Posted in: Comics, DC Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: Alan Moore, auction, dc comics, heritage, rick veitch, swamp thing
Alan Moore & Rick Veitch Swamp Thing Original Art Up For Auction
There is a Heritage Auction listing for the piece below that reads "Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala Swamp Thing #63 Story Page 19 Original Art (DC, 1987). After devising a plan to kill Swamp Thing, Dwight Wicker orders all vegetation to be removed from the workplace. Created in ink over graphite on Bristol board with an image area of 11.75" x 17". Text bubbles are all paste-ups, whiteout correction/clean-up, editorial notes/marks, staining, smudging, and handling wear. In Very Good condition."
Which all sounds fine, but it might also be worth pointing out to the fine folk that the page is from a Swamp Thing comic written by Alan Moore, his penultimate issue on the series, and the book that made his name in American comic books. It is also from the time when they still put the speech balloons on the pages as well. And maybe, just maybe, that might help push the price above the high bid of $23 at the time of writing. Ah well, we're always happy to help. I wonder how much higher than $23 it will now go?
And if you remember the next page, never great to eat a sandwich with lettuce in it when you are at war with The Swamp Thing.
In the early-to-mid-eighties Alan Moore, with Steve Bissette, John Totleben and Rick Veitch reconfigured, revamped, relaunched, and retconned the Swamp Thing's origin to make him a true monster, as opposed to a human transformed into a monster, and revealed that the Swamp Thing was not Alec Holland transformed into a plant, but actually, a wholly plant-based entity created upon the death of Alec Holland, having somehow absorbed duplicates of Holland's consciousness and memories into himself. He is described as "a plant that thought it was Alec Holland, a plant that was trying its level best to be Alec Holland." Moore would later reveal, in an attempt to connect the original one-off Swamp Thing story from House of Secrets #92 to the main Swamp Thing canon, that there had been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Swamp Things since the dawn of humanity, and that all versions of the creature were designated defenders of the Parliament of Trees, an elemental community which rules a dimension known as "the Green" that connects all plant life on Earth. Swamp Thing inspired the "legacy" character trope that was popularised across superhero comicdom, including Ghost Rider and Spawn as well as TV shows such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer…