Alan Moore

I mentioned The Watchmen in my blog about “Dark Knight”.  I’m not a big comic book fan, but I make an exception for Alan Moore – somehow his work is compelling, even if it is, sometimes, pretentious.  He’s done tons of stuff, but by far his most popular – and the only stuff I’m familiar with (!) – is listed below.

 The Watchmen (artwork: Dave Gibbons).  Of course, we have the plot by now, but for those of you who neither saw the movie nor read the graphic novel, which supposedly started this whole thing:  Dr Manhattan, the big blue naked guy, is virtually omnipotent, but he’s so intelligent that sometimes he’s a little clueless.  He’s so far above us all that he has trouble relating to us or talking to us as equals.  Thanks to his work in Indochina, the US won the Vietnam War, and Nixon was able to weasel 5 terms, so he’s still President in 1985, which is when the story takes place.  Another superhero, the arch-cynical Comedian, is killed, and his comrade Rorschach takes it upon himself to find out what’s really going on.  Ultimately they uncover a huge plot by Ozymandias – sort of Batman’s Bruce Wayne without the Batman part, and without Wayne’s high moral standards  – to solve the Cold War at the cost of several million lives and framing Dr. Manhattan.  Along the way, Silk Spectre – the token super hot superheroine, and daughter of the original Silk Spectre from WWII – and Nite Owl, himself a 2^nd generation Nite Owl – the nerdy but wealthy Batman type – hook up and help out Rorschach. This is one story where you’re unsure to be amazed and impressed with its complexity or disgusted by its sheer cynicism and weight.  It’s certainly different.

 V for Vendetta (artwork: David Lloyd).  Also turned into a movie, with Hugo Weaving (Elrond from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, and the computer nemesis from the Matrix movies) behind the Guy Fawkes mask and Natalie Portman as the girl.  This takes place in the distant future, where England is now a totalitarian dictatorship, very reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984.  One lone rebel, known only as V, and perpetually wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, takes on the hapless regime, with a surprising amount of success.  We don’t know who he is (or even if it is a “he”) but have some clue that this person survived torture and other atrocities at one of the regime’s concentration camps.  In some ways it actually seems like a sequel to 1984 – what if, instead of the hapless Winston, we actually had someone who had the guts and the intelligence to pull off an underground war, by himself, against the state.  Certainly Jon Hurt didn’t seem like that guy.

 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (artwork: Kevin O’Neill).  Yes, turned into a movie, with Sean Connery as Allan Quartermain (H. Rider Haggard).  Moore basically picks famous, notable fictional characters from popular American and English literature, slams them together as superheroes, then sets them off on various sophisticated adventures.  The other heroes are The invisible Man (H.G. Wells), Dr. Jeckyll/Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson), Captain Nemo (Jules Verne), and Wilhelmina Murray (Bram Stoker).  The villains were first Professor Moriarty (Arthur Conan Doyle’s nemesis to Sherlock Holmes, who himself is absent) then H.G. Wells’ Martians from War of the Worlds.    

 Lost Girls (artwork: Melinda Gebbie).  I’m still waiting for the movie of this one, which is probably not going to happen.  Alice in Wonderland, Wendy (from Peter Pan), and Dorothy (from Wizard of Oz) find themselves together in a hotel somewhere in Europe (Austria?) in the spring of 1914, just before WWI is about to explode.  Alice, by this time, is an older, mature woman, Wendy is older but unhappily married (frustrated, as we can imagine), and Dorothy is still young and single, but has a boyfriend.  There is LOTS of sex here: 50% lesbian, 40% heterosexual (though some of that is incestuous) and 10% gay.  The artwork, as done by Gebbie, is meant to imitate a children’s book of the turn of the century, though clearly the content is well beyond any children’s book.  This was borderline erotic vs. interesting.

 Of course, Alan Moore, who is a big Simpsons fan, appeared as himself in a 2007 episode.  Funny, though – none of his stuff has been made into an animated film, it’s all been live action.  Perhaps Lost Girls can fill this role.