Eruditorum Press

Pounded in the butt by dialectical materialism.

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A Country That Instinctively Hates The Foreign (The Last War in Albion Part 44: Dave Thorpe’s Captain Britain)

, 18

The Kickstarter to fund The Last War in Albion is just $1500 away from committing the blog to running through Volume 4 of the project, focusing on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Also, Last War in Albion will be running on Thursdays for this and the next two installments. 

This is the fourth of ten parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Dez Skinn oversaw a successful revival of Captain Britain as a supporting character to the Black Knight in Hulk Comic, the first Marvel UK comic consisting primarily of material created originally for the UK market. But a little over a year after taking over at Marvel UK Skinn left the company, eventually creating his own company, Quality Communications, where he would publish Warrior, an anthology comic featuring two well-received strips by Alan Moore…
“We’re not supposed to be a country that instinctively hates the foreign and spies on itself.” –Warren Ellis, Jack Cross
Figure 327: Alan Davis’s first published
comics page features a memorable
Z-shaped panel layout as Captain Britain
and Jackdaw travel from dimension to
dimension. (From Marvel Super-Heroes
#377, 1981. Click to enlarge.)
Meanwhile, during the nine months in which Warrior was under development, Marvel had decided to try again with Captain Britain, picking up where Steve Parkhouse had left the character in his Black Knight serial, namely being sent back to Earth accompanied by the elf Jackdaw. Helming the strip were a pair of fresh faces – Dave Thorpe, who had mulled around Marvel UK’s editorial staff for a year and change waiting for a writing gig to open, and Alan Davis, making his artistic debut. Like many British comics creators of the time, Davis was a part-timer who came to comics as a second job, in Davis’s case alongside driving forklifts for a warehouse. Famously, Davis was unaware that comics pages were typically drawn on oversized sheets and shrunk down for reproduction and so drew the art for his first issue at print size, resulting in there not being enough room for the dialogue and in the strip having to be printed in six pages instead of the intended five. 
Nevertheless, Davis’s style is recognizable and distinctive from the start. with the cartooning influence that would characterize his later D.R. & Quinch work already in evidence. He’s immediately adept at character design, managing to introduce the strip’s villains, Mad Jim Jaspers’s Crazy Gang, in crisp detail. He shows an immediate aptitude for drawing expressive faces and particularly fluid action – in his first page he manages a visual gag in which Captain Britain and Jackdaw land on what appears to be Earth, with Jackdaw, who lays back as though reclining, crashing onto the ground while Captain Britain lands in a dynamic pose, already prepared to fight. 
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The Old Straight Tracks and the Sacred Stones (The Last War in Albion Part 43: Hulk Comic)

, 12

The Kickstarter to fund The Last War in Albion has made it to its first stretch goal! Next up is a commitment to blogging through Volume 4 of the project, focusing on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

This is the second of ten parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The 1976 launch of Captain Britain, Marvel’s first comic created for exclusive UK release, was filled with a lot of fanfare, but under the hood the fact that it was blatantly created by Americans was altogether obvious…

“I am Elen, Goddess of the old straight tracks and the standing stones! Once only in seven times seven score years can mortal man gain the powers of Earth and Fire from the stones of this place.” – Grant Morrison, Captain Clyde

The fact that only sixteen issues into his own series Captain Britain not only needed to be propped up with a high profile guest star, but had to be propped up by the exact character he was demonstrably designed as an imitation of speaks volumes about the problems the series was facing. And these problems can hardly be called a surprise – of course a series with a hook of “Britain’s very own superhero” is going to be lackluster when it’s produced by a bunch of Americans with a minimal-at-best connection with Britain. At least Claremont was born in the UK, even if he moved away too young to have any meaningful memories of it – but Herb Trimpe’s UK bona fides consisted of having vacationed there once, an experience that seems to have mostly left him with the view that he “didn’t believe that a superhero could be popular in England.” But as tenuous as the initial creative team’s connection to the UK was, Friedrich’s arrival marked the point where the series became a revolving door of creators with no connection whatsoever – Trimpe left after issue #23, with John Buscema, a longstanding artist most associated with The Avengers, drawing seven issues before being replaced by Ron Wilson, around which point writing duties became a complete mess. Issue #36 was plotted by Friedrich but had dialogue entirely written by Larry Lieber, issue #37 was scripted by Len Wein, with Larry Lieber joining Bob Budiansky for plotting duties, and issues #38 and 39 were plotted by Bob Budiansky with dialogue by Jim Lawrence. By this point the comic had long since deteriorated to where it was no longer profitable to print it in color, and with issue #39 it was cancelled entirely and, in the usual Marvel UK way, merged with another title, in this case the newly reminted Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain.…

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Flying Was The Best Bit (The Last War in Albion Part 42: The Origins of Captain Britain)

, 14

Hello everyone. I’m currently running a Kickstarter to help fund the continuation of The Last War in Albion. Right now we’re funded through Book Two, which will focus on Watchmen, and are well on our way to the first stretch goal, which will guarantee Book Three. Please consider contributing to help this blog keep going and this blogger keep eating food.

