Follow The Leader: On Doom, Gloom and 'Deconstruction' in the Comic Book Works of Alan Moore
The essential idea of the series was that, if Superheroic Fiction is seen as somehow analogous to Mythology, then it's missing one thing - the idea of a Ragnarök - an ending. Most mythic or folkloric cycles have inherent within them, some concept of an ending, but the goal with comics as a commercial property are to continue publishing as long as they remain profitable.
During the discussion, someone commented that the whole idea was more of:
(By 'deconstruction', of course, he meant, filling superhero stories with gloom and doom and generally trying to tear down everything audiences love about these characters, rather than anything Jacques Derrida would recognize by the word, but wat the hell, I'll play. Besides, I don't understand 90% of what Derrida was saying, either).
I had to disagree.
From my perspective, it feels more like:
To be fair, there is a big chunk of Moore's work that is about undermining the image of perfect and powerful heroic figures. Most of this was written during the mid-late 1980's, where two, larger-than-life figures, one of whom was a Fantasy Cowboy from a Mythic Golden Age and the other an equally mythologized Iron Lady, were using their strength, power and capacity for devastating violence to assert a form of absolute control, and justifying this control with appeals to Absolutist Moral Necessity.
As an anarchist, Moore would have found this appalling, but as a writer, he'd definitely be able to see the ways in which the public images of these people had been built using mythic and heroic archetypes.
And there's no doubt that that sentiment would have been an influence on something like 'Marvelman' or 'Watchmen'.
However...
Those two series represent a fraction of Moore's overall comics output. From the get-go, Moore's work has always been wildly eclectic, ranging the full gamut from daft, gonzo comedy riffs on science fiction tropes and weirdly conceptual horror stories, to overtly political and meticulously researched historical/occult studies, and overwrought operatic superhero desconstruction with all the resultant sturm-und-drang, but it's the latter that audiences glommed onto.
I mean, if he's the 'Grimdark Superheroes Bloke', where do 'Time Cops', 'DR & Quinch', 'From Hell', 'For the Man who has Everything', 'Mogo Doesn't Socialize', 'The Hyper-Historic Headbang', 'Maxwell the Magical Cat', 'Footsteps' (from 'Secret Origins' #10), 'The Ballad of Halo Jones', 'V for Vendetta' or 'The BoJeffries Saga' fit in all of this?
He even saw it himself. He started out with a goal of pushing the envelope in all different directions, but realized that fans only followed when he was pushing in one direction. You can see him beginning to realize that fans were deftly stepping around the humanity and warmth in work like 'Watchmen' or 'Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow', or the wild, near-infinite possibilities of 'Marvelman: Olympus' to get to the murder and misery bits. And in response, he shifted gears.
Suddenly, he was doing 'Supreme' and '1963' and trying to remind readers that you could revisit old characters and push them in directions besides horror and nihilism. In fact, if you remind yourself of why you read these things in the first place, you might even be able to look at them with new eyes.
With his America's Best Comics stuff, he filled pages with wonderment, adventure, romance, transcendent occult wisdom, tributes to creators whose work he loved and admired and comedy - comedy in all shapes and sizes, from the slapstick of 'Splash Brannigan' to the satire of 'First American' and 'Jack B. Quick' and the non-stop, anything goes, Mad Magazine meets Law and Order love letter to comics in all their absurdity and magnificence that was 'Top Ten'. All of them pushing in wildly different directions ... every single way EXCEPT miserable nihilism...
But when asked about his entire career, everyone only ever seems to want to return to the misery and gloom of the worst excesses of five years or so in the mid-late 80's.
It all starts to feel like being invited to be shown around a palace and but only wanting an exhaustive tour of the downstairs shitter.
"Moore's standard fixation on the deconstruction of superheroes"
(By 'deconstruction', of course, he meant, filling superhero stories with gloom and doom and generally trying to tear down everything audiences love about these characters, rather than anything Jacques Derrida would recognize by the word, but wat the hell, I'll play. Besides, I don't understand 90% of what Derrida was saying, either).
I had to disagree.
From my perspective, it feels more like:
"The standard fixation on Moore's deconstruction of superheroes."
To be fair, there is a big chunk of Moore's work that is about undermining the image of perfect and powerful heroic figures. Most of this was written during the mid-late 1980's, where two, larger-than-life figures, one of whom was a Fantasy Cowboy from a Mythic Golden Age and the other an equally mythologized Iron Lady, were using their strength, power and capacity for devastating violence to assert a form of absolute control, and justifying this control with appeals to Absolutist Moral Necessity.
As an anarchist, Moore would have found this appalling, but as a writer, he'd definitely be able to see the ways in which the public images of these people had been built using mythic and heroic archetypes.
And there's no doubt that that sentiment would have been an influence on something like 'Marvelman' or 'Watchmen'.
However...
Those two series represent a fraction of Moore's overall comics output. From the get-go, Moore's work has always been wildly eclectic, ranging the full gamut from daft, gonzo comedy riffs on science fiction tropes and weirdly conceptual horror stories, to overtly political and meticulously researched historical/occult studies, and overwrought operatic superhero desconstruction with all the resultant sturm-und-drang, but it's the latter that audiences glommed onto.
I mean, if he's the 'Grimdark Superheroes Bloke', where do 'Time Cops', 'DR & Quinch', 'From Hell', 'For the Man who has Everything', 'Mogo Doesn't Socialize', 'The Hyper-Historic Headbang', 'Maxwell the Magical Cat', 'Footsteps' (from 'Secret Origins' #10), 'The Ballad of Halo Jones', 'V for Vendetta' or 'The BoJeffries Saga' fit in all of this?
He even saw it himself. He started out with a goal of pushing the envelope in all different directions, but realized that fans only followed when he was pushing in one direction. You can see him beginning to realize that fans were deftly stepping around the humanity and warmth in work like 'Watchmen' or 'Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow', or the wild, near-infinite possibilities of 'Marvelman: Olympus' to get to the murder and misery bits. And in response, he shifted gears.
Suddenly, he was doing 'Supreme' and '1963' and trying to remind readers that you could revisit old characters and push them in directions besides horror and nihilism. In fact, if you remind yourself of why you read these things in the first place, you might even be able to look at them with new eyes.
With his America's Best Comics stuff, he filled pages with wonderment, adventure, romance, transcendent occult wisdom, tributes to creators whose work he loved and admired and comedy - comedy in all shapes and sizes, from the slapstick of 'Splash Brannigan' to the satire of 'First American' and 'Jack B. Quick' and the non-stop, anything goes, Mad Magazine meets Law and Order love letter to comics in all their absurdity and magnificence that was 'Top Ten'. All of them pushing in wildly different directions ... every single way EXCEPT miserable nihilism...
But when asked about his entire career, everyone only ever seems to want to return to the misery and gloom of the worst excesses of five years or so in the mid-late 80's.
It all starts to feel like being invited to be shown around a palace and but only wanting an exhaustive tour of the downstairs shitter.
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