Allan Haverholm » Alan Moore

Review: Lost Girls

Allan Haverholm — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:13:43 +0000

3 years after my old site crashed, I’ve managed to dig out the blog posts from the debris of the database. This is one:

Which isn’t so much a review as a towel being thrown -

Lost Girls,”>

I’ve tried and I’ve tried to write this review, but I just haven’t been able to gather the enthusiasm for it. The fact remains that as much as I want to like Moore and Gebbie’s Lost Girls, it seems to fall short of the expectations mounted by the pre-release controversy and massive coverage. The book has all the makings of a (in)decent Moore romp, and I openly admit to being touched in the right places (metaphorically) by the erotic pornographic material – somehow, the two parts are at odds, though. It’s like two people attempting to have sex with their backs turned to each other, which gives an oddly fitting picture of the reading experience.

It will take a sturdier reader or a more hardened porn fiend than me to identify which element gets in the way of the other, but there is a persistently unsatisfying feeling of “Goddammit, I was this close – !” in reading Lost Girls’ alternating takes of retelling the classic children’s books and the main characters engaging in rollicking threesomes. A good-humoured tease is fine and well, as is retardation, but what do I get for reading through 330 pages of it? A bomb crater with a dismembered penis next to it? In some ways I liked the Hyde/Invisible Man sex scene from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen better.

That was sarcasm; I don’t want to paint Lost Girls as a horrible turnoff. As mentioned above, there are genuine thrills of either kind to be had. However, the hype leading up to the publication of the book(s) was partly concerned with Moore and Gebbie’s aim to produce a) a pornographic work of literature and b) porn that isn’t degrading or obtuse. In my opinion, they only succeed in the latter – but one out of two isn’t half bad, really. The attention that Lost Girls garnered prior to its collected release may have been hyperbolic when it came to the use of established characters, but the critique for openly displaying imaginative, sexual intercourse actually just showed that in the 21st century there are still people among us who are afraid of sex. Moore’s the pity.

Sorry ’bout that one. I don’t have any conclusions to this, other than a faint hope that I’ll like the LoEG: Black Dossier more. And an encouragement to Top Shelf not to use the same Photoshop texture on the dustjackets of all three books next time? It cheapens the look on a quality publication.

1910

Allan Haverholm — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:41:53 +0000

During the Stockholm SPX this weekend I got hold of the latest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book, Century: 1910, habitual Alan Moore oniomaniac that I am.

Upon first reading, I am somewhat underwhelmed, even if the artist and author are visibly having a ball with the contrafact, pre-war period piece.

This doesn’t detract from the fact that Moore and O’Neill are probably the best collaborative team working in comics right now. However, this being the first of three books under the Century header, there are many plot lines left hanging by the last page.

1910 further investigates some of the vast continuity that Moore and O’Neill mine from pulp literature, and I won’t pretend to catch even 10 per cent of the references to different fictional events or characters.

Many of the references I did get were (disappointingly) pointing right back to other parts of Moore’s œuvre: most obviously the Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, from which the author lifted the Black Freighter motif in Watchmen.

Weil and Brecht’s “opera” serves as a skeleton for the main plot, Moore fitting his own players into several of the parts. Mack the Knife becomes a latter-day Jack the Ripper and the delusions of poor Pirate Jenny is turned into the very real prospect of a quite different Jenny.

Even a twice fictionalized Aleister Crowley makes an appearance, or manifestation if you will, and I’m quite sure that’s the esteemed Iain Sinclair appearing as the Prisoner of London. Sinclair is thanked in the credits, anyway.

Crowley has played a major role in Moore’s magical thinking, as well as that of most Western dabblers in magic, and has appeared personally in at least From Hell and Promethea. Other Crowley/Moore connections may elude me at the moments.

Sinclair’s epic poems about London, and specifically the Whitechapel murders, were source material for From Hell, and Moore has on several occasions praised him for his visionary transtemporal writings that precede Moore’s own magic manifestations like The Birth Caul or Snakes and Ladders by decades.

If the Brecht/Weill seems somewhat dominantly out of place, it is likely because Moore is using large quotations from the lyrics as characters burst into singing, with notations circling the balloons to make sure the reader gets the point.

It’s not as bad as it may sound, taking into consideration the overall solidity of the book. Still, it is such an incongruently mixed media that it lessens the impact of Pirate Jenny’s revenge fantasy come to life.

As opulent as Threepenny Opera can be, it does not come across at max effect in this treatment, and it represents an uncommon miscalculation of the author’s tools of the trade on Moore’s part.

A thing that has naturally faded since the first two collections of LoEG is of course the Jules Vernean steampunk technology displayed as early as the fist pages of vol. one.

Sure, there is still weird science in abundance but one might expect it to be a bit more advanced by the early twentieth century. Of course, that is more dictated by the pulp works of the time than by logical progression.

As has been the case since vol. two, the things that do point onward and out from the familiar tropes are mostly contained in the text piece at the end.

A palaeolithic man presents to a woman, Bio (probably a reference I don’t get) the shattered remains of an obsidian stele. Originally of the dimensions 2x4x9, I’d hazard.

And to some delight for those like me, who are sad to see the Victorian elements of the first two volumes disappear on the horizon, the same text piece also features Captain Universe, a hint that in due time Moore and O’Neill will perform the slightly askew LoEG parlor magic on the superhero canon.

All in all a good read but so full of unanswered questions that it can’t be properly reviewed until the Century cycle has run its course.

Much like that other work of pop literary cross reference, Warren Ellis’ and John Cassaday’s Planetary, previous volumes of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have been notoriously, chronically late for publication.

Hopefully the publishers of this edition have made sure to buffer enough material to ascertain a more or less steady publication schedule!

Large digits

Allan Haverholm — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:51:00 +0000

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.