There are trade paperbacks of the Miracleman comics, but they are all out of print and thus expensive and hard to get ahold of. Reprints aren't forthcoming because the rights to the series are tied up in Legal Limbo.

Todd McFarlane thought that he had the rights to Miracleman, and planned to have him appear in Spawn. After a court battle with Neil Gaiman it became clear that he doesn't, and the character who was going to be revealed as Miracleman is now "The Man of Miracles" who bares a resemblance to Miracleman but isn't him. No. Not at all.

Neil Gaiman hopes to resolve the rights issues and continue the series at Marvel, but the legal limbo that the rights are in is so complicated that I doubt it will happen for some years.

Some characters, surely, are not meant to be "darkened"?

Or did James Barrie really intend for Wendy Darling to be in porn comics?

What the %#^# happened?

Moore's runs on Captain Britain and WildC.A.T.S. also pulled the "lie" trick.

Oh -- and "but it's a good story" is the biggest load of crap ever foisted on the reading audience. Any story which deliberately violates core concepts and themes of original materials is not, by definition "a good story". Time some people pulled their heads out of various writers asses and realized that.

Moore is practically the poster boy for the Type B writer -- the one who wants the characters to serve his story, rather than the other way around.

i think the matrix ripped of Miracleman heavily also.

QUOTE: morphed into a nation of nihilistic whiners

Are we Americans seen like that? ARE we like that?

QUOTE: A changing of a core concept isn't always a turn for the worse

If you're changing core concepts, why bother with a pre-existing character at all?

QUOTE: is there a trade of the early Miracleman [Moore/Gaiman] stories?

Yeah, but you'd have better luck if you just looked for the individual issues.  Trades are running $70+ a pop these days while you can find the Eclipse series for a few bucks apiece (with the exception of #15, but you still come out ahead in the long run).  #1-16 is Moore, #17-25 is Gaiman.  The last two Gaiman issues haven't been reprinted.

Glenn Kendall wrote: If I had already been a regular reader of these titles and then saw what Moore had done, I don't know what I would've thought.  In WildC.A.T.S., Moore revealed that the war between the two alien races stuck on earth had actually been over for hundreds of years, which completely tossed out the whole premise of the series.

Do people just hire Moore and tell him to have fun?  Do the editors even ask for proposals or story pitches?  I seem to recall mention that he had proposed essentially his entire Swamp Thing run at the beginning of his work on the series.  (I haven't read this in years, so it's entirely possible that I am misremembering.  I will try to locate the quote I am thinking of.)  I also remember some editor commentary from Supreme indicating that Moore and the editor had talked about his plans for Supreme, which surely experienced the most radical changes of any character under Moore.  (Once again I will try to locate a reference.)

I'm guessing the editors who, nowadays, hire Moore to work on characters he didn't create are probably expecting that he will change them. 

Core concepts are Core Concepts because they are important to the character. If you take them away, you are left with something completly different, which is fine if the characters is YOUR character. If you decide to mess with something that isn't yours, like, oh, say an established character, then I'd have you say your in the wrong.

If I may be frank, I'm baised since Moore's writing is far to bleak for myself.

Moore's Miracleman was amazing, and it's a shame that so many people have never been able to read it because of the legal problems.

And then just when I thought it was perfect, Gaiman came aboard and continued perfection, in a whole new direction.  Landmark stuff, exploring the deification of superheroes.

Rene wrote: ...They begin to investigate the death and discover a Marvel-Man type character "killed" him (turns out to have faked his death)...

Wouldn't a "Marvel-man type character" really be a "Captain Marvel-type" character?

Love Moore's Marvelman! Brilliant work! Absolutely brilliant!

I also enjoyed Moore's Miracleman/Marvelman work.

Matt Linton wrote:  Matt Hawes wrote: Rene wrote: ...They begin to investigate the death and discover a Marvel-Man type character "killed" him (turns out to have faked his death)... Wouldn't a "Marvel-man type character" really be a "Captain Marvel-type" character? Actually, they're investigating the death of a "Constantine-like" character, not Marvel-Man.

Did either Rene or I write otherwise?

Considering Jim Lee owned/created WildC.A.T.S and hired Alan Moore to write it, I'd assume he had no problem with what Moore did, so I don't think that qualifies as violating the core concept.

I wonder if Lee regrets it now.  I don't remember Moore replacing the concept with anything else, what I've read of the rest of his run was Moore poking fun of 90s superhero comics.  WildC.A.T.S. has been cancelled twice since Moore left, bouncing from concept from concept (Joe Casey even tried turning it into a corporate boardroom 'action' comic).

You do understand what terms like "core concept" mean, don't you?

I have always had a dislike for Alan Moore's "The Killing Joke". So many Batman fans and to some extent writers have latched on to that as the Joker's definitive origin just purely (it seems to me) because it was written by Alan Moore.

The context of that origin story turned the Joker in to just another helpless victim.

So  was the pre Moore/Gaiman MarvelMan personality more closely related to his US counterpart Captain Marvel, or the 70's boycott Superman?

I really enjoyed some of Alan Moore's work.  V for Vendetta I found to be original, From Hell was enjoyable and unique, for comics at the time, and enjoyed Watchmen when first serialized.  However, I began to have a nagging dislike for the work when I saw that he wasn't bringing anything new to the table.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was dark 19th century adventure lit.

Watchmen was dark Charlton.

Miracleman was dark Captain Marvel/Marvelman.

Even Top Ten's most lauded issue riffed on an episode of Homicide.

I have not read most of the ABC line nor Swamp Thing, so I can't comment on those.

It's a shame, then, to see characters like this fall into the hands of the deconstructionists -- especially someone like Moore, who seems to really have no story to tell beyond "everything you know is a lie".

***

I thought the "everything is a lie" conceit worked terrifically, within the context of Moore's first Marvelman story arc. I think it's best to think of it as a science fiction (rather than a superhero) comic.  

I disagree when John says that Moore has no other story to tell. Sure, it's a common theme in much of his work - from "Watchmen" to "From Hell" - but what about "Tom Strong" or "Top Ten" or, uhm, "D.R. and Quinch"?

By all means -- if you like Moore's stuff, read it, enjoy it, recommend it to your friends. But don't pretend it's something it's not.

Seigel and Shuster mined certain elements from Doc Savage -- the Fortress of Solitude, for instance, and some have drawn parallels to Clark Savage Jr. being created by Lester Dent -- but saying Doc Savage is like Superman (even modifying with "kind of) pushes the point a bit. Of DC characters created around the same time as Savage, Batman probably comes closer to the model.

John Byrne: ..as seen so many times before, this is Moore doing "nostalgia" with things about which he clearly does not feel nostalgic.

--------------------------------------

At last i read a phrase that examplifies Alan Moore!...I have never thought about him like that...until now!....and you are right....Thanks Mr. Byrne!

He seems like the friend everybody has who could find fault with free sex!  It's what we call looking at the world through shit colored glasses.

"Yet, as seen so many times before, this is Moore doing "nostalgia" with things about which he clearly does not feel nostalgic"

 I remeber catching this feeling with him in "Whatever happened to the man of tommrow?" when it said "This is an imaginary story, aren't they all?"

 Way to miss the friggin' point, smarta**.

 *grumble*

Mig Da Silva  Posted: 09 June 2006 at 7:02am

QUOTE: You haven't read WATCHMEN, and you're here entering a discussion on Alan Moore... ...apologies, i just passed out momentarily. Where am i again? .

You know if you read the posts in order  they make more sense. Try it some time.

Gene Kendall Posted: 09 June at 5:48am

QUOTE: Moore's runs on Captain Britain and WildC.A.T.S. also pulled the "lie" trick.

QUOTE: (I haven't read those either by the way. Are they good?)

Glenn Moane Posted: 09 June 2006 at 6:06 am

QUOTE: Oki, Mister Byrne, I have read the following works of Alan Moore: Swamp Thing (entire run) League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Watchmen <-------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------- Top Ten Tom Strong V for Vendetta From Hell Various Future Shock tales Promethea Smax the Barbarian Whatever happened to the Man of Tomorrow? Albion Big Numbers The Ballad of Halo Jones Batman the Killing Joke

Funny how thats works out.

QUOTE: Even Top Ten's most lauded issue riffed on an episode of Homicide.

And of course the climax of the series had a group of JLA analogues as child molestors...

As happens every 4 years the flag of St George is no longer considered rascist and is flying from most cars and houses,the reason? England are in the World Cup.Any other day it is seen by the P.C. brigade as a sign of racism! Can you imagine the U.S. not flying the Stars and Stripes ?  Mind you Radio 1 did have a ban on songs using the word England in case it offended the Scots and Welsh! They had no such rules when Scotland was in  previous World Cups and played their songs,not that we would be offended anyway!

Sorry,but i like most of Moore`s stuff,and when i saw the subway fight in the first Matrix movie i thought of Miracleman immediately.

Found these pages, yeah I'd say they are just a little dark and gloomy

You haven't read WATCHMEN, and you're here entering a discussion on Alan Moore...

...apologies, i just passed out momentarily. Where am i again?

My word, didn't JB say he never finished Watchmen himself? It seems to me someone who's read Moore's other works can speak up if they want to!

QUOTE: Of DC characters created around the same time as Savage, Batman probably comes closer to the model.

Very true. Whatever superficialities (no pun!) were used by Siegel/Shuster, it is the Batman who is most akin to Doc Savage.

QUOTE: Dent, who wrote most of the adventures, described his hero as a cross between “Sherlock Holmes with his deducting ability, Tarzan of the Apes with his towering physique and muscular ability, Craig Kennedy with his scientific knowledge, and Abraham Lincoln with his Christliness.”

"Christliness"? OK, maybe not....

I won't defend Moore on the level that's being discussed. And I don't have any real sense of what Moore is other than the work I've read by him. The philosophies behind good comics writing as opposed to telling a pretty intense story with typical Moore nihilism is two different things. Moore is who he is as a writer. He's interested mostly in literalizing the superhero in order to intensify the impact of the story. So you only know Superman as the Big Blue Boy Scout? Well, in Moore's eyes there cannot just be that assignation. He wants to come to a full understanding intellectually and he works his plots against what the character is supposed to do to become "real" in Moore's mind.

You can blame the industry for allowing Moore to deconstruct Charlton and Doc Savage and Swamp Thing, and the prevading impact of Moore's passions have taken over, for the worst. But really, when was the last time Moore worked on Spider-Man or the Hulk or FF or Batman or Wolverine? I don't think either of the two bigs would really want Moore to deconstruct their prime money properties. Moore did Superman work, but very little, and I don't know if his lack of exposure to the larger properties is purposeful on his part of the companies. The whole Marvelman thing is beyond me since I didn't grow up knowing the character. I only know Miracleman had some profound effect on me when I was younger, with that whole "reality" line shaking me a little. I think Moore is particularly fascinated by how frightening Superman would be as pure evil. Or how Charlton heroes would work against an alternate history of the US. What's the problem with these stories other than that they deal in characters that not many had an interest in before he took them over (Batman and Superman blips aside), and then afterward (decades later) people proclaiming he sullied those characters.

Most writing is split into two camps. There's literary writing that's character focused and usually more internalized. Think John Updike or films like THE MACHINIST. Then there's plot driven stories that use technique and formula. Think Richard Stark and films like the original ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. Alan Moore is a literary writer writing comics. Whether he's a pompous prick who has no interest in preserving comics (plot) histories is immaterial. The companies who hire him know what they are getting, just as they know John Byrne produces generally compelling, plot-based comics designed around the history and form of the medium. Moore doesn't write comics, and Byrne doesn't write literary essays on what it is to be connected to all the plants on Earth. And yet I can still dig both of these approaches, at least until they hire Moore to write FF and he delves into the microscopic flora living in the spaces between Ben Grimm's "rocks".  Wait, they hired the knock-off, Morrison, to do something like that.

The worst thing about that line is that it became an instant mantra of the fanboys who live only to show how kewl and filled with ennui they are. I cannot count the number of times I have heard or read it since. Aren't they "all" imaginary stories? The first time you think that, it's time to find a new hobby.

I remeber catching this feeling with him in "Whatever happened to the man of tommrow?" when it said "This is an imaginary story, aren't they all?"

***

But I don't think think that Moore was being disrespectful to the genre with that line. In "Whatever happend to the Man of Tomorrow" he'd given Superman a happy ending, of sorts, and he was saying that, Ok, this story isn't part of mainstream DC continuity (or at least it won't be for much longer) - but in it's way it is as valid as any that were to come.

I agree that used by anyone outside the context of that particular story the line does seem to say "I don't take this seriously". But in context, within that particular story, it worked. For me.

Beside the point, in any case. I have heard as many justifications of that line -- including from higher ups at DC -- as there have been people who offered them. I border on being convinced that Moore could say "Superhero comics are utter shit and anyone who reads them is brain dead," and there would be people lining up to put a positive spin on it.

Gene K: In WildC.A.T.S., Moore revealed that the war between the two alien races stuck on earth had actually been over for hundreds of years, which completely tossed out the whole premise of the series.

****

Although I like some of Moore's work quite a bit, there's no getting around that he takes liberties wherever and whenever he pleases.

True story: I was assistant editor (late in the game) on Spawn/WildCATS. Spoiler warning, for those that haven't read a 10-year old story that's hard to find these days... in the conclusion of the mini, Future Spawn (who defeated Malebolgia and thereby got the magic to take over the world) was undone when he killed Future Zealot, who turned out to be his daughter Cyan.

Anyone spot the glitch?

Apparently I was the first (and only), after it had been circulating in our offices awhile. Everyone just assumed Alan had done his homework. I called him for a rewrite and then asked Tom Orzechowski to reletter the relevant balloons-- a fix that took all of half an hour but spared us some grief from alert fans.

Not a major problem, as these things go, but still.

Alan Moore is just one of those individuals that need to stay away from Hero comics

Something happened to England after I left. The people who had fought thru the Blitz, survied Dunkirk, produced Shakespeare, carved an empire upon which the sun never set --- morphed into a nation of nihilistic whiners. "Fascist England", a term that could be coined only by someone who had never personally experienced Fascism.

What the %#^# happened?

You lost your access to first-hand information?

Jesus, Americans worry about how they're perceived by the rest of the world. Still, mustn't whine.

IMP.

Oh, you do not want to return there. You'll suffer a serious heartbreak. I used to check out the news in English TV channels, pretty much everyday, one day the whole thing became so bizarre, nauseating, just out right outrageous, i couldn't even stand to witness it.

