Did Green Arrow predict today's politics four decades ago?
The Justice League are the coastal elites of the DCU and wealthy industrialist Oliver Queen is the voice of the people
Once again, I don’t want to say Alan Moore was peering four decades into the future, but… who was watching out for Lacroix, Louisiana?
But first, the game I recently wrote a story for, Neon Apex: Beyond the Limit, was announced. It’s developed by Repixel8, aka Andrew Jeffries, and will be published on all the major platforms and across a whole pepper grinder of territories next year. It will get a boxed retail release, which is especially satisfying to me. Andrew’s made it look cool as f___, drawing on the likes of Akira and Red Line. You can watch the announcement trailer here.
Numskull, who are publishing it, will be announcing the story mode separately, so I won’t bang on, except to say that we’re going through localisation (translation) right now, and I keep getting queries like “‘cybernetic forest womb’ - please give context?”
Elsewhere, there are a few copies of the Joe and His Killer Robot Dad special I wrote for on the OK Comics website. It includes some great work by the really-for-real-legendary Mick McMahon. Mick has a real hardcore fanbase who keep sending the shop angry emails when there’s a lag between us saying ‘just sent OK Comics more stock!’ and the stock actually appearing on site.
Short one this week—I’m just mopping up a couple of bits and pieces relating to these early Swamp Thing issues in between frantically trying to wrap everything else up before Christmas. In the new year we should start moving through the run at a faster clip.
First: in issue 24, discussed at greater length last week in Swamp Thing and the Super Heroes, Green Arrow angrily barks:
“What you’re saying is ‘We get to lose this one. This time we finally strike out.
“Man, I don’t believe this! We were watching out for New York, for Metropolis, for Atlantis…
“…But who was watching out for Lacroix, Louisiana?”
And he seems to have perfectly summed up our Western political moment in 2024. The Justice League, aka the super heroic coastal elites, were paying so little attention to middle America that some second rate super villain was able to wander in and sweep the board.
Fortunately, the fictional Lacroix, Louisiana, has Swamp Thing to sort the mess out. I don’t know what the real-world political equivalent to a benevolent weirdo swamp monster is. Louisiana voted Trump, by the way.
I’m not sure Alan Moore was particularly interested in 2024 when he wrote that line. But, it’s interesting to think about how long some version of the sentiment ‘no-one’s paying attention to the places outside the major metropolitan cities’ has been slopping about. You’d have hoped that someone would have done something about it before Trump/Farage/Le Penn/insert-your-populist-horror-show-of-choice-here seized on it.
But here we are, in need of a benevolent weirdo swamp monster.
Here’s Moore discussing his basic take on Swamp Thing, as discussed at great length over the last five issues of this newsletter:
The ones that aren’t doing well are your best bet because if their sales figures are that low, then you are probably being offered the character as a last-ditch act of desperation. This gives you a splendid opportunity for making it much better.
I had such an opportunity with Swamp Thing, a comic created in the early seventies about a scientist who’s fallen into swamp and arises as this green swamp monster that looks like it’s made out of vegetation. It had a certain appeal – it was a big swamp monster – but had huge limitations.
‘SOLVE ET COAGULA’
With solve et coagula, you analyse something to find out why it isn’t working as well as it could, then put it back together in a hopefully improved way. This is what I did with Swamp Thing. Taking it apart I realised that there’s no way the scientist didn’t die. Armed with the knowledge of a horrid worm experiment where knowledge was transferred through ingestion, I made the swamp’s organisms absorb information from the scientist’s corpse, so the Swamp Thing wasn’t a transformed human being at all – he was a plant that thought it had been a human being. Or, as I’ve put it, ‘a ghost dressed in weeds’. Sales soared and everybody was very pleased with me.
“A ghost dressed in weeds.” Wonderful.
That’s from the course notes of Alan Moore’s BBC Maestro course on storytelling. He goes into a bit more detail in the videos. I’m about halfway through and enjoying the course. No mention of an act break or saving a cat in sight, but plenty of actionable advice that doesn’t attempt to dessicate storytelling into an algorithm.
As much as anything, though, it’s fun to listen to Moore talking enthusiastically about some of his earlier work. Interviewers have made a sport of getting Moore to grouse about a lot of that sort of material, so hearing him discuss Swamp Thing or Watchmen with something resembling pride is a pleasure.
And that’s it! Take care of yourself, try to charge your batteries. See you in 2025.
Cheers,
Mark