Eruditorum Press

Our business actually is to reason and compare

chapter nine

Tombs and Seances and Murders (Book Three, Part 69: Brought to Light)

, , 2

1673

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Moore made savvy use of his artist in Brought to Light, offering a wordy and dense history of the CIA for Sienkiewicz to offer his abstract and often terrifying illustrations to.

You wonder why the children of America are obsessed with death? You wonder why rock groups that look like corpses and zombie comic-book heroes are so goddamn popular here? It’s just the same way your Victorians loved their tombs and seances and murders. The American Empire is dead and does not know it. Like your empire before it, it’s only aware of the truth in its sleep.” – Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

The eagle presents himself as a salesman, and launches into a pitch, though for what exactly is not clear. The content, however, is a history of the CIA, narrated to the reader over twenty-one of the comic’s thirty pages. This is a complicated frame for a story that could have been presented more straightforwardly, but it gives Moore several advantages. The eagle functions as an unreliable narrator—a point that’s made emphatically clear at the outset, when he talks about the CIA’s relationship with Congress in terms of how “My wife, she holds the purse strings, see? I gotta account for every cent. As for laying down the law… hell, she practically drafted a Bill ‘o Rights!… Bitch watches my every move. Still, there’s ways an’ means. What she don’t know ain’t gonna hurt her.” (This stylized dialogue provides the unquestionable highlight of the Gary Lloyd audio adaptation, with Alan Moore voicing the eagle in a style that could be described as “the voice he’d developed for ‘Old Gangsters Never Die’ on several lines of cocaine” but is frankly far better simply sought out and experienced for one’s self.)

This gave Moore three separate ways of revealing information. On the most basic level, he could simply have the eagle convey some historical fact—for instance, that “over in Cuba this friendly dictator named Fulgencio Batista ad been running things along with Santos Trafficante, the Mafia’s man in havana, Cuba’s capital. Batista ignored the drugs, gambling, and prostitution for a cut of the profits… Suddenly, in 1959, this socialist, Fidel Castro, an’ his buddy Ché Guevara overthrew Batista in a so-called popular revolution. Under Castro, Trafficante and the mob hadda leave Cuba.” But he could also lean into the eagle’s status as an unreliable narrator, such as the following sentence, “Say watcha like, the Mafia represent free enterprise, which we, as a company, are sworn to protect.” On top of this, he still has Sienkiewicz’s illustrations, so he can then devote two panels to the eagle lighting a cigar (“Havana cigars—best smoke inna world”) and taking a long drag on it, implicitly commenting on the way in which the CIA and its officers enriched themselves on Cuba.

The unreliable narrator also allows Moore to inject some humor into what is not exactly inherently entertaining subject matter. So, for instance, talking about the use of a Pepsi bottling plant in Laos as a front for a heroin-running operation, Moore has the eagle dryly remark that “later we decided that things went better with Coke.”…

Continue Reading

Languages of Apocalypse (Book Three, Part 68: Bill Sienkiewicz)

, 2

Figure 1666

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Bill Sienkiewicz got his start as a Neal Adams imitator drawing Marvel’s Batman imitator Moon Knight, but eventually moved on to a more prestigious project: New Mutants.

I have heard the languages of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence. – Neil Gaiman, Sandman: Endless Nights

This was one of the books in the X-Men line, written by Chris Claremont, then at the apex of his clout as a major figure in the industry. New Mutants was a book focused on the younger generation of mutant characters. Among these was Dani Moonstar, a Native American mutant. From the earliest issues of New Mutants it became clear that Dani was haunted by a bear spirit—one that had previously killed her parents. A year and a half into the book’s run, as Claremont prepared to pay off this story, he grew frustrated of working with Sal Buscema. As Claremont saw it, “[Buscema] looked like everything else. And I didn’t want that. I wanted this to be very much a kid-centric book. There needed to be a totally different visual sense.” And so he turned to Sienkiewicz.