The expatriates are augmenting, i believe, we have a good fair deal of them in the Algarve area here.

England, has now been thoroughly destroyed. Culturaly. Demographically. Even the Union Jack is considered "Racist" these days. The London mayor is straight up Marxist Communist. The major last sculpture put in there was a giant pebble. I really can not fathom more insane a diametrically opposed political switch than the one from the Tatcher years, and the current Tony Blair years.

I do wonder how an amazing woman like Tatcher survives witnessing her country being turn to shreds, piece by piece, by anarchic nihilists every single day... sweet lord.

What a load of bollocks. For God's sake, what are you people looking at? Do you want your counties assessed on the strength of their broadcast news output (remembering that, for the US, that's Fox News)? Either do a bit of research or carry on looking stupid. The choice is, it should be obvious, yours.

I thought the issue of Planetary in question was crass and silly in its representation of Britain. It wasn't as crass and silly as the above, though.

IMP.

I`m no Thatcherite,but in 10 years of Blair rule we have gone even further down the crapper,the working man is taxed to the hilt to fund indolent scrotes who will never work,the honest persons rights are put behind those of people who attack or rob them,the `English` have become a non-race-eg on the recent census you could be Welsh,Scottish or British,but not English(although you were ok to put Jedi as religion).we are going to have to work til we drop as the pension pots are going to be worthless.If you drive a car you are made to suffer with sky high fuel costs,a road sytstem designed to cause delays and inconvenience(to try and force us to use public transport which is dirty,unreliable and expensive)and speed cameras everywhere to fleece you yet again,but curiously very few signs telling you the exact speed limit in the vicinity of the camera.when criminals are caught they are given feeble punishment if any. Rule Brittania! ;-)

Now, that's whining. Sorry, Bill (English good manners, see). Life in Britain is like life anywhere else: shit when you look at it that way, not so bad when you look at it another way, not as bad as it could be, could be better especially if you try to do something about it. And don't ever watch Big Brother.

I'm careful about judging or thinking I know the US on the basis of its own entertainment output. Others should be even more careful about judging the UK on what you see on TV. I don't think I've ever seen a representation of anything British in an American TV programme which was accurate. I don't really mind, except when I read invective like I've been reading in this thread written by people who have no idea.

Obviously, that's not Bill. Bill's POV just comes under how-you-look-at-it.

IMP.

No more WildStorm stuff?

Glenn Moane wrote: As for Lost Girls, it'd be fun to see how that turned out. Personally, if the comic book is good and give me a great reader experience, I don't care if the topic is a sodomizing Peter Pan or whatever.

You honestly can't be serious.  I can't think of any world where "great reader experience" and "a sodomizing Peter Pan" would go together hand-in-hand.  I can, however, think of a world where taking established children's characters and making them pornographic objects is sick.

Jay, you're being contrary. JB makes it perfectly clear that he's talking about what he thinks has happened since he left, and is Portugal a better vantage point for the UK because it's geographically only a few hundred miles away? I specifically addressed that poster's stated primary source, which is TV.

The only way to know much about living in Britain is to live in Britain, and I've just been addressing Bill's post.

It will save time if you read what I write before you disagree with it.

IMP.

***

No more WildStorm stuff?

I thought he'd retired. In any case, his ABC work is finished, I believe.

IMP.

Now, I like most of Alan Moore's work, but more LOEG? One made the point, two drove it home, three...?

IMP.

Ian,

I agree with everything you've written with regards to modern Britain. It's been a hell of a lot worse in my lifetime.

 I was born and raised in Scotland, educated in Wales and have lived in the north of England for nearly 10 years. The current Government is smug and arrogant but the previous Tory regime ripped the heart out of this country, in my opinion. Their heartless contempt for the working class, Clause 28 , the Poll Tax and their commitment to sleaze and lies made the current lot the only sane option in '97.

edited for clarity

Yes, Bill, and Martin lives nearby.

Like I said, it's like anywhere else, and it's the way you look at it. Hunt for shit, you'll find shit. Doesn't mean the world's made of shit, and you don't have to eat it.

IMP.

You've nailed it, Ian. I try not to judge a whole people or country from what I read in the papers or see on 24 hour news stations. Surely everyone's lives or situations aren't as fraught or grim as they are sometimes presented to us?

I applaud the Americans I see on this board ( and elsewhere ) who stick up for their country and fellow citizens, often in circumstances I would find difficult to do so. I don't live there so don't presume to know. I'm glad to live in the UK and don't find it being dismissed as a nation of "nihilistic whiners" neither accurate or helpful.

edited to make sense  

Not to pick on Bill, but to consider some of his specific complaints about Britain:

I saw a news programme recently in which one item on how pension money wasn't going to be enough was followed by another on how many of us are failing to claim all the tax benefits to which we're entitled, and I thought, just as when I read Bill's post, "It's the same money!" You can't complain simultaneously about taxation and the quality of the services it pays for: the money's got to come from somewhere. Pretending it pays for idlers ignores the national health service and the existence of those roads complained about. Speed cameras "fleece" people who drive illegally fast, who are criminals - the same ones who get let off lightly, apparently. It's easy to moan like a tabloid newspaper; it's harder to be responsible about questions like taxation and criminal behaviour. If you don't speed, speed cameras aren't your problem, and suggesting you can't tell what the speed limit is is, frankly, lying.

One of the things very wrong with this country is the tabloid press. They lie, they're packed with hypocrisy, they encourage exactly the whingeing culture JB thinks is all we have, and everything Bill says is said in them too. Life here is more complex and less miserable than the Press and, no offence, Bill will tell you.

IMP.

Ian: I really feel bad for how much more widespread the tabloid press is in the U.K. Here in the States, it's really kind of annoying and harmless but doesn't really do any lasting damage to anyone. (At least not lately.) The National Enquirer really isn't taken seriously by the majority of Americans.

In the U.K., the tabloid press killed Princess Diana. And the stuff the print on a weekly basis would get them sued for libel in the States in a New York moment. And the public BELIEVES it!

Sadly I have to mostly agree with Bill when it comes to England and what it has come to. To blame Thatcherism is naive though. The rot set in during the 70's (before Thatcher) and certainlly carried on throughout the Thatcher years and has not stopped. If anything it has accelerated more under Blair than Thatcher. Sadly the more rights people are given and the more choices they have the more likely they are to F*&% things up for themselves.

I think a lot of the problems we have have little to do with politics. The remark made about people not watching the same TV shows as each other is not as daft as it sounds. England no longer has any real sense of community anymore. I feel that the fact that pretty much no one goes to church anymore (as an Athiest I hate to say that) has not helped. One thing that Churches do, do well is bring people together. Further to that people no longer stay put in one city. At my place of work I am am the only one in my department who was born in the city I work in. My neighbours are not from my city neither is my partner. People no longer have a shared sense of themselves everything is based on the individual and not on the community.

Our biggest problem at the moment though is that if people do anything wrong in this life from the most basic thing as littering through to murder we can no longer deal with it in a manner that the public can understand or get behind. In my newspaper this week one person was fined £75.00 for feeding a pigeon a chip and another was fined £50.00 for maiming a person for life in a hit and run accident (the driver was not even insured). Child rapists can get sentences so low they can be back on the streets in less than 6 years. The average man in the street has as much to fear from the police as he does from the criminal it seems these days as the generally law abiding have as much to fear from them them as the average crook.

To top all this off though we have a human rights act that does far more harm than good and out of control illegal immigration.

In the U.K., the tabloid press killed Princess Diana. And the stuff the print on a weekly basis would get them sued for libel in the States in a New York moment. And the public BELIEVES it!

.................

Crap. The press might be scum a lot of the time but this death was down to a driver to drunk to do his job.

 The rot set in during the 70's (before Thatcher) and certainlly carried on throughout the Thatcher years and has not stopped. If anything it has accelerated more under Blair than Thatcher.

***

Or maybe we're just all getting older.

***

Or maybe we're just all getting older

........................

I think it has more to do with some people caring far more about rights than responsabilities.

Regarding speed cameras,believe it or not i have a totally clean license(25 years of driving),it irks me that a person can be fined for driving perfectly safely say doing 35 in a 30 mph zone,but the growing number of drivers who drive carelessly or downright dangerously are ignored because the police traffic patrols are virtually non-existent because of cameras.If they are for safety why are a good number hidden behind walls etc on roads that don`t really need them?

The Labour government was supposed to be by and for the working man,now they are more concerned with the human rights of scroungers and criminals.Case in point,guy steals car,is chased by police,he scales building and gets on roof,he then spends the day dismantling the chimney and hurling bricks onto the street below causing thousands in damage to the roof and cars below,rather than leave him to come down when the summer sun gets too much for him,they acually get him a KFC meal and coke because they arte worried about his human rights,never mind the fact that the human rights of the building and car owners are being breached by this moron!

Never mind the tabloid press,I see the examples all around me in day to day life.

Well, the "KFC and a coke" story - I'm guessing that while they had him cornered on the roof he was technically in their custody and so they had a legal obligation to feed him.

Personally I like the fact that in Britain public bodies follow the letter of the law. You can argue that the law should be changed - and if you feel that strongly about it you can lobby your MP or something... but I think it's a good thing that the police (especially) don't just ignore laws they might not like.

(I just got 3 points for speeding after having had a clean licence for 20-odd years. Driving to a meeting in North Wales.)

I'm a Brit. Let's be more specific shall we? I'm English. I'm Lancastrian. I'm a Leighther. And I just don't recognise the Britain portrayed in some of these posts. They make it sound like a post apocalyptic wasteland, like the land of Yahoos, and it's really not. Britain isn't perfect but I firmly believe that for those of us living in the U.K. at the start of the 21st century it's the best place and time to have lived.

I grew up under Thatcher and life was tough. Things were grim, depressing, bleak. You could possibly argue that life was worse 30 years previously during the austerity years but at least then you knew why things were so bad. There was a price to be paid for fighting the good fight and however bad life was under ration measures it was better than it had been during the war and anyway we won. Britain was being rebuilt and the welfare state was a dream worth dreaming.

But under Thatcher where was the hope for the common people? Greed was good and money was all that was worth having. For every yuppie bathing in asti spumanti with a Page 3 girl after a night in China Whites there were hundreds, thousands, of people on the dole with no hope of a future. Thousands of people leaving school and signing on, thousands of peoplebeing made redundant in the prime of their lives when they had families to support. Strikes that lasted forever until the worker was crushed not listened to. Riots on the streets of Brixton and Toxteth. One of the most invidous evils of the time was the privatisation of publicly owned companies. No, the railways didn't turn a financial profit but the societal profits of having a cheap and efficient public transport system made it worthwhile. Now they do turn a profit but the service has been run into the ground.

They say the home you left becomes a nostalgic haven and to look back from a distance is to compare that idyll to reality and it seems that true. Like I said Britain isn't perfect, but it's still Great. Not perfect and the 'things can only get better' dawn of Blair isn't going to happen but I'd take a hundred years of Blair for one more day of Thatcherism. Just my opinions and probably provably wrong. I'd like to hear the proof though.

And I'm sorry if that sounds like a rant but when I see people describe Thatcher as great and express sympathy for her I don't know how not to rant.

Two sidenotes - I'm assuming the statue of a pebble refers to 'Alison Lapper Pregnant' a piece of representational art that I found moving beyond words and lingeringly thought provoking in ways I'm not sure I can express this early on a Sunday when I've got work hanging over my head and I've not had my first cup of P.G.

Secondly on a hot summers day some time around the age of ten I read my first superhero comic, a L.E.M. erprint of the Man of Steel episode about Magpie and it helped pass a holiday day nicely.

I am no great fan of Thatcher, David but to say that more harm was done to this country by her than by Blair is just not true.

the real destroyers of our country are the health and safety mob and the human rights brigade. who have stifled us to the point that we can no longer even breath without offending or injuring someone and therefore getting fined or criminalised for it. The things we enjoyed in our youth like village fates and commuity events days are becoming a thing of the past because of skyrocketing insurances. the Scouting (and similar) movements are on the verge of collapse because adults are to frightened of being called kiddy fiddlers if they spend time with kids or sued if a child bruises himself in there care. The list goes on and on. Parents are more likely to punch a teacher if he disciplines a child than side with school.  Schools can't afford to expel evil kids becuase they have to pay for that kids care from then on.

Most of these problems have occured under Blair's rule not thatcher's.

Wasn't it Thatcher who said there's no such thing as society anymore? In Womans Own of all places the Prime Minister said it wasn't governments role to look after the members of society who coulnd't look after themselves. I disagree completley. Yes it's the individuals responsibility to look after themselves, and their neighbours but having a government who abdicated their responsibilities caused greater damage to British Society than anything Blair has done.

Systems should, indeed, be created to help support those who cannot support themselves, but the key word is "cannot", which should never, ever be allowed to blur over into "will not".

Bill I know where you are coming from. As a shift worker I get to see just how many people are around during the day on some estates near me. On a hot summers day like to day you can't move for people of all ages sitting on lawns drinking beer and playing music at full blast. All are wearing designer clothes and smoking away like chimneys. In the estate I have recently moved from because I worked I was one of the few that could not afford a holiday every year because I had less spare cash than the unemployed families* did.

*

Family = On average this consisted of a woman with three kids by three absent unemployed dads (none working)

I think this quote somes up my thoughts when it comes to politics.

"If a man is not a socialist by the time he’s 20, he has no heart. If he’s still a socialist when he’s 40, he has no mind."

Of course there are spongers, and the system gets it wrong. I read recently about the problems of the NHS - with so much more money under Labour, how is it still failing to deliver? - and part of the problem is that expectations have increased. Where once you got hospital food, now you require a menu, TV and a 'phone, and you'll still sue if the nurses are too tired to smile. Plus of course technical progress means there are expensive treatments now available which didn't exist twenty years ago - but have to be paid for.

The principle of the welfare state is that the unfortunate should be helped to survive until they can get back on their feet. Clearly when it supports idle and comfortable lifestyles more attractive than work, it's getting it wrong; but that doesn't mean the whole system should be abandoned. JB's implication that the luckless should be left to starve is intolerable in a humane society.

IMP.

Ian I do agree with the idea of a safety net but I see no reason for it to be a feather bed for the feckless and lazy.

