Eruditorum Press

Discontent creators

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

A Fluctuation in the Visual Purple (The Last War in Albion Part 18: Steve Moore, Doctor Who)

, 47

This is the first of seven parts of Chapter Four of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Doctor Who and Star Wars from 1980-81. An ebook omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. The ebook contains a coupon code you can use to get my recent book A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman for $3 off on Smashwords (the code’s at the end of the introduction). It’s a deal so good you make a penny off of it. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help support it. 
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore quit his job to become a comics creator, and between his work in Sounds Magazine and in his local paper was able to make £45 a week, slightly more than he was making on welfare. Thus began his career as a full-time professional comics creator. But Moore recognized that his art skills were not up to the task, and that he should look into the more efficient approach such as writing scripts for other people to draw…
There’s nobody there, was never anybody there except a fluctuation in the visual purple, a perceptual misunderstanding, trick of moonlight. -Alan Moore, Unearthing
Figure 136: Part two of Three Eyes McGurk
and his Death Planet Commandos (Steve
Moore, as Pedro Henry, and Alan Moore,
as Curt Vile, 1979)
Moore’s ascent from a grubby £45-a-week freelance existence to becoming one of the most successful and acclaimed artists of his era was similarly dependent on a variety of friends and helpers. Most significant of these, early on, was his friend Steve Moore, who he first met in the late 1960s, and who provided the model for his eventual transition into being a writer instead of a writer-artist. Steve Moore, in fact, is the writer behind the Pedro Henry pseudonym, and stepped in to help Moore manage his workload by plotting the final year of The Stars My Degradation. But Steve Moore’s influence is not just limited to this late game assist. One of the major characters of The Stars My Degradataion is Axel Pressbutton, an extravagantly violent cyborg who made his first appearance in a strip called “Three Eyes McGurk and his Death Planet Commandos,” another early non-paying gig Moore did for the minor British music magazine Dark Star. Moore had been working on a strip called The Avenging Hunchback, a superhero parody, but the second installment of that strip was lost when the editor’s car was stolen, and Moore was too disheartened to repeat all of his delicate stippling. Accordingly, Steve Moore stepped in to help his friend, writing “Three Eyes McGurk” as a replacement strip, and including the Pressbutton character. (Moore in fact based Pressbutton’s visual design on Lex Loopy, a Lex Luthor parody designed for The Avenging Hunchback.) “Three Eyes McGurk” ended up being Moore’s first American publication, getting a reprint in a 1981 anthology edited by Gilbert Shelton, and Moore went on to incorporate the character (earlier in his life, as he dies at the end of his original appearance) into The Stars My Degradation. 
…

Continue Reading

Outside the Government: Adrift

, 11


All this week my coauthor Alex Reed and I are guest-editing 33 1/3’s blog in celebration of our book on They Might Be Giants’ Flood coming out on Thursday. The latest post is my short essay “How to be Fifteen,” a reflection on teenage music fandom in the late 90s. If you miss the Nintendo Project, this post is in a similar vein.

It’s March 19th, 2008. Duffy’s at number one with “Mercy,” with Leona Lewis, Alphabeat, Utah Saints, and Nickelback also charting. Nickelback has been charting for a really long time, actually. It’s kind of unnerving. In news, Queen Elizabeth opens Terminal 5 at Heathrow, Geraldine Ferraro resigns from the Clinton campaign for saying stupid things, and Wales win the Six Nations tournament, taking the rugby Grand Slam in the process. There’s sizable unrest in Tibet, Bear Stearns goes under as the Great Recession gathers steam, and Obama gives his big race speech in Philadelphia.

On television, meanwhile, it’s Adrift. Where Something Borrowed marked a satisfying return to Torchwood’s strengths, Adrift marks an unabashed celebration of those strengths. Double banked with Fragments, it pushes the bulk of the regular cast to the margins to tell a story that is focused intimately on Gwen Cooper and on her personal supporting cast of Rhys and Andy. From the start of the series it has been clear that Gwen is its real star. Captain Jack may have the Doctor Who connection and the leading man charisma, but Gwen has the astonishingly gifted Eve Myles, who routinely offers an impressively brave performance that imbues the character with a warmth and humanity that never makes her feel like she was designed to be part of a generic action-adventure ensemble.

