Alan Moore!

I have thus far been afraid to open the pages of issue 4.

Annoyingly, no where in Dublin seems to have a copy of issue 3. Dublin SuXoR.

And my LCS didn't order enough copies of 4 for me to read it, they're on backorder.

apologies if this has been mentioned (specifically the picture)

http://www.comicscube.com/2010/07/get-off-alan-moores-case.html

has any other major storytelling artist (i phrase it that way to include filmmakers and novelists as well as comics writers) ever committed him or herself so wholly and explicitly to appropriating and reinterpreting the work of others? moore has taken his fascination with pre-existing mythologies, genres, characters and character-types so far that he's created a form/genre that's his and his alone, or so it seems to me.

it makes sense that it would be a comic book writer who carried recombinant literary appropriation to its logical extreme, as comics more than any other storytelling form depend on a stable of pre-existing characters and mythologies that grow by slow accretion at the hand of many different artists. many of the british comics writers who came of age in the 80s were similarly interested in the revisionist excavation of pop culture's past, but no one has taken this approach anywhere near so far as moore.

i'm not sure what to make of it. books like the league of extraordinary gentlemen and lost girls provide a good deal of "where's waldo" style character-spotting fun, and the pastiches and tributes are often quite amusing, but there's a weirdly hermetic quality to it all. moore's world seems composed entirely of references to other things, many of them referential in themselves, and it's all held together with an uneasy and often angry sense of paranoia. i'm intrigued by the depth of detail, but there's very little to his storytelling outside polemical vigor and the pleasure of referentiality itself.

comics more than any other storytelling form

no

really? i admit that i'm talking about superhero comics as though they were the entirety of comicdom, but with that out in the clear, i can't think of any other form/genre that's so indebted to a specific mythology and/or canon. the way oral traditions once passed along myths and folktales is comparable, but what else? film and television occasionally recount the exploits of familiar characters (daniel boone, batman, various historical figures), but for the most part not. these forms are nowhere near so fundamentally based on the telling and retelling of a fixed set of stories concerning a fixed cast of characters.

i admit that i'm talking about superhero comics as though they were the entirety of comicdom,

yes

ok

"but there's very little to his storytelling outside polemical vigor and the pleasure of referentiality itself."

i have to disagree -- there's a pamphlet-length book he wrote a while back on how to write comic books that shows what he's doing is at least interesting on a formal level that has nothing to do with polemics or referentiality. also, the highest selling comics composed of appropriated cultural mashups right now isn't by alan moore -- it's fables, much to the chagrin of my buddy who thinks fables is beneath comparison.

a pamphlet-length book he wrote a while back

a series of articles he wrote for Martin in 1985, you mean. reprinted in AH iirc

yeah, i know that moore isn't a big seller these days. nor am i suggesting that stories based on other stories (mashups, w/e) is new or unique to moore. just impressed by how deeply he's burrowed into it.

i would agree that his narrative construction is formally interesting. my complaint is more that he doesn't seem to be addressing anything outside the small room of his pet obsessions: literary history, conspiracy theories, hermetic magic, cranky politics, etc. this makes his work feel weirdly closed to me, shut off from the world. doesn't help that his characters are so relentlessly two-dimensional and symbolic, their relationships and dialogue so unlike anything i've encountered in life. his stories are like dragnet episodes where joe friday and bill gannon are polysexual, sybaritic magickal adepts who keep stumbling into weird porn conspiracies.

^ some shitty grammar. sub: "...stories based on other stories (mashups, w/e) are new or unique to moore. just impressed by how deeply he's burrowed into this approach."

"his stories are like dragnet episodes where joe friday and bill gannon are polysexual, sybaritic magickal adepts who keep stumbling into weird porn conspiracies."
this sounds awesome!

i don't like a lot of his stuff, but the complaint that alan moore is too focused on writing about the things he wants to write about seems really weird to me, considering how strongly he reacts to outside pressures to do things he doesn't want to do. I do think his stuff is better than fables, though, but that's a series that I would suggest is just as committed to operating in the referential arena as moore, if not more so, if for no other reason than they have more pages and volumes to deal with. also, any given superhero title is by default operating under decades of references and continuity, at least within its own sphere, so at this point it's just part of the game.

literary history, conspiracy theories, hermetic magic, cranky politics, etc.

i don't much like alan moore but that is plainly enough material for any one body of work

well, it's sustained umberto eco pretty well. but i think he does a better job with characters and relationships, has a richer view of life and sense of humor, integrates the political with the personal in interesting ways. doesn't give off quite so intense a "locked in the library of babel" vibe.

re philip nunez: i like moore's stuff a lot more than fables, but the comparison does help shed light on my criticism. it's not that alan moore's interested in whatever. i wish more superhero-oriented writers used the forum to explore things outside the usual good guy/bad guy, tights & powers stuff. i get frustrated with moore because his characters take such a back seat to his more esoteric interests. he just doesn't seem all that interested in people.

