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Alan Moore: Discovering New Territory through Derivation

The Quarter Bin normally points out the cheesy shortcuts some comics take by helping themselves to material other writers have created in order to spare themselves the effort of originality, occasionally taking side trips into the territory of particularly amusing parodies. The feature manifestly intends to deal with borrowed concepts in comics, a topic that frequently involves reproachful implications. However, talents exist in the industry who turn derivation into a high art through which to expand the scope of the original material.

Therefore, the Quarter Bin Recycling Bin chooses to recognize Alan Moore for exceptional work in derivative comics. If this recognition means more than (say) Moore's recognition by American Spectator in a reader-penned nomination for that magazine's enemies list, so much the better. Unlike O'Rourke's enemies list (or, for that matter, the Oscars), any recognition Moore receives here can neither offend nor impress him. However, I give credit based on what he puts on the page and not on his politics, so in this sense, the trifling recognition of the Quarter Bin at least can inspire a suspicion of sincerity.

Alan Moore distinguished himself years before comics readers would associate his name with derivative material. Increasingly, however, he seems to flourish in the world of the pastiche and imitative property. As he adds to a resume of work centering in material designed to suggest the iconic aspects of established seminal characters, he becomes more likely to place himself in the role of superlative derivator of the medium.

A hack might steal everything he prints, but Moore does not need concepts external to his own imagination. Moore, instead of simply extracting material, sees possibilities that allow him to add to the bedrock concepts underlying numerous timeless pieces of superhero comics. Therefore, without derisive intent, I propose that Alan Moore has earned a place as a luminary of derivative comics.

Works on Prototypes

Batman: Killing Joke and the Superman piece "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow remain important pieces in an Alan Moore canon. To add to the regard one might hold for him after seeing his work on these pieces and his run on Swamp Thing, one might note that Alan Moore, uniquely, of all writers in the business since 1952, impressed Will Eisner enough to allow him, with Dave Gibbons, to produce a new Spirit book in the late 1990s.

Before Alan Moore decided he could stomach no more of what DC had to offer him (for whatever reason), he established himself as an exceptional writer, with the aforementioned Batman and Superman pieces under his belt. Perhaps the experience made him desire to work on the iconic heroes, even after his relationship with DC Comics had soured to the point that he resolved to have nothing more to do with them. For whatever cause, though, Alan Moore would increasingly turn to projects involving characters gleaned from seminal superheroes.

Watchmen and Reputation

Charlton Comics spawned sentimental attachments to its superhero properties in some readers and especially in certain professionals with solid connections to that defunct publisher. This loyalty apparently motivated Dick Giordano and Bob Layton to undertake the unfortunate L.A.W. miniseries (partially reviewed here).

However, to less dedicated comics readers, and to a number of stalwart consumers of material in the superheroic form, the Charlton heroes represented little more than a footnote or a refreshing side-trip away from the increasingly-congested tales from the continuity-heavy major publishers. Furthermore, some readers attached to the Charlton material because of Steve Ditko's role in creating many of its major characters.

In Watchmen, Alan Moore took a handful of disposable characters from a failed comics publisher and made them mean something, in the process creating a work of such impact that it would immediately assume a place in the canon of superhero comics. Watchmen set industry standards in ways foreign to simple-minded and formulaic slug-fest tales.

If one must describe Watchmen as dealing with some particular something, one might best describe it as a chronicle of the arrogance of power as it destroyed - or, worse, failed to destroy a number of long-time heroes whose personal abilities outstripped their ethics many years previously. For all the superheroic trappings, the story deals with the human condition even as it fulfills the Aristotelean criteria for tragedy (in that a number of characters portrayed within indeed get just what they deserve).

Miracleman

The character Miracleman ultimately derived from conventional and classic Golden Age superhero comics. As "Marvelman," he more accurately demonstrated his pedigree; his person and mythos had roots in Fawcett's Captain Marvel books.

Unlike Watchmen and the Charlton heroes, Moore took the character to such distant places that the prototype became very difficult to recognize. The visual concept differed enough to make the original difficult to deduce, but that doesn't keep a canny reader from the facts too long. However, Moore took Miracleman places Captain Marvel did not, could not, and perhaps should not, go. By the end of Moore's run, the resemblance lay mainly in the name (which in Britain remained "Marvelman") and in the fact that the character transformed to his superheroic form by means of a magic word.

A Miracleman piece might depict the consequences of supervillainous sexual abuse, or it might drift into an almost completely literary philosophical reverie by a key player during Moore's tenure, but one could count on it not to approach superhero comics in a fashion even vaguely reminiscent of a forties or fifties Captain Marvel piece. One might note the occasional homoerotic theme as an element particularly unlikely to have appeared in a Golden Age book from Fawcett.

