Why DC’s Scariest Villain Was Actually Swamp Thing’s [SPOILER]

Through reimagining villain Anton Arcane, Alan Moore produced what might be his greatest deconstruction in the pages of Saga of the Swamp Thing.

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What makes a villain? Is it the harm they cause? Is it the degree of blackness in their hearts? Or is it something simpler? In 1983, a young English comic book writer by the name of Alan Moore arose out of obscurity to pen his first mainstream book at DC Comics. It was these questions he sought to answer right out the gate and his answer would come in the form of a stock villain who nonetheless Moore managed to write into legendary depravity. Mad scientist Anton Arcane, perhaps DC’s most twisted villain.

Before Watchmen, From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Promethea, legendary comics scribe Alan Moore came to fame in the pages of an obscure, but memorable horror comic “Saga of the Swamp Thing.” Though it may sound strange to say it, there was a time in the mid-‘80s when DC’s Swamp Thing was among DC’s hottest trending franchises, the subject of films, a TV show, and a short-lived Saturday morning cartoon. Scrambling to put together a successful creative team, Swamp Thing creator and then Editor for DC Len Wein tapped Moore to bring some unconventionality to the flagging title. And that is precisely what Moore accomplished, beginning his run in Issue #20, and quickly seeing the character cast off its previous incarnation as a disfigured scientist to reveal “Swampie” to be a literal monster made of plant life.

Taking old characters and reimagining them with dark, adult-themed undertones would come to be a trope identified chiefly with Moore’s name, and perhaps no characterization he ever did strikes as fearful a tone as Arcane, Swamp Thing’s nominal archenemy. Originally a Nazi scientist who combined science with the occult to create an army of corpse-men, in his first appearance (written by Wein) Arcane lured Swamp Thing to his castle in… Transylvania and tried to transpose himself into Swamp Thing’s body so he might live forever. Following this failure, the character became known for his penchant towards returning from the dead, having died several times before Moore came on the scene.

Through Arcane, Moore produced what might be his greatest deconstruction, or at the very least his least satirical. Summarily, Arcane uses his demonic powers to possess a fly, and begins to haunt the husband of his niece Abigail, Matt Cable (later made famous in the pages of Gaiman’s Sandman). Cable has been revealed to have reality-warping powers over the course of the series, and, seeing an opportunity, Arcane engineers a violent car crash which fatally injures Cable. Offering him the chance to live, Cable accepts, only to be possessed by his wife’s Uncle, now a demon returned from hell.

Arcane inhabits Cable’s body for weeks, during which time he sexually assaults his niece several times. In the disturbing Issue #29, entitled “Love and Death”, Moore spends the majority of the story exploring Abigail’s slow, yet horrifying, realization of what her Uncle has done. She begins smelling the stench of a corpse upon her at all times, and begins trying to wash herself obsessively to no avail, eventually resorting to scraping off her skin with steel wool. By the time she finally ascertains the horror of the deception, it is too late. Her Uncle uses the souls of the damned he has returned to earth to torment her into blind fear, and then murders her, using magic to send her soul to hell.

While Moore has received criticism for his use of sexual violence in his stories, in this early example, we can begin to parse exactly what the interpretation of these vile acts within his narratives are meant to communicate to the audience. Moore has repeatedly chastised mainstream cinema, television, and other media for showcasing representations of slasher-style brutality and sexual assault in such a way as to rev the audience into excitement. Coming to a horror book, Moore had already made a name for himself in deconstructing the common devices associated with the kind of genre he was writing, and he’d always hated the use of stock tropes like the threat of sexual assault and murder for the inducement of cheap thrills found in horror books like Swamp Thing.

So with Arcane, Alan Moore’s gave his most sincere and non-satirical postmodern deconstruction by having the villain embody what he felt was wrong with the horror genre itself, and juxtaposing it with its opposite, the “superhero” genre, represented by the inhuman monster Swamp Thing. Because he felt horror as a genre relied too much on images of violation, pain, and sexual violation, he portrays Arcane as the quintessential “horror” figure: the ghost of a sorcerer who comes back from hell to torture his niece. Arcane is duplicitous, nearly all-powerful in the body of Cable, and among the most disturbingly and realistically vile characters in terms of temperament ever published under a DC label. But in doing so, he gets to the heart of the real “good versus evil” battle within DC comics itself.

For, true to his own sense of right, Moore writes Swamp Thing, a non-human plant-being, as given being a true “hero” despite the fact that he’s a monster. He represents the power of love against hate, which Moore writes as the true battle, at least more important than any supervillain showdown. Perhaps the most famous of Moore’s stories in Saga of the Swamp Thing comes after Abigail’s rescue from hell in Issue #34, where the two begin a romantic relationship in a highly symbolic and psychedelic act in which Abigail eats a tuber grown from Swamp Thing’s body. Surely an interesting slant on the classic “Beauty and the Beast” arc, what Moore seems to be preoccupied with is that “love” is what a “hero” signifies. And what this force signifies is not dependent on control and fear, or even sex for that matter.

Arcane used sex as a weapon to terrify his niece, to violate a bond of trust she had with her husband, and he hoped this would destroy her psychologically. But the act of having sex does not equal making love. Making love does not have to involve sex, is what Moore really seems to be saying. It is a part of it, perhaps a very important part, but it is in some ways possibly a separate thing from actually connecting in love with someone.

While truly this villain is a terrifying and powerful figment of fiction, what Moore was ultimately able to summon, in perhaps as obscure a platform as one could during the time, was a true representation of what superheroes really represent in the cultural station: they represent love versus hate, and, ideally, the inability of hate to triumph over the power of love. While the years would turn Moore’s stories slightly less optimistic in this sense, his philosophical trip through the DC Universe in Saga of the Swamp Thing still stands the test of time in the strength of his thought-provoking narratives and immersive characterizations.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/swamp-thing-anton-arcane-scariest-villain/