For his part, Sienkiewicz had been on a kick of reading Hunter S. Thompson, with the memorably grotesque art of Ralph Steadman, and watching David Lynch films, and so when Claremont came to him with a story that took place largely in an abstracted spirit world and a mandate to bring a distinctive visual sense, he cut loose. Reasoning that “the benefit of dealing with dream logic and nightmares is that anything goes,” Sienkiewicz embraced a harsh and abstract line that made characters feel as though they had been clawed into the page, less drawn than scratched. His Demon Bear was a towering monolith of crazed eyes, murderous teeth, savage claws, and the vague yet terrifying implication of a snout. The result was moody, kinetic, and like nothing mainstream superhero comics had seen before. It was not, to be clear, that Sienkiewicz was creating new techniques; ultimately he was simply importing concepts from the fine art world (in which he had trained before seeking a career in comics) that the stodgy comics industry had largely neglected—the same concepts that artists like Dave McKean and Duncan Fegredo would hit on as well. But Sienkiewicz’s run on New Mutants was the first time these techniques had been employed in a mainstream American comic. It was also a massive hit, and Sienkiewicz ended up spending a year on the book instead of the originally planned three issues, introducing the cybernetic alien Warlock, who, in Sienkiewicz’s conception, was an shifting mass of circuitry that got to cyberpunk horror a full five years before the twin 1989 releases of Tetsuo the Iron Man and “Driller Penis: Yes, He Does What You Think He Does.”

Sienkiewicz’s work on New Mutants was aided by the particular dynamic he had with Claremont, who, in 1984, was arguably the single most mainstream writer in superhero comics.…

Continue Reading

The Great, Warm, Red-White-and-Blue Beating Heart of This Beleaguered Country (Book Three, Part 67: The Christic Institute)

, 0

Figure 1660

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The CIA was very bad, and then there was a bombing in La Penca, Nicaragua, that injured a journalist, Tony Avrigan.

In this, the eleventh hour, with the world poised on the brink of Red Armageddon, it is vital that we, as a nation, should rally around those symbols that are closest to the great, warm, red-white-and-blue beating heart of this beleaguered country. They are our hope and our inspiration, the legends that urge our people onward even in times of deepest crisis. -Alan Moore, Watchmen

Subsequent investigation revealed that “Per Anker Hansen’ was in fact a man named Vital Roberto Gaguine, an Argentinian leftist who had traveled to La Penca along with Swedish journalist Peter Torbiörnsson. Tobiörnsson was in fact a Sandinista sympathizer who had worked closely with a Nicaraguan intelligence unit called the Fifth Directorate, run out of the Interior Ministry by Tomás Borge, although he has always maintained that he simply thought Gaguine was a spy and not a bomber, and in his later career worked to expose the details of Sandinista involvement in the bombing. This has not entirely satisfied Honey, however, who, not unreasonably, points out that pinning the blame on the Sandinistas would have benefitted the Reagan administration, who instead stonewalled and obfuscated the investigation, and who points out a number of aspects of the bombing that remain unexplained.

The details of Gaguine’s involvement and Torbiörnsson’s complicity, however, did not begin to emerge until 1993, and Torbiörnsson’s full involvement did not emerge until 2009. Long before all of this, when the bulk of the evidence to be unearthed was still related to the CIA theory, Avirgan and Honey found themselves in touch with the Christic Institute, who felt that the evidence they had collected tied in with their ongoing investigations of the CIA. Ultimately Avirgan and the Christic Institute filed a $24 million lawsuit against a wide spread of people alleged to have been responsible for a conspiracy to commit the La Penca bombing along with drug and arms trafficking, illegal assassination programs, and more. It should be stressed that many of the underlying claims in the lawsuit were ultimately well-documented—the Iran-Contra scandal was, after all, real, and the lawsuit was filed months before it emerged into popular awareness. And, more to the point, the CIA really was responsible for a host of illegal activities including drug smuggling and illegal assassinations.

Despite its prescience, however, Avirgan v. Hull was a deeply ambitious lawsuit, and the Christic Institute had bad luck in drawing James Lawrence King as the judge. King was a Nixon appointee who would have a long career of conservative and pro-government rulings, and on June 23rd 1988 he dismissed the case, declaring that the Christic Institute’s case consisted of “unsubstantiated rumor and speculation from unidentified sources with no first-hand knowledge” and levying one million dollars in fines against the Institute for filing a frivolous suit.

