Tag Archives: Alan Moore

Stop Hating on Laurie Juspeczyk! (Female Characters Roundtable Part 1)

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There were lots of things to hate about Watchmen the movie, but for me the most revelatory was what was done to the Silk Spectre. As I noted here and here, the Watchmen movie thoroughly disemboweled the character of Laurie Juspeczyk, replacing her with a standard-issue brain-dead supermodel in latex.

The fact that Snyder chose to lobotomize the main female character wasn’t surprising — that’s Hollywood, after all. But what did startle me was how much I minded. When I was 16, first reading the Watchmen books, my favorite character was undoubtedly Rorschach, both for his cool-as-shit bad-ass violence and for his traumatized, tragic commitment to a noble, if nonsensical, moral code. Somewhere in the intervening twenty years, though, Rorschach got a lot less interesting, and watching the movie from which she had been excised, I realized that Laurie had for some time been my favorite character in the book. You don’t know how much you’ll miss someone till they’re gone, I guess.

I got a second shock on seeing the reaction to the Silk Spectre character in the reviews. Pretty much everyone noted that the character in the movie sucked. But I’ve seen a lot of people argue that Laurie in the comic was lame as well. For example, in
comments, looking2dastars said:

…not only was the part of Silk Spectre II not given much to do but the character was probably the worst developed out of the next generation of heroes. It was the same way in the comic, where the main thrust of Laurie’s story is that her entire identity has never been her own. Her mother tried to turn her into a younger version of herself and when Laurie began to rebel against that, she defined herself entirely by her romantic relationship. Even after she breaks free of John, she immediately falls into the same pattern, attaching herself to Dan.

Or, as another example, Spencer Ackerman argued that:

Laurie is the most functional character in the film, where in the comic, she’s one of its most broken. Laurie Juspeczyk resents her mother, is desperate for a father, and is unable to function as a normal human being.

This perspective — that Laurie is uniquely dysfunctional and uninteresting, and that her character is uniquely defined by her relationships with others — is so far from my own experience of the character that I have trouble believing that we all read the same comic. In the first place, to say that Laurie is “among the most broken” characters seems to be willfully blind. Of the six main protagonists, Rorschach is a sexually stunted homicidal nutcase, completely trapped by his childhood trauma. Adrian is a megalomaniacal mass-murderer. The Comedian is a vicious amoral rapist, thug, and murderer. Jon is isolated and cripplingly passive — if there’s anyone who’s defined by others, it’s him. He lets his father choose his career for him, not once but twice, and when his girlfriend leaves him, his mature, adult reaction is to *go to Mars*. Moore suggests pretty strongly that Dr. Manhattan’s alienation and passivity can be read as psychological; he’s that way because that’s who Jon Ostermann is, not because of his super-consciousness. Next to these folks, Dan and Laurie’s garden-variety neuroses seem like pretty small beer.

Along those lines, it’s certainly true that Laurie is seen interacting with others more than, and that those relationships are more important to her than, is the case for most of the other characters. But that’s because she’s *normal*. For most people, human relationships are a big deal. It’s only for sociopaths like Rorschach and the Comedian and Adrian that other people don’t matter.

That’s not to say that Laurie’s relationships are all healthy. She has an extremely tangled relationship with her mother, complicated by an absent father, and her story in the comic is very much about coming to terms with that and figuring out who she is and who she wants to be — in accepting responsibility for her own actions. Or, to put it another way, *Moore* doesn’t define Laurie by her relationships, but *Laurie* often does. Most conspicuously, rather than admit that she rather likes being a super-hero, she blames her mother for forcing her to dress up against her will. There’s a lovely scene in which she tries to pull the same thing on Dan, telling him she put on the costume to help him out with his sexual and personal frustrations — to which he replies, with great amusement, that she’s full of shit.

A lot of Laurie’s character is tied to her absent father. Her stepfather, she notes, was mean to her and constantly bullying. She notes that that’s “probably why I’m edgy in relationships with strong, forceful guys…;” but it’s also why she seeks them out. Jon is pretty clearly the ultimate father-figure; the great blue god who will make all the troubles go away. Laurie’s reaction to stress is often to wish for someone to make it all okay — Jon functions as a kind of super-protector, teleporting away everyone who makes her uncomfortable, swooping in to pick her up when she’s depressed after the jail-break. He’s the surrogate, all-powerful parent she never had…or that she did have, considering his distance.

