A Small Killing - closing arguments

Welcome back! We're on to the last chapter of A Small Killing. You can find my write-up of chapter 1 here, of chapter 2 here, chapter 3 here, and chapter 4 here. If you want to follow along (warning, there's going to be a lot of spoilers) you can easily find a used copy online, or if you're less morally inclined, you can read it online here.

So, we've pretty well covered almost every panel in the book. What's left?

Well, let's put A Small Killing in context. First off, let's start off with the negatives. While a fair number of Moore fans have never even bothered reading A Small Killing, many who have don't rate it very highly. The complaints are kind of obvious:

• The art is ugly.
• The main character is unlikable.
• Not much happens.
• The stuff that does happen is so ludicrous, it can't be taken seriously.
• It's all too symbolic.
• Where are the superheroes?

Okay, let's take these on. "The art is ugly." Yes, the art is very different from what we've been used to in Moore's bibliography. Oscar Zarate is much more artistic and, in a lot of ways, pretentious. But some of his art is beautiful and undeniable, such as that page when the giant bugs come sliding out of the glass jar. Ultimately this is a personal choice. I don't read Moore for the art, so I can sort of go along with most any artist and Zarate brings some interesting elements, even if sometimes "interesting" is code for fugly.

"Timothy Hole is unlikable." That's the point. But he also has his moments. I can understand not caring about the midlife crisis of an English yuppie, but I also think we're supposed to see our own worst tendencies in Hole. I know I do.

"Not much happens." Yeah, that whole car crash, London brawl and giant bottle of bugs spilling out and all over Hole sure were boring weren't they? But yes, a lot of it is a man going on vacation and worrying that he's being stalked by a boy.

"The stuff that happens is ludicrous." True, the fetus thing seems to be a sticking point for a lot of people (Hi, PeteDratt of reddit.com/r/AlanMoore). Is it realistic? No, probably not. Does it work in the context of the death/life thing of the story? I think so. Again, this one is up to you.

"Too symbolic." Yes, this book is overloaded with symbols. Are they all necessary? No, probably not, but Moore was eager to prove he could take the lessons learned on Watchmen and turn them to a more artistic and adult work. That's interesting to me.

"Where are the superheroes?" Shut up.

I guess what I'm saying is that I think most of the complaints are well founded (except the superhero thing) and I don't disagree with the people who find that they hold them back from liking or getting into this work. But I think the strengths of the book outweigh the weaknesses.

The one that sticks with me is that Timothy Hole is unlikable. And I think that will lead through the rest of this post. I think Timothy was supposed to be so unlikable because Moore was using him as a sort of mirror for himself and some of the aspects he didn't like about himself.

The clues to this are kind of obvious.

Moore wrote the years and locations for each of his chapters, corresponding to when Timothy was in those locations. So, Timothy was working in New York from 1985-1989. Those years roughly correspond to the same years Alan Moore worked at DC Comics. Moore started with Swamp Thing in 1984 and V for Vendetta finished in 1989. Timothy worked in London from 1979-1985, roughly the same years Alan Moore worked on mainstream British comics. Moore started Captain Britain in 1980 and finished Book 3 of Halo Jones in 1986. Timothy was born in 1954. Moore was born in 1953.

Sheffield is not Northampton, but in the Avatar edition, Moore notes that Zarate used the landscape of Northampton, including the lot where Moore's boyhood house once stood, for drawing the Sheffield and Old Buildings chapters. It's Moore's home.

Moore standing in the empty lot

Moore was writing about his career. But the advertising was a stand-in for superhero comics. Remember the line about New York being Timothy's "peculiar mood I flew out of." When Moore was writing the ABC line of comics in the early 2000s, he talked about his 80s work:

"The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it's like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we'd got this insane right-wing voter fear running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. So that tended to reflect in my work. But it was a genuine bad mood, and it was mine. I tend to think that I've seen a lot of things over the past 15 years that have been a bizarre echo of somebody else's bad mood. It's not even their bad mood, it's mine, but they're still working out the ramifications of me being a bit grumpy 15 years ago.”

Timothy had been hired by Flite or an advertising company to work on Flite from 1985 on. And now he had to sell Flite to the Russians, a new market. But what is Flite? Does it help if I spell it Flight? I think Flite, the soda, is superheroes with their powers, such as flight.

The Russians are a new audience, wary of this sugary concoction. Perhaps the Russians are the new adult audience the comic marketers made such a big deal about after Moore created Watchmen and Frank Miller created Dark Knight Returns?

In this theory (which was written about pretty well here, well before I started my reread) , the opportunity to sell Flite is likely the opportunity to do The Twilight of the Superheroes, the crossover designed to affect all of the DC superhero comics. (I don't want to get into the Twilight proposal, so just go Google it, okay?) Suffice it to say, Moore could probably have done whatever he wanted at DC after Watchmen.

If Flite is DC superheroes, what does that say about the London work? Well, what's the comic that most got Moore noticed to go work in America? That would be Marvelman (or Miracleman). He had reinvented superheroes, adding psychology and real-world ramifications. And the American industry took notice. Remember when Timothy talked about his target audience: young, single, white males, earning between 10 and 15 grand? That's the same audience for comics.

So, remember that terrible ad, where the cars were chasing the woman?

I think that's Moore's view of his Marvelman work.

 

One more thing since we're on the subject of Moore's British comics. Remember when Timothy thinks about how being 10 is when you first start knowingly doing wrong. Moore wrote something similar in his Night Raven work in the back-up MarvelUK feature:

"Ten was a good age. Maybe the last good age. It was the age when parents stopped worrying about what other people might do to their kids, given the chance, and started worrying about what their kids might do to themselves."