It is undoubtedly the case that King was a particularly hostile judge, and opinion was sharply divided on whether his dismissal and penalties were unduly harsh, but even writers who are sympathetic to the Institute’s aims tend to suggest that the lawsuit was deeply flawed.…

Continue Reading

Ordinary Torture (Book Three, Part 66: The CIA)

, , 2

Figure 1657

Content warning: Images of physical mutilation

Previously in Last War in Albion: Joyce Brabner, after getting into the world of comics by becoming a major figure in Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical comic American Splendor (and marrying Pekar in the process), is contacted by the Christic Institute, run by Daniel Sheehan, a lawyer who came to prominence during the Karen Silkwood case.

You’re tuning it out. I can see your ocular focus shifting. You’ve been trained to handle interrogation, in a very specific way. I bet you can even bypass ordinary torture. And none of these people picked it u. Because DHS is formed out of sixteen domestic agencies. And you’re from the Central Intelligence Agency. – Warren Ellis, Jack Cross

Silkwood’s family ultimately sued Kerr-McGee for negligence in the original plutonium poisoning, successfully recovering $1.38 million dollars in a settlement; Sheehan was among the attorneys in the case, and founded the institute in the wake of their success to pursue similar cases, using civil suits to right wrongs that the criminal justice system had proved inadequate for.

This was often a successful strategy—in one of their early cases, for instance, the Institute represented survivors of the Greensboro massacre, in which white supremacists shot and killed five participants in a “Death to the Klan” rally. State and federal prosecutions failed to secure any convictions, and so the Christic Institute led a successful civil suit to secure justice. But it is important to stress the degree to which the Christic Institute’s strategy was also one of public relations. Sheehan was always, in part, a legal impresario, and one who was prone to making sure he was prominently centered in stories about the group. This meant that the Institute could often be a blunt instrument; one media article about it quotes the leader of another public interest group as saying that “Danny Sheehan is to investigating what a depth charge is to sports fishing.” This bluntness would ultimately have significant consequences.

In 1984, the Institute represented Stacey Lynn Merkt, who had been arrested transporting refugees from El Salvador on behalf of the Catholic American Sanctuary Movement. In the course of working this case, Sheehan was visited by multiple religious leaders who repeated claims passed by unnamed government officials that the Sanctuary Movement was in fact smuggling known terrorists into the country. Perturbed by this dedicated misinformation campaign, the Institute began investigating their source, and soon found itself investigating the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Central Intelligence Agency was formed in 1947, in the aftermath of World War II. During the War the US had set up the Office of Strategic Services, its first effort at an intelligence agency. At its head was General “Wild Bill” Donovan, who quickly developed a taste for extravagant covert operations, dropping agents behind enemy lines to commit sabotage or exploring complicated gadgets and tactics—at one point he was investigating how to use bats as a bomb delivery system. In late 1944, Donovan wrote to Franklin Roosevelt arguing for the establishment of a permanent intelligence service.…

Continue Reading

Sunburn Tatters (Book Three, Part 65: American Splendor)

, 1

1651

Last War in Albion is produced with the support of my Patrons. My Patreon is currently in some trouble after a Patreon-mandated start from scratch to switch to per month billing, and is currently below the level of our monthly rent, which my family has historically relied on my Patreon to pay. If you enjoy my work, please consider supporting it.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore contributed a story to Joyce Brabner’s Real War Stories project. Brabner got into comics, as she tells it, by appearing in one—specifically Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor.

Only the gutter margins where the strata peeled back into sunburn tatters gave away the lawyers of human time compressed below, ring markings on the long-felled cement tree-stump of the Boroughs. – Alan Moore, Jerusalem

