Tag Archives: Alan Moore

Very skeptical about the Comedian

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Now that I think about it, I don’t believe the Comedian would be so shocked by Veidt’s master plan. Kill 5 million people to scam the world into a new era of peace? The Comedian didn’t mind Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden or the bombing of Vietnam, all mass killings of innocents for higher goals. In fact most people don’t mind those deaths, not unless they’re forcefully reminded and hectored a bit, and even then …

Of course Veidt’s body count is higher, but the Comedian doesn’t mind shooting a woman pregnant with his own child if she gets in his face. If the ordinary person is, at most, regretful and occasionally troubled by politically motivated aerial slaughter, then I would expect the Comedian could keep his soul together in the face of even an extra-size jumbo slaying like that engineered by Veidt. At least I don’t see any reason to assume otherwise unless you feel like doing Alan Moore and his script a favor. It’s quite a big gimme at the heart of a classic.

UPDATE: Another note of disgruntlement about the Comedian. His keynote line goes as follows:

“What happened to the American dream? You’re looking at it — it came true.”

I guess the idea is that America’s all about kicking ass when the other guy can’t kick back, and a case could be made highlighting that particular strain of the American experience. But I’ve always seen the phrase itself, “American dream,” used this way: In America you can work in a factory and earn enough to raise your kids in a house and then send them to college so they can become middle class. The idea managed to be true for a couple of decades but has since hit the wobbles. Still, nothing to do with shooting protesters.

Another Day, Another Future Past

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This review initially appeared in The Comics Journal.
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Alan Moore/Travis Charest et. al.
Complete WILDC.A.T.S.
Wildstorm
color/softcover
392 pages/$29.99
ISBN: 13-978-1-4012-1545-3

Alan Moore/et. al.
Wild Worlds
Wildstorm
color/softcover
320 pages/$24.99
ISBN-13: 978-1-4012-1379-4

In Watchmen, Alan Moore answered the question, “What if super-heroes were real?” In his work on WildC.A.T.S., he asks instead, “What if Chris Claremont were real?” Like Claremont’s X-Men and its many imitators, Moore’s WildC.A.T.S. is basically a soap-opera with tights, complete with love triangles, amnesia, false deaths, and gobs of interpersonal angst. The difference is that Claremont’s characters always behaved like a twelve-year-old’s melodramatic fantasy of adulthood. Moore’s tend to act like an adult’s melodramatic fantasy of adulthood. This is perhaps most apparent in the approach the two series take towards evil. In Claremont’s world, good guys can be egotistical and abrasive, but they’re still essentially good— which is why much of the bickering in the classic X-Men series seems peculiarly unmotivated. The characters tend to argue simply because its good drama, not because they actually have different goals or even perspectives. When Jean Grey goes over to the dark side, it’s a result of mystical Jungian gobbledygook, not because she’s prone to recognizable human impulses like greed or hate.

Moore’s characters, on the other hand, are, in fact, greedy and petty and cruel and even bigoted. You can see why they dislike each other, because they do in fact have unlikable traits. This isn’t quite the same thing as saying that they are true-to-life. This is pulp adventure, and the merciless grinding of the plot is a lot more important than the coherence of any individual caught up in it. Would Zealot really repudiate her teammates and friends after a few days of flattery? Is Majestic really dumb enough to fall for Tao’s elementary reverse psychology? Probably not — but the way the corruption works is true-to-life, even if the characters themselves aren’t.

As with the philosophy, so with the plotting — where Claremont relies almost exclusively on a handful of gimmicks (how many times do the X-Men get captured and then break free, anyway?), Moore is actually able to come up with intelligent, surprising twists on a regular basis. The two central arcs of the WildC.A.T.S. series (Tao’s machinations and the fact that the war with the daemonites is not at all what it seems) are both infinitely more coherent, surprising, and affecting than anything Claremont ever came up with.

