Sentient plants? Sign me up. I think the idea of a world where plants have become sentient and lash out at humans for the damage they are doing to the Earth is kind of cool, if a bit heavy handed. The art is fantastic. There are some wonderful scenes that made me stop to just take them in. It also has some moments where I just couldn't tell what was supposed to be happening.

The plot doesn't hold up real well though. There are a group of scientists investigating what is happening with the plants. None of the characters stood out to me, so the story just plodded along. The story gets caught in the labyrinthine environment as much as the characters that head into it. Not a bad book by any means, but the elements that didn't work for me held me back from enjoying the rest of it too much.

Deep Roots is a lot like Swamp Thing but with unnatural prose that tries too hard to be something it isn’t. This version of Swamp Thing is called The Sentinel and he wakes from his slumber to muse about tree rings. To distinguish itself from Swamp Thing, the story features some scary bank robbing vegetables and a snooty lady who works for yet another secret X-Files type agency. There's also a plant-based underground called the Otherworld, which seems a lot like Swamp Thing's "the Green." In the Otherworld, there lives a beast that has become a tree, or maybe it’s a tree that has become a beast, sort of like Swamp Thing's Parliament of Trees. The Otherworld is getting even with us for ruining the planet, which has also been an occasional a Swamp Thing theme and a fairly standard plot of “plants take over the world” stories. The story becomes a bit tedious but the art is middling good.

The plants take over the minds of termites who learn to eat through concrete and collapse buildings. I'll bit you didn't know termites could eat concrete. It just takes a bit of coaching. The plants are also babysnatchers who somehow use the babies as a conduit between this world and the Otherworld. The secret agency lady has a thing called a whispersuit that, notwithstanding its name, does not empower the wearer to whisper. The snooty lady gets in trouble for saving a life using the whispersuit but her heart was in the right place. This same lady once visited the Otherworld wearing the hide of a bull and eventually she will go back, once a tree branch starts growing out of her head. Oh, and there’s a little green guy who used to be a Brussels sprout. Does this story make any sense at all? Not in the slightest, but I kind of like the resolution, if only for its bleakness.

Search out Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing during the 1980s if you’re interested in seeing how humanized plant monsters can be done brilliantly. Deep Roots has pretensions of depth but I think the story could have been called Shallow Roots. Still, it generated enough interest to earn an indifferent 3 stars.

This has a cool Vertigo feeling to it. Plants are fed up with us and have started to fight back. Just not in a dumb <i>The Happening</i> kind of way. There's some really cool elements here, especially the scene at the bank with vegetable homunculi murdering people. The art is fantastic. Where the book falls apart some is the storytelling is very obtuse. It's not always clear how the scenes fit together or what exactly is happening. Still there's a lot of unrealized potential here.

You know that sense, in the heart of woodland, that you're at once in the most natural of spaces, and somewhere on the brink of the supernatural? This powerfully creepy horror-fantasy sees that super/natural world revolting against humanity, our separation from and our pollution of the whole. It's not the newest idea – Aldiss' Hothouse made a future from Marvell's "Annihilating all that’s made to a green thought in a green shade", and in comics this has been a recurring plot in Swamp Thing (a character referenced in one of the alternate covers here). But visually, it's seldom been quite so convincingly...vegetal. From the first, blackly comic manifestations (a bank robbed by killer sprouts) to crumbling buildings and parks devouring picnickers and a breakdown in the very borders of the human, this captures and then amplifies the hum of a certain sort of oppressive English summer day, that haze of sap running through everything. In particular, Val Rodrigues and Triona Farrell make their otherworld look at once like a van Gogh homage, and as if everything there has the grain of heartwood running through it; it's the closest I've ever seen on the page to how the world looked on my one experiment with hallucinogens, when for a little while I knew I could very nearly read trees. Dan Watters' script has tricks familiar from his sometime collaborator Si Spurrier, in particular the way that you can't trust the narratorial voice as far as a ventriloquist could throw it, and the foul-mouthed agency director at the heart of the crisis would be right at home in a Warren Ellis comic (indeed, the whole project has definite family resemblances to Injection). But for all those points of comparison, this feels at once new and fresh, and old in the sense of being primal. Very, very impressive. Not least in having such a strong environmental agenda, but never once feeling awkwardly polemical. Maybe if we're lucky, this apocalypse really will replace the scheduled one.

[NB - I have posted this review to Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2766245011?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1 - but Netgalley appear to have broken the mechanism for posting a link from there below this]

Red Herrings from Hell. I love the way this story is written.

Though it was a tad hard to follow.

The whole environmental aspect was very inventive! And the art was perfectly dark and horrifying.

