Alan Moore is one of the three writers I feel have affected me and my writing the most, at least as an adult – the others being Nick Cave and David Milch. For all three, this is partly through their work, and partly through how they think and speak about their work. Each of these creators has a deliberateness about their work that comes through in interviews and talks, and I’m indebted to all of them for the way I think about my writing.
With Moore, Watchmen, From Hell and Providence are the comics I reread the most, but they’re a small fraction of all of his books that I love. If those three didn’t exist, then Miracleman, Top Ten, Tom Strong, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Halo Jones and Promethea would be enough for a writer to qualify as a favourite. And that’s not even counting Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem, the latter of which is, for my money, one of the best novels of the 21st century thus far.
So you might say I have been waiting quite a long time for Illuminations to be published. Moore’s first prose short story collection – this is an event for me.
Rather than simply barreling through it, I thought I’d read one story at a time (in one day or longer, since some of these go on a bit – there’s a whole mid-length novel stuffed into this), and note down my thoughts as I get done with each one, starting with the first story on the day of release.
“Hypothetical Lizard”
This is the first time I’m reading this in prose. I read it in Avatar Press’s comics adaptation, but that version passed me by. I think something this and “The Courtyard”1 have in common is that Moore is using the prose almost as if he’s bricklaying. The story and its meaning accretes sentence by sentence, as Moore layers on details that make the picture slowly come into focus. Having pictures to go with them means that you lose a lot of the intent, which is clearer in the prose.
This was written for a shared-universe anthology back in 1987 – the only story in Illuminations written in the 20th century – and it stands up surprisingly well. Moore’s tendency is to work by thinking about implications. He looks at the surface of the world he is given, and then he plumbs its depths to fish out possibilities and specificities that would lead to that world, and he does so incredibly well here, building out the brothel which is the setting of the story to the point you almost forget that it is not the entire world. This is nominally a character piece, but the character aspects of it largely function as a Pinter-esque play. It is the world it happens in, and how that world relates to its individuals, that is the source of both the pathos and the horror.
“Not Even Legend”
As I started reading this one, I got the sense it was one of Moore’s more trivial stories, and by the end … well, the plot is certainly a simple one, but it acts as a springboard for him to do a formal exercise, and in that, it’s a delight of a short story. And as with Moore even with his most trivial work, it gets a lot done in a small page count.
Speaking of small page counts, what this reminds me most of is much of Moore’s work for 2000 AD, where the plot would be beside the point, and Moore would try and work through a science fictional concept and how it could be expressed in the formal confines of the comics page. In fact, apart from the rather fun fantasy idea at the centre of the story, the formal idea is pretty much a combination of two of his 2000 AD shorts from the early 80s.
That’s fine, though. Hard to begrudge Moore a bit of recycling when he’s clearly having so much fun writing the story.
“Location, Location, Location”
This one reminded me, oddly enough, of Moore’s writing in 2000 AD as well, but for a different reason. This is an out-and-out comedy story, and we haven’t seen Moore writing much funny stuff since his 2000 AD days.2
The idea here is that the Panacea Society’s conception of the Garden of Eden being in Bedford was true, and when the Apocalypse from Revelation happens, Jesus moves into “the Ark” – the house they’ve set aside for him. And as he does so, the Panacea Society’s lawyer accompanies him, while the Biblical apocalypse rages outside.
It’s a lark of a story, frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and in some ways, it represents a writer’s dream. If you talk to almost any fantasy writer long enough, they’ll tell you they’ve got this funny idea of doing what would essentially be a slice-of-life story with the production values of a blockbuster. In essence, using a fantasy setting as very expensive set dressing for a kitchen-sink drama.
This is Moore doing that story, except in prose. And this visual idea only works in prose because Moore brings his imaginative heft to describing these grand Biblical visions and their vertiginous effect on the human mind – the bricklaying approach I mentioned earlier – all while two people look around a perfectly normal house.
