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]

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 :-)