Here we are then.
The Vertigo Weekly Reader*, Issue 1.
This newsletter is a deep-dive into the early(ish) years of Vertigo, the comics imprint from DC that changed the industry forever. I’ll be covering everything they put out through to the end of the British Invasion in chronological(ish) order, starting in its murky pre-history with the comics that eventually got rebranded to form the Vertigo bedrock.
Which means starting at The Saga of the Swamp Thing #21, written by Alan Moore, pencilled by Steve Bisette, inked by John Totleben, coloured by Tatjana Wood, lettered by John Costanza, edited by Len Wein, with cover art by Tom Yeates. Words (spoilery ones) about that below, but first a bit of other business.
I’m making my debut as a published comics writer at Thought Bubble in Harrogate this weekend. I’ve written several shorts for a Joe and His Killer Robot Dad special, which are designed and laid out by the (actually) legendary Mick McMahon.
It’s a weird book to kick my comics work off with. I missed the ground floor—the Steves (Sterlacchini and Green) conceived it and my pal Sam Read wrote the first issue. This book is effectively a bonus feature with a limited run of 50 copies. And it’s designed and thumbnailed by one of the greatest artists British comics has ever produced, the guy who drew the first ever published Judge Dredd strip.
Meanwhile, my mate Si Smith and I are a couple of tweaks away from finishing a 272 page beast of a graphic novel being published by Top Shelf. We’ve been working on it for four or five years (depending on where you go from)—it predates my work on Joe by a full half-decade 😳. But that won’t see the light of day until 2026.
But bloody hell, I’m pleased to have my name on this Joe book. It includes some great work by Mick, and Steve (Sterlacchini) has slogged his guts out putting it together (Joe has a pretty interesting production pipeline, which I’ll get into at some point). It’s going to be a lovely piece of print, and each copy will be a little different (for reasons). Hopefully I’ll see you at Thought Bubble.
Now, our main feature…
Maybe, one day, you’ll wake into a body that feels… off. The last thing you’ll remember is being dunked into a sensor bath, or fed through a buzzing white tunnel, or having something delicately pushed through a hole in your skull.
And now your body feels wrong. Hard, and stiff. Or light, lacking mass. Or that low ache in your shoulder that’s been bothering you since the snowboarding accident is mysteriously gone.
Everything’s a bit off.
Or a lot off.
And it will dawn on you, slowly, that you are not, in fact, you…
Actually, you don’t have to worry about this off-putting scenario. Because it won’t be you waking up like this at all.
It will be some other version of you, copied from the tangle of neurons and synapses and blood and whatever-else-it-is that makes up your brain. Except there’s no such thing as ‘other versions of you’. There’s you, and there’s not-you.
And the person waking up is not-you. It’s just subjectively indistinguishable from you. It thinks and feels exactly like the you of an hour or two earlier, but it’s actually an artificial copy of you, uploaded to one of the tech-bro-singularitarians' synthetic bodies or infinite virtual paradises.
You are lying on a bed, recovering, or having a coffee, or a meal, talking quietly to a loved one about how strange it is that not-you is out there somewhere now. Or maybe months or years have actually passed since whatever-the-procedure-was, and you are watching telly or watching the news about yet more dangerous small boat crossings by climate refugees.
Or maybe you’re dead. Maybe you’ve been dead for hundreds—thousands? millions?—of years.
Not-you, who feels and thinks just like you, now has to work out what to do with the fact that their entire history belongs to someone else. Every last experience that led (not-)you to this exact moment is, in some sense, an illusion. Are you real? Are you a person? What do all those people you love think of you/not-you? Is it possible for anyone to love you?
That’s the experience of not-Alec-Holland, longtime star of Saga of the Swamp Thing. The Swamp Thing is not Alec Holland, transformed into a plant. It is "a plant that thought it was Alec Holland, a plant that was trying its level best to be Alec Holland".**
It is an extremely fucking brassy move, story-wise—10 years of Swampy continuity flipped on its head***. And, more importantly, a deeply disturbing, existentially traumatic lever to pull that sets the bar for the rest (I presume!) of Alan Moore’s run on the book.
It should be required reading for all the tech bros who’ve recently pivoted to AI and are convinced that general AI is imminent, with the singularity and our mass consciousness-upload presumably following soon after.
I won’t overreach and say that Moore was being prophetic. It’s not impossible he was thinking about artificial intelligence when he wrote SotST #21, but the field was going through an AI Winter in the ‘80s. It probably wasn’t top of mind.
And yet.
The idea of a non-human, non-sentient entity copying the thoughts of a non-consenting human feels very 2024. That entity coming to believe it is, in fact, Alec Holland, feels like it’s either very 2026, or maybe very 2030, or 2050, or 20-never, depending on how much you buy into the hype about imminent AI take-off. (I’m a sceptic, for the record, but I think it’s territory that’s worth exploring.)
All of which is very appropriate for… can we say this is ground zero for modern monthly comics? Maybe? No? Let’s agree it’s a turning point for American monthly superhero and genre comics. And it flips the entire saga of the Swamp Thing on its head.
Next time: look, it’s going to be Swamp Thing for a while, OK?
*Name TBC. Maybe?
**(Of course if, like not-Alec, not-you happens to live in the DC Universe, their existence is further complicated by the fact that literally anything can happen there. Perhaps in your universe there are some circumstances, depending on what supra-universal creator being is pulling the strings that month, in which there is some sort of immaterial soul that has transferred into not-you’s body. Or perhaps, as in a case in another universe, not-you is a ‘backed up’ mind inserted into a cloned body hatched from a gold ball, and despite the fact that logic dictates you are dead and this new person is a copy, the supra-universal creator being says that not-you is in fact you and everyone just has to accept it. Thank goodness we don’t live in a fictional universe. (do we???))
***(I wonder whether the team behind Spider-Man’s clone saga were knowingly drawing on Swamp Thing when they informed their readers that, actually, the Spidey they thought they knew was just a clone that thought it was Peter Parker. The main difference is that a plant monster that’s appeared in 50 or 60 comics over the course of a decade invites a lower level of attachment than one of the most beloved, likeable superheroes of all time. Plus, Moore was actively trying to creep us out, not create a version of his protagonist who could go on dates. Plus, execution, innit.)
Love this! Restacking...
That ** has got me all 🤯