vdgg81:
I really have to stop posting in this thread before I start looking like some sort of Moore zealot…
I wouldn’t call Top Ten deep, as I’m not even sure what it means, really. It sure isn’t as layered or as important as other works by Moore and has no literary pretensions. Except for issue 8. That one was “deep”. It’s the one with the huge teleportation mishap: the human drama was fantastic and the huge alien’s explanation of the great game brought me chills when I read it:
But it does have well-written, three-dimensional characters inhabiting a very well thought world. Sure, it’s explicitly modeled after a TV cop show, but it’s much more like Homicide than Law and Order , only with lots more laughs and zaniness. (If, of course, you don’t think that Homicide is all that different or any better than your regular cop show, that’s perfectly fine and the rest of this post can be disregarded.)
What really got me was how I ended up feeling those characters and the city of Neapolis were real. It’s like between every panel dozens of stories were happening and each person that appeared on the comic was already there before the first issue and would go on living after the last. Moore’s characterization made the comic; who can dislike Irma or Joe Pi or feel untouched by Kemlo’s erotic dilemma (the love that dares not bark its name)? This was essential because the comics were not about solving crimes but about the people who worked the crimes and the place where they occurred. It was the human -superhuman?- drama, along with the humor that made it work.
Also, this was another instance of the city as a character, and we got to know a lot about Neapolis - its particular style, the culture and the architecture, its youth culture and gangs and their slang, the fashion, the foods, the ethnicities that formed it, the nazi mad scientists that built it, even some of the music! The place is utterly preposterous but so well realized its utterly real as well; it’s somewhere were all those absurd characters can actually exist. That was impressive world building in the comics and went much beyond satire and parody. Each frame was filled not only with easter eggs but with mad ideas as well.
I don’t think it requires too much knowledge of other comics either. The easter eggs are just that - bonuses. The only time I think that the references intrude on the narrative is on the Cosmic Mice Crossover, but even that is incidental. I sure didn’t get a lot of those references and still enjoyed the book.
Just so I don’t praise the thing uncritically, let me say that it did have defects. Issue 7 (the one with the bar for the gods) is almost completely worthless. It would have been a good idea for a one panel gag, but stretching it to fit over 20 pages killed any humor pretty fast.
Well-written post; I agree with it all (especially about the gods - ugh). The thing about Top 10 was the lived-in feel and the characters. The fact that the world created seemed so real, so consistent, so intriguing - and it provided endless ways to comment on humanity and real-world issues (Andy “Airbag” Soames and S.T.O.R.M.S for AIDS; the fight between the old couple - the sand guy and his wife which Joe Pi solves).
And it was all suffused with both a sense of world-weariness but also with optimism and belief in the human (well, and other) spirit - clearly capturing a feeling first mined extensively in Hill St. Blues.
So, no, it doesn’t come nearly as close to asking the Big Questions as some of the other books. But its world is so well realized that I put it near the very top of my list…