Moore, Moore, Moore...
...how do you like it, how do you like it?
Well enough so that, even at the beginning of what was to be a four-day weekend devoted to moving (but turned into a nine-day Bataan Death March), I found time enough to re-read, over the course of a twelve hour period, the classic graphic novel (translation: long comic book) V For Vendetta, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd. V For Vendetta, of course, is the basis of the movie that just opened (in the U.S. at least) on Saint Paddy's Day this past Friday, produced by the same meatheads what brung yez the Matrix trilogy (talk about your diminishing returns...) and the lezza-cum-crime noir girl-grope between Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly, Bound.
Moore has become disenchanted enough with movie adaptations of his work that, not only has he refused any payment for said adaptations (instructing the studios to give his portion to whatever artist he collaborated with on the work in question), he has now refused a credit, much to the shock (if not awe) of the movie studios and his artists. (Although contrary to the impression conveyed in the article in last Sunday's [12 March] New York Times, Moore retains enough of a sense of humor about his scruples and artistic pride to have made a joke at his own expense during the episode of BBC Radio 4's Chain Reaction programme -- whose premise is to have one celebrity interviewing another to frequently humorous results -- when he was in the hot seat; I forget who interviewed him, but when it was Moore's turn to play David Frost, he interviewed Brian Eno.)
I was terribly irritated at Michael Wolff's column -- a pundit and failed Internet entrepreneur whose usual brief is the intersection of politics and the media -- in the February 2006 (No. 546) issue of Vanity Fair: Wolff ejaculated in the course of several pages over the mudlucious wonderfulness of the movie version of VFV, only to cavalierly dismiss the source material with a single adjective -- "turgid," IIRC. While this article isn't available on-line (which is probably a good thing for Wolff, unless he wants his in box flooded with angry missives from Alan Moore fans), The Daily Kos did quote from it fairly extensively on 29 January. Did he even read the bloody thing? Or did he take his cue from the art while flipping through the trade paperback, deciding that any comic book with that many shadows in it and no dishabille lovelies being ravished by toothy monsters of one sort or another simply had to be "turgid"?
I also managed to finally read -- beginning after our possessions were transported from our previous residence to the new one or the storage unit, though not yet fully unpacked or put away -- From Hell, the massive (over 500 pages) graphic novel meditation on Jack the Ripper by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell; the trade paperback retails for U.S. $35.00 (I managed to purchase it at a 30% discount), and consists of a prologue, fourteen chapters, an epilogue, and two, count 'em, two appendixes: a 42-paged text-only one (three columns to a page...) and a 24-paged graphically illustrated one. I started it around -- oh, let's say 5 March -- and finished it last Friday morning (Saint Pat's Day: 17 March) before going to work.
From Hell (yes, yes: 'twas turned into a movie bearing little relationship to the source material starring Johnny Depp) is -- how can I put it? Tres accabler? Overwhelming, yes. That's about it. That, and it beats the almighty snot out of the four-part comic book mini-series by Mark Wheatley and Marc Hempel, Blood of the Innocent (Dracula vs. Jack the Ripper!), published by WaRP Graphics in 1986.
It's not really fair to compare the two; but From Hell did make me feel guilty for having enjoyed Blood of the Innocent, even if the latter had a text piece by Robert Bloch. (I also wasn't too jazzed to discover that Lone Star Comics is selling "very fine" copies of Blood of the Innocent for almost half the price that they were first published at, and which I purchased them at. Where is the love, I ask you? Where is the love??)
But as much as I was enthralled and appalled at From Hell (particularly Chapter Four: "What doth the Lord require of thee?," which, though it contained no mayhem whatever, nearly made me jump out of my skin, despite the fact that I read it in broad daylight), I was irked at the not infrequent typos contained in the first appendix, and flat-out gobsmacked at an errata on page 18 (panel #6) of the second appendix ("Dance of the gull catchers"): the information that self-described Ripperologist John Morrison, author of a pamphlet entitled Jimmy Kelly's Year of the Ripper Crimes, obtained money from Mickey Rourke, who was "filming The Long Good Friday out at Leytonstone."
Um, excuse me: The Long Good Friday (1980) -- a contender for the greatest British gangster flick ever -- and Mickey "Straight-to Video" Rourke?? Is this some Bizarro World version of the film I've not seen? Did Moore possibly mean to say A Prayer For the Dying (1987 or 1988), which Mickey Rourke did star in, along with the star of The Long Good Friday, the fantastic Bob Hoskins?
Forget the mysteries and synchronicities of the Ripper murders; I want to know where Alan Moore learned that Mickey Rourke was in The Long Good Friday, and whether he's ever seen the footage that obviously got left on the cutting room floor. Did Rourke originally have Pierce Brosnan's role, and sham being a gay hustler just a bit too convincingly? What??
