Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 40
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Popular Culture Review
him in a revealed world of instinct, emotions, and interconnectedness.
The central conflict in Dark Genesis is not between Swamp Thing and his
various foes, all familiar in the world of comic book superheroes. Rather, it is
between what he could be— an organic, unifying force, the “earth elemental,” as
he is often called— and what he was, is, and believes he must (against all odds) try
to be again: Alec Holland the scientist. Throughout most of the book, he attempts
to recapture that identity while, in a sense, ignoring his potential to be much more.
Not all that surprising, given that his scientiflc/technological paradigms (like those
o f most male comic book superhero protagonists) have afforded him a distant,
confident authority and the power to make that authority manifest, to transform
the world according to his own terms. They have wrapped him in what Ruth Bleier
(referring to popular narratives of science) calls a “pristine and aseptic neutrality,”
and they have conferred upon him science’s “powerful, mysterious, impenetrable,
coercive, anonymous male voice” (62). Despite postmodern critiques of science
(and its offspring technology) as a construct, as a subjective rather than an objective
enterprise, and as historically gendered (i.e., male),4 it nonetheless continues—in
comic books, as in the culture at large—to privilege certain hyper-masculine traits
over what has traditionally been defined as feminine or “other,” i.e., “unscientific”:
reason over emotion, objectivity over subjectivity, the mind over the senses, the
intellect over instinct, isolation (the lone researcher) over connection, self-reliance
over love, experience mediated by technology (the impersonal paraphernalia of
the laboratory) over experience that is immediate, personal, atechnological.5 This
is Alec Holland’s paradigm; it is the source of the unquestioned power Swamp
Thing has already lost but is nonetheless loathe to give up.
And yet, little by little, he does give it up, most remarkably against the apparent
wishes of his co-creator Len Wein, whose narrative voice, lured by the conventions
o f the gothic romance genre, cannot resist the urge to tell its own version of
Frankenstein. Thus, the rhetoric is of “mist-wet old mansions” and “memories
that bring only pain” (Wein 1), of dragging one’s “fetid bulk” across the room to
“force the life from” an enemy’s “black-hearted body” (Wein 7). The original story
(about Alex Olsen, not Alec Holland), published in 1971 in House o f Secrets, takes
place in a decidedly nineteenth century setting, but when Wein and co-creator
Bemie Wrightson update the story to the present day for Swamp Thing issue #1
(1972), they only make more explicit the Frankenstein connections. When Alec
and Linda Holland, now co-researchers on a top-secret project, first view their
shiny new lab deep in bayou country, Alec remarks, “We’ve got enough equipment
here for a dozen Dr. Frankensteins! Seems almost a shame we’re not building a
monster!” (Wein 1.4). Alec will, of course, end up playing both Frankenstein and
monster—the scientist as science—and later, as Swamp Thing, he will survey
another well-stocked laboratory with the faith that here is “a cure for my condition