Rick Veitch on Moore and Swamp Thing

Stunning art by Rick Veitch.

Below, excerpts from an interview with Rick Veitch conducted in the 80ies by Mark Belkin.
The complete interview is available HERE.
I personally consider Veitch one of the greatest comic book authors of all times! Visit his site here.

DC in the 80s: Rick spoke with DC in the 80s during an appearance at Baltimore Comic Con. The first half an hour we discussed Carl Jung. This is a transcript of the second half, discussing the Joe Kubert school, his days at Epic, Swamp Thing, and what happened at the end.

Rick Veitch: [...] Both Steve and I ended up back in Vermont, so, I would help him out, just as we’d always done. Fortunes of the book were not looking good, sales kept going down and down, and it looked like Swamp Thing was going to get canceled. As a last ditch effort, DC decided the hire this unknown British writer, Alan Moore. Now that’s the kind of luck Steve is famous for. He came over to my place with the first script he did from Alan, "The Anatomy Lesson", and I got to read it. It was a revelation. Alan had created a new way to work with an artist. His scripts were insanely detailed, but so beautifully realized it didn’t matter. He wrote them like love letters to the artist, he knew everything you’ve ever done and analyzed it brilliantly. He would make light of his own obsession with detail and then toss off something like "don’t worry about all this, you don’t have to do this, do what you think is best". And you’d end up busting your ass to give him exactly what he wants because he’s so clear in how he writes his panel descriptions.
So, based on Alan’s scripts, I became more interested in Swamp Thing and regular comic books as well. There was a great potential future for the art form in Alan’s breakthrough and I wanted to learn as much as I could from it. Steve started to draw Anatomy Lesson, but was running up against the deadline and I helped him out with that first issue. I did about a third of the Anatomy Lesson. [...]
I really wanted to learn more about this... magic... Alan was conjuring. In the process I got to know the editor, Karen Berger, so it seemed natural that when Steve and John left, that I would become the regular penciller on the book.
[...] Alan also decided to take Swamp Thing in a different direction and it became more sci-fi. We started mining the golden age and silver age DC characters. [...]

Bringing them into Swamp Thing was a lot of fun and really formed the beginning of our extensive retro collaborations over the decades.

The complete interview is available HERE.