What really underlines just how impressive Gwen is as a character is the fact that even here, at the end of the first season, elements of her character that were designed to let her function as the “viewpoint” character are still in place. Initially, after all, Gwen was the character through which we found out about Torchwood Three. The first few episodes used the order in which she learned things as the order in which they were revealed to the audience, and her character was defined by her inexperience and lack of knowledge. By this point in the show, of course, that’s long gone; Gwen is thoroughly experienced with Torchwood and hyper-capable.

And yet elements of her initial characterization persist. Gwen wasn’t just a fish-out-of-water character, but a character who was defined by the fact that she did not originate in the world of Torchwood, which was first presented as a strange and eccentric space that superimposed itself over her world. What’s key in Everything Changes is in hindsight the way in which she slowly remembers her trip to the Hub, as a flickering dream that plays out over her world, not quite making contact. She is an ordinary person who comes to Torchwood. The next episode makes clear that this is a trait unique to her – every other member of Torchwood either originates from that world or has their ordinary life torn down around them before they join.…

Continue Reading

The Five Wonder Woman Comics You Must Own

17

As promotion for my forthcoming book on They Might Be Giants’ Flood (out this Thursday!), my co-author and I are guest-editing the 33 1/3 blog at 333sound.com this week. That’s right, you get double the blogging from me this week. Our first post is here, featuring bits of our interview with the band that didn’t fit into the book.

So, you’ve bought A Golden Thread, my critical history of Wonder Woman. And you’re one of the readers who hasn’t read any Wonder Woman comics – which is fine, as I wrote the book assuming a reader who hadn’t. But now you want to go read some because you’re interested.

Or perhaps you haven’t bought it yet because you don’t know enough about Wonder Woman, but you’re curious why I think the topic is so interesting.

Either way, here are my picks for the five Wonder Woman collections/eras somebody interested in knowing more about the fascinating history of the character should read. Or just the five Wonder Woman collections anyone looking for a good comic should read. Really, just read them. Then go buy A Golden Thread. Even if you’ve bought it already; just buy another copy. They make great Christmas presents.

The Wonder Woman Chronicles (Volume 2)

Volume 1 of this series is currently out of print, but the original William Moulton Marston/Harry G. Peter stories don’t really require chronological ordering anyway. What’s important is that this is nearly two hundred pages of World War II era Wonder Woman by her creators themselves. This is the era of Wonder Woman in which she was a propaganda figure for her creator’s imagined female supremacist bondage utopia.

What jumps out about stories in this era is twofold. First is their weird inventiveness. Marston was completely barmy, and his stories are packed with strange and wonderful ideas. Second is the fact that Marston has a radical vision of the world that is as idiosyncratic and sweeping as that of William Blake or Philip K. Dick. Wonder Woman is a part of a larger philosophical and intellectual system for him, and though the full nature of that system isn’t clear from the strips alone, they sparkle with a sort of mad passion lacking in any other superhero comic I’ve read. These are some of the weirdest comics ever to have a major cultural impact.

Diana Prince: Wonder Woman (Volume 4)

One of my favorite parts of A Golden Thread is the two chapters devoted to the so-called I Ching era, a period in the late 60s/early 70s in which Wonder Woman lost her superpowers and adventured as an ordinary human being. This era was pilloried by Gloria Steinem, whose objections were used as a pretext for sacking the creative team and replacing it. In practice, though, the creative team was a bunch of fabulous writers and artists, headed by Denny O’Neil, whose angry leftist take on Green Arrow remains one of the iconic comics of the 1970s. For the last two issues of the era they had Samuel Delaney writing, who was doing one of the most serious-minded feminist takes on the comic ever, before or since.…

Continue Reading

Outside the Government: From Out of the Rain

, 8

It’s March 12th, 2008. Duffy are at number one with “Mercy,” with Taio Cruz, Alphabeat, Westlife, and Flo Rida also charting. In news, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer gets wrapped up in a prostitution bust and resigns, Barack Obama wins some more primaries, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling unveils his first budget.

