This week’s question: What’s your favorite romance in comics?

Logan Polk: Thanos is one of my favorite characters. I think he’s endlessly compelling when handled right, and a big part of that is his love life. So, my favorite romance in all of comics has to be Thanos and Death. Okay, it’s more of an obsessive and unrequited love than an actual romance, but it’s a story that I’ve followed for most of my comics reading life, and one I still find completely fascinating. To want the approval and affection of someone so much that you would seek godhood and attempt to wipe entire portions of the galaxy out of existence? That’s an epic love story. What can I say, I’ve always been a fan of the bad guys just as much (or more) than the good guys.

Tim Durkee: Even though it is not as popular as his first fling with the human Lois Lane, I enjoy the chemistry between Superman and Wonder Woman. I was first introduced to their relationship with the Kingdom Come miniseries, an Elseworlds tale. That is a story that does not take place in the current time frame of stories in the DC Universe. I’m not sure if he was seeing the Amazon on the side and decided to go full-time after Lois Lane’s death, sorry for the spoiler. They both are also an item in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight universe. More spoilers: Superman and WW have a child together and another on the way. The impression is that there was still a relationship between Clark and Lois before Lois’s death. I can understand Lois being all gaga over the Man of Steel, I just can’t see him seeing any interest in her, so having him with the most powerful woman in the DCU makes more sense to me. Now, the new 52 universe has them together, so I’m told. I have read some reviews about them together. Some love hate, more hate it. I am curious what direction the DCU films will take with the introduction of Wonder Woman.

Mike Sterling: I never really paid much attention to romance in comics when I was younger. Generally, that was for good reason; in most of the superhero comics, it wasn’t so much “romance” as “plot point” or “character description.” You know, “Lois is Superman’s girlfriend” or “Iris is Flash’s wife” or whatever. Love interests existed to be threatened by villains, or to be nosy about secret identities, or to be pined over, or whathaveyou. It was a technical point, not an emotional connection.

So, as will come as no surprise to most of you who are familiar with my online shenanigans, it was the romance that popped up in, of all places, Swamp Thing that caught me off guard.

Yes, Swamp Thing, the comic about a monster who fights other monsters while hangin’ out with pals who are related to monsters or are monsters themselves. That’s where a comic book romance finally hit home with me, and yeah yeah make your jokes, but it was one of the most totally out-of-nowhere-but-yeah-of-COURSE moments I’d ever read in a comic at that point. I’m talking about Saga of Swamp Thing #34 (March 1985) by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette and John Totleben, where Abby tells Swamp Thing of her feelings for him, exclaiming “how could you love me?” Swampy’s response: “Deeply…silently…and…for too many…years.”

That pair of awkward admissions between a couple of characters I’ve been reading about for so long…that was the sort of honest emotion that’s not present in the eternal running-in-place of Superman and Lois, or most other superhero books. Particularly for someone like me, who’d been invested in these characters and was suddenly blindsided by this step forward, a change in the status quo in a storytelling industry that doesn’t like changes in the status quo.

Naturally, the relationship was fuel for melodrama, as this is comics, after all. Abby getting up to some plant-lovin’ becoming fodder for tabloid journalists, losing her job as a result, etc. etc. – all part and parcel of the soap opera style of funnybook storytelling, but through everything, Swamp Thing and Abby felt like an actual, and oddly normal (or as normal as they could manage) couple.
It didn’t last, sadly. Now, a couple of Swamp Thing series and a line-wide reboot of the shared DC universe later, Swamp Thing and Abby's life together is no longer at the center of Swampy’s adventures. It's nice, though, to recall a time when I could be genuinely surprised at a turn of events in a comic book. And not the usual "THIS ISSUE - SOMEBODY DIES!“ type of nonsense that’s no longer really working anyway - but just a couple of characters that you’ve read about for several years, quietly and shyly admitting their feelings to each other.

Joe Gualtieri: Growing up, I was the weirdo in your group of comic-loving friends, the one with really weird taste. You see, I vastly preferred Cyclops (Scott Summers) to Wolverine.

As the kid in your class who literally would remind the teacher to give the class homework, I suspect this is part of why Scott Summers appealed to me, along with the hyper-competence. I suspect it’s also worth noting that my first X-title was X-Factor #65, and I started regularly reading with X-Men #1, so more than five years after the ugliness with Madelyne Pryor occurred, and a couple years after Pryor was firmly established as a clone of Jean Grey created by Sinister, so that controversy was essentially a settled matter when I began reading. So I was Cyclops fan, and I was really into his relationship with Jean Grey. When John Byrne and Fabian Nicieza teased an affair with Psylocke, I didn’t take it seriously as storyline (nor, rereading those issues, should I have. There’s nothing there, really). Years later though, when Stephen T. Seagle hinted at real cracks in their relationship, I was apoplectic, and wanted him off the comic, which happened not long after, and after a few terrible issue by Alan Davis, I dropped the X-Men comics for the first time in about eight years. I soon started buying them again, as Davis finally did “The Twelve”, a story the X-books had teased since the late 80s. That arc ended with Cyclops apparently dying after being possessed by the soul of Apocalypse (this is all actually relevant). That was basically it for Davis, as Chris Claremont returned to the X-title for a disastrous run both creatively and n terms of sales. Marvel’s Editor in Chief Bob Harras was basically fired over it, he was replaced by Joe Quesada, who brought in Grant Morrison to revitalize the X-franchise. Oh, and Scott Summers returned from the dead prior to Morrison’s run starting in New X-Men #114.

