Moore Omnibus
Apr. 15th, 2004 01:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
learnedaxSince last effusing about Alan Moore, I've read Top Ten vol. 1-2, From Hell, Promethea 1-2, and Swamp Thing 1-4 in vaguely that order.
Top Ten was mostly light comedy, and good at it. The eventual disturbing elements that were more, well, like Alan Moore were certainly well done, and I don't think they dragged the tenor of the story too far off. Worth reading just for the background ads.
From Hell is deep, bloody, and elegant. I was slightly concerned that my reading would be colored by seeing the movie first (how could I not, Johnny Depp and Robbie Coltrane!), but as it turns out that only matters for one comparatively minor part. This book is about myth, men, and a whole lot of occult resonance. The facts of the story are provokingly laid out, but only part of the point.
As a side note, the content of this story would have made me dubious about it being made into a faithful movie with less than an NC-17 rating. The comic (such classic irony in applying that name to this work) medium allows an amazing flexibility, and of course the film got around that by leaving out 80% of the book.
This is high art, and it still made me chuckle darkly quite a lot. At the same time, the fascinating and well-researched intricacy of this story does at times become too much. The chapter that is essentially an occult tour of London is heavy going, and in a number of cases a blatant element will make no sense at all until you go and read the copious annotations. In this way it is much like Ulysses, where once you've read a paragraph of background you will see how clever that line is.
In summary, From Hell is a mighty obelisk.
Promethea, for a change of pace, is a book about myth, women, and a lot of occult resonance. It's very different from From Hell, but the end of volume two has some extremely striking similarities. Also some topical relation to Cerebus. The big difference here is that rather than solemnly unfolding its mysteries, Promethea bounces at you saying "hey! wanna see me a neat trick I can do with myth?". The effect is both interesting and entertaining, although it too begins to go off into its own mythological tour of history. One almost wonders whether Alan decided his points in the earlier work were lost in its complexity, and that he should try again, but luckily it stays on this side of being the 14-year-old's version of From Hell.
Swamp Thing is... odd. Sometimes it looks like a standard 80s superhero comic that happens to be written by Alan Moore, and sometimes it looks like Dante reborn into Sandman. Volume one is alright, volume two has lots of separate interesting ideas (hooray for Pogo!), and volumes three and four are a big tale of good and evil with only occasional ecological warnings.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
alexx_kay's comments on this being a big inspiration for Sandman are well backed up here. I really like Alan's John Constantine in particular, and many things that orbit around him read eerily like Neil. With this as background I really ought to re-read Sandman now. And maybe Black Orchid. And probably some Hellblazer. That's the problem with comics that casually cross over: to fully grasp a single story can require grasping the whole field. But of course, as Alan points out in his introduction, comics are an interesting genre in that there is a high level of context that the reader will not know, and in particular the story may well have no beginning or end... you just get a slice of it.
Top Ten was mostly light comedy, and good at it. The eventual disturbing elements that were more, well, like Alan Moore were certainly well done, and I don't think they dragged the tenor of the story too far off. Worth reading just for the background ads.
From Hell is deep, bloody, and elegant. I was slightly concerned that my reading would be colored by seeing the movie first (how could I not, Johnny Depp and Robbie Coltrane!), but as it turns out that only matters for one comparatively minor part. This book is about myth, men, and a whole lot of occult resonance. The facts of the story are provokingly laid out, but only part of the point.
As a side note, the content of this story would have made me dubious about it being made into a faithful movie with less than an NC-17 rating. The comic (such classic irony in applying that name to this work) medium allows an amazing flexibility, and of course the film got around that by leaving out 80% of the book.
This is high art, and it still made me chuckle darkly quite a lot. At the same time, the fascinating and well-researched intricacy of this story does at times become too much. The chapter that is essentially an occult tour of London is heavy going, and in a number of cases a blatant element will make no sense at all until you go and read the copious annotations. In this way it is much like Ulysses, where once you've read a paragraph of background you will see how clever that line is.
In summary, From Hell is a mighty obelisk.
Promethea, for a change of pace, is a book about myth, women, and a lot of occult resonance. It's very different from From Hell, but the end of volume two has some extremely striking similarities. Also some topical relation to Cerebus. The big difference here is that rather than solemnly unfolding its mysteries, Promethea bounces at you saying "hey! wanna see me a neat trick I can do with myth?". The effect is both interesting and entertaining, although it too begins to go off into its own mythological tour of history. One almost wonders whether Alan decided his points in the earlier work were lost in its complexity, and that he should try again, but luckily it stays on this side of being the 14-year-old's version of From Hell.
