Alan Moore - Two Early, Works, Five Late Works and One Bridging Work

Skizz (1983) [with Jim Baikie] 

 

Captain Britain Omnibus (1985-1987) [Various Contributors, notably Dave Thorpe, Chris Claremont and Grant Morrison] 

 

Lost Girls (2006) [with Melinda Gebbie] 

 

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen [with Kevin O'Neill] 

    Black Dossier (2007) [also with Ray Zone] 

    Century 1910 (2009)

    Century 1969 (2011) 

 

Neonomicon (2010) [with Anthony Johnston and Jacen Burrows] 

 

Fashion Beast (2013 originally from a 1985 film script) [with Anthony Johnston and Facundo Percio]

 

Skizz, first published in 1983 for British comic series 2000AD (originator of Judge Dredd and many other iconic comic figures), is a rather heart-warming tale. Yet the tale is told without losing an ounce of the dystopianism for which the British are so well known. Set on the Planet Burmy-Gam, it helps to read the text in a Brummy accent to get a real feel for it. Alan Moore is very good with linguistic clues – his brutal and unhinged government alien hunter is positioned as South African in the age of apartheid with just two carefully placed words at the beginning.

Skizz is a kinder predecessor to Moore’s V for Vendetta and perhaps a riposte to Spielberg’s ET. The British Midlands are presented as brutal and Government as wholly weak or malign but there is good to be found in a bad system. The ordinary coppers and state servants are good enough blokes (much as in V) but they are obliged to obey cruel orders. The local working class population, if dim, is, however, good hearted. Although nearly three decades separate this story line and Thatcher’s Britain from today’s discontent and economic crisis, you would not think it from the tone.

Today Government would be seen as not fully competent enough to be evil and the police would not get such a good press but the sense of a population coming to terms with the unthinkable could be 2011 or 2023. A word is due here for the artist Jim Baikie. Alan Moore is rightly considered a bit of a genius and this often means that his illustrators get put into second position by default.  Skizz, however, is a perfect partnership of word and picture. Baikie illustrates the text from well within the British comic tradition, which is all stark black and white pen and ink contrast.

The panels are constructed almost filmically but with ‘real people’ rather than following the American propensity at thtat time to give their kids a succession of good and bad ideal types. Perhaps if a solid TV Director with access to Dr Who level CGI could just follow the instructions and not get too creative, one day this might be the one film that Alan Moore does not have a moan about.  It would simply be a kind and fun film with solid old-fashioned emotional engagement.  

Skizz himself, the alien interpreter who breaks a few rules and finds himself lost on Burmy-Gam, horrified by the ape-creatures (meaning us humans), is a wonderful creation, the very type of the ordinary alien bloke. The story is really one of minor civil servant out of his depth, lost in the jungle and waiting for the local colonial police to come and rescue him. In this story, we British are just the tribespeople.

There is a minor bit of weirdness in the 2021 edition of the Captain Britain Omnibus, the apparent writing out of Alan Moore as significant player in the commentary despite Moore producing the most impressive run of issues in the eventual development of the Jaspers Warp story line.  Both Alan Davis' Forward and Jim Krueger's Afterwards and Afterwords contain the same cryptic 'Edited for Content' which may or may not be relevant. Maybe it was a matter of squabbles over 'unpaid invoices' surviving forty years on. 

Who knows and who honestly cares any more? Be all that as it may, although an incomplete representation of Britain's answer to Captain America, this Omnibus has enough to provide sufficient lore, to show a distinctive British tone to the hero and to mark out the character as Marvel UK rather than Marvel stateside.

He is a creature very much of the early 1980s where there were genuine fears of fascist takeover (as opposed to the current nonsense spouted by an over-excitable sports commentator). Political themes are surprisingly dominant even after Dave Thorpe was displaced for being too political (ironically) by the perhaps more subtle Moore. Thorpe's story lines from the 1981 re-boot begin the Omnibus which could be seen as a mash-up between Valiant, Marvel and 2000AD [founded in 1977] in style (that is, very British). The troubled history of the creative activity behind the character can be read on Wikipedia for those interested enough.

