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Sunday, June 08, 2008
Droids
I've been reading Alan Moore's Future Shocks from old issues of 2000AD. At BOOM! I can pitch the odd Zombie Tale story (I suppose Cthulhu Tales as well but I've never read any Lovecraft stuff in my life). I figure if I'm going to need to know how to do a good five to eight page story I might as learn from one of the greats, right?
When I was first discovering Watchmen, Swamp Thing and From Hell I looked at Moore's work with this mix of wonder and frustration. I was perplexed with how he could come up with so many great ideas. I felt the same about Grant Morrison. Reading their stories I figured I could come up with one really clever idea inside a year, whereas Moore and Morrison could come up with 730 crazy new concepts in the same time frame. How did this happen?
Reading Moore's earliest stuff I think I know. For Future Shocks he was basically being asked to come up with a whole new sci-fi creation roughly every week. He was building his career and supporting his family this way. A person's imagination can grow by leaps and bounds when there's a paycheck dangling at the end.
The younger me saw Moore and Morrison as something like Mike Baron and Steve Rude's Nexus. I thought the creative process meant one would slumber and let the unconscious take over, only to awake with a shiny new idea ready to unleash upon the world. Now I know things aren't quite that enigmatic. Delving into the deeper parts of the brain is an important part of the job. But instead of being these Shaolin Monks of creativity in reality things were probably much more domestic. In their early days ol' Alan and Grant were probably staring at their typewriters thinking "fuck, the rent's overdue and I need to come up with something the jaded British comic book fan has never seen before and fast!" That's the spark of wonderment right there.
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