I believe that's what I said. And I think Joe was joking, and I agree with him if he was. Thatcher believed we all needed a kick up the arse, and she certainly gave us a kicking. Even more than twenty years later, I still can hardly believe that "trickle-down economics" (Make the rich richer, and everything will work out okay) was actually a policy.

IMP.

im a nurse in the NHS, and have been for the last 20 years.

the NHS is in a terrible state, the money ploughed into the NHS went to PFI iniitatives,ridiculous GP and Consultant wage rises, their pay rises were more than my annual salary.

there are now 2.5 managers and admin staff to every 1 nurse in service.

i dread the day when i have to make use of the NHS for myself.

i could go on and on, but its too depressing.

'Personally, I think Moore is very over rated and that many fans,creators,and critics give him a pass (and often praise him) for doing crappy work simply becuse he is Alan Moore. I still say that Barbra (sp) Gordon would still be walking and being Batgirl if she was not crippled in the KILLING JOKE. I believe (and I could be wrong) that there are a number of editors and creators out there who are afraid to retcon/reverse anything that Moore has done to a DC or Marvel character in the past. The worship and butt kissing of Moore has gotten so bad and rediculous that a few years ago Marvel editor Axel Alonso called Moore up to ask him for his permission to use Captain Britain and the charactrs Moore co-created durring his run on that series with Alan Davis, for a proposed Captain Britain comic. Excuse me, Moore did not create Captain Britain, and the last time I checked he does'nt own any of the characters he co-created for Marvel. I have to wonder if Alonso would have taken the time to call creators living here in America to ask them for their permission to use characters that they created. "

I'm not sure I get this. You're saying that Barbara Gordon's crippling is still in effect because Moore's work altered the character forever. I don't think there's ever been in a case in any medium using characters owned by major companies like DC, whether TV, movies or novels, that the company will not change. Kojak turns black. Nick Fury turns black. Starbuck turns female. Lois Lane goes from her mid-30s to her early 20s in a sequel. X-Men stop wearing costumes. Are you seriously suggesting the comics world thinks so much of Moore that they would not have Barbara Gordon healed by magic or whatever and simply remove the fact of it? I think Gordon's crippling might be seen as a watershed moment, like the Question getting shot in the head and becoming a kung fu man. The company must have felt more could be done with Gordon as she is. Maybe too there's the whole idea that the Huntress took the role Gordon once inhabited, and with Black Canary already running around, that's a lot of femme fatales in tights who basically do the "Batman". The cripple angle must be good for the kind of story-telling the company wanted done, that's all. Either it's shockingly simple to give Gordon her legs back or DC prefers writers work the angle. But I seriously doubt it's because Moore is such a God that no one will alter his work.

And the whole Captain Britain thing seems a bit overstated. Maybe that editor was one of those PC touchy feely types who wanted to get on Moore's side. I doubt Moore was approached for permission to use Captain Britain specifically, when it's pointed out that the secondary characters Moore created is actually the real reason. As CB had reached some popularity at the time, and a bunch of continuity was put in place, the work that Moore had done was something this editor wanted to kickstart with other creators. Going to Moore to use his "version" of the character and the universe he put together for that character makes sense to me. That's not ass-kissing, that's making sure a name brand guy (at the time) like Moore doesn't rant and rail and create bad press. Of course, why the editor just didn't do what he wanted and simply disregard Moore's contributions doesn't make sense either, considering it isn't necessary for "continuity" with a character like CB who had a blip of popularity for a time, in America at least.

Anyway, I fail to see what Moore has done to directly draw the kind of ire he has. No, he's not Steve Englehart or John Byrne or Roger Stern, producing no-frills good comics anyone could read. That's not in his language to do that, and a shame to boot. You can rightly blame him for the dark turn comics have taken, but Frank Miller needs to catch some flak for that as well. I mean, Miller's Batman (and I love DKR) has alienated the fan base of the character for anyone who read him before 1988 or so. Moore may have created an atmosphere, but Miller evolved the one-celled organisms in the muck. Punisher, Deathstroke, Deadshot, Wolverine, all great characters and all with direct lineage to Miller's style choice which forever changed how "violent" characters were shown, leading to the Dark Age as it should be called, the 90s. The 90s stemmed a horde from Miller more than Moore, who was much too romantic and flightly for the fanboy pop, I believe.

Personally, I prefer a real division in my comics. Give me the hardcore stuff in its own creepy hardcore world, like Conan and TOMB OF DRACULA used to be in the 70s. Then give me the adventure stuff and superheroics of FF and JLA and Avengers that any kid could pick up, and which reminds me of when I was young and the whole world was in front of me. Everyone has forgotten how to just relegate stuff where it is supposed to be and let the division be firm. SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING had the great "Suggested for Mature Readers" label. There you go, plain as day, what you're getting. Nowadays you never know what's going to happen, beheadings by Wonder Woman, surgical nuturing by Reed Richards, Thor with VD, there's no end to it.

Chad, your post is articulate and plausible.

I got a bit sidetracked by the Britain stuff, but Miracleman, Swamp Thing, Captain Britain, Watchmen, DKR, Ronin, Born Again, Year One are all great comics. They just are. That a load of inferior writers and editors tried to copy them and do nothing else for a long time can hardly be blamed on those creators.

IMP.

Ian,yes there will always be spongers,and i agree that we shouldn`t let the unfortunate starve,but it is increasingly seen as a lifestyle choice to live off the state ie you and me the worker.If they were made to work to earn their benefits or forfeit them it would be a start. The work could be local community stuff like litter collection or gardening for the elderly etc.

I can't see an ethical problem with that. Practically, the spongers will develop difficult-to-diagnose back problems...

It would be helpful to see a cultural attitude change, too, through those influencing authorities, TV and the popular Press, away from resenting taxation and believing that anything stolen back is a moral victory. From each according to his means... I'm not talking about manipulation or a controlled Press, I'm talking about responsible journalism. Because what we have now is irresponsible journalism.

IMP.

There will always be some that cheat systems. That's an unfortunate aspect of human nature. So it would be foolish of me to say that no-one ever deliberatley sets out to cheat the system. But then checks and measures are in place to ensure that the system isn't abused. Call me naive but I don't believe the majority of people on the dole are necesarily on the skive.

Rather than "one of the most destructive inventions of the 20th Century". I truly believe that the Welfare State was, in potential at least, one of the greatest ideas in the history of ideas. Any society that doesn't provide a safety net for the weakest members of it surely doesn;t deserve the right to the label 'society' in the first place.

Very right.

IMP.

Any society that doesn't provide a safety net for the weakest members of it surely doesn;t deserve the right to the label 'society' in the first place.

***

I agree, but does the state have to provide the safety net? Or could an adequate safety net be provided by charities, churches, extended families, etc? 

How would you ensure that?

IMP.

And human nature being what it is, would it be right to put the burden of supporting the needy onto those who want to?

IMP.

I'm actually a bit scared of replying to that. I tried cutting and pasting and replying point for point but it was so rambling and circular in it's arguements that it wasn't possible. You don't care what I think, you're not going to listen. Yet for some reason I can't help myself. Stupid me.

Firstly you seem to equate tax with Socialism. For one New Labour has as much in common with true Socialism as I do with Soo the Bear. I've heard of her but never met her and I doubt she even knows I exist. Secondly you seem to infer that only Socialist governments enforce taxation. Well that's patently nonsense. All government taxes it's population. Left, right, center, tax is one of the two inevitabilities of life, right Mr Clemens?

You also say that Socialists want to 'fashionably' abort people like you. I don't know what that means but if you're implying they want you dead well that's nonsense too. If they want to leech you, as you implied, you're needed.

You also say, several times, that Socialists arranged enough voters to win by promising handouts. If that was happening then surely the Right Wing government of pre 97 would of been aware and could have stopped it. And I'm proud that this country still takes refugees. Apart from anything else you could argue we need tham, but that's another arguement. I have an ex who works in immigration and I can tell you that they are rigorous and fair and send back many more people than they let in. And I know many teachers, trained as one myself, and not one cries at night because there are Africans in their class. Where did you get that idea from?

And besides have you really never benefitted from the tax you pay? Never needed medical treatment or the emergency services? Never had a state education? Never had your rubbish carted away to a municipal tip? Never driven on a surfaced road? If you really believe that they, and the other millions of small ways you benefit from taxation should be yours without the need to pay for them somehow...well that's scrounging.

QUOTE: Who the hell is the government to steal money from me, and give it to someone it considers "unfortunate"?

Is the Goverment stealing from you when it funds schools, law enforcement, trash pick up, building highways, military or countless other things?

Excuse, I know it was three or four pages ago, but...

"Whatever happened to the Man of Tomorrow" gave Superman a happy ending? The Wesinger/Schwartz Superman in particular?

The story killed off Pete Ross, Jimmy Olsen, Lana Lang, and Krypto. Surprised they didn't off Batman and Mon-El to complete his friends list.

He gave up both halfs of his identity. He gives up his powers not because he's not needed anymore, but because he took a life.

One happy element, marrying Lois, does not make for a happy ending.

Bates and Maggin should have been given the final writing assignment, instead of going for the gimmick.

At this point, in the ever contentious relationships between Moore and the two major publishers, why doesn't DC just say "the heck with it, lets do a new Watchmen!"

Worst comes to worst, Alan Moore will refuse to work with them again!

Phil

About the same as the point behind the magnum opus Infinite Crisis-- Money.  the positive being it could be ignored and not set everything ahead "One Year Later".

It seems as if Alan Moore is the most actively courted and accomodated creator today.  However, he seems to find fault with even the best deals!  I recall the Watchmen toys from a few years ago that were cancelled after there were concerns of Moore's reaction.  I imagine that they were fearful he'd become fed up, and take all of his projects from Wildstorm.  Flash foward to 2006, Moore gets angry and takes all of his projects from Wildstorm.

Phil

Sometimes a character desperately needs "everything you knew was a lie". Captain Atom, for instance.

More than willing to write that one.

IMP.

What are his complaints?

IMP.

I agree, for the most part.  "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tommorrow" (WHTTMOW) was simply the wrong ending for an age of wonders.  I appreciated that every important concept from the Weisinger-era Superman got trotted out for a last bow, but I pretty much despised what happened to them.  I was particularly unhappy that instead of Superman taking action to protect his loved ones, they all take action to protect him.  The only part of the story that rang true to me was Superman using the Gold kryptonite after he killed.

On the other hand, I never minded the line "This is an imaginary story, aren't they all?"  All of my friends and I always thought that referred to the fact that not only was WHTTMOW itself an imaginary story in the classic setup, but that every single Superman story published up to that time was being made an imaginary story by Crisis.  I have no idea what Moore intended with that line, but I've always read it to mean the above.

I doubt Moore was approached for permission to use Captain Britain specifically, when it's pointed out that the secondary characters Moore created is actually the real reason. As CB had reached some popularity at the time, and a bunch of continuity was put in place, the work that Moore had done was something this editor wanted to kickstart with other creators. Going to Moore to use his "version" of the character and the universe he put together for that character makes sense to me. That's not ass-kissing, that's making sure a name brand guy (at the time) like Moore doesn't rant and rail and create bad press.

                            ********************************************

The truth is, Alan Moore and Alan Davis co-created those "secondary characters". After they'd worked together on MiracleMan, Moore managed to somehow block the reprinting of Captain Britain in the U.S., much to the chagrin of Alan Davis. Davis was naturally interested in building a rep in America, and he couldn't understand why Moore~ already well-established in the U.S.~ didn't see that. CB wasn't collected in trade form in this country until 2002, well after Alan Davis had already made it on his own. This is why they haven't worked together since.

So what standard was Alan Moore upholding here, other than raising the bar for four color prima donnas? I've enjoyed some of Moore's work in the past, but enough already, huh?

My source for this info (btw) is "The MiracleMan Companion", published by TwoMorrows. "You could look it up", as they used to say.

QUOTE: The truth is, Alan Moore and Alan Davis co-created those "secondary characters".

Not that many of them, really.  Merlyn and Roma came from Claremont and Trimpe (although Moore revamped them), Captain Britain's new costume came from Davis prior to Moore starting, as did the Crazy Gang, Saturyne and Jim Jaspers.  He put all of that stuff to pretty good use, IMO, but didn't originally create them.

Moore's main contribution was the idea of the Captain Britain Corps and a few of the characters who were later used in the Technet.  (The Technet name itself and other characters came from the Delano/Davis run.)  Oh yeah, and Meggan, though he only used her as a character in one story, and virtually everything we know about her came from Delano/Davis and later.

QUOTE: After they'd worked together on MiracleMan, Moore managed to somehow block the reprinting of Captain Britain in the U.S., much to the chagrin of Alan Davis. Davis was naturally interested in building a rep in America, and he couldn't understand why Moore~ already well-established in the U.S.~ didn't see that.

IIRC, this was the time Moore got ticked off at Marvel for blocking the use of the "Marvelman" name for his Marvelman series because they wanted to protect the "Marvel" trademark.  Coulda gone the DC route and called it "Kimota," but they opted for "Miracleman" instead.  Since in Britain, writers keep the copyrights for their stories, which I guess is how he was able to block the reprints.  (And yeah, Alan Davis got ticked off about that.)  Joe Quesada made nice with him to get the trade paperback out.  Don't know how the "X-Men Archives Presents Captain Britain" series came about.  Either they caught him in a good mood or opted to do it without his approval and found a loophole.  I dunno.

Thanks for the clarification, Dave. It reminded me of something, though. According to Moore, back in his Swamp Thing days he realized how shabbily DC was treating their artists (in this case, Bissettte & Totleben). He made a big point of this, and yet when it came time to lend a hand to Alan Davis, he literally kept Davis' work out of print. 

Evidently, what's unacceptable coming from the Big Two is a completely different matter when it's coming from Alan Moore and his perceived Artistic Integrity.

It was awful for several reasons, Floyd; IMO the death of Superman is not only the point at which the speculator bubble burst, it was also what shifted Event-driven comics into overdrive. Suddenly, telling a good story was low on the priority list.

IMO.

He wrote about leaving the country for good when V For Vendetta was reprinted by DC, twenty years ago.

IMP.

Couldn't stand the way "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" finished off the pre-Crisis Superman. All that death, destruction and just a general air of nastiness was not what the the Earth-1/Mort Weisinger Superman was about.

It was not the end Superman, his supporting cast and his villains deserved when you look back at the tone and style of the pre-Crisis Superman.