But, let's be careful. Timothy is obviously not a complete stand-in for Moore in all aspects. Moore never cheated on his wife, as far as we know. He had kids and Timothy didn't. Moore never left Northampton. So let's not go too far in trying to make the two line up. I think Moore was focusing on his professional life and the clues seem to suggest that, so that's where I think the comparisons should stay.

Anyway, following this line of argument, what we know is that by the time Moore was writing A Small Killing he likely was tired of writing superheroes. He felt like he was selling soda for a major U.S. corporation. Probably, he felt like he had sold his soul for success.

I can't imagine where he got that idea

Let's look at the timeline:

• Watchmen comes out in 1987-88
• Moore proposes Twilight of the Superheroes in 1987
• A Killing Joke comes out in May 1988
• Moore puts together the artists for his A.A.R.G.H. one-shot and it comes out in october of 1988. As part of that, he tells Zarate he wants to work on other things and Zarate tells him his idea about the boy stalking the man.
• V for Vendetta finishes in May 1989 and Moore knows that he already knows he's been screwed by the Watchmen and V for Vendetta deals and has sworn off DC (for other reasons, too).
• From Hell is previewed in Cerebus in July 1989.
• Big Numbers appear in April and September of 1990
• Lost Girls and A Small Killing appear in 1991

A Small Killing is the symbolic work representing Moore's turn away from DC superheroes to his work on creator-owned and less mainstream "more adult" work.

At the end, when Timothy decides to stay in Sheffield is Moore deciding to stay and focus on personal work, such as his hometown of Northampton, which became a major part of his later work.

I think this is all pretty clear and it's a pretty sound argument. But, if you'll join me, I'll take it a step too far and hopefully we won't fall off a cliff.

What if the ending of A Small Killing is not just about working on DC Comics? What if it's a personal decision Moore made to change his outlook on life? Remember that foul mood he talked about?

My thesis is this (and it's the thesis for most of the work I've done on this blog), what if Moore made a conscious choice to change his attitude and his life? What if he decided to change his view from the pessimism and nihilism that marks his work on Watchmen and The Killing Joke?

Granted, his work on From Hell and Big Numbers were both filled with evil forces. But he also loved working on them and they were more important to him than his DC work. Nowadays he won't even talk about work he doesn't own.

But let's go back to the timeline.

• In the early 1990s, his wife (and her lover) leave him. 
• Big Numbers dies twice, first by Bill Sienkiewicz leaving and then by Al Columbia physically destroying the art for issue 4.
• With these two acts, Mad Love, Moore's imprint (that put out A.A.R.G.H. and was associated with A Small Killing) goes bust
• By 1993, Moore returned to superhero comics with 1963 and his issue (and later issues) of Spawn for Image, largely to make money while working on From Hell
• He works on Spawn and WildCATS through 1995
• He did Outbreaks of Violets for the MTV Europe Awards in 1995
• He takes over Supreme in 1996, which leads to the revamp of the whole Awesome line. When Awesome went belly up in 1998, he went on to create ABC

Those first three would be enough to test anyone's resolve. But look at his work after that. His early Image work, 1963, attempted to capture the fun and whimsy of early Marvel comics. Even his Spawn work had an enchanted lunacy to it, like an insane version of Loony Toons. And Outbreaks of Violets was a chance to find the humor and optimism in the terrible news of the day.

 

Then came Supreme, Moore's love letter to the superheroes of his youth. I've written a lot about why Supreme is important to me, but for the sake of this, let me point out how far Moore had come. In A Small Killing we can make an argument that Moore had come to hate superheroes and left them to work on important comics and to find his truth. That ends in triple tragedy and he comes crawling back to superhero comics mainly for the money. But he's found his center. He's found the optimism and joy he enjoyed as a child. And through that optimism and joy he's found a way to love superheroes and make them optimistic and an ode to the imagination.

 

So, no matter all the complaints about A Small Killing and how reasonable they are, it's also the work at the crux of Moore's career that explains everything that came before and everything that came after.

And if that's still not enough for you to realize it is a major Moore work, Tim Callahan in his wonderful "Great Alan Moore Reread" said this about A Small Killing:

"The most highly-regarded 'literary' graphic novels of all time,– name whatever famous Top 5 pops into your head, are almost sure to be memoirs, presented in an overly-literal, likely chronological order. Maus, Persepolis, or Fun Home. Something like that. Or, on the other end of things, formal masterpieces that are difficult to connect with emotionally. Jimmy Corrigan? Ice Haven? Asterios Polyp? A Small Killing is that rare beast of a fiction graphic novel that steals from what prose, poetry, and film can do, but tells the story as only comic books can. It’s as good as any of the other books listed above, and yet I’ve never seen it mentioned in the same sentence as any of the others.

"What a pleasure it was to reread this book by Alan Moore and Oscar Zarate. I can’t recommend it highly enough."

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case. How do you find the defendant?

Shameless plug

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Jenn Marshall of Sirens of Sequentials said: “Miskatonic High is a fun story that balances everything you want in a good horror story. There is some gore, but not so much that you get overwhelmed. The jokes are funny, but they don’t make the story feel like a parody of something else. It was well thought out, and I cannot wait to see where it is going to go next.” Read the full review

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A Small Killing - chapter 4

Welcome back! We're on to the last chapter of A Small Killing. You can find my write-up of chapter 1 here, of chapter 2 here, and chapter 3 here. If you want to follow along (warning, there's going to be a lot of spoilers) you can easily find a used copy online, or if you're less morally inclined, you can read it online here.

