by DennisMM on Sun Dec 23, 2007 4:55 am
Gaiman has a great deal of charm, personally and in his prose and scripts. Miller is intense and honest, once again personally and in his work. The one I haven't exchanged a few words with is Moore, but I've read enough about him to see his personality reflected in his writing. And it is prismatic.
Gaiman feels, in a slightly melancholy fashion, reflecting on possibilities. Miller asserts, in a bold, Hemingway-esque manner especially in his more recent work. Both are very talented, but their talents are rather tightly focused. They do a couple of things very well.
Moore, on the other hand, is to comics writing what Bill Sienkiewicz is to comics art. He explodes with possibilities, writing across a wide range of genres. If his works sometimes have too similar a voice, it is the voice of a probing intelligence trying to see past what is in front of it into deeper reality. It can involve magick, which Moore practices as part of his spiritual beliefs, or quantum physics (and today no doubt would include string and brane theory). He writes about politics constantly, economics more than occasionally, personal and societal prejudices, and, once in a while, the psychology and sociology of violence.
We must consider how long each man has been working in comics. Gaiman has been writing and very occasionally drawing for about 20 years. Miller has been drawing for 30 years and writing for 25. Moore has been writing and very occasionally drawing for 30. Moore obviously has the advantage of longevity, although he has been fallow for years at a time without releasing non-comics work, unlike Gaiman who mostly writes fantasy novels these days and Miller who does film work now and again.
Gaiman has largely worked with classic fantasy themes, sometimes moving them into the modern world, most obviously in Sandman but also in The Books of Magic and Stardust. He took on the post-postmodern superhero when Alan Moore handed him the reins of Miracleman (and would have taken the reins of Swamp Thing from Rick Veitch had Veitch not been censored by DC). His most notable non-genre work has examined the nature of memory - Violent Cases, Signal to Noise, Mr. Punch. (Signal to Noise was just republished in a lovely hardcover edition, BTW.) In recent years he's taken on traditional superhero themes and bent them for his own purposes, as in 1602 and Eternals.
Miller's work, starting with his first writing assignment on Daredevil in 1982, all but created the "grim and gritty" superhero style that spread like kudzu through the '90s and still has to be sprayed with malathion periodically to stop it covering the dang detached writing room/studio (AKA the garage). He's done tough superheroes with Daredevil and Batman; tough sf war stories in the Martha Washington series; tough hard guys and women in Sin City; tough cyborgs in Robocop and Hard Boiled and tough ancient Greek warriors in 300. His work since the late '80s has been characterized by a cynical, libertarian streak where governments and militaries are led by arrogant incompetents and so are largely impotent. Corporations that may take the place of either of those institutions are bound to be just as corrupt. When he does leave the tough genre he tends to be childlike in his enthusiasm, as in The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot.
Moore - fuck, Alan Moore can write like nobody's business. He started with a crude, weekly gag strip in a music paper, moved on to short, humorous stories in 2000 AD and a couple of Dr. Who stories for Marvel UK. Then he exploded. In 1982, Warrior #1 contained the first installments of both "Marvelman" and "V for Vendetta," with each appearing over most of the next 20 issues. It's not unknown for writers to produce more than one work at a time, and the Warrior installments were short, but we're talking about some serious work here. During this period he wrote "Skizz" for 2000 AD - his own take on the first-contact story as ripped off from E.T. by order of the editor - and continued to produce gag stories for Fleetway.
In 1983 he took over Swamp Thing from Martin Pasko and in his second issue redefined the character with such exacting logic (as seen through the DC superhero lens) that it became the standard for dark fantasy and essentially made the Vertigo imprint necessary. Twenty-five years on, Moore's earliest ST stories may look a little bit naive, but if you'd spent ten years following the character, "The Anatomy Lesson" was as much of a shock for you as being shot in the head was for Swampy.
Moore wrote Swamp Thing until 1987. During that time he also produced the feminist science fiction strip "The Ballad of Halo Jones" for 2000 AD, while continuing to contribute "V" and "Marvelman" scripts and yet more humor (okay, it was D.R. and Quinch - they were meant to be funny) stories. He wrote a number of backup stories for DC and First Comics, several issues of mainstream DC hero books, and three Superman stories - a Swamp Thing crossover in DC Comics Presents #85, the Superman Annual story "For the Man Who Has Everything" and the Silver Age Superman's astounding farewell, "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?"
In 1986, as he worked at wrapping up Swamp Thing, Moore was also writing Watchmen. and Eclipse Comics' continuation of "Marvelman," Miracleman. '87 brought a Batman annual, '88 The Killing Joke and the first installments of "From Hell" in Taboo. The next five years were slow, with a number of projects interrupted. "Lost Girls," which had appeared in Taboo, just ended. "From Hell" stopped. Big Numbers, a study of an English city, died when Bill Sienkiewicz and Moore could not work together. However, Moore did finish the psychological study A Small Killing and his wonderful early Marvel pastiche, 1963, as well as conclude V for Vendetta.
I could go on for another ten paragraphs likely. Moore did a lot of work for Image in the early '90s. Some of it was clever work that paid the bills, other was bad work that paid the bills Later in the decade he wrote Supreme, which was nearly as good a pastiche of Superman as 1963 had been of Marvel. Then came ABC and we got takes on pulp, Jack Cole, Tom Swift and the Phantom Lady in America's Best, plus Doc Savage in Tom Strong. Promethea showed me something I'd never seen before - a comic in which the story existed to present the beginnings of a philosophy. And Top Ten was an attempt to mix half a dozen genres together, throw in some Hill Street Blues and see what would stick to the wall.
Moore wins. There's no other logical choice.
Last edited by
DennisMM on Mon Dec 24, 2007 7:25 am, edited 3 times in total.
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but that 'one plot' sounds general enough to work more than once. Do the similarities in the works you mentionend go past that point?
