More Moore part 23: DC Shorts Roundup part 2

"A Man's World" (1985)

This second Omega Men short couldn't be further from "Brief Lives", at least in terms of quality. A cute alien anthropologist finds a primitive tribe of men that seem to have no concept of what women are. She asks one of the tribesmen how his people reproduce, and they have sex. The next morning, he leaves the hut and checks on the babies of the tribe, who reproduce asexually, like mollusks. And that's it? I don't know if the mollusk reveal is supposed to be a twist or what, but there's really nothing worth going on here. Maybe it's a better read if you're an Omega Men maniac, but as-is, "A Man's World" is, at best, a waste of a couple minutes.

"The Jungle Line" (1985)

"The Jungle Line" is a typical DC team-up from around the time: two heroes run into each other, a misunderstanding makes them fight for a few pages, and then they team up to stop some villain. Even in the '80s, the team-up was an inoffensive bit of padding, with usually somewhat of a Silver Age throwback feel to it. What makes Alan Moore's single foray into the genre is his choice of heroes: Superman is a no-brainer, but here he teams up with the Big Green Machine himself, Swamp Thing! Rick Veitch channels his inner Curt Swan in a story about Supes going insane because of a hunk of Kryptonian fungus called Bloodmorel, and Swamp Thing finds his comatose body after the Man of Steel crashes a used car in the Louisianan wilderness. Once again trapped in his own mind by a sinister plant, Superman has all sorts of hallucinations, of bleak red landscapes and massive skeletal automatons, to the point where I really have to wonder if Scott Snyder and his ilk had been reading this story before coming up with 'The Rot' in the New 52 Swamp Thing stories. His mind clouded, Superman goes after Swamp Thing briefly before Swamp Thing pulls Supes into The Green, cleansing his mind and body. Superman wakes up, clueless as to what happened, and flies off, good as new.

Outside of the disturbing hallucinations, there's nothing special about "The Jungle Line", but it's good, harmless fun regardless, a quintessential team-up story under its strange choice of heroes and its battlefield of the mind: the heroes start out fighting, and it's only by working together that they can overcome the villain-of-the-week. Veitch's art is great, especially his closeups of Superman's crazy mug, all be-stubbled and ranting like an old EC horror lead, and Tatjana Wood does a fantastic job with colors as always, the Red World looking scorched and alien. If you're a fan of New 52 Swamp Thing, it's worth picking this up just to see the kernels of the new works opening story arc. Not Moore's best, not even his best short wok (honestly, not even close) but it's a nice palette cleanser for heavier works.

"Tygers" (1986)

Heavier works like this one. Oh man, like this one. "Tygers" is another Green Lantern story, this one detailing the backstory of Abin Sur, the Lantern who gave original Green Lantern Hal Jordan his ring and rank to begin with. In "Tygers", Abin Sur is exploring the corpseworld Ysmault, where the Lovecraftian abominations that make up the Empire of Tears have been chained for all eternity. Ysmault and its inhabitants are horrifying, part flesh, part architecture, and the demonic Qull of the Five Inversions feeds Sur twisted truths that will one day lead to his doom, kicking in motion the entirety of the Green Lantern story. In the future, when Abin Sur's ship falls screaming to a crash below, he can hear Qull and his chained brethren laughing.

"Tygers" is a brilliant fusion of horror into a superhero story, a visceral, body-horror-inflected work made all the more fantastic by Kevin O'Neill's totally unique, deep shadowed landscapes of pulpy masses and twisted demons. The whole planet of Ysmault looks like a scene out of Hellraiser, and the living architecture whispering promises to Abin Sur only ratchet up the hellish feeling. Here, Moore uses the 2000 A.D.-style twist ending; Qull's words of Sur's oncoming death haunting Sur to such an extent that he inevitably seals his own fate; to flesh out Green Lantern's mythos, giving Sur a reason to be traveling by spacecraft when we know that the Power Rings allow flight as-is. Modern Lantern wunderkind Geoff Johns mined into "Tygers" when writing his Lantern-centric epic Blackest Night, as many of Qull's prophecies about the end of the Lanterns are fleshed out and used during Johns' Lantern apocalypse. Kevin O'Neill's technique is unlike anybody else in the business, and "Tygers" is a great place to get used to his pulpy viscera before diving head-on into The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. If you're a Green Lantern fan, check out "Tygers" for its deeper connection to the Lantern mythos, but even if you're not, the worldbuilding by Moore and O'Neill deserves to be admired.

"Footsteps" (1987)

"Footsteps" tells the origin tale of The Phantom Stranger, A member of the DC occult pantheon used by Alan Moore to great extent in Swamp Thing. Here, prior to his career as a wandering paranormal assistant, the Stranger was an angel who was unable to take sides during Lucifer's rebellion. Cast off by Heaven, the new denizens of Hell tear off his wings and both sides leave him to wander the Earth for eternity.

To this reader, "Footsteps" is totally forgettable. There's a plot that runs concurrent to the Paradise Lost-style story, of a homeless man being similarly complacent in a gang war, that I didn't remember at all when it came time to sit down for this review. Joe Orlando, he of the endless prestigious career starting in Mad and EC, who last worked with Moore doing the pirate comic backup in chapter five of Watchmen, does the art in an EC horror pulp style, lots of various shades of red and burgundy, but the story leaves no lasting impression. John Constantine has gone on record canonizing this particular origin story, so big fans of Vertigo or New 52's Justice League Dark might find more merit within, but even as a Vertigo fan myself, I left the story bored.

"In Blackest Night" (1987)

Another Green Lantern story, this one penciled by Bill Willingham, about young Lantern Katma Tui and her attempts to find a new member of the Corps in the lightless deep space called The Obsidian Depths. The creature she finds there is totally blind and has no concept of color, thus the idea of a 'green lantern' makes no sense to it. Quick-thinking, Katma fudges the idea of the Corps to be more about sound than light. She describes the ring's energy to the creature as a bell making sound waves, and even changes up the Green Lantern oath to fit a creature with no concept of sight or color:

"In loudest din or hush profound, my ears catch evil's slightest sound.."

"In Blackest Night" is the slightest of Moore's Green Lantern work, but it's not too bad, it just doesn't have the killer ending of "Mogo Doesn't Socialize" or the squamous dread of "Tygers". The concept of adjusting the idea of the Green Lantern Corps to fit cultures that wouldn't understand it is clever, but like "A Man's World", the story just kind of ends after it does what it wants to, with no real resolution (though not anywhere near as jarring as "A Man's World" thankfully). Still, "In Blackest Night" shows that Moore was more than capable with the Green Lantern mythos, and probably could have made a killer arc if given the chance.

"Mortal Clay (1987)

 Moore's final short for DC is "Mortal Clay", a Clayface story of all things, that takes the sympathetic treatment that Mr. Freeze will get in a few years with Batman: The Animated Series and makes a gorgeous, by turns comical and by turns aching, story for one of Batman's worst-utilized rogues. This Clayface is Preston Payne, which is Clayface #3 I think, who can kill with a touch and is stuck in a biosuit to keep himself from falling apart. "Mortal Clay" is the story of Payne's relationship with Helena, a silent, austere woman whom Preston does not seem to realize is a mannequin. Payne narrates the story, and his narration tends to be hilarious, living the ups and downs of domestic life with his silent companion, embracing her after the stores close, joking darkly about women and shopping when she is moved to the ladies eveningwear section, becoming enraged when a night watchmen gets too handsy. This last action brings in the Batman, and when Clayface becomes convinced that Bats has stolen Helena's affection, the spurned lover attacks with a ferocity, until Batman realizes what has Preston so upset, and offers to help. Our story ends in Clayface's new cell in Arkham, while Preston and Helena watch TV, drink beer, and settle into a vaguely Honeymooners-esque marital routine. As they do, Preston's narration finishes us up, in possibly the funniest monologue Moore's ever done:

"He tried./Too bad it didn't work out./Oh, I suppose we can tolerate each other enough to live together, and neither of us wants to be the first to mention divorce./But the love...the love's all dead./Her habits and snobberies grow increasingly irritating. I long to be rid of her, but I can't bring myself to do anything./Each day she becomes older, dowdier...never mind. One day I shall be free. After all.../She can't live forever."

Even now, I can't read that without cracking a big smile. "Mortal Clay" is the perfect blend of the tragic and the comic, accomplishing in mere pages what many authors, graphic novel and otherwise, couldn't do in volumes. Moore writes the perfect Clayface story, a hit out of the park worthy of Dini and Timm's iconic turn for Mr. Freeze. "Mortal Clay" joins Watchmen, Swamp Thing, "Tygers", and "For the Man Who Has Everything" as absolute gold during his tenure at DC. Finally, when DC's withholding merchandise profits became too much for the Wizard of Northampton, it was time for him to go. And go he did, back to independents, where he was about to embark on yet another epic for the ages.

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Up next: "The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn't you."

More Moore part 22: DC Shorts Roundup part 1

Special thanks to Cat for the generous gift of this collection! Wonderful birthday present.

Before we bid farewell to DC Entertainment, here are short writeups of his lesser works, all of which are collected in DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore, which also contains Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? and The Killing Joke, making it a pretty good buy, all things considered. The stories are all short and sweet, several having twist endings similar to the 'Future Shock' one-shots Moore had done for 2000 A.D. prior. Some of these works deserve more extensive discussions than others, but, as befitting Moore's 80's work, nearly all of them are at least entertaining, and a few are better than some of his more well-known and prestigious work.

"For the Man who has Everything" (1985)

And the first of those surprises is 1985's "For the Man who has Everything", a Superman story that is not only better than the average-to-middling Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? but for this reader's money is the best Superman story there is, before or since. "For the Man..." takes place on Superman's birthday, February 29th (pause for big laffs) when Batman, Robin, and Wonder Woman come to give him a surprise present and find the Man of Steel covered with extraterrestrial plantlife known as Black Mercy, immobile while the plant hypnotically sends Supes' mind to a brighter past, where Krypton didn't explode, where he was married and had children. I read the comic for the first time after I had seen the also-excellent Batman: The Animated Series episode "Perchance to Dream" which treads on similar ground: a villain traps the hero in a happy alternate timeline, and the hero has to reject this complacency for the world we have, darker but real. While Batman, Robin, and Wonder Woman struggle with interstellar barbarian Mongul, Superman has to untangle the illusory world in his mind, even as his new life proves seductive and comfortable. But even as he settles into that comfort, Superman knows things are wrong, and that to make things right he will have to shatter the illusion and bid farewell to the Krypton that never was, eventually forcing Black Mercy onto Mongul, leaving the conqueror stuck in a rather amusing dream of total intergalactic conquest.

