On the persistent metafictions of Alan Moore

(Because Amazon's taking away your almost-free books, I thought I'd offer up a free excerpt from mine.  It's neither finished nor particularly good, but turning stacks of virtual notes into viable prose is a messy process and what's the point of even having a blog if you can't ask your readers to help straighten up your mess?  It ends rather abruptly because I need to mark essays, but rest assured, it will arrive at the obvious destination soon enough.)

The inaugural issue of the British comic anthology Warrior, published in March of 1982, contained two stories scripted by a 29-year-old Alan Moore that could not have been more different in tone or conception.  The first told the story of an attempted rape in a dystopian future: corrupt police accost a young woman, but before they can rape her, they are murdered by a man who explains, in iambs, why he came to her aid and why he is about to blow up the British Parliament.  In stark contrast to the opening chapter of V for Vendetta, Moore’s second contribution comes from “an age of lingering innocence, an age of golden dreams,” and recounts how, in 1956, “the Miracleman Family” repelled the invasion of a terrorist organization from the future called the “Science Gestapo.”

These serialized stories represent two possible career paths for young Moore: he can become a writer who creates and develops original ideas, as he does in V for Vendetta; or he can become the kind of whose genius is particular to comics, i.e. one whose talent lies in the ability to transform a caricature into a character of compelling psychological depth.  (Characters in mainstream comic books are, after all, a form of communal property: they belong to a company, and are subject to regular refashioning and repurposing.)  Although its cartoonish art and quaint language could hardly differ more from the harsh lines and sharp tongues of V for Vendetta, the final eight panels of the Miracleman story depict the process that, over the course of the decade, will become Moore’s signature style. 

Reunited after preventing the “Science Gestapo” from traveling to the past by defeating them in the future, the Miracleman clan shares a laugh: “S-so…Garrer was never here, because he never left 1981!  It sounds unbelievable,” says Kid Miracleman.  “Maybe so, Kid,” Miracleman responds, “But that’s the way it was…or was it?”  As they laugh, the focus shifts from the family to Miracleman alone and the narrator, whose role up to this point had been providing linguistic gristle for the duo-specific word-picture relations—in which the words and the pictures say the same thing, as in books designed to teach children to read—begins quoting an ominous-sounding passage from Nietzsche:

The shift from duo-specific to interdependent word-picture relations—in which the combination of the words and pictures accomplish together what neither could alone—marks a transition from a childish, if educational, redundancy to a more rhetorically sophisticated intersection of word and picture.  After ten pages whose form and content belonged to a mode designed for a younger, more innocent audience, the reader must now attempt to identify how Nietzsche’s foreboding prose relates to a plot that had been as cartoonish as its art had been until this page. 

These panels evolve from conventions of the Golden and Silver Age of comics—the unrealistic rotating wall of pastel colors behind Miracleman’s head in the first three panels can be found, for example, behind the Batman when he solves “The Case of the Criminal Syndicate” in Detective Comics #27—such that from the fourth one forward, each successive panel inches closer to Miracleman’s right eye, almost as if Moore is attempting to signal the psychological complexity to come by literally forcing the reader into his character’s head.  He need not have done so, as the change in the word-picture relation from duo-specific to interdependent signaled as much, but that he felt it necessary speaks to his expectation of what an audience in 1982 could understand.

Moore creates a model here that he will come to define his career: take established characters and exploit their premises and history in order to interrogate and complicate the comic medium in which they are delivered.  Books by Alan Moore are, as often as not, about the relationship of comic readers to the titles they read, meaning the rhetorical situations in the book mirrors the rhetorical situation of the reader reading it. 

Recursiveness for its own sake sounds—and typically is—tedious, but Moore has an uncanny talent for finding narrative devices that obscure this complexity behind a compellingly naturalistic story.  In this case, that device is an inversion of the one depicted above: instead of delving through the eye and into the mind of a cartoonish character, Moore implants that cartoonish character into the mind of a more realistic one. 