This also alerted me to a tendency in Moore’s prose that I have noticed in some places in Jerusalem as well, which is to write prose close to the way he wrote comics. The actual action of this story is, like I said, two people walking and talking, but there are tranches of description separating the action and dialogue, almost like a comics script – here’s the mise-en-scène, here’s what the characters are doing within it, and here’s what they’re saying. He’s obviously more elegant than that, and it’s weaved through well enough, but it does give his prose a bit of a stop-and-start quality that I’ve noticed as I read more of his prose, particularly with the pieces that I imagine he’s “dashed off”, though in Moore’s case, even a dashed-off story has had a prodigious amount of intellect poured into it.
“Cold Reading”
This is the first story in the collection that, honestly, I have no big interest in commenting on. Much as I have called some other stories “trivial”, each of them has had something formal, conceptual or emotional to recommend them. This one is a genuine trifle – a “ghost story for atheists” as Moore has referred to it. A decent bit of fun, but nought to write home about.
“The Improbably Complex High-Energy State”
This is a doozy! As it began, I assumed it was going to be a formalistic exercise on Moore’s part, to try and imagine sentience in the first femtosecond of the universe, and for several pages, it is in fact a tone poem, which made me wonder how he was going to pull quite so many pages out of a fairly thin concept.
But then, a third of the way through, it pulls a shift, and what was an enjoyable but impressionistic word cocktail turns into a fascinating parable on power, identity, and the inherence of hegemony. It is possible to read this as a cynical story, implying as it does that existence necessarily involves hierarchy, but then it goes on to infer rebellion from hierarchy, so there is that. It’s not terribly deep, let’s be clear, but far from just being an exercise. It is a joy to read, and I can only imagine how much fun it must have been for Moore to sit and directly connect human existence to the Big Bang itself, and, so to speak, pull it down to our level for a little while.
Plus, it’s hard to complain about a story that starts with the line, It was the best of times, it was the first of times.
“Illuminations”
This story is Moore reaching for naked bleakness in a way we rarely see him do. There’s a streak of it in most of his writing – some detail that’ll make you despair for humanity – but rarely is it the point of the story. This story is simply desolate.
“Illuminations” is about a divorced man who is trying to recapture some spark of life by visiting a beachside town he used to visit with his parents as a kid. Moore creates this effect where the main character is sort of the only human in the story – everyone else is a shadow, flitting in and out of this man’s life.
And the story itself is one of straightforward decline. Here is a man who has nothing to live for, and his desolation reaches back through time and taints his memory of any joy he found in this place as a child.
It’s a fascinating story, and there’s a nice gimmick of the “flashbacks” being written in present tense while the present-day is in simple past. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
This is the story in this collection that best exemplifies Poe’s maxim for short stories (that Moore references in interviews about Illuminations) that a short story is meant to do one thing, and on doing that, should end.
What We Can Know About Thunderman
The primary-coloured off-register elephant in the room. I took my time reading Thunderman – about four days of switching between the print book and the audiobook. Obviously, I was curious about this one and had been waiting to get to it – this is Moore directly addressing an industry he has no remaining love for, and fans as well as industry professionals seem to be ticked off by it. (Far more enjoyed it than seem to hate it, mind you.)
I adore the comics medium, and I’ve had a pretty good go of it in the industry as well – despite living thousands of miles away from the main body of the industry, I have lucked my way into great clients, and many dear friends and collaborators. I can’t pretend that industry hasn’t and doesn’t still suffer from terrible practices, but – as came up during a conversation with a storyboard artist friend today – other industries aren’t immune from exploitation, and are often worse. Low pay, terrible deadlines, IP theft – these are part of filmmaking, advertising, commercial art, the list goes on.
There is, though, a special kind of heartbreak that comes with exploitation in comics. First, comics is a medium you enter because you love it – you were fired up by the joy of creation at some point, you want to capture that and impart it to someone else. Going from that to disillusionment is far more disappointing than industries entered mainly because you want to earn a living.
