FACTOID
FROM THE BOG
Notice that as this story takes place through three issues, the first issue's title ends with elipses ("...") and the second part's title both begins and ends with elipses and this final part's title begins with elipses. It's as if all three titles could be strung together into one phrase "The Sleep of Reason...a Time of Running...by Demons Driven".
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7:35 The identity of this insect is made clear in #31.
17:3 This scene is shown again in #31, page 9.
COMMENT: The Demon was created by Jack Kirby.
COMMENT: The school for autistic children in this three-issue story is based on the former Green Meadows School in Wilmington, Vermont, where Marlene Bissette (the artist's wife at the time, formerly named Nancy O'Connor), worked. In COMICS INTERVIEW #12, Moore says, "We're doing a Demon plotline, using Jack Kirby's Demon. Most of the plot is Steve's. His wife Nancy works in a home for autistic children, such as the one we're using in the story. And the idea of the Kamaro [sic] - this creature who feeds on fear - being let loose in their own private universes of fear, was Steve's."
COMMENT: In 1987, DC Comics collected/reprinted issues 21-27 in a trade book titled "Saga of the Swamp Thing". In 2009, DC Comics collected/reprinted issues 20-27 in a hardcover titled (again) "Saga of the Swamp Thing". This was the first time that issue issue #20 was reprinted in the United States, but the caption on the final page of issue #24 was left out! This issue was reprinted in black & white as ESSENTIAL VERTIGO: SWAMP THING #7 May 1997.
COMMENT: The SWAMP THING creative team once proposed a DEMON mini-series. In a December 2004 interview at Ultrazine.com, artist Steve Bissette recounted how writer Alan Moore and fellow artist John Totleben had wanted a character that they would have more freedom with after issue #29 was rejected by the Comic Code Authority: "DC didn't want us to do it -- they definitely didn't want us leaving SWAMP THING, since the sales were climbing." Matt Wagner had already been tapped to write a DEMON mini-series too. Steve said:
Too bad; no one in the history of DC Comics has scribed as fluent and flowing Demon dialogue as Alan, nor handled the schism of Jason Blood and Etrigan so gracefully. John and I were itching to do more with the Demon, we loooooved drawing him. It would have been a hell of a series.
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