<i>Eat your vegetables, Kevin.</i>

<i>Thanks to NetGalley, Diamond Comics, and Vault Comics for a copy in return for an honest review.</i>

Early discussion of us humans not realising that our myths come from an actual place, and not our imagination? Check. Plot that takes Swamp Thing and hugely runs with it? Check. Yes, Gaiman's and Moore's influences are all over these pages. Shame then that ultimately they're just a little too weird for my taste. It's one of those comics that pride themselves in being wilfully awkward to read.

Though there are some cool ideas present I generally was pretty bored because they characters were flat and the art was awful.

After the ecological collapse, Planet Earth teaches humans a lesson. Homicidal vegetable homunculi gun down people across the globe. The Otherworld knows no mercy and it seems humanity's only chance is a clandestine organization and its "champion".

The book depicts two worlds and their intersection. We see both man’s world and an ancient vegetative world beneath. I'm impressed with this volume - it gets everything right. Pacing, world-building, characters, and art delighted me. The artwork of Val Rodrigues paired with Triona Farrell's colors do the job of presenting otherworldly landscapes and creatures convincingly and with style.

The only flaw I can see is the unfocused narrative, especially in the beginning, but don't let it stop you. Deep Roots is a thrilling eco sci-fi thriller.

Mixing two styles of art, two worlds and lots of characters plus a bit of criticism, we have a amazing graphic novel called Deep Roots by Dan Watters and Val Rodrigues.

Earth and man, and myth. Two worlds linked, two worlds being destroyed. Fauna is attacking back, the God Pan is dead.

I really enjoyed the volume 1 of this graphic novel a lot, the art, the colors, the way they told the story. Ot was marvelous.

'Deep Roots' by Dan Watters with art by Val Rodrigues is a weird graphic novel about plants that decide to fight back.

Plants and roots have had enough and they've decided to overthrow humans. Humans, of course, decide to fight back. As buildings become choked with roots and fall, and humanoid plant beings invade, a mission is taken to try to understand what is happening and to take the battle to the plants. Along the way, they meet an ancient warrior, and a man caught in the plant's world for over a century.

This book was weird and cool. There are two art styles prevailing and I love the "plant world" art with it tree ring lines informing everything. It doesn't all make complete sense, but it had me turning pages and reveling in the strangeness of it all.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Vault Comics, Diamond Book Distributors, and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

"Deep Roots" has a lot going on. Some of it works well, like the color work and the characters. But the story was a little lost on me.

I have a little bit of a problem on how to start with the review. I usually do not like comic books that are filled with criticism on any kind of topic (abortions, pollution, climate change, gays, blah blah other things), it starts to bore me very quickly and then I get a huge aversion to similar things. This was exactly the criticism on how people destroy our planet but you could barely feel it. So, what happened? Flora finally said "not anymore this shit" and people are attacked. Believe me, you want to see how the vegetable creatures kill employees of the bank. Fungi absorb countries, humanoid plants are killing people in London. The secret organization 000 covering the whole situation up... a lot is happening.

What's important to say is that the story is set in modern times, modern city, just imagine the present time; then there is some kind of fantasy world filled with amazing creatures. Different characters, a different time in the story, different places. I think this story is not a one-time read, you definitely need to read it one or two more times because it's a mishmash, hard to read and understand what's exactly going on at first, but not in a bad way. A complex, interesting narrative with stunning artwork.

Deep Roots Volume 1 features beautiful artwork and a well-crafted story that seeks to understand the flaws of humanity and our abuse of the world at large. Straddling two worlds, the narrative flits between modern day and a fantasy world filled with creatures we can’t understand, coupled with a destiny that doesn’t include us. It’s an epic story, to be sure, reminiscent of mythology or dark fairy tales.

Most impressive were the character arcs each primary followed. Time is finicky in the space between worlds and we end up with a mishmash of humans and creatures from different times and places. This is a heavy destiny narrative, and each character has a part to play in fulfilling the new destiny of the world.

I was completely floored by the art style and execution. The modern panels are well done, evoking a typical modern art style but sticking to a somewhat grungy feel. The panels depicting the alternate plant-based world are truly stunning, filled with intricate details and mystical beings. Intricacy is key when the focus is on a root theme, and the artists have done a superb job inserting those details into every inch of the panels. As the novel progresses, the worlds and characters begin to devolve from something we recognize into something entirely foreign. The art does a wonderful job of balancing grotesque with natural, giving us a strange dichotomy to wrap our heads around.

Deep Roots Volume 1 is brilliant for the art alone. If you’re looking for a complex narrative intermixed with stunning, intricate artwork, you’ve come to the right place.

Interesting read and I finished it in a day. I did not enjoy the artwork though, very sloppy, and too dark.