In other words, and to no one’s surprise, Moore is a vastly better writer than Claremont. And yet, despite its limitations, I think Claremont’s run on X-Men actually holds up better than Moore’s stint on WildC.A.T.S. In part, it’s the art. Many illustrators worked on Moore’s stories, but there’s little point in separating them. The pages are a jumble of cluttered panels, garish colors, and improbable poses. In comparison, John Byrne’s X-Men work looks startlingly good — the layouts are clear, the faces pleasant, the bodies stylized in a consistent and professional way. It’s not Jack Kirby, but it’s not embarrassing either.

Indeed, Byrne’s open, even innocent art fits easily into Claremont’s story-telling. Yes, Claremont’s moral sense and plotting skills are, to put it kindly, not of the best. But that’s part of what gave the X-Men its directness and freshness. Though it’s obviously genre hack-work in some sense, you get the feeling that Claremont really believes in his tropes. It would be churlish to sneer at him for telling us, for the fiftieth time, that Colossus is just a Russian farm boy, just as it would be churlish to roll one’s eyes at the cookie-cutter descriptions of Nancy Drew’s friends placed at the beginning of each book in the series. The formula is the formula; its simple-mindedness is also its simplicity, which is to say, its charm.

Moore really believes in these tropes too, but in a way that’s a good bit more abstract and circuitous. When he tackles straight-forward genre hackwork he’s always performing a kind of intricate shell-game, moving back and forth between irony, nostalgia, and a complicated sense of wonder. When it works, it’s a marvel. For instance, my favorite character in the series (and Moore’s as well, I think) is a murderous, foul-mouthed killer cyborg named Maxine. It’s only at the end of the run that it becomes clear to both readers and WildC.A.T.S. that Maxine is less Wolverine than Kitty Pryde — and that moment of revelation is probably the most moving sequence in the comic.

At least in part Moore’s hand is so sure here because Maxine is his character. He’s interested in her, and so he’s paying attention to what he’s doing. When his concentration slips, though, the results are ugly. The Voodoo mini-series in the Wild Worlds volume can be seen as a bland desecration of Moore’s Swamp Thing zombie story from the mid-80s, replacing that tale’s subtle take on race and time with a dull serial killer yarn tricked out with exoticized voodoo touches. The Majestic spotlight, with the hero the lone survivor at the end of eternity, is more entertaining, though it too feels second-hand — Neil Gaiman, for example, did much the same thing, and did it better, in his Books of Magic mini-series.

As always, though, everybody saves their worst efforts for the crossovers. Moore participates in two, and they both do indeed suck. The first is a generic company-wide crisis event, filled with meaningless battles and lots of stentorian bellowing about self-actualization. The second — a WildC.A.T.S./Spawn crossover included in the Wild Worlds volume — is even worse. In a riff on Claremont’s “Days of Future Past,” we are treated to a time travel story in which we see the coming apocalypse and our heroes’ hideous fates. As an emblematic moment of crappiness, I give you… The Harem of Super-Heroines! Yes, Moore has gone there. Former heroes are forced to put aside their degrading, revealing costumes and put on degrading, not-quite-as-revealing bikinis. Then they are raped by evil guards and ogled by evil fanboys who, I guess, have never seen actual women and so aren’t put off by the glaring anatomical inconsistencies in the illustrations.

Claremont’s classic X-Men was for kids. It never quite tipped over into adult themes and as a result, it never managed to produce anything as stupidly, ineffectually tasteless as this. Moore’s Watchmen was basically for adults, and its handling of sexuality was sensitive and thoughtful. Moore’s WildC.A.T.S., on the other hand, is, like most super-hero comics these days, intended for adults who want to pretend they’re kids. And while I appreciate the man’s craftsmanship and genius, nostalgic self-aggrandizement is a lousy foundation for art.

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For more recent Alan Moore blogging, check out Tom on Miracleman.

Mr. Cream’s sapphire teeth

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Since I’m writing about Miracleman, I might as well mention my favorite bit in the series so far: the assassin Mr. Cream, an elegant fellow with black skin and sapphire teeth. I wonder if a writer, at least a white writer, could invent him now. A big part of the character’s gimmick is that he’s black but named “Cream” and dressed in white. To tell the truth, I suspect that even 27 years back only Europeans, not Americans, could have gotten away with that gag. Racial etiquette is stricter here because we were a slave-holding society whereas the Europeans were slave-trafficking societies. Blacks and whites have spent much more time side by side in America than in Europe, giving American blacks more time to speak up and combat the idea that the white perspective is the only perspective.