Morrison’s run infamously begins with the line, “Wolverine. You can probably stop doing that now” foreshadowing how the series would focus on the idea of change and nowhere would Morrison affect more change than in the character of Cyclops. Following his resurrection, Summers’s marriage to Jean Grey is in tatters, the two not having touched each other for five months. Cue Emma Frost joining the team. She almost immediately hits on  Summers, and Morrison leaves the result of her come-on ambiguous at first. Gradually, it’s revealed that the pair involved, but only psychically, as a sort of sexual therapy for Cyclops. Jean Grey-Summers learns about it at the end of “Riot at Xaviers”, and the fallout carries into the first part of “Murder at the Mansion”. To Jean, the affair is just as real even if it’s happening on the psychic plane, and it soon turns out that despite her detached demeanor, Frost has real feelings for Summers. The reveal comes on one of my all-time favorite pages (drawn by Phil Jimenez) as she break down in Wolverine’s arms, the panel layout narrows until she has to ask, “Why did I have to fall in love with Scott Bloody Summers?”

The relationship hits the back-burner for the series from there until the final arc, “Here Comes Tomorrow” (the title an allusion to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake), a new take on “Days of Future Past” where the key moment is Summers walking away from Frost at Grey’s grave (she died at the end of the previous arc). Jean Grey, in a superhero afterlife, heals reality, urging “Live. Scott.” Which prompts him to embrace Frost, after answering her question, “Don’t you want to inherit the Earth” with “I… yes.” The “yes” and scenario reads as a gender-flipped allusion to Molly Blooms long soliloquy that closes Joyce’s Ulysses:

[…]how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

As the Blooms do not have a perfect relationship, but love each other, the allusion suggests that rather than the story-book, “perfect” romance of Scott Summers and Jean Grey, Summers and Emma Frost will have a more realistic and messier relationship. Subsequent comics certainly bore this out and while the relationship seems to have run its course (plus Cyclops is dead again), the beginnings of their relationship make it my favorite in comics.

Whatever Happened to the Man of Miracles?

“As it transpired, I was quite touched: They made a bonfire on the wastelands that was once Trafalgar Square and on it heaped their comic books, their films and novels filled with horror, science fiction, fantasy, and as it burned they cheered; cheered as the curling, burning pages fluttered up into the night; cheered to be done with time when wonder was a sad and wretched thing made only out of paper, out of celluloid.”

from Miracleman #16 (December, 1989)

Alan Moore ended the era of the superman. He first did it in 1986 when he sent the Superman of Siegel and Shuster off into the realms of memory with the two-part “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” in Superman #423 and Action Comics #583, almost immediately following DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths which reset the DC universe and marked a clear departure from the old DC Comics. In that story, the Superman of the Golden, Silver and Bronze age is given one last adventure as all of those corny, aged villains come back, more bloodthirsty than ever. It’s one last remembrance of friends and foes before John Byrne reimagines the character into something not quite as magical. And then Moore finally ended the idea of a superheroic nirvana with the destruction and resurrection of London in Miracleman #15 (Nov 1988) and #16 (Dec 1989.) That conclusion of his “Olympus” arc accuses DC and Marvel Comics of every atrocity that allowed to happen within the pages of their comics and blithely ignored. Sure it was all imaginary stories but did that make them any less real?

Miracleman is such a product of its time that when Marvel Comics recently reprinted the long-out-of-print comics, it was basically ignored. It was like you could almost hear fandom’s collective yawn of “been there, done that.” After all, the Alan Moore of the mid-late 1980s directly influenced the tenor of comics for at least 10 years, that is if the strong reach of Moore isn’t still very active in the most mainstream of superhero comics today. Geoff Johns has spent a career trying to rewrite Moore so the general direction of DC is haunted by the ghost of Moore. Moore and Frank Miller wrote the textbook on superhero deconstruction that’s still used by the likes of Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar.

For Moore, that legacy is mostly cemented by Watchmen, his mic drop moment in superhero comic books. But Miracleman both predates and postdates Watchmen, begun as a serial in the British Warrior magazine in April 1982 before wrapping up over seven years later as a semi-monthly Eclipse Comics publication. If “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” was Moore’s gently rocking the Superman myth to a gentle and unending slumber, Miracleman counted off every sin of the superhero and laid them all down at the superman’s feet.

As Moore progresses through the Miracleman story, he begins it by wondering what a C.C. Beck Billy Batson character might be like if they suddenly found themselves in 1980s Britain with the power of a god? Middle-aged Mike Moran is a bit overweight, probably overworked, and wakes up from dreams of flying through space with pounding headaches. Rediscovering his magic word, “Kimota!” he becomes a blonde, chiseled god. Even his thinking is so much clearer that it’s like he’s a different person. From finding his maker, his “father,” to discovering others like himself, Miracleman’s story is about him becoming something more than human. He’s not just the next evolutionary step; he’s the next one thousand steps.

Moore and his various artists’ stories are about how a god operates first as a superhero and then as a man. But the twist isn’t that the god learns any real lesson. In the end, Miracleman accepts his godhood, his place above humanity and sets to reign from on high in his new Olympus. For all of the sins of the superhero, Moore judges them to be apart from humanity and unanswerable to them. This isn’t praise of the superhero; it’s a condemnation of them.

It’s odd that in all of Moore’s superhero work, the one character he remains somewhat sympathetic to is Superman. “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” gives Superman and Clark Kent the sendoff that they deserve. The story, drawn by Curt Swan, with inks by George Perez and Kurt Schaffenberger, sees the future in which these childish characters become more “grim and gritty,” more homicidal. The story is a mercy killing as much as anything else, protecting the original Superman from what comics would become in the late 1980s and 1990s. The irony is that this is the future that Moore himself created primarily in Watchmen. “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” serves as an apology for Watchmen but it also serves to protect the story of Superman, no matter what may happen to the characters afterwards.

In Miracleman, particularly in the final “Olympus” storyline (issues 11-16), Moore doesn’t show the character the same kindness. He’s far from being protective of Mike Moran, his wife, his daughter or any of the other heroes or villains introduced in the story. His Miracleman story shows a god remembering who he is and then taking his place among a pantheon. London and humanity are collateral damage in this world where middle-aged men and children wear the bodies of gods. Or are the gods wearing the bodies of middle-aged men and children and then discarding them in favor of their godhood? The damage done is both emotional and physical. The destruction of Liz Moran is no less frightening than the desolation of London.

