Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct by Paul Di Filippo and Jerry Ordway

Generally with these posts, my preference is (a) to try and figure out how these comics are put together and (b) to elaborate on how my own particular p.o.v. affects my capacity to do (a). I've been trying not to talk in terms of this-or-that "working" or "not working", because, IME, those kinds of judgments require making assumptions about how a given comic should work that makes it easier to miss out when a comic is working in a way that is new to me.

But comparing Paul Di Filippo's work on this series to Alan Moore's, what sticks out is not that Di Filippo's ideas aren't as good, necessarily, but that they're a lot more safe, like he knows he's playing with someone else's toys and doesn't want to break them. Or get too attached to them, for that matter: the way the characters are written makes them feel like actors going through the paces in a sequel they're just doing for the money.

So, Di Filippo has a Moore-like overarching A plot, a Morrison-like overarching B plot, and a number of TV cop show-like subplots, but they all feel pasted on. It ends up feeling like the whole thing is badly structured - with an ending that just sort of happens and a lot of scenes that don't seem to add up - but the problem is really that the plot just happens and it isn't grounded the characters or the setting.

And I really like Jerry Ordway's work - Power of Shazam was one of the few super-hero comics I consistently* bought on a monthly basis during the 1990s - but it's never rated very highly on the "sense of humor" scale. So here, while the background jokes are dutifully executed, they're not that funny. Ordway's take on the Top Ten universe is just too literal.

And the whole thing lacks the sense of wonder that made the original Top Ten work: even when it was poking fun at super-hero comics it understood the poetry and majesty of those crazy Jack Kirby images of spandex-clad gods.

*Most of the time in the 1990s I'd follow super-hero titles in bits and pieces and buy up a whole bunch of back issues if something ended up clicking. Ordway's Shazam and James Robinson's Starman were the ones I tried to follow month-in, month-out.

More Moore

One more comment on Sean's Alan Moore posts, which is actually tangential to Sean's point but speaks to the quote from the more interview that Bruce Baugh quotes in the e-mail that Sean quoted:

I think it's interesting to look at which parts of Watchmen influenced the super-hero comics that followed it and which part didn't. We can see its grim 'n' grittiness (Identity Crisis), its meticulous "coded" structure (Arkham Asylum, Seven Soldiers), its taking-apart of the super-hero comic book (Animal Man, Seaguy), and its super-heroes in the "real world" perspective (two very different takes: Astro City and Supreme Power). What we don't see much of, though, are super-hero comics that have been influenced by Dave Gibbons's contributions to Watchmen. I've said this before, but I think what Gibbons does is show us super-heroes - who, archetypically, are (most?) famous for being able to defy gravity - who are bound by the laws of gravity. That's my cute way of saying: the super-heroes in Watchmen (with one exception) look like normal people and have realistic non-idealized bodies. They're flabby and sagging and scared and wrinkled. They don't strike poses: they just kind of stand around like normal people.

This aspect of Watchmen has, to my knowledge, never shown up in a super-hero comic since them, except when occasionally played as a joke (i.e. Blue Beetle gaining too much weight in the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire-era Justice League books).

This is Watchmen's central visual idea and I think it tends to get the short shrift in discussions about the book because it is visual and it tends to be more fun and rewarding for us word-crazy intellectual-types to decode/interpret symbolism than to write about what is actually right there on the page, staring us in the face.

Hey (and this isn't tangential to Sean's comments): while I definitely agree with his point about Moore's "Important Statements", it's Moore's collaborators who really put those books over for me. I wish more people would talk about the art of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell (Eddie Campbell shouldn't be the only person doing detailed analysis of these pages).

I've brought this up before and received dismissive comments along the lines of "the artists are just doing what Moore tells them to do" or "they're just following his detailed scripts", but I'm completely willing to accept that and it doesn't change what I'm trying to get across: that even though Moore's scripts are "coded" and (to a certain extent) closed-off, the art opens them back up by grounding the symbolism and clockwork structure within specifically-observed and realized worlds.

A Short Comment on Alan Moore Movies on the Occasion of Me Not Going to See V for Vendetta

The Spider-Man, Superman, and Batman movies that work well, do so, in part, because those characters are all brilliant creations, in their own right. Even last year's Fantastic Four movie, which doesn't even try to achieve 1% of the visual extravagance and elegance of Jack Kirby's comics, gets by on the strength of Kirby and Stan Lee's original characterizations. Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby had a gift for coming up with these explosive pop culture concepts. (Shuster and Siegel and Bob Kane and Bill Finger aren't quite giants, in that they more or less stumbled upon their great creations by accident, but they did manage to tap into some very powerful mojo). The movies based on these comics tend to be good based on the extent to which filmmakers can translate the basics of the concepts to the screen.

The thing with Alan Moore is that he's not at all "creative" in the same way that Lee, Kirby, and Ditko (and others) were (or even in the same way that Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, or Grant Morrison are). Moore doesn't create his own powerful, potent, pop culture concepts: he takes other people's concepts and turns them inside out or rearranges them or makes them answer all those unanswered subtextual questions that, not coincidentally, helped make the concepts powerful and potent to begin with.

He does it in From Hell with the Jack the Ripper created by fringe Ripperologists, in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? with Mort Weisinger-era Superman, in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with late 19th Century pulp/adventure/genre fiction, in V with ubermensch mystery men-type characters like The Shadow and Batman, and in Watchmen with Steve Ditko et al.'s Charlton heroes.

But when Movie Industry People look at his comics, all they see is the potent, powerful, pop cultural concept, and they ignore all the other stuff, i.e. the actual "Alan Moore" stuff. The way Movie People use his comics is a lot like the way they use Philip K. Dick's short stories: to provide a clever hook on which they can hang a standard action thriller.