YMMV / Swamp Thing Volume 2 - Issue 24: "Roots"

• Cry for the Devil: Despite all the death and destruction he's caused, it's hard not to feel sorry for the Floronic Man when he pleads with a single flower to heal the loneliness he now feels after the plant world has abandoned him, and subsequently when he tries desperately to reassume his human identity, only to find he now belongs in neither world.
• Genre Turning Point: The arc beginning with The Anatomy Lesson and concluding with this issue was what first made comic fans and industry insiders realize that Moore was doing things that had never been attempted on such a scale in mainstream American comic books before:
  • He had radically deconstructed the title character, showing how his presumed origin didn't make sense, and given him a new one which did, without necessitating a complete series reboot.
  • He had reworked an essentially reactive, perpetually brooding character—"Hamlet covered in snot," as Moore put it on Prisoners of Gravity—into a more proactive and genuinely heroic protagonist, by freeing the Swamp Thing from wanting to Become a Real Boy.
  • He had turned a third-tier, gimmicky bad guy (the Floronic Man) into a Tragic Villain whose rise and fall also served as a Plot Parallel to the protagonist's Character Development.
  • He had introduced a formalist and literary approach to a genre-fiction "funny book."
  • On the commercial side, he had transformed a little-read, nearly-cancelled comic into one of DC's biggest-selling and most-talked about titles. This led in turn to the recognition of the writer—as opposed to just the artist—as a primary determinator of a comic's success or failure. It also kickstarted the 1980s through 1990s "British invasion" of American comics, in which other UK-based writers, such as Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis, reinvigorated or revived forgotten characters, or created new ones, with innovative and literary approaches.