Swamp Thing #6 (Sept-Oct. 1973) begins with the titular character falling out of the back of a truck while traveling through Vermont (after, in previous issues, making an unplanned and rather adventurous tour of Europe and Scotland). And, because Swamp Thing's life is what it is, he tumbles directly into yet another adventure.
He's found by Alec and Linda Holland. Which is a bit weird, because Swamp Thing is Alec Holland--or rather he was before that pesky lab explosion turned him into a monster. And Linda was dead.
(Yes, I know that Alan Moore later retconned this into Swamp Thing being a seperate entity who had absorbed Alec's memories when the human died and thus just thought he was Alec for a time. I've never read Moore's run and do not have an opinion on that--though its a perfectly sound idea. But for me, "real" DC Universe history all took place before 1986, so I'm just sticking with Swampy literally being Alec.)
Anyway, it's understandable that Swamp Thing is a bit confused when he meets both himself and his dead wife, but the human pair continue to treat him with kindness and eventually take him into town. Here, he meets the mayor, Hans Klochmann.
Klochmann, it turns out, is a genius in robotics. He came to what was once an abandoned mining town and populated it with robots, all designed to look like people he'd seen in the obituaries. He's happy running a town full of "people" who are incapable of feeling jealousy, hatred or greed. It's not a bad place to live, though Swamp Thing is having some understandable trouble in adjusting to the "resurrection" of his wife as a robot.
Len Wein's script and Bernie Wrightson's superb art set all this up perfectly. The plot unfolds smoothly, with those of us reading finding out what's going on along with Swamp Thing, allowing us to emphasize with the confusing emotions this is generating in him. The story thus captures the proper atmosphere for the story perfectly, giving a lot of emotional punch to the violent conclusion.
To reach that conclusion, I'm afraid the town will have to stop being a nice place to live. Government investigator Matt Cable has been pulled off the Swamp Thing case to investigate the town, where no one has ever registered with the governement or paid taxes.
That by itself wouldn't be so bad. But a criminal organization called the Conclave (the same guys who killed Linda and supposedly killed Alex) also find out about the town. Soon, a gang of machine gun-toting henchmen led by a killer robot arrive. Matt and his assistant Abigail Arcane are captured and flown in a helicopter to be questioned about his organization.
The Conclave plans on taking Klochmann as well to force him to use his robotics skills for their nefarious purposes. When Klochmann objects to this, a few of his robots are shot down. This includes the Linda Holland Robot.
Well, that doesn't sit well with Swamp Thing. And you don't want to be on the wrong side of an angry Swamp Thing. He destroys the robot in a brief but brutal fight. The henchmen then get ready to open first on him.
By this point in the series, Swamp Thing had been shown to be immune to most physical damage and had even had a severed arm grow back. So there's a brutal irony involved when Klochmann jumps in front of Swamp Thing and sacrifices his life to take the bullets instead. Was Swamp Thing actually in danger? Perhaps concentrated machine gun fire would have shredded him. But its also possible the fire power might have been insufficient to kill him.
But Klochmann does die for him. The robots--supposedly unable to feel vengeance--rush the henchman. The robots are destroyed, but they take the henchmen with them.
So Klochmann's dream of a town untouched by violence and hatred comes to a violent and hate-filled end.
This is one of my favorite stories from the Wein/Wrightson run. As I mentioned above, it does an excellent job of setting up the story and generating just the right emotions to give the climax a sense of real tragedy and loss. Wrightson was an artist who could infuse comic book panels with an extraordinary level of emotion. That talent is definetly on hand here.
Well, there is a dangling plot thread left at the end of this issue, with Matt and Abigail still prisoners of the Conclave. So next week, we'll continue to travel to with Swamp Thing into the next issue as he tracks the Conclave to....Gotham City?
Gee whiz, off all the places in the world to set up the headquarters of your international crime syndicate, Batman's home town seems like a very poor choice.
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