Some of these stories have haunted me for decades

Across the Universe: The DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore
Alan Moore
DC Comics, 2003


V for Vendetta and From Hell are two of my favorite graphic novels, due in no small part to the brilliant ideas and prose of Alan Moore. Because I first read both books in the `00s, I'd just assumed that Moore was only a contemporary comic book writer. Imagine my surprise, then, that upon picking up this volume at the local library, I discovered not one but three stories that affected me so profoundly when I read them as a kid that they still stick with me twenty-plus years later.

Two of these stories, both of which involve the Green Lantern Corps, still come up in my comparative religions class when I am reflecting on perception and frames of reference. In "Mogo Doesn't Socialize," Bolphunga the Unrelenting has come to a remote planet in search of the great Green Lantern Mogo. Suffice it to say that Bolphunga and the reader both discover precisely why Mogo can't be found anywhere on that remote world in a perceptual shift worthy of the Twilight Zone. "In Blackest Night" challenges a Green Lantern to communicate with a blind being from a dark planet who knows (and, more importantly, can know) nothing of "green" or "lanterns." This story drove home the point that you need a common frame of reference in order for ideas to translate.

The third story, "Brief Lives," filled a single page spread and came from something called Vega. As with the latter of the GL stories, this one was all about perspective. Two giants, whose lives encompass epochs of geological time, encounter---in the form of an almost imperceptible little cloud of dust---the futile attacks of a race of militant insectoids. The punchline, delivered by one of these eons-old creatures to his colleague, is that he shouldn't worry too much about the dust cloud because "life is too short." Wonderful!

All the other stories collected in this volume are strong, and most of them explore the nuances of interpersonal relationships, hardly the standard fare of superhero comic books. In "For the Man Who Has Everything," Superman is attacked by an alien plant-thing that renders him comatose while allowing him to live out an idealized virtual life on a Krypton-that-never-exploded with his wife and children. "The Jungle Line" finds the Swamp Thing gently, almost tenderly, rescuing Superman from the feverish grip of a lethal Kryptonian fungus. "Night Olympics" follows an evening out with socially conscious crime fighter couple Green Arrow and Black Widow as they encounter drug freaks, stereo thieves, and a would-be assassin. "Father's Day" is a troubling, if overlong, Vigilante story about a child-abusing, wife-murdering ex-con, and the complex, unfathomable relationship he has with his daughter. The closing story, "Mortal Clay," finds Batman dueling with the third incarnation of Clayface over the affections of an, um, woman.

Alan Moore has demonstrated time and again that he is a writer to be reckoned with. The implications of some stories in this collection took me by surprise decades ago, and their effects have still not worn off. I recommend the stories in this collection very highly.

(This review was originally written on November 19, 2007.)

Not your run of the mill comic book

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History
Art Spiegelman
Pantheon, 1986

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History is at once the autobiographical tale of an American baby boomer trying to get to know his Holocaust-survivor father and of that father's experiences in and survival of the Holocaust. Spiegelman's audacity in attempting to use a "child's art form" to discuss one of history's greatest atrocities is matched only by the skill, both as a writer and a graphic artist, with which he accomplishes this goal. This groundbreaking graphic novel is definitely deserving of the accolades it has received.

In Maus, Spiegelman has demonstrated that comics and cartoons cannot be automatically relegated to the literary ghetto of the Sunday papers. This novel also proves true the old adage that pictures are worth thousands of words. Consider, for example, the cut-away view of the hidden bunker (p. 86) which graphically (in every sense of the term) shows the lengths to which Jews and other untermenschen had to go to hide from the Third Reich. Maus is successful not only in terms of its artwork, but also in terms of the stories that it tells. Spiegelman manages to show not only how the evils of the Holocaust unfolded and shaped his father, his late mother, and his new step-mother, but also how those same events shaped the relationship between Vladek Spiegelman and his son Art thirty years later.

At the risk of admitting my aesthetic thick-headedness, I still don't understand why Spiegelman chose to use animals instead of people in this work. Perhaps it is because, as some have suggested, seeing Nazis and Jews as animals allows the reader to drop the mind-stopping question of how humans could treat one another in such inconceivably barbarous ways. Perhaps the use of mice for Jews and cats for Nazis is an allusion to the old phrase about playing cat and mouse, or maybe it is a symbol of the Nazi perception of Jews as vermin. I tend to think Spiegelman's use of mice refers to his father's comment that maybe Artie will grow up to be like that famous cartoonist, "what's his name." After all, "what's his name" became famous through his cartoon mouse character, so why shouldn't Art Spiegelman? Whatever his reasons for the interesting choice to use animals as people, it works.

