Alan Moore on Frank Miller

It's interesting that Moore singled out The Dark Knight Returns as the point where comics got so much darker and more mindless, since he had spent so long crediting Frank Miller up until that point.

In 1983, in the British superhero magazine Daredevils #1, Moore had written a glowing column about Miller.

And later, when DC was collecting the Dark Knight Returns into a special hardcover, Moore offered this introduction:

THE MARK OF BATMAN: An introduction by Alan Moore

As anyone involved in fiction and its crafting over the past fifteen or so years would be delighted to tell you, heroes are starting to become rather a problem. They aren't what they used to be...or rather they are, and therein lies the heart of the difficulty.

The world about us has changed and is continually changing at an ever-accelerating pace. So have we. With the increase in media coverage and information technology, we see more of the world, comprehend its workings a little more clearly, and as a result our perception of ourselves and the society surrounding us has been modified. Consequently, we begin to make different demands upon the art and culture that is meant to reflect the constantly shifting landscape we find ourselves in. We demand new themes, new insights, new dramatic situations.

We demand new heroes.

The fictional heroes of the past, while still retaining all of their charm and power and magic, have had some of their credibility stripped away forever as a result of the new sophistication in their audience. With the benefit of hindsight and a greater understanding of anthropoid behavior patterns, science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer was able to demonstrate quite credibly that the young Tarzan would almost certainly have indulged in sexual experimentation with chimpanzees and that he would just surely have had none of the aversion to eating human flesh that Edgar Rice Burroughs attributed to him. As our political and social consciousness continues to evolve, Alan Quartermain stands revealed as just another white imperialist out to exploit the natives and we begin to see that the overriding factor in James Bond's psychological makeup is his utter hatred and contempt for women. Whether most of us would prefer to enjoy the above-mentioned gentlemen's adventures without spoiling things by considering the social implications is beside the point. The fact remains that we have changed, along with our society, and that were such characters created today they would be subject to the most extreme suspicion and criticism.

So, unless we are to somehow do without heroes altogether, how are the creators of fiction to go about redefining their legends to suit the contemporary climate?

The fields of cinema and literature have to some extent been able to tackle the problem in a mature and intelligent fashion, perhaps by virtue of having a mature and intelligent audience capable of appreciating and supporting such a response. The field of comic books, seen since its inception as a juvenile medium in which any interjection of adult themes and subject matter are likely to be met with howls of outrage and the threat or actuality of censorship, has not been so fortunate. Whereas in novels and movies we have been presented with such concepts as the anti-hero or the classical hero reinterpreted in a contemporary manner, comic books have largely had to plod along with the same old muscle-bound oafs spouting the same old muscle-bound platitudes while attempting to dismember each other. As the naiveté of the characters and the absurdity of their situations become increasingly embarrassing and anachronistic to modern eyes, so does the problem become more compounded and intractable. Left floundering in the wake of other media, how are comic books to reinterpret their traditional icons so as to interest an audience growing progressively further away from them? Obviously, the problem becomes one that can only be solved by people who understand the dilemma and, further to that, have an equal understanding of heroes and what makes them tick.

Which brings me to Frank Miller, and to Dark Knight.

In deciding to apply his style and sensibilities to The Batman, Frank Miller has come up with a solution to the difficulties outlined above that is as impressive and elegant as any that I've seen. More strikingly still, he has managed to do it while handling a character who, in the view of the wider public that exists beyond the relatively tiny confines of the comic audience, sums up more than any other the essential silliness of the comic book hero. Whatever changes may have been wrought in the comics themselves, the image of Batman most permanently fixed in the mind of the general populace is that of Adam West delivering outrageously straight-faced camp dialogue while walking up a wall thanks to the benefit of stupendous special effects and a camera turned on its side. To lend such a subject credibility in the eyes of an audience not necessarily enamored of super-heroes and their trappings is no inconsiderable feat, and it would perhaps be appropriate to look a little more closely here at what exactly it is that Miller has done. (I hope Frank will forgive me for calling him 'Miller'. It seems a little brusque and rude and I would certainly never do it to his face, but somehow it's just the sort of thing you call people you know quite well when writing introductions for their books.)

He has taken a character whose every trivial and incidental detail is graven in stone on the hearts and minds of the comic fans that make up his audience and managed to dramatically redefine that character without contradicting one jot of the character's mythology. Yes, Bat-man is still Bruce Wayne, Alfred is still his butler and Commissioner Gordon is still chief of police, albeit just barely. There is still a young sidekick named Robin, along with a batmobile, a batcave and a utility belt. The Joker, Two-Face, and the Catwoman are still in evidence amongst the roster of villains. Everything is exactly the same, except for the fact that it's all totally different.

