Swamp monster

Swamp monsters have been a staple of comics for years. From the 1940s to the present many murk-dwellers have made their muddy mark in comics. Swamp creatures are humanoid creatures similar to fish or resembling living piles of swamp mire. They live underwater and occasionally come to the surface, but only when provoked.

They seem to be akin to kelpies, kappa, the Loch Ness Monster, and muck monsters. Being only part humanoid, it is not popular belief that they are capable of speech, but in some cases, they have been capable of speech.

Popular renditions of swamp creatures occur in popular media such as Kim Possible (Ron Stoppable's rival at Camp Wannaweep?) and comic books (Marvel's Man-Thing and DC's Swamp Thing). They have even been featured on older films, most notably "The Creature from the Black Lagoon". In all these cases, they displayed superstrength, extreme underwater adaptability, possible muck spitting and a frighteningly bad attitude.

Examples in Literature

* Hillman Publications' The Heap
* Man-Thing, character created by Stan Lee, Gray Morrow, Roy Thomas, and Gerry Conway for Marvel Comics
* The Swamp Thing, a fictional character created by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson for DC Comics
* Danny Dunn and the Swamp Monster by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams.
* In the anime and manga Princess Resurrection, the characters are attacked by a tribe of monsters resembling the creature while vacationing by a lagoon, who desire Hime's blood to make them immortal and keep their kind from dying out. In a possible reference to the novel version of the movie, one of the creatures is roughly 30 feet tall.

Examples in film and television

* The Gill-man from "The Creature from the Black Lagoon".
* A creature, credited as the Gill Man, also appears in the non-Universal release the Monster Squad (1987) along with Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy, and the Wolf Man. He was portrayed by Tom Woodruff, Jr.
* A swamp monster made a cameo appearance on an episode of TV's "The Munsters" as visiting Uncle Gilbert.
* In the "Simpsons" episode "There's Something about Marrying", Bart and Milhouse play various pranks on a Huell Howser look-alike. One of them is where they go fishing in a lake contaminated by the power plant, and the lookalike gets attacked by a Swamp Monster, which originally seemed like Blinky, the oft-referenced three-eyed fish.
* In the Family Guy episode, "I Never Met the Dead Man", the Griffin family catches a creature strongly resembling a "Swamp Monster", while fishing.
* In the novel "It" by Stephen King, It takes the form of a swamp monster to kill Eddie Corcoran
*Tim Burton's film "The Nightmare Before Christmas" had a background character who resembled a female swamp creature.