Veni Vidi Scripsi

Hah! You think you curse Alan Moore now, when you leisurely picked up the book after years of not-getting-around-to-it. Back in my day, we had to put up with several months of suspense between issues 10 and 11, and nearly another year before the final issue. We had some quality cursing then, boy, let me tell you!

On a more serious note, why are you cursing him? Is it just that you've discovered another must-read author who will eat up gobs of what we laughingly refer to as "free" time?

I'm a long-time Moore junkie myself, so if you want to bug more than just Metahacker, feel free :-) And I will happily engage in long literary discussions on them as well.

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The graphic novel as art form (American, anyway) was still relatively young when Watchmen first came out. The work he did in planning the reflective parts of the story (and the layout, even in the artwork itself) along with the side story was top-of-the-game then. (In addition to being an enormously pleasant discovery for those of us reading it month to month.) The story is an epic climax in the world of Watchmen, so some amount of grand vision is called for.

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I do understand, of course, that I'm lucky to be getting the digest form. But the flip side to that is the tendency to look up and notice I've been reading it until ungodly hours of the night. It is that, and the expectation that I will do the same with other work of his, that makes me so faintly curse Alan.

I'll remember to literarily geek with you about him, once I develop something to say beyond "it's, um, awesome."

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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_

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Hey woo, I met you last night!

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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.

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Hey! That's right...at the restaurant, right? Universe folding again.

(There are only 10,000 real people in the world...the rest are special effects.)

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Yeah, I've found the universe is very bendy around the Boston/Cambridge area. That, or there's just the same 100 people in all the subcultures I seem to be joining...

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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 :-)

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But it does lead to pleasant surprise encounters.

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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...

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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.

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It does, it does.
I think the chances of me not being talked into attending Intercon are decreasing dramatically. Between

londo,

learnedax,

tpau, and now theoretically you...

I feel like I've already written that somewhere, but I'm not sure where.

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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.

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Theoretically? Allow me to further convince you. Not only will Intercon D have a generous assortment of the best LARPs in the area, if not anywhere, you already have several friends who are already going to be there and will also find a like-minded friendly and eclectic group of creative people who get some of the most fun out of this hobby.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 :-)

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Not sure if you're aware, but by pitching the Con to me you are pitching the Con to a complete Con newbie and in fact, a complete RPing newbie. I've grown up around RPers (siblings, every single one of my friends, every guy I've ever dated) but through various insecurities I've never attempted to join in.

Therefore, sell me the Con from that point of view. :) Seeing as the idea of a "generous assortment of LARPs" makes my head spin and some serious agoraphobia to kick in, and this thing's so big that the few people I do know aren't guaranteed to be nearby all the time... Make me feel comfortable with going to this hotel (?) for a weekend with a bunch of people and attempting to fumble my way into joining the things they all - or at least most - have tons of practice doing.

p.s. I looked up agoraphobia to ensure I was using it correctly, and it turns out I was using it more correctly than I thought. "Abnormal fear of being helpless in an embarrassing or unescapable situation that is characterized especially by the avoidance of open or public places."

p.p.s. I know I'm putting up serious resistance to people's attempts to help me have fun, but unfortunately that's the nature of a phobia. :P

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Okay, I plead guiltly to being overwhelming. In general, LARPing is fun and very social and, at least the ones that typically run at Intercon, don't require learning a lot of rules. And the games at Intercon D pretty much all rock so it's fairly easy to be entertained as well. You could get a lot of firsthand comments on what kind of fun your friends have had at LARPs and at Intercon. Some people just like the social aspects of the games, some people want to *ACT* in a major role, some people want to solve puzzles and some people just like making and/or dressing up in costume. There'll be a couple hundred or so people attending but there are several tracks of games and there's thirtyish, tops in any given one. And, part of the fun about Intercon is the interaction between and after LARPs as everyone compares notes and catches up until way early in the morning. Granted, it's easier if you know someone is going to be with you and/or being in a LARP with you. But, newbies by and large are expected (and encouraged) in all of the games and one of the unique things about LARP is that eveyone has a part in making the experience happen and there's rarely "one right way" to accomplish that goal.

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learnedax scolded me for being too hard on you, so I apologize if I came across as pushy or demanding. I've reached the point where I really want to say, "Yes, I'll go to Intercon and have a grand time!" but worries hold me back from saying it, so I'm just trying to get as many people to talk me into it at once as is possible. ;)

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Gods forbid--I wouldn't have said anything like that. I'll just be quiet now and perhaps have the pleasant surprise of seeing you in March!

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