That Texas Blood

Chris Condon & Jacob Philips That Texas Blood (2021)
Well, this makes a pleasant change to the usual depiction of Texas in this sort of thing, this sort of thing being those special comics for mum and dad - no kids allowed! I suppose when I say the usual depiction I'm actually thinking of Garth Ennis donning his atomic powered thinking cap and cleverly depicting Texas as a place where siblings marry - chortle chortle - and have one-eyed kids - titter - who tie you up and bum you should you stop by and ask to use the telephone - guffaw belly-laugh belly-laugh - and if there have been others, they were hopefully a little more nuanced than an old Billy Connolly routine from the fucking seventies.

Anyway, That Texas Blood is described as a mature neo-western crime series on the Image Comics website, which is as good a description as any; and it inhabits a place which really does feel like Texas right down to the finer details of speech. Not only have I driven through Condon's fictitious Ambrose County but I feel like I know half of the people in this book, which serves as a testament to the power of doing one's homework and getting it right. That Texas Blood is a murder mystery, but primarily seems to be about sense of place and the possibility of escape from the same, and as with any quality narrative delivered by actual literate functioning adults, much of what it does is described in the spaces between what isn't said or clearly depicted. More than any other comic book I've read in the last few years - keeping in mind that most of them predate the nineties - That Texas Blood is absolutely cinematic in terms of pace, and to the point that it only really resembles what I tend to think of as a comic book in how it's reproduced as panels on pages with dialogue. Jacob Philips near photo-realist art is gorgeous, somewhat resembling that of his father, Sean, but more expressive, in my opinion.

I'm sure someone will try to make this into a Netflix series at some point, particularly given that they can at least save money on having to come up with a story board, but there's really no need. This thing is pretty much perfect as it is.

Happy Days

Jason Williamson Happy Days (2018)
Gave up after fifty pages without so much as a sniff of the Fonz...

Possibly in the way of a joke which gets better with each telling, Happy Days inhabits the same territory as Williamson's previous, substantially slimmer collection, but is somehow more convincing, more satisfying - if that's quite the right term. Where Slabs from Paradise was a short and sour belch in the reader's face, but probably in a good way, this one settles in and builds up enough momentum to say something beyond what may initially have seemed like an improbably harrowing version of Tom Sharpe. It's rich in the sort of working class detail that I'm not sure anyone else is bothering to record at the moment, and so much so that I felt as though I'd lived in a couple of these stories, albeit without the cocaine and swingers; and Happy Days goes further, becoming more than just a smellier Mike Leigh, as we see in Dolled Up wherein grown men take to transvestitism specifically for the purpose of getting into fights with dangerous shitheads. I expect Garth Ennis tried something similar at some point, and it would have been rubbish, whereas this is actually weird and amazing.

Naturally, it feels a little like reading Williamson's stream of consciousness from a Sleaford Mods record, but it's nevertheless impressive how well all that bile translates from that medium to this one, still side-splitting, yet still appalling.

Martin and Zanna start fucking as Dolly looks on and tries to remember all the things he thought he would be feeling when he finally got to do this but the fantasy's edge doesn't materialise. The house stinks, the carpet stinks, the sofa stinks and most who are in attendance look way past their best years, with Zanna being the exception.

It seems the title, Happy Days accompanying an image of a graveyard, isn't quite so ironic as it might have seemed at first. These are tales of it being as good as it gets under predictably dire circumstances - Liveable Shit, as the song goes; and somehow the tone is ultimately uptempo, which should be impossible given the details of all that goes on here. I am seriously impressed with this one.

Scalped: Indian Country

Jason Aaron & R.M. Guéra Scalped: Indian Country (2007)
I wasn't too sure about this one at first, despite a marginally more than passing interest in Native America. Stood in various branches of Half Price flicking through copies on three or four occasions, I couldn't help but notice death, violence, extortion, and at least one meth lab. It seemed like a poor advert for the culture it had chosen to inhabit, the whiskey-soaked offering of another one of those writers who has a keyboard with a specific key set to render the word motherfucker with a single tap so as to save time, and the same whiskey-soaked offering as usual transposed to someone else's misery for the sake of a sales pitch. It made me think of Preacher or any number of Tarantino wanabees.

