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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