Comics and the U.S. South

Of Slaves and Other Swamp Things: Black Southern History as Comic Book Horror

187 of slaves and other swamp Things Black Southern History as Comic Book Horror —Qiana J. Whitted Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm—every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. —Beloved, Toni Morrison Of the many captivating changes that British comic book writerAlan Moore brought to his run on the DC Comics Swamp Thing series from 1984–1987, two are especially significant. He began by reconceptualizing the character’s physiological structure as sentient plant matter, rather than as the mutated and monstrous human being first developed by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson in 1971.1 All that was left of biochemist Alec Holland after the bio-restorative formula explosion plunged him into the swamp slime was consciousness; Moore revealed that the creature was little more than living vegetation in the shape of a man,one whose“humanity”operated like phantom limbs on a mossy, hulking frame. With this transformation, Moore’s Swamp Thing could move freely about his environment by willfully allowing his body to die and reanimate anywhere plants thrive. Swamp Thing, while still an aberrant presence among his human neighbors, developed a more interdependent relationship with the land and became a deeply compassionate guardian of the Green. Even as Moore altered Swamp Thing’s form to make him more versatile, mobile, and intellectually complex, a second major modification fixed the character more firmly in space and time by establishing the comic’s setting in and around present-day Houma, Louisiana. After determining “which swamps he was the Thing of,” Moore told interviewer George Khoury that Qiana J. Whitted 188 he researched the area’s history and culture as well as its geographic features ,“so that I could use the location, so that I could get interesting images or atmospheres from it” (Khoury 88). The results of Moore’s research are vividly manifested through the artistic style of Stephen Bissette who, along with other artists including John Totleben,Alfredo Alcala,and Ron Randall, brought a darker, more intricate realism to the series.2 It is through these collaborative efforts to convey the regional “atmospheres” of Swamp Thing that we see a more focused engagement with United States southern history and its landscape of horrors, including storylines that grapple with the region’s legacy of slavery. This essay takes a closer look at Moore’s depiction of the South and the manner in which Swamp Thing comments upon social and cultural histories of racial oppression. My analysis will focus, in particular, on two issues from the “American Gothic” story arc that employ well-known comic book horror tropes to illustrate a tale of vengeful slaves and unrepentant masters: “Southern Change” (#41) and “Strange Fruit” (#42). These issues, published in 1985, adapt many of the formal and aesthetic qualities of early horror comics,yet my reading also connects the ideological thrust of Swamp Thing’s zombie tale with the post-civil rights era development of the “postmodern slave narrative”—a literary sub-genre similarly concerned with issues of historical recovery, cultural rebirth, and identity formation.3 I maintain, for instance, that the concept of “rememory” that Toni Morrison develops in her 1988 novel, Beloved, is useful in framing an experiential understanding of the present as being physically and psychologically inscribed with traces of the past. Described by Caroline Rody as a trope that“postulates the interconnectedness of minds, past and present,”rememory is used as both a verb and a noun in Morrison’s novel to convey the lasting materiality of thoughts and emotional resonances. In Beloved, the main character regards places as entities stratified with “thought pictures” that, once formed by a person or an event, endure with an affective potency that can be perceived by others.4 These interminable “thought pictures” of rememory can also describe the way southern history is understood in Swamp Thing. Rather than simply exhuming the inarticulate monsters of Tales from the Crypt, Moore and Bissette complicate the discourse of zombification and spiritual possession to foreground a trauma that reaches beyond the grave. What is especially significant about Moore’s unearthing of the past in “Southern Change” and “Strange Fruit,” I argue, is the way in...