Reading Richard’s last post I was reminded just how clever Moore was to put his vampires in the water. First of all, it allowed for some incredible visuals…and second it’s just a really smart idea. Vampires don’t need to breathe…so a pond would be a perfect place for them to form a community. Why didn’t somebody else think of that first? (Maybe they did…but even if that’s the case, Moore’s clever for lifting it. (Update: …and he lifted it from Marty Pasko’s earlier Swamp Thing story, according to Alex Buchet in comments — which makes it maybe a little more obvious a lift than I was thinking. Sort of invalidating the whole point of this post. But oh well…that’s blogging for you. Update to the update: no, apparently the idea of having vampires in the lake was Moore. Carry on then.))
One of the things about Moore that’s very unusual for horror writers and for certain kinds of pulp writers is how carefully he thinks things through. He’s got all these ideas about how stuff fits together — if you start here, then that means this, which means you get to that. Steven King, for example, doesn’t do that. His stories make no sense — or they sometimes make sense, but you definitely get the feeling that he’s making it up as he goes along (in Salem’s Lot, for instance, the vampires are sort of solid, sort of not — it just depends on what the story calls for.) Neither do Lovecraft’s, really — it’s all unnameable this and unmentionable that and you know he doesn’t care whether the Yog-shoggoth works or not so long as he can work in a Poe reference. Moore really does care about the mechanics, though — which can end up really badly when he tries to deal with gender anxiety (which Lovecraft, for example, manages to do a lot smarter by being a lot less aware/explicit about what he’s doing). But it can also give you a tour de force like the Anatomy lesson, where everything you think you know about the character gets turned inside out.
Basically, Moore seems like a very deductive writer — which seems like perhaps not the best fit for horror, which tends to work best when it deals with subconscious inklings and anxieties rather than with ratiocination. Moore really hit his stride when he moved towards works which had a greater focus on ideas rather than on the half-formed dream world of horror.
Though those vampire issues are still scary. And the monkey-king was pretty bad ass…. Moore could do horror if he put his mind to it, even if it did work against his strengths in some ways.
Update: The whole swamp thing roundtable is here.
Noah, just a remark from a typical anal-retentive fanboy…it was Marty Pasko, in an earlier Swampy story, who put the vamps underwater there, though Moore really ran with the concept.
And the Monkey King came from Jack Kirby’s ‘The Demon.
It would be interesting to compare Kirby and Moore’s approach to horror. Basically Kirby bludgeons you with sheer volume…and it sometimes is surprisingly effective!
As to whether comics can be scary, surely this is a function of age? I remember screaming out loud at the age of nine, seeing the ghost of Nancy in the ‘Classics Illustrated’ adaptation of Oliver Twist.
Jeez, did Moore take everything from somewhere else?
I don’t know if I’ve seen Kirby’s horror, other than his monster books (Fin-Fang-Foom!)
Kids are a lot more easily scared than adults, certainly. Still, horror can be effective for adults too, though often not as viscerally.
“Jeez, did Moore take everything from somewhere else?”
My thought exactly. I always thought John Constantine was Alan Moore’s big original creation, but I just read an interview with Steve Bissette where he says the only reason Constantine exists was because Bissette and Totleben kept drawing him in the backgrounds.
http://www.avclub.com/articles/steve-bissette,30751/
It seems Moore’s real talent is riffing on other people’s ideas, which doesn’t necessarily take away anything from his skill or imagination.
Oh, Kirby did some champion horror stories precode.
Try to rustle up some of his old ‘Black Magic’ comics.
We’ve been comparing fear comics to fear films, but look in another direction.
Why are novels and short stories — fear literature, in short– scarier than comics?
It seems to me that comics are caught in a “valley”– between the imagination-stimulating properties of image-deprived prose, and the overwhelming power and control of film.
(One medium that is also very effective in doling out frights is radio.)
Moore basically borrowed all of his ideas…but so did Shakespeare. No one seems to downgrade Big Bill because of it.
As Noah points out, his biggest skill is in taking things to their “logical conclusion”–even when nobody else can see that it IS the “logical conclusion.”
Swampy’s vegetable powers seem obvious–but nobody else who ever wrote Swampy ever arrived at that conclusion.
