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.

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.