The trick with Laurie is that, what she’s hiding from herself, what she wants Jon to protect her from, isn’t her weakness, but her strength. She clings to an image of herself as wounded and needy, but there are lots of indications that that’s not really who she is at all. On the contrary, the Laurie who comes across throughout much of the book is absolutely able to take care of herself — she’s a tough, take-no-bullshit fighter, with a nasty mean-streak. She walks out on Jon, for example, for exactly the right reasons; he’s treating her badly, and she’s sick of taking it.

She also, incidentally, has a wicked sense of humor. There are lots of funny moments in Watchmen, but Laurie is one of the few characters who is actually, consciously, and repeatedly witty. When she’s rescuing the tenement dwellers from the fire, and one of them asks her if she’s with the fire department, she snaps out, “Listen, I’m smokey the bear’s secret mistress. Now will you please just move or throw yourself over the side or something?” Her byplay with Dan about how “Devo” he looks is laugh-out loud funny, too. Moore seems to have loved writing her dialogue, which sparkles throughout. After Jon leaves earth and the military tosses her out, and Dan suggests she go to her mother, she tells him, “Oh, she’d love that. I’d sooner sleep on a grating. Nah, I’ll get by. It just burns my ass to be so damn disposable.” It’s just a throw away, but I love the mix of profanity, self-awareness, and self-revelation. (And incidentally, when she goes to the Red Planet, the line is supposed to be “Oh, shit. I’m on Mars” — which suggests disbelief and an almost resigned wonder, not “Oh wow, I’m on Mars” as in the movie, which suggests that the character sees interplanetary star-hopping as a kind of amusement park ride)

Of course, it makes sense that Laurie is funny. She’s the Comedian’s daughter. It’s interesting that, in the handful of comments I’ve seen accusing Laurie of being dependent on other characters, nobody has pointed out how, throughout the book, we subtly and poignantly see her father in her. Laurie’s earthiness and her no-nonsense attitude echo her father’s; during the roof rescue, it’s Dan who’s the calm and reassuring one; Laurie’s busting people’s chops for their own good — mirroring the dynamic between Dan and the Comedian when they handled the ’77 riots . Laurie’s smoking also links her and her father. In one flashback, we see her Dad helping her to light a cigarette. After she mistakes the flame-thrower button for the lighter and nearly sets his basement on fire, Dan tells her that the Comedian made the same mistake. And then there are visual echoes, like this:

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Finally, in her final panel in the book, Laurie is shown speculating about getting a new costume with protective leather and a mask, and perhaps a gun. She also says “Silk Spectre” is too girly and she wants a new name. The implication is that she’s going to become the Comedian.

I guess you could use this to say that she’s just racing to another father figure; defining herself in relation to someone else, etc. etc. But the point here is that she’s not *going to* a father figure. She’s becoming a father figure herself — or accepting the part of herself that is strong, like her father. In discovering who her father is, Laurie seems able to let go of her anger that he wasn’t there for her growing up, and at her need to be weak in order to draw him (or someone like him) back to her. In doing so, she’s able to forgive her mother…or perhaps to realize that there isn’t anything to forgive. “You never did anything wrong by me,” she tells her mom. Directly, she’s telling her mom that sleeping with Eddie Blake was okay — but she’s also saying that she’s not mad at her mom for pushing her to be a super-hero. A few panels later, Laurie’s telling Dan that she’s not going to have kids until she’s had some more adventures. Accepting her parents, she’s able to love her Mom, and be (at least in part) her father.

She’s also able to sleep with somebody who really has nothing to do with either of them. It’s true that at times Laurie turns to Dan for comfort and help — notably after she’s seen the destruction of New York, and she asks him to make love to her. But he also turns to her; it’s she who makes the first move in their relationsip, and she who figures out a way to aleviate his malaise; she saves him by putting on her costume. You could see it as a typical wish fulfillment nerdy loser guy – sexy girl dynamic, I guess — except that Dan, while a nerd in some ways, is hardly a loser — he’s incredibly physically tough; he’s a scientific genius, he’s wealthy, he’s caring and thoughtful, and while his fashion sense is not ideal, he’s quite good looking (“why Mr. Dreiberg, you’re ravishing.”) You can totally see why she likes him, as well as vice versa. I think it’s definitely the case, too, that she is in a lot of ways more butch than he is…though he can be kind of commanding and domineering as well. Ultimately, it doesn’t seem like either of them has to wear the pants (or tights or whatever) in the relationship; they seem like partners and friends. I don’t think it’s any more correct to say that she’s defined in relationship to Dan than it is to say that he’s defined in relationship to her. That is, it’s somewhat correct for both; they’re a couple. They’ve chosen to be together. That’s not a sign of weakness or a lack of character development. It just means that, in contrast to Rorschach or even Adrian, they’re adults.

