Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 41

Male/Scientist in Sw am p Thing

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. . . hidden here somewhere . . . among the tubes and vials and beakers. Just a
matter of putting the materials together in precisely the correct relationship” (Wein
3.2).
This faith in science and technology owes less to Mary Shelley than to all
those succeeding Frankensteinian incarnations in movies and comic books,6where
“nothing is impossible” and, according to Richard Reynolds in Super Heroes: A
Modern Mythology, “science is treated as a special form of magic” (53, 16). But it
points especially to comic books’ reverence for knowledge and the knowledgeable
man (see Reynolds 53). The newly bom creature envies his “creator” for a very
specific reason: “Dr. Alec Holland had all the answers . . . He was an intelligent
m an . . . But Alec Holland is dead. . . and in his place stands only a Swamp Thing”
(Wein 1.24). Here is the rhetoric of the outsider, gazing at a world of intelligent
men who have all the answers. And lest the presence of Linda Holland confuse us
in that male arena, she takes care almost immediately to infantilize herself as “this
little scientist” (Wein 1.4); is described by Alec, with affectionate condescension,
as a “woman scientist” who “fight[s] dirty,” because she uses her feminine wiles
and doe-eyed charm to influence a decision; and finally, after Alec’s death, no
longer useful as an unwitting accomplice and grieving widow, she gets herself
murdered right away. No, this is a man’s world, all right, a world of science and
reason and answers, of alienation, anger and conflict. It is what Swamp Thing
claims to want back and, as he stands in the lab of mad scientist Arcane, he believes
unquestioningly that, if his own monstrous hands were not “too thick . . . too
strong” (3.2), he could have used the equipment to regain his existence as Alec
Holland: “Damn! All of this material at hand. . . and all of it useless!. . . This body
imprisons me in more ways than one” (3.3). Science and technology are there to
support him; their magic is strong. It is Swamp Thing who has failed, precisely
because he is no longer a man.
One of the things I like best about Swamp Thing’s character in Dark Genesis
is that, though he is ultimately unsuccessful, he resists Len Wein’s efforts to confine
him to a Frankensteinian paradigm, to bitter frustration. For the narrative itself
suggests that not only is he not imprisoned, he’s freer than he could ever have been
as Alec Holland. In the course of the book he travels to the “icy Balkans” (2.7) and
Arcane’s cliflfside castle, to a decaying manor on the misty Scottish moors where
werewolves roam, to another time and a Salem-like village where Rebecca
Ravenwind has been accused of witchcraft, to Gotham City and a meeting with
Batman, to another town out of time ruled by a seething evil deep in a cave, and
finally back to bayou country and a world of ghosts who exact revenge for the
brutalities inflicted on them as slaves in the past. During his journeys, he establishes
relationships of trust and support with some people and is driven away by others.
But, most remarkable, he exists in a world unbounded by time and space, a world