I would have much rather have seen Cary Bates, Elliott S! Maggin and Julius Schwartz' original choice, Jerry Siegel, finish the story off.

The sort of mood that's evoked can have a lot to do with the questions being asked.  I remember Stan Lee coming across as sad and angry on 60 Minutes because of the questions they choose to ask him.

-------------------------

Not to mention how they might have chosen to edit it!

(deleted because I shouldn't bait trolls)

Was the vision still an android when he wasn't the original Human Torch with Wonder Man's personality overlayed onto it? Were all the stories where that origin was mentioned somehow completly overturned and invalidated?

How about X-men Hidden years. Was Orroro knowing about the X-men during her African RAin Goddess years really that out of line with anything? Did it make everything a lie?

Was the House of Thunder ruling a chunk of the Earth with a seemingly incestuous marriage between Mary and Billy to produce an heir more or less of a damaging blow to the characters than changing the vision? Was the eventual revelation that Billy Batson (who couldn't grow up ) was strangled by the Martian Manhunter who he thought was a dominatrix more or less subversive to the history of the character? I mean here we have a dynastic murder in a very seedy situation attributed to a pathetic Mr. Batson.  THAT is pasted over Captain Marvel and you don't find that WORSE by orders of magnitude than merely deciding that a detail of the origin of the Vision(which itself was retconned from him simply having him being made by Ultron) was a misconcpetion that allows the original human torch to come back?

You think that a retelling of Peter's high school years with more modern dressings is as bad?

How about turing Barabra Jordan into a paraplegic for shock? How about turning Len Wein's Frankenstein-esque swamp thing character into one of a whole lineage of plant gods?

Or taking a fun whimsical British Captain Marvel knockoff and turing him into an amoral alien war machine given sentience who decides to kill his host and gets screwed over by an evil govenrment?

Feh.

Oh and Fyodor...you're supposed to sign up with your real name and not a favorite author or muppet or whatever.

Perhaps "Mean Moore Stories" should be grouped with the "Bad Byrne Stories"?
*****

I don't want to come off as a jerk, but I honestly always felt like there was something in common.  Heck, my fanboyish dream was always to see them work together.

So, if you don't like my work, please feel free to attack it with all the vigor at your command. Just make sure your cannon are actually loaded.

Is this more of an "Uff da!" or an "oy vey!"?

I can't decide.

Marvelman/Miracleman was completely reinvented, Matt, but I think you know that. Per Alan Moore, none of Mark Moran's origin was true; he never got a 'magic word' from Guntag Borghelm, but was instead the creation of his greatest enemy, Emil Gargunza, using alien bodyswapping/genetic engineering technology. Moran was a brainwashed patsy and science experiment, whose alter ego was heroic but also deluded.

In short, Moore firebombed what had come before with what became his trademark on Swamp Thing: You don't know the truth (and the previous origin was pretty ridiculous anyway).

How you can compare this to a regeneration of Superman, cleaning off the barnacles and detritus of 50 years and getting the character back to his roots, is beyond me.

Taking snarky little potshots at other forum members is a quick route to the exit. Watch it.

Matt Timson,

JB's splitting of the Hulk and Banner was no different a story arc for the character than Bill Mantlo giving the Hulk Banner's intelligence or Peter David's long story arc featuring the Merged Hulk.

Maybe you need your glorious leader to decide for you?

Yeah. That must be it.

No wait. It's definitely more that your objections seem to be poorly supported or even distorted. Here you are equating a short plot in the hulk that was resolved with Barabra Jordan getting capped and crippled to this day.

You want to make the spurious and strained comparison of Moore's Miracle Man to Byrne's Man of Steel? To get at MarvelMan Moore had to jump through hoops and when he got it he immediately turned it upside %$#&ing down for shock value and when he was done it was nigh unrecognizable. He turned a Captain Marvel clone into somethign dark, fascistic, sick and evil. He was forced to change the name. Now if Byrne had had Superman flying around shooting up neighborhoods with twin Mac-10's and flash frying pedestrians because all the CIA brainwashing finally came unraveled then you might have a point. But he didn't so you don't.

Mr. Byrne merely submitted a propsal for a revamp of Superman paring down some of the more ridiculous elements that made Superman less unique and it was chosen and he was authorized to do it and even had it commercially supported by the very company who owned the IP as the "right thing to do" and the "real" Superman.  What is more Superman was not revealed to be a souless alien warmachine, he did not at one point kill Clark Kent or trap a crazy superboy in VR or conquer the earth or perform heinous and arbitrary acts in opposition to the nature of Superman (except once under very sober circumstances and then the result of that transgression was Superman being MORE determined to observe his own moral code even in the face of great adversity).

Then you are demanding more "everything is a lie" examples from Moore when some have already been provided for you.(Swampthing, Twilight proposal)

You are not listening to any counter arguments and are generally wasting everyone's time with your lame one sided poorly reasoned ankle biting.

You also seem to think that liking JB's Fantastic Four run somehow insulates your "arguments" from criticism. Guess what? I like some Alan Moorse stuff too! Oddly though that doesn't stop me from recognizing that he is primarily a destructive influnece on superheroes rather than constructive and that he prefers to pervert and destroy or twist things rather than carefully maintain them or respectfully restrain himself in the exercise of his crass "how could this happen!" style plots. 

You've jumped through the usual hoops. I can hardly wait for you to start pretending that you are being victimized somehow. I have to ask, in the same spirit of argument YOU'VE stooped to, how much is Moore paying you to post here. Or is this one a freebie? Or does that not seem like a valid sentiment when it's directed at you?

Matt,

Mr. Byrne had ALREADY responded to you first once on this thread when you were asking what are essentially the same questions. Once he does that you are in an open thread.

You don't get to have a "Bryne and you" only thread. The rule is that Mr. Byrne answers questions directed at him first per thread. It is not that you get to have an uninterupted one to one conversation with Mr. Byrne for the duration of an entire thread by adding a directed question each time.

And my "potshots" were at your arguments and not you. You, o the other hand, were essentially calling me a myrmidon who obeys Mr. Byrne without thinking. Presumably this was to avoid responding to my counter arguments. 

You clearly ARE NOT trying to be as respectful as you can. You are also clearly not making legal headway with your very selective reading of "the rules". You are here primarily to stir the mailto:#$@% - #$@% . That much is obvious. As I predicted you are already crying "unfair" and trying to imply that you are being victimized somehow.

Cheers.

Yes you are entitled to an opinion and I'm entitled to criticize that opinion. You are presumable entitled to criticise my critique if you are so inclined.

There are whole herd of people out there that sound just like you so your "thinking for yourself" line is not eveidence of much of anything.

I think your "MarvelMan is fair game because nobody outside of UK cares" thesis is very flawed. I think that the character being dead has no impact on whether it was brutally subverted or not. I think the "problems" with MarvelMan history argument is trivial and not really germane to the subject.

I think your "calm down/lie down" stuff is without value and irrelevant.

My "How much is Moore paying you" line was a direct response for your "Ask Byrne what you think" line. It was to show you just how dissapointing and ridiculous that arrogant and presposterous line of thinking was. That's okay though because it seems that you totally missed the point and just went down the same road again. See the point is that you claim to want open discussion and are entitled to an opinion but you have to deal with my disagreement with your opinion by implying that I'm just a a brain dead Byrne cultist reading verbatim brainwahsed mantars at you. You assume that since I disagree with you that I must not be thinking for myself. That is ridiculous.

What's more it is hypocritical because you've  come here with an axe to grind in defense of Mr. Moore. This seems to place you a position that seems vulnerable to similar accusations of YOU being thoughtless programmed myrmidon or a paid plant or a fanboy who can't see past the lens of his own prejudices.

My point was this:

1. You were very foolish to insinuiate that I am a mindless Byrne drone, for daring to disagree with you, instead of just responding to my counter arguments asserting that your comparisons were as weak as bannana strawberry jello on a hot day,

2. If we accept, for the sake of argument, that you may have been right to call me a drone then it should occur to you that by using those very rules, based on the fact that you disagree, you are EQUALLY open to having your own opinions summarily discredited by the insinuation that YOU are somehow not impartial enough to make judgements on the subject of subversively altering superheroes ina  revamp or perhaps not even speaking your own idependently arrived at words.

Emery Calame wrote: To get at MarvelMan Moore had to jump through hoops and when he got it he immediately turned it upside %$#&ing down for shock value and when he was done it was nigh unrecognizable. He turned a Captain Marvel clone into somethign dark, fascistic, sick and evil. He was forced to change the name.

You make it sound as if Moore was forced to change the name because of the things he did to Marvelman.  The name was changed to Miracleman because Marvel threatened to launch some kind of trademark infringement suit.  I would guess that Marvel would have objected to the Marvelman title being used to package reprints of Mick Anglo's work.

QUOTE: Then you are demanding more "everything is a lie" examples from Moore when some have already been provided for you.(Swampthing, Twilight proposal)

I am genuinely curious as to how you see the Twilight proposal as conforming to the "everything you know is a lie" nature of Moore's stories.  I took the original "everything you know is a lie" comment to refer to a habit of re-writing or undermining the origins or the past history of the characters.  Nothing in Twilight does that, though.  I think it'd be fairer to say that the Twilight proposal is an example of some horrendous plot ideas that would be well out of character.

Compare that to Swamp Thing where Swamp Thing is not the freak result of sabotage, but instead the latest in a line of Earth elementals, all of whom were born in substantially the same way as Alec Holland.

Yeah. Here's the argument as I understand it: Nobody much cares(according to you) about Marvel Man so Marvel Man is fair game. Therefore there is no annoyance factor. Therefore Moore gets a pass.

Superman fans are more numerous and some of them were very annoyed(according again to you) by man of Steel so it's not fair game. Therefore Byrne shouldn't point fingers, pot, kettle black, glass house stone etc. He did the same thing.

That is precisely the argument that I WAS responding to and debunking so I don't really see anything for you call shennanigans on.. I smell a feeble quibble aimed at exaustion and distraction rather than a real point worthy of discussion.

I called that assertion both weak and not really important. Why? Because Moore largely destroyed the concept of MarvelMan in his reinvention. He did not end up with anything remebling MarvelMan except in the most shallow superficial way. Moore was by FAR more off model. Moore was by far more subversive and harmful to the chraacter. This is quantifiable. It is not a shades of grey thing. It is obvious and self evident.

Superman was revamped per DC's insructions and according to their commision with their blessing and Byrne worked with them and ended up as you yourself seem to agree with a very recognizable Superman who looks, acts, and talks and fights, like Superman should.

Thus the issue of destructive subversion/reinterpretation and character renovation (which is the topic of discussion -not who got pissed off where and why)  does not really put what Moore did with MarvelMan/Miracle Man and what Byrne did with Man of Steel in any sort of state of equivalency. 

I can't see how you can honestly imply that this is the same thing at all. I can't see how you can seriously imply that all change is violation, that violation has no dimension of magnitude, that all violations are equivalent,  that the scale and depth of violation is not important nor is the intent behind it...

The position all changes or revamps are equivalent and equally dstructive is is a laughable position. Miracle Man and Man of Steel are clearly not equivalent situations.

I am genuinely curious as to how you see the Twilight proposal as conforming to the "everything you know is a lie" nature of Moore's stories.  I took the original "everything you know is a lie" comment to refer to a habit of re-writing or undermining the origins or the past history of the characters.  Nothing in Twilight does that, though.  I think it'd be fairer to say that the Twilight proposal is an example of some horrendous plot ideas that would be well out of character.

Did you know that Billy Batson is destined to become a freak who can never reach sexual maturity who visits dominatrixes to have some semblance of release? Would Martian Manhunter kill him and impersonate him to form a figure head for a nation based on allegiance to a super hero? If not then everything you know is a lie. Thankfully Mr. Moore was going to put us all straight as to the true nature of these characters before the Man put his foot down and hid the turth from the people.

Swampthing needs no further dsicussion.

As for the rest, I was pleased with 'The Man of Steel', but plenty of other
people were outraged at the pruning of fifty years' worth of continuity.

****************************

You do realize that Superman, prior to MOS, was not one, long sustained narrative (a la Cerebus). MOS did basically the same thing that previous creators had done several times before -- Weisenger made serious changes to the character, so did Schwartz.

Emery Calame wrote: Did you know that Billy Batson is destined to become a freak who can never reach sexual maturity who visits dominatrixes to have some semblance of release? Would Martian Manhunter kill him and impersonate him to form a figure head for a nation based on allegiance to a super hero? If not then everything you know is a lie. Thankfully Mr. Moore was going to put us all straight as to the true nature of these characters before the Man put his foot down and hid the turth from the people.

Okay, I understand.  I don't think I would classify the story as an "everything you know is a lie" type story, but at least I see where you are coming from.

Speaking as a person who is not really a huge fan of that proposal, I think it's important to keep in mind that the future we are shown is supposed to be one where things have gone horribly awry.  The point of the story is to avert that future.  I don't at all think it's fair to claim that Moore was saying that these were the "true nature[s]" of the characters.

Matt your assertion that you are a fan of both writers is largely negated by your arguing with Byrne about the very meaning of what he wrote and your primary point being a defense of Moore's works. You are here to bash on Mr. Byrne as a hypocrite for bashing on Alan Moore's holy scripture.

And you threw the "fanboy" bomb around well before I did. Except you said it differently.. "Maybe you need your glorious leader to decide for you? "

This may suprise you Matt but I am not that big a fan of Mr. Byrne's writing. I like it okay. I do not buy books just because they are written by Mr. Byrne. I do not collect Mr. Byrne's stuff except for specific runs and usally it's because of the book title rather than the fact that Mr. Byrne worked on it.

I am usually less enthralled by the writers of comic books than I am by the artists.

I have not even read most of what Mr. Byrne has written throughout his career. I have read mostly Alpha Flight, His old X-men, His old FF runs, Man of Steel, His recent Action run, His Doom Patrol. I have read a some of Spider Man chapter one a long time ago, and a little bit of West Coast Avengers froma  cheap issues box at a half price bookstore, and one issue of X-men Hidden Years. I have a copy of the first TPB of NextMen and have only read about the first third of it.

What I'm objecting to is you trying to establish a tennuous equivalency between constructive revamps that barely change a character and destructive ones that totally screw a character up and make them nearly unrecognizable.

I'm quite happy at Bryne's reinterpretation of Superman- and
was annoyed when DC started undoing it- but I'm at a complete loss as to
why you're so outraged at Moore's reinvention of a character you'd never
even heard of.

