Weekly Reading: Judgment Day: Aftermath

Published by Awesome Entertainment in March 1998

The covers:

Title: None

(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.)

And then, five months after the last issue of the miniseries, long after most of the readers had forgotten what had happened, Awesome came out with this sort of epilogue -- a collection of tales that was supposed to point the way forward for the new Awesome Universe. There were a few problems with that idea, though.

First off, the issue took so long to get out, some of the comics it was supposed to precede, such as Youngblood #1, had already come out, making that team's introductory story even more of a tangled mess than it needed to be (which I'll explain more when I get to Youngblood).

Second, this issue was published in March of 1998, just as the major financial investor in Awesome Entertainment pulled all of his funding for the company, near-fatally injuring the organization. Most of the talent would soon leave for other work, most notably in the architect for the new Awesome Universe in Moore himself.

Also, as long as we're talking about what's wrong with this issue, there's a noticeable problem with the lettering where some lines are repeated and some are obviously out of order. It's annoying and shoddy, much like the color reproduction. Add these to the number of bad omens for Awesome's future.

But let's ignore all of that for now and read this in the order Moore intended, so right after the rest of Judgment Day.

For the sake of these weekly readings, I am skipping the Glory and Youngblood stories in this issue, as they fit in certain orders with their ongoing series, and it gets too confusing to take them separately.

I have to say that I'm a fan of the Adam Polina cover on this issue. There aren't many images that represent most of the heroes Moore was arranging for Awesome, and this comes about as close as they'll get. The second cover, by Ed McGuinness was one of a series of variants he was doing across the whole company's books of little chibi characters. Clearly manga had taken root in the American comic scene by 1998.

We can't talk about this issue without talking about Gil Kane. Kane was a legend in the field. He drew the most famous Spider-Man story in the Night Gwen Stacy Died. He created the Silver Age Green Lantern, the Atom and Iron Fist. Name just about any superhero and there's a good chance he drew them. He was also a dynamite Western artist, which he displayed in Judgment Day Alpha and a later issue of Supreme.

Kane was one of the first to experiment with graphic novels with the self-published sci-fi spy story His Name Is... Savage. As a sort of parody, Kane became the lead character in a little story that appeared in DC Comics' supernatural anthology House of Mystery #180 (June 1969). In the six-and-a-half-page tale, penciled by Kane and inked by Wally Wood, frustrated comic-book artist Gil Kane kills his House of Mystery editor, Joe Orlando. Orlando, also an artist, and Friedrich exact revenge by drawing Kane into artwork that is then framed and mounted in the house.

Moore, being the encyclopedia of comic history that he is, decided to use the idea of Kane as a character in Judgment Day: Aftermath in the framing sequence that is one of the weirdest things Awesome put out but also probably one of the most personal to Moore's belief in Idea Space.

We see Kane, in some sort of space suit, fly through the a rainbow color field to some sort of space station overlooking a planet that looks like Earth. The space station is a "concept-generator" and represents Awesome Entertainment. Kane is a freelancer in the "imagineering corps."

He flies down and meets up with Fighting American, whome he recognizes as "one of Jack's boys," referring to Jack Kirby. He then says that he heard Kirby was over on this side full time (as Kirby was dead by this point). Fighting American says that yes, Kirby is off with Woody and some of the other guys. (Moore will get into what Kirby is doing in a later issue of Supreme.)

Fighting American hands Kane off to some weird Awesome mascot named Andy Awesome, who takes him to the concept generator. "We've got some discs of raw idea-stuff that needs shaping into visible, material form," Andy tells him. Kane jokes that he remembers when they came as typescript, before settling in to visualize Moore's scripts.

And then we're into the Youngblood and Glory stories that I'm going to wait on. Each story was about six pages long, so there's really not much to them. They're more like the sampler pack, giving you a taste of what Moore had in mind for each character and group, giving us the best idea of what the Awesome Universe was supposed to look like.

After those two come the NewMen's story. Moore has changed the NewMen from yet another supergroup into a Challengers of the Unknown-inspired group of explorers, discovering more about the mysterious Conqueror Island. In redesigned uniforms, Reign, Byrd, Kodiak and the others explore a volcanic vent that leads to a magma-filled pit. Over the radio, Dash (with a broken ankle) and Dr. Conqueror relay information to the group.

In the pit, they're attacked by a '50s gigantic monster called Magman. The burning-hot creature makes short work of the NewMen but not before they discover that Magman is a she and she's protecting her clutch of eggs. The NewMen depart wondering if they shouldn't have gone to the Youngblood tryouts (which we'll read about soon), but decide that they like the idea of being explorers and advancing knowledge.

As I said, there's not much there, but it was a new way to take the group. Awesome planned to revamp the NewMen series to follow the lead of this story, but when the financial crisis hit, that plan never came about. This was all that we got of Alan Moore's NewMen, and probably ever will unless his series proposal ever turns up.

Next up was Maximage, who we last saw in Judgment Day Omega. As far as I know, he never planned to give her her own title, but he suggested that he had plans to work her into the pages of Youngblood (which we'll get to later). She had her own series at one point in the Extreme days, but Alan Moore decided to give her a fresh start, basically as the Dr. Strange of the Awesome Universe.

