A Small Killing - chapter 1

Hey everyone. It's been a little while and I've been a little busy, so sorry for not being around so much.

Recently, a friend invited me to do this podcast with him on Alan Moore's A Small Killing, a graphic novel that holds a lot of meaning for me. I went through and made a ton of notes for that podcast, but as we got talking, I only touched on some of my notes. There are some interesting bits that I've never really seen talked about, so I thought it'd be a good time to do another read-through.

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.

A Small Killing was a graphic novel first published in 1991. Written by Alan Moore and with art by Oscar Zarate, it was published by Victor Gollancz, an established book publishing house in Britain which was looking at getting into the graphic novel boom that followed Watchmen.

After Watchmen, Moore formed his personal imprint, Mad Love, with his wife and their live-in lover (do you need me to tell you how destructively that turned out?). The imprint first put out A.A.R.G.H. (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia), an anthology in 1988. Zarate, an Argentinian cartoonist, submitted a story to that anthology and got talking with Moore. Moore said he was looking to move away from superheroes and was looking for a new project dealing with real people.

As Zarate said in an essay at the end of the 2003 Avatar edition, “We shared a curiosity: He wanted to innovate, to move in some other way. After that enormous thing he did, Watchmen, he wanted to talk about other things and it seems that our encounter happened at the right time.”

As part of the encounter, Zarate said he had an idea.

"[Oscar] kind of came to me and said 'Look, you know, we ought to do something together,' and I said 'Yeah, okay,' you know, I’d liked what he’d done with Alexei Sayle and him and Alexei have worked on various books. So we kind of came up with the story between us, it would sort of grow out of conversations," Moore said in this interview.

"Oscar had got a very definite idea of what sort of book he wanted to do and he’d got this image of somebody haunted by a little boy, or somebody being followed by a little boy, and I think that was the image that he’d got in his head, he didn’t know any more about it than that. And he kind of threw it to me and I kind of said 'Well, what if the little boy was him?"

The size of the book and the artwork give it a European feel. I'm sure it didn't sell well in America and many fans had moved on to the Marvel exodus/Image revolution that was taking place across the Atlantic.

"I think people found it dull, because they’d just read Watchmen or whatever, or The Killing Joke and there’s a kind of 'Well, when’s something going to happen?' It’s just about this self-obsessed advertising guy," Moore said.

That said, Moore thinks the book is, "one of my favourites," he said. "[Oscar's] got one of the most wonderful approaches to colour of any artist I’ve ever worked with, with the possible exception of Melinda Gebbie."

But, let's get into the story. The first chapter begins with the chapter title page: "New York (1985-1989)" and a plane getting ready for takeoff at sunset. We'll get into the years in one of my later posts.

Our story starts on the plane as Timothy Hole (pronounced "Holly") sits staring at the occupied bathroom. We can't see his eyes, but from the captions, we know he's still livid from events we'll see very soon.

He remarks about how he pulled his hand back from a gay flight attendant because of an electric shock. "I wasn't even thinking about AIDS," he says to himself. As we'll find out, Timothy is not completely honest, especially with himself.

While looking out the window, he sees the sunset sky and remarks that it looks airbrushed. Because he works in advertising, he often sees the world in terms of advertising artwork. In other words, he often sees it as fake.

When Timothy finally does turn to look at us, his glasses are slipping off. Take note of his glasses throughout this book because they are the purest symbol for how Timothy views the world, whether his view or an unobstructed view. He tells the flight attendant that he better not have any coffee or tea, to which she replies, "Tummy too full already, eh?" Her wording almost makes him sound like a child, another metaphor to watch for.

And as he continues to sit on the plane, staring at the "occupied" sign (his mind occupied) he starts flashing back to a party he recently attended. At the party at his apartment, we find out that Timothy has just been hired to work on a major campaign selling the soda, Flite, to the Russians. Before he gets started, he plans a trip home to England, where he hasn't been since he "was supporting Forbes-McCauley," the ad company where he started.

In the background are all the voices of the party, but Timothy is separate from them, even in a party filled with people. However, the voices are so much fun and such an indictment of 1980s New York, talking about celebrity and advertising, interjected with the sound effect of snorting cocaine.

Timothy says that he doesn't want to repeat Pepsi's mistake in Japan, where they had "Come alive with Pepsi," and in Japanese, it said, "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead." Ancestors back from the dead, eh? Well, just wait.

We find out Timothy was married while he was in England, but it fell apart. "My fault. Well, our fault. Me and this other woman," he says. Again, it's impossible to trust what he has to say about certain subjects, and his love life is one of them.

We also see the relics of childhood on display at the party, including a collection of birds eggs. It crashes and breaks at the party, and while he tells people it's not a big deal, we see later, as he's cleaning up, that it is.

As he's looking at one of the broken eggs that looks like it is streaked with blood, he thinks, "When the egg comes out of the mother, for a moment it must look like a tiny human baby, the gory crown engaged..." The cracked egg in his hand looks like something... something dead for a long time... has been born.

Falling asleep while reading Lolita, he has a dream of a man and a child in the distance and as a storm strikes, one of them falls, but he can't tell if it's the child or the adult. Notice that he took his glasses off before he starts to dream.

One of the running thoughts that Timothy keeps returning to is ideas he's going to use for the Russian campaign, brainstorming concepts. Maybe a giant Lenin glaring at a Flite billboard? No.

A friend from the office, Lynda, takes him shopping for his trip. "Does she fancy me? Yes. No. Yes. Probably I should have taken her back to the apartment, we could have... no. No, she's really anorexic and I don't really like her..." And yet, in the flashback, we see him hint to her about going back to the apartment, and she's the one who ignores his passes.

He tells her of how his marriage got wrecked, saying of his ex-lover, "...once she'd broken my marriage up, she was satisfied. She didn't want me anymore..." and "...okay, I cheated on my wife. My fault, I accept that, but Sylvia, this other woman, I mean, to her it was just some sort of power game..."

While he's having this conversation with her, he notices a boy of about 10 in a strange outfit, whom he saw before. Lynda doesn't seem to notice him.

Timothy goes home alone but he sees the boy going up in his apartment elevator. He quickly changes and heads out to a bar, where he tells us that he had the birds eggs since he was 11. Leaving the bar in his car, there's a debate about whether he was drunk. He listens to the Talking Heads, "'I can't seem to face up to the facts...' "Psycho Killer."

As he's driving he sees the boy in middle of the road. He jams on the brake and smashes the car, banging his head.

When he goes back to his apartment, he sees the elevator descending, but avoids it, in case it's the kid again, but claims, "Using the stairs occasionally is healthy."

He gets little sleep, but dreams of his ex-wife and ex-lover on a bus, laughing. His dreams are like that, with more truth about the world than his waking thoughts. As though his subconscious is trying to tell him something?

He thinks about the campaign, and maybe using big protean Soviet figures holding up bottles of soda, but rejects it."That's not how they see themselves." It's funny to hear him think about how others see themselves when he's so deluded in how he sees himself.

At the airport, he sees the boy as he's going through customs and tries to run after him. The guards don't see the boy and find him suspicious. They make him open his bag and find the Nabokov book, about an adult lusting after a child and decide to question him in private.

Twenty minutes later, he gets on the flight and is certain the kid is on the flight somewhere. Despite looking everywhere on the plane, he can't find the kid. While looking, he starts to wonder why the kid would be following him. And then we see the flight attendant again, but as we see him, he now has his glasses on. The glasses allow him to see the world as he sees it... through his self-delusions.

And then we see that he has fallen asleep (he didn't get much sleep and staring at an occupied bathroom is pretty boring). The male flight attendant (the gay one?) shakes Timothy awake to buckle up for take off. As he does so, he sees the bathroom is now vacant. Whatever was in his mind is now free.

And he thinks that the sky in his dream was so clear. Not like the sky he's flying into. The one that seems fake.

This is a weird book, loaded with symbolism and yet, not a lot of plot. It has a strange and different look to it. Almost as though it were a little surreal?

Anyway, we'll explore the next chapter in a few days.

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.

A podcast with Moore Swamp Thing illustrator Ron Randall

A friend asked that I share this and even though it's not really about a forgotten part of Moore's work, it's definitely worth sharing with you. It's a podcast interview with Ron Randall who illustrated Alan Moore's Swamp Thing story "Abandoned Houses." He shared stories about about Moore, Steve Bissette, John Tottlebon, Joe Kubert, and others. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

An interview with Tim Seeley

Back when I was doing my After Awesome series, I mentioned that one of the true highlights of the comics that followed Moore's Awesome series was Bloodstrike, written by Tim Seeley. Seeley went back to the original idea of Bloodstrike--the government bringing back superheroes from the dead and sending them on suicide missions--and made it witty and fun. It was a great book, which unfortunately didn't last long. But what we did get was a wonderful read and featured an amazing two-parter featuring Suprema and Twilight, which is worth finding.

Seeley was nice enough to agree to an interview about the painfully overlooked series.

Me: Why did you want to restart Bloodstrike? Was it the concept, the character of Cabbot? It must have been important to you since you pitched it so many times (I think I heard four times)? Were you told anything you couldn't do or had to do in the series, or was it very hands off?

Tim Seeley: I think for me, Bloodstrike was always about the unlimited potential. As a guy who grew up on a steady diet of superheroes, action movies, zombies and slashers, I knew Bloodstrike could be ALL of those things at once, and scratch every itch I had. I wasn't given much in the way of restrictions.. Eric Stephenson just told me to 'do my thing,' which was so cool and trusting of him. Mostly I felt a need to respect the original concept and material, and gave myself a self-restriction. Looking back at it all, maybe I was too conservative given how out there PROPHET with Brandon and his crew went.