"For the Man who has Everything" is good. It's a perfect comic to show Superman neophytes that the man is not 'too powerful' and has stories that are interesting, thought-provoking, and exciting without the usual song and dance of Supes getting his powers drained. The art is done by Watchmen's Dave Gibbons, and though his faces are a little limited (all the men look like Dan Dreiberg and all the women look like Laurie Juspeczyk), he is still an excellent artist and even here, a year before Watchmen you can tell that artist and writer understand each other. The colors are soft and washed out and rather stereotypically '80s, but that works with the dreamlike quality of the story. "For the Man who has Everything" is a story every comic fan should read, and whether you love Superman or hate him, you'll come out impressed.

"Night Olympics" (1985)

"Night Olympics" is Moore's one and only Green Arrow story, featuring Arrow and Black Canary wondering if they are responsible for the Social Darwinism of criminals, weeding out the weak ones until only the dangerous survive. The answer to the question comes in the form of a bow-wielding, mohawk and mesh-shirt-wearing "ordinary person" Peter Lomax, who wounds Black Canary but then crumbles easily to Green Arrow.

In contrast to "For the Man who has Everything", "Night Olympics" might be the worst story in the collection. The story is bland and uninspired, saddled with a handful of ridiculous Olympics metaphors like "...A sudden-death playoff beneath the sodium lamps a strip lights, night after night, a ceaseless marathon..." But moreso than the groan-inducing script is the art, which is flat-out terrible. Klaus Janson did pencils for the piece, and while his Daredevil work never bothered me, his sub-Frank Miller scrawlings here are passable at best, and atrocious at worst, with Black Canary unfortunately getting the lion's share of the latter. This one isn't worth it, I read it so you don't have to.

"Mogo Doesn't Socialize" (1985)

Moore teams up with Dave Gibbons again in Green Lantern story "Mogo Doesn't Socialize". Lantern Tomar Re tells the story of Mogo to apprentice Arisia, how Bolphunga the Unrelenting landed on a planet to seek out the enigmatic Mogo and spent years hunting until he realized Mogo was the planet itself. "Mogo Doesn't Socialize" pairs the best of Moore's quick-and-dirty 'Future Shocks' from 2000 A.D.  with the Green Lantern mythos to tell an enjoyable story in 6 pages with a killer twist ending. Gibbons' art is better here than in "For the Man who has Everything", and the lack of humans mean there aren't any Nite Owl or Silk Spectre clones running around. This is another keeper, though not the best of Moore's Green Lantern stories (that will come later).

"Father's Day" (1985)

"Father's Day" stars Vigilante, an amoral Punisher-influenced DA who dons tights and goggles every night to fight crimes the police are ineffective against. Eventually Vigilante committed suicide after looking back at his violent, arbitrary past, but there's no hint of regret in this story, where he defends a little girl and a pair of prostitutes from the girl's perverse, violent, incestuous father. Even in the grim and dark world of comics in the mid to late '80s, "Father's Day" is pretty discomforting. Everyone feels disposable, from the girl's mother to the prostitutes with hearts of gold to the scumbag, sociopathic father himself. Jim Baikie, who did the art for "Skizz", lends his awkwardly expressive pen to "Father's Day", making all the characters look pained and uncomfortable. The story ends with one remaining living prostitute trapping the father under the wheels of her car and spinning them, reducing the man to a pile of goo while Vigilante holds the young girl and intones, rather hilariously, "Oh jeez...". "Father's Day" is not a good story by any stretch of imagination, but if you're a fan of ultraviolent, grim early '90s comics, you might get a kick out of one of the precursors to the genre.

"Brief Lives" (1985)

"Brief Lives" is a one-shot found in the pages of The Omega Men, a team of misfits that originated in the pages of Green Lantern that I have to admit I know absolutely nothing about, aside from these two Moore stories. "Brief Lives" is exactly that, at a paltry four pages, but in those four pages, Moore and artist Kevin O'Neill tell an engrossing, humorous story that ends on yet another wonderful 'Future Shock' style twist ending. The story is told by the leader of an arachnid army after a failed invasion of a planet called Ogyptu, inhabited by blue giants that move on a different, incredibly slow time frame compared to the invaders. This fact renders the invasion moot; the arachnids would have to stand still for decades before the giants even noticed them, and after thirty fruitless years, the invaders have gone insane and died. Finally on the last page, we see things from the giants points of view, with the arachnid's city being built and crumbling to untended rust in the fraction of a second. Giant #1 asks Giant #2 if he saw the little blip at their feet, and Giant #2 responds with the perfectly-timed "Don't let it worry you./Life's too short."

