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Ending Explained (Part 1)

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Part 1 of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994).  Some of the ideas in this essay were partly developed in conversation with George Daniel Lea and Elliot Chapman.

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John Carpenter’s late – and last – classic In the Mouth of Madness (1994) is famously metafictional.  In the final scene of the film, the ‘protagonist’ John Generic Name… sorry, I mean John Trent… goes into a cinema which is showing a film called In the Mouth of Madness, advertised as starring John Trent, and watches himself on the screen, watches the film we’ve just seen, essentially.  He watches himself declaring repeatedly (in alternate cuts of the same scene, featuring Sam Neill’s varying line deliveries) that he is nobody’s puppet and that the surreal things he’s experiencing are “not reality”.  Apparently overcome by the realisation that he is, in fact, a fictional character in a film, John Trent begins laughing.  His laughter gradually goes from being hysterical in the figurative sense to hysterical in the literal sense.  As he starts having a panic attack, the film – the one we are watching – cuts to the credits.

Carpenter does not put ‘Starring Sam Neill’ on the poster.  He does not break the fourth wall directly.  Within the frame of the text, the barriers between reality – the life of John Trent, the world in which Hobb’s End is a fictional town created by author Sutter Cane – and fiction – the world of Hobb’s End and the monstrosities that exist there – breaks down, and the two are shown to be essentially one and the same.  But the text does not breach its own actual limits.  The text does not depict the barriers between itself and us, the viewers, breaking down.  The metafictional apocalypse depicted on screen does not seem to affect us, the viewers.

In the Mouth of Madness landed in 1994.  In 1994 I was in my second year of an English & Philosophy degree.  I was wading through Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, Kristeva…  It was the high academic fashion of the moment.

Lacan famously used topology as a source of metaphors and analogies, even if he himself denied that they were metaphors and analogies.  He describes the neurotic subject as a torus or möbius strip – or as a cut on a torus or möbius strip.  Putting aside the question of his actual knowledge of topology or mathematics more generally, we can appreciate the image of the circulating, edgeless, closed-loop shape as a way to visualise neurosis.  At the risk of sounding like Zizek, we can easily apply this image to In the Mouth of Madness, in which a sequence of events plays out which is easily interpreted as the experience of paranoid neurosis on the part of an individual subject – indeed is so interpreted within the frame of the story – and which loops back upon itself at multiple points.  Not only does the framing story provide an exactly symmetrical shape to the story – Trent is put in the lunatic asylum at the start; Trent escapes the lunatic asylum at the end – but the inner story, the picture within the frame, is recursive.  …

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Last War in Albion Book Three, Chapter 11: A Small Killing

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“Within a fortnight it can all fall down, the luminous Wurlitzer palace of our youth: no luck, no school, no happy home. The job down at the skinning yards… the tide comes crashing in, and sweeps us all away.” – Alan Moore, The Birth Caul

Although the slow motion disaster of Big Numbers, along with his less ruinous but still time-consuming efforts on From Hell and Lost Girls, occupied much of Moore’s time in the wake of Watchmen, these sorts of projects—self-published or put out in friends’ self-published anthologies—were not what he’d initially imagined his post-DC career to be. As he put it, “my intentions at that time were that I would work for book publishers. I was getting an awful lot of offers from book publishers asking me to do graphic novels for them, which seemed like a good option to me because I’d own my copyright, I’d be dealing on more equitable, grown-up terms.” In practice this never materialized, in part because the graphic novel boom that was leading these book publishers to take interest in the medium was quickly being squandered by the actions of the very publishers Moore was leaving. In practice, Moore would only publish one work with such a publisher, a 96 page graphic novel called A Small Killing that he did for Victor Gollancz’s short-lived VG Graphics imprint.

Victor Gollancz was notable, at least in the late 1980s, as one of the UK’s most prominent family-owned businesses, existing since the 1920s and publishing authors such as George Orwell, Daphne du Maurier, Kingsley Amis, and John le Carré. In the 1960s the publisher became a notable science fiction publisher, developing an eye-catching yellow trade dress that stood out and helped establish the publisher as a brand unto itself. In 1990, however, in the midst of Moore’s work on A Small Killing, Gollancz was sold to the US publishing giant Houghton Mifflin, which in turn sold it on in 1992, with a third and final sale coming in 1998. Combined with the petering out of the graphic novel boom, A Small Killing became a niche title—it got an American edition from Dark Horse in 1993, and then came back into print in 2003 from Avatar as part of their authorized ransacking of Moore’s back catalog. Moore would eventually identify it as “the most underappreciated work that I’ve done.”

