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

[Martin Wisse]

Actually it isn't possible to disagree on whether or not Vdertigo followed Moore or the other way around, if you know your history. Without Moore succes with Swamp Thing, and later on Watchmen, DC would not have gone to the UK to look for more of him, Morrison wouldn't have been on Animal Man and Doom Patrol, or Gaiman on Sandman, both taking old and/or defunct DC properties and re-imaging them in a more mature direction, which ultimately led to Vertigo once enough of such titles were around. It also needed the fiasco that was Swamp Thing #89 and DC's desire to both wall off the more mature titles from the mainstream fare while not alienate their talent again, but the foundation was laid by Moore.

It's therefore absurd to say that 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) and imply with it that Moore did no more than taking this established method, when he in fact originated it.

This isn't all that important of course, but it's a good demonstration of how ignorance can undermine a plausible theory -- as with SEK's original post, which makes a good point but assumes a chronology that doesn't exist in reality, as Maggie Gray points out...

Shorter me: context matters.

[Rich Puchalsky]

When I made my original comment I had forgotten that Alan Moore's Swamp Thing was moved to Vertigo rather than originating there. So it was a dashed-off blog comment, yes. But without more historical investigation -- which could pretty easily be done, but which I don't know of, so I'm writing from ignorance again -- I think it's just as possibly ill-founded to say that Moore originated it. It might be even more accurate to say that Karen Berger originated it, if it became a Vertigo tic not because Moore did it and then other British authors imitated him, but because Moore did it and Berger then recruited other British writers and gave them similar projects. If we're talking about "why did Moore do project after project of the same type" -- which is part of what Scott seems to be addressing -- then the marketplace might really have more of an influence than Moore's own stylistic choices. When Moore got well-known enough to be able to support his own imprint, after all, he didn't choose to do stories that were, exactly, reworks of older, caricutured characters -- although he would have had to buy the rights to do so, so perhaps that doesn't say much.

[Donald G]

Would it be churlish of me to correct SEK's identification of the company which owned the characters the Watchmen were based upon (before they were acquired by DC Comics)?

For the record, the Watchmen characters were based upon characters published by Charlton Comics, not Charleston.

With the exception of that little nitpick, I'm finding the discussion quite interesting.

[SEK]

Shorter me: context matters.

Absolutely, and one of the benefits of blogging is that I start correcting myself much, much sooner. As to the chronology, I'm obviously going to have to correct the factual errors, but I think I'm going to stick with a rhetorical reading of the first issue of the Eclipse collection. I'll justify why in a follow-up post shortly.

Also, Maggie's index lists Moore and Alan Davis as responsible for the 1956 section that Maggie identifies as Mick Anglo and Don Lawrence's work, which points to another difficulty when dealing with what was, at the time, considered an ephemeral art form. The odds of me finding a copy of the 1956 book are slim.

Would it be churlish of me to correct SEK's identification of the company which owned the characters the Watchmen were based upon (before they were acquired by DC Comics)?

Not churlish at all. Damn helpful, in fact, and I want to encourage you to keep it up. One reason re-reading my dissertation is such a harrowing experience is finding all sort of little slips of this sort: I know better than to say X, then I say X not once, not twice, but repeatedly.

[Prodigal]

I own Warrior #1 and the Marvelman Family Special (cost me a lot on eBay, but was worth every penny to me), and Maggie's correct.

[Nate]

Scott,
Great post. About Doug M's question and your reply -- is it that the medium of comics lends itself this kind of thing, or is it something more a matter of the context? I always feel wicked clumsy at anything aesthetic but my impulse is to want to say that while there are important qualities that are inherent to the medium (for instance I think the medium has a powerful ability to represent temporally simultaneous and geographically proximate events that are not immediately/directly connected in narrative -- there's a great sequence in Goodbye Chunky Rice that does this I think), I'm not convinced that self-referential...ness is one of those inherent qualities. I'd be happy to have my mind changed, though, because anything that adds to the "this is an awesome art form" balance sheet on comics is great.
take care,
Nate

[Nate]

Ooh that Moore parody of Miller/Daredevil is sharp! I have mixed feelings, because I like Daredevil...

I like the small touches, like having Daredevil 158 in the trash can, and the list of Matt Murdock's ex- love interests written on the wall.

[קניית דומיין]

I thought that,in the first part of my Animal Man retrospective, we will consider how Grant Morrison handles Animal Man’s reboot in the first four issues of his run, the original commission for the series.

[mujeres]

Good food for thought here... Thanks for such an informative article, it's been very useful.