Strange Daddy: Uprooting the Environmentalist Family Romance in Nancy A. Collins' Swamp Thing

abstract:This essay examines writer Nancy A. Collins' 1991–1993 run on the DC Comics series Swamp Thing, an era of the series that has heretofore been neglected by scholars. The overwhelming majority of scholarship on Swamp Thing focuses on writer Alan Moore's tenure on the title, and much of this work lauds Moore's run for its development of an ecological consciousness that breaks down the distinction between the human and nonhuman worlds. As I demonstrate, however, the putative radicalism of Moore's ecological perspective is constrained by the conventional romance plot that organizes his run and that is particularly pronounced in its conclusion. I argue that the tension between the series' preoccupation with love and family, traditionally defined, and its putatively transformative ecological politics is central to Collins' run on Swamp Thing. Drawing on the growing body of scholarship on queer ecology, this essay examines how Collins' depiction of Swamp Thing as obsessively fixated on maintaining a normative family functions as a critique of what Nöel Sturgeon has described as the "environmentalist family romance," the tendency in popular environmental narratives to idealize the white, middle-class nuclear family as an effective formation for addressing environmental degradation. With a particular focus on how Collins and her artistic collaborators—including Scot Eaton, Kim DeMulder, and Tom Mandrake, among others—depict Swamp Thing and Abigail Holland's daughter, Tefé, as a figure who exceeds the boundaries of Swamp Thing's heteronormative ecological thinking, this essay argues that Collins' Swamp Thing both reveals the ways in which normative understandings of gender and family constrain the ecological imagination and points toward the ways that alternative models of affiliation, community, and kinship can expand it.