Alan Moore

(This article was first published a few years before it became obvious that the Watchmen movie really was going to happen, and when I felt that some of Moore's works still needed a bit of explaining to the general public.)

Everybody has hang-ups- including legendary comics writer Alan Moore. To those in the know, Moore is the main man in comics. His work has challenged and changed the industry. He’s also an insanely bearded guy who worships a spoof Roman snake-god.

Almost all of Moore’s well-known works are preoccupied with super heroes- in particular, with making the super hero ‘genre’ somehow respectable. Comics have been synonymous with super-heroes since the 40’s. As a form of story-telling in which the story-teller is not bound by the limits of reality, budget or practicality, anything can happen. And yet most western comics on sale today belong to, or are indebted to, a single genre.

Moore’s first major work which is still popular today is V for Vendetta. Many will recall the (surprisingly good) film of the same name. Written in the darkest depths of Thatcherite Britain, it posits a not-too-distant-future in which Britain is a totalitarian state. It’s a setting familiar from 1984 and its many rip-offs. There are curfews, CCTV cameras everywhere, secret police, and mantras designed to drive all independent thought from the minds of men. Into this situation Moore throws the character of V- an anarchy-loving theatrical showman who blows up the Old Bailey to the strains of the 1812 overture. In the comic version, V was quite clearly a terrorist. Given todays political climate, this aspect of his character was toned down somewhat in the American-made movie.

Despite the dressing of the setting, Vendetta is a superhero story, and V is a superhero. He has a distinctive costume (his Guy Fawkes outfit), a secret identity, a distinctive weapon (his foot-long throwing knives), and he descends from the darkness to rescue helpless girls from bullying thugs. Perhaps Moore’s real point of reference here is not 1984, but Batman. Moore has worked hard to give this hero more depth than the traditional spandex-clad ones. V is morally ambiguous, possibly villainously homicidal, and definitely insane. Unlike the heroes of old, in V’s world the issues are not clear-cut. Though the government is portrayed as being corrupt, the actions V carries out against them (basically terrorism) are not softened of watered down.

Alongside Frank Miller, Moore helped to bring comics (and inevitably, superheroes) into the mainstream in the 80’s with works like Batman: The Killing Joke. In this regard his most important work is Watchmen. A movie version of this has been in development hell for about ten years. What’s good about the book is that its one of the earliest comics to construct an insanely realistic and thought-out world on such a scale. Close examination of the art shows that much of the action takes place over a single block in New York, and that the dimensions and geography of this area could be worked out (I wasn’t bothered, but it’s impressive anyway). In this alternate world, locations, brand names and histiry are used consistently for hundreds of pages. But Watchmen too is a superhero story.

The central conceit of the book is that in the 40’s, people were inspired by superhero comics to dress up in ridiculous costumes and actually go out and fight crime in the real world. Thus we are presented with a selection of heroes who are actually people with no real powers, but plenty of real-life problems. We’re not talking ‘Peter Parker’s gotta fight the Green Goblin while worrying about his date with Mary Jane’ problems, though. There’s Hooded Justice, who commits suicide after rumours of homosexuality ruin his life. There’s Nite Owl, who has become a lonely old man who fixes antique cars. The Comedian is a right-wing fascist who fights in Vietman for a three-times elected Richard Nixon. These characters are not the ageless, perfect citizens of comic lore.

I guess that Watchmen best displays Alan Moore’s hang-up about superheroes. The adventures of these super-powered beings clearly meant a lot to him as a kid (though they didn’t to me). At some later point he began to realise how patently ridiculous the notion was, and became fascinated with the idea of placing them in some kind of real-world situation. How would the simplistic, primary-coloured superheroes fare in an age of civil-rights movements, distrust of the government and international terrorism? How would they deal with loneliness, alcoholism, divorce and other personal problems?

Watchmen is a multi-tiered work in which every image is a motif that connects with what has gone before or will come after. It is told in fragments from different time periods, and reading them in order can be no more enlightening than reading them randomly. Like Ulysses, it can be opened at any page. Now there’s a pretentious recommendation. Basically, by the standards of any art-form, it’s damn good. Yet Moore himself has stated that however good it is, Watchmen can never rise above its genre. He has pushed the superhero story to places it was never designed to go… but its still a superhero story.