Seeing demons in New York City and reading lots of bad omens there, she decided to set out for San Francisco to find the house of a previous Master Magus, Eddie Saint. Oddly wearing her costume under a trenchcoat, she goes to the house unheeded but is welcomed by the master magus' servant Lei-Ling.

Lei-Ling fills Lori Sanders (Maximage) on the previous master magi: Eddie Saint, the third eye in the '50s; Della Psychic in the middle '60s; Stephen Hush, ghost-breaker from the '20s; Dr. Mystic in the '40s. And now Lori. They see some trophies from the various magi before Lori finds an old table with her name carved in one of the chairs. She sits and falls into a weird time loop with the magi from various times all talking over one another.

Lori talks about a mission against the Coven in 2004 and another in 2011. Realizing that time is messed up, she stands away from the table and returns to 1998, where she settles into the house. The table's a neat device and another way for Moore to play with the historical heroes he invented for the Awesome Universe in Judgment Day. It's a real shame that we never got to see more of it.

Next up is a seven-pager on The Allies, Awesome's version of the Justice League, featuring Supreme, Glory, Die Hard, Roman, Professor Night, the Fisherman and Spacehunter. All of The Allies get summoned to their headquarters on an asteroid. We find out that Spacehunter has a human guise as a police officer and that even though he speaks in some kind of alien language, people can always understand him in their own language. We also find out that The Allies have a transporter system.

On the asteroid, Roman tells them that he saw his nemesis the Killer Crab on the asteroid, but the others doubt it. Then they see the inter-stellar mind-controlling plant, Florax, though that doesn't make sense, since the sensors don't detect her and she had been destroyed long ago. Then Prismalo shows up and then Magno (all seen from the pages of Supreme).Professor Night suggests thinking about people they love instead of people they hate and then their love interests start to appear.

It turns out to be nano-dust particles that the asteroid base must have drifted through after The Allies abandoned it in the 1960s. They vent the particles out then decide to return to their respective locations. There's a funny typo where the letterer wrote in "alien" for Spacehunter's alien speech.

I don't know, this Allies story was kind of lame, but it did have to be cramped into seven pages. Moore wrote a proposal for an Allies series, which I'll talk about in a post later on.

The last story was a five-page on Spacehunter. I don't think Moore ever intended to do a series just on him, but he was the least seen of The Allies. This is the strangest of the stories. As best as I can make out, Spacehunter belongs to a race that is part of an extra-dimensional network and he serves on a kind of police force to protect the network.

All of the dialog after the first page is in Spacehunter's alien language, so we have to follow the art which shows him waking up from some kind of robotic connection. He has some kind of eagle/bat pet thing. An evil alien tries to attack him, but the bird protects him, killing the evil alien.

Then we're back to Kane on the Awesome base, who speaks for the audience when he says, "I was just starting to have fun with that last one, whatever it was about." Kane tells Andy he's off to do more imagining, maybe toward the jewelled borealis of the science fiction latitudes or the smouldering hellburn of the horrorworlds.

There's a nice line, harkening back to that His Name Is... Kane story: "Once, long ago, a tale processed had portrayed him as a prisoner of the imaginary realm. If so, no freedom ever was so sweet."

Even with this sampler pack, Moore was able to turn the issue to the themes so important to him, which had become the core of his Awesome work: the idea that imagination is magic and Idea Space is the ultimate realm of that magic.

This was the last full issue Gil Kane ever worked on before dying shortly after. It stands as a wonderful memorial to him and his lifetime's work of creating the images from imagination. Even if you hate all of the Awesome stuff and think it's not worth considering as being a vital and important work in Moore's history (as I do), I think you can look at the bookends to this issue as something truly special and important on its own merits.

Next week, we return to the pages of Supreme.

he drew one of the (if not the) most famous Spider-Man story of all time, “The Night Gwen Stacy Died.” He co-created the Silver Age Green Lantern and Atom. He co-created Iron Fist.

Read More: His Name Is... Kane: A Birthday Tribute to Gil Kane | http://comicsalliance.com/tribute-gil-kane/?trackback=tsmclip

he drew one of the (if not the) most famous Spider-Man story of all time, “The Night Gwen Stacy Died.” He co-created the Silver Age Green Lantern and Atom. He co-created Iron Fist.

Read More: His Name Is... Kane: A Birthday Tribute to Gil Kane | http://comicsalliance.com/tribute-gil-kane/?trackback=tsmclip

he drew one of the (if not the) most famous Spider-Man story of all time, “The Night Gwen Stacy Died.” He co-created the Silver Age Green Lantern and Atom. He co-created Iron Fist.

Read More: His Name Is... Kane: A Birthday Tribute to Gil Kane | http://comicsalliance.com/tribute-gil-kane/?trackback=tsmclip

he drew one of the (if not the) most famous Spider-Man story of all time, “The Night Gwen Stacy Died.” He co-created the Silver Age Green Lantern and Atom. He co-created Iron Fist.

Read More: His Name Is... Kane: A Birthday Tribute to Gil Kane | http://comicsalliance.com/tribute-gil-kane/?trackback=tsmclip

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: