Swamp monster
Swamp monsters have been a staple of comics for years. From the 1940s to the present many murk-dwellers have made their muddy mark in comics. Swamp creatures are humanoid creatures similar to fish or resembling living piles of swamp mire. They live underwater and occasionally come to the surface, but only when provoked. Within modern American folk myth and legend a notable example is Louisiana's Honey Island Swamp monster.[1]
They seem to be akin to Kelpies, Kappa, the Loch Ness Monster, and muck monsters. Being only part humanoid, it is not popular belief that they are capable of speech, but in some cases, they have been capable of speech.
Popular renditions of swamp creatures occur in popular media such as Kim Possible (Ron Stoppable's rival at Camp Wannaweep?) and comic books (Marvel's Man-Thing and DC's Swamp Thing). They have even been featured on older films, most notably The Creature from the Black Lagoon. In all these cases, they displayed superstrength, extreme underwater adaptability, possible muck spitting and a frighteningly bad attitude.
Examples in literature
- Hillman Publications' The Heap
- Man-Thing, character created by Stan Lee, Gray Morrow, Roy Thomas, and Gerry Conway for Marvel Comics
- The Glob, a fictional character created by Roy Thomas and Herb Trimpe for Marvel Comics
- The Swamp Thing, a fictional character created by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson for DC Comics
- Swamp Beast, from Monster in My Pocket by Dwayne McDuffie and Gil Kane for Harvey Comics
- Bog Swamp Demon, a fictional character appearing in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic books.
- Danny Dunn and the Swamp Monster by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams.
- In the anime and manga Princess Resurrection, the characters are attacked by a tribe of monsters resembling the creature while vacationing by a lagoon, who desire Hime's blood to make them immortal and keep their kind from dying out. In a possible reference to the novel version of the movie, one of the creatures is roughly 30 feet tall.
Examples in film and television
- The Gill-man from The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
- A creature, credited as the Gill Man, also appears in the non-Universal release the Monster Squad (1987) along with Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy, and the Wolf Man. He was portrayed by Tom Woodruff, Jr.
- A swamp monster made a cameo appearance on an episode of TV's The Munsters as visiting Uncle Gilbert.
- In The Simpsons episode "There's Something about Marrying", Bart and Milhouse play various pranks on a Huell Howser look-alike. One of them is where they go fishing in a lake contaminated by the power plant, and the lookalike gets attacked by a Swamp Monster, which originally seemed like Blinky, the oft-referenced three-eyed fish.
- In the Family Guy episode "I Never Met the Dead Man", the Griffin family catches a creature strongly resembling a "Swamp Monster" while fishing.
- In the novel It by Stephen King, It takes the form of a swamp monster to kill Eddie Corcoran
- Tim Burton's film The Nightmare Before Christmas had a background character who resembled a female swamp creature.
- David Winning's film Swamp Devil starring Bruce Dern as a retired sheriff trying to prove the existence of a swamp monster.
- A gill man appears in the movie The Castle of the Monsters, alongside a vampire, a werewolf, a mummy and a Frankenstein monster.
- While criticizing a movie featuring a Swamp monster, one of the hosts of This Movie Sucks! tells the legend of Lake Erie Pete, about a man who becomes a crime fighting swamp monster after his parents are killed by one.
- A lake-dwelling merman by the name of Old Gregg makes several appearances on the BBC television comedy The Mighty Boosh
See also
References