To start off, we get the chapter page which tells us we're now in The Old Buildings. We're covering the period of 1954 to 1964, the first ten years of Timothy's life. We see Timothy's back at the top of a hill on his way down into a section of old lower-class English row houses. He's riding his father's bike, and the shadows and silhouettes of the barren trees seem to be reaching out for him.

I've never really understood what Zarate is doing with the styles on these chapter headings. The first two were bright and colorful and then the third was stark black and white and now this moody one that doesn't look much different from the rest of the story. Is there a meaning in all this or did he just do whatever he wanted on the day?

As he's biking, he thinks, "through this scrapyard of clapped-out utopias; failed social visions that came here to die. Just like me..." Moore would explore this psychic geography a lot in his later writings on Northampton, but it's enough to know that he's returning to his very low-class roots.

"How on Earth did I come to be here?" he thinks, but what does he mean? Why is he here now and how did he get brought here by his subconscious? Or how did a boy from such lower class ever get out of here to London and New York?

He blames it on the bike, which his dad rode here for 12 years. It carried him here. "I'm being ridden by the bike," he thinks, because nothing is his fault.

He thinks, "I feel as if I'm treading darkness...trying to push my head above the surface of this night, but failing...going down..." That's a beautiful line. He's drowning in the night.

He thinks about being a kid and pretending to walk on a tightrope on the curb. Moore has always been so good at capturing the memory of youth. "The present's less substantial here." The memories of the past are coming to him here as he's in this place. He's being drawn back here to remember something. "It's where he lives," he thinks of his 10-year-old self.

He thinks about wanting to live and whether that means meeting the boy or killing him. And then he sees a kid, but it isn't young Timothy, it's Maggie with her own children. And she's happy to see him.

"God, you're looking smart. You look like a yuppie." She introduces him to her two little kids. Remember that they didn't have kids when they were married but since he left she's been able to. So this kind of confirms that the problem of having kids wasn't her biological problem, but his. Everything he produces is dead.

She tells him that she lives down here but is moving now that her handmade toy company is taking off. She stuck to her ideals. She tells him that she has to go and see her husband. "Lovely seeing you," she says. "You take care of yourself." She holds no animosity toward him. No one does, really. Only young Timothy.

(By the way, she's wearing glasses, so maybe her eyesight was bad all along? Or maybe she's on her own way toward becoming a yuppie and she can't see clearly anymore, either?)

But he's not sure what to make of the chance meeting, thinking that maybe he's dreaming or maybe he's dead. I guess those are potential answers to this story, but they're kind of a chicken way to rationalize this story, so I'm not going to think too much about them.

He keeps heading toward his old house, seeing one that wasn't his, but it represents so much to him. "If I entered, every toy I ever lost would be there, in the starlight and the mildew." The house is his subconscious, holding all that he's lost. But his house is gone, demolished, nothing but grass.

And as he looks at the yard, he hears voices, even though no one is there. They're the voices of children, probably from his own youth. Up until this point in the book, we've always heard the voices in crowds of people, but where Timothy was separate from them in his own world of thought. The voices were part of the setting, part of the place, helping us to feel what New York was like or what the pub in Sheffield was like.

But what do the voices mean here? Are they ghosts? Are they his subconscious? Are they part of the remnant of human memory that have been stamped onto a place? I think any of those are an okay answer. For me, I think it shows that the sights and sounds of his memory are becoming very real and substantial to him, even where his outside senses are picking them up. He is physically hearing his memory. Soon, he'll physically feel it too.

He moves on from his house to "the old buildings," where he'd played as a child. And he thinks about the time he had put the live bugs in the bottle and buried them. The art zooms in on his little smiling face. "I buried them alive, like little Eichmann. It felt...sexy." Sex/puberty is a dividing point for when a child becomes an adult (or at least a young adult if you go by the sections of the library).

He looks at where he stopped and made up his mind about returning to free the bugs. The captions of his thoughts tell us that he returned to free the insects, but the art shows us that he didn't. Then he stops and realizes that he didn't. That his memory was a lie he told himself.

"I couldn't face it, sickened with myself." And he runs into the wasteland of the old buildings, Zarate beautifully showing the building like partially submerged wreckage. "It was the first bad thing that I did knowingly. The first." But not the last, as we've seen.

He thinks about how people change, from being the young innocent Lolita, deciding to play grown up, and then being the grown up Humbert Humbert filled with bad intentions toward the child.

He finds the spot and starts digging, hoping it's not there and that he really did dig it up in the past. But then it's there, glowing unearthly and so much bigger than when he was a kid. It's grown from all the lies and terrible things he did after burying it.

He decides to open it. "There. There," he thinks of the lid, "it's giving..." Is it giving way or giving birth?

This reminds me, I think intentionally, of the myth of Pandora's box. He's letting all the evils out, just as Pandora did. But in the myth, Pandora shuts the box, trapping one of the evils in, that last one being hope. I've always enjoyed the little conundrum of why hope is sometimes considered an evil, though I don't think that part applies here.

Then we see a splash page of the giant terrible insects climbing out and all over Timothy. It's so incredibly well drawn by Zarate. It's creepy and gross and magical. And notice that Timothy is not wearing his glasses now. His eyes are wide with fright, but he sees.

Then he's throwing up as the glasses return. And that's when the boy finds him.

He asks what the boy wants and he says to kill the adult. When asked why, he responds, "You killed me first," and picks up a club-like stick.

