I read this issue against my better judgment. It's not that I hated the first issue -- I thought it was OKAY -- but I saw little in it that warranted giving the series a second chance. Then my LCS owner gave me this issue for free. I wish I could say I was wrong and that issue #2 changed my mind, but it only made me think less of Scott Snyder's ability to actually inject originality or innovation into the Swamp Thing concept. Everything seems formulaic, and even his half-hearted attempt to tweak the origin seems superficial and meaningless. (Alec was supposed to become Swamp Thing anyway? Who cares. It's almost like saying there was a certain radioactive spider that was supposed to bite Peter Parker...but then another one bit him instead.) As others have noted, this issue was way too exposition heavy. Let me point out that I do NOT have a short attention span. I don't mind a lot of words in a comic. I didn't need to take a break halfway through this issue or anything like that. I wasn't bothered by the AMOUNT of words; rather, the problem was in how tedious they were. All of the exposition Snyder set up here -- it all just contributes to several different cliches that we've seen many times before. There's an impending end-of-the-world-type disaster. There's a dark villain coming to get us from beyond. There's a reluctant hero who doesn't want to take up the mantle of "chosen one" again. And yet, because of the villain's henchmen attacking him, he will no doubt be forced into becoming a hero again. We even meet the somewhat familiar archetype of the "strong wise woman who saves the man and then helps him find his courage". We've seen each of these tropes many, many times before. Snyder decides to use ALL of them in this one story, which only compounds how unoriginal it all seems. But, more than that, we're seen over half of these ideas spread across Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run. Once again, I'm baffled as to why people think Snyder is a great writer. Maybe he'll be a great writer someday, but he's not there yet. Not if he's still walking in Alan Moore's footprints 75% of the time, and the other 25% of the time he's cranking up the nostalgia factor in a different way by having his artist name-check Bernie Wrightson and Steve Bissette. (Seriously, enough with the creators names as Easter Eggs. It's gotten tacky.) Some have tried to justify the wordiness of this issue by saying that it was "necessary" in order to introduce the Parliament of Trees. My question is: WHY INTRODUCE THE PARLIAMENT OF TREES AT ALL? Why not come up with your OWN original concepts or twists for once? Alan Moore didn't invent Swamp Thing (or Marvel Man, or Jack the Ripper, or Supreme, or the original Charleton Characters that became the Watchmen), but he RADICALLY reinterpreted things and created NEW characters and concepts to go around the protagonist. So why does Snyder feel the need to bring back: the Parliament of Trees, an old Swamp Thing from a previous age, Abbie Arcane, and legions of villains based on the concepts from Moore's run? It's very uninspired. Snyder can wax poetic about these concepts all he wants, in as many dialogue bubbles and text boxes as he wants, but he can't make them very interesting. Unoriginal concepts are unoriginal concepts no matter how long a writer goes on about them in purple prose, no matter how many irrelevant anecdotes puts around them as window dressing. The pages in the beginning devoted to how the older Swamp Thing came to be -- Does anyone find that stuff interesting? Why waste the pages on it? Does it contribute to the story in any way? No, it's just another chance to wax poetic. Snyder riffs on how the guy wanted to be a pilot so he could get above the earthly Green. Does that even make sense? Even professional pilots or pilots in war are on the ground more often than they're in the air. They sleep on the ground. And Abbie Arcane isn't even introduced. Indeed, whenever Alec starts to talk about her, he's cut off. So, if Snyder and his fans are justifying all the exposition because it's supposed to familiarize new readers with old Swamp Thing concepts -- What was the point of NOT introducing Abbie before her appearance? What sort of reader does this technique possibly serve? If there are any new readers who don't know who Abbie Arcane is, then her appearance on the last page would mean nothing to them. Alec has been mentioning a woman with white hair, but that's not enough to give the reader much of an idea of who she is. Not to worry, though, I'm sure next issue there will be MUCH exposition explaining who Abbie is and what she thinks Alec should do. Ugh. Not much happened in this issue. It all could have been done in three or four pages, actually. The art was still nice, but not as great as last issue. The coloring in particular was not as great this time around. Paquette himself is still doing a good enough job, but he's not wowing me the way he did in issue #1 or in his Wolverine and Batman Inc. issues from the past few years. I've heard it said that Snyder "needed" to do this first two "setup" issues "so that we can start to have fun" in issue #3. Why not start off with the fun? Why all this tedium? Will the "fun" even start in issue #3? Will there even be room for much fun after Snyder gets done giving even more tedious exposition and purple-prose anecdotes about nothing? Twitter and the 24-hour hype machine of the internet have clouded people's minds. If Tony Daniel wrote this issue people would be calling it absurdly wordy, and they'd be saying things like "That's it?" in regard to the lack of forward development. Scott Snyder's written good comics in the past, and I'm sure he'll write good comics in the future, but this is not good comics. It's derivative and unnecessarily plodding.