Eruditorum Press

Our business actually is to reason and compare

chapter twelve

Last War in Albion Book Three, Chapter Twelve: 1963

6

1735

Moore’s move into self-published and wholly independent comics had an obvious cost. The bulk of the Watchmen money had been spent failing to get Mad Love going, and none of Moore’s personal projects were advancing or earning money; A Small Killing was trapped under the crumbling wreckage of Victor Gollancz’s sale, Lost Girls and From Hell were coming out in Steve Bissette’s Taboo, which managed to produce seven issues in five years and only paid $100 per page, to be split between Moore and the artist, and Big Numbers simply didn’t exist. By 1992, Moore was broke and only nominally a comics writer, in that he simply did not have any current projects that were actually coming out anywhere.

And so in the spring of 1992, when Bissette approached him with an offer of work, Moore was receptive, even though it would mean wading back into the mainstream American comics industry that he had so definitively departed five years earlier. Bissette was in fact acting as a messenger—the job offer was from Jim Valentino, who wanted Moore and Bissette to do an issue of a comic called ShadowHawk. And in 1992, Jim Valentino was very possibly the single most interesting man in all of comics.

Valentino got his start in the late 70s/early 80s post-underground scene, appearing in anthologies like Dope Comix alongside underground veterans like Aline Kominsky-Crumb to tell the story of a bad trip on belladonna, or putting out his solo book Yer Basic Comix. He wrote a backup feature for Dave Sim’s Cerebus called normalman, about the one non-superpowered person in a world of superheroes, which eventually turned into a series, first at Sim’s Aardvark-Vanaheim, and then with Renegade Press when Deni Loubert effectively kept the title in the divorce, then went on to do a book of autobiographical comics called simply Valentino.

Eventually his career saw him drift into superheroes, and he settled into a job at Marvel writing and drawing Guardians of the Galaxy. This had been a longstanding minor property at Marvel, first created in 1969 by Doom Patrol co-creator Arnold Drake along with Gene Colan. The team languished in obscurity for two decades hamstrung by the detail that they were from the 31st century and thus largely outside of Mravel continuity, but around the turn of the decade Tom DeFalco, then editor-in-chief at Marvel, saw the concept as a way to cash in on the popularity of the new Star Trek series. Coincidentally Jim Valentino had just worked up a proposal for the characters, having been a fan of the most substantial effort to date to make the spacefaring team work, a stretch of issues by Steve Gerber, who had long been notable as one of the figures in superhero comics with the closest ties to the underground, and so he joined the book as a writer/artist.

Valentino’s work on Guardians of the Galaxy offered a gradual evolution over the twenty-nine issues that he did. On the one hand, his roots as a cartoonist are evident, especially early on, but he was adept at using these as a springboard for clear, expressive storytelling.…

Continue Reading

Myriad Universes: Ill Wind Part Two

, , , , , , , 0

The racers are on their marks at the starting line. Captain Picard has Data call up the course schematics onscreen. It’s a winding, zigzagging course around the star that will take the racers about three days to traverse, a quick pace for a solar sail vessel. But, as Captain Picard says, “These are the best”. When Commander Riker asks him if he’d rather be “out there”, Jean-Luc replies that he already is. The Enterprise crew wishes all the competitors good luck in turn, but when they get to the Cynosure team, Deanna observes that they’re without their sail technician. Will comments that the Kihin navigator must not have found him “to her taste”, to which Deanna replies “On the contrary…She found him very tasty indeed”. Meanwhile the Thubanir captain is still alive, though Deanna quips that it’s still early yet.

