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Dead Kings Walking Underground (The Last War in Albion Part 104: Grant Morrison’s Future Shocks)

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This is the final part of The Last War in Albion Chapter Eleven, focusing on Alan Moore’s The Ballad of Halo Jones, as well as the final part of The Last War in Albion Book One. An omnibus of all five parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Ballad of Halo Jones is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore decided to stop working for IPC and 2000 AD, but the magazine had an obvious replacement in the form of an up-and-coming Scottish writer named Grant Morrison

“The night before returning to America, I wandered into the desert and ate a ball of hashish I’d been given in Tibet. The ensuing vision transformed me. Wading through powdered history, I heard dead kings walking underground; heard fanfares sound through human skulls. Alexander had merely resurrected an age of Pharaohs. Their wisdom, truly immortal, now inspired me.” – Alan Moore, Watchmen

Figure 822: The revelation of obscene
alien graffiti, a plot point shared by
both Moore and Morrison. (Written by
Grant Morrison, art by Colin MacNeil, from
“Fair Exchange” in 2000 AD #514, 1987)
There is no way to reasonably deny the fact that Morrison’s short pieces for 2000 AD owe a heavy debt to Alan Moore. “Hotel Harry Felix,” features an alien life form that takes the form of thoughts and ideas, a concept Moore had already explored in “Eureka.” His second, “The Alteration,” is a two-pager featuring a man on the run who is caught by monsters and turns into one, only to have it turn out that he was actually a monster who had contracted “humanitis” and was being cured, a joke not entirely dissimilar to Moore’s two-page “Return of the Thing.” His fourth, “Some People Never Listen,” bears more than a passing resemblance to Moore’s “The Bounty Hunters.” His seventh, “Wheels of Fury,” featuring an AI car that turns into a jealous lover, is almost a straight reworking of the Moore/Gibbons “The Dating Game,” in which a city’s central computer becomes a jealous lover. “Fair Exchange” uses the same joke that concludes “D.R. and Quinch Have Fun on Earth” of a comedic misunderstanding in which an alien is presented with something that is secretly rude graffiti in its native language, while the two-part “Fruitcake and Veg” is a more or less straightforward repeat of the basic joke of D.R. & Quinch, including a section where the narrator reflects, “People say to me, ‘Mr. Sweet, what is it that makes yo commit senseless and irresponsible acts of wanton destruction? What made you become the deranged homicidal maniac we’ve come to know and love? Well it’s a fair question. So I always give them a fair answer. I say it’s my upbringing, I tell them society’s to blame… and then I blow ‘em up!”
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All Known and Unknown Things (The Last War in Albion Part 103: The Not-End of Halo Jones)

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This is the fourth of five parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Eleven, focusing on Alan Moore’s The Ballad of Halo Jones. An omnibus of all five parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Ballad of Halo Jones is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The third book of The Ballad of Halo Jones offered a portrayal of futuristic war grounded in the psychological horrors war inflicts on its combatants. 

“First, there is Brahma, the self-aware immensity, from whose thought-substance are created all known and unknown things.” –Grant Morrison, 18 Days