The bottom line is that Marvel allowed and sponsored (no doubt under pressure from young British creatives) a unique and stand-alone super-hero who could be periodically integrated into the Marvel Universe and has been ever since. Brian Braddock as Captain Britain (and his many multiverse iterations) has the virtue of always being the same essential representative of a national ideal while he or she transmutes constantly into new variants of national destiny and dies and resurrects as magic competes with science.

Given that Britain has given the world two global minor religions in Wicca and Thelema, it is right and appropriate that a British superhero should straddle the worlds of magick and science (much as Dr. Strange may be an American but has to be played on film by a British actor doing an American accent!). Moore introduces a cosmic element with a Moorcockian omniverse and set of multiverses. Merlin represents Clarke's oft-cited notion of magic being merely undiscovered science and the relationship between magic and science with rebellious politics suits Moore to the ground.

It also suits the British national character (certainly of that period) where gloomy dystopian fears, a dislike of bullies, a penchant for the supernatural, a respect for practical science, a relative lack of interest in space-faring and a sense of (not always reliable) history can co-exist in uneasy balance. When Moore leaves (over 'unpaid invoices'?) the series weakens substantially but that does not make it bad just a little less interesting and more episodic. Eventually it declines into an X-men 'riff' on intolerance as the logic of Moore's world is explored to its natural limits.

The final two entries have Chris Claremont (Captain Britain's creator) giving Captain Britain a role in exploring the X-juniors' 'teenage angst' in creditable stories whose main purpose seems to be transfer Braddock's sister to the New Mutants story line as Psylocke. Captain Britain is a character who probably never got his full due but this might be because of his internal contradictions. He was a figure of intense national pride who appeared just when the generations who read 'Commando' were giving way to a more liberal generations of kids.

Some later iterations seem to avoid 'politics' by emphasising the magical elements of his origin story although he subsequently gets integrated into the Avengers' story lines and is certainly not allowed to die off as an integral character although never again one of the top-liners.Captain Britain will eventually become like a pair of well worn and comfortable carpet slippers no one wants to chuck out for sentimental reasons but where no one is prepared to go out and invest in new slippers with any conviction.

Moore bridges the early contradictions by making Captain Britain a determined fighter against fascism and intolerance while retaining his link to Albion. Grant Morrison subverted this with a prose horror story about Captain Gran Bretan (1986) where the magic is malign. At least Morrison thought he was worth subverting! Today, Captain Britain is possible but problematic. To be true to his creation could place him unwittingly somewhere on the nice side of the national populist camp but to deny his 'national meaning' could be to make him a laughable 'woke' nonentity, an add-on to a plethora of US heroes.

So, this book is like a snapshot of a culture when it was still possible to be anti-facist, patriotic and good, a self-questioning fighter against intolerance, all at the same time, before cultures started to divide. He is still in the top 100 in terms of aesthetic appreciation but not popularity. Moore followers should certainly include it in their reading. Many of the themes of V for Vendetta (1988-1989) and perhaps, Americanised, Watchmen (1986-1987) are to be found in his Captain Britain work from 1982-1984.

Claremont's fertile attempt, on the other hand, to Anglicise Captain America and trigger a British allegiance to the Marvel Universe was only a very small part of his formidable output but we should note that, out of it, he created a 'plausible' narrative for Psylocke that enhanced his X-men Universe. From a British perspective, I suppose we can see Captain Britain as a noble failure and, if we were sour, as both the product and victim of American cultural colonialism. But the core story line stands and could even have future legs under a serious creative hand who could escape the 'woke'. Yes, he still appears and is dealt with creatively when he does even if he is not the figure that he was in the early 1980s. Despite more recent attempts at revival, he has not broken the barrier that would let him back into superhero eminence. 

