ST101 The Birth of Swamp Thing

Reading House of Secrets #92

The story that started everything, and how to read a comic closely.

About 90 minutes. Sample lesson, open to everyone.

Reading for this lesson

  • Required House of Secrets #92 Len Wein (writer), Bernie Wrightson (artist) the whole story, eight pages

    This is the primary text for Week 1 and for Assignment 1. Read it three times: once fast, once slowly, once for the art alone.

    Buy
  • Optional Grand Comics Database Grand Comics Database contributors the entry for House of Secrets #92

    Practise checking a credit and a cover date.

    Open accessLink

Introduction

Everything in this degree grows out of eight pages. In the summer of 1971 DC's horror anthology House of Secrets ran a short story by a young writer, Len Wein, and a twenty-two-year-old artist, Bernie Wrightson, about a scientist who is murdered and comes back from the swamp as something that is no longer quite a man[1]. Readers responded, DC noticed, and within eighteen months the two of them had a series.

This lesson is about reading those eight pages properly. Not summarising them, which you could do in two sentences, but reading them: watching what the page does, where your eye goes, when you learn things and when the story withholds them, and what the last panel leaves you holding.

What you are studying

House of Secrets #92 (cover date July 1971) is an anthology issue. The Swamp Thing story is one story among several, hosted, as the whole comic was, by the character Abel, one of the two brothers who fronted DC's mystery titles after their late-1960s revival. The story is set not in the present but in the Victorian era. Its scientist is Alex Olsen, its villain his friend Damian Ridge, and the woman between them is Linda. Ridge sabotages Olsen's laboratory; the explosion kills Olsen; something rises from the swamp and comes back to the house[1].

That is the plot. Notice how little of it there is. The story's power is in delivery, not events, which is exactly why it makes a good first object for close reading.

Learning objectives

  • Read a short comic three ways: for story, for structure and for art.
  • Record a first reaction in your own words before any secondary reading.
  • Identify where the story gives information, where it withholds it, and what that timing does.
  • Tell the difference between summarising a page and analysing it.

Historical context

DC's House of Mystery and House of Secrets had been revived as horror anthologies in the late 1960s under editor Joe Orlando, a veteran of EC Comics, at a moment when the Comics Code Authority's restrictions on horror were being tested by the big publishers. Cain first appeared as the host of House of Mystery #175 in the summer of 1968, and Abel became his counterpart at House of Secrets. Short, twist-ending stories with a host's framing were the house style, and Wein and Wrightson's story was written for that format[1].

The same spring, across town, Marvel's Savage Tales #1 (May 1971) introduced Man-Thing, another scientist turned swamp creature[2]. Both descend from the Heap, a Hillman character from 1942[3], and from Theodore Sturgeon's 1940 story "It"[4]. Week 6 takes up that family tree. For now, hold the fact that 1971 produced two swamp monsters in a month and ask what that says about the moment.

Key concepts

Close reading

Close reading means paying attention to how a text produces its effects, at the level of the sentence, the panel and the page. In prose you would look at word choice, rhythm and point of view. In comics you add the size and shape of panels, their order and rhythm, what the pictures show that the words do not, the lettering, the colour, and the transitions between panels, where a great deal of the meaning happens in the space between one image and the next.

Summary versus analysis

A summary answers "what happens?". An analysis answers "how is this done, and why does it matter?". Compare: "Olsen dies in an explosion and returns as a monster" with "the explosion is given a whole panel of white, so that the reader's eye, like Olsen, loses everything at once". The first sentence could be written by someone who had only read a synopsis. The second could only be written by someone looking at the page. Your assignments are marked on the second kind of sentence.

The Gothic

The Gothic, as Fred Botting describes it, is less a genre than a mode: a set of conventions and moods that first cohered in eighteenth-century fiction and has been revived, parodied and reinvented ever since[5]. Its furniture is familiar: the old house, the secret, the double, the body that will not stay dead, the past that returns to claim the present. Wein and Wrightson's Victorian setting is not decoration. It is a signal that the story knows what tradition it belongs to.

Questions to think about while reading

  • Where does the story tell you Olsen is dead, and where does it show you? Are those the same panel?
  • Who narrates? Does the narration know things the pictures do not, or the other way round?
  • How many panels does Wrightson give the swamp itself before anything moves in it?
  • What is the very last thing you see, and what do you expect to happen after the page ends?
  • Whose story is it: Olsen's, Ridge's or Linda's? What in the art makes you think so?

Things to notice

  • Wrightson's blacks. Count how much of a page is solid ink and where the light falls. In a horror comic, light is a decision.
  • The size of the creature relative to the panel border. When does it fit inside, and when does it press against the edge?
  • Text boxes versus speech. The story's mood is carried by captions as much as by dialogue. Notice their tense and their tone.
  • The house. How much of the story happens indoors, and what does the swamp look like from the window?

Reflection questions

  • What frightened you, if anything? Be specific about the panel.
  • Did you sympathise with the creature, with Olsen, or with neither? Did that change between your first and third readings?
  • Write one sentence of summary and one sentence of analysis about the same panel. Which was harder?

Homework and tasks

Two tasks this week, both short. The first is your first-thoughts record, which the tools below will ask for. The second is a single-page analysis: pick one page of the story and write two hundred words on what it does, not what it shows.

Next lesson

Next week you read the same story again beside Swamp Thing #1, where Wein and Wrightson tell the origin a second time with a different scientist, a different decade and a different swamp.

References

  1. Len Wein (writer), Bernie Wrightson (artist). House of Secrets #92. House of Secrets, #92. DC Comics, July 1971.
  2. Gerry Conway (script), Gray Morrow (art); character conceived by Roy Thomas and Stan Lee. Savage Tales #1 (first appearance of Man-Thing). Savage Tales, #1. Marvel Comics, May 1971.
  3. Harry Stein (writer), Mort Leav (artist). Air Fighters Comics #3 (first appearance of the Heap). Air Fighters Comics, #3. Hillman Periodicals, December 1942.
  4. Theodore Sturgeon. "It". Unknown. August 1940.
  5. Fred Botting. Gothic. The New Critical Idiom. Routledge, 2014 (second edition; first edition 1996).