DC Is Finally Publishing Swamp Thing’s Lost Jesus Story, And It’s One Of The Most Interesting Things They’ve Done In Years

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In 1989, DC Comics cancelled a fully written and editorially approved issue of Swamp Thing because the cover showed the plant elemental as a crucifix. The script had been greenlit. The art was done. DC pulled it at the last minute, writer Rick Veitch quit the book in protest, and Swamp Thing #88 became one of the most infamous unpublished comics in the industry’s history. Thirty-seven years later, DC is finally publishing it.

Swamp Thing 1989 #1, written by Veitch with art by the late Michael Zulli, ships April 29th as the first of a four-issue series completing the storyline DC buried in the late 1980s.

The context for the original cancellation matters. The script had Swamp Thing time-traveling back to the Passion of Christ as part of an ongoing arc. The cover depicted Swamp Thing literally becoming the wooden cross, adorned with a crown of thorns and Christ’s blood. DC executives looked at that image and panicked. DC’s leadership feared an organized boycott from Christian groups and reversed course despite having already approved the script. No amendments were offered. Veitch walked after being asked to do changes despite it being done and through editorial.

Having read the script myself, I found the panic baffling. The story is not blasphemous. It is the opposite. Swamp Thing emerges from an olive tree at Gethsemane and observes the events of the Passion as a witness, not as a participant who distorts or degrades them. The script follows the Gospel accounts closely, drawing on the Last Supper, the arrest, Judas’s betrayal and suicide, Pilate washing his hands, the scourging, the crucifixion darkness, and the burial by Joseph of Arimathea. Jesus is treated throughout as genuinely divine. The centurion’s confession, “Truly this man was the Son of God,” lands with weight. The narration frames Christ as the central axis of all realities, with time-streams literally forming a cross around him.

The DC Universe elements layered into the Passion narrative are clever rather than sacrilegious. The demon Belial and his evil magi are actively trying to prevent the crucifixion because it threatens infernal power. Hell is working against the Passion. Heaven depends on it proceeding. Jesus is depicted as so cosmically important that supernatural forces are maneuvering around him in ways that only reinforce the theological stakes rather than diminish them. In a genuinely inventive twist, Jesus exorcises the infant Etrigan from a Roman centurion during the arrest at Gethsemane, providing a DC-continuity origin for the Demon that flows naturally from the scriptural account. The idea that a demon would be expelled from a human body by Christ’s proximity is not a strange one for anyone who takes the Gospels seriously.

Bleeding Cool spoke to two comic shop owners about the preview, one a vocal atheist and one a church leader. The atheist retailer was shocked by how hard-line Christian the story plays. The Christian retailer, while initially uncomfortable with early DC Universe framing of Jesus in mystical terms, ultimately saw a very respectful portrayal of Christ and his sacrifice, and wondered whether DC had originally canceled the issue for being too Christian rather than too blasphemous.

That reaction tracks with what Veitch always maintained. The cancellation was institutional cowardice driven by fear of optics, not by anything the script contained. The story frames Christ’s power as rooted in self-sacrifice and purity, explicitly distinguished from the self-serving occult rituals of the villains working against him. The “white magician” framing that caused internal objection at DC is a perspective held by Swamp Thing, an unreliable narrator who processes the world through a plant elemental’s framework. The story’s actual theology is orthodox.

DC in 2026 is a very different operation from DC in 1989. The four-issue series carries art by Zulli on the first issue, Tom Mandrake on issues two and three, and covers throughout by Veitch himself. The series runs through June, ending with Swamp Thing facing the Source of the Multiverse at the Big Bang and its aftermath, while John Constantine works to locate the lost elemental and Abby prepares to give birth to their child.

Whether DC had the courage to publish this in any of the thirty-seven intervening years is a question worth asking. Modern DC has pushed content far more genuinely provocative than anything in this script with little hesitation. Putting out a reverently written, theologically serious story about the Passion of Christ required waiting four decades. That tells you something about which controversies the industry fears and which it welcomes.

Swamp Thing 1989 may be the most interesting thing DC has put on the stands in years. The issues are coming out with #1 shipping April 29th, #2 on May 27th, #3 on June 24th, and #4 to follow.

Are you picking up the complete Swamp Thing 1989 run? Let us know in the comments.

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