 

Perhaps the UK market is simply not large enough. Jumping two decades to the twenty-first century, how do we approach Lost Girls, a graphic, very graphic, novel? As a consistent continuation of the ouevre of Alan Moore? As an investigation of the pornographic? Or as a subliminal political tract? Let us start with Moore because this text is recognisably within his style. HIs artists may come and go but Moore's themes are often those of the power of imagination to cast new light on the world. Much of his earlier work involved alternate futures and histories - the dystopia of Thatcher's Britain in Skizz, a fascist Britain for V for Vendetta and the world where Nixon won an election he lost in reality in Watchmen.

Later work overlays this with a game of memes set around a grand theme - magic and the esoteric in the magnificent Promethea series and popular literary figures in the finely tuned but sometimes disappointing League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series (see below). Lost Girls takes the theme of pornographic literature and cross-fertilises it transgressively with three seminal (excuse these puns) children's stories about girls written by men - Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Alice is older and a lesbian defensively avoiding men, Dorothy is an up-front American flirt and Wendy is the repressed wife of an equally repressed and shatteringly dull British businessman.

The whole is set at a point of maximum decadence - Austria-Hungary in the days before the First World War - and Moore's words are set to brilliant pastiches of the erotic art of the preceding decades: the cards of Becat, Von Bayros, Mucha, Schiele and more. Von Bayros will appear again in Extraordinary Gentlemen's Black Dossier. He has found a superb artistic collaborator in Melinda Gebbie who has not flinched from the subject matter - my initial irritation with the girlish soft-hued pastel shades collapsed before the skill of her interpretations and versatility.

But be in no doubt - the pictures and text are 'pornographic' in the most extreme way and there is no let up in it. As in all pornographic material, the story seems thin (three women tell stories of their past in a hotel on the eve of war) so that couplings and multiple copulations can be effected without too much distraction. Of course, Moore is cleverer than this. The story is, in fact, sophisticated with its investigations of the difference between fantasy and reality even if it slips into cliche with the 1914 theme by the end.

The casual reader must understand in advance that this is not just the graphic presentation of sexuality but the sexuality of the histories of the young girls who became women, of fantasies of incest and exploitation and of the most callous Sadean activity. Each of the children's stories is subverted into a tale of simultaneous pleasure, extremity and both willing and unwilling exploitation. Alice is a victim of child abuse who becomes a sexual addict dragged into orgies, drugs and prostitution by a lesbian 'set' of singular obsessive cruelty.

Dorothy discovers masturbation and sex on the farm and effectively half-seduces and is half-victim of a seriously abusive father. On the way there, she happily masturbates a horse while being anally buggered. Wendy is 'perverted' by street urchins who provide sexual services for middle class men when they are not engaged in sexual activity among themselves. This 'Tinkerbelle' is the sexual plaything of her brother, Peter, giving more cause to the jealousy in the story than Disney scriptwriters had managed.

Incest is a central theme of the book - fantasies of every form of coupling (though minimally male homosexual) express a vision of the family dynamic which nods to Freud but which, in fact, is simply a play on one central theme: how is it that we both have such desires and control or repress them so effectively. Which is where we come to an implicit politic because Moore's position seems to be that civilisation depends on the maintenance of the separate realm of a free imagination which is uncontrolled.

It is the pornographic extremities of the imaginative realm that act as an outlet for the repressive miseries and potential for violence and exploitation seen in the girl's 'real' stories and in the onset of war. This is not an easy argument for many people to understand. For them, the map of literature or art is the territory of real life and social relations. They cannot 'get' that the imaginal realm is 'other'. It is the same flaw in thinking that makes God a real presence in people's lives or has the same imagined creature judging an act from within.

The inability to understand that these are two different realms is what results in the 'politics of disgust', the attempts to repress desire and the failure to deal with acts of exploitation when they appear. Child abuse is a general theme within the book. It is expressed graphically and often. Moore intelligently avoids the black and white interpretation where some evil adult seduces the innocent in favour of something more ambiguous and true to life. What is going on is a trading of desires and power which are enabled by secrecy and denial.

Another theme is the fact that the girls are lost because no one talks about desire in their world of innocence, things are done in secret and the girls are left to fend for themselves and work out mysteries that are imposed on them by circumstance - whether stuck on a Kansas farm or in an English middle class household. This sophisticated and multifaceted work raises the essence of the problem behind social control and repression of sexual desire, one which appears to have passed by the Christians and feminists who encircle our political processes.