This is the second of ten parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Marvel Comics traces its origins back to 1939, but in its modern incarnation dates to 1961 when Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created The Fantastic Four and a string of further hits. By the 1970s, however, Marvel had largely moved on to its second generation of talent.

“Flying was the best bit. The rest of it was fraught with more misery and self pity than the entire recorded output of Les Smiths.” – Grant Morrison, “Captain Granbretan”

Figure 313: As was the norm for debuts
of British comics, the first issue of The
Mighty World of Marvel featured a free
and thoroughly lame gift.

As part of this corporate expansion, Marvel decided to look into foreign markets, specifically the United Kingdom. Short of Odhams’ Power Comics line that gave Steve Moore his comics industry breakthrough, Marvel comics had no official UK distribution, famously arriving as ballast on ships that was then sold off in an entirely unlicensed and functionally unregulated market that made following individual series difficult. In 1972, three years after Odhams was absorbed by IPC and dropped the Marvel license, Marvel decided to take matters into their own hands by creating a UK-based publisher that would distribute Marvel work for the UK comics market. Recognizing that the British and American comics markets were fundamentally different media, with the UK dominated by weekly black and white anthologies as opposed to the monthly color comics featuring a single story of the US market, Marvel UK kicked off its line at the end of September with The Mighty World of Marvel, an anthology that initially featured Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the Hulk. Five months later they added Spider-Man Comics Weekly to the line-up, bringing Thor and Iron Man to the UK market as well. 

The initial model of Marvel UK was straightforward – comics were printed in Europe, but were edited in New York alongside Marvel’s other fare. They consisted of black and white reprints of Marvel material, with stories that filled a single US monthly issue getting cut up over multiple UK weekly installments.
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The Promethean Age (The Last War in Albion Part 41: Marvel Comics)

, 14

This is the first of an unknown number of parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. The omnibus for this chapter is not quite ready yet, and I’ll post it next week.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore and Alan Davis had a vibrant and popular creative partnership in 2000 AD on the D.R. & Quinch strips, but the roots of their collaboration go back to 1982 and their work together for Marvel UK…

“The Promethean age had been announced; the time of men as gods who bore fire in the palms of their hands had come.” – Grant Morrison, Supergods
This is hardly surprising for what was, by the time of D.R. & Quinch, a well-honed creative partnership. Moore and Davis had been working together since June of 1982 when Moore, having made his bones on the Star Wars and Doctor Who titles published by Marvel UK, was given the reins of Marvel UK’s Captain Britain, at the time an ongoing series in the monthly anthology Marvel Superheroes. Davis had been drawing Captain Britain for the comic since September of 1981, where he made his mainstream debut illustrating a script by Dave Thorpe that served as the character’s first appearance in that title. But the history of the character stretches back considerably further.
Figure 307: Uncanny Tales, one of the many
pulp magazines published by Martin
Goodman.
To understand the nature of Captain Britain as a character it is necessary to understand Marvel UK, which in turn requires an understanding of Marvel Comics. The company originated out of the broader publishing portfolio of Martin Goodman, born Moses Goodman in 1908 to Lithuanian immigrants to the United States. Goodman’s family was large and poor, and Goodman had to drop out of school in the fifth grade to enter the workforce, and finally started traveling the country as a teenager, riding the rails and staying in hobo camps throughout the Great Depression. Eventually he returned to enter the publishing industry, rising through the ranks at Eastern Distributing Corperation, and then jumping ship to form his own company, Newsstand Publications with Archie Comics cofounder Louis Siberkleit. In 1934 Newsstand Publications went bankrupt when their distributor went under, leading Silberkleit to depart the company, but Goodman managed to convince creditors that he could turn the company around, which he proceeded to do.
Goodman’s business model was based on trend-surfing. He changed the insignias on his titles regularly, creating different lines to house different sorts of books, and was ruthless about pushing out clones of successful titles. The bulk of his magazines were pulps in the classic model: All Star Adventure Fiction, Ka-Zar, Two-Gun Western, Uncanny Tales, and, in a title that Goodman would use later to more success, Marvel Tales.
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We Confuse Rebellion With A Hairstyle (The Last War in Albion Part 40: D.R. & Quinch, Alan Davis)

, 5

This is the sixth and final part of Chapter Six of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Skizz and D.R. & Quinch  for 2000 AD. An ebook omnibus of all six 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. 

