From Marvel to Miracle (and Back to Marvel): Two Miracleman Reference Books

Having read my way through the complete (as of now) runs of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman (and their various artistic collaborators) on the character originally known as Marvelman and now known as Miracleman, I decided to pick up a couple reference books about the character. The first is Kimota!, published by comics reference publisher TwoMorrows. Originally published in 2001, there was supposedly a 2010 new edition, but I couldn't find it for sale anywhere at any price, nor was it in any libraries, so I settled for getting the 2001 edition via interlibrary loan. Poisoned Chalice, on the other hand, is self-published and thus not available in any library; I bought a print-on-demand copy via Lulu.

Kimota!: The Miracleman Companion
by George Khoury

Published: 2001
Read: August 2024

Together, the two books provide a lot on insight into the character, but they come at him from different directions. George Khoury's Kimota! largely consists of interviews with various figures: Mick Anglo (original creator of the character), Alan Moore, Dez Skinn (original publisher of the 1980s revival), many of the artists (Garry Leach, Alan Davis, Chuck Austen, Rick Veitch, John Totleben, and Mark Buckingham*), Cat Yronwode (publisher of the comic when it moved to Eclipse Comics), Neil Gaiman, Barry Windsor-Smith (who did a lot of covers), and Beau Smith (who worked at Eclipse when it published Miracleman). It also contains other features like Moore's original proposal for the revival, a timeline Alan Moore and Steve Moore worked out of how (among other things) Marvelman fit with V for Vendetta (!), an index to all issues of the comic, the script of Miracleman #1, the pencils for an unpublished Moore/Totleben collaboration, and more.

Poisoned Chalice is, on the other hand, a history of the character, mostly focusing on the legal issues. Pádraig Ó Méalóid dives into the various disputes that ultimately led to the existence of Miracleman: how Fawcett was accused of ripping off Superman and thus had to stop publishing Captain Marvel, how the company repackaging Captain Marvel in the UK ripped him off to create Marvelman once they ran out of Captain Marvel material, how Dez Skinn brought the character back in the 1980s but probably didn't do his legal diligence, how Marvel UK began sending cease-and-desist letters to Skinn once he published a book with "Marvelman" in the title, how the character ended up being renamed "Miracleman" so it could be published in the US, how the rights to the character ended up spread out all over the place, how possibly some of them fell into the hands of Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, how McFarlane got caught up in a long dispute with Neil Gaiman over various characters Gaiman created for McFarlane, how publishers in the 2000s and 2010s began attempting to assert and consolidate rights to both Marvelman and Miracleman, and how the character ultimately all ended up in the hands of Marvel Comics (who finally republished both some of Mick Anglo's original stories and Moore's and Gaiman's runs, as well as continuing into new stories). Ó Méalóid does a lot of a research, drawing on primary source legal documents, interviews from various sources including Kimota!, and his own original interviews.

Between the two, you get a good sense of both the significance of the character and the legal disputes that without which the character would not exist, but also made the actual publication of the character a fraught issue. Kimota! is a quick and easy but informative read; it's the kind of "companion" book that doesn't focus on analysis really, but more on providing behind-the-scenes information. The interviews are interesting and fun. What were these people thinking when they did this work? There's good tidbits here you won't find anywhere else. Not everything here is going to interesting to every reader—I skipped over the script to Miracleman #1, the unfinished Moore/Totleben story, and the index, for example—but there's a lot to like here, and I tore through it in about a day.

Poisoned Chalice: The Extremely Long and Incredibly Complex Story of Marvelman (and Miracleman)
by Pádraig Ó Méalóid

Published: 2018
Acquired and read: September 2024

By contrast, Poisoned Chalice is a long, detailed read. Not content to start even just with the dispute between Fawcett and DC over Captain Marvel and Superman, Ó Méalóid goes all the way back to Philip Wylie's Gladiator and claims that it was ripped off by Siegel and Shuster when they created Action Comics #1. Ó Méalóid surfaces every single fact he can find about the legal ownership of the character—much of which was pretty thin on the ground before his investigations. As he shows, the character has often been mismanaged or used flat-out illegally; it's pretty clear from his investigations, for example, that Dez Skinn probably didn't really lay the necessary groundwork to use Marvelman in Warrior. Some of what was in here I knew already, either from Kimota! or my general knowledge of the character, but it's good to see it documented in detail. I think the most new-to-me information was contained in the discussion of how the rights to Miracleman supposedly ended up with Todd McFarlane, how  McFarlane ripped off Neil Gaiman, and how the two tangled in court for years until Gaiman was ultimately vindicated. I knew vaguely there was a dispute about a Spawn character named Angela, but I didn't know any of the parameters, or what it had to do with Miracleman.

The book's detail is, however, sometimes its downfall. There is a decent amount of repetition, and sometimes Ó Méalóid uses five examples when two would do. And though he's mostly scrupulous about the legal details, I did find that occasionally Ó Méalóid made statements that I don't think make any legal sense. Even if Marvelman was a rip-off of Captain Marvel, the collapse of the company that owned Marvelman would not somehow grant rights to the character to DC, that's just not how copyright (or any kind of ownership) works as far as I know.

On top of that, this is self-published—and oh boy is that obvious. Some paragraphs are indented, but most are not, resulting in huge blocks of text on many pages; footnotes are not always logically positioned; sometimes the little black bar dividing footnotes from the main text overlaps with text. On top of that, it needed a good content edit; there are way too many footnotes and Ó Méalóid is, at times, an overly digressive writer. For $18, one hopes for better! It reminds me a lot of Camestros Felapton's Debarkle, though, in that a professionally published version of this would be better in some ways (it would have been actually edited) but probably worse in others, because I don't think a professional publisher would want something with such a narrow focus and such detailed documentation. So you either get the roughness of a self-published book, or you get a different book, to be honest. 

