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Monday, May 23, 2005
Alan Moore Then & Now
It's a cool coincidence that the day I plan to go over Alan Moore's two-part piece on Marvel comics from 1983 that 4ColorHeroes dug up (scroll down to "Moore on Stan Lee") is the same day Rich Johnston turns in a great piece on Alan Moore's reaction to films based on his works and his dissatisfaction with DC comics. I'm sure a lot of you have seen the Johnston piece already so let me just go over that quickly.
I never expected the V for Vendetta movie to be any good in the first place (to be honest it's far from my favorite Moore comic) so I can't say I'm too surprised to hear the script is not that hot. Not that there's really anything wrong with making some big changing when translating a book to a film. When you're creating something you have to be adamant in realizing your vision and if that means throwing away important parts of the original text then so be it. It's just there doesn't seem to be a creative vision being produced here that in anyway will stand beside what the book stood for and what it stood for is very important in these times of the Patriot Act. We'll probably just get another sci-fi/action movie that barley touches on the theme of governments’ hypnotizing of the public while evil deeds take place, something worth exploring in mass communication whether a film is based on a comic or not. Of course there's always the chance the film could make some serious evolution between what Moore read and what the final product is. I have no idea, I'm a guy who just wrote a paragraph on a subject that doesn't really interest him so who am I to say?
What I really got out of the piece was Moore's dealings with DC, both the history and the present. I've always thought it is somewhat nefarious that Watchmen is kept in print all this time so the rights never revert back to Moore and Dave Gibbons. DC can congratulate themselves that they've got a landmark graphic novel under their belts that is taught in classrooms and held up as a remarkable achievement in the medium but the only reason they have it under their belts is because they are too afraid to ever see the work be owned by its actual creators. One of those creators is writing an "event book" that brings the company a short-term victory while no real progress is made and the other now has a clause in his all his contracts that if any company he works with is eaten by a bigger company all is null and void. I think that says a lot about the comic book industry, certainly the big companies like DC and Marvel.
Speaking of DC's competitor (competitor in who can destroy the American comic book industry faster it seems) that brings me back 22 years ago when Moore wrote a two-part article in the pages of Marvel UK's Daredevils. Entitled Stan Lee: Blinded by the Hype and sub-titled An Affectionate Character Assassination it is both a memoir of a young boy enthralled with the world of the Fantastic Four, both their universe and publisher, as well as a man’s realization that what once captured his imagination has let him down.
It starts with the origin of a Marvel fan. Moore’s mother mistakenly bringing home Fantastic Four #3 instead of an issue of Blackhawk might have upset the younger Moore at first but he sound found himself enjoying the darker, weirder artwork of Jack Kirby and the dysfunction Lee created between the team. The fact that these superheroes bickered and could be petty was a great leap forward in Moore’s mind (as it was in the annals of superherodom). This was comics just a little closer to real life and just a little closer to be able to say something about to its readers, not just entrain them. That being said entertaining was still Marvel’s main goal and for Moore and many other children it certainly did in those days of M.M.M.S. Moore writes how Lee created this great hold on the audience by making it feel like being a Marvel reader was something special. The relationship between fandom and publisher might have gotten a boost with the EC books but Lee took it to a whole new level and Kid Alan sure could appreciate it.
There was something else, though. It couldn’t have just been the records sent to fan club members that had Don Heck joking around with Lee and Flo Steinberg (although that record is pretty awesome. I wonder if any blogger will post it…). The actual comics kept the pace rolling along to match a fan’s appetite. Moore says that fans stuck with Marvel as they grew up because of the “constant application of change, modification and development” the books expressed. My mind thinks of the Beatles, those fellow icons of the ‘60s, where we see a band go from “Love Me Do” to “Tomorrow Never Knows” to “Revolution No. 9” in less than the span of a decade. Kirby, who is easy to identify as the John Lennon to Lee’s Paul McCartney although I think that comparison is bit too simple, went from virtuoso depictions of actions in simple tales like the FF going up against Miracle Man (not the one Moore would make his claim on) to drawing mind-blowing tales of a god creature coming down to eat the Earth while the Human Torch reaches a sudden cosmic awareness he could never before know of. Having that happen all relativity close to each other is what makes the early Marvel comics incredible and left all the other publishers in the dust.
In the second half of the article Moore bemoans the loss of that spirit of change. Lee had left to concentrate more on publishing and speaking so the books now featured writers who had grown up on Lee’s books try to capture that magic only to have future creators who had grown up on those books try to capture that second-hand magic and so on and so on. Moore seems less pleased with the Lee disciples like Marv Wolfman than I am but his point about “grinding to halt” is there. I think a lot of it is due to the split between Kirby and Lee. Lee did not have Kirby’s innovation to sell and Kirby did not have Lee to sell his innovation. This is something Moore doesn’t realize in his article but I think it’s a big culprit. I still love a lot of Kirby’s DC work and consider the “New Gods” titles, books DC cut off from realizing the full potential Kirby had for them, to be of his finest work although there is a certain sense of excitement missing.
The notable thing is that the second half of the article, the “character assassination” part, is less about Lee as it as an indictment of the Big Two’s difficulty to develop its creativity capital. He mentions that this recycling of the “teenage problems” theme that has kept both Marvel’s Spider-Man and DC’s Firestorm alive, both examples Moore brings out to show a lack of progress, is not keeping the sales up. It is a bit comedic to see Moore peg selling 300,000 copies of a comic as failure when Marvel and DC would love to hit those numbers regularly today. Moore’s depiction of Lee’s legacy is something like what he would say about his own legacy to younger artists later on: don’t copy the techniques I employed, be inspired by the innovation brought on to innovate all on your own. Most creators are too lazy for such things and would rather just follow along in Lee or Moore’s footsteps than travel their own path.
I think that central message is an important one and I’m glad Moore has stuck with it throughout the years. That being said, I often feel that the Lee/Thomas/Wolfman/Englehart style of writing of superhero comics is the style that is perfect for superhero comics and should be employed more, no matter how “old fashioned” it feels. Superheroes live in a tight genre and one that is often stretched beyond its limits. I have to wince when I see caption boxes taking the place of thought balloons and entire comics come and go without a decent fight scene in it. I feel that even those steps in evolving the craft of writing superheroes give the genre too much than it deserves. When I read Gilbert Hernandez say that superheroes were more of a ‘60s thing for me I have to nod my head in approval, even if I was born in the year Moore’s two-part article came out. The ‘60s was the height of superheroes and ever since then things have been going down hill. Not just because of the regurgitation of Lee’s style but because I felt that the evolution of writing superheroes just doesn’t work. A sense of wonder and imagination seems lost somewhere during the ‘80s and I find myself going back to DC and Marvel’s output of the years before my birth for my superhero fun fix.
While I writing that I realize that I do like some of the superhero books of all decades, many of them completely different than the zippy style of the so-called Silver Age. Perhaps there’s a right way to explore the ins-and-outs of superheroism and a wrong way. Or maybe two of my perceptions of superhero comics completely contradict themselves. I can’t say that I have any plans to reconcile the two.
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