Gotham City, a place which during the comic stories of the forties and fifties seemed to be an extended urban playground stuffed with giant typewriters and other gargantuan props, becomes something much grimmer in Miller's hands. A dark and unfriendly city in decay, populated by rabid and sociopathic streetgangs, it comes to resemble more closely the urban masses which may very well exist in our own uncomfortably near future. The Bat-man himself, taking account of our current perception of vigilantes as a social force in the wake of Bernie Goetz, is seen as a near-fascist and a dangerous fanatic by the media while concerned psychiatrists plead for the release of a homicidal Joker upon strictly humanitarian grounds. The values of the world we see are no longer defined in the clear, bright, primary colors of the conventional comic book but in the more subtle and ambiguous tones supplied by Lynn Varley's gorgeous palette and sublime sensibilities.

The most immediate and overpowering difference is obviously in the portrayal both of The Batman and of Bruce Wayne, the man beneath the mask. Depicted over the years as, alternately, a concerned do-gooder and a revenge-driven psychopath, the character as presented here manages to bridge both of those interpretations quite easily while integrating them in a much larger and more persuasively realized personality. Every subtlety of expression, every nuance of body language, serves to demonstrate that this Batman has finally become what he should always have been: He is a legend.

The importance of myth and legend as a subtext to Dark Knight can't really be over-stated, shining as it does from every page. The familiar Batman origin sequence with the tiny bat fluttering in through an open window to inspire a musing Bruce Wayne becomes something far more religious and apocalyptic under Miller's handling; the bat itself transformed into a gigantic and ominous chimera straight out of the darkest European fables. The later scenes of The Batman on horseback, evoking everything from the chivalry of the Round Table to the arrival in town of Clint Eastwood, serve to further demonstrate this mythical quality, as does Miller's startling portrayal of Barman's old acquaintance Superman: The Superman we see here is an earthbound god whose presence is announced only by the wind of his passing or the destruction left in his wake. At the same time, his doubtful position as an agent of the United States Government manages to treat an incredible situation realistically and to seamlessly wed the stuff of legend to the stuff of twentieth century reality.

Beyond the imagery, themes, and essential romance of Dark Knight, Miller has also managed to shape The Batman into a true legend by introducing that element without which all true legends are incomplete and yet which for some reason hardly seems to exist in the world depicted in the average comic book, and that element is time.

All of our best and oldest legends recognize that time passes and that people grow old and die. The legend of Robin Hood would not be complete without the final blind arrow shot to determine the site of his grave. The Norse Legends would lose much of their power were it not for the knowledge of an eventual Ragnarek, as would the story of Davy Crockett without the existence of an Alamo. In comic books, however, given the commercial fact that a given character will still have to sell to a given audience in ten years' time, these elements are missing. The characters remain in the perpetual limbo of their mid-to-late twenties, and the presence of death in their world is at best a temporary and reversible phenomenon.

With Dark Knight, time has come to the Batman and the capstone that makes legends what they are has finally been fitted. In his engrossing story of a great man's final and greatest battle, Miller has managed to create something radiant which should hopefully illuminate things for the rest of the comic book field, casting a new light upon the problems which face all of us working within the industry and perhaps even guiding us towards some fresh solutions. For those of you who've already eagerly consumed Dark Knight in its softcover version, rest assured that in your hands you hold one of the few genuine comic book landmarks worthy of a lavish and more durable presentation. For the rest of you, who are about to enter entirely new territory, I can only express my extreme envy. You are about to encounter a new level of comic book storytelling. A new world with new pleasures and new pains.

A new hero.

Alan Moore
Northampton, 1986

Of course, people's opinions change over time, as we saw when Miller and Moore came out on opposite sides of the Occupy Movement.

Moore: "Frank Miller is someone whose work I've barely looked at for the past 20 years. I thought the Sin City stuff was unreconstructed misogyny; 300 appeared to be wildly ahistoric, homophobic and just completely misguided. I think that there has probably been a rather unpleasant sensibility apparent in Frank Miller's work for quite a long time."

It's fine for people to change their minds over time and feelings evolve. But I don't think Moore was singling out Dark Knight Returns because it was not well done. My reading of that panel in Judgment Day Final Judgment was that people misread what was great in Dark Knight Returns, as they had in Moore's Watchmen. The point was experimenting with new ways of telling stories. The point was not to gritty every superhero up, but to find new ways to tell new stories. But once comics started going down that path, it became an echo chamber, with (as Moore espoused in Supreme #51) comic creators who read nothing but other comic books. So, as the comics got worse, the creators did too.