*****

Byrne's reinterpretation of Superman stayed true to the mythos of Superman.  He was still Earth's greatest hero.  Moore took Marvelman to the extreme and the result resembled nothing like the original.  What if he had deconstructed Archie Comics and showed real teenagers engaging in sex, doing drugs, getting drunk, etc (you know like real teenagers!  haha)?  Nothing against stories like that but why would he have to use Archie?

just my $.02.

Is this repetitive debate over yet?

I thought the revamp of Superman did an almost-perfect job of updating him (to the late 1980s) and making him interesting again in a different way and in the context of a cluttered superhero universe fifty years old. I enjoy reprints of the older Superman, but I'm aware that the 1950s Superman wasn't appearing in new comics by the '80s and would be difficult to sell sustainably by then anyway.

I was unaware of Marvelman before Miracleman. I now appreciate Marvelman in the same way as those Superman reprints, but Miracleman isn't that character. Perhaps Moore should have used a different name, a different costume and different background elements, but Marvelman was long dead by the time of Miracleman, and it's not unreasonable to say that if hardly anyone remembered him, there was hardly anyone to offend.

Miracleman is a great comic: not one which could run for twenty years, and not an upbeat one, but an interesting and powerful exploration of some aspects and implications of this superhero thing. It's also long out of print, and unknown to most current comics readers. In itself, not a lot of harm done.

Also, I like the name Miracleman, but I believe I'm the only one ever.

IMP.

I'm still going with 'conversational cul-de-sac', I'm afraid...

*****

No disrespect but what kind of answers were you looking for?

For defending Byrne's revamp work vs. Moore's I was, according to you Matt, automatically his subject in need of him to form my own opinion for me. Disagreeing with you made me an extension of Byrne's will. That was your inital contribution to out discussion. NOW you want to bitch loudly about me examining the contents of your argument, your approach, your words, and  on that basis doutbing your loud and inconsistent protestations that you are both a Moore fan and a Byrne fan just objectively looking for some simple answers? All the while you were painting me a Moore hater and Byrne fan and ignoring my counter arguments...yep.

It sounds to me like you're being a tad arbitrary here. And pedantic. And flat out full of it.

I hate what Moore does with super heores mainly. Especially pre-existing ones that he didn't create himself. I've explained why.

I hate what his immitators have done with super heroes considerably more.  I hate watching Marvel and DCspeinging the last twenty years trying to become semi-2000AD hardcore.

And yes, Matt you are absolutely more full of it than I am.  You not only don't agree with my arguments... you don't meaningfully respond to them. You just sit there babbling about Cul 'de sacs and insinuating that I'm all Byrne-loving and all Moore hating and ignoring them.  Why? I submit that it's because you can't make a good case that what Moore did with Miracle man and what Byrne did with Man of Steel are equivalent even though you admit you'd like to hear Mr. Byrne admit that they are....why exactly?

Bored now.

You posited John Byrne's revamp of Superman as being just as much meddling with the intent of a character as anything Moore did. You also brought up the Vision, and the unfinished Hulk plot.

I am listening. What's more I am responding. I am applying critical thinking to what you said. I am objecting and supporting my objections. What I am not doing is agreeing with you. Or being persuaded.

In fact your assertion that what Moore did to Marvel Man doesn't matter because I never would have heard of Marvel Man(which previously you suggested that you never in fact said BTW) has been shot down as bunk. It only works if you can convince me that turning a character virtually inside out doesn't matter as long as no one (comparitively) can see it happening or if it's done to boring out of favor characters. I maintain that it does matter very much. It is an atrocity whether it is widely reported or not. Furthemore it is yet another set of evidence that Mr. Moore IS famous primarily for doing what you take issue with Mr. Byrne saying he does. "Everything you know is a lie."

It may be a bit of hyperbole to say that Moore doesn't ammount to  anything but "everything you know is a lie" but it is certainly a very large and significant  portion of Moore's super hero work and largely the sort of stuff that he is most famous for. No it is not literally true but it is largely accurate as far as observations go.It captures the reality wuite well. That IS Alan Moore's biggest claim to fame. Catastrophic re-invention, darkening, deconstruction. That is primarily how he services his audience. Are there some exceptions? Sure. However is it not said that the fact that exceptions are exceptions proves that there is a rule there?

Also if we are going to go hyper legalistic and pedantic as our only leg to stand on then:

" Surely, sticking to the claim that Moore has no story to tell beyond "everything you know is a lie" is doing exactly the same thing- pretending that Moore's work is something that it clearly is not."

is not the same thing as Mr. Byrne's actual quote:

" I have some very fond memories of MarvelMan, from when I was a child in England. I don't suppose I read more than a small handful of stories, but I remember enjoying them. It's a shame, then, to see characters like this fall into the hands of the deconstructionists -- especially someone like Moore, who seems to really have no story to tell beyond "everything you know is a lie".

Some characters, surely, are not meant to be "darkened"? "

If we are going to play overly semantic games then it should count for something that YOU Matt, had to remove extant softening words in Byrne's quote to transform his sentiment into an absolute formulation that you could then effortlessly "find invalid" mostly on the basis of the absoluteness that you chose to artificially heighten with your truncation. This reduces most of your own arguments so far to a mere exercise of the straw man fallacy. You've substituted your OWN STATEMENT for the actual statement of Mr. Byrne's that you wished to knock down.

Mr. Byrne is in his quote obviously referring to Miracle Man (Moore's "work" in this case) and saying that here Moore "seems to have no story to tell beyond "everything you know is a lie"." He brings nothing to the old story or the character beyond the act of perverting it and chewing it up. Now whether Mr. Byrne is applying that to Moore's entire carreer or just this work, or perhaps that specific period in Moore's career, is open to some interpretation unless Mr. Byrne chooses to clear it up.

I personally (and independently of Mr. Byrne's opinion on the matter) maintain that the claim applies pretty accurately for the most part(more than it does not) to most of Mr. Moore's "big time" career. That IS Moore's most commonly employed schtick in nutshell. The shoe fits.

There's only so many times that I can point out the fact that your outrage
of the treatment of Marvelman is laughable. It's a character you would
never even have heard of if not for Moore. John says he doesn't like it-
he at least has a genuine comparison to make. What do you have? Did
*you* read any of those stories as a boy?

*****

Just because i never read The Yellow Kid doesn't mean i would like to see an updated gritty version of it today.  i just object to basically destroying any characters for future generations.  Once you go into that territory, it's hard going back. 

One thing I don't get is why Moore is singalled out for 'everything is a lie' ness when comics have, almost uniquely as a story telling media, have a long history of playing that card. There are dozens of occasions where new writers come along and write the character they want to write. I'm prepared to be wrong but hasn't Aquamans history changed? And look at the characters that were revamped in the silver age.

Green Lantern is the most obvious example where the people involved took what they wanted from the concept and added what they wanted. It's a comic book thing I see Moores Marvel Man as being in the same catagory as the Silver Age Green Lantern. I'm guessing you could argue that Hal Jordans introduction is less offensive because they're closer in intent than the two Miracle men but hey ho.

And I think it's an odd arguement that only a creator can change a character, or that for that matter that any change is permenant. For a start the majority of creators of the superhero folk are long gone. Does that mean they should be static and unchanging? By subtle degrees characters have been changed and adapted to fit the world they're produced. Those that didn't eventually fade away becuase they become irrelevent. The 60's Batman might be a beaming buffoon a long way from the core concept of his origins but that kept him alive. There aer some gloriously silly stuff in the 50's and 60's that I dearly love - Batmite! - but in a way that's as far from the core concept as Miracleman.

And secondly I've read and seen over the years many stories that take Rupert the Bear, a beloved newspaper strip, in a darkly adult direction. The famous Oz image springs to mind. It didn't ruin the original, that's still there, and nor did it change my affection for him. The same goes for Morrisons Dare for that matter. Nothing has stopped people produciong adventures for the original Dan. And if you want to read them check out the awesome Spaceship Away!

Anyway, that's my tuppence worth.

I don't see the point in arguing with an established creator about another established creator, when the philosophies behind their work are diametrically opposed and your (Timson's) "points" will be lost. I agree that John Byrne's views on Moore are overt, but he's earned the right to make them. It is true that Moore has no interest whatsoever in respecting the history of comic characters, to his own ends, but it's been pointed out that no character has to be descontructed forever. If DOOM PATROL can be brought back to its roots after Grant Morrison, any title can be returned to what it once was. Including MIRACLEMAN.

And I think it's an odd arguement that only a creator can change a character, or that for that matter that any change is permenant. For a start the majority of creators of the superhero folk are long gone. Does that mean they should be static and unchanging? By subtle degrees characters have been changed and adapted to fit the world they're produced.

*****

Real change in comics is bad.  It's the illusion of change that makes it interesting.

Of course, now that you seem to be saying that because the 'lie' is nearly
always the rule (which it isn't), that it's ok to generalise? Interesting.

When a strong pattern is clearly established (and "everything you know is a lie" most definately is) in abody of work am I to understand you that it is somehow NOT okay to generalize? Is that not WHY we actually make generlizations in the first place?

That's a laughable ridiculous statement akin to "I'm not vegetarian because I ate part of a drumstick four years ago. Don't generalize me as a vegetarian."

By those lights Salvadore Dali was not really a surrealist because we dare no generalize his work.

Perhaps. But then there are things like the Mary Tourtell created Rupert The Bear which was created to order in response to competition but was taken over and became sublimely good and a fixture of British Childhood ever since because of what Alfred Bestalls work. If they'd stopped after Mary left the strip he'd be a forgotten non entity in the world of newspaper strips. Thanks to Bestall, and his eventual succesor John Harold he's still entertaining millions of kids. Certainly not better to stop in that case.

Are theer people who could continue Peanuts. Certainly, just as there are people who can and do follow on from Chester Gould. The strip isn't continued because, like Modesty Blaise, the creator remained the same throughout the run and he chose to walk away after decades behind the pen. If either had died in the job would there strips have been relegated to repears if they appear at all. Who knows but I suspect not.

One thing I don't get is why Moore is singalled out for 'everything is a lie' ness when comics have, almost uniquely as a story telling media, have a long history of playing that card.

Moore is "singled out" because 1.) we are talking about Marvel Man/Miracle Man and 2.) Moore took the deconstructive redefinition of super heroes thing to an extreme and was applauded for it and widely imitated(usually badly) until what was a weird and intense sideline of super hero comics morphed into the main product.

Hair shirts----->

True. And as, by the point of the thread when I posted that message the chat had broadened out to comics in a more generalised context I don't think it was an unfair point for me to make.

But to adress your second point briefly I don't think Moore should be blamed because other people copied what he did. If at the next comic convention all the creators had beards you could paint green and pretend they were bushes that wouldn't actually be his faulr would it? Because other people with lesser skills tried to copy him and fail doesn't make hos work any less valid in my eyes. I've seen a hundred local artists trying to use L.S.Lowrys styles and imagry and failed miserably. Doesn't make his work any less valid.

Well David your eyes and the validity of Moore's work are yours to value as you see fit. I hate to see More doing what he typically does to super heroes especially in light of what it turned out to be the vanguard of. I talk about it. That's not going to change.

I don't blame Moore for all of it so much as I recognize that he is a big part of what's happened to super hero comics and is the most often trotted out justification for it. In fact he's more or less become the patron saint of it.

I remeber when people talked about Moore's swampthign bringing respectability to comics. And years later...it hasn't happened. Now comics are just as marginal to the mainstream as they ever were except the audience keeps aging and shrinking and demanding that their comics trend towards being more and more crass, smutty, bleak, intense, cinematic, padded, late, and brutal.

The only monkey wrench in that universe is Bob Kane's Batman.  He probably would have ran out of stuff to swipe.  Hey, something just occured to me.  Bob Kane is the golden age Liefeld!  OK, that was mean, I'm sorry.  Sorta.......

Endless repeats of unfunny Peanuts strips in the newspaper, Trevor.

                                   ********************************

Not going after you in any way, John (I love Peanuts to the point where I have no objectivity at all), but I'll take the endless, unfunny {sez you... :-)} repeats of a classic strip over the endless, unfunny new strips (at least 99.9%) that currently populate the daily comics page.There are notable exceptions, of course, but IMO the vast majority of modern strips are being created by people who haven't the vaguest idea of what makes people laugh.

IMO.

John, I haven't read the Chicago Tribs' comics page in a while, but last time I looked, they were pulling from the early/mid 70's~ my teenage years. There is that obtuseness in the later strips...

Matt, I can't recommend Fantagraphics Complete Peanuts hardcovers enough. The first 5 volumes are amazing, and Sparky is just hitting his stride! Plus, I got to see which strip appeared on my birthday (2/18/59). Funny, I hadn't thought of that until I actually got Vol. 5 home.

Say, what the hell am I doing up this late?

'Night, guys...

To be honest, Floyd, I never thought Alan Moore improved much on what Len Wein and Berni Wrightson created in the first place.

I always preferred Swamp Thing as a scientist trying to find a cure for his condition and wandering the world helping people in need.

At the time there were protests -- especially from people who pointed out Moore's version of Swamp Thing's origin was contradicted by what we had seen in the Wein/Wrightson run -- but DC applied the age old rule of simply not printing those letters. What if that had not been an option?

I remember when I originally read Swamp Thing # 21 and got the "revised" version of the origin, I just thought it was a really kick in the head as it destroyed the basic storyline and premise of the series, and allowed Alan Moore to take it where he wanted.

(And before anyone jumps in to point out that Len approved the changes, let's keep in mind that, with such a volume of work behind him, it's entirely possible Len did not remember the issue of SWAMP THING that Moore's deconstruction contradicted.)

Len's Swamp Thing was very entertaining, Alan Moore's version really didn't appeal to me.

it's entirely possible Len did not remember the issue of SWAMP THING that Moore's deconstruction contradicted

***

Which one is it? I thought I remembered a story where Swamp Thing's arm is somehow freed of it's vegetable-matter covering - but I flicked through my copy of "Swamp Thing: Dark Genesis", and it's not there. Do you mean the first Arcane story, with the soul jar?

Reading up on the thread - I believe the Peanuts strips that are being reprinted were chosen by the creator specifically to be the ones repeated. Prepared to be wrong.

