Not likely. The Sumerians and Babylonians had fire enough to make bronze when the Greeks were still going through their Cycladic menhir building stage.

But perhaps you can blame oxidation chemistry.

I look forward to hearing more of the Chewbacca defense.

Comes down to the traditional litmus test -- who got Swamp Thing's origin right, Alan Moore, or the guys who created the character?

To clarify, saying that Allan Moore doesn't deserve any of the blame is absolutely wrong.

Let's look at the B&B argument. The argument I'm hearing here is "blame the guy who lit the fire" or "the fire" itself.  Heck blame the origin of fire! This is offered sarcastically with the implication that blaming Moore is like blaming a prime mover since he is presumed to have no immediate direct intent in the crime.

Now Moore is no Prometheus. He did not invent deconstructionism nor bring it to humanity. So comparing him to Prometheus is specious. I will assume that taking the blame back to a "Prometheus" is intended to suggest that only the straw tha broke the camel's back should really be blamed for the harm to the camel. It is the tiny final bit of total threshold energy that bears the responsibility for consequences of the entire reaction. The catalyst itself and all energy preceding the point of the reaction's initiation is somehow blameless. Blaming anything but that last bit of energy is somehow supposed to seem unreasonable. This is NOT how we determine responsibility. This is also not really a good anaology for what we are discussing. The analogy must be modified to be valid.

If we let the bed and breakfast be equivalent to the current state of super hero comics then we need more actors than one arsonist(the supposed final bit of threashold energy) to extend the metaphor to represent deconstructionist approach as detrimental to super hero comics. We need to look at EVERYTHING that burned some of the b&b.

What we would have is an eyewitness telling the fireman that Moore didn't burn down the bed and breakfast. Oh he burned down two of the shutters on the front window, and the mail box, and a couple of pieces of siding but there was still plenty of the bed and breakfast left when he wandered off. No it was the other people behind him who thought the fire burning a few parts of the bed and breakfast was pretty cool and burned the rest of it bit by bit until only the freestanding garage converted into a laundry room survived.

While you can correctly say that Moore didn't burn the whole thing down himself he certainly contributed to it getting burned down. While he may not have wanted the whole bed and breakfast burned down and did not command the people following him to burn it down he nonethless with his own hands BURNED some of it.

Now we might want to blame fire instead of the particular idiots who wielded it. But then we end up looking at fire itself as being inimical to bed and breakfasts or, if you prefer, "deconstuctivism"  is now preseumed to be inherently destructive to superhero comics. If we accept this then Moore is again guilty for employing the fire to the b&b. He is not responsible for ALL of the burning but for his part he does bear some responsibility. Also when asked, many of the arsonists would admit that watching Moore burning the mailbox and shutters is what led them to burn down the rest of b&b one at a time until all that was left was the laundry room (which now stinks heavily of ash and smoke BTW).

Prometheus may have brought fire to man as Derrida is said to have invented deconstruction however Derrida never wrote comics. Unlike Derrida Moore clearly had a direct hand in deconstructing superhero comics himself. Thus he gets a chunk of the blame rather than some mythical prime mover red herring.

I dunno. I don't much care if the creator is outraged so much as if the original intent of the character is greatly modified and how long that character has had to "set" before the modification happens. And the degree of change is a big part of it too. Going from chemically altered scientist wandering the swamps alone and blundering into helping people mostly by fighting monsters to plant lifeform mimicking the long dead scientist to occult plant god created by fate and stretching back in time to the beginning of plant life surrounded by lesser colleagues... that's a pretty big change.

Swamp Thing debuted in 1971(Alex Olson version). The book with Alec Holland came out in 1972. Anatomy Lesson was 1984. The elemental revelation was 1985.

So Swamp Thing had about twleve or thirteen years to "set" as character before getting rewritten as something almost entirely different(beyond a creature with the same look and few of the same background characters)..

I mean I haven't heard Stan Lee out bitching in public about clones, bio-webs, stingers, Gwen Stacy with a little goblin up her that one time that MJ never told Peter about, the unmasking on TV, the wearing a new robo-costume built by a fellow New Avenger, animal totems, and such.

That doesn't make it right for the character or faithful to the original concept.