Talking About Meatballs (The Last War in Albion Part 63: American Gothic)

This serves as the beginning of the so-called “American Gothic” arc (the name was never actually used in the comics), a storyline in which Constantine leads Swamp Thing on a tour of the United States to confront various classic horror tropes like vampires and werewolves. The timing is apropos - Moore had taken his first trip to the United States in August of 1984, midway through the Arcane arc of Swamp Thing, and the same month that Marvelman ceased publication in Warrior. There he had hobnobbed with DC executives and gotten variously praised and treated as a bit of a golden boy. He hit it off some of the DC staff - particularly with his editor, Karen Berger, and with Julius Schwartz, a long time DC editor, who impressed Moore by having the signature of H.P. Lovecraft in a scrapbook, having served as his literary agent late in Lovecraft’s life. Others proved chillier - Paul Levitz, a fanzine writer who had steadily ascended into upper management at DC, referred to Moore as his “greatest mistake,” a line that, whatever was meant by it in 1984, has bottomless depths of iciness in hindsight. 

And so it was hardly a surprise that Moore would opt to explore the American-ness of his newfound success. And, given that his success was proving as a horror writer, a tribute to American horror must have seemed wholly appropriate. And on target - Levitz’s words perhaps ringing in his ear, Moore started the arc with a strangely barbed story. The choice of Rosewood, Illinois was not an arbitrary setting. Martin Pasko, early in his Swamp Thing run, wrote a story set in a town called Rosewood that featured Swamp Thing fighting vampires, with a father and son sacrificing themselves to flood the town and drown the vampires. Moore retcons this conclusion, having Constantine explain that there were vampires who hid out in freezers in the supermarket, and who were thus untouched by the running water and could simply wait for the water to become still before emerging. “They’re living down there, in Rosewood, totally unmolested,” Constantine explains. “Having a stable community has opened up lots of opportunities for them. They can settle down, after years of hiding. They can breed.” 

And so, suitably chastened over his failure to adequately clean up the vampires last time he encountered them, Swamp Thing trudges into the water to fight underwater vampires. This, however, goes poorly, with Swamp Thing being efficiently dismembered by the vampires’ newly hatched giant fish monster. But where this would have been a significant problem in any past issue of Swamp Thing, it instead comes after two issues that have stressed the increasing ease with which Swamp Thing can build a new body, and he reacts to being killed by a giant fish with relative casualness. “It is my own fault,” he thinks. “I am too human in the way I think… in the way I fight. I must learn to exploit the possibilities of what I am.” And after some reflection, he proceeds to reach out over the entirety of Rosewood, incarnating not in a regular sort of swamp monster body, but as an entire landscape, resulting in a fantastic half-page panel from Bissette and Totleben in which Swamp Thing’s visage is stretched out across an entire hillside as he moves the earth, rerouting the river into the lake, and making the water run once again, destroying the vampires for once and for all.

This is, of course, utterly cheeky. Moore in effect reframes an event from before he took over the book just to show how utterly trivial and silly a threat it is under his vision for the book. The overall point of the exercise is clearly, as with several previous stories, to break with the past publication of Swamp Thing, but in this instance the comparison is aggressively direct. Moore is no longer just ripping up the past, he’s pointedly highlighting the difference and positively boasting about what his version of Swamp Thing can do that previous runs couldn’t. Moore is in effect criticizing the Pasko run for the measly nature of its threats, pointing out that his vision of Swamp Thing is so wildly powerful that some pesky vampires simply don’t register. 

This sort of negative example carries real weight. The basic plot of “Swamp Thing tours America and encounters stock horror tropes” is, after all, the premise underlying both the original Wein/Wrightson run on Swamp Thing and Pasko’s run. It’s the default mode of Swamp Thing, and while Moore may have contrived to remove the clumsy mechanism of having Swamp Thing jumping freight trains to travel (as he did when arriving in Rosewood the first time), it’s still not instinctively clear why the “American Gothic” arc is a good idea as opposed to the point where it is clear that Moore is out of ideas and has nothing better to do than the most generic Swamp Thing stories imaginable. By initially leaning into that critique by literally revisiting a past Swamp Thing story and then abruptly showing that his take on Swamp Thing fighting vampires is utterly unlike past stories, Moore makes a major statement about what he’ll be doing differently.

The effectiveness of this statement rests in part, however, on the fact that Moore makes sure to outdo Pasko’s story in other ways as well. Pasko’s story is ultimately focused on the people of Rosewood fighting back against the vampires, and treats the vampires as wholly knowable and predictable - so much so that there’s not even any descriptions of their horror that can be quoted in order to demonstrate their inadequacies. Their function within the issue is to be generic horror monsters that allow Pasko’s plot about a man so obsessed with fighting vampires he casually sacrifices his entire family to do it. But Moore, despite the fact that he is writing a story that trades in part on the fact that a bunch of vampires aren’t actually a significant threat to Swamp Thing anymore, goes to considerable length to make the vampires scary. The vampire fish monster gets a lengthy description of how it is “massive and bloated, gorged upon its siblings… it pulses and takes stock of its surroundings. It licks pulp from dreadful, splattered talons, and considers what to do next,” for instance. Moore similarly engineers a sequence that plays on many of the same themes of Pasko’s story, inverting a scene of Pasko’s where a kid is attacked by his now vampirized mother by having a vampiric child kill his mother and mock his ineffectual father, a scene with far more perversity and cruelty than any of the corresponding scenes in Pasko’s story. Perhaps most impressively, Moore includes a scene that attempts to generate empathy for the vampires. “Why must we be destroyed,” the vampires ask as they are disintegrated by the running water. “We asked for so very little. Only a home that we could call our own, some livestock to provide our food, and a safe place to raise our children.” The effect is that Moore not only demonstrates that he’s moved past stories like Pasko’s, he also casually demonstrates that he can do Pasko’s stories better than he can as well.

