The Four Color Media Monitor

The Nashua Telegraph's written a fluff-coated article about the New 52 take on Swamp Thing, and says that it's:

...creepy as all get-out. “Swamp Thing” is a genuinely scary book, as it was always meant to be. It’s also gently slouching toward a crossover with another surprise hit, “Animal Man,” starring Buddy Baker, a former superhero who is now the champion of The Red (animal life), who is also battling The Rot. [...]

Even if you’ve never enjoyed Swamp Thing before, you should try this version. It will, ahem, grow on you.

I have enjoyed the older Swamp Thing stories, and they're much better than this wilted wreck's content is turning out to be. According to this review of the zero issue on Broken Frontier:

...through some very disturbing images concocted by Kano –– from Arcane rotting and ripping his way through the body of a little girl and biting the head off of the previous Swamp Thing to suffocating an infant fresh from the womb and lying helpless in a hospital crib –– we get a more complete and terrifying sense that Holland’s arch nemesis is the quintessence of evil. We already know how this particular story ends: so that “Rotworld” can begin.

It already ended the moment DiDio was given the keys to the kingdom and gave Scott Snyder the one for this series. There is no beginning, save for yet another chapter in the desecration of the DCU. This does not sound scary so much as it does sound repulsive, and I don't recall the Swamp Thing tales from the 70s and 80s ever stooping this low. Basically, this is just an example of how bankrupt the writers have become in their idea of how to make the villains seem "scary" or even remotely effective: by depicting them as more dangerous to defenseless civilians than they actually are to the heroes themselves. But in the end, all they do is make them unbearable and dispiriting to read about. Besides, the most really effective horror stories are the ones that provide something to think about, and don't go out of their way to gross out and repel like the Friday the 13th movies do. I don't forsee Snyder giving much food for thought here. All that's scary here is just how much gross-out shock value they're bound to reach for.

So once again, we have the mainstream press fawning over a book without giving any clear sign of what's inside, whereas an online site, even if they're biased, tells a lot more. I also don't see the point of giving the new Swamp Thing (Alec Holland?) a pair of antlers, except for more pointless "costume tweaking".

Labels: dc comics, dreadful artists, dreadful writers, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, violence