After the pre-race formalities, the Alkamin captain informs the Enterprise crew that they’ve seen something unusual on the keel of the Scherdat crew’s yacht. Captain Picard asks the Scherdat if they’ve modified their ship in any way, but the Scherdat captain responds in the negative. Worf scans the ship and finds something that doesn’t fit official speculations, but he can’t get a transporter lock on it, so the Enterprise is forced to movie into the race zone and use a minimal power tractor beam to remove it. They manage to remove the device and get it off the course just in time, as it turns out to be an explosive that promptly detonates, thankfully harmlessly out of range of any of the ships. The Carrighae captain complains about the Enterprise forcing a false start, but Captain Picard cuts him off and he and Deanna cynically note that moving their ship into the race field, thus endangering the lives of the competitors, was precisely what the Carrighae captain had tried to bribe Captain Picard to do in the first place. While the competitors prepare for a restart that will take a hour or two, Captain Picard wants his crew to investigate where this bomb might have come from and how it got on the Scherdat ship. Jean-Luc decides “This sport is definitely not what it used to be”.

Six hours later, the race has successfully restarted. Captain Picard asks Worf and Will how things are going, and they say things are fine except that the Mestral’s tender, which she had previously sent away, has not yet arrived at Capella, where it was meant to undergo servicing. Since that’s only a half-day away, the crew is supicious something might have happened to it, so Captain Picard has Worf inform Starfleet Command while he goes inform the Mestral. The Mestral says she’ll see what she can do, but doesn’t see any reason to withdraw from the race, despite Captain Picard’s growing concern. Following a quick exchange where she accuses him of worrying too much while he accuses her of not worrying enough, Mestral gives an impassioned speech about living a life of choice. She asks the Captain how many “little things” he’s had to give up in service to duty and security, but he responds that we all make sacrifices if it means service to a good cause.…

Continue Reading

Be afraid of stories, be afraid of storytellers. They are only trying to lie to you. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Seven: Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre)

3

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Before Watchmen: Minutemen did some mildly interesting technical things with the form, but was frustratingly vapid in its portrayal of race, gender, and sexuality.

As with race, the real problem here is a lack within the book; it is, in the end, pretty much only interested in white men. And, of course, this is a complaint that can readily be leveled at Watchmen as well: essentially all of its non-white characters are supporting characters who are killed in the book’s climax, and women are thoroughly marginalized within its plot, which also focuses almost exclusively on white men. These are well-trod and valid criticisms of Watchmen. What is baffling and disappointing, however, is that Cooke, a writer who got the job largely on the back of his historically-grounded previous take on the time period in which it’s set, repeated the errors. Especially given the extent to which Cooke retcons out large swaths of Under the Hood. To go to great lengths to revise Watchmen only to, in the end, uncritically reiterate its flaws is, to say the least, a disappointment.
 
Figure 860: Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre
also featured the worst of Jim Lee’s generally
execrable variant covers for the series.
At least some of these problems are addressed by Cooke’s other Before Watchmen series, Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre. The book’s racial politics are still deeply imperfect, with the overwhelming majority of non-white characters being villains, as are its gender politics. But there’s at least an evident investment in the latter, and one that came into the book’s conception quite early. Cooke made the presence of artist and co-writer Amanda Conner a precondition for taking on the book, on the grounds that, as he puts it, “I didn’t feel like I could convincingly write a young girl at that point in her life.” The breakdown of work appears to be that Cooke came up with the basic plot, and that Conner did actual page breakdowns (Cooke explicitly credits her with the decision – unique among the Before Watchmen artists – to work entirely within the nine-panel grid) and a lot of the nuance. 
 
Figure 861: The final page of Before
Watchmen: Silk Spectre tacitly positions
Laurie as an object traded among the male
characters. (Written by Darwyn Cooke and
Amanda Conner, art by Amanda Conner, from
Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre #4, 2012)
For the most part, this breakdown of duties favors Conner. The overall plot, after all, is where much of the weakness comes in. The premise – a sixteen year old Laurie Juspeczyk runs away from home in frustration at her mother’s demands on her and lives amongst hippies in 1966 San Francisco for a bit – is a solid idea. But the execution, which ultimately hinges on her two father figures, Eddie Blake and Hollis Mason, going to San Francisco to, in their own ways, rescue her. It’s certainly a story with a female lead character, but it’s a story that’s ultimately about the way in which Laurie is a possession traded among men, focusing heavily on her obsession with boys and closing with the abortive Crimebusters meeting depicted in Watchmen #2 with her giving her (ironic given Watchmen) assessments of the characters, before a final splash page of Laurie sitting between Night Owl and Doctor Manhattan, her two romantic interests in Watchmen, making eyes at Doctor Manhattan and thinking, “get a load of this guy.
…

