that happens to involve a huge mutated fish. And it’s a magnificent film. Rampage has all the elements of a typical action film: a hypermasculine action protagonist who manages to shrug off a bullet, the destruction of a lot of property. Come to think of it, I’m surprised that this hasn’t been done before. The action protagonist and sensibility is what differentiatsd this film from, say, Cloverfield, in which the protagonists are simply there to watch what’s happening. Protagonist Davis Okoye is there to solve plot problems, rather than watch the plot unfold. He also has a convenient background that allows him to perform a a lot of actions what would baffle the average person. He’s a primatologist who was Special Forces, so he knows how to fly a helicopter, when it becomes useful. Quite the Action Hero guy.

The other indicator of action film ethos is the large amount of gunfire. When the military shows up, they bring in s a lot of guns, including an A-10 Warthog. And unlike the standard kaiju film where the missiles and bullets just bounce off, the bullets that hit George, for example, make holes. By the end, despite his mutant healing factor, George is looking pretty rough.



Anyway, about the monsters. They are all exposed to a goofy MacGuffin, canisters with a genetic editing delivery system. It's been fascinating to watch genetic manipulation become the new way monsters are created. In the thirties, it was gland transplants, in the fifties and sixties, it became radiation, after that, pollution, and now genetic tampering. Anyway. George the gorilla, Ralph the wolf and Lizzie, who's either an alligator or a crocodile (I'm going to say croc for the rest of the post) are exposed and go on a… rampage. In Chicago.



Our buy-in kaiju is George the gorilla. He’s Okoye’s best friend, the most human-like, and the least mutated by the MacGuffin. But like only the most recent Kong, Skull Island, this gorilla eats people. And he maintains sympathy, even though Kong: Skull Island cuts away from the giant gorilla actually eating the soldier, Rampage treats us to a long, beautiful shot of the woman in the red dress goes down George's gullet. In the original screenplay, George was to die at the end of the film, probably as penance for eating humans. More on this later.



George is an albino, which was done because it's difficult to see bloody holes in dark brown or black fur. This differentiates him from Kong, but also lets the damage show. And that's the real thing about Rampage. Although the bullets and explosives aren't the plot solution, (I'm looking at you 1998 Godzilla) they do hurt the monsters. George, as the protagonist, gets shot, impaled, mauled, and really banged up. Unlike Japanese films, where the only thing that can really affect a giant monster is another giant monster, there’s a lot of things that can hurt George. It doesn’t actually slow him down, any more than being shot slows Davis down.



Ralph is the intermediate monster. He gets a fair amount of screen time early on, when a mercenary group is sent out to deal with this second giant monster. Ralph is at base a wolf, but in addition to mass, gains porcupine quills and membranes between his legs allowing him to glide like Varan the Unbelievable. Ralph also seems to instinctively know how these work, and controls himself well while in the air. But he’s ultimately the kaiju we spend the least time with. Although mammalian, he’s not humanoid, and doesn't present with a complex emotional life. Like George, we watch him eat people, but they're all bad people, mercenaries in the employ of ScumlabsEnergyne.



He also serves to show how monstrous Lizzie is, since she makes short, bloody work of him.



Lizzie, the mutated crocodile, is the real star, the real kaiju. Ralph the wolf is kind of near, but it doesn't have menace Lizzie does. Once she arrives, everything else is secondary. She has to be taken down. She is the most mutated of the trio, and nearly invulnerable. Where the gorilla and the wolf have soft, fleshy bodies, Lizzie is armored like a tank. She's developed gills, but these are not as vulnerable as is hoped, possibly as a nod to the 2014 Godzilla, where gunfire is ineffectively directed at Godzilla's gills. But they look pretty cool when frilled.



Lizzie is what makes the film a kaiju film. She’s an engine of destruction, and a strange beast. George has a personal connection to Davis, and Ralph sort of only takes out bad people. Lizzie is there to wreck shit. And she does. Whoever thought of giving a giant croc a gecko’s ability to scale walls was a either a madman or a genius, because Lizzie looks frightening and amazing as she is climbing the Sears Willis Tower. Rampage uses the 2014 Godzilla's idea of echolocation, originally used by the MUTOs and applies it here. How you get creatures attracted to a signal, and for that matter how you mutate animals to receive radio waves from a distance of a thousand miles. But hey, it got all the monsters into Chicago.