It’s almost funny how much DC’s movies look like they’re embracing the ideas of Alan Moore’s Miracleman while Marvel chooses to ignore them.  The idea of cities falling out of the sky is commonplace in Marvel’s movie kingdom while DC’s The Man of Steel visually embraces parts of Moore’s “Olympus” storyline.  The final battle between Zod and Superman in Zack Snyder’s film looks an awful lot like John Totleben’s scenes of chaos and destruction.  But Snyder in that movie didn’t follow up on the consequences of the fight the same way that Moore did in his final issue. Once again, it’s the wrong lessons of an Alan Moore story applied to one of those future iterations of the Superman that Moore tried to spare the character of back in “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”

Alan Moore’s Miracleman still remains one of the great superhero comics. But what once looked like the celebration of the superman now looks like its condemnation. John Totleben, the final artist in Moore’s run, ends the story with Miracleman in a military dress-style version of his own costume, sitting in the heights of Olympus, sipping on a glass of wine and looking down on mankind. It’s not a protective gaze of the character but more a gaze that puts Miracleman and mankind in their places, one sitting high above the other. “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” ends with a wink and a nod to the reader, letting them in on the secret of the way that Moore saved Superman. Miracleman: Olympus ends with a warning about placing these characters to high on a pedestal.

And much like what we all took away from Watchmen, the lessons of Miracleman fell on deaf ears.

I miss the Silver Age Superman to this day.

– Scott Cederlund

Earlier today, I posted something about Alan Moore’s forthcoming novel Jerusalem. I titled it, “What is Alan Moore’s Jerusalem About?” Judging by the Tumblr notes, it’s one of the more popular posts on this site in some time.

In a sarcastic response to my post on Facebook, someone whose opinion I usually respect replied “I bet it’s about rape.” This is a common complaint about Moore’s work, because it often features incidents of violent sexual assault, and I wanted to address it.

No Alan Moore work that I am aware of has ever been ‘about’ rape, any more than Citizen Kane is ‘about’ running a newspaper or Synecdoche, NY is about producing a play. As Roger Ebert was fond of noting, it isn’t important what a story is about, what matters is “how it is about it.” How the telling of the story reflects our lives and experiences, and what emotions it evokes.

Many of Alan Moore’s stories have rape or violent sexual incidents in them, as indeed, many lives have such tragedies befall them. What matters most of all isn’t that his stories feature rape, or how many, or why. What matters is that he has never, ever depicted rape as anything other than an horrific event, as indeed it is in real life. Such incidents are sometimes key to a given story, sometimes they are one of the many events that occur in the lives of his characters. Rape is something that happens in the world, all too often. Should one of the best writers alive and working today not write about it? Would that other writers, and other people, were so committed to a realistic depiction of the truth about one of the worst things that can happen to a human being.

I know easily a dozen people in my life that have been the victims of rape or sexual abuse, and indeed, I had an abusive childhood myself, although not sexual abuse. I take it very seriously, and I believe Alan Moore does too. I don’t think he thinks it’s funny, and I don’t think it’s a part of his work for facetious or cynical reasons. I do think he intends to provoke thought, and in the case of Miracleman, I think he was, in his clumsy and then-primitive way, trying to empower abuse victims. His more recent works, particularly Lost Girls and Voice of the Fire, have been far more confident and effective in addressing the subject.

I hope this site attracts readers who are smart enough not to join the crowd of Moore-haters that latch on to any easy slur they can aim at him in the hopes of taking him down a peg. Moore is very often the subject of insults and derision in the comics community because he has been so critical of its unfair and legally questionable practices for so many years now. It would be hyperbole to say Moore has been raped by the comics industry, but it is certainly worth noting that his trust has been abused, and that he understands what it feels like to be violated. I think that understanding comes through in his work in a powerful way, even if it does provide weak-tea ammunition to those who wish to diminish his standing as a writer.

– Alan David Doane

Photo by Mitch Jenkins

Alan Moore’s new prose novel Jerusalem has long been in the works, and now we know when it will be released: September, 2016. Less than a year from now, we will once again enter the mind of Alan Moore through language alone, as we did through his masterful first novel The Voice of the Fire (available from Top Shelf Productions).

Gosh London has published Moore’s promotional blurb for Jerusalem, and it sounds like readers are in for more of a mind-blowing experience than even Voice of the Fire provided:

In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England’s Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap tower blocks. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district’s narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes and derelicts a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrol-coloured puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them. Fiends last mentioned in the Book of Tobit wait in urine-scented stairwells, the delinquent spectres of unlucky children undermine a century with tunnels, and in upstairs parlours labourers with golden blood reduce fate to a snooker tournament.   

Disappeared lanes yield their own voices, built from lost words and forgotten dialect, to speak their broken legends and recount their startling genealogies, family histories of shame and madness and the marvellous. There is a conversation in the thunderstruck dome of St. Paul’s cathedral, childbirth on the cobblestones of Lambeth Walk, an estranged couple sitting all night on the cold steps of a Gothic church-front, and an infant choking on a cough drop for eleven chapters. An art exhibition is in preparation, and above the world a naked old man and a beautiful dead baby race along the Attics of the Breath towards the heat death of the universe.

An opulent mythology for those without a pot to piss in, through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth and poverty; of Africa, and hymns, and our threadbare millennium. They discuss English as a visionary language from John Bunyan to James Joyce, hold forth on the illusion of mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon the meanest slum as Blake’s eternal holy city. Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its scope, this is the tale of everything, told from a vanished gutter.

