Month: May 2014

Two quick thoughts on this PR about the launch of the new digital comics app/imprint Electricomics:

1. Only one artist is listed in that creative line-up. Is that because they only have one artist signed up, or is art that unimportant to the company?
2. Of course Alan Moore is “revisiting” an existing character. For such an important, revolutionary comic creator, the extent to which Moore revamps existing properties instead of creating new ones is kind of amazing. Miracleman, Swamp Thing, Watchmen, Supreme (which is a one-two punch, considering the 1950s Superman tribute he turned the character into), League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Lost Girls, and arguably Tom Strong and Promethea, as well… I’m sure I’ve forgotten some in there (Does From Hell count, in that he didn’t create the characters per se? Hmm). It’s oddly fascinating to me.

(via graemem)

Re #2, I think at this stage it’s just What He Does – Moore is an artist who is fascinated by lots of different aspects of the relationship between creativity and culture, and using existing cultural properties as icons or totems or IDK jokes is a good way to explore that. I’ve noticed people on Twitter jumping on this, but it seems no more odd or negative a tendency – not that you’re saying it’s negative – than Garth Ennis writing yet another war comic, which I see we’re also invited to get excited about.

It’s interesting that he does this, of course, and I remember that Amazing Heroes (?) list of What Alan Moore Is Reading from 1988 or so which was basically all original-IP indies – Love And Rockets, Puma Blues, Cerebus, Beanworld… I think Zot! and American Splendor too, EXACTLY the reading list any diligent Comics Journal reader who was sick of superheroes would have put together. (Also, perhaps importantly, almost all ‘writer-artists’ to use the ungainly term of the era). And a bit after that he starts Big Numbers and From Hell, which are very much the Alan Moore projects you might predict someone with those tastes would have.

That feels like a real pivot point – I wonder the extent to which the failure of Big Numbers (and the difficulties in getting From Hell done) affected his creative direction. After that, as everyone points out, he tended to prefer working with existing ideas, characters, etc.

(People often go – ah but he attacks other people for doing that and then he does it himself, the big hairy hypocrite – but for all that I find Moore in interviews infuriating about a lot of things, and for all that I’m not actually that in love with or engaged with his creative approach since about Promethea… I think what angers him – aside from a certain amount of guilt – isn’t the fact of the revivalism but the way the revivalism is so crude and one-dimensional and circular and unadventurous and as the icing on the cake centred so obsessively on the properties of companies that have fucked him and others over. “Using old bits of popular culture” is a really really REALLY broad umbrella.)

(via tomewing)

Oh, I think Big Numbers is crazily important in the grand scheme of Moore’s originality as a comic book creator – I think the failure of that project really impacted his idea of what comic readers “want” as a whole, and also what the medium can and can’t support in terms of subject matter. I think the way in which Big Numbers fell apart cemented his opinion of mainstream comic book culture as something intellectually retarded and unwilling to engage in anything other than nostalgic reworkings no matter how ambitious they may be in scope or executions.

It’s odd to wonder what Moore would be like had Big Numbers made it to completion. What comics would be like, in fact.