A group of small Funny Animal-like extraterrestrials, travelling in a sapient spacecraft shaped like a turtle, land in the Houma swamp. What they find seems too good to be true: a planet, much like the one they had to leave, that could be their new home. The sudden appearance of the Swamp Thing terrifies them, but Strigiforme, an owl-like crew member, subdues him with a stun gun and manacles him to the ground.
The aliens split up to scout out their surroundings, but Pog, their possum-like captain, stays behind and gently rouses the Swamp Thing. Although Pog can't understand his speech, he intuits that the vegetable creature means no harm, and releases him. Taking a hint from the Swamp Thing, Pog draws on the ground with a stick so that they can communicate.
Using pictographs, Pog explains that everyone on his home planet, "the Lady," once lived in harmony, until a monkey-like species, "the Loneliest Animals of All," came to dominate the others, slaughtering them for food and using them for cruel scientific experiments. So each of the other species selected a single representative, genetically altered them to make them cloneable and immune from natural death, and sent them off to find a new home, which Pog believes they've now succeeded in doing.
Meanwhile, another crew member, the alligator-like Bartle, goes for a dip in the bog, where to his delight he finds similar-looking, though much larger, animals he assumes are kin, and goes to greet them.
The Swamp Thing sadly leads Pog to a fast food stand outside Baton Rouge, and shows him people eating hamburgers and hot dogs. Pog, disheartened, realizes that this planet, too, has a domineering species much like the one back home. As the Swamp Thing compassionately gives him a ride back on his shoulder, Pog dreads telling the others they'll have to search elsewhere for a new Lady.
As they near the swamp, they hear Bartle screaming, and rush back to find alligators attacking him. The Swamp Thing wrestles them into submission, but it's too late: Bartle is dead. He helps the aliens lay Bartle to rest in the swamp, and they take off in their ship.
Tropes:
- Adam and Eve Plot: Averted. Instead of selecting animal pairs, Noah's ark-style, to repropagate their various species, the aliens select single representatives and make them cloneable from their tissue.
- Arc Words: "Trifles light as air" is how the Hystricide characterizes his shipmates' quest on the first page. Towards the end, Pog repeats the phrase, acknowledging in despair that that Hystricide was right, at least about this particular planet.
- The Ark: The aliens travel the cosmos in the Find the Lady spaceship, searching for a safe planet where they can repopulate their respective kinds.
- Filler: Moore wrote this standalone issue, which is unrelated to the comic's ongoing plot (although it does touch on some of its themes), for fill-in artist Shawn McManus to illustrate, so that Bissette and Totleben would be able to finish the art-intensive "Down Amongst the Dead Men" and "Rite of Spring" on schedule.
- Homage: The entire issue is an affectionate, though Played for Drama, homage to Walt Kelly's satirical Pogo, set in Florida's Okefenokee swamp.
- Pog is an Expy of the title character, who's the Straight Man and often Only Sane Man of the cast.
- "Find the Lady" is patterned after the turtle Churchy LaFemme (a Pun on the French expression cherchez la femme, "find the lady"), who enjoys composing nonsense songs and poems. The opening line of Find the Lady's funeral hymn, "Dark, a soul wind blasts so chilly," is a bleak parody of Churchy's "Deck Us All with Boston Charlie
," which is in turn a (much more lighthearted) send-up of the Christmas carol "Deck the Halls." - Bartle is an anagram of Albert, the extroverted, foolish comic Foil to Pogo.
- Strigiforme is based on Howland Owl, a self-proclaimed scientific genius. ("Strigiforme," in scientific classification, is the order to which owls belong.)
- The cynic with a heart of gold Hystricide is modelled on the like-minded Porky Pine. ("Hystricidae" is the scientific name for the family of Old World porcupines.)
- The Reveal that human beings are this planet's equivalent to the "Loneliest Animals of All" is an implied reference to the most famous Pogo quotation, "We have met the enemy, and he is us," a Green Aesop from a specially commissioned Earth Day 1970 poster.
- The three "junior umbrella-birds" are based on the three bats, Bewitched, Bothered and Bemildred.
- The Posthumous Character Aplodontia is presumably Miz Beaver. (Aplodontia is the scientific name for the genus of the North American mountain beaver).
- The Tadling in his portapuddle is based on the tadpole in a jar, as well as the use of "tad" in Pogo to mean any young animal (such as Churchy's nephew, the turtle tad).
- Pog's log at the start of the issue is numbered "AE: 8491.4.01". This is a flipped version of the date Pogo first debuted in newspapers: 10.4.1948 (October 4th, 1948).
- Humans Are Cthulhu: Pog sees people eating meat—an activity most human beings don't think twice about—as a monstrous act because it reminds him of the vicious domineering species on his home planet. Played with in that he and his crew are equally horrified to see Bartle attacked by animals who resemble him. This intentionally complicates what would otherwise have been a simplistic "four legs good, two legs bad" Aesop.
- Meaningful Name: Aside from referencing the spaceship's ultimate goal, "Find the Lady" is a stereotypical piece of Shell Game patter, bleakly implying that the aliens' search for an unsullied planet is as hopeless as the idea of winning a shell-game.
- Mother Nature: The aliens personify their abandoned home planet, and their theoretical future home, as "the Lady."
- Portmanteau: In place of the malapropisms which pervade the dialogue of the Pogo characters, Pog and his crew speak almost entirely in portmanteaus. For example, Pog tells the Swamp Thing, "You're made out of the same ingreenients ["ingredients" + "green"] as the Lady. You must be her guardiner ["guardian" + "gardener"], or some such." Moore told Neil Gaiman that once he'd completed the script for this issue, he had to readjust to writing standard English.
- Sapient Ship: Find the Lady not only speaks but sheds a tear while singing during Bartle's funeral. He does seem however to suffer from memory loss, as he can only remember the first line of "The Extinct Song."
- Shout-Out: "Trifles light as air" is a quote from Othello (Act III, Scene 3, line 33). Its appearance here as the Hystricide's Catchphrase may be a reference to the well-known Pogo strip in which Porky Pine tells Albert, "Don't take life so serious, son, it ain't nohow permanent."
- Xenofiction: The story is told from the extraterrestrials' viewpoint. Their dialogue is, as it were, in English (albeit nonstandard), whereas the Swamp Thing's speech is represented as glyphs.note