It’s a shocking portrayal of post-traumatic stress, grounded in the same brutal social realism that saw Mills depicting Charley Bourne on the dole in 1933, and, for that matter, in a Britain where Thatcher’s had only recently gone to war with Argentina for some obscure islands as crushing unemployment sparked riots at home.
Figure 815: Halo Jones slowly drinks herself to death. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by Ian Gibson, from The Ballad of Halo Jones Book Three
in 2000 AD #451, 1986)
This parallel is, of course, in no way incidental. The Ballad of Halo Jones was, from the beginning, rooted in social commentary on Thatcher’s Britain. This was in many ways the point, the satirical tradition of 2000 AD being one of the things that endeared it to Moore in spite of the numerous frustrations. The Hoop was just another variation on the terraces of Moore’s childhood: a place built for poor people to die in with as little fuss as possible for the rest of the world. The callous disregard for the safety or well-being of its residents and the cruel farce that there might be any jobs for them anyway was, as with the best strips in 2000 AD, and indeed the best science fiction, nothing more or less than Moore looking outside his own window and describing what he saw from an oblique angle, an approach perfectly suited to Gibson’s brilliantly grotesque blend of realism and cartooning. And the focus on the economic realities continues to be at the heart of the strip in Book Three, which uses its prologue chapter to depict Halo’s decade-long downward spiral after leaving the Clara Pandy as a vicious cycle of unemployment and claustrophobia slowly leads her to a life of petty crime and alcoholism. It’s in this context that Halo’s enlistment in the military is shown, making it clear that this is an act of desperation – the only way out of the galaxy that Halo can find. In this regard, notably, Moore surpasses his model Charley’s War, which never really looked at the economic conditions that make the military an attractive career option, least of all tied that into its overall portrait of the horrors, both material and psychological, of war, and it is hardly surprising he considers Book Three the high point of The Ballad of Halo Jones.
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The Exposed Violet Membrane (The Last War in Albion Part 102: Halo Jones Book Three)

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This is the third of five parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Eleven, focusing on Alan Moore’s The Ballad of Halo Jones. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Ballad of Halo Jones is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The editorially troubled second book of The Ballad of Halo Jones introduced the character of Glyph, a character so meek and unobtrusive that people don’t even notice her when she’s standing there, and forget about her even as she’s talking to them, to the point where her roommates, Halo and Toy, don’t even realize they have a third bunkmate.

“One of the Culacaons detaches himself from the main herd and rushes screaming at the nearest mollusk. He stabs the exposed violet membrane over and over with his spear. Everyone cheers. Soon, his fellows join in, each assaulting the snail-thing of their choice. The atmosphere is overwhelmingly masculine.” – Alan Moore, “A Man’s World”
Figure 807: Halo drinking at a bar, far from home, after learning that
Rodice would not be meeting her on Charlemagne. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by Ian Gibson, from The Ballad of Halo Jones Book Two
in 2000 AD #415, 1985)
Glyph’s tragedy (they ultimately sacrifice themself to save Halo and Toy from Toby’s attack, with neither of the two noticing or remembering them after they’re gone) serves in many regards as a mirror for Halo’s own arc over the course of Book Two, which tracks her voyage on the cruise ship The Clara Pandy. Halo plans to meet Rodice on the planet Charlemagne after a year’s journey, a meeting that hangs over the entire arc from the first installment, which is narrated in the form of a letter from Halo to Rodice as she passes Pluto on her way out of the solar system. But upon reaching the appointed meeting place at the story’s end she discovers that Rodice changed her mind after Halo’s departure and is still back on the Hoop. Angry and betrayed, Halo responds to Rodice’s promise that “I’ll tell you everything when you get back to the Hoop” by proclaiming that she won’t be coming back to the Hoop and hanging up on her, leaving her, in her own way, as isolated and cut off as the forgotten Glyph.
Certainly the character was a success. In stark contrast to Book One’s chilly reception, it quickly became obvious that the profound and crushing sense of isolation and loneliness that Glyph represented had struck a chord in readers. As Moore put it, “the response to this story of a terminal nonentity was surprising in its intensity and I think that, maybe, that was the episode where we finally got the readers on our side.”
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A Home That’s Miles From Home (The Last War in Albion Part 101: Halo Jones Books One and Two)

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This is the second of five parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Eleven, focusing on Alan Moore’s The Ballad of Halo Jones. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Ballad of Halo Jones is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore and Ian Gibson created The Ballad of Halo Jones to give 2000 AD a rare female-fronted strip. In approaching the series, they decided to largely throw readers in the deep end, offering a lot of information about Halo Jones’s world but very little context. 

