book one

December 28, 2013

Rippling, Dribbling Blobs of Pure Holographic Meta-Material (The Last War in Albion Part 24: Alan Moore’s Star Wars Comics)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter four 5

This is the sixth of seven parts of Chapter Four of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work onDoctor Who and Star Wars from 1980-81. An ebook omnibus of all seven parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. The ebook contains a coupon code you can use to get my recent book A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman for $3 off on Smashwords (the code’s at the end of the introduction). It’s a deal so good you make a penny off of it. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help support it. I should perhaps also note that all of these books are currently on sale as part of Eruditorum Press’s annual post-holiday sale.

The stories discussed in this installment and the next are currently in print as part of Dark Horse’s Star Wars Omnibus: Wild Space Volume 1.

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Despite his distaste for Star Wars as a franchise, Alan Moore, after departing Doctor Who Monthly in solidarity with Steve Moore, settled in to write several stories for Marvel UK’s variously titled magazine of Star Wars comics.

“Perhaps someone else would call these rippling, dribbling blobs of pure holographic meta-material angels or extraterrestrials.” – Grant Morrison, Supergods, 2011

But the cleverness of “Rust Never Sleeps” is not primarily in the fact that it is a by-the-books horror story. Rather, it is in the fact that it is not a horror story at all, even though its basic plot structure is straightforwardly lifted from one. The structure is really just a platform for the real point, which is an exploration of the basic idea of a robot god. Tellingly, C-3PO drops out of the narrative at the end. Once the Stormtroopers arrive at the end of the third page, his role is superfluous. He begs Brother Fivelines not to confront them and bemoans how Fivelines didn’t listen to him while he’s vaporized, but that’s his final line. The remaining page and a half of the story consist only of the droid god’s rising up to defeat the Stormtroopers. C-3PO doesn’t even get a full appearance after it – he appears cut-off on the side of one panel on the last page, but the story has nothing to do with him. Instead it focuses on an extended narration ruminating on the nature of the god of the droids.

Figure 176: The wrath of a meek and subservient god. (Alan Moore
and Alan Davis, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Monthly #155,
1982)

This narration is interesting in a large part because it gives the sense of recreating Moore’s own process in hatching the story, starting from the premise of the droids having a god, and then speculating that “surely it would be as meek and subservient as the droids themselves. It would not be a god of wrath.

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December 19, 2013

One is All (The Last War in Albion Part 23: Joseph Campbell, Alan Moore’s Star Wars Comics)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter four 8

This is the sixth of seven parts of Chapter Four of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work onDoctor Who and Star Wars from 1980-81. An ebook omnibus of all seven parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. The ebook contains a coupon code you can use to get my recent book A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman for $3 off on Smashwords (the code’s at the end of the introduction). It’s a deal so good you make a penny off of it. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help support it.

The stories discussed in this installment and the next are currently in print as part of Dark Horse’s Star Wars Omnibus: Wild Space Volume 1.

“God is one and all. God is all. One is all. One perfect moment” – Alan Moore, Promethea #23

Figure 170: John Dee’s black scrying mirror, in which
Edward Kelley received his vision of Babalon.

Within Campbell, however, this event is paralleled by another immediately after, which Campbell calls Woman as the Temptress. After encountering the Goddess there comes a point where women “become the symbols no longer of victory but of defeat,” for “no longer can the hero rest in innocence with the goddess of the flesh; for she is become the queen of sin.” This evokes the virgin/whore complex at the heart of many depictions of the sacred feminine, and captured chillingly in the revelation given to Edward Kelley while scrying in the seventh aethyr that drove him to abandon magic:

I am the daughter of Fortitude, and ravished every hour from my youth. For behold I am Understanding and science dwelleth in me; and the heavens oppress me. They cover and desire me with infinite appetite; for none that are earthly have embraced me, for I am shadowed with the Circle of the Stars and covered with the morning clouds. My feet are swifter than the winds, and my hands are sweeter than the morning dew. My garments are from the beginning, and my dwelling place is in myself. The Lion knoweth not where I walk, neither do the beast of the fields understand me. I am deflowered, yet a virgin; I sanctify and am not sanctified. Happy is he that embraceth me: for in the night season I am sweet, and in the day full of pleasure. My company is a harmony of many symbols and my lips sweeter than health itself. I am a harlot for such as ravish me, and a virgin with such as know me not. For lo, I am loved of many, and I am a lover to many; and as many as come unto me as they should do, have entertainment.