Well enough so that, even at the beginning of what was to be a four-day weekend devoted to moving (but turned into a nine-day Bataan Death March), I found time enough to re-read, over the course of a twelve hour period, the classic graphic novel (translation: long comic book) V For Vendetta, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd. V For Vendetta, of course, is the basis of the movie that just opened (in the U.S. at least) on Saint Paddy's Day this past Friday, produced by the same meatheads what brung yez the Matrix trilogy (talk about your diminishing returns...) and the lezza-cum-crime noir girl-grope between Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly, Bound.
Moore has become disenchanted enough with movie adaptations of his work that, not only has he refused any payment for said adaptations (instructing the studios to give his portion to whatever artist he collaborated with on the work in question), he has now refused a credit, much to the shock (if not awe) of the movie studios and his artists. (Although contrary to the impression conveyed in the article in last Sunday's [12 March] New York Times, Moore retains enough of a sense of humor about his scruples and artistic pride to have made a joke at his own expense during the episode of BBC Radio 4's Chain Reaction programme -- whose premise is to have one celebrity interviewing another to frequently humorous results -- when he was in the hot seat; I forget who interviewed him, but when it was Moore's turn to play David Frost, he interviewed Brian Eno.)
I was terribly irritated at Michael Wolff's column -- a pundit and failed Internet entrepreneur whose usual brief is the intersection of politics and the media -- in the February 2006 (No. 546) issue of Vanity Fair: Wolff ejaculated in the course of several pages over the mudlucious wonderfulness of the movie version of VFV, only to cavalierly dismiss the source material with a single adjective -- "turgid," IIRC. While this article isn't available on-line (which is probably a good thing for Wolff, unless he wants his in box flooded with angry missives from Alan Moore fans), The Daily Kos did quote from it fairly extensively on 29 January. Did he even read the bloody thing? Or did he take his cue from the art while flipping through the trade paperback, deciding that any comic book with that many shadows in it and no dishabille lovelies being ravished by toothy monsters of one sort or another simply had to be "turgid"?
I also managed to finally read -- beginning after our possessions were transported from our previous residence to the new one or the storage unit, though not yet fully unpacked or put away -- From Hell, the massive (over 500 pages) graphic novel meditation on Jack the Ripper by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell; the trade paperback retails for U.S. $35.00 (I managed to purchase it at a 30% discount), and consists of a prologue, fourteen chapters, an epilogue, and two, count 'em, two appendixes: a 42-paged text-only one (three columns to a page...) and a 24-paged graphically illustrated one. I started it around -- oh, let's say 5 March -- and finished it last Friday morning (Saint Pat's Day: 17 March) before going to work.
From Hell (yes, yes: 'twas turned into a movie bearing little relationship to the source material starring Johnny Depp) is -- how can I put it? Tres accabler? Overwhelming, yes. That's about it. That, and it beats the almighty snot out of the four-part comic book mini-series by Mark Wheatley and Marc Hempel, Blood of the Innocent (Dracula vs. Jack the Ripper!), published by WaRP Graphics in 1986.
It's not really fair to compare the two; but From Hell did make me feel guilty for having enjoyed Blood of the Innocent, even if the latter had a text piece by Robert Bloch. (I also wasn't too jazzed to discover that Lone Star Comics is selling "very fine" copies of Blood of the Innocent for almost half the price that they were first published at, and which I purchased them at. Where is the love, I ask you? Where is the love??)
But as much as I was enthralled and appalled at From Hell (particularly Chapter Four: "What doth the Lord require of thee?," which, though it contained no mayhem whatever, nearly made me jump out of my skin, despite the fact that I read it in broad daylight), I was irked at the not infrequent typos contained in the first appendix, and flat-out gobsmacked at an errata on page 18 (panel #6) of the second appendix ("Dance of the gull catchers"): the information that self-described Ripperologist John Morrison, author of a pamphlet entitled Jimmy Kelly's Year of the Ripper Crimes, obtained money from Mickey Rourke, who was "filming The Long Good Friday out at Leytonstone."
Um, excuse me: The Long Good Friday (1980) -- a contender for the greatest British gangster flick ever -- and Mickey "Straight-to Video" Rourke?? Is this some Bizarro World version of the film I've not seen? Did Moore possibly mean to say A Prayer For the Dying (1987 or 1988), which Mickey Rourke did star in, along with the star of The Long Good Friday, the fantastic Bob Hoskins?
Forget the mysteries and synchronicities of the Ripper murders; I want to know where Alan Moore learned that Mickey Rourke was in The Long Good Friday, and whether he's ever seen the footage that obviously got left on the cutting room floor. Did Rourke originally have Pierce Brosnan's role, and sham being a gay hustler just a bit too convincingly? What??