Articles with the Tag Alan Moore

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow

Comix
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I’ve got such mixed feelings about that story. Rereading it just now, having been triggered by Tegan’s tweet, it still choked me up, as it does every time. But I’m also fully aware of how schmalzy it is, how dependent on having feelings for Silver Age Superman with all its silliness already.

To start with, the creative staff for what was to be the very last story to be ever told about the classic, Silver Age Superman and his world, was pretty much stunt casting. There’s Curt Swan, the classic Silver Age Superman artist, brought back to team up with two of the hottest flavours of eighties DC: Alan Moore and George Perez. It makes sense to have Swan there, but not have him being inked by e.g. Murphy Anderson, not having Cary Bates or Elliot S! Maggin or any of the other long term Superman writers write the last ever Superman story feels a bit sad.

The real problem is the context in which Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow was published. DC had decided that it didn’t want to be saddled with its fifty year history anymore, that all that old stuff was dumb and embarrassing, that they needed somebody modern like John Byrne to come around and give Superman a make-over. Even with Alan Moore being quite fond of Silver Age Superman, he was still in his make superheroes edgy phase and that same mood pervades Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow. Imaginary stories (“aren’t they all”) were always much more bloodthirsty than mainstream Superman, but Moore turns it up to eleven. Just because Lois and Clark survive and get a superbaby doesn’t make this a happy ending.

Everybody dies: friends, villains, lovers, superdogs. Bizarro destroys his own planet before attacking Metropolis. The Toyman and the Prankster murder Pete Ross and reveal Clark Kent is Superman. Metallo attacks the Daily Planet to murder Superman’s friends. The Legion of Supervillains murder Lana Lang and Jimmy Olsen when they’re defending the Fortress of Solitude. The Kryptonite Man takes out Krypto but not before he’s bitten to death by him. Brainiac usurp’s Lex Luthor’s body. And the one responsible for the carnage turns out to be a bored Mister Mxyzptlk, because “a funny little man in a derby hat” doesn’t work in the eighties anymore. Next issue Byrne would come and reboot Superman as Superyuppie.

Thirtyplus years on it’s all just as silly as the Silver Age Supes it was saying farewell too and a darn sight more offensive. The combination of nostalgia and carnage would be a prelude of some of DC’s worst instincts during the next three decades, constantly killing off, rebooting and killing off again. In hindsight, I like the imaginary stories of Mr and Mrs Superman much better.

What the eighties really felt like

Comix, Warfare & Military history
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Is nailed by Alan Moore in this 1986 interview talking about Watchmen and part of what he was attempting to do with it:

I know it’s only a tiny little comic book that goes over there every month and gets seen by a relatively small number of people, many of whom perhaps agree with us anyway, so it’s difficult to see what it’s doing, but I was consciously trying to do something that would make people feel uneasy. In issue #3 I wanted to communicate that feeling of “When’s it going to happen?” Everyone felt it. You hear a plane going overhead really loudly, and just for a second before you realize it’s a plane you look up. I’m sure that everybody in this room’s done that at least once. It’s something over everybody’s head, but nobody talks about it. At the risk of doing a depressing comic book we thought that it would be nice to try and … yeah, try and scare a little bit so that people would just stop and think about their country and their politics.

That was what growing up in the eighties felt to me, too young to pay much conscious attention to politics, but old enough to pick up on the fear, on the almost certainty that the bombs would drop sooner rather than later conveyed not so much through the news and such as through pop culture where the nuclear holocaust was present one way or another, as well as through the huge demonstrations against cruise missiles, the largest demonstrations ever held in the Netherlands and about as useful in the end as the later demos against the War on Iraq would be. Throughout everything, up to at least 1987 and Gorbachov, that dread was there and seeped into everything.

Watchmen was one of the best attempts in any artform to make this inchoate fear visible and I immediately recognised it when I first read the series back in 1989 or 1990, when we’d just passed out from under it. It’s the inevitability of it, the idea that if certain things happened, some unclear threshold was crossed, quite ordinary men and women would have no choice but to order the end of the world, more in sorrow than anger, believing to the end that “better dead than red” made sense.

Because of our baby boomer dominated media we tend to think as the fifties and early sixties as the time when we were most obsessed by our coming atomic doom, but the reality of it was that throughout that time the US could’ve easily destroyed the USSR without the latter being able to do much about it, while by the early eighties the weaponry had advanced enough, was ubiquitous enough, was complex enough that a nuclear war would no longer just be devastating, but fatal to the human race as a whole, could really end our world and looked increasingly likely to do so by accident or paranoia.

Alan Moore visits the Occupy movement

Comix, video
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With bonus appearance of Frank Miller. A surprisingly good Channel Four news item on Moore, V for Vendetta and the way in which V’s Guy Fawkes mask has inspired and informed the Occupy movement. I love Alan Moore because he’s such a sensible, decent chap, no ego whatsoever.