Initially, the simplicity of the world depicted in the first issue is countermanded by complexity of the second: “A Dream of Flying” opens with Michael Moran screaming in his sleep because of “a dream of death and numbing vertigo” in which Miracleman seemingly dies in a nuclear explosion.  The ominous tone set by the quotation by Nietzsche is made literal in a dream that could not have existed in the cartoonish, caricatured reality of the first issue. 

Moore forces the reader to draw connections between that “comic” reality to the more realistic one depicted in Moran’s dream.  In contrast to the early 21st century tradition of confusing grime and grit with realism, in this instance the realism is a function of the dark content of the dream and the art itself.  Gone are the thick lines, solid backgrounds and bold primary colors from the first issue, replaced by characters and backgrounds made more realistic by crosshatches, stippling, and a more subtle palette, as a comparison of their respective first appearances demonstrates.  From the first issue:

Compare that to the same first looks of Moran and Miracleman in the second:

The realism of the second issue is a photorealism, because the experience of moving from the cartoonish reality of the first issue to a more photorealistic one is designed to bring this superhuman character into closer contact with the world of the reader, i.e. one in which men in tights can only fly in dreams.  Having established this, Moore proceeds to have Moran utter the magic word that transforms him into Miracleman, but in the interim Moore has created a situation in which the reader must constantly question how they interact with the visual and narrative conventions of the book. 

Because they are depicted in such a radically simpler style, the status of the events depicted in the first issue is difficult for the reader to ascertain.  They did, Moore eventually reveals, happen; however, they did so in the same sense that the events depicted in the comic in the reader’s hands happened: in a comic book.  To wit:

The first issue of the comic was the cartoonish book implanted into the more realistically rendered Michael Moran's brain, meaning that the reader has a similar relation to reality as Moran: cartoonish narratives are “implanted” in his or her head, and these narratives influence how they understand the world in which they live.  Miracleman is a book about reading “too much” into simplistic narratives written for children, but it is also a defense of the genre, in that it is a book that superficially resembles the narratives whose rhetorical effectiveness it interrogates.

Comments

[Ahistoricality]

I'm having an Ockham's Razor moment. Isn't what Moore does with MiracleMan (and my familiarity with the character begins and ends with this post, so take this as the complete shot-in-the-dark that it is) a way of finessing (in that kill-a-fly-with-a-hand-grenade fashion so common in comic writing) the continuity issue while simultaneously allowing the contemporary reader to feel superior to the "golden age" readers who put up with the kind of thoughtless plotting and artwork that characterized the early years of the genre?

In other words, I don't see this as a "defense of the genre" but more of a self-defense of change within the genre.

[SEK]

I'm having an Ockham's Razor moment.

This is one of those cases where context trumps Ockham: had Moore not spent the entire rest of his career appropriating the histories of preexisting characters---from Charleston in Watchmen, the public domain in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lost Girls, etc.---I'd agree with you that this was a simple case of retconning. But Moore does seem to be invested in a genuinely different process: he wants to mine the unexplored bits of their premises for narrative and/or emotional effect, in the way that, for example, the sympathetic character of The Question (Marlow in a mask) becomes Rorschach (what a dogged detective would be if granted, say, a mask that provided anonymity akin to what's found on the Internets).

[Doug M.]

Question: is the comics medium inherently more prone to this sort of self-reference and self-interrogation?

History suggests the answer is "yes" -- comics started parodying, retconning, re-inventing and holding dialogues with themselves almost immediately. Other genres did too, sure -- Swift and Pope were parodying professional writers almost as soon as professional writers came into existence -- but I can't think of one that started so quickly and continued so relentlessly.

Doug M.

Doug M.

[Ahistoricality]

Other genres did too, sure ... but I can't think of one that started so quickly and continued so relentlessly.

One of the first true modern novels is Cervantes' don Quixote, which is built around a parody of the heroic literature of his age.

I could also argue that the Japanese poetic tradition, with it's highly referential, "thick" language, becomes similarly self-absorbed quite quickly (by medieval literary standards).

had Moore not spent the entire rest of his career appropriating the histories of preexisting characters....

