Tag Archives: alan moore

09.11.18 [Wednesday]
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books

book review: voice of the fire

Alan Moore, as far as I know, has withdrawn from comics and is now a zine producing magic lurker in the dark. Good for him. His historical novel, Voice of the Fire, is about the place where he does most of his lurking, Northampton, England. It spans about 6000 years and many linguistic quirks.

The first chapter is told with great difficulty. You can feel that language is a new thing as you read sentences about “I’s gleaning heat water foot mother.” The entire first chapter is a test. There is a story there. It is the basis for everything that comes after. It is very difficult.

As history proceeds the stories are told by witchy women and murderers and templars, judges and a head on a spike. All different but unified by fire and shagfoals and unattached legs.

This book was finished in 1995 or so and was really difficult to find for years. Now though Top Shelf has done a paperback version that you can get anywhere. If you like Alan Moore’s work, it definitely works even without the pictures.

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09.10.30 [Friday]
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books, comics

book reviews: a summary of the past month

I’ve been reading, but not a lot, and for some reason haven’t been real keen on writing everything up as I finish it. Here’s what I can remember since the last review.

Recently I finished Shadow & Claw the first two volumes of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun tetralogy. A classic and one I’m enjoying. It’s got short chapters which help you not feel like you’re slogging through stuff.

I read The Moor’s Last Sigh just before the Salman Rushdie thing. It was the last of his novels I hadn’t read and good. I feel like I’ve said this before about some other book but it feels like the novel is an excuse to get the backstory out there. We need to read the story of Moraes’ grandparents’ love story to know anything about him. It’s interesting to consider in light of SR’s notions of the role of the novel today.

Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut was found at a used bookshop a few weeks ago and devoured in an afternoon. Have I mentioned that I got the first volume of Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing? The new edition that has his first story on the title in it, not just the beginning of his first arc. Also read Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet, and today I finished Nick Abadzis’ amazing comic Laika, which was heartbreaking.

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09.10.07 [Wednesday]
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books, comics

book review: league of extraordinary gentlemen black dossier

I read this because I decided I’m going to do a buy nothing kind of Xmas this year and don’t really want anyone to buy me presents. This means I no longer had to save the Black Dossier for the Xmas list and could read it for free at work. Hooray.

I was leery of this book beforehand because I loved the first two Extraordinary Gentlemen books, and this was different. The previous volumes were steampunky things where they foiled Moriarity and Wells’ Martian invasion. This one takes place in the 1950s. What cool literary characters could they do neat stuff with there?

Well, when you make James Bond a horrible little prick and do Jeeves & Wooster/Cthulhu pastiches in a world where Britain was actually Airstrip One and the big villain may or may not be Harry Lime (from the Third Man) yeah there’s a lot of coolness. There’s a lot of straight prose in here and varying formats (textbook treatises, memos, British sunday strips, pornographic tracts, the whole shebang) as Mina and Quatermain engage in a (pretty thin) chase to get the dossier talking about what they’ve been doing since 1898. It’s all about the backstory here and it was all pretty neat. I wish I knew more early 20th century British fiction because I think I missed a lot.

The only thing I really disliked was the Kerouac (Sal Paradyse) bit. That’s because it was over the top with the misspellings and stuff which obscured whether it felt like Kerouac at all. I felt it didn’t but it was hard to tell.

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09.03.29 [Sunday]
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books, comics

book review: the courtyard

One of my farewell gifts from the kind folks at Intrepid was Alan Moore’s The Courtyard, a Lovecraftian comic about an FBI agent investigating a bunch of unrelated homicides. Anomaly Theory he calls it. The story is nice and tight, but knowing a bit about mythos stuff sort of spoiled the big reveal. I knew long before the character did what was going on and how it was all going to end in tears. Thankfully, the reveal isn’t the point of the story. It isn’t trying to be uber clever so it doesn’t really matter. It goes into some of that Alan Moore traditional stuff about time and our perception of it. Evidently he didn’t do the script, Antony Johnston did. Beautiful book too. Jacen Burrows is one of those Avatar Press artists who makes comics I like to look at.

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09.03.20 [Friday]
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books, comics

book review: from hell

When you talk about important comics, Watchmen usually gets mentioned, but From Hell (also by Alan Moore) is probably the better book. It’s a Jack the Ripper story in 14 chapters, but it’s really about the birth of the 20th century (which makes it a bit more significant historically than rewriting the superhero genre).