For another, if you grew up reading Marvel Comics, say, and believed that the people in the bullpen mentioned in the credits and the letter columns were your friends in some way, growing up and finding out how they were exploited by others in the same line, often in the same credits box, tastes bitter.3
Third, if you grow up loving superheroes, revelling in the clarity of morals afforded by those stories, it is dispiriting to experience or witness those morals being compromised – were you the chump for actually believing in those values? – and you might be understandably angry watching people indulge in the meaningless aesthetics of good and evil having given up any belief in those concepts. Or so I imagine.
In short, I know there are people who resent Moore’s bitterness about the industry and his casual dismissal of the creative breadth of it after his time, but I’m not one of them. Even when I don’t agree with him, I think the bitterness is earned.
That said, I went into Thunderman expecting an angry polemic of some kind. Instead, this is a riotous roman à clef, making a meal out of strange obscure industry anecdotes, and twisting known facts into caricatures. A distended history of the medium from its relationship with the mafia to the multimedia conglomerates releasing mediocre CGI-fests to rapturous reception, Moore is happy to skewer everything and everyone. From Stan Lee to Julius Schwartz, Mort Weisinger to Bill Gaines, Moore spares Jack Kirby from the drubbing, and perhaps Siegel and Schuster, but no one else, not even himself.4
The story takes the form of short nonlinear chapters that follow various viewpoint characters in their journey through the comics industry. Most of the chapters are straightforward narratives, but one takes the form of a comics script, one a listicle of movie reviews, another a Reddit thread, and so on. While Moore changes everyone’s names and occasionally combines multiple figures, mostly this story is a matter of taking in the worst stories about the industry (and some eccentric but otherwise innocuous ones) and exaggerating them for comedic effect, with a sprinkling of insidious fantasy/magical realism (or, in a writing trick Moore does very well, a perfectly ordinary incident described like a fantasy scenario before it resolves in front of you).
I think some complaints about Moore’s treatment of certain characters are fair (there are two that seem particularly mean), but these complaints are also personally motivated.5 There are name-drops that will be clear to people who have been working in comics for decades, but for most of us, we might wonder “Who was that?” and then move on. As has been pointed out, the fact of this being a roman à clef is perhaps essential to its enjoyment, but beyond that, you don’t need to know who stands in for whom to let the story wash over you.
I do also note a heavy Stewart Lee influence on this story. Lee is a friend of Moore’s and Moore is a fan of Lee’s comedy (as am I, I should add). One of Lee’s best comedic tricks is slowly pushing an idea into more and more absurd realms while outwardly insisting that he is speaking in good faith. When deployed well, it creates an astounding temporary shared reality where you and Lee are in on the joke – and usually the joke is how pathetic the character Lee is playing is to have these ideas in the first place – but it’s you and him against a world that doesn’t get the joke.6 I feel like Moore’s borrowing that particular delivery here – a poker-faced yanking of the chain that you’re either in on, or that you’ll be angry about, and it’s up to you where you want to land.
Originally, I was confused why Moore would include a full-length novel in a short story collection, but having read it, I can see that while it is a novel in length, it is a novella at heart. There are a lot of vignettes, and I laughed out loud several times – there is a florid description of an editor swimming through his dead boss’s overflowing collection of pornography that made me laugh so hard I had to put the book aside, and the Stan Lee analogue’s conversation with a CIA agent is also hilarious. But the whole thing doesn’t quite come together as a unified story. If it was published as a separate book, it would have been unsatisfying. But it wouldn’t be quite as much fun if it was a more well-rounded story – it would be The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and we’ve already got one of those. It’s an extended stand-up routine, and that’s how it works best. Also – and this is only my theory – by not releasing it separately, Moore gets to cut the number of interviews in which he might be asked about superheroes by half.
More than the expected anger, I found a dissipated bemusement in the story. A litany of minor atrocities pushing us away from the sense of wonder all of us found in this medium as children, ending with a question – how have we allowed ourselves to get like this? – with no answers, only a rueful shake of the head. We that still call comics home do so because we have hope of some kind. Moore, with all his knocks, has lost that hope, and yet, here is a man who, in an inversion of one of his most famous creations, can’t seem to forget the magic words, try as he might.