The History of Mars Attacks

In 1996 Warner Brothers released Mars Attacks. It featured more big-name stars than it knew what to do with, so it killed most of them off- none of the top-billed actors lived to see the end credits. This aside, it was very much a Tim Burton movie- the photo-realistic (at the time, anyway) rendering of a completely ludicrous B-movie situation was oddly creepy, and had the familiar Burton mix of merriment and the macabre (Jack Nicholson’s death scene is particularly memorable). The eerie, skeletal Martians and their array of cheesy but terrifying weapons and vehicles were ludicrous and straight out of a cold-war era 1950’s communism-parable invasion movie. However, the characters within the movie accepted this situation with po-faced seriousness, and as the script was unafraid to serve up horrible deaths to them, the audience was forced to take it seriously too. A quick scan of the net shows that this movie traumatised quite a few youngsters during its original run.

The inspiration behind the film came from an unusual and far more disturbing source- it may in fact be the only movie ever made based on a set of trading cards. In 1962, the company Topps, who specialised in baseball cards and bubblegum, released Mars Attacks, a series of cards that featured science fiction scenes. Topps had previously scored big with a civil war series of cards popular with the kids due to their high gore content. The idea of the Mars Attacks cards was to up the gore while presenting a loose retelling of a ‘War of the Worlds’ type invasion story, updated with 50’s sci-fi staples like flying saucers, ray-guns, marauding robots and giant insects.

The art was by Norm Saunders, a man known for many a lurid cover during the pulp-magazine era. These covers hinted (usually inaccurately) at the wonders within- scantily clad broads writhed in the grip of hideous monsters and unscrupulous Nazis, and square-jawed heroes and detectives shouldered open doors to come to their rescue. Saunders brought to the Mars Attacks cards a kind of hideous and gritty comic-book realism.

The plot wasn’t much to write home about- Mars is about to self-combust due to a build-up of internal pressure, so the big-brained Martians send thousands of warships to clear some new real estate for themselves on Earth. This they achieve with a violence that is genuinely astonishing. Flying saucers with mysterious heat-rays deal death onto army bases, topple skyscrapers, burn entire herds of cattle, leave Washington and New York in flames, slice passenger planes in two and make human torches of individual civilians. The scenes of death and destruction feature gory close-ups of humans with pained and agonised expressions that are occasionally quite unsettling. The Empire State building tumbles, trapping thousands of workers in a hellish blaze while hundreds more kill each other in the panic to leave the city by car. The cockpit of a fighter plane becomes a ‘’flaming coffin’ for a valiant pilot foolish enough to try to intercept a saucer.

Throughout the story, the sense of hopelessness is palpable. People hide out in basements until forced by hunger to leave their homes and walk streets where marauding bands of Martians exterminate humans on sight. Any brave attempt to resist or fight back is rewarded only with instant and horrible death. Martians capture beautiful girls to perform sadistic experiments on (there is a card depicting a dying mans’ removed heart being shown to him by his grotesque surgeon) in order to learn how to more effectively dispose of us, something at which they are extraordinarily creative. Saucers with giant shovels clear the streets of people and crush them against walls, Martians shrink humans to nothing or make frozen statues of them, and gargantuan robots walk the streets crushing humans beneath their spiked heels. Any prisoners captured by the Martians are no use to them due to the language difference, so they are strapped to the exhaust ports of their enormous machinery to be blown to oblivion. The diabolical scientists of the Red Planet have also devised a way to enlarge insects, and soon the world is overrun with a new horror. The US army is overwhelmed by a horde of homicidal spiders and the Eiffel Tower is consumed by a monstrous caterpillar- all in lurid comic-book Technicolor. And all the while the masters of the invasion watch and laugh from Mars.

Finally, the combined military of the ‘world’ (though only WASP American soldiers are shown) gets its act together and sends rockets to Mars to counterattack. This part of the story is gloriously ludicrous- because of a forcefield around the planet that prevents orbital bombing, soldiers wearing military helmets under their glass spacesuit helmets (why?) parachute to the surface and enter the Martians domed cities to deal out some vengeance. And yes, the cities have monorails (all ‘futuristic’ domed cities from the 60’s have monorails). The soldiers use their weapons to rip open the Martians huge, exposed brains. Nice. Actual earth tanks with US symbols on them (!) roll across the sands of Mars and smash their civilization into the ground. Eventually, the stars and stripes is hoisted on Mars and the soldiers leave just before geological forces tear the planet apart. All in all, it’s an enjoyably silly and unapologetic end to an otherwise harrowing tale.

