If I don't know a lot about comics but like Alan Moore's stuff, what else would you recommend

Try Grant Morrison, particularly his self-contained minis from the last year: SEAGUY, VIMANARAMA and WE3. Can't go wrong with ANIMAL MAN or DOOM PATROL, either. Try Peter Milligan too: HUMAN TARGET, ENIGMA, SHADE: THE CHANGING MAN (that was him, right?), or SKREEMER. Maybe, maybe Neil Gaiman would be up your alley. Give the first SANDMAN collection (PRELUDES AND NOCTURNES a try, as he was aping Moore heavily in that one--but it's very long and badly needed an editor by the end of things.) Writer wise, I'm not sure what else out there even comes close.

a Dave Sim addiction results in a lot of expense and frustration

This may be one of the truest things ever said on ILC.

Actually, if ILC will indulge me for a minute I'm going to list the stuff I haven't read. Tell me what's good.

Supreme
Miracleman
Lost Girls
A Small Killing
That collected DC tales book

the dc tales book is pretty good too, some real winners and some stuff (like the vigilante story or the green arrow story) that's meh.

The one issue I read was rubbish.

Miracleman

It seeemed good at the time, but in retrospect it is over whingey and over wordy, particularly as it reaches the final moments. Some great superhero FITEs in it, and I suppose the whinginess does kind of have an operatic quality to it.

Lost Girls

High class smut.

A Small Killing

Never read it.

That collected DC tales book

Complete genius, buy buy buy.

Miracleman = Absolutely classic reimagining of Captain Marvel (the DC one), and the chaos that real superheroes would throw the world into.

DC tales: essential if you don't have the Superman bits (I think it has "Whatever happened to Superman?" and "For the man who has everything", it definitely has the swampthing crossover), probably missable if you do. Actually, isn't there two collections of his DC stuff?

funny that the artist, in the intro, seems to hate it though!

i don't really get that they're palling around so much as laughing-to-keep-from-crying kinda jobby.

i think the joker backstory is great, really affecting and sad.

that's why i like it so much!

Would it be acceptable to say that I find Swamp Thing pretty unreadable?

the art can be pretty awful though... well, generally swampy HIMSELF and everything swampish looks great but the people look terrible.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo/programmes/index.shtml?id=culture_show

He comes across as rather weird, self-regarding and petulant. Also they've smothered the whole thing in cheesily spooky ambiance for no apparent reason.

And the collections a) are printed unreadably badly, b)left out some stories, c) don't have the ending but claim they do and d) don't pay royalties to anyone but Rob (who stole Veitch's art from the Kirby issue and won't give it back. last excuse given: "I went into my warehouse to look for it but something fell on my head because the shelves are too high and I had to go to the doctor." FACT!)

I heard that they're bringing out some kind of mega edition featuring Killing Joke (which I've lost) and Man of Tomorrow (which I haven't read), so I think I'll wait for that.

It's been out for a month or two, they left out the text from the final Superman story though so AVOID.

Totleben, no Bissette.

Bolland on the other hand, WTF? Has he even done anything but covers since then?

All or most of Mr Mamoulian, all the Actress & The Bishop stories, the frog and princess story in HeartThrobs, that torture thing in some other Vertigo anthology. The last was a bit dull but everything else is k-excellent. (Don't think he's done any comics he hasn't written himself since Killing Joke, though. And fair enough!)

was aphex twin, from selected ambient works volume 2.

> they left out the text from the final Superman story though so AVOID.

there was an interview with alan once where he was complaining about watchmen and how his cut was 10%, dc keeping 90% for editing errors IN. i guess nothing has changed.

(I searched for info, but what I could find is mostly stuff you probably know about.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8xRfzo9rIE&search=alan%20moore

I'm kinda disappointed that he plays into the whole "oh superhero comics are so goofy" thing. Of course, his comments were likely edited as such…

Pretty OTM - I was buying it on a monthly basis and it really was interminable. It does rally for the last hurdle, though - the last ten or so issues are pretty great, and contain one of the best cliffhangers Moore has ever written (the one involving the Painted Doll).

