Pull List Review: Swamp Thing #11

I can't tell if I'm just so sick of this Rot storyline that I can't get into anything having to do with it anymore. Animal Man is grating my nerves these days, and Swamp Thing #11 felt similarly annoying. It's a one-long-fight issue, Anton Arcane vs. Abby & Swamp Thing, but the fight isn't all that inventive or interesting, the dialogue throughout is just the same old death-is-beautiful-and-everywhere-and-can't-be-stopped rhetoric all the Rot-based villains refuse to shut up about, and the ending is so abrupt it feels like Scott Snyder just crashed into the crossover without realizing it was time. Arcane just decides to leave. He gets pounded on over and over, and the whole time keeps healing himself and turning his wounds into mouths and blathering on about how unstoppable he is, then one gunshot to the head and he bails. It makes no sense, and nobody even tries to make sense of it before the Baker family appears out of nowhere to get another several months of Rot story rolling.

Ok, so, I can tell. I am too sick of this Rot storyline to enjoy it any longer. Unless, of course, it were to somehow offer something new. Next month we get zero issues, providing some sort of Rot-centric history, it would seem. And then after that I think I give this and Animal Man one more issue each, one official chapter of "Rotworld" to convince me to stick around.

Marco Rudy's art, at least, was superb. The two-page spread where Abby looks into the Rotworld alone saved this issue from feeling like a total waste, and even though I'm sick of looking at all these dead or undead or half-dead monsters, Rudy draws thoroughly disgusting versions of Anton Arcane and his un-men. But there are an awful lot of pages devoted to them, and I grow as tired of looking at them as I do listening to them, eventually.

I'm on the border with this book and Animal Man both. It's sort of a bold move on DC's part to have these two series so closely tied together through one story for so long. Because if it doesn't work, like it's failing to work now, then they're bound to lose sales in a pair of titles simultaneously. Definitely close to losing me.
4.0/10