The adult tries to apologize to the boy, but the boy isn't here for an apology. Notice that the adult apologizes with his eyes closed. Is he even sorry, really, or is he just avoiding his guilt? Is there any truth to this apology?

It doesn't matter, the boy hits the man, knocking him back into the hole that is his namesake, and knocking off his glasses. Finally clear about what story he's in, the adult grabs a sharp piece of glass and squares off with the kid. And the adult has his inspiration, born of this conflict.

The idea is: In Red Square a boy will be drinking Flite while his grandfather looks up at the disapproving image of Lenin. Flite doesn't mean anything to the boy because he's untroubled by the past. The grandfather, hot and thirsty, glances up guiltily, perhaps letting the past stop him from what he really wants.

And the two Timothies continue fighting. We pull farther and farther away and Timothy thinks of the dream and how they could have been anyone. "It happened, and I was away in the distance." And we see the crash of lightning from the dream strike the two.

I'm not sure who the "I" was away in the distance. Is it just a thought from the adult Timothy? Or is some third Timothy watching as this adult version and child version battle it out? Is it like Don't Look Back, where the main character has visions of his own demise? Or is it me, Mike, reading this comic? I'm not sure.

Then we see the bike in the dark, which looks like a pair of glasses. And then we see the light of morning glint off a wheel. And then we see the light glint off of Timothy's glasses. Then we see the adult Timothy wake up next to his glasses but never put them on and walk away from them, obviously able to see clearly without them now.

A bird flies up and will soon become a symbol for how the world has changed as we're no longer talking about dead eggs.

We've gone through the darkness of night and soul and have come out the other end, like Dante in the Inferno having to go through the deepest depth of Hell to come out.

Timothy walks into a shop and gets a paper and a can of Vimto, the only one on a shelf full of Flite. He talks to the old woman clerk, and I feel like maybe she's a counterpoint to the phony cheery stewardess we saw at the beginning of the book. And we see him looking at the section of the paper that says "Situations wanted." (Situations wanted is like a help wanted section, except you say what you can do and hope someone hires you.) And then there's that bird again.

I've hear people tell me that the ending is meant ambiguously, and we're not sure who won or what happened, but to me it seems obvious who won. We're supposed to think that the boy Timothy, who represents honesty to oneself, has won and that this new Timothy will be staying in his hometown, drinking Vimto and leading a new life.

He thinks, "There's a new yolk in the blown egg. There's a new pulse in the scraped womb. Everything is pregnant." And we see the bird with a nest of three eggs. Where Timothy only produced death, he will now produce life.

And here's an important part of that. He can't go back and make a child with Maggie and he can't go back and undo the abortion with Sylvia. Just as he didn't go back in time to let the bugs out; he came back when he was older and tried to make amends. The only life he can produce right now is his own. He needed to make amends with himself. And now he's pregnant with his own future.

There's also the question of if the lie about killing the bugs was the point where his life spun off in the wrong direction, was all of it wrong? Wasn't his love of Maggie great and wasn't he an idealist for a little while? Yes, of course. No life is all bad or all good. But it was built on a foundation of him lying to himself, which is what sunk it. If he had been honest, would Maggie have married him? Who knows, but it would have been built on who Timothy really was rather than who he thought she wanted him to be and who he wanted to be.

But what about the boy? Was he real? I don't know. Does it matter? The simple answer is that no, he merely represented Timothy's subconscious, and it was all symbol and metaphors for a man wrestling with his soul and coming to a midlife crisis. If you prefer to think the boy was real, that works, too. In Moore's view, ideas are real whether they're physical or not. But you decide. Moore's not giving simple answers in this book.

And Timothy walks off into the morning light, looking at his paper. Around him, we see a person on a bike, a cab, a train and a jet plane. All of these things are taking people elsewhere, but he's not going anywhere anymore.

And he thinks, "Into the morning, unnoticed, I slip from the scene of the crime." What's the crime? The bottling of the insects or the killing of the adult Timothy? I guess there's some ambiguity after all.

Here's a little more ambiguity: On the final page, the one little sketch of an image shows us the nest. And one of the eggs is cracked. Is it something alive or is it something dead? We get to decide. Will Timothy become a new and better person or will he be the person he's always been? Can a person ever really change?

I hope he becomes the better person. Is hope still in the box or did he let it out?

What did you think about the ending?

I plan to do one more post about A Small Killing, so come back as we try to determine the motive!

Shameless plug

One more project I'm working on: A friend and I have created a comic book called Miskatonic High. Five teens take on H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters and their small-town high school … They’re just not sure which is worse.

We successfully launched our first kickstarter, which you can buy (PDF or physical copy of issue 1 so far) from here. It has received plenty of rave reviews:

Jenn Marshall of Sirens of Sequentials said: “Miskatonic High is a fun story that balances everything you want in a good horror story. There is some gore, but not so much that you get overwhelmed. The jokes are funny, but they don’t make the story feel like a parody of something else. It was well thought out, and I cannot wait to see where it is going to go next.” Read the full review

The Pullbox called it “the bastard lovechild of John Hughes & H.P. Lovecraft.” (We’re pretty sure they meant that in a metaphorical way, because if that’s literal, well… ewww.) Read the full review

Our kickstarter for issue two just ended. You can get the PDF of the second issue on ComixCentral.com real soon.

Goshdarn Geeky raved of issue 2: "Miskatonic High has proven it can hit us right in the heart with a character-centric story that goes past the cosmic horror, and I hope it can continue to deliver." Read the full review

A Small Killing - chapter 3

Welcome back! We're on to chapter 3 of A Small Killing. You can find my write-up of chapter 1 here and of chapter 2 here.  If you want to follow along (warning, there's going to be a lot of spoilers) you can easily find a used copy online, or if you're less morally inclined, you can read it online here.