In a sense, Moore made Miracleman a polarity apart from its apparent progenitor: The piece remained thoroughly experimental and not at all escapist, with a tone that few would accuse of sickly-sweet optimism.

Supreme

The name Rob Liefeld often evokes potent criticism, especially regarding his own dabbling in derivative works. Without intending to open any old wounds surrounding the man's reputation, his own derivative material does not tend to the depth or quality that Moore has desmonstrated again, and again, and again.

Moore, however, in his work with Image Comics and its offspring Awesome Comics, saw derivative creation as an opportunity rather than a straitjacket. When he applied himself to Supreme, he saw a character with a set of powers that clearly implicated borrowing from DC Comics' Superman. Moore, therefore, completed the picture by appropriating for Supreme the Silver Age concepts that Superman had lost when John Byrne revised the character in the 1980s.

As Moore had played a role in putting the Silver Age Superman to rest (in "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow"), he became the agent of his resurrection. Though congested and frequently strange, after all, the Superman mythos as it stood between 1964 and 1970 enjoyed a peculiar richness in its heritage of maudlin Wayne Boring-era tales of Superman's lost Kryptonian childhood, Weisinger's reliably odd additions to the mythos, and the stable of Kryptonian and semi-Kryptonian support characters that vanished in the aftermath of the Crisis on Infinite Earths series.

As in the case of Miracleman, Moore took Supreme places where Superman might never dare go. For instance, in a recent issue of Supreme (from a legacy script Moore left before he stopped doing work for Awesome Comics), Supreme must confront a swarm of super-puppies spawned by a frenzied rut-fest on the part of his dog, Radar, who, after seventy years, suddenly discovered sex and pursued a twelve-minute binge that sired over 300 litters of hybrid dogs.

The 1963 Books

Image Comics' 1963 books (reviewed here) in some ways represented a prodigious piece of unselfconscious irony. Creators who broke away from the constraining properties and editorial models of the locked-in mainstream publishers to create a "new comics" found a great current of appeal in attempting a pastiche of early Marvel Comics in the heyday of Lee, Ditko, and Kirby. Pretensions notwithstanding, key figures of the new generation of celebrity talent had inclinations that others might plausibly label as retrograde rather than cutting edge (although the best of their kind can span that gap).

Unlike other derivative pieces, however, 1963 constrained itself to the concept of an early-sixties Marvel Comics homage, and Moore faithfully remained within that framework, even though he acquitted himself with wit and intelligence.

Promethea

Promethea demonstrates another Moore piece where he has found new material in an old (some might claim "exhausted") concept. Imagine, if you will, the kernel of DC's Wonder Woman concept, but with elements of Fawcett's Captain Marvel (the transforming human who gains tremendous powers based on antique religious powers), Little Nemo (in her connection with a dream/mythical world of story that serves as both escape, menace, and source of her immortality), plus a conspiracy of enemies with both Faustian elements and dual natures rather similar to those of the villains in Steven King/Peter Straub's best-seller The Talisman. And, typical of Moore, this brief description leaves out more than it includes.

If post-Crisis Wonder Woman eventually became a goddess of truth, Promethea enjoys a similar role as an avatar/demigoddess of Hermetic knowledge, connected to ancient deities of knowledge like Hermes, Thoth (literally), and Prometheus (through her role and through the obvious eponymous connection).

Furthermore, as in Tom Strong, Moore infuses an futurism and heavy Victorian overtones in what seems likely to become another of his signature themes, what one might call "Moore Paleofuturism."

Inventing Superheroic Neoclassicism

A short monograph (such as this web page) can't really deal with Moore's work in depth. It can't even give a complete treatment to his derivative works, a subset of his famous pieces. Time, finance, and motivation, for instance, all failed to provide adequate impetus to include Greyshirt, a pulp-themed hero that belongs in a complete description of Moore's derivative works.

However, I didn't intend to approach this topic bibliographically. Rather it struck me that Moore's work has done much to make derivative pieces in superhero comics credible in a way no previous talent has made them. Parody creations like the Squadron Supreme (as originally formulated) and Cap'n Strong, after all, do not break into the precincts of such "Art" as we may describe with a capital 'A;" they remain, at best, guilty pleasures. With Moore's work, however, we see something we might call the beginnings of a comics neoclassicism.

Pre- and post-deconstructionist literary criticism recognized as key lights a number of people who retold stories, frequently in forms better than the originals. Homer retold stories. Sophocles retold stories. Shakespeare retold stories. In the twentieth century, John Gardner experimented with a modern neoclassicism in works like Jason and Medea and Grendel. Traditions of literary criticism recognize the merit of works that borrowed - sometimes shamelessly - from earlier pieces.

Moore's work, should we prove so lucky, will help comics readers to recognize the potential this approach holds for such canonical materials as the superhero comics medium has managed to spawn in its brief, post-1938, history.

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