Primer is The A.V. Club's ongoing series of beginners' guides to pop culture's most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you. This week: We examine the comic book work of writer Alan Moore, the mind behind Watchmen, From Hell, and Lost Girls.
Moore 101
"I'd discovered American comic books at age 7," Alan Moore told the website Comic Book Resources in a 2002 interview. "I later came to appreciate comics as an art form, and realized that even with glorious exceptions like Will Eisner [and] Harvey Kurtzman, this was a field that was still largely untouched. Its great work still lay in the future at that point." Coming from anyone else, the statement would sound immodest, but Moore's work backs it up. Since entering the comics business in the late '70s, Moore has helped redefine the medium several times over. But his work leans more toward the subversive than the radical. The lion's share of Moore's writing can be classified neatly into genres—dystopian science fiction, true crime, more than a few superhero stories—but written in a way that takes the genre's conventions apart while still paying heed to them. Moore is a maverick who realizes he needs a tradition to play against.
Moore's best-known, bestselling work is Watchmen, which calls upon decades of superhero tradition, and helped kick off the trend of "grim 'n' gritty" adventure comics by placing morally ambiguous characters in a more realistic milieu. Released in serial form over 12 issues in 1986 and '87, Watchmen was loosely based on the Charlton Comics' line of Golden Age superheroes (properties wholly owned by DC Comics, Watchmen's publisher), but it added all manner of pulp archetypes and historical conundrums, from pirate tales and murder mysteries to the Gordian Knot and the quagmire in Vietnam. Unlike the postmodern superhero stories to come—some by Moore himself—Watchmen doesn't take a tongue-in-cheek approach to existing comics history. It rewrites that history completely, imagining costumed crusaders as pathetic and pathological, less interested in keeping the peace than in living out their self-satisfying fantasies. But while Watchmen's characters and plot have become less radical over time—either because they've been copied so much, or because they were thin and derivative to begin with—the structure and sophistication of the book's storytelling remain every bit as thrilling now as they were 20 years ago. Dave Gibbons' insanely detailed art finds visual rhymes and thematic connections that even Moore didn't know he'd implied, and Moore's method of stopping the action in order to look deeper into what a character is reading, as well as his devoting whole chapters to some heroes' convoluted backstories (complete with frenetic time-jumps, in the case of the omni-powerful Dr. Manhattan) has influenced a generation of geek art, right up to the current ABC hit Lost. The immediate impact of Watchmen was a wave of violent, ugly, and stupid superhero comics. The long-term impact has been much more resounding.
After swearing off major comics companies over issues of creators' rights in the late '80s, Moore spent much of the '90s doing quirky short-term assignments and work-for-hire jobs for the many upstart independent publishers that sprung up in the early '90s. Meanwhile, he worked on a pair of long-term projects: Lost Girls (see below) and From Hell, a sprawling, copiously researched account of the Jack The Ripper slayings. As a mystery, it's a non-starter: Moore reveals the killer early on, and his solution is neither original nor, with its conspiratorial ties to Freemasonry and the Royal Family, plausible. But that really isn't the point. From Hell lets Moore vivisect Late Victorian culture, pinpointing the source of the slaying less as one man than as the society that produced him, and tracing a pattern of cause and effect from the architects of Atlantis up to the present day. Moore's work has always been best served by artists ready to realize his vision down to the minutest detail, and here, Australia-based artist Eddie Campbell uses quavery black-and-white art to capture the church steeples, downtown billboards, and back-alley blood-spatters with equally unsparing attention.
Moore, a lifelong resident of Northampton, England, ended the '90s by launching the slyly named America's Best Comics, an imprint consisting, initially at least, of comics penned entirely by Moore. All the ABC titles have qualities to recommend them, but none has the immediate appeal of Top 10, a police drama set in a city of superpowered beings inspired more by Ed McBain than Justice League Of America. Loaded with references both obvious and obscure (some buried almost subliminally in Gene Ha's penciled art), it sends up the conventions of cop and superhero stories without letting the humor overwhelm the emotional pull of its appealing characters. It breathed fresh life into both genres, before ending unceremoniously after 12 issues. Moore returned to the Top 10 world twice, with excellent results both times: Using a pair of characters to explore the conventions of fantasy literature with the spin-off limited series Smax, and delving into the origins of the Top 10 world with the prequel graphic novel Top 10: The 49ers.
