I have recently gotten into reading the Alan Moore Swamp Thing stories, now that they have been collected in Trade Paperback format. I have a question for those of you familiar with the post-Moore issues of the book. (I know the basic outline of Swamp Thing’s post-Moore history, but not the specifics.)
In issue # 52 or 53, some folks from the Sunderland Corporation, enemies of Swamp Thing from the pre-Moore days (in fact, didn’t they plant the bomb that killed Alec Holland and created Swamp Thing?), succeeded in banishing Swamp Thing from Earth (well, they attempted to kill him and everyone thought they had). The Gotham City Police were all over themselves trying to convince Abby that they weren’t responsible for it, and that they weren’t just trying to use her as bait to trap Swamp Thing. From then on, the Moore issues just centered on Swamp Thing’s space travels, with one Abby-centered issue thrown into the mix.
Did any subsequent storyline ever have Swamp Thing or associates try to find the guys who had ambushed Swamp Thing outside the Gotham courthouse? Did the Sunderland Corporation ever make any further appearance in Swamp Thing? Or were the cast of Swamp Thing just content to forget anything ever happened?
If memory serves, The Swamp Thing hunted down and killed all involved…horribly. I think he even had the microscopic plants in one guys intestines “grow” and kill him…nasty way to go.
Lex Luthor who gave Sunderland the plans for the device that “killed” him, escaped as he always does.
The Sunderland Corporation was not directly responsible for the bomb that killed Alec Holland. That was the Conclave, a would-be organized crime cabal based out of Gotham City; defunct due to combined efforts of Swamp Thing and Batman.
The Sunderland Corporation came about in the second run of Swamp Thing, not long before Alan Moore took over the writing. They’d got wind of Holland’s bio-restorative formula via their connections within the Conclave, and began hunting Swamp Thing in order to obtain his body – the only remaining concentration of bio-restorative formula known to exist.
After the Swamp Thing lost his hand to a redneck with a Bowie knife, they were able to make some progress by analyzing the hand, but they still couldn’t figure out how the stuff could have saved Holland’s life, since the stuff only worked on plants.
The answer finally came about in “The Anatomy Lesson,” penned by Moore.
After Swampy was “killed” by a bullet to the brain, Sunderland got supercrook Floronic Man to analyze the body and determine how the plant formula had kept Holland alive, and how and why it had turned him into a plant. The Floronic Man made the breakthrough discovery: it had not. It had simply catalyzed a plant growth process, in which the emerging “plant elemental” assimilated Holland’s intelligence, and fueled the high-speed growth of a plant elemental that thought it was Alec Holland, and possessed his memories. Later, after Swampy revived and escaped, we find that this was all a natural process; the earth itself generates “plant elementals” from time to time as protectors of nature, and the process invariably begins with the death of a human being. The only effect Holland’s plant serum had had on this was to speed up the process of converting a corpse into a Plant Superhero.