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chapter four

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

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

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

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

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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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