Last War in Albion

March 7, 2014

Turn to Urban Furniture (The Last War in Albion Part 34: Alan Moore’s Final Future Shocks)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter five 9

This is the tenth and final part of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation.

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s late Time Twisters short stories for IPC served as the occasion for some of his most interesting storytelling for that company.

Don’t move. For almost sixty years, don’t move. Stand still and turn to urban furniture, to your own monument, to landscape. – Alan Moore, Unearthing

Figure 255: The big clock from whence all time is
mined. (From “The Big Clock,” written by Alan
Moore, art by Eric Bradbury, in 2000 AD #315, 1983)

But the uptick in the quality of Moore’s stories cannot be attributed entirely to his serious stories. DR & Quinch, after all, are thoroughly comedic, as is “Chrono-Cops.” “The Big Clock” takes a positively whimsical tone. It’s a guide to how time functions, which turns out to be because of the work of people living in a giant clock “suspended at the center of eternity” run by a gentleman named Arthur Seck. Seck takes the reader on a tour of the facility, showing them the process by which time is dug up, the fate sisters who weave time once it’s been processed into fine wires, the people who sort it into good times and bad times, and so on. It is unabashedly a list story – a plotless exploration of various entertaining concepts of how time might work. The best is Cyril, whose job it is “to remember everything in the whole of existence. If he forgets something, it vanishes from living memory,” which is exactly what happens when Seck interrupts him by asking how its going, leading to everybody in the cosmos losing their ballpoint pens. (“Portugese dramatist Gil Vicente was born in 1470… Mrs Booth of Islington has to cancel her milk tomorrow… Stalactites grow down, not up…,” he mutters to himself, trying to keep track of the rest of it). The story ends with Seck realizing that he’s behind on winding up the mainspring of the clock, leading to it running down and, presumably, time stopping entirely. It is unabashedly a slender thing, but it’s terribly charming and memorable.

Also memorable is “Eureka,” one of Moore’s later Future Shocks, which tells of a ship fruitlessly searching for alien life. Eventually one of the crewmen suggests that “an alien could be anything,” wondering “what if an alien is just a concept? Something that doesn’t even exist in any physical sense.” A few months later the same crewman, Marty Kessler, proclaims that he’s “had an idea.

…

February 27, 2014

Curdled to Sea Foam (The Last War in Albion Part 33: The Reversible Man and Chrono-Cops)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter five 11

This is the ninth of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation.

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s flagging middle period of short stories for IPC came to a fortuitous end with the introduction of the Time Twisters line of stories, which provided his work with a renewed energy.

The flood of animal emotions surging in the street. Present desires precipitated. Curdled to a sea foam. – Alan Moore, The Highbury Working

Figure 247: The narrator of “The Reversible Man” sees his wife for the last
time. (From “The Reversible Man,” written by Alan Moore, art by Mike
White, in 2000 AD #308, 1983)

Moore has commented that “The Reversible Man” was “pathetically easy to write,” and that he was as a result surprised by its reception, speculating that its popularity was because “the events of our lives become dulled by reputation and it takes an unusual view of them for us to see life and its emotional implications anew,” disclaiming that the story’s success “had very little to do with me as a writer.” This is, perhaps, false modesty, however – elsewhere he proclaims it “one of the best stories I’ve ever done,” and boasts of how “during their lunch hour, the day that came out, it had all the secretaries weeping.” But even in that interview, where he breathlessly describes the emotional effect of how “an ordinary little scene of two people meeting, their first meeting… becomes their final departure,” he suggests that the story came mainly out of his inclination to “do something to see what will happen” and to experiment within the confines of the format.