The stories discussed in this chapter are available in the collections Skizz and The Complete D.R. & Quinch.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s D.R. & Quinch featured juvenile delinquency and massive amounts of destruction played initially for countercultural and satirical laughs, but eventually played for little more than its own sake. Early installments rail against corrupt authority and the cruelties of war, but the final storyline is a largely toothless (albeit terribly entertaining) satire of Hollywood.

“We confuse rebellion with a hairstyle. Nightmare of the teenage jobscape, suddenly made stupid, weak and clumsy there among the calloused adults.” – Alan Moore, The Birth Caul

The specific style in question dates to MAD #4, from 1953, and from the acclaimed story “Superduperman,” although following the success of that story it became the house style for MAD. Still, “Superduperman” is a known influence for Moore, who has credited it as an influence for both Marvelman and Watchmen, and as such is as good a vehicle to describe the style as any. In many ways “Superduperman” reflects the style of short story that Moore characterized as a “list story” when writing Future Shocks for 2000 AD. Its structure is in effect a frame for going through a bunch of parodied aspects of Superman and, later, Captain Marvel.
Figure 298: Wally Wood’s extremely
detailed art packs in a number of
entertaining sight gags. (Click to
enlarge.)
And so in rapid succession the strip introduces Clark Bent, Lois Pain, and Billy Spafon, who with the magic word SHAZOOM! (Strength, Health, Aptitude, Zeal, Ox, Power of, Ox, Power of Another, and Money) becomes Captain Marbles and proceeds to have an extended fight with Superduperman. The story drips with irony – Superduperman’s chest insignia constantly changes from panel to panel, often serving as various corporate logos or notes that the space is for sale, while Captain Marbles has openly given up being a superhero in favor of making money. All of this is a barely veiled parody of the then-current legal case between National Comics (the then-owners of Superman) and Fawcett Publications, who owned the at the time more popular Captain Marvel. 
Although there is a plot – Superduperman meets and fights Captain Marbles and finally defeats him by tricking him into punching himself in the head, only to find out that Lois Pain still considers him (quite correctly, given his habit of using his X-Ray vision to spy on the women’s room) to be a creep – the plot is, like that of “Sunburn” or “They Sweep the Spaceways,” mainly an excuse to pack in jokes, including elaborate sight gags within Wally Woods’ hyper-detailed art and various suitably awful puns in the vein of Clark Bent.
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Kid-With-Knife Is Behind You With An AK-47 (The Last War in Albion Part 39: D.R. & Quinch)

, 7

Coming a day early due to the nature of this week’s extra post, this is the fifth of six parts of Chapter Six of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Skizz and D.R. & Quinch  for 2000 AD. An ebook omnibus of all six 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. The Last War in Albion now also has an imageblog on Tumblr. 

The stories discussed in this chapter are available in the collections Skizz and The Complete D.R. & Quinch.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s D.R. & Quinch featured juvenile delinquency and massive amounts of destruction played for countercultural laughs.

“Kid-With-Knife is behind you with an AK-47.” -Kieron Gillen, Phonogram: The Singles Club

Figure 290: Northampton School for Boys, from which Moore
was expelled for dealing acid. Moore notes that he declined
to rat out his accomplice, who he says went on to become
a police officer.
Also important, of course, is the material itself. The anarchic glee that D.R. and Quinch builds its humor out of is an ideology that must surely have appealed to Alan Moore. The detail that the two lead characters have been kicked out of school makes this one of the earliest of relatively few instances in Moore’s career where one is compelled to read a story at least partially autobiographically. Moore, after all, was himself kicked out of school, and, if not under similar circumstances to those of D.R. and Quinch (he was only caught dealing acid, as opposed to harboring an extensive stash of high energy weapons), at least under a similar rhetoric. “The headmaster who had dealt with my expulsion had, I think, taken me rather personally,” Moore explains.  “He had written to all of the colleges and schools that I might have thought of applying to and told them that they should under no circumstances accept me as a pupil because it would be a corrupting influence upon the morals of the other students. I believe that he did at one point in the letter refer to me as sociopathic, which I think was rather harsh.” 
It is difficult not to find certain parallels between Moore’s wry interview humor in 2005 and the opening gag of “D.R. & Quinch Have Fun on Earth,” where Quinch explains that “my psychiatrist says I’m a psychotic deviant. But that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person, right?” Similarly, in another interview, Moore describes how “I was just convinced I must get my revenge upon society, no matter what” for being kicked out, making it clear that his animosity was for “the government, it was the structure of everything.” Although this is delivered with similar humor (Moore encourages the interview to “try to picture, if you will, a little 17-year-old Alan sitting there, kind of staring, hallucinating”), the similarity between it and D.R.
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Acid Bombs From Little Hatches (The Last War in Albion Part 38: D.R. & Quinch, O.C. & Stiggs, Juvenile Delinquency)