Figure 171: Dion Fortune was a
Welsh occultist and contemporary
of Aleister Crowley’s.

After this encounter with the sacred feminine, predictably, comes the (in Campbell’s eyes at least) more important encounter with the masculine divine, Atonement with the Father.

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December 13, 2013

So I Hit Him. What Would You Do? (The Last War in Albion Part 22: Alan Moore’s Feuds, Star Wars, Joseph Campbell)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter four 22

This is the fifth of seven parts of Chapter Four of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work onDoctor Who and Star Wars from 1980-81. An ebook omnibus of all seven parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. The ebook contains a coupon code you can use to get my recent book A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman for $3 off on Smashwords (the code’s at the end of the introduction). It’s a deal so good you make a penny off of it. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help support it.

“So this Zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God. So I tell him I killed God. I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob, and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath. So he pulls an alternating-current taser on me and tells me that only the Official Serbian Church of Tesla can save my polyphase intrinsic electric field, known to non-engineers as “the soul.” So I hit him. What would you do?” – Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore wrote some clever comics about Doctor Who, including the beginning of an abandoned epic involving a war unfolding non-chronologically such that the first attack precedes the incident that sparked the war…

Figure 163: Alan Moore’s reputation for fights is often a part of more
caricatured depictions of him.

Moore was, apparently, intending to further flesh out his idea of a non-chronological war further, but circumstances intervened. Instead left the title along with Steve Moore, who had worked extensively on a plot outline for a third Abslom Daak story only to discover that the editor, Alan McKenzie, had already begun writing a story with the characters. Angered by this, Steve Moore abruptly quit the main title and was replaced by Steve Parkhouse, and Alan Moore followed suit in what Steve Moore has referred to as “a wonderful gesture of support that was remarkable for someone at that early a stage in their career.” While it’s true that Moore, who had not come close to establishing himself as a writer, took a genuine professional risk in quitting, the fact that he did so early in his career is the only remarkable thing here. It is, in fact, the first of many such gestures in his career. Moore has, within comics, become almost as famous for his tendency to get into professional feuds as he has for his comics work. Indeed, Moore’s capacity for umbrage is ultimately one of the primary casus belli of the War.

It is worth, then, looking at this first dispute in order to better understand the nature of Moore’s umbrage. First of all, this dispute is interesting in that there is no way to frame it as being over a slight to Moore himself.

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December 5, 2013

A Map of Causality (The Last War in Albion Part 21: Alan Moore’s Doctor Who Comics)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter four 17

This is the third of seven parts of Chapter Four of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work onDoctor Who and Star Wars from 1980-81. An ebook omnibus of all seven parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. The ebook contains a coupon code you can use to get my recent book A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman for $3 off on Smashwords (the code’s at the end of the introduction). It’s a deal so good you make a penny off of it. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help support it.

“Increasingly observers describe the War as a shape rather than a secquence of events, a map of causality.” – Lawrence Miles, The Book of the War

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore was given his first straight writing job – backup comics for Doctor Who Weekly – on the recommendation of his friend Steve Moore. His first two stories were four-parters constructed of two-page chapters, but even in this early work hallmarks of Moore’s iconic style…

Figure 157: Sinister smiling figures stepping noiselessly
forward in Doctor Who Weekly #41 (Alan Moore and David
Lloyd, 1981)

What’s immediately interesting about Moore’s early Doctor Who work is that his second story is no less metered in its narrative, but that it has an entirely different tone. Where Black Legacy sticks mostly to iambic tone, Business as Usual goes for dactyls and trochees, as with the line, “NO one RAISED an EYEbrow when BLUNT inVESTed his CAPital in FOUNDing his OWN PLASTics COMPany. IT was JUST SOUND BUSiness.” Again, the meter is not strict, but it repeatedly puts the emphasis at the beginnings of phrases, favoring three-syllable feet with words like “capital” and “company.” These longer feet give the work a very different feel, as does the triple stressed syllable in “just sound business,” which draws considerable attention to that specific and seemingly mundane phrase, quietly exposing the underlying deception, namely that, far from being ordinary sound business, Blunt’s decision is in fact part and parcel of an alien invasion. Black Legacy feels clipped, and like it’s working in a more classical, epic sense, where Business as Usual sounds mundane and conversational. It’s slightly too wordy, resembling the obfuscatory language of stereotypical corporate jargon. Business as Usual also features, in places, highly alliterative phrasing such as “the sinister, smiling figure steps noiselessly forward. Behind, in the shadows, something stirs.” In twenty-three syllables Moore manages to get nine that feature an s sound. The effect fits perfectly into the milieu of sales and corporate branding that the larger story utilizes, highlighting its satirical bite.

