Scott Snyder Offers Extensive SWAMP THING Teaser on Twitter

Last week Scott Snyder took to Twitter to tease his upcoming run on Batman with artist Greg Capullo. This week his other relaunch project got the same treatment.

To start off, here’s an image from Swamp Thing #1, drawn by Yanick Paquette and colored by Nathan Fairbairn:

From Swamp Thing #1 by Scott Snyder, Yanick Paquette, Nathan Fairbairn

But that’s just the tip of a tantalizing iceberg. Or the sprout of a tantalizing root vegetable, to keep with the…you know. Anyway. Here now–in 924 of his own words–are Snyder’s plans for Alec Holland, The Green, and all the flora we’ll be fawning over come September. We took the liberty of adding paragraph breaks:

The questions I keep getting are:

1. “Is Swamp Thing going to incorporate what came before?”

The answer is YES. Everything that happened before stands. Abby. The Parliament of Trees. etc. Like with Batman… ours is a story that will build on what came before, the rich history that makes this character legendary, while taking the story in a new direction

2. “But if it builds on everything that came before, and I’ve never read Swamp Thing, will I be able to jump on?”

A: YES. The story is designed to be a starting point. You can know nothing about Swampy and pick up number 1 and enter the world of the character easily

3. “What’s it about?”

For me, the heart of Swamp Thing the series, Wein, Wrightson, and beyond, is a man wrestling with monsters. Internal and external. On the surface, it’s about a botanist who, while working on a formula to help grow vegetation in the world’s most arid places, gets caught in an explosion in his lab and falls into the swamp on fire, and rises again as a monster called Swamp Thing, a kind of creature from the Black lagoon at first or a frankenstein. Then under the Moore run, Swamp Thign learns that he man he thinks he is Alec Holland, died in the explosion and he is a plant monster that thinks it’s Alec Holland, a creature known as swamp thing that is in fact a kind of warrior for the Green or for nature, essentially, a kind of elemental. The point is, in both forms, whether he’s a human turned monster or a monster who thinks he’s human deep down, despite being all monastery, the series, at its best, for me, is always about a man struggling with the loss of his humanity. Struggling to remain himself – Alec Holland – despite his monstrous nature and amazing powers.

So our take: I’ve wanted to do a story about Alec Holland as human for a long time. Swamp Thing has always been one of my favorite all time series and characters and so I’ve had this idea of doing a story with him human for a long time. What I wanted was to bring him back human. Have him crawl out of the swamp human, restored as a man, but with the memories of everything that happened to him “as” Swamp Thing. Back in the winter, long before relaunch stuff, @GeoffJohns0 called me up (I was cooking dinner 🙂 ) and told me @DCComics was thinking about bringing the character back – or rather, when we got right into it, he was actually going to do it in Brightest Day and he had a great take I loved, and he asked me if I had a story in mind to follow it, as it was known I was a big fan of the character. I told him my idea which was to have Alec back, human, but with the memories of everything that happened in his mind, and Geoff liked it and so I started working up my big outline.

The idea is, Alec Holland died years ago, His last memory is of being on fire, falling into the swamp. But after being joined to the Green in BD, he was restored, and having been joined, he reatins the memories of Swampy. So his head is full of these other memories, too, like dreams. He says in issue 1, he has these memories of being a monster, or being in love with some woman with white hair he doesn’t even know and now, all he wants to do is get away from the memories. From the green, from the mantle of Swamp Thing. He wants to move on, escape.

But, what if there’s a secret history as to why he, Alec, was chosen by the Green to be its monstrous protector? What if there’s a secret reason behind every one who’s ever been a Swamp Thing (and we’re going to see that there’ve been many, throughout he centuries and learn more about them). After all, Alec as a human has appeared on like 10 pp of comics, despite the hundreds of pages clocked by the Swamp Thing series. So who is he? Who was he? IS there a secret history to him? And the other men (and women) who’ve become Swamp Things over the eras? And what if there’s an opposing force to the Green? Something that has its own monsters and candidates and legacy? What if its warrior only rises every so often throughout history, and it’s rising now?

The idea is to delve into the mythology created by all the great writers on the series, to celebrate it and explore and expand it. This will be a different sort of Swamp Thing book. He will be human for a lot of it. You will see Swampies, I promise, but the idea is that thsi is a book about a man, wrestling with monsters, internal and external. A man who hasn’t really been Swamp Thing, joined as human to the Green except for the briefest of moments in BD. So in fact, we have’t even really seen what he’ll be the biggest, baddest, mosr awe-inspiring Swamp Thing of all time  🙂

So it’s a big, long form story that’ll culminate in a battle that’ll have reverberations across the DCU. As for will it be very DCU – you will see DCU characters in the book, but it is a horror book first and foremost, with some of the creepiest sequences I’ve ever done (you’ll see some in issue 1 🙂 ). It’s “sophisticated suspense” 🙂  – it’s dark and twisted and violent and our own. All I can say is that I couldn’t be prouder or more excited about this one. And I hope you’ll pick it up. Cool?

Cool.