If you enjoy being creeped right out of your sleeping bag, then you should go down to the swamps of Louisiana and camp out without a tent or fire whilst reading Swamp Thing by the fading glow of your dying flashlight. Seriously, can you imagine anything creeping you out more? Well, I guess you could try to do some sort of séance, or call on the spirits from beyond the Green, or something. But, if you do that, you are so messed up, that you probably aren’t reading this review. So, idiots who take their souls into their own hands aside, what about the rest of you?

I tell you what, I read this book in my bed with the light on, and the lamp on, and my wife lying next to me. I also keep a Bible near by, and some holy water, a Saint Christopher too (just in case I get so scared that I decide to run far, far away).

But, maybe it isn’t fear alone that smacks me in the chest like a two-fisted The Darkman mega-punch. Perhaps it is unease, unease mixed with a feeling of dread, dread mixed with the odor of unclean britches. What does the book make one to dread? For starters, it tends to make me dread that all around us are people with the nare- do-well spirits abiding within, and not just people, but things too. And, not just people or things, but also just things from other realms scratching and clawing their ways, slowly and surely, up into this plain with naught but bad intentions for all else but themselves. So, try feeling that while camping in the swamp in Louisiana. Or, don’t.

As for the comic itself, as opposed to the feelings that it causes yours truly, Swamp Thing continues to be one of the best written books, with some of the most disturbing art and dialogue. The art, like the art of Powers, Kabuki, Hellblazer, Y the Last Man, and many others, is excellent in its appropriateness to the book’s genre. The painted cover-art of this episode, by Totleben, is exceptional. I would love to have a huge framed copy hanging in my house, but then I would never sleep. This is stuff of mysterious, intriguing, heavy, and dark, dark, dark fiction. I enjoy Swamp Thing every month, and you should too.

-Peblee