Violator

Alan Moore, Bart Sears & Greg Capullo Violator (1994)
Here's another one I'd never heard of through having given up on comics, or most comics, around the end of 1991. It's billed as one of the greatest things Alan Moore ever wrote by the online advertising, but I'm suspecting a certain bias given that they obviously wanted me to buy the thing - although the sales pitch worked so I did, for what it may be worth. This dates from the period during which Moore had become thoroughly browned off with DC due to the publication of the Watchmen Babies meet Archie crossover, while still needing to pay off a substantial phone bill incurred through calling the Post Office Dial-a-Disc service in order to hear Whigfield's Saturday Night over and over and over. The Image Comics boys had seen the sense of having their drawings of massive tits, angry faces and explosions scripted by some guy who could do word stuff good, and so here we are.

Violator is a demon at large on earth in the form of a member of Insane Clown Posse, apparently, and a character who first appeared in Todd McFarlane's Spawn; and Spawn is what happened when pow! the comic book grew up - lavishly crosshatched goth-metal art beautifully reproduced on glossy pages, swearing and a shitload of gratuitous violence in what otherwise may as well have been a seventies comic book about a guy in a cape. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Nevertheless, Violator is a lot of fun. It's fucking stupid, but as I say, it's a lot of fun and Moore clearly had a blast with the dialogue, although I'm guessing he probably zipped it off in the caff one morning while waiting for his egg and chips. There's a story, sort of, but only just, which doesn't really matter because Violator is, roughly speaking, D.R. & Quinch reimagined as a track on an Insane Clown Posse album, which I say as someone with quite a few Insane Clown Posse albums. It falls some way short of being one of the greatest things Alan Moore ever wrote, but it's better than Jerusalem.