LWIA 4.3: Act III Intro

And we're back. Act III is still a little unstructured and inchoate, and so I'm starting off chronologically, picking right up from the end of Act II. Which I'm just now realizing I never sent the omnibus of. I'll get that over the weekend unless I'm a dumb bitch with ADHD, in which case I won't.

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This was, however, a relatively slow process, especially if one dates its beginning to writing “What doth the Lord require of thee?” sometime in 1990. The two subsequent chapters published in Taboo are relatively tame. Chapter Five, “The Nemesis of neglect,” opens with a kind of glorious weirdness in the form of a three page scene of an unnamed couple in Braunau, Austria having sex, with the moment of orgasm being coupled with a vision of the doors of Hawksmoor’s Christ’s Church, Spitalfields bursting open with a torrent of blood. The dialogue is rendered in untranslated German, leaving the scene profoundly obscure unless one happens to recognize Braunau as the birthplace of Adolf Hitler some nine months after the scene is set.

After this endearing barminess, however, the issue settles into an altogether more normal flow, alternating between depictions of William Gull and Polly Nichols in the lead-up to her murder. Campbell—unusually—creates a new formalist conceit for the sequence, rendering Nichols’s sequences in his usual dense black linework while rendering Gull’s scenes (at least those in which he’s alone) in a soft inkwash. It’s a good issue, and Moore does an excellent job of painting the grim circumstances of an East End sex worker in the Victorian era—particularly memorable scene in which Nichols is shown sleeping on a bench, held up against a wall by a taut rope, and ultimately woken up when the lodging-house keeper simply unhooks the rope and lets her and her fellow homeless women simply fall forward onto the floor. But opening scene aside, it has nothing of the crazed and over-intense vigor of “What doth the Lord Require of thee?”

The final chapter published in Taboo, simply titled “September,” is similarly prosaic. Its purpose is to introduce—or reintroduce after the prologue published four years earlier—Inspector Abberline, who appears on every page as he begins his investigation of Nichols’s murder. Nor was the seventh chapter, “A torn envelope“—written and drawn for Taboo but never published there and instead left sitting for over a year—anything more than a functional advancement of Moore’s plot and themes. This is, of course, far from nothing; Moore’s plot and themes for From Hell were vast and towering things. More to the point, by the 90s Moore was a skilled enough writer that even his “get high and bash out a script in a night for fifty grand” comics were pretty good; his merely functional still towered above most people’s ambition.

But beneath the surface, things are plainly spiralling. Moore’s long dead “eight page chapters” plan was off by a factor of five, with both “The Nemesis of neglect” and “A torn envelope” ballooning to forty pages each. But it is perhaps more instructive to compare the two issues. “The Nemesis of neglect” is long in no small part because of decadences like a six page sequence of three-panel pages. But despite its length, its focus is acute; opening sequence aside, every scene focuses either on Gull or Nichols. “A torn envelope,” meanwhile, features the murder of Annie Chapman, second of the Ripper victims, but there is nothing like the singular focus of “The Nemesis of neglect.” The chapter moves around freely, with numerous subplots, and the murder isn’t even the climax—it takes place on page twenty-five, and though it lingers in the aftermath for several pages the chapter moves on entirely by the final scene, which is Abberline reading the letter from which the “Jack the Ripper” sobriquet came (which Moore presents as a fake penned by a journalist in order to tart up the story). There’s a clear sense of the story threatening to spiral out of control, thrashing like a pissed off octopus in his increasingly desperate grip.

And then it broke free, at least momentarily. Taboo folded and Moore coasted into 1993 with little to do but desperately grab hold of some Image work—the only work he put out in what was otherwise a complete wash of a year for him. And even that was fraught, with Moore falling unexpectedly behind in his work on 1963, much to the dismay of his collaborators. Rick Veitch has described how Moore would “disappear for a week, two weeks at a time” suggesting this was in part because he was “getting into magic and he was exploring magic using psychedelics, and he had a mini nervous breakdown,”[1] although he declined to share this information with his collaborators at the time. Meanwhile things got even more vexed for From Hell. Tundra managed a second issue of reprints in the middle of the year before going under entirely. Its assets were ultimately acquired by Kitchen Sink Press, a by then longstanding underground publisher run by Dennis Kitchen, which moved its operations to Massachusetts to take over the cratering wreckage of the company. Recognizing From Hell as one of the actually commercially viable projects coming out of Tundra, Kitchen Sink worked to get things back on the rails, putting out a third issue in December of 1993 containing the last of the Taboo material.

By this time the dam had finally broken in full. On November 23rd, at his fortieth birthday party, Alan Moore declared that he would become a magician. As noted, this is no more of a lightswitch moment than the “grandeur and monstrosity” line. Indeed, in at least one telling of the story Moore says that “on that birthday I stated that I had become a magician,”[2] making it clear that this was a public acknowledgment of something that was already true. He’s also suggested that his motivation in this was simply that he was concerned about his own mental state, noting that he “told friends they ought to be keeping an eye on me.”[3] Mind, he’s also said he did it because he’d “started to run out of ways of worrying people. You should have seen the looks on their faces,”[4] so perhaps one is best advised to go with his eventual claim in The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic that he did it “for reasons which were no more clear to him than those of his associate’s magic sword experiment of nearly twenty years before.”

Whatever the reason, though, his decision plainly shifted the course of his previously disorganized and seemingly quite worrisome explorations. As he put it in one of his faltering attempts to account for himself, his declaration was made “so I couldn’t back out of it.”[5] But he knew the score, as Clint Mansell would put it. Speak a thing into existence like that and it’ll soon come true anyway. And sure enough, it did. A month and a half later, in the early days of 1994, Moore had his own version of William Gull’s encounter with Jahbulon, thankfully spurred by psilocybin instead of a stroke. In what he would identify as his first visionary experience, Alan Moore looked upon the golden face of what would henceforth be his god.

[1] The Comics Cube, “Rich Veitch Interview: 1963,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIfPDKgp_pM&t=6s&ab_channel=TheComicsCube

[2] Matt Brady, “Alan Moore, Practicing Magician,” 1999 interview for an unknown venue, transcript provided privately

[3] Nick Hasted, “He Does it With Magic,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/jun/01/artsfeatures.fiction

[4] Brad Stone, “Alan Moore Interview,” Comic Book Resources, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20081227042437/http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=511

[5] Matt Brady, “Alan Moore, Practicing Magician,” 1999 interview for an unknown venue, transcript provided privately