Continue Reading

A story is a machine that kills fascists. A story is a machine that kills whatever you want it to. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Six: Before Watchmen: Minutemen)

16

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Darwyn Cooke got the job of writing and drawing Before Watchmen: Minutemen in part on the strength of his previous work on DC: The New Frontier, which, like Watchmen, was a formally thoughtful and heavily historicized look at the history of comics.

Figure 854: The portentous opening monologue
resolves into a gag about writing styles. (By Darwyn
Cooke, from Before Watchmen: Minutemen #1, 2012)
Before Watchmen: Minutemen shares much of that formal thoughtfulness, taking an often playful angle on Watchmen’s style. The comic opens with two pages of four stacked page-width panels that evoke the lush visions of The New Frontier while also utilizing the object-to-object transitions that define Watchmen. The first page, for instance, jumps from a first person perspective of an infant Hollis Mason staring out of his bassinet, defined by an arc traversing the panel, to a skyscape of New York City from within a tunnel, also providing a central arc, to a Kirby Krackle-filled panel of the Solar System, the sun providing a third central arc, and finally to a panel of Doctor Manhattan’s forehead. Over these panels is a portentous monologue, in caption boxes that wind down the page in a backwards S: “You come into this world, and your point of view is narrow. If you’re lucky, it’s a safe and loving place. As you grow, your view of the world broadens and you struggle to find your place within it. If you’re strong, you learn to survive it. Over time you may not decipher the mysteries of the universe, but you can make your peace with that and find strength in what you know to be true. If you’re wise enough to approach this seeming impasse with humility, you may even find a sustained happiness. Then one day you meet a guy, and he throws a wrench in the gears. He takes away your understanding of the world you live in.”  The approach continues on the second page, only with the object-to-object transitions slowly zooming out to represent the whole of the circle until, in the third panel, the entirety of a clockface, the time still hours before midnight, is visible. The text here stutters – the caption box reads “you hope that over time…” while a dialogue box, the speaker off-panel, repeats “over time…” The fourth panel simply zooms out further from this scene, the clock moved to the midground, while in the foreground, at the right of the panel, a typewriter containing the first page of the epilogue to Under the Hood is visible. The off-panel dialogue continues with a punchline rivaling “that’s quite a drop” from the seventh panel of Watchmen: “this is terrible.”
Figure 855: Cooke subverts the nine-panel grid.
(By Darwyn Cooke, from Before Watchmen:
Minutemen #3, 2012)
But Cooke’s moves following this punchline pull in two different ways. On the one hand, the opening panel of the third page features Hollis Mason staring out at the reader as he says (ostensibly to his dog), “I’ll just have to face facts, girl.
…

Continue Reading

The Point is to Change the World (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part 5: Before Watchmen: Minutemen)

