Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies in ...

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were attending the Joe Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey in 1977 (Bissette 217).
Having read the original series during their youth, the two had formed ideas about its
characters and imagined ways to expand the narratives surrounding these figures on their
own. In an interview he provided for Millidge's anthology, Bissette explained how deep
the desire to contribute to this project truly was for his co-collaborator John Totleben:
In his heart of hearts, John really wanted to have a shot at his all-time favorite
comic book character, Swamp Thing. He had already evolved his own take on
the muck monster, delineated in stirring brush-and-ink renditions of the sorroweyed
Swampy looking up from the mire, detailed in drunken conversations at the
great parties classmates Tim and Beth Truman threw in their Lake Hopatcong
apartment wherein John described the notion of Swamp Thing growing edible
potatoes from his body, and Rick Veitch (if memory serves) suggested the bon
mot of their being hallucinogenic (Bissette, “Mr. Moore & Me,” p. 217-218).
The figure was at once familiar and personal; having engaged the original stories during
their youth, the two undoubtedly imagined other scenarios for the Swamp Thing to
experience and reinvented him through their own perspectives. Also, their ability to
freely discuss shared childhood reading experiences with friends and peers reveals how
important the content of those works was to generating thought. The graphic narrative is
an ideal medium for developing questions about community ethics since it can provide
space to perform continued experiments with the implications of the narrative’s content
against the opinions expressed by others and sustain their interest through this flexibility
to adaptation. Bissette and Totleben's shared attachment to the work and belief in its
potential helped to guide the series to its current place of stature.
Initially there were difficulties, though. Starting their tenure on the revival with
its sixteenth issue, “Stopover in a Place of Secret Truths” (cover dated August 1983),
Bissette and Totleben were unhappy with how the prospects for the future of the project