To start off, the chapter page tells us we’re in Sheffield and the years Timothy is dealing with in his past were 1964-1979. Roughly, those were the years he was 10 to 25. A teenager to a young man. The chapter page is in stark contrast black and white of a taxicab in the rain outside the Sheffield railroad station. Why Zarate chose to make it stark black and white… no idea.

Sheffield is a small city up near Leeds in the north of England and we’ve heard mention in the past that Sheffield is where Timothy is from.

The chapter starts with Timothy deep in thought in the back of the cab thinking, “I daredn’t think anything.” Good luck with that.

He’s so busy not thinking about a kid trying to kill him that he doesn’t realize he gave the cab driver the wrong address and ended up outside the old flat he and his wife Maggie used to live at.

And then he flashes back to think about Maggie. He thinks of their marriage, “It was just something left over from when we were kids. It wasn’t real.” As he thinks that, we’re seeing a dollhouse, thinking it’s real before a giant eye peeks into the window. Notice that the eye doesn’t look like it’s wearing glasses.

In a way, Maggie and Timothy were playing house. Playing grown up. But maybe they weren’t really grown up? Maybe you don’t really become grown up until you have kids of your own? But claiming that it wasn't real is a way that he attempts to absolve himself of the crime of single-handedly destroying that marriage.

Of course, for the rest of the flashback, he refuses to look at Maggie or us as he lies about Barry’s party, which we saw one of last chapter. He admits that Barry has “done no end for me,” which is not something he would admit now. And is he talking about career wise or sex wise?

He tells Maggie that she wouldn’t like the people at Barry’s party: “not your type. Well, not my type either…” except he’s thinking of Sylvia, who we've talked about how she really wasn't his type.

Maggie tries to console him for having to work for Barry in advertising, “I know you feel compromised, working with advertising people… you’re not doing anything wrong, love.” Of course he is on so many levels. But notice that this isn’t what gets him upset. We go to another whole panel where she starts to slip off his glasses… starts to take down the lies so he or she can see things as they really are, and that’s what gets him to jerk away from her.

He gives her the butterfly necklace that Sylvia made. And now we realize that the Barry party he was at wasn’t the one where he met Sylvia, it was after he’s been to her shop, after he’s told her that he’s married to Maggie and after Sylvia has given him a look that says she knows and is willing to have a sexual relationship anyway.

Maggie loves the necklace and says whoever made it must be Maggie and Timothy’s type of person. Because, of course, Maggie and Timothy are the same type of person, right? Or is one of them living a lie?

Then he thinks about his nickname for her: Magoo. It’s from Mr. Magoo, a weird cartoon about an old man who can’t really see and all the oddball adventures he gets into because he thinks he’s somewhere else and refuses to admit he has a vision problem. Hmm... sound familiar?

I think this is another way of showing them still as kids: nicknames are what we give to each other as kids. “Because of her eyesight,” he thinks. But that’s weird, since he’s the one who wears glasses and has problems seeing reality and her only problem is seeing Timothy for who he really is.

He heads to the pub and thinks of the old flat, “Had a children’s room, so Maggie said it would be handy for when we had…” But they didn’t have children, because again, everything that he creates is already dead.

He goes into a pub and hears lots of working class voices as he orders a beer. And a voice from the side orders a Vimto. He looks over and it’s the kid.

It turns out that Vimto is a real soda from nearby Manchester which I’ve seen here in the United States. I always thought Moore made it up, like Flite.

Timothy actually orders the Vimto and goes and sits with the kid, who asks, “Do you really like beer?” I’m not a beer drinker, so I’m kind of biased, but beer does taste horrible and I can see a kid, asking in a direct way, whether someone really enjoys the taste of beer.

Timothy starts yelling at the kid until the bartender comes over and tells him to be quiet. He asks the kid if he’s trying to kill him, to which the boy answers yes and walks away. As Timothy chases after him we see the empty beer glass and the full Vimto. Of course we’re supposed to wonder at this point whether the boy is real, since no one else talks to him or notices him and he only seems to affect the world through the adult Timothy.

Thinking about that, isn’t that absolutely the power of ideas in Moore’s view of Idea Space and magic? That they exist and have power because of how we respond to them? By what they make us do?

Back out in the rain, he can’t find the boy so he heads to his parents’ house and tries to come up with a rational explanation for this. He thinks maybe Flite’s competitors hired a midget to kill him or drive him mad, knowing no one would believe him. He thinks about the crazy midget woman in the movie Don’t Look Now.

Okay, if you don’t know the movie Don’t Look Now, it’s also very much a part of the themes Moore’s playing with. In the movie by Nicolas Roeg, adapted from a story by Daphne du Maurier, a married couple are in Italy trying to recover from the shock of their young daughter’s accidental death. A clairvoyant tells them that their daughter is trying to contact them and that they’re in great danger. They have premonitions that appear as flashbacks and flashforwards. The father keeps seeing a figure in a red raincoat, similar to the one his daughter died in. When he confronts the child-like figure, it’s a female dwarf who pulls out a meat cleaver and cuts his throat, which is the image he saw in his visions. It was a famous movie for focusing on the psychology of grief and the effect the death of a child can have on a relationship.

Um, yeah, I don’t think Moore slipped that reference in accidentally any more than he did Mr. Magoo.