“I wanna live with Halo Jones. I wanna home that’s miles from home. I wanna drugs from the Twilight Zone. I wanna never never never never never never never say no.” – Shriekback, “Malaria”
The result of this is that the first thing the audience learns about Halo Jones’s world is not what it’s like, but rather the fact that she wants to get out of there, and that everybody else in the world does too, but, as her friend Rodice puts it, “even if you do get out it’s no good, ‘cause no matter how far you get, they’ll fetch you back here and bust you to pieces.” Past that, as with American Flagg, the world is introduced more through the media playing in the background than through characters explaining it to each other. (Not that Moore avoids blatant exposition entirely -not long after the disorienting opening spread, for instance, Moore has several characters straightforwardly explain the Different Drummers to each other, despite the fact that all of them are seemingly familiar with the group and have no reason to describe their basic features.
Figure 801: Halo Jones explains her motivation in life. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by Ian Gibson, from The Ballad of Halo Jones in 2000 AD #376, 1984)
This continues throughout. Nowhere in Book One is there anything that quite serves as an explanation of the Hoop and how it works. This is not, to be clear, a flaw: The Ballad of Halo Jones is not a story about the Hoop and how it came to be. (In point of fact, it’s a scheme to move the unemployed – or “increased leisure citizens,” to use the preferred euphemism – out of sight and out of mind. This isn’t really established until Book Two, however.) It’s about what life on the Hoop is like, which is to say, about a soul-crushing dead end designed to serve as little more than a human landfill. In this regard it’s just an iteration of a trope that has already appeared numerous times in the course of the War, generally as an analogue for Thatcher’s Britain in some form.
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Our Skullbabies (The Last War in Albion Part 100: Girls)

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This is the first of five parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Eleven, focusing on Alan Moore’s The Ballad of Halo Jones. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Essentially the entire early career of Alan Moore was covered, save for one work.

“Our skullbabies will always tight the day for peoplekind.” – Alan Moore, Crossed +100

Figure 794: The debut of Halo Jones.
This is The Ballad of Halo Jones, an ongoing strip for 2000 AD published in three separate runs. The first, published as Book One, ran for three months beginning in July of 1984, one month after Moore ceased work on Captain Britain, one before he ceased on Marvelman for Warrior, and alongside the publication of Swamp Thing #29, the infamous zombie incest rape issue. The second launched in February of 1985, the same month that Moore began work on American Flagg and that Warrior ended, and again ran for three months. And the third, Book Three, began in January of 1986, one month after Moore’s tie-in issue to Crisis on Infinite Earths and one month before Miracleman commenced in the US, running until April, two months before Watchmen debuted. 
The strip’s existence marks an obvious and in many regards overdue shift in Moore’s status within IPC’s roster of 2000 AD writers. Of the UK comics companies with which Moore worked, IPC was the last to give him an ongoing, waiting until after he was already writing Captain Britain and winning massive acclaim for his work in Warrior, and even then offering him nothing more interesting than “can you write us an E.T. ripoff,” an unpromising request that Moore shaped into the better-than-you’d-expect Skizz, alongside artist Jim Baikie, one of the many eternal journeymen of British comics. Subsequently, one of his Time Twisters, “D.R. & Quinch Have Fun on Earth,” done with frequent collaborator Alan Davis, got expanded to a series of recurring stories. But once Moore started making waves in the US market IPC, mindful of how it had lost both Brian Bolland and Dave Gibbons to DC, finally deigned to offer him a relatively free hand to create a concept of his own design.
Figure 795: Call me Kenneth as Jack Kirby
pastiche. (Written by John Wagner, art
by Ian Gibson, from 2000 AD #17, 1977)
Teaming with Moore for the new strip was Ian Gibson, who had worked with Moore on his early Future Shock “Grawks Bearing Gifts.” Gibson’s style was distinctive, mixing a cartoonish and exaggerated sense of figure and facial structure with dense line work. The result was particularly well-suited to humor strips, and indeed, prior to The Ballad of Halo Jones Gibson was most associated with the ongoing Sam Slade, Robo-Hunter strip, chronicling the adventures of a humorously taciturn bounty hunter on the trail of various robots.
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The Storm I’ve Unleashed (The Last War in Albion Part 99: Notes on the Fundamental Nature of Alan Moore)

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This is the eleventh of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore grew up in the Spring Boroughs area of Northampton, a desperately poor part of England near Green Street, famously described by Jeremy Seabrook in his book The Unprivileged.

