Comics Fondle

Vaughan’s Swamp Thing now makes a bunch of sense. I thought he was just ignoring Mark Millar’s run, but he’s not. He’s shitting on the previous Swamp Thing comic and the work of those writers. He’s turned Swamp Thing père into an amoral monster to suit his lousy story about Team Tefé sitting around a bar talking about their fathers. It starts with a talk about politics and the Inuit guy supports Bush, so it’s sort of funny when he turns out to either kill or maim his own father a few pages later (I guess those are the best Bush supporters). The ex-Marine has a decent story and Vaughan’s actually got a character there who deserves a hell of a lot more than this lousy series.

As for Tefé’s story about Swamp Thing? The Paul Pope art is unfortunately unexciting. In fact, I didn’t even know it was him until near the last page. It isn’t about Vaughan crapping on continuity, it’s about him contriving to make things simpler for him. I mean, Vaughan’s Tefé is a terrible character, practically incompetent. Issues like this one make me wish he’d stuck with focusing on other characters instead of her.

The capper to the issue is the conclusion, when Tefé realizes her next mission in life. There’s dumb and bad and lame and all three are different things and none of them are the right word for this cliffhanger. Inept is actually closest (since I already used incompetent).

I was thinking, before I read the issue, I needed to punish myself and read another Vaughan Swamp Thing. I didn’t know it’d be this bad though (on the other hand, it’s impressive how Vaughan can have bad plotting, bad ideas and trite, hipster dialogue… most people can only manage one of the three).

F

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