So did most of the writers in mainstream comics. Truly original characters are very rare birds, and even very original writers (Gaiman [outside of Sandman], Stracyzinski, etc.) spend a lot of their time and energy trying to finish stories started by others. Moore's schtick is to play the backstory for laughs at the character's expense; I'm not sure I see that as a particularly subtle or interesting thing, except that he can get away with it and do more interesting things as a result.

[Halloween Jack]

Another way to look at that page with the quote from Nietzsche is to imagine Strauss' fanfare from Alse Sprach Zarathustra accompanying it; even though that's a bit Dark Side of the Moon-meets-The Wizard of Oz to assume that Moore might have intended that, it does make sense on one level; like the Monolith in 2001 (and Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen), Miracleman changes the world, in part, simply by existing.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"Moore creates a model here that he will come to define his career: take established characters and exploit their premises and history in order to interrogate and complicate the comic medium in which they are delivered."

I don't think so. On the one hand, this means that books like From Hell and Promethea do not "define [Moore's] career" -- that his career is defined commercially, instead of critically. On the other, this ignores the context of Vertigo. Taking established characters and exploiting their premises was so much a Vertigo tic that nearly all the Vertigo writers started that way (Gaiman and Sandman, say). So yes, it was what Moore did when he started out. I'd say that his career arc has been away from it, or at least away from "established characters" -- even those in Watchmen are not really the Charleston ones -- and into reexaminations of genre more broadly.

Moore has himself become an established character to be reconfigured, as you've seen if you followed my Email update on breakthroughs in Japanese-influenced schoolgirl fanart.

[SEK]

Doug:

History suggests the answer is "yes" -- comics started parodying, retconning, re-inventing and holding dialogues with themselves almost immediately. Other genres did too, sure -- Swift and Pope were parodying professional writers almost as soon as professional writers came into existence -- but I can't think of one that started so quickly and continued so relentlessly.

I'm inclined to agree, but it wasn't nearly so deliberate an act before Moore. If you were a frighteningly original writer working on comics, you went outside the mainstream and are now published by Fantagraphics. Moore opened up the possibility of taking these broken toys, these half-not-bad-ideas and enlivening them with dramatic purpose; in short, Pope and Swift never saw themselves as improving upon children's literature the way that, for example, Moore did. (And continues to do with, say, Lost Girls.)

Ahistoricality:

Moore's schtick is to play the backstory for laughs at the character's expense; I'm not sure I see that as a particularly subtle or interesting thing, except that he can get away with it and do more interesting things as a result.

Really? Swamp Thing is profoundly more moving and meditative than it has any right to be, as is Miracleman. Outside of something like Supreme, in which he's having fun at another character's expense, I can't think of many examples of Moore fiddling with the backstory to further mockery. (It may just be that I need coffee, though.)

Rich:

Moore has himself become an established character to be reconfigured, as you've seen if you followed my Email update on breakthroughs in Japanese-influenced schoolgirl fanart.

Thanks for the link, Rich. I got the email, knew I'd seen those somewhere (turns out here) and was waiting until I found that site again before responding.

Taking established characters and exploiting their premises was so much a Vertigo tic that nearly all the Vertigo writers started that way (Gaiman and Sandman, say). So yes, it was what Moore did when he started out.

It's the other way around, though: Vertigo started in '93, a good decade after Moore started fiddling around with this formula in explicitly comic terms. Moore's reconfigured Swamp Thing migrated from DC to Vertigo at its inception. Also, Gaiman took over for Moore on the Miracleman with Warrior #17. Then there's this:

One of the things I had in common with Alan Moore and a whole generation of comics writers around us -- certainly Grant Morrison -- was a love and respect for what had gone before but also a healthy interest in seeing where we could go with it. It was a combination of those the two impulses. We were in a period then in mainstream American comics that things had gotten a bit hidebound. Comics read very much like a mixture of what had come before. And I think at the time you had this wonderful little transatlantic thing that happened, this mini-British Invasion. Looking back on it, the analogy of what happened to pop music in the 1960s was probably pretty accurate. Alan Moore got to be the Beatles and, along with Grant Morrison, I was Gerry and the Pacemakers.

Authorial intent to the side, Gaiman clearly sees himself (and Morrison) as a generation removed from Moore in terms of character re-purposing.