The story may have been straightforward to write, but the suggestion that there is no writerly skill involved in its success is clearly untrue. Much of the story’s power comes not just from the way in which it frames the events of a man’s life, but in its specific choices of what events to frame and how to frame them. For instance, when the narrator’s father is dug up and brought to the hospital and eventually goes home, the narrator’s mother, understandably, moves out to live with her newly un-dead husband. The narration describes how “they took several of our things with them to furnish their home. Mostly antique furniture. We didn’t mind.” The choice of the furniture as a detail for this reversed event – the death of the narrator’s father – is a carefully chosen one. There are many things that accompany the death of a parent, but the choice of a mundane, material thing like dealing with their old furniture is a well-chosen one, such that the word “antiques” speaks volumes.

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February 20, 2014

Even Reverse the Flow of Time (The Last War in Albion Part 32: Alan Moore’s Future Shocks, Alan Moore’s Time Twisters)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter five 10

This is the eighth of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation.

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: After an initial period of promise and originality, Moore’s future shocks began to fade into repetitiveness as the limits of the format became increasingly and painfully clear…

“We have camera eyes that speed up, slow down, and even reverse the flow of time, allowing us to see what no one prior to the twentieth century had ever seen — the thermodynamic miracle of broken shards and a puddle gathering themselves up from the floor to assemble a half-full wineglass.” -Grant Morrison

Figure 242: “The Wages of Sin” even recycles the final
joke of “They Sweep the Spaceways,” with the major
difference being that Talbot arranged his panels
vertically and Leach horizontally. (c.f. Figure 235)
(From “The Wages of Sin,” written by Alan Moore, art
by Bryan Talbot, in 2000 AD #257, 1982)

But many other stories in the period are flatter at best. “A Second Chance,” a two-pager in which the last man on Earth finds a woman, is utterly devoid of any point. “All of Them Were Empty,” in which a siege on a American truck stop is revealed to be conducted by sentient cars wanting a fill-up, is similarly uninspiring, as is “No Picnic,” in which a man is buried alive on Easter Island to become one of the famed heads. And when Moore did hit gold, it was often by rehashing his own previous work. One of his best stories of 1982, “The Wages of Sin,” is a redo of “They Sweep the Spaceways,” this time focusing on the training that would-be galactic conquerers go through. It’s not that it is a pale imitation of “They Sweep the Spaceways.” In fact, its jokes are a step sharper, and the art by Bryan Talbot is superlative. But it’s still just a refinement of an earlier strip.

For the most part this stretch of Moore’s work is characterized by a heavy reliance on straightforward twist endings. Some of these are reasonably clever – “The Beastly Beliefs of Benjamin Blint”,” for instance, uses the basic twist of the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Eye of the Beholder,” whereby the eponymous Benjamin Blint tells his therapist about the horrible creature that periodically appears to him. The strip shows several such encounters, between a typically square-jawed man and a suitably horrible looking creature. The final panel reveals that Blint is in fact the monstrous creature, haunted by the “hideous” ordinary human, who Blint finally admits can’t possibly be real, because there just isn’t room in the real world for creatures as stomach-turning and loathsome as that.”

…

February 13, 2014

The Day I Finished It, He Died (The Last War in Albion Part 31: Abelard Snazz, Moore’s Early and Middle Future Shocks)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter five 7

This is the seventh of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: (Alan Moore’s accidental plagiarism of Norman Spinrad was one of two lifts he’s discussed from his 2000 AD days, the other being the second Abelard Snazz story, Snazz being a genius whose plans inevitably turn out terribly…

“I had actually had plans. We had just sort of opened up very, very preliminary negotiations to find out if Gorey would be interested in illustrating it. And the day I finished it, he died. I mean literally. I finished it and the news was that Edward Gorey died.” -Neil Gaiman, on Coraline