Also part of Mr. Cream’s gimmick is that he’s black and yet elegant, cultured, the owner of an original Hockney, etc. Sadly, I think this gimmick still gets trotted out today. It has a patina of well-meaningness that allows it to get by.
But I’m getting off track. The point of this post is that so much of Miracleman concerns itself with dragging silly old superhero tropes into the light of day and exposing them to adult notions of probability: Dicky Dauntless is a silly name, Miracleman can’t just pick up his wife and fly her thru the air because the wind resistance would kill her, and so on. But it’s completely improbable that a cunning, stealthy, highly secret assassin would have sapphire teeth. In fact it makes no sense. People would see him coming; after he left the scene of the crime, anyone anywhere who had seen him that day would remember him. So the idea is absurd. But it’s still great. An elegant black man dressed in white and with sapphire teeth and he goes about killing people thru use of his superior, icy cold intellect — I don’t care if it’s laughable and borderline racist, I still dig it.
Which goes to show that our notion of cool doesn’t care about anything but itself (for me, even using the word “cool” is a horrible concession, since I hate it, but the phenomenon needs a name and I can’t think of any other). And also that genre realism is all relative: the point isn’t to be realistic, it’s to be more realistic than some well-acknowledged cultural touchstone, producing an unexpected contrast (familiar story, everyday facts) that gooses the reader. Which is, oh God, cool too. In writing this post I don’t mean to debunk Alan Moore or Miracleman, just to bring out what they actually offer, as opposed to what we imagine they offer.     
 

Alan Moore’s purple prose

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Through the corpse-orchard. Through the boneyards … Strange fruit brushes his cheeks. The skinless aristocrat of the cemeteries follows close behind, white head nodding, smiling, top hat fallen over one socket … Somewhere, a bird screams.

 

From Miracleman, when Mr. Cream is having a nightmare. The thing is, I like all that, and especially the description of the skeleton monster (“skinless aristocrat”), but I would tolerate it only in a comic book. There it’s okay. In regular prose, writing like this would make me groan. Oh, someone wants to show off! He can’t just say skeleton! And by “comic book,” I expect I mean mainstream comics, the sort put out in the world to entertain and make money. If a creator starts out as a presumptive artist and then gets into the purple, I want the creator to shut up. If the creator starts out as a working professional and then tries a few ambitious tricks and angles, I’ll wait to see how the tricks and angles play out. Of course, very often they crash to the ground. Moore wrote good purple prose, an effective purple, not like the endless wind of ’70s Marvel. Miracleman, at least in its first few issues, is one of the few Moore works with a caption-picture ratio of something like 1:1; the captions never go away for long, and they do a lot of talking. But they do a lot less talking than their counterparts in a typical Len Wein issue of Thor. Having made the choice to be verbal, Moore still avoids being verbose. The Marvel writers would flail about and imagine they had dreamed up gorgeousness. Moore goes ahead and gets the job done in a sentence or so, a phase. Even so, they’re very ripe sentences and phrases.
I’m not against fancy writing in general, though most often it goes wrong and, when it does, it produces a much worse stink than plain writing gone wrong. I guess what I look for are passages that produce all the wonderful things sought from fancy writing but without seeming to show off, which is a very subjective judgment. Moore’s captions definitely show off, but they’re on the same page as pictures of a guy in a weird costume, so somehow I give them a break — another subjective judgment. 
UPDATE:  All right, here are a couple of groaners. Miracleman’s wife gives birth:

Moments later the placenta slides out, a marvelous life-support system of glistening burgundy.

Oh, ha ha ha ha! 
Two aliens reminisce:

Once, near Antares, we copulated as whale-mollusks amidst the churning methane.

Ho ho ho ho.
Oh well, genius is prodigal. Moore’s got a million of them and, as Andrew “Dice” Clay was wont to say, they can’t all be golden.