Laurie convinces Jon to come back to earth by demonstrating to him the improbability of human life; the unlikelihood that this man would love this woman, and so produce this particular child. For Moore, in other words, the miracle of human life is a miracle of *relationships.* That’s why Jon smiles when he sees Laurie and Dan sleeping together at the end; love and the way people create one another is, for him, the beauty of life. People are miraculous because they are made of, or come out of, other people. In accepting her parents, in admitting how she is connected to them, Laurie is able to accept herself, and make choices about what she wants to take and leave from each. Finding that she’s not alone, she realizes that she doesn’t need a savior, but can instead be the hero she was pretending not to be all along.

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This is the first entry in a roundtable on female characters in comics. Tom, Miriam, and Bill will be along with posts on the topic as the week goes along.

Update: I have a follow-up post on Alan Moore’s female characters here

Update:Looking2dastars feels I mischaracterized his comments. His objections are here.

Saturday Morning Watchmen

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There are a few versions by now. Classic or “Matrix On-line” (the images work nicely) or classic with messed-up editing (stutter effect, imposed bits of speeded-up music).

Via Sullivan, the Schulz-as-Miller parody that’s going around.

Alan Moore’s Simpsons appearance; go to 6:24. Some joker taped the episode off his tv screen; the wobbly effect is actually kind of pleasant, but the sound suffers.

Future Shocks

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I knew that Alan Moore had done some work early in his career for 2000 AD, but I’d never seen most of it (unless you count Halo Jones, which I think was serialized in 2000 AD first?) So I was excited to read through “Future Shocks,” compiling his work from the magazine.

In the event, the book was a little disappointing. Certainly, if you didn’t know the author, you’d be hard-pressed to guess that he was destined for future greatness. The stories are mostly three to six pagers, and they’re fairly rote, smug twist-ending sci-fi tales. A ravening race of conquerors heads off across the universe, destroying everything in their path…but space is curved, and they end up despoiling their own home world! A woman clubs an older lady and steals her car…but the car time-travels, and eventually it turns out that the women the younger lady clubbed was herself as an old woman! There’s even one that pulls the hoary old gambit of having the captions natter on about an invasion of disgusting aliens…and then at the end, you learn that the disgusting aliens they’re talking about are humans.

Not that the book is bad. The art — by folks like Ian Gibson, Dave Gibbons, and Alan Davis — is uniformly professional and enjoyable. And there are hints, here and there, of Moore’s future. You can see his facility in a couple of rhymed nursery morality tales, more reminiscent of Hillaire Belloc than of standard sci-fi fare. And in one or two places you can see his unusual (for pulp comics creators) ability to write non-stereotypical female characters. In “Going Native” for example time-traveler from the distant future goes back to study neanderthals. He becomes friends with one of the neanderthal woman, Murr. Like the other neanderthals, Murr’s appearance is apelike and animalistic. Nonetheless, over the course of the four page story, as the narrative mostly speaks of other things, we see her humor, her intelligence, and her strength. At the end of the story, the time-traveler falls in love with her, not despite her appearance, but because he has come to see her as beautiful…as, at least to some extent, has the reader. The story is both bizarre and touching, prefiguring the Swamp Thing/Abby, monster/human love story in some ways…though with the gender of the monster (and the human, for that matter) reversed.

Most of the best moments in the collection, though, come from Moore’s humor. I had always thought that his ABC joke strips, like Jack B. Quick, were a new departure for him, but, as it turns out, they were just a return to his roots. Most of my favorite gags in “Future Shocks” volume come from Moore’s Abelard Snazz stories. Collected at the end of the volume, they read like a more bitter Douglas Adams. In one memorable tale, Snazz (who is a professional genius with (literally) four eyes) — decides to help some down-on-their-luck gods gain new worshippers. So he updates their images; Demeter, for instance, becomes the God of organic foods, while Ares becomes the God of space invaders machines (“Hey!” as one bystander comments, “That’s my kind of omnipotent being!”) To Snazz’s horror, however, the old Gods haven’t shed all their past ways, and, soon enough, gamers are performing human sacrifices atop arcade machines in order to improve their scores. Other Snazz adventures involve spaceships powered by the good thoughts of particularly saintly worms, giant tennis players with the uploaded bio-brains of John McEnroe, and gigantic Rubik’s cubes that take six million years to solve. It’s all quite clever and bracingly mean-spirited; a nice conclusion to an uneven, though overall enjoyable, volume.