I succumbed in the end, and I'm glad I did because I was wrong. Scalped may not be sympathetic to Native culture in terms conventionally patronised by new-age Whitey, but neither is it unsympathetic, and it strives to at least convey some of the grinding and distinctly unphotogenic poverty and misery which passes for life on the reservation. I don't know many Natives, but I know a couple, and I gather that Scalped is fairly true to life even with the narrative pinned to a conveniently episodic crime drama falling roughly half way between The Sopranos and The Shield - here referencing television shows for the sake of convenience and because I haven't read any comics which do quite the same thing, and certainly none written by Garth Ennis. Scalped is pretty dark and gritty, but is conducted with a lightness of touch, an elegance you wouldn't experience on a screen with a hole ostentatiously blown in someone's noggin every fifteen minutes - so good that it doesn't need to be made into telly.

JLA: The Tenth Circle

Chris Claremont & John Byrne JLA: The Tenth Circle (2004)
As I said back in August, I've been catching up with neglected incarnations of the Doom Patrol, and this is where the John Byrne version was born, immediately prior to a couple of years appearing in their own title. I had a feeling I wasn't going to like this much, and a few online reviews suggested it all seemed a bit childish, as though written for kids. Happily I was wrong on the first count, and as for the second one, well - seeing as how this is a Justice League of America comic book in which Superman has a scrap with a vampire, what the fuck did you expect?

Okay. I had other reservations too, notably how John Byrne has always had a thing for what I seem to remember him calling big stick heroes, so in other words, big, colourful, and sunny just like when I were a lad. Like Teddy Roosevelt, they carry a big allegorical stick with which they duff up the bad guys, and they probably won't have much in the way of dark secrets. There's nothing inherently wrong with such ideas, but in context of Doom Patrol, the essence of Byrne's revival seems oddly Republican in its apparent revision of established continuity, starting again from the beginning so that we no longer have to think about all that weird Morrison stuff with men wearing dresses and drugs and all manner of related beastliness. That said, I haven't actually read Byrne's run on Doom Patrol as yet, so I'll have to suspend judgement a little longer.

On the other hand, I've always enjoyed John Byrne's work. It's easy on the eye, and there's something pleasantly chunky and tidy about his art. It's traditional and clean, almost classical in comic book terms; and yet in apparent contrast to such unashamedly mainstream appeal, he's always been quite good at weird, notably in West Coast Avengers and those early issues of Alpha Flight.

Anyway, here we have a vampire called Crucifer who bites Superman, thus placing him under some kind of hypnotic thrall. He's a vampire very much in the traditional sense, as seen in Murnau's Nosferatu, and he wants to bring all the other vampires back from the  tenth circle of Hell, to which they've been banished by Wonder Woman's people. Luckily the Justice League of America are on the case, as is some mysterious new group of slightly odd supertypes led by a dude in a wheelchair. So, yes, it almost certainly was written for kids, which I nevertheless found a pleasure, and I'm in my fifties.

It's been a while since I read anything by Chris Claremont, and the dialogue is very obviously his, with sentences broken up and splattered all around the frame in strings of speech balloons, pensive dialogue boxes, and unapologetic use of thought bubbles; because in case any of us should have forgotten, this is a comic book, not Crime & Punishment. I'd grown weary of Claremont's dialogue by the end of his run on the X-Men back in the nineties, always trying too hard and coming across like the idea of teenagers seen in a late eighties Rod Stewart video, but it could just be that he was overworked. In any case, whilst this may not strive for the sophistication of one of those grown-up comic books by Garth Guinness, Claremont writes a beautifully smooth read, pulling you right into the story from the first page and keeping your attention firmly pinned in place. There's nothing particularly profound in this collection, except that it's beautifully rendered, rounded, and very, very satisfying. It never needed to do anything more than it already does.

American Splendor: Another Day

Harvey Pekar, Dean Haspiel & others

American Splendor: Another Day (2006)
Ten years later and I only just discover that Vertigo published Harvey Pekar, which is about the one thing to inspire regret at my having lost touch with what was going on in the comics biz back then, and additionally means I can forgive Vertigo for driving me away with Grant Morrison's Unreadables and Garth Ennis' award-winningly awful Preacher, a comic predicated on the daringly innovative high concept of rural working-class Texans being uneducated with a tendency to marry their own sisters. Nice work, Garth - very brave.

