Beyond The Panels #3- Hey, Do You Like Alan Moore? I Like Alan Moore While Also Having A Lot Of Opinions About Him. Let's Talk About Them.
I think that even if you don't read comics, you know who Alan Moore is. You've probably seen the movies V For Vendetta or Watchmen and if you haven't seen the movies, you might have at least heard of the Watchmen comic. It was on Time's list of top one hundred fiction stories of the 20th century. It's kind of a big deal.
So is Alan Moore.
Among comic readers, Alan Moore is regarded as one of the best writers to work in the industry. There's a really good reason for this, but if I'm being honest, I don't think Alan Moore stories are amazing. That's right, I said it. Alan Moore isn't the best ever at everything.
Let me finish.
Alan Moore's biggest strength isn't the stories. His stories are pretty much shit we've all seen before, with some exceptions. What makes Moore special is the way he tells stories. The tone. The situations. The dialogue. The characters and their inner lives. In the Holy Trinity of British writers (Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison), Moore is probably the best at the actual writing. Gaiman tells simple stories, like Moore, but he also invests them with a lot more emotion than Moore does and he does universe building waaay better. Morrison's imagination beats the shit out of Moore's, but his writing isn't as formal and polished as Moore's.
I feel like I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's start from the beginning. Before we start, I want to say I haven't read everything Moore has done. I've read a lot of his DC stuff, Miracleman, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He's done a lot of indie work, but most of it doesn't appeal to me, for a variety of reasons, one of the most important being I like superheroes. Now that's out of the way, let's get started.
Alan Moore started in American with Saga of the Swamp Thing. I only read it for the first time last year and it's quite good. If you've read any 90s Vertigo (including early Neil Gaiman, especially the first two volumes of The Sandman), you know the tone- dark. What you might not know is how lovely it all is. Moore's prose is beautiful, descriptive and lyrical. I would go so far as to say this is Moore's most emotional work- I don't think Moore does very well with emotions in his comics (although he does capture that sort of thing very well in his book Jerusalem, which I love, but I don't recommend), but this one does well with it because of the relationship between Swamp Thing and Abby.
Moore was instrumental in the changing of the tone of comics and Saga of the Swamp Thing was the beginning of that. It was marketed as "sophisticated suspense", but it was really just Southern Gothic horror with some superhero and sci-fi stuff thrown in. Comics grew up because of Alan Moore, but the thing is that it's not like Saga was super violent or sexual or profane. It was just the tone. From there, Moore would go on to do lots of work in the DCU and bring that kind of tone to all of it- an adult tone, with undertones of menace, psychological horror, sexual abuse and more. Moore, for better or worse, started the grim and gritty tone of comics.
Now, this growing up of the industry was a good and bad thing. Without Moore, we wouldn't have Vertigo. Then again, without Moore, we wouldn't have a million hyper violent 90s comics full of guns and spikes and dudes with the word "Blood" in their name.The problem was this- Moore was able to make comics for adults without going too explicit (although he could do and did do that) because of the way he wrote. The thing about Alan Moore is that being so well read, he knew a lot about the craft of writing and it's there that he's second to none. Other people read his stuff and wanted to write comics for adults, but they didn't have the skill Moore has, so they piled their comics with all the shit that made a lot of comics in the 90s so cliche. Moore giveth and Moore taketh away.
One of the big problems I also have with Moore's style is his reliance on rape and sexual abuse as plot points. Years back, on my Facebook, I wrote as a status, "Alan Moore has never met a rape he couldn't milk for dramatic effect." This is the truth. Thinking of all the Alan Moore books I have, rape or sexual abuse are in just about all of them. We live in a time where DC's Identity Crisis is roundly criticized for the rape of Sue Dibny being used as a plot point, but everyone sort of glosses over the first Silk Spectre falling in love with the Comedian after he raped her in Watchmen. It's a bit weird, really. Moore isn't some right wing kook, like Frank Miller. I look at his work and I think maybe he sees rape and sexual abuse as the highest crime one can commit and that's why he uses it as a plot point, so much. Still, it's disconcerting.