But for all the cleverness of these two stories and all that Moore learned from the two-page chapter structure, it is, in the end, a limitation. Business as Usual suffers badly from having to recap its basic premise every other page.

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November 28, 2013

Dawn Transformed the Sky into an Abattoir (The Last War in Albion Part 20: Moores’ Doctor Who Comics)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter four 8

“It would be equally irresponsible of me to instruct up-and-coming writers on how to write sickly extravagant captions like ‘Dawn transformed the sky into an abattoir’ or whatever.” – Alan Moore, Writing For Comics

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Steve Moore, Alan Moore’s closest friend and confidant over the course of the War, came to work on Marvel UK’s newly launched Doctor Who Weekly in 1979, where he created the character of Abslom Daak, a close cousin of the Axel Pressbutton character he co-created with Alan Moore and wrote for Warrior. In one issue of Warrior, Moore interviewed his own “Pedro Henry” pseudonym on how to write comics…

On one level this is the same sort of tightly structural approach that characterizes Alan Moore’s work. But on another, there’s a fundamentally different sort of focus. As Steve Moore puts it, “if Dez asks for six pages, you give him six… the same as some editors will ask you for a set number of frames… and if they say forty frames, they don’t mean thirty-nine or forty-one. If you turn up saying ‘Sorry, boss, I couldn’t fit it in so I’ve used four extra frames’ then that, quite simply, is bad writing.” This highlights the degree to which Steve Moore writes his comics as a professional concern, within the material realities of publishing. That’s certainly not to say that Alan Moore doesn’t, but there’s a clear difference between the sort of ruthless targeting of what the editor wants and the storytelling Alan Moore engages in.

This perspective on Steve Moore’s work helps explain the odd tone of Laser Eraser and Pressbutton. Moore was tasked with a specific set of editorial concerns; revamp the old Abslom Daak strips into something for Warrior, using the comedy character of Axel Pressbutton. That the resulting script is a bit disjointed in many ways speaks to just how good Steve Moore was at giving editors what they want, no matter how strange. But it contrasts sharply with Alan Moore, who took his Marvelman revamp and his mandate to make a Night Raven clone and ran in unexpected directions with them that ended up far from the original concepts.

Figure 151: Unsurprisingly, Selene made an appearance in Steve Moore’s
Doctor Who comics (Steve Moore and Dave Gibbons, Doctor Who
Monthly #50, 1981)

This sort of diligence also explains why when Mills and Wagner departed the lead strip after Doctor Who Weekly #34, during the pause in the midst of Star Tigers, Steve Moore was promptly promoted to replace them.

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November 21, 2013

1/2./”£5/8£-&'(?)WEXzz (The Last War in Albion Part 19: Abslom Daak, Pressbutton and Laser Eraser)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter four 13

This is the second of seven parts of Chapter Four of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work onDoctor Who and Star Wars from 1980-81. An ebook omnibus of all seven parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. The ebook contains a coupon code you can use to get my recent book A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman for $3 off on Smashwords (the code’s at the end of the introduction). It’s a deal so good you make a penny off of it. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help support it.

“Oh, and by the way, Pedro Henry is really Steve – HEY!! Leave it out, you! This is my typewriter! My typ1/2.*/”£5/8£-&'(?)WEX*zz” – Warren Ellis, fan letter to Warrior, 1983

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s closest friend over the course of the War is Steve Moore, to whom he is not related. Steve Moore is a long-time comics professional who started in 1968, and bounced around the British comics industry in both an editorial and creative capacity. By 1979 he’d settled in as the writer of backup features, and, later, the main feature in Marvel UK’s new Doctor Who Weekly, where he would create one of his more enduring creations…

Figure 144: Abslom Daak makes a solemn vow. (Steve Moore
and Steve Dillon in Doctor Who Weekly #20, 1980)

