Swamp Thing, a series that was cancelled after a single episode had aired on a streaming service that won’t exist anymore in a few months, has found a new life on broadcast TV, and its audience on The CW have been demanding more. Of course, if rumors are to be believed, it has nothing to do with the show itself, but was instead budgetary concerns, that got the series cancelled prematurely, so it may not be plausible to #SaveSwampThing. That doesn’t mean the characters have to just fade away, though. After all, John Constantine (Matt Ryan) survived the cancellation of his show on NBC to thrive on DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.
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In the comics, Constantine’s first appearance came during a Swamp Thing story, actually, so during a recent chat with Henderson Wade, the actor who plays Matt Cable on Swamp Thing, we asked him whether he’d be interested in meeting some time-traveling superheroes. If the opportunity arose, he says he would be all over it.
“In a heartbeat, brother,” Cable told me. “That was the one thing that was so awesome about immersing myself in this universe. There was this great comic book store in Wilmington — Memory Lane Comics — and all the guys that worked there, and the owners, were really, really helpful as far as the source material that I needed to craft Matt. I saw how he was kind of interplaying in all of these different storylines. And then all of a sudden, you get to the Arrowverse and you kind of hear the plans there, and then initially what the plans were for Swamp Thing. I remember talking to [producer Mark Verheiden] early on and asked him, I was like, ‘Hey, are some of these characters from the comic run going to pop up here?’ And obviously in the season you get Madame Xanadu, you get the Phantom Stranger. You get Blue Devil as well.”
“There had been talk of like, ‘Hey, we’re going to introduce all of these Justice League Dark characters at some point or other,’” Wade admitted. “Constantine is going to be there, just like he was in that Alan Moore run, as this kind of guide, if you will. This sidekick. That was all there. So if that opportunity presented itself, if it wasn’t necessarily on a Swamp Thing, and if it was on Legends, or one of the other DC shows? Man, just to put the uniform back on one more time and be a part of that world, I would gladly do so.”
Swamp Thing airs on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.