Speaking of Watchmen, while I agree it's one of the greatest comics ever published, I don't think it's his best comics work. Watchmen is a great mystery story, but if you just go by the plot (which Moore got from an episode of The Outer Limits), it isn't the greatest thing ever. Again, as with most Moore things, what makes it wonderful the way it's written. The extras Moore throws in. (Before I go any further, I just want to say this- Moore is known for writing super long, detailed scripts and after reading his book Jerusalem, I can only imagine how amazing and descriptive they are) The complexities he gives the characters. That's what makes it great. However, if you have to ask me, Miracleman beats it by a million light years.
Miracleman is based on Marvelman, a British 1950s rip off of Captain Marvel. Mike Moran, after saying the word "Kimota!" becomes Marvelman (or in the states, Miracleman). Along with his sidekicks, Young Marvelman and Kid Marvelman, he fights aliens and all kinds of stuff. Moore was writing it in Britain in the comic magazine Warrior, doing an update of the character for the 80s- Moran and his sidekicks went to fight an alien vessel in the 60s or 70s (I forget which) and shit happened. His sidekicks disappeared and Moran forgot his heroic identity and his word. When Moore got big in America, Eclipse Comics brought it to the States, changing the name of the character to Miracleman.
Jesus fucking Christ is it good.
I had wanted to read it since reading about it in Wizard magazine back in the 90s, but you couldn't find the single issues very easily or inexpensively and even the collected editions went for hundreds of dollars a piece. To make a very long, complicated story short, Neil Gaiman ended up with the rights to the Miracleman universe, sold it to Marvel, and they reprinted it all. It's out of print again, but I was able to get hardcovers off Amazon and it was well worth it. I wouldn't say it's the best superhero comic I've ever read, but it's damn close. It's Moore at his best- poetic yet grounded. Heroic yet realistic. Superhero yet also sci-fi with some horror splashed in. For me, it's better than Watchmen because it plays with superheroics a lot more. Watchmen is very much grounded in a real world, except for Dr. Manhattan. The characters feel real. The situations are more realistic. No one in it is actually a superhero. They're all hyper violent, most of them are killers. Miracleman is a superhero story, in a superhero universe with realism injected into it. As someone who loves superheroes, it appeals to me more for this reason. It may be different for you, but read it and find out. I got the hardcovers on Amazon for a reasonable price.
Before I get to the part of this blog post that will cause most Moore fans to respond with all the vitriol in the world, I also want to recommend From Hell, Moore and Eddie Campbell's masterpiece about the Jack the Ripper murders. It's meticulously researched, haunting, and just plain amazing. I feel like Campbell didn't pencil it, but used ink for the whole thing- pools and pools of black ink that perfectly match the tone set by Moore's dark prose and the situations inside. The line work is jagged and perfect. Seriously, go and get it.
So, I mentioned Watchmen earlier. The characters are based on the Charlton Comics characters DC bought- Captain Atom, the Question, Peacemaker, Nightshade, Blue Beetle, and Judomaster. Moore's first draft of the story included all the Charlton characters, but DC wanted to use them and Moore's comic would have taken them out away, so he created homages to them- Captain Atom became Dr. Manhattan, the Question became Rorschach, Peacemaker became the Comedian (or maybe it was Peter Cannon, the Thunderbolt- I'm not sure), Nightshade became Silk Spectre, Blue Beetle became Nite Owl, and Judomaster became Ozymandias. DC did something unprecedented, too, because this was Alan Moore- they put a provision in the contract that if the book ever went out of print, Moore and co-creator Dave Gibbons would get ownership rights to the characters. At the time, this was unprecedented. To my knowledge, neither of the Big 2 had ever done this at the time. DC would eventually do it with their Vertigo imprint and even Marvel rarely does it, but at the time, this was some new shit. This never happened, though. Watchmen has never went out of print and has since become one of the best selling trade paperbacks ever. Moore has always been bitter about this and if asked in an interview, will harp on and on about it, saying DC acted in bad faith and so on.
I'm of the opinion that he has nothing to complain about. Please, bear with me.
So, lets go back to the mid 80s. Comics didn't stay in print forever. The trade market wasn't what it is today. I don't know what the people at DC thought, but I don't know if any of them thought they were going to get what many critics say is the greatest comics ever and that it would stay in print forever. The only people who can say that are the people at DC who wrote the contract. Hell, it might not have even been the people who actually run DC, but the accounting department who made the decision. None of us can say.
