Not much of a hundredth issue celebration for Swamp Thing apparently. Unless you count Wheeler going back and retconning a lot of Moore and Veitch’s details about the Parliament of Trees and the new Earth Elemental storyline. And the time travel storyline. Lots of retconning.
But Broderick can draw trees, so at least the trip to the Parliament looks all right.
Kelley Jones handles some of the other pages, with Swamp Thing in Antarctica searching for Eden. The Jones pages are fantastic, even if he doesn’t have as interesting scenery to render.
Most of the issue’s exposition and there’s a lot of it (because it’s retconning exposition). It makes the issue drag to say the least. None of Wheeler’s new details are any good; they’re all set-up for some future storyline. And they raise the question of whether he’s corrupting the previous writers’ intentions.
The comic fails to resonate.
CREDITS
Tales of Eden; writer, Doug Wheeler; pencillers, Kelley Jones Pat Broderick; inkers, Jones and Alfredo Alcala; colorist, Tatjana Wood; letterer, John Costanza; editor, Karen Berger; publisher, DC Comics.
Wheeler writes an interesting scene between Alec and Constantine. Alec finally loses control with him and lifts him up, presumably to do him harm. It’s a bit of a shock, since Alec’s always restrained in his anger towards him. Sadly, Broderick’s art ruins the scene.
Thanks to guest penciller Tom Sutton–and a real understanding of the Arcane character–Wheeler brings his Tefé in Hell storyline to a successful close.
Besides Pog, about the only thing Broderick draws well this issue is Etrigan.
Interesting… Wheeler is able to sell the impossible here. He does another of his callbacks to Moore’s run–specifically the adorable alien, Pog–and makes it work.
Wheeler tries so hard and it just doesn’t go quite right. Some of the problems are with the art. Broderick gets more ambitious in his composition with conversations, but he can’t visualize the stranger parts of the story.
Wheeler’s evening out. His ambition here is constrained–some kind of monster in a different wavelength of reality is the patron to a serial killer. It likes to hear jazz while people get murdered. Alec comes across some victims and investigates. There are some other plot contrivances–Abby in danger, Chester and Liz pop in–but the main story is good.
Good grief, Wheeler’s just trying to wrap himself in Moore and Veitch’s runs now. He brings back one of Abby’s old jobs–along with an unlikable but nice woman who rehires here, which I think is from Veitch’s run–and also the kid terrorized by the monkey demon, one of Moore’s first stories.
Wheeler is getting rather predictable. As far as Abby and Alec go–you know, Swamp Thing’s main characters–he has no idea what he’s doing. But he’s ambitious and enthusiastic. And well-versed in Swamp Thing. He seems to have read a lot of it; he just can’t write it.
Ew. I guess Broderick is getting a little better with the people, but now his Swamp Thing is an awkwardly shaped disaster. There’s no grace to the form, no majesty. Alec looks like a Mad Magazine caricature.