Snazz exists to satirize over-elaborate top-down thinking, but it’s important to note that Snazz is merely a consultant working for the government – a government that never once pipes up to say “wouldn’t just decommissioning the robot cops make more sense,” or “why don’t we reprogram the buggers so they don’t arrest people for wearing ugly ties,” just as, in “The Return of the Two-Storey Brain” Hoolio Moolabar never steps in to say “erm, why don’t we just go get the car instead of betting every penny we have with the doorman.” Snazz, in other words, is not so much a villain as a parodic version of a particular societal tendency that allows people like him to function in the first place. Moore, reflecting on Snazz, rejects the idea that Snazz works because he’s “a symbol of irresponsible science run amok, a sort of boffo Frankenstein,” noting that “anybody who can bring about the downfall of entire civilizations armed only with good intentions can’t be all bad,” and that “he is nowhere near as irredeemably stupid as the people who listen to him.”

Figure 232: The sublime pinnacle of creative
ecstasy. (From “The Multi-Storey Mind Mellows
Out,” written by Alan Moore, art by Paul Neary,
in 2000 AD #254, 1982)

This tendency is reinforced by the later Snazz stories, which focus less on the preposterous schemes Snazz comes up with and more on the sorts of places Snazz ends up. By the time of the fourth Abelard Snazz story in January of 1982, Moore was putting Snazz in increasingly weird situations. That story, “Halfway to Paradise,” has Snazz acting as an image consultant to a variety of gods [including a lisping Thoth whose name, it is thus implied, might actually be pronounced the same as “sauce”], and the next story, two months later, features him building giant robot tennis players for a bunch of parodic Californians under the title “The Multi-Storey Mind Mellows Out.”

…

February 7, 2014

I Must Protect This Bag of Meat (The Last War in Albion Part 30: Plagiarism and Abelard Snazz)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter five 11

This is the fifth of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s work for 2000 AD quickly led to a spate of extremely good stories, including “The Last Rumble of the Platinum Horde” (a title Moore inadvertently nicked from Norman Spinrad

“Robots couldn’t really give a fuck if you live or die. Seriously. I mean, what are you thinking? ‘Ooh, I must protect the bag of meat at all costs because I couldn’t possibly plug in the charger all on my own.’ Shut the fuck up.” – Warren Ellis

Figure 225: The Golden Horde, also known as the Ulus of
Jochi, spanned a large portion of both Europe and Asia in the
13th century.

The story ends with Cornelius attempting to ride off on the horse of the last Khan of the Golden Horde, which is said to have “waddled forward a few steps, puked, and died.” And that’s basically that. That this apparently inadvertent coincidence of titles should take place around a Jerry Cornelius story written by someone other than Michael Moorcock, given that one of the most superficially obvious conflagrations in the War centers on Grant Morrison’s Gideon Stargrave character and the degree to which it and his larger work are or are not rip-offs of Moorcock’s work. Essentially no plot elements coincide between Spinrad and Moore’s stories. And yet there is a thematic kinship between them. Both are ruminations on the nature of violence that hinge on an over the top display of violence that is revealed to be fundamentally hollow. The end effect is to highlight the impressive diversity of potential in storytelling. Two writers with relatively similar ideas – a rumination on the banality of violence featuring the iconography of the Mongol hordes – ended up in profoundly different places. Even the similarity of title is wholly understandable – there really was a 13^th century Mongol Khanate known as the Golden Horde, and it’s hardly surprising that two separate writers working with Mongol iconography riffed on the same famous and poetic name from history.

Figure 226: In more ways than one, this is not the original
Snazz story. (From 2000 AD #209, 1981)

This was, however, not always the case for Moore’s Future Shocks. Two months before “The Last Rumble of the Platinum Horde” Moore penned “The Return of the Two-Storey Brain,” his second story featuring Abelard Snazz. Unlike “The Last Rumble of the Platinum Horde,” which Moore was content to have reprinted in the Shocking Futures collection with a self-deprecating note in the introduction, Moore asked for “The Return of the Two-Storey Brain” not to be reprinted alongside the other five Abelard Snazz tales in the Twisted Times collection because, as he puts it, “some while after the sequel was published, I reread a story by the incandescent R.A.

