#matt cable

Matthew Cable has been part of Swamp Thing since the very first issue in 1972. He was a government agent assigned to protect scientist Alec Holland and his wife (who were developing a biological formula to end world hunger) but failed to save them. He then mistakenly believed the Swamp Thing was the killer of Holland (the Swamp Thing initially also believed he was an altered form of Alec—all very convoluted, partly retconned at some point, too, but in short: When Alec was killed, his body was drenched with the formula, which affected the plants in the swamp. They basically formed a new organism that held his memory).

Lots of stuff happened in the years in between, and I won’t go into it all here, but suffice it to say that when Matthew the Raven admits he’s not always been a good person, that’s a bit of an understatement.

The Sandman #15, “Into the Night”

In short: He basically lost his mind, but that also gave him powers (to alter reality no less, ha! No wonder he piqued Dream’s interest 🤣). Unfortunately, Matt didn’t exactly use those powers for good (since he could only really access them when drunk or severely distressed, he had “wonderful” ideas like manipulating reality for creations he could have sex with, and those acts got more and more grotesque as time passed). That obviously wasn’t great for his marriage to Abigail Arcane (or rather: Holland at the time he meets Morpheus). Now you know why he got so excited about strip clubs in Brief Lives 🙈.

Matthew then had a car accident while driving under the influence in 1984.

Swamp Thing #84, cover art by John Totleben

Lots of goings on between this point and issue #84, but again long story short: Matthew eventually ended up in a coma, and since he was an organ donor, a corrupt hospital administrator uses him as an organ farm. Enter first Eve in dreams (ha! again) and then Morpheus, who basically advises him to end his life so his ex-wife Abby can exist in peace after all these years (she is pregnant with… something, which Morpheus also cryptically alludes to here. Plus the hospital administration tries to land her with a nearly 3 million dollar bill for all the years Matt has been on life support). Before Abby can unplug said life support herself, Matthew comes to, gathers all his strength for one final time and destroys the machines that keep him alive to spare Abby the guilt. In his final moments, he asks her to forgive him and move on. Also: He quite strictly did not die in his sleep, so how did that work? 🧐 Dream logic 🤣

Morpheus’ cameo had been agreed upon with NG at the time (he is mentioned in the credits). And since issue #84 has been published in March 1989, you can also tell that we’re pretty firmly in Sam Kieth territory, and that Mandrake & Alcala tried to replicate Dream’s look accordingly. Plus: The first issue in which Matthew the Raven appears in The Sandman (“Moving In” of The Doll’s House arc) was published in October 1989. So they had this cooking for a bit.

This is 1970s comics writing, so Matt makes friends with the Hollands more or less off page. No time for small character moments when you have to cram an entire origin story into the available page count. Things go pear-shaped, Matt is successfully decoyed, and the lab is blown up with Alec inside it. Linda survives, only to be shot and killed not long after, in front of Alec who has resurrected as the Swamp Thing. Matt sees him shambling away from the scene, thinks he’s what killed the Hollands, and dedicates himself to the pursuit of the monster who killed his only friends. For convoluted comic book reasons, Alec has decided he needs to be believed deceased, so he doesn’t explain any of this, meaning Matt spends much of the next 12 issues chasing the Swamp Thing. Along the way he picks up the other major character in this run, Abby Arcane, after chasing the Swamp Thing to the Balkans (it’s a long story.) Abby is also a recurring character for the rest of this run and has an evil uncle who’s a recurring villain for the series (more on that later).

I’m fairly sure that Eurydice’s hair is deliberately the inverse of Abby’s.

In issue 12, Matt succeeds in capturing Alec, still believing him a monster albeit one that has repeatedly saved his life, and delivers him to the DDI, at which point Alec finally reveals his identity and Matt and Abby break him back out.

They travel together for a number of issues before Alec’s mindless double appears and attacks Matt before it is destroyed and Alec is once again presumed dead. That’s the last of Matt and Abby in the original run, which was cancelled four episodes later (in the middle of a story-arc that was apparently retconned out of existence and never gets any resolution, annoyingly.)

