LWIA 4.3: Introduction

At last, the first.

I'll package this into an Act I omnibus and get that out in the coming days, along with revised omnibi of the first two chapters that balance the "comics industry implodes" material between them instead of putting it all in Chapter 1.

And from there it's on to Act II, which has what's probably the most fearsome research knot I've ever had to untangle in LWIA, so will probably lead to another planning notes document for the $25s and a couple weeks hiatus before I can get back to work.

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Moore, on the other hand, was a busy man indeed. This fact was largely why he found himself having to crank out silly Image comics on the regular. Or, perhaps more specifically, it was the fact that virtually none of his other projects at the time had any sort of commercial prospects. This was the basic dynamic of Moore’s Image period—a bevy of gigs writing high quality stupid comics taken entirely for the money, and a second set of of gigs creating esoteric and often obtuse works taken entirely because Moore believed in their artistic merits.

After the collapse of Big Numbers the biggest of these was From Hell. This would not remain uncommercial forever—once his collaborator Eddie Campbell did the work of collecting it as a trade paperback in 1999 it became a perennial backlist seller that moved a couple thousand copies a year. More to the point, it eventually would become established as Moore’s second great magnum opus—the comic that, along with Watchmen, provided the frontline defense of the claim that he was an all-time master of the medium. But during the period where Moore was writing Fire From Heaven and Violator vs. Badrock it was a black and white comic being published by a small time publisher with as much as nine month gaps between the issues. And this marked a significant improvement upon the initial terms on which From Hell was published back in 1989, a full decade before it finally became a stable-selling trade paperback. 

From Hell started so small as to be nearly invisible, in the second issue of Taboo. This was a horror anthology published by Steve Bissette under his own Spiderbaby Grafix imprint. This was something of a high profile boondoggle. Its contributors’ list was stunning—S. Clay Wilson, Charles Vess, Chester Brown, Neil Gaiman, Michael Zulli, Moebius, Dave Sim, Ramsey Campbell, and Clive Barker all contributed at various points. But its pay was desultory—$100 a page, to be split between writer and artist—and even at that rate Bissette haemorrhaged money. But the very things that made it a disastrously unsustainable—the fact that, as Bissette later put it, it was “too fucked up, too big (one hundred pages plus per issue), too expensive to produce, too high a cover price, too selfless a business agenda, too generous with its royalties, too erratically scheduled, and too confrontational”—also made it, for the brief period of its existence, one of the most vibrant comics anthologies ever produced.

Unsurprisingly, given his then close friendship with Bissette, Alan Moore was involved from the start. His contribution to the first issue, published in the fall of 1988, was a nine page story with Bill Wray called “Come On Down” about a game show called Brief Candle in which contestants spin a wheel to determine the way in which they’ll be killed on stage. This, however, had been repurposed from Harris Comics’ abortive attempt to resurrect Warren Publishing’s Creepy, and Moore soon got to work creating From Hell as an bespoke contribution. But this remained a marginal piece—Moore brought it up fleetingly in a couple of interviews, but was not actually asked a question about it in any interviews prior to a 1991 Comics Journal piece, and even there Gary Groth leaves it for the end.

This initial sense of smallness is in many ways mirrored in the work’s beginning. Its opening section, a prologue entitled “The Old Men on the Shore,” is fascinatingly understated. Its title is wholly descriptive—its entire plot consists of two men, a Mr. Abberine and a Mr. Lees, having a conversation as they walk along the Bournesmouth shore in 1923. Their conversation is oblique—some matter from Abberline’s past as a policeman that he and Lees allowed to be covered up because, as Abberline puts it, “we didn’t want our throats cut.” Eventually they return to Abberline’s house and the chapter ends.

It is only with hindsight—the knowledge of From Hell’s eventual weight and the seismic changes to Moore’s life that it would unleash—that “The Old Men on the Shore” betrays its significance. Its key scene comes when Mr. Lees—evidently a spiritualist of some sort—confesses to Abberline that he is in fact a fraud who began claiming to have visions as a small, frail child because he liked the attention. Abberline is astonished, asking “what about the seizures, man? I’ve seen you meself, rigid as a sleeve-board; eyes like blessed millwheels.” But Lees proceeds to fake a seizure, offering a prediction that he sees death in five years (the real Frederick Abberline would in fact live six more). Abberline is still dumbfounded. “What you said,” he protests. “Everything you said, it all happened. It was all true.”

It is at this point that Alan Moore comes to write what would prove, perhaps, the single most consequential line of dialogue in his entire career—the pebble bouncing down the mountainside to prefigure the avalanche of change that would follow. Years later, when publishing the final epilogue of From Hell, Moore would cheekily use a blown up version of this panel as the whole of his author’s statement. In a real sense, it could serve as a statement on his whole career—his life’s work summarized in a single sentence the import of which he could not possibly have understood as he scripted it. Indeed, looking at the script it’s plain that he did not—he swallows the line in a panel with two other lines of dialogue, and requires Eddie Campbell to recognize the beat’s import and move it forward to the next panel, joining it with the wry “That’s the funny part” that concludes the thought. Moore describes how “As Lees looks out towards us in the foreground his eyes are still haunted and full of sorrow and tragedy, but one corner of his mouth lifts up slightly into a sad little half smile.”

And then he explains. “I made it all up, and it all came true anyway.”