Halloween Jack:

Another way to look at that page with the quote from Nietzsche is to imagine Strauss' fanfare from Alse Sprach Zarathustra accompanying it; even though that's a bit Dark Side of the Moon-meets-The Wizard of Oz to assume that Moore might have intended that, it does make sense on one level; like the Monolith in 2001 (and Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen), Miracleman changes the world, in part, simply by existing.

That's not nearly so random as the Dark Side of Oz, and it works perfectly, amping up the playful creepiness of the sequence.

[Ahistoricality]

Moore's schtick is to play the backstory for laughs at the character's expense...

I can't think of many examples of Moore fiddling with the backstory to further mockery.

I put that a little roughly, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that his characters aren't emotionally interesting and serious -- often they are, though not always in ways that Moore, I think, intends or realizes -- or that Moore doesn't take them seriously. But I still can't quite get "Duck Amuck" out of my head: the Golden Age material is being used against the character, as evidence of insanity, or trauma. The reader is in on the joke: in the new age, old-style stories are infantile, damaging, the result of a more controlled, paternalistic publishing environment.

There's an otherwise forgettable episode of ST:DS9 in which the characters go back in time to intervene in the events chronicled in "The Trouble With Tribbles": when one of the characters notes to Lt. Worf the difference between Original Series Klingons and later ones, he gruffly says something like "we don't talk about that."

[NickS]

The first issue of the comic was the cartoonish book implanted into the more realistically rendered Michael Moran's brain, meaning that the reader has a similar relation to reality as Moran: cartoonish narratives are “implanted” in his or her head, and these narratives influence how they understand the world in which they live.

Hmmm . . .

I too know nothing about Miracleman other than what is contained in this post, but this makes me thinking immediately of Ronin by Frank Miller which uses a very similar device in which the first issue is revealed, by the end, to have been derived from a TV series. Incidentally wikipedia informs me that Ronin was published beginning in July 1983, so it was probably developed independently rather than taking inspiration from Miracleman.

It would make me interested in a simple comparison of the two, since I have always thought that bait and switch was one of the most effective elements of Ronin.

[SEK]

Incidentally wikipedia informs me that Ronin was published beginning in July 1983, so it was probably developed independently rather than taking inspiration from Miracleman.

Need to return to grading, but vis-a-vis Moore and Miller in 1983, here's a link to the Moore-penned mockery of Miller, "Dourdevil."

[NickS]

Oh my . . . that's awesome.

[Rich Puchalsky]

When you put it that way -- I agree that it could well have been Vertigo following Moore rather than the other way around. I don't think that what Moore was doing was so new that Vertigo had to get the idea from him, but it does make sense that Vertigo as a whole followed Swamp Thing. Perhaps Moore --> Vertigo is worth mentioning in your book, since that later became core Gaiman, Morrison et al material. I still think that your "original ideas" vs "transforming a caricature" dichotomy risks sweeping some of Moore's critically best-regarded work under the rug. Moore likes to work within a mode where he develops a childhood form into something more complex -- even From Hell could be seen as a murder mystery so developed -- but I don't think he's wedded to particularly caricatured existing characters so much as a caricatured setting.

Still wondering when someone is going to trace all of Moore's work back to his early run on D.R. & Quinch.

[SEK]

I put that a little roughly, I'm sorry.

Alan Moore will find it in his heart to forgive you, I'm sure.

I didn't mean that his characters aren't emotionally interesting and serious -- often they are, though not always in ways that Moore, I think, intends or realizes

I'm not sure I buy that: works as structured as his will, by clever design, signify in ways that the author didn't intend, because even if he doesn't invest as much energy in one end of an analogue as he does the other, he can count on meaning accruing to both via juxtaposition/imbrication/whatever you'd like to call it. That said, I think Moore's cannier than most about how these figures joust for meaning ... but I'm carrying out my end of this discussion in a very abstract way because I've been grading all day and forgotten how to use language good.

I don't think that what Moore was doing was so new that Vertigo had to get the idea from him, but it does make sense that Vertigo as a whole followed Swamp Thing.

