America's Best Comics Primer

Alan Moore etc. America's Best Comics Primer (2008)
I pretty much already reviewed this back here when it was published as just America's Best Comics, but this version was only a couple of bucks when I happened upon a copy and noticed a few bits and pieces which hadn't been in the other collection. This one reprints first issues of Tom Strong, Tom Strong's Terrific Tales, Tomorrow Stories, Promethea and Top 10, and it all started to make more sense once I noticed an imprint of DC Comics in the small print of the title pages. America's Best Comics ceased to be a thing when Moore pulled the plug in 2006, or thereabouts, and each reprinted issue is here followed by a page shunting us towards the gift shop from which we might purchase collected editions of Promethea and the rest; so beyond the words and pictures, this Primer is also a message from the sponsor, a few words about some fine entertainment products in which we might like to invest and which will be sure to give value for money and bring pleasure to all of the family for many years to come. In other words, it's DC Comics milking the Alan Moore cow as bleeding usual.

Of course, it's mostly good stuff, and the new stuff - meaning new to me, obviously - is decent, even the Cobweb story, and Top 10 is possibly the greatest thing Moore ever wrote; but you probably already knew that.

He should have changed his name to Alan Moo - you know, sort of like when Prince went around with slave written on his face.

Smax

Alan Moore, Zander Cannon & Andrew Currie
Smax (2004)
For anyone who may not know, Smax is a character from Moore's Top 10, a grunting blue giant given to thumping people whilst dispensing terse observations of a generally grudging disposition; and Top 10, in case that too should seem mysterious, is sort of a cop show set in a city populated by superheroes, but funnier than that probably sounds. The story of Smax, his background and origin, never really felt like a story which needed to be told, but I'm really glad that it was.

Smax is basically Alan Moore doing a Terry Pratchett, or if you prefer, giving fantasy fiction the treatment he dishes out to the superhero genre in Top 10; and so our blue man returns to his home dimension to defeat a dragon, and to do his best to not get married to his own sister. It's one of those tales which seems so simple and yet could have gone so horribly wrong at the hands of almost any other writer, or even at the hands of Moore himself under other circumstances; but it's cute without slipping over into twee, clever without being smartarsed, and the jokes are funny, even laugh out loud funny here and there.

After the mindfuck of nine-hundred-plus pages of Jerry Cornelius, Smax is exactly what I needed - warming and gentle without turning into Terry fucking Wogan; and in terms of this particular writer, it's also exactly what I needed after that Fashion Beast shite the other week. As with much of Moore's work for the America's Best imprint, you can really tell he had fun writing this book. Such a shame Wildstorm and DC had to go and fuck it up for everyone.

Top 10 book two

Alan Moore, Gene Ha & Zander Cannon Top 10 book two (2002)
Not wishing to perpetuate the beef, but reading Alan Moore immediately after Grant Morrison really throws the work of the two into sharp relief, not so much because they necessarily have anything in common as with regard to their ongoing exchange of sneering commentary. The major salvoes appear to have been launched from the mystic slaphead camp, seeming particularly poorly targeted and fuelled by what looks a lot like butthurt - as keyboard warriors are wont to refer to the resource in question. Most notoriously, Morrison referred to Moore's Watchmen as the three-hundred page equivalent of a sixth form poem, which is a bit rich coming from the creator of Gideon Stargrave; and for all that Marvel Boy is readable, compared to Top 10, at best it's a precocious sixteen year old playing you his Muse albums. I'm not aware of either title being particularly suggested for mature readers - or at least no instructions of that sort appear on my copies - but Top 10 at least features themes which will be familiar to those who mow lawns, hold a driving license and are able to prepare their own meals, as opposed to themes which are only going to make sense to comic book obsessives.

Shocking contrasts aside, Top 10 is - very roughly speaking - a caped variant on Moore's D.R. & Quinch treated as photorealist soap opera. One might argue it's the last word in the engrittification of the superhero which began with Peter Parker complaining about school and acne, and ends here with characters who are in themselves more interesting and remarkable than their powers or casually absurd appearance. Top 10 is funny just as real life tends to be funny, occasionally poignant and sad without needing to break out the violins or fire puppies from a cannon, and it impresses by getting on with its own business whilst assuming that readers will be sufficiently mature to form opinions of their own. Top 10 is as perfect a superhero book as you're ever likely to find, and it shows up all the shouting and bombast of the genre for wind blown down empty tunnels; a million alternate realities collapsing into a quantum space-arse will never be so powerful as the raw force of human farts.

