More Moore part 25: From Hell chapters 8-14

From Hell chapters 8-14 (1993-1996)

By the time From Hell reaches its halfway point, William Gull is losing his grip. Gull steps up his ritual murder in chapter eight, doing away with two women, while Moore lets the narrative slow and stretch each time. Long Liz Stride falls under the knife first, while each panel alternates between the gristly murder and William Morris reading a poem to an assembled group of Communists a few houses over. The second murder is the crux of the chapter, however, as it introduces and disposes of a new character within its forty-eight pages. Kate Eddowes, a prostitute who returns to London after a time away, is mistaken by Gull and Netley as Mary Kelly, the ringleader of the royal blackmail plot. As time slows within the panels, Gull leaps through the air to dispose of the innocent woman in a three-panel-wide action shot that is completely unlike anything else in the entirely of the novel. The panels remain silent except for Gull's grunts and gasps as he slices through his victim with an animalistic violence, long bloody strokes of action and movement like an ape messily devouring his prey. His deed done, Gull is seemingly stricken with another hallucination, raising his arms in triumph in front of a massive skyscraper before time returns to its normal pace and Netley shakes him from his stupor. The whole arc is horrific and disturbing, a kind of dreamy slow-motion within the confines of the medium, Gull losing himself as he slaughters a woman like an animal. His great task is losing its calm, practiced cruelty and drifting into an unhinged obsession.

While Gull is losing his grip on the real world, Abberline remains firmly within its realm, still one step behind his perpetrator. The action in chapter nine skips between Abberline putting pieces together in the autopsy and flashbacks of Gull silently disemboweling Eddowes. Abberline is accosted by a fourteen-year-old Aleister Crowley and given a brief lecture on magic, while Gull rebuffs Robert Lees, the psychic from the prologue, and acts catty with William Butler Yeats. The real Mary Kelly drifts into drink and sex and scares off her lover, while Prince Albert Victor, the bon viviant that started this whole mess to begin with, sulks, consumed with guilt over the mess his dalliance has created. Gull forces the semi-illiterate Netley, now a wreck after his complicity in the murders, to write the "From Hell" letter that gives the novel its name, and chapter nine ends with Gull sneaking into Mary Kelly's house under the cover of darkness. The final murder begins on the first page of chapter ten and lasts for a whole thirty pages, time slowing to a crawl as Gull slips in and out of reality, mutilating Kelly's body horrifically as spectres from his past address him like a homicidal Ebenezer Scrooge. The chapter goes for pages without the slightest dialogue before Gull mutters madly to the spirits around him, finding himself in a 1980s office building as he finally completes his ritual twenty pages in. He rails against the spirits his magick has unleashed, finally embracing Mary Kelly's destroyed corpse and leaving her heart in the fire. The whole scene is horrifying and effective, page after page of an elderly, upper-class man tormented by the future he hath wrought dissecting a working-class prostitute. It's the second amazingly effective moment in the novel, and the opposite of chapter four; whereas Gull's speech six chapters ago was endless droning by a strong, self-assured man, here he is mostly silent and clearly insane. By the time Gull is finished, he can give only an exhausted confirmation to Netley that they are indeed finished:

"I have been climbing, Netley, all my life toward a single peak. Now I have reached it. I have stood and felt the wind. I have seen all the world beneath me./Now there is only descent. Only the valley. Would that I had died there, Netley, in that light above the cloudline. I'm cold. Take me home."

The climax of Gull's life is also the climax of Moore's story; after the murder of Mary Kelly the rest of the world feels as exhausted as Gull himself, with chapter eleven, "The Unfortinate Mr. Druitt" dealing with the aftermath of the murders. As Kelly's body is discovered, the Freemasons and the royal family finally decide that enough is enough with Dr. Gull, and find a patsy in schoolmaster John Druitt while they decide what to do with their incapable doctor. Druitt himself comes off as an incredibly tragic character, a stooge in the royal machine that has no idea what's coming to him even as the reader does, making it all the more heart-wrenching when it happens. His life falls apart on-panel, sabotaged by the establishment just as much as the prostitutes were in the past ten chapters, and like them, Druitt is completely unable to do anything but die, drowning helpless and alone in the Thames, another sacrifice to Victoria and her court. Abberline finally agrees to accept the assistance of Mr. Lees, and Lees, angry at the way Gull treated him, offers up the royal surgeon's name as a potential candidate from a suspicious doctor. Gull, confronted and no longer in control of his faculties, admits to the murders.

