Read Between the Lines: The Swamp Thing #8 Flashes Back to the Present

Great comics are made of great scenes: the pages and panels that use the comics medium to tell a story well. This is a column to unpack why it is that they work, and spotlight some cool bits that might not get talked about enough. Whether it’s a stellar page, a multi-page sequence, or a single effective panel, we’ll sit with all of them and consider them here. First Up: The Swamp Thing #8.

The Swamp Thing is among the best of the superhero titles being published today. It’s a meditation on memory, identity, imperialism, and monstrosity. But what I’d like to discuss here is a 3-page sequence from the latest issue, #8, by the stellar creative team of Ram V, Mike Perkins, Mike Spicer, and Aditya Bidika, and why it works so well, at least for my money.

Let’s dive right in.

Here, we’re seeing the encounter of Parasite, the Superman antagonist, and Levi Kamei, our leading man, The Swamp Thing. Notice the use of space here with abstract blacks and greens, as we’re in The Green, the realm of memory, the realm where all is embedded and forever.

Etched upon this abstract space of green and black, of natural memory and the shadows within it, you have the firm jagged blocks of orange. These captions, these weighty things which hold the ground and make us stand firm on this abstract space, they are the rooted thoughts of The Swamp Thing. He is the certainty, the pillar, amidst all the half-remembered shards of memory that encompass The Green.

But notice how that changes here. The Swamp Thing is the firm, jagged mass of power. His caption-boxes are thick, with firm outlines, and don’t end up uniform. He is a force. But Levi Kamei is not that. Levi Kamei is but a human.

He’s a vulnerable, messy, person who has been made to become The Swamp Thing, a sentient Idea, the avatar of The Green. He’s the Indian Immigrant who still struggles with his identity, with who he was, who he hopes to be, who he thinks he is, and who he actually is. He’s a mortal trying to place meaning upon his reality, trying to attain some measure of certainty.

And so above we see the orange captions of force transform into ‘simpler’ and ‘normal’ green rectangles. The green as a choice feels quite pointed here, being fundamentally tied to The Green and bound to the colors of memory itself. The visual vines are a lovely touch to denote transformation and a shift in a single lettering choice alone, rather than needing anything else. It’s an efficient choice that is immediately clear and deliberate in its intentionality. We’re seeing the very obvious shift from Swamp Thing’s perspective of memories towards Levi’s perspective.

From there, we are plunged into the memories of Levi, who in this context becomes a fun mirror to Parasite, for he is Parasite’s ultimate opposite. Not a ravenous monster of hunger, feeding on natural things, but host to the natural world and order itself, a bridge bound by balance. Unlike the previous sequence with Parasite’s past, this is not passive observation of memory. This is active observation of memory. Swamp Thing can be passive. Swamp Thing is an Avatar. An Idea, which ascends beyond mortal perspective. Ideas can afford to be passive.

Note how truly calm, almost solemnly observant Swamp Thing’s captions are here,with the ellipses playing into that. They’re rather like nature itself. They have a detachment and a distance.

Levi can’t fully be like that, he is the man wrestling with a larger Idea of the natural world to make something of it. He’s the foolish mortal who toils and is uncertain. Which is why Levi must be the focus here. 

We see here the little bits and pieces, these flashes of the past, these fragments of times that were, times that never will be. In a real sense, the green captions here act almost akin to journalistic notes upon each of these flashing pieces of the past. They’re a note of retrospective consideration. The kind of pinned up assessments we put on the past with time and reflection. The kind of notes now and forever associated and bound up with these memories, which always turn up when we recall them.

Which is perhaps what makes this page so striking to me.

Levi is flashing back once more and putting up those notes again. They reveal how he saw and experienced this. They’re the monologues you give when you’re narrating and going over the moment to yourself.

Here, he’s back with his dying father, in the hospital. The man who gave him everything, the man who brought him into this world, the man who gave him life and raised him. The man he moved away from, and the man he hurt in his hubris.

But as this happens, as he’s turning over this memory, something unexpected and interesting happens. The green captions break in the middle, all of a sudden, in the midst of this whole memory sequence. And instead we get this:

The almost note-like captions of arrangement, these boxes of assessment placed over the images vanish. Instead, you have these words in white etched into the imagery itself. Like scribbles of chalk put upon the backgrounds of this memory. Like it’s being written over in-the-moment, rather than just noted upon like prior.

What’s happening in this one panel is different, and all the more noticeably striking, visually, because of this choice. And it’s important that it be this way, for there is something vitally different here. 

Levi’s just had a breakthrough. He finally sees and understands this whole event in a new way, and that new understanding is what is being etched into the page, this space of memory and meaning. He has a new perspective of it now. 

Levi believed his father just didn’t understand him. That he couldn’t hear or see what Levi was trying to express to him, and he was frustrated. His relationship with his father was…difficult, to say the least. But in this moment, having been exposed to his own failures and flaws in thinking, having seen the cost of his own choices, he has a different perspective. He sees a more essential truth. That what he felt was one-sided went both ways, for he too had stopped listening or being able to truly hear what it was his father had been trying to tell him. Perhaps if he had, perhaps if he’d realized earlier, none of this would’ve happened. Perhaps if both of them had, if he and his father had communicated better or differently and been able to understand one another sooner, things could’ve been better. That’s an understanding that’s incredibly vital, and it only emerges from revisiting these memories. He’s got a new lens on everything that happened.

He’s transformed his unchanging, firm interpretation of the past into a more fluid one. The passive reactivity of his past self and memories morphs here into a new active understanding. It’s his nature as the new Avatar Of The Green, the keeper of memory, captured in a microcosm, with the captions playing into that. It’s a simple touch, and it’s a moment many might just present in another same ol’ green caption box, same as the rest.

But because the creative team did not do that, this stands out marvelously. This makes the whole beat sing. This panel is immediately noticeable in the context of the sequence and the revelation Levi has hits you just as sharply visually on-page, the same way it must for him in his mind. It’s a great little way to put you in the character’s headspace and make you experience and feel what they’re feeling.

It’s also why it’s not something to be repeated, as such revelation while reflecting on one’s memory isn’t as common. And it’s why right after it, we’re back to the notes-esque green caption boxes, with the reflection upon the moment continuing, as the revelation itself now becomes a new embedded part of this entire memory.

It’s these little formal touches that make comics truly comics. It’s this specific-to-the-form stuff that when mined has the greatest impact, even if we don’t regularly articulate why a choice just worked so well, and fit the contents of the work so seamlessly.

It’s what makes all of this so fun.