I know everyone's already thrashed this out, but I'm reading these for the first time.

I'm enjoying it. It's homage not parody, despite a few moments, and it's really well done. I'm not sure how Moore can write things like this (among other stuff) and then claim he has no love for superheroes.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/ ... s-watchmen

Has Moore claimed he has no love for superheroes? I thought he only lamented their dominance over a medium that can be used to tell any kind of story.

He's said that he much prefers writing horror. He's made statements that indicate he writes superhero stuff because it's commercial and he knows it will sell.

I don't believe it, though. I think he just enjoys messing with interviewers.

https://www.wired.com/2009/02/ff-moore-qa/

I really enjoyed those, being a comix fan and an ERB fan.

I think Moore loves to write about what he used to enjoy reading about when he was younger.
And, Tom Strong just convinced me that Alan used to love reading The Pulps, in particular,
Doc Savage. I haven't read much Doc Savage myself, but, yeah, combine that with Superman
and the old Doc Strange character from Thrilling Comics, and you have a nice foundation
for Alan to tell new stories.

Alan Moore writes like the's an expert reader of everything cool that was published in the 20th century. But he's not really old enough to have done that, and it's a lot of stuff that was hard to find or get a hold of. He was a much younger man in the 1980's, but wrote like he had spent a lifetime absorbing "pulp culture." (A term I have coined for all things cool and comic booky).

In a recent(ish) interview he said that superhero comics was always only a job. Even at the beginning of his career, he had no real desire to write superheros. It was an opportunity that was offered to him.

Yeah, I agree. For awhile there, it seemed like one of his things was to be revisiting
other people's works of fiction—but about 100 years after they originally appeared.
Or maybe that was just League of Gentlemen stuff. I thought I saw it elsewhere, though.

I agree.

In that wired interview I posted a link to upthread, Moore mentions that modern superhero comics are for 'hopeless nostalgics' or people who suffer from stunted emotional intelligence. He then goes on to mention that he's currently writing a history of magic which is designed to be exactly the sort of thing he'd have loved when he was eight years old.

I really think he enjoys saying contentious, contradictory stuff: he knows he'll get away with it in an 'emperor's new clothes' way so he just messes with people's expectations for his own entertainment. In reality, as others have said, Moore couldn't have written the things he has as well as he has if he didn't have a detailed knowledge of them and an innate understanding of how they work and why they're appealing. He's absorbed all this stuff from an early age and things like TLOEG prove that he's an avid student of popular culture. He's examined this in-depth stuff because he's interested in it not because it's 'just a job'. That line is just an example of Moore playing games, IMO. The fact that he's been referencing The Threepenny Opera since the 1980's (at least) is evidence of this, as is his extensive use of 19th Century pop cultural characters in TLOEG.

He's doing his own take on the Wold Newton Family concept, in which all these fictional characters are somehow interrelated. His remarks about how certain characters are continually popular, or continually being reinterpreted, is him showing the interviewer that he actually thinks about this stuff. None of his work is off the cuff or done carelessly - Moore loves this stuff. He just likes to equate superheroes with fascism because it sounds contentious and he likes to get a reaction from people.

His work clearly reveals his influences and fascinations. His interviews are like little performances he gives for fun, I think.

In one of the latest TLOEGs , Moore has an unimportant scene showing the frozen corpse of a public domain superhero (Stardust the Super Wizard:a hero that used to punish evil doers in a way that would make the Spectre squeamish)


Although I was familiar with the character, I wasn't aware that it's creator had gotten drunk, and had frozen to death.(its implied that this is how stardust was defeated)
The character with the U on his chest, is not in the Public Domain. It's creator(Mick Anglo: creator of Marvel Man) gave the rights to Moore.

I believe Hanzo has posted images from Stardust the Super Wizard before.

Thanks for posting that, Steve. It's little details like that one which prove Moore knows all about this stuff and that it's more than a convenient well-paying gig. If Moore genuinely just stumbled into writing superhero stories he certainly managed to right himself convincingly. I think he's simply a curmudgeon who enjoys pretending he doesn't completely love all this stuff (for whatever reason).

While Tom Strong reminds me of Doc Savage in concept, in practice the book reads more like The Fantastic Four to me. Tom is Reed, Dhalua is Sue, Tesla is Johnny... and I suppose King Solomon is like a British Ben Grimm, but he isn't as important to the book as Ben is to the FF.

It's a theme that shows up in his work as well. I think he genuinely likes exploring the idea, and loves the irony of characters' goals and ideals creating the opposite effect of their intentions.

I think he does enjoy it, but he resents it because it's the only genre that seems to have any pull in the comics medium. I also think it isn't his genre of choice. I'm reminded of Mark Evanier saying that if Kirby could really do anything in comics, he probably wouldn't even have done New Gods -- his true choice would have been to do pseudo-autobiographical stuff of growing up in NYC or fighting in WW2. Just like he did romance, crime and horror comics in the 40s and 50s, he did superhero stuff mainly because it was what was selling. But he did certainly enjoy it.

I'm up to issue #16 and I'm enjoying the world the characters inhabit much more than I enjoyed Supreme's world (which I still liked). It's clear from the 'Science Hero' stuff that Tom's world is the same one that Top Ten occurs in (albeit in another city).

I agree with Hanzo's FF comparison as well.

Fantastic Four very much reminds me of Doc Savage. The way Monk and Ham snipe at each other is just like Johnny and Ben. And each member of the team has a specialty.

I've seen this argument made as well, and it probably has some merit. After all, the Fantastic Four were just super-powered versions of Challengers of the Unknown, and the Doc Savage influence is even more plainly clear in that property.

I guess the dude from Dial B for Blog did a feature on how Doc inspired the FF --


http://www.dialbforblog.com/archives/48/

Doc's building is just like the Baxter Building.

Great point.

It's interesting - if you boil these ideas down you can identify the raw elements and see where they came from. Even Pneuman is a HERBIE analogue.

I disagree with Moore's point about superheroes being inherently American. Literally every human culture we have any records of - written or verbal - have stories about heroes capable of superhuman feats of strength, bravery, self-sacrifice, etc. It may be that the specific stylistic elements Moore's talking about were defined in American pulps and comics but the basic idea has existed since the beginning of human culture. I don't see Superman as being a pop-cultural reaction to the firepower employed an WWII (as Moore suggests). I see Superman as the latest version of an age-old concept. A lot of what we think of as conventionally heroic (in terms of fiction) dates back to Hellenic Greece. Much of this stuff pre-dates Christianity and is continually being renewed.

I'm sure Moore knows this. Maybe he didn't get to wash his tights and he was just being obstreperous?

Inherently American. You're just butthurt because Aussie.