1. Mike Mignola’s work.  Particularly Hellboy’s depiction of the Ogdru Jahad, but the Lovecraftian unnameable, unspeakable horrors permeate through much of his work, including:

2. The Doom That Came To Gotham.  Still one of my favourite Elseworlds stories and a mash up of Batman and Lovecraft.

3. The disturbing fishman rape in Alan Moore’s Neonomicon.

4. Ben Templesmith.  Just in general.  When I think of Lovecraftian unnameable things, at least one image is a bunch of tentacles from Templesmith.

5. Atomic Robo battling HP Lovecraft after he was taken over by an interdimensional tentacle monster.

BONUS: Before Watchmen.  It just should not be, not that it has any ties to Lovecraft.

Note from ADD: I received an email from a reader who asked not to be named, in response to my comments in this week’s TWC Question Time regarding whether Alan Moore is still relevant. Here first is my take on the question, followed by the email I received.

Alan Moore is still relevant to me, as a reader. In fact, the only comic book I currently have my comic shop hold for me is Providence, his current 12-issue miniseries with artist Jacen Burrows that is exploring the works of H.P. Lovecraft in ways both delightful and surprising even for someone who has been reading and thinking about Lovecraft for close to 40 years (me). Some of my favourite comics of the past few years have been Moore’s collaborations with artist Kevin O’Neill on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen projects like Century, which is the third volume of the ongoing saga of their Victorian superhero team, and the spinoff Nemo graphic novels, recently collected in a gorgeous slipcased edition from publisher Top Shelf Productions.

Moore is still relevant to me as a comics critic, because every time I read a comic book I can’t help but wonder why it exists in a world where it seems like so many great works have already been done. I always ask myself “Is this good enough and interesting enough to join the pantheon of great comics works?” So I might compare some new work in some way to that of greats like Krigstein, Kirby, Pekar, Ditko, Crumb, or Moore. Usually new comics fail to meet those standards, but what a delight when they do. What a delight when they even come close.

Moore is still relevant to me as an observer of the comics industry, because he created Watchmen, which even I think is somewhat overrated but which undeniably changed the entire industry forever from practically the moment it debuted. I look at how DC has spent decades first using Moore, then cheating him, then strip-mining his creative legacy for whatever else could be wrung from its rancid corpse (made rancid by their policies and misdeeds), and I think “How can anyone work for DC? If they will fuck Alan Moore, and not just once but again and again for decades, who won’t they fuck over?” And sadly, that’s true to a lesser extent of pretty much any corporate comics company: Stan Lee himself had to sue Marvel to force them to live up to their promises, don’t forget. So I see whoever the Flavour of the Year is, swelled up with pride at their great partnership with this or that company, and I wonder how long it will be before they, too, get the Alan Moore treatment. DC has even managed to turn many of the fans themselves against him, because who has time to actually think about the facts or consider context before deciding whether to side with a great writer who is just a human being or a megacorporation with the power to chew up and spit out anyone it wants, and which does so with alarming regularity?

As a talent, Moore gave me some of the greatest comics I ever read, from Swamp Thing to Miracleman to Top 10 and Promethea and LOEG and From Hell and the list goes on, and on, and on. The fans largely hate him because they can’t understand why he is so grumpy about getting screwed over by the industry. I love him because he gave me so many great comics that I cherish and re-read frequently, because his work never fails to challenge me and expand my mind, and because I will always, always, always side with a human being who hasn’t harmed me over a giant corporation that has spent nearly a century harming and cheating those whose imaginations and skills allowed it to ever even exist in the first place.

The incredible irony to me, as a reader, is that Moore’s best work isn’t even comics. His novel The Voice of the Fire is among the most extraordinary works I have ever read, and I have read it now nearly half a dozen times. I await his next novel, Jerusalem, with great anticipation. And I will buy it with the money I might have spent on comics, if they were still capable of entertaining and challenging me in the same way Alan Moore can do with nothing more than his imagination and the power of the written word.

And now, reader JK’s response to my comments:

Just wanted to send on a note saying how much I appreciated your answer on the question of Moore – it’s effectively the most succinct, accurate and poignant summation of the situation as I’ve yet seen. And of course for anyone who cares about comics – which I guess I still do – the treatment of Moore is pretty much one of the five big questions about the medium.

(Unfortunately, the other four questions are pretty much the same with the proper nouns changed.)

Also thank god for your summation of his novel [The Voice of the Fire] – it’s a masterwork.

– JK

We conclude our month long tribute to Alan Moore by asking, is he still relevant in 2015?

Tim Durkee: I feel guilty about even participating in this week’s question, since I am not familiar with much of Moore’s recent work. Then I figured I could answer this question just by how the majority of retailers that I have seen, hell, it’s all of them (what they carry and how or do they promote his material when released) and do consumers care for what is being published. My naked eye sees that Alan Moore is not relevant in 2015. I don’t think I have seen one piece of advertisement in any comic store (aside from projects based on his creations, that he had nothing to do with) making me aware that Alan Moore has a new release… ever. I have a feeling if he was to make an appearance at a store the owner would sell, “Come meet comic book legend Alan Moore this Saturday. The co-creator of Watchmen will be here from noon to 3pm.” Moore does his own thing with small publishers, so he will not be seen as relevant to the comic book fan. I’m sure any new material will have to be special ordered because the store owner does not see any sense in carrying it when his customer wants the super mega crossover that will change the universe forever first issue. He is still relevant to his fans? Of course. To the comic book fan in 2015? No.

Mike Sterling: So the question this time ‘round is if Alan Moore is still relevant to comics, now, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Fifteen? Yes, he blew all our American minds when he dropped into our funnybooks back in the early '80s, after presumably blowing British minds in 2000 A.D. over there in Jolly Ol’. He reinvented horror comics using a character on the verge of cancellation. He wrote a superhero graphic novel that was a masterpiece of worldbuilding. He wrote a Joker story that he considers one of his lesser works but, decades later, still influences both comic creators and filmmakers in their interpretations of the character. He interwove an enormous number of preexisting fictional characters into a new interconnected narrative, and made it work as an entertaining story rather than a tedious intellectual exercise. He wrote a meticulously researched and terrifying Jack the Ripper yarn. He reinvented and revamped characters. He created new fun, lighthearted comics to counter his own involvement in the “grim 'n’ gritty” trend. He explored his belief systems, he parodied the art form, he challenged his readers, and he wrote and he wrote and he wrote.