Look, it sucks that Moore didn't get the rights to the characters eventually, but here's the thing- at the time, he could have easily went somewhere else, like Eclipse (who was publishing Miracleman at the time) or some other small press company, and got this book published. He didn't have to publish it at DC. He signed the contract. Not just that, but Watchmen made Moore a very wealthy man and world famous. And you know who sent him those checks? Who published those books? DC. It's okay to be bitter, but maybe get over it?
I've been told that this attitude makes me some kind of monster who doesn't care about creator rights, but I do and I support them by buying the books of creators who I love. However, lots of comic creators make characters they don't own and most of them haven't spent decades complaining about it. Get over it, Alan Moore. Everyone loves you. You're wealthy and can write whatever you want because of Watchmen. I wish I could have that. Most of us do.
Before I go, I do want to talk about his novel, Jerusalem, for a bit. I think it's a brilliant book. The story is... complicated. Hell, there really isn't one story- it's a bunch of stories set in Northampton, England through the millennia connected by certain characters and families. It's super dense, in the best possible way- it takes time to wade through the prose, but you lose yourself in it. The use of language is brilliant. It's amazing. However, it's super complicated and if you aren't already down for Moore, you might not like it. I feel like it was Moore trying to prove he was a genius to the world, but no one who has never read his stuff is going to pick up an over thousand page Alan Moore novel. I'm going to read it again soon. I love it. I can't tell you to read it. I won't. Just know I love it.
So, I don't know if that's what you were all expecting when you read my Next Issue blurb last issue. I had planned on going into his work that I've read more, but I felt like this was a better way of doing it. Most of you know who he is, and if you don't, well, read some of the stuff I mentioned. I may have problems with Moore and his work, but I still love it. It's still some of the best comic work ever. Honestly, I could talk about Moore for hours and hours and in future installments, I'm going to go into more of his work on in depth basis, after re-reading some of it, especially Saga of the Swamp Thing and Miracleman. I just wanted to get this out of the way. My last opinion has started a flame war elsewhere and I wanted to get it out of the way- I wanted you to know what you were dealing with and who you are dealing. I have a lot of unpopular opinions. You're going to get them here. Hopefully, you'll stick around, especially for the nest issue of....
Beyond The Panels!!!!!!!!!!!!
Next Issue-
What are the three greatest team books ever? Did you know they were all written by the same guy? They are and you'll find out who that writer is next issue. You might be able to guess who I'm going to say if you know me.
Remember, tell your comic loving friends to check this blog out. Also, if you want, friend me on Facebook. I'm a nice guy and I'm quite funny and charming. See ya around.
So is Alan Moore.
Among comic readers, Alan Moore is regarded as one of the best writers to work in the industry. There's a really good reason for this, but if I'm being honest, I don't think Alan Moore stories are amazing. That's right, I said it. Alan Moore isn't the best ever at everything.
Let me finish.
Alan Moore's biggest strength isn't the stories. His stories are pretty much shit we've all seen before, with some exceptions. What makes Moore special is the way he tells stories. The tone. The situations. The dialogue. The characters and their inner lives. In the Holy Trinity of British writers (Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison), Moore is probably the best at the actual writing. Gaiman tells simple stories, like Moore, but he also invests them with a lot more emotion than Moore does and he does universe building waaay better. Morrison's imagination beats the shit out of Moore's, but his writing isn't as formal and polished as Moore's.
I feel like I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's start from the beginning. Before we start, I want to say I haven't read everything Moore has done. I've read a lot of his DC stuff, Miracleman, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He's done a lot of indie work, but most of it doesn't appeal to me, for a variety of reasons, one of the most important being I like superheroes. Now that's out of the way, let's get started.
Alan Moore started in American with Saga of the Swamp Thing. I only read it for the first time last year and it's quite good. If you've read any 90s Vertigo (including early Neil Gaiman, especially the first two volumes of The Sandman), you know the tone- dark. What you might not know is how lovely it all is. Moore's prose is beautiful, descriptive and lyrical. I would go so far as to say this is Moore's most emotional work- I don't think Moore does very well with emotions in his comics (although he does capture that sort of thing very well in his book Jerusalem, which I love, but I don't recommend), but this one does well with it because of the relationship between Swamp Thing and Abby.
Moore was instrumental in the changing of the tone of comics and Saga of the Swamp Thing was the beginning of that. It was marketed as "sophisticated suspense", but it was really just Southern Gothic horror with some superhero and sci-fi stuff thrown in. Comics grew up because of Alan Moore, but the thing is that it's not like Saga was super violent or sexual or profane. It was just the tone. From there, Moore would go on to do lots of work in the DCU and bring that kind of tone to all of it- an adult tone, with undertones of menace, psychological horror, sexual abuse and more. Moore, for better or worse, started the grim and gritty tone of comics.
