"Re: diving into superhero comics with little or no backstory-- I don't think it's possible, any more than one can pick up a late ANITA BLAKE novel and not expect to be deluged with all sorts of history. Of course such novels have an advantage over comics in that you can usually pick up back issues in a series with a lot less trouble than learning the whole DC Universe to read BLACKEST NIGHT, but the principal is the same.
I think the days of "done in one" are dead and gone. Various companies have tried to promote a return to non-continuity-heavy comics and even if the companies didn't SPECIFICALLY fail because their comics didn't sell, none of those attempts managed to change the Marvel Continuity Paradigm Alan Moore's line apparently sold reasonably well, but I see no indications that readers want more of the same from other authors: they're just willing to support whatever Moore chooses to write.
If Moore actually did hope to change the Paradigm as some of his early hype implied, then I'd have to say he failed spectacularly."
Now the above wasn't a direct response to his interview on mania.com. However, I do relate the above opinion to some of the things he does say about the Bronze Age, aka "the mud age:"
"Well, actually, Marvelman was never meant as a rebellion against the Silver Age. The Silver Age, as far as I’m concerned was over by 1969, as I remember it. I was talking to Kevin O’Neill about this the other day. The ‘70s was kind of the mud age. In the early ‘70s, there were still some experiments being tried, but I remember it as a very grim period. There were perhaps a couple of books that I was interested in, but everything else seemed to be a mess. I was mostly reading underground comics during that period, or 2000 AD. But, the American comics of that period seemed very dull and seemed to have lost their way."
Now, as I mentioned in the previous essay, I do think one can fairly critique 70s comics for a number of failings, though I would not take very seriously the opinion of someone who wasn't reading a sizeable sampling of the comics on a regular basis.
Yet, perhaps more by instinct than sustained analysis, Moore's criticism is at least partly on point. I was one of the hardcore readers who followed dozens of titles, even if I purchased a fair number of them from quarter bins, and in addition to my personal experience with the 70s spate of fans-turned-pros, I know that it was an oft-voiced criticism by fellow hardcore fans that a lot of them were dull, tending to repeat ideas spawned by Marvel or DC pros from the Silver Age. Still, I have two problems with Moore's declarations:
The first objection is that many of the ideas spawned during the Silver Age were not brand-new. Some were simply elaborations of earlier trends from Golden Age comics. What Moore calls the "smiley uncle" period of BATMAN under editor Jack Schiff clearly hearkens back to the more formalized Batman comics of the late 40s, many of which Schiff edited back in the day. Other ideas were derived from prose SF and adapted to superhero tales, as is the case with a great many of the John Broome/Gardner Fox tales. So even then, there was nothing new under the sun.
The second objection is that I think Moore underestimates how much some of his lesser work resembles the lesser lights of the "mud age." I would be on his side if he decried (not that he would ever be this specific) the MARVEL TEAM-UP story in which Bill Mantlo seemingly exhumed two minor villains from the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, the Big Man and the Crime-Master. There's no question in my mind that this was a dull and lazy story that tried to skate by on the associations of older, better stories.
At the same time, I think Moore "homages" to the Silver Age are in many cases not much more complex than similar evocations by Bronze Age fans-turned-creators. I've found his emulations of the Superman and Wonder Woman mythoi in SUPREME and GLORY to be exercises in nostalgia rather than insight, and the homages in TOM STRONG, while better in terms of technique, frequently do little more than copy externals, such as the TS story that more or less rewrites Lee and Kirby's FANTASTIC FOUR #4, substituting an arrogant lava-man suitor for Tesla Strong in place of Namor the Sub-Mariner.
Every creator does his/her share of lazy stories, and Moore certainly has a better track record than the average 70s comics-creator. But at times the adulation for Moore overlooks the fact that he often uses the exact same tools used by every working professional, and for the same basic effect, as opposed to writing some brilliant satire on the original stories.
5 comments:
Interesting point. Makes me wonder though at what point something can be said to go from homage to pastiche. Could AM's work on Supreme be considered the former, or the latter?
I always enjoy your critiques of Moore's many outrageous claims, even though, as I think nearly all comic book readers are, I am a big fan of his. I've can't think of another artist who has such a bizarre attitude towards the medium in which he is most successful.
At any rate - and this is only tangentially related to your post - it's nice to see people who are familiar with Moore's lesser work have something insightful to say about him. Many so-called Moore fans I've encountered have read Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta, and, maybe, his Swamp Thing stories. I realize not everyone has the time to go and read all the Top Ten books or thirty year old issues of Marvelman, but, in terms of volume of copy, it's things like that that make up the bulk of his output.
Strangely enough, the kinds of Moore fans I just mentioned rarely have read From Hell, either, which I easily think qualifies as his richest work.
Josh,
I checked American Heritage and while "homage" can be any kind of honor paid to a person or entity, "pastiche" is more specifically the imitation of an earlier work. I take from that the former is better used in more limited occasions, like (say) the issue of MARTHA WASHINGTON where Miller has his heroine meet a character who is a homage to both Jack Kirby and Kirby's co-creation Captain America.
So SUPREME would definitely be a pastiche, which could take in a whole series of imitations, like when August Derleth pastiched the "Sherlock Holmes" series with his "Solar Pons" series.
GLORY is not so direct a pastiche as Moore's work doesn't stay so close to any particular version of WW.
Lee--
Believe it or not, I count myself a fan of Moore as well, and I'm serious with my last line: I'd much rather seeing him address himself to giving his impressions of current politics or religion than to talk the same dreary talk about "the state of comics," especially as he says he doesn't read many of them any more.
I don't want to leave the impression that I don't think Moore's ever been successful in doing a homage. He does a fine job of catching the tone of the Silver Age Superman in the two-part "Whatever Happened to the Man of Steel?" HOWEVER, in that story he did the same thing there that he excoriates modern creators for doing: he travestied the original by having once-innocent characters meet gruesome fates. I realize that he's saying now that he *wouldn't* do that these days, but I think that's a little ingenuous: it's a perfect story precisely because the innocent SUPERMAN was coming to an end. Works like SUPREME were, in contrast, had the feel of being preserved in amber.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I think it's obvious that you're a fan of Moore's work. However, as you said in your post, far too many Moore fans simply accept anything he writes and anything he says simply because he's Alan Moore. Questioning his (frequently misguided) railings against modern comic books seems to be a new form of blasphemy, as if one has to be a fanboy or no fan at all.
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