On television, meanwhile, it’s Peter J. Hammond’s other Torchwood story, From Out of the Rain. Hammond’s two Torchwood scripts are, by any reasonable account, oddities. Hammond, as mentioned, is a longstanding television writer. He’s the closest thing to a writer shared between the classic series and the new series, in that he has, in effect, near-misses for both; he had a script rejected for Trial of a Time Lord (Pip and Jane Baker were, alarmingly, preferred), and wrote two for Torchwood. And unsurprisingly, there’s something a bit dated and old-fashioned in his Torchwood scripts. Characterization is lax at best. Hammond is clearly interested in the fact that Jack is over a hundred years old, but this is about the only aspect of Jack that comes up in either of his stories. The other characters are interchangeable – there’s nothing about Ianto that makes him the sensible choice to be fascinated by old film, and nothing about Gwen and Owen that would make them likely to randomly tag along with Ianto to the cinema, even with the vague mutterings of some historical rift activity. Tellingly, every scene of this is about revealing plot information; nothing hinges on anybody’s character traits. The only thing that happens to advance the plot is people finding out new details about the Night Travellers.
All of which is to say that most of the advances in televisual storytelling since Sapphire and Steel was on the air are ignored here, at least on the level of writing. This is old-fashioned storytelling, and the closest thing to a good argument that those who wish Doctor Who were more like the classic series have. Because it does more or less work. It doesn’t have the spark and snap that Small Worlds did, but that’s mostly a factor of its more esoteric subject matter. Small Worlds was an efficient and compelling take on a longstanding and classic bit of mythology that took Torchwood’s basic premise and its specific connection to the Welsh landscape in a direction that was essentially inevitable. From Out of the Rain is far more idiosyncratic – evil early 20th century circus performers and the preservation of old filmstock is an interesting premise, but it lacks the straightforward hook of Small Worlds. 
Still, it largely works and ends up as one of the stronger entries in an admittedly weak season of television. This is largely for the reasons discussed last time. Whatever its idiosyncratic simplicity, it is very much its own story with its own focus and interests. There’s a sense of vision here. What happens is clearly happening according to a logic unique to this story, as opposed to according to the logic of Torchwood’s format.
…

Continue Reading

Fuller Statement on my Wikipedia Banning

9

EDIT 11/11: I asked the arbitration committee why the bit of policy that says “”if individuals have identified themselves without redacting or having it oversighted, such information can be used for discussions of conflict of interest (COI) in appropriate forums” does not apply in this case.

The response was that “I don’t think that what the Guardian described as an “angry blog post” is what the community had in mind as an ‘appropriate forum’.”

It’s official: the arbitration committee does not consider my blog an appropriate place to discuss conflicts of interest.

Original post below:

I’d do a Saturday Waffling about the Day of the Doctor trailer, but I’ve seen it and there’s not all that much to say. Still, feel free to discuss it in comments. Meanwhile, I’ve got a dead horse to beat.

Back on Wednesday, in an interstitial post, I mentioned that I’d been permabanned from Wikipedia and made some appropriately dark mutterings about this. But since the issue has continued to be contentious on Wikipedia I wanted to make a more detailed response, if only because the arbitration committee persists in making the suggestion that I haven’t “answered their questions.” (This, in practice, is much like the political tactic of declaring that one’s opponent has to answer questions, in that the questions are never stated and the answers are never acknowledged.) Indeed, the committee is currently misrepresenting what I’ve said and done in a variety of ways, and so it seems worthwhile to turn the spotlight on this body again and look at what passes for decision making on Wikipedia.

Let’s start with the basic facts. In my post entitled “Wikipedia Goes All-In on Transphobia,” which is, at the time of writing, my fourth most-read post on the blog and is thus linked on the sidebar, I revealed that an editor who was accusing people of conflicts of interest over the discussion on what the appropriate name for the article about Chelsea Manning should be on the basis that they knew trans people, and who engaged in disturbing and stalkerish behavior towards several editors was, in fact, an employee of the US Military. I did so by revealing their name and workplace.

Since Wikipedia is currently removing all links to that post (which was used as the main source for a Guardian article on the subject, incidentally, and which Brad Patrick, the former legal representative for Wikipedia, praised and shared), I won’t mention the editor by name here, just because, well, I want the people still arguing about this on Wikipedia to have the ability to link to what I’m saying here in order to dispel some of what can charitably be called the misrepresentations of what I’ve done. Regardless, yeah, I doxed a dude.

Shortly after the post went up I received the following e-mail from a member of the arbitration committee.

Please contact the Arbitration Committee to explain why you have posted personal, non-public information about another contributor on your personal blog. This blog post has direct ramifications on the project, and may put you in gross violation of the project’s norms and policies.

