Quick announcement: I’ve started a new podcast with my friend Missi Pyle. It’s about acting and show business and it’s called "Freelance Pretend". Check it out here, or subscribe wherever you get podcasts. We launch our first episode next week!https://freelancepretend.transistor.fm
This is a story about worms. It starts with a simple suggestion.
Last week I did musical improv with my friends Ross, Shannon, and Rashawn at the Clubhouse here in Los Angeles1. This particular configuration of people had never done a show before, so we had no preconceived notion of how we should improvise a comedy show together, even down to what kind of suggestion to get. So we did the standard thing, we asked for “anything at all”.
ROSS: Can I get a suggestion of anything at all?
AUDIENCE: A walk in the forest.
ROSS: A walk in the forest, thank you!
Ross and I started the first scene. I have a brilliant, complicated, baroque, rococo comedy mind, so I began the scene, jumping off of the suggestion of “a walk in the forest” by walking in a forest. I would explain to you how I made this connective leap but I don’t have the space. Just trust that I’m the Mozart of taking a suggestion and then doing exactly what that suggestion… suggests.
I played a bit of a nerdy character, and at one point Ross made reference to the large trees surrounding us, and I made mention of them.
CHRIS: Ah, the Parliament of Trees.
ROSS: I hope that’s a thing you just made up.
CHRIS: No, it’s actually from the comic book Swamp Thing, during the Alan Moore era. It was one of the most revolutionary and influential storylines in modern comic book history.
ROSS: <something much more funny>
Sometimes, when I don’t know what to do in an improv scene, I just talking about something on my mind, and it turns out to be so dull and prosaic that almost by oppositional reflex, sometimes the show has to get more interesting and dynamic. Other times the show descends into dullery. (This was not one of those times, it was a very fun show and a good time was had by all.)
But it got me reminiscing about 1980s era Swamp Thing, which was truly an influence on my storytelling mind and some of the most trippy, mindblowing comic book narrative I’ve ever experienced. It all started in Saga of the Swamp Thing #21, just at the start when Alan Moore2 began his run. In that issue, called “The Anatomy Lesson”, Moore completely upended the Swamp Thing mythology and set the series in a completely new direction.
Before that issue, the idea of Swamp Thing was this: a guy named Alec Holland died in a swamp, and then something in the muck turned him into this plant-man hybrid called Swamp Thing. But in “The Anatomy Lesson”, Moore had a character discover that that wasn’t what happened at all. What actually happened was that a guy named Alec Holland died in a swamp, then plants ate the body, and ingested Holland’s memories, and then formed into a man-shaped plant that was not Alec Holland at all, but only thought that it was. A plant dreaming that it was a man.
This changed everything about the series, because it detached the main character from human identity and morality, and kicked off a decade of insane stories that took Swamp Thing around the world, out into space, through time, and into the nature of consciousness itself.
Crazy, but it was based on science! You see, in “The Anatomy Lesson”, Moore had a brilliant character named The Floronic Man3 investigate Swamp Thing’s body, and randomly, The Floronic Man read about a study of planarian worms (pictured above). This was a reference to an actual study in the 1960s by a biologist named James McConnell, in which he taught planarian worms to navigate a maze for food. Then he chopped up the worms and fed them to other planarian worms that had not been taught to travel through the maze. After eating the educated worms, the new worms were able to find the correct path through the maze. This was the basis for Moore’s idea that the plants in the swamp ate Alec Holland and formed with his memories into a new creature.
Crazy, but also: debunked. McConnell’s results were unreplicable by other scientists, and soon he was discredited. And that’s what I remember from all of it… that it was a cool idea, but not really true.
Cut to 2022, after I did the show at the Clubhouse, and I thought about revisiting those old Swamp Thing issues, which I did (“The Anatomy Lesson” is still an incredible piece of writing), which led me to Google all sorts of … swamp things, including if the planarian worm study was still discredited. Answer: it is, but a new variation of the study was considered serious and real as of 2015 or so.
In the new study, a biologist at Tufts named Michael Levin taught planarian worms how to navigate a path for food, then cut off the worms’ heads. Planarians can regenerate almost completely, even if you decapitate them, and even after decapitation, the worms created new heads and brains for themselves, and they retained the ability to find the food they had been taught. So there is something there that seems true in a way similar to McConnell’s study… the worms are carrying some kind of information or memory somewhere that’s not their brains. They still don’t know where, or why, or what it means. But it’s a trippy idea… you could have actual memories locked up in some physical part of yourself that isn’t your head.
I’m not sure what this means for our own biology, and I couldn’t find much recent information about Levin’s study (because I’m partly expecting this one to be discredited as well), but I also enjoy when I learn something, and then learn that what I learned was wrong, because that’s what’s great about science. And the fact that it may have happened twice on the same subject is even more fun.
So now when people ask me about Swamp Thing and I explain that planarian worms affected his origin story, because they showed that memory and learning might reside somewhere other than the brain, I’ll have a bit of science to back me up. And when their eyes glaze over or they mumble some response and look to walk away, I’ll do what I always do when I bore someone with the most recent thing on my mind… try to find my friend Ross so that he can something much more funny.
Thanks to Mary Lou Kolbenschlag for asking Ross to do the show, and Ross for asking me to do it with him, and Sam Johnides for playing piano.
Who also wrote Watchmen, Batman: The Killing Joke, V for Vendetta, From Hell, Miracleman… essentially, the greatest comic book writer of all time.
Made of plants, kind of, but not in a Swamp Thing way.