In a trope that goes all the way back to the 1925 The Lost World, we see George, Lizzie, and Ralph trashing the most distinctive building in Chicago, the Willis Tower. Because of course the big evil companies lie Energyne need a tall tower to be evil in. Still, Chicago is a nice break from Tokyo, San Francisco, and New York.



Of course the military is called out to deal with the creatures. And they are treated with respect (another lesson learned from 1998 Godzilla). In fact just about everyone who's got a name is a competent character. There's friction between the non-military government agent. But the military is not obsessed with destroying the animals, and responds to setbacks with calm, rather than going to pieces. And that was greatly appreciated. Despite this, the screenwriters didn't do as much research as I would have liked. Like Shin Godzilla, the B-2 Spirit bomber is deployed. But the Shin Godzilla team did their homework better. The MOAB deployed in Rampage is too large to fit into the Spirit's bomb bay. It's designed to be deployed out the back of a cargo plane. Interestingly, the B-2 survives Rampage where the new Godzilla cuts them out of the sky.



The end battle is brutal. While we don't get any shots of lines of people who have been hurt, the landscape is a dusty gray and filled with rubble. George and Davis really get knocked around, action hero style. It’s not quite too much, but a lot of the action had me wincing in sympathy. Also like Shin Godzilla, the Spirit Bomber provides us with a ticking clock. If Davis and George can't deal with the other two kaiju, the military is going to drop a bomb. Unlike Shin Godzilla, this time the bomb is non-nuclear. The fightthere fore is like watching a middleweight go a couple of rounds with a heavyweight in a fixed fight. George and Okoye lose and lose and lose until they win. And it should be said that similar to Kong: Skull Island this film loves



the jumping



gorilla.



Jumping George solves the plot by putting a steel beam through the giant croc’s eye.

Apparently, the original script called for George to die, but Johnson himself campaigned for the giant gorilla to live. Which givesd the film a more upbeat ending, which it really needs, but at the same time doesn’t solve the plot’s giant monster problem. How much does George eat now? Will he get over his taste for human flesh? How the hell are they authorities going to dispose of two gigantic rotting corpses? Questions like these are part of why I like Pacific Rim so much. It looks at these questions, including kaiju excrement and body disposal, way beyond the usual kaiju film plot.



Ultimately the film is engaging, although the violence is uncomfortably brutal. I suppose I'm used to the genteel 'weapons bounce off' feel of Japanese Kaiju films. Maybe it's more honest, but whatever. It's a movie in which people survive blatantly impossible things. But the human story is pretty good, the actors giving good performances in the human plot that interacts with the monster plot. It'sd not groundbreaking drama, but it's not supposed to be. It's an action film, like any of the Fast and the Furious or Transformers films, which happens to involve kaiju. the two go together surprisingly well.

Atlantic Rim: Resurrection: Shit Sandwich

If I really had nerve, I would leave the review at just the title. If you’re about to be executed, or dying of a painful disease, and need a movie to make that last hour an a half a reason to embrace oblivion, Atlantic Rim: Resurrection is that film. It’s so lazily, stupidly conceived, executed, and then marketed that I would go so far as to call it a blight on moviemaking. You may remember that I loathed Atlantic Rim. Everything about the sequel is worse. Everything.

In the introductory voice over, we’re told that the monsters threatened all life on Earth. Two monsters failing to attack a Florida city and then going on to New York isn't even close. Likely this is a pull from the similarly histrionic 1999 Yonggary, histrionics that are completely not supported by the film. There’s a lot of this in the film, claims in the dialog that are utterly unsupported by the rest of the script.