Backtracking further, by 1989 I had finished a three-year fine art degree course and was living alone and on the dole in a damp single room bedsit in Chatham, Kent, sharing a house with ageing alcoholics and persons who were more or less just living there whilst waiting to die. The degree course had left me no more employable than I'd been when I started it, and had taught me only that I had nothing in common with anyone describing themselves as an artist. In June I went for an interview with Royal Mail, and was taken on as a postman, a job in which I remained for the next two decades; but meanwhile back in 1989, Bill Lewis - who lived in the same road - sold me a stack of American underground comics, including a couple of issues of Harvey Pekar's self-published American Splendor, notably issue three which included a story called Awaking to the Terror of a New Day wherein our man forces himself to keep on moving forward through a seemingly futile existence more or less identical to my own without slashing his wrists. That was when I realised that Harvey had something unique, or at least something which is generally in short supply. Harvey understood.

Autobiographical comics briefly became a big thing around the early nineties, although not many of those I saw were that good - the worst possibly being Joe Matt describing his heavy pornography habit in one comic in wilfully lurid detail, then spending the next issue describing his girlfriend's reaction to reading the comic describing his heavy pornography habit with masochistic relish. On the other hand, American Splendor coming from a sixties blue collar sensibility was always heads above other representatives of the genre - a unique hybrid which somehow really needed to be a comic rather than just prose, and yet which never bothered with any of the comic as arts cinema pretensions associated with the comic book's supposedly having grown up - even though that's exactly what this is, and far more so than whatever the latest reinvention of fucking Batman may be. Harvey told it like it was, making wonderful use of the timing and emphasis afforded by sequential panels, then stopping when he'd said what he wanted to say - no real punchline, often not even a moral, sometimes leaving us wondering what had happened to the rest of the story and all because that's how life works, I suppose. It may seem mundane, and it may fixate on details like what thoughts run through your head when asking a neighbour to come and fix your toilet because your eyes don't work so good and you've lost your glasses and all he needs to do is fix the chain back onto the stopper, but never mind comics, this stuff is poetry.

To further infect the review with autobiographical detail, I'd had a shitty day, suffering in the heat of Texas in August, worried about a stray cat which has stopped eating and generally succumbing to good old existential nausea. I'd been reading one of the worst things I'd read in a long time - and the quality of my reading always affects my general mood - and had become fixated on all those people who just can't find it within themselves to add anything good to the world, instead just leaving a path strewn with worm-casts of recycled culture. Who are these people, these product-sponge cunts - as Louis CK calls them? Why are they alive? Why must I be aware of [name of person who doesn't matter excised for the sake of diplomacy]'s existence, and of the blog he has written explaining what he was trying to say in his five-thousand words of generic fanfic delineating a further adventure of [description excised because I'm not having that fucking argument again].

So I picked this and sure enough I feel restored, because Harvey always seemed to understand. There's something profound in his comics, and I've now been reading them for nearly three decades, but I still find it hard to pinpoint what it is, except that I know it's something between the lines, or the panels, I suppose. It may even be as much what it isn't as what it is, if that doesn't sound too preposterous a proposition. There's something calming about Harvey's voice, it being something far removed from all the bullshit and the shouting, or which is at least able to understand and make sense of the bullshit and the shouting - just read Delicacy in this collection, two wordless pages illustrated by Hilary Barta, the comic equivalent of a silent film, I suppose, and packing such a punch that I laughed out loud. That's real art, and if you don't see that, then I feel sorry for you and for the fact that we have nothing to say to each other.

As with David Bowie - of all people - I somehow still can't quite believe that Harvey is gone, because a world which doesn't have Harvey Pekar in it seems weird and unfamiliar, but thankfully we still have his voice.

