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Eruditorum Press

The struggle in terms of the strange

chapter three

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

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

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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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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)

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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 INTHE 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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Uncontaminated by Effect and Consequence (The Last War in Albion Part 14: Obscenity and Alan Moore’s Juvenilia)

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This is the fourth 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. Seriously. It’s been a hell of a week, and I could use it.

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s earliest comics owed a large debt to the “underground comix” tradition pioneered by people like R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson. These comics featured what is at once a troubling and alluring visionary quality, looking at the world and saying things that seemed unthinkable before them, and reflecting the peculiar genius of their creators. 

“But they are fictions. They are uncontaminated by effect and consequence. Why, they are almost innocent.” – Alan Moore, Lost Girls

Figure 106: Spain’s grim depiction of the end of Stalin’s life
in Arcade #4 (Spain, 1975)

While the underground clearly appealed to Moore on an ideological level despite the ethical failings of its leading lights, it is also worth discussing the aesthetic appeal. The gratuitous excess of the underground in and of itself is an odd fit for someone as focused on intricate structure as Moore. The tone of his praise in “Too Avant Garde for the Mafia” is telling – when he praises artists, it’s for things like being “creatively self-conscious in his use of the medium,” and the moments he chooses to single out are things like the final images of a biography of Stalin: “The narrative caption boxes relate how, during his final years, Stalin would travel by car along highways built for his solitary personal use across Russia. Wherever he stopped along the way there would be a room waiting for him specially constructed so as to be an exact duplicate of his room in the Kremlin, right down to the book lying open on the bedside table,” Moore explains, going on to describe the way these captions work in considerable detail, saying that “while this is sinking in, we see three pictures, showing a simple side elevation of a sparsely furnished, neat-looking bedroom. Each picture is identical to the others except that they get progressively smaller.” He goes on to describe the impact, saying, “in effect, we get the impression of an endless series of identical rooms stretching away into the empty distance, proving an unnerving glimpse into the mind of someone who once controlled half of the world.” When he does praise an artist of excess like R.
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We’ve Unpicked The Thread Of The World (The Last War in Albion Part 13: Roscoe Moscow, Arcade, Madness)

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This is the third 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 stripMaxwell the Magic Cat. An omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form fromAmazon, 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: Alan Moore’s earliest comics work was heavily indebted to the aesthetic of the American underground comix scene, pioneered by artists like R Crumb. But the publication that was really close to Moore’s heart was Arcade, a 1970s anthology of underground artists edited by Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffiths…
“There’s no going back. We’ve unpicked the thread of the world.” – Grant Morrison, The Invisibles #2
Figure 99: The sardonically bleak ending of R. Crumb’s
“That’s Life!” (R Crumb, 1975)
Arcade, in other words, was an ambitious publication.As Moore put it in his appreciation of the magazine, “Too Avant Garde for the Mafia” (the title comes from Griffiths’s reply to a letter Moore sent the magazine), “Arcade served as a rallying point for those cartoonists who were more concerned with their art than their bank balances,” although in the case of both Griffiths and Spiegelman (and for that matter Moore), it’s perhaps more accurate to say that they were concerned with the idea that the two might be interrelated. Nevertheless, Moore is wholly correct: Arcade was the venue for a wealth of impressive comics. Moore singles several out, not just by Crumb, but by second string underground artists like Spain Rodriguez, Justin Green, and Kim Deitch. But it is Moore’s praise of Crumb’s contributions to Arcade that is perhaps the most fascinating. Moore singles out a story in the third issue of Arcade entitled “That’s Life,” which tells the story of Tommy Grady, an obscure blues singer who recorded one record before being shot and killed in a barroom confrontation, then segues into a depiction of Crumb finding Grady’s lone record and plays it. As Moore describes it, “the last panel shows a crowd of rich white-American blues scholars smiling blissfully as Tommy Grady’s voice drifts around the elegant apartment: ‘Po-o boy, lo-ong way f’um home… Po-o boy lo-ong way f’um home…’ A lone caption reminds us of the title: ‘…And that’s life!’ Crumb at his manic-depressive zenith.”
Figure 100: Racist caricature persists even in R. Crumb’s less overtly
parodic material such as “That’s Life!” (R Crumb, 1975)
None of this is wrong as such. “That’s Life” is a well-worked story that builds skillfully to its bitter slap of a conclusion.
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Glassy-Assed Jokers (The Last War in Albion Part 12: Roscoe Moscow, The Underground)

