Luscious Tubers: Sexuality & Swamp Thing

Swamp Thing may seem an unlikely sex symbol, but thanks to Alan Moore, his story is a potent exploration of the virtues of free love. As Audrey Ference explains, that's no small potatoes.
30 January 2004

Okay, sex sells. Often in comic books that means sexy, visually stimulating images: big boobs, rippling muscles, those boots that go all the way up women's thighs with no visible support mechanism, yet somehow don't fall down - costumes and bodies that are almost hyperbolically sexy.

Unless there is a romance written into the storyline, though, the owners of those bodies seem completely unaware of their own eroticism. You never catch Cyclops trying to get a peek down Storm's top, or Batman flexing in front of the mirror. Despite having a butt that you could bounce a quarter off of and come back with fifty cents, Clark Kent was shy and bumbling around Lois Lane at first, and had trouble even asking her out.

These classic caped-and-costumed heroes' sexualities is completely externalized: not a way for them to interact with each other, but a conduit for creator and reader to communicate about fantasy. The same way that when you really participate in a story, you and the writer are using the characters to explore fantasies about being a hero or overcoming the laws of physics or having an extraordinary life, when you notice that a character is hot, you and the artist are using the characters to explore fantasies about, say, voluptuous, scantily clad women.

SWAMP THING, by Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, John Totleben, and Rick Vietch, shows how rewarding it can be to take the opposite tack. Start with the title character: The Swamp Thing is not conventionally attractive. He's made out of swamp. Moore makes every effort to stress Swamp Thing's inhumanity, his alien qualities, giving him a heavy brow, red glowing eyes, and a constantly changing selection of flora sprouting from his surface. Though he arranges himself in a humanoid form, his discorporeal trips into the Green and across the universe make it clear that his anthropomorphism is just a courtesy to the humans around him.

Despite his looks and ontological status, though, Moore engages Swamp Thing in a very adult, overtly sexual relationship. Swamp Thing falls in love with Abigail Cable, a human, very early in the series. Though their relationship takes a bit of a back seat to the action during the 'Crisis on Infinite Earths' storyline, Swamp Thing's motivation throughout the series is explicitly and consistently 'being with Abby'.

Though it is made abundantly clear that Swamp Thing and Abby's relationship is based on love, Moore doesn't back down from their mutual sexuality. We watch as they navigate through their first sexual encounter, Abby as confused about the mechanics of the process as we are. By eating a fruit that the Swamp Thing plucks from his back, Abby is transported to a psychedelic sexy wonderland where she and Swamp Thing can make out.

Though obviously the two are never shown having intercourse (and it's not clear that they do), we see their bodies "joining together" in trippy sex-vision. Instead of an external sexuality for the delight of the readers, the two share a private sexual fulfillment that the reader is allowed to observe. Their communion is beautifully rendered on the page, awash in swirls and spirals and full-page sparkly "orgasms", without showing anything that could be considered titillating or censorable. In what may be a bit of a wink to the Comics Code, Moore reverses a typical 1950s movie and television censor trick: instead of showing character eating a piece of fruit to allude to a sexual act, Abby must literally eat Swamp Thing's fruit to commit the sexual act.

SWAMP THING's sex positive viewpoint is not limited to the lives of its main characters. Swamp Thing's sex fruit, which seems to function as his primary sexual organ, is found by Chester, an old hippie tromping through the swamp. He takes the fruit, which he oh-so-suggestively refers to as a "tuber", back to his house, and discovers its hallucinogenic properties. Ingested by people other than Abby, the tuber becomes a kind of litmus paper for the soul: bad guys take it, have a bad trip, and kill themselves; good guys take it and see the wonder and beauty of nature and the universe. When Chester gives a bit of tuber to a dying woman, she spends her final hours in rapture, no longer afraid of death. The message? Sex, if performed with love and good intentions, makes the world seem like a better place.

Not everyone can get down with this freaky love groove, though, and Moore knows it. In 'Earth to Earth', Abby is arrested and brought up on crimes-against-nature charges for her relationship with the Swamp Thing. This serves to re-emphasize that Swamp Thing is in no way human, that Abby is in every way human, and that the two of them bone like bunnies. The authorities are not okay with the situation.

As Swamp Thing greens over Gotham City in an attempt to force Abby's release, the Batman is brought in to defoliate. Instead of playing out a classic nature vs industry metaphor, Moore's use of Batman allows him to pit Swamp Thing's honest, loving sexuality against Batman's sexual bankruptcy. Seeing the two characters juxtaposed highlights the discordance between Batman's muscled, tightly-uniformed exterior and his utter lack of sexual desire. Interestingly, the matter is resolved only when Batman suggests to the commissioner that prosecuting Abby Cable would criminalize any act of physical love between Superman and a human.

Moore is not content to indict the sexual hypocrisy of only the comic book world, however. A parallel 'Earth to Earth' storyline features our old friend Chester, the tuber-loving hippie, as the leader of a rag-tag band of back-to-naturists frolicking in the newly verdant Gotham. He introduces his fellows to the transformative powers of the tuber. The number of nature lovers steadily increases, much to the chagrin of the authorities. These authorities are typically stern and buzz-killing, warning people not to eat the dangerous "potatoes" and to stay away from Swamp Thing's plants.

Moore creates for us a very black-and-white scenario, equating sex, love, nature, freedom, and, to be honest, hallucinogenic drugs with the "good guys", and anger, fear, control, and repression with the "bad guys". He takes pains to make clear that Swamp Thing's quest is not only for the freedom to love, but the freedom to copulate: lovers cavort happily in his re-created Eden, flowers bloom and fruit blossoms, birds and bees are in full attendance. Even the different names for Swamp Thing's fruit are illustrative: the bad guys insist on calling them the distinctly unsexy "potato," while Chester and his free-loving pals call them the much more luscious "tuber".

'Earth to Earth' is Alan Moore's panegyric to sex, excoriating censors who allow violence but ban the erotic; writers who rob their heroes of the sexual part of their humanity, and the puritan culture that refuses to see sexuality as beautiful and important. He writes a mature and loving character that isn't afraid to ask his special lady to eat his tuber every now and again. The SWAMP THING series proves once and for all that everybody-even Planet Elementals-need loving.

Audrey Ference lives in Brooklyn and writes the Zeitgeist Jamboree column for the L Magazine.

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