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January 30, 2014

The Sentinels Lied About All Them Space Wars (The Last War in Albion Part 29: Alan Moore’s First Future Shocks)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter five 3

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s first few short stories for 2000 AD focused mainly on robots, but gave him his first opportunity to work with Dave Gibbons…

You’re saying the Sentinels lied about all them space wars? Well what have they been doin’ all these years? – Alan Moore, Top Ten #12

Figure 218: Dave Gibbons manages to work the
Saturnian Singing Orchids into the page with
entertaining frequency. (“The Dating Game,”
written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons,
2000 AD #176, 1980. Click to enlarge.)

These strips culminate in “The Wild Frontier,” a story that demonstrates straightforwardly how Gibbons’s art style lends itself to Moore’s style of comedy. Moore describes the strip as “one of those stupid things you do when you hear that Dave Gibbons will be drawing a job.” “The Wild Frontier” is a two-page bit of larking about on the premise of a space-western, complete with jokes about “the octobanndits led by that cephalopod sidewinder… Billy the Squid!” and the Clone Ranger, a vast stampede of identical masked men with their catchphrase of “Hiyoo, Chromium! Hawaay!” All of this is depicted by Gibbons in comically ludicrous detail that not only emphasizes the ridiculousness of the concept but wallows in its glorious excess, encouraging readers to dwell on panels to catch all of the sight gags Gibbons has managed to cram in. But even as early as “The Dating Game” Gibbons was showing his propensity for detail, making sure to put the bouquet of Saturnian Singing Orchids that the computer gives Myron in as many panels as possible (and allowing Moore to create more deliciously awful plant rhymes such as “Who cares if the greenfly bite? / I’ve got you to hold me tight. / You’re my man, I don’t mean maybe… / You’re my fertilizer baby.”) and, of course, depicting the sublime lunacy of Myron’s homicidal toothbrush.

Figure 219: Alan Moore has admitted that
he designed Snazz’s visual appearance in
part because it was unnerving and slightly
headache-inducing to look at.

Unfortunately, for all that Moore was clearly better at them than other writers, there simply weren’t a ton of slots for short stories at this period in the magazine’s history. Tharg’s Future Shocks hadn’t appeared since Prog 135 in late 1979, and wouldn’t make a return until March of 1981, at which point Moore began getting published in 2000 AD with considerably more regularity. If his earliest 1980 shorts were merely competent, his 1981 work must be recognized as an extraordinary run of stories.

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January 23, 2014

The Comedian Is Dead (The Last War in Albion Part 28: Alan Moore’s Earliest 2000 AD Work)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter five 3

This is the fourth of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: 2000 AD built its reputation on the back of popular series like Judge Dredd, Ro-Busters, Rogue Trooper, and ABC Warriors. In his time working on the magazine, Alan Moore wrote for these properties only occasionally…

“Jeez, y’know, that felt good. There don’t seem to be so many laughs around these days.”

“Well, what do you expect? The Comedian is dead.” – Alan Moore, Watchmen #1

Moore’s Rogue Trooper work is altogether more somber affair. The first, “Pray for War,” tells of Gunnar having to kill another soldier who calls himself “Pray for War” because, as he says,“war is the best thing that ever happened to me” and “combat is what makes me happy,” ending with Rogue reassuring Gunnar that “you only killed part of him – the ugly part. The war killed any humanity left in him long ago.” The second, “First of the Few,” involves Rogue finding one of the abandoned prototypes of the Genetic Infrantrymen, who he allows the mercy of death, actively declining to lead his consciousness into his gun or helmet. Both are straightforward anti-war stories; “First of the Few” describes the hellish world of Nu Earth, “the ultimate monument to war. The land is scorched bare and the air is a poisonous soup,” Moore writes with obvious relish, crafting a dour and pleasureless war story that subverts the genre.

