For one thing, he felt that he had been conned by DC. And it was adored by reviewers: Time magazine declared it to be one of the 100 greatest novels published since 1923 – the only comic to make it onto the list.īut Moore wasn’t happy about all this success. In sales terms, it propelled DC Comics ahead of Marvel, its main competitor in the superhero business. Watchmen was an immediate commercial and critical hit. The medium had never known anything as richly intricate. Moore said that he wanted it to be “a superhero Moby Dick something with that sort of weight, that sort of density” - and he wasn’t far off. It even incorporated a comic-within-a-comic, plus prose sections at the end of each issue. It flicked between different points of view, and flitted back and forth through the decades, but a host of recurring symbols and themes tied everything together. Over the course of its 12 issues, Watchmen grew from being a noirish mystery thriller to an intricate mesh of interlaced stories. But even among all these eccentric aliens, robots and mutants, the strips written by Moore – The Ballad of Halo Jones, V For Vendetta – stood out: they were funnier, weirder, more erudite, more poetic, and more structurally inventive than anything being done by his peers.īut it wasn’t just this naturalistic, revisionist angle that was radical it was the comic’s dazzling narrative complexity. Both magazines exploded with wild ideas and unconventional characters, from the blue-skinned, genetically-engineered soldier, Rogue Trooper, to the fascistic future lawman, Judge Dredd. ![]() ![]() A long-haired, bushily bearded autodidact from Northampton, Moore was expelled from school for selling LSD, but that didn’t stop him making his mark on two British anthology comics, 2000 AD and Warrior, at the start of the 1980s. It’s debatable which is the better of the two, but Watchmen is the more ambitious, largely due to its writer, Alan Moore. Even to the most casual browser, these twin landmarks proved that superhero comics could be as sophisticated as any novel or film, despite all the people in them who strode around wearing underpants over their tights. Both of them divide their pages into neat grids of small rectangles, packing in far more information than a typical superhero comic both of them set their stories in a recognisable, but crumbling US on the verge of nuclear war both of them ponder what sort of person would put on fancy dress and punch muggers every evening (in short: a crazy person) and both of them ask how such gaudily-garbed do-gooders would be perceived in the media and by the man in the street. ![]() Given that they were being written and drawn at the same time, and so they had no chance of influencing one another, it’s remarkable how much the two mini-series have in common. The other was Watchmen, a 12-parter from the British writer-artist team of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. One was The Dark Knight Returns, a four-issue series, written and drawn by Frank Miller, which reimagined Batman – or rather, “The Batman” – as a middle-aged sadist. But two mini-series published by DC Comics raised the medium to the level of literature, and they both hit newsstands and comic shops within weeks of each other. The X-Men scripts written by Chris Claremont emphasised the growing pains of the troubled cast of misfits John Byrne’s clean, eye-catching artwork brought Hollywood glamour to the pages of The Fantastic Four.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |