Those who forget are doomed.
Holy Christ. I’d forgotten. It’s been bugging me all this time and I’d clean forgotten until something, some quirk, some happenstance jolt sparking between here and here maybe lit up the memory and I squatted, in the muck, hauled it up, felt a chill…
You’ve seen this, I’m sure.
And we’ve read all the foofooraw and snarked it up about as far as it will go, but there was still, somewhere, deep inside, a chill. You felt it. Didn’t you? I did. And I don’t know where it came from for you, and like I said, I had no idea where it was coming from for me, until I remembered “In Pictopia.” —Buzz Bunny opening that black gash of a sneer and spitting “What’s up, doc?” like it was “This time, it’s personal,” that’s pretty much the moment when Nocturno taps Flexible Flynn on the shoulder and Flynn turns around and he’s, he’s different, and forget for a moment the fact that the changes in the funnybook industry that Moore and Simpson were allegorizing so terribly well in “Pictopia” are no longer a pressing concern; the long Dark Knight of the superhero soul has come and gone and commented ironically on itself and we’ve had nostalgia explosions since then, and joycore, we’ve eaten it all up and gotten used to the idea that the occasional paradigm twitch is part of the paradigm, now, and if Sue Dibny is dead, well, the Teen Titans are tearing up the cartoon ratings. It’s a wash. —Oh! You’re gonna jump when Buzz snarls, all trace of the transvestite trickster god ruthlessly rubbed from his face and voice. It’ll give your innards that twist of wrongness that only Echthroi and the finest committee-dump entertainment product can manage—it’s a pure shot of the visceral punch that Moore and Simpson so lovingly, heartsickly conjure up with the blank flat sneer on Flynn’s steroided face. But the snarl, the sneer, those are just the signs: what’s signified is what you see when you stumble out of Captain Billy’s on the desperate, despairing heels of Nocturno, through the black-and-white streets past windblown scraps of blank paper to the very edge of town where you cling to the chain-link fence. Out there, past all that, is nothing. It’s empty and flat. Far as the eye can see.
Is it getting bigger? Blanker? Coming closer?
Sure, laugh at the Loonatics. It’s gut-bucket funny how bad it is, how naked the opportunism, how shoddy the assembly, how quickly it will fold and be forgotten. But it was here, in the first place. This isn’t bad art; please. That we will always have with us. This is something else, and we may always have that with us, too. Now.
Mind the chill. Remember the run to the fence. We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again.
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Well, no, I hadn't heard, actually.
Rather disturbing, yes. My own son
(eight next month) has had moderate
exposure to things like "Teen Titans"
and "Foster's Home", but when we catch
an old Tom & Jerry or Bugs, he laughs
just as vociferously. There's something
pure about an eight-year-old boy laughing
so hard at a cartoon cat getting whomped
by a cartoon mouse that he breaks wind.
But I digress. I appreciate the alert -
Loonatics sounds like something to keep
out of our house, like rat poison or Chick
tracts. The post does bring up something
that occasionally troubles me on this site:
how much of this stuff should I know?
Echthroi and Captain Billy's Whizbang,
yes, I get that, and I've even read the
second Dark Knight series all the way through,
but. . . . In Pictopia? No idea, never
saw it. Knowing that it introduces themes
Moore would use later in "Supreme" doesn't
help - never saw "Supreme". I liked "Ministry of Space" - does that count for partial credit?
Is there some Baedeker to what the well-informed comics cognoscento should know/read/have read?
It's a 1986 story from Alan Moore and Don Simpson that appeared in a color anthology Fantagraphics put out (I think) to help cover costs in their fight with Harlan Ellison (?). So, yes, obscure, though you can find a copy of the short in The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. And while I do write aslant and askew sometimes (some?), I do try to sprinkle some few tidbits of hints: there's a link to a rather full synopsis of the story in the text above. No substitute for the real thing, but hey. —In the age of Google, I think one can afford onself a little more room for allusiveness (we can with a little work make our own Baedekers), but you could make a case that I maybe afford a little too much room. (I'm still chuffed at Scott's "overextended" riff above. —Oh: I even found some fanfic for "Pictopia," though I couldn't work it in.)
I appreciate the expansion - I'd already hit some of the links and read about In Pictopia - the fanfic was a great surprise. Nice to see the distorted names and figure out (most) of them - sort of like in DK2 seeing what was done with various Gold and Silver Age characters.
What I meant was more like this - when reading the "Planetary" collection, the sequence with IIRC
John Constantine's funeral, the cameo of Death and Dream feeding pigeons (got that) and a crowd of "'80s people" who have turned out to mourn.
Until "Books of Magic" I had no clue who John Constantine was supposed to be; first encountered him in "Sandman", and still don't know who most of the mourners were, or what happened to comics in the '80s. The recent _history_ of comics, in other words. To employ my usual formula, I know more about the Thirty Years War than I do about what Alan Moore did before LoEG. (Wait, just checked Google - what?! He did "From Hell"? Had _no_ idea. And "Miracleman"? I've heard of that - it was mentioned in Beanworld).
See what I mean? I know Beanworld, but not Miracleman. I know more about Elfheim than I do about Elfquest. There's no pattern, no consistency, no overview. FWIW, I'm not expecting LSSP to provide one, but if you have any suggestions as to where I might look, it'd be greatly appreciated.
(Just for the record - are you not just a bit surprised at someone who only knows about Miracleman because it was mentioned in Beanworld?)
I'd forgotten Eclipse did a company-wide crossover that ended up tossing the Beans and Miracleman together. Wow. —For a delicious dose of irony, rumor has it Marvel will end up getting Miracleman back in print, or at least had it so a while back; since Miracleman was once Marvelman, and had to change his name to prevent upstart Marvel from suing his ass back to the Stone Age when he came over the water, well, like I said, irony.
If and when it does come out, it's worth picking up: if nothing else, there's a paper or three to be written stacking it next to Promethea and seeing what happens when you balance tropes of fantasy and SF, "science" and "magic," "Male" and "Female" (soi disant, soi, soi disant), internal and external, personal and political, elegiac and celebratory, young turk and old master—the two comics definitely tango with each other in some interesting ways, I think.
As far as a Bædeker—again, I've got little to recommend, I'm afraid. I read a lot in the late '80s and was in the reviewing game in the '90s, but now all I do is scope out some stuff online and pick up the occasional Grant Morrison comic. —Probably the best starting place I can think of is The Staros Report: it's out-of-date and has its biases and there's the problems you end up with whenever you try to rank anything, but it's got a lot to go looking for. Also, for a broader view, the Comics Journal's top 100 lists. But again, caveat caveat starting point only go forth and read and read, &c.
Anyone else have any suggestions?