Me: What was the genesis of the Egyptian zombies? And what was your long-term plan for them? The series kind of ends with them wanting to take out famous politicians and even governments that kill in the name of God.

TS: Yeah, I had some really big ideas for those guys. I mean, a team of militant zombie supervillains is cool enough on its own, but having them be heroes in their own minds and philosophically in opposition to Bloodstrike was going to raise all kinds of questions about ideas of the afterlife and give me tons of material for story-lines had we gone on.

Me: Did you enjoy writing for Cabbot? You did such a nice job of humanizing him and even giving him an arc of developing feelings for Kendra, the poor sexually harassed tech, who you developed nicely, too.

TS: I loved Cabbot. I felt like Cabbot didn't get a lot of personality back in the original series, so I made it my duty to build him out and give him some flaws and desires. I wanted his arc to be about aging, having strong personal morals, and about living past your era. And, the idea was that he and Kendra wold be those two broken people, out-of-time in their own ways, who, against odds, would find something in each other.

Me: It seems like after the TPB, the next three issues were very superheroy, with the flashback to Slingstone and then the Youngblood girls. Was that intentional or it just sort of worked out like that?

TS: Bloodstrike never really got the Awesome Comics revamp that the other titles did, so I wanted to connect those to ideas of the Extreme Universe. Moore's Youngblood and Supreme are two of my favorite comics of all time. I thought the dichotomy of the 80s action movie world that Cabbot had come from and the 50s superhero world that Suprema and Twilight came from would be a great study in contrasts.

Me: What was the thought behind bringing Suprema and Twilight into the series? Moore's run on Youngblood hadn't been well-read and wasn't tied to previous incarnations of Bloodstrike or Extreme. How much did you need to research them (did you read the unpublished Youngblood scripts)? Was it fun to write for Suprema and Twilight? Did you like the Awesome run? Did you have any plans to tie in more from the Awesome days?

TS: Yeah, I've studied those Alan Moore scripts for years, and like I said, the Awesome books were treasures to me. Preppy, snooty Suprema is, undeniably, in my top 5 characters to write, ever. I would chuck some pretty plum assignments to write a book just about her, co-starring Twilight. So, yeah, I had a lot of ideas about bringing in more Awesome stuff, including, eventually incorporating The Goat from the unused scripts. And I wanted to do a flashback issue to the Slingstone days featuring young Cabbot, Waxman, The Fisherman and others on a street level mission.

Me: This is something I'm always curious about with comic writers... when you're doing a series and have a lot of threads going, do you worry about cancellation and leaving them all hanging, or do you just not think about it and write like you're going to be on the series for a long time? Was it a surprise when the series was cancelled? Was there anything you regretted not getting to do before you were cancelled?

TS: Yeah, I was under the impression I'd be getting a longer run, and wrote that way. I was really bummed out the series didn't catch, but I blame myself, and the fact that I wasn't SHOCKING anyone, which is what I think people were expecting out of those books. I was just writing good superhero stories for Gaston to draw beautifully. I wasn't trying to reinvent the wheel. I should have I guess.

Me: Do you mind if I ask about some of the loose threads? Was Tag someone before she was killed that was part of Youngblood? You seemed to hint at it, but we never found out.

TS: Yeah, I had a lot of plans for her, as I did for all the new members. I wanted to play this a lot like the New Titans series Marv and George did...giving each character a different genre backstory so we could play in every single sandbox.

Me: Were we going to see more of the original Fourplay and other original Bloodstrike team?

TS: Yeah, I had a big plan to show those characters and where they'd ended up, eventually putting them in conflict with the new team. I loved what Michel Fiffe did it with them though, so it worked out.

Me: Where were you going with the Battlestone and Cabbot? Were they just always going to hate each other or was there a bigger plan?

TS: I was going to get into their history more, and show why Battlestone was such a prick. But, I also wanted to show what motivated him to do good, because he had that in him too. Eventually I wanted to get into what I felt like Rob was always going towards with his Extreme universe stuff...this idea that superheroes weren't always necessarily inherently good, and that really, the most selfless of all of them was really Cabbot. We'd have seen that Cabbot was originally going to be the head of Youngblood but that he thought the institution was corrupt from the beginning, and that his ultimate punishment was being inducted into Bloodstrike. I dunno...it would have been pretty cool. You're making me all sad I didn't get to finish it!

Shameless plug

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 launched it on Kickstarter a few weeks ago and completely crushed our goals. We'll be launching the Kickstarter for issue 2 in early April, which will be a great opportunity to get caught up on the first issue. You can find out more at miskatonichighcomic.com.