Secret of the Swamp Thing - 2005

Like the Sgt.Rock collection, this was another digest release that seemed to slip out DC's back-door, onto the loading truck, and crawled its way onto the shelves of a few comic book stores, unbeknownst the the store owners themselves.

It was listed on DC's website for months, and never came out, to the point where I had just forgotten about it. Then I saw one copy sitting on a shelf in a comic store I don't normally go to, so I grabbed it.

It's a damn shame this wasn't promoted more, since this obviously collects the classic tales by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson, from Swamp Thing #'s 1-10, although oddly all the story titles have been removed from the splash pages. I guess this is to make it more like one long story, but who buying this book hasn't read the original comics a hundred times already?

I would've loved to have seen a whole line like this--a color, afforadble line of manga-ish collections of some of DC's best material. Howabout digest-sized versions of The Dark Knight Returns, JLA/Avengers, Kyle Baker's Plastic Man, or Batman: Year One? Man, those woulda been sweeeet...