American Splendor gradually evolved from the meandering anecdotal form into more long form and piercing accounts of Pekar and his life. Many of the stories were simply several page accounts of conversations Pekar had with various people in Cleveland, while others offered more piercing accounts of Pekar, his anxiety, stubbornness, and sense of himself. A story in American Splendor #3 entitled “Awakening to the Terror of a New Day,” for instance, starts with Pekar on the phone with his ex-wife, trying to get back together, only to be rebuffed, at which point he loses his temper at her and is castigated for it, concluding that “I shouldna lost my temper. That’s one reason chicks don’t dig me. They’re scared a’ me.” He lays down in bed, wakes up anxious, masturbates, and is left feeling hollow and empty inside. He takes a bath, reflecting on his job, and how he doesn’t want to get out of the tub. “Sometimes I wish I could freak out,” he thinks, “have a nervous breakdown, anything to get away from the same routine.” Instead he rises from the tub, gets dressed, grouching about how his clothes are tattered but how he doesn’t want to spend money on new ones because “what could be more ridiculous than fat slobs spendin’ a lot a’ money on clothes. They’re gonna look lousy anyway.” He has breakfast, leaves for work, and decides on the walk that he should take the civic service exam and look for a government job. The comic ends with him sitting at the bus stop, resolving that “I gotta take the days one at a time… make a plan an’ try t’ follow it out. I might be able t’ make it if I get my ass in gear. I’ll check out the gover’mint gig scene an’ think over where I stand with th’ chicks I know. Mybe I’m overlooking someone. T’day’s Thursday. Tomorra’s Firday. Saturday I c’n sleep late.” A final caption notes that “Man looks wherever he can for hope,” and the strip ends. It’s elliptical, willfully unsatisfying, but more than anything is simply a poignant reflection on working class life in Cleveland in the 1970s.

Pekar’s work drew a number of admirers, although the comic remained a niche operation that ran at a steady but sustainable loss.…

Continue Reading

Fantasy Means Almost Nothing (Book Three, Part 64: Real War Stories)

, 0

Figure 1642

Before we get started, an update: my new Patreon, which I had to start from scratch after Patreon informed me that it was not possible to simply convert my Patreon of nine years over to per-month billing, is still $2400 a month short of the old one, which is an absolutely terrifying hit to my income. This new Patreon gives you more content—all my ebooks, Britain a Prophecy, and more—for less money than the old one, and if you want my work to continue I really implore you to support it.

Especially because, as of a few minutes ago, all Patrons got access to a pre-release ebook of Last War in Albion Volume 3, featuring this amazing cover.

So if you’re not currently a supporter of my work on Patreon, please do consider changing that.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Having finished his outstanding obligations to DC and free at last to pursue his own interests, Alan Moore moved on to other things.

There are things that happen out on the most violent edge of human experience that eclipse fiction by their sheer intensity – that you simply could not ever invent. The many accounts I’ve read of human experience in wartime reveal degrees of courage, cruelty, cowardice and even kindness that are beyond imagination. Next to that, fantasy means almost nothing. – Garth Ennis, interview with Unwinnable

One of the first of these things would see Alan Moore make his final trip to the United States in October of 1987, a few months after the publication of Watchmen #12. Although he was still a couple of months away from finishing his work on V for Vendetta, he did not visit the DC offices at all. Instead he went to Washington DC, where he met with members of a law firm called the Chrsitic Institute and with the American comics writer Joyce Brabner.

Moore had already worked with Brabner before on a volume called Real War Stories, published by Eclipse Comics the same month that Watchmen and Swamp Thing concluded. This was a comic produced with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, which, as Brabner explained it, “needed a tool to reach teenagers with information about the military. This was during the peacetime draft, when they were looking for smart white kids to sign up, and they had a very aggressive recruiting campaign around the time Top Gun was in the theatres.” The CCCO had originally envisioned and had the budget for a small indie book, but Brabner successfully argued that in order to have any impact on its intended audience “it had to be a color book with popular artists and writers if we were going to get the kids,” and so she worked with Eclipse Comics to bring the project to fruition. Moore’s explanation for his interest in the project, printed (along with similar statements from other contributors) at the outset of the comic, was simple: “Because I have a deep aversion to all forms of violence and war, and if I have to explain, I must fall back on the pacifist slogan that says ‘A bayonet is an instrument with a worker on either end of it.’”…

Continue Reading

Their Almost Sexual Hatred (The Last War in Albion Part 88: The Softly Hissed Tones of a Mafia Hitman, The Liberators)

, 4

This is the sixteenth of sixteen (it grew) parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: As Grant Morrison began turning back towards comics in 1984, he started with an unsolicited Kid Marvelman story for Warrior, entitled “October Incident: 1966.” 