Dan Dare - the 2000AD Years

Pat Mills, Massimo Belardinelli, Dave Gibbons & others
Dan Dare - the 2000AD Years volume one (2015)
In his introduction, Garth Ennis writes that while 2000AD's 1977 reinvention of Dan Dare as a generic action hero may have annoyed purists, we all loved him because we were too young to have read the original in Eagle and he was our Dan Dare - the we here equating to my generation. The thing is, I'm not sure this is strictly true. I was myself very much familiar with the earlier Dan Dare through a stack of Eagle annuals inherited from my dad who had read the comic when he was a kid; and even after it had been cancelled, Dan remained sufficiently popular as to warrant his own Fleetway annuals. I still have the one which came out in 1973 reprinting The Red Moon Mystery and Safari in Space; so most of us knew who he was, I would say.

That said, I'm probably just splitting hairs, because the return of Dan Dare was why I started buying 2000AD, and the main reason why I continued to buy it during those first couple of years. I've seen it argued that Dan Dare as Sid Vicious and then Joe Strummer has been somewhat relegated to the basement of comic book history simply because it wasn't very good. After all, this is the Dare who kicks your ass, hangs out with ne-er-do-wells, and says rude words such as stomm and possibly even drokk. In defence of our boy, I've also seen it argued that if you look closely you will notice that the Eagle version of the strip was also badly written juvenile piffle despite those lovely pictures.

Well, I have had a look and it simply isn't true. Rather this seems to be a case of someone being unable to tell the difference between something which is badly written and something which is simply aimed at a fairly young audience. The Hampson and Bellamy Dare may be a little stilted due to having been delivered in a million instalments of just one and three-quarter pages each; and old Dan was stylistically very much of its time, but it never pandered and should at least be credited with concessions made to yer actual proper science and a surprisingly progressive attitude towards persons other than the white, English, Christian, and male. Most notably it didn't seem to require that there be either an explosion or someone firing a gun every three panels.

Tharg's Dare is bewildering and inept by comparison. The stories are vehicular to massive implausible ideas such as the Biogs with their living spaceships, and in terms of plot the stories verge on Scooby Doo levels of thin. No less than two tales in this collection conclude with food gags punning whichever generic menace has been defeated in the preceding panels - one of Dan's crew remarks that he's built up quite a hunger following the team's escape from a desert planet of living sand, and so Bear jokes that he will happily eat anything except a sandwich; and I can even remember a third one of these - a no cauliflower cheese for me zinger which concluded a story presumably scheduled for reprint in the second volume.

Bear is the huge Russian ex-cosmonaut Dan hires as a general puncher of faces. He refers to himself in third person and, like many of the characters, often describes what he's doing for the benefit of the reader - 'Stava! Bear's astro-axe spikes the alien guns,' as we watch him swing the aforementioned nuclear-assisted axe into the mechanism of some alien weapon; in this case a weapon belonging to the Starslayers who live on a planet called Starslay and who are ruled over by their Dark Lord, who actually knows he's a bad guy. I have no idea how or why the axe is nuclear-assisted. It just is, okay?

It's not simply that new things are always rubbish. Tharg's Dan Dare really was a poor effort compared with the original, at least in terms of narrative relationship with its readers. Aside from the name and the fact of his being recognised by the Mekon, he may as well have been Dredger or Hellman or John Probe or any other generically grizzled action hero from a seventies comic; and yet knowing all of the above, I can't help but love this stuff in spite of itself.

The key is, I suppose, the art combined with those previously mentioned massive implausible ideas - the Biog's living technology, the Shepherds, the Two of Verath in his hollow planet, the Roman-style vampires and their heart-shaped spaceships. This stuff once blew my mind on a weekly basis in a way that not even Doctor Who could manage, and so much so that I never noticed how there was hardly a story underneath. Now that I'm fifty, the same tales have lost some of their initial impact, but the shortfall is made up with massive blasts of memory sherbert going off every few panels. Nostalgia alone shouldn't really be enough to save a strip, which is where the art comes in. Belardinelli's figures were often ropey, but you don't really notice here, and he was at his absolute weirdest drawing the Sid Vicious version of Dare in those early progs - bordering on the Hieronymous Bosch of the comic strip; and it looks so fucking amazing that it doesn't seem to matter that the dialogue - mostly bloody awful as it is - should be reduced to something like background music, a sort of word condiment sprinkled across the artwork for the sake of flavour. The same roughly applies to the Dave Gibbons version which, if not quite so visually arresting, has enough of a pleasantly chunky quality to compensate for crappy or even non-existent narrative.