14

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Actually, it basically just left off in the middle of More’s lengthy description for the first panel of Watchmen.
Figure 849: The ending of Watchmen is foreshadowed
by its first panel. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave
Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #12, 1987)
THE SECOND ITEM OF REMARK IS A 1” DIAMETER SMILEY BADGE, COLORED A VIVID SUNSHINE YELLOW AS IT LAYS THERE IN THE GUTTER SMILING UP AT US AGAINST A BACKGROUND OF LURID BLOOD RED. IT HAS SOMEHOW LODGED IN THE GUTTER SO THAT IT WON’T GO DOWN THE DRAIN, AND SIMPLY REMAINS STUCK THERE, STARING UP AT US WITH ITS JARRINGLY INANE EXPRESSION. A SMALL SPLASH OF CRIMSON STAINS THE FRONT OF THE BADGE. A SINGLE TINY SPATTER ACROSS ONE BLACK CARTOON EYE ON THE FACE OF THE BADGE. THAT’S BASICALLY THE WHOLE OPENING IMAGE, UNLESS YOU WANT TO STICK A CANDY WRAPPER THAT’S ABOUT TO FLOAT DOWN THE DRAIN, IN WHICH CASE WE HAVE A PACKET OF MELTDOWNS, WHICH ARE LIKE TREETS (ENGLISH) OR M&M’S (AMERICAN) ONLY WITH LITTLE BRIGHTLY COLORED ATOMIC SYMBOLS ON THE WRAPPING. ONLY INCLUDE CANDY WRAPPING IF IT DOESN’T DETRACT FROM THE SIMPLICITY OF THE IMAGE WITH THE GUTTER, THE BLOOD AND THE BADGE, THOUGH, BECAUSE THIS IMAGE IS PRETTY IMPORTANT. IT GIVES US THE BLOOD SPATTERED SMILEY-BADGE, WHICH IS A PRETTY WORKABLE SYMBOL OF THE COMEDIAN’S MURDER, WHICH RUNS THROUGH THE ENTIRE SERIES, AND IT ALSO GIVES US A FAINT SUBLIMINAL PREDICTION OF THE ENDING WITH ITS IMAGE OF THE GUTTERS OF NEW YORK AWASH WITH BLOOD. ANYWAY, SEE WHAT YOU THINK AND LEAVE OUT THINGS LIKE THE SWEET WRAPPER IF YOU THINK THEY’RE EVEN SLIGHTLY DISTRACTING. WE’LL HAVE PLENTY OF TIME TO GET ALL OUR CUTE BRAND NAMES IN LATER ON IN THE SERIES. THE ACTUAL TEXT UPON THIS FIRST PAGE IS ALL TAKEN FROM RORSCHACH’S JOURNAL, WHICH WILL BE A MORE-OR-LESS CONTINUING FEATURE OF THE NARRATIVE THROUGHOUT THE SERIES. I MENTION THIS IN CASE YOU THINK IT MIGHT BE NICE TO VISUALLY DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN RORSCHACH’S JOURNAL AND ANY OTHER CAPTION BOXES THAT MIGHT OCCUR BY GIVING IT A SPECIFIC COLOR A SPECIFIC SHAPE OR LETTERING STYLE OR SOMETHING. I SUPPOSE IT’D BE NICE IF WE COULD ACTUALLY GET SOME OF THE CHARACTER OF RORSCHACH HIMSELF BY THE WAY HIS JOURNAL IS WRITTEN, ALTHOUGH I SUPPOSE A SUITABLY WARPED-LOOKING STYLE OF HAND WRITING MIGHT BE OFF-PUTTINGLY DIFFICULT TO READ OR TIME CONSUMING AND DIFFICULT TO MAINTAIN. MAYBE YOU COULD SUGGEST A SORT OF SCRUFFINESS WITHOUT GETTING TOO ELABORATE, THOUGH. PERHAPS A MORE RAGGED EDGE OR A FAINT SPATTERING OF MESSY INK BLOTS INT HE BOXES HERE AND THERE AS IF THEY’D BEEN LETTERED BY A PEN WITH A SPLIT NIB OR SOMETHING. ANYWAY. THE OPTIONS ARE THERE, SO JUST DO WHAT YUOU WANT. IN FACT, IF YOU’RE ANXIOUS TO SEE ANYTHING THAT EVEN SMACKS OF VISUAL FLUMMERY THAN PLEASE FEEL FREE TO MAKE RORSCHACH’S BOXES THE SAME AS EVERYONE ELSES AND RELY UPON THE TEXT IN THEM TO SET THEM APART FROM OTHER NARRATIVE WITHOUT IMPOSING ANY VISUAL GIMMICKS NEEDLESSLY.
…

Continue Reading

Do you want to feel self-righteous or do you want to win? I like to win. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Four: The Eternity of Alan Moore)

15

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore cursed the man who would be his successor with the most brutal of curses imaginable for a man of Grant Morrison’s ambition: he gifted him an open throne, and made no effort whatsoever to acknowledge his rival or compete with him.

