Moore Omnibus

[learnedax]

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. 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.

Comments

[oakenguy.livejournal.com]

I don't think you need to worry about Black Orchid too much.

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.

[jducoeur]

I'm fond of Top Ten, although I agree that it's largely light comedy. As brain candy goes, it's one of my favorite brands. Tom Strong is in a similar vein, although striking slightly different notes.

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...

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

In summary, From Hell is a mighty obelisk.

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?