I did really appreciate Ó Méalóid's critique of the pretty stupid way Marvel published the Marvelman and Miracleman material it acquired, fannish as it probably was. I appreciate all the hard work, labor, and love that obviously went into this book—Ó Méalóid has clearly read everything ever written about Miracleman, and dug up a lot of information no one else has ever bothered too, straightening out a lot of vague misconceptions people have around the character. I like that he interviews key figures in the history of the character, but also (unlike Khoury, who to be fair, just has a different project) puts those interviews in context of other interviews and actual facts. I also appreciated the times he showed what was bluster, such as that the disappearance of Marvelman from Warrior was probably more about Dez Skinn's deteriorating working relationship with Alan Moore than the threats from Marvel UK over the use of the "Marvelman" title.

Like I said, I had to read the 2001 edition of Kimota!, but even the 2010 edition wouldn't have been very up-to-date, as it would have predated Marvel's acquisition of the character and republication of the Moore and Gaiman's runs. That's probably its biggest flaw; there's just a significant piece of Miracleman content that the book does not and cannot say anything about. If TwoMorrows announced a third edition, I would pick it up... but maybe they need to wait until The Dark Age is done. I was worried that, as it predates the publication of The Silver Age, Poisoned Chalice would be out-of-date a bit, too, but actually in terms of the legal issues, Ó Méalóid is pretty much up to the moment; things have stabilized since his book was published even if it was six years ago.

Are these books for everyone with a casual interest in Miracleman? Probably not. (Though—do people with a casual interest in Miracleman actually exist? Seems to me you're probably either in or you're out.) But if you're the kind of person who's into 1) Alan Moore, 2) the development of superhero comics as a genre, or 3) literary histories and copyrights, (and I'm into all three) these books are must-reads.

* I think John Ridgway is probably the significant omission. Of course, as a Doctor Who Magazine fan, he's one of the ones I'd like to hear from the most!

Miracleman: Olympus by Alan Moore, John Totleben, et al.

Miracleman, Book Three: Olympus

Collection published: 2015
Contents originally published: 1987-2015
Acquired: April 2015
Read: August 2024

Story: The Original Writer with Grant Morrison & Peter Milligan

Art: John Totleben with Thomas Yeates, Joe Quesada & Mike Allred

Color Art: Steve Oliff with Richard Isanove & Laura Allred

Lettering: Joe Caramagna with Chris Eliopoulos & Travis Lanham

Alan Moore's final Miracleman volume explains the mystery running through the previous book (who was the mysterious woman?), ties things up with Michael Moran's wife and child, sends him into space to meet the Warpsmiths, and draws him into a final confrontation with Kid Miracleman.

Moore's comics can often be densely narrated, but usually he makes this work, achieving sympathy between word and art. I did not find that to be the case here. Though the stuff with Miraclewoman is fine if kind of predictable (the critique here is that female superheroes are sex fantasies), once the action moves into space, I struggled through the massive amount of ponderous text boxes, and I very much struggled to care. In here and in book one, the Warpsmiths are very much the weak link of the Miracleman saga. They are a necessary part of it, I suppose, but I never found reading about them very interesting.

Once we move back to Earth, the high point is definitely the stuff with Michael Moran's wife, showing us the human cost of utopia and perfection. 

The fight with Kid Miracleman is one of those things that would have been more shocking at the time, but after Watchmen, The Walking Dead, The Authority, and so on, it's hard to get excited about comics' ability to depict detailed and gruesome violence.

The other high point is the last issue. This to me was the truly revolutionary idea of Miracleman, and admittedly, the violence of the previous issue was a necessary step to get us there. The idea that superheros are fundamentally about using violence to reshape the world is baked into the origins of the genre; you can see it in the very first Superman stories. But most superhero stories pull back from this, not wanting to show violence, or not wanting to show big changes to the status quo. In Miracleman (as in Watchmen), Moore runs straight into that premise—now that the violence is over, Miracleman and Miraclewoman reshape the world into utopia. It's a staggering concept that few superhero comics would dare to embrace, and I loved the issue; it clearly makes the whole rest of the series worth it, and is probably the single best contribution Moore makes to the idea of the "realistic" superhero.

The volume has two stories by other writers, both published in 2015. One is by Grant Morrison, written in 1984 but not illustrated or published. I found this kind of half-baked, an interesting idea not well executed. The other is an adventure of the Miracleman Family at its peak, like the ones Moore sprinkled through the first two volumes, mostly worth it for the great Mike Allred art.

Don't be fooled by this volume's page count of 328; the actual story pages only go up to 147, and the Alan Moore stuff you are here for just 124. There's a lot of original art here, which to be honest I do not find very interesting. Marvel's three chunky collections of Miracleman are a lie; they are really three thin collections... and ought to have been one 300-page collection. (Marvel did later release a Miracleman Omnibus, but again, they padded it out with all these extras.) It feels like, having finally secured the rights to the character, Marvel wanted a return on its investment by padding the series out into as many purchases as they could, but in the long run, I think it harms the series's purchasability. It wasn't until 2023 that Marvel finally released a reasonably-sized volume of the whole series in one go than can stand alongside Moore's other 1980s works. I probably should have held out for that one.

Miracleman: The Red King Syndrome by Alan Moore, Alan Davis, John Ridgway, Chuck Austen, Rick Veitch, et al.

Miracleman, Book Two: The Red King Syndrome

Collection published: 2014
Contents originally published: 1983-86
Acquired: November 2014
Read: July 2024

Story: The Original Writer with Cat Yronwode

Art: Alan Davis, John Ridgway, Chuck Austen & Rick Veitch with Rick Bryant

Color Art: Steve Oliff

Lettering: Joe Caramagna

The second volume of Miracleman is very attention-grabbing—it contains both gruesome violence and an extraordinarily detailed rendering of a birth, as Michael Moran's wife gives birth to their baby. In the post-Watchmen, post-Authority era of superhero comics, the violence isn't so striking, but I still can't think of any other superhero comic I've read in the following four decades where a baby's head emerges from a woman's vagina in close-up detail.

