This weekend’s escapist, light-hearted superhero post from Balladeer’s Blog will look at some of DC’s Swamp Thing covers that fit the Halloween Season.
SWAMP THING Vol 1 #3 (March 1973)
Title: The Patchwork Man
Villains: Dr. Anton Arcane and his Patchwork Man
NOTE: Scientist Alec Holland developed a bio-restorative chemical formula to help plant and animal life survive under hostile environmental conditions. A group of villains called the Conclave wanted the formula for their own purposes and murdered Alec and his wife Linda when they would not sell them that formula.
Alec’s body was dumped in the swamp, where the bio-restorative chemicals his body had been soaked in interacted with his own anatomy, the mud and the plant life in the swamp, letting him rise from the dead as a murk-monster. The Swamp Thing retained Alec Holland’s intelligence but could not speak for the first several issues.
Synopsis: The Swamp Thing was searching through the laboratory of his foe, Anton Arcane, genetic engineer and sorcerer combined. He winds up battling another of Arcane’s macabre creations, the Patchwork Man, one of the villain’s Un-Men.
SWAMP THING Vol 1 #4 (May 1973)
Title: Monster on the Moors
Villain: A werewolf
Synopsis: A female mad scientist imprisons Alec Holland’s Interpol Agent friend Matthew Cable and Arcane’s niece Abby. She is trying to transfer her son’s curse of lycanthropy to Matthew so her son will be free of it.
The Swamp Thing, as you would expect, winds up clashing with the werewolf and its mother.
SWAMP THING Vol 1 #5 (August 1973)
Title: The Last of the Ravenwind Witches
Villains: Gideon and his mob of villagers
Synopsis: The Swamp Thing comes to the aid of Rebecca Ravenwind, a young woman accused of witchcraft by superstitious residents of the town of Divinity. Horrors are unleashed when it is discovered that Rebecca’s brother Timothy is the real witch and he attacks.
SWAMP THING Vol 1 #8 (February 1974)
Title: The Lurker in Tunnel Thirteen
Villain: M’Nagalah
Synopsis: In the exhausted mines around the town of Perdition, the Swamp Thing does battle with M’Nagalah, a Lovecraftian entity from the distant past who has been preying upon the locals.
M’Nagalah hints that it telepathically implanted H.P. Lovecraft with lore for his Cthulhu Mythos and Edgar Allan Poe with some of his horror ideas, too.
SWAMP THING Vol 1 #10 (June 1974)
Title: The Man Who Would Not Die
Villains: Arcane and his Un-Men
Synopsis: Deep in the Louisiana swamps, our title monster encounters the ghosts of Elsbeth and Jubal, a pair of former slaves who were star-crossed lovers in life.
He also discovers a long-disused cemetery where he clashes once again with Dr. Anton Arcane and his Un-Men.
SWAMP THING Vol 1 #11 (August 1974)
Title: The Conqueror Worms
Villains: Zachary Nail and his mutated creatures
Synopsis: The Swamp Thing must save Matthew Cable and Abby Arcane from mad scientist Zachary Nail, his mutated alligator and his enormous, mutated worms.
NOTE: Zachary Nail was also a foe of DC’s horror characters the Phantom Stranger and Dr. Thirteen.
SWAMP THING Vol 1 #13 (December 1974)
Title: The Leviathan Conspiracy
Villains: Commander John Zero and his troops
Synopsis: Matthew Cable and Abby Arcane help government forces who have been trying to capture and study the Swamp Thing. It turns out the intense Commander John Zero plans to destroy the muck-monster rather than study it.
NOTE: For the very first time, the Swamp Thing manages to speak, telling Matthew and Abby that he is really the presumed dead Alec Holland.
SWAMP THING Vol 1 #15 (April 1975)
Title: The Soul-Spell of Father Bliss
Villains: Father Bliss and his demonoid Nebiros
Synopsis: The Swamp Thing gets caught up in the hellish plans of Father Jonathan Bliss, a seemingly helpful man of the cloth who instead turns out to be a defrocked priest.