And doesn't a work for hire arrangement, like most major superheroes were created under, mean that the creator doesn't have any say on what happens next? To an extent it doesn't matter if the creator disagrees or not when it's not creator owned.

And I've just watched a belting episode of Doctor Who that was funny, exciting, sweet, moving, romantic and a million miles away from the core concept the creators shaped in the 1960's. If that series, when relaunched last year, didn't take the good bits and abandon the bad whilst reashaping the series for the audience of now it would never have worked. A drama thats purpose is to be educative on science and history within a serial format? Never work. There's a legendary annecdote of the first producer of Who being summoned to a bigger boss' office and being bawled out beacuse she had varied from the core concept. When she was proved right and it was a hit she was summoned back and got an apology and a promise never to be told how to do her job again. If those invovled over the last 43 years had stuck rigidly to the core concept would I be typing this now. Doubtul.

The SWAMP THING Moore stuff up until issue 50 is some of the most poignant writing I've come across (well, it was hard to end that American Gothic storyline satisfactorily, so ish 50 feels a little hollow). I don't think a lot of people at the time were getting their panties in a bunch because Moore took a character marginally known from a tongue-in-cheek (but very fine b-movie) film, and made some damn great work out of it. I came in at the beginning of the AG storyline and discovered a writer and a couple of artists worth their weight. I will never shirk on this score, as SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING was of a time and a place of excellence rarely seen. I had merely dabbled in DC comics up until that point, but Perez on CRISIS and SAGA hooked the Marvelite. It's easy to crap on DARK KNIGHT and CRISIS and Moore's WATCHMEN and so on, but it doesn't diminish how I felt when I first read them. And it didn't make me dismiss all the great comics from all the great creators I knew about. In fact, without Moore and CRISIS, I'd have split on comics even earlier than I did. Did I dig his cold, vicious protrayal of Superman/Batman/ect; I didn't, but then it didn't bother me in the context of SWAMP THING. This is another one of those time and place things: Moore was necessary for ME at that time to continue interest in comics. At THAT time, I was tired of the formula, tired of ten Spider-Man titles, tired of mediocre art (Ron Wilson anyone? And hell, I'm nostaligic for Wilson in today's comics, where the art looks like Technicolor spooge on slick magazine paper)and already tired of post-DARK KNIGHT uber violence wankery (Punisher ect). So to find the Moore Swamp Thing was a revelation, there wasn't anything else like it, and it spoke to my own writerly desires. I don't know about the other people who argue that Alan Moore's a god of some sort, but it was necessary I think at that time on a personal level to find out comics could spike in fascinating ways.

Would the comics world be a better place had Moore never touched it? Hell no. And hell yes. Who knows? Alan Moore's not to blame for the state of comics today. Blame your mediocre overall culture and the creators who pander to it.

Would the comics world be a better place had Moore never touched it? Hell no. And hell yes. Who knows? Alan Moore's not to blame for the state of comics today. Blame your mediocre overall culture and the creators who pander to it.

And Moore would obviously be one of those "creators" who deserves some of the blame...not all of it but he ceratinly has his share to choke down and has even said as much.

Not likely. The Sumerians and Babylonians had fire enough to make bronze when the Greeks were still going through their Cycladic menhir building stage.

But perhaps you can blame oxidation chemistry.

I look forward to hearing more of the Chewbacca defense.

Comes down to the traditional litmus test -- who got Swamp Thing's origin right, Alan Moore, or the guys who created the character?

To clarify, saying that Allan Moore doesn't deserve any of the blame is absolutely wrong.

Let's look at the B&B argument. The argument I'm hearing here is "blame the guy who lit the fire" or "the fire" itself.  Heck blame the origin of fire! This is offered sarcastically with the implication that blaming Moore is like blaming a prime mover since he is presumed to have no immediate direct intent in the crime.

Now Moore is no Prometheus. He did not invent deconstructionism nor bring it to humanity. So comparing him to Prometheus is specious. I will assume that taking the blame back to a "Prometheus" is intended to suggest that only the straw tha broke the camel's back should really be blamed for the harm to the camel. It is the tiny final bit of total threshold energy that bears the responsibility for consequences of the entire reaction. The catalyst itself and all energy preceding the point of the reaction's initiation is somehow blameless. Blaming anything but that last bit of energy is somehow supposed to seem unreasonable. This is NOT how we determine responsibility. This is also not really a good anaology for what we are discussing. The analogy must be modified to be valid.

If we let the bed and breakfast be equivalent to the current state of super hero comics then we need more actors than one arsonist(the supposed final bit of threashold energy) to extend the metaphor to represent deconstructionist approach as detrimental to super hero comics. We need to look at EVERYTHING that burned some of the b&b.

What we would have is an eyewitness telling the fireman that Moore didn't burn down the bed and breakfast. Oh he burned down two of the shutters on the front window, and the mail box, and a couple of pieces of siding but there was still plenty of the bed and breakfast left when he wandered off. No it was the other people behind him who thought the fire burning a few parts of the bed and breakfast was pretty cool and burned the rest of it bit by bit until only the freestanding garage converted into a laundry room survived.

While you can correctly say that Moore didn't burn the whole thing down himself he certainly contributed to it getting burned down. While he may not have wanted the whole bed and breakfast burned down and did not command the people following him to burn it down he nonethless with his own hands BURNED some of it.

Now we might want to blame fire instead of the particular idiots who wielded it. But then we end up looking at fire itself as being inimical to bed and breakfasts or, if you prefer, "deconstuctivism"  is now preseumed to be inherently destructive to superhero comics. If we accept this then Moore is again guilty for employing the fire to the b&b. He is not responsible for ALL of the burning but for his part he does bear some responsibility. Also when asked, many of the arsonists would admit that watching Moore burning the mailbox and shutters is what led them to burn down the rest of b&b one at a time until all that was left was the laundry room (which now stinks heavily of ash and smoke BTW).

Prometheus may have brought fire to man as Derrida is said to have invented deconstruction however Derrida never wrote comics. Unlike Derrida Moore clearly had a direct hand in deconstructing superhero comics himself. Thus he gets a chunk of the blame rather than some mythical prime mover red herring.

I dunno. I don't much care if the creator is outraged so much as if the original intent of the character is greatly modified and how long that character has had to "set" before the modification happens. And the degree of change is a big part of it too. Going from chemically altered scientist wandering the swamps alone and blundering into helping people mostly by fighting monsters to plant lifeform mimicking the long dead scientist to occult plant god created by fate and stretching back in time to the beginning of plant life surrounded by lesser colleagues... that's a pretty big change.

Swamp Thing debuted in 1971(Alex Olson version). The book with Alec Holland came out in 1972. Anatomy Lesson was 1984. The elemental revelation was 1985.

So Swamp Thing had about twleve or thirteen years to "set" as character before getting rewritten as something almost entirely different(beyond a creature with the same look and few of the same background characters)..

I mean I haven't heard Stan Lee out bitching in public about clones, bio-webs, stingers, Gwen Stacy with a little goblin up her that one time that MJ never told Peter about, the unmasking on TV, the wearing a new robo-costume built by a fellow New Avenger, animal totems, and such.

That doesn't make it right for the character or faithful to the original concept. 

IMoore clearly had a direct hand in deconstructing superhero comics himself

And as such Moore is only to 'blame' for the work he did. Just because it was popular and other people thought they could do it as well isn't Moores fault. You don't like my example? Fine. But I really don't think in this case that the person who set the example has any responsibility for the people who copied him. If blame is to be apportioned, and I don't think it is, then look to the people who thought to follow suit rather than do their own thing, blame the editors who either instigated it or didn't veto it, blame the audience who biought it.

And anyway what damage did it do? There's still whizz bang, bright and light, positive, optomistic comics about superheroes produced in abundance.

Swamp Thing debuted in 1971(Alex Olson version). The book with Alec Holland came out in 1972

***

It's interesting that the character's origin (though admittedly not the core concept) was revised so soon after his first appearance. At least the "plant elemental" storyline reconciled the two Olsen & Holland versions of Swamp Thing in an entertaining way.

***

And anyway what damage did it do? There's still whizz bang, bright and light, positive, optomistic comics about superheroes produced in abundance.

***

That's true. And unlike Marvelman Swamp Thing was never a bright, positive or optimistic character to begin with.

I like JB's stuff and Alan Moore's, too - both have been highly influential on the genre, which means both have made changes to it over the last few decades. John is perhaps more respectful, less iconoclastic when handling other creators' work.

It's minor, perhaps, but Alan Moore wasn't responsible for the version of Adam Strange he presented. Man Of Two Worlds had been submitted and approved, and Alan was asked to make his version consistent with that.

I think Moore's version of Swamp Thing was "better" than the previous. Current changes to characters like Spider-Man, if they improve him or his stories in some way, are likely to become acceptable (to someone like me). If they don't improve something, they were the wrong changes.

IMP.

Long time since you read the first series?

I can't remember how Alan Moore's Rann was consistent with the miniseries's, I just remember reading that.

IMP.

About how many other characters can we say the same?

Well, there are some characters who've become better than when originally conceived.

Apparently Gail Simone improved Catman dramatically.

Christopher Chance (HUMAN TARGET) as put together by Peter Milligan.

Grant Morrison ANIMAL MAN. Still the best thing he ever did in comics.

I'd say Wolfman's take on the Teen Titans, though maybe he simply altered the entire concept to suit him.

It could be argued that Denny O'Neil's THE QUESTION either improved or destroyed a great character. To this day I really can't decide, as I'm a sucker for stories where a brutal guy has to change or die. What if he can't? That's an interesting sub-text of O'Neil's Question series.

SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE, to me, seriously updated Wesley Dodds while keeping him firmly in place in time. LOVE that series. Top five all time for me (post-1970 or so).

And I think you definitely have to add John Byrne and Frank Miller's respective work on Wolverine's look and character, which altered him into a phenomenon.

All this to say, most characters are as great as they are (most of the big names), while b-list characters can be taken up and improved dramatically. I guess I always thought Moore was doing that with SWAMP THING.

JSA might have a touch of this, as far back as Roy Thomas' run on it. And James Robinson came up with a Hawkman I really enjoyed, but I never picked up the other incarnations of the series so I can't say how different Carter Hall really is.

Unfortunately, the thing about this "improvement" writer cockery, though it can be outstanding (STARMAN and the Gentleman Ghost come to mind as well), the idea has spread to the big names, as indicated. Changes made to Spider-Man that are more than arrogant dismissals of what the character represents.

I've always thought, myself, that the big name titles keep a status quo of excellence, a formula, like Spider-Man (he's a young guy with super powers, he lives with his kindly aunt who knows nothing of it, he fights for good as he's feared by the populace and JJJ's newspaper, he has crushes on beautiful girls but he screws it up, and villains sometimes get the best of him until he comes up with a solution, and even then his bad luck will run true...this is as perfect a formula for a Marvel superhero comic ever), and you leave it in the hands of capable creative teams who understand they're on a flagship title that brings in new readers while sustaining old.

And then you have the secondary, b-list characters, like Power Man and Iron Fist, Doom Patrol, Metal Men, where you give a set of creators a little carte blanche to take chances. Not "Morrison Doom Patrol" type free reign, but push the limits of what comics are allowed creatively. You don't HAVE to have Moon Knight cutting off an opponent's face, but if you do, you state very clearly that's what's in the content on the cover.

All this seems simple to me. While the world is run by PC twattle, the comics world is rife with giggling adolescent "rebellion". Against what? Against the history of the medium and its more famous creators...that's about it. It's all the inbreeding in the comics world which is killing it. Somebody needs to open a window.

Well when I briefly looked through John Byrnes F.A.Q. there were lots of terms he'd made up and assumed it was referring to one of those. When I learnt it wasn't and was given a context I realised it was being used in a derogatory against my post. Should I then have gone to the bother of googling an insult just to find out how I was being insulted. And if anyone was using that defence it was Emery in the first place. His objection against Moore being what others did in his wake.

How can you accuse ME of the Chewbacca defense after submitting  "Blame Prometheus for the local neighborhood arson" to suggest that Moore's has no rational responsibility for any damage to the tone of super hero comics and later went on to claim that there was no damage anyway ? And if you don't understand something that sounds like a bit of pop culture or a refernce to a pervasive meme then goole it in quotes. That is standard procedure for people with web access.

It's how I found out what IMWAN was.

Moore clearly had a direct hand in deconstructing superhero comics himself

Yep. And that's what I just said.

And as such Moore is only to 'blame' for the work he did.

Yep. That's ALSO what I just said. Are you even reading my responses here? However I was responding to someone who said I should blame Moore at all. I think the truth is that people here are actually mad at me for blaming Moore for the work he did.

Just because it was popular and other people thought they could do it as well isn't Moores fault.

It's partly Moore's fault. Otherwise really noone is responsible for anything because you can divide almost anything into small chunks and then suggest that noone has enough chunks to make them responsible. Also Moore never asked his immitators to stop. He really didn't stop doing it himself when it was floated that his work was harmful. He accepted the accolades of his immitators and tgheir supporters and seems to have bought into the idea that he was ushering in an age of important comics that would take their place beside film and lietarture as mainstream forms of culture.. The great crass-ening and "r-rating" of super hero comics content is still somewhat his responsibility.

You don't like my example? Fine. But I really don't think in this case that the person who set the example has any responsibility for the people who copied him.

Why is that? Do you not understand why I don;t like your example. Do you feel that my dislike of your example is purley arbitrary and emotional and my ciriticism of it is unfair or invadid? Also you seemed to be trying to suggest here that Moore was not even responsible for his own deconstructive stories now which conflicts with your agreement before.

If blame is to be apportioned, and I don't think it is,

See? From what can Moore derive blamelessness?

 then look to the people who thought to follow suit rather than do their own thing, blame the editors who either instigated it or didn't veto it, blame the audience who biought it.

I'm not sure why you think I don't ALSO blame them? Seriously. Where is this assumption of yours that ONLY Moore is to blamed coming from? Is it because I am focusing on Moore in a thread that is mostly about Moore and the negative aspects one of his particular works?

And anyway what damage did it do?

Look around you. Look at recent superhero comics in their shrunken DRM salesspace. Heck read Alan Moore's quotes on his perception of the damage it did.

There's still whizz bang, bright and light, positive, optomistic comics about superheroes produced in abundance. 

