Reviews and Comments

Okay so this space ship crash lands on a farmer's house and ruins all his melons and he gets a magic cloak that doesn't do anything, so then the farmer and his new friend, a giant gun-toting space hippopotamus-man, are on the run from these fascist space spider-eels who want the do-nothing cloak and who have giant insect-ape slave/servants who sometimes carry them around like Oscar the Grouch and Bruno the Binman, and so Farmer and Hippo keep running and get the help of some crazy tiny scientists who live in a hollowed out volcano who build a new space ship out of spare parts, and they all run away into outer space.

Pros:
- fun, light, easy fantasy romp
- I wanted to read something in the spelljammer setting, and this was unarguably that
- The gnomes were funny

Cons:
- My copy had typos and grammatical errors, which was distracting.
- Tropey and predictable. Shallow, one-dimensional characters
- The cloak itself is a super lame plot device. The fate of the multiverse depends on it! But it literally does nothing. We should have been given some kind of a taste or a hint at its powers, assuming it has any.
- I wanted some outer space stuff, and didn't get any until the epilogue
- The entire sea-faring bit was.. very D&D campaigny: "Here's a tangential side quest so you can level up a little bit before the next big encounter."

Overall, very entertaining, but pretty poorly written and executed.

Edit: Browsing the reviews here, there seems to be a lot of hate toward the Nat Broder/Silicon Crystal Man character. That story was one of my favorites! Because a) Phantom Stranger, and b) the character was a great mirror to hold up to Swamp Thing. Their origins were almost exactly the same: bodies suffused with strange science stuff during a lab explosion. Broder's body was literally dumped in the swamp, from which he rose up as the Silicon Man!
He was extremely the Anti Swamp Thing: made of silicon and circuitry instead of roots and moss; cold, unfeeling technology instead of moss and muck that feels too much. Yearning for power and dominion instead of belonging and family. Swampy doesn't have his connection to the Green yet, but Broder's connection to the web and weave of the Internet unknowingly predicts even that. He even looked like Bizarro, and was Swampy's inverse every bit as much as Bizarro is Superman's.

Original review:
Super fun and nostalgic. Swampy has always been one of my favorites, since I was a kid.

Started reading this when the DC TV series was going to come out. Standout moments:

1. The Monster of the Week format of the earliest issues: Swampy punches a werewolf! A vampire! A Frankenstein! A robot! An alien! A weird worm!

2. Seeing first appearances of TV series tie-ins: Nathan Ellery and the Enclave, Avery Sunderland, the Phantom Stranger.

3. One of Swampy's very first adventures lead him to Gotham, and to an encounter with Batman! Did not know that.

4. There is nothing earth elemental, and nothing about The Green at all about this entire first run. He's just a mossy green hulk who wants to be left alone.

5. The "Karen Clancy/Anti-Christ Saga" was a loooooong run full of characters and content that I've never heard of. That whole bit felt like a fever dream. When it was finally over and we got to another Anton Arcane/Un-men fight, I was happy to be back to "classic Swamp Thing" territory.