Just Saw Watchmen

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It’s terrible. I’m just glad the thing ended; for a while there the question seemed touch and go.


I guess the film wins the award for biggest falloff from credits to movie. I loved the credit sequence. The movie itself … to quote a dispassionate observer, the movie is “hollow and disjointed, the actors moving stiffly from one overdetermined tableau to another.”  It’s like a well-meaning eccentric decided to tell the story of Watchmen thru parade floats, after which an absolute hack shot and edited together the parade floats using techniques made familiar by low-budget rock videos of the 1980s. The movie helps you appreciate how quiet the comic book is, not to mention understated, deft, elegant. The comic book is pretty much told in medium shot, without sound effects, and at a measured pace. The movie’s approach would be the opposite  of all those things.

No big problems with Malin Ackerman or her character. All the cast seemed pretty lame, lightweights chosen for their resemblance to the characters, then stranded amid the dioramas and looped dialogue. The Ozymandias chap was the feeblest all around, but the biggest disappointment was Rorschach’s voice.  He sounded like a cartoon dog.

Most regrettable switch from the movie: Rorschach’s business with the handcuffs and file is gone. Instead he just brings an ax down on the child killer’s head.

The Sex Element, part 1 (b): The Problem with Lost Girls

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To continue our blog’s sex theme …

Man, Lost Girls really sucked. It crapped. It was terrible. All right, the coloring was fantastic. But imagine reading the thing as a pile of black-and-white xeroxes. That’s what I had to do, since the book costs a ton and Top Shelf would have needed a bank loan to send out review copies. So nothing stood between me and Melinda Gebbie’s draftsmanship, a style that makes everyone look like a combination of pie plate and trombone. Worse, nothing stood between me and the script. I like Alan Moore; in fact I admire him. But Lost Girls is dumb as hell and won’t shut up.


Having slogged thru the pile, I summed up my thoughts in a review that Noah has asked me to reprint here.  All right, I’m game. Lost Girls convinced me that pornography is so dumb that attempts at intelligent pornography — Moore’s avowed goal — are bound to produce lump-headed parodies of thought. The problem with my theory is that it’s based on one example. Possibly The Story of O is not dumb, or those books by that de Sade person, or even some of that googly-eyed pervy shit from Japan that people profess to like (though the works’ kindergarten feel should give right-minded citizens pause). Well, whatever. I saw The Lover and that was okay, a bit of a weak pulse but the film wasn’t really stupid or anything. Still, if you took out the sex scenes you’d have a work so slight it could be wrapped in a handkerchief. Maybe the book is better.
Two great phrases sum up the pornographic experience. I found the first one in a Village Voice review of some bare-tit movie version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. This is so long ago that people didn’t have VCRs. The lady who wrote the review said that in the row ahead of her was some joker in a raincoat, or maybe he had a newspaper in his lap; I forget. All thru the film’s build-up, with the costumes and the green scenery and maybe a vintage car, he kept saying, “All right already, all right already.” He wanted to get down to business.
Phrase number two is from an Eric Bogosian routine. A slob recalls a bachelor party and the porn tape that was playing: “So they’re doing it, they’re doing it, they’re doing it.”
The Lover is an “all right already” film. Lost Girls is quintessential “doing it, doing it, doing it” with a heavy topping of “Oh God, please shut up.” 
One more phrase is particular to Moore-generated porn, and it’s the title of the review.
Hey-Yoh!  
  If you couldn’t write a masterpiece, then you couldn’t write Lost Girls. But Lost Girls is no masterpiece. Alan Moore reports that he once spent a week or so believing that cherubs were the reason for the universe; the next thing he knew, his hallway was painted solid with cherubs and he couldn’t figure out why. Lost Girls is kind of like that but on a bigger scale. It’s a wrong turn.