Swamp Thing is... odd. Sometimes it looks like a standard 80s superhero comic that happens to be written by Alan Moore, and sometimes it looks like Dante reborn into Sandman. Volume one is alright, volume two has lots of separate interesting ideas (hooray for Pogo!), and volumes three and four are a big tale of good and evil with only occasional ecological warnings.
alexx_kay's comments on this being a big inspiration for Sandman are well backed up here. I really like Alan's John Constantine in particular, and many things that orbit around him read eerily like Neil. With this as background I really ought to re-read Sandman now. And maybe Black Orchid. And probably some Hellblazer. That's the problem with comics that casually cross over: to fully grasp a single story can require grasping the whole field. But of course, as Alan points out in his introduction, comics are an interesting genre in that there is a high level of context that the reader will not know, and in particular the story may well have no beginning or end... you just get a slice of it.
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no subject
Date: 2004-04-15 05:50 pm (UTC)The problem I had with both From Hell and Promethea is similar to what you mentioned. It's not that I mind being educated by a comic book. What I *do* mind is an author self-consciously putting The Education of the Reader as his or her top priority, and that's what Alan Moore seems to do sometimes. (Even moreso with his performance art events, from what I've read. Oy.) When Promethea's Mercury broke the fourth wall and gave the reader his wink-wink nudge-nudge, I put the book down.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-15 08:33 pm (UTC)I highly commend the recently-completed Smax miniseries, BTW. It takes Smax and Toybox (who really are the protagonists of Top Ten anyway, IMO) and plonks them down in Smax' home dimension, which is essentially Fairyland gone to seed. The result is just as heavy on fairytale in-jokes as Top Ten is on superhero ones, but they are more often dead-on funny, and the concept of Fairyland as (essentially) backwoods West Virginia works oddly well...
From Hell -- I have a strange view of this, because I spent fully ten years reading it. It started out in the late and highly lamented anthology series A1, possibly the best anthology book in comix history, and continued at an average of about a chapter a year. As a result, I think I think of it as even slower going than it is. But yes, it's one of his best books. (Which is part of why I just can't bring myself to see the movie.)
I'm really fond of Promethea, although it suffers from the same problem as Watchmen in spades: it's just a little too clever and self-absorbed for its own good. But as a longtime student of the occult, it's fascinating to watch what he does with it. The entire volume of the climbing of the Tree of Life is a gigantic collection of metaphors, and fun in that way.
Really, the way I find myself thinking of Promethea is as the graphic equivalent of poetry rather than prose literature: highly structured, mannered and metaphorical. When viewed with a poetic mindset, I think it works better.
Swamp Thing is not nearly as deep as some of his later stuff, but it's hard to understand in retrospect how important it was then. Today it's merely a good comic in the modern style, but at the time it was earth-shaking -- as important as the 70's Neal Adams Batman or GL/GA. (And really far more important than Sandman, which largely codified the shift that Swamp Thing started.) Modern story-oriented comics really grew from there.
I confess, I was never that impressed with Black Orchid, although I agree that a reread of Sandman would be nice. (I only read it during its original run.) Hellblazer is *enormously* variable, and I honestly don't consider most of it all that brilliant. I loved the Garth Ennis run (really the only thing Ennis has done that I really respect), and the recent Azzarello work was marvelously dark. But it's always been up and down, with great stories alternating with overindulgent crap, IMO...
Yay Smax
Date: 2004-04-15 09:13 pm (UTC)About Swamp Thing, I hadn't realized that volume four was the intersection with The Crisis. While I recognize that it is a dramatically important comic work, it was also tied to a huge Comics Event, so most of the major titles were breaking new ground in some direction or other, right?
I had already planned to reread Sandman, not as much because I consider it an Important comic, but just a very well written one, in a style that, before, I had thought of as very distinct. I'm curious as to how my perception of it will have changed, since the first time I read it I essentially hadn't read any other comics.
The Black Orchid I wanted to glance at was just Neil's short run of it, because Swamp Thing drops in. Similarly Hellblazer, just because I've seen him as a guest star but never in his native territory.