Go ahead and define "abundance" for me because I doubt we will agree on that term's meaning. Just because you are happy with the smoke coated Lunadry room remaining doesn't establish that no damage was done. Heck compose a nice fat list of whizz bang, bright and light, positive, optomistic super hero comics  for me would ya? Maybe I haven't noticed them on the stands in their abundance! And then lets compare that list to the super hero comics available to see what kind of abundance ratio we really have in today's market.

Also, please don't waste time with rolling out the usual easy to think of comic board distraction arguments such as books like "Marvel Age Spider-Man!" (how many books like that are around?) Read old comics! ( I do. How does that afgect what comics are out NOW?) Read Archie!(Hah. Hah. That just gets funnier everytime I hear it. Is Archie truthfully known for his super heroics? )

I am not trying to put words into your mouth here but I am trying to avoid having the dicussion fly off into the usual limbo by listing what I've often heard in the past on various other boards so you can anticipate what my response to them will be. It is intended as a short cut around maybe six or so posts worth of going back and forth.

I am willing to accept that you can improve and build on a character. I think however that this is often an error prone and pragmatic process requiring adding and subtracting things as time goes on. When a character is sufficiently blank then adding seems like a good idea. Adding conflicting elements seems less wise.

I have a hard time accepting though that the goal of improvement should be a huge alteration in the character that results in them having an almost reversal of their nature ( Marvel Man rethought as Miracle Man, Green Lantern---> Green Lantern with MONDO feet of clay-->Parallax-->Spectre-->Green Lantern, HankHall--> Hawk-->Monarch-->Extant) or an eclipsing of their original status(Swamp Thing--->Plant-->Plant Elemental--->Planet Elemental)  or where they end up being a different character from the original and probably could have been introduced alongside the original without switching aspects.

So what I'm saying is some thought should be taken to see if additions and subtractions are clarifying, or just muddying the water with trivia and mundanity, or tacking things on for a short term effect(Kitty Pryde is now a Ninja!) with no thought to the future. Also a change should be evaluated as to whether it will most likely be destructive or constructive in terms of having others write that character. Will it amplify the character or just mute and dampen it?

Editors do not seem to exert a lot of responsible control over this. In fact they seem to be rather prone to whoring the character out to a big name to produce shocks enough to temporarily spike sales or just rolling the dice and letting creators try anything and then letting the next cross over or revamp effort to clear things up somewhere down the road.

Why is that the traditional litmus test? The implication seems to be that it must be the guys who created the character {who got it right}, but I can't for the life of me see why that should be so."

Hear hear

Actually the real point seems to be that if someone tries something new and it doesn't work, the reason is because you should NEVER try anything new.

" Me too? " C'mon. Jump in and speak your mind.

You know the Prometheus comparison? This one's worse. I feel like Al Pacino in Gadfather 3 when reading certain posts.But to move on.

There were several examples that sprung to mind of comic book characters that were improved by others work.but Chad listed some of the ones I came up with. Others would be Gaimans Sandman but once you get past the trappings of the Dodds Sandman and the Matrix Supergirl who I prefer to the original.

Reading up on the thread - I believe the Peanuts strips that are being reprinted were chosen by the creator specifically to be the ones repeated. Prepared to be wrong.

And doesn't a work for hire arrangement, like most major superheroes were created under, mean that the creator doesn't have any say on what happens next? To an extent it doesn't matter if the creator disagrees or not when it's not creator owned.

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Only if you make the huge assumption that Charles Schulz entered into a work for hire arrangement with United Features Syndicate in 1950 and then was unable to make any kind of better deal(s) with them over the course of the next 49 years.

Remember, in the 1960's, Peanuts was right up there with the Beatles as a cultural phenomenon.  "Happiness is A Warm Gun"- John Lennon lifted that title from a gun magazine; the magazine itself was riffing on "Happiness is a Warm Puppy", one of several top selling paperback Peanuts books that Sparky produced aside from the comic strip. Now, throw in all the money that Schulz was making for UFS on the merchandising.

Do you really think that when the time(s) came to renegotiate his contract, United Features said "no, this punk is asking for too much. Let's dump him and bring in Johnny Hart"?

Of course not. Lightning in a bottle, man... in strip terms, Peanuts is the Beatles. 

All of which is to say that no, comic strip syndicates don't necessarily deal with their creators in the same way as comic book companies. Which might be why several of the greats~ I'm thinking of Kirby & Wood with "Skymasters"~ were always looking to create successful comic strips. My understanding is that a comic strip gig was like the grail in those days.

David if you don't like the thread and are tired then go ahead and take a short break. The Luchessies won't ruin your legit operation by throwing kick backs to the archbishop to con you, take a mass hit out on your organizational partners turn your best ground level lieutenant and confidante against you, assassinate the pope, or hire a Sicciallian to kill you that accidently kills your daughter. I promise.

And you won't have to send a guy to sitck the ear-thing of the big bad guy's glasses into his carotid artery.

I was thinking "Northern Exposure".

Personally I'm going for Brokeback Mountain.

Jim, I wasn't thinking of Peanuts when I mentioned Work for hire arrangements. Your points are all valid and yes, when it's something like that where the creator is such a part of the success then they have a massive bargaiing chip. Rarely in superhero comics is one person solely responsible for a series and rarely are they so intrinsic to the success.

I grew up reading comics in England and had never heard of Marvel Man until Moore brought him back,having since seen the original,it was a very poor and obvious rip off Captain Marvel.I liked Moore`s take on the character.Similarly i suspect that DC put the new Brit on Swamp Thing as it was a poor selling title and not many would care if it sank,fortunately he did something different and special with it and he made it a hit.I admit i bought my first Swamp thing after hearing gossip in a comic shop that he was to take it on,and then reading a little prose promo he did in other DC comics to promote it,i liked what i read and my first issue was The Burial,i then tracked down the previous issues.I don`t like everything Moore does but these two are classics IMO.

Jim, I wasn't thinking of Peanuts when I mentioned Work for hire arrangements. Your points are all valid and yes, when it's something like that where the creator is such a part of the success then they have a massive bargaiing chip. Rarely in superhero comics is one person solely responsible for a series and rarely are they so intrinsic to the success

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Got it.

And I'll go with Neil Gaiman's Sandman as an excellent example of "rarely", since DC even agreed to end the series when he was finished with it.

...Rachel Pollack...

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That just became my #1 reason why they agreed so readily with Neil...!

Heh heh heh. However I'm sure their are writers that could have done good and interesting things with the concept too.

"So what I'm saying is some thought should be taken to see if additions and subtractions are clarifying, or just muddying the water with trivia and mundanity, or tacking things on for a short term effect(Kitty Pryde is now a Ninja!) with no thought to the future. Also a change should be evaluated as to whether it will most likely be destructive or constructive in terms of having others write that character. Will it amplify the character or just mute and dampen it."

It's almost like, after so many posts, I start to see why changes ARE made.

Alan Moore didn't cause every comics creator to suddenly turn into douche bags. He was too good, and created too much of an impression, that's all it was. If he is apalled by that, and I bet he is, that's not a fault in the man. It's a fault in American "culture". The need to suckle at the tit of real talent has changed from lionizing someone, say, like Ernest Hemingway or Faulkner, to creating clones of them who do the real muddying, the real cruddying, of the culture. For every Stephen King in the 70s-80s, there was fifty imitators trying to lock-step. That was the real beginning of the boom to create duplicates of lesser quality. You see, if Marvel and DC had kept their ethics intact, they'd have realized you don't dismiss the Roger Sterns of the world to jump on the Moore clone bandwagon. Some good talent was guilty of publically fellating Frank Miller and Moore, and it ruined comics pretty much forever. Again, NOT Miller and Moore's fault. The inane imitators (whether forced by the companies into doing or not), had no idea that even WORSE talent was going to hold their knock-offs in high esteem. This is not new. It happened in publishing, it happened in films. Do we blame Steven Spielberg for the Blockbuster mentality in Hollywood? Or whoever the hell it was that started Remake Fever? (Actually, that guy needs a good de-nutting.)

Hating Alan Moore because he's pretentious or whatever is one thing. But he's not the comics Anti-Christ either.

Starman wasn't really a Revamp though. It was a new character replacing an older one. Unfortunately it did so with death. It also pulled in the other variant Starman characters and some long unused characters(Black Condor, Tigorr, etc.) to set up a bit of an ensemble. Really the character that got a "huge" change from Starman was The Shade. He sort of got the Magneto treatment and a convenient excuse for a lot of his bad behavior.

Gaimon's Sandman was also mostly a new character. The old Sandman had his own sidekick replace him(unfortunately with death again) and strangley he became a guy with rock powers. We didn't have to face the idea of Weseley Dodds mutating into a dream god. We did have to face the idea of Sandy being a powered(powedered) hero though.

I said the Gentlemen Ghost in relation to STARMAN. I meant the Shade. GG was in the Hawkman series. Excuse please.

Mostly new character? Yep. Absolutely. Started out with the trappings of the old character and letting Gaiman write what he wanted essentially taking the character away from the core concept and subverting the history of the character to his story needs? Yep. Absolutely. Good thing. Yep. Absolutely.

Y'know, the only Moore work that actually pissed me off (besides "Killing Joke") was "Promethea". Here was an interesting idea about a character who's a "living story" (simplified definition, I know). So I started buying it because I was intrigued by the concept and because I figured the story possibilities were endless.

But what did it morph into by the end of the series? A dense, tedious tour of the Kaballah (or whatever), because that's what Alan's into this year. Self indulgent in the extreme and a major disappointment, but most of all~  a cheat. Thanks anyway, but a comic book shouldn't be something I find myself plowing through because I want to like it.

(And now, back to burning my post-Beatles Beatles album...)

"We did have to face the idea of Sandy being a powered(powedered) hero though."

Didn't have a real problem with it. You can either have Sandy become the "Golden Age" Sandman with a gas gun and some hand t- hand skills, and be largely ineffective against other super-powered individuals (and since he isn't BATMAN, he can't kick the collective ass of the JLA all by himself, sans super-powers, as every writer likes to envision), he needed something to prevent his becoming a "cheerleader". I mean, it's not too original to make him literally a SAND man, but what the hell. It's not like somebody decided to hand Speedy super powers after Ollie Queen "died", something along the line of being able to shoot bone arrows out of his crotch. I mean, THAT would be ridiculous.

Chad I never said Moore was the antichrist and also didn't accuse him of being the beginning of douchebaggery in the comics industry.

So why even bother pretending that I somehow did? I have been very clear in my posts of what I hold him responsible for and have already dealt with this "point" you are trying to "reinsert" in apologetics for Mr. Moore in my responses to Dave.

I think the rest of your observations about flawed American culture, a necessity for change being inherent expressed in negative discussions of it, and such are less that persuasive. Sure there is aping in comics like in literature. Sure there are artistic movements. Sure it can be bad or good. So what? How is this a defacto absolution for Mr. Moore's deconstructive approach to super heroes?

Speilberg IS somewhat to blame for having effects Blockbusters becoming almost their own genre. He deeply participated in this along with Cameron. Lucas, and Carpentor and many others. This is not to say that he is solely repsonsible nor is it to portray him as the anti-christ or any other silly hyperbolic and valueless distortion of what I've said.

Nontheless Moore IS guilty of messing some crap up.(as Spielberg is).

That's all I've said and I've supported it well enough that I now think that you are more interested of blunting ANY criticism of Moore's deconstructive super hero work than you are in saving him from being unfairly labeled a one man down fall of comics.(which was never my claim). I merely said that he played a role in that downfall. Apparently even THIS is to be portrayed as a controversial point even though it is self evident.

I never said that Moore was solely responsible for the downfall of super hero comics. Yet you and Dave keep repeating, as though it is the topic of discussion, that Moore isn't soley responsible.I say well buh but he does have some responsibility and poof! We are right back to "Moore isn't soley responsible" again. Then what follows is an effort to somehow parley THAT small victory(which I even agree with) into him having NO responsibility for it whatsoever. He pioneered a massive genre change that followed his model but it isn't in any way even partially his fault! Not at all! Not even what he did is his fault! Then when I confront this version of events to show that he does have some responsibility(partial) I am once again told that he is not solely responsible as though I had previously suggested that he was soley responsible.

Dave even took it to the length of suggesting that there hasn't even BEEN a downfall or any damage or harm after ealier stipulating that there HAD been damage by comparing super hero comics to a local arson and then suggesting that happy positive super hero comics are still "abundant".

The theme here seems to be that anyone who criticizes Moore's role in formulating the current balance of super hero comics MUST believe that he is somehow soley responsible and must be unfairly singling him out. Even if the person discusses other things such as the fans and editorial and imitators and does not try to claim that Moore is totally responsible it doesn't matter. The actual content of the ciriticism is unimportant.

The whole thing must be immediately snapped back to the absolutist "Moore is fully and totally responsible" red herring and indeed ANY responsibility must be reflexively denied and attributed SOLELY to Moore's imitators or even a pervasive market environment than enabled them. Moore must NOT be touched or implicated!

Mostly new character? Yep. Absolutely. Started out with the trappings of the old character and letting Gaiman write what he wanted essentially taking the character away from the core concept and subverting the history of the character to his story needs? Yep. Absolutely. Good thing. Yep. Absolutely.

Original character(Dodds) left alone to be used by others and not awkwardly transformed into new character? Yep. See the difference? The change was non-consumptive. It had no real cost to the Sandman legacy.

I'm not arguing against change. I'm arguing against a certain species of it. A careless and destructive subset of it.

From an interview with the "Onion", OCT 2001

O: Is it true that you regret in some ways the effect that Watchmen had on the comics industry?

AM: To a degree. That is partly because there seems to be a kind of allure that is... Perhaps it happens in any medium, where anything of any kind of great proportion, no matter how good it is, will have an adverse effect upon the medium itself. I think that what a lot of people saw when they read Watchmen was a high degree of violence, a bleaker and more pessimistic political perspective, perhaps a bit more sex, more swearing. And to some degree there has been, in the 15 years since Watchmen, an awful lot of the comics field devoted to these very grim, pessimistic, nasty, violent stories which kind of use Watchmen to validate what are, in effect, often just some very nasty stories that don't have a lot to recommend them. And some of them are very pretentious, where they'll try and grab some sort of intellectual gloss for what they're doing by referring to a few song titles, or the odd book. They'll name-drop William Burroughs here or there. Just like MAD comics, which was a unique standalone thing, it's almost become a genre. The gritty, deconstructivist postmodern superhero comic, as exemplified by Watchmen, also became a genre. It was never meant to. It was meant to be one work on its own. I think, to that degree, it may have had a deleterious effect upon the medium since then. I'd have liked to have seen more people trying to do something that was as technically complex as Watchmen, or as ambitious, but which wasn't strumming the same chords that Watchmen had strummed so repetitively. This is not to say that the entire industry became like this, but at least a big enough chunk of it did that it is a noticeable thing. The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it's like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we'd got this insane right-wing voter fear running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. So that tended to reflect in my work. But it was a genuine bad mood, and it was mine. I tend to think that I've seen a lot of things over the past 15 years that have been a bizarre echo of somebody else's bad mood. It's not even their bad mood, it's mine, but they're still working out the ramifications of me being a bit grumpy 15 years ago. So, for my part, I wouldn't say that my new stuff is all bunny rabbits and blue-skies optimism, but it's probably got a lot more of a positive spin on it than the work I was doing back in the '80s. This is a different century.

