As Dane Cook said In 'A Vicious Circle', "Thanks Dad, you make me feel so good."

[kage_ankoku]

So I went out with my father yesterday to spend quality time together. We spent most of the day wandering about Granville Island, checking out the farmer's market (I love markets, even if I hate the crowds. You can always find the coolest stuff), the stores (I did visit Opus but it broke my heart a little since they were having a summer sale on all

Comments

[nathskywalker]

It really depends on what kind of Alan Moore you want to read because he does tons of different stuff.

There's his work that has been turned into bad movies like V for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, Constantine and Swamp Thing. League is really good, even for people who aren't into comic books because it has all those literary references and you can really tell that he has spent ages on his research. Vendetta is one of his really good early works. And he has some mainstream work that is also really good but you probably have to be at least a bit familiar with the characters. There's so much of him that it's hard to narrow it down, so I just listed some of his more famous stuff.

Moore is a recluse who refuses to have his name mentioned in the movies based on his work (I get it, his work has been screwed with so, so much in the past).

For me, Watchmen is his masterwork. Best Alan Moore, best comic book ever because it takes such a deep look into the medium, does so much with it, works on so many levels and is a real deconstruction of ther superhero genre.

[kage_ankoku]

Alan Moore created Constantine? I wasn't aware. I've heard a little about the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen before, and it's always interested me. I just need to find a copy of it somehow, since my library always seems to be missing the books I want to read. But perhaps because of how popular Watchmen is, they'll begin to carry more of his work.

What is V for Vendetta about exactly? I've seen bits of the movie, though not very much.

Is Watchmen his most recent work? And thank you for your advice; I appreciate it. :3

[nathskywalker]

Watchmen isn't recent at all. It came out in 1987. Right now, the third volume of League is coming out.

V is set in a totalitarian British government where a man with no face dons the Guy Fawkes mask to fight back, getting a girl who lost her parents to this regime involved and teaching her about how he sees the world.

Watchmen is incredibly popular right now for obvious reasons. They have been trying to make a movie for ages and it worked quite well all things considered.

[nathskywalker]

Oh really? So then League is his most current work?

That does sound very interesting. And is it just one volume, or is it several?

It worked out much better then the movie based on the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen turned out, from what I heard. I'm very excited to watch the movie this weekend for the first time. :3

[nathskywalker]

There are three or four volumes of the League, depending on how you count them. The third publication, called the Black Dossier is more of a source book kind of thing. The first volume came out in 1999 and the third that is labeled Century has started coming out this year and is scheduled to be completed in 2011 which means that I'll wait till it comes out in a collected edition to read it.

The League movie was a failure on many accounts if you ask me. They added characters, most notably Tom Sawyer, to have someone the American audience can identify with and the plot has little in common with either of the League books. It's a fun watch if you don't go in with any expectations though ;)

[kage_ankoku]

Interesting. And do all three books follow the same storyline with the same main characters, or do the stories differ at all?

My English teacher discussed how they brought in Tom Sawyer for that reason actually. We also discussed the changes in the character of Dorian Gray, who I hear isn't actually in the graphic novel. But you're right; with no expectations it is a fun movie to watch. :3 My favourite line most definitely has to be "I'm complicated" from Dorian.

That, and I generally enjoy anything with Sean Connery. ;)

[nathskywalker]

But there won't be anything with Sean Connery anymore since he officially retired after League. What a bad choice of a movie to go out on.

The characters are generally Mina Harper (Dracula), Allan Quartermain (King Solomon's Mines), Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde, Hawley Griffin (H.G. Wells' Invisible Man) and Captain Nemo (1,000 League under the Sea) although there are lots of side-characters, so the movie had all of them at least.

The cool thing that can make you waste hours looking through the volumes is that there are references to other literary characters of that era everywhere. There's the portrait of Dorian Gray hanging on a wall, all the characters who are named are from some novel, etc. so that's really, really cool and proves just how much Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill put into those stories.

[kage_ankoku]

I know! It makes me so sad that he's retired. But apparently he was going to do a sequel for the League had it done well in the box office. But since it did so badly, he chose to retire instead. But I know what you mean about a bad choice in movies to go out on.

Well that's good. I'd actually wondered about whether Mina was a character that was added, or if she really was a main character from the book.

Now that's really cool. I could spend hours looking at literary references. I always love it when I find one. I wonder how long it took them to research the stories?

[nathskywalker]

Alan Moore is a real research machine. He did an entire book based on the myths of Jack the Ripper ("From Hell"; still have to read that). Especially when reading League I get the feeling that he wants to show people how much more intelligent than them he is and he succeeds at it in a way that still makes his work enjoyable because you can just read it at surface level or you can delve deeply into it.