Intermediate Work
After a couple of years of writing short comic-book stories for British magazines—often using pre-existing characters like Captain Britain—Moore started developing ideas for original series. In 1982, in the cutting-edge UK anthology Warrior, Moore and artist David Lloyd introduced V For Vendetta, a dark commentary on what they saw as the creeping fascism of the nuclear age. Moore and Lloyd offer up two protagonists: a philosophical terrorist wearing a mask fashioned after notorious anarchist Guy Fawkes, and an abused young woman whom "V" takes under his wing, to teach her (and thereby us) what needs to be done to preserve individuality and free thought. Built around short chapters, frequent plot twists, and heavy doses of bleak irony, V For Vendetta was a sensation in serialized form, but Moore and Lloyd had to abandon the story when Warrior folded. They came back to it three years later, when DC offered to let them finish the run, but the completed book feels unbalanced. It's two-thirds a gripping yarn, followed by a rushed, shrill third act. Still, those first two-thirds were enough to prove that Moore had the vision to spin a complex, involving narrative over more than eight pages.
Another densely detailed period piece, this one illustrated by Kevin O'Neill, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen takes a concept straight out of fan fiction and turns it into an exciting inquiry into how the heroes and villains an era produces reveal its fears and desires. With explosions. That premise: What if The Invisible Man, Captain Nemo, Mr. Hyde, Allen Quatermain, and Mina Murray from Dracula teamed up to save the world? It works both as high adventure and as a game of spot-the-reference sure to challenge the most hardened devotee of Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction. But Moore's treatment of the characters truly distinguishes the book. He doesn't so much redefine his heroes as draw out who they already are. The Invisible Man becomes the definition of amorality. Nemo's opposition to authority becomes a precursor for the coming centuries' terrorist acts. After revealing that The League was one of several Leagues that appeared over the centuries, Moore and O'Neill deepened the mythology with a satisfying second volume and the frustrating The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, the latter as much a sourcebook as a proper story.
Watchmen overshadows most of Alan Moore's other superhero work, but it was neither his first nor his last plunge into the world of capes and tights. The tangled history of Miracleman—from its origins as a British derivation of the 1940s Captain Marvel character to its current status as the source of a seemingly bottomless legal quagmire—is a Primer unto itself. Moore's run on the title stretched from its 1982 revival as a feature in Warrior through 16 issues. It begins with the middle-aged Micky Moran remembering he has the ability to transform into a superhero with the use of a magic word, and it ends with Moran's alter ego becoming a god on earth. In between, Moore teases out the troubling implications always present in the genre. What do these power fantasies mean, and, if left unchecked, where would they take us? Can the gulf between humanity and superhumanity ever be closed? "His emotions are so pure," Moran tells his wife early in the run, "when he loves you it's gigantic. His love is so strong and clean… When I love you it's all tangled up with who's not doing their share of the washing up and twisted neurotic things like that." By the end of Moore's story, the part of Moran that asks such questions is gone.
Moore was growing up in public as he wrote Miracleman. His progression and the wildly variable art—it begins beautifully with pencils by Garry Leach and Alan Davis, and ends with John Totleben's masterful pointillist work, but suffers in between—makes Miracleman show its seams a bit. But should it ever become widely available again, it should assume its proper status as one of Moore's best work. (The A.V. Club would never endorse illegal downloads, but there are rumors that it's digitally available online.)
After stripping superheroes down to their base elements in the '80s with Miracleman and Watchmen, Moore began putting them back together again in the '90s. Invited by the artists at Image to do more or less whatever he wanted with their creations—whenever he needed a quick influx of cash to help him finish From Hell—Moore initially responded with the muddled, unfinished miniseries 1963, and some routine work-for-hire on Spawn and WildC.A.T.s. Then he took over Rob Liefeld's grotesque Superman rip-off Supreme, and renewed a love affair with the genre that Watchmen had effectively killed off. Over the course of 22 Supreme issues, Moore strove to write superhero stories as imaginative and light-hearted as the best of the Silver Age, while subtly acknowledging that times had changed, and that throwback comics can never be more than a self-conscious construct. Though Moore was mainly spitballing ideas that he'd bring to fruition with the America's Best Comic line a few years later, and though he never got to bring Supreme to the big battle-royal finale he'd planned, the series' individual issues—collected in two sloppily produced trade paperbacks by Checker—are in many ways the most purely "fun" comics Moore has ever written, and some of the best "Superman" stories since the '60s.
Like Supreme, a lot of Alan Moore's projects in the '90s went unfinished or unrealized, as he struggled to make the transition from genre writer to serious writer, while independent comics publishers and unreliable artists folded all around him. But in 1991, Moore completed an entire graphic novella that has gone practically unnoticed. A Small Killing, illustrated by Argentinean painter Oscar Zarate, jumps around the consciousness of a rising young advertising executive as he prepares to start pitching a soft drink to the Soviets. He flashes back to his childhood in the low-rent suburbs, and tries to puzzle out the reasons behind his intuition that someone's trying to kill him. The secret isn't that hard to figure out, but A Small Killing isn't the kind of story that relies on surprise. It's more a poignant depiction of how the ghosts of our choices linger, as well as a demonstration that Moore is capable of writing a sophisticated non-adventure book that doesn't descend to pretentious incomprehensibility. A Small Killing is his most underrated work.
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