Hi Space fans,
I used to have a good resolution to not repeat myself in this column. ‘Just do something fresh every week’, I thought blithely. It’s a good resolution but difficult to keep. I’ve probably broken it a few times ere now by repeating themes but this time I’m going to really, really break it and enthuse about Alan Moore again.
(Alan Moore looking windswept)
Another resolution was to be a bit different to the wider world. I’m breaking that one too, because the wider world, inasmuch as it notices Mr. Moore at all, thinks he’s a complete genius. I think he’s a genius too, albeit not a perfect one. So anything I say here to tell the world how excellent Moore is will be lost in a chorus of more well-informed writers with time to tell Moore how good he is in great detail.
So be it! Resolutions are made to be broken, so please be warned that I’m going to promote the new(ish) collection of Alan Moore’s short stories for 2000 AD and enthuse about Moore’s genius. Anyone who’s had it up to here with hearing the praises of the comics writer voted ‘looks most like the singer of Jethro Tull’ just look away now. Come back next week, alright?
(Jethro Tull, wishing Alan Moore was their lead flautist)
If you’re still here, you should immediately buy the collection which is called ‘The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks’ and is a lash up of all the stories Moore did for the ‘Future Shocks’ format. These once-off stories are a perennial of 2000 AD in one form or another. I think it’s partly that they stand alone and can be pulled out of a draw when a serial gets held up and a few pages need filling, and partly for the stated reason of giving new writers somewhere to prove themselves. Over all, the Future Shocks read like unsuccessful Twilight Zone ideas, although without Rod Serling leaning against a wall moralizing at the end. When they’re good they’re very good – tight little tales with twists. They morphed into a copy of the X-Files back when the X-Files was the hottest thing on TV; 2000AD started a series called ‘Vector 13’ in which creepy guys in suits and dark glasses narrated Future Shocks with a tendency towards government conspiracies and ‘who really killed JFK’ ishness. There was a science-fantasy version called ‘Tales of Telguuth’, which were stand-alone stories with a twist at the end, set in a far-off world near the edge of the universe where more strange things happen than is the case here in the quiet galactic centre. Lucky them! The trouble with Telguuth, which was very much the sort of alien world that Edgar Rice Burroughts used to write about, was that the entire world was overrun by demons or man-eating vampire wombats every other week. After a few stories, you were faced with the problem of being interested in people who’d been eaten/possessed/chewed into tiny pieces about fifteen times in the past and who you knew probably wouldn’t make it to the end of the next page. Still, some nice twists and some lovely Siku art occurred while Telguuth lasted.
Moore started his career at 2000 AD with Future Shocks and was so good at them he was promoted to Time Twisters (which were Future Shocks with a bit of a time theme). He then moved on to Skizz (ET goes to Manchester, although it’s better than that makes it sound) Halo Jones (absolute genius) and on to fame and Watchmen, via a process you can follow on Wikipedia with something like accuracy.
Back to the Future Shocks. Haven’t you bought it yet? Get a wriggle on!* I’d love to inflict this collection on someone who doesn’t know what a comics legend Moore is, to get a fair evaluation of how good the stories are. My reading of them is tainted by the fact that I know he’s going to go on to be very clever and loved by all right-thinking readers, so I’m looking for signs of that cleverness in embryo. Mind you, the only people who don’t know that Moore bestrides the comics world like a colossus (a colossus who’s been sleeping outside in a park), are people who hurl comics across the room rather than actually read them. If I had a time machine, I’d go back to before I knew who Moore was (say about 1996) and treat myself to this book. I think I’d still see genius.
True the brilliance is not evenly spread. There’s a story about a school for supervillains that is completely predictable (you can read this one on the 2000ad website). As a Moore fan, I notice that it’s very well done and a bit of a giggle, but it’s nothing special. ‘Chronocops’ however is complete genius. It’s a story of two deadpan cops, very like Friday and his partner from Dragnet complete with the ‘just the facts’ line. These are time cops who arrest people for trying to assassinate their own grandparents as young men or depositing ten cents in 1900 and collecting the interest now. When the cops return from a mission, they keep returning to a central waiting room in which every small background detail is connected to another point in the story. The various problems that would crop up if we really could do time travel are illustrated as well as in any sci-fi story on the subject, which rather neatly supports Moore’s argument that comics, rather than being merely books for people who need the help of pictures, can offer the writer more choices than using only text. Chrono-cops is very clever and gets you in good practice for a lot of Moore’s later writing. I’m a chronic re-reader of my comics, but the Ungroomed one is the only comics writer who makes me go back to see how he did it, as well as for fun.
One constant of the stories is alliteration. ‘The Regrettable Ruse of Rocket Redglare’ is here, as is the ‘Lethal Laziness of Lobelia Loam’ and ‘The Startling Success of Sideways Scuttleton’. I think Moore got this habit from the Irish writer J.P Donlevy, the author of ‘Meet My Maker the Mad Molecule’, who was very cool when Moore was a lad. Wherever it came from, the stories are simple one-off tales very well told. Evil puns abound too – one of my favourite punch-lines is about the guy who found his place in the sun.
I can’t stress the ‘well told’ enough here. Moore’s famous technique of inserting parts of the story in background details which we see, but don’t observe is clever, but can be mechanical if you read enough Moore. Anyone could do it with a bit of time and effort. But Moore has a way with characters that makes them substantial. Even Sideways Scuttleton. He’s a stereotypical wartime black marketing spiv who will only ever exist in four pages of black and white art, but he seems more real than a thousand pages of Superman.
Moore can be very sentimental – the story ‘the Time Machine’ is a real weepy, albeit one in which I didn’t spot the twist coming. He can be just plain silly and fun. My great good fortune and that of everyone who buys the book** is that they padded it out with the Abelard Snazz stories. These concern a self-obsessed genius who is constantly talking about what a genius he is and coming up with brilliant ideas. We know he’s brilliant because he’s got two sets of eyes and is described as ‘the double-decker brain’. The ideas always go wrong He is accompanied an obsequious robot who never doubts his brilliance. He – but I’ve spoiled enough already. Very funny stuff.
It’s touching how often the stories incorporate Tharg, 2000AD’s alien editor. Moore writes Tharg very well, sometimes ticking off his ‘droids’ (ie the staff) sometimes babysitting his nephews. It’s a shame that Moore is so ticked off with the actual Thargs who refused to let him have the rights to Halo Jones.
A parenthesis: according the message board, Tharg couldn’t let Moore have the rights to Halo Jones, because then the 2000AD publishers have to give all their artists ownership of their material. I’ve never gone along with this. Why would they need to be consistent? Couldn’t they just say ‘you’re not Alan Moore’ to the others if they asked? Besides, since the price of keeping ownership of Halo Jones was Moore refusing to write further material, I think they should have given him the rights and the Hope diamond.
I’m not an uncritical Moore fan, as I’ve said before (unless one judges by the loopy standards of the John Byrne forum, where not seeing Byrne and Moore as Absolute Genius and Evil Talentless Freak respectively marks you down as a mindless idoliser of the Hairiest Man in Comics). Some of his stuff is just okay (in this collection the alien-english phrasebook story could have been written by anyone). Some is a little funny but not memorable (like, for mine, DR and Quinch stories, not reprinted here, which are a pastiche of the old OC and Stiggs stories in National Lampoon). Some is pretentious (like Promethea, although I’m in a minority here).
In the Complete Future Shocks there’s no pretension yet and every story is worth reading. I’m going to re-read mine any moment now, so you can’t have it. Get your own!
*’get a wriggle on’ = ‘hurry up’
**what? You haven’t bought it yet? Get it together!