“My thought exactly. I always thought John Constantine was Alan Moore’s big original creation, but I just read an interview with Steve Bissette where he says the only reason Constantine exists was because Bissette and Totleben kept drawing him in the backgrounds”
But surely Moore provided the character concept? Its a bit unfair to say Constantine wasn’t original, because the artist came up with the look of the character.
Anyway, its pretty clear that Moore could have pretty much written anything. I think I read at one point he was going to do Challengers of the Unknown instead of Watchmen.
At one point Watchmen was envisioned for the Archie universe of characters.
“Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” was based on the concept of a final Superman story by Julius Schwartz.
Supreme came about because Liefeld asked Moore to write his character, and Moore came up with a twist on the Superman knock off idea.
Similarly, I think I read that Neil Gaiman was pitching a different series than Sandman (the Demon maybe, i forget) and Sandman was sort of something he had thrown out there as a possible idea, and the editor really liked it.
It seems that art is very arbitrary.
Alex, I think maybe one thing that has hampered comics horror in relation to film and prose is simply length. Comics are relatively short and often episodic; I think it’s hard to create the immersive feeling of creeping doom when you have to resolve things in 24 pages or less. I’ve been thinking about this in part reading Junji Ito, where the need for episodic plots really hurts many of his tales (though not all.)
I think succcessfully scary comics would probably have to work like a ghost story rather than a horror film. Ghost stories are episodic and short, but they can be terrifying, especially to a child. But even for adults they can be creepy because they make you distrust the reliability of your own perception and understanding.
Horror films are about reproducing the emotion of feeling directly threatened, which is hard to do in comics (or ghost stories). And it’s harder to come up with something that an adult would be afraid of that isn’t physical threat.
I think the Monkey King works because it’s this incredibly destructive thing that was brought into being by actions that seemed innocent but weren’t; it feeds off fear, and needs people to stay around. We’re very implicated in it. It’s like The Demon of Consequences and Human Weakness (read that in a very melodramatic and booming voice.)
Now, if you’re cynical about ghost stories and allegorical abstractions, then that kind of thing won’t be scary no matter what, but I think that’s more the fault of cynicism than the medium itself. Film can force a base emotional response, but comics requires you to play the game a little.
Yes, I thought the Monkey King was quite effective; it worked through taboo, the sense of unknown but deadly rules that you violate and are then fucked. And all the kids drawing the same thing was decidedly creepy.
The thing that worked less well I thought was the incest angle. It seemed heavy-handed and poorly integrated; sort of a movie-of-the-week turning up in what’s essentially a monster story. And, of course, the monkey king stops being all that scary when Swamp thing and the demon show up and stomp on it — horror and super-heroes don’t really mix, again.
I always though the Monkey King was pretty lame–still do.
Eric, I agree completely with everything you said in earlier comments, except maybe the Monkey King, but as I find out more about Alan Moore, I’m still surprised by the very direct correlations between Moore’s ideas and other works. In looking into Constantine some more, I was unaware of similarities between that character and Marv Wolfman’s Baron Winters. I know every creator does a great deal of borrowing, but Moore never hides that he using someone else’s idea and making it better.
Well, regarding the Monkey King…the little fucker functions pretty much the same way in Kirby’s ‘Demon’ as in Moore’s ‘Swamp Thing’.
A cute but creepy li’l mammal who suddenly manifests your worst fears.
But chez Kirby, these were shown as typical Kirby demons; Moore dredged up the horror of incestuous rape…And, pace Noah, put this into context– at the time, there were no allusions to incest or rape or pedophilia whatsoever in “mainstream” comics. The impact was literally extraordinary.
(Sabotaged by Briticism, though! “Momee needunt know…” When’s the last time you’ve heard a North American treat ‘need’ as a modal auxiliary? Some lazy editing here, as when characters speak of taking people ‘to hospital’.
On the other hand, it may be that demons from Hell have a penchant for the modal auxiliary.)
To return to the wet vampires: yes, as I’ve said, they were originally flooded out by Martin Pasko. But that was in a mediocre tale of vamps-as-Punks that was crowned by their destruction in a dam’s explosion.
Moore did the thing that my wise University counselor said to do, which is to ‘ask the next question’. What became of these vamps?
Perversely, Swamp Thing is almost the villain here…or at the least, a merciless god. The vampires have set up a viable culture. We identify with them, even in our repulsion.