“It flows out of me, and I don’t understand it and I don’t know where it’s from, but it’s there and undeniable and mine and I get to share it. I get to share it with everyone. This? This is as good as it gets. I feel small and holy, and the part of me that hasn’t disappeared in the storm I’ve unleashed is whispering… ‘This is worth it.'” – Kieron Gillen, The Wicked and the Divine
Seabrook returns constantly to the closed-mindedness of the area’s inhabitants, describing their hatred of abstract art as “the anger of anyone brought abruptly face to face with ideas which he has no use for, but which he finds form the very basis of someone else’s philosophy. They did not admit it willingly that anything exceeded their ability to understand, and in consequence violence had to be done to everything they encountered in order to accommodate it.” This resulted in attitudes characterized on the one hand by intense suspicion towards “other people [who] were sure to abuse your hospitality, take advantage of your kindness and exploit your generous nature,” and on the other by an intense desire “not to be beholden to anybody.” He describes one group of relations simply as “mean. Of them it was said that ‘they’d bottle a fart and use it again if they could’. Tom’s mother was extremely reluctant to throw away anything she had used personally, and even left the water she had washed in cooling greyly for hours in the enamel bowl in the sink. Once they found some mice-droppings in a sack of flour, and they spent the whole night extracting the tiny black grains from the bag before offering the tainted powder for sale the following morning.” The sense of anti-intellectualism and insularity is profound, and the theme that Seabrook circles back to again and again, concluding that “the life of the streets had a devitalizing effect, and did not allow of any departure from a rigidly fixed pattern of behaviour and relationships.” But for all of this, he speaks movingly of the plight of his family and neighbors, explaining in the book’s final passage how, when the terraces were finally bulldozed in favor of some new vision of social engineering, the now displaced residents were “shown the error and irrelevance of their faith by those who have access to greater truths, and who tear the veils from the eyes of others, veils that prove to be not veils at all, but living membranes, the removal of which leaves nothing but empty and bleeding sockets.”
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The City’s Burdened, Swollen Heart (The Last War in Albion Part 98: The Unprivileged)

, 8

This is the tenth of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Several thousand words were spilled upon the subject of Alan Moore’s minor works, culminating with remarks on his two contributions to Fantagraphics’ anthology Honk. The first of these was a piece entitled “Globetrotting for Agoraphobics,” with illustrations from Eddie Campbell.

“Outside the horses walk on cobbles, ringing in the city’s burdened, swollen heart. Cars follow and then more cars; cyclone flow of noise and fume and coloured steel. The factories are born, thrive briefly, turn to husks as the hand lettered signs above the shops give way to corporate logo.” – Alan Moore, The Birth Caul
Figure 783: Moore’s family as depicted by Peter Bagge.
Moore’s other contribution to Honk is a reprint of a piece earlier published by Knockabout Comics, originally with illustrations by Savage Pencil, although the Honk version was illustrated by Peter Bagge. Entitled “Brasso with Rosie,” the piece is one of the few, and by some margin the earliest openly autobiographical piece that Moore has written. It is, to be sure, an exaggerated and at least partially fictionalized piece – Moore’s claim that an elderly relative of his was once “totally immobilized when a thoughtless spouse decided to hang mirrors upon either side of the tiny, damp-scented room in which he customarily sat, presenting the luckless dotard with an infinite succession of doppelgangers arrayed to either side of him,” leading him to believe that he had “been granted some form of X-ray vision, enabling him to see through the peeling walls and into the identical living rooms of his neighbors,” and that “he remained like this for twenty years” is, for example, surely overstating the case by at least half a decade. But underneath the comedic exaggeration is a sardonic and vivid account of the texture of Moore’s childhood, featuring no shortage of details that Moore would go on to revisit in later works, such as his claim that “while it was true that before I was ten years old I had been hung from a tree by my wrists, whipped with barbed wire and buried alive by my schoolchums, there were also moving and poignant memories that I shall carry with me forever,” an account he would eventually revisit in his magical working The Birth Caul. Indeed, “Brasso with Rosie” discusses birth cauls in the context of his grandmother’s “elaborate and obsessive system of Juju and Counter-Juju,” claiming here that she in fact had an “extensive collection” of them that was discovered after her death, as opposed to, in his later account, simply having his mother’s caul.
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It’s All True (The Last War in Albion Part 97: Nightjar, Sinister Ducks)