The Quartermain character is much more fun in the books where he is a slightly pervy old man who gets on Mina's nerves a lot. She was portrayed quite well in the movie though. Closest to the source material if I recall correctly.

[kage_ankoku]

The more I hear of Alan Moore, the more I want to read of his work. There's such satisfaction in reading well-researched stories. Why haven't I heard much about him before the Watchmen movie came out?

Hah! I'd wondered if any of the characters were true to the way they were portrayed in the book.

[nathskywalker]

Moore is mostly in indie comics nowadays as he has the tendency to fall out with publishers and doesn't put out work consistently. If you look at the credits for the Watchmen movie (or V for Vendetta; not sure about League), you'll see that he isn't credited as creator since he disliked what they did to his work and insisted on them taking his name off the movie. He refuses to watch them from what I hear (at least Watchmen) and doesn't accept any of the money he might have otherwise made with it, giving it to the artist instead. So no interviews about the movies, nothing which probably doesn't help his sales. Then again, he is one of the highest-regarded comic book writers of the modern age anyway.

What I think is amazing about his work is that you can just read it as something entertaining, only taking the surface level of it. Like Watchmen. You can skip the backmatter and not look at the parallels in storytelling, how the Black Freighter story is related to the main story, the plays on the characters (who they are based on, sexual issues, etc) and it's a cool read. You can also go indepth and find so much more. The same applies to League and most of his work. Stay away from Lost Girls though. I only made it through the first of three books and sorry, but it's just an excuse for porn using Alice in Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. Not my thing.

I think most characters in League are fairly similar to their inspirations. I know Mina is to me.

[kage_ankoku]

Ahh, I see. It sounds like he's not an easy person to work with, but the results of his efforts are fantastic. I find it interesting that he refuses to watch the movies; if I were in his position, my curiosity would overwhelm me into watching them. In any case, regardless of how he's had his name removed from the movie, the comic for Watchmen must be selling better. I see it every bookstore I go to now.

The way the Black Freighter story paralleled the main storyline was really well done. Actually, I really wish I had a copy of the Watchmen again so I could read it more closely. But I've heard that they've released an animated version of it alongside the Watchmen movie? And thanks for the warning about Lost Girls. So there's no real storyline it then?

I always find it impressive when characters remain close to their inspirations. It's not an easy thing to do, I find.

Hey are you very familiar with fairy tales at all? I'm curious because I've been looking for a good collection book to use as a reference for one of my stories but I'm unable to find a good one.

[nathskywalker]

I have a copy of Watchmen by my bed. It's the softcover because I'm too poor for the wonderful, absolutely beautiful Absolute edition but it's Watchmen and I love reading it over and over again. Earlier this year before the movie was released a comic book podcast did a twelve episode run looking at every single issue of Watchmen, commenting on the parallels, pointing out little things in the backgrounds, foreshadowing, etc. and even having read it so many times it was amazing that they found even more. Things like the cover, the first and the last panel being the same and other cool stuff.

There is an animated version of the Black Freighter but I haven't gotten around to seeing it yet, mostly because it's hard to track that stuff down in Germany.

Lost Girls is mostly porn from what I saw but there seem to be allusions to the history at the time with it being set in Austria shortly before WWI. I read half of the first volume and thought it was just porn though. Moore is very open-minded about sexuality anyway (all the Watchmen characters have their neat sexual backgrounds) and he used to live with his wife and their lover before both of them dumped him (persumably for a relationship, I'd assume) and he eventually got married to the artist who drew Lost Girls. So not only is he a hard person to work with but also to live with ;)

Watchmen has never been as popular as after the movie was announced and I think that's really cool because it is my favorite comic book of all times. Even before that it was the only comic book on the Time Magazine's 100 best novels, so it was critically acclaimed long before that. I think Moore doesn't care about popularity all that much. He is somewhat reclusive in Northhampton and he's one of those I have never heard were convention attendants or gave interviews which is a little unusual.

I love fairy tales but my resource book for them is a big German fairy tale book. Grimms' Fairy Tales. Speaking of using characters in comic books, there is a really good ongoing comic book series by Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham called Fables that uses fairy tale characters that had to flee from their fairy tale dimension and live hidden in NYC. The Big Bad Wolf (Bigby Wolf) is the sheriff of Fabletown, Snow White's, Cinderella's and Briar Rose's Prince Charming are all the same guy ... it's pretty fun to see what they do with the characters. But yeah, for orignal stuff, I'd try to find some book that is credited as being put together by the Brothers Grimm. I think it's known as Grimms' Fairy Tales.