Working with Moore was Oscar Zarate, an Argentinian artist who grew up as a devoted fan of Alex Raymond and Hugo Pratt and worked as an assistant in the Argentinian industry before migrating to advertising and, in 1971, Europe, this latter move to escape the right-wing military government of Argentina. There he sought work and ended up working for the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, where he worked with writer Richard Appignanesi on  Lenin for Beginners and Freud for Beginners, part of the collective’s iconic For Beginners series, which used comics as a medium to explain the thought of prominent philosophers and scientists. He went on to illustrating comics adaptations of Shakespeare and Marlowe before, in 1987, connecting with comedian Alexei Sayle for a graphic novel called Geoffrey the Tube Train and the Fat Comedian.…

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The Hidden Abode

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On The Boy (2016).  Spoilers, and CW for references to psychological and physical abuse.

 

The Boy, a film from 2016, written by Stacey Menear and directed by William Brent Bell, has been largely-forgotten, but deserves better.  It tries to be to patriarchy what Get Out, released the following year, would be to racism.

The film was marketed as a specimen of the creepy haunted doll subgenre of supernatural Horror, which enjoyed a rather half-hearted renaissance in the wake of the massive success of The Conjuring in 2012, and its breakout star (and best actor) Annabelle.  The Boy spends a good part of its first two acts pretending to be just such a creepy haunted doll movie… though precisely how hard its pretending is open to question, as we will see.

It’s a surprise to me that I like this film as much as I do.  Firstly, the director, William Brent Bell, is generally a purveyor of crap.  Misogynistic crap, in one marked instance.  Secondly, The Boy does things which I generally – and ideologically – dislike.  It has a ‘twist’ ending which…

If you’re reading on, I’m assuming you have either seen the movie or don’t care

…which supposedly recontextualizes the entire film, and makes it clear that, while you may have thought you were watching a story about a creepy haunted doll, you were actually watching a story with no supernatural elements whatever, beyond the usual implausibilities built into most movies via the aesthetic ideology of ‘realism’.

I do not like ‘twist’ endings.  I especially do not like ‘twist’ endings which also function as ‘narrative substitution’.  Like fourth wall breaking, I generally find narrative substitution to be a cheap trick which can give the appearance of cleverness while actually saying very little, and generally unravelling the text’s coherence of theme and character development.

I do not like stories which appear to be supernatural but which turn out to have a ‘natural’ explanation.  I do not even particularly like stories which maintain an ambiguity as to whether or not the events of the story are supernatural.  Firstly, such stories tend to cheat.  The ambiguity tends to be a pretence.  In order to manufacture the supposed ambiguity the story must impose an overpowering natural reading, even if it pretends not to.

More importantly, for me, by undermining or eschewing the supernatural, a supernaturally-inflected film cheats itself of the vast and fertile potentialities of polysemy that is the uncanny, the symbolic, and the truly irrational, confining itself instead to the banal personal irrational of the individual disordered psyche.  The great strength of uncanny storytelling is that it deals with the generalised irrational.  Irrationality as society, as history, as life.  It depicts characters experiencing a world that is irrational – and hopelessly so – all around them, and deep in its structure.  I am convinced that this hits closer to a true and visceral expression of the experience of living in modernity.

The Boy does all the stuff I dislike.  Its twist recontextualises the film, substitutes one narrative for another, and removes the supernatural from the story, substituting one disordered psyche for what looked like an irrational universe.  …

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Last War in Albion Book 3, Chapter 10: Big Numbers (Remainder)

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Hey folks. I’ve decided that the serialization of LWIA v3 is simply far too delayed, and that I’m going to get through it in a series of three omnibus posts so that it’s wrapped up before the 60th Anniversary Doctor Who Specials. Right now those are still set to be Patreon-exclusive, with roughly $370 a month to go before they happen on the site. You can help by backing my Patreon, where I’ve got reviews of the first five installments of Tales of the TARDIS up, with the last going up later today.

Previously in Last War in Albion: Alan Moore became fascinated by fractals, or at least by what he thought fractals were.

The blue world spins below me, fragile as glass, a vast and delicate ornament. Naked creation crackling and streaming off in all directions. Clouds are not spheres. Mountains are not cones. Lightning does not travel in a straight line. These things are abstractions of reality. The geometry of nature, like the geometry of life itself, contains infinites.” – Grant Morrison, Animal Man

Allow a moment of fancy. It will not escape notice that Dewdney’s introduction sounds very much like something Alan Moore might write, and thus almost tailor made to capture his eye. Could this article in fact have been his introduction to the Mandelbrot set? Certainly Moore was an avid reader of popular science magazines. He generally favored New Scientist, but it’s easy to imagine him passing by a newsstand and seen the striking visualization of the set on the cover, a crackling flame tongue in all its mad and infinite detail. If so, and if he picked up the issue out of curiosity, what would he have learned? Much of the article consisted of semi-technical explanations of complex numbers and computer programs that would have sailed over his head, but his eye would surely have been caught by the thrilled descriptions of how “the numbers inside remain to drift or dance about. Close to the boundary minutely choreogrphed wanderings mark the onset of the instability. Here is an infinite regress of detail that astonishes us with its variety, its complexity and its strange beauty,” or the lush descriptions of the recurring patterns within the set: “a riot of organic-looking tendrils and curlicues sweeps out in whorls and rows. Magnifying a curlicue reveals yet another scene: it is made up of pairs of whorls joined by bridges of filigree.” Ultimately, however, one suspects the key detail, beyond the breathtaking illustrations, would have been the subheadline billing the Mandelbrot set as “the most complex object in mathematics” would surely have been eye-catching. (Indeed, Moore parroted the line in an interview, describing the Mandelbrot set as “the most complex shape in mathematics, and possibly the most complex shape in the universe.”)

It is worth unpacking that complexity a little. In the case of the Koch snowflake, zooming in on the image generates the same pattern. Pick a single point to zoom in on and you’ll see an endlessly repeating jagged series of triangles.…

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The Crack Down the Spine – Part 1

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Opening a consideration of the Ghost Story, drawing on…

 

…the valorization of the realm of a culture’s ghosts and phantasms as a significant and rich field of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled… *** …a Marxist genealogy fascinated with the irrational aspects of social processes, a genealogy that both investigates how the irrational pervades existing society and dreams of using it to effect social change. Gothic Marxism has often been obscured in the celebrated battles of mainstream Marxism, privileging a conceptual apparatus constructed in narrowly Enlightenment terms. The Enlightenment, however, was always already haunted by its Gothic ghosts… 

Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination

 

Miracles; murders; demons driven out and stones roiled from tombs. The cheap glamour did not taint the sense beneath. It was only, in the natural history of the mind, the bright feathers that drew the species to mate with its secret self.

Clive Barker, The Forbidden

 

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I first encountered ghost stories in the sense I mean the term, the modern Ghost Story, in the spare room of the paternal grandparents’ bungalow.  I used to stay with them for a week or two every summer holiday when I was a kid.  They – and I suppose I mean my grandfather really – used that room to store the books he didn’t want on display.  Alongside all the old issues of Readers Digest, and the condensed novels, and my father’s old football and cricket annuals, there were lots of old books.  I don’t mean old books in the sense of dusty, leather-bound tomes, their pages wormy and crumbling, attached by chains to the shelves.  I don’t mean Foxe’s Book of Martyrs or In Praise of Folly.  I don’t mean the Tractate Middoth or the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred or The King in Yellow.  I mean from the 1950s and 60s.  Cheap little paperbacks, and hardbacks with tatty paper jackets of at most two colours, both usually yellow, bearing artless illustrations and prices in shillings and pence.  There were more recent paperbacks too.  All dogeared and ragged, some losing their yellow pages when opened, their glue binding turning to powder, their spines cracked.  The anthologies of science fiction stories and ghost stories were the ones that grabbed little me.  The numbered Fontana collections with their amazingly eerie covers.  The trashier ones covered in studio staged photos of cobweb-draped skulls.  It was here that I first encountered Lovecraft, the two Jameses (M.R. and Henry), the two Bensons (A.C. and E.F.), Machen, Hodgson, and Blackwood.  Oliver Onions and Saki.  Dickens and Poe and Stoker and Le Fanu.  And lesser lights like Chetwynd-Hayes, and outright inferiors whose names I don’t remember – but which I often liked best at the time, if I’m honest.  And so on.  