A few years later, a version of Eagle returned and reclaimed Dan Dare for its own. I had a look at the thing, but despite the admittedly bed-wettingly gorgeous art of Ian Kennedy, it seemed like a boy band version of the character, a pointless exercise in recreating the original magic by following the same recipe which failed because the rest of the universe had long since moved on; and this was why Dan Dare worked so well in 2000AD, because I was twelve and it absolutely nailed the spirit of its time, for better or worse.

Having only just found out that Belardinelli is no longer with us, this also comes as a wonderful reminder of just how magnificently weird his art was at its best. I can't help feel that had somebody pushed him in the general direction of a life drawing class or two, he might have been remembered with the sort of reverent tone generally reserved for the likes of Kirby, Ditko and Moebius.

X-Men: E is for Extinction

Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely & others
X-Men: E is for Extinction (2002)
I've a feeling this may have been the one which got me back into reading comic books, and more significantly into actually buying comic books. As the nineties broke for half-time, the number of monthly titles I could be bothered to pick up had dwindled to just a few Vertigo efforts which I'd been following with ever-decreasing levels of enthusiasm. Then came Preacher in which Garth Ennis bravely experimented with references to that time we drank a million pints of Guiness and ended up in this really amazing Irish pub with this bloke playing one of those Irish tambourine things and we were all singing Pogues songs and we were sooo pissed and it was like really wild so it was and we were sooo hungover it was untrue as a substitute for narrative, and Morrison's Unreadables which was shit; and my comics habit began to feel like I'd found myself cornered by the world's most boring wanker at some party I hadn't really wanted to go to in the first place. Thusly did I pack it in.

Almost a decade later, probably not too many months before I committed to obsessively penning reviews of everything I read, I found this collection misplaced in some corner of the book store which patently wasn't comics and picked it up out of simple curiosity.

'So this is still going,' I scoffed to myself, feeling older and wiser before noticing that it was written by Grant Morrison. I'd had no idea he'd become quite so mainstream whilst I'd been looking in the other direction. X-Men was a superhero title which had once pissed over most of the competition, historically speaking, and the thought of it having been written by the author of the wonderful Zenith and Doom Patrol intrigued the shit out of me. I skimmed through the collection there in the shop, making sure it wasn't just an incoherent sequence of references to Aleister Crowley. It wasn't, and there seemed to be much to suggest that I'd be able to follow the story despite not having bothered with an X-Men comic since about 1992.

I loved the X-Men at least since junior school when the classic Lee and Kirby material had been reprinted in black and white in the back pages of something or other; and then again in about 1985 when shopping at the Maidstone branch of Safeway with Charlie Adlard, I noticed a comic bearing the same title with an individual I didn't recognise on the cover.

'Who the hell is that?' I wondered out loud.

'That's Wolverine,' Charlie told me, revealing a previously unsuspected interest in comic books.

'What does he do?'

'He has these metal claws,' Charlie explained, and so I bought the thing and became immediately addicted. This was the Chris Claremont run on X-Men. As a writer, Claremont had certain weaknesses - not least a propensity for way too many thought bubbles crammed with proto-emo corn - but he was always a fucking great storyteller. Over the next couple of years I became obsessed, faithfully following the ever-expanding catalogue of mutant titles until the whole edifice eventually began to collapse under the weight of its own overextended marketing. Suddenly Claremont was no longer involved, and Rob Liefeld was, and the formerly wonderful New Mutants had been cancelled, and it all seemed like a massive waste of everyone's time. It really felt as though Marvel were taking the piss, and so I took my wallet elsewhere.