Top 10

Alan Moore, Gene Ha & Zander Cannon Top 10 book one (2000)
Here's another title I happened upon by chance when noticing that the local library had added a graphic novel section. I'd been driven away from comics a few years earlier by the contents of Grant Morrison's navel and Garth Ennis celebrating his five-hundredth successful retelling of that story in which a man, nursing a hangover following a night of Guinness and Irish show tunes, finds himself wrestling inner demons; Top 10 seemed oddly uninviting, and it took me a long time to get around to borrowing the collection, but it left a good enough impression for me to buy the thing more recently when I stumbled across a copy in Half-Price.

I'd lost track of Alan Moore roughly around the time of From Hell - issues of which I kept missing for some reason - but assumed he'd turned his back on superheroes - excepting I suppose 1963 which seemed so far into the realms of parody that it probably didn't count. It seems I had assumed correctly, as he explained here:

At the time I thought that a book like Watchmen would perhaps unlock a lot of potential creativity, that perhaps other writers and artists in the industry would see it and would think this is great, this shows what comics can do. We can now take our own ideas and thanks to the success of Watchmen we'll have a better chance of editors giving us a shot at them. I was hoping naively for a great rash of individual comic books that were exploring different storytelling ideas and trying to break new ground.

That isn't really what happened. Instead it seemed that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about twenty years of very grim and often pretentious stories that seemed to be unable to get around the massive psychological stumbling block that Watchmen had turned out to be, although that had never been my intention with the work.

More recently, he expanded upon the specific details of his disillusionment with the genre:

I've recently come to the point where I think that basically most American superhero comics, and this is probably a sweeping generalisation, they're a lot like America's foreign policy. America has an inordinate fondness for the unfair fight... I believe that the whole thing about superheroes is they don't like it up them. They would prefer not to get involved in a fight if they don't have superior firepower, or they're invulnerable because they came from the planet Krypton when they were a baby. I genuinely think it's this squeamishness that's behind the American superhero myth. It's the only country where it's really taken hold. As Brits, we'll go to see American superhero films, just like the rest of the world, but we never really created superheroes of our own.

Nevertheless, as is probably obvious, before too long he came crawling back with the America's Best Comics imprint, and so at the risk of reviewing by quotation:

When I was working upon the ABC books, I wanted to show different ways that mainstream comics could viably have gone, that they didn't have to follow Watchmen and the other 1980s books down this relentlessly dark route. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I'm not a particularly dark individual. I have my moments, it's true, but I do have a sense of humor. With the ABC books I was trying to do comics that would have perhaps appealed to an intelligent thirteen-year-old, such as I'd been, and would still satisfy the contemporary readership of forty-year-old men who probably should know better. But I wanted to sort of do comics that would be accessible to a much wider range of people, and would still be intelligent even if they were primarily children's adventure stories.

So there you go.

Top 10, not entirely unlike Marshal Law, presents a variation on an old Simpsons Comics storyline in which the atomic power plant inadvertently irradiates the entire population of Springfield turning everyone into caped superheroes, or at least there's so many of them walking, flying, or swimming around as to negate the prodigal implication of the super suffix. Possibly this is why Moore dubs the inhabitants of his sprawling Neopolis science-heroes - they may have strange, unearthly powers, but so does everyone else, and they're so regular they could have been written by Harvey Pekar.

Whilst Marshal Law bends the genre over for a prune juice enema it will never forget, Top 10 is an altogether more gentle affair - sort of like Moore's Bojeffries Saga rewritten as Hill Street Blues with superheroes - packed with gritty blue collar detail, yet very funny without feeling the need to pull Lenny Henry comedy faces. Because it's always easier to dissect a flaw than a virtue, it's actually quite difficult to know what to say about Top 10 once we're past motivation, secret origins, and descriptions of what it isn't, not least because it's so unassuming. There's no big message; it just tells a story - or rather several stories simultaneously - and leaves the reader  reminded of how much fun superhero comics could be before Moore unwittingly ruined it for everyone with Watchmen - by his own testimony -  and had to re-reinvent them all over again.

Weirdly, I think this might be one of the best things Alan Moore has ever written, and before I forget, the art is absolutely sublime.