Halloween is just around the corner, lurking among the masked streets of social avoidance.
DC’s Halloween Spectacular, Legend of The Swamp Thing, is a 48-page special that is ideal for hunkering indoors, sheltered from the tricksters. But is it a treat? Let’s carefully unwrap it and have a peek inside!
This Halloween special, featuring the bog monster that was created by writer Len Wein and artist Bernie Wrightson, contains ‘six tales rooted in terror’.
The emphasis on these divergent tales is a look at the Green, the swamp spirit, the conscious energy contained in the swamp in times past. So, we drift back into early days for these stories, with two of the six ‘stories’ acting as a foreword and epilogue, leaving us four tales within this ‘wrapper’.
The first story begins in Britannia in 54 BC at the outdoor army camp of Julius Caesar, and another one is based on the Spanish conquerors of 1494. Another deals with a Japanese soldier, isolated on an island in the Pacific during World War II.
Perhaps the most poetically told tale occurs in Puerto Rico (Boriken) in 1948. Writer Vita Ayala teams up with artist Emma Rios and Jordie Bellaire on colours to recount a tale of a young woman coming to terms with the expansion of the sugar factories on the island. This story, visually intriguing, with an organic, hand-drawn and sensitive style, is quite captivating.
All in all, a treat with a delicious filling, thanks to writers Ram V, Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Vita Ayala, Julian Little, and James Tynion IV, you can’t go wrong. Artists include Mike Perkins, Dominike “Domo” Stanton, Emma Rios, John Timms, and Christian Ward. Colourists are Andy Troy, Jeremiah Skipper, Jordie Bellaire, and Gabe Eltaeb.
DC, Legend of the Swamp Thing Halloween Spectacular, $5.99 for 48 pages of content. Teen
Newsdesk