         As genres go, porn makes superhero comics look good. Both are built around spasms of activity that apparently can’t be left out of the action. You have to have fight scenes, you have to have sex scenes. But at least the fight scenes come with some motivation. The man wants to rob the jewelry store, or the man is mad because he was imprisoned in the Parallax Zone. The maid who jumps the bellboy in Book II of Lost Girls doesn’t have a particular reason. The bellboy has less than a reason to respond, since just a couple of minutes ago he came while fooling around with one of the guests. Still, he and the maid go at it. Getting through Lost Girls is like reading three volumes about people who eat fried chicken and don’t care about anything else. No matter what, they’re going to eat fried chicken, and they’re going to do it with a chummy Rotarian air that sounds like nothing on earth: “Monsieur Rougeur’s narrations and his member are both very nice indeed. Could you read us another tale like that, perhaps? Oooh. Ooh, yes . . .”

            You have heard there’s shocking stuff in Lost Girls, pedophilia and bestiality and incest. Indeed there is, plenty. From interviews, it appears Moore decided to carry his Lost Girls experiment right to the limit. If he was going to do pornography, he was going to do real pornography, not some polite literary substitute. He tells us that real porn is meant to be “transgressive” and set loose fantasies that can never be acted upon, fantasies from the core of our being. To know ourselves is to know them too. So you start with freeing the psyche and you wind up with a girl jerking off a horse. (“It felt sorta like peach-skin.”) Moore believes in expanding the consciousness, so he believes in consciousness-expanding porn. And in some distant sense a girl jerking off a horse does amount to a freer psyche, because it’s an unthinkable idea slapped down in front of you. But I don’t feel freer after experiencing the idea. I feel like something I care about is being misrepresented. If sex means getting a horse to come, or doing an eight-year-old, or having everybody in the family fuck each other, then all right, I’ll find some other interest. The scenes just mentioned come in the third volume because Lost Girls is organized to represent the way we all first discover sex and come to terms with it. The book builds to a frenzy because sex is a powerful and disturbing force, and to fully experience it means learning that it can pull us in scary directions. Fair enough in theory. The problem is that one person’s fantasy dragged from the primal core is another person’s bizarre turnoff. Lost Girl’s concluding frenzy involves genitals, but for me it doesn’t involve sex. Instead of believing that Moore has something fundamental to say about everybody’s shared experience, I feel like he’s speaking a language only he understands.  

            The more particular a desire gets, the more ridiculous it gets. Some of the ones shown here are very particular, but there’s no comedy a la Robert Crumb, no recognition that our personalities, right down in their central recesses, can be kind of absurd. If it’s central, it’s serious. In fact it’s sublime. Moore treats the erotic imagination the way a cargo cult treats Charlie Chaplin: the damn thing gets worshipped. He wasn’t like this with superheroes. Maybe the difference is that fight scenes, though crucial to superhero comics, aren’t really the point of the genre, whereas sex scenes are the whole reason pornography exists. At any rate Moore’s superhero work played with genre requirements, sometimes gave them the slip. Whereas his pornography accepts full-on the central, dumb necessities of the genre. Moore figures he can improve on standard porn by means of better art, highbrow themes, happier-looking women. But he’s willing to be as stupid as pornography requires, to pretend that writing about sex means writing about people engaged in great chain-fucks, and to pretend that these chain-fucks don’t violate laws of common sense and probability.

            Being serious about something dumb does bad things to the sense of humor. In Lost Girls  Moore’s playfulness gains about twenty pounds. It thuds, and the result is a recurring “Hey-yoh!” effect. He (exasperated): “Please, Dorothy. You make it hard for me.” She: “Oh, I’ll make it hard, all right.” The nifty echoes Moore likes to bounce between caption and picture no longer seem so debonair.“Having to start at the bottom,” “All that spit and polish” — okay, now guess what goes with them.

            The book is derived from three (four, really) children’s classics: The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, and the Alice books. All of them belong to the great harvest of Victorian-Edwardian fantasy texts that fed pop culture for so long. Even people who haven’t read the books know the characters and the key events. That’s what attracted Moore to the three of them — their exposure. He has things to tell us about our fundamental selves, and books with well-known characters provide a fast route to fundamentality. But does he like the books? Does he care about them? Nothing worthwhile in the originals manages to show up in Moore’s derivative. He gathers a selection of tourist-level surface details and works out little nods and allusions to them, and that’s pretty much it. Dorothy’s Emerald City parallel: “Outside, with the gaslight, the sky over New York looked green, sorta.” Or young Alice goes at it with her lover, Mrs. Redman, while Mr. Redman sleeps. If he wakes up, they’re sunk! Which is not very much like Alice watching the Red King. If  the Red King wakes up, his dream is over and maybe Alice will disappear because possibly she is what he’s dreaming about. The first situation is melodrama, the second is Lewis Carroll. If you start out with the Red King and end up with Mr. Redman, you know you’re doing something wrong.

