Despite featuring nothing but big names in comics, there’s only one really decent story out of the five in Swamp Thing: Roots of Terror - not a great ratio for any collection!
That would be Tom King and Jason Fabok’s Eisner-winning The Talk of the Saints (which walked away with the Best Short Story award in 2019). It’s a trippy tale about Swamp Thing trying to keep a young boy alive in a wintry wilderness while being pursued by an unseen snow monster. The mystery deepens as time passes, though you don’t know how much, just that Swamp Thing deteriorates badly while the boy oddly stays the same.
It’s a creepy, unpredictable and engaging story with the usual high quality artwork from Fabok - The Talk of the Saints is easily the standout here.
Despite being seasoned pros, Brian Azzarello and Greg Capullo’s Hollow is just that - a hollow story about Swampy fighting some lil monsters on Halloween. Mark Russell and Frazer Irving’s Heart-Shaped Box is even more forgettable as Swampy tries romancing a girl on Valentine’s Day while hunters enter the bayou to git them a monster.
It only gets worse with Tim Seeley and Kyle Hotz’s The Spread, about a virus threatening the Green, and then the final story, Len Wein and Kelley Jones’ Spring Awakening, which became Wein’s final work before his death. Jones produces a finished issue with his artwork, though, because Wein didn’t complete a lettering script, it’s left “silent” and his page-by-page script for Jones’ guidance is reprinted at the end instead.
It’s poignant but I won’t pretend I was a huge fan of Len Wein’s work. Spring Awakening looked like it was shaping up to be about as terrible as his previous Swamp Thing book, The Dead Don’t Sleep, and the storytelling is very simplistic anyway so you can follow what’s happening just by Jones’ art alone.
The art throughout the book is very impressive. I loved Fabok’s pages and enjoyed Capullo’s and Hotz’s, though I like Frazer Irving’s art less and less over time and Kelley Jones’ art has always been an acquired taste. It’s distinctive at least.
A full third of the book is made up of scripts and sketches so there’s a helluva lot of padding to this one. I don’t know anyone who’s a fan of these sorts of extras but then there isn’t the option available not to go for the Deluxe Edition so we’re stuck with this crap regardless - lucky us!
I don’t know if The Talk of the Saints is worth getting this book, or whether you should just get that story separately, but it is definitely worth reading. The rest of Swamp Thing: Roots of Terror is pretty to look at but isn’t nearly as entertaining to read unfortunately.
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