Produced by American publisher Marvel Comics’ British imprint Marvel UK between 1990 and 1993, the comic book series The Knights of Pendragon (KOP, hereafter) has been described by its co-writers Dan Abnett and John Tomlinson as, respectively, a 'quasi-mythic Arthurian superhero comic' and 'the world's first green comic' (Abnett, Tomlinson, Erskine et al, 2010: NP). The titular Knights were a group of British superheroes assembled to serve the Green Knight of Arthurian legend. In the series, the Green Knight is an aspect of the Green Man from European pagan folklore, represented in the comic as a nature deity. As Tomlinson's description of it indicates, environmentalism is a key theme in the series which, as he has acknowledged, was heavily influenced by the James Lovelock’s and Michael Tobias’s hypotheses that the Earth is a living organism (Abnett, Tomlinson, Erskine et al, 2010: NP). In KOP mysticism and environmentalism are fused in a similar fashion to another obvious influence on the series, writer Alan Moore's run on the horror comic Swamp Thing (1984-87), published by Marvel's main rival DC Comics. Like Swamp Thing, KOP contains strong horror elements, drawn from a range of folkloric sources, which emphasise industrialised Western society's antagonism towards nature which retaliates via the ‘spirt of The Green’: an ‘ancient anger manifesting as a series of seemingly unrelated ecological disasters’ (Abnett, Tomlinson, Erskine et al, 2010: NP).

Ultimately, this approach which, as Abnett has admitted, involved 'very little superhero content’, (Abnett, Tomlinson, Erskine et al, 2010: NP), would lead to the book's cancellation in 1993. In retrospect, KOP seems, in many ways, to have been ahead of its time as 1993 also saw the launch of DC's enduring and influential 'mature readers' imprint Vertigo, the aesthetic sensibility of which was also strongly influenced by Moore's Swamp Thing run and its spin-off title Hellblazer (1988-2013). The latter featured cynical English occultist John Constantine whose early adventures also fused British folklore and mysticism with ecological themes. Both series would move from DC's main superhero line to Vertigo, freeing them from the conventions of the DC universe in particular and the superhero genre generally. KOP's editor Steven White has cited Vertigo as the model for his thwarted ambitions for the title which he envisioned as 'Marvel's very own European enclave of sex and violence' (Abnett, Tomlinson, Erskine et al, 2010: NP) and it is easy to see how, for example, the KOP character Dai Thomas, a world-weary Welsh policeman who involuntarily gains supernatural powers , could have developed along similar lines to the Vertigo iteration of Constantine given similarly sympathetic publishing conditions.