31 Favorite Monsters: Weed Killer
Society has a long history of turning dark, violent and cerebral comic books into corny, more innocent children's cartoon shows, and DC's Swamp Thing got the treatment back in 1990, complete with a toy line and a slew of more marketable new characters, including a great trio of bungling henchmen for Swamp Thing's rival, Anton Arcane. One of these was Weed Killer, an oddly blue-skinned "herbicide specialist" who constantly wore a gas mask, and like his fellow henchmen, had an alternate "un-man" form represented by a creepy rubber mask, in this case, a giant mutant leech:
Believe it or not, I had no idea what a leech actually looked like when I received this toy, but I had heard of them and always wanted to see one; I even asked older kids to describe them for me, and they just snottily responded "WORMS WITH SUCTION CUPS," as if that were remotely enough of an explanation. Seeing a rubber toy of a "leech" with insect limbs, pointy ears and eyestalks didn't help matters much, though even as a kid I kinda knew it must have been exaggerated.
Either way, Weed Killer's design is pretty awesome...the cartoon version was more expressive, but I really love the figure's blank, beady eyes and emotionless howl. What isn't cool about having an entire gigantic leech for a head?
Though referring to a leech as a "bogsucker" is unique to the packaging of a single obscure action figure (it wasn't even uttered in the show), it stuck with me enough to partly inspire the name "Bogleech" for my first email address and eventually my website.
posted by Scythemantis at
3:33 AM
3 Comments:
Not just comic books: just look at Hopalong Cassidy.
And so history was made!
I had Anton Arcane when I was a kid, and even had a nightmare once about him chasing me through a desert. In retrospect, I think I like the Bogsucker's mask design a bit more.
It always seemed a bit of a waste to me that Weed Killer never used his giant leech head to bite anyone in the cartoon. I suppose his arch-enemy didn't really have blood, and squirting everything with herbicide is a better tactic when fighting a plant, but I would have loved to have seen him suck the life out of one of the annoying little kid sidekicks.
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