Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 46

38

Popular Culture Review

As he tells his niece triumphantly, “There is nothing that I cannot do” (66). Helpless
at first, declaring that he would follow Abby “even there ’ if only he were not
“shackled” to his body (103), this Swamp Thing abruptly recognizes something
that the Swamp Thing of Dark Genesis never could. His non-human form is actually
free to roam in unusual ways, and his participation in elemental forces enables him
to journey “beyond the green . . . beyond the world of the quick and the warm . . .
beyond life itself’ (105).
Significantly, given his earlier tendency toward solitary travel, Swamp Thing
does not journey alone. In fact, he has four different guides through the afterlife
and into hell. He learns from one that God is a woman (111) and from another that
God is a man (117), suggesting that the ultimate shaping force—and the ideal
consciousness— is both female and male. But he learns emphatically that the halls
o f hell “were carved by m en” by “lusts uncontrolled” and “swords unsheathed”
(131), by greed and violence and anger and desire for power, the products of all
those “manly values” identified by Sabin as central to adult adventure comics (223).
And in the midst of this male-created place, a place aggressively defined by a
willingness to destroy life rather than cherish it,9 Swamp Thing finds the innocent
victim Abby, who does not belong here but has been sacri