Editors: the smoky man/Gary Spencer Millidge
Publisher: Abiogenesis Press
352 pages. $14.99. A celebration of fifty years of Alan Moore, arguably comics' finest writer ever. Proceeds going to a worthy charity. A huge number of contributors. How can it fail to be great?
Unfortunately the book can only be as good as the sum of its parts, and its here that it falls down greatly. Check out the contributor list on the back - I guarantee you won't be able to immediately recall works of fully half of the list. Five articles have been drawn from the Italian Moore fansite, ultrazine, the rest specially commissioned for this book - but whilst there's a wide range of voices in the book, and by including so many non-american-mainstream contributors you could say "hey, it exposes the readers to their work" - on the other hand, most non-Moore fans would look at the list and go "not enough people I'm interested in, forget it".
Some contributors put forward pieces of art - the best of these are related to Moore and pass on a Happy Birthday note, or, as in the case of the best strip in the book by Millidge himself, tell a story (in this case, a potted biography of Moore). The worst are irrelevant drawings, or poor strips…and there's too many of these..
The essays then, the bulk of the book. Some are mini-tribute pieces, telling a personal story of Moore, and these on the whole work exceedingly well - for example, the pieces by John Higgins, Mark Millar, Michael T. Gilbert, Antony Johnston and Joel Meadows are all interesting, illuminating and excellent contributions. Then you have pseudo-intellectual analyses of various facets of Moore's works, that are totally out of place and better suited to an academic publication, or even The Comics Journal. Their presence here shouts nothing more than filler material…the bad news is these tend to run for pages and pages (and pages and…you get the idea).
The absolute best essays number precisely two. The first is a surprisingly candid affair from Stephen Bissette, which, although reads almost like a protestation that Moore's Swamp Thing success should not all be attributed to Moore, provides depth and information beyond almost anything published before about the ins and outs of actually working with Alan over a period of time. The second is a reprint of an extensive set of From Hell dialogues between Moore and Dave Sim, which originally appeared at the back of four issues of Cerebus (complete with a new, and typically idiosyncratic introduction by Sim) - this is the closest we get to hearing Moore's undiluted voice talking about one of his comics works, and although the longest feature in the book, it's the most interesting, and a good reason to buy the book. What it does bring to the forefront of one's mind, however, is the absence of a number of important voices in the rest of the book.
There's no Eddie Campbell. No Jamie Delano. No Dez Skinn. No Alan Davis. No Garry Leach. No Karen Berger. No Brian Michael Bendis. No William Christensen, for goodness sake. Oh. And no specific new Alan Moore. These guys are all critical to the success and development of Moore's work in UK & US comics, and to have them decline to contribute (or be "unobtainable") speaks volumes and gives more credence to one or two of Bissette's suppositions than you might otherwise have given.
It's still a good book. It's just not as great as I hoped it would be. If you're a Moore fan, you'll have bought it already. If not, it's hard to recommend unreservedly...and you can't give it to someone who isn't a fan of Moore's work to persuade them of the virtues of it…hence, it disappoints.
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