Swamp Jogger

Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. That is in fact the Swamp Thing participating in the jogging craze of the turn of the decade, wearing au courant (for 1982) jogging couture, and stepping in a dog turd as a an apparent homage to the ouevre of noted auteur de chien-merde Al Jaffee. What can I say? It was the '80s, man.
I was crazy for Swampy and Berni Wrightson in general in this period, although both were disappointing me with their then-current projects...Wrightson with his tepid and stiff Creepshow adaptation, and Swampy with his wretched movie and tepid tie-in comic (which would soon after the time I drew this piece take a radical turn for the better). I vividly remember riding the 20 or so miles to the (long-since demolished) Belvedere Theater in Anderson, SC to see the movie, rereading my back issues in anticipation. I also remember riding home in sullen silence, feeling like a chump.
I've got a good number of other drawings of ol' Swampy (drawn in the Bissette/Totleben mode), but they fall outside the time period this site covers. Indeed, this is straining against the boundary fence as it is.


BONUS SWAMP THING MOVIE-RELATED AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES: A family friend at the time worked on a lot of movies shot in the Charleston area, and worked on Swamp Thing. He was on the scene when a good number of the cast and crew were apparently busted for coke possession (I don't recall the specifics). We were visiting at the time of the filming, and went with him to a sneak preview of Raiders of the Lost Ark, wher he pointed out to me that we were sitting maybe three rows behind Adrienne Barbeau herself. Around this time, he also gave me some script pages to study (I was interested in working in the industry at the time) from Larry Kasdan's new script. It was some time later when I was sitting in a theater trying to figure out why portions of the movie seemed so familiar, and realized it was the script I'd read...now in its completed form as The Big Chill.