LWIA 4.3: The End of Taboo

One more section of Act II to write after this, which will be an absolute doozy, though thankfully not in anything like the way that fucking Sinclair section was.

Taboo #5 came out at the end of 1991. Two further issues appeared in 1992—an output that momentarily bested Eddie Campbell’s oft-repeated bon mot that it was “a quarterly anthology that came out once a year,”[1] but these marked the end of the line for Bissette’s perpetually troubled anthology. This was inevitable—as Bissette later put it, “Taboo was like a kamikaze plane going into the deck of the Midway. It was a defunct business model before it started! I lost tens of thousands of dollars. […] My family ate macaroni and cheese some weeks.”[2] Bissette would later identify the death blow as Moore and Campbell’s decision to begin republishing From Hell as standalone issues, saying that “it killed our numbers because the people that were picking up Taboo particularly to follow From Hell had no reason to pick it up any longer.”[3] In fact, Dave Sim, who served as Bissette’s advisor and financial backer on the project, had warned him that From Hell was a bad idea in the first place, claiming that “serialized stories kill anthologies.”[4] (Ironically, Eddie Campbell was just as displeased with the arrangement, repeatedly arguing that he “didn’t think an irregular anthology was the best place to be running an ambitious serial.”)[5]

But Bissette also just found that he disliked the job of publishing, concluding that “I just don’t have the mercenary instincts necessary” to do the job[6] and complaining that he found himself torn between the degree to which he “was not willing to continue to allow myself to be exploited as a selfless publisher on Taboo; that was a no-win situation. Nor was I willing to embrace the opposite.”[7] He also discussed the ugly emotions the job instilled in him, noting how From Hell “might not have been conceived without my vehicle. I suggested to Alan the collaboration of Eddie as artist, and worked hard to implement it. I fronted money when it was needed, even when to do so meant hard times for my family. But it is in no way my creation or property, nor should it be considered as such. I still wrestle with those emotions […]. When that marquee appears, if the film From Hell is actually made, that’s going to be a real rough night for me. I feel I have no right to have those feelings.”[8] Stepping into the role of publisher proved particularly rough for Bissette’s relationship with Moore. As he put it—in the interview that would ultimately end their friendship—“as soon as I sent that first check to him, I became the employer, and Alan became the employee, and that relationship began to assert itself.”[9]

Indeed, the experience seems largely to have burnt Bissette out almost entirely. He moved on to his self-published Tyrant, a dinosaur comic about the life of a tyrannosaurus, but only managed to produce four issues before that venture collapsed, and his work on it gives every sign of being rife with self-sabotage. In one interview he talks about abandoning a plot point about the dinosaur being caught in the vicinity of an erupting volcano, but then “I saw on one of those shows, they had a whole episode about dinosaurs and volcanoes, and I went ‘Oh, there goes that story arc,’” a decidedly puzzling decision to make on the back of some nature documentary Bissette couldn’t even remember the name of a decade later. Eddie Campbell is positively withering on the matter, saying that “Steve has so many cockeyed justifications for not finishing his epic Tyrant, the biography of a dinosaur (he got four issues of the 24 page comic out in three years), that if you sit through a session of listening to them you will lose the will to live,”[10] noting that Bissette complained about the unsustainability of his order numbers despite Campbell managing to be perfectly successful on a third as many. As he put it, “the simple fact is that if Steve had continued to work on Tyrant for half an hour every day while making a living doing other things, he would have had a completed project years ago and publishers would have fought and still be fighting each other to have a part of it. But he would have to finish it first, because no publisher would commission it with an advance payment. None of them would hope to live so long.”[11] (Campbell goes on to predict that “Steve will write 500 words in the comments [of the blog post], during which time he could hypothetically drawn a panel of Tyrant”; in fact it was only 180 words, so probably only enough for layouts.) Bissette, in any case, retired from comics a few years later.

And so, as 1992 wound to a close, neither From Hell nor Lost Girls had any obvious home. The collected edition of From Hell that had been such a death blow to Taboo had come out in 1991 from Tundra, which was in about as rough shape as Taboo had been, and no second issue was obviously following. Lost Girls, meanwhile, presented a massive challenge for any publisher due to being literal pornography. Just five years out from being on top of the world with the completion of Watchmen, Moore was all but without a career, all three of his creator owned epics having run aground. And all of this on top of a divorce in which his kids went with his ex-wife, leaving him alone in his house amidst the ruins of all his grand ambitions. Little wonder, then, that he went completely mad.

[1] Eddie Campbell’s blog, https://eddiecampbell.blogspot.com/2009/07/s-teve-bissette-is-interviewed-at-av.html

[2] Chris Dahlen, “Steve Bissette,” The AV Club, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20090726105431/http://www.avclub.com/articles/steve-bissette,30751/2/

[3] Kim Thompson, “Steve Bissette: Back to the Drawing Board,” The Comics Journai #185

[4] Kim Thompson, “Steve Bissette: Back to the Drawing Board,” The Comics Journai #185

[5] Eddie Campbell, From Hell Companion

[6] Kim Thompson, “Steve Bissette: Back to the Drawing Board,” The Comics Journai #185

[7] Kim Thompson, “Steve Bissette: Back to the Drawing Board,” The Comics Journai #185

[8] Kim Thompson, “Steve Bissette: Back to the Drawing Board,” The Comics Journai #185

[9] Kim Thompson, “Steve Bissette: Back to the Drawing Board,” The Comics Journai #185

[10] Eddie Campbell’s blog, https://eddiecampbell.blogspot.com/2009/07/s-teve-bissette-is-interviewed-at-av.html

[11] Eddie Campbell’s blog, https://eddiecampbell.blogspot.com/2009/07/s-teve-bissette-is-interviewed-at-av.html