Bound for Glory

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I’d posted a bit back about Alan Moore’s proposal for Glory. Basically I argued that for the most part Moore didn’t seem to understand what made the Marston/Peter run great; in his proposal he tended to take weird, absurd ideas (like the invisible plane), note that they were weird and absurd, and then go on to suggest changing them in ways that made them more conventional and boring (turning the invisible plane into a more mythologically appropriate, and therefore less goofy, transforming chariot thingee, for example.)

Well, my brother very kindly sent me the three issues of Glory that Moore actually wrote (numbered 0, 1, 2) — and I was pleasantly surprised. I think the actual book is a good bit better than the proposal.

Not that Moore has suddenly figured out the Marston/Peter run. There’s no particular evidence that he has. Rather, it’s that, despite some lip service to the WW history and mythos, he really largely manages to ignore Marston and get on with his own ideas. For instance, I noted that the most interesting part of the proposal seemed to be Moore’s ideas about Glory’s secret identity. WW did have a secret identity in the Marston run, of course, but it always seemed tacked on — there because super-heroes were supposed to have secret identities rather than because it was an integral part of Marston’s politics or fetishes. WW always seemed to be slumming as Diana Prince — presumably because she wanted to be near Steve Trevor…but since WW always hung out with Steve Trevor anyway, the motivation didn’t seem especially coherent.

For Moore, however, the secret identity expands and becomes essentially the entire point of the book (or of the couple of issue he wrote anyway). Glory wants to know what it’s like to be human — which isn’t an original trope, exactly. But the trick is that the person she chooses to become/inhabit, Gloria, is a waitress who’s a schizophrenic. She’s Gloria’s secret identity, and Glory is her fantasy. The tension between those two perspectives is funny and poignant and even a little disturbing, especially at the cliff-hanger ending (never resolved), where the gap between Glory and Gloria, or between imagination and reality, swallows both of them up.

In the proposal, Moore suggested that the comic should be “disingenuous” and “coy” in its portrayal of cheesecake, lesbian subtext, sex, and so forth. I felt that this was really a fundamental misunderstanding of Marston, and overall just not a good way to go. And, indeed, the moments where the series goes that direction are, in general, not of the best. In issue #0, for example, there’s a flashback/retelling of Glory’s history which includes a lot of badly-rendered gratuitous cheesecake which is irritating and dull. And then there’s the cameo by a female comic reader in a half-shirt who a skeevy old book-retailer keeps refers to as “child”, and who behaves more or less like a kid (deferential to old skeevy guy, eager for new book,…she’s an analogue to that comic-reading kid in Watchmen, actually), but who has the hard-bodied, half-shirted, butt-falling-out-of-her-bottoms look of a poorly-drawn pin-up.

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On the other hand, the retro-bondage flashback story in issue #2 with cross-dressing, serious butch-femme play, and tongue-in-cheek parodically second-wave sneering at the bonds of matrimony was quite entertaining…though its knowing satire, its exploitation, and its clever plotting with the twist ending is world’s away from Marston/Peter (it reads much more like Moore’s own efforts for 2000 AD, actually, albeit with less explicit violence and more implicit sex.)

In any case, the point is, these are largely aberrations; the bulk of the series doesn’t go for coy or disingenuous or cheesecake especially. Instead, it treats sex and love in an above-board, respectful manner. Gloria the waitress sleeps with a marginal drifter character, and its sweet and sexy and cute (“I like his name and how he talks,” Glory thinks, “I like his bottom.”) Similarly, Hermione, Glory’s companion, has an unrequited crush on her…Moore threatened to mine that for titillation in the proposal, but in the actual comic it’s played almost entirely for bittersweet pathos. Maybe Moore wrote the proposal figuring that Liefield wanted coy cheesecake? In any case, there’s much less of it in the comic than he promised, which is all to the good.

