Sheffield's Most Wanted. Part 7: Swamp Thing #5.

Glug, gluggle glog and slurg; bubbling like a mad thing, Steve Does Comics emerges from the swamp to list the latest comic it always wanted as a child but never possessed.

I only ever had one issue of DC's Swamp Thing - and this wasn't it. The one I had was, if I remember correctly, the penultimate issue and drawn by Nestor Redondo. While the inside of that comic was a beautiful thing to look at, the cover was pretty run of the mill.

Swamp Thing #5 on the other hand, I have no idea what it looks like inside but you can't ignore the thing it's wrapped in.

Actually this is the first time I've ever seen it in colour as, at the time, I'd only ever encountered it via those one-page ads DC used to run where they'd post a picture of five or six random titles they had out that month, while reproducing them with a seriously strange colour scheme. Therefore I had no inkling as to how brightly-coloured parts of the cover really are.

Still, even if I'd have preferred it to be more darkly lit, the sheer dramatic composition of Bernie Wrightson's image - with its echoes of old Universal horror films, and Swampy bursting out of the frame itself to do some serious smiting - was more than enough to sell me on the thing.

All of this inevitably raises one obvious question. And that's the subject of the site's latest life-or-death poll which can be found in the life-or-death sidebar to the right of this life-or-death blog.