Pornography as cause of sexual crime is simply special pleading by the criminal. The expression of erotic fantasy for most people most of the time is a liberation of desire and violence precisely so that it does not act in the world. It is a salve. It may even be a form of salvation. Sexual pleasure and even transgression between adults 'works through' the system so that exploitation and abuse remain in the literature and the art and do not leach out into the real world. Attempts to control the imagery of desire drives what cannot be obliterated not merely underground but into vicious corners where the imagined may become real - as in rural child abuse, predatory sexual abuse of urban minors and systems of economic sexual exploitation.

All the pornographic styles and stories in the book arise out of an age of repressed expression of desire but are part of the solution and not part of the problem. The problem lies elsewhere - not in a fascination with the sexual, masturbation or curiosity but with social structures that make all these normal interests out to be 'deviant' or 'perverted'.  The 'lost girls', on the other hand, are all exploited and abused not because they are sexual beings but because they are sexual beings without power to express their sexuality on their own terms.

Alice is, in fact, not permitted just to be a lesbian but must enter a sub-culture that is vicious. Dorothy is a highly sexual creature who just wants to experiment on equal terms with men. Wendy has sexual desires but is forced by circumstance into danger or total denial and ends up with an apparently a-sexual bore who turns out to be a submissive gay. But it is even more complicated than this. Alice is not in control of her history and is even a little predatory towards Dorothy and Wendy but Dorothy and Wendy, as adults, embrace the predation.

Dorothy avoids to the end the admission that her sexual affair was with her father but she is not traumatised by it, merely avoiding discussion of a social taboo where she was actually in more (though not complete) control than we might like. Her complaint is not of abuse but of having to continue a very run-of-the-mill sexual relationship after the transgressional glamour of a trip to the big city. She feels sorry, in the end, for her step-mother in a very true-to-life female reaction.

Wendy's childish familial incest is pushed aside in horror when the games go wrong and she is threatened with rape in woodland by a paedophile as she turns from child to woman - but the horror results in decades of unhappiness until liberated by her new 'sisters'. The event is also not one of a victim either. She turns on the bully and uses words to whip lash him into humiliated withdrawal - she has become empowered under extreme pressure. In short, both Moore and Gebbie (and we are reminded that the graphic images are all produced by a woman) are reminding us that sex-positivity is more complicated than the 'victim' mentality imposed on us by our current culture.

These ambiguities do not belong to society but to the individuals who are free to react in multiple ways - relaxed acceptance and complicity, defensive resistance or denial and unhappiness after a moment of empowered epiphany - and that any responses that may result in a personal transformation equally belong to individuals and not society. If Alice brings Wendy's sexuality back to life, there is no suggestion that her life between the rape attempt and her new friendships was a lie but rather that it had served its purpose for both Mr. and Mrs Potter and now it was time to move on.

The men in the story are mostly all sad, lonely and weak characters - furtive child abusers, repressed homosexuals, men coming to terms with their own sexuality through strategies of denial, men who are thrown aside at their moment of transformation, secretive men, dead militarist men. In the end, there is no real conclusion to the book. You either share a general position of sex-positivity and triumph over abuse as the best 'normal' way of things or you will be, frankly, confused, 'disgusted' and even horrified.

If the latter, then you have done something that Moore is warning us against - confused imagination for reality and failed to see imagination not as an expression of actual intent in the world but as a tool for internal transformation of the person who exists within that world. Perhaps our politicians and somewhat dim-witted advisers will finally get it. A free imagination does not cause criminality or abuse, criminals and abusers commit crimes and abuse but such crimes and abuses arise not from the pornographic imagination but from a lack of ability to master the imagination to manage desire ethically. Open discussion of sexuality as it is and not as it should be is part of that ethically directed process. Too many voters confuse imagination with action and the odd examples of vileness arising from the acted out imagination become the cause for a panicked and often hysterically expressed social caution.