, 9

This is the fourth of six parts of Chapter Six of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Skizz and D.R. & Quinch  for 2000 AD. An ebook omnibus of all six 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. The Last War in Albion now also has an imageblog on Tumblr. 

The stories discussed in this chapter are available in the collections Skizz and The Complete D.R. & Quinch.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s first recurring feature for 2000 AD, Skizz, was a mixed success, but his second, D.R. & Quinch, featuring an anarchic and psychotic pair of alien delinquents, was an altogether more popular endeavor.

“He dropped acid bombs from little hatches in the base of his testicles.” – Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan

Figure 284: Randall Schwab Jr. discovering the Uzi left
for a wedding present.
The second major influence is the National Lampoon’s recurring feature O.C. and Stiggs, an influence that D.R. & Quinch largely wears on its sleeve, or, at least, in its title. Like D.R. & Quinch, O.C. and Stiggs tells the story of two socially maladapted college students and their mayhem-causing adventures. For instance, at the start of their most iconic adventure, The Utterly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs, which took up the entire October 1982 issue of the National Lampoon, the narrator, O.C., describes “the small inconvenience of having to attend the wedding reception of Schwab’s sister, Lenora, a totally white-skinned harpist and ballet deviate with nostrils that look like old-fashioned key holes, who never appears anywhere without a ribbon on her somewhere, usually on her head, and usually four or five of them.” He goes on to explain that “because Lenora was so artistic and withdrawn and delicate, and totally unable to function anyplace where there were any people or any windows or anything else that might suck her into a connection with the world, me and Stiggs got her an Uzi submachine gun for a wedding present, with a twenty-round clip and a detachable stock.” This turns out to be a prime example of starting as one means to go on. 
Once again, the obvious difference is in the sort of technology, although if one is being honest the presence of submachine guns already puts O.C. and Stiggs in a class closer to D.R. & Quinch than Dennis the Menace. But on the whole, O.C. and Stiggs takes a markedly different approach than D.R. & Quinch. Where D.R. and Quinch revel fairly purely in the destruction they cause, largely seeing it as an end in itself, O.C. and Stiggs are visibly motivated by an outright hatred for the people they harass. When D.R. and Quinch take revenge on someone it is inevitably because that person has done something terrible to them like kick them out of school or say mean things about them at a legal hearing.
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I’m At An Impressionable Age (The Last War in Albion Part 37: Boys from the Blackstuff, Skizz, D.R. & Quinch, O.C. and Stiggs)

, 8

This is the third of six parts of Chapter Six of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Skizz and D.R. & Quinch  for 2000 AD. An ebook omnibus of all six 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. The Last War in Albion now also has an imageblog on Tumblr. 

The stories discussed in this chapter are available in the collections Skizz and The Complete D.R. & Quinch.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore finally got a regular strip in 2000 AD with Skizz, in which he combined the basic premise of the still forthcoming E.T. with the atmosphere of Alan Bleasdale’s then-popular television series Boys From the Blackstuff.

“I could still walk away from this. I could say I was kidnapped. I could say I was forced to do things. I’m at an impressionable age. And I haven’t killed anyone. Not yet.” – Grant Morrison, Kill Your Boyfriend

As with The Black Stuff, the point of Boys from the Blackstuff was the depiction of the difficulty of working class existence at that particular moment of British history. It is not a show about diagnosing the underlying causes of unemployment – there are no thorough and informative debates over monetarism, or close-readings of Friedrich Hayek. It simply attempts to show the experience of living at the bottom of society when times are getting harder. Its iconic episode was its fourth, “Yosser’s Story,” which focused on Yosser Hughes, the character responsible for getting drawn into the scam back in The Black Stuff.
Figure 274: The final image of “Yosser’s Story” is a freeze
frame on Yosser’s grotesquely contorted anguish at his own
survival.
In “Yosser’s Story” he is reduced to a broken shell of a man, and, over the course of the hour-long episode, broken down further as his children are taken away and he continues to fail to find employment. The character becomes steadily unhinged and erratic, unable or unwilling to grasp that his increasing desperation is making his situation worse at every turn. The episode culminates with Yosser attempting suicide by jumping into a lake, only to be hauled out by the police, the final shot being his face as he screams in horror at realizing he’s survived.
Figure 275: Desperate Dan (From The
Dandy #1258, 1966)
“Yosser’s Story” works by combining this brutally bleak story with the superlative acting of Bernard Hill, who sells the anguish of a simple man who never had much trying to make sense of having it all taken away from him. Hill’s performance makes Yosser at once pathetic and eminently quotable, especially with Bleasdale’s deft use of the catchphrases “Gizza job,” (that is, “give us a job”) and “I can do that,” often spoken in rapid succession as he fruitlessly hounds someone for employment.
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A Scary Culture (The Last War in Albion Part 36: Skizz, E.T., and Margaret Thatcher)

