Too bad ol’ Swampy was Snyder’s Red-Headed Step Child – he never got the love and attention he deserved.

Oh sure, things started off great with the first few issues, building a suspenseful story where Alec Holland struggled with the decision whether or not to become the Swamp Thing (“To be or not to be.”) – but to save his love he did indeed choose the plant life and his unveiling was truly awesome (horns and wings!)

But after that the book started to suffer. It became stagnate. Repeating the same beats over and over again. The Rotworld story arc was a 3 issue one at best – not 7 and not crossed over into another comic that you HAD to buy in order to make sense of things (not that buying Animal Man was a bad thing thing. You could do worse out there in the DCU), no this series is dragging and I blame one man for this……

Batman.

Yeah you heard me, it’s The Dark Knights fault that Swamp Thing has gone down the drain. You see Scott Snyder’s Batman book is fucking incredible and easily one of the best comics of 2012. You can tell Snyder pours his heart and soul into Batman every month and it is always the first comic I read on the week it comes out. I love it. But it’s Batman’s fault that Swamp Thing got the short end of the stick. I mean with Snyder devoting so much time to massive epics like the Night of the Owls and Death in the Family you can see why I think he had little time to cultivate and nurture Swamp Thing to become a another classic – following in the vein of Alan Moore before him. But it is clear to me that Scott Snyder had a great idea to redefine Swamp Things roots again (just Moore did back in the 80’s) and set the course for an epic run. But after the brilliant first 6 issues of this series that cool idea was not enough to keep the momentum going. The series started to falter and struggled to keep it’s feet and as a result we got a story-line that felt like a single issue script stretched out to 7 issues.

Bottom line, Batman took up Snyder’s time and Swamp Thing suffered for it.

And now Snyder is leaving as of issue 18, even sighting the fact in interviews that he couldn’t devote enough time to the book. Perhaps this a good ting. Perhaps a new creative team will come on board that has the time and energy to give to Swamp Thing to make this book soar once again – but honestly I have my doubts. I predict this series ending by issue 24 unless a truly talented writer like, like Snyder was, comes on and takes the baton handed to him or her by Scott Snyder.

It’s too bad that this run ended with the less then stellar Rotworld story line, but over all i think it will go down as the second best Swamp Thing run of all time (unless Alan Moore ever decides to return to write it. Yeah right.)