But this is, in the end, Moore’s nature; the magic trick he’s always been better at than anyone else in the War. He is Eternal. Whatever changes he may bring down upon the world, Moore himself does not change. This may seem a strange claim – he exists in linear time, after all, and there is self-evidently such a thing as a narrative of his career such that one can track an artistic and intellectual evolution between, for instance, V for Vendetta and Providence. But this objection misses the point of the observation. Of course an Eternal entity appears to change when situated in a changing world. But it’s just an illusion; a trick of psychic light. Moore’s entire career has, in practice, been a singular and unwavering action, a masterfully executed con whereby, instead of working a real job, he makes things up. He has never aspired to more. That he, in the process of doing so, became one of the great magi of his age and a primary figure in a history-defining War is something he largely stumbled upon by accident, and it is something he has alternately accepted with grace and good humor and violently and angrily reacted against, depending on the circumstances.
The nature of Moore’s Eternity has precedent, both within his work and without. Indeed, Watchmen itself has such a precedent in the form of Doctor Manhattan, a character who, it is revealed in later chapters, experiences every moment of his life simultaneously. In this regard, Doctor Manhattan approaches his own life through the lens of history, getting to see actions in terms of all their causes and consequences. Such a perspective is obviously denied to Moore, whose vision of his own Eternity eventually coalesced around the less personally ambitious metaphysical view of eternalism, which holds that all moments, past and future, are simultaneously and equally real, with, in Moore’s particular flavor of eternalism, a single human life simply playing on loop. The result is a cosmos that is much like that which Doctor Manhattan experiences, but, crucially, not one that is directly experienced from such an omniscient view.
Figure 845: Doctor Manhattan is often
withdrawn and unconcerned with human
emotion. (Written by Alan Moore, art by
Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from
Watchmen #1, 1986)
And yet Doctor Manhattan’s defining character flaw is one that Moore can fairly be accused of as well. It is not quite that Moore, like Manhattan, is deficient in empathy and ability to understand people. Quite the contrary, one of Moore’s great strengths as a writer has always been his ability to depict rich psychological nuance for his characters. Rather, it is that Moore and Manhattan both have a strangely fatalist lack of belief in their own agency.
…

Continue Reading

Your purity only hurts the reason you’re doing it. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Three: Corporate Comics)

15

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The intricate fictional history of Watchmen is based closely on the history of DC Comics, and the characters served as analogues (albeit imprecise ones) for the archetypal heroes of DC.

For all that Moore and Gibbons created an elaborate superhero universe based on the principle of taking a more materially realistic view of the impact superheroes would have on the world, going so far as to think through the comics industry of his fictional world, there is a crucial tangible oversight within Watchmen: it almost completely ignores the way in which superheroes are, historically, generally corporate owned franchises. There are occasional nods towards it – the tragicomic fate of Dollar Bill, Ozymandias’s business empire, and the relationship between the first Silk Spectre and her agent all gesture at the commercial dimensions of costumed heroes. But it is a minor theme within the book, despite ultimately serving as a major one outside of it. Moore might fairly have asked himself, after all, how it was that the Charlton characters, created by Steve Ditko, Joe Gill, Pete Morisi, Charles Nicholas, and Pat Boyette, were initially available for his use at a completely different company from either of the two they had originated at, with none of their creators even remotely involved. Had he done so, the ways in which writing Watchmen would eventually turn sour for him might have come as somewhat less of a surprise than they in practice did. 
The truth, however, is that Moore’s alienation from this aspect of superheroes was always fairly fundamental. For all the money that Watchmen made him (and it was considerable), there were always numerous ways in which Moore left money on the table, and not just from himself. He adamantly refused to write a sequel to the book, and the only prequel he ever seriously considered was a series focusing on the Minutemen which, in any event, he never wrote. And when Barbara Randall (now Kesel), his editor on the series, leaked to him plans that had been cooked up at a DC editorial retreat shortly after the book’s completion for a trio of prequel series (one focusing on the Minutemen, one on the Comedian, and one on Rorschach), he acted swiftly to derail the plans. Indeed, this is a position he has never wavered on in the thirty years since the book’s release, declaring, upon the announcement of the Before Watchmen project in 2012, that “if people do want to go out and buy these Watchmen prequels, they would be doing me an enormous favor if they would just stop buying my other books,” and declaring that he had “complete contempt” for anyone who did buy them. Moore was, simply put, not terribly interested in serving as a productive member of the DC Comics stable of creative personnel.
Figure 842: Even when Moore took jobs on
high-profile titles like Batman, he was more inclined
to write stories focusing on semi-obscure villains
like Clayface than to focus on the iconic characters.
…

