A work as grand and various as that
Reviewing Jerusalem by Alan Moore, published by Knockabout in the UK and Liveright in the US. Let’s divide things arbitrarily into threes. If Alan Moore’s career is considered in the usual periods of early Moore, mid-Moore and late Moore, we’re clearly into the last one. The first has a mountain of work but a trilogy … Continue reading
Cover versions
It should be pretty clear from the history of this blog – Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, Alan Moore’s Marvelman, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the disgusted reaction to Before Watchmen before it even came out – that I’m an Alan Moore fan. Most readers of comics are, by default, Alan Moore fans. If you’re my … Continue reading
My own private League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
You’d obviously speculate. Back when the League was just a Victorian thing, when any possible 20th century was unconceived, when Allan and Mina has normal lifespans, I did. Along with other comics obsessives on a messageboard that began as a long postscript to Grant Morrison’s Invisibles, I wondered who would be members of a 1998 … Continue reading
Fiction germinates
Rereading The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Book III: Century, by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. You read the first two books of a series and they’re about the Justice Society: Superman and Hawkman and Starman and the Atom and all those guys. You get to know them. Then book three comes out and it’s about … Continue reading
The Alan Moore plagiarism scandal
The Alan Moore trolls – every comments section has one – have got their schtick pretty much down by now. He never created a character in his life. He doesn’t want other people doing Watchmen but he made Peter Pan’s Wendy do Alice in Wonderland. He supports Occupy wearing V masks which is hypocritical because … Continue reading
Kill all the superheroes
Rereading Captain Britain by Alan Moore and Alan Davis. In a way, we were quite lucky with Captain Britain. Okay, so he was an aristocrat given superpowers by Merlin at Stonehenge who wore a rampant lion over a Union Jack on his chest, but it could have been much worse. For example, this letter from … Continue reading
The view from Olympus
Rereading Miracleman Book Three by Alan Moore and John Totleben. Marvelman and V for Vendetta were once part of the same universe. Well, in point of fact they never were by any objective yardstick: they never crossed over, they never interacted through any other shared events or characters, one is thirty years older than the other, … Continue reading
The careless and foggy continuum
Rereading Marvelman Book Two by Alan Moore, Alan Davis, Chuck Beckum, Rick Veitch, John Ridgway, and Rick Bryant. Remember that scene, close to the end of Book Two of V for Vendetta, where Evey enters the Shadow Gallery and realises where she’s been all along? The first full-page splash, simple and stunning, in a comic … Continue reading
Why didn’t we realise what they were doing to our lives?
Rereading Marvelman/Miracleman Book One by Alan Moore, Garry Leach and Alan Davis. Writing about the early days of Swamp Thing was writing about a vanished world, where readers chose their comics by rifling through the sheaf on the shelves of their local newsagent, where fill-in issues appeared as regularly as annuals and any comic more than … Continue reading
Suggested For Mature Readers 