Abberline learns of the royal bastard on a whim visit to the sweet shop that Mary Kelly worked in all the way back in chapter one, and while Gull receives a secret, Masonic trial, Abberline is told by his superiors in no uncertain terms that if he breathes a word to anyone about the royal web that had been weaved, he wouldn't reach retirement, leaving Abberline and Lees as helpless accomplices in the atrocities, just as we first found them in the prologue. And that sets up the final chapter, and the third really heart-stopping section in the novel, chapter fourteen, "Gull, Ascending."

Chapter fourteen finds Gull institutionalized, his death faked and under an assumed identity, in the final moments of his life. Languishing in a madhouse, a nurse and her lover rutting nearby, Gull has a final hallucination that takes up almost the entirety of the final chapter. Floating through space and time, Gull gives another pages-long, gorgeous, poetic monologue while he visits drifts back and forth throughout the 20th century, in a world birthed by his act of death magick. His spirit meets murderers such as Peter Sutcliffe and a young Ian Brady, it influences William Blake's demonic paintings, and it kills the shaken, wasted Netley, dashing his brains out on one of the obelisks they discussed decades ago. Gull moves through the galleries of his gods, past Jesus, Jupiter, and Horus, before we reach a strange, heavenly vista (which Moore keeps irritatingly mum about in his annotations) where what appears to be Mary Kelly, along with what must be Annie Crook and Albert Victor's daughter, in a cloudswept Irish landscape. Kelly commands Gull's spirit to "Clear off back to Hell and leave us be!" and Gull's spirit departs, leaving his body dead in the madhouse.

From Hell is magnificent. It is one of Moore's strangest, most idiosyncratic works, possibly the furthest he ever got from the nostalgia-based work that informs nearly everything else he ever did. It is nearly historical fiction, but it is historical fiction that plays with reality, a piece of 'fantastic realism' if ever there was one. To this reader, William Withey Gull is Moore's greatest creation, a giant not only of the medium but of all literature, a character worthy of standing alongside the greatest villains ever concocted. Gull's every word and every movement are awash in power, and nearly every other major character in the novel- Abberline, Lees, Netley, Druitt, Kelly, Stride, Crook, Chapman, Eddowes, and Nichols- are helpless pawns to the government, of which Gull is its public face, and which inexorably brings to ruin everything it touches. Gull is a force of nature, like a Cormac McCarthy villain, an avatar of death and destruction that slices through London's poor and falls to pieces when its job is complete.

Eddie Campbell's artwork is horrific, all movement, like an impressionist painting done entirely in pen. He lends every scene a sense of squalor, even the glittering hallways of Buckingham, and he makes the gore and grime of the murders almost unbearable. Color would do nothing to improve this work, and Campbell wisely keeps it black and white, even little grey, simple light and darkness illuminating the birth of the 20th century. This is not an easy work, but it rewards like no other, and Moore's annotations only suck you deeper into the world he and Campbell created. From Hell is brilliant, almost amazingly so, and it could be the pinnacle of Moore's work; scholarly, imposing, and worth every second.

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Best quote: "I feel the tug of my ascension; my becoming. I go up into the sacred. I go up into the gold./They're waiting for me."

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Up next: Wacky, bumbling aliens in D.R. & Quinch

More Moore part 24: From Hell chapters 1-7

From Hell chapters 1-7 (1989-1991)

