Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Volume 2

Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Vol. 2 by Various
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Volume 2 collects Swamp Thing 14-24, The Brave and the Bold 122 & 176, DC Comics Presents 8, Challengers of the Unknown 81-87, and the surviving pieces of the unpublished Swamp Thing 25.

I'm going to get this out of the way right away: the Swamp Thing issues in this collection are mediocre at best. Not even Nestor Redondo's art could save the run of the mill stories. The Len Wein run felt like The Hulk done by the EC crew in the 1950s. This run feels like The Hulk done by whomever DC could get in the late 1970s.

The collection is not without its charm, though. We get top notch Jim Aparo in the two issues of The Brave and the Bold and the seven issues of Challengers of the Unknown do a lot to keep the collection out of two star territory. The Challengers battle Multi-Man and some mysterious monster-containing cubes with Deadman and Swamp Thing along for the ride. The bickering dynamic of the Challengers makes me think of the glory days of the Fantastic Four, not surprising since the FF are largely COTU 2.0.

Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Volume 2 combines top notch art with largely forgettable stories. The Challengers of the Unknown issues were the best part of the collection. Three out of five stars.

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