Continue Reading

Take the techniques that make it a masterwork and use them for changing the world. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Two: The Nine-Panel Grid, History and Superheroes)

14

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Watchmen is defined by its intense formalism, and yet no rule within it ever goes entirely unbroken, including its most basic unit of form, the nine-panel grid.
Figure 837: The experimental panel layouts of Swamp Thing are a marked contrast
to the rigidity of Watchmen and its nine-panel grid. (From Saga of the Swamp Thing
#30, 1984)
As a page layout, it is an unusual one, especially for American comics. For one thing, the standard approach in American comics since the emergence of Neal Adams has been to break the strict grid with irregularly shaped panels that allow for dramatic emphasis. On Swamp Thing, for instance, Bissette and Totleben constantly create new layouts that blend trapazoidal panels, panels splayed diagonally across the page, and panels that cut into each other’s space. It’s as basic a technique for Swamp Thing as the nine-panel grid is for Watchmen. Gibbons completely foregoes this, consciously denying himself a tremendous swath of techniques typically used to draw emphasis to specific beats of the story.
Figure 838: Even when not working in a nine-panel
grid, Dave Gibbons’s style is tidy and straightforward.
(Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and Tom
Ziuko, from Superman Annual 1985)
For another, the nine-panel grid means that there are a staggering number of panels per page. The first issue of Watchmen averages 7.5 panels per page. In contrast, Moore and Gibbons’s story for the 1985 Superman Annual, “For The Man Who Has Everything,” averages 5.7 panels, nearly two panels per page fewer. Similarly, in Swamp Thing #52, which came out the same month as Watchmen #1, Moore gives Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala an average of 4.7 panels per page. But in some ways the more revealing fact is that the highest panel count for a page of “For The Man Who Has Everything” is seven, and the highest for Swamp Thing #52 is six. An average page of Watchmen, in other words, has more panels than the most crowded page of most American comics. Of his past work, only V for Vendetta averages anything close to Watchmen’s dizzying panel count, and this can be explained at least in part by the fact that Warrior had a considerably larger page size than US comics. But even in British comics Moore’s panel count generally remained well below Watchmen’s level: Marvelman tended to be somewhere between six and seven panels per page on average, whereas Moore and Gibbons’s most beloved British collaboration, “Chrono-Cops,” averages six. But mere panel count is in many ways misleading. Out of the first issue’s twenty-six pages, nine are true nine-panel grids. More to the point, out of its 196 panels, 177 are 1/9th of a page or smaller. The standard unit of storytelling in Watchmen, in other words, is in effect the comics equivalent of a miniature – a two inch by three inch rectangle.
Figure 839: The one time in “For The Man Who Has Everything”
that Gibbons violates a panel border.
…

Continue Reading

Art that cannot move people effectively loses the war. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part One: The Beginning)