But really, what has he done for us lately?

Yes, I’m being facetious. Alan Moore is still an active creator doing interesting work that attracts notice and discussion in his medium of choice. That alone makes him still relevant. And even if he wasn’t still working in the industry, his influence would still be felt. What was DC’s Vertigo imprint initially if not a sort of four-color Alan Moore cargo cult, hoping to recapture something like the excitement, the awareness that this is something  different, regarding Moore's writing but hopefully without the part where they alienate the talent into taking its toys elsewhere? How many of Moore’s one-shot ideas from various Green Lantern shorts are still being exploited in Green Lantern comics today? And how often is the answer "Watchmen!“ when the call goes out for the most outstanding achievements in the field?

Certainly a lot of that is indicative of the constant self-cannibalism of the comics industry, always looking back at its peaks and trying to scale them again, eventually wearing them down to tiny hills. But Moore’s writing is a pinnacle of the art form for a reason, and it’s no wonder that it casts as long of a shadow as it does. The vast majority of creative output in any field eventually falls to the wayside, forgotten, leaving only the giants who can endure the passage of time and the frailty of human memory to remain as examples. And even if most of Moore’s work fades away, if the comics medium survives at all, rest assured folks will still be talking about, or ripping off, Watchmen at the very least.

In an odd sort of way, even the idea that someone wants to ask "Is Moore still relevant?” shows that Moore is still relevant, that his work is still worthy of study. Who would ask, if he didn’t matter at all?

Alan David Doane: Alan Moore is still relevant to me, as a reader. In fact, the only comic book I currently have my comic shop hold for me is Providence, his current 12-issue miniseries with artist Jacen Burrows that is exploring the works of H.P. Lovecraft in ways both delightful and surprising even for someone who has been reading and thinking about Lovecraft for close to 40 years (me). Some of my favourite comics of the past few years have been Moore’s collaborations with artist Kevin O’Neill on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen projects like Century, which is the third volume of the ongoing saga of their Victorian superhero team, and the spinoff Nemo graphic novels, recently collected in a gorgeous slipcased edition from publisher Top Shelf Productions.

Moore is still relevant to me as a comics critic, because every time I read a comic book I can’t help but wonder why it exists in a world where it seems like so many great works have already been done. I always ask myself “Is this good enough and interesting enough to join the pantheon of great comics works?” So I might compare some new work in some way to that of greats like Krigstein, Kirby, Pekar, Ditko, Crumb, or Moore. Usually new comics fail to meet those standards, but what a delight when they do. What a delight when they even come close.

Moore is still relevant to me as an observer of the comics industry, because he created Watchmen, which even I think is somewhat overrated but which undeniably changed the entire industry forever from practically the moment it debuted. I look at how DC has spent decades first using Moore, then cheating him, then strip-mining his creative legacy for whatever else could be wrung from its rancid corpse (made rancid by their policies and misdeeds), and I think “How can anyone work for DC? If they will fuck Alan Moore, and not just once but again and again for decades, who won’t they fuck over?” And sadly, that’s true to a lesser extent of pretty much any corporate comics company: Stan Lee himself had to sue Marvel to force them to live up to their promises, don’t forget. So I see whoever the Flavour of the Year is, swelled up with pride at their great partnership with this or that company, and I wonder how long it will be before they, too, get the Alan Moore treatment. DC has even managed to turn many of the fans themselves against him, because who has time to actually think about the facts or consider context before deciding whether to side with a great writer who is just a human being or a megacorporation with the power to chew up and spit out anyone it wants, and which does so with alarming regularity?

As a talent, Moore gave me some of the greatest comics I ever read, from Swamp Thing to Miracleman to Top 10 and Promethea and LOEG and From Hell and the list goes on, and on, and on. The fans largely hate him because they can’t understand why he is so grumpy about getting screwed over by the industry. I love him because he gave me so many great comics that I cherish and re-read frequently, because his work never fails to challenge me and expand my mind, and because I will always, always, always side with a human being who hasn’t harmed me over a giant corporation that has spent nearly a century harming and cheating those whose imaginations and skills allowed it to ever even exist in the first place.

The incredible irony to me, as a reader, is that Moore’s best work isn’t even comics. His novel The Voice of the Fire is among the most extraordinary works I have ever read, and I have read it now nearly half a dozen times. I await his next novel, Jerusalem, with great anticipation. And I will buy it with the money I might have spent on comics, if they were still capable of entertaining and challenging me in the same way Alan Moore can do with nothing more than his imagination and the power of the written word.

As we continue our tribute to Alan Moore during his birthday month, this week we asked our QT contributors to name their favorite original Alan Moore character, other than John Constantine. Constantine was excluded from consideration to try and throw a spotlight on other, lesser known Moore originals.

Scott Cederlund: I think one of the main problems with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen may be that, depending on which character you focus in on, you come away with different and possibly misguided lessons of the book.

Focus too much on Dr. Manhattan and you can lose touch with the humanity of the world.  Spend too much time on the Comedian and everything becomes a tragic joke. Ozymandias could make you think everything that is horrible and ugly in the world may also be strangely transformative. (Okay, maybe that last lesson isn’t so misguided and more time and ink should be spent on the possible moral repercussions of Ozymandias’s actions.) The biggest lessons though that we seem to have learned from Watchmen are Rorschach’s violent lessons, and even there we focused too much on the means rather than the causes or the questions.