Amazingly, Morrison's X-Men turned out to be every bit as good as I had hoped. He'd reigned in his own more self-indulgent tendencies and really tapped into the essence of what made the book so great back in its heyday, back when Chris Claremont had been pulling the sort of wacky twists which just shouldn't have worked and making it seem effortless - turning the bad guy into a hero, resurrecting the dead and so on: all the stuff which has become commonplace and prosaic in the tiresomely mannered storytelling of modern film and television and other media aspiring to be film and television. Morrison seemed like a natural for this book, pulling off all sorts of convoluted continuity derived intrigues without the off-putting fan-wankery so often associated with the form. It's soap opera with explosions, and is at least as much science-fiction as it was ever about leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Superheroes tend to entail a certain degree of wish fulfilment of the kind which appeals to outsider types, and the success of X-Men was always rooted in this idea, perhaps more so than has generally been true of the genre as a whole. You might wish for Superman or one of those others to sweep down, fix your broken glasses and retrieve your dinner money from Gripper Stebson, but you knew full well that you could never be like him, you weirdo. The X-Men, on the other hand, were similarly outcast and - once over the initial hump of expectations associated with a 1960s mainstream comic book - it wasn't even about fighting crime. X-Men was always about survival, about getting from A to B without having your head kicked in. Even if the readers weren't actually strange mutants with peculiar powers, they may as well have been so far as our Gripper Stebsons were concerned. Accordingly Morrison's X-Men is an appeal for tolerance and an indictment of the censorious and religious right as representative of everything which is wrong with society; and the message is somehow written in block capitals without so much as a whiff of preachy, which is some feat.

Even with the massive chins of Frank Quitely, this is a raw and unalloyed joy to read. It's at least as solid as anything Chris Claremont ever wrote and is amongst Morrison's very best - right up there with Zenith and Doom Patrol if you ask me.

American Jesus: Chosen

Mark Millar & Peter Gross American Jesus: Chosen (2004)
Another new one on me, I'm afraid - a comic book asking what would it be like to be twelve years old in present day America and to discover that you're actually Jesus reincarnated for all the reasons described in the good book. Millar states in an interview in the appendix that he wanted to do a book about faith that wasn't about child-molesting priests or all the usual shit you get when we liberals write stories about the Church, which is refreshing; and peculiarly, not only does this share very little common ground with Garth Ennis, but it speaks directly to Christians on their terms, or so it seems to me. This may sound about as much fun as the church army meeting I was roped into attending when I was fifteen - which actually was fun but for all the wrong reasons - but Mark Millar clearly knows what he's doing, presenting a broad message with which it should be impossible to disagree if you have any sort of moral standard, and presenting it without a hint of droning proselytisation. It's probably not a huge surprise that American Jesus might almost be considered a rewrite of his much-earlier Saviour, albeit a substantial rewrite, and the only notes that jar pertain to the American setting, principally due to a few incongruities such as references to chopper bikes and the like - details which some editor really should have caught. Given how the notes that jar in a Mark Millar comic are usually persons forced at gunpoint to sauté and then consume their own bumholes or similar, it would seem churlish to complain. Much of the book fixates on the texture of childhood in similar terms to Millar's more recent 1985, which nicely grounds American Jesus in the real world, or a real world. I don't think the second part of the story ever came out, leaving this one with something of an abrupt ending, and yet the book still does more or less all it needs to do, so it doesn't seem to matter.

In light of recent world events, its nice to see that some Christians are prepared to distance themselves from the actions of extremists.

Magic Words - The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

For some time there's been a certain rivalry between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, roughly speaking the two most celebrated comic book writers of the British Isles; or at least there's been a certain  rivalry in terms of Morrison sniping at Moore every two or three months, occasionally having Batman say something like you know, Robin, I've always regarded bearded men from the English town of Northampton as little girls - which is of course very clever - whilst Moore generally appears to take no notice barring an infrequent rolling of eyes. Comic book enthusiasts being comic book enthusiasts have come to regard this rivalry with relish in some instances, somehow imagining it to be on par with the beef between Pac and Biggie, or at least the beef between Master P and Pastor Troy - which was something that happened out there in the real world in case you were wondering; and so we have examples like that of the individual presently writing his print-on-demand book about the mystic war between Moore and Morrison representing the two major currents of English culture, for what that may be worth. Whilst I'm reluctant to further expand this particular notional bullshitplex, it's out there now, and it isn't going back in the box any time soon, so what the fuck...