Outside of that, though, this feels like the weak link in the chain of the Miracleman saga. Not that it's bad, but in terms of story, what happens in the two volumes on either side of it are more significant and more interesting; in a classic middle-volume-of-trilogy situation, we need this volume to get from book one to book three, but it doesn't have as much to say on its own. We need the birth, we need to see Miracleman investigate his origin, and there's some important themes and resonances here, but they're not so interesting as what the other two books do.

Thankfully, given it's by Alan Moore and some talented artistic collaborators, how it says what it says is always interesting. Interesting writing as always (though some of what it does with race is very dated now), and Alan Davis and John Ridgway in particular are always great illustrators worth reading. (This might be the first time I've seen John Ridgway art with color and not felt it diminished by the coloring, so kudos to Steve Oliff.) Highlights include: Miracleman's conversation in the woods with a kid scared of nuclear war, the flashback chapters about Gargunza manipulating the dreams of the "Miracleman Family," and the way the malignant government agent ends up helping Miracleman in the end.

There are two extra stories here: one a kind-of-funny story about Young Miracleman trying to hit on a receptionist in 1957, and a frame story by Cat Yronwode to a set of Mick Anglo Marvelman reprints that had to be run in Miracleman #8 when a flood damaged the Eclipse offices, which I guess is nice to have for completeness's sake but pretty meaningless on its own.

Most of the extras in this volume are pages of uncolored original art, which is less interesting to me. Two things I find frustrating about the otherwise detailed archival presentation of these volumes are 1) there are no individual art credits (which chapters did Alan Davis draw? who knows) and 2) there is no original publication data given. Where did these stories originally appear? This is particularly frustrating as the extras will say things like "this is the cover of Warrior #16"... but you have no clear indication of which story originally appeared in Warrior #16!

Miracleman: A Dream of Flying by Alan Moore, Garry Leach, Alan Davis, et al.

Miracleman, Book One: A Dream of Flying

Collection published: 2014
Contents originally published: 1982-89
Acquired: May 2014
Read: July 2024

Story: The Original Writer with Mick Anglo

Art: Garry Leach & Alan Davis with Don Lawrence, Steve Dillon & Paul Neary

Color Art: Steve Oliff

Lettering: Joe Caramagna and Chris Eliopoulos

Many years ago now, I got interested in Alan Moore's 1980s comic Miracleman (a.k.a. Marvelman) as part of a project about superheroes, violence, and utopia; analysis of the series by Peter Paik in his excellent monograph From Utopia to Apocalypse made it sound very relevant. Unfortunately, rights issues meant the book was long out-of-print, and copies of the collected editions so rare, I couldn't get any via interlibrary loan except for the Neil Gaiman–penned follow-up. But, some years later, Marvel acquired and sorted out the rights, eventually reprinting Moore's run in a series of three deluxe hardcovers (with new coloring and lettering) that I picked up as they came out, and some years after that, that I am finally getting around to reading.

Clearly one of the things Alan Moore did to the superhero genre that he came along and asked, "What if superheroes were real?" Now, he was not the first to do this, nor the last; I would argue that a great many important works of superhero fiction, at least as early as Amazing Fantasy #15, were premised on this question. But with his work on Watchmen, Moore was the one who asked this question for the 1980s. In the first book of Miracleman, A Dream of Flying, Moore asks the same question in a different way. While Watchmen looks at what kind of people would do something like become a superhero, and what real people would do with that kind of power, and what the real effects of using violence to change the world would be (a theme Moore comes back to a lot; see also V for Vendetta), A Dream of Flying comes at it from the opposite direction.

Instead of taking heroic figures and making them sordid and realistic, A Dream of Flying asks how could a heroic figure exist in a real world. Back in the 1950s and '60s, Mick Anglo wrote the adventures of Marvelman and his friends; Moore imagines that those stories sort of really happened—in the head of Michael Moran and his friends. Moran was abducted for an experiment as a child by a depraved scientist, who used alien technology to give Moran superpowers and held him in a dreamlike state, pumping crudely written superhero stories into his brain to develop him into the weapon he wanted. Eventually things went horribly wrong, Moran lost him memories, and by the 1980s was a fortysomething adult with no idea he had a superpowered alter ego. Miracleman is, both in story and in reality, based on Captain Marvel, and Moore manages to come up with reasonable science fiction explanations for a lot of what happens in Captain Marvel stories; I liked the explanation for body-swapping a lot.

A Dream of Flying begins with Michael's slow rediscovery of his true self, and then his discovery of how he was created and what happened to his friends. It's Alan Moore at the top of his craft, and he has strong artistic collaborators in Garry Leach and Alan Davis. The best parts usually center on Moore's appliance of grounded realism to the character, both in terms of psychology and in terms of sci-fi explanations. This kind of story has been told a lot since, but Moore is very good at it. I particularly liked the stuff about Michael's wife.

In addition to the eleven chapters of A Dream of Flying (most about seven pages), this volume includes a prologue retelling a real Mick Anglo Marvelman tale in Moore's idiom, a flashforward story (set during Book Three, I think) about Miracleman and the Warpsmiths of Phaidon doing some time travel, and two side stories about the Warpsmiths. The first of these is fun, and the flashforward is fine if a bit pointless. The Warpsmith stuff I found largely inscrutable, but I guess I'm glad its in here for completeness's sake. 

There's also about sixty pages of "behind-the-scenes" stuff to pad this book out to a marketable length. Most of it is pretty interesting: contemporary house ads, art try-outs, and the like. Original artwork and variant covers are less interesting, but I'm sure some people appreciate this stuff.

I would have, however, preferred a recoloring done in a more genuine 1980s style, rather than the contemporary approach Steve Oliff took.

Overall, this is an interesting start to the Miracleman saga, and highly recommended if you are interested in Alan Moore and/or the history of the superhero genre.