The sexual imagination, like the Japanese and American imaginative flirtations with violence, is an inoculation against excess in a world that is stupid, brutal and cruel. The good society requires its expression because we are human animals in this world, not castrated saints in the making for the next.  Our sexual desire is central to who we are even when we deny it or it appears to be absent and, because we, not an abstraction, are central to the social, sexuality is best accommodated in a positive way and not as a furtive business of misery and guilt. 

Third in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series but between Volumes II and III, The Black Dossier is a tour de force parading the breadth of culture of the two authors Alan Moore (writing) and Kevin O'Neill (illustration). It is also very self-indulgent and expects a lot from the reader. The framing story sets Mina (survivor of an encounter with Dracula in Volume I) and Allan (Quatermain) in a glum early 1950s Britain just coming out of the wartime and post-war tyranny of a socialist state in a narrative that references 1984. Once again, we have an invented dystopian alternative history of Britain.  They recover a 'black dossier' of documents which purport to tell the history of the League in its many incarnations in time and in space (which also means witty German and French versions involved in the machinations around the origins of the First World War).

This becomes the excuse for a whole set of literary parodies and many other often cheeky treats, a few of them downright pornographic where O'Neill and Moore parody many popular cultural icons, including the iconic London Underground map and the wartime cartoon Jane. It is almost too much of a rich feast. The parody of an American beatnik novel is literally unreadable (which is the joke) and Bertie Wooster's account of his experience alongside Gussie Fink-Nottle of dealing with his Aunt's dabbling with the Cult of Cthulhu is ... well, you get the picture. At one level it is a romantic picture of an England that lasts in the imagination despite its national decline ever since the loss of its 'faery' nature with the death of Gloriana. At another it is the vehicle for an anarchic individualist assertion of the freedom to imagine, another very Moore theme.

There are innumerable 'in' jokes. James Bond is a slimy sexist government thug of weak intelligence. Sir Basildon Bond is Gloriana's 'intelligencer'. Fanny Hill's adventures with Gulliver and in the Venusberg are illustrated with stylish erotic parodies of Franz von Bayros' work. But ultimately it gets ridiculous especially with the arrival of our heroes in a trans-dimensional faerie toyland on a flying ship captained by a Golliwog (only Moore can get away with this). This requires special 3D glasses to appreciate. Moore, as I do, will remember these as giveaways in the comics of our youth. The magician Prospero (there is, of course, a bawdy lost Shakespearean work in the dossier) represents the final victory and primacy of magick and imagination over the prosaic reality of the grimy Britain of 'today' - probably actually 'today' today after the latest economic news.

 

Part of the comic's charm is that it can provide almost endless fun attempting to identify not only the obvious derivations from popular and high literature (such as the sex-shifting Orlando) but transpositions of name (so Dr Dee becomes both Prospero and Dr. Suttle). All very clever, a work of immense labour and carefully constructed to fit into the universe of League comic books (there are six of them counting the Nemo trilogy), this is certainly worth enjoying in conjunction with the rest of the series.

1910, the 2009 contribution to Extraordinary Gentlemen (this and 1969 are two parts of the three part Volume III) is unfortunately a bit of a potboiler by any standards.

 

As usual, Moore assumes an in-depth knowledge in the reader of the highways and byways of past popul ar and esoteric culture, but whereas, in the past, the jumbling of images and themes appeared to be both coherent and instructive, here it is just showy.  It is as if Moore was making sure that he got in all the references in '1910' that were left over from previous works. What next '1920' with cute references to Crowley, Rohmer and Buchan? '1930' with a young Auden coming up against Junger, Evola and various characters from the Waugh novels? Und so weiter ... This Moorcockian conceit is in danger of becoming tired without the offer of some deeper message behind it. As with early Moorcock, it is more style and self-indulgence than substance and meaning.

Moore's work is here much like his character of Orlando, a gender-changing immortal but also a thorough bore who drops names from the past like the worst sort of metropolitan socialite. The graphic novel is saved by the illustrator, Kevin O'Neill, who takes this relatively lazy material and creates some arresting images - the naked daughter of Captain Nemo more at home at sea than on land is creatively transformed into victim and then brutal heir to her father's domain as much through draughtsmanship as penmanship. Not great but good.

