Oh, and while I’m at it: V for Vendetta was overrated. The scene where Evie discovers she was locked up by V and not the state undermined his entire storyline. While he was trying to teach her what he’d gone through, one fact remains: Evie’s sole experience of oppression was never at the state’s hands, but at V’s, and her subsequent loyalties should have reflected this. It’s like learning about American imperialism from Harrison Ford’s character in The Mosquito Coast.
But Alan Moore is a comic-book writer, not a screenwriter or a novelist. It seemed to me that you were saying you’d have more respect for him as a comic-book writer if he’d write a good screenplay, when writing screenplays is not what he wants to do.
I admit I wasn’t aware he’d written a novel. Have to keep an eye out for that. I disagree with you viz. the made up language thing. For reference, see Iain Banks’ Feersum Endjinn or Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, to name a few. Or the works of Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote in a dialect so thick it might as well have been a made-up language. However, I haven’t read Moore’s novel, and perhaps his attempt at this particular device was poorly executed.
I do agree with you about V for Vendetta being over-rated. It’s a solid effort, and would have been a crowning achievement from a lesser writer, but compared to Moore’s later efforts, it is clear how much more room he had to grow as an artist. There’re some problems with continuity, for example. One character is clearly presented as being gay, but is later ret-conned into a predatory heterosexual after Moore decided that homosexuals were rounded up along with the blacks and other “undesirables.” And the whole thing about driving that first victim insane by destroying his collection of dolls was highly contrived.
I also agree with you about the book falling apart after Evie got out of the cell, but mostly because after that point she had that hideous short, curly perm. Bleh. I liked her better with long hair. However, you’re wrong when you say that was her first taste of oppression. When we are first introduced to her, she’s been orphaned by the state, functionally enslaved, and forced by impossible state policies into taking up prostitution, which the state has mandated to be punishable by death. Still, I’m sympathetic to the conclusions you drew from her experience: I found her continued loyalty to V afterwards unconvincing. Although the story she found while in their from the actress who had been the cell’s “previous” resident was tremdously affecting.
I forgot to mention another one of Moore’s best: 1963
Sure, it was left uncompleted (a shame – he was moving toward some interesting territory), but it was both a wonderful hommage to Marvel Comics of the 60s and a vicious satire on Stan Lee. “Affable Al” was one of Moore’s greatest characters.
Hmm, good point. The appeal to Moore’s comics is, even when he’s writing about dopey shit like superheroes, his work has a recognizably literary quality. Except for Gaiman and Los Bros, you can’t say that about very many comic book writers (Even, ironically, the numerous ones who are also successful novelists). So yeah, I expect books from Moore, and I expect to enjoy them without reservation. As for the screenplays: If he’s not going to write them, I wish he’d just sit on the movie rights to his stories, like Bill Watterson. You know that dread feeling you get when you see the words “Based on a story by Stephen King”? After the first two awful ones, King can’t believably feign outrage any more, and neither can Moore.
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My views here are tinted by a story I heard on NPR last year. At a Jewish Summer camp in the 70s, the kids were roasting marshmallows when suddenly, a bunch of thugs in Klan robes surrounded them, said stuff like “Go to the police? Jewboy, we are the police!” and dragged the kids off into the woods one by one. Of course, it turned out that the “Klansmen” were actually the camp counselors, imparting a valuable lesson about hate and Fascism. I think the point was lost on the kids and counselors that the kids’ natural suspicion of cops and gentiles was inflamed, even though neither had actually done them any wrong that day. And I remembered V for Vendetta.
It’s not so much that Moore needs to write the screenplay. But he needs to have some form of creative control. Like the ability to say: “Tom Sawyer has no right being in the League, if he did, I would have put him in the first place”.
The thing I like best about Moore is his ability to just spew out dozens if not hundreds of comic characters, and each is interesting in their way. And most of all, very “comic book”. He is also able to write in a wide range of ways. From Dark to light (many Tom Strong comics are downright comical), from mystic to mundane.
To I diefy him? I supose to an extent. I mean, in our DC RPG, we did name out hero building the “Alan Moore Complex”.