The Top Cop of Houma, Louisiana
Written By: Len Wein
Art By: Kelley Jones,
Michelle Madsen
Letters By:
Rob Leigh
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: April 6, 2016
**Non-Spoilers and Score At The Bottom**
I’m not gonna kid you,
this has been one weird Swamp Thing
arc. Normally, he’s raging against pollution and injustice and making entire
mountainsides shudder with his awesome power, but in this series he’s been sort
of milling about the swamp, bumping into random DCU “Dark” characters and sort
of half-heartedly enduring minor horrors. It’s almost like Swamp Thing is tired
of being Swamp Thing, and I don’t really blame him. If I had to hang out that
long outside I’d probably kill myself. Save the nature scenes for hotel
landscape paintings and shows on Animal
Planet, give me a nice warm bed and a wi-fi signal any day. If the Swamp
Thing does tire of being the avatar for the Green, then he’s in luck because
just last issue Zatanna did the impossible: she restored Alec Holland’s
humanity. In doing so, she turned his pal Matt Cable into the Swamp Thing, so
it’s not all hunky-dory. So what happens next? You’ll find out if you read on!
Explain It!:
Thanks to Zatanna’s ritual
magic and everyone wishing really, really hard with all of their might, Alec
Holland has been returned to his human form and Matt Cable is now the Swamp
Thing. Matt seems okay with it, though, since his human life was lame and
debilitating alcoholism has probably reduced his libido to nothing. Zatanna asks
a naked Alec if there’s anything from the human world he’s missed since turning
into a houseplant, and it’s hard to tell (because her features are rendered
like they’re sliding off the front of her face) but I bet she’s raising her
eyebrows and enunciating the word “anything” in a sexy way and pursing her lips
and making kissy noises. So Alec tells her he’d like a stack of fucking
pancakes. Like, really dude? You probably think I’m implying that Alec should
fuck Zatanna, but no. I think the first thing he should do is take a nice shit.
It’s been nothing but photosynthesis for years, and you’ve got to figure his
colon is full of fiber at this point. He should have asked Zatanna to point him
to the most remote bathroom in the house and brought a magazine. Instead, he
takes Zatanna’s robe and she goes off to make Alec some pancakes in the buff.
Matt and Alec eventually
leave Zatanna’s creepy home, and return back to the Louisiana swamps so Alec
can teach Matt in time to win his karate match against the Cobra Kai. Alec
keeps wondering where the Parliament of the Green is, they should be along any
minute to explain your duties, he can’t imagine what’s keeping them…then they
hear a gunshot somewhere in the swamp and rush to discover a poacher kneeling
over a dead deer. Swamp Cable lumbers towards the hunter and he isn’t even
surprised—he merely warns him and Alec away from his kill. He shoots Matt’s
mossy torso, which merely grows a giant hole and knits itself back together.
Then Matt uses nearby plants to draw and quarter the hunter in a very
satisfying, gory panel.
Matt Thing begins
shambling towards the nearby town of Houma, while puny Alec flits around him,
begging him to return to his karate training. That’s when Matt drops the
bombshell we knew all along: he’s very happy to have Swamp Thing powers, and
he’s going to use them to wreak havoc on humanity. He has a great reason to
want revenge, too: he’s a disgraced cop, and he wants to show his fellow boys
in blue that…he’s a criminal? I’d think he’d want to out-hero to the police to
prove that he was a great guy all along. Maybe they’d let him back on the
force, which honestly would be an awesome book: Swamp Thing of the Louisiana State Patrol. So anyway, Swamp Cable
strolls into Houma, and people are mildly alarmed by it. Matt starts wrecking
things with his plant powers, when some guy comes out and chucks a grenade at
him, so Matt makes the microscopic flora in his body grow until he gets all
distended and dead. I really liked seeing this scene because it’s something
past Swamp Things have threatened to do, and now we finally get to see it
happen. Matt strangles a few more people with plants, then makes a giant plant
throne so he can wait for the media to arrive, but before they show up he grabs
Alec with plant tendrils and drags him bodily into the soil!
So there’s not a whole lot
of story movement here, but there sure is a heck of lot of destruction and some
nice gore. Kelley Jones was never great at rendering human faces, but here he
really loses the plot and some characters look like they’re wearing ill-fitting
masks—particularly Zatanna. Despite Alec acting like an annoying sidekick and
Matt Cable turning dickhole being the obvious conclusion since the end of the
previous issue, I enjoyed this one enough. It has a great horror vibe and to
see Alec regain his humanity, outside of a dream or hallucination, gave me what
I believe the kids are calling “the feels.”
Bits and Pieces
Some rushed-looking art and a fairly thin plot hold this book back from greatness, but there's plenty of good classic horror scenes and down home gore to make it worth a peek. Nothing much changes from the last issue, except Matt Cable throws a hissy fit over being kicked out of the Police Benevolence Association. I wonder if this comic is actually subtle commentary on the overworked and underpaid state of many municipal police forces? Beware how you treat your cops, lest they become swamp monsters themselves!
6.5/10
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