absolute swamp thing by alan moore vol 1 new printing

Oliff is an award winning colorist and a veteran in the industry but radically changing the colors is akin to changing Alan Moore’s text. She’s listed as the original comic colorist, but coloring credit goes to Steve Oliff and ‘Olyoptics’. Tatjana Wood isn’t even given coloring credit.

I know that Alan Moore gets 98% of the credit for this run but it was a collaborative effort. Sometimes images have a single color where there used to be multiple colors and details are lost. Sometimes colors are added such as giving Swamp Thing an orange tongue where it was originally green. The monkey king was original black and white but now has shades of grey. His inking was sharp and frightening and now it’s soft and friendly. Page after page is altered and the worst thing is, these new colors are more often than not, softening Totleben’s inking. The last panel of issue 25 shows an image of Goya’s ‘The Sleep of Reason’ in all red. Pages that have greens and blue are now purple and grey. Scarcely a page goes by without radical color shifts. It was as if DC decided that the comic was too gothic and gritty and decided to give it a more disco appearance. It was a great moment in the original comic but now it looks distractingly weird. Wait, what? That’s supposed to be Matt Cable and in the original his skin is flesh colored. Issue 30 opens with, “The returned man smiles” as the lips of a green skinned alien part. The problem here is that DC looked at the colors supplied by Tatjana Wood and decided they could do better. In fact, if the Absolute Edition looked like a scan of the original, I’d be complaining. It makes sense that a more expensive version is going to have superior paper, printing techniques and modern tools so things are going to look different, and hopefully better. I’m not one of those purists who thinks that every reprint should look exactly like the original.

Unfortunately, DC made one disastrous decision in this Absolute Edition. I was always disappointed when an issue was released without their art, but I understood given the detail of Bissette’s penciling and Totleben’s inking. I wanted to talk about how Stephen Bissette and John Totleben were perhaps the first artists where, for me, their names became synonymous with the series they worked on. I bought these comics when they were first released, and they made a profound impact on me in my teenage years. I have to admit that DC was honest in the product description when they wrote, “brand-new coloring.” They question is, why? My review was going to be all about my love for the 1984 Alan Moore run on Swamp Thing and how it was a perfect marriage between art and writing.

Absolute swamp thing by alan moore vol 1 new printing