The most significant of Steve Moore’s backup strips were a pair of stories introducing the character Abslom Daak. Daak’s first appearance was in Doctor Who Weekly #17 in a strip illustrated by Steve Dillon and titled simply Abslom Daak… Dalek-Killer. It opens with Daak being convicted of “murder, pillage, piracy, massacre, and other crimes too horrible to bring to the public attention” and being sentenced to his choice of “death by vaporisation or exile D-K.” Daak’s response is that “vaporisation doesn’t hurt,” and so he is teleported to a planet occupied by Daleks to kill as many as he can before they inevitably kill him. Thus do Daak and his chain-sword plunge to the Dalek-occupied world of Mazam, where Daak meets Taiyin and rescues her from Daleks. The story consists of Daak repeatedly trying to engage in suicidal assaults against the Daleks, openly wanting to die, and Taiyin steadily falling in love with him and trying to save him from his self-destructive impulses. Daak remains an over the top hero throughout; he wise-cracking, violent, lightly misogynistic, and virtually unkillable. The story ends with one of the handful of Daleks Daak has not murdered killing
Taiyin just as she admits her love for Daak. With her dying breath she tells him to live his life, leading him to scream his promise to “kill every damned, stinking Dalek in the galaxy!”

Daak’s story picks up about two months later in Moore’s Star Tigers, the first installment of which speaks volumes about how pleased Marvel UK was with Daak’s first appearance.

…

November 14, 2013

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

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter four 47

This is the first of seven parts of Chapter Four of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Doctor Who and Star Wars from 1980-81. An ebook omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. The ebook contains a coupon code you can use to get my recent book A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman for $3 off on Smashwords (the code’s at the end of the introduction). It’s a deal so good you make a penny off of it. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help support it.

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore quit his job to become a comics creator, and between his work in Sounds Magazine and in his local paper was able to make £45 a week, slightly more than he was making on welfare. Thus began his career as a full-time professional comics creator. But Moore recognized that his art skills were not up to the task, and that he should look into the more efficient approach such as writing scripts for other people to draw…

There’s nobody there, was never anybody there except a fluctuation in the visual purple, a perceptual misunderstanding, trick of moonlight. -Alan Moore, Unearthing

Figure 136: Part two of Three Eyes McGurk
and his Death Planet Commandos (Steve
Moore, as Pedro Henry, and Alan Moore,
as Curt Vile, 1979)

Moore’s ascent from a grubby £45-a-week freelance existence to becoming one of the most successful and acclaimed artists of his era was similarly dependent on a variety of friends and helpers. Most significant of these, early on, was his friend Steve Moore, who he first met in the late 1960s, and who provided the model for his eventual transition into being a writer instead of a writer-artist. Steve Moore, in fact, is the writer behind the Pedro Henry pseudonym, and stepped in to help Moore manage his workload by plotting the final year of The Stars My Degradation. But Steve Moore’s influence is not just limited to this late game assist. One of the major characters of The Stars My Degradataion is Axel Pressbutton, an extravagantly violent cyborg who made his first appearance in a strip called “Three Eyes McGurk and his Death Planet Commandos,” another early non-paying gig Moore did for the minor British music magazine Dark Star. Moore had been working on a strip called The Avenging Hunchback, a superhero parody, but the second installment of that strip was lost when the editor’s car was stolen, and Moore was too disheartened to repeat all of his delicate stippling. Accordingly, Steve Moore stepped in to help his friend, writing “Three Eyes McGurk” as a replacement strip, and including the Pressbutton character. (Moore in fact based Pressbutton’s visual design on Lex Loopy, a Lex Luthor parody designed for The Avenging Hunchback.) “Three Eyes McGurk” ended up being Moore’s first American publication, getting a reprint in a 1981 anthology edited by Gilbert Shelton, and Moore went on to incorporate the character (earlier in his life, as he dies at the end of his original appearance) into The Stars My Degradation.

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November 7, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

To continue to come up with inventive page layouts and subversive cat gags week in and week out is one thing. To labour excessively on a reasonably humorous sci-fi parody strip in order to cover up inadequate artistic skills is another.

Figure 130: The Stars My Destination was
first serialized in four issues of Galaxy in 1956

In this regard there’s something strangely apropos in Moore’s choice of parody subjects in The Stars My Degradation. The title – indeed the entire opening rhyme – is a parody of Alfred Bester’s 1956 novel The Stars My Destination, originally titled Tiger! Tiger!. Bester is very much a science fiction fan’s science fiction writer – one who enjoys rather more renown within science fiction fandom than without. To name The Stars My Destination as one’s favorite science fiction novel is not in the least bit controversial – it’s widely and repeatedly cited as one of the best. But it is not a particularly famous book outside of science fiction circles. Unlike writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, whose work became influential and widely known outside the sci-fi community, Bester remains at once obscure but terribly well-respected: Samuel Delany, William Gibson, and Michael Moorcock have all identified it as their favorite science fiction novel.