Of course, this wasn’t my introduction to stories about ghosts.  But it was my introduction to Ghost Stories.  

 

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If you come to think of it, the one thing which the human mind cannot grasp is the finite, not the infinite, the temporary, not the eternal.

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Review: Tough Crowd, by Graham Linehan

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I suspect that by posting this I’m on my way to a really shit day. Please consider improving it by supporting my Patreon so I can continue to create and publish work like this in a world that would much rather platform people who want me dead than me.

Every time there’s another one of these prominent media-pushed anti-trans books one of us dutifully steps up and takes one for the team in offering a review. Grace Lavery stepped up for a triple header and did Bindel, Stock, and Joyce in the LA Review of Books. Gretchen Felker-Martin, having killed her off in Manhunt, offered an absolute savaging of one of Rowling’s Cormoran Strike things. And as a trans media critic specializing in British television, the release of Graham Linehan’s memoir means that my time has alas come. 

Let’s start with the headline: this is a very bad book. I cannot imagine anybody who generally likes my stuff will enjoy much of anything about it. I cannot imagine anybody getting anything of value out of it. Even for Linehan’s fellow virulent transphobes it would seem to offer only the hollowest of pleasures, although I can’t in good conscience pretend that’s not their thing. But broadly speaking I encourage you to not bother reading this book, and if you for some reason feel you must read it, do not under any circumstances pay money for it. I sure as hell stole mine.

To get more into the meat of it, “very bad” is a statistical average of what are in fact two books welded together by a bizarre interlude in which Linehan attempts to make a brilliant “checkmate trannies” sort of argument. The first of these is an ordinarily bad memoir of a sitcom writer, while the other is an almost indescribably bad account of a man’s complete psychological collapse. Linehan presents this bifurcated narrative up front in his subtitle, which promises to tell how he “made and lost” his career. Indeed, as he explains, he lost more than that, including his family and all of his friends.

Well. Clearly not all of them. His book features blurbs from Jonathan Ross and Richard Ayoade, among those from a few less notable old career contacts and fellow professional bigots. These suggest the book will be “funny,” “honest,” “complicated,” and above all “compelling.” The overall result is a book that, to put it in the sort of Catholic terms that start to pathologize him, feels like a confession, though of course, one devoid of any repentance. “Here is how I pushed everyone away” says the man whose friends are blurbing his book and who is giving numerous interviews to promote it. “Don’t you think I’m compelling?” 

The first part of this argument—the sitcom memoir—functions as a sort of “I used to be somebody” windup to the sob story. And he did—a level of prominence roughly akin to what Steven Moffat had pre-Doctor Who, which is to say that he was well known among UK sitcom fans who paid attention to the writer’s name.…

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Queen Shit: The Case for Joan Baez

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This post, and work like it is only possible because of the support of my Patrons. And speaking of Patreon, we’re currently $450 a month in pledges away from Doctor Who reviews being posted to the site instead of paywalled. If you’re interested in that, or in supporting my work in general, you can join the Patreon here.

Also, I’ve created a playlist surveying Baez’s career for anyone who’s interested. It’s up on both Spotify and Apple Music.

Upon some self-reflection, I’ve determined that my single most heterodox critical position is that the greatest recording artist of the 1970s is Joan Baez. This is not true because of a lack of heterodox opinions in other spheres—Wish is the best Cure album, the Peter Capaldi/Jenna Coleman era of Doctor Who is the pinnacle of the series, if you’re in an American wine store you’re better off with South America than France—but because on almost every level the critical deck is stacked against Joan Baez. To use a recent example, it’s striking that when Jan Wenner, desperately backpedaling after being called out for writing a book called The Masters consisting entirely of interviews with white guys, tried to think of any women or people of color he had any respect for, the names he came up with were people like Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, Grace Slick, or Curtis Mayfield—other singer-songwriters in the mould of his supposed masters. Joan Baez never even gets a look in. To be clear, I’m no more surprised by this than I am that Wenner failed to interview anyone that isn’t a white guy. While certainly an able and at times brilliant songwriter, Baez was largely more famed as an interpreter of other people’s songs, and so doubly excluded from Wenner’s paradigm. (For her part, when asked about Wenner’s comments, Baez’s response was simply “he’s a schmuck.”)