In 1989 Alan Moore, flush from an endless string of successes starting with Marvelman six years earlier and culminating in Watchmen and The Killing Joke in the late '80s, was at the absolute pinnacle of his career. Depending on your outlook then, it is unfortunate or fortunate that this is the precise moment when Moore's relationship with DC soured and Moore, after being screwed out of merchandise royalties from Watchmen trinkets, decided to stake out on his own, going indie for the first time since Captain Britain and beginning the true second phase of his work, one focused more on the complexities of the human brain, and one that doesn't come within miles of the superhero genre. While it's true that Moore would go on to make some incredible work after this point, from a commercial standpoint there are only a handful of his works from the '90s onward that could be considered equal to the staggering success he enjoyed with his work in the '80s, and especially his work in the early '90s seems the product of a master doing what he wants with his craft, offering psychological profiles and historical fiction without the genre underpinnings that made him such a household name in the prior years. It should come as no surprise, then, that Moore's first major work, free of editorial meddling, is the gargantuan From Hell, a vicious, bloody, impenetrable monster that couldn't be more different from his previous work if it tried. And yet Moore's prose, solid, lyrical, and self-assured, turned what could otherwise be an indulgent mess into a work of horrific beauty, and for this writer's money, his absolute definitive work. From Hell is the medium's Moby-Dick, a leviathan of ugly grace, a beast that demands your rapt attention and rewards you like no other when you submit to it.

From Hell is Moore's fictionalized story of the Jack the Ripper murders, and this first point is the most crucial to understanding it: this is no whodunit, and you will glean no insight in to the real-life murders by perusing Moore's words; the book's basis as to the nature of the killer, Steven Knight's Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, was already debunked and thought ridiculous when Moore and artist Eddie Campbell began on their macabre opus, and Moore admits as much in his supplemental index "Dance of the Gull-Catchers". But Moore isn't out to reveal what really happened in Whitechapel; the London of From Hell is as much an alternate reality as the New York of Watchmen, if perhaps more realistic due to the lack of superheroes and psychic squid. But while Moore doesn't give us any startling truths of the murders, he didn't set out to and he doesn't have to: while From Hell may be about the Ripper (and it is, his presence looms as large as Ahab or Iago in their respective works) it is also about the cancer that was London in the late 19th century. It is about the birth of the 20th century with a surgeon's knife, and about the working class and the aristocracy and what happens when they mix with deadly consequences.

The book begins with several epigraphs, the last of which is a quote from Queen Victoria's royal physician William Gull. Gull is our Ripper, according to Knight and as told by Moore, and he is without question Moore's greatest, best-written character, as well as his scariest, more disturbing villain. Gull focuses the thoughts and the attention of readers even when he isn't on-page, commanding a respect and attention that not even Moore fan-favorites like Rorschach and Constantine could ever dream of. Every great moment in From Hell's 600-something pages involve Gull, every beautiful bit of poetry is issued from Gull's lips. And yet, for all the black-coated terror he will bestow upon us and the world in which he lives, Gull doesn't even appear until chapter two. First is the Prologue, taking place well after the events of the novel. Here we're introduced to two old men: Lees and Abberline, as they walk across a rotting, grey English beach. We don't know who these characters are, and neither of them will actually appear in the story for quite some time, but Campbell gives their slow, doddering walk a sense of foreboding, carcasses of seabirds nearby as the two men discuss times long past on their way to Abberline's house, "The House that Jack Built".

The first proper chapter seems even more slight, until its conclusion. "The Affections of Young Mr. S." tells of a whirlwind romance between candy shop worker Annie Crook and young aristocrat Albert Sickert. The whole thing unfolds in just a few pages, Eddie Campbell's scratchy, splattered inks telling the tale of Albert and Annie meeting thanks to the elder Walter Sickert. The young couple live and love, and soon Annie is with child. Despite Walter's increasingly nervous warnings, Albert and Annie are married. And then like a thunderclap, the first domino falls: Albert is herded into a carriage by soldiers. They refer to him as "Your Highness" while Walter begs Annie to take the child and run. Annie Crook, simple working girl, in suddenly in posession of a royal bastard, belonging to Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria's grandson. Something will have to be done.

Chapter two introduces us to William Gull and provides a similar expedient telling of his young life. We see the entire chapter from Gull's point of view, only his hands visible until the last handful of panels, as he chillingly intones to his father that he is to have “a task most difficult, most necessary and severe”. Gull grows up rapidly, finding an interest in cutting open animals and removing their organs, an interest he turns into a trade as a physician. Gull becomes a fanatical Freemason, and the order's prestige, secrecy and trappings are yet another domino, putting him into position to rise to the top of society, finally taking on a job from Victoria herself to 'relieve the suffering' of poor Annie, locked away in an asylum howling for the return of Albert and the baby, last left with Walter Sickert. One removed thyroid gland later, and Annie is taken care of and Victoria's royal embarrassment is cleaned up. Or it would be, if Annie's prostitute friends didn't know of the whole sordid affair, and try to blackmail the royal family with the information. Gull's work must continue.

