8. Alan Moore & Rick VeitchSwamp Thing
More Alan Moore. Probably the best artwork in any mainstream comic of all time. Steve Bissette, John Totleben and Rick Veitch did really incredible artwork. And probably the best writing in any mainstream comic of all time. Like Eightball, I recommend that you read the original issues. There’s something pulpy about the original pages, the way that the art and the writing are so much better than the cheap printing of the form creates this really exciting reading experience. It’s like this piece of culture that’s smuggled into you in a very unassuming form. The advertisements for bubblegum on the next page while you’re in the midst of this very dark and hard-hitting, sharp storyline. That contrast of reading it in its original form in the original issues is a really unique experience.
Swamp Thing was a regular comic that you’d see on newsstands, you didn’t have to go to a comic book store to find it. And in those days my brother Jack and I would buy a lot of comics that way, at a magazine store or newsstand on the corner. You would see Swamp Thing there. It seemed a little too adult at the time., I remember my brother buying an issue and saying: "Ah, you don’t wanna buy stuff like that, it’s for grown-ups. It’s not as fun as reading The Fantastic Four." And then what really hooked us was the way that they were planning on hooking readers exactly like us – they had a Batman crossover around issue number 50. At that time in the late ’80s everything that had to do with Batman was cool. So as a 12-year-old comic reader who is engrossed in things like The Dark Knight Returns, I was like, "Oh Batman’s in the new issue of Swamp Thing, I’ll get that." And then the writing and the art were so incredible that it made us wanna go back and seek out the other issues and eventually end up with all of them.
