Anton Arcane
77 years ago - Anton Arcane is born the eldest son of the Arcane Family, one-time rulers of a small eastern european country & descendants of homo-magi.
72 years ago - 5-year-old Anton Arcane is trapped in the tomb of his recently-buried father for three days.
59 years ago - 18-year-old Anton Arcane attends university to study medicine and begins practicing bizarre experiments on cadavers.
57 years ago - 20-year-old Anton Arcane is quietly sent away from school to avoid controversy after his experiments are discovered. He joins the army as a medic, quickly getting his own labs, continuing his experiments.
49 years ago - 28-year-old Anton Arcane ends his active military duty, moving his labs into his family home, able to continue his experiments with near impunity. He starts creating his Un-men.
46 years ago - 31-year-old Anton Arcane meets his brother Gregori Arcane's new wife Anise, secretly lusting after her.
41 years ago - 36-year-old Anton Arcane has his brother Gregori Arcane's wife Anise condemned for witchcraft and burned at the stake after the birth of her daughter Abigail Arcane. He becomes Abigail's guardian as the head of her father's house.
37 years ago - 40-year-old Anton Arcane is unable to prevent his brother Gregori Arcane from keeping custody of his niece Abigail Arcane. He plots to one day control her again.
22 years ago - 55-year-old Anton Arcane's experiments are discovered by his brother Gregori Arcane, who he kills and turns into the Patchwork Man. His efforts to take over the country are exposed by Abigail Arcane with the help of S.H.A.D.E. Agent Matthew Cable. His labs are destroyed and he falls from the castle, presumably to his death. His Un-men find him and rebuild his body into a hulking monster.
17 years ago - 60-year-old Anton Arcane approaches Avery Sunderland, disguising his now-deformed features as Eric Loveday, revealing that the Swamp Thing may be a result of Alec Holland's Bio-restorative Formula. Sunderland funds Loveday's laboratories, all designed to capture the Swamp Thing and reveal the secrets of his transformation. Arcane takes over a plantation and hires Matt Cable as the local expert on the Swamp Thing. He is successful, but Abigail Cable breaks into the plantation to free Alec and discovers the truth about Arcane. he rebuilds himself into a hideous monster to confront Swamp Thing, and is ultimately killed.
13 years ago - Anton Arcane is able to take possession of Matthew Cable's body as his drinking & depression worsen and hIs relationship with his wife Abigail Cable deteriorates. He uses Matthew to psychologically torture Abigail and eventually kill her, forcing her soul into hell. Matt is able to steal control from Arcane, allowing Alec Holland to defeat him.
7 years ago - Anton Arcane is able to escape his torment in hell during a disruption in it's leadership. He finds sanctuary within the rot, a negative reflection of the elemental force of the green, and uses that role to attempt to attack the Parliament of Trees. He contacts 5-year-old Tefé Holland and attempts to claim influence over her. Her father Swamp Thing battles Arcane within the Earth for influence over her, but she ultimately rejects the rot when it proves too limited for her.
1 year ago - Anton Arcane begins to take a foothold within the Red, twisting the powers of Buddy Baker, who must venture into the Red & Green with the help of Swamp Thing & Suzy Black to fight the Rot and excise Arcane from within
It is really, really hard to summarize Anton Arcane. He's the recurring arch-nemesis of Swamp Thing, that much is clear, but his every appearance is so crazy that you really have explain each of them separately if you want to give any sort of history of the character. This happened in the comics, as well.. with whole issues given over to describing his backstory just to catch up current readers.
Attempts to summarize him are made even more complex by virtue of how strangely the whole story of Swamp Thing unfolded, with whole series going by without any real measurable effect on continuity as a whole, other than the fact that they include appearances by specific characters whose later, more important appearances require an understanding of earlier ones to have the right context.
So, in order to describe one of the scariest, most overwhelmingly evil characters in DC, we're actually going to have to describe most of his early appearances one at a time.
Attempts to summarize him are made even more complex by virtue of how strangely the whole story of Swamp Thing unfolded, with whole series going by without any real measurable effect on continuity as a whole, other than the fact that they include appearances by specific characters whose later, more important appearances require an understanding of earlier ones to have the right context.
So, in order to describe one of the scariest, most overwhelmingly evil characters in DC, we're actually going to have to describe most of his early appearances one at a time.
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Anton Arcane's Comic HistoryTechnically, Anton Arcane actually appeared for the first time in issue #1 of the original Swamp Thing series in 1972, when a mysterious, ominous figure is revealed to be watching Alec through some sort of mirror. After the first issue told the story of Swamp Thing, rather than continue to follow the exploits of the title character, he instead quickly becomes a framing device for other monster stories. Issue #2 saw Swamp Thing attacked by strange monsters who subdue him, and fly him strapped to an airplane to a castle in a distant European country where he meets the creepy scientist Anton Arcane who wants the secrets of Holland's monstrous body. At first Holland agrees, as it means having his human body restored, but when it's revealed that Arcane is bent on world domination Alex fights him, and Arcane appears to fall to his death. The next issue introduces more of Arcane's backstory in his niece Abigail and his brother Gregori, but for now, it was understood that he had died in his introductory story.