He thinks of the Talking Heads song, Burning Down the House, with the phrase, “Psycho killer. Qu’est ce que c’est?” The French phrase is used to ask, “What’s going on?” but it’s literally translated as “What is it that it is?” As he thinks this he looks at us. Almost as if he’s asking us, What is this man that it is? What is the truth to him? What is he really?

Behind him there’s a strange grinning face in the window. But that’s just his dad and mum, who welcome him in. He dries off as they talk to him in the warmth of home and he thinks about a time he had taken LSD when he was 17 and tried to act normal with them.

Two things to consider with the revelation of the LSD. One is that people experience flashbacks years later. Maybe we’re supposed to suspect that he’s haunted by something he experienced as a kid? Two is that LSD messes up your sense of time. You might see the world around you in flashforwards and flashbacks. Moore, who famously got kicked out of school for dealing LSD, has said that his use of LSD prompted him to see time differently, which allowed him to write Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen.

Okay, so I’m trying to figure out what is going on in this panel where he talks about the LSD. His dad is talking to him and holding up four fingers. Are they making a shadow puppet on the TV or is the TV just playing a wolf movie? It really doesn’t matter, but I can’t figure it out.

He goes to bed and thinks about how they live in such a dull, real world far removed from one where little boys try to commit murder. And as he thinks that, his glasses are off.

He wakes up and he explains how he can’t see without his glasses and it comes back to him that yes, the boy is trying to kill him. He asks his dad where he can hire a car, but his dad tells him to take the old beater a younger Timothy sold him when he was broke. He goes to inspect it and thinks it’s “been waiting here these years.” It’s been waiting, like his parents have. “I s’pose I’d always thought that they’d be dead by now.”

But things live on forever at home because they aren’t always real things. It’s like when you go home and your parents make you feel like a child. That truth only exists in how we think or feel about home. But that truth never goes away no matter how old we get.

He goes to pull a “Rock against racism” sticker off that he had put on when he was younger and more idealistic. But try as he might, it doesn’t completely come off. You can’t get rid of your old ideals and old truths that easily, Timothy.

He thinks about going to the police, but they’d never believe him. And then he thinks back to how much simpler life used to be in this car. And his old, distrustful eyes become young, idealistic eyes in a flashback. He picks up Maggie at high school (maybe) and they talk about their art projects before he asks if she wants a bite to eat or something. She looks directly at him and says she wants something and then we see a beautiful scene of them making love on her jacket on a hill side.

With his glasses off and looking at her, he asks what she would say if he asked her to marry him. (Even here, where we like him, he still can’t just come out and ask directly…it has to be someone else’s decision.) And maybe his eyes are closed this whole time. It’s hard to tell. But that might be the point.

She asks him what the worst thing he’s ever done is. He thinks and (while not looking at her) tells her he buried a can full of live bugs. But halfway home, his conscience got the better of him and he went and dug them up and got in trouble with his mum for being late. “But what else could I do?”

She says, okay, let’s get married. And a rabbit jumps through the panel.

It's such a beautiful little scene that we almost forget all the terrible things Timothy did to destroy his marriage and his life after this. It begs the question of what would have happened if he had been a better person from the start? But we'll get to that soon enough.

We cut, unsuccessfully continuing the rabbit jump, to a kid jumping in front of the car as he thinks about Maggie encouraging him to hang up his birds eggs. She accepted him even though his art was devoid of life.

His eyes in the mirror are full of fright. But he slams on the brakes, despite thinking, “I thought it was him, and I almost didn’t brake.” He thinks that everything is dangerous now… “I’m dangerous to me.”

The car stalled when he braked and now it won’t go again, so he has to push the car home. He hadn’t been paying attention where he was driving and now he’s by the old flats he lived in when he was a younger boy. “I don’t remember driving here.” Gosh… do you think his subconscious has been driving?

The old neighborhood hasn’t changed, despite everything else changing. You can’t change your past, but you can try not to look at it. “Eyes down,” he thinks as he pushes the car. He thinks about when he was a kid and tried to avoid some older kids. He had to stay ahead of the pack, referencing his later car ad. His moments of inspiration are influenced by his past, by who he used to be.

He makes it to his parents’ house and thinks about reading Lolita, but thinks about how Humbert’s obsession with Lolita drove her mother to her death under the wheels of a car. So he looks at an old photo album instead. His past is always there.

He works his way backwards: his marriage to Maggie. He can’t remember why they objected to getting married in a church. “Motives. They aren’t Kodachrome. They fade, they blur…” Of course he would put it in terms of an advertising pitch.

He sees a picture of him as a baby and then one of him as a teen, with his very symbolic artwork. The worker crucified on a dollar symbol. One of him at a christening party and one of him with his father on the beach for a holiday when he's twelve. He’s almost there... almost to his ten-year old self.

Notice that as a small child and baby he doesn't have his glasses and after about twelve, he does. And while that's true for a lot of people, that they develop bad eyesight about age 10 or 11, it also works for the metaphor of how his vision of the world changed. 

Then he sees a photo and in a fright, he has to get out of the house.

“I knew it. Get out. He’s here.” This is reminiscent of that old line from the horror movie about the killer who calls and the phone company said the call came from inside the house!

We see the picture of him as a ten-year old and it is the boy who is trying to kill him.

Escaping by his father’s bike, he thinks, “The murderer. He’s here.” Of course, the only one in this panel is Timothy.

What did you think?

Shameless plug

One more project I'm working on: A friend and I have created a comic book called Miskatonic High. Five teens take on H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters and their small-town high school … They’re just not sure which is worse.