Yeah Chad. That's one of the interviews I was referring to when I mentioned that Moore himself acknowledeges and regret his influence somewhat earlier in the discussion when I was talking to Dave. I'm quite aware of it.

I'm growing to love Moore more by the second. And I still love my Kirby, Colan, Buscema, 1970s comics, "Silver Age", Infantino Flash, EC Comics, Goon, ect. Doesn't affect me one BIT that Moore is a long-haired Wicca freak, or that I think he's completely got his head up his ass about the V FOR VENDETTA movie. I also acknowledge he's a hell of lot smarter and more talented, even if that talent is slanted. He's still correct in his assessment of his impact, he accepts the responsibility. Sounds like a stand-up guy to me. The only way he could feel worse is if he'd given birth to his clones straight out of his colon.

How much you like Moore doesn't seem to have been the issue we were talking about nor is a testimonial on whether he's a stand up guy or not particularly relevant to his influence on comics. Neither is dramatic denial of a non existent speculation regarding his status as a comic book anti-christ.

Where is this stuff even coming from? What exactly is it designed to do here?

I mean HE even accepts some responsibility and acknowledges having harmed the super hero comic market and yet a  litttle while ago you were assuring me that he had no responsibilty and Dave was saying that there had been no harm.

???

John,

All the brick walls in my house were pounded down to dust ages ago. Indeed my forehead is now listed amongst the significant forces of natural erosion operating on the rocks and rigid terrain of central Texas. I listed well below, wind, rain, gravity,and beer but I do rate.

Thanks anyway though.

Well to put it bluntly I've been arguing that what Moore did to MarvelMan was pretty bad as well as what he did to Swampthing.

So while bad imitators don't automaticallty mean that the original has to have been bad but in this case yeah I consider the "original" deconstructive events  to be a bad thing that lead to even more bad things. Again I see that there were some other factors that turned what would have been a minor mess into a  rather huge one. It's till overall a bad thing though.

Do you not see the reasoning for why I consider it bad throughout this thread? Have I ever said that just the state of haveing imitators automatically makes something bad? Haven't I already made my point clearly enough without it being constantly morphed into all kinds of other things(usually straw men)?

I'm not arguing against change. I'm arguing against a certain species of it. A careless and destructive subset of it.

***

Make a list -- even a short list -- in your head. Think of as many characters as you can whose creators you know. How many of those needed to be "fixed" by later writers? Of the top of my own head, the only one I can think of who was vastly improved was Bullseye, with what Frank did with him. He started out as basically a lame FLASH-style gimmick villain. Frank turned him into a real threat.

And, as usual, the word "actually" is immediately followed by the expression of an opinion, and not something "actual" at all.

Of course you can't. You simply don't want to.

***

Circular argument? Is referring to an aesthetic or an intrinsic good a circular argument now?

Why do you want to taste Coke everytime you open a bottle marked Coke and not pinapple soda or iced tea?

Why do we maintain brand names? Why do we keep this suff seperate? Why do people tend tho say that Mad Max Beyond Thunder Dome is not like the other Mad Max movies? Why did they say that Roland and Emmerich's Godzilla is a poor batsardization of the Toho's Godzilla? I mean don't they all just blend into a meanignless subjectively experienced gradient of relativistic preference?

When we buy a Spider-man comic we want to read about spider-man not some odd new thing loosely portrayed as being spider-man. We can detect the substitute. Same with Swampthing. If Moore's ideas were so good then why were they ever tacked onto swamp thing in the first place? Why not create a new character called Son of the Earth/Swamp or GreenWalker or something?

It's like having a wasp larva hatch from a paralayzed spider and claiming that the parasitized creature has somehow magically become the wasp. Why does plant-god Swamp Thing have to devour damaged scientist Swamp Thing to emerge into the world? Why couldn't we just have a NEW Swamp Thing appear and shake hands with Alec who says he'll head back to the Swamp and work on his cure?

What is the good that justifies having the old SwampThing melt into this new powered up unkillable plant Swamp Thing with an "everything you know is a lie" insertion technique?(Other than it doesn't seem to bother YOU personally?)

I thought Macfarlane lost that one in court?

Neil's Miracleman wasn't Alan's, but then, he didn't get to finish it, so it's hard to say what it might have become.

IMP.

Kevin Pierce wrote: I hate to see Neil screw up yet another Marvel title, now I am not familiar with the Marvelman/Miracleman so it' s hard for me to comment on what he did to the Marvelman character good or bad

What other Marvel title did Neil screw up?

A certain type of change.

Well there's the rub.Was Moores change negative or positive. You say neative. I saw positive. Besides the history of comics is an history of change and even if Moore hadn't written what he wrote the comics of now wouldn't be anything like theose of 30 years ago.

We're never going to agree on this are we? But I think Moore wrote some great stories and added new shade to the genre.

And don't mistake my Prometheus analogy as an'acknowledgement' of anything other than your point of view. Which you're welcome too. But like so many others on the net I'm glad it's not mine.

I don't usually buy comics for the art (and in this case it's by Neil Gaimen, so I'd be buying it anyway) but I'll gladly buy any comic that looks this good:

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I have a thought about this: back when I was a comic devouring kid, there was a British strip called The Trigan Empire.  The illustration in there was, I think, painted - whatever the case it was beatifully rendered work.  And it left me - a ten year old comics fan - absolutely cold.  Because it looked impossible.  Part of the appeal of comics to me as a child was that I could do them too.  When I read the books I would dream of a time when I could emulate the artists - and it only seemed a matter of practice.  After all I could do line drawings with shading - I just couldn't do them as well as the artists I admired.  I admired their skill because it was, or seemed, within reach.  Modern comics - those I have seen anyway - with their computer generated colours and painstakingly produced artwork have lost that, I think.

Well there's the rub.Was Moores change negative or positive. You say neative. I saw positive.

Hear hear.

Hmmm.  I can see your point, Ian, and I certainly felt that way for a while (hence my early love of Liefeld).  Maybe it's just because I'm an aspiring artist, but "I wish I could draw like that" overtook "I could do that" a while ago.  As for CG colors and such, check out the Coloring JB thread and play around with Photoshop or GIMP for a while.  I'm actually amazed at how (relatively) easy some of that stuff is (and I suck at it).

*********

Oh sure Matt - but I meant from the point of view of a kid, really - the 'intended' audience has yet another barrier to the love affair we all enjoy.  Or not.  I dunno.

Coming into the discussion late here I know.

Having read all of Moore's MiracleMan, which I had to track down after picking up a cheap copy of Gaiman's The Golden Age and not understanding it at all, I liked it.  Books 1 and 2 where it's more a "Super hero in the real world" than "Super Hero creates new world" were a great read.

I have never read the originals, and probably will never get the chance., so I can't say whether the Moore version ruins them.

On the other hand, with Swamp Thing, which seems to have been dragged into this conversation, it was my second real experience with American comics, the first being Preacher.  I found I enjoyed what I read, which was the first 3 books.  A couple of years later I was given a couple of the original comics and nothing about them really stuck in my mind.

What I have found with Moore's stories s that they tend to be great reads when you get them as a whole set.  I think it is this aspect of his writing that leads him to changing characters.  It's my opinion that having ST as an elemental lends itself to much more epic storytelling than Alec Holland looking for a cure, which as was pointed out elsewhere, is not exactly an original idea.  The same goes with MM.

Yes, he could have created new characters, but in both cases, from what I have read, he was given the characters and then when he put forward his proposals for plot, was given the go ahead by the editorial staff.  And would you have picked up a new comic featuring a new character by a writer you'd never heard of called Elemental?  New characters are a risky proposition for companies, changing old characters that are either out of print or underselling is less risky, and I feel this is a major factor in the retrofitting of these characters.

this is part of why i love Marvelman/Miracleman,outstanding art by Gary Leach and Alan Davis.I frequently buy comics just for the art,for example when JB is the "art robot"

Well there's the rub.Was Moores change negative or positive. You say neative. I saw positive

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If I maybe honest, he took a super-hero story and made it much darker and less pleasent to read. I can't see how the change is a positive one.

Ian, that Trigan Empire artwork was by Don Lawrence. Interestingly - to me, anyway - his work is an influence on several 3D comics artists I know, one of them me.

3D has made it easier for us to imitate what Don did the hard way: what seemed impossible to you then is a bit less so now.

IMP.

There is no such thing as a consumptive retcon or revamp. Creators are fully capable of restoring the past within a panel. The changes are often completely ignored and the original version hits the ground running as if nothing ever happend.

I apologize for speaking of something which I have not (fully) read but John seems to have restored the Doom Patrol to its original state just like that. So writers can do their worst and with a new #1 issue all can be restored.

Morrison's Doom Patrol, no matter what many may think, was faithful to the core concept of the group at the same time he used the everything is a lie approach. The lie part was that the Chief had evil designs and intentionally threw tragedy in the path of future DP members in order to form the group. On the other hand he kept the premise that the DP were social misfits. They delt with the weird threats that groups like the JLA weren't able to take on. Finally he put them on a collision course with catastrophe (DOOM!!!) which led to his run ending up very badly for the group. This is all part of the core concept.

Morrison's DP stories were some of the funniest, most original, and suspenseful (especially at the end) that I ever read. And for all the wierdness the characters were done no harm because...BAM just like that they are back to their original state thanks to John. But what happens to the characters that Morrison introduced that I just loved? Gone....that is until someone else dreges them up.

As long as we're talking core concepts and the darkening of characters I think the original template for this sort of thing is provided by John himself. I don't think Stan and Jack envisioned Jean Grey as struggling with dark power hungry forces which eventually overpower her causing her to go on a cosmic rampage of death and destruction leading to her eventual death. (Do I need to tell you I'm referring to the Phoenix saga?) Was it a good story? Sure was. Was it better than the not too subtle chauvanism that Stan and Jack handled female characters with in the 60's. Yep. Were we able to eventually turn things around and get Jean Grey back right as rain? We sure were.

So I see nothing wrong with deconstructing or darkening in and of themselves. Good stories can and are told outside of the original core character concepts. I have to disagree with John if he feels that altering the core concept automatically means a story is bad. As another poster has pointed out though, a bad idea is a totally different story. Some creators just have bad tasteless ideas that they dress up in the shock value of retcons or darkening. But really a story must be read to determine if this is the case. The original Dark Knight was a great story. Miller's current All Star series is just plain dumb (He wants Robin to eat rats? That just makes no sense.)

Finally, a word about Swamp Thing. How many more Swamp Monster horror stories did you want to read? The original premise of the character was tired. (Who's trying to steal Alec's body this month?) There's just not much you can do with it. What Moore did with it was absolute genius and expanded my idea of what could be done in comics. For all of you that lament his deconstruction, don't forget that in this run we got to see the Demon, The Phantom Stranger, The Spector, Deadman, Adam Strange, The JLA, Batman, and a Green Lantern, all handled quite respectfully.

If the Chief is one of the "bad guys", this rips out the guts of the concept as surely as if, oh, Swamp Thing was revealed not to be Alec Holland after all, or MarvelMan was shown to be the product of a collosal mindfuck.

In terms of 'core concept' does it really matter what ethnicity the characters are? So having actors of a different ethnicity doesn't seem to have, for me, any impact on the remake.

Yeah, wasn't clear there. I was referring specifically to the Honeymooners remake. Obviously ethnicity CAN have an effect in some cases. I just don't see it in that specific example that was given.

I've got nothing against the "everything was a lie" approach, retcons, or "darkening" of a boy scout character if it is in service of an engaging story. I said in an earlier post that I disagree w/ Byrne in that going altering a core concept doesn't automatically make a story bad.

What I think is bad is what I see as a cycle of alteration and restoral that in no way actually moves a character forward. In otherwords a creator makes a character bad, or substitutes a new hero for the old, or in some way alters the core concept, just for shock value. Sales go up. Then people get tired of it and want the old guy back. So they bring the old guy back and do a nostalgia trip on the original core concept. Sales go up. That is until people get tired of the core concept again.

It could go on indefinately as long as sales increase with each change. Neither situation requires the creator to actually tell any new compelling stories.

What I think is bad is what I see as a cycle of alteration and restoral that in no way actually moves a character forward. In otherwords a creator makes a character bad, or substitutes a new hero for the old, or in some way alters the core concept, just for shock value. Sales go up. Then people get tired of it and want the old guy back. So they bring the old guy back and do a nostalgia trip on the original core concept. Sales go up. That is until people get tired of the core concept again.

It could go on indefinately as long as sales increase with each change. Neither situation requires the creator to actually tell any new compelling stories.

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Why is this bad? If the criteria you set for a good story is that it be engaging, then why does it matter if the character does not move forward or if the story is not new. Certainly it might not be engaging to you personally if you've seen it before, but it must be entertaining someone.

You can tell engaging stories without changing anything. My favorite X-Men (and indeed Marvel Comics) story is Days of Future Past, which, for all its sound and fury, doesn't change ANYTHING on the X-Men series! Brilliant comic.

Most of the really sucessful long running comics characters worldwide are pretty much unchanged since their creation. Disney comic characters (that sell on the millions outside USA, if you are wondering), italian western hero Tex, Tintin, Asterix, all pretty much static. Yet extremely sucessful to this day!

When you think of it, how much did Batman change after it's first year (i.e. after Robin first appearance)? The stories are obviously better done (and their tone has changed wildly with the times, but not their nature), the support cast is a bit larger, Robin is a different guy (not that you would notice the difference if no one told you) and the costumes are slightly tweaked. And that's it. Is he a worse character for that?