And yet the poptimists who might have embraced Baez in the same way they do Rihanna, Aretha Franklin, Madonna or any number of other stars who made their careers interpreting other people’s songs or working with established songwriters to develop originals also tend to neglect her. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, folk music is a rockist genre; the poptimists don’t go for Peter, Paul, and Mary or Judy Collins either. For another, however, the nature of Joan Baez’s pop stardom is odd. Whether it’s the aesthetic reputation of folk music, Baez’s steadfast political activism, or just her resolute disinterest in performing coolness, she comes off as fussy and stodgy in a way that keeps her from ever having gotten claimed. Indeed, as we’ll see, the particular sort of pop star she was is one that is almost necessarily not going to rise to the top of the poptimist heap. The result is that Baez’s legacy largely sits in the hands of a bunch of rockist twats who view her as a 6/10 historically significant also-ran, as opposed to one that even gets her a look-in as a dark horse pick for something like “greatest recording artist of the 1970s.” …

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State of the Erudition

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Hello everyone! I know, I should probably have another thrilling installment of Last War in Albion up today—people are no doubt dying to learn more about fractals. But it’s been a while since I’ve just done a general update, and there’s a fair amount of stuff. So Last War in Albion will have to wait two weeks. (Wait, two weeks? What’s happening next week? Well… read on.)

So, first of all, I’ve got a proof of TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 8 on its way to me. I still have some ebook formatting to do, and I’m obviously going to get Kickstarter orders fulfilled before I put it on general sale, but I figured I should announce the fact that this is happening imminently.

Second of all, and excitingly for UK folks, Penn and I will be tabling at Thought Bubble next month in Harrogate. We’ll mostly be pushing Britain a Prophecy because it’s a comics convention, but I’ll have any Eruditorum Press stuff at the table as well. We would love to see you.

Third, I wanted to talk a bit about the Patreon. It took a pretty sizable hit earlier this year when I had to nuke and restart it—it went from paying our rent every month with some to spare to falling well short of our rent. That’s been rough. And so I figured now would be a good time to announce two things. First is that… well, you remember that time I accidentally wrote a book? This time I accidentally wrote a novella-sized essay on Joan Baez. Seriously, there’s a 26,500 word essay called “Queen Shit: A Defense of Joan Baez” up on the Patreon. It’ll be here next week, because I realized while I was writing it that there’s a big Joan Baez documentary out and given that I’m not going to embargo it for long.

Which brings us to number two. Because honestly, I don’t like embargoing stuff. Especially not with the collapse of Twitter and the lack of social media. I’d much rather be putting stuff out here for public consumption. Which brings us to Doctor Who.

There’s one school of thought that says that the obvious solution to my low Patreon is to just put my reviews of the 60th Anniversary specials and of Series 14 on the Patreon and make people go there. But like I said, I don’t like embargoing stuff. Especially not things like reviews. I mean, come on—don’t you want a proper Eruditorum Press comment section for The Star Beast? Don’t you want podcasts? I do.

So I’m going to do this the perverse way. Right now my plan is to paywall all my Doctor Who reviews. But if enough people back the Patreon between now and November 23rd, I’ll switch gears and do them publicly. In fact, if enough people do it I’ll do podcasts too, and make those public. That’s right—the more people who back the Patreon the less exclusive it gets. It’s like capitalist fundraising as understood by weirdo anarchists who hate capitalism!…

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Crinkly and Complex (Book Three, Part 72: Numerocracy, Fractals)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The first issue of Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Big Numbers was a lush and splendid object that positioned itself as a formal heir to Watchmen even as it rejected superheroes in favor of shopping malls and math.

Eventually, the snowflake’s edge becomes so crinkly and complex that its length, theoretically, is infinite. Its area, however, never exceeds the initial circle. Likewise, each new book provides fresh details, finer crenelations of the subject’s edge. Its area, however, can’t extend past the initial circle: Autumn, 1888. Whitechapel. – Alan Moore, From Hell

As with Watchmen, Moore uses a detached, omniscient perspective. Indeed, he takes it even further than he did in Watchmen, where he could use Rorschach as a pseudo-narrator. Big Numbers has no equivalent character. The closest it comes to narration is a montage at the end of the first issue in which one of the character’s poems is contrasted with a series of single panels reviewing the various characters that the book has introduced. For the most part, however, Big Numbers is told with an impassive objectivity. It takes flights into individual subjectivities, as with the dream sequence in the opening sequence or a later sequence in which Mr. World, a psychiatric patient released into the “care of the community,” fantasizes about the violent murder of a fellow bus passenger, but even these subjectivities are treated with a level of objectivity, the internal landscapes of the characters being treated as just another thing to look at.

