I finally read Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing recently. I liked it, though I got the impression it would have seemed more revolutionary if I'd actually read it when it was published. Of course, I would have been eight.
One thing I noticed in the art was the frequent occurrence of Mark Trail Giant Foreground Animal Syndrome (MTGFAS). I looked through the last month of Mark Trail strips to see just how close I could get to something found in Swamp Thing. I apologize if the numbers or dates are off; I shuffled things around a lot while dealing with all these files.
These first two are from July 16 and August 1. The fish in Mark Trail are much more likely to jump out of the water than those in Swamp Thing (issues 25 and 26). Also, the humanoid characters in the Mark Trail strips tend to be much smaller than in Swamp Thing, even when they've shapeshifted into buildings:
The beavers in both Mark Trail (July 19) and Swamp Thing (#51) seem content to observe or swim away from nearby conversations:
Jack Elrod has been drawing (and writing) Mark Trail since 1978. I have no idea whether there were Giant Foreground Animals in the original Swamp Thing series, or whether the original Mark Trail artist used them too, so I can't say who did it first. Maybe all graphical stories set in the wilderness are destined to contain a certain number of GFAs. Whatever the reason, I'm just glad it happens.
(Why so few examples? Blogger hates me right now and doesn't seem to want me to upload anymore pictures, however tiny they are. Needless to say, there are more where these came from, and I'm only using the ones that sort of match.)
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