Finished.
My conclusion, if anyone's interested:
Eh.
(And I say that as someone who has followed Moore's work since D.R. & Quinch, Marvelman, and Swamp Thing, and thinks he's the best comics writer of all time. And who can recite huge chunks of the Alice books from memory.)
Moore pulls off a few excellent formal tricks (the Seven Sins bit I mentioned above, some bits involving Alice's mirror, and some twists on the Oz, Peter Pan, and Alice stories), but the writing is over-florid, the plot's a bit dull, and the points he's trying to make seem pretty obvious (women need to understand their own sexuality, war is bad, sex is usually good). And Moore has interesting ideas of how a early 20th century Kansas farm girl talks.
I have to admit that at times I found myself wanting much less sex and much more plot.
And Gebbie's artistic skill is . . . limited. She does beautiful pastiches (Schiele, Mucha, and Beardsley, among others), and her color sense is fantastic, but she seems to have serious problems with proportion, anatomy, perspective, and simple illustration that can't just be chalked up to her distinctive style.
An interesting experiment, but not worth waiting 16 years for.
Of course, everyone here will have to judge it for him- or herself. |