…

Continue Reading

Outside the Government: Something Borrowed

, 15

It’s March 5th, 2008. Duffy is at number one with “Mercy.” H Two O, OneRepublic, Basshunter, and David Jordan also chart, along with several more… notable artists. In news, former Thai Prime Minister and owner of Manchester City Thaskin Shinawatra returns to Thailand to face corruption charges. Prince Harry returns from a deployment in Afghanistan due to his location being leaked by the press. The Presidential Primaries rumble on in the US, with Hillary Clinton winning the Rhode Island, Ohio, and Texas primaries, but Obama winning Vermont and the Texas caucuses, which results in him getting more delegates overall out of that state. John McCain, meanwhile, officially secures the Republican nomination.

While on television, it’s the pleasantly idiosyncratic Something Borrowed. It’s possible, looking at the dramatic improvement Torchwood undergoes in its last two seasons (yes, really), to suggest that Torchwood is simply not very good at done-in-one episodes, and that its natural format is the miniseries. Certainly it’s true, as we’ll get around to seeing, that the series undergoes a profound transformation and improvement with its third season. And it’s true that the first and second seasons are pocked with mediocre and occasionally dreadful episodes. But this is not in and of itself a refutation of its format. 
I bring all of this up because Something Borrowed is the last time Torchwood attempts a fairly light-hearted episode; indeed, a broadly comedic one. As it happens, it’s also the best episode of the season to date, and a credible contender for the best episode of the season outright. And so it represents a vanishing glimpse of another sort of Torchwood. The problem with the eventual miniseries format is that it is bombastically big. And while this can be terribly effective, it’s easy to forget that in the first two seasons Torchwood was at its best with small stories.
Because this is what appeals so much about Something Borrowed. It is, in the end, just a story about Gwen and Rhys getting married. It’s a human story. Something goes terribly wrong on their wedding day, and Gwen is determined to find a way to make it work because she refuses to let Torchwood interfere with this one. The result is that one of Torchwood’s absolute strongest points – the Gwen/Rhys relationship – is in the foreground. (Notably, this is what made Meat, the most recent more-or-less functional episode of Torchwood, work as well) And so we get the sort of thing Torchwood is good at – ordinary human moments juxtaposed with strange, eccentric spaces. 
There’s a line of critique about this episode that declares that Gwen is mad to carry on with her wedding. Which she very plainly is, and yet it’s an entirely human madness. Gwen is hardly the first person to become a bit monomaniacal on her wedding day. (And her initial justification is so perfectly accurate: “do you have any idea how much a wedding costs?” Because yes, that is exactly what it is like.) And more to the point, there’s a clear motivation, particularly in the wake of Rhys finding out about Torchwood.
…

Continue Reading

Dangerous, Mysterious, Hyperscientific (The Last War in Albion Part 17: The Stars My Degradation, The Stars My Destination)

, 4

This is the final of Chapter Three of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work for Sounds Magazine (Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation) and his comic strip Maxwell the Magic Cat. An omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. It is equivalently priced at all stores because Amazon turns out to have rules about selling things cheaper anywhere but there, so I had to give in and just price it at $2.99. Sorry about that. In any case, your support of this project helps make it possible, so if you are enjoying it, please consider buying a copy. You may also enjoy my newly released history of Wonder Woman, A Golden Thread. Chapter Four will begin next week.

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s first strip for Sounds, Roscoe Moscow, ended after a little more than a year, and was replaced with The Stars My Degradation, a science fiction parody strip…

“The Stars My Destination is, after all, the perfect cyberpunk novel: it contains such cheerfully protocyber elements as multinational corporate intrigue; a dangerous, mysterious, hyperscientific McGuffin (PyrE); an amoral hero; a supercool thief-woman…” – Neil Gaiman


To continue to come up with inventive page layouts and subversive cat gags week in and week out is one thing. To labour excessively on a reasonably humorous sci-fi parody strip in order to cover up inadequate artistic skills is another. 
Figure 130: The Stars My Destination was
first serialized in four issues of Galaxy in 1956
In this regard there’s something strangely apropos in Moore’s choice of parody subjects in The Stars My Degradation. The title – indeed the entire opening rhyme – is a parody of Alfred Bester’s 1956 novel The Stars My Destination, originally titled Tiger! Tiger!. Bester is very much a science fiction fan’s science fiction writer – one who enjoys rather more renown within science fiction fandom than without. To name The Stars My Destination as one’s favorite science fiction novel is not in the least bit controversial – it’s widely and repeatedly cited as one of the best. But it is not a particularly famous book outside of science fiction circles. Unlike writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, whose work became influential and widely known outside the sci-fi community, Bester remains at once obscure but terribly well-respected: Samuel Delany, William Gibson, and Michael Moorcock have all identified it as their favorite science fiction novel.
Figure 131: Gully Foyle is my name
Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination
(Howard Chaykin, 1979)
On one level, The Stars My Destination is a fairly straightforward pulp-style novel. It was serialized over four issues of Galaxy, and features the sort of episodic content familiar to such material. What elevates it is the character arc of its protagonist, Gully Foyle.
…