David Lloyd meanwhile, who designed the mask all those years ago, is quietly chuffed everytime he sees it on the news:


How do you feel when you see a V mask or the V graffito at a protest or on a blog?

DL: Happy that a symbol of resistance to tyranny in fiction is being used as a symbol of resistance to any perceived tyranny in real life. The image of Che Guevara – another bearded guerrilla fighter, though in reality – has been used similarly as a badge of resistance to perceived injustices, and V’s just joined the club. Badges and symbols are useful as instant communication devices, though in the case of V, it seems to me that the communication isn’t quite as instant as with figures such as Che because, despite the movie, V For Vendetta, and its trappings, is not well-known to the general public. But then, any puzzlement shown by anyone in ignorance can always be allayed by their investigations of the source of the images – and then, who knows, they might become beneficially educated by the experience!

DC Comics still clueless

Comix
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Proof that DC Comics still does not get Alan Moore, even twentyfive years after Watchmen:

However, DC Comics co-publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee said, “Watchmen is the most celebrated graphic novel of all time. Rest assured, DC Comics would only revisit these iconic characters if the creative vision of any proposed new stories matched the quality set by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons nearly 25 years ago, and our first discussion on any of this would naturally be with the creators themselves.”

It also shows the essential inability of DC to sell comics any other way but by constant regurgitation of characters, concepts and series, on the monthly superhero pamphlet model. That Alan Moore would want to stay far away from this, that his approval cannot be bought even with the rights to the original series, is both unsurprising and understandable. Watchmen needs no sequls, prequels or side projects: everything Moore and Gibbons had to say about it was said in the original series, which was a product of the time and place it was produced and anything else that will be done in its name will only lessen the original.

Can you imagine a Jim Lee or Dan Didio greenlighted Watchmen project, written perhaps by Darwyn Cooke or a Garth Ennis or Mark Millar (and I don’t honestly know what would be worse: Cooke’s fauxstalgia let loose on Watchmen or the inevitablity of Ennis or Millar going for a Rorschach prison rape “joke”), drawn by whoever is the to-go guy for dark, moody serious superheroics. It would be awful, but still sell on the scale of what DC did to Milestone, with what was a great attempt to create modern superheroes for a properly multiracial America has been folded into the DC mainstream to function as spear carriers and capeholders for old, white supermen.

DC will use up the Watchmen characters because that’s the only thing DC knows how to do, though often they don’t even know how to make effective use of them. As Tim O’Neill points out, this is the main failing of both Marvel and DC, because that’s what their business models are build on. With their comics mean selling points now being their ability to be turned into succesful summer blockbusters (and the continuing sale of pamphlets and deluxe hardcovers to aging fanboys a nice sideline) this has only gotten worse. DC doesn’t just want Watchmen 2: the comic, it wants Watchmen: the Saturday morning cartoon.

The Killing Joke

Art & Criticism, Comix
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In retrospect, Dorian Wright doesn’t like The Killing Joke:

In the long run, it was probably a mistake. While it’s still a masterfully crafted story, and Brian Bolland’s art is exceptional, the overall trend towards “darkening” Batman did serious damage, I feel, to the character and the comics industry as a whole. It was an attempt to chase a post-adolescent audience’s brief, media-driven flirtation with comics, but it froze out younger and more casual audiences. The audiences comics really needed to grow as a medium. It’s only lately, with the The Brave and The Bold cartoon and Grant Morrison’s Batman work, that a serious attempt to rehabilitate Batman from the brooding, angsty loner with mommy issues has been made.

Hear, hear.

Killing Joke always felt cynical to me, an attempt by Moore and DC to cash in on his surface reputation as a mature superhero writer, where mature equals R-rated sex and violence, for those readers who thought the nudity and brutality in Watchmen and Miracle Man were “deep” and missed anything more subtle. Even Moore at his most cynical offers glimmers of interest so it’s not completely bad, certainly not as bad as the glut of post-Watchmen, post-Dark Knight “mature” superhero titles that crowded the shelves in the late eighties/early nineties.

and yet it’s still awfully superficial and glib in its philisophy, the loveingly and lingering depiction of the the crippling and implied rape of Barbara “Batgirl” Gordon as a device to “break” Batman not that different from any such seen in a revenge movie like the “Deathwish” series, a device to propel the hero into action but only seen as an affront to the hero’s honour rather than as what it does to the victim, just a broken toy in this context. The ending where supposed hero and supposed villain meet in the middle and laugh it all off is annoying as well, as is its trite message, that all it can take is one bad day for a normal man to become a monster.

But the Bolland art is gorgeous.