"Brief Lives" is so succinct, and simple, and, well, brief, and yet it tells a story better than not only some of Moore's other short works, but even some longer ones. None of the Omega Men themselves appear in it, as far as I can tell, it's just a quick, entertaining one-and-done. Kevin O'Neill would work with Moore a few more times, most notably on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and his grotesque, busy lines perfectly encapsulate the insane arachnid species and the massive blue humanoids. "Brief Lives" is very, very good, and sits nicely with "Mogo Doesn't Socialize" as an example of a master of the short comic story showing off his craft, honed after years on 2000 A.D. By 1985, Moore knew how to write a short story, he just needed the right inspiration, and the right collaborators.

And there's still plenty to go.

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Up next: More shorts! Green Lantern, Swamp Thing, The Phantom Stranger!

More Moore part 21: The Killing Joke

The Killing Joke (1988)

I don't like The Killing Joke.

I figured I'd get that out of the way first thing. Barring a dark horse that I expect to be bad coming out of nowhere as a masterpiece, like if "Violator vs. Badrock" is the true successor to Watchmen, I suspect this will be my most controversial opinion for the duration of this series. Everyone loves The Killing Joke, from Batman fans, to Joker fans, to industry insiders, to people who have never read a single issue of Batman outside of this one. It's dark, it's edgy, and even I have to admit it's stunningly well-drawn. But to this critic, that's all it is, and stripped of Brian Bolland's painstakingly detailed artwork, there's just nothing underneath.

Granted, there is one other person who agrees with this sentiment: Mr. Moore himself. He's been quoted with his dissatisfaction on the work as well, calling it, "[not] a very good book. It's not saying anything very interesting." So where's the problem? Why is The Killing Joke hailed as such a game-changer if it doesn't have anything interesting to say?

The Killing Joke was designed, from its very start, as the quintessential Joker story. Like Watchmen it cuts back and forth between the past and the present through flashbacks, to flesh out the Joker origin story first dreamed up in 1951s "The Man Behind the Red Hood" in which Batman discovers that Red Hood, a criminal from his past that he could never catch, was The Joker, pre-chemical bath. Moore takes the story's thin premise and expands on it, giving Joker his origin as a failing comedian, so desperate to make ends meet that he agrees to put on the red hood and ends up taking a bath after a botched robbery attempt. Now in the present, Joker attempts to make Commissioner Gordon's mind snap like his did, by taking away everything that Gordon holds dear, most notoriously by blasting Barbara 'Batgirl' Gordon through the spine, paralyzing her for the next 23 years until the New 52 reboot. Gordon shows his mettle by not buckling under the pressure of Joker's sick game, and when Joker is cornered by Batman, the police closing in, the worst he can do to the Dark Knight is tell a joke (admittedly, a pretty funny joke) before he's presumably taken away, off-panel, at the end.

And the problem woth the novel is that there's just not much more plot to tell. It's thin before it even gets off the ground, and no amount of violent realism is going to change that, because The Joker's already been done violently before this, most notably in Frank Miller's 1986 The Dark Knight Returns Denny O'Neil's 1973 "The Joker's Five Way Revenge". Brian Bolland's art is better than either of those works, sure, but it's not backing up anything of substance, just cheap violence to shock and titillate readers who could have read gritty, 'realistic' works with more meat on them long before. The Killing Joke actually reads like an Alan Moore wannabe, like some fledgeling author caught up in the majesty of Watchmen who wanted to tell a similar story without knowing how. It feels cheap, gaudy, a swipe for the lowest common denominator that Alan proved on his very first major work he was already above. It's that cynicism that makes The Killing Joke less than The Ballad of Halo Jones, because though Halo was boring, it had a heart that Joke lacks. Halo Jones is just a dull book, whereas The Killing Joke is an offensive one, a too-little-too-late bit of hackwork that gives us almost nothing worth remembering. Almost

And that almost is the one positive from this whole debacle: in shooting out Barbara Gordon's spine, Moore laid the groundwork for the character to become a very positive, sympathetic character that DC most certainly needed: as wheelchair-bound information broker Oracle, Barbara was strong-willed, brilliant, and able to overcome any limitations put on her, a positive role model for girls and the disabled in a medium that often has trouble with both, let alone at the same time. I won't deny it: 20 years after The Killing Joke, when Babs lifted herself out of her chair and beat down Spy Smasher even with two useless limbs in the pages of Birds of Prey, I cheered. And then of course 3 years later the reboot happened and now she walks again. Oh well.

We started off with a Moore quote and we'll end with one too: "...there've been worse Batman books than The Killing Joke." The sentiment is absolutely true of course; for as much as I give the book a hard time, there were worse Batman stories before, and worse after, by droves. Mostly the feeling I get from the Killing Joke is disappointment: Brian Bolland is a brilliant artist and Alan Moore is a brilliant writer, so they should have made something equal to the home runs that Moore had already hit: 1988's Watchmen or Swamp Thing or Marvelman. but instead we got a slight, nasty piece of work that would be repeated over and over for the next 23 years by authors who wanted to be 'dark' and 'edgy' like Alan Moore without recognizing the humanity underneath that made his works so brilliant. Maybe someone can give a really strong, persuasive argument to the merits of The Killing Joke, but as of now it's just something unpleasant.

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Best quote: "All these years and I don't know who he is any more than he knows who I am./How can two people hate each other so much without knowing each other?"

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Up next: The little things. DC short works.