Continue Reading

The Post Wikipedia Doesn’t Want You To See

33

Due to my revelation in this post that the Wikipedia user Cla68, who has been arguing that transgender people are too biased to edit the article on Chelsea Manning, is in fact a member of the US Military and thus has clear biases of his own, the Arbitration Committee of the English language Wikipedia has removed my administrator privileges and banned me indefinitely, forbidding any appeal of the ban for a year.

As discussed in the post, Cla68 has, prior to this, been open about his participation on Wikipedia, freely giving quotes to the media and engaging in discussion on Wikipedia about those quotes. It’s only now that he’s begin editing with an obvious conflict of interest that he has suddenly developed a desire to keep his identity a secret. My “revelation,” in other words, is nothing of the sort. Indeed, it’s difficult to see how this decision comports with Wikpiedia policy, which declares that “Posting another editor’s personal information is harassment, unless that person had voluntarily posted his or her own information, or links to such information, on Wikipedia.” Which, again, Cla68 has done.  Since my post, in fact, Cla68 has posted on Wikipediocracy, a Wikipedia criticism site on which he’s a forum moderator, confirming his employer. Furthermore, I’ve made no mention of his identity on Wikipedia, nor have I linked to that blog post from there. I revealed his identity in my capacity as a z-list blogger, not as a Wikipedia editor.

My reasoning for outing Cla68 was and is simple: it’s in the public interest. The sixth largest website in the world is sanctioning trans allies and Chelsea Manning supporters for being “too involved” to work on the Chelsea Manning article, but is giving a pass to members of the US Military, who apparently have no conflict of interest. This is straightforwardly something that deserves to be talked about.

This shockingly harsh sanction – the harshest the committee ever hands down – takes on an unnerving tone when one considers that the bulk of that blog post consisted of criticism of the Arbitration Committee’s decision to punish editors complaining about transphobic behavior on Wikipedia more harshly than they punish transphobic behavior itself. It is difficult, if not impossible, to see this move as anything other than petty retaliation.

Particularly entertaining is that I’ve been banned for attempting to disinfect with sunlight with regards to Chelsea Manning. Not only does this sanction look petty, it looks particularly ridiculous when applied on the topic of someone who is in jail for her commitment to transparency. I’m actually taken aback by the comedy of it. The Arbitration Committee censures its critics for leaking things in the public interest. Over the Chelsea Manning article.

It is not the ban in particular that bothers me. I rarely edit Wikipedia anyway, have not used administrator powers in ages (though they were quite nice for finding well-written articles on fiction that got spuriously deleted on “notability” grounds). I knew there was a risk in criticizing the Arbitration Committee, and I took it because the consequence – banning – wasn’t one that personally mattered to me much at all.
…

Continue Reading

Outside the Government: A Day in the Death

, 30

It’s February 27th, 2008. Duffy are at number one with “Mercy,” with Kylie Minogue, Adele, Nickelback, Rihanna, and Kelly Rowland also charting. In news, the British Government officially nationalizes the failing Northern Rock bank, Tottenham Hotspur defeat Chelsea in the Carling Cup final, and Pakistan, in an attempt to censor the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons, blocked access to YouTube and, in doing so, inadvertently took the site down worldwide.

On television, Torchwood, broadly speaking, improves. It would be overstating things to suggest that A Day in the Death works. It doesn’t. But it fails in an interesting way more evocative of Season One than of the banal mediocrities of Series Two. Whatever else might be said of it, A Day in the Death is trying to do something interesting and new. It’s an intimate character piece that focuses tightly on Owen and works to give us his perspective on his new status quo as an animated corpse. It’s a story that works hard to stay on the human level.