Part of this sense of distance is simply the sheer number of characters involved. Moore’s outline for the series features thirty-one separate characters along with one group of characters, three characters from a story within a story, one ghost, and a set of people in a model railway set that will be treated as characters. In the forty pages of Big Numbers #1, twenty of these are introduced overtly, along with the ghost, and another is positioned in the background of a panel. Even though the action is centered almost entirely on Hampton, it gives the impression of a startlingly broad portrait of the town—one that, by the time the bulk of the remaining characters are introduced in the second issue, spans from the town’s rich and powerful to its underclass, with policemen, construction workers, students, sex workers, shopkeepers, and more all represented within the sweep of its worldview. And by exploring the connections among these people, as works of this sort of sprawling social realist genre inevitably do, Big Numbers displays the same sort of meticulous clockwork precision as its predecessor. The overwhelming sense of the first issue is one of inevitability; that a town in Thatcher’s Britain can only face the arrival of a massive shopping mall in one way. Moore even discussed as much, noting that “What I wanted to do was to show the fragility of human community, human relationships, and then to put this shadow of a large and inhuman shopping mall, a monolith of purely economic concerns, that would cast its shadow over that community.…

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The Agency of a Talking Anteater (Book Three, Part 71: Big Numbers #1)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: On the back of his monster success with Watchmen, Alan Moore declared that he would be self-publishing a comic about shopping mall and algebra.

“It fascinates because Sim is an absolutely brilliant maker of pages, a sublime cartoonist with total control of the form… and because, during the progression of the work, you can clearly see his mind crumbling under the pressure of his immense undertaking and twenty-five years of increasing solitude in which he can only express himself to the world through the agency of a talking anteater.” – Warren Ellis, “Grey Fog”

This declaration came in the context of Moore talking about his experiences self-publishing AARGH via his Mad Love imprint. This had been a decision made at the behest of Canadian writer/artist Dave Sim, who had found considerable success self-publishing his satirical Cerebus via his own press, Aardvark-Vanaheim. As Moore put it, “For years, this frosthardened son of the North has been standing there in his snowshoes, haranguing those of us within the bullpens and sheepdips of mainstream comics from an uncompromised position that’s been increasingly difficult to refute. ‘Hey! Why work for them guys? You must be some kinda stupid hosers, eh?’” It must be stressed, however, that Sim was in many ways a latter day William Blake—a singular and visionary talent who could not possibly have had the career he wanted on any terms other than his own. Blake, when this comparison was put to him in a 2020 seance, scoffed that “at least my gender politics weren’t that bad,” and it is notable that Moore would eventually terminate his relationship with Sim after Sim appended an introduction to an interview they did together explaining that “it would be really nice if, as a 50th birthday present, I could just type ‘IN THE NAME OF ALMIGHTY GOD COME OUT OF ALAN, THOU VILE AND ACCURSED.’ And have it work. Just like that when Alan read it. But, alas, I don’t think demonic possession—at least of the sort that Alan seems to have involved himself with—works that way” before digressing into a bit of Biblical exegesis to the effect of “women are hella icky.” Which is to say that, as effective an evangelist for self-publishing as he was, ultimately what worked for Dave Sim was not inherently likely to work for anyone else.

Equally, in a world in which Dave Sim was prominently advocating for self-publishing (and had not yet publicly accused Moore of being demonically possessed), Moore was never going to not try it. A central concern of his triptych of magna opera was the basic fact that these were his great works. They would not be owned by a vast American media company that could endlessly license them off in a cynical bid to bilk as much money as possible from rabid fans of malls and algebra. This was, for Moore, the point every bit as much as his creative interests. From Hell and Lost Girls both found their initial homes in Steve Bissette’s Taboo anthology, published via his own Spiderbaby Grafix, but for The Mandelbrot Set, or, as it eventually ended up being named, Big Numbers, Moore decided to put it out via Mad Love, investing the bulk of his profits from Watchmen (save for some with which he bought his parents a greenhouse) into the endeavor, with his wife Phyllis and partner Deborah Delano handling the business end of it.…

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