Cybermen: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 50)

Cybermen: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Alan Barnes, Andrew Cartmel, Mike Collins, Steve Dillon, Martin Geraghty, Scott Gray, David Lloyd, Alan McKenzie, Mike McMahon, Steve Moore, Grant Morrison, Paul Neary, Steve Parkhouse, John Ridgway, Adrian Salmon, et al.

Collection published: 2023
Contents originally published: 1979-2005
Acquired: September 2023
Read: October 2023

As with the Daleks collections, I obviously had to read this out of sequence based on when it came out. Like with those, I just read the new-to-me stories. If I was integrating this into my marathon from the beginning, I'd just do the backup strips and read it after Dragon's Claws, saving the Doctor-focused strips for reading in the main volumes.

Deathworld, from Doctor Who Weekly #15-16 (Jan. 1980)
script by Steve Moore, art by David Lloyd

Some Ice Warriors get attacked by some Cybermen. David Lloyd draws the hell out of an Ice Warrior for the most part (somewhat less convinced by his spindly Cybermen), but this—like a lot of monster-focused DWW back-up strips to be honest—reads to me like the kind of thing that would be thrilling if you were ten, but is more of an interesting curiosity if you come to it as an adult.

Black Legacy, from Doctor Who Weekly #35-38 (June-July 1980)
written by The Original Writer [Alan Moore], art by David Lloyd

Look, okay, maybe it's by Alan Moore, but I just can't take a Cyberman story where one shouts "What? Who... No! Blood of my ancestors, NOOOOOOOOO...." seriously. Like, this just isn't how it works.

from Doctor Who Weekly #16

Stray Observations:

• New-to-me strip content: a whole sixteen pages! But also we get some new commentary by Paul Scoones on Junk-Yard Demon, Exodus/Revelation!/Genesis!, and The World Shapers. I particularly liked getting to hear from Grant Morrison about The World Shapers (in an archival interview from 1987), and David Lloyd is always interesting. Kind of funny they can't even say "Alan Moore" in the commentaries. Does he appear like Voldemort if you say his name?
• As a complete package, though, it's fairly attractive; I like getting one bumper volume better than the two slim Dalek ones. And there have been some great Cyberman strips in DWM history. I'm not sure I would count The Glorious Dead as a Cyberman strip even though it's got Kroton in it, but I guess it would be odd to leave it out of a book containing literally every other Kroton strip. The best one remains, of course, The Flood.
• List of all other stories and what collections they were previously printed in: (see links below to read my reviews)
• Junk-Yard Demon (in Dragon's Claw)
• Exodus / Revelation / Genesis! / The World Shapers (in The World Shapers)
• The Good Soldier (in The Good Soldier)
  
• Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman / Ship of Fools / Unnatural Born Killers / The Company of Thieves / The Glorious Dead (in The Glorious Dead)
• The Flood (in The Flood)
  
• The Cybermen / Junk-Yard Demon II (in The Clockwise War)
  

This post is the fiftieth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers Liberation of the Daleks. Previous installments are listed below:

Review: Smax by Alan Moore, Zander Cannon, and Andrew Currie

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2004 (contents: 2003-04)
Acquired and read October 2016

Smax

Writer: Alan Moore

Artist: Zander Cannon
Inkers: Andrew Currie, Richard Friend
Coloring: Ben Dimagmaliw
Lettering, Logo and Design: Todd Klein

This is the last Top 10 spin-off (at least, the last one collected in trade paperback format). This takes Top 10 cop Jeff Smax back to his home dimension, a parallel Earth governed by the rules of fantasy stories, not superhero stories, accompanied by his partner, Toybox. Unlike Top 10, which smashes superhero stories and cop dramas together, this isn't really about genre collision; it's mostly an affectionate riff on the conventions of fantasy fiction, especially the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings/Dungeons & Dragons-based quest stuff. Smax finds out that the only dragon he ever ran away from is still rampaging, and Toybox guilts him into confronting his responsibilities.

Two things I like at once: jokes at the expense of Tolkien lineages, and jokes at the expense of the socially clueless.
from Smax #2 (art by Zander Cannon & Andrew Currie)

There's no deep insight into the fantasy genre, but there are good jokes: I appreciated the "politically correct" take on fantasy races, the idea of a bureau to authorize quests, Smax's inability to read emotions and utter conviction that he is reading emotions, the tedious dwarf funeral, and the fact that dwarves play RPGs based on being in middle management. And of course, I have to love any page that has jokes based on both Victorian poetry and Homestar Runner:

To be honest, it's a pretty high references-per-panel ratio throughout. It's interesting that Moore's post-Watchmen attempts to return to genres earnestly still do so self-consciously. Having deconstructed genre, can he only perform genre via reconstruction?
from Smax #3 (art by Zander Cannon & Andrew Currie)

I do wish that Smax played a bigger role in the resolution of his own story-- the ending is probably the only part of this that didn't work for me, as Smax is outshone by Toybox, and the romance subplot is resolved in a pretty rushed way, too. This isn't as good as Moore's work on Top 10 proper, but it's an entertaining diversion with a couple of its key characters.

Review: Top 10: The Forty-Niners by Alan Moore and Gene Ha

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2005
Acquired and read September 2016

Top 10: The Forty-Niners

Writer: Alan Moore

Artist: Gene Ha
Colorist: Art Lyon
Lettering, Logos and Design: Todd Klein

Alan Moore and Gene Ha return to Top 10 to fill in some of the backstory of Neopolis. Following World War II, the United States confines its "science heroes" to the city of Neopolis. Heroes accustomed to ruling the battlefield during the war, like Steve "Jetlad" Traynor and Leni "Sky Witch" Muller, must adjust to life as civilians, and figure out a use for their powers outside of a military setting.

It's a book about finding your purpose in peace. Steve and Leni find theirs, but many of their fellow veterans can't manage it. Leni joins the Neopolis Police Department; Steve becomes a mechanic for the Skysharks, an aerial squadron. Though, since he's the captain of the Neopolis P.D. by the time of the present-day Top 10 stories, we know he must join up eventually. The original run of Top 10 revealed at its very end that Steve was gay (which he seemingly kept on the downlow from his fellow officers), and his finding of purpose is as much a finding of himself, as he tries to force a relationship with Leni that neither of them really wants in order to deny part of his own nature.

