chapter six

Figure 284: Randall Schwab Jr. discovering the Uzi left for a wedding present.

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.

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.

“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.

“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. 

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.

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.