24


Figure 832: The cover of Watchmen #1,
depicting the iconic badge.
Yellow smile in bloodpool as panel one, single stain on right eye. An image and synecdoche, it is Watchmen’s true face. Marketing and trade dress have made it a precisely defined sigil of Watchmen, just as the Guy Fawkes mask is the sigil of V for Vendetta and the serpent of Alan Moore. It is a Harvey Ball style smiley, a type first drawn in 1963, linked with a host of 1970s culture both kitsch and psychedelic. The bloodstain is four-pronged splash in the upper left, three droplets petering out before the eye, a fourth traversing the eye at a sharp angle like a pair of clock hands converging on midnight. In some renditions there are six precisely placed patches of white, as on the cover, but in the first panel the badge is already in the midground, framed by a monotone slate of red upon purple-grey bricks. There is a gutter in the lower left which the blood flows into. It is an iconic opening panel of comics as an artform, setting up the book’s aesthetic approach from the beginning. The War begins thusly, in the middle of a cataclysmic battle the history of which will serve as its own battleground.
Figure 833: The first page of Watchmen. (Written by
Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins,
from Watchmen  #1, 1986)
The close-up, a cover-to-panel transition, defines a mystery even before the comic’s six-panel pan up from the street to a man staring out a broken window many stories up. A red-haired man carrying a “The End is Nigh” sign walks down the street, yelled at by a man hosing down the bloodstain. In four pages the red-heard man will tacitly be revealed as Walter Kovacs, the civilian identity of Rorschach, whose journal provides these panels’ narration, written in a slightly blobby typeface upon caption boxes like torn notepaper, with splatters of ink on every scrap, never in the same arrangement twice. The monologue is as famous as the image: “Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “save us!”… and I’ll look down and whisper “no.” 
These first six panels are arranged in two rows of three, occupying the upper two-thirds of the page. The bottom third is a single panel, precisely three times wider than each of the six. These demonstrate the first narrative conceit of Watchmen, the juxtaposition of text and images from different parts of the narrative. The reader does not yet know that Rorschach is visually present in the second through fifth of these panels.
…

Continue Reading

The Last War in Albion Book Two: Introduction

13

Before we start, there’s a new podcast featuring an interview with me by James Wylder up. It’s a nice, lengthy chat about occultism, Recursive Occlusion, Gamergate, and all sorts of other stuff. It’s in two parts, the first a bit over an hour long, the second a nice solid ninety minutes. Part one. Part two.


Right, so, you may have noticed that we, at long last, reached the end of Book One of The Last War in Albion last Friday, which means that we’re finally going to start Book Two tomorrow. And that seemed like a good time to take a breath, recap events, and give some explanation for what’s coming up next.
First off, if you’ve not been following The Last War in Albion, or have fallen behind, this is, as they say in comics, a great jumping on point. So, let’s recap. 
The Last War in Albion is a history of British comic books told through the lens of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. It’s epic, sweeping, and although the story it tells starts in 1979, frequently dips into the history of Britain and of comics to paint a fuller picture of what’s going on. Individual chapters are in turn cut, with wry arbitrariness, into two-thousand word chunks, which are serialized weekly. A user’s guide can be found here.
Book One concerned the early careers of both Moore and Morrison, from 1979-86. Mostly it’s about Moore, since he was the more prolific in that period. Here’s the recap I’ve got in the omnibus of the next chapter:

In 1979, two men got their starts in the British comics industry. One, a young Scotsman named Grant Morrison, largely sunk without a trace, writing only a few short stories for a failed magazine called Near Myths, a local newspaper strip, and a couple of sci-fi adventurers for DC Thomson’s Starblazer, a magazine renowned for only ever giving the editorial note “more space combat.”
The other, a decade older man from Northampton named Alan Moore, steadily worked his way from some low rent gigs writing and drawing his own strips to a career in the mainstream British industry, pulling together a living writing disposable short stories for 2000 AD, superheroes for Marvel UK, and low-selling but critically acclaimed work like V for Vendetta for Dez Skinn’s Warrior, before making the jump to American comics to try to salvage the failing title Swamp Thing, which he did in spades, taking it from a book on the brink of cancellation to one of DC Comics’s crown jewels.
Meanwhile, Morrison, having largely failed in his goal of being a rock star, and inspired by Moore’s work, particularly his postmodernist superhero tale Marvelman in Warrior, got back into comics, following the trajectory of Moore’s early career by securing a strip in Warrior (unfortunately for Morrison, his first appearance was Warrior’s last issue) and beginning to write short stories for 2000 AD.
In 1986, DC Comics published the first issue of Watchmen, a new superhero series from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

…

Continue Reading