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Meeting of the Swamp Critturs

I should have seen it as inevitable, but it took me by surprise when I opened one of DC's late-nineties "Essential Vertigo" reprint books to encounter Alan Moore's tale "Pog." The tone of the works that most established Moore's reputation, such as Watchmen, after all, do not implicate him as a likely fan of the clever and benign work of Walt Kelly. In the Moore Swamp Thing #13 - now reprinted both in the "Essential Vertigo" black-and-white format and also in trade paperback form - he reminds us that, in spite of the reach of his imagination, he has more than a passing familiarity with the exceptional comics and comic strips of earlier eras.

The number of times Moore has surprised me with the novelty of his approach or the slyness of his ability to sneak in elements from other, sometimes obscure, comics literature suggests to me that perhaps a long-running slide of quality in the comics medium in the late seventies introduced a quiet contempt of lowered expectations into my opinions. Recurrently, however, Moore proves and proves again that the limitation does not exist in the medium, nor in the subject matter, but in the writer.

Referential comics containing tributes sometimes fail to do homage even where creators intend to do so. Fearing to come too close to the originals (close enough that a lawsuit might bite them), they might steer too far from the salient features of the material to which they plan to refer; or, alternately, they might not dare to deviate from the original concept for fear of "contaminating" the appropriated material. Moore had none of these limited approaches, instead going beyond the simple cameo to pull analogs of Kelly's "Pogo" cast into a morality play about the human diet. And, in spite of opportunities (and, doubtless, temptations) to self-righteously rub grit in the faces of the hot-dog eating crowd he impugns in this piece, the author maintains a Kelly-like benevolent tone throughout.

The Original

Swamp Thing, obviously enough, in the various incarnations of that title, dealt with a humanoid creature with the mind of a scientist named Alec Holland and a body mostly made of swampy flora. A swamp thing, furthermore, would most likely inhabit bayous, swamps, and other places that tend to breed mosquitoes.

Len Wein and Berni Wrightson created the Swamp Thing circa 1973, an interesting enough year, for in that year Walt Kelly died. Walt Kelly created a comic strip that dealt with the residents of the Okefenokee Swamp, the much-missed strip "Pogo."

"Pogo" primarily featured the eponymous opossum and his long-winded companion Albert the Alligator, sometimes in ongoing story sequences of some sociopolitical import, and sometimes in (elegantly!) ridiculous tales that made fun of human folly without descending to elitism or contempt. Much of the charm of this strip built on a kind of benevolent wisdom Kelly enjoyed, recognizing the fundamentally flawed aspects of human nature without developing a contempt for mankind entire (as would many in the generation that followed his).

The Namesakes

The names "Pog" and "Bartle" suggest Pogo and Albert without requiring much deciphering. Other regulars from the Pogo strip show up occasionally, perhaps for a panel or so. A sharp reader can pick out analogs of Howland Owl, of the tadpole in the glass of water (did he ever have a name?), and of Porky Pine.

Where called for, Moore put together the necessary alternate names for characters. "Pogo" he obviously truncated to "Pog," and rendered "Albert" in anagram to "Bartle;" others, however, involved more knowledge or more work to compose, such as "Aplodontia" (Miz Beaver? The term aplodontia refers to beaverkind) and "the Hystercide" (Porky Pine - so named because of his less-than-winning ways with the female folk?)

The names serve to reveal rather than conceal; indeed, where a reader fails to recognize the referent of one of these doubles, its name and design have failed in their intent. Furthermore, they betray their origins by the means of transportation, poling along the swamp in flat boats, a staple of too many Pogo strips to count.

The Mangled English

Some cartoonists approached immortality on their ability to mangle the English language. For instance, Segar's shredding of the formal Anglo-Saxon through the proxy of Popeye, through years of "Thimble Theater" and "Popeye" strips proper, stamped on popular culture the imprint of an idiom that has solid, if ludicrous, rules for permutation of phonemes, and remains readily recognizable among various tiers of English-speaking civilization.

Popeye, however, retained something of a monopoly on the abuse of the vernacular in his own strips and, eventually, cartoons. In "Pogo," on the other hand, almost all characters participated in the mutilation of the Mother Tongue. Kelly claimed, in prefaces to paperback collections of his work, that his father would tell him stories in which he attempted to use dialect - perhaps in the vein of the Br'er Rabbit stories of the nineteenth century.

However, Kellysprach owed more to the cartoonist's vivid imagination and a passion for atrocious punnery. For close to a quarter of a century, from 1949 to 1973, Kelly delivered doses of his humor in a synthetic dialect he created ad hoc as the occasion of the daily and Sunday strips demanded.

Throughout "Pog," we see an approximation of this twisted speech in the overly-convoluted malapropisms and synthetic terminology of the alien narrator Pog, who attempts to relate the unfortunate events of his arrival on, and departure from, Earth.

A Dose of Polemic

Moore, amid a tribute to a much-missed cartoonist gone ten years and more by the time this story originally saw print, used Kelly's creations as the cast of a passion play about vegetarianism.

The original sin that made these funny-animal aliens refugees originated in the ape-analogs that took to eating their fellow sentients, a crime not too different from cannibalism, given the similar cognitive levels of eater and eaten.

Near destruction, "anykind," meaning the non-simian aliens, fled their homeworld, genetically engineering themselves the immortality necessary to allow them to survive long enough to span the distances between stars and find some world untainted by the crime of flesh-eating.

At this point, it might do well to recall that this message comes from Moore, not Kelly, who occasionally (but not often) had denizens of the swamp eat each other, the dire fate of, for instance, three piscine lady singers called the Louisiana Perches, who died in a frying pan in one sequence.

Romantic Notions versus Reality

Moore, in spite of strong opinions, seldom writes like a brain-dead ideologue, however. Where the temptation exists to do so, real-world notions frequently intrude into his works, throwing the inevitable monkey wrench into even his utopian notions. Not all writers have the courage to allow their ideal places to fail.

However, we do not have here a heavy-handed and simplistic tale of forced moral equivalence along the lines of Piers Anthony's "The Barn." Instead, nature reasserts itself, spitting in the face of those who might fancy that, left to itself, the earth's biosphere would resemble some pastel-colored Saturday morning cartoon of decades past where bunnies and butterflies and flowers all dance in a benign circle and no one wants for anything.

No, "nature red in tooth and claw" intrudes, and it costs the naive Bartle his life. Bartle, believing that he and the remaining specimens of Anykind have found the target world beyond the control of the rapacious meat-eating monkeys, discards his protective space suit and takes to the waters, after the way of lacertilians. And, furthermore, he encounters some genuine Louisiana alligators, who, to him, seem like kinsmen, and he greets them with stereotypical Southern friendliness.

Bartle behaves like a cartoon funny animal and the 'gators behave like 'gators, so at the first opportunity one of them crunches him to carrion between his teeth, and the dream ends.

Meanwhile, in a sequence that may have intended to implicate humans as just another of the cannibal monkey-things the funny animal aliens fled - Swamp Thing shows Pog the horrors of humanity by taking the space possum to a roadside hot dog stand, where men, women and children eat the flesh of slaughtered animals in the form of hamburgers and hot dogs. Pog, at that point, realizes he has not found the promised land.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 211. Completed 25-DEC-2000.