Overall, I think the fact that this isn’t actually Wonder Woman helped Moore a good bit. Glory’s costume is no great shakes, but it’s not the dreaded swimsuit of Americana. She isn’t tricked out with bondage gear. She doesn’t have tons of baggage about, for example, the mission of peace (Moore basically has her going to man’s world initially because Hitler pisses Demeter off by being a jerk, and later just because she feels like it), or feminism (which Moore uses as an off-hand joke a couple of times, but doesn’t otherwise bother with.) There isn’t any need to make any homage to the idea that she’s an icon of any sort. Though he takes some things from the WW mythos, Glory ends up as much less WW than Supreme was Superman. Instead of fetish and feminism, Moore uses the title to talk about magic, imagination, and relationships — his obsessions, not Marston’s at all.

Maybe this is clearest in the retelling of Glory’s origin, illustrated by Melinda Gebbie. The first image of the story is this:

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This reminded me of the Ms. cover image where WW is shown as a giant. Here, though, the sexualizing effects of manipulating body size are much more thought through and under control; the children’s book stylized whimsy, the girly outfit, the fashion pose, the skin, and the tiny figures showering her with adulation; she’s powerful, but also a sexual object in a whimsical way. I mean, Marston wasn’t exactly whimsical, I don’t think — more cracked. But this seems like a nice nod to his themes; a way to point to them without pretending to take them as seriously as the man himself did. It is coy, I guess, but almost nostalgically or poignantly so — especially as those very elliptically suggested themes of sexual power and submission don’t really play out in the following narrative at all. Instead, the story Moore tells is actually much more like a Neil Gaiman Sandman tale than like a Marston fever dream — it’s a reworking of the Persephone myth, with Demeter impregnated by a demon in the form of a silver rain about halfway thorugh. There’s no bondage or purple healing rays or caricatured masculine stereotypes anywhere in sight. Gebbie’s artwork does share some traits in common with Peter — a somewhat simplified cartoony style, some frilly filigree, a penchant for stiff poses creating frieze-like compositions. Her faces, though, are much more expressive, and her linework less so. The feel ends up being more conventional and sentimental, as in the image below:

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I really like that panel, with the diamond patterns in the back and the demon thinking in Lichtenstein melodrama. We get love and mystery and magic. It’s nothing like Marston/Peter, the putative object of the tribute. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

This isn’t to say that Glory is overall comparable in quality to the Marston/Peter WW run. In the first place, other than Gebbie’s eight-page cameo, the art is typical mainstream crap; ugly stylistic nullity mottled in that horrible computer coloring. Moore tries for a couple of Winsor McCay effects and you just want to tell him to stop, man; nobody here has the skill for that. You’re just embarrassing everyone. Give it up.

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Art problems aside, Moore’s authorial vision, in this title at least, isn’t nearly as weird, as funny, or, I’d argue, as thoughtful as Marston’s original. What with the flashbacks and the backstories and the diner drama and Glory running off to fight badness every so often…the characterization and plot are clever and fun, but they’re too diffuse to really seem urgent or to add up to all that much. As with Supreme, you get the sense that Moore (like Glory) is slumming; running along and entertaining himself without breaking too much of a sweat. The themes around imagination are things we’ve seen from him before…stories affecting the world, stories breaking into the world, etc. etc. In a couple of sequences, characters in the comic are reading comics, and then the comic within a comic turns around and breaks the fourth wall and talks to the character in the comic…and you think, yep, whatever, Alan — comics are a metaphor for existence. Can we move on now?

The thing is, since I don’t find these ideas that compelling in the first place, I’d just as soon see Moore treat them as toss offs; better that than Promethea, certainly. The air of improvisation doesn’t hurt the book;on the contrary, I like the breeziness of it, and there’s still enough depth to keep things engaging and even affecting. It’s not genius, but it is one of the few versions of WW that isn’t an aesthetic pratfall. Marston/Peter’s character is impossible to deal with, and so Moore, very reasonably, refuses to, and comes up with something else entirely.

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One complaint though; Moore puts an Etta Candy analogue in one of his flashback stories…and she’s thin and hot! What’s with that? Did Liefield decreed that there couldn’t be any fat women in his comics, no not even one?

Wonder Woman Is Not a Tease

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In this post I talked about Alan Moore’s proposal for Glory and compared it to the original Marston run. In particular I quibbled with Moore’s comment that the original WW was “coy but suggestive.”