Chapter three fleshes out the stories and relationships of Gull and the four prostitutes: Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, and Mary Kelly. The girls are portrayed crude and realistic, weak human beings in a world with no room for weaklings. Even before Mary Kelly gave Walter Sickert the ultimatum that would be her undoing, there is a heavy tragedy about her, in the truest sense of the word: an inevitable end for her and her friends, as helpless as the characters in Watchmen. The next domino falling into place comes courtesy of Gull: he has a stroke on holiday and hallucinates the massive visage of the Masonic god Jahbulon in a gorgeous single-panel page, Gull insignificant before the towering majesty of his Pagan creator. This sudden occult awakening is exacerbated when he is summoned back by Victoria to eliminate the further threats to the throne, leading into the awe-inspiring chapter four, "What Doth the Lord Require of Thee?"

Chapter four is another thing of perfection from Alan Moore. With the exception of a couple pages at the beginning, the entire chapter is a long, single monologue from Gull, thirty-eight pages in length, detailing his thoughts on man, woman, and god to his semi-literate coachman Netley. The speech is easily the best Moore has ever done, issued from the lips of his greatest villain, spiraling and weaving along with Netley's carriage to several of London's great cathedrals, all designed by architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. On the way, Gull launches into an occult diatribe against womankind, that he has been chosen as an avatar for the rational, male half of the brain to exert magickal dominance over the irrational, female half of the brain. He gives a history of Hawksmoor and his Pagan leanings, showing the city to be dotted in masculine, phallic obelisks, Apollo and his progeny keeping Diana chained, and that the renewing of this seal through the ritual murder of Diana's prostitute-priestesses is Gull's true, difficult task. By the end of the chapter, Gull lays out his map of Hawksmoor's cathedrals to show Netley that they intersect as a pentagram, a Satanic secret deep within the very heart of Protestant London, which acts as an eye-opener for both Netley and the reader through Netley's astonished eyes. The writing is gorgeous, and even though his aristocratic veneer, Gull's misogynist insanity shines through. The man is a monster, and the story is so much better because of it. If there was any question that Gull is Moore's most incredible creation, and one worthy of the pinnacle of literature's villains, "What Doth the Lord Require of Thee?" should make a convert of of anyone. And throughout it all, Eddie Campbell's messy, pen and ink linework propels the madman along, waiting for night to fall to begin his arduous work. As Walladan Bint Al-Mustakfi said, "Expect my visit when the darkness comes. The night I think is best for hiding all." 

After the grandeur of chapter four, the second quarter of the book is best examined in sequences of action, as Gull and Netley pick off the first two girls, cutting their throats from left to right, in accordance to Masonic tradition. Gull removes the women's wombs, and in each you can feel him grow as a murderer: while Polly Nichols' death is sloppy and botched, Annie Chapman is dispatched in a series of careful, surgical cuts. Abberline is finally introduced  in the main story in chapter six, an Inspector from Scotland Yard forced back to the dismal, rotting Whitechapel because of the murders, and his disgust with the land that he once thought he left behind is palpable on every page, even as he fights assertions by his peers that a Jewish bootmaker is likely the suspect. Of course, though Abberline doesn't yet know it, the Yard is well aware that Gull is doing the killings, and that his connection to the Queen is keeping them silent. While at the same time, the press emerges as a fourth contender in this tragic opera; chapter seven ends with journalists forging the infamous "Dear Boss" letter and creating the name Jack the Ripper themselves. Lastly, Gull's hallucinations are getting worse. Moments before the murder of Annie Chapman, Gull seems to look into the future, seeing a beat-up English tenement room from 70 years or so further in time, a TV blaring. The new century is creeping up, called forth by Gull's ritual sacrifices, and it's only going to get worse.

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Best quote: The whole of chapter four. But is we must pick one, than it's “The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.”

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Up next: “Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate.”

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.

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

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

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