Jeff Lemire’s run on DC Comics’ Black Label title Swamp Thing: Green Hell continues into issue two.
Earth is a mess, and the last humans live on a mountaintop, surrounded by water. The Parliaments of the Green all agree that it’s time to pull the plug and reboot the earth. Alec Holland, dead for decades, emerges to ‘negotiate’.
Green Hell is a hard one to follow, to fathom, this densely woven saga. Lemire injects plenty of sparsely worded pages with a running series of captions. Swamp Thing’s thoughts ended. (letters by Steve Wands). There’s lots of discussion and lots of ‘wishing I wasn’t here’ going on.
Artist Doug Mahnke (David Baron on colours) floats the rising tide of characters to life: Constantine and Swamp Thing, the monsters, the muck, the family, and the others. Some better rendered than others, (children’s body proportions are a well-documentedly tough assignment) but everything dramatic and sinister.
It’s dark, it’s Black Label for goodness sake, and the large mucky violence is the backdrop for plenty of confrontations and clobbering.
And so it all continues, all day and all night: the dead, the undead, and the deadly.
DC Comics, Black Label imprint, Swamp Thing Green Hell #2, $6.99 for approx 48 pages of content
Newsdesk