Figure 131: Gully Foyle is my name
Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination
(Howard Chaykin, 1979)

On one level, The Stars My Destination is a fairly straightforward pulp-style novel. It was serialized over four issues of Galaxy, and features the sort of episodic content familiar to such material. What elevates it is the character arc of its protagonist, Gully Foyle.

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November 2, 2013

An Unused Can of Monster’s Cat Food (The Last War in Albion Part 16: Maxwell the Magic Cat, The Stars My Degradation)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter three 18

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

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s earliest works included not only his underground-inflected Roscoe Moscow, but Maxwell the Magic Cat, his attempt at a newspaper strip featuring a talking animal. What started as a children’s comic (at least in the editor’s mind) steadily drifted into something altogether stranger…

I fed her with an unused can of Monster’s cat food, which I spooned into Monster’s dusty cat bowl. – Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Figure 123: A late Maxwell the Magic Cat strip that plays with the formal
constraints of the comic medium (Alan Moore, as Jill de Ray, 1986) Click
to expand.

Before long any resemblance between Maxwell the Magic Cat and a children’s comic was gone, and eventually the Northants Post conceded the point and moved the strip off the children’s page entirely. It’s not that the strip was ever child-unfriendly as such, though after a few months it becomes hard to imagine any child particularly enjoying the jokes about pairing red wine with fish or Robert Mitchum. By the time Moore got to tins of cat food sitting on death row and the tragic end of Liver Chunks in Oyster Sauce any pretense that the strip was aimed at children was firmly out the window. Instead Moore turned the strip into a general gag-a-week strip that wandered through any number of interests: politics, complex formal play with the structure of the comics medium, bleak existential jokes (a captured mouse asks Maxwell what happens after death, and Maxwell describes cat heaven.The mouse admits that this doesn’t sound that bad, and asks where mice go when they die. “Oh, they go to cat heaven as well.”), and, of course, wonderfully dreadful puns. (Maxwell 4 page 30 for formally complex strip)

Figure 124: Alan Moore’s acerbic commentary on the Falklands War (Alan
Moore, as Jill de Ray, 1982)

By and large, this worked. Moore’s intensely structural approach lends itself well to comedy. This is something that even a cursory examination of interviews with him reveals: he is a terribly funny man. Even when Moore is working with a bit of a shaggy dog punchline he frames it in a precisely worked set of comic beats.

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October 24, 2013

I Don’t Have to Have a Cat Die in Order to Produce a Good Work (The Last War in Albion Part 15: Alan Moore’s Pre-Professional Work, Children’s Comics, Maxwell the Magic Cat)

Elizabeth Sandifer Last War in Albion book one, chapter three 5

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

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Moore’s earliest professional work was in a style heavily indebted to the American underground comix scene. But this scene influenced him on more than just a stylistic level – the movement’s fondness for iconoclasm and a locally produced, self-published mode of production appealed to Moore too, and in fact described the environment in which he worked prior to selling Roscoe Moscow to Sounds…

“I don’t have to have a cat die in order to produce a good work.” – Grant Morrison, 2013 interview

Figure 114: Alan Moore, under his Curt Vile pseudonym, did
a set of humorous cartoons for Marvel UK’s 1979 Frantic
Winter Special.

In many ways the most obvious precedent for Roscoe Moscow from this earlier period is the series of eleven comics he did for the Back Street Bugle, an alternative newspaper out of Oxford, entitled St. Pancras Panda. Conceptually, St. Pancras Panda is a straightforward parody of Michael Bond and Peggy Fortnum’s Paddington Bear, although, like Roscoe Moscow, the parody does not bother staying narrowly focused, and the strip is instead an opportunity for Moore to cram in a wealth of gags, allusions, and parodies of institutional power. Stylistically, like Roscoe Moscow, it’s a straightforward imitation of the underground comix scene. More broadly, if Roscoe Moscow is Moore visibly working out the stylistic and storytelling skills that define his later work, St. Pancras Panda is Moore working out the skills he’d need to start Roscoe Moscow. It is, in every regard, a slightly more primitive version of the strip – the art is scratcher, the storytelling is less clear, the jokes are less sharp. But it demonstrates that the underground comix style affected for Roscoe Moscow was not just a one-time thing selected for a specific job. To some extent it may be a matter of basic convenience – Moore is endlessly self-deprecating about his artistic skills, claiming that “I was barely capable of drawing even simple objects in a way by which they might be recognized… I wasn’t really sure how many ribs people had or where the muscles were in the arms and legs.” This is, as is characteristic for Moore, an overstatement, but it is the case that Moore is not a first rate artist.

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