“They were friends once, these creatures of near unimaginable power. Now, horns locked, they fight to the death in the pounding rain. There is passion here, but not human passion. There is fierce and desperate emotion, but not an emotion that we would recognize. They are titans, and we will never understand the alien inferno that blazes in the furnace of their souls. We will never grasp their hopes, their despair. Never comprehend the blistering rage that informs each devastating blow. We will never know the destiny that howls in their hearts, never know their pain, their love, their almost sexual hatred. We are only human, and perhaps we will be the less for that.” – Alan Moore, Marvelman

Morrison is blunt about what happened: “Alan Moore had it spiked. He said it was never to be published,” an event Morrison credits for the “slight antagonism” that exists between the two creators. Morrison goes on to claim that Skinn, following his falling out with Moore, “asked me to continue Marvelman,” an opportunity he was tremendously excited by, but that Morrison, when he wrote to Moore asking for his blessing, received back “this really weird letter” beginning “I don’t want this to sound like the softly hissed tones of a Mafia hitman, but back off” and threatening Morrison’s future career if he carried on.
This account of events was flatly denied by Moore three years later in an interview with Lance Parkin for his biography of Moore, saying that it “has no bearing upon reality at all” and defying anyone to produce such a letter. Moore recalled Morrison’s script, saying that “Dez had rather sprung it on me out of the blue, and it didn’t fit in with the rather elaborate storyline that I was creating,” and explaining that he was “almost 100 per cent certain that I never wrote any kind of letter to Grant Morrison, let alone a threatening one,” with Skinn separately clarifying to Parkin that for his part, “I never saw or asked to see the letter Grant got,” but that he “enthusiastically sent Grant’s wonderful little cameo story up to Alan Moore, ill-aware of his growing possessive paranoia.” It is worth noting, however, that Moore and Skinn are, in these interviews, conflating what Morrison depicts as two separate events – Moore’s spiking of Morrison’s spec script, and the separate instance of Morrison being offered the opportunity to take over the main Marvelman strip.
…

Continue Reading

And So It Begins (The Last War in Albion Part 87: October Incident: 1966)

, 12

This is the fifteenth of sixteen (it grew) parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Eventually, the wheels came off at Warrior amidst a number of ego clashes, many involving Moore, who fell out with both Dez Skinn and his Marvelman artist and longtime collaborator Alan Davis. 

“There is a moment of crystalline silence. The storm holds its breath. And so it begins…” – Alan Moore, Marvelman

the period in question was one where Moore was bringing a number of projects to a close. He ended his Captain Britain work in June, done his last D.R. & Quinch in May, and then pulled Marvelman in August. Taken in the context of his ceasing work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD in the wake of the Swamp Thing job and a different picture of why he was dropping projects starts to emerge – especially given that this is around when DC would have started offering him additional work. Certainly that’s Alan Davis’s contention when he states bluntly, “Alan clearly quit both Captain Britain and Marvelman at virtually the same time but claims external, unconnected reasons for both. Isn’t it simpler to accept that with Swamp Thing and new offers from DC – which were far better paid – the volume of work increased to a point where choices had to be made. I know I, amongst many other creators, was hoping for a call from DC.” But this “pure self-interest” theory of Moore’s actions still doesn’t explain why he persisted with V for Vendetta in Warrior, which would have been just as low-paying. Some of it, surely, is that Lloyd was keen for it to continue, noting that “I was very happy to keep doing it because Dez was still paying me money,” and that, more importantly, he was passionate about the work, saying that “nothing was more important to us… it was ours. And we could do what we liked with it.” And there was, to be sure, a practical consideration: the project had a planned ending that, one reached, would allow it to find new life as a stand-alone volume. Whatever Warrior’s flaws, it was at least adequate to the task of funding the work’s completion, and if Lloyd was happy with its payment, well, he was the one who most needed the money. V for Vendetta was still his main job, as opposed to a passion project to be done on days he didn’t have any Swamp Thing work to do.
…

Continue Reading

Physics Bubbling Down Into Chaos (The Last War in Albion Part 86: Marvelman’s Unraveling)

, 3

This is the fourteenth of sixteen (it grew) parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The seventh issue of Warrior contained an installment of Marvelman that would, ultimately, cause Moore to depart from the magazine two years later. The eight page strip jumps among settings, starting with Sir Dennis Archer shortly after briefing the sapphire-toothed Evelyn Cream on his mission. Archer reflects on the events of October 12th, 1963, when they blew up the Marvelman Family. The second page has Mike and Liz out on Dartmoor, getting ready to test Marvelman’s powers. Liz brings a stack of American superhero comics, reading off possible powers he could have. 