Now, this growing up of the industry was a good and bad thing. Without Moore, we wouldn't have Vertigo. Then again, without Moore, we wouldn't have a million hyper violent 90s comics full of guns and spikes and dudes with the word "Blood" in their name.The problem was this- Moore was able to make comics for adults without going too explicit (although he could do and did do that) because of the way he wrote. The thing about Alan Moore is that being so well read, he knew a lot about the craft of writing and it's there that he's second to none. Other people read his stuff and wanted to write comics for adults, but they didn't have the skill Moore has, so they piled their comics with all the shit that made a lot of comics in the 90s so cliche. Moore giveth and Moore taketh away.
One of the big problems I also have with Moore's style is his reliance on rape and sexual abuse as plot points. Years back, on my Facebook, I wrote as a status, "Alan Moore has never met a rape he couldn't milk for dramatic effect." This is the truth. Thinking of all the Alan Moore books I have, rape or sexual abuse are in just about all of them. We live in a time where DC's Identity Crisis is roundly criticized for the rape of Sue Dibny being used as a plot point, but everyone sort of glosses over the first Silk Spectre falling in love with the Comedian after he raped her in Watchmen. It's a bit weird, really. Moore isn't some right wing kook, like Frank Miller. I look at his work and I think maybe he sees rape and sexual abuse as the highest crime one can commit and that's why he uses it as a plot point, so much. Still, it's disconcerting.
Speaking of Watchmen, while I agree it's one of the greatest comics ever published, I don't think it's his best comics work. Watchmen is a great mystery story, but if you just go by the plot (which Moore got from an episode of The Outer Limits), it isn't the greatest thing ever. Again, as with most Moore things, what makes it wonderful the way it's written. The extras Moore throws in. (Before I go any further, I just want to say this- Moore is known for writing super long, detailed scripts and after reading his book Jerusalem, I can only imagine how amazing and descriptive they are) The complexities he gives the characters. That's what makes it great. However, if you have to ask me, Miracleman beats it by a million light years.
Miracleman is based on Marvelman, a British 1950s rip off of Captain Marvel. Mike Moran, after saying the word "Kimota!" becomes Marvelman (or in the states, Miracleman). Along with his sidekicks, Young Marvelman and Kid Marvelman, he fights aliens and all kinds of stuff. Moore was writing it in Britain in the comic magazine Warrior, doing an update of the character for the 80s- Moran and his sidekicks went to fight an alien vessel in the 60s or 70s (I forget which) and shit happened. His sidekicks disappeared and Moran forgot his heroic identity and his word. When Moore got big in America, Eclipse Comics brought it to the States, changing the name of the character to Miracleman.
Jesus fucking Christ is it good.
I had wanted to read it since reading about it in Wizard magazine back in the 90s, but you couldn't find the single issues very easily or inexpensively and even the collected editions went for hundreds of dollars a piece. To make a very long, complicated story short, Neil Gaiman ended up with the rights to the Miracleman universe, sold it to Marvel, and they reprinted it all. It's out of print again, but I was able to get hardcovers off Amazon and it was well worth it. I wouldn't say it's the best superhero comic I've ever read, but it's damn close. It's Moore at his best- poetic yet grounded. Heroic yet realistic. Superhero yet also sci-fi with some horror splashed in. For me, it's better than Watchmen because it plays with superheroics a lot more. Watchmen is very much grounded in a real world, except for Dr. Manhattan. The characters feel real. The situations are more realistic. No one in it is actually a superhero. They're all hyper violent, most of them are killers. Miracleman is a superhero story, in a superhero universe with realism injected into it. As someone who loves superheroes, it appeals to me more for this reason. It may be different for you, but read it and find out. I got the hardcovers on Amazon for a reasonable price.
Before I get to the part of this blog post that will cause most Moore fans to respond with all the vitriol in the world, I also want to recommend From Hell, Moore and Eddie Campbell's masterpiece about the Jack the Ripper murders. It's meticulously researched, haunting, and just plain amazing. I feel like Campbell didn't pencil it, but used ink for the whole thing- pools and pools of black ink that perfectly match the tone set by Moore's dark prose and the situations inside. The line work is jagged and perfect. Seriously, go and get it.