Unsurprisingly, the cards were pulled from shops due to parental complaints. They are extremely rare nowadays, and a full set is worth around 2,500 US$. Scans of the cards are easily found on the Internet, and many of the images still have the power to shock. Due to the cult nature of Mars Attacks, in the 80’s a similar series was released called Dinosaurs Attack, which similarly featured a fanciful sci-fi premise, ridiculous amounts of gore, and scant regard for scientific or paleontological facts. Perhaps the most disturbing descendant of Mars Attacks is Don’t Let it Happen Here, a‘patriotically’ themed set of cards with artwork depicting scenes of hideous torture, terrorism and human rights abuses in countries other than the US. Scenes include an Iraqi man having his tongue cut off for speaking on television against Saddam Hussein, the Tokyo underground nerve gas killings, and young women in Bangladesh being scarred with sulphuric acid for rejecting suitors, a crime which, according to the card, is endorsed by their government. Presumably the reader is expected to think ‘thank God I live in America where nothing bad ever happens!’

Trading cards are not a phenomenon that ever really caught on outside the States. Just don’t get me started on Premier League Stickers…

Black Dossier Review

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier by Alan Moore

The following is a review first published when this book came out, back in 2007. It's probably still unavailable in Europe. I haven't checked recently.

Comic fans will know that this, the eagerly-awaited and serially-delayed third instalment (though strangely, not the third volume) of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is currently only available in the US due to copyright issues. It is, after all, a series which exists solely to bring together various pre-existing fictional characters in a sort of ‘communal memory’ universe. With this latest volume, Moore expands his vision further, seemingly indicating that the world of the ‘League’ consists not only of characters from fantastic Victorian fantasy, as in the previous volumes, but the multitude of characters from all of fiction, be it books, comics, film, television or radio. But is it any good?

Moore presents us with a 1950s Britain in which Big Brother and the Ingsoc government from Orwell’s 1984 has just fallen. (Apparently Orwell originally intended his terrifying parable to take place in 1948, but was convinced by his publishers to set it in that fateful year instead.) Against this backdrop, the remaining characters of the turn-of-the-century league struggle against their supervisors for possession of an item chronicling hundreds of years of secret League history- the titular Black Dossier.

As is frequently the case with Moore, the chief pleasure of the Black Dossier is perusing the detailed panels spotting familiar characters. Enthusiasts of 50’s era culture will not be disappointed, with appearances and nods to Emma Peel (from the Avengers), Jack Kerouac, James Bond, and that timeless hero of British comics, Dan Dare. Even the newspapers note the antics of aging screen legend Norma Desmond (from the classic film noir Sunset Boulevard) and Roy of the Rovers’ team, Melchester Rovers. It’s the unusual nature of some of the source material, as well as the treatment of some of the more well-known characters that provide much of the enjoyment in the Black Dossier. For example, the James Bond that features is Flemming’s Bond, not the more well-known screen incarnation- and as such is far more misogynistic and hateful than most readers will expect, as befitting his actual literary origins. All this is conveyed through the distinctive scratchy-yet-crisp drawing style of Kevin O’Neill which gives the series its flavour.

This fiction-based name-dropping is taken to a whole new level with the inclusion of excerpts from the Dossier itself- each written in a different style, reflecting the facet of society that created it. Thus we are presented with the history of the League as told through a sequel to Fanny Hill, an undiscovered work by Shakespeare, a beat novel, and a miniature 50s porno comic. To Moore, all are as valid as any ‘real’ art when it comes to representing culture. Moore utilises the very substance of the book to make his point- different paper types, sizes and textures are used to create different atmospheres. The tale finishes with a metaphysical trip to a 4-dimensional land where characters seem to realize the true nature of their existence- presented to us, the reader, in 3D (via a pair of glasses that come with the book). It’s not just a gimmick- it’s a bizarre attempt to alter the relationship between the reader and the book, to use mixed mediums to tell the story, such as it is.

And therein lies the sting- for all Moore’s genre-busting (and medium-busting), some of the terrific dialogue and characterisation of the previous volumes has been lost. The plot is merely a vehicle for Moore to cram as many self-indulgent references into his universe as possible. A little restraint can go a long way. Moore and O’Neill aimed high, producing a unique creation which succeeds at being quite unlike anything which has gone before, yet ultimately fails at being a satisfying comic book. That said, its still better than most shelf-cloggers in the comics shop, and hardcore fans are doubtlessly off to Amazon.com as you read this.