Fortunately, Moore had Awesome to start changing the kinds of stories being told.

In Pictopia

Judgment Day was not the first time Alan Moore had mixed up genres of comics or even to do so to critique the comics industry. In 1986 Alan Moore contributed a little 8-page story to a benefit book called Anything Goes. I'm not going to get into the specifics of the book, but Moore's story soon expanded to 13 pages by illustrator Don Simpson and has long been hailed as a minor masterpiece.

The piece was originally called In Fictopia, but Simpson changed it to the more appropriate In Pictopia. In it, Moore tells the story of an older cartoon magician, Nocturno the Necromancer, who lives in a city of cartoon and comic characters. The older ones like him have fallen on hard times, living in the black and white slums. A new breed of superhero characters are moving in, taking over the city, leaving no room for the older-style characters.

It was an angry cry about what was happening in the comics industry, forgetting its past. Its message is not that dissimilar to the outcome of the Judgment Day trial, but in Judgment Day, there's a positivity that things can change. Perhaps Moore realized that to bring back stories of knights and cowboys and cartoon-like characters, it would take someone of immense stature in the industry to do it. Someone like Alan Moore.

Anyway, here is In Pictopia. It's been in and out of print a number of times, but is definitely worth owning. Check it out:

Weekly Reading: Judgment Day Final Judgment

Published by Awesome Entertainment in October 1997

The covers:

Title: Brought to Book

(Judgment Day is currently out of print. There are a number of ways to read it, which can be found on the How do I read Moore's Awesome works page.)

So three months after the last issue, Awesome finally released the final issue of the miniseries (sort of). On the cover, Dave Gibbons finished off his three-part image that made a cool poster (I'm a sucker for covers that link up to make a bigger image):

 

Isn't it interesting that Awesome decided to use a Dave Gibbons image with black and yellow lettering to sell the miniseries. What could they have possibly been trying to reference?

Anyway, on to the issue. Marat Mychaels does his best Liefeld impersonation at the dawn of the next day. Shaft and Sentinel are talking as they fly in, Shaft in disbelief at how things are turning out. "I guess this case is full of revelations. Revelations as in apocalypse... Revelations as in judgment day." Subtle dialog there, Alan.

We then switch to Fisherman and Toby, who lay on the fishing sayings a little too thick: "Don't cast your net too wide, Skipper..."

It's important to remember that the Fisherman and Skipper were always intended as ridiculous characters, even in the pastiches in Supreme. Now that they've recently awoken from the 1960s, it's jarring to hear them still speak as in dialog from comics put out then.

We find out that Toby thought Troll was the most likely subject, but a stray video of a Youngblood barbeque has him thinking differently. He sends two suprematons off to get one last bit of evidence. The trial starts up again and Toby calls Blake Baron, the occult agent. Baron refuses to acknowledge The VEIL, but tells of what he knows personally, starting with his service in WWII.

Flashback to the war. We learn that the company's mascot, Sammy Smith, got the book when the Phantom Aviator died (back in the first issue of the miniseries). Sammy Smith rewrote what the book could do and became Storybook Smith of the Allied Supermen of America. Eventually Smith became a late-night movie host before disappearing completely.

A letter from Smith's common-law wife fills in more details in a wonderful flashback by Rick Veitch. We see how Storybook Smith joined the Allied Supermen and how he had already started writing the storyline for his daughter in his book. We find out that Smith is the descendant of Eliza Smith, Deliverance Drue's servant girl.

Smith moved on from superheroing and got into drugs. Eventually he was robbed and the book disappeared from his life. In a hilarious bit, even Detective Gorilla couldn't track the book down for him. So he turned to late-night movies before walking out and never returning. But he left a gift with his longtime girlfriend: she was pregnant. The baby grew up to be Leanna Creel, Riptide.

The suprematons return with Elizabeth Langston, Marcus's (Sentinel) wife, and the book of destiny, which Toby soon reads from.

And we get our last flashback, by Ian Churchill, whose detailed, modern style is a good representation for the late 1980s and 1990s. Marcus got the book from his thief of a father in the late 1950s. After that, there are two stories in the book for Marcus, one crossed out. The crossed out one has him become a drug addict and dead from a botched robbery. The other one has him go to college, invent a supersuit and form Youngblood. "He writes it so that he gets to be the bestest superhero, in the bestest super-team in the world."

But the adventures aren't dark enough.

"Around the middle ninteen eighties, Marcus has grown bored of this. He decides to write a nastier, shadowier and more violent world for himself... and for everybody else. Our entire reality changed and darkened."