Figure 210: Hammerstein’s somber reflections over the grave
of a Martian animal (2000 AD Annual ’85, 1984)

Moore is even more somber in his ABC Warriors story, “Red Planet Blues,” which has Hammerstein investigating a problem on Mars. The problem turns out to be that the planet still has life on it, and the solution of the humans that hire Hammerstein is to simply burn the weeds in which the lifeforms live. Hammerstein reflects at the end that “we burned the whole undergrowth and we only found one dead Martian animal. I figure even that was a fluke.” Nevertheless, Hammerstein opts to bury the animal, admitting that he’s “getting old” and “getting soft.” The story ends as a haunting dirge about the nature of colonial genocide, as Hammerstein warns the dead alien that “the humans are coming, and soon all your tribe will lie as still as you. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s their planet now.”

Figure 211: A classic twist ending page from
the first installment of Tharg’s Future Shocks
(From “King of the World,” in 2000 AD #25,
written by Steve Moore, art by Blasquez, 1977)

But while Moore dabbled with these characters, the bulk of his 2000 AD work was either on the three strips he created – Skizz, D.R.

…

January 16, 2014

The Tek-Judges of Anubis (The Last War in Albion Part 27: Judge Dredd, Ro-Busters)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter five 4

This is the third of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: After successfully launching Battle Picture Weekly and the controversial Action for IPC, Pat Mills and John Wagner were given the task of launching a sci-fi comic, which they called 2000 AD. The comic’s flagship was the iconic Judge Dredd, featuring hard-edged futuristic cop Judge Dredd patrolling the mad streets of Mega City One.

“The Tek-Judges of Anubis have eaten a poison-weed and they shall die soon.” – Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, Judge Dredd: Book of the Dead

Figure 200: Judge Dredd is largely unreceptive
to requests for leniency or mercy. (Written by
Malcolm Shaw, art by Mike McMahon, 2000
AD #6, 1977, click to enlarge)

But the heart of the strip’s appeal came in its combination of the anti-authority leanings of Kid Rule OK or Look Out For Lefty with the noble bad guy protagonist of Hellman of Hammer Force. Judge Dredd takes for granted that its audience would recognize that its protagonist was deeply unsympathetic. The standard set-up of a Judge Dredd story involves Dredd going to great lengths to bust some “creep” whose crime seems relatively minor. Even if there is a proper villain, it’s not uncommon for a Judge Dredd strip to end with some minor accomplice getting arrested by Dredd, who inevitably rejects any pleas for mercy. An early story, for instance, ends with Dredd arresting a man for receiving an illegal but presumably life-saving organ transplant, proclaiming him to be one of “the real villains” in the illegal transplant ring he’s busting.

The strip, in other words, is an aggressive satire of what would become known as the broken windows theory of policing, in which focusing on small crimes against the social order – vandalism being the textbook example – was believed to reduce crime in general. In practice, of course, broken window policing became an excuse for police forces to focus on petty crime committed by poorer people, and was little more than an excuse for neoliberal crypto-fascists like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to arrest more racial minorities. Dredd predates both Thatcher’s Britain, which came into power in 1979, and the broken windows theory, first codified in 1982, but this only added to its power. It meant that when Thatcherism rose to power the artistic resistance to it was already worked out and ready.

Figure 201: Like Figure 97, this Brian Bolland
cover of 2000 AD #11 caught a young Alan
Moore’s eye.

…

January 9, 2014

A Loud Smack Where The Spine Parted Company With The Skull (The Last War in Albion Part 26: Action and 2000 AD)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter five 10

This is the first of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Shortly after getting his first work in Doctor Who Weekly, Alan Moore sold the first of several short stories he would write for IPC’s 2000 AD, an iconic sci-fi magazine created by Pat Mills and John Wagner, who got their start at IPC creating Battle Picture Weekly in 1975.