One consequence of the gambit Moore plays out over the course of the two-part vampire story, however, is that he forecloses a large number of story possibilities. After stories like “Rite of Spring” and the initial Floronic Man arc that demonstrated new possibilities, the vampire story was notable as a story that actively tried to close the door on a sizable category of stories. This is a dangerous game - no matter how emphatically and convincingly Moore demonstrates the flaws of the story structure, the fact remains that Swamp Thing has fewer possibilities at the end of issue #39 than it did at the start. Swamp Thing has become so thoroughly powerful that physical confrontation has become essentially irrelevant to the book. The category of things that can be meaningfully treated as threats to Swamp Thing seems, in other words, significantly reduced. And so in many ways the decision to make the next stop in the “American Gothic” tour a werewolf story is surprising, given that werewolves are acutely physical threats. 

But Swamp Thing #40, “The Curse,” in fact goes a long way towards demonstrating the sort of threat that Moore imagines Swamp Thing facing. On one level, the plot of “The Curse” is simple enough: Swamp Thing arrives in Kennescook, Maine just in time to confront a woman who has turned into a werewolf and gone on a rampage. But the nature of the threat in “The Curse” is not really Phoebe herself, but rather the social structure in which she exists and that fuels a rage that can only be expressed by turning into an eight foot tall snarling death beast. The story opens with Phoebe shopping, buying menstrual pads, and the atmosphere is one of claustrophobia. Moore focuses on the package of the pads, on which “a laughing woman runs through endless fields beneath a cornflower sky,” while the branding proclaims that these particular menstrual pads are “for freedom,” a description that clashes jarringly with the paralleled description of the (fictional) Pennamaquot tribe of Native Americans, which, in Moore’s description, constructed a Red Lodge “upon stilts, that its dark and sullen female power should not taint the Earth.” The purpose of the Lodge is to isolate the tribe’s women during menstruation - within it the women “were forbidden to stand, or lie down, or see the moon. They could touch nothing, even themselves.. they ate from sticks, like lepers, and the gourds that they sipped water from were afterwards smashed and buried without trace.” 

Phoebe imagines the Pennamaquot women’s rage at their situation, “their anger, in darkness turning, unreleased, unspoken, its mouth a red wound, its eyes hungry… hungry for the moon” as she walks the aisles - as “the checkout lady places the package in a paper bag, as if to protect her other groceries,” as she walks past a massive sign advertising the “Autumn Morn disposable douche, with the gentle scent of white flowers… for the real woman in you,” and past another advertising the wares of a porn shop, with its images of “numb-eyed women [who] stare through zippered leather masks.” Later, as she and her husband entertain guests, her husband jokes about the lodge, saying that “it was where the Indians sent their squaws when they started getting cranky around that time ‘o the month,” and one of her guests pipes up to insist that his wife not eat any more cookies because “she’s still trying to get her figure back after the kid… and that was two years ago,” and throughout this her rage festers until finally, when her husband confronts her over dinner being late, she transforms into a werewolf and begins rampaging through the town. 

The implication of all of this is made explicit in the story’s climax, where Swamp Thing confronts Phoebe and tries to help her. “I am woman,” she proclaims. “I seek release from this stifling place that has been built for me.” On its most basic level this refers to the Red Lodge whose psychogeographic ghost haunts Kennescook, but more broadly it clearly refers to the systemic oppression that is depicted throughout the issue - one that goes beyond the material cruelty of the Red Lodge and into the bizarre dualism with which the female body is treated, on the one hand eroticized and objectified, and on the other thoroughly rejected, with its natural functions declared shameful and disgusting millstones from which women are encouraged to seek freedom, a freedom that only serves to leave them ready to be objectified and, should they fall short as objects, to be mocked as poor Joannie is for the awful crime of having her body change after giving birth. And faced with all of this, and with the fact that her rage is useless in destroying it, Phoebe opts to fling herself upon a display of steak knives, the image of which provided the issue’s opening panel, with the cruelly ironic slogan “here’s good news for housewives!”

Swamp Thing’s role in all of this is ultimately to bear witness to it. Just as Phoebe, for all her animal rage, cannot simply eliminate the systemic oppression of women, nor can Swamp Thing, for all his power. When Phoebe demands release, Swamp Thing is forced to admit that he cannot help her, and it is in the face of this that she chooses to kill herself rather than continue suffering under her rage and indignity. This serve to demonstrate the sort of threat that Swamp Thing, with his newfound powers, is best matched up with: ones in which the underlying problem is not simply a villain in need of punching, but a systemic issue that cannot actually be confronted directly like the reality of female oppression. 

“The Curse,” however, was not an uncontroversial story. Indeed, it generated so much response that the letter pages of both Swamp Thing #45 and #46 were devoted entirely to letters regarding the story. For the most part, however, these letters were in favor of the story. The only outright critical letter in Swamp Thing #45 comes from a gentleman in (ironically) Northampton, Massachusetts, and complains that Moore repeats the phrase “hungry for the moon” too often, objects to the story’s generality in speaking for all women, and complains that the display of steak knives is unrealistic (“no market worth its liabilities would ever, ever, never-ever display its cutlery so dangerously”). Of these three complaints it is, in an idiosyncrasy typical of the sorts of people who wrote in to DC letters pages in the 1980s, the steak knives that seem to be the biggest problem. [continued]