This image is a reminder of the monsters from the first film:



Much of the beginning of the film is a montage of stock military footage, a common way for a cheap production to stretch its run time. Hey, director Jared Cohn, if you’re pulling from Coleman Francis’ playbook, you may want to stop. Cohn’s direction is just about on the level of the Charles Band films, Kraa and Zarkor, only without the competently-directed sequences from SPFX director Michael Deak. I really would have preferred suitimation to the lazy and uninteresting CG we get. Because bad as Atlantic Rim was, they must have cut the budget or found people even less competent. Possibly both.



I like dumb films. Pacific Rim and Rampage weren’t the most sophisticated scripts out there, but they drew me along because they had some interesting ideas and executed them with enthusiasm. But Atlantic Rim: Resurrection isn’t dumb. It aspires to be dumb, but it doesn’t have enough juice. If I were to call it anything, I’d say it was holoanencephalic. The entire film is a holding action until the end mercifully arrives.

The film starts with footage from the first film in order to pad out the run time, and to refresh our memory of the goofy monster. But when the monsters show, they’re completely different. Not just a different skin, or a different color, but literally six-legged as opposed to four-legged. No explanation is given, and in fact the film goes so far as to completely ignore the differences between the monsters. The kaiju don’t even look like what’s on the promotional materials. It’s like Cohn is daring us to like the film, making it as difficult as possible.



As befits such a basement-level production, the script is also garbage. Six minutes in, the monsters have appeared on a populated beach, but in some random-ass bar, nobody knows that the monsters have returned. Because there’s a lack of cameras, phones, and social media or something. Or because the script is utterly incompetent. Further, nothing seems to have a fixed location. It’s all X miles from the Atlantic Coast. Which isn’t some sort of two thousand mile stretch of America.



When the armed forces have to retreat from the sprawling city, they regroup at sandstone mountains of Florida. Which makes a certain amount of sense, because the promotional blurb says “Los Angeles is under attack by monsters. The mechs attempting to fight them off are better armed than their precursors, but so are the creatures.” Los Angeles is on the Atlantic, right? I mean, it clearly is the suburbs of Los Angeles, but could someone have actually paid attention enough to not list it as Los Angeles in the promotional material? Ha ha, no. Because everything about this production is cheap, incompetent, and performed without thought.



But hey if you wanted a kaiju movie about scientists complaining about competing computer formats, this is totally your film. Because that’s fascinating I mean, sure someone says “One wrong line of code, this whole place is going to blow.” Apparently, they’re writing their computer programs in C4+ or some other idiotic bullshit.

A lot of cues are taken from Pacific Rim. There’s the scientist who might sympathize too much with the kaiju. I don’t suspect Geoff Meed took his cues from the original Godzilla, the dialog is much closer to Pacific Rim. There’s a new neural link that’s used to control the robots. Which doesn’t work as well as the previous interface. Which is stupid. The new control scheme involves long joysticks, which the robot-jocks occasionally jerk around, making them look like they’re playing rock-em sock-em robots. What else did Meed watch? Probably Cloverfield. After the first monster is killed, its body swells and then explodes with smaller versions of the monster. Sort of a reverse Legion from Gamera 2: Attack of the Legion. Only stupid. When the two monsters combine into a single monster, it gains an acid spit, similar to Reptilicus.



The film also has a certain amount in common with the 1998 Godzilla. The film’s plot solution is not actually a firepower, but a complete bullshit science thing. Half-way through the film, but the plot throws all sorts of mechanical glitches in the way so the technological McGuffin doesn’t get deployed until the film’s run time is running down. I don’t know if that’s a deliberate homage, or if two less-than-stellar scriptwriters had the same idea. I suppose it doesn’t matter, since the bungled results are the same.



The incompetent script and direction aren’t just lazy and uninspired, though. They actively embrace the worst stereotypes in film-making. Does the black jaeger pilot buy it first? You betcha. Does the black guy who replaces him suicide ram the monster and die? You betcha. And just in case you had some hope because the initial jaeger pilots are two women in addition to the black guy, during the second jaeger fight, the experienced women pilots are locked into a room, and the white scientist, who also knows how to pilot the jaeger, gets to deliver the killer goo that he scienced up to destroy the monsters. White action science guy saves the day while everyone else is sidelined. How original



