As Swamp Thing faces the end of the world head-on in Future State, the Green’s champion reveals why he works best with a human host.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Future State: Swamp Thing #2, by Ram V, Mike Perkins, June Chung and Aditya Bidikar, on sale now.
As the defender of the Green, Swamp Thing is an avatar personally selected by the Parliament of Trees to pursue its interests throughout the DC Universe. While the physical composition of Swamp Thing is usually made up entirely of plants, the avatar almost always has developed prominent links to humanity, either through a human body bonded directly to the Green or retaining the memories of a human connection to the Green.
And in the post-apocalyptic timeline of Future State, Swamp Thing reveals why exactly it’s important for the Green’s various champions to maintain this important link to humanity despite mankind’s propensity towards polluting and destroying the world’s plant life.
Swamp Thing is most commonly associated with Alec Holland, a scientist who was murdered, with his fiery corpse falling into a bayou outside of his home. While Alec initially believed he had been reborn as Swamp Thing to serve the Green, maintaining his human core under all the foliage, closer inspection revealed the superhero was actually just a sentient plant that inherited Alec’s memories from the scientist in his final moments. Despite this, Swamp Thing maintained his sense of humanity to varying degrees even after this revelation, deepening his bond to a resurrected Alec Holland at the start of the New 52 era.
Farther ahead in the timeline of Future State, a mysterious cataclysm resulted in the iconic heroes and villains of the DCU seemingly wiped out. Swamp Thing continues to live on, with his connection to humanity visibly fading while the last remnants of the species shelter up north as the ruins of the old world are consumed by the Green. Rather than being left completely alone, Swamp Thing has spawned an entire family of sentient plants that look up to him as their father figure. And as Swamp Thing’s longtime enemy Woodrue resurfaces for one last bid to topple the superhero, Swamp Thing makes it clear that the reason Woodrue couldn’t completely bond with the Green and why the avatar needs a human host are one in the same.
Woodrue has always been obsessed with replacing his own humanity to become the ultimate sentient plant, deeply jealous of Swamp Thing being selected by the Parliament of Trees as their champion. In Future State, Woodrue went as far as to inject plant DNA directly into his body to gain access to the Green only for the transplanted foliage to visibly reject him, transforming Woodrue even more into a monster. Swamp Thing explains that while the Parliament of Trees’ dynamic with humanity has always been tenuous, the Green works in tandem with other species to preserve the natural order; Swamp Thing constantly being bonded to a human host throughout history is an important piece of that symbiosis.
With generations of Swamp Things stretching back throughout time for untold millennia, one of the major constants has been a human host to bring a perspective to the Green outside of one that plants entirely rely on. And while humanity is on the brink of extinction in Future State, Swamp Thing recalls how important it is for the species to endure as he reconnects with his lost past while remembering that he once identified as a human himself.
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