Among these gods and madmen sits the simple people, Dan Drieberg and Laurie Juspeczyk. Here are the people who aren’t touched by a god in any type of way. They’re not super powerful or deluded with a moral superiority that most of the so-called “heroes” of the story possess.  Sure, they are superheroes in a very basic way, but the sense that Moore and Gibbons build around them is they were superheroes once upon a time like some of us were punks, stoners or goths.  It was something that they once did and then they grew up.  For the longest time in my readings of Watchmen, they were also the most unexciting characters of the book. They were what I had to wade through to get to Mars or a prison break or an arctic Xanadu.  They were the distraction from the misidentified coolness of Rorschach.

But as I’ve gotten older, Watchmen has become Dan’s story and that’s a bit of why the book gets more absurd as I get older but it also gets more humane. Now in ways that I couldn’t before, I see Watchmen as a story about people trying to find their way through a crazy world. It’s the silliness of the plot and Ozymandias’s almost mustache-twirling machinations that continually compound the unreality of Watchmen. The EC Comics dystopian vibe is practically infantile in 2015 as we watch the nightly news and see these type of actions performed on a regular basis in the name of religion.

Watchmen is a comic filled with madmen, vigilantes and terrorists. And yet within that storm of absurdity rests two of Alan Moore’s most human characters and maybe even Laurie’s backstory stretches the boundaries of that thought too far. But in Dan, Moore builds a character who is searching for some kind of certainty in this uncertain world. The memorable image of him isn’t an action shot or even anything related to the threats that are facing the heroes of this world. The most memorable image is after Rorschach accuses him of quitting, Dan sitting alone in his basement, staring at the Comedian’s bloodstained smiley face button as his unused costume hangs in a locker just a foot away from him. It’s easy to read in that moment that Dan is a loser, out of touch with the superhero he should be.

Dan’s story is so much more than that. He’s the everyman of the comic. It’s not a sexy part but it is an integral part to it. Dan is the solid rock that the story is built on. He doesn’t need an origin story like everyone else gets because it’s important that he doesn’t have much of a story. He doesn’t have a horrible childhood or a traumatic accident that forever alters his destiny. He doesn’t even have a point of view other than he wants to do what is right and good. There’s no moment when an owl flew into his study and he said, “I shall become like an owl.” He just likes birds and thought he could do some good as one of these superheroes.

One of the biggest problems with Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie is that as he tried to remain so faithful to the text, he completely misinterpreted Dan Drieberg. The way that Moore and GIbbons portray him is slightly schlubby. He’s let himself go a bit since his crime fighting days. When he and Laurie get attacked in an alley, his can still fight but he’s terribly winded at the end because he’s out of shape. In the movie, as soon as he puts on his costume he’s back in fighting shape, fighting and moving more like Batman than the Dan in the comics ever did. The Dan of the comics isn’t a superhero. He was one a long time ago but now he’s just trying to figure out his place in a mad world.  

And that’s what my 30 year old reading of Watchmen is. How I read it in 1986 is very different than how I’ll read it in 2016. Back then, Dan was the lamest character of the book. He didn’t do anything cool. But now it’s the rest of the book that’s kind of dumb in a comic booky way but in Dan I find a character who looks at the world as confused and unsure as I am.  He may find that he feels alive only when he’s looking for a thrill and excitement but that’s a fleeting memory of his own immaturity. That excitement is as fleeting as the safety any of us may feel in the world today. Even at the end of the world, he lives in a moment of Nostalgia that runs metaphorically throughout the book.

Joe Gualtieri: I made this question even harder for myself by refusing to consider anyone from Watchmen (aside from Veidt, they’re too similar to the Charlton originals) or From Hell (since most of the characters are based on real people). Evey Hammond and V from V for Vendetta are probably Moore’s best original characters with my self-imposed restrictions, but favorite? There are several characters from Top 10 who are just amazing.

Detective Synaethesia Jackson is amazing. As her name states, she possesses synesthesia, but in Top 10, rather than being a hindrance, it gives her a near-supernatural ability to solve cases. I could read a whole series about her. Unfortunately, the only times Moore lets the reader behind her professional façade is to discusses her love life, first her former involvement with Smax and then to reveal her current crush on her married partner. So she’s out.

Joe Pi only appears in two issues of Top 10, but makes a tremendous impression. The scene were Pi convinces the anti-robot Shockheaded Pete that he is sexually molesting Pi’s vending machine cousin might be the funniest scene Moore’s ever written. While Pete is the worst about it, most of the cast displays some level of anti-robot prejudice, particularly in terms of how they expect him to react to human emotions, yet at every turn he impresses with how empathetic he apparently is. In terms of actual police work, Pi comes across as hyper-competent and able to do the job of both an officer, a forensic pathologist, and even has his own built-in body camera. The result of this, however, is that Joe Pi actually seems to prove Shockheaded Pete correct—a precinct of nothing but Joe Pis would be as good or better than the cast the reader grew to love over the ten issues prior to Pi showing up.

And then there’s the more sinister side of Joe Pi. One would hope that robot cops would be more honest and law-abiding than the worst of the real ones, but Joe Pi is not. The body camera and recording device I mentioned earlier? There is nothing prohibiting him from shutting them off whenever he wants. The series presents his decision to do so when a fellow offer talks about killing a pedophile is presented as one of those moments of surprising empathy, but it is quite disturbing, if thought about. And then Pi proceeds to talk that same pedophile into committing suicide, rather than going to trial and getting released after a few years. Moore never shied away from displaying the warts of his police cast in the issues prior to Pi’s arrival, but none of the street-level police do anything on the level Pi does, and it functionally darkens the series for the reader in a way similar to what happens to Swamp Thing in “The Anatomy Lesson.” That Moore was able to pack so much into the character in just two issues makes him my favorite original Moore character. Other than Constantine, of course.

Mike Sterling; So the thing about picking a favorite Alan Moore-created character is that he created a whole bunch of great characters for 2000 A.D., some serious (Halo Jones, Skizz) to the bizarrely peculiar (Abelard Snazz), all of which I enjoyed, but my favorites may be D.R. and Quinch.