So, I mentioned Watchmen earlier. The characters are based on the Charlton Comics characters DC bought- Captain Atom, the Question, Peacemaker, Nightshade, Blue Beetle, and Judomaster. Moore's first draft of the story included all the Charlton characters, but DC wanted to use them and Moore's comic would have taken them out away, so he created homages to them- Captain Atom became Dr. Manhattan, the Question became Rorschach, Peacemaker became the Comedian (or maybe it was Peter Cannon, the Thunderbolt- I'm not sure), Nightshade became Silk Spectre, Blue Beetle became Nite Owl, and Judomaster became Ozymandias. DC did something unprecedented, too, because this was Alan Moore- they put a provision in the contract that if the book ever went out of print, Moore and co-creator Dave Gibbons would get ownership rights to the characters. At the time, this was unprecedented. To my knowledge, neither of the Big 2 had ever done this at the time. DC would eventually do it with their Vertigo imprint and even Marvel rarely does it, but at the time, this was some new shit. This never happened, though. Watchmen has never went out of print and has since become one of the best selling trade paperbacks ever. Moore has always been bitter about this and if asked in an interview, will harp on and on about it, saying DC acted in bad faith and so on.
I'm of the opinion that he has nothing to complain about. Please, bear with me.
So, lets go back to the mid 80s. Comics didn't stay in print forever. The trade market wasn't what it is today. I don't know what the people at DC thought, but I don't know if any of them thought they were going to get what many critics say is the greatest comics ever and that it would stay in print forever. The only people who can say that are the people at DC who wrote the contract. Hell, it might not have even been the people who actually run DC, but the accounting department who made the decision. None of us can say.
Look, it sucks that Moore didn't get the rights to the characters eventually, but here's the thing- at the time, he could have easily went somewhere else, like Eclipse (who was publishing Miracleman at the time) or some other small press company, and got this book published. He didn't have to publish it at DC. He signed the contract. Not just that, but Watchmen made Moore a very wealthy man and world famous. And you know who sent him those checks? Who published those books? DC. It's okay to be bitter, but maybe get over it?
I've been told that this attitude makes me some kind of monster who doesn't care about creator rights, but I do and I support them by buying the books of creators who I love. However, lots of comic creators make characters they don't own and most of them haven't spent decades complaining about it. Get over it, Alan Moore. Everyone loves you. You're wealthy and can write whatever you want because of Watchmen. I wish I could have that. Most of us do.
Before I go, I do want to talk about his novel, Jerusalem, for a bit. I think it's a brilliant book. The story is... complicated. Hell, there really isn't one story- it's a bunch of stories set in Northampton, England through the millennia connected by certain characters and families. It's super dense, in the best possible way- it takes time to wade through the prose, but you lose yourself in it. The use of language is brilliant. It's amazing. However, it's super complicated and if you aren't already down for Moore, you might not like it. I feel like it was Moore trying to prove he was a genius to the world, but no one who has never read his stuff is going to pick up an over thousand page Alan Moore novel. I'm going to read it again soon. I love it. I can't tell you to read it. I won't. Just know I love it.
So, I don't know if that's what you were all expecting when you read my Next Issue blurb last issue. I had planned on going into his work that I've read more, but I felt like this was a better way of doing it. Most of you know who he is, and if you don't, well, read some of the stuff I mentioned. I may have problems with Moore and his work, but I still love it. It's still some of the best comic work ever. Honestly, I could talk about Moore for hours and hours and in future installments, I'm going to go into more of his work on in depth basis, after re-reading some of it, especially Saga of the Swamp Thing and Miracleman. I just wanted to get this out of the way. My last opinion has started a flame war elsewhere and I wanted to get it out of the way- I wanted you to know what you were dealing with and who you are dealing. I have a lot of unpopular opinions. You're going to get them here. Hopefully, you'll stick around, especially for the nest issue of....
Beyond The Panels!!!!!!!!!!!!
Next Issue-
What are the three greatest team books ever? Did you know they were all written by the same guy? They are and you'll find out who that writer is next issue. You might be able to guess who I'm going to say if you know me.
Remember, tell your comic loving friends to check this blog out. Also, if you want, friend me on Facebook. I'm a nice guy and I'm quite funny and charming. See ya around.
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