But, as always, with Moore, we are judging him here by the high standards of his own past. He is still a cut above most graphic novelists even when he fails. This story is consciously Brechtian and bleak, one in which a localised catastrophe is mistaken by these paranormal investigators, who strike me as rather bumbling compared to previous incarnations, for the one yet to come: the holocaust that started in 1914. We know it is coming. They don't. And yet they are supposed to be more prescient than us. This leads us to the strange mood of the piece - one of despair. Alan Moore has always been quintessentially British in his sensibility. This means, in fantasy terms, either dystopian (as in V for Vendetta or Watchmen) or hopefully occult (as in Promethea). In '1910', there is a lot of dystopianism and very little of the occult. The bad guys are the winners, bad acts only get punished through cathartic violence and lies protect the aristocratic order. It is more Poliakoff than Moore.

 

Still, this sounds like Moore captured perfectly the quiet rage bubbling under the surface of Middle England in the wake of the credit crisis and political lies and failures -  a rage that has not diminished in subsequent years. This rage is palpable in England today, especially amongst the older generation of the middling sort who foolishly trusted the people in office and in the City in 2008 and then trusted the former on Brexit and will soon wonder why they trusted them on issues of war and peace. It is a sublimated rage that floats between depression and violence and graphic novels do not do depression very well - the rage's impulse is thus towards violence in a comic book world where serial killers and pirates are looked on cynically as no worse than the system they declare war on, where ordinary humans are little more than rats and where apocalyptic violence seems both inevitable and purgative.

 

What Moore has done, perhaps in a fit of absent-mindedness but as an aspect of his genius, is capture the psyche of Western culture as we move into a period of extreme scarcity for some and the destruction of dreams for many others while the system itself seems to continue with all the momentum of a steam engine whose crew has long since bailed out but which has managed to leave sufficient coal in the boiler to drive it eventually into a wall. So, not a great work but already a work of its and our time and one that, more than the literary outpourings of metropolitan London society, should act as a warning that the street revolt that brought us Brexit may scarcely have begun.

 

As to 1969, initially I was inclined to be rather dismissive of this post-modern redrafting of the 1960s to fit the conceits of Moore's League, now reduced to three - the sex-shifting Orlando, a dull and uninteresting Allan Quatermain and the real heroine of the story, Mina. Fortunately, the clever-cleverness of the references to everything from the Krays and Get Carter via the Rolling Stones and Jerry Cornelius to every possible literary reincarnation (you'll get that when you read it) of Crowley is redeemed with what turns out to be quite a good story. Nevertheless, this is Moore coasting with a product that is entertaining enough but which he and O'Neill are offering us without much apparent conviction.

Perhaps all that might be said about it to tempt the jaded palate is that Moore continues his campaign of sexual awakening for the great unwashed that started with Promethea and reached its notorious zenith in Lost Girls.  Sexuality is presented as varied, and normal in its variety, in a way that you will rarely see on the comic book shelves of WH Smith. If it livens up and liberates a few adolescents, then he will have done some anarchic service to humanity - certainly one or two scenes are a definite turn-on. But it is a pretty pot-boiler and not up to the usual standard we have come to expect from the great Anarch.

Ah, but if you want dark ... Neonomichon is truly dark. Well within the spirit of the Lovecraftian tradition, it has an added dash of American FBI TV drama with serial killer characteristics. Alan Moore even gets in a bit of Kenneth Grant on the side. However, since many in America have more of a problem with sex than gory violence, Americans be warned ... this is a work of sexual horror with explicit scenes of truly unpleasant sexual violence. The scene of reptilian jissum flying through a wide arc as the FBI heroine jerks off the monster to save herself from yet another rape is not for the faint-hearted. There is a certain Sadean quality to one long section.