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This is the ninth of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore was particularly passionate about his handful of collaborations with Bryan Talbot. But his major effort at collaborating with Talbot, a strip to be called Nightjar and be published in Warrior, was never completed.

“The world must be warned about those ducks. It’s all true.” -Translucia Baboon, quoted by Neil Gaiman
Figure 776: The opening to Nightjar, unpublished for
twenty years. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Bryan
Talbot c. 1983, published in Yuggoth Cultures #1, 2003)
Nightjar ultimately became a casualty of Moore’s falling out with Dez Skinn, who, for his part, insists that he “was never very keen on Nightjar (hated the name) and Bryan was another slow – or busy – artist, so it would never have happened in Warrior.” Talbot ultimately only completed two and a half pages of the strip, with another page partially completed, but roughly twenty years after Talbot had started the page,  William Christensen at Avatar got in touch and asked if he still had the unfinished pages. Talbot did, and Christensen proceeded to commission Talbot to finish the strip, reprinting it along with the script and Moore’s letter to Talbot about the development of it in the first issue of the anthology Yuggoth Cultures, collecting various Moore obscurities with newly commissioned adaptations of some of his poems and song lyrics.
Figure 777: The seven villainous sorcerers
who killed Mirrigan’s father. (Written by
Alan Moore c. 1983, art by Bryan Talbot,
from “Nightjar” in Yuggoth Cultures #1, 2003)
The resulting strip is a straightforward thing – mainly a slab of exposition that starts with ten-year-old girl watching her father die, a death that Moore, in typically florid captions, describes as “a dirty death, stumbling and falling amidst the yellow grass and rusted pram wheels, eyes rolling, white foam flecked on blackening lips” as a man the audience is told is the Emperor of all the Birds is “murdered by sorcerers.” The strip then cuts eighteen years later as the girl, Mirrigan Demdyke, receives a lecture from her dying grandmother (memorably depicted by Talbot as an old woman with her eyes sewn shut), who explains that her father was not killed fairly under the rules of magic, as he was not killed by a single opponent, but by a cabal of seven sorcerers conspiring against him. Outraged by this travesty, Mirrigan swears that she will kill the seven, who are introduced at patient length by her grandfather, starting with “Hart Wentworth, whose soul is like a monstrous slug, crusted with sapphires, thrashing contentedly in the tarpit of his own vileness” and ending with Sir Eric Blason, the new Emperor of all the Birds, who Moore leaves relatively undescribed in the comic, but notes in the script is “a member of parliament” with “power on a level that drug-addled ninnies like you and I can scarcely conceive.” 
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Talons of the Old World (The Last War in Albion Part 96: Writing for Comics)

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This is the eighth of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Moore’s early minor and marginal works in the American market were largely in small indie publications, in reflection of his ideological preferences. 

