i think arkham asylum would work better written by alan grant and drawn by norm breyfogle.
the factionalism here is silly, but fun to think about for a while: moore, gaiman and mckean represent the general broadsheet side of the late eighties adult boom - to this day they get madder props for due to the coffetable friendliness of their definitive work. they have big enough faces for weight of face alone to have got them good gigs in hollywood or on the hapless fringes of mainstream publishing. despite their preference for stratospheric environments, they have good earthy links to the selfpub/B&W domains and are constantly raving about or namechecked by millidge, talbot, grist, bissette, campbell, or sim, the truly respectable, sane, hard-working individuals who're still out there building these crazy books we call comic from the ground-up.
at the same time neil, alan and the plump, poorly-groomed david were establishing their reputations another group of brits were doing the same thing. though they 'broke' a few years after affable al and nihilistic neil, the deadline lot, the hewletts, bonds and dillons, are basically contemporary with them. their style of comics was markedly different, revelling more in its disposability and alignment with yoof-pop culture. they were basically cartoonists or designers, different to mckean in ways that hardly need describing, who were into making comics that felt like music, or music journalism perhaps. morrison and milligan were who these chaps went to when they wanted a nicely crafted story to go around their pictures of people wearing indie-ts.
nearly twenty years on these two gangs haven't really met-up much. team spirit is still very sure of who it does and doesn't imbue. the cartoonies have solid links with both mainstream comics-publishing companies and the music biz, but the photomontagiers have shitloads of movies in production. so they've both won.
so we go back to the comics, where everyone started, and where everyone's relative talents can best be measured. personally, i'll take flex mentallo or rogan gosh over sandman and probably even from hell, moore's body of work is likely to persist further, his writing connects more easily with preconceived notions of how the lexis of literature should sound.
promethea ends this week. seven soldiers seems too big to convince me that there won't be holes here and there, for kovacs and boboss to twist their breeks around, and the comics blogosphere to give a lukewarm response. moore's forthcoming albion could turn out to be perfidious indeed: he might not even write most of it himself. it's a sign of the enormous good will he's built up that the word 'nepotism' has not yet been widely used around him.
point? no, there isn't one really. remember saying a while ago 'stuck in dynamic creative tension for the good of the rest of us'. i still hold by that, the barbs are fun, turning unseemly, especially to the fans of both who see so many similarities in their work (and lives - neither have been too shy about letting us know).
[and i think arkham asylum was okay. it's been years, but i remember thinking that the jung and the tarot held together pretty well. the fact that morrison has managed to put out a lot more batmanology thn moore has helps his case here. if moore really wanted to write a classic batman joker story, he should have told the tale of what happened the next time they met up.] |
