BRIGHTER THAN YOU THINK - ALAN MOORE

       Despite being seemingly the only culture our society produces anymore, comic books were once (in my lifetime even) thought of as a very disposable and degraded medium. Even the idea of collecting issues into nicely bound “trade paperbacks” instead of flimsy and cheap individual issues is an invention of the past 30 years. As a result, not unlike early film, which was also seen as debased and expendable, a lot of it is lost and hard to come by. So something like this, which combs through and picks out certain stories that appeared in anthologies and special issues, in this case, stories that all have the same author, is quite special and useful in piecing together the history of comics. This book is part of a series that I didn’t know about, called Critical Comics, which allows writers and historians who specialize in comics to put together collections around a certain topic or theme and write essays between each entry. Here we get Marc Sobel’s thoughts and commentary around 10 Moore short stories. I had only read one of these beforehand so the collection was very exciting to get my hands on. Moore is one of the great geniuses of comics for a reason and it’s evident from this early work. Actually, a surprising amount of his later obsessions and occupations are all here. There is a story about a land called Pictopia where all “styles” of comics, from newspaper funny pages to Crumb-style underground comix exist next to one another and are all threatened by the newer, meaner super-hero stories. It’s a far-out concept he fleshes out better in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but it’s fascinating he had the germ of this idea in ‘86. There is a startling range of subject matter and tone. There is a realistic, melodramatic comic about the war in Vietnam, a comic that is a poem and history lesson in defense of gay/lesbian love, a biography of Jack Parsons, a comic about 9/11 that highlights resonances with the tarot as well as a quasi-horror story that takes place in and is largely about Japan. Perhaps my favorite of these is a stupid story that imagines the Kool-Aid man as a real “person” who lives through the acid tests and is cagy about his involvment in Jonestown, all while lamenting that since his smile is drawn on, he can never change expressions. As you can see, lots of his later obsessions, magik, war, the tarot, sex, treating silly throw-away concepts as serious, etc. are very much here from the begining, and we can see reading this, how he really nails these topics later in his career with a longer work. The art changes between each story but remains strong throughout, Peter Bagge worked on the aforementioned Kool-Aid one and nails it. Likewise with the Sobel essays which make interesting connections and provide context without getting boring or over-explaining. I’d certainly recommend it to a Moore fan. 10 mirrors