I remember borrowing Hassie’s copy years ago, and not knowing much about Jack the Ripper beforehand I came out a little underwhelmed. On my re-read I think there were two reasons for that. 1) I was concerned mainly for who did the killing and the mundane mystery of it all, which the book pretty much dissipates early. I felt like I was missing something, and I was: the significance of everything that was going on. 2) I tried reading the appendices all in one shot after finishing the story. This time I read each chapter’s notes directly after finishing the chapter and it worked so much better. I also could linger more (since I didn’t have my whole “what happens next?” portion of my brain dragging me through) and appreciate all the interesting things they did with time (which is where it’s easiest to tell this is the same guy as the writer of Watchmen).

Anyway. This time I let the chapters seep into my brain where they could slosh around with everything else and they’re doing much more good this time around. Though really, it’s the appendices that make the book. As I am not a Ripperologist I love that feeling that Mr. Moore is sifting through all the detritus and pulling out the most interesting bits and forming it into how he thinks the story may have gone. And then demolishes the entire idea of there being any way to talk about anything having one solution.

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09.03.07 [Saturday]
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books, comics, movies

movie and book review: watchmen

So I saw Watchmen this afternoon, and am happy to report that it didn’t make me want to claw my eyes out, but it’s really not as good as the comic. I don’t know that I ever expected it to be and I was kind of relieved it wasn’t.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

While it was neat to see a bunch of the stuff on screen, it felt like it was a lot of eye candy but with like a salmon flavour (possibly tunafish). Just off somehow. Like Veidt is trying to get society off fossil fuels, when in the book he’d already done that and it hadn’t really helped the world. And Rorshach kills the kidnapper/killer with a cleaver instead of letting the guy make his own compromise to save his life or not. There wasn’t really a reason to care about anyone in the movie apart from the fact that it was a great book (which might have been the metatextual point).

The pace of the thing was wrong. I mean wrong for a movie and wrong for the book. In the book the simultaneity of the arrangement of panels on a page means that the whole Dr. Manhattan episode is actually happening all at once. It’s all right there and you can go with it back and forth, instead of being pulled through flashbacks. A movie goes forward even when it doesn’t really. But the structure of the thing needed to be handled differently. Movie flashbacks aren’t the same as comic book flashbacks. I know I’m probably just parroting a bunch of Alan Moore stuff here (it seems I a lot of my “views on comics” are the most easily understandable bits of his interviews), but I think in the end I do agree that it was unfilmable. (I do stand by my previous assertion that the best possible adaptation would have been as a 12-episode HBO miniseries.)

That’s not to say it was horrible. They did a good job with what they could do. There are lots of bits I missed seeing but they’re all still in the book. I just checked. No pages were erased by the existence of the film.

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07.04.03 [Tuesday]
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comics, writing

on creativity and consumption

Okay, I’ve been reading some interesting things recently it seems. Here’s a couple of bits from an essay called Wake Up Neo: There is No Counterculture, You Twit:

Word in the counter culture grapevine is: the poorer you are, the cooler you are. You stick to your ideals. People take pride in it because it’s all they have. Word in the mainstream culture is: the more money you have, the cooler you are. You know how to get things done, and you can purchase all the status money can buy. You have to consider the cost to your dreams a tax write-off. This is where I do a 360, guzzle a bottle of whiskey, and stagger into the tall grass. I don’t buy any of it, anymore.

If your life revolves around what people think about you, how the shoes you wear define you as a person, or which line of body spray is most likely to get you laid, you’ve turned yourself into a patsy.

The only way out of this cycle is to create, and forget about trying to be original.

People don’t set the artistic trends by trying to set the trends. They are genuine to what really gets them in the vitals. Fight long enough and it will find its market, or you will die trying. Even if only one other person reads and really absorbs your words, you haven’t lost.

I spent my day not creating anything, really. I did read a lot of comics though. It’s great having Hassie back in town for these month-long spurts as it kicks my ass into reading stuff. He’s got a much better collection of trade paperbacked comics I like than the library does. Or at least his has shorter waitlists.

One book I read today was V for Vendetta. It’s interesting how some of the themes in there bounce off the Hassie and Justin comics project. Not that ours is going to be the next great Alan Moore style phenomenon, but there are connections. The greats have done things with these themes and now we’re slowly trying them ourselves.

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