More Moore part 20: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? (1986)

As previously stated, 1986's Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot changed the face of DC forever...for a little while. At the time though, it was a pretty radical direction to take with their 50-year-old property, to dump everything and essentially start over. In September of '86, after the Crisis but before the official reboot, the decision was made by longtime DC editor Julius Schwartz to give Superman a sort of proto-Elseworlds treatment with his last two issues before the reboot hit, a "what if?" closing out the stories of Superman, his friends, and his foes before the post-Crisis world fully began. Schwartz originally wanted Superman creator Jerry Siegel and Curt Swan, who had then been drawing the character since 1948, to take a crack at the 'last issue', but Siegel wasn't able to work on the book due to legal hoops that needed jumping through, so our ol' buddy, our ol' pal Alan Moore, then flush with success from Swamp Thing and about to launch into the stratosphere with Watchmen (chapter one of which came out the same day as chapter one of ...Man of Tomorrow) was given a crack at writing the final chapter in pre-reboot Superman. The result is Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, partly-groundbreaking, partly-safe, a Superman story where nearly everyone ends up dead that still feels innocuous and even a little forgettable. But is it bad? Not really, it's just proof-positive that they can't all be knocked out of the park, even with a character as iconic as Superman.

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? uses a framing story an interview with a middle-aged Lois Lane, with all the main action taking place in Lois' flashbacks about the day that Superman vanished. Lois is now married with a child, as Lois Elliot to her husband's Jordan Elliot, which is about as clever as the Devil in Angel Heart calling himself Louis Cypher, so I don't blame you if you figure out the plot twist in the first couple panels. Her story details all of Superman's enemies suddenly getting more vicious and homicidal, goofy b-listers like Bizarro (and d-listers like the Fearsome Funsters) picking off Superman's pals and even outing Clark Kent as the Man of Steel early on in the plot. While Supes has his hands full of the losers, the real threats in his rogue's gallery start to stir as well; Lex Luthor's brain and body are hijacked by Braniac, who leads an assault on the Fortress of Solitude to eliminate Superman once and for all.

Even early going, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? has a surprisingly high body count for a Superman story, though merely average for an Alan Moore one. Pete Ross, Kryptonite Man, Lana Lang, Jimmy Olsen, even super-dog Krypto (with no tears shed from me) all bite the dust as Braniac-Luthor assaults the Fortress. He seals off the area in an indestructible bubble, which leads to a great scene of the Justice League trying to superpower their way in...Batman and Robin reduced to hitting the thing with clubs. Moments before her own death, Lana actually manages to break Luthor's neck...and in easily the most chilling moment in the novel, Lex rises again, his dead body still manipulated by Braniac until rigor mortis sets in.

With the dust cleared and everyone pretty much dead, it's revealed that the one behind all the death and destruction is none other than Mr. Mxyzptlk, the prankster god of the Superman world  who, like Bizarro, is usually confined to goofing around until Supes gets tired of his annoyances and banishes him back to the Fifth Dimension. Well after 2000 years of being a magical pain in the ass, Mxy has decided to try being evil, so he manipulated minds and events to bring down all the terrible things that have happened so far, which I have to admit I actually kind of enjoy as a motivation. It gives him an arbitrary cruelty somewhat like The Joker, and fits in nicely with my earlier assessment of Superman's trickster god status, like Loki or Susa-no-o. Superman wins in the end, of course, but only by breaking his own rule and killing Mxyzptlk. Grief-stricken, Superman walks into a vault of Gold Kryptonite, stripping himself of his powers, and vanishes. We cut back to modern day, where Lois finishes her interview and her husband Jordan grins like a doofus and winks to the camera. Curtain call, goodnight Superman.

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? is the closest Moore's ever come to doing a kind of Christmas special-type comic like A Christmas Story. Even with the body count, it feels surprisingly safe and corny, with Curt Swan's silver age style artwork not helping to diffuse that feeling (though incidentally I wonder what his thoughts were killing all these characters that he had a hand in making what they eventually became). I used to loathe it, it was possibly the first Alan Moore comic I really didn't like, though looking back at it now I don't know, it's not so bad really. Like those selfsame Christmas specials, it's hokey and will make your eyes roll, but it's not a bad way to close that chapter in Superman's life and is kind of a fun look back at his first 50 years. It's incredibly slight, I had about as much to talk about in the entire novel as I did with a couple chapters of Watchmen, but it never overstays its welcome. Moore was asked to finish off Superman before the reboot, and he did alright. Ten years after this, in the midst of the '90s, this might even look like one of his highlights.

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Best quote: Now, two thousand years later, I'm bored again. I need a change. Starting with your death, I shall spend the next two millennia being evil! After that, who knows? Perhaps I'll try being guilty for a while."

