Only this Friday, March 27th the photocopied pages for the lost, third volume of Big Numbers were made (legally) available on the Internet, some twenty years after they were produced.
What the big deal is? These are the last pages made for Alan Moore’s failed comic to end all comics.
On the heels of his groundbreaking Watchmen and V for Vendetta comics, Moore had soured on working for publishers that would steal the rights to his work, given half a chance. That disenchantment with the industry continues to this day, and has been widely publicized each time a movie has been made from his work, against his will and advice.
In the late eighties, spurred on by self-publishing comic creators like Dave Sim and Kevin Eastman, Moore’s escape was to form his own publishing company, Mad Love. An apt name, seeing that Moore’s business partners were his wife and their shared lover, who in Eddie Campbell‘s description had been the author’s “extended family” for years.
After the ruminations of Vendetta on anarchist theory, and the multilayered, self-reflecting intricacy that is Watchmen, Moore decided it was time to step away from the superhero fantasy and take on a subject matter based in reality, but made all the more fantastic by the fact. It was time to inspect and wield the Big Numbers that connect human life according to fractal mathematics and chaos theory.
(Interestingly, the story is set in a fictionalized version of the author’s own hometown Northampton, foreshadowing his later novel Voice of the Fire, which took place in that city over the course of thousands of years, a practice of manifesting a particular location’s genus loci that he has also used in “seances” like Snakes and Ladders, and The Birth Caul)
Over the years Moore has made light of the insane, meticulous planning he went through to sketch out his intended 12-volume interpretation of the Mandelbrot set: how Neil Gaiman “shat himself” when presented with the 2′x2’9″ sheet minutely charting the whereabouts of all the characters at any given point in the story.
And the strain of the complex, elaborate work speaks for itself: Artist Bill Sienkiewicz ran dry (some say he cracked) after carefully crafting two chapters of 40 beautiful pages each, and his assistant Al Colombia who had had a big hand in drawing chapter three also was promoted to take over his job entirely with chapter four.
Eddie Campbell, Moore’s collaborator on From Hell, vitriously lays out the scene in his How to be an Artist (pages 110-116), but I’ll keep it short:
Al Colombia’s work was destroyed by the artist in a fit, attempts to find a replacement were proved futile — Big Numbers sank like a rock, Moore’s wife and lover had decided three was a crowd, and all there was left in the rubble was those five square feet of paper mapping a lost dream.
Until, of course, the Age of the Internet came upon us. Instant, ubiquitous availability brought us gems thought dead and lost, such as the Star Wars Christmas Special and that ill-fated Fantastic Four movie. And for years, rumours circulated about existing xeroxes of the lost, remaining chapter of Big Numbers.
And that is where we come in. It goes without saying that the pages (or some of the pages, in different combinations and sequences, and varying degrees of xerosion) have been around on the Mules and Wires and Torrents of the internet for years now, but this is the first time that I know of that the full book has been made available, and with Moore’s blessing to boot, it appears!
By sheer coincidence, it all happened less than a week after I had actually bought my first ever copies of volumes one and two. I’d avoided the series because it wasn’t completed, but gave in, eventually. With the online publication of chapter 3, it is actually possible to read a quarter of the intended work, making it all the more painful to see what a subtle, intricate, engaging narrative is starting to take shape. Characters are coming to life from the outlines we meet in chapter 1, patterns emerge, possible story developments simmer in the horizon.
All forgotten dreams and wishes that will go unfulfilled. Or what? Heidi MacDonald, of comic news source The Beat, played a really lowdown and dirty April’s Fool prank recently, but that’s just cruel. No, after some eighteen years of dodging the subject, like that of a long lost girlfriend that broke your heart, artist Bill Sienkiewicz has expressed interest in taking on the project again, should the author be willing. “I’m older and wiser, and would approach the entirety of the book and series differently than I did then,” he states, implying probably that he is less prone to jump ship after all these years.
Whatever comes of that outstretched hand is up to Alan Moore, who has retired from mainstream comics, now dividing his time between work on his 2000 page novel, Jerusalem, magical practices, and the odd comic book work of love every now and then. Mainly, the latter have been in the context of his and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but two years back he also finished Lost Girls, a book he started with collaborator Melinda Gebbie shortly after the demise of Big Numbers.
Moore is no stranger to longterm commitment to projects, and V for Vendetta was on an extended hiatus before it was finished and published, but I’m probably grasping at straws.
Big Numbers may well be left unfinished and, like some Gothic Revival mock-ruin, remain a monument to the creators’ insane ambition and eventual failure. The work might even leave a bigger impression in its amputated state than it would if it were concluded.
Judging from what is now available, there is little doubt in my mind that Big Numbers taken to its conclusion would have been a milestone in comics. Instead, the “Making and Unmaking of Big Numbers” has become a tale of caution to creators of even moderate ambition.
Many comickers have tried and failed to raise the bar, on a personal scale or for the entire medium. Yet none have floundered with such massive publicity, or leaving such wreckage as Moore and Sienkiewicz’ Big Numbers. Reading the first three chapters now is like entering an opulent cathedral, only to find the interior a shelled-out shambles; all walls tumbled down but the one you’ve come through, leaving only the idea of a cathedral in your mind. And the Big Numbers of my mind is still pretty damn huge.