Being North America-bound as I am, I didn’t encounter this pair of extraterrestrial delinquents until they were reprinted stateside in the color 2000 A.D. comic book series in the 1980s. The scrawny, violent D.R. and his oversized stoic partner Quinch were introduced in a story that had them traveling through, and seriously interfering with, Earth’s history, and things went hilariously downhill from there in the subsequent all-too-short series of shorts that were to follow. Drafted into military service, becoming movie moguls, D.R. falling in love…wonderful set-ups for a great series of anarchic calamities, and it was all beautifully and expressively illustrated by Alan Davis.

It wasn’t until much later that I found out D.R. and Quinch may have been inspired by the similarly anti-social O.C. and Stiggs, who had appeared in National Lampoon. Despite this, I still have a soft spot, in my heart as well as in my head, for these alien troublemakers and their brief funnybook lives. Thanks to them, the phrase “Mind the oranges, Marlon!” will forever be fixed in my memories.

This week marked the birthday of Alan Moore, on November 18th. To celebrate the birth of The Magus, TWC will be running themed Question Times for the rest of the month alongside a few Moore-specific articles.

This week’s question – what do you think is Moore’s most neglected work?

Rob Vollmar: Talking about Alan Moore’s most neglected work is kind of like trying to identify people’s least favorite Beatles album, but for me, it’s got to be The Birth Caul. This spoken word piece, later adapted for comics by From Hell collaborator Eddie Campbell, strikes chords not often found in Moore’s other work and, not surprisingly, it hits them masterfully.

Unabashedly autobiographical, Moore uses the occasion of his mother’s death to superimpose a map of his own life over that of the audience (and the reader) with just enough universal themes to make it feel both intensely personal and profound on a broader scale. Here, Moore keeps his occult themes (which dominate his other spoken word pieces) beneath the surface but performs something of a magick trick in the work itself by telling the story in reverse, beginning in the middle age and looping backwards in each succeeding section until he arrives at the beginning…which in this case is prior to conception. Though The Birth Caul is a very human work, it’s also intellectually ambitious, using memoir as a vehicle for exploring challenging ideas - how language shapes perception, how geography dictates destiny, how the tiniest causes can avalanche into the most devastating effects. The emotions in this piece are so raw and, for my dollar, it puts all of the look-I-spank-it-into-a-sock autobiographical comics of the 1990s Western Hemisphere to utter shame. The recording catches moments where Moore is on the absolute verge of tears and, man, it’s like watching Aslan die..

The Campbell adaptation is the perfect companion to the audio recording and helps to make the work more accessible by blending in visual components that bring a generational identity to some of the things that Moore is saying about his own life. Campbell produced the piece immediately after “The Dance of the Gull Catchers” (the epilog to From Hell) and the ten years he’d spent interpreting from inside of Moore’s words prior sing from every panel. Though rendered in black and white, Campbell throws in everything he’s got to capture the dizzying range of ideas from painted brush strokes to collage. I hold Campbell’s work in very high esteem and I’m pretty sure this is the most ambitious piece he ever attempted and possibly the most impressive of his career.

So, yeah, if you liked From Hell and don’t mind having your guts torn out, by all means, read The Birth Caul. It’s kind of a big deal. The CD features music from David J. (Bauhaus, Love and Rockets) and frequent Moore collaborator Tim Perkins. Unfortunately, it is often challenging to find and I don’t think it’s streaming legally anywhere but the whole package is best consumed in tandem like an old-school book and record set. The basic sum effect is a lot like what’s offered in this incomplete video sequence bringing the two together.

David Allen Jones: Alan Moore’s most neglected work?

Well, while on a scale of “neglect” it doesn’t necessarily seem more ignored than early works like sadly unfinished Ballad of Halo Jones or more recent ones like his Lovecraft homage Providence, the series I have in mind has not really been examined as much as I would have hoped; it seemed to be written from a very personal point of view and was staggering in the scope of its ambitions, and would seem to provide endless fodder for discussion and speculation. Perhaps it’s because of the lesser regard that Mr. Moore seems to be held in among readers of a certain age and younger; his public behavior over the last ten  years, generally speaking, has been erratic at best and offputting at worst. He has seemed to withdraw and lay low for generous stretches of time, only sporadically presenting new works that sell to a select few acolytes and not a wide audience. The name Alan Moore now perhaps suggests “’90s writer of Watchmen and V for Vendetta” and little else for today’s comics buyers.

The series I’m thinking of? The America’s Best Comics series Promethea.

Initially presented as a Wonder Woman pastiche and tricked out with a lot of gentle superhero satire, this series evolved into far, far more; it turned into an examination of Moore’s (mostly) occult beliefs about the nature of fantasy vs. reality, magic(k) and religion, old reliable good vs. evil, life/death, sexuality and male/female gender roles…a huge cornucopia of concepts and notions and ideas that impressed jaded old non-believer me with the sheer imagination involved in the way he presented his convictions. While I cant say there weren’t times when it seemed that Moore was disappearing right up his magickal arse in the course of the narrative, he usually managed to bring it home in a satisfactory fashion. Of course, the remarkably detailed, equally imaginative and nuanced art by J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray, often in styles cleverly imitating well-known fine and genre artists, helped him visualize his concepts…but the mind of Moore was the driving wheel. It wasn’t even my favorite ABC series; that would be Top 10…but Promethea was right up there with Watchmen, Swamp Thing, and V in my estimation and I’m a little disappointed that it’s rarely mentioned in the comics discussions I see online and in print. Perhaps it was too sprawling, perhaps many aren’t comfortable with the questions it raised…but I think the best examination of this series has yet to be written.

