Mild spoilers for The Swamp Thing #1 below!
With a new creative team, a new host, and a new location, Swamp Thing is back and embracing horror in the best way possible. As Future State ends, Infinite Frontier begins, opening a vast new Omniverse full of potential in the DC Universe. The Guardian of the Green is one of many heroes to see a creative and vastly different new status quo.
A trio of elemental forces known as the Green, the Red, and the Black maintain a pivotal presence in the DC Universe. Each force has its own respective avatar. For the longest time, the Green and the plant life it is represents has been repped by Alec Holland AKA Swamp Thing. Or at least it was, as Holland was recently killed in Justice League Dark. Now the Green has a new avatar; his name is Levi Kamei, and he just made one helluva debut.
With the talented creative team of Ram V, Mike Perkins, and Mike Spicer, The Swamp Thing is a 10 issue maxi-series that looks to be diving head first into the character's horror roots. The genre is a natural fit for a character like Swamp Thing, and it's apparent that the new creative team knows this. There's a dread-inducing atmosphere from the very first panel on in The Swamp Thing #1. The issue begins with a bloat fly-infested crime scene set in the American Southwest, and segues into the story of a new villain called the Pale Wanderer, a Civil War Veteran who transformed himself into an oil chugging monstrosity that terrorizes denizens of the desert.
The artwork here is a perfect companion to the book's haunted script. The Pale Wanderer's origin and the environment the story is set in are inherently hostile. Perkins' pencils draft a world of visceral detail and shadow that is perfectly complemented by the hot, putrid color palette that Spicer imbues in the book. It all feels sticky in the best way possible. Those qualities are kept as the book shifts over to its cursed protagonist.
While also breaking ground as DC's first ever Indian lead, Levi Kamei arrives as a vastly different take on Swamp Thing. For starters, he can shift back and forth between his human and monstrous forms. Readers meet Levi as he travels from New Delhi to New York. Levi had gone back home to India to self-reflect and spend time with his family. Disorienting flashbacks paint a grim and mysterious picture of Levi's trip. Something terrible happened that's left our hero with something much worse than the bad dreams he has throughout in issue. Namely, he's been randomly transforming into Swamp Thing like he's some sort of werewolf made of kale. From the get go it scratches an Immortal Hulk kind of itch that is far too absent in comics from the Big Two.
For Alec Holland, the transformation into Swamp Thing was a permanent one. Levi's uncontrollable and horrific transformations have massive storytelling potential. It reads like a mixture of a classic werewolf story and the more hardcore body horror that has risen in popularity in recent years.
Swamp Thing's very concept—a human scientist morphing into a horrifying plant monster—is an unsettling one. That the new creative team appears to be gleefully running in this direction of atmospheric body horror is incredibly exciting. The Swamp Thing #1 is brimming with dread in every single panel, from the opening ghost story to the references to David Cronenberg's beloved adaption of The Fly and the Cthulu mythos peppered throughout the book. This first issue establishes an intriguing central mystery along with some genuinely disturbing imagery. Levi Kamei and his dreadful new powers promise to break new ground for inclusivity at DC and the very premise of Swamp Thing himself.