“American Light: An Appreciation”
This is a strange one. On one level, it’s a straightforward pastiche on the lines of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, with a seemingly (I don’t like Beat poetry nearly enough to check) perfectly pitched rendition of a “lost” Beat poem with footnotes. On the other hand, it reads a lot like a lost chapter of Jerusalem, given that it’s a plotless narrative of someone walking around for a few hours (12, in this case) as past trauma is laid open to the reader. One might point out that San Francisco is quite far from Jerusalem’s Northampton, but given that he folded London into Northampton, I’d have faith in Moore’s ability to do the same with the city by the bay.
It is certainly an enjoyable piece. Moore creates an entire internal mythology for his invented Beat poets which involves them having pulled from the Book of Coming Forth by Day in a characteristically Occidental manner. Moore manages to make his characters – none of whom actually appear on the page – appear smart but also punctures their self-regard and their pretension.
It would be a stretch to call it a story, though. There is an implied revelation towards the end, but it’s obvious enough that one feels Moore got cold feet and backed off of doing an entirely plotless tone exercise, which would’ve been just as much fun, honestly.
“And, at the Last, Just to Be Done with Silence”
I wouldn’t say any of the stories in the collection are actually bad, but this and “Cold Reading” are likely the least of them. This is a conversation between two men seemingly near their deaths, sometime during the reign of Richard the Lionheart. There’s some good period flavour to the story, and a quick twist to the ending, but I’d be hard-pressed to deem this any kind of classic.
However …
Conclusion
From the individual reviews, it will be clear that I loved some stories, and merely liked most of the others. But what that doesn’t capture is the sheer breadth of what Moore has attempted here, and my admiration for it. I can’t think of any other single-author short story collection that encompasses this diverse a range of subjects, genres, styles, and voices.
Broadly, all of these stories, other than “American Light”, qualify as “fantasy”, but there is a dizzying variety in what Moore tries to do with each story. And that’s where this collection shows the restlessness that has made Moore an epochal creator. Anyone else in his place could be said to have earned the right to rest a bit, and the funny thing is, I feel like this is what Moore does when he rests – writes something simply to amuse him. It is just that this – the formal trickery, the imaginative weight, the pastiche – is what his brain seems to require to keep itself amused, and that’s … admirable is an insufficient word for this.
I just love that having just turned 69, Moore isn’t contented to remain at cruising speed till the end, but is willing – nay, excited – to drive off a cliff and see if he still knows how to fly.
A fucking icon. Happy birthday to himself. May he abide and prosper.
- Another short story of Moore’s adapted as a comic by Avatar Press. That one led to Moore writing Neonomicon and eventually his later-era masterpiece Providence. ↩︎
- There were the Splash Brannigan stories in America’s Best Comics, which weren’t bad per se, but were far too much of a MAD Magazine throwback for me to enjoy entirely. And then there were the Jack B. Quick stories in the same series, which were brilliant in their po-faced absurdism both in Moore’s writing and Nowlan’s marvellous art. ↩︎
- I didn’t have this happen with American comics, myself, but I’ve had the experience of loving Indian comics and then finding out how badly the talent was paid and how their ideas were taken from them by companies who paid them pennies – a familiar story. ↩︎
- You can’t tell me that at least some of the writing in Milt Finefinger’s series of movie reviews isn’t Moore taking the piss out of himself. ↩︎
- I mean, I didn’t know those people, and Moore, for all his apparent meanness, didn’t make me think particularly badly of the real people in those cases. If I’m even thinking of the right ones, that is. ↩︎
- This is why, though, taken out of context and rendered as clips, Lee can appear to be extremely mean about other people in his industry. It would be easy enough for him to break character on stage and explain that he doesn’t mean what you think he means, but that would take the fun out of it. ↩︎