When he is on, he is the best there is - period, IMHO.
I love Watchmen and Top Ten the best by far.
I thoroughly enjoy most of the rest, but books like Supreme and Tom Strong which are plays on classic DC don’t really work for me. 1963 which is a play on classic Marvel does only a bit better.
I appreciate and respect the ambition of Promethea far more than I personally like it.
As for filming Watchmen - I have stated on this board a few times that my preference would be for Pixar to start a Grown-Up Film division and do Watchmen in installments…
Most of Moore’s ABC work is worth a look (I’ve read maybe half so far). Even though I enjoyed the Top Ten and Tom Strong I’ve read, I don’t think they’re in the same universe as Moore’s great genre-bending stuff. It’s just not as ambitious. Prometha, though, is wonderful and LOEG is in the aforementioned universe or great, ambitious Moore works, even though I don’t think it’s all that great.
His old 2000AD strips miss your “15 years” criteria by about 10 years, but don’t seem to be that well known in the States, and are available in trade paperback: The Ballad Of Halo Jones {three volumes} and D.R And Quinch {just re-released in one tasty hardback volume…mmm…} are the standouts: they were written pretty much concurrently before Moore was known in America, and showcase Moore’s astounding breadth of talent.
Halo Jones was an excellent attempt to create an “everywoman” SF heroine who was neither semi-clad gun-toting femme fatale nor screaming assistant: the three volumes progressively tell Halo’s story as an unemployed teen on a backwater Earth in the grip of a recession, a waitress on a starship, and a soldier in a galactic war. Excellent characterisation, strong writing, and a heroine who’s attractive in her ordinariness: a nice break from cliche, and Moore managed {especially in the first book} to anticipate a lot of “cyberpunk” tropes before the term had even been thought of.
D.R And Quinch is the total opposite: the cartoon misadventures - running a rehab centre for maniac war veterans, falling in love, getting drafted, going to Hollywood, running a nature camp - of a couple of gun-toting delinquent alien teens who like guns, beer, destructive anarchy and snappy one-liners: “The arsenal was full of weapons so terrible and destructive I had scarcely dared to imagine they could exist. I felt totally patriotic.” Laugh-out-loud funny.
This is nitpicking in the extreme, but I always liked Dave Gibbons’ character designs and I’d like to see Pixar emulate those as much as possible. If they looked too much like typical Pixar designs that wouldn’t be a good fit for the movie.
BUT MY GOD Wordman hit this on the head – the thought of Pixar, under Brad Bird’s tutelage and their customary world-buidling detail, doing Rorschach’s face mask, the psychic creature’s destruction of half of New York City, the Silk Spectre/ Nite Owl romance, the Owlcar, and animating Doctor Manhattan – not to mention their brilliant use of character voices…
Voicing Rorshach would be fun: I’d give him an Alec Baldwin growl, a laThe Shadow. On a slight hijack, half the problem with most of the Batman movie adaptations is that no-one gets the voice right. Christian Bale wasn’t bad, but he was too obviously trying for rasping menace and not quite getting it. Too pretty, I guess.
The thing I really like about Alan Moore is that he’s such a visionary- I’ve only read Watchmen and V for Vendetta but it’s clear that he’s stretching to do big things. I thought V for Vendetta didn’t work as well as I hoped as a whole, but it had great moments. That Vicious Cabaret is a good example. The idea of putting in sheet music and lyrics as part of the comic sounds absurd and idiotic, but he pulled it off. Or just the way he has huge, climactic, operatic moments like blowing up the buildings to the 1812 Overture.
Or how about Watchmen? The very first page of that is brilliant. Maybe it’s actually the first two pages, but it’s whatever pages the sequence of the viewpoint moving from the streets to the roof is.
I think I might read something of his as soon as I’m done with the book I’m on. I guess I’ll look into the stuff that’s been mentioned in this thread, but do any of you have recommendations for what to read after V and Watchmen?
Second of all - Case Sensitive got my thinking - Brad Bird would be an amazing helmer of my dream Pixar Watchmen - the point is that they care about story first, which is all that matters to me.
I agree with you, Askia - I would prefer to see Dave Gibbons design feel translated to the big screen - my only hope would be that they do NOT try to do a photo-realist, Final Fantasy type of animation - I WANT it to have a stylized, animated feel - I think it would help with the fantastic, suspension-of-disbelief aspects that a story like this requires…
I mentioned Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow? It is one of my favorite comic stories of all time, despite the fact that it took me a decade to read the second part of the story.
Yep - I’ve known about this for a while - it is covered on aintitcoolnews.com pretty regularly.
But, to middleman’s point, Watchmen has been in play for a while - Terry Gilliam of Monty Python/Brazil, 12 Monkeys, etc., was working on it for a long time before throwing up his hands…
Bizarro commits mass-murder and suicide. Toyman and Prankster torture Pete Ross to death. The Daily Planet is destroyed by Metallo to get at Superman. Lana kills Luthor (at his request!), and is then, herself, fried by Lightning Lord. Jimmy’s killed by Brainiac-animating-Luthor’s-Corpse. Krypto dies in the process of killing the Kryptonite Man. Superman’s forced to kill Mr Mxyzptlk, then, punishing himself for that, removes his powers. Lois and the Whites are the only ones who come out of it unscathed.
Good story, but I don’t think the most sadistic Superman story ever - even worse than the various stories involving his death - is ‘the only fitting story to end the Superman story with’.
Tengu. High tragedy should never, ever be confused with sadism, particularly when that sadism you claim didn’t really happen. Every death in that story, brutal as some of them were, was met with some measure of shock, bewilderment and regret. Sadistic deaths – like the mindless fodder of most slasher films – wouldn’t do that.
It’s fitting because it’s one of the only “last” Superman stories that actually felt like a true ending to the Superman legend: Superman died, the supporting characters died defending him. Like the fall of Camelot’s Knights, like the disbanding of Robin’s Merry Men in Sherwood, like the winnowing of Frodo’s Fellowship, like the end of the Jedi, like the loss of four of seven of Kurosawa’s samurai.
THIS was just a horror movie with Superman and his supporting characters cast in it. It was a well-done horror movie, but that’s all it was. The story is 50-odd pages long, and most of Superman’s major supporting cast are killed because of a sudden shift in one character’s personality.
If it had been written today, it would get nowhere near the respect it does. Hell, it wouldn’t even get the respect it deserves. It would, in fact, be decried to the high heavens as everything that’s wrong with comics today. Because its major advantage is happening when it did. (Ignore, for a moment, the fact that if he hadn’t done it when he did, it probablty WOULD still be ‘innovative’.)
