As spring arrives, Abby visits the comatose Matt in the hospital. She feels a mixture of emotions over the fact that he isn't expected to recover, and sheds tears for him, but is determined to move on.
In the swamp once again, she admits to the Swamp Thing that "there wasn't much love" left between her and Matt anyway, and asks him if it would be wrong to have feelings for someone else. He urges her to tell that someone she loves them. She manages, awkwardly, to convey that she's in love with him.
When the Swamp Thing doesn't immediately respond, Abby fears she's made a mistake, and castigates herself for contemplating a relationship that's unworkable, probably illegal, and simply impossible, given that he's a plant. The Swamp Thing reveals that he's been in love with her for years, but hadn't said anything for fear of how she'd take it.
Tentatively, the two of them share their first kiss. Abby is pleasantly surprised that it tastes like lime. As they walk arm in arm, the Swamp Thing suggests that as a human, she needs more from a relationship than "the taste of lime." Abby acknowledges that their bodies are too different from each other for lovemaking, but says she can live without it.
Then the Swamp Thing has an idea. He offers her one of his tubers to eat. No longer repulsed at the thought, she warily takes a bite, and soon begins to perceive the world around her as made entirely from strands of coloured light. The Swamp Thing explains that she's absorbed a piece of his consciousness, and is now seeing the world the way he does, when he wishes to.
As the lovers roll around together in the water, Abby has a transformative, poetic psychedelic experience in which she accesses the Green and feels the connection between all living things, between her and the Swamp Thing.
When the tuber's effects finally wear off, she asks him, "Does this mean we're going out?" And they kiss once more.
Tropes:
- Beast and Beauty: Begins for Abby and "Alec" here.
- Bizarre Alien Senses: Abby temporarily experiences Swamp Thing's ability to perceive the wetlands as a shimmering field of glowing vegetation, dotted with bright life-sparks of animals.
- Breather Episode: This issue had its origin in this trope. Bissette and Totleben, having become attached to Abby after drawing her for so long, asked Moore whether, given all the horror she'd been through recently, he could write a standalone issue in which she and the Swamp Thing just hung out together. Of course, it evolved into rather more than that.
- Call-Back:
- Abby recalls how, in Swamped, she threw up at the very thought of anyone eating the Swamp Thing's tubers. Now, she's willing to give it a try.
- A subtler one to the same issue: Upon first spotting him rooted and insensate in the swamp, Abby was horrified at the sight of a single insect in his arm. Now, during her tuber trip, she's delighted when she learns that the "little stars...little jewels of light" inside him are insects.
- Convenient Coma: Matt's fate makes this a Death of the Hypotenuse situation, without the death. With him effectively out of the picture, Abby and the Swamp Thing are free to be lovers.
- Fantastic Drug: The Swamp Thing's tubers. The active chemical in them never receives a name in the series, so it's presumably unique to his body and therefore fictional.
- First Kiss: Lime-flavoured, too.
- Higher Understanding Through Drugs: The Swamp Thing's tubers are a powerful hallucinogen that, under his guidance, enable Abby to see how they, and all life on Earth, are connected.
- I Can't Believe a Guy Like You Would Notice Me: Abby's reaction to "Alec" reciprocating her feelings.Abby: You're a plant, for God's sake! [...] How could you love me?
The Swamp Thing: Deeply...silently...and for too many years. - Love Confession: The Swamp Thing and Abby share their feelings for each other.
- Male-to-Female Universal Adaptor: Averted. It's not simply a matter of Abby and the Swamp Thing having incompatible genitalia; the latter apparently doesn't have genitalia at all, not even a stamen. Fortunately, he finds a spiritual workaround.
- Mushroom Samba: The issue portrays Abby's communion with the Swamp Thing and nature not only through her prose-poem inner monologue but also through vivid psychedelic illustrations.
- Official Couple: Yes, Abby. As of this issue, you and "Alec" are going out.
- Painting the Medium: As Abby's psychedelic experience begins, the panels gradually shift from portrait to landscape layout, and then gradually shift back as she comes down. This conveys the sense of a radical shift in consciousness, and invites the reader, as it were, to experience it too.
- Relationship Upgrade: The Swamp Thing and Abby go from friends to lovers.
- Shout-Out:
- The Rite of Spring is an Igor Stravinsky ballet/orchestral work. Its plot, however, is rather darker than that of this issue, concerning as it does a pagan rite in which elders make a young woman dance herself to death as a sacrifice to the god of Spring. Assuming this isn't yet another instance of Moore's dark sense of humour, he may have instead had in mind the Fantasia segment in which the work accompanies a partial history of life's evolution.
- The Swamp Thing's statement, "You ate...the fruit...Abby...You absorbed a little...of my consciousness... my perceptions...", recalls Genesis 3:6: "And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat." (King James Version) The difference is that whereas Eve's (and, subsequently, Adam's) eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil has negative consequences (shame over being naked and distancing from God), Abby's "eating of the fruit" has positive results (expanded, cosmic consciousness).