“The client’s head, contained inside the sack, came free with a loud smack where the spine parted company with the skull.” – Warren Ellis, Dead Pig Collector

Figure 190: The first issue of Pat Mills’s
controversial classic Action.

Battle Picture Weekly was an unambiguous success, much to the chagrin of Le Grand and the old guard (although this may have had as much to do with Pat Mills’s impressive pay package, which exceeded that of John Sanders, who hired him as it did with any actual creative differences). Appropriately, Mills and Wagner quickly found more work within IPC. Wagner was tapped to lead an only semi-successful revamp of Valiant, an old adventure magazine that was, despite Wagner’s efforts, merged into Battle in 1976. Mills, on the other hand, was tasked with creating another book that would go even further in the direction pioneered by Warlord and Battle Picture Weekly, to be called Action, and debuting in February of 1976.

British comics were by and large a working class medium, as Alan Moore has observed, but Action was unusual in targeting the working class population directly and fully indulging the working class, anti-authority attitudes of The Bootneck Boy. Its famed centerpiece was Hook Jaw, which was ostensibly a Jaws knockoff. Featuring a giant shark named, fittingly enough, Hook Jaw, the strip inverted the Jaws formula – where Spielberg reveled in keeping the shark off-screen for as long as possible and building up suspense, Hook Jaw puts the giant shark in the first panel, and proceeds to revel gratuitously in its violence. But for all the strip’s glorious violence, Mills was insistent that it be an “ecological” story in which Hook Jaw is the protagonist, who would take bloody vengeance against evil and corrupt humans on behalf of the untamed nature he represents. This was central to Action’s appeal and logic – it was not merely a comic about reveling against gratuitous violence, but one about reveling in gratuitous violence against authority figures.

Figure 191: Hook Jaw was deliberately given the center
position in Action so that it could get color pages and use
ostentatious quantities of red ink.

…

January 2, 2014

Call Vala From her Close Recess (The Last War in Albion Part 25: Alan Moore’s Future Shocks, Battle Picture Weekly)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter five 3

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Realizing that he’ll be hard-pressed to make it as a writer-artist, Alan Moore turned his focus in 1980 towards scripting comics for other writers, first getting work on Marvel UK’s Doctor Who Weekly and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Monthly writing short back-up strips featuring secondary characters from those franchises. But Moore was quick to augment that with other work, most notably for IPC Media’s 2000 AD…

“Sound clarions of war. Call Vala from her close recess in all her dark deceit.” – William Blake, The Four Zoas

And yet it also suggests that Moore is not best served by writing in such narrow genres as “Star Wars tie-ins” or “Doctor Who stories that don’t feature Doctor Who.” It is both telling and compelling, then, that a far larger body of Alan Moore’s early work comes in the form of bespoke short stories for 2000 AD published under the header of Tharg’s Future Shocks. It is not that this format allowed unfettered creativity by any measure. But it was a structure that allowed Moore to stretch his creative wings, as well as to work with a compelling variety of artists.

Figure 182: So thoroughly collected is
Alan Moore’s work that even his Star Wars
strips have found a home.

The dawn of Moore’s work for 2000 AD marks a subtle but significant change to the nature of the War’s narrative. Prior to this point in the narrative the material under discussion has been only sporadically collected. Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation have been put up for free on the Internet with Moore’s consent, Maxwell the Magic Cat has a long-out-of-print reprint series, and Moore’s Star Wars material has found a home in an omnibus published by Dark Horse Comics (although with Disney recently acquiring both Star Wars and Marvel Comics there’s a question mark over how long that will remain in print. But from this point on the overwhelming majority of the texts that constitute the War are readily available in print, and thus form a coherent and reasonably well-known body of texts, all of which were published in the same general period.

As it happens, the period in question coincides almost perfectly with the portion of Alan Moore’s career in which he wrote for IPC’s 2000 AD, a period which lasted from July of 1980 through April of 1986. Within this roughly six-year period, however, there are two distinct phases.

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