“We’re not gods from space who can survive planetary impacts and physics bubbling down into chaos and clashing timelines. We’re just human.” -Warren Ellis, Supreme: Blue Rose

Figure 656: Evelyn Cream murders the terrorist upon
 getting the information he needs. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by Alan Davis and Garry Leach, from “Secret
Identity” in Warrior #7, 1982)
The third goes to Johnny Bates, now in the hospital, catatonic. The scene shifts to inside Bates’s mind, where Kid Marvelman berates him, calling him a “snot-nosed little pratt” and a “snotty little virgin.” Then it cuts back to Marvelman and Liz investigating his powers, trying to figure out exactly how they work and how, for instance, the impact of a massive boulder falling on him doesn’t drive his feet into the ground at all. Page five has Evelyn Cream, with caption boxes explaining how he has figured out that Marvelman must have been one of the reporters at Larksmere, that the transformation probably resulted in some sort of energy transfer, and that the terrorist with burns was probably closest when it happens, arriving at the hospital. This is followed by one more page of the Morans, with Marvelman having turned back into Mike and the two of them driving off. As they do, Liz tells Mike that “I’ve missed my last periods and I’m going to have a baby and it isn’t yours its Marvelman’s.” The final two pages form a single scene depicting Cream’s encounter with the terrorist, who lies in his hospital bed, heavily bandaged. As Cream enters, he wakes up, and murmurs, “Huh? Whaddayou want, chocolate?” Cream communicates with him by writing on a notepad, promising not to kill him if he answers his questions. He proceeds to ask enough questions to identify Marvelman’s secret identity, and then explains to Steve that he was lying about the promise not to kill him, smothering him in his hospital bed and calmly walking out.
…

Continue Reading

Devoted to Joy (The Last War in Albion Part 85: Garry Leach’s Marvelman)

, 3

This is the thirteenth of fifteen parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Following the cessation of Captain Marvel stories on the part of Fawcett Comics, L. Miller & Son, a British company that had been publishing reprints of Fawcett’s material, created a transparent knockoff of Captain Marvel called Marvelman. In 1981, Moore pitched a revival of the character for Warrior, with the idea that Mickey Moran, Marvelman’s human alter-ego, had forgotten his magic word, and indeed that he was Marvelman, until one day he was taken hostage by terrorists.

“He was mad. He devoured Nietzsche’s writings, enamored of the idea of the superman being devoted to joy, and bringing joy by dint of his existence.” -Warren Ellis, Stormwatch
Figure 649: The iconic panel of Marvelman’s
return as reworked by Alan Davies. (Written
by Alan Moore, art by Alan Davies after Garry
Leach, from “The Yesterday Gambit” in Warrior
#4, 1982)
Moran, held hostage, sees the word “ATOMIC” reflected in a door, and reads it backwards, out loud, suddenly transforming into Marvelman. The terrorist next to him simply drops dead, burnt to death in the force of Marvelman’s transformation. Seven feet tall and blue, he trivially cleans up the terrorists and flies away, joyful at being a superhero again. Moore then goes on to outline some future plots, starting with one in which Kid Marvelman turns out also to have survived, but in his superhero form, which he remained in, growing rich and powerful with his secret abilities and becoming, in Moore’s words, “a nasty amoral son-of-a-bitch.” He also suggests an arc in which Gargunza’s employers take an interest in the newly returned Marvelman after he visits the grave of Dicky Dawson, Young Marvelman, followed by one in which Marvelman confronts Gargunza himself. “This should take us well into the stage where we’re selling the film rights and printing up the T-Shirts and similar,” Moore quips, although this would more or less have been true save for a series of creative conflicts and poor investments. “I’ll worry about what comes next when I get that far.” Moore then suggests Dave Gibbons or Steve Dillon as artists – both had in fact already been sounded out but were uninterested – and notes that he could rework the idea with a Marvelman pastiche, perhaps called Miracle Man, if the rights prove unavailable. This pitch sufficiently impressed Skinn that he asked Moore to write a first installment on spec that, if Skinn liked it, would land him the job.
…

Continue Reading

1 2 3