There are problems. Maggie is perhaps a bit overdone – losing her husband is probably sufficient reason for her to be up on a rooftop contemplating suicide without needing to add the bathos-inducing wedding day car crash. The ending is mawkish. Owen’s overall plot still doesn’t really do anything; it’s not a functional lens on any aspect of human experience. There’s some stuff that’s vaguely evocative of people putting their lives together after an extreme trauma, particularly one leaving them with permanent disabilities, but the metaphor never quite crystalizes. There’s too much focus on the imagery of death, and particularly on Torchwood’s usually more interesting “there’s nothing” image, and it distracts from the plot being about anything other than its own science fiction conceit. It’s not that science fiction only works when exploring understandable and familiar spaces; that’s the opposite of true. But it is that science fiction that’s just about coming up with weird concepts isn’t very interesting. Yes, something odd is happening to Owen, but there’s no metaphoric depth to it, not even here, in the episode that focuses on it.

But there are real strengths. Richard Briers does a phenomenal amount with his brief appearance, although it lacks some of the intensity of his previous appearance within Doctor Who. The bizarre alien artifact that serves as the story’s MacGuffin is, in fact, just a pretty alien artifact that emits beautiful light displays. It’s completely harmless; it wasn’t keeping Henry alive, and it wasn’t a bomb. This is a wonderful plot beat of the sort that Torchwood (and for that matter Doctor Who) doesn’t do often enough; one in which the world of the alien is actually the wondrous thing it’s usually advertised as being instead of just a source of unimaginable horror. And while it seems strange to mention it, Martha works quite well here. She’s a minor character and her departure scene is shoehorned in in a fashion that’s utterly extraneous to the plot, but she actually has something to do here that both extends sensibly from her character and fits into the story such that she doesn’t need to be knocked out of the plot at the two-thirds mark by some contrivance.…

Continue Reading

Book Review: Magic Words

13

At this point the overlap between Lance Parkin’s interests and mine is downright unsettling. How am I ever going to get anywhere with my interests when I have to compete with someone as good as him? It’s not enough, apparently, that he be one of the best writers of Doctor Who auxiliary material and a damn fine scholar of the show, as evidenced by his marvelous volume of the Time Unincorporated series. He’s got to go write about Alan Moore as well. Actually, he’s on his second, having written a quite solid introduction to him for the Pocket Essentials series. But Magic Words is something else; a landmark, definitive tome that immediately establishes itself as one of the absolutely essential works for anybody interested in Alan Moore.

Before we get to any of that, however, let’s start with the fact that the book is absolutely gorgeous. This is a sumptuous, lush book. Its cover, a green-tinged photo of Moore staring out at the reader through the smoke of the almost certainly not tobacco cigarette in his hand, is augmented by a bellyband proclaiming the title. The edges of the pages are inked black, giving the exterior a sleek elegance. Inside is similarly well-designed, save for a frustrating decision to use a cod-comics lettering font for chapter headers. Still, it’s one of the nicest physical objects of a book I’ve laid hands on this year.
That bit of geekery aside, the book itself. It is, to be clear, a biography. It is not Gary Spencer Millidge’s (very excellent) Alan Moore: Storyteller, nor George Khoury’s The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. The former is an overview of Moore’s work; the latter an extended interview. This, however, is an attempt to grapple with Alan Moore the man. This obviously involves a lot of looking at his work, but mainly in terms of how it explains his evolving career.
This is, to be sure, an interesting subject. Moore’s career, after all, is a fascinating litany of brilliance and idiosyncrasy. First of all, there’s the somewhat puzzling matter of him worshipping a snake puppet. Second, there’s the stark litany of fairly explosive feuds he’s had with various people. Third, there’s the fact that his life is simply full of idiosyncratic and extreme beliefs, positions, and courses of action, most of which are backed up by complex and nuanced explanations.
Complicating Parkin’s task is the fact that, up until the very end of the writing process, Moore wasn’t participating in the biography. Moore was shown what was at the time intended to be the final draft, and was impressed enough to both give a charming blurb (“In Magic Words Lance Parkin has crafted a biography that is insightful, scrupulously fair-minded and often very funny – a considerable achievement given its unrelentingly grim, unreasonable, and annoying subject. Belongs on the shelf of any halfway decent criminal profiler.”) and what Parkin has described as the most wonkish Alan Moore interview ever, as it consisted of no questions regarding well-trod subject matter, and instead consisting entirely of issues like sorting out Grant Morrison’s claim that Moore had written him a threatening letter in response to Morrison’s unsolicited submission of a Kid Marvelman script (Moore says it never happened, and Parkin backs the claim up with a Dez Skinn interview) and why Moore decided to do his ABC work as a work-for-hire such that he doesn’t own Tom Strong or Promethea (still unclear, actually, though I have my speculations for a few years from now). 
…

Continue Reading

«‹ 135 136 137 138 ›»