            Taking porn seriously seems to involve putting a crimp in the brain. But having committed his error, Moore devotes all his superhuman resources to it. Lost Girls goes on for 320 carefully planned and executed pages. It isn’t just the equivalent of seeing someone you admire hit a false note and make a fool of himself, as everyone does at some moment or another. It’s like watching him hold the false note. It’s like watching him put on a stupid, would-be funny voice to tell a story that bombs and then hold that voice for the entire rest of the day. Meanwhile, in some ways, his noble mind is marching along quite well. Because many of Moore’s old knacks don’t desert him here. I’m no expert on how an English businessman of nine decades ago would sound, and an Austrian military officer who likes ladies shoes is totally beyond me. But Moore somehow makes them sound right, even under dire circumstances (“it is a passion for me. I . . . huhhh . . . I hope I . . . have not startled you . . .”). I don’t know much about the pornography of Colette or Pierre Louys, but apparently Moore can mount their wild styles and create excerpts that at least resemble nothing else on earth (“Mother was rudely alerted to my presence by the arcing squirt of sperm which crossed the room to splash against her cheek, dangling snot-like from one earlobe like a pendant pearl”). I do know about purple prose, and Moore still produces the only strain in existence that’s worth reading (“My right hand mapped thunderstorms of static on the silk of Miss Gale’s knee”).

            Melinda Gebbie’s art is hard to size up because the book was sent to reviewers as a set of black-and-white photocopies. She drew most of the pages with layers of colored pencil; from what I remember of the chapters  Kitchen Sink published, the effect is beautiful and gives the work a lot of its body. Of course black and white doesn’t keep her Aubrey Beardsley pastiche from coming through, and it’s lovely. Perhaps best of all, Lost Girls’  panel sequencing shows Moore hasn’t lost his juggling arm.  If you want to see chapters told entirely through reflections in a mirror on a dresser, or see fully-clothed characters unwittingly produce a sex scene by means of their shadows, or watch many small moving bits of plot, language, and symbol chime together like a three-volume cuckoo clock, then Lost Girls won’t entirely disappoint you. Moore can’t help being brilliant. But being brilliant never stopped anyone from acting like an idiot.

Top 10 Things I Used to Hate

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I know I promised no more Alan Moore blogging…but I just remembered this letter I wrote back in 2000 to the Top Ten letter column, back when I was young and foolish and hadn’t figured out that the proper place for random pointless burbling is the Internet. So here we go (“Donut Shop” was, apparently, the name of the letters column.)

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Dear Donut Shop,

I’ve been a fan of Alan Moore’s since his Swamp Thing days, and for the most part I’ve enjoyed the ABC titles. Top 10, unfortunately, is something of an exception. The writing and art are both frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and the characters are engaging. But whenever I put down an issue, I tend to find myself both frustrated and depressed.

The problem I have with the series is that Top 10 portrays the police as heroes. Cops may make mistakes, but civilian charges of bias or misconduct — of shapeism, speciesism, or just general abusiveness — are clearly not supposed to be believable. Smax may beat up gang-members, or drug-users, or drunk thunder-gods, but he is a good sort at heart, and, in any case, even the drunk’s all-knowing father thinks he had it coming. Whatever their faults, the police are the good guys.

Of course, in real life, things are less clear cut. Police in New York and Chicago have shot several unarmed civilians in the past year. In Los Angeles, anti-gang units have been accused of drug-trafficking, fabricating evidence, and torture. And at the recent anti-WTO demonstrations in Washington D.C. and Seattle, police used tear gas on, and apparently even shot at, peaceful demonstrators.

All of this is not to suggest that police are super-villains or that they are “bad” (though, of course, there are bad police, just as there are bad bankers or bad teachers.). Police are just working-class people who, like most working-class people, have an unpleasant job. That job is to promote justice, as defined by the rich whites who, in general, run the country. Practically, this means keeping poor minorities in their place by, for instance, enforcing drug-laws which notoriously target African-American populations, or by intimidating protestors. In recent years, it has also meant filling prisons to bursting with non-violent offenders and, in the tried and true traditions of police states, punishing more and more minor infractions of the law with more and more draconian sentences.

