I may have been technically dreaming, or technically awake, or somewhere in between. I was lying in bed this morning, and I remembered reading something I read somewhere where Alan Moore said something rude about superhero comics and their fans. And I thought, "This from someone who wrote a pornographic work about Wendy from
Peter Pan."
And then, thinking more about that, I thought maybe I shouldn't try and write the story I came up with last night, rooted in all the Narnia fic I have been reading, that was likely to say some unkind things about Prof. Lewis and sons of the Emperor-Beyond-The-Sea. Because it was
like something Alan Moore would do.So, that's today's post.
(Note: I have never actually read
Lost Girls, so I just went and looked at the Wikipedia page, not knowing really much about it. Oh good lord, it's worse than I feared. Dreadful, sad, unimaginative, dog-Freudian, "deconstructive" claptrap. His treatment of Cthulhu was better than this, and it was mostly rude for rudeness's sake. So for reference, I thought the above quote without knowing how
Lost Girls actually went, only that it had versions of a few children's book heroines, and sex in it.)
Well. That parenthetical is going to inform the rest of the post now.
You know, one thing I thought about doing to Narnia was having it all be a story that Lucy started believing and forming false memories from, but that pseudorealism's too uncomfortably close to the genre
Lost Girls, now, isn't it? I mean, it's not the same, it's simpler rather than crudely sexualized, but it is a little like? I was just thinking that rewriting Aslan is a fraud as well as a self-important dick was perhaps too Moore-ishly "deconstructionist."
Moore has done good stuff. And clever stuff. Even stuff worth learning from and trying to (and this is a horrible term here, but go with it for now) emulate. But he's gone to the "dark reimagining" well too often. It's become his trope.
I think looking at this as behavioral reinforcement explains a lot of it, and yet sadly not all of it. He was inordinately praised for his darkfic of
Marvelman, which led to work in America. Then he successfully reinvented
Swamp Thing (which was already horror, but he changed a major premise, so it was still "rethinking"), and gained even more fans. Then his attempt to ruin all the Charlton Action Heroes in a dark reimagining got redirected into
Watchmen--which was given a lot of critical acclaim because of the confluence of fans of superheroes and fans of grim pretension.
(So if he now regrets his 1980's "bad mood," and thinks superheroes ridiculous, what does it say about the fans of his
Watchmen and
Marvelman, and thus his reputation? Kicks the legs out from under it, I say.)
He then tried to darken up the Justice League and Marvel Family characters in something called "Twilight of the
Gods Superheroes." He'd been rewarded for this sort of thing before, and made lots of money at it, so that was where his imagination went now. But making some expy of an obscure knockoff superhero into a sexual pervert was OK with editors, doing it to Superman or the Big Red Cheese was not done, and he didn't grasp that. It was just too far.
And he ended up breaking ties with DC, ostensibly for other reasons. So he tried doing more serious, real-world-based work for a while, perhaps a bit shy of trying that trope. So we got
From Hell, and he started
Big Numbers, which fell apart (his artists quit, and one
destroyed his own artwork--so...that's a thing).
And then he found he could go back to his major trope, the one he will be remembered for despite the clever work of his youth: Trashing other people's characters. All he had to do was use characters in the public domain! So he produced
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I have read the first one. A few neat reinventions, but it was obvious to me that his Mr. Hyde was really more like the Hulk, not Stevenson's Mr. Hyde, and this was basically public domain superheroes in a lowest-common-denominator Alan Moore / Kevin O'Neill mode.
And then the little bitch whined that filmmakers would take "his" work--including
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which is all other people's characters, not even renamed expies!--and (gasp! shudder!)
change things. What a twat.
OK. Let's be clear. Moore has written some brilliant stuff.
The first Moore stories I read were some of his Green Lantern Corps stories (quite good in some cases, if a bit wacky) and his
Swamp Thing. His (I think they were his, but I won't swear to it) underwater vampires in
Swamp Thing gave me the heebie-jeebies for a long time.
I first became really aware of his name as a writer about the time of
Watchmen, I guess? I opened up the second issue to see a masked mystery-man raping one of his colleagues. I decided that was not for me, and I did not quite like Alan Moore.
I later read parts 2 & 3 of
The Ballad of Halo Jones (I don't think I ever ran across part 1) and it was neat. Lovely Ian Gibson art, trippy science fiction--it went dark and violent in places, yes, but it was imaginative.
Alan Moore enjoyed a reputation for a long time as, "
the literary writer in English-language comics." I myself hit a point where I decided that while I didn't like him personally, he was objectively at a level of skill beyond most comics writers I did like. (I would not make that claim now. I don't know exactly where that came from, actually. "Literary" and comics-good are different things, anyway.)
Well, other people have learned from his bag of tricks, and his head-and-shoulders-above quality was probably exaggerated anyway. And I am not a green adolescent, either. So his more recent stuff doesn't impress me at all now.
Alan Moore is one of those figures in comics, though. You can point to artists like Milt Caniff, Neal Adams, Arthur Adams, and Adam Hughes, and see how many imitators they gained. Moore is like that as a writer, to a scary degree. And I'm not sure that's even counting Jamie Delano, who is a little different animal I guess, but somehow got a career out of being hired by people who'd just lost Alan Moore. It's a pity that more people aren't getting the cleverness out there, though. Instead, we get Moore's dumb side: Dark "deconstructions" which are measurably stupider than the source material they are mining and fouling.
I'm not saying we needed Alan Moore, or that he was greatly seminal. A world without Moore would still have Harlan Ellison, Steve Gerber, Joe R. Lansdale--and perhaps a better known Jamie Delano. Weird horror would be doing just fine, and many of Moore's tropes already existed
somewhere. He just was the Big Name, without another very different writer to stand as a strong alternative, for a Long Time. And that is a shame, just as a generation of comics artists trying to be Adams knockoffs (either of them) would have, without some countervailing artistic influences, been an even bigger shame
than those generations actually were.
Anyway, when I call him, "the guy who created Axel Pressbutton," that's me being
less than vicious.
