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

Bingham 113
General Avery Carlton Sunderland 3 to determine how Swamp Thing, a creature his
corporation put down in the swamps of Huoma, Louisiana, came into existence.
Although he believes the creature is a transformed version of a scientist who was working
on federally funded research, Sunderland has no feasible explanation to support this
conclusion.
Instead of a character, the protagonist appears like any other specimen in a lab
might. The experimentation Woodrue performs upon his body in the following pages is,
in ways, representative of a search for identity as determined by the judgments of others.
Since fiction can reflect and inform how its readers think of themselves in relation to
their surroundings, it can impact the overall health of communities. By inverting the
position of the hero into a space of vulnerability and experimentation the creators have
unsettled the expectations of their readers. Experimentation with narrative is doubly
expressed through the work's content of scientific research. Supposedly the creature
frozen in Sunderland's lab was once a doctor and scientist named Alec Holland. Holland
and his wife, Linda, were performing research for the government, “Developing
something called a bio-restorative formula, which was intended to promote crop growth”
(Saga, pg. 16, panel 2). Admittedly, this project seems to stress the benefits research can
provide for society. Its aim to increase the production of food would also increase its
availability to those in need of it. Ideally, this research would benefit not only the
agricultural industry but humanity at large by reducing the possibility of famine and
starvation. Despite these lofty ideals, the experiment was sabotaged by an explosion
(Saga pg. 23, panels 1 & 4). Sunderland hypothesizes that this series of events has
transformed Holland into the plant creature he's hired Woodrue to examine but is unsure