The film raises some real questions about the nature of film making. Is it really dialog if it’s just there to waste time? It's certainly not exposition. There are times that the characters are standing next to each other, telling the audience what they might see if Asylum had a budget. There’s also a surprising amount of travel by car while we get two-second glimpses of the robot/kaiju fight. I mean, technically, this is a movie. It’s a series of still pictures run together to create the illusion of motion, there are people that recite lines they have memorized. But it’s all so incompetently done that it’s not actually entertaining. It’s a masterclass in what happens if you don’t pay attention, don’t care, or possibly have utter contempt for your audience. Monsters demonstrated that you don’t need a huge budget in order to make a decent monster film. However, some good ideas, appropriate dialog, and competent direction all help make a film worth watching. Even less than Atlantic Rim, Atlantic Rim: Resurrection is a desolate void of interest.

I Aten't Dead

My goodness, it's been six months since I blogged. I didn't intend to stop, but the current work in progress is very consuming. As well as my Patreon. Once a week is a pretty serious schedule. In addition, the blog is not getting nearly as many hits as it used to, once I took down a post that was likely being used in some sort of spam scheme. My initial post about Kong: Skull Island received 444 hits since 3/11/17. The full DVD review, posted 10/15/17, has thus far received 90. And that's a little discouraging.

For those of you waiting for more essays about Swamp Creatures in the comics, I plan on more. The next essay for the Pasko-Yates Swamp Thing is about half way done. For those of you waiting for my discussions of Pacific Rim: Uprising, Rampage or, God help you, Altantic Rim: Resurrection, those are also coming. But it's more difficult to justify writing something that doesn't pay and doesn't get much exposure.

Something else that has come up is the publication of my collection of short stories. Here is is, Dark Draughts, available in e-book and paperback from the fine folks at Crossroad Press. Yes, that's a Stephen Bissette drawing. Dream one achieved: to have a book published. Dream two achieved: Have a cover by Stephen Bissette. I mean, the man was part of the comic that changed me in profound ways. So there's that.



So there is more to come, and I will be posting to this blog more regularly.

Man-Thing's Many-Handed Revival

Steve Gerber’s run on Man-Thing ended in 1975, and Marvel let the book lay fallow. When I say lay fallow, I mean that the Man-Thing was a guest star in eighteen books, from the Micronauts to Marvel Team-up with Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, the Master of Kung-Fu, and Gerber’s own Howard the Duck.

In 1979, Marvel decided that the Man-thing deserved to have its own book again. And so Man-Thing returned, resurrected by Michael Fleischer and later, Chris Claremont. This return lasted for eleven issues.

Neither Claremont not Fleischer were inexperienced writers. Claremont was in the process of writing his monumental X-Men run, one of the longest and most successful writing stints in comics history. Claremont started with a notable Man-Thing appearance in Marvel Team-Up #68, (April, 1978) introducing Man-Thing to Spider-Man, a pairing not as long-term fruitful as Man-Thing’s association with the Hulk, but a close second. This involves a very familiar prison, similar to the one Len Wein put the Swamp Thing in during the “Leviathan Conspiracy” (Swamp Thing # 13, Nov-Dec 1974). The captured swamp monster story hook is something that would be re-used when Swamp Thing was brought to Metropolis to meet Superman in DC Comics Presents # 8 “The Sixty Deaths Of Solomon Grundy” (April, 1979). Are our authors reading each others’ books? I think so. Claremont brings back Jennifer Kale and Dakimh the wizard from Gerber’s stint on the book. It’s a pretty standard superhero story. Dakimh and Jennifer are held hostage by costumes creep named D‘spayre. He can project burning fear on command, but Spider-man’s mental toughness allows him to eventually overcome it. It s a bit of a shock to read after the Gerber’s primarily narration-heavy stories. There’s a lot of supervillain monologing and Spider-man talking to himself to shake himself out of his fear. Man-Thing distracts D’spayre, and Spider-man is able to surprise him, and that’s about all of the story.

More than a year later, Michael Fleischer wrote the first three comics in the new Man-Thing series, in 1979. Man-Thing’s tag line, “Whoever knows fear burns at the touch of the Man-Thing” is now on the cover.