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This is the second 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 stripMaxwell the Magic Cat. An omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form fromAmazon, 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: Alan Moore began his professional comics career in the pages of Sounds under the nom de plume “Curt Vile,” debuting Roscoe Moscow: Who Killed Rock ‘n Roll. 
“Hawdy haw! You glassy-assed jokers are a pushover!” – Alan Moore, Astounding Weird Penises

Much of this is due to the nature of Sounds as a magazine. It is, of course, primarily a music magazine, which means that its comics section was largely an afterthought. It was also, in many ways, the third rate music magazine of the late 1970s. The big two magazines were NME – the New Musical Express, to which Moore made his first professional sale: a drawing of Elvis Costello – and Melody Maker. These magazines were not meaningfully competitors – both were published by IPC, publishers of 2000 A.D., and presented a reasonable dichotomy. Those with traditional and more conservative taste could go to Melody Maker, edited by Ray Coleman, which was still embracing prog rock while getting very excited about Bruce Springsteen. Those favoring a more progressive, avant garde approach had NME, which was openly political and had a bevy of music writers who went on to become the sorts of elder statesmen that The Guardian likes to hire. 
Figure 91: Nicky Crane on the cover of Strength
Through Oi!
So when Jack Hutton and Peter Wilkinson left Melody Maker in 1970 to start their own company, this was the closed system they confronted. The approach they eventually settled on was straightforward: they were the magazine that would embrace brash, new music. Sounds was the first of the three music magazines to embrace punk, and eventually spun off a heavy metal magazine called Kerrang! that, unlike Sounds, continues to be published today. Sounds was originally conceived of as a left-wing magazine, but by the late 1970s had become something of a mishmash – Sounds covered the Oi! subgenre of punk extensively, to the point of, in 1981, releasing a compilation called Strength Through Oi!, a subversion of the slogan “strength through joy,” the cover of which featured gay neo-Nazi Nicky Crane on the cover. Crane was, at the time, serving a prison sentence for having violently attacked more black people than was socially acceptable.
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A Detective, A Man We Could Trust (The Last War in Albion Part 11: Roscoe Moscow)

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This is the first 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. 
Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation have been posted online, for free, with the permission of Alan Moore by 4 Color Heroes. Maxwell the Magic Cat was reprinted in four volumes by Acme Press in the 1980s. It is out of print, but used copies are available. 
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Seventeen-year-old Grant Morrison made his professional comics debut in the Edinburgh-based Near Myths #2 with a new wave-inspired run of strips including two introducing his Gideon Stargrave character. This venture, along with his realist superhero newspaper strip Captain Clyde faltered, and aside from occasional work on DC Thompson’s sci-fi digest Starblazer, Morrison found himself unable to advance particularly in a comics career. But at the same time, 340 miles away, in Northampton, events were unfolding that would change Morrison’s life, and indeed the entire British comics industry forever… 
“A detective, a man we could trust, even with our children.” – Grant Morrison, Supergods


Figure 83: The first installment of Roscoe Moscow: Who
Killed Rock n’ Roll (Alan Moore, 1979, as Curt Vile)

Grant Morrison is not a writer of near-misses and the merely competent. The depth of Morrison’s skill may not be obvious in his earliest material, but his ambition is. The conditions necessary for his ambitions to be realized were simply not yet present in the British comics industry of 1979, nor even of 1981. But everything began to change on March 31st, 1979 when Spotlight Publication’s national music weekly, Sounds published the first installment of Roscoe Moscow: Who Killed Rock n’ Roll. Less than five months later, on the 25th of August, 1979 the local Northampton paper the Northants Post began a weekly comic strip entitled Maxwell the Magic Cat. Sounds was paying £35 a week, while the Nohants Post paid £10, making a combined weekly of £45 a week – £2.50 greater than the unemployment benefits Alan Moore had previously been drawing, and officially marking the beginning of his career as a full-time comics writer. 

Figure 84: The cartoonist cryptically
reveals his identity (Alan Moore,
1979, as Curt Vile)
The revolution that this event heralded was, at first, wholly invisible. Roscoe Moscow was published under the name of Curt Vile, an obvious parody of German composer Kurt Weill, best known for his work with Bertolt Brecht on The Threepenny Opera, while Maxwell the Magic Cat featured the more obscurely punnish pen name Jill de Ray.
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