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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Re: Yay Smax
Date: 2004-04-16 10:14 pm (UTC)