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Moore Omnibus
Since 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.
Re: Yay Smax
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
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.