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However, it was soon revealed that Arcane actually survived his fall from his tower. In issue #10, a monstrously disfigured Arcane appears, revealing that his Un-men were able to recover him and use his labs to construct a new body for him, although without his guidance, the procedure left him a misshapen hulk of a creature.
He continued to pursue Swamp Thing, more determined than ever to claim the secrets of his body. Arcane was defeated this time by the arrival of a small army of ghosts of murdered slaves, because this original series was already starting to slip into a haze of deliberate weirdness. The important thing here is that Arcane, despite being the first truly recurring villain Swamp Thing faced, and despite being an absolutely horrifying comic creation, had now died in both of his appearances. |
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The early stories of the new Swamp Thing series from 1982 were all a bit of a mixed bag, with our hero getting a little lost in a sea of supporting characters, but in the final issues before Martin Pasko left the book as writer he was joined by artist Steve Bissette, and suddenly the book became an absolute whirlwind of nightmarish horror imagery, most personified by the sudden return of Anton Arcane.
We are given the same explanation; that Arcane's Un-men again claimed his body and rebuilt him, this time using even more of his twisted mad science, turning him into a truly horrific half-cyborg half-spider monstrosity that is honestly just downright hard to look at. He returned to try to claim Swamp Thing using his now far more insectoid Un-men, capturing him in his strange insect-like tesseract ship. He is only defeated thanks to the sacrifice of one of the series many forgettable supporting characters, leading to a absolutely gristly death, in what is very likely the single best pure horror sequences in Pasko's rub on the book. Alan Moore's run began with the next issue, and starts with Swamp Thing examining Arcane's body verifying that this time.. he finally, unquestionably dead. |
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But of course, that still wasn't the end. A few years later, in the unbelievably terrifying issue Love and Death (which happens to be the first DC comic to publish without the approval of the Comic Code), We discover that Abigail Arcane's husband Matthew Cable, who had been suffering deepening depression and alcoholism, had been possessed by her uncle. Arcane would use Cable's strange reality-warping abilities to murder her and force her soul to hell before Cable and Swamp Thing were able to finally defeat him.
This was followed immediately by Swamp Thing 1985 Annual #2, in which Swamp Thing follows Abigail's soul into the afterlife and quests across hell to save her. While there, we see Arcane suffering unimaginable torment, and yet gloating because he believed he'd had his revenge by making his innocent niece suffer. Of course, Swamp Thing was successful in freeing her and restoring her to life, and the last we see of Arcane was him wailing in despair, seeing that his revenge was ruined. While he didn't appear again during Moore's run, Rick Veitch would occasionally depict Arcane's continual torment in hell, and even referenced the change in ownership of hell taking place in the Sandman series during the Season of Mists storyline. Later stories would eventually start bringing back Arcane more regularly, especially in the new 52 era when he became an agent of the rot, an energy opposing Swamp Thing's green. These depictions would vary in quality, but it's really these original stories that established Arcane as a true embodiment of evil. |
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Our Arcane StorySwamp Thing is a character with very specific, hugely important story beats that all want to be represented correctly. Arcane is a part of SEVERAL stories that we wanted to get right, but in adapting them to our timeline we actually wound up making several pretty sizeable changes. First, the original story of Arcane actually no longer includes Swamp Thing at all, we've made that just something that happens between him, his niece Abigail, and agent Matthew Cable. Alec Holland's involvement in those stories actually felt much more like a framing device in those original stories, and for our purposes, this actually works much better this way.
This of course means that we need a new, original story for how Arcane first comes to be an enemy of Swamp Thing, and for that we've actually tapped a little bit into some non-comic media. In the late eighties, it was common knowledge that a successful children's property HAD to have a tie-in toy line with an animated series to help sell it, and no one in that business could quite wrap their head around the idea that the hugely successful Swamp Thing comic wasn't for kids, so there was absolutely an animated Swamp Thing series. This (and the Wes Craven movie) all suggested that Arcane was a scientist trying to capture and experiment on Swamp Thing, an idea we can build on in a way that brings together all the characters in the swamps of Lousiana, setting up the events that follow. |
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We'll absolutely be using his far more horrific stories in which he tortures and kills Abigail; its one of the most awful things that's ever happened in a DC comic, and clearly establishes him as one of, if not THE most evil character in their catalog, but it's precisely because Abby and Swamp Thing endure such horrors that their ability to finally find healing and peace and closure together is so important.
And of course, we don't necessarily want to end Arcane's story there. He is a really fantastic villain to keep using, and the fact that his role continues to grow even long after his death is one of the truly awful things about him. We want him to actually escape hell during the Season of Mist storyline, and do plan to use the idea that he becomes an avatar of the rot. This makes him some sort of death elemental, in some ways still a twisted counterpart of Swamp Thing. This can even make him an enemy of Animal Man, who is the avatar of the red, which is another counterpart to the green. We do want to include the idea that at some point he tries to corrupt Tefe, Abigail & Swamp Thing's daughter, a growing elemental of both plantlife AND flesh, and want to make that story feel epic as Swamp Thing must battle his archnemesis in the bowls of the earth... but ultimately simply have Tefe reject him for being limited to ONLY the rot. We think this maintains the idea of Arcane being such a horrifying villain, but also sets up just how unsettlingly powerful Tefe will grow to be. |
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