bill willingham doesn't exactly write realistic characters and relationships. his view of humanity seems derived from popular media, tending to soap opera complications involving reassuringly familiar types. he sentimentalizes where moore disengages. this probably explains why his work is more popular. i really just have no idea where moore's characters are coming from. they seem like aliens or robots. (note that this applies mostly to the stuff moore has written in the last 5 years or so. in the first moore stories i was exposed to, watchmen and swamp thing, there's a lot more attention to characters and relationships.)

also, i'm phrasing all of this far too strongly, like i've identified the "critical flaw" in moore's work. i don't mean to do that and should write more carefully.

i think alan moore is one of the best and most interesting writers in comics today. there is, however, something about his work that i find rather off-putting, and i'm trying to get at what it might be.

has any other major storytelling artist (i phrase it that way to include filmmakers and novelists as well as comics writers) ever committed him or herself so wholly and explicitly to appropriating and reinterpreting the work of others?

Stanley Kubrick says Hi!

a lot of directors do, really

has moore really done anything all-cylinders-on since 'from hell'

'locked in the library of babel' -- well, after the first couple collections georgie gets about as obsessive a revisitor of past tropes as al does, only it's all islamic mysticism and cowboys

i'm sure there are dozens of ppl from approximately 1961 onwards whose prose careers are mainly scribbling at the edges of pre-existing narratives. kathy acker is sort of close in methodology to moore, but is more interested in junk sculpture than in architecture. (or landscape gardening, if you're more an acker fan than a moore fan.) i don't know. john barth? i feel like on a better day i could come up with a half dozen more relevant names

i think what's offputting about moore's work is that he's had no real call to push himself for fifteen years, tbh

Some wag in the control booth dubbed Alan Moore "Rasputin impersonator" in a recent interview. Such scampery!

has moore really done anything all-cylinders-on since 'from hell'

idk what cylinders you're looking for but Promethea, Top Ten, Voice Of The Fire and The Birth Caul? (Most of the CDs are v. good but Birth Caul is the greatest thing he's ever done, maybe)

Stanley Kubrick says Hi!

no, i don't think kubrick's work compares w TLOEG, lost girls and moore's updating of the cthulhu mythos. stuff like promethea and tom strong set the stage for this part of his career, and at that point he was approx as dialed in on excavation and reinterpretation as, like, george lucas and quentin tarantino, but he's gone a hell of a lot deeper since.

voice of the fire is contemporaneous with from hell, promethea and top ten are entertaining enough but minor, birth caul i thought was very impressive when i was fifteen

i'm sure there are dozens of ppl from approximately 1961 onwards whose prose careers are mainly scribbling at the edges of pre-existing narratives. kathy acker is sort of close in methodology to moore, but is more interested in junk sculpture than in architecture. (or landscape gardening, if you're more an acker fan than a moore fan.) i don't know. john barth? i feel like on a better day i could come up with a half dozen more relevant names

lol, i was thinking about acker when i wrote that stuff yesterday, but i don't think her work is all that similar. acker uses existing narratives & characters as a shell from within which to tell personal stories that only occasionally intersect with the "inspirational" text. john barth used beowulf to make grendel in much the same way that angela carter used fairy tales as a genre, but he never committed himself to this approach. it was pretty much a one-off. angela carter is perhaps a competitor to moore, in that she did write quite a few reinvented/deconstructed fairy tales, and those are what she's best known for, but i still want to say there's something different and unique about moore's work. the best comparison i can think of off the top of my head is gregory maguire, author of wicked and its sequels. all of his books have been based on fiction and folktales, and the wicked series plays moore-like spot-the-inspiration games.

what makes moore's work in TLOEG and lost girls different, imo, is that it's not a pastiche of a single work or a generic approach, but of literature itself. it draws in every character, story and cross-connection possible to create this dizzyingly dense landscape of direct reference. and it changes its for from moment to moment to approximate this or that source. tarantino does do something similar, but seems much more limited in his sphere of reference.

voice of the fire is contemporaneous with from hell

From Hell started in 1988 (and ended 1996), Voice Of The Fire came out 1997

yr thinking of gardner, not barth, but yeah, neither of them committed themselves quite the same way moore did

i don't know - i'm sure someone's written a novel which consists solely of pre-existing fictional characters interacting with each other without explicitly breaking diegesis - the rider there is so that smth like mulligan stew doesn't count

my suspicion is that this relies on something like 'the reification of traditions of popular fiction' (oy) but don't ask me to make that idea work - like, that we now arrive at a place where you can write the league of extraordinary gentlemen says essentially bad things about our culture, in ways that moore may or may not be aware to the extent he is complicit in

xpost how long do you think it takes to write a novel exactly

Birth Caul is the greatest thing he's ever done, maybe

kind of agree with this tbh

yr thinking of gardner, not barth, but yeah, neither of them committed themselves quite the same way moore did

gah, yr right! i don't know how that happened there. stupid brain...

