Or, Alan Moore leads the 80's comics renaissance and all Hollywood could do was miss the point.
How do you improve a legend? Swamp Thing had returned to comics in tandem with his ill-made film (1982), but readers demanded the series live up to the revolutionary work of its 70's creators, Wein and Wrightson. Enter Alan Moore in 1983, who renovates the character, the form, the profits, and mainstream acceptance of the entire comics medium beginning with his work on this book.
Writer Moore, penciller Stephen Bissette, and inker John Totleben turned the character inside out in a shocking way that reopened perception. They then turned the industry inside out, with adult writing, fine art, social conscience, brilliant revision, historical reverence, and bracing innovation. Along the way, they invented John Constantine, the Dante levels of DC's entire supernatural pantheon, the post-grad maturity of comics (mislabeled sadly and too simply since as "dark"), blueprinted Vertigo Comics, and unleashed the euro-wave into the US mainstream of brash creators like Gaiman, Morrison, Milligan, Delano, Gibbons, Mckean, McCarthy, Ellis, and Ennis.
All this second B-movie got from that was to improve the suit design. Pathetic and forgotten, now overturned by sales of the great works which continue to turn over.
