Angola in the Comics #10: Swamp Thing #19

Here's another very brief look at an appearance by Angola as the setting of a DC super hero comic. Like my previous look at a 1977 Batman comic, Angola appears for only a single panel. The book in question is Swamp Thing #19 and the story "Rootless" by writer Brian K. Vaughan and artists Giuseppe Camuncoli & Cameron Stewart, originally released in 2001. It seems appropriate that a DC super hero visited Angola near the beginning of the Civil War and likewise one visited near the conclusion. (there doesn't seem to be any appearances from the middle though)

Swamp Thing is normally a thoughtful horror/fantasy book about the plant elemental creature Swamp Thing who, per Alan Moore, once thought he was a man named Alec Holland. However, the star of the Swamp Thing series which ran during 2000-2001 was Tefé Holland, the half-human/half-plant daughter of the original. Brian K. Vaughan was a relatively young comics author at the time, this being before his breakout work on Y: The Last Man or Runaways. In fact, Vaughan has said in interviews that he doesn't think too highly of his early comics work, that he saw it as a means to get "bad writing" out of his system.

It seems Tefé and her friend Pilate are searching for the literal Tree of Knowledge and their quest has brought them to Africa. Like, the entire continent. In a quick series of panels we see them visit just about every hotspot in Africa circa 2001: first an "amputee camp" in Sierra Leone, then to the civil war in Angola, then rescuing slaves in the Sudan, then opposing female genital mutilation in Ethiopia, then starvation in Somalia, and finally battling rebels in Namibia. Any one of those subjects could have been the subject of a half-decent post-Alan Moore Vertigo comic, but it's ultimately Namibia where the bulk of issue #19 goes down.

So all we're left with is that panel of Tefé & Pilate fighting nondescript people in a nondescript location which is only identifiable as Angola because the caption tells us it is; are those guys UNITA? MPLA? Mercenaries? Or just criminals? Heck if I know. Giuseppe Camuncoli has come a long way since 2001 - his work in this comic is very thin on detail. Even with Cameron Stewart inking him, it looks very dashed-off.

Swamp Thing was frequently a great platform for authors to talk about environmental issues they were passionate about and there is much to discuss about Angola - you could talk about how landmines have wrecked the agricultural industry, discuss the perfect environmental conditions they enjoy. You could talk about the unique plant life found only in that part of the world, like yesterday's Poison Ivy comic did. But nope, it's just glanced over, which is a pity. The actual plot in Namibia reads a little strangely as Tefé & Pilate encounter an African mystic who talks to them in English. Pilate says it's the first English he's heard in weeks, which is... huh? There's a pretty visible white population in Namibia and plenty of English spoken there. Heck, they'd just come from Sierra Leone, which has a lot of English spoken. Good rule of thumb for writers: former English colonies tend to have English-speaking populations.