The absolute same to you, Kurt!

Swamp Thing
Co-Created by Lein Wein (Writer) and Bernie Wrightson (Artist)


Concept and Creation ... From Wikipedia
Len Wein came up with the idea for the character while riding a subway in Queens. He later recalled, "I didn't have a title for it, so I kept referring to it as 'that swamp thing I'm working on.' And that's how it got its name!" Bernie Wrightson designed the character's visual image, using a rough sketch by Len Wein as a guideline.  

The Swamp Thing is a fictional character in the DC Comics Universe. He is a humanoid/plant elemental creature, created by writer Len Wein and artist Bernie Wrightson. Swamp Thing has had several humanoid or monster incarnations in various different storylines. He first appeared in House of Secrets #92 (July 1971) in a stand-alone horror story set in the early 20th century.


I do have House of Secrets #92 -  Here's the Menacing Cover of Bernie Wrightson created! 



From MechaGodzilla
To me, I have to include both names to keep the record straight and I consider this Comic Book one of the best that I seen in the early 70's and that's why I adore both of these gentlemen when they created this character - Bernie is the master of drawing Swamp Thing and I'm one of his biggest fans in the Comic Book World as an artist that created this masterpiece of this humanoid/plant creature that got me hooked in a big way. By the way, I acquired the first 12 issues of Swamp Thing about 15 years ago and it's a beauty to see. Here's are the first three issues that I have. Len Wein and Bernie did a terrific job blending their skills as Writer/Artist together and that's why I credited Len for providing the initial sketch for Bernie to polished it up and did it in a magnificent way.  



Swamp Thing #1


Swamp Thing #2


Swamp Thing #3


Swamp Thing Artist Bernie Wrightson



Len and Bernie were a perfect team and I admire their work on Swamp Thing!

LOLOLOLOLO

That was an excellent tribute to Sim's skills, shaxper! Good job!!!

Anybody who pays my posting any attention and who cared to notice who hasn’t yet shown up knows who my #1 is. Since I expect none of you (except maybe shaxper) put in that time, I’ll just tell you…

1. Stan Sakai
…for his work on Usagi Yojimbo

To love Sakai is to love Usagi and vice versa. He hasn’t done all that much else. Sure you’ve got Hermy & Nielsen, lots of lettering jobs, and the occasional art project like 47 Ronin or a Grendel short… but really his contribution to comics is Usagi. From the don’t-waste-a-stroke school of artistry, he knows how to tell a story well, has a story worth telling, and characters you can grow to care about as you follow their saga across the years (31 years for us, maybe 8 or so for the characters). Told with more craft and more heart than anything else I’ve encountered.

I have an Usagi Yojimbo review thread it’s long past time I got back to. That will give you a hint why he’s my #1.

And the thread isn’t even to the best of it yet.

Where do I begin with Usagi you ask? Why, at the beginning of course. They used to collect everything in these nice little trades, and you could get vol. 1 of those. Now they seem to have these large collections packaging several trades together. Last I checked the only thing in print for the early issues is a $50 slipcased 2 book set collecting the first 7 volumes of smaller trades and all the stories published in and prior to the Fantagraphics days. It’s a bit of a commitment, but worth it. Or track down the smaller Usagi Book 1: Ronin.

It begins a bit crudely. The artist grows and gets better. Figures out what Usagi should look like, how to tell a story, and what story he’s telling. It doesn’t take long. You’ve really only gotta push through the few stories from the anthology comic Albedo. By the time you get to the stories published in Critters, you should fine one to win you over. Perhaps where he first encounters Gen, the roguish bounty hunter, or Zato Ino the blind swordpig or the touching story of Usagi’s attempt to return home and settle down.

It only gets better. Over its three ongoing series it has introduced a great cast of characters, told countless amazing single issue stories, and a few great multi-part epics.

The best of the best include the epic "Grasscutter" saga from #13-22 of the Dark Horse series, which tells a tale that sweeps seamlessly from myth to legend to history into Usagi’s own story, building in excitement to a climactic swordfight.

And the single issue story “Chanyou” from #93 of the Dark Horse series. Easily one of the best single issue stories of any genre or era that I have encountered. In which Tomoe prepares the traditional tea ceremony for Usagi.

#1 Walt Kelly

As much as I love the work of Bill Watterson, I don’t know that he would have been who he was without the existence of Walt Kelly. And as much as I love Watterson, I think Kelly’s broader canvas gives him the upper hand here.

Kelly was the Jonathan Swift, James Joyce and Thomas Nast of the comics. He could warm your heart with tales of innocent romance one week, make you smile at the familiar farce enacted by Albert the blusterer and Owl the know-it-all the next, and then leave you wide-eyed a week later as he deftly eviscerated the repugnant herd of humbugs, sycophants, and demagogues who had only our best interests in mind.

Walt turned language into a musical accompaniment to his art. His command of dialect and his knack for just the right word – real or invented – made Pogo a delight to read, and doubly delightful because Kelly’s command of typefaces and calligraphy took the characters’ words to a new level, from the poster-style proclamations of the boastful Phineas T. Bluster to the funereal look of Sarcophagus Macabre’s gloomy musings.

The regulars were flawed but harmless, the neighbors and friends we all recognized and loved despite their annoying habits. Even when they made a mess of things like baseball games and Christmas carols, we had fun with them, and all the while Kelly was making fun of something else.

What I also love about Kelly is that he could do anything from adaptations to children’s comics to wonderful nonsense poetry to sentimental strips with just enough, and not too much sugar, to biting political satires. Most notable among the satires were his takedowns of the skulking Joe McCarthy and his mob of sycophantic fearmongers and that hypocritical attack dog of the Nixon administration, the loathsome, officious hyena Spiro Agnew. And his accomplices, J. Edgar Hoover (a bulldog) and John Mitchell (a wiretapping large-beaked bird).

It’s safe to say that Kelly was not the only journalist or commentator going after Agnew, but during the McCarthy era, Walt was out there almost alone in his relentless assault on McCarthy. He was an equal-opportunity lambaster, though; his Khrushchev was a pig, his Castro an idiotic goat. Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, election foes in 1968 were the interchangeable Tweedle Twins. Each said that the other was “Dum.” Nixon eventually “evolved” into a spider. Just imagine what a flaying he could have given to this year's herd of humpties!

For his outspokenness, Kelly often found Pogo cancelled by various papers, but that was an insignificant price for him to pay. Much as I enjoyed and admired Doonesbury, which may have been the best of the political strips that followed Pogo, I never felt the sense of humanity that Kelly brought to his animals. Trudeau’s dialogue often sparkled and many of his characters were sharply defined, but his spare, repetitive drawings could not hope to compare with the lushness of Kelly’s vision. His art was an enchanting as his dialogue. He refused to “draw within the lines;” in fact, the rules on his panels were simply hand-drawn, as if they were organic parts of the swamp where all the fun took place.
And again, Kelly could draw his strip to suit whatever genre he was illustrating: low comedy, ironic commentary, pastoral romp, whatever.

I love the closing Kelly wrote for one of his collections, full of the calm, common-sense wisdom that he brought to the strip each day:

“Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of self-conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle.

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blast on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

And one last bit of advice from Walt (via Porky):