Most of us are riding in steerage

[learnedax]

Just finished reading Watchmen, long delayed. Darn you Alan Moore, darn you all to heck.

At least I can bug metahacker for most of the back catalog that I will now need to devour.

(Without spoilers: the style struck me as extremely cinematic, to the point where some panels looked like nothing so much as crossfades. The density of information also seemed like an occasionally over-deliberate attempt at meaningful multilayering, particularly when juxtaposing two narratives against each other for pages at a time, with e.g. only half of a relevant piece of information visible. I could easily see this being called pretentious and intentionally convoluted. Luckily, it's done so excruciatingly well that I can't help but love it. Curse you again Alan Moore for controlling your release of information so cleverly. Finally catching the strangely triumphal Pyrrhic end on the last page even though it was quite dramatically set up long before was, I suppose, transcendental.)

Comments

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

The density of information also seemed like an occasionally over-deliberate attempt at meaningful multilayering, particularly when juxtaposing two narratives against each other for pages at a time, with e.g. only half of a relevant piece of information visible

Watchmen is, IMNSHO opinion, the ne plus ultra of comic book formalism in construction. That said, the actual story is not one of Moore's strongest, partially because so much effort went into the structural elements. There are segments with far more than just two narratives in them, though many of these layers are only apparent on a close re-read.

Fortunately, having gone as far as it was possible to go in that direction, Moore started exploring other ideas. [SFX: Alexx rummaging about in his quote file]

"I feel a need to try and evolve my work towards a deeper level of
intimacy with the reader, by which I don't necessarily mean
friendliness. Intimacy isn't always comfortable."
-- Alan Moore in correspondence with Dave Sim about _From Hell_

"These days, I would almost prefer it if nobody noticed my technical
flourishes, since if they're recognized as technical flourishes, to
some degree they have failed to do their job of affecting the reader
subtly and unnoticeably at a distance."
-- Alan Moore in correspondence with Dave Sim about _From Hell_

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Yes, there certainly are quite clever bits with more than two narrative threads active at once. What I was trying to say was that, particularly with the prolonged crisscrossing dual narrative that cropped up a number of times, it was very obvious that a Clever Thing was being done. Your second quotation describes why this can be a problem. In this case I'm not sure you could achieve the same effect without being so upfront about it, but it drew my attention as an unusual technique nonetheless.

I'm kind of tempted to go back over Watchmen again, but I think that by and large I noticed just about everything, even if I didn't piece it together until later on. That's part of the reason it took me a long time to get through: I knew in advance that slivers of information in the background might be pertinent throughout.

As for From Hell, I made the possible mistake of seeing the film first, not having actually realized that it was a comic. I understand the adaptation was far removed from the original, but it's probably still unfortunate.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

As for From Hell, I made the possible mistake of seeing the film first, not having actually realized that it was a comic. I understand the adaptation was far removed from the original, but it's probably still unfortunate.

That depends. Did you enjoy the film? If so, you picked the right order, because you certainly wouldn't have enjoyed it as an adaptation (and if not, then reading the book first wouldn't have helped). For one thing, the book version isn't at all a "whodunnit". There were a wide variety of "viewpoint" characters, with the murderer being perhaps the most prominent among them. The book is a detailed dissection of Victorian England, not a murder mystery, so the film is in no significant sense a "spoiler" for the book. The film did have lots of (extremely brief) visuals that were taken directly from the book, which was neat to see, but that wasn't enough to make up for the raping of the actual structure of the story.

Oh wait. I suppose the very ending of the film is a bit of a spoiler, since, though the same thing happens in the book, it is presented (in the book) in a manner subtle enough that many readers actually miss it. But it's a relatively minor detail; in such stories, the journey matters far more than the destination.

kestrell and I actually first got to know each other well through my reading From Hell aloud to her. So she likes to say "Alan Moore was our Cupid." :-)

We actually went out to see the film (for Valentine's Day? I forget) together. A few months later, she said to me, having seen a mention on the net, "Hey! Did you know they made a movie of From Hell? We should go see that!" She'd totally blocked out the memory. I figure that's got to be one of the most amusingly-bad movie reviews ever :-)

[jducoeur]

I'm kind of tempted to go back over Watchmen again, but I think that by and large I noticed just about everything, even if I didn't piece it together until later on.

Actually, it's unlikely -- Moore went into preposterous depth with the formalist games in that book. While it was coming out, Usenet spent essentially the entire time dissecting it in elaborate detail, teasing out a remarkable number of subtleties in it: weird front-to-back symmetries and stuff like that. Most of which do nothing whatsoever to add to one's appreciation of the story, IMO, save to make you go, "Gee, that's clever" a lot.

If you want Alan Moore at his finest, go read V For Vendetta (if you haven't yet). IMO, it's by far his best work...

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Well, I did double-qualify my statement for a reason. It would be foolish for me to assume I'd worked out every possible aspect of it... and yet I feel like I scoured deeply enough that there probably aren't many factual details that I would figure out on an immediate reread. There are probably still thematic aspects which I still haven't noticed, but those are much harder to grasp by any method except osmosis, I find.

Vendetta is probably next on my list. So far I have only read League volume 1 and Watchmen, so I have some catching up to do.

[mr-teem.livejournal.com]

I've been picking up an large amount of Moore's work in America's Best Comics collections in the last few months. I'm currently enchanted by Top Ten and, to a lesser extent, Tom Strong which both echo Busiek's Astro City in both quality and creativity. I found my copy of Watchmen to reread soon.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Yeah, metahacker's been talking about Top Ten, so it's also high on my list. I actually read about two panels of it before getting ail:racted by something else. So far so good.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Vendetta is probably next on my list.

Want me to bring it (or some other choice Moore) by dance practice tonight? I agree with Justin that it's his best work overall. It's not without some weaknesses, but among its strengths is the single most emotionally powerful scene (and strongly mixed emotions at that) I've encountered in all of literature. YMMV, of course.

I'm a rabid Moore collector, and have very nearly everything he's published. Like Will Eisner, even his earliest and least polished work stands up as above average among its contemporaries. And when he's at the top of his form, I don't think I could name five others that even come *close*. Eisner again, Gaiman, Sim... no one else is leaping to mind.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Yes, I would love for you to bring it.

So, do you have Marvelman and/or Miracleman? I know jducoeur does... someplace. Since I got to Moore largely by way of Gaiman, I'd be very interested to see something they both did work on.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

As I said, I've got very nearly all things Moore, including all of Miracleman. (I may even have a bit of Marvelman tucked away somewhere, though by no means a complete set). More to the point, all of the *major* Moore works I own live on an easily-accessibly bookcase, for convenient re-reads and/or loaning :-)

MM shares the interesting property with V for Vendetta of being a Watchmen-bisected work. That is, both of them started off as serials in Warrior Magazine, were abandoned for years after Warrior folded, and then completed after Moore had already used many of his original ideas/themes for them in Watchmen. The shift is more noticeable in MM than in VfV, but is apparent in both books.

Gaiman certainly started out as a disciple of Alan Moore's. I thought that Black Orchid and the first 7 issues of Sandman were very much "trying to be Alan Moore and not quite succeeding". Luckily, Gaiman found his own voice fairly early on, and it proved to be an excellent one :-)