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Up next: Being mad isn't bad in The Killing Joke

More Moore part 19: Watchmen chapters 10-12

Watchmen chapters 10-12 (1987)

"After so much music, love, and flowers, she felt benumbed/Thunder struck by this psychedelic Götterdämmerung." - M. Torgoff

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By chapter ten, Watchmen is in a free-fall. The crystal that formed the first half of the book, that began to shatter in the early going of the second, has turned organic, a spectracolored mess of pulp and bone. The shifts and changes are still there, but they're frantic, schizophrenic, slipping from the muddy browns and reds of Rorschach and Nite Owl in Archie to the garish carnival colors of Ozymandias' Antarctic retreat. When Tales of the Black Freighter appears unannounced among the creeping paranoia, it takes a moment to register that we've gone into a different comic; the main character's ragged, hurried stares don't look much different than Rorschach's near-catatonia. Now instead of the meter ticking back and forth between scenes and colors like a metronome, each scene has its own individual palette, saturated in reds and browns, browns and purples, or blues and yellows. Thematically, chapter ten is the journey to finally discover who killed Edward Blake, and put to rest the mystery that had begun in the second panel of the first chapter. And that the reveal is so anti-climactic I have no doubt is part of Ozymandias' game: once Ozy is revealed to be the killer, he starts to talk...and talk...and talk... to anyone who will listen, and I have no doubt that he engineered Rorschach and Nite Owl to find the one thread in his plan just so he had someone to brag to. I'm almost surprised that he didn't leave the password already entered on the computer, just waiting for Daniel to hit enter.

Ozy's biggest speeches come in chapter eleven, 'Look on my Works, Ye Mighty' which mostly functions as his origin issue, and most certainly is the wordiest chapter of the entire novel. Ozymandias tells his story, first to  his beloved pet Bubastis, then to his servants as he drugs their drinks to keep their spirits in his fortress forever, and finally to Rorschach and Nite Owl as they arrive and are quickly pacified by the Smartest Man in the World. Ozymandias' plot is simple: he removed Dr. Manhattan from the equation to ratchet up world tension, and then teleported a fake alien into New York as a sort of organic atomic bomb, as an invasion from outer space to deflate the tension, hopefully permanently. In the world of 'realistic' comic books this strikes one as absurd, but it's also a perfect comic book scheme, something a pulp villain would try to do to take over the world, but instead done by a delusional superhero to try and bully the world powers into peace. And because Ozymandias is a pulp villain planted into the real world, he doesn't blab his plan to the heroes, giving them time to stop it...he already carried it out before they even arrived (I always liked the fact that, if you pay attention, you can see him teleport the creature away at the very beginning of the chapter, no ceremony, not even any dialog...a finger on a button and it's done).

And of course the ridiculous part of all of this is the fact that it works. Rorschach and Nite Owl find themselves completely helpless at the end of chapter eleven, and chapter twelve opens with six beautiful full-page illustrations of New York in utter ruins, the creature's psychic shockwaves having killed millions. Among the wreckage you can see several minor characters we've grown to know, charred and lifeless, and if the pages don't quite reach the level of horror seen at the climax of Marvelman, it's that recognition that sets it apart: Marvelman is a story about gods, and Watchmen is a story about men. While Kid Marvelman's rampage was unspeakably vicious, it was against the faceless population of London. Here we can see the two Bernies, Rorschach's psychiatrist, knot-tops, a Gunga Diner waitress, the fighting lesbian couple...even as Ozymandias claims that killing millions will save billions, we see people we recognize among the throngs of dead, and we know that his methods are unforgivable. However, as news reports flood in, there's no question that Ozy's fix worked, if only temporarily...the nations are laying down their arms to defend against an attack from the unknown.The world was swindled into peace. Rorschach, absolutionist that he is, would never live such a lie of course, and so he's permanently removed from the equation. Everyone else assumes new identities and moves on with their lives.

But is it enough? One of my favorite scenes, and among the biggest disappointments that they cut it from the movie, was Ozymandias' final conversation with Dr. Manhattan. The World's Smartest Man asks the story's one true superhuman if he made the right choice, if the fighting is really over, and Dr. Manhattan, the being that experiences time fractally, intones that 'nothing ever ends'. It humanizes Adrian, strips him of his ego in the very last scene he's featured in, and shows us a man that, underneath the posturing and speeches and grand plans, really does want to help the world. That it was cut from the movie damaged Ozy's character irreparably, because it's the only time we see Adrian Veidt as he truly is. And of course Dr. Manhattan's final words set up the last panels of the novel, with one of the survivors of the attack about to put his hand on Rorschach's journal, which spells Ozy's whole scheme out page by page. But even if he picked it up, would anyone believe it? Or is all of Ozymandias' planning about to crumble before the dust has even settled?

We're nearly 30 years on since Watchmen was published, and countless numbers of clones have sprung up. Yet the story is still visceral and urgent. It still is all sharp edges and teeth. The dialog is still shocking, and the clones that have come since still pale in comparison to the one true king. Watchmen is a reflection of Marvelman, Moore's first foray into the graphic novel realm: each book is a treatise on what happens when the superhuman is out of control among the human, when Gods play sport with men. Marvelman sets its sights loftily, with the Gods in their palaces, looking on the men as playthings, whereas Watchmen is a view from the gutter, the men among the filth trying helplessly to stop the Gods. It may be that all these years later, to look at Watchmen with contempt is in vogue: no king can reign for so long without attracting those who claim he's been naked this entire time. The movie, all sound and fury signifying nothing, didn't help matters either (though there's little more enjoyable than the 3.5 hour long 'Ultimate Cut', a large bottle of something potent, and several friends who love the novel. A night well-had by all). But still to this day, when I crack open Watchmen, I am impressed by, even with all the 80s political caricature, its sense of timelessness. The king isn't dead yet, and may he live long.