I've just looked at the cover gallery on GDC and realised that I missed an issue during the Kabbalah rant and didn't even notice at the time! That's how little was happening.

As for Ha!, I'll take his inked stuff any day before his painted stuff, which is still better than Ross. Heck, I'll even admit it's better than Gr3g Hr0n!

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier is due for the fall and covers the entire secret history of the LoEG. It starts with the first League, goes into the 1950’s, and right now looks to be about 185 pages of story.

As announced prevously it will have different pages in different sections representing different eras, and a 3-D section that Dunbier said is not a gimmick, has real meaning and that Moore uses the effect in a very complex portion of the story that really suits it.

Sounds good, but it will of course be about five years before it's released in paperback.

I know. I'm sounding awfully rockist...

(Not that I've read Sumpreme or more than one issue of 1963, but what you write on a message board doesn't have to stand up in court, dammit)

incidentally, his run on wildcats was quite good, wasn't it? i love it when the powerless brainy guys turn out to be secretly manipulative

1) why is FROM HELL out of print
2) when will it be in print again
3) why did i never read it when it WAS in print

2) There have been at least three printings I'm aware of (if you discount the floppies) so it's likely it'll be soon.

3) I'm sure you have your own reasons.

xpost to Doug's X-Planation.

1) why is FROM HELL out of print

I think what actually happened is that Preney, the printer for Aardvark-Vanaheim and the erstwhile Eddie Campbell Comics, had some "financial reorganisation" issues at the time that Top Shelf needed to go back to press. The reason that both artist/publishers used them was that because they still shoot process camera they get really really good repro even on really cheap paper that you can make 600 page books with and not sprain yr readers' wrists.

Unfortunately the entire rest of North America has given up on photo repro, so even though they could have had the negs released from Preney to print a new edition, no other printers were able to do it at a reasonable price. So Eddie's been scanning in his old photocopy backups of the original art in order to lurch into the twenty-first century and have shitty jagged lines all over everything like when he's printed by Marvel or DC.

I never got past the atrocious art.

I liked Halo Jones too, mainly because it's rather low-key and emotional. Based on what I've read I think Moore lis kinda like the Stanley Kubrick of comics: technically brilliant and interested on big ideas about the human condition, but not so much on real mundane human beings. As for non-Moore suggestions, the original poster would probably enjoy Milligan's and Fegredo's Enigma.

Someone should post that GMO interview where he talks about AM's sucky magic ability and about their ongoing chaos magick war!

Halo Jones is emotional? Actually, I think a good general question is how moving or unmoving (or alternatively, how human or inhuman) do you find Moore's work? I feel like he's good at doing that sort of basic plot outline humanism (see the Captain in Top Ten; most of top ten 49ers; the girl's dad in the first issue of top ten; there's a one panel look at Rorschach's face in Watchmen that I think is the most moving scene I can think of in superhero comics), but sometimes it may feel sort of empty. If this is the case, then that leaves us interested in the grand social and political views of a man whose politics often seem to be that of a rebellious, teenager, hippie-stoner, no? Usually people like political works not for their aesthetic qualities ("Gulag Archipellago--what beautiful metafictional rhyming couplets!"), but for their subject matter. With Moore, it's the reverse: no one really finds compelling the eighties cold war satire in Watchmen or the silly anarchism in V for Vendetta. They like these works in spite of their politics--for their art!

Wildcats - Travis Charest is good! Don't you think that Wildcats is like Moore parodying Watchmen? Tao = Ozymandias.

I love VfV for the politics! Valerie's Tale is one of my favourite issues of anything ever!

Also, I think LoEG supports about what I said earlier about Moore: when it comes to his characters, they usually feel cold and detached (maybe deliberately so). I guess Mina and Quatermain were supposed to be sympathetic, but I didn't really care for any of the characters. The only exception was the scenes between Mina and Hyde.