Empathy is essential for horror to work, and Moore understands this. But it’s been known since ‘Oedipus Rex’ and the ‘Bacchae’; forgotten, perhaps, in the age of the slasher film.
Wait a minute…so Pasko didn’t have the idea of putting them in the lake!
Darn it, I was right to begin with….
Hey, you blow up a dam, you get a lake. Complete with drowned villages.
By the way, if you want an egregious example of overplotting, check out the Pasko issues.
Good thing on Moore’s part, though– he didn’t ignore any of Pasko’s idiocies, he developed them and extended them. Today, a scripter on a “mainstream” title feels free to throw everything out. (Alas, Hawkman!)
Baron Winter gets used in ST #50 remember–so there is a shout out.
Constantine’s character, I’m pretty sure, comes more from Michael Moorcock’s run of characters with J.C. initials (obviously linked to the big JC–you know, from the Bible). Jerry Cornelius, especially, but others as well. Moore was/is a big Moorcock fan (Gaiman too).
EB
Alex, I laughed: I imagine almost all grammar students would agree it’s the “damned modal auxiliary.”
(I don’t remember reading it and can’t find it now; I don’t think it’s quite as distinctively Brit as “to hospital”, though. I use it…)
I didn’t feel expected to empathize with the vampire culture though, at all. It’s such an awful corruption of birth and motherhood, taking imagery that we associate with growth and life and perverting it into death and decay. To me it’s not so much empathy as this nightmarish identification; I agree you have to recognize and be repulsed by the possibility of empathy to have horror rather than just disgust, but I don’t think it actually becomes empathy. Empathy as such works against horror, I think.
I never empathized with the vampires either. On the one hand, they’re just doing what vampires do, they want to survive and reproduce like any other animal. But they survive by eating people or turning people into more vampires … so I’m none to heartbroken when Swampy gets rid of them.
“did Moore take everything from somewhere else?”
Here’s what i’ve noticed…
The business in the Arcane storyline with Abby meeting her husband’s new co-workers and discovering on a trip to the library that they’re all dead mass murderers is lifted from a 70s horror film called The Sentinel, in which a young woman attends a party in the apartment upstairs of her new building and later finds out the floor has been tenantless for years, and all the nice people but odd people she met were… etc. The plot diverges from there but shares that episode.
The male South American witches in the American Gothic storyline are lifted in every detail from folklore related by Bruce Chatwin in his travelogue In Patagonia.
The Pogo tribute issue features aliens who speak in an odd dialect of double or triple words compounded to form a new meaning. Some similar wordplay may have been a feature of Pogo, I don’t know the comic well, but this was certainly inspired by James Joyce’s use of the same technique in Finnegans Wake.
A commenter to an earlier post pointed out that some business in the “Demon” storyline with Jason Blood appearing in a small town and predicting people’s deaths was taken from the opening of The Master and Margarita, but calls it a “reference” and suggests an awareness of this enhances the meaning of the Swamp Thing story in some way. That seems excessively generous to me. Surely Moore just liked the idea and took it.
The werewolf business… I hadn’t heard about that but at this point- after loving the comic as a teenager and having all these little moments of recognition as I go through other books and movies- it doesn’t surprise me at all.
What I heard about the creation of the John Constantine character was that Bissette and one or more of the other artists were Sting fans and told Moore they wanted to draw a character who looked like Sting. The character details from that point might seem a bit obvious- a mysterious British figure who leads Swamp Thing through a world of magic and intrigue- but I don’t see any reason not to credit Moore for essentially creating the character. They did seem to have ambitions to launch Constantine as a spinoff feature right from the start, and you can see from Moore’s unsuccessful “Twilight of the Superheroes” crossover proposal that the original intention was to have him do the same act with other DC superheroes. You could sum him up as a rock and roll Phantom Stranger.
It is true that even if Moore takes the ideas from somewhere else, what matters is what he does with them. Countless writers playing in that DC toyset weren’t able to make all those obscure characters look like much. But it’s also true that Moore gets a lot of mileage from being able to bring in ideas from a wider range of movies and books. His predecessors were stealing from pulp science fiction and Universal horror movies, but Moore had done some artier reading. Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman, two other precocious young men who’d been reading widely, were able to repeat the formula for success. This is probably not possible now.