How Jesus Christ Got A DC Comic Book Canceled - Twice
Religion is always a divisive topic in entertainment. Some folks enjoy seeing biblical figures reimagined in unique ways, while others feel stories of this kind attack their personal beliefs. As such, some companies refuse to release projects featuring religious figures, and that's why Jesus Christ never got to mix it up with Swamp Thing in the pages of DC Comics back in 1989.
Rick Veitch's stint as the writer on "Swamp Thing" saw him pen an ambitious tale about the titular monster traveling through time and bumping into various historical figures along the way. However, "Swamp Thing" #88, aka "Morning of the Magician," was supposed to take DC's iconic plant creature on a quest to Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion, where he would have learned that God's son was a wizard called Nazarene and the three wise men were assassins. Despite its subject matter, the story wasn't intended as blasphemous, though it was edgy enough to give DC second thoughts, and, ultimately, it never saw print.
While speaking to The Comics Journal, Veitch said the publisher's higher-ups pulled the plug on the story (which was also going to be acclaimed artist Michael Zulli's debut at DC) before it made it to print, even though they knew what it would entail long before he started writing it. In the end, they feared it would offend religious readers and cause the publisher no end of controversy and trouble. Veitch subsequently left the series, but that wasn't the end of the matter.
Another Jesus-themed comic later prevented Rick Veitch's Swamp Thing story from happening again
It's understandable why DC Comics feared a backlash over Jesus appearing in "Swamp Thing." The religious right's influence grew significantly in the 1980s, as evidenced by the Satanic panic epidemic that "Stranger Things" Season 4 references. That sort of prominence, combined with events like the release of Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" leading to a religiously motivated terrorist attack on a Paris theater in 1988, basically scuttled Rick Veitch and Michael Zulli's story. The timing arguably wasn't suitable for a Jesus-meets-Swamp Thing tale back then, but DC once again got cold feet about publishing the story over thirty years later in 2019.
According to The Gutter Review, there were reportedly conversations about finally printing the "Swamp Thing" story in a collection of Veitch's DC work. Unfortunately, the negotiations coincided with the backlash against "Second Coming," a religious satire from co-creators Mark Russell and Richard Pace that DC intended to release as part of its adult-oriented Vertigo imprint. This series caused massive outrage in religious circles before its release, forcing the publisher to cancel its publication and seemingly curtail any stories involving the Son of God. (It is worth mentioning that "Second Coming" was eventually acquired and released by Ahoy Comics, where it found success and spawned two subsequent miniseries.)
It remains to be seen if "Swamp Thing" #88 will ever see the light of day (perhaps to capitalize on the character's big screen reboot under James Mangold's direction) or if it will forever be regarded as a forbidden curiosity, a comic that scared DC so much that the publisher canceled its publication more than once.
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