That said, the plots aren't the best point, everything else is. The characterisation, the cleverness, the art, the interest people might have in imagining 'what happens next/before'.

I thought the backup strips in LOEG2 were woeful, though. Just print a list of the books you've read and charge us 2 pages less, Mr Moore.

(x-post)

Yeah, but the Britishes were at least fleshed out.

xpost - not really. The people in the train carriage that gets smashed in the second volume are just twits. They get more dialogue than the average Manchu henchman, but I don't think they come off any better. Also the point of view of both series is English looking out - Moore could have done something else, but I don't really require that everything I read subverts all the unpleasant aspects of its influences.

(xx-post)

Andrew, I'm talking about what was the situation in real life.

I'd prefer both the death after that (and I can't believe I didn't see the joke about 'Serpentine Park' coming!) and the two scenes with Mina and Hyde, the one in between the two deaths, and the first one in the inn just after the first invasion. The latter is probably my favourite scene from the two series.

In fact, this is partly why people love the series is that they are to pulp novels what Watchmen was to comics, they sit down and ask "yes, but these people that did this, what would they be like"? And they come up with obvious and non-obvious answers: Hyde would be more and more the dominant monster and also capable of being surprised by one last thing in himself, Mina would be an outcast and also possessed of a completely iron will and self-posession, Quartermain would be an opium-addled sot and also an adventure junkie in a world that he thought had outgrown him, The Invisible man (name forgot, sorry) would be a capricious rumour and also a complete psychopath. Nemo gets a little short-changed, he's a terrifying outsider who trades off his reputation and also right at the end a noble savage disgusted to find out he was right about the whiteys all along.

I think I've made it clear that I have no interest in this question.

Vol 1 is remarkably tightly plotted, in a slightly old-fashioned way. It has a perfect three act structure.

Yeah, as I said it was a minor point, and I didn't want to bring in another heated debate. The stereotypes didn't ruin my pleasure, but that doesn't mean they're not problematic at all. As I said, it's kinda interesting how Moore choses to bring a new life into certain archetypes, but not to others. This is most obvious in the beginning of volume 1, where Quatermain saves Mina from being raped by the beastly Arabs. Now, if this was a satire, both Quatermain and the Arabs migth be presented as stereotypes: Quatermain as the gallant hero rushing to save the damsel in distress, the Arabs as evil rapists. The problem, however, is that the equation is only partial here. Quatermain is presented in a realistic light: he is a weak, opium-addicted old man. The Arabs, however, remain stereotypical. So, while I think there are many ways you can use ethnic and other stereotypes in an interesting manner, Moore's way of doing it is problematic because it's rather half-hearted.

Top 100 comics of all time.

If I was to rewrite the top 100, it would be quite different, but I guess it gives you a general view on my tastes. The reason I may sound overtly critical here is that most of the stuff I absolutely love isn't discussed here that often (but let's not go into that again, it isn't ILC's fault rather than mere a difference between my tastes and what comics are generally being discussed here). Still, I hope you don't mind me occasionally joining the threads here, even if I have negative things to say.

(x-post)

In fact, isn't this the most critical thing about art? BLATANT art-qua-socio/politico mirror tends to be Highway to Heaven at its most benign and, y'know, Liberality For All at its most amateurishly whateverest.

wrong Moore.

Wouldn't that have been antithetical to Moore's humanist aims in writing stories, Tuomas? Presenting both as self-conscious stereotypes seems like it would have come off as an easy swipe at his source material, whereas the OTT orcishness of the villains in LOEG makes the obvious comment on the source material in a subtle way while also being a celebration of it, and he still gets to tell a story about human beings instead of doing a MAD Magazine pisstake (the sort of thing that's better left to his First American).

Oh wait-- reading on, I realize that that's what Chuck and kenchen already said in response. Ah well. Hey, Nemo's not a stereotype! Doesn't his "they were only British" scene make up for Moore's supposed flaws in telling the story?

Most likely this book will be enjoyed by teenage fanboys around the world who wouldn't know good writing from their left [expletive deleted].