C'mon, Steve, admit the truth!

I really liked Leni, too: a statuesque woman who initially fought on the wrong side during World War II, now trying to make good. Her subplot, like the original Top 10 books, blends superhero stories with police procedural in a way I found satisfying-- instead of the police vs. the mob, it's the police vs. organized vampires.

I guess you could say the police are... on a witch-hunt.

Gene Ha is always a strong artist, but this is probably one of his very best books, with great character, clear storytelling and emotion, and some beautiful scenes. Art Lyon's subdued coloring adds to the retro feel as well as to the book's morose, contemplative vibe as its characters find their places in a less colorful world than the one they knew during the war.

Ha captures the scale of Neopolis ever better here than in the original Top 10 series, I think.

Overall, a much better permutation of Top 10 than Beyond the Farthest Precinct. Now I just have to hunt down Smax!

Review: Top 10, Book 2 by Alan Moore, Gene Ha, and Zander Cannon

Doctor Who is a strange old thing; Doctor Who spin-offs sometimes even moreso. Today, I attempt to decode the long-delayed second series of Charlotte Pollard with the help of a Lance Parkin quote I had to dig up off the Internet Archive over at Unreality SF.

And now, on to the main course:

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2002 (contents: 2000-01) 
Acquired and read August 2016

Top 10: Collected Edition, Book 2

​

Writer: Alan Moore

Finishing Artist: Gene Ha
Layout Artist: Zander Cannon
Coloring: Alex Sinclair
Lettering: Todd Klein

This book wraps up the original twelve-issue Top 10 series by Alan Moore, Gene Ha, and Zander Cannon, and it's just as good as the first volume. My favorite part was probably what happened in the battle between the ultra-mice infecting Dust Devil's mother's apartment and the atom cats brought in by an exterminator: I laughed so hard when it was revealed their battles had triggered an multiversal crisis.

It's not all jokes, though. There's a surprisingly moving issue about a hyperspatial traffic accident that results in a collision between a tourist from Rigel and a piece in a gigantic galactic game. The two are fused together and slowly die while a couple cops can't do anything but watch.

Life is a game, but that doesn't mean it's not important: cosmic truth from a giant space chessman. Also swearing, though I'm not sure why it has to be bleeped out in a series that also deals with pedophilia and prostitution.
from Top 10 #8

The various plot threads from Book 1 are pulled together pretty comprehensively here, as we discover what links many seemingly disparate events together, and Top 10 shows their stuff in a couple devastating battles. I enjoyed the ongoing subplot about Shock-Headed Pete's racism against robots, though I guess it's easy to laugh about racism in this kind of context, where it's devoid of repercussions.

Totally dig whenever Alan Moore mocks the over-the-top nature of classic comics.
from Top 10 #12

I was a little on the fence for the first couple issues of Top 10, like I said, but once I reached the end of Book 2, I knew I wanted to keep up with the series through all its future incarnations: prequel The Forty-Niners, sequels Beyond the Farthest Precinct and Top 10: Season Two, and spin-off Smax. I like these characters and this concept, and I want to see what else can be done with them.

Review: Top 10, Book 1 by Alan Moore, Gene Ha, and Zander Cannon

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2010 (contents: 1999-2000) 
Acquired December 2011
Read August 2016

Top 10: Collected Edition, Book 1

​

Writer: Alan Moore

Finishing Artist: Gene Ha
Layout Artist: Zander Cannon
Lettering: Todd Klein

It took me a little bit to warm up to this book. I don't know if it was me or the book. Set in a city called Neopolis where everyone has a secret identity and a superpower, this book follows the cops that patrol the city. Though there is a new-to-the-precinct viewpoint character, there are still a lot of characters to acclimate to in a pretty short span of time. There are also a lot of ongoing subplots: drug dealers, someone killing prostitutes, suspects committing suicide. But when I hit Chapter Four (there are eight issues collected here), it started to click into place.

I've just realized I should have got a scan of the Top 10 HQ, which is based on DC's Hall of Justice, which is of course based on Cincinnati's own Union Terminal.
from Top 10 #3

Probably because this is the issue where the dad of a lizard Top 10 has in custody turns up demanding the release of his son. The son is basically human sized, but his dad is a Godzilla-esque giant lizard-- except his better days are long behind him, and he's more of a careening drunk now. In Chapter Four, the precinct captain, Jetman (who was "Jetlad" during World War II) must keep Gograh under control via conversation while his subordinates try to find a way to neutralize him. It's a fun riff on some familiar tropes, and that's basically what the whole of Top 10 is, mostly on the tropes of the superhero and cop genres. You have a police sergeant who's a dog with prostheses, a phantom pervert, a telekinetic Santa Claus in October, an investigation into the death of a Norse god that leads to Odin threatening to just end the universe if the crime isn't solved, and a cop's mother whose apartment is being terrorized by ultra-mice-- the only solution to which is atom cats. The book was constantly making me smile, and often laugh.

It only escalates from here.
from Top 10 #6

But it's not all jokes: the book is funny, but it also takes its duties as a cop procedural seriously. It's just that the things these cops investigate are incredibly far-fetched. But there are still killings and murders and prostitution to investigate, and it becomes clear that a longer story is unfolding as you read these issues, one that will continue into Book 2. I quickly become interested in many of the characters, especially Jetman; Duane "Dust Devil" Bodine the techno-cowboy; viewpoint character Robyn "Toybox" Slinger, who has some kind of dad problems; her partner Jeff Smax of gruff and mysterious past; and more. Like a lot of ensemble stories, what's most fun is seeing the way these various people and personalities all bounce off each other. Alan Moore, Gene Ha, and Zander Cannon do a great job bringing them all to life, and making Top 10 greater than the sum of its parts, filling the stories with little details, amusing and great.

Even super-cops have to take public transit home at night.
from Top 10 #1

Alan Moore is arguably a master of genre more than anything else: in Watchmen and Miracleman, he used that power to blow the superhero genre apart. But here he shows that power can be used for good as well as for evil. By fusing several different pop culture genres, he creates something hugely fun and enjoyable that presents familiar ideas in unfamiliar lights.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Gotham, Part XXIX: Batman: The Killing Joke: The Deluxe Edition

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2008 (contents: 1988-96)
Borrowed from the library
Read January 2016

Batman: The Killing Joke: The Deluxe Edition

Writers: Alan Moore, Brian Bolland
Art and Colors: Brian Bolland
Letterers: Richard Starkings, Ellie DeVille

Year Twelve, March

One of the last lines, but it would have worked perfectly as the first.
from Batman: The Killing Joke (script by Alan Moore, art by Brian Bolland)

This is probably the most widely-read Batman comic that's not by Frank Miller. So of course it's by Alan Moore. Moore is an exquisite craftsman: the way this builds up tension is perfect. Of course, a large part of that's in the art, too, and Bolland and Moore make a helluva team here. It's great to look at and great to read.

But: really, this is it? Why is this one of the most read Batman stories? It's nasty, brutish, and short, and it all seems to be in service of those last two to three pages, which are brilliant, I think. I love the idea that Batman believes he or the Joker must kill the other,* but all that really happens is they share a joke. And kind of a dumb one at that. (Though I am familiar with the theory that someone is dying on that last page, I'm reading this as part of a sequence of stories, so it definitely can't happen in this context!) But I'm not convinced this story says enough to justify its existence. I dunno, maybe I'm overthinking it, but I admired this story intellectually much more than emotionally. Well crafted, but sort of empty, and cruel.

It seems pretty clear to me in reading The Killing Joke that Barbara was raped, but a lot of people (including Alan Moore, allegedly) insist that she was not. Again, this is something that I think changes if you view the story as in- or out-of-continuity. If it's out, then yes she was because there are some insinuations that don't make any sense if you don't think that's what they're adding up to. But if it's in, then pretty clearly not, because none of the subsequent 23 years of Barbara Gordon stories ever indicated something like that had happened. That said, the mental trauma this must have caused isn't really dwelt on at all by later stories, which mostly just focus on the physical act of crippling caused by Joker's bullet.
from Batman: The Killing Joke (script by Alan Moore, art by Brian Bolland)

I did like "An Innocent Guy," an eight-page story written, drawn, and colored by Brian Bolland that is also collected here. It felt like "Harvey Pekar Does Batman," actually. Is that weird?

from Batman: Black and White #4 (script and art by Brian Bolland)
Yeah, I know it's in color.

* I must say, this sticks out as odd in the context of my readthrough, in which the Joker has a been a major villain in exactly two stories (The Man Who Laughs, Batman: Batgirl) and a minor one in a few others (The Long Halloween, Strange Apparitions, The Cat and the Bat). If the previous 28 stories were all I knew about Batman, I'd be hard-pressed to identify the Joker as his greatest nemesis! He's been curiously absent from these tales. I feel like Two-Face probably pops up the most consistently. Or maybe, strangely enough, Hugo Strange. I should make a chart and find out.

Next Week: In Soviet Russia, Star Wars watches you! Batman tangles with the KGB in Ten Nights of the Beast!

Student Review: V for Vendetta by Alan Moore & David Llloyd

Comic trade paperback, 288 pages
Published 2005 (contents: 1982-88)
Acquired December 2013
Read April 2014

V for Vendetta

Written by Alan Moore

Art by David Llloyd
Coloring by David Lloyd, Steve Whitaker, Siobhan Dodds
Lettering by Jeannie O'Connor, Steve Craddock, Elitta Fell
Additional Art by Tony Weare

This was the one novel I assigned this semester despite having never read it before. I think it turned out okay, despite that:

• "I loved War of the Worlds and V for Vendetta. The stories were really interesting and the ideas and themes too."
• "V for Vendetta, War of the Worlds, Bloody Chamber- no one ever teaches these and i think they have a lot of cool things going on for them."
• "I think it's up to you to teach V for Vendetta or War of the Worlds -- since V was taught during the last week of class it was an easy read for us students who have already checked out mentally for finals."
• "I thoroughly enjoyed 'Frankenstein,' 'War of the Worlds,' and 'V for Vendetta.'"  
• "I think that V for Vendetta was the most enjoyable."
• "Keep V for Vendetta on the condition that you cover The Filth as an addition to the theme of Dystopia."
• "drop V for Vendetta"
• "Keep V for Vendetta and War of the Worlds, both interesting reads that add a great variety to the course, you don't find many courses here that let you explore more modern works of British Literature."

Review: Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2005 (contents: 1986-87)
Acquired January 2012
Previously read November 2008 / February 2012
Reread July 2013

Watchmen

Writer: Alan Moore

Artist/Letterer: Dave Gibbons

Colorist: John Higgins

My third reading of Watchmen comes from teaching it, where I was sadly unable to convince my students that Rorscach is nuts and that Ozymandias is right. They seemed to like it, though, and some of them really liked it.

Review: The New American Splendor Anthology by Harvey Pekar

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 1991 (content: 1974-91)
Borrowed from the library
Read January 2014

The New American Splendor Anthology
by Harvey Pekar
art by Robert Armstrong, Alison Bechdel, Chester Brown, Kevin Brown, Gregory Budgett, R. Crumb, Gary Dumm with Laura Darnell Dumm, William Fogg, Drew Friedman, Rebecca Huntington, Bill Knapp, Paul Mavrides, Val Mayerik, Alan Moore, Willy Murphy, Spain Rodriguez, Gerry Shamray, Carole Sobocinksi, Frank Stack, J. R. Stats, Colin Upton, Ed Wesolowski, Jim Woodring, Joe Zabel, and Mark Zingarelli

The short story, I think, is Pekar's element-- aside from The Quitter, his long-form work has failed to interest me as much his shorts. The New American Splendor Anthology collects a wide range of his material, from his earliest comics work to his then-latest, though mostly it collects issues of American Splendor that came out after More American Splendor, I think. There's perhaps some stuff here that's not great, but that's okay, 'cause it's always over with right away, and Pekar is spinning you a new yarn in his distinctive voice: buying food at West Side Market, going to comic book signings (including a cameo by Ed Brubaker!), being obsessive about losing something or forgetting something, picking his wife up from the airport, or driving from Washington, D.C., to Cleveland overnight. I empathize with his small obsessions that he tries to clamp under control, and his occasional irrational inflexibility.

