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

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Bingham 110 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
Bingham 111 appeared. Though the two had serious ideas about how to modify the story and advance its plot, their superiors were not receptive to these changes. Bissette remarked, “One night in early 1983, during a phone conversation in which John and I agonized over the misdirection our stint as artists on DC Comics' SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING seemed to be going, we briefly fantasized how cool it would be if we could work with that new British comics writer, Alan Moore...We imagined a kindred soul there” (Mr. Moore & Me 218). Whether by fate or chance their editor, co- creator of the series Len Wein, reached out to Moore and convinced him to sign onto the project. 2 As a creative team, the collaborative approach these three took to completing the work became a perfect mirror for the content of connectedness or collectivism which their content also promoted. In the first letter Moore wrote to Bissette in May 1983 after accepting the job he explained, “I suppose my basic attitude to the work is that what ends up on the printed page is the only important thing. To that end, the script and art really have to be seen as one process, rather than as pictures over here and words over there... it'd be a pretty dismal waste of potential if we didn't all have equal input into the work as a whole” (ibid 219). Since the overall theme of the work favors the acceptance of interconnectedness, it seems important that the process used to construct the content which would convey this message was dependent upon the combined efforts of multiple people working toward a particular goal as well. Bissette continued, “From the get-go, it was apparent that Alan's ego was not a driving determinative force; it was the genuine desire to seek, create, nurture that elusive plane of shared existence wherein physical parameters dissolve in the mingling of ideas and dreams, to be given form through lucid, skilled and forever shared work” (ibid). With harmony as an articulated ideal proposed
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Bingham 3 I owe an extreme debt of
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Bingham 5 Introduction My project e
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Bingham 7 personal growth through t
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Bingham 9 beliefs. Seeing a possibl
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Bingham 11 zombie exceeds death as
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Bingham 13 the validity of singular
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Bingham 15 Chapter I: The History o
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Bingham 17 Swamp Thing. According t
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Bingham 19 instructional profession
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Bingham 21 Another artist who worke
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Bingham 23 action into panels (Cohn
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Bingham 25 sponsorship. He designed
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Bingham 27 Charles Moulton. Marston
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Bingham 29 Frederick Wertham prompt
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Bingham 31 “graphic novel” was
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Bingham 33 what is or isn't a graph
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Bingham 35 Works Cited Benton, Mike
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Bingham 37 Chapter II: Transfusion
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Bingham 39 conflict or war. This ex
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Bingham 41 and dismember other bodi
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Bingham 43 bodies to pieces. (Cavar
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Bingham 45 thus creating an affecti
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Bingham 47 margins. Unlike the four
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Bingham 49 implicates the role of o
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Bingham 51 demonstrates that he is
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Bingham 53 Amy (Figure 10 & 11). Th
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Bingham 55 being who has done nothi
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Bingham 57 transgressions, this ima
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Page 65 and 66: Bingham 65 with yourself? Not me. I
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Page 77 and 78: Bingham 76 APPENDIX A Fig. 1. Openi
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Page 107 and 108: Bingham 107 Wrightson only drew the
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Page 113 and 114: Bingham 113 General Avery Carlton S
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Page 135 and 136: Bingham 135 If we read each charact
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Page 139 and 140: 1 According to comics historian Rob
Page 141 and 142: Bingham 140 - Interview by David Ro
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