Mike Sterling: Now, it’s hard to describe this particular Alan Moore work as being particularly “neglected” as such, as it was reprinted, but we’re approaching nearly thirty years since the books in question were in print, so I think it’s safe to refer to these as being among those Moore works that have been left behind. I’m talking about, of course, Maxwell The Magic Cat.

This was a series of four black and white staplebound books, measuring 8 ¼ by 11 inches, reprinting Alan Moore’s comic strip from The Northants Post. The strip ran about seven years, written and drawn by Moore under the homophonic pseudonym “Jill de Ray” (after a particularly nasty serial killer).

A lot of the strips were metatextual examinations of the very idea of a comic strip and its format, but the strip ran the gamut from simple sight gags, to real groaners of puns, to political humor, to outright absurdity (such a favorite sequence of mine, where a snake carries on a torrid affair with Maxwell’s tail). Occasionally…well, mostly…Moore’s artistic reach exceeded his grasp, but his gag-writing is solid and usually clever, and the general roughness of the art is just part of the charm. If the drawing were more polished, it just wouldn’t be Maxwell the Magic Cat.

Now, I’d originally bought volumes 1 through 3 as they were released, in the mid ’80s. I never saw volume 4 on the shelf, and at the time I just assumed it never came out. Eventually, I discovered that volume 4 had been released, but for some reason it appeared to have limited distribution. I don’t know if it actually did, or if it was just hard to find in my neck of the woods, or what the deal was, but several years of casual eBay and Amazon investigations seems to bear out my belief that the fourth book is the rarest of the volumes.

Luckily, a few years back at my previous place of employment a collection arrived that contained the Complete Maxwell the Magic Cat Set of Volumes One Through Four plus a protective folder, so at last my collection was complete. Given that even the initial three volumes weren’t so easy to find when they were brand new, all four are certainly obscure items in Moore’s bibliography nearly three decades on, and deserving of some sort of reissue. Maybe not Moore’s most important, ground-breaking, or significant work, but certainly a lot more laughs than The Killing Joke.

[APOLOGIA: this is a reworked post from my regular site…please forgive me if this bit of business is familiar to you.]

Joe Gualtieri: My pick for Moore’s most neglected work is a comic he did for Eclipse. No, not that one. Unlike Miracleman, Brought to Light: Shadowplay—the Secret Team is not currently in print. Commonly just known as Brought to Light, that book is actually a 60 page compilation and flipbook. One side consists of Flashpoint—the La Penca Bombing, which is an unvarnished examination of a press conference bombing with CIA involvement by Joyce Brabner and Thomas Yeates. It is a fine example of comics journalism, but it pales in comparison to Shadowplay.

Written by Moore and illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz, Shadowplay is arguably the second most important comic of Moore’s career. By 1989, he was the biggest thing in comics, all of his projects were ending or about to, his feud with DC would see Twilight fall apart. The initial chapters of From Hell would also appear this year, in the Taboo anthology, making Shadowplay the fulcrum of the switch from one phase of Moore’s career into the next.

As a story, Shadowplay is quite straightforward. The comic is told solidly from the reader’s point of the view, and the reader goes on a journey into the heart of darkness to meet the anthropomorphized embodiment of the CIA, which is naturally a humanoid eagle. The eagle details the messy, sordid history of the CIA, all the killings, drug-dealing, and other questionable acts. What makes Shadowplay so remarkable is how despite mainly being a 30 page info dump, it is never, ever boring. Moore’s voice for the eagle is remarkable, a perfect example of the arrogant, privileged thinking that led to the horrors he recounts as if they were rarely anything other than good times (so long as there was not a Democratic president). Sienkiewicz’s work here isn’t as innovative as the roughly contemporary Stray Toasters, but his versatility is perfect for the comic, as he blends the surrealism of the eagle narrator with many different styles of cartooning to depict the CIA’s various atrocities, ranging from abstract cartooning to infographics. The latter provided one of the more lasting legacies of the work. On page five, there is a chilling image of the eagle, wearing sunglasses and a bathing suit, atop a floating pool cushion. The pool is filled with blood, as the eagle explains, “Average body holds a gallon. Big swimming pools hold 20,000 gallons, so imagine a pool filled with blood.” Throughout the rest of the story, Moore and Sienkiewicz use the image as a motif to show how many people are killed in different CIA programs. Stanley Donwood credits the swimming pool of blood with inspiring part of the album artwork in Radiohead’s Kid A.

Shadowplay concludes with the reader running away from the eagle, outstretching a hand, and disappearing into the mist. Rereading it now, the sequence foreshadows the fantastic sequences in From Hell where Gull travels through time, hand similarly outstretched, connecting the major completed Moore work of the period back to its beginning. I say major completed Moore work, because Moore and Sienkiewicz would collaborate again on Big Numbers, and well, if you don’t know the story behind that, stay tuned.

Q: As October 31st approaches, how do you celebrate Halloween?

Alan Moore: You have to understand that I’m from an English, not to say a Northampton, working-class background, and that the way that we traditionally regarded Halloween over here before we had the America re-imagining of the phenomenon imported, was as a serious and ominous event that was part of the witches’ calendar. My grandmother, whom we lived with, was unwavering in her insistence that since this was a night in which malevolent and destructive supernatural forces were abroad and roaming freely, this was also a night when sensible people, particularly children, should stay indoors.

I feel, personally, that this was a properly respectful attitude to the ‘spirits of a place’ that accumulate, if only in that place’s legend and dream and imagination: these things are an important part of a place’s psychological reality, and I would actually prefer not to see them reduced to a fourteen year-old girl in a ‘sexy witch’ costume.

Still, each to their own, and I’ve no doubt I shall spend this Halloween handing out money to, hopefully, some of the neighbourhood’s younger children accompanied by their parents, as these are always very respectful and point out to the children that they are actually talking to a real warlock. And of course, if they’re not with their parents I can ritually sacrifice a couple of them to my deformed 2nd century snake-god. Then everybody’s happy.

69 other questions for The Magus at Good Reads.