Lance Parkin Magic Words - The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore (2013)
I met Alan Moore at a comic convention in Coventry in 1989. This is not to directly contradict Lance Parkin's assertion that Moore had ceased attendance of comic conventions a few years earlier, having tired of two hundred drooling fanboys following him into the toilet every time he tried to do a poo. The convention held on the campus of Lanchester Polytechnic just opposite the steps of Coventry Cathedral was barely advertised and very poorly attended with guests almost outnumbering punters. At the time, Charlie Adlard and myself were attempting to break into comics with material which I'd written and Charlie had drawn, and so we were working the convention circuit in our own small way. Alan Moore had, I would guess, just turned up for a grin given his native Northampton being only thirty miles away, and so his name had not appeared on any publicity material. Scarcely able to believe our luck, Charlie and I approached him, our hands quivering as we held out photocopied samples of our work for his mighty approval. My own hands were particularly aquiver as they conveyed unto Him a copy of a strip I'd drawn taking the piss out of obsessive comic fandom which featured Moore as a character, and which would never have happened had I not spent a couple of years chuckling over the material he'd drawn for Sounds music paper:

Larger version here.

Alan Moore accepted our offerings, flicking through as we made the usual apologies submitted when in the presence of greatness, and began with 'well, Charlie and Lawrence, here's what I have to say to you,' in thoroughly genial tones before delivering an encouraging fifteen minute speech on the topic of sticking to your artistic guns and not letting the bastards grind you down. With hindsight I realise this encounter seems particularly astonishing given its dating to a period during which Moore had supposedly turned his back on snotty little turds such as ourselves asking him when we can expect Watchmen vs. X-Men; and contrary to received wisdom, he was lovely.

We also spoke to Garth Ennis - who was similarly a nice guy, although I dislike everything he's done since Crisis - and Neil Gaiman - who was just a bit rude - and then suddenly a couple of years later, Charlie became sickeningly rich and famous as artist for The Walking Dead and others.

Anyway, moving on from issues of fame by spurious association with international megastars, there's this biography which paints a seemingly faithful picture of Alan Moore, from what I can tell, and it appears that the man himself is happy with Lance Parkin's account, which has to be a recommendation.

The great strength of Magic Words is in the fine balance which is struck, acknowledging Moore's triumphs whilst keeping its feet firmly on the ground. I'm a fan of much of his work, but he's done a few things I really haven't enjoyed, even that I would regard as a waste of time; and so it's appreciated that no attempt is made to sell every last eccentricity as symptomatic of genius, or to suggest that Alan Moore is incapable of making huge mistakes. Lance Parkin allows the reader to judge each aspect of Moore's work on its own terms which does much to distance the man from his possibly overinflated reputation, and the resulting portrait is fascinating - someone prepared to take risks rather than who necessarily always knows what he's doing; and after several hundred pages, it's hard not to admire the guy, and perhaps to admire him even more than his comics. Even the deal of Moore declaring himself a magician is handled with grace, clarity, and absolute honesty considering how ridiculous it may seem in most contexts, which is hugely refreshing given the sort of po-faced nebulous bollocks that's usually spouted in the name of the subject, as I'll come to later.

There may have been previous books, or at least essays, on the life and work of Alan Moore, although I've not read any. I've seen one online person whining about how Magic Words doesn't really cover any new ground or go into enough detail, although I'd say there's most likely plenty of new material here for anyone who doesn't weigh seven-hundred pounds or spend eighteen hours a day having online arguments about Power Girl's costume - sorry if that comment seemed judgey or made anyone feel a little bit inadequate; and I can't really see how more detail could be achieved without giving Alan Moore a colonoscopy. In any case, I don't know why you would need more detail than is given here.

As biographies go, this is pretty much perfect. I found it fascinating. I also found it significant that Magic Words, which for the sake of argument could probably be considered the definitive work on Alan Moore, is written by someone other than Alan Moore, which contrasts with Grant Morrison's Supergods - the work of an author who seems almost pathologically obsessed with how the rest of us see him, who often becomes the subject of his own stories, and whose equivalent tome is thus, quite naturally, a semi-autobiographical history of the superhero genre; and to be clear I find this significant because Alan Moore's comics tend to have a subject besides their author's navel.

Further whining here.