This collection also includes writeups of many of Pekar's appearances on Letterman's Late Night. I don't think Pekar is as clever as he thinks he is, but I think he knows that. (I love the one where he tries to get free stuff off the Late Night producer and ends up with a couple crackers.)

Alison Bechdel and Alan Moore draw stories in this one. Seriously: Alan Moore! For some reason Bechdel is one of five artists whose name is left off the cover, and distressingly, there is no credit to the artists on the title page, just Pekar. (Also no good publication data.) By this point, Pekar has gotten good as selecting artists who work well with his style of writing: I imagine that drawing normalcy is more difficult than it looks, and these guys do a great job on the whole, especially Joe Zabel & Gary Dumm and Bill Knapp.

Rewatching the Watchmen

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2005 (contents: 1986-87)
Previously read November 2008
Acquired January 2012
Reread February 2012

Watchmen

Writer: Alan Moore

Artist/Letterer: Dave Gibbons

Colorist: John Higgins

Can I just say that I strongly dislike the cover of the most recent edition of Watchmen? Something just turns me off about that CG-looking blood splatter on the smiley-face eye. I don't know what it is, but I much prefer the cover of the 1987 trade paperback edition.

That aside, there were a number of things that stuck out at me on this rereading of Watchmen, and I'll attempt to highlight those rather than do some kind of comprehensive review of the book. (Besides which, I've reviewed the book as a whole before.)

Foremost among these aspects was the utopian underpinning of the superhero concept. This is an aspect of the superhero that's arguably waned over the decades, but it dates back to the original Superman stories by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. That Superman was on the side of justice, not necessarily the law, and willing to do whatever he had to if it served the cause of right. Of course he never killed anyone, but he dropped a munitions lobbyist into a warzone, destroyed a bunch of dangerously made cars, imprisoned a mine owner in his unsafe mine, and destroyed an entire housing district to force the government to rebuild it better. The reader gets to see the negative aspects of their own society purged, and the implication of the stories is that what is built in their place will be better, leading to a better society. Relatively quickly Superman moved on to battling supervillains and cosmic menaces, but the utopian fantasy clearly underlies most superheroes.

What, then, is Ozymandias's destruction of New York City but Superman destroying the housing district on a massive scale? Through destruction, he can cause the world to be rebuilt. The superhero fantasy is that with a sufficient level of power, you can change the world for the better-- but of course, the deployment of power requires the release of violence, and the violence is unlikely to be as contained as Siegel and Shuster's Superman was always able to do. Ozymandias knows this, but rather than shrink from the violence, he embraces it and uses it to make the world better. Many commentators on Watchmen ask if it is Ozymandias or Rorschach who is in the right, and for some reason, most of these commentators seem to think that Rorschach is right.

It's not that I think that Ozymandias is right, but that to think this is an either/or proposition underestimates how complicated Moore and Gibbons are. Even Peter Paik, whose book From Utopia to Apocalypse is a substantial influence on my own thoughts on the utopian aspects of superheroes, falls into what I call the "Rorschach trap"; when you find yourself agreeing with a psychopath, you might have done something wrong. Rorschach is simply Ozymandias on a smaller scale. He commits countless acts of violence in pursuit of his vision of justice, against people who are innocent of the crimes he is investigating.

Indeed, one of the supplemental text sections reveals that Rorschach admires President Truman for being willing to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki-- which probably killed more people than Ozymandias's faked alien attack on New York City. Rorschach commits the violence that it is in his power to commit to change the world to the form he sees as optimal, as do all those who exercise power. And thereby Moore and Gibbons make their book about something other than superheroes.

But it is about superheroes, too, and does all sorts of things to them that have since become intrinsic to the genre. A friend of mine insists that Watchmen is the single most important superhero story ever written, and I think he's wrong about that. Genres are filled with stories that cause them to mutate, but those changes become absorbed, and the stories' significance underestimated. Where would be without Amazing Fantasy #15, for example? What makes Watchmen so significant, though, is that it is both genre-redefining and very good. (This is harder than you'd think.)

Watchmen is simply an excellent comic book, by which I mean an excellent use of the comic book medium. Watchmen never tries to be like a movie or anything like that (though it certainly uses some cinematic techniques), but it tries to do things that only comic books can do.

The use of repeated panels is one that sticks out at me the most. In a sequence early in the book, we see the Comedian murdered. Images from this sequence pop up throughout it, interspersed into other parts of the narrative. I don't think film could pull this off quite the same way. It would have to be a snippet of action or motion, and it would have to be brief. A comic book, though, can show us a single wordless panel, isolating a moment in time that our eye can linger over without it using up much space in the story.

Comics are perhaps unique for the fact that the size/duration of something is unrelated to how much time you spend with it. Both words and moving images go by at a constant rate, so if you want your reader/viewer to spend time with something, you have to devote time to it. Comics don't have to do that; a single image of a single moment can arrest the reader. Moore and Gibbons also use this effectively in the chapter where Doctor Manhattan and the Silk Spectre talk on Mars; the perspective keeps shifting to a perfume bottle slowly turning in the Martian atmosphere. Only it's probably moving quite quickly.

