Swamp Thing: Gary Dauberman Teases Ideas for the Unrealized Second Season
Swamp Thing executive producer and writer Gary Dauberman is speaking up more about what the abruptly cut short DC Universe Original would’ve explored.
ComicBookMovie.com caught up with him to ask about the season two we aren’t getting. He confessed what a fan of Alan Moore he is and Moore’s infamous 1980s run on Swamp Thing comics. They were a heavy influence:
Related: Ian Ziering Thinks DC Universe’s Swamp Thing Can Be Saved, Calls Experience Fun
“He’s one of my heroes, of course. Really, everyone involved just fell in love with the source material and the characters and I think that shows in the episodes. I think if you’re interested in what the other seasons were going to be like, you can go back to the source material.”
Don’t mess with the swamp. Watch the finale of #DCUSWAMPTHING now, only on @TheDCUniverse. pic.twitter.com/euBA8crJVs
— Swamp Thing (@DCUSwampThing) August 2, 2019
Moore’s stamp on the character was visible throughout the brief 10-episode run. Dauberman, Wan, and their team incorporated The Green, The Rot, and the “plant that thinks it’s a man” motif.
Dauberman revealed they had the idea of going in the direction of an anthology that mirrored the comics even more closely. And he wanted werewolves:
“Season one is very much like a movie in that it has a beginning, middle, and end, and is one story told over the course of ten episodes and what I liked a lot about the comics is that there’s like werewolf in a hospital and things like that, so we would have had episodes like an anthology with standalone stories.”
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He adds the tales were to get “weirder” and “more twisted,” diving deeper into the murkiness of the swamp and the horror genre:
“The swamp is very much the kitchen sink of supernatural terror and, as you know, you can go into different subgenres of horror with that and I was really looking forward to exploring that in season two and getting into some of the more twisted horror tales from the later comics. It just would have got weirder. For people who don’t know the character, season one was telling people what Swamp-Thing was all about but season two was going to be more about getting into the deeper, twisted, weirder, and gross ideas.”
Swamp Thing was canceled mysteriously right after it premiered late last May. Cost-cutting by WarnerMedia is often cited as the reason, but they haven’t gone on the record.
Swamp Thing is waiting for you… Binge all the episodes of #DCUSWAMPTHING now, only on @TheDCUniverse. pic.twitter.com/AudFpwOmoR
— Swamp Thing (@DCUSwampThing) August 3, 2019
Dauberman, like his compatriots working on the DC Universe show, was blindsided by the cancellation, stating to JoBlo over the summer, “It was a gut punch.”
He expanded on that to CBM, his love for the source material, and previous comments fellow executive producer Mark Verheiden steered the ship:
“I was heartbroken over [the cancellation] because I think, creatively, we – and I say “we” but mostly mean the other people because Mark Verheiden was really the captain of the ship and he did such a bang up job of it – the show came out of a love for the source material because we really loved the books, especially the Alan Moore run”
Reportedly, if Swamp Thing had reached the third season, they were going to introduce Justice League Dark. That might still happen – a feature for the team has been in development at Warner Bros. for years and might still have legs.
Related — Rumor: Justice League Dark Back in Development as a Feature Film
Alec Holland could even come back to the big screen for another adventure. Dauberman didn’t say much about that to JoBlo. At the time, he said, “because I don’t know,” but if the opportunity arose for him to do either, he tells CBM he’d take it:
“For sure. Comic books in a lot of ways were the thing that made me fall in love with movies. I still read comics every week and again it would have to be the right thing but I would love to still play around in the DC Universe because I love so many of those characters and there are so many great ones that I would love to spearhead any stories within that universe.
There’s a lot of cool things there. The short answer is, ‘Yes!'”
The Blue Devil has been unleashed in Marais… #DCUSWAMPTHING pic.twitter.com/ZDo5fqQ3sg
— Swamp Thing (@DCUSwampThing) August 1, 2019
Related — Report: Swamp Thing Could Be Revived as Feature Film
If Dauberman gets another crack at Swamp Thing or JLD or some other DC franchise remains to be seen. Right now, his installment in The Conjuring-verse, Annabelle Comes Home, is out on Blu-ray and Digital.
How do you feel about a second season of Swamp Thing? What would you want to see? Let us know.
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