lost in the funhouse is the only barth i've ever read. bogged down in the sot-weed factor, and always meant to read giles goat-boy but never got there.

other artists with a moore-like approach: terry gilliam in time bandits, several of umberto eco's novels.

michael moorcock. and, unfortunately, neil gaiman.

my suspicion is that this relies on something like 'the reification of traditions of popular fiction' (oy) but don't ask me to make that idea work - like, that we now arrive at a place where you can write the league of extraordinary gentlemen says essentially bad things about our culture, in ways that moore may or may not be aware to the extent he is complicit in

that's an interesting idea. do you mean "essentially bad" in the sense that drives simon reynolds' retromania, a frustration with the stagnant and backwards-looking nature of contemporary culture? or bad in that the real is being swallowed by reified ephemera? i suppose the latter complaint is pretty close to my issue w moore: there isn't enough of what i think of as "the real" in there with the cataloging of arcana.

moorcock has largely devoted himself to the exploration of a self-created mythology though, right? the countless books of the "eternal champion cycle" don't reference much outside it, though he has done work with pre-existing stories (behold the man, gloriana...).

gaiman predicts bill willingham and frequently borrows from existing stories, but i think there's a difference between working with the stuff of myths and legends (something that's quite common, really) and the wholesale ransacking of literary history, complete with spot-on artistic and textual copycatting, to which moore seems to have committed himself.

i doubt i'm ever going to read retromania tbh

i don't think 'contemporary culture' is stagnant and backwards-looking, but i think popular fiction largely defined is not in a great place right now -- i don't know. try and imagine loeg '12 with the cast of twilight, harry potter and law and order: svu

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most (all?) of moorcock's 'eternal champion' stuff has recognisable precursors and ancestors, doc savage or conan or james bond, but i don't know that it does anything ultimately all that interesting with the relation to pre-existing ideas, concepts, characters

i think gaiman is trying to apply moore's method to inappropriate materials maybe? he's definitely not all that interesting

Moorcock ransacks history, not just literary history

(altho he does that too)

i think it's impossible to write a naive story that is 'here is a new idea about a wizard' (or a barbarian, or a vampire, or a detective) *

and there are a couple of versions of the sophisticated take of 'here is a new idea about a wizard' - there's the declaredly self-aware kind, which is what happens with new wave sf in some ways - but see m. john harrison or michael swanwick to follow through on it in fantasy - and the sort of motivated alignment of various elements of pastiche, which is the mainstream of fantasy fiction right now

and i think you need to reach that point for moore's method to look viable - it needs to be impossible to say anything naively 'new' about vampires or gentlemen adventurers for it to seem worthwhile to go back and write a story about mina murray having sex with allen quatermain

in one of the recent loeg stories he introduces the blazing world, which is where all the fictional characters go and cohabit, which is meant to be some kind of utopian place: but really it must be the dullest place imaginable, because in order for it to exist they have to already be past it

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*i don't know whether or not this is the same thing as it being impossible to write a naive story that says 'here is a new idea about a petit bourgeois family', which is obviously a much older problem

Moorcock ransacks history, not just literary history

agree with this, but in a sense that's true of literature in general. shakespeare did this. historical novelists have always done this. moore's crazy-quilt "gotta catch em all" pastiche is something different, imo.

and i think you need to reach that point for moore's method to look viable - it needs to be impossible to say anything naively 'new' about vampires or gentlemen adventurers for it to seem worthwhile to go back and write a story about mina murray having sex with allen quatermain

this aligns, i think, with reynolds' critique and with complaints about postmodernism in general.

if it were just astory about nina having sex w allan in some steampunk victorian world, it wouldn't be at all remarkable. it's the attempt to pour the entire history of western literature (including film, comics & illustration, folktales and musical theater) through this framework that makes moore's project seem a little different to me. maybe i'm making a mountain of a molehill, i dunno. appropriation is certainly a popular approach to fantasy these days.

i hate to think that i'm agreeing with simon reynolds

agree with this, but in a sense that's true of literature in general.

true I don't think Moorcock is particularly unique in this regard.

I do think the extent to which he has developed his "multiverse" concept is audacious and unusual, it goes a bit farther than most authors' self-contained literary worlds. And it's also a good deal sloppier and more carefree than Moore's uber-referentialism in LOEG. Moorcock has different people pop up here and there and makes very obvious nods/homages/pastiches to various forms and characters but he doesn't overstuff every narrative other people's creations.

Love the caption:

http://desmond.yfrog.com/Himg857/scaled.php?tn=0&server=857&filename=rwojr.jpg&xsize=640&ysize=640

the BBC would never use the term "Mall Santa"

I assuming there should be no need to point out that caption was added later, right?

duh.

Still funny. And accurate.

You'd be surprised how many people seem to think it's genuine, though. Or maybe you wouldn't.

Sadly, not surprised at all.

a lot of people found that fake fox news thing doing the rounds last month genuine

I fell for it too. Guess I underestimated the acidity of BBC control-booth humour.