It also actually does not actually get thrown until the end of the chapter, showing another technique that Moore and Gibbons use to great effect: images from different times in sequence. The chapter explaining Doctor Manhattan's history uses this best of all. Doctor Manhattan views all times simultaneously, and so does the viewer of a comic book, since your eyes can scan back and forth across the comic panels at will. It's a very clever way to make the reader become Doctor Manhattan in a sense, and again, a trick that could never have the same effect on film. (It's definitely the best chapter in the book.)

There's also the jumping between multiple plots in rapid succession, such as when we see what's going on in New York, what the superheroes are up to in Antarctica, and what is happening in the comic-within-a-comic Tales of the Black Freighter. Moore and Gibbons even place the dialogue or narration boxes from one of this threads within the image of another. Again, it can only really work in comics, where the eye can linger and figure out how everything goes together. It would be cacophonous to cut a film together this way.

With Watchmen, Moore and Gibbons not only scrutinized and redefined the superhero genre, they exploited the comic book medium to its utmost, and the two of the these two actions make Watchmen the legend that it is. Given all of this, it's no wonder than the Watchmen film turned out to be largely pointless. Zack Snyder's slavish adherence to the visuals of the comic underestimates the extent to which the structure of the book was intrinsically comic-y in ways that the film could never hope to transfer. (That said, the film's best sequence is also the part where we learn Doctor Manhattan's backstory, because it exploits an exclusive part of the film medium: sound. The soundtrack seals the deal.) And, of course, the book had already redefined the genre and the tropes it spawned had been incorporated into countless superhero films already. What could the film hope to do in this regard?

As far as adaptations go, by sheer coincidence, I was reading Watchmen when the news about Before Watchmen broke. Personally, I'm interested enough; DC has put together a top-flight of creators, and I think that they could create a series of top-flight superhero stories. They won't utterly change superhero comics the way that Watchmen did, but I don't expect them to.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Star City, Part XI: Green Arrow / Black Canary: For Better or For Worse

Comic trade paperback, 199 pages
Published 2007 (contents: 1969-2003)
Borrowed from the library
Read November 2009

Green Arrow / Black Canary: For Better or For Worse

Writers: Denny O'Neil, Elliot S! Maggin, Alan Moore, Mike Grell, Chuck Dixon, Kevin Smith, Brad Meltzer
Pencillers: Dick Dillin, Dick Giordano, José Luis García-López, Klaus Janson, Mike Grell, Lurine Haines, Rick Hoberg, Rodolfo Damaggio, Phil Hester
Inkers: Dick Giordano, Klaus Janson, Rick Hoberg, Joe Giella, Frank McLaughlin, Vince Colletta, Terry Austin, Robert Campanella, Ande Parks
Colorists: Julia Lacquemont, Lee Loughridge, Guy Major, James Sinclair
Letterers: Todd Klein, Ken Bruzenak, Steve Haynie, John Costanza, Sean Konot

At the time that Green Arrow and Black Canary were getting married, DC released this anthology, collecting the highlights of Oliver and Dinah's relationship over nearly forty years of comics. It has a rather nice introduction by Denny O'Neill, where he explains the genesis of their relationship and its appeal to him.

The book falls into two distinct halves, though more through accident than design. The first half is stories from the 1960s and 1970s. These stories are typically short and fun, and feature both Green Arrow and Black Canary... but not exactly their relationship, as they're more just stories both characters happen to be in. For example, "In Each Man There is a Demon!" (written by Denny O'Neil, art by Dick Dillin & Joe Giella) is simply narrated by the two of them (though it is important to their characters for other reasons). "The Plot to Kill Black Canary!" (written by Elliot Maggin, art by Dick Giordano) has Black Canary confess her love, but it's a one-page coda to an unrelated adventure. Most of the stories in this section do short shrift to Black Canary, too: despite her own status as a superhero, Green Arrow is always rescuing her. I don't understand why in "A Gold Star for the Joker" (written by Elliot S! Maggin, art by J. L. Garcia Lopez and V. Colletta) she simply stands around and does nothing while the Joker wreaks havoc: she's a judo expert and possesses a canary cry, for goodness sake! The two-part "Lure for an Assassin!"/"Terminal for a Tragedy" (written by Denny O'Neil, art by Mike Grell & Vince Colletta) has Black Canary trying to rescue Green Arrow for a change... but two minutes later she's captured by the villains and held hostage to make Green Arrow co-operate, so she sits out the rest of the story. Surely the Black Canary ought to be written differently than Lois Lane, yet she's just a damsel is distress. If you ignore that component, they're decent stories in the goofy way comics were in the period, and the art is usually strong. The Joker one was probably my favorite.

The second half of the book is stories from the 1980s through the 2000s. The tend to take a different tack, focusing more directly on the relationship between the two characters and treating them both like competent superheroes. The first of these is "The Hunters" (written by Mike Grell, art by Mike Grell and Lurine Haines), which shows us the moment that Dinah reveal to Oliver she doesn't want to have a child with him. But it's only part of "The Hunters", showing us the flaw of the second half of the book: there's not a single whole story or even issue in it. In some cases this makes sense, even when it's irritating to have some text filling the gaps for you: most of "Membership Has Its Privileges" (written by Kevin Smith, art by Phil Hester and Ande Parks) actually has nothing to do with the relationship. But in other cases it's annoying: "Auld Acquaintance" (written by Mike Grell, art by Rick Hoberg) does seem to be about their relationship, and it looks like Black Canary even saves Green Arrow from danger for once, but who knows, as half the story has been replaced with a two-paragraph synopsis. But even when you know it's justifiable, it's still annoying to read. I think my favorite in this half of the book was either "The Hunters" (wish we'd had more of it, though) or what we get of "Run of the Arrow" (written by Chuck Dixon, art by Rodolfo Damaggio and Robert Campanella), which has a great scene where Connor Hawke goes to tell Dinah about Oliver's death.

The relationship between the two characters is one I didn't know a lot about (Black Canary appeared very seldomly in the 2000s Green Arrow series), and I was glad this book existed to fill me in. But it didn't do so in an entirely satisfying fashion.