Re: Yay Smax
Date: 2004-04-15 09:39 pm (UTC)Not so much, from a modern perspective. A typical "shocking Crisis crossover" would be Teen Titans, in which, *gasp* A Titan Dies! Of course, it was a relatively new character, who had been introduced a year earlier with the express (though not explicit) intent of being a sacrificial lamb to the Big Event. Had about the same emotional effect as Anya's death at the end of Buffy: "Well, we had to kill somebody, but we couldn't kill any of the stars."
Very few books (Legion, All-Star Squadron) were as intimately involved in the Crisis as Swamp Thing was, and I don't think that any of those that *were* can be called successful on any level. Mostly, they just caused ongoing continuity nightmares.
Though, come to think of it, that sort of wraps around to Sandman again. Part of the reason that Lyta Hall seems rather adrift when we first meet her, and has a mysteriously missing mother, is due to those continuity meltdowns. You see, her mother used to be (and here, english tenses start to be insufficient) the Golden Age Wonder Woman (hence the name "Hippolyta"). After the Crisis, she was one of the characters whose history was... confused, to say the least. [Not that you actually want to go through the excruciating process of *reading* any of this stuff, mind you. It has enough amusement value for a few footnotes, but not to slog through on its own merits.]
As far as Sandman's style, it eventually did become quite distinct. But I think it's fair to say that for the first several issues, Neil was definitely imitating Alan.
Re: Yay Smax
Date: 2004-04-16 10:14 pm (UTC)Re: Yay Smax
Date: 2004-04-20 04:44 pm (UTC)Oh, right -- the Infinity, Inc. debacle.
Yes, this is the worst of the lot. Infinity, Inc. was composed, more or less, of the kids of the original Justice Society. Clever and mildly innovative idea at the time (although now sadly overused), and it originated a lot of characters who have become significant if second-class citizens of the DC universe since. (Jade, Mr. Bones, Fury, Hector Hall, etc.)
But the Crisis made a complete hash of the series: indeed, they spent months thereafter just trying to make even vague sense of Infinity, Inc. The series was *so* Earth-2 based that shoehorning it into the merged universe was messy. The retcon process essentially got written into the book -- you could watch history as it was rewritten. But they never managed to make complete sense of it, and *especially* never managed to make Lyta make any sense. Which is why she's been mostly in a coma ever since, and they've just recently declared that the person in the coma wasn't even her, conveniently shuffling her off the stage...
But I think it's fair to say that for the first several issues, Neil was definitely imitating Alan.
Hmm -- good point. I think of Sandman as high fantasy, but the flavor was rather more like Moore's intellectually-tinged horror at the start...
Re: Yay Smax
Date: 2004-04-20 08:23 pm (UTC)Re: Yay Smax
Date: 2004-04-15 09:51 pm (UTC)In the most literal sense yes, but artistically not so much. The Crisis was a crucial milestone in DC continuity, not least in that it was DC finally letting go of the past, and allowing things to flourish without being chained to all of What Has Gone Before. And yes, some very good stuff came out as a result: the average quality of DC after the Crisis was a couple of notches higher than before it.
But in terms of real artistic quality, most comics were still most comics. They broke new ground storywise, but most of them didn't do much that was genuinely *different*. Really, the thing that was striking about what became the Vertigo line was that it was the dumping-ground for all of the really experimental work at DC -- the books that just didn't *feel* like what had come before. That's still largely the case today: I'm still as much of a sucker for the DC mythos as ever, but I'm much fonder of the Vertigo books than the rest.
[Sandman] the first time I read it I essentially hadn't read any other comics.
Oh, man -- no wonder you're such a harsh critic sometimes. That's pretty much starting at the top: while there are some other books I might put on a level with Sandman, I'm not sure there's anything I'd put above it, at least in pure writing terms. (I think Moore is the better storyteller when he tries, but Gaiman is a much better writer.)
Similarly Hellblazer, just because I've seen him as a guest star but never in his native territory.
Well, the key thing to remember, as Alexx points out, is that Swamp Thing is the *original* vision of Constantine. When he got his own book, it was notably revisionist in some key areas. In particular, in Hellblazer it's clear that John is actually a sorcerer of no trivial skill. That was never anywhere near so apparent in the original vision: Moore's version of Constantine is the guy who may or may not be simply the world's greatest flim-flam artist. Disambiguating that actually weakens the character a little -- he loses the mystery that is at his essence...
