Swamp Thing 25-27
'The Sleep of Reason'
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| We'll never get away from evil monkeys. |
I'm a big fan of horror comics. I like
the gruesome art, the twisted, descriptive Lovecraft-like narration,
and the short-form story-telling of the comics medium lends itself
better to horror than a film or a novel. Comics do have a problem
with being scary though: it's hard to do when the story is told
through images laid out in a grid. It's easy to see what's coming.
Horror comics as a whole may not be scary or out-and-out frightening,
but they can be creepy easily enough; and 'The Sleep of Reason' is
creepy as hell.
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| Common fact: super-people hate glass. |
In addition to being another amazing
tale in Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing, and aside from being another
showcase to the amazing (and under-praised by me so far) art by
Stephen Bissette, 'The Sleep of Reason' is important to this blog because
it's the first time we see Etrigan The Demon. Etrigan is big, he's
yellow (thus completely immune from anything Green Lantern can do to
him), and most importantly, he's a rhyming demon, which means Etrigan
speaks in amusing meter. Even though The Demon is saddled with a meat
suit in the form of uptight prick
immortal-human-from-Autherian-legend Jason Blood, a man with whom
Etrigan is mystically bonded and shares a soul, it doesn't stop
him from also being one seriously badass son-of-a-bitch.
Jason Blood is a knight from Camelot.
He was used as a pawn by the wizard Merlin who bound Etrigan to the
young knight in an effort to learn the demon's secrets. This plan of
course fails, and Blood, now immortal in being bound to Etrigan,
wanders the world.
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| The only pleasant moments in this story. |
Jason Blood is introduced as a
well-dressed, polite man, who nonetheless delights in mocking
individuals he meets with tales of their impending demise,
imprisonment, or the general unending malaise surrounding their life.
Blood finds it immensely funny that a life insurance salesman is
trying to sell him insurance at a bus stop when he informs said
salesman that he's destined to be impaled by a giant swordfish that
very same day. Earlier in the day Blood found it amusing to let the
person whose negligence would lead to the future swordfish impalement
know that he'd be spending the next 20 years in prison for the act. Etrigan is less amusing or dapper and more pragmatic. In order to defeat the fear demon that escaped from Hell
that makes up the crux of this story's conflict, Etrigan's plan is to
murder an entire hospital full of mentally-ill children to deprive
the demon of what it needs. Is it wrong I think that's cool?
As rad as Etrigan might be, what's a
Swamp Thing story without Swamp Thing? He and Abby are spending a lot
of time together, with her helping him come to terms with the fact
that his much lamented humanity never existed and he helping her with
the fact that her marriage to Matt Cable is disintegrating and both
of them completely unaware that Matt is losing his shit in a big way
as well as developing demonic powers. Because that just happens.
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| Uhhhh...I'm pretty sure he fucks those clothes. |
Settling into life by the bayou, Abby
takes a job at hospital caring for troubled children both as a means
to support her and Matt as well as a way to just get some distance
from the guy because he spends his days drinking beer and
telepathically animating Abby's clothes to act as a submissive
version of his wife. And he creates freaky pixie-like prostitutes from thin air when no one is watching.
Because Abby just can't get away from weird
shit, the hospital is inhabited by a fear demon that looks like a
small, deformed albino monkey. That sounds funny, but it's creepy I
swear! The creature sports a barbed tongue, red eyes and it forces
its victims to relive their greatest fears so it can feed on this
same fear. My personal favorite is the poor little girl who was
responsible for her infant brothers death. The Monkey King delights in sending images of her dead brother to torment the child night after night. It's a veritable fear
buffet.
It's not long before both Swamp Thing
and Etrigan appear on the scene, both hunting the same creature. As
is commonplace with these super-character (the 'hero' just wouldn't
make sense) team-ups ('cause that's what it is), both the green guy and the yellow guy ignore the white
little fear monkey and start wailing on each other. Normally I'd
ignore such cliché fisticuffs, but it does lead to an amazing scene
where Etrigan uses his claws to lop off Swamp Thing's arm. In the
span of a page, the arm flops to the ground, is picked up again by
Swamp Thing who reattaches it to his body, plant roots and shit I
guess, and finally punches Etrigan in the face with the newly
attached arm. Simply beautiful.
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| Etrigan is so blown away but what he sees. |
Before long the story wraps itself up
in a bow with Swamp Thing, uh, in the swamp; Etrigan towing the fear
demon back to hell and Abby going back to her husband who's been
possessed by an even more nefarious demon. some kind of shadowy bug-demon who may or may not have been responsible for the Monkey Kings carnage in the first place. It's a shitty bow, but
still a bow, and after all, what would comics be without sub-plots?
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