CIA Deputy Director Smathers needs someone to reproduce Ted Sallis’s formula, to he abducts biochemist Dr. Cheimer and gives him a proposal. The CIA needs the supersoldier formula, before the Russians develop their own (always with the Russians, the CIA). Cheimar agrees, and the Man-Thing is trapped. Now, it should be said that at the beginning of the Marvel Team-up with Spider-man, Man-Thing was captured by carnival folk. Now, the government is going to build a hugely expensive trap. Cheimar is working on neural regeneration, and hopes that his work can make the Man-Thing sentient again. Of course, it’s not really the CIA, and SHIELD gets involved. They stage a raid, and Cheimar is killed in the ensuing action.

Next, the Man-Thing is teleported to the Himalayas, and is immediately beset by Himalayan wolves. And later a Himalayan brown bear. Each of these manages as well as do the gators back in Florida. Although out of its element, the Man-Thing manages to acquire some new companions, Russell and his wife Elaine, American mountain climbers in search of the Yeti. The Himalayas, are of course depicted as a series of snow-covered peaks. Where the wolves and the bear get their food, who knows. Muck monster versus bear bears some resemblance to Swamp Thing. There is a slight callback to Swamp Thing #8 (“The Lurker in Tunnel 13” Jan-Feb 1974) in which the Swamp Thing kills a bear in a cave during a snowstorm. The companions are then abducted by actual Yeti, who have accepted Hiram Swenson, an anthropologist, as their leader. After various shenanigans, the Man-Thing escapes the icy mountains by hanging onto the ski of a plane with one arm, and Elaine in the other.

Fleischer did not have the flair for the weird, or the personal, that Steve Gerber did. Man-Thing is not a book that is well-served by its supporting cast, but rather by the sort of stories that can be told about the wordless main character. Gerber’s endless reinvention of the genre of the book, and willingness to break the boundaries between superhero, fantasy, political satire, superheroes, and science fiction. Fleischer seems to be making this an adventure book, with exotic locations, daring escapes, helicopters, and explosions.

With issue four, the writer changed to Chris Claremont. Claremont, who was still writing X-Men at he time. He kicks off with a cross-over with Doctor Strange. Man-Thing and Elaine fall off the helicopter. Man-thing reappears in his swamp, mind-controlled by Baron Mordo. This all leads up to a large sorcerous working by Mordo. He has also kidnapped Jennifer Kale, although Dakimh is nowhere in evidence. Man-Thing and Dr. Strange work together to gum up the works, and succeed. Strange, in gratitude, attempts to turn Man-Thing back into Salis, but cannot. After all, if the Man-Thing became human again, where would the comic go? Better to tease the creature’s return to Ted Salis than to actually do it.

“Who Knows Fear,” issue #5 is a non-supernatural story, with Barbie, a young woman, being betrayed by a McGuire, a real bastard. He’s good-looking, setting up a simple dichotomy between the handsome man who is ugly on the inside, and the Man-Thing, ugly on the outside, but gentle and kind. The next story follows a similar plot, with a morally-bankrupt fraternity doing illegal things in order to capture the Man-Thing. Sheriff Daltry is caught in the middle of it. The plan is to make him the fear-generator that will attract the Man-Thing so the boys can spray him with defoliant. In the end, the good are rewarded, and the selfish frat boys who instigated the plan are dead. There’s more substance to the story: Claremont is a deeper writer than Flescher. He is developing a stronger supporting case, and the dichotomy between the attractive jerks and the good-but-ugly Man-Thing. Barb and Sheriff Daltry now for the new nucleus for the Man-Thing’s side characters. Barbie goes from being a fleeing victim to someone who is willing and able to fight back, which is a nice change.

The next two issues concern Captain Fate and his flying pirate ship. Claremont had clearly been reading Gerber’s work and wanted to expand on it. Fate is once again preying on jets, boarding them as if they were prize ships in the Caribbean. Fate imprisons Daltry and the Man-Thing together, which gives Daltry an opportunity to realize that the muck monster is not actively hostile, but can be approached by someone calm. It’s an important moment in their relationship. But Fate transfers the curse of immortality to Sheriff Daltry.