Top 10’s refusal to address the actual position of police in our society is particularly frustrating because the premise of the comic seems ideal for doing so. Linking super-hero titles with police procedurals is really a stroke of genius. As Alan’s story shows, both genres share many traits in common — a belief in the ultimate rightness of law and order primary among them. But, while books like Promethea and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are willing to deal, at least tangentially, with the questions of gender and imperialism raised by their pulp sources, Top 10 , apparently, has nothing to say about justice, except, in issue 8, that on the great grey board, white is winning. This is no doubt true. But it is of little comfort to many of the people in this country and the world, who are not white, and are not winning.
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And no, this never got printed. I actually think now that Top Ten may be my favorite of those ABC titles; I think it’s politics are still suspect, but it had the most engaging plot all the way through, especially since Promethea went so spectacularly off the rails….

49ers and the black dossier

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I’ve pretty much accepted at this point that the four favorite mainstream comics writers of my youth have all pretty much passed their peak. Neil Gaiman hardly writes comics of course, which is a shame; his super-hero/fantasy crosses were innovative and interesting, but his novels look pretty much like just straight fantasy, without the same spark (I haven’t read them, admittedly, so perhaps I’m being misled, but they sure don’t appeal on the surface.) Frank Miller’s hard-boiled approach is now such a cliche that when he does it he seems to be imitating his imitators. Grant Morrison is still entertaining, but I’ve given up waiting for him to attempt anything as ambitious or graceful as Animal Man and Doom Patrol (or as his first couple of fantasy/erotic short prose stories, for that matter.)

And then there’s Alan Moore. Over the last week I read Top Ten: 49ers and tried to read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier. The first is inventive and entertaining, though nowhere near as good as the Top Ten series, much less Watchmen or Swamp Thing or Halo Jones or Miracleman or any of Moore’s classic work. The Black Dossier isn’t so much a train wreck as a train that doesn’t ever start; simply put, it’s boring, in the way that the Silmarillion is boring, but without the excuse of never being intended for publication. Basically, Moore is trying to create a single continuity for every book he’s ever read to exist in the same world. It’s an incredibly sophisticated puzzle, and an impressive intellectual achievement on the level of solving an immensely difficult crossword — but watching someone solve a crossword is, unfortunately, neither especially entertaining nor especially profound. I couldn’t get through it; even the Wodehouse/Lovecraft crossover pastiche was a lot less fun than it should have been (for all his skill as a mimic, it turns out that Wodehouse’s studiously vapid effervescence is a bit beyond Moore, who has always been, even at his funniest, a bit heavy-handed).

I’ve talked elsewhere about why I think Lost Girls is both disappointing and pernicious. I don’t think I’ve ever discussed Promethea, but I’m not a fan. Douglas Wolk claims that those of us who chafed at the series’ plunge into plotlessness didn’t get it — that Moore was just trying to teach us about cosmology and magic in an entertaining way. Alas, it wasn’t entertaining, and the art, which was clearly supposed to carry the day, simply wasn’t anywhere near worth looking at on its own. And, frankly, while Moore has many talents, cosmologist is simply not one of them.

But and still, compared to Miller, Gaiman, and even Morrison, Moore still seems like the one most likely, at some point, to be able to repeat his glory days. Where Gaiman has abandoned the medium, and Miller and Morrison seem unable to do anything but compulsively repeat themselves, Moore has kept trying, and when he fails it tends to be in new and inventive ways. Not that he doesn’t have his series of tricks, or that his body of work isn’t consistent. But in numerous ways, he seems to keep challenging himself. He works with new and interesting artists for one thing — I’m not a big Melinda Gebbie fan, but you can’t argue that she draws like Steven Bissette. And, for another, you can see him, over time, trying to wrestle with new material and new ways of approaching his art. He’s tried, for example, to respond to Grant Morrison’s critique of Watchman’s downer grittiness; to loosen up his dependence on massive structure; to incorporate some of Chris Ware’s approach to layout; to use more explicit material; to move away from super-heroes, to write prose. His success has varied widely, but it certainly doesn’t feel like he’s in a rut. And as long as he’s not, it seems possible that he’ll scale the heights again…or at least keep producing flawed efforts that are worth thinking about and arguing with.