Friday Favorites – Swamp Thing #4 August 5, 2011 – Posted in: Blog, Featured Columns, Friday Favorites

Another Friday, another favorite.  This week it’s Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing #4.

Swamp Thing #9 was my introduction to Bernie Wrightson.  That issue really didn’t do it for me though.  If I recall it was a story about aliens.  Just not my cup of tea.  It was years later that I went back and collected all ten issues of Swamp Thing that Bernie drew.  (Amazing isn’t it that he only drew ten issues (11 if you count House of Secrets #92)?  At that time I was really just picking them up for the stunning artwork.  Having read #9 years earlier I wasn’t all that interested in reading them.  With artwork like this, did it really matter what they were about?

Compare the quality of a book like Swamp Thing #4 to other books that were on the stands that same month. There’s no comparison.

But then I flipped through the pages of #4 and saw…

A werewolf story!  THAT’S more like it!  Growing up, one of the things I most looked forward to were Saturday afternoons.  Saturday morning cartoons were ok, but in the afternoon our local television station played what they liked to call “Creature Double Feature”.  Back-to-back old time monster movies!  It was joyous!  Godzilla, King Kong, Dracula, Frankenstein…you name it.  Loved them all.  I especially liked werewolf movies.  They were almost always horrible, but I liked the idea of werewolves.  It’s just too bad there are so few good werewolf movies.

Page 4 to Swamp Thing #4. It has everything a classic monster tale should have. Deep shadows, misty fog…so much wonderful atmosphere!

This comic was what a werewolf movie should be like!  I must have read and re-read this comic dozens of times.

Bernie’s entire 10 issue run can be had in handy trade paperback form here.