When Alan Moore was *not* crap? (Violator: The World, Pt 2)

[arbre_rieur.insanejournal.com]

I've changed the title for this one entry because most of the people who commented on Violator Part 1 said they actually thought it was good. In some cases, very good. Personall, I don't see it.

I'm surprised because the second half of the Violator Vs. Badrock mini-series had a very similar tone to this, but the comments to that were almost uniformly negative.

When we left off, Violator's four brothers (who want to kill him) had gotten into a fight with the mercenary the Admonisher (who also wants to kill him).









Back at the fight, Vaporizer tosses the Admonisher down his mouth.







His idea is to go to Spawn for help. I'm wondering if someone can help me out here. Violator is brought before Spawn by three homeless men who are implied to be famous dead people believed to be alive by conspiracy theorists. Two are Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa, but the third is a "Mr. Hughes." Who's that?





Re-powered, his first order of business is to rip up his brother Vandalizer. The other three had fallen down a hole with the the Admonisher. ("Remember basic demon safety training! Try to land on a baby carriage!")

His second order of business is revenge on mob boss Tony T.









The Admonisher catches up to them then. "AAAAGH! Guys, he's back... and this time it's personal!"

Comments

[box_in_the_box.insanejournal.com]

Looking back on this thing as a whole, I'm more inclined to classify it as a noble failure than anything else.

Part of the problem with the characters from Spawn, and especially Violator, is that they're not just utterly one-dimensional, but INTENTIONALLY so.

Thus, unlike Moore's work for Liefeld, who actually granted him license (albeit only temporarily) to go nuts in redesigning and adding depth and detail to Liefeld's characters and their world, Moore really seems constrained by McFarlane here, since McFarlane is a marginally more intelligent and self-conscious storyteller, which means that, when McFarlane's characters spin their wheels in a go-nowhere status quo, to a certain extent, it's on PURPOSE.

I mean, it's actually much EASIER to redeem characters when their creator pretty much says, "Yeah, whatever, dude, just go ahead and do whatever you want," as opposed to when a creator tells you - as it seems like McFarlane told Moore here - "Yeah, you can use my characters, but you can't have anything actually HAPPEN to them."

Watching Moore try to turn Violator into an interesting character, within those constraints, is like watching a brilliant mathematician trying to get five from two plus two - it's doomed to failure, but you can't help but admire the sheer brainpower that's being poured into it.

[tanetris.insanejournal.com]

2.4 + 2.4 = 4.8. Rounding takes care of it from there. Also pretty much anything can equal pretty much anything if you play around with infinity enough (and play it a bit fast and loose with the associated rules).

*analogy-ruiner*

[box_in_the_box.insanejournal.com]

Believe it or not, this actually did occur to me as I was writing this - a while back, I had a discussion with someone on how you could turn "absolute" truths into lies, and 2.4 + 2.4 = 4.8 did indeed come up - but I still liked the analogy enough to use it here (assume, in this case, that 2 < 2.2).

[tanetris.insanejournal.com]

I do in fact believe it. It's really the obvious place to go when one takes a serious look at the old "trying to make [x] + [x] = [2x + 1]" cliche. Still, as long as you understand it, carry on.

[halloweenjack.insanejournal.com]

The way I look at it, even Shakespeare wrote scenes and characters for the groundlings. I think that Alan Moore worked very hard at Big Numbers (his intended follow-up for Watchmen), saw it crash and burn along with the rest of Tundra, and thought, you know, I've already got From Hell on the burner, and no matter what I do from now on, everyone will say "it's no Watchmen", so fuck it. And, really, this still works as an over-the-top parody/critique of McFarlane's work in general.

[box_in_the_box.insanejournal.com]

True, but at the time this was originally published, I was BULLSHIT over this miniseries, because a) I already knew Alan Moore was good and b) I already knew Todd McFarlane was shit, so when I saw that Moore was working with McFarlane, I mistakenly thought to myself, "Wow, Moore must have figured out a way to make McFarlane's creations not suck! I'd never buy a McFarlane comic otherwise, but it's a good risk to get the Violator mini." HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

I think we forget, as people who are so much "in the know" on this insider industry stuff now, what it was like to be more casual consumers, who actually felt like they could harbor certain broad (and admittedly naive in retrospect) expectations.

[halloweenjack.insanejournal.com]

Oh, I haven't forgotten completely; feet of clay and whatnot. Hey, I used to believe that John Byrne was literally incapable of producing a bad comic, swear to [random deity].

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

I've never heard of 'Big Numbers'. Details?

[halloweenjack.insanejournal.com]

The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Numbers_(comics)) will give you the basic rundown; some of the links at the end will tell you some of what happened. Besides not wanting to work with DC ever again, two of the big things that Moore had gotten out of working on Watchmen were a fascination with the way that connections between different elements in the book had almost seemed to make themselves (this was a bit before the Glycon phase, I think), and that he was more interested in the interactions between the people at that Manhattan streetcorner than he was with people who wore tights or walked on Mars.

Big Numbers (originally called The Mandelbrot Set, until Benoît Mandelbrot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beno%C3%AEt_Mandelbrot) contacted Moore and asked him not to use his name commercially) was supposed to be an examination of human society as it behaved fractally. In one of the links from the Wikipedia article, Moore says that he still has the whole series plotted out on big sheets of paper, although he doesn't think it will ever see completion.

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

Huh - sounds interesting. A man of varied interests is our Alan. (By the way, what do you mean his 'Glycon phase'?)

[halloweenjack.insanejournal.com]

When he really started to get interested in magic.

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

Ah, I see. You mean his current 'I've hit middle age; screw buying a flashy car - I'm gonna be a magician!' phase.

[halloweenjack.insanejournal.com]

I should be more precise: I see the early fascination in Moore's work with how things tie together eventually developing into a real and knowledgeable interest in magic. (Consider how he deals with magic in, say, Swamp Thing with the detailed, historical approach in From Hell and, eventually, Promethea and LoEG.) Then again, maybe I'm the one who's seeing a pattern that isn't there...

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

I'm not really a Moore completist - I love his stuff, but there's lots of it that I haven't read yet - so I can't really comment on that. I WILL say, however, that he's definitely become much more detail-oriented in recent years (and he wasn't sloppy in that regard to begin with - the dude does his research).