#alan moore

I’m up to the third issue, but I just have to blabber on about the protagonist’s second dream, the one in which he’s on a train. All the hints and hooks and seemingly minor incidents in the story up to now feature in the dream, but at the same time, some of these allusions are obviously “premonitions”. I put “premonitions” in quotes because in Providence, time is kind of a permanent, motionless thing where every thing that happens sets up echoes in the past and the future. (It makes more sense in the actual graphic novel than in my words.)

The premonitions are unmistakably of the Holocaust, still twenty or so years into the protagonist’s future. Stating it flat out like that doesn’t begin to convey the growing atmosphere of dread, of foreboding. It’s still just disturbing little hints, but it chills me to the bone! It’s almost as if the premonitions reflect something approaching him that’s even worse, if possible, than the Nazi genocides.

I originally started reading the novel due to Gordon White’s praise of it. He described it as having a genuine magician’s understanding of time, and that each event thus sends echoes down through the past and the future. I’m beginning to see what he meant.

i took an ungodly amount of psychic damage just reading this headline

Superverse - Album on Imgur

Shared on Twitter, sharing here too: a compilation I put together of nearly 100 sketches from the abandoned Alan Moore/Rick Veitch project Superversethat the latter posted to Facebook.

Background for those who didn’t hear anything about it: Alan Moore has a collection of short stories titled Illuminationsreleasing later this year, with one chapter apparently constituting a novella in itself called What We Can Know About Thunderman, which “charts the surreal and Kafkaesque history of the comics industry over the last seventy-five years through several sometimes-naive and sometimes-maniacal people rising and falling on its career ladders…Moore reveals the dark, beating heart of the superhero business”.

This called attention to a sketch Rick Veitch had posted last year without much notice of a character named Thunderman, perhaps a notion carried over into Illuminations, from the scrapped project titled Superverse. It turns out he spoke quite a bit about it: it was a project he described as covering the whole of superheroic history, “like ’League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ but with long underwear guys,” with Thunderman and his counterpart Thundergirl meant to be siblings sent from their presumably-doomed world to parallel Earths and unaware of one another’s existence.

It was of all things meant to tie into Moore’s film The Show, with in-universe comics appearing in it (probably somehow via the film’s ‘superhero’ supporting character The Flash Avenger) which Veitch and Moore would have actually made, each essentially promoting the other. This was conceived of roughly 8-9 years before Veitch originally decided to start rounding up his assorted character designs and posting them to Facebook, and he alluded to part of why it fell through being due to some outside funding being cut off. There were no formal scripts or plot outlines, these sketches were purely spawned from conversations between Moore and Veitch and apparently there were ideas for a couple hundred more characters before the plug was pulled.

A loss for the medium for sure, as evidenced by the remarkable flair and cleverness on display in the linked album above, but keep in mind two things to ease your soul:

* Moore would have been forced to give even more interviews about superheroes than he already does, and the man’s miserable enough having to talk about them once or twice a year.

* Given Moore’s notorious apparent fondness for Superfolks, the imagery of the two evoking the Silver Age Superman/Supergirl with all the memetic weirdness their relationship occasionally brought about, and that it’s specifically noted they didn’t know they were siblings, Thundergirl and Thunderman absolutely would have fucked, so we dodged that bullet.

“Despite the speed with which the wave of smothering depression was upon him, Mick was not aware of its arrival, and was instantly convinced that what was now roiling like toxic fumes inside his mind had always been his point of view, his usual optimism nothing but a fraud, a flimsy tissue behind which he hid from what he knew was the inevitable truth. There was no point. There was no point and there had never been a point to all this grief and graft and grovelling, to being alive. When the heart failed or the brain died, he’d always really known inside, we just stopped thinking. Everyone knew that within their sinking, secret heart, whatever they might say. We all stopped being who we were, we just shut down and there was nowhere that we got beamed up to after that, no Heaven, Hell or reincarnation as a better person. There was only nothing after death, and nothing else but nothing, and for everyone the universe would all be gone the moment they exhaled their final breath, just as though they and it were never there. He didn’t really sometimes feel the warmth and presence of his parents still around him, he just kidded himself now and then that this was what he felt. Tom and Doreen were gone, dad from a heart attack and mum from cancer of the bowel that must have hurt so much. He wasn’t ever going to see them anymore.

Mick had by this point reached the bottom of the ramp, and the incinerator odour was now everywhere. He tried to raise a flutter of resistance to the irrefutable awareness that pressed down upon him, tried to summon all the arguments that he was sure that he’d once had against this hopeless blackness. Love. His love for Cathy and the kids. That had been one of his protective mantras, he was certain, except love just made things crueller, gave you so much more to lose. One partner dies first and the other spends their final years alone and crushed. You love your kids and watch them grow to something wonderful and then you have to leave them and not meet with them again. And all so short, seventy years or so, with him near fifty now. That’s twenty years, assuming that you’re lucky, less than half of what had already slipped by, and Mick felt certain that these final decades would flash past with grim rapidity.

Everyone went away. Everything vanished. People, places, turned to painful shadows of their former selves and then were put to sleep, just like the Boroughs had been.”

cleverwordsandotherstuffilike:

All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That’s how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.

Alan Moore

Yes I’m enjoying the Alan Moore BBC Maestro series.