A couple folks in comments argued that the original WW was in fact coy. Eric B. says

while they ARE certainly about bondage and the sexual thrill of S & M, they never explicitly give us that, but rather come up with a number of ways to show “sexual bondage” without actually showing them.

Guy Smiley adds

It’s hero-jeopardy in an action adventure. That’s coy compared to, “I want to tie you up, Wonder Woman, because it’s a hot, yummy turn-on for you, me and the old weirdo who writes us! Grrrrowl!”

Both of these comments miss the point, I think. The books are explicit. Marston is a bondage fetishist and he’s serving up bondage. If you asked Marston whether he would rather get off by looking at pictures of people who are naked and not tied up, or people who are clothed and tied up, I am quite quite sure he would tell you clothed and tied up, every time. If you asked Marsten whether he would rather show look at pictures of people clothed and tied up or pictures of people naked and having sex, I’m willing to bet he would say he would rather look at pictures of people who are clothed and tied up. If you asked him whether he would rather look at people who are naked and tied up or read an elaborate narrative about bondage and dominence which narratively requires the characters to be clothed — well, narrative fantasy is really, really important to masochists. I think WW is Marston’s erotic fantasy…not something like his erotic fantasy, not pointing to or suggesting an erotic fantasy, but his erotic fantasy, period. There’s no feeling of something held back in the WW comics; no sense that the real sensual pleasures are being deferred to heighten tension or for censorship reasons. The obsessive reiteration of a fetish isn’t coy or disingenuous. It’s a really different mindset to say with Moore, in the one case, “I’m going to cutely suggest situations which I find sexually stimulating, but hold something back” and, in the other, with Marston, to say, “I’m going to fill a book by obsessively repeating the situations– the very ones — that I find sexually stimulating.”

I think my commenters and Moore, are somewhat thrown off by the fact that they don’t share the fetish. As it happens, I don’t share the fetish either — but Marston is clear both in his other statements and in the book itself about what his intentions are.

I guess you could say, well, *Marston* may not be coy, but the reader will perceive it as coy or suggestive. I still don’t see it, though. “Coy” is about being in control — which is certainly an important aspect of Moore’s art. Obsession is about not being in control; about submitting. Marston’s WW feels obsessive in its repetition, its outlandishness, its monomania, and its philosophical integration, it doesn’t feel like he’s placing this stuff out there to tantalize *you*. It feels like he’s caught up in it; like he can’t stop and doesn’t want to. In the way he blatantly, obsessively puts his fetishes out there, he’s much more like R. Crumb than he is like Moore’s Cobweb.

Update: In other-people-who-disagree-with-me news, Bluefall has an impassioned post about the coolness of truth and how I denigrated same when I said that WW’s lasso of truth was better when it was a lasso of control. I guess in response I’d say there are truths and truths, and that the psychotherapeutic new-agey self-actualizing that seems to carry the day in WW mythos doesn’t, to my mind, have the kind of power that Bluefall claims for it.

Also — and this was my point in the original post to a great extent — it seems like any self-knowledge worth its salt would be a self-knowledge that would allow you to figure out that, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m wearing a swimsuit and bondage gear…maybe I should put some clothes on.”

Relatedly, Bluefall seems outraged that people think that WW is a ridiculous character; she sneers at those who say “”this character fails” or “she shouldn’t be popular” like that’s actually going to make her fail or stop being popular,”

But…she can be a failure aesthetically even if some people like her…I mean, some people like anything, even Tom Petty. And moreover, she’s not especially popular. Sure, there’s a small fanbase, but it’s not big even by the standards of comic-book super-heroes. She’s got nowhere near the pop-culture cachet of Superman or Batman or Spiderman or Hulk or even the Flash.

To the vast majority of people, WW isn’t even on the radar. If she is on the radar, she’s a joke. And those people are right. The character is preposterous — gloriously so, I would argue, but still. I guess that may be an uncomfortable truth to face for some…but embrace it! It will set you free, or tie you up, or something.