(This review was originally written on July 11, 2007.)

Not as good as some of Rick Geary's other Victorian murder books

The Beast of Chicago: An Account of the Life and Crimes of Herman W. Mudgett, Known to the World As H.H. Holmes (Treasury of Victorian Murder)
Rick Geary
ComicsLit, 2003

As always, Rick Geary's art is stupendous, yet as other reviewers have noted, much more could have been done with this graphic novel. The bizarre nooks, crannies, and asphyxiation rooms of H.H.Holmes' castle would have made for a visual feast, but unfortunately Geary focuses on these matters relatively briefly, choosing instead to spend time following Holmes step-by-step as he abandons one wife and child after another and murders his way through most of the children in the Pietzel family. Still, a competent introduction to one of the more horrifying figures of 19th century America.

(This review was originally written on August 6, 2006.)

Erudite, horrifying, and masterfully illustrated fiction

From Hell
Alan Moore
Top Shelf Productions, 2000

This "comic" dissects the most famous unsolved crimes in history, peeling away their layers of misogyny, class stratification, abject poverty, imperial machinations, conspiracy, magic, and madness like so much flesh and sinew. Each chapter approaches the topic from a different angle, focusing here on the hidden Masonic architecture of the British capital, looking there in detail at the lives of the Ripper's victims. The basic plot is that the Ripper is one Sir William Gull, royal physician and Masonic magician, who is killing these women to keep them from blackmailing the Queen's grandson, Prince Eddy. To reduce the story to this plot, though, is to miss its incredible richness and intelligence.

Those looking for the definitive Ripper "solution" need to continue their searches elsewhere. As author Alan Moore notes in the second appendix, "Jack is not Gull or Druitt. Jack is a super-position." Instead of presenting the typical cops and robbers version of a played-out murder story, Alan Moore uses the Ripper to reveal the banal horrors of everyday life for the poor women and children of Victorian England and to indict a male culture whose callousness and brutality was matched only by its religious and aristocratic hypocrisy. In Moore's novel, the Ripper is not merely a doctor conducting Masonic rituals whilst ostensibly ridding the Crown of a handful of blackmailing whores. Rather, the Ripper is the entire miasma of modernity, the calculated technological horrors of 20th century condensed into four murders, one year, one decade. Jack is the man who leaves his wife and two children to be with their midwife, he is the royal brat whose dalliances have disastrous consequences for the little people, he is the media bent on selling papers by peddling gore and hysteria.

The erudition of the cultural commentary in the volume is staggering. A review of the 42 page monstrosity of an appendix reveals the manifold reasons behind each frame of each page of the story. It all boils down to this: "Five murdered paupers, and one anonymous assailant. This reality is dwarfed by the vast theme-park we've built around it. Truth is, this has never been about the murders, or the killer nor his victims. It's about us, our minds and how they dance. Jack mirrors our hysterias. Faceless, he is the receptacle for each new social panic."

This book is a work of literature, easily on par with such other classic graphic novels as Maus, Persepolis, or Fagin the Jew.

(This review was originally written on July 27, 2006.)

Inventive recontextualization of classic Marvel heroes and villains

Marvel 1602 Volume 1
Neil Gaiman
Marvel Comics, 2004

I rarely keep up with comic books and graphic novels these days, so I know very little of Gaiman's work with the Sandman series. That said, I think this reinvention of some classic Marvel heroes is strong on creativity and short on a coherent storyline. In this collected series of 8 comic books, Gaiman tells of an Elizabethan England that is threatened both by Count Otto Von Doom's Latveria and by the religiously motivated machinations of James of Scotland, heir to the throne. Familiar characters like Dr. Strange, the Fantastic Four, and Thor show up in altogether unfamiliar places and contexts. Many of the details are thoroughly enjoyable (e.g., Gaiman touches on the spiritual consequences for the Christian who turns into the Norse god Thor), but there are an equal number of plot threads and loose ends that go nowhere.

(This review was originally written on July 9, 2006.)