Moore is, as he gets older, increasingly interested in the sexual imagination and it is not unconnected to his interest in magick. For him, magick is creating something out of nothing and extreme sexual imagination is magick. From Promethea through Lost Girls to this, the intensity grows but it is an honest intensity that should disturb the reader not as wrong or sick but as an expression of the wild capabilities of the full imagination. There is also a genuine twist to the usual Lovecraftian story line that any aficionado of the horror genre will pick up as a borrowing from another trope of demonic literature (no spoilers here). 

Let us just say that hybridisation is a theme that turns back on itself as the hybridisation of literary memes into new creative activity.  This graphic novel is genuinely horrific and far from 'adolescent'. Moore is also well served by the classic comic book style of Jacen Burrows which captures the Lovecraftian iconography of the tale well. Recommended but with the standard caveat that it is for mature minds only. 

Finally, we have a promised bridge between his early and later work - derived from a film script of 1985 (the era of the Watchmen breakout) but 're-mastered' in 2013. However, this graphic novel is really one for Alan Moore completists and for those interested in the post-modern punk creativity of the world of Malcolm McLaren. It is a Phantom of the Opera/Beauty and the Beast mash-up centred on a caricature of the fashion industry set in the sort of dystopian world which seemed to exercise Moore in the Thatcher era.

 

But the novel is more interesting as an attempt by Moore to respond to a cinematic brief. It simply confirms that Moore and filmic thought simply do not get on. If anything, it is closer to a musical theatre adaptation! He is famously withering about the film adaptations of his stories (which are all generally well received by film-lovers despite his views). This was an early chance to think a story along filmic lines and he clearly could not do so easily. 

 

The work was initiated as a commission by the late cultural impresario McLaren who could think in multiple forms but needed others to put in place his vision. Moore cannot even remember the date of the commission. The artist commissioned to complete the project for 2013 tries his best to make it filmic but it does not work because the story line is classic Alan Moore - a literary creation to be told in a succession of fixed images.

The point of film is that it blurs and moves and our mind's eye settles into passivity. The comic book, like the novel, requires that things be filled in actively and remembered with some attention. All that happens with a graphic novel is that certain imaginative choices are removed which are permitted in the literary novel (lengthy description and dialogue is replaced with 'look and see') so that the reader is even more constrained, leaving him or her to invent much of the background meaning and the transitions.

Graphic novels give us more space to imagine the world in which the story is set but at the cost of guiding us with some rigour down just one visual path within it. The literary novel is more seductive and requires us to visualise more deeply. Film is a waking dream. All three art forms are psychologically different in the way we receive them.  Unfortunately, the illustrations of Facundo Percio are part of the problem - there was a choice between portraying Mooresque dystopia or fashion as glamour and Percio and Moore made the wrong choice.

The dystopian aspects of the story frankly seem a little hackneyed (especially when compared to Moore's masterworks V for Vendetta and Watchmen, and even Halo Jones and Skizz) and should just have been a back drop. What should have been emphasised is fashion as glamour and so allow the work to be a bridge from the past to the later Moore fascination with the magical and how things can apparently come out of nothing to have meaning. As it is, the illustration plays up the weakness of the story line as Moore attempts and fails to think in filmic terms. 

 

Another theme of Moore - sexual transformation - is also weakly handled. The boy who is a girl who is a boy and the girl who is a boy who is a girl is standard fare in Japanese manga and serves its transgressional purpose well. Here, though, there is an odd diffidence. The theme should be erotic - even if sublimated erotic - yet neither character contains much of the transgressional eroticism found in manga versions. Neither are 'appealing' visually.

Again, this is an early exploration of the sexual by Moore so the re-master required (in illustrative terms) linking forward in time to his later radical expression of his attitudes to sex and magick rather than back to the original dystopian aspects of the work which mean so much less now. Illustrators often have problems with expressing sexual transgression when they move away from faux-realism. This novel hints at transgression (unlike later work) and those hints should have been more realistically 'glamorous'. Perhaps not one of the great Moore works but still ahead of his then-contemporaries in the writing and an interesting cultural footnote. There is an insightful essay at the beginning from Moore.