Elizabeth Sandifer

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The first issue of Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Big Numbers was a lush and splendid object that positioned itself as a formal heir to Watchmen even as it rejected superheroes in favor of shopping malls and math.

Eventually, the snowflake’s edge becomes so crinkly and complex that its length, theoretically, is infinite. Its area, however, never exceeds the initial circle. Likewise, each new book provides fresh details, finer crenelations of the subject’s edge. Its area, however, can’t extend past the initial circle: Autumn, 1888. Whitechapel. – Alan Moore, From Hell

As with Watchmen, Moore uses a detached, omniscient perspective. Indeed, he takes it even further than he did in Watchmen, where he could use Rorschach as a pseudo-narrator. Big Numbers has no equivalent character. The closest it comes to narration is a montage at the end of the first issue in which one of the character’s poems is contrasted with a series of single panels reviewing the various characters that the book has introduced. For the most part, however, Big Numbers is told with an impassive objectivity. It takes flights into individual subjectivities, as with the dream sequence in the opening sequence or a later sequence in which Mr. World, a psychiatric patient released into the “care of the community,” fantasizes about the violent murder of a fellow bus passenger, but even these subjectivities are treated with a level of objectivity, the internal landscapes of the characters being treated as just another thing to look at.

Part of this sense of distance is simply the sheer number of characters involved. Moore’s outline for the series features thirty-one separate characters along with one group of characters, three characters from a story within a story, one ghost, and a set of people in a model railway set that will be treated as characters. In the forty pages of Big Numbers #1, twenty of these are introduced overtly, along with the ghost, and another is positioned in the background of a panel. Even though the action is centered almost entirely on Hampton, it gives the impression of a startlingly broad portrait of the town—one that, by the time the bulk of the remaining characters are introduced in the second issue, spans from the town’s rich and powerful to its underclass, with policemen, construction workers, students, sex workers, shopkeepers, and more all represented within the sweep of its worldview. And by exploring the connections among these people, as works of this sort of sprawling social realist genre inevitably do, Big Numbers displays the same sort of meticulous clockwork precision as its predecessor. The overwhelming sense of the first issue is one of inevitability; that a town in Thatcher’s Britain can only face the arrival of a massive shopping mall in one way. Moore even discussed as much, noting that “What I wanted to do was to show the fragility of human community, human relationships, and then to put this shadow of a large and inhuman shopping mall, a monolith of purely economic concerns, that would cast its shadow over that community.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: On the back of his monster success with Watchmen, Alan Moore declared that he would be self-publishing a comic about shopping mall and algebra.

“It fascinates because Sim is an absolutely brilliant maker of pages, a sublime cartoonist with total control of the form… and because, during the progression of the work, you can clearly see his mind crumbling under the pressure of his immense undertaking and twenty-five years of increasing solitude in which he can only express himself to the world through the agency of a talking anteater.” – Warren Ellis, “Grey Fog”

This declaration came in the context of Moore talking about his experiences self-publishing AARGH via his Mad Love imprint. This had been a decision made at the behest of Canadian writer/artist Dave Sim, who had found considerable success self-publishing his satirical Cerebus via his own press, Aardvark-Vanaheim. As Moore put it, “For years, this frosthardened son of the North has been standing there in his snowshoes, haranguing those of us within the bullpens and sheepdips of mainstream comics from an uncompromised position that’s been increasingly difficult to refute. ‘Hey! Why work for them guys? You must be some kinda stupid hosers, eh?’” It must be stressed, however, that Sim was in many ways a latter day William Blake—a singular and visionary talent who could not possibly have had the career he wanted on any terms other than his own. Blake, when this comparison was put to him in a 2020 seance, scoffed that “at least my gender politics weren’t that bad,” and it is notable that Moore would eventually terminate his relationship with Sim after Sim appended an introduction to an interview they did together explaining that “it would be really nice if, as a 50th birthday present, I could just type ‘IN THE NAME OF ALMIGHTY GOD COME OUT OF ALAN, THOU VILE AND ACCURSED.’ And have it work. Just like that when Alan read it. But, alas, I don’t think demonic possession—at least of the sort that Alan seems to have involved himself with—works that way” before digressing into a bit of Biblical exegesis to the effect of “women are hella icky.” Which is to say that, as effective an evangelist for self-publishing as he was, ultimately what worked for Dave Sim was not inherently likely to work for anyone else.

Equally, in a world in which Dave Sim was prominently advocating for self-publishing (and had not yet publicly accused Moore of being demonically possessed), Moore was never going to not try it. A central concern of his triptych of magna opera was the basic fact that these were his great works. They would not be owned by a vast American media company that could endlessly license them off in a cynical bid to bilk as much money as possible from rabid fans of malls and algebra. This was, for Moore, the point every bit as much as his creative interests. From Hell and Lost Girls both found their initial homes in Steve Bissette’s Taboo anthology, published via his own Spiderbaby Grafix, but for The Mandelbrot Set, or, as it eventually ended up being named, Big Numbers, Moore decided to put it out via Mad Love, investing the bulk of his profits from Watchmen (save for some with which he bought his parents a greenhouse) into the endeavor, with his wife Phyllis and partner Deborah Delano handling the business end of it.…

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Moore found his worldview rapidly evolving in the wake of Watchmen.

“It’s a new world, Arcane. It’s full of shopping malls and striplights and software. The dark corners are being pushed back a little more every day.” – Alan Moore, Saga of the Swamp Thing

These evolutions were already in progress, however, as Moore contemplated what he wanted his next major project to be. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he remained ambitious. Watchmen would have been a perfectly fine career capstone for most people. Indeed, Watchmen was already substantially more ambitious than what most people would attempt, which was at once its virtue and its tragedy. But Moore was surely rankled by the fact that his magnum opus sat in the control of a company he disdained and was steadily sliding towards outright despising. On top of that, he was only thirty-five. There was plenty of time for Moore to write another work of the scale of Watchmen.

In fact, he would decide to write three projects of that sort of scale and ambition, each picking up on different aspects of Watchmen. One of these was From Hell, which saw Moore expand his idea of using a murder and detective story to understand a larger world away from a narrative device for a comic book universe and into an interrogation of the 20th century itself via the Jack the Ripper murders. Another was Lost Girls, which saw Moore give his recurring interest in sexuality as a theme its fullest realization.

It was the third project, however, that was the biggest, most ambitious, and most fascinating thing Moore would work on during the period—a work of audacious formalist complexity that would delve into the storytelling tools he had developed for Watchmen and build an entire philosophical worldview out of them. Moore’s first description of it came in an interview published in February 1988, where he proclaimed that “ I want to do a graphic novel about shopping malls.” Clarifying this willfully puzzling remark, he explained that the comic would be “about a number of things. What happens is that an American shopping mall of Californian scale, one of those monstrous, minature cities you seem to have over there in LA, is erected in this small town in the middle of England.”

This captures one of the essential things about the shopping mall, which is that it was a distinctly American phenomenon even as it was exported to the world, emerging out of the specific concerns of post-World War II America. It is helpful, since Moore sets up the contrast himself, to contrast this with the UK. Both countries experienced a post-War economic boom. In the UK, this involved the creation of the welfare state, and, on a housing level, things like the new towns scheme and the “renovation” of the terraces into tower blocks. These were mixed blessings at best, as Moore trenchantly observed at numerous points during his career, and indeed their failings would be an implicit part of his malls project.…

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