We successfully launched our first issue on kickstarter, which you can buy (PDF or physical copy) from here. It has received plenty of rave reviews:

Jenn Marshall of Sirens of Sequentials said: “Miskatonic High is a fun story that balances everything you want in a good horror story. There is some gore, but not so much that you get overwhelmed. The jokes are funny, but they don’t make the story feel like a parody of something else. It was well thought out, and I cannot wait to see where it is going to go next.” Read the full review

The Pullbox called it “the bastard lovechild of John Hughes & H.P. Lovecraft.” (We’re pretty sure they meant that in a metaphorical way, because if that’s literal, well… ewww.) Read the full review

Our kickstarter for issue two ends in just a couple of days and you can find it here.

Goshdarn Geeky raved of issue 2: "Miskatonic High has proven it can hit us right in the heart with a character-centric story that goes past the cosmic horror, and I hope it can continue to deliver." Read the full review

A Small Killing - chapter 2

Welcome back! We're on to chapter 2 of A Small Killing. You can find my write-up of chapter 1 here.  If you want to follow along (warning, there's going to be a lot of spoilers) you can easily find a used copy online, or if you're less morally inclined, you can read it online here.

At the start of chapter 2, we're now in London. The years on the chapter page say 1979-1985, which don’t correspond to the setting of this chapter, as it continues the story of Timothy from New York. What becomes obvious is that even though the story is moving forward in time, we’re also traveling backwards through Timothy’s past to when he worked in London from 1979-1985.

In a way, this comic is like Memento, where it is moving both backwards and forwards, also with an unreliable narrator. Let’s see who ends up dead at the end, shall we?

The chapter page opens on 1980s London architecture and business people moving quickly while wearing strange headsets. (Were those headsets a thing in the late ‘80s?)

Timothy says of landing in London, “It’s like New York was just a peculiar mood I flew out of.” Remember that quote, as I’ll be coming back to it later.

Timothy doesn’t see any boy depart the plane and goes to his hotel and sleeps. All better, right?

He rides an automated train and more voices surround him, this time throat clearing replacing the sniffing of cocaine. He refers to the train as “a little clockwork train” and the architecture as “nursery architecture, like those wooden bricks they used to make, columns, blocks, triangles…” He says how after 5 o’clock this part of London must empty out. It’s weird because while that describes an office place, it also describes a daycare.

There are so many symbols for children here, but I’m not completely sure what Moore is getting at. Are we just grown up children? Does Timothy have children on the brain? I can’t decide.

Timothy’s thoughts turn to his ex-lover, Sylvia, who used to have a workshop in the area, where she made puppets and art for children’s performances. Timothy’s also stuck on how it ended with her, about how he thinks she wanted him to choose for her when “they go on and on about women’s right to choose.”

And then we see them in a flashback, him going to see her at her shop after meeting her at Barry’s party (Barry being his boss at the Forbes-McCauley advertising agency at the time). He’s checking her out and yet making sure she knows he’s married. Making sure she understands the rules before they start anything. (I love Zarate's drawings of the wildlife art and Timothy wearing the elephant mask.) Notice that she doesn't take off her welding goggles until she cuts through the bullshit and talks truthfully about knowing he's married.

Quickly the flashbacks jump to them in bed, but clearly not for the first time. And he says that he told his wife about them. In the stream-of-conscious monologue, Timothy thinks about all the art Sylvia created to mimic real animals and life and yet she hated his eggs, which were from real life and not allowed to have life. That he can’t see the difference speaks to the difference between them. And if you look at that last image between them, they almost look like a yin-yang symbol. They were never right for one another.

The fallout from the affair destroyed his marriage, but he threw himself into work and produced some car ads that were “brilliant. They kept Forbes-McCauley afloat.” We see a bit of that ad, just frightened lady’s eyes. The dots are from an ad, but they also look like comic book dots, don’t they?

In the present, he thinks about Thatcher and Bush and complains a bit, but you get the sense that maybe he voted for them. Then he sees a kid, and rushes after him, but it’s just a separate kid on a skateboard. He feels humiliated, “such a prat. It feels great.” What?

This is another place I get stuck. Why would it feel great to be an idiot or an ass? I guess it’s because it isn’t the kid from New York and he’s relieved? But if you have a better theory, let me know.

He goes back to his hotel and hears more voices. And he starts thinking about Flite and what he’s going to do, which leads him back to the car ad. He tells us that the car ad is what got Flite to notice him. He wonders where his inspiration came from (but we'll soon see).

He heads out on the town and recalls a night out with Barry and Nigel. Of Barry, Timothy thinks, “He turned out to be a bastard though, didn’t he, Barry? Pretending to be ill… When I said I was leaving, trying to make me feel g…”

The “G” word you’re looking for there, Timothy, is gay. And when Barry was pretending to be ill, did he have AIDS?

He flashes back to being hired by Barry. Barry hires Timothy with very little experience and little room at the agency, and Timothy is grateful. And the flashback ends with Timothy’s finger touching Barry’s. Who came on to whom?

Remember, Zarate connected with Moore by submitting a piece to Moore's anthology against homophobia. Moore was putting out an anthology against homophobia because he was living in a marriage with a wife and her girlfriend, so homosexuality was on Moore's mind at the time. (To be clear, I'm not suggesting Moore is/was gay, though good for him if he is/was, too. There's just no evidence that I've come across in my readings.)