“There’s not much left of tomorrow. The wind from tomorrow is scouring her away. The talons of the old world are reaching up out of the dirt for her ankles. She can barely remember what hope and peace felt like. She dreams of those infinite childhood Augusts when she didn’t know anything and nothing was coming, and wakes up with cold in her bones.” – Warren Ellis, Injection

Figure 729: Captain Airship One electrocutes
Winston Jr. (Written by Alan Moore, art by
Chris Brasted and SMS Quill, from Captain
Airstrip One in Mad Dog #10, 1985)
But it was in the British scene that Moore took this ideological preference to its logical extreme, contributing several works to publications that came out of the fan scene as opposed to from professional publishers. Of course, just like the American comics industry, the line between these two categories was in many ways porous, a fact illustrated by Moore’s year spent doing fanzine reviews and write-ups of conventions for Marvel UK, primarily in The Daredevils. And indeed, one of his fanzine contributions, a five page comic for the magazine Mad Dog entitled “Captain Airstrip One,” rather neatly bridges the gap between Moore’s talking about fanzines and participating them. The comic expands upon the eponymous Captain Airstrip One, who is Moore and Davis’s creations for Marvel UK, the alternate-universe Captain Britain of a world based on George Orwell’s 1984. The strip is a humor strip largely structured like what Moore called his “list” stories for 2000 AD – a fairly linear exploration of the humor implicit in the idea of an Orwellian superhero – for instance, having him crash through a window to help deal with little Winston Jr.’s propensity for smut-think by electrocuting him to death. But for all its disposability – the strip is firmly an amateur production – it adds a useful point to the larger tapestry of Moore’s Captain Britain work, affirming his inherent suspicion of the basic idea of a Captain Britain by demonstrating directly that the archetype need not be considered in the least bit heroic.
Figure 730: Moore’s contribution to Moonstone.
(From Fantasy Advertiser #77, 1983)
Elsewhere, Moore contributed the script for the final installment of Moonstone, an ongoing superhero sci-fi story in the fanzine Fantasy Advertiser, to which he also contributed a lengthy four-part essay entitled “Writing for Comics,” an essay worth looking at in some detail simply because of the level of direct insight it provides into Moore’s general approach to comics at what can fairly be called the zenith of his early career.
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The Word “Fuck” Typed Eight Thousand Times (The Last War in Albion Part 95: American Flagg)

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This is the seventh of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Also, I’d like to apologize if I inadvertently persuaded anybody that because the early comics of Alan Moore were so good the UK should just go back to the Thatcher era. That was not the intended thesis statement of The Last War in Albion. 

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore wrote a large number of very minor works in his early years, generally in keeping with his primary creative goal of being able to feed his family.

“I want to see eight thousand words. Printable words. I still remember that essay you wrote when the Beast got elected. I do not want to see the word ‘fuck’ typed eight thousand times again.” – Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan
Figure 722: The first page of Alan Moore’s 1984 Batman
text story.
This vision is not some mere alternate history of a world where there never was a War, where Moore’s Scottish devil had no great master whose career he could illustrate, where a Hampshire journalist never gets a vital lesson in writing comic scripts, and where a boy from Essex and games journalist from Bath don’t have a comics industry waiting to receive the next British genius with open arms. Rather, it is a career that happened alongside the familiar narrative of Moore’s chain of successes from 1979 to 1986 – a career that consists of nothing more or less than the sum total of works that don’t fit into the tale of Moore’s relentless march to success, and even some, like much of his 2000 AD work, that do. Nor is it as though Moore’s American career brought an end to his time taking minor British gigs. Far from it, almost immediately after taking the Swamp Thing job, Moore found himself writing a humorous two-page text piece for the 1984 Superman Annual – not, to be clear, Superman Annual #10, which featured an Eliot Maggin/Curt Swan tale called “The Day the Cheering Stopped,” but a UK Superman annual in the same basic vein as the Dukes of Hazard annual he’d contributed to the year before. Moore’s piece, entitled “Protected Species,” is written in the form of a resignation letter by Graunch Quiglow, who is quitting his job capturing endangered alien species so that they can be kept safe by the Interstellar League of Gentlefolk Concerned About Endangered Wildlife following a disastrous attempt to “rescue” Superman. The next year he contributed another piece, “I Was Superman’s Double,” an extended narration by an unscrupulous cab driver about the day he was drafted in as a substitute Superman after the real one had a nervous breakdown (his passenger, “that Kent Clark guy” from The Daily Planet, is unimpressed), as well as a more serious piece for the 1985 Batman Annual entitled “The Gun.”
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