Look at the panel Moore tells Churchill to draw for this.

Where have we seen this before? Oh, that's right. Here:

So, everything in comics went bad because of the Dark Knight Returns? Um, that's an interesting take. But that feels like he's blaming Miller, which I have a hard time imagining that's what he's doing. He's spoken quite eloquently on how important Miller and DKR were to comics and to Moore's growth as a writer.

You know, it might have been better if Moore had used The Killing Joke, which we know he doesn't like, but this sort of leads down a different path of blaming someone else. Does Moore take responsibility for the awful comics that followed Watchmen and The Killing Joke? Or was it all DKR's fault? Would comics have been better if DKR never happened? What would comics have looked like then?

Of course, DKR and Watchmen were the poster childs for a movement to darken comics anyway. And I believe we would have gotten the same crappy comics we got in the late '80s and early '90s regardless of those two seminal books. And we shouldn't blame good writers for the bad writers.

There's also the issue that Moore and Miller's politics have gotten in the way of their relationship over the years. But I'll deal with that in a later post.

As Toby explains: "Gone was the naive wonder of the 'forties, the exuberance of the 'fifties and the nobility of the 'sixties. ... Now, heroes motivated only by money or psychopathology stalked a paranoid, apocalyptic landscape of post-nuclear mutants and bazooka wielding cyborgs."

So, Toby recites Langston's story as his confession, telling how Leanna saw the book in Langston's house and knowing what it was, took it. He went to her apartment to get it back, killing her in the process. Then he went downstairs and wrote the opening monologue from the first issue into the book, making Knightsabre the fall guy.

Sentinel attacks Toby, grabbing the book. Supreme and Suprema knock out his flight controls with sight supreme. Langston threatens them with the book, but an arrow from Shaft knocks the book off of the Citadel. When Langston jumps after it, Toby uses a fishing pole to catch him and reel him in. From the moment Moore created the Fisherman in Supreme, I'm sure he was waiting for the day someone would catch a crook with a rod.

Later, the case over, we find out that they locked Sentinel into Supreme's Hell of Mirrors. We find out that Kid Thunder was Langston's forefather and that Deliverance Drue's curse of damning his seed to hell came true.

Now that the case has been cleared, the Allies decide that they might reform. Shaft is talking to Waxey Doyle about reforming Youngblood with a new team and that the New Men are talking to Blacky Conqueror about exploring the dinosaur-filled Island of Conqueror Island.

In a final epilogue, we see the book fall into the hands of a homeless girl. When she sees the book, she says, "Oh wow." And the story goes on.

And that's Judgment Day.

The most obvious aspect of the book is that there's a wonderful irony of Alan Moore using a Rob Liefeld-illustrated comic to rail against the stories told in Image-era of comics.

The ad for the Judgment Day TPB
from Awesome that never came.
It included a 10-page prelude story
that was only six pages in the
Sourcebook. What a strange company.

It's also refreshing that Moore is clearing that landscape out to start the new Awesome universe that harkens back to the '40s, '50s and '60s, but will also be its own thing. Probably his Youngblood will best represent that, which we'll get to soon. It feels like he's optimistic for this new thing to commence, which makes one hopeful for Awesome's future, even knowing that it all ends badly.

Obviously, some of it works and some of it doesn't. It's got a weird structure and some of the dialog is very bad. There's also the problem (as reader Ice pointed out) of using a terribly-written piece of violence against a woman to wipe clean a period where terrible things often happened to women characters. But overall, I think it works because it's so personal to where Moore was as a comic creator at this time. The Hermes parts are some of the best interpretations of his magical beliefs, at least until we get to Promethea, and of course the greatest magic would be the magic of stories that have always existed. Moore's DNA is all over this series and I think to write off any of this work as work he did for the money completely misses what he was doing at Awesome.

There's also the possibility that it was truncated from what Moore wanted to do. A friend with connections to Awesome passed along this tidbit a little while back:

For instance Rob [Liefeld] one day found a story idea that he said was phenomenal, and asked Eric [Stephenson] why they didn't publish it.  Eric said that it was the other half of Judgement Day, and Rob was trying to keep it short.  Can you believe that!  There is more to Judgment Day!

Despite all that, it's a series that I appreciate because of all the parts that do work. As he said in the interview I posted a while back, this is Moore at play. And all work and no play makes Alan a very dull boy.

Next time we'll get into the odd last bit of Judgment Day in Judgment Day Aftermath.

As always, please check out the Annotations Page, for all of the details and references that I completely missed.