Matt reappears briefly with the Doom Patrol in Showcase # 94-96, which I don’t have access to, and then isn’t seen again until issue #17 of the 1982 Swamp Thing revival. Through this run, Matt is clever, driven, reasonably moral, very much a square-jawed, competent hero type. He’s a good dude who, other than his decision to drop everything to chase after a monster out of revenge, generally has his life together and he tends to be pretty emotionally stable. The last we see of him, he thinks Alec died either furious at him or after finally snapping from the pain of his existence as a shambling plant monster.

In issue #17 of “Saga of the Swamp Thing,” things are substantially different. Alec has been through a bunch of stuff with new characters, and they run into Abby by chance. She informs them that she’s living under an assumed name and that she’s married Matt, and begs Alec to come back to their house with her because she thinks it will do Matt good to see him.

It becomes clear that something is very wrong, because Abby seems quite different from the woman in Alec’s memories

Along the way, they’re beset by creepy monsters, which Alec has a hard time fighting because they repeatedly dematerialize, but eventually they reach the house and…

It’s really hard to convey how shocking this page is if you’ve just read 20 issues of Matt the competent, resilient secret agent. He’s also consumed by guilt over Alec’s supposed death (years earlier at this point even with DC’s messy timeline) and half-convinced this is a hallucination.

Turns out, when the DDI decided Holland was dead, they tried to scrub all evidence of the entire program, including setting Matt up with a bogus diagnosis to fry his brain with unnecessary electroshock therapy. They didn’t manage to erase knowledge of Holland or his formula, but they did manage to destroy his ability to work as a government agent, and his mental fuzziness is both too much drink and an after-effect of the ECT.

In addition, the ECT has given him the ability to manifest representations of his intense emotions, explaining the strange monsters that have been plaguing him and Abby, something he’s only just realized. After this, the series changes writers and whatever plans had been in store for Matt get abruptly aborted. The new writer on the series was Alan Moore, and the new run would change comics. He wanted to set Abby up as Swamp Thing’s love interest, so Matt has to be removed (right at the start of Moore’s run, it is revealed that the Swamp Thing is not, in fact, a transformed Alec Holland, but is a plant mass that somehow, through an interaction with the biorestorative formula, absorbed Holland’s consciousness and grew itself a facsimile body, so I’ll be referring to the character as Swamp Thing from here forward.)

In Moore’s hands, Matt lies to Abby, claiming that he’s gotten control of his drinking and that his power has disappeared. In reality, he’s still drinking and has now simply gained control over the manifestations. He and Abby begin having intimacy issues.

It goes on like this. Matt keeps drinking and surrounds himself with manifested horrors. Abby grows closer to the Swamp Thing and begins to reclaim her life as something other than Matt’s wife, including getting a job. Matt grows increasingly jealous of both the friendship and the job, culminating in a very unpleasant argument after which Abby storms out on foot. After a while, Matt partially comes to his senses and chases after her in the car.

Next issue, as she faces down a monster that takes the form of your greatest fear, we find out that Matt has become Abby’s. Also, Matt, dying in the wreck, makes a deeply foolish decision.

For a brief span things seem better, Matt is miraculously healed and his relationship with Abby begins to improve. And then things start to seem off and Abby realizes that Matt has been possessed by her uncle, Anton Arcane. I’ll gloss over that. It’s pretty horrifying.

Matt eventually recovers himself enough to cast out Arcane and gathers himself enough to resurrect Abby, who Arcane had killed, but he’s left in a coma.

(Don’t worry, Swamp Thing gets her soul out of Hell fairly soon afterward.)

After that, Matt lingers in a coma for several more years, publication time (during which the series again switched writers), before in issue #84, Abby finally decides to disconnect Matt’s life support. This is the March 1989 issue and the last time we see Matt as a human. His consciousness has apparently been stuck in the Dreaming all this time, in Eve’s cave.

Hi, Morpheus! Nice of you to show up and help Matt finish straightening himself out.

Various medical malpractice bullshit has been going down in the waking world and Matt’s body is a wreck. Abby decides to finally disconnect him from the machines keeping him alive, but