...

Best quote: "But you'd regained interest in human life..."

"Yes I have. I think perhaps I'll create some."

...

Up next: Alan says good-bye to DC's first 50 years in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?

Happy Birthday Lady Lillian Rose!

An actual photo of the first time the author and the subject met.

Many happy returns for the beautiful and talented Lady Lillian Rose of A Child's Garden of Books.

In the mustardseed sun,
By full tilt river and switchback sea
Where the cormorants scud,
In his house on stilts high among beaks
And palavers of birds
This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave
He celebrates and spurns
His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
Herons spire and spear.

Under and round him go
Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
Doing what they are told,
Curlews aloud in the congered waves
Work at their ways to death,
And the rhymer in the long tongued room,
Who tolls his birthday bell,
Toesl towards the ambush of his wounds;
Herons, stepple stemmed, bless.

In the thistledown fall,
He sings towards anguish; finches fly
In the claw tracks of hawks
On a seizing sky; small fishes glide
Through wynds and shells of drowned
Ship towns to pastures of otters. He
In his slant, racking house
And the hewn coils of his trade perceives
Herons walk in their shroud,

The livelong river's robe
Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;
And far at sea he knows,
Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end
Under a serpent cloud,
Dolphins dyive in their turnturtle dust,
The rippled seals streak down
To kill and their own tide daubing blood
Slides good in the sleek mouth.

In a cavernous, swung
Wave's silence, wept white angelus knells.
Thirty-five bells sing struck
On skull and scar where his lovews lie wrecked,
Steered by the falling stars.
And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage
Terror will rage apart
Before chains break to a hammer flame
And love unbolts the dark

And freely he goes lost
In the unknown, famous light of great
And fabulous, dear God.
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is alwas true,
And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the woods
The dead grow for His joy.

There he might wander bare
With the spirits of the horseshoe bay
Or the stars' seashore dead,
Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales
And wishbones of wild geese,
With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,
And every soul His priest,
Gulled and chanter in youg Heaven's fold
Be at cloud quaking peace,

But dark is a long way.
He, on the earth of the night, alone
With all the living, prays,
Who knows the rocketing wind will blow
The bones out of the hills,
And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last
Rage shattered waters kick
Masts and fishes to the still quick stars,
Faithlessly unto Him

Who is the light of old
And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild
As horses in the foam:
Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined
And druid herons' vows
The voyage to ruin I must run,
Dawn ships clouted aground,
Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
Count my blessings aloud:

Four elements and five
Senses, and man a spirit in love
Thangling through this spun slime
To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
And the lost, moonshine domes,
And the sea that hides his secret selves
Deep in its black, base bones,
Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
And this last blessing most,

That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
And every wave of the way
And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
With more triumphant faith
That ever was since the world was said,
Spins its morning of praise,

I hear the bouncing hills
Grow larked and greener at berry brown
Fall and the dew larks sing
Taller this thuderclap spring, and how
More spanned with angles ride
The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
As I sail out to die 

-Dylan Thomas

...

Photo lifted from Progressive Ruin

More Moore part 18: Watchmen chapters 7-9

Watchmen chapters 7-9 (1987)

By Watchmen's second half, the structure of plot-centric odd chapters and worldbuilding even chapters runs out of steam. Briefly, Moore reverses the trend and has an odd-numbered flashback chapter or two, but even that doesn't last. I don't know if this is intentional or not, but it fits in well with the breakdown that's going on with the characters as well; things are becoming less structured, more haphazard and chaotic, from the plot down to the chapters themselves. What was once crystalline and structured is becoming more organic, more disheveled. Once we lose the 9-panel grid, that's when you really have to start worrying.

The one character who never gets a flashback chapter is Nite Owl. In a way, that's okay because it's doubtful he needs one; the man now known as Dan Dreiberg has fewer psychological problems than the rest of the cast, and his origin story is equally without flourish: Dan simply comes off as the superhero fan who went a step further, the boy who looked up to the costumed fighters of the '40s, and when they put their mantles down, he used his inheritance money to put his own mantle on. Despite the lack of backstory, chapter seven is Nite Owl's chapter, in which his formerly unrequited feelings for Laurie Juspeczyk, the Silk Spectre, are finally made manifest. Of course, Dreiberg can't escape from even his comparatively tame neuroses, and in chapter seven we see his fetishization for his superhero identity made manifest in his inability to perform sexually until both he and Laurie are be-costumed. Dan is sweet and kind, doughy and uncomfortable, and he has a strong sense of justice and the need to do the right thing, without being as deranged as Rorschach. I don't see many fans extolling the virtues of Nite Owl like they do the man with the ink-blot face, which is too bad because he seems the most relatable; in this cast of lunatic misfits, Dan is the comic book fan in all of us. And after his coupling with Laurie, floating through the clouds in his owl-craft Archie, his decision to spring Rorschach from prison is the first moment worthy of our cheers in the whole story, over halfway through. The band's getting back together after all.

