#4: Halloween Issue
An Historicist's look at Swamp Thing Annual #2 (1985)
Swamp Thing’s roots run deep. Especially under Alan Moore’s stewardship, the character’s tendrils fix themselves in some of the earliest and most quietly lasting stories Western culture has; stories like The Epic of Gilgamesh, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. These tales are often mimicked or reimagined - kryptonite, for example, is fundamentally a sci-fi reinterpretation of Achilles’ heel - but it’s passingly easy to name these “tropes” and assume they’ve somehow always existed. That wasn’t Moore, though. Particularly in Down Amongst the Dead Men, published in Swamp Thing Annual #2 (Jan, 1985), he spends a great deal of energy acknowledging and honoring the storytelling traditions that he draws on.
“Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies. The glaciers have their own legends. The ocean bed entertains its own romances.” - Alan Moore
Katabasis
“Katabasis”, loosely translated from Ancient Greek as “going down”, is a term used in comparative mythology to describe a heroic journey to a supernatural underworld - be it Hades, Hell, or other - most frequently conducted in an effort to rescue a loved one. The often-retold story of Orpheus & Eurydice, in which Orpheus may return the deceased Eurydice from Hades only so long as he doesn’t turn his head to check she’s following him, is perhaps the most well-known example of the theme. It’s certainly not the originator, though. The story of Enkidu, told in The Epic of Gilgamesh, contains likely the first written record of katabasis. Funnily enough, Gilgamesh is also known to be mankind’s earliest surviving literary text (~2100 B.C.).
Down Amongst the Dead Men, too, is katabasis pure and simple. In the issue, Swamp Thing disincorporates to embark on a journey through the afterlife in search of the soul of Abby Arcane, it having been stolen by her wicked uncle. The trip takes Swamp Thing through layer after layer of supernatural setting; The Green, The Region of the Just Dead, the plane of The Spectre, Heaven, and Hell. Katabasis as systematic descent (that is, a descent through sequential and discrete levels) is a concept that can be attributed to Dante Alighieri ’s Inferno and more broadly to the whole Divine Comedy cycle. Encompassing Dante’s journeys through Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Heaven), the cycle is broadly considered an allegorical representation of the soul’s quest for salvation in growing close to God.
Levels of Lessons
In Inferno, each stratum of Hell serves to teach Dante, and illustrate to the reader, the consequences of each of the seven deadly sins. Commonalities end there, thankfully; Inferno is a deeply religious text, Down Amongst the Dead Men is not. It is, however, deeply invested in educating the muck monster in similar fashion. It’s worth noting that this point that, at the time Down Amongst the Dead Men was published, Moore was about 10 issues into a 40+ issue run. In that time, he’d completely upended our understanding of the character… but hadn’t yet given the change space to breath for Swamp Thing himself; the Parliament of Trees wouldn’t be written in to provide a semblance of closure to the issue for another year and a half. So, circling back to Dante, Down Amongst the Dead Men seems to use katabasis with the fitting intent of helping ole’ Swampy understand himself and his place in creation just a bit better.
In the Green, for example, Swamp Thing contends with how easy and fulfilling it would be to “let [his] consciousness dissipate… to drown in peace and silence.” He grapples with his new understanding of self, with the choices available to him in his “new” life, and is required to interrogate the responsibilities he feels himself to have. In Heaven, he’s met with the opportunity to reunite with his deceased sort-of wife Linda, who’d been killed prior to Moore taking over the book. In Heaven, Swamp Thing must deal with letting go a comforting past and with facing much harder truths about who he must be. Finally, in Hell, he bears witness to the horrific fates of vanquished enemies General Sunderland and Anton Arcane, and must thereby contend with the consequences of heroic deeds - even of those that seem just.
There’s something about katabasis, Moore seems to be acknowledging, that is particularly well suited to hard-learned lessons and growth.
Tour Guides
Moore uses another frequently re-occurring element of katabasis narratives to world-build (rather than character-build); that being using informed insiders as temporary secondary characters. In other words, Swampy gets some tour guides on his trip.
When Hercules descended to Hades to slay Cerberus, Hermes and Athena guided both his direction and his understanding of what he saw. When Dante does, Virgil did the same. For Swamp Thing, it’s a wonderful rotating cast of some of DC’s best supernaturally-oriented characters; Boston Brand (a.k.a Deadman), The Phantom Stranger, and Etrigan, The Demon. Just like Hermes, Athena, and Virgil; Deadman, Phantom Stranger, and Etrigan are primarily used to provider context, color, and explanation to the afterworlds our protagonist finds himself in.
There’s a simple reason this is important, I believe - were the hero to be familiar with their surroundings, readers wouldn’t be as able to share in a sense of discovery - or dread - which is so acutely transfixing about life after death. In that sense, Deadman, Phantom Stranger, and Etrigan are written in for our benefit just as much as they are for Swamp Thing’s. Katabasis is something readers and characters do together, in a way, and there’s no comics creator better suited to the theme than Moore.
Wrapping Up
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