Top 10

Alan Moore, Gene Ha & Zander Cannon Top 10 book one (2000)
Here's another title I happened upon by chance when noticing that the local library had added a graphic novel section. I'd been driven away from comics a few years earlier by the contents of Grant Morrison's navel and Garth Ennis celebrating his five-hundredth successful retelling of that story in which a man, nursing a hangover following a night of Guinness and Irish show tunes, finds himself wrestling inner demons; Top 10 seemed oddly uninviting, and it took me a long time to get around to borrowing the collection, but it left a good enough impression for me to buy the thing more recently when I stumbled across a copy in Half-Price.

I'd lost track of Alan Moore roughly around the time of From Hell - issues of which I kept missing for some reason - but assumed he'd turned his back on superheroes - excepting I suppose 1963 which seemed so far into the realms of parody that it probably didn't count. It seems I had assumed correctly, as he explained here:

At the time I thought that a book like Watchmen would perhaps unlock a lot of potential creativity, that perhaps other writers and artists in the industry would see it and would think this is great, this shows what comics can do. We can now take our own ideas and thanks to the success of Watchmen we'll have a better chance of editors giving us a shot at them. I was hoping naively for a great rash of individual comic books that were exploring different storytelling ideas and trying to break new ground.

That isn't really what happened. Instead it seemed that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about twenty years of very grim and often pretentious stories that seemed to be unable to get around the massive psychological stumbling block that Watchmen had turned out to be, although that had never been my intention with the work.

More recently, he expanded upon the specific details of his disillusionment with the genre:

I've recently come to the point where I think that basically most American superhero comics, and this is probably a sweeping generalisation, they're a lot like America's foreign policy. America has an inordinate fondness for the unfair fight... I believe that the whole thing about superheroes is they don't like it up them. They would prefer not to get involved in a fight if they don't have superior firepower, or they're invulnerable because they came from the planet Krypton when they were a baby. I genuinely think it's this squeamishness that's behind the American superhero myth. It's the only country where it's really taken hold. As Brits, we'll go to see American superhero films, just like the rest of the world, but we never really created superheroes of our own.

Nevertheless, as is probably obvious, before too long he came crawling back with the America's Best Comics imprint, and so at the risk of reviewing by quotation:

When I was working upon the ABC books, I wanted to show different ways that mainstream comics could viably have gone, that they didn't have to follow Watchmen and the other 1980s books down this relentlessly dark route. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I'm not a particularly dark individual. I have my moments, it's true, but I do have a sense of humor. With the ABC books I was trying to do comics that would have perhaps appealed to an intelligent thirteen-year-old, such as I'd been, and would still satisfy the contemporary readership of forty-year-old men who probably should know better. But I wanted to sort of do comics that would be accessible to a much wider range of people, and would still be intelligent even if they were primarily children's adventure stories.

So there you go.

Top 10, not entirely unlike Marshal Law, presents a variation on an old Simpsons Comics storyline in which the atomic power plant inadvertently irradiates the entire population of Springfield turning everyone into caped superheroes, or at least there's so many of them walking, flying, or swimming around as to negate the prodigal implication of the super suffix. Possibly this is why Moore dubs the inhabitants of his sprawling Neopolis science-heroes - they may have strange, unearthly powers, but so does everyone else, and they're so regular they could have been written by Harvey Pekar.

Whilst Marshal Law bends the genre over for a prune juice enema it will never forget, Top 10 is an altogether more gentle affair - sort of like Moore's Bojeffries Saga rewritten as Hill Street Blues with superheroes - packed with gritty blue collar detail, yet very funny without feeling the need to pull Lenny Henry comedy faces. Because it's always easier to dissect a flaw than a virtue, it's actually quite difficult to know what to say about Top 10 once we're past motivation, secret origins, and descriptions of what it isn't, not least because it's so unassuming. There's no big message; it just tells a story - or rather several stories simultaneously - and leaves the reader  reminded of how much fun superhero comics could be before Moore unwittingly ruined it for everyone with Watchmen - by his own testimony -  and had to re-reinvent them all over again.

Weirdly, I think this might be one of the best things Alan Moore has ever written, and before I forget, the art is absolutely sublime.