Re: Yay Smax
Date: 2004-04-15 11:10 pm (UTC)Well, that's not an unusual situation. It's often an outstanding work that draws us to a medium/genre/artist that we had overlooked. I'd read a few individual issues of various things, e.g. X-Men, so I knew that the thing I was reading was of unusually high quality of writing even then.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-15 09:25 pm (UTC)Nitpick: You mean Taboo. Also late and lamented.
I find myself thinking of Promethea is as the graphic equivalent of poetry
Fascinating. I think that's an excellent way to look at it.
And really far more important than Sandman, which largely codified the shift that Swamp Thing started.
I would quibble with that. What you say is largely true in a storytelling sense, but Sandman was astoundingly important for a number of structural reasons. First (not explicitly limited) series to be allowed to end when the author wished. First long-term mainstream series to be consistently and completely in print after its initial publication. First huge money-making series that the publisher didn't screw over the creator in some major way. I could go on.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-15 09:38 pm (UTC)Ah. Similar timeframes, so I'm not surprised that I got them mixed up. That makes sense, though -- Taboo was published much less regularly than A1, which accounted for *some* of the dilatory release time for From Hell. (And I think A1 was a few years earlier than Taboo.)
Taboo was also a great series, although in very different ways. A1 was a bit more oriented towards a variety of genres, whereas Taboo was much more strongly tilted towards horror specifically. A lot of what I think of as "good modern horror" got started there, though...
I would quibble with that.
Hmm; interesting. I'll grant you the quibble, although with the observation that most of the most ground-breaking aspects of Sandman had more to do with the business side of it than the artistic vision itself.
Don't get me wrong: Sandman is brilliant, and IMO significantly better in all respects than Swamp Thing. But it doesn't stand nearly as high above Swamp Thing, compared to how Swamp Thing towers above almost everything that came before it. (At least from the major US publishers.) The whole standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants thing...
no subject
Date: 2004-04-15 09:44 pm (UTC)Remember also, the reason that Eddie Campbell self-published the collected edition was because the story's previous three publishers had all gone out of business. It started in Taboo, from Spiderbaby Press, which was absorbed in the end by Tundra. Then Tundra absorbed/was-absorbed-by (accounts vary) Kitchen Sink. And then there were none...
The whole standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants thing
We are the chorus, we agree, we agree...
no subject
Date: 2004-04-16 04:57 am (UTC)Nitpickier: you mean Cerebus. (http://continuitypages.com/fromhell.htm)
no subject
Date: 2004-04-16 03:15 pm (UTC)Also, I was unfamiliar with that web site, but I will probably lose many hours there now. My employer un-thanks you :-)
no subject
Date: 2004-04-16 04:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-15 09:17 pm (UTC)I love that sentence.
By the way, in case you weren't aware of it, Swamp Thing v.3 is John Constantine's first appearance. Steve Bissette really wanted to draw a character that looked like Sting, and Alan obligingly wrote one in.
Also in the "big influence on Neil" dept., that volume contains the first time that Cain and Abel (earlier known largely as hosts of horror comics) were presented as being ancient parts of the collective unconscious.
As far as re-reading other stuff to get additional context -- I don't really recommend it. If it's worth re-reading in it's own right (as Sandman surely is), then by all means go ahead. But if something was only a so-so work before-hand, knowing how it fits into The Great Web of Continuity won't do much to improve it.
Do you want me to bring some more Moore along on Monday's Hellboy expedition?
no subject
Date: 2004-04-15 10:56 pm (UTC)Blink. Oh. My understanding of his causality was entirely backwards, then. If that's his platonic state, I'm in much less of a hurry to read Hellblazer.
Do you want me to bring some more Moore along on Monday's Hellboy expedition?
Well, hmm. I've gone through most of his stuff that I know about, let me consult a bibliography... I'm not sure where to go from here. Possibly the remainder of Swamp Thing, though I wouldn't be surprised if it was less earth-shaking after "The End".
no subject
Date: 2004-04-16 03:20 pm (UTC)The last two volumes of Moore Swamp Thing are... different. Wildly experimental, and in the nature of such things, not all the experiments succeed. But they're interesting, nonetheless.
There's still *lots* of Moore that you haven't read, but you have gotten through most of his *best* material, at least in comic book form.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-16 04:15 pm (UTC)I largely agree; indeed, I liked him in the original Books of Magic more than I have in most of his own book.
My only real counter-example is the aforementioned Garth Ennis run, which I thought was savagely fun and *utterly* Constantine, as he pulls off one of the cleverest, nastiest and most dangerous cons in human history...