My friend Koom, with whom I recorded the podcast about A Small Killing that started all of this, disagrees with my take on Timothy being gay or having gay flirtations:

"I'm not convinced they were sleeping together but I'll concede that perhaps Barry is meant to be read as gay. I think a lot of the other points are circumstantial at best. If they were sleeping together, Barry would not have introduced Tim to Sylvia or been detached/neutral when asking about the end of Tim's marriage. The body language between the two as Tim announces he's taking the Flite job suggests disappointed mentor and mentee. The panel where Tim touches Barry's finger is the most compelling aberration but that can also be described as evocative of a child asking an adult for something which fits into the other/thread."

To be fair, that's probably the more overt reading but there are some problems. That finger touch is hard to interpret any other way. And if Moore wanted Timothy to say that Barry was making him feel "guilty," he wouldn't have left it at "g..."

Honestly, I think Moore is playing with us here and left this purposefully vague and left the clues to us to decipher. Personally, I can't rectify that finger touch as anything other than a come-on. But there's no evidence they acted on it. Maybe Moore just wanted us to know that Timothy was flirting around beyond just Sylvia. He could have also been doing it to show the difference between now and the start of the book where Timothy pulled back his hand from the flight attendant. Or maybe that Timothy was willing to lie to Barry through that touch in order to get the job. I have my theories, but I'm curious what you think.

Just a note to say that I love the way Zarate uses real photos and bits of map to illustrate this part. It looks so odd and new and different. This is very far removed from Watchmen.

And then we flashback to Barry’s party where Timothy met Sylvia. It feels like a mirror image to the party in New York. We hear the sounds of puffing weed in the crowd behind them. But this time Barry leads Timothy to Sylvia. So, maybe he didn't sleep with Barry? Or maybe they had an open relationship?

Timothy’s still thinking of the Russian campaign and his old car campaign, trying to recapture his glory. The car ad concerned Barry, who wondered how the breakup with Maggie was going. With the car ads, Timothy knew his audience. “Young, single, white, male. Earning between ten and fifteen grand.” Hmmm… that target audience sounds familiar. But I'll deal with that at the end.
Timothy sees the boy in the crowd in London and goes running after him. Interspersed with the chase are flashbacks of him leaving Sylvia, who is pregnant. She just wants him to say what he wants, and he refuses to have an opinion and puts it all on her. We also get the flashback of him leaving Barry. He just barely admits to leaving Barry in the lurch, but not quite. And the more I read this, the more I wonder if Barry's more distraught than just because he was losing an employee.

The boy leads him into a club where a riot is just breaking out. Timothy is convinced that the kid is trying to kill him, first with the car crash and now with the riot.

Zarate goes crazy with the riot police taking on the crowd. It’s some amazing work.

I think Moore is making a connection between the London crowd, filled with animosity and boiling rage, with the car ad we’re just about to see. Did the ad feed off of the animosity and rage in the English young men or did the ad feed them animosity and rage. Moore doesn't say, but it's a question he wants to raise.

In flashback, we find out that the marriage with Maggie ended and he stayed with Sylvia, but made her feel terrible about it. “You do it with everything. Everything in your life has got to be somebody else’s fault,” she tells him.

She sent him the dead fetus (or did she?) after they broke up. I think Moore wants us to wonder if the kid is really Sylvia’s child. But the art and the cover of the book have left us little doubt about who the child actually is.

I had a conversation with a guy on the Alan Moore subreddit about the fetus. He made the point that it's not very realistic and we're supposed to feel a sense of horror toward Sylvia. But that's not the way I read it. I read it that we're supposed to be horrified by Timothy's reaction and seeming unconcern. That he would go from the fetus to creating an image of a car about to run down a woman suggests that he's maybe not an innocent character in this book. 

Anyway, right after the breakup, Timothy showed the car ad to Barry. And now we get to see that ad. The ad of a pack of cars chasing a woman like she’s the prey of a pack of wild animals. It’s a horrible ad filled with horrible intentions. And you can imagine it being successful.

Back at his hotel, he thinks about the kid trying to kill him (and notice his glasses are off), “I’m scared. It’s dark. I’m, out late, I want to go home, to Sheffield. I want to sleep and wake up and everything be all right.” Like a kid wanting to be made to feel safe.

Instead, he masturbates and thinks of men and women. Even his fantasies are conflicted about who and what he wants. And there's a definite connection to be made between the sperm he kills by masturbating and the dead fetus he killed by his indecision. Everything he produces is dead.

And then he curls up into a fetal position.

On the train to Sheffield the next morning, he’s deep in thought about the Flite ad. “Blue Jeans is it. Whatever the West means. To them, that’s what we associate Flite with.” He’s going to sell them America.

Meanwhile, the ticket taker comes up and asks for his ticket. But there’s a problem. Timothy only paid for a child’s fare. And then the train shoots into a dark tunnel. 

What did you think?

Shameless plug

One more project I'm working on: A friend and I have created a comic book called Miskatonic High. Five teens take on H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters and their small-town high school … They’re just not sure which is worse.

We successfully launched our first issue on kickstarter, which you can buy (PDF or physical copy) from here. It received plenty of rave reviews:

Jenn Marshall of Sirens of Sequentials said: “Miskatonic High is a fun story that balances everything you want in a good horror story. There is some gore, but not so much that you get overwhelmed. The jokes are funny, but they don’t make the story feel like a parody of something else. It was well thought out, and I cannot wait to see where it is going to go next.” Read the full review

The Pullbox called it “the bastard lovechild of John Hughes & H.P. Lovecraft.” (We’re pretty sure they meant that in a metaphorical way, because if that’s literal, well… ewww.) Read the full review

We're now Kickstartering issue two, which you can find here.