, 11

This is the first of six parts of Chapter Six of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Skizz and D.R. & Quinch  for 2000 AD. An ebook omnibus of all six 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. The Last War in Albion now also has animageblog on Tumblr. 

The stories discussed in this chapter are available in the collections Skizz and The Complete D.R. & Quinch.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore finally got a regular strip in 2000 AD with Skizz, conceived of as a clone of E.T. Unfortunately, Moore had to write it before E.T. actually came out in the UK, thus leaving him with the unenviable task of ripping off something he hadn’t seen. 

“England was a scary place. No wonder it produced a scary culture.” – Warren Ellis, Planetary #7
“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” tells the story of a winged man who crashes to ground in the courtyard of Pelayo and Elisenda. But the story focuses resolutely on Pelayo and Elisenda’s experience and not on the nature of the winged man in their courtyard. Its memorable first paragraph carefully holds the titular detail back until the end so that it becomes just one of a host of details about their lives. “On the third day of rain,” Márquez writes, “they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench.” Only at the end of the paragraph about this rainstorm does the narration turn to the fact that there was “ a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.” The story never moves beyond this approach: the nature of the old man is not explored. Instead the story tells of how Elisenda thinks to charge for admission to see the old man, who is proclaimed over the objections of the local priest to be an angel. But over time the old man becomes commonplace – his status as the town’s star attraction is usurped by a “woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents,” and who had none of the old man’s reticence about being a carnival attraction. The old man, meanwhile, only musters up a few odd miracles “like the blind man who didn’t recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn’t get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers.” In time he convalesces and flies away without explanation, and the story ends, never having stopped to consider much of anything beyond the question of what it is like for a poor family to have an old man with wings literally crash into their lives. 
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Fantasies in the Here and Now (The Last War in Albion Part 35: Skizz and E.T.)

, 7

This is the first of six parts of Chapter Six of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Skizz and D.R. & Quinch  for 2000 AD. An ebook omnibus of all six 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. The Last War in Albion now also has an imageblog on Tumblr. 

The stories discussed in this chapter are available in the collections Skizz and The Complete D.R. & Quinch.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore wrote numerous short stories for 2000 A.D., but the holy grail of comics assignments in early 80s Britain was an ongoing series. In March of 1983, he finally got a crack at one…

“Best bet is to set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.” – Neil Gaiman


Moore finished his time doing shorts for IPC the way he began it – by trying to learn new storytelling techniques. In this regard his comments about “doing an apprenticeship in public” and using short stories to learn “to do all the things that you will have to do in a bigger work but in a much more constrained space” are very much on target through and through. He used his time at IPC to learn his trade and craft. That not all of his experiments came off is, in many ways, proof of this fact. But notably, many of the experiments that did come off demonstrate techniques he would later make considerable use of, up to and including his confidence in purely visual storytelling that he was clearly trying to build in his last few strips. The effect is not entirely unlike the old story about Michelangelo creating the David by taking a block of marble and removing everything that wasn’t the David. The figure that is Alan Moore visibly emerges into the narrative, and comes ever more into focus over the course of these dozens of short stories.
Figure 261: 2000 AD‘s humorous conceit that its
comics were produced by robots under the command
of the alien Tharg the Mighty did not always result
in the most dignified of public portrayals of its
employees. (From 2000 AD #322)
Indeed, it’s clear that by the time he was done with his Future Shocks that he had, in practice, emerged. He visibly stopped doing Future Shocks in order to focus on his new and much higher-paying gig doing Swamp Thing at DC Comics. There is no serious way to describe Alan Moore in the autumn of 1983 as a tentative journeyman. Indeed, as we noted, even within the period working on Future Shocks for 2000 AD there is a clear dividing line in March of 1983, when Moore began writing his first ongoing for 2000 AD, Skizz.
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