Bliss, who was thrown out over his black magic studies, conjures up an infernal creature named Nebiros to further his sinister schemes.
SWAMP THING Vol 1 #16 (May 1975)
Title: Night of the Warring Dead
Villains: Laganna and her zombies
Synopsis: In the fictional Caribbean Island country of Kala Pago (a pastiche of Haiti), the Swamp Thing, Matthew and Abby get caught in the middle of a nearly unimaginable war.
High Priestess Laganna and her army of zombies clash with the soldiers of the island’s dictatorial regime. Neither side is really worth rooting for and, in the end, an entire village gets slaughtered during the battle.
SWAMP THING Vol 1 #17 (July 1975)
Title: The Destiny Machine
Villains: Nathan Ellery and the Conclave
Synopsis: The Swamp Thing, Matthew and Abby clash with our title character’s longtime foes in the Conclave and their leader Nathan Ellery.
The resulting battle pits our heroes against the Conclave’s android canines and their latest invention – a device that can scramble a human’s brain, leaving them insane and gibbering.
SWAMP THING Vol 1 #18 (September 1975)
Title: Village of the Doomed
Villains: The Trask Family
Synopsis: The Swamp Thing and his friends discover the dark secret of Serenity Village – the inhabitants retain their youth by leeching life-force from human victims.
They are backed up by demonic creatures conjured up by using a book called the Ebontome.
SWAMP THING Vol 1 #20 (January 1976)
Title: The Mirror Monster
Villains: Ho’tah Makinaw and a second Swamp Thing
Synopsis: The arm that our title monster lost way back in his adventure in the town of Divinity has grown back into a full-sized, complete Swamp Thing which is a mindless beast.
(The real Swamp Thing’s severed arm had soon grown back after its loss in the battle in Divinity.)
Our hero fights the unthinking brute and destroys it.
SWAMP THING Vol 1 #24 (September 1976)
Title: The Earth Below
Villains: Thrudvang and the Colossus Organization
Synopsis: A shady group called the Colossus Organization want Alec Holland’s formula so they can create an entire army of Swamp Things. They unleash their Earth Elemental creation Thrudvang on Swamp Thing hoping to capture him.
The Swamp Thing involuntarily transforms back into his human form during the fight but uses his intellect to destroy Thrudvang.
NOTE: This was the last issue of the series, but Swamp Thing became a regular guest star in DC’s Challengers of the Unknown when it turned out his reversion to human form was only temporary. Volume Two of the Swamp Thing series began in the early 1980s.
FOR MY LOOK AT HALLOWEENISH GHOST RIDER COVERS CLICK HERE.
FOR MY LOOK AT HALLOWEENISH WEREWOLF BY NIGHT COVERS CLICK HERE.
FOR LILITH, DRACULA’S DAUGHTER CLICK HERE. FOR EARLY BLADE STORIES (1973-1983) CLICK HERE.
FOR HALLOWEENISH COVERS OF THE SIMON GARTH ZOMBIE CLICK HERE.
Balladeer's Blog 
A wonderful post, well done, good luck and have a nice day, my dear brother
Thank you very much! You too!
💜
Thank you!
🎵 Swamp Thing!
You make my heart sing!
You make everything …… oozy 🎵
I know it wasn’t a good movie, but whenever I see Swamp Thing I think of the 80s flick with Adrienne Barbeau. Because reasons.
I know what you mean! I preferred her to Heather Locklear in Return of Swamp Thing.
Great posts as always. I have never heard about the Swamp Thing before but he definitely appears to be a very interesting character. I would like to some day see a movie made about him. The character reminds me a lot in his physical appearance of the Hulk. Both characters share a similar appearance, strength and presence. I’m a fan of the Hulk and love the way that the hero was portrayed in the MCU movies. He was depicted really well in all the Avengers movies by Mark Ruffalo. I particularly enjoyed “The Avengers” the most which introduced the hero toward audiences for the first time.
Here’s why I loved it:
Thank you very much. I really enjoyed your Avengers review!