The above caveat applies here too, but I'm not saying that Vertigo specifically followed Moore (although the authors most closely associated with the early titles, Gaiman and Morrison, did see themselves as following Moore's footsteps), only that Moore initiated the revisionary mode that led not to more adult-oriented titles -- Pekar, Crumb, and comix explored mature themes, after all -- but to investing ostensibly childish books with an adult sensibility. This isn't the case with Swamp Thing, as the horror titles were always intended to skirt the Comics Code by marketing themselves as adult books, but it certainly is with Miracleman.

I still think that your "original ideas" vs "transforming a caricature" dichotomy risks sweeping some of Moore's critically best-regarded work under the rug.

Off the top of my head, the works that don't fit my model are V for Vendetta, Halo Jones, and a slew of one-shots for 2000 A.D. Even D.R. & Quinch is repurposed from National Lampoon, and From Hell is heavily indebted to Stephen Knight's books. I don't mean this as a criticism: Ulysses, after all, works in much the same manner, which probably indicates why I'm so attracted to Moore.

[Hob]

Ahistoricality: Whether you're being too harsh or not, you seem remarkably confident about your thesis considering you haven't read the comic.

One thing you'll notice about the comic, if you read it, is that most of what happens after Miracleman's real story becomes known to him is much, much, much, much worse than anything that could've ever happened in the backstory. Everyone would've clearly been much better off if the original version had been true. I'm not sure how you can get from there to "feeling superior to the 'golden age' readers"; that sounds a bit like the kind of music criticism that's based on mind-reading of some annoying hypothetical hipsters that the critic imagines to be fans of the disliked band.

[Hob]

SEK - "Gaiman took over for Moore on the Miracleman with Warrior #17" - Slight correction: it wasn't in Warrior any more at that point. It was an independent Miracleman series, published by Eclipse Comics, which reprinted the short MM stories from Warrior #1-24 in its first six issues (changing the name from Marvelman) and then continued from there. So there were 16 issues of Miracleman written by Moore.

Argh, I can't believe this is still out of print.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Promethea, too. I think that I basically agree with what you've written; I think there's just too much emphasis on reexamination of existing characters as opposed to reexamination of the setting of those characters, so to speak. To do Promethea Moore had to invent a background for her that worked exactly as if she was someone else's old character, repurposed. But she actually wasn't. The same with the (less-regarded) Tom Strong: firmly set in a certain pulp tradition, the character is not actually a retread.

[Maggie Gray]

Um, the Marvelman/Miracleman story you mention didn't appear in the first issue of Warrior. It was a re-print of an original Mick Anglo/ Don Lawrence Marvelman episode from October 1956 with the balloons reworded by Moore and the final page with the Nietzche quote added by Moore and Garry Leach. It was done explicitly for the first issue of the Eclipse re-publication of the series.
The Marvelman episode that appeared in Warrior #1 was 'A Dream of Flying'.
The original Mick Anglo/Don Lawrence episode was called ‘Marvelman Family and the Invaders from the Future’ and was reprinted in the Marvelman Special, published by Quality Communications (the Warrior publisher) in 1984.
(N.b. Both Marvelman and V for Vendetta were black and white in the original Warrior versions)

[Ahistoricality]

Whether you're being too harsh or not, you seem remarkably confident about your thesis considering you haven't read the comic.

Most of Scott's readers won't have either. He's doing a close reading in the interests of illustrating some larger truths about comics generally and about Moore specifically, and while I may be blazingly wrong, my reading isn't particularly tendentious given the evidence presented, and what else I do know about comics history. It's up to Scott whether to take my reading seriously or not, whether the remainder of his chapter makes it unlikely that readers will be left with a similar impression, and whether his presentation needs more context or evidence to support the reading he's presenting.

[SEK]

Maggie Gray, I have to teach in a minute, but I wanted to thank you for that comment. Given the extremely sketchy publication (and lack of republication) history of Marvelman/Miracleman, I've been working with copies of the reprints, and they didn't indicate that they were different from the original. (And getting my hands on the original Warriors is even more difficult.)

[Maggie Gray]

the Grand Comics Database is generally pretty accurate I've found
see
http://www.comics.org/series/2706/