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

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authority. This subtle, but discernible, way to reveal information struck me as
particularly memorable.
As theorist Mark Ledbetter writes in his book Victims and the Post-Modern
Narrative, “To be playful is to practise politics and ethics. While the rules of any game,
particularly language's game, may be superficial constructs, they do exist; if not, we play
the game alone. And we must remember, rules are political even if necessary. I think that
the critical question is, 'Who makes the rules?” (5) By virtue of being born and raised
within a community among others, it is natural and necessary to learn and copy behaviors
and habits. Witnessing, assessing, and mimicking simple acts are the crucial means by
which an individual develops an awareness of his or her surroundings. Through these
exercises a person becomes cognizant of how participation reinforces social standards;
and then he or she can begin to question how routines considered to be normal came to be
so commonly accepted. Similarly, testing the congruence of social roles against political
idealism is a more complex adaptation of this type of play which manifests in Saga of the
Swamp Thing. Moore's Post-Modern approach is lofty: “He wants to do more than
convey a summary of cultural codes. He wants to examine the mechanism of fiction. To
do this he turns it inside out and back again. He displays its falsehoods and then
convinces us it’s real again” (Yaco 250). The constant back and forth which challenges a
reader's notion of certainty about the content of the text cautions of a world constructed in
an even more complex manner: that world is reality. However, it is this complexity
which makes Moore's work appealing. Yaco speculates, “The reason Moore's
rationalizations work so well for many of us is that we get to enjoy the somewhat guilty
pleasure of reading comic books, for an intelligent adult viewpoint has been overlaid on