Chapter eight, 'Old Ghosts', is a chaotic, dense mess of a work, most assuredly intentionally so. The plot bounces around between Hollis Mason in his junkyard, Dan and Laurie in Dan's basement, the (still-ineffective) 'Tales of the Black Freighter' comic, the offices of right-wing newspaper The New Frontiersman, a mysterious island art collective, and Rorschach is prison, as a riot foments, boils over, and explodes moments before Dan and Laurie arrive to spring him. The momentum is tangible, with the 9 panel grid ticking down the moments between all the plot threads, cutting back and forth from inmates threatening Rorschach to Nite Owl and Silk Spectre rushing to the scene to save him. Of course, Rorschach hardly needs saving himself, and on the outbreak of the riot he dispatches three of his attackers bloodily. As the novel becomes less about deconstructing superhero themes and more about an exciting superhero comic, a lot of Moore and Gibbons' literary tricks start to fade into the background, and this is the first chapter I really noticed a lack of that poetic meter so strong in the early chapters; the colors don't alternate panel to panel, the scenes don't tick bath and forth. Instead the transitions are haphazard and random, like the nature of the riot itself. If the early chapters were a structured, metered poem like, say, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, then 'Old Ghosts' is The Waste Land, and no weaker because of it. Eventually the power in the prison goes out and the panels are bathed in harsh reds and blacks, which only helps to disguise the blood left in Rorschach's wake.

After the prison break, Laurie is confronted by Dr. Manhattan, who spirits her off to Mars, and then Hollis Mason, the first Nite Owl, is beaten to death by gang members who mistake him for Dreiberg and assume his complicity in the prison riot. Here we do see some of that old poetry again, as the panels alternate between Hollis attacked n the present and sepia-toned flashbacks of Hollis' fights in the '40s and '50s, great pastiches of golden and silver age comics with typical '50s moon men and '40s Nazis, Hollis backed up by a canine companion (Owl Dog?) even as the thugs finally overtake him in the present. If there was only one problem with the movie version of Watchmen, more so than the removal of any psychic squid beings, it's that Hollis' death was left on the cutting-room floor. It's such a sad, touching scene, not to mention an important scene for Dan's character, as Hollis was indirectly killed because of something Dan did, and like any good classical tragedy, Dan never realizes that was the case. The scene is a perfect example of pathos in comic storytelling, and one of those moments that really made me realize for the first time that maybe these books have something more to tell. Finally, the backup is an article from The New Frontiersman, and makes a brief mention of missing artists, including pirate-comic scribe Max Shea. It's just a small thing now, but it will have greater significance in the future.

Lastly we have chapter nine, 'The Darkness of Mere Being'. If chapter seven explored the relationship between Dan Dreiberg and Laurie Juspeczyk, this chapter deals with the relationship between Laurie and Jon Osterman, the man who became Dr. Manhattan, as well as functioning as an origin story for Laurie. Laurie is unique in that, among the main characters, she's the only one who has no precedent in the old Charlton comics, but instead was invented just for the plot. She's the pageant daughter of the superhero community, forced into the life by her overbearing superhero mother, who Laurie now both cares for and resents in equal measure. In the '60s, Laurie, then 16, was swept up in awe for Dr. Manhattan and fell for him hard, causing a rift between Jon and his then-girlfriend Janey Slater, which helped make Slater lash out at him so bitterly in the present when Jon exiled himself to Mars. As always, Moore's pieces fall into place slowly but very, very perfectly.

But this chapter is troubling as well, for reasons I briefly mentioned back in chapter two: Jon and Laurie debate the point of going back to an Earth which Jon sees as not worth his attention anymore, despite his non-standard perception of time telling him that there will be a horrible catastrophe befalling the world soon. In trying to reason with him, Laurie triggers her own memories of her unhappy childhood, her mother and father fighting, and comes to realize that she is not her father's daughter, but in fact the daughter of The Comedian, Eddie Blake. Blake, you may recall, raped Laurie's mother back in chapter two, and apparently their relationship continued afterward and led to Laurie's conception.

I've mentioned it before, but Moore had a bad tendency, especially in the '80s, of using rape as a plot device (just off the top of my head, I think we've had 4 or 5 rapes so far, and we've only read 7 novels), but this is the most uncomfortable of them all because the plot dictates that Sally Juspeczyk fall in love with her rapist, and they have a child together. I still maintain that I don't feel Moore is misogynist, and others have claimed, and he's not just using rape as a cheap shock, as Laurie herself is sickened as much as the reader is by her revelation. That fact is that Sally is a complex character, and like everyone else in Watchmen, there's more to it than black and white, as she stated herself back in chapter two, long before we knew what she meant by it. Thankfully Moore gets all this rape out of his system soon enough, but it certainly does lend 'The Darkness of Mere Being' a more uncomfortable quality than expected. It's this revelation however, that despite all odds Sally Juspeczyk and a man she had every right to hate created life together, that convinced Jon that perhaps there are things worth saving in the land of the living, and the chapter ends with them heading home. But is it enough?

...

Best quote: "...And there was this toy, this snowstorm ball, with a tiny castle inside, except it was like a whole world, a world inside the ball/It was like a little glass bubble of somewhere else/I lifted it, starting a blizzard. I knew it wasn't real snow, but I couldn't understand how it fell so slowly/I figured the inside of the ball was some different sort of time/Slow time/...And inside there was only water."

...

Up next: It's not enough, in Watchmen chapters 10-12