Issue nine was written by Dickie McKenzie. It’s an interesting variation on Wein’s “Sins of the Fathers” (Giant-Sized Man-Thing #5, as well as Gerber’s “Deathwatch” (Man-Thing #9). A couple run away to have their baby in the swamp, not having checked the water. They die, poisoned by a bad well, leaving the baby alive. Man-Thing receives the baby, and begins carrying it around the swamp. The baby’s gun-toting grandparents show up and attempt to take the baby, but whoever knows fear burns at the Man-Thing’s touch. Only one man is left, and the Man-Thing gives the babe to him. It's one of the very small, very personal stories and Gothic that Man-Thing can pull well, with the correct writer.

There’s an additional story by JM DeMattis, who would later write Swamp Thing, Volume 3. The story develops as the experience of a high school student who was seduced by a cult, and then brutally deprogrammed. Having had several drug experiences, Larry doesn’t realize the Man-Thing isn’t a hallucination. Man-Thing shows up and the deprogrammers burn at his touch, and Tommy is reunited with his cult family. It’s a very ambiguous ending; the deprogrammers were brutes, but did they truly represent Tommy’s family’s wishes? The ending is melancholy, with the Man-Thing once again alone in the desert. I get the feeling this was cut down from a longer story: a lot happens in just five pages.

Claremont’s next issue “Swampfire” borrows a little bit from an early Heap story. John Kowalsi is a wandering veteran, who turns out to be the incarnation of Death. The cancellation of the book may have been immanent, and Claremont was clearing up the many loose ends. Barbie is transformed (one entire issue) into a death-dealing superhero.

Issue eleven was Claremont’s last, and he again imitates Gerber’s sign-off, as well as tying up as many of his series threads as possible. Claremont himself is a character, and he walks into Dr. Strange’s sanctum sanctorum, and gets drawn into the book itself. There’s a lot of fighting and revisiting of old characters, including Thog the Nether-Spawn. Ultimately, it feels like the issue is Gerber’s run put through a blender. I nthe end, Death and Dr. Strange reverse everything that has been done in the issue, and Daikh the Enchanter breaks the fourth wall and says farewell to the reader. It’s a a very unsatisfying end to the series, partially because, despite putting his own spin on the story, Claremont is retreading Gerber’s much more original idea.

I suspect that Claremont could have gotten the hang of Man-Thing if he’d had more time on the book. But I expect that he was brought in when Michael Fleischer’s reboot of the book failed to take off. More themes could have been developed, Claremont could have broken free from Gerber’s characters and struck out on his own. But the character just wasn’t enough of a draw for readers to wait until the writer got the feel of the book.

It’s not a brilliant run, and clearly, Claremont and Fleischer lacked the feel for the Gothic combined with the very personal nature of Gerber’s work, which is what made it so popular. Man-Thing is not a superhero and cannot be treated as such. Weird adventures work better, and as McKenzie demonstrated with his fill-in story, non-supernatural stories work as well. But the Man-Thing is and remains a passive character, and cannot drive stories. Nor should it be used as a plot solver, in which it shows up at the end of a story and administers justice until the guilty parties have been beaten senseless. It’s a delicate balancing act, one that no one, aside from Gerber, has truly mastered in the long run. I want to so dome analysis of what was going on, but the run is so short, the stories so scattered that there's very little for me to sink my teeth into. I can say that Claremont likely read old Heap comics, and definitely Gerber's work, but seemed to have difficulty latching onto his own way of making Man-Thing stories.

And it’s a pity. Well-written Man-Thing stories are a pleasure to read. The character’s strange powers and swamp appearance tickle a very specific niche. I think it’s possible that, if given more time to develop themes and ideas, Claremont could have been a good writer of the series, made his mark on the on-going character. Unfortunately, Gerber started the character off on an extremely high note, and no one has yet returned with a clear, strong vision on how to make the character relevant or unique, the way Martin Pasko and Alan Moore did with the Swamp Thing.

Next time, we’re looking at the often-overshadowed Pasko Swamp Thing. It’s better than most people remember.