Another problem with deconstruction storytelling is that it often perpetuates and serves as a leading examples of the very tropes it often criticises and dismantles. Alan Moore often deconstructed comics in an effort to criticise their relentless darkness and sexualisation, but ended up only furthering such endemic issues. It's the same as Grant Morrison did with his Batman run and Batman Inc especially where almost everything was a criticism of DC Editorial and its obsession with immature darkness, even though the run itself was filled with relentless cheap darkness and blood and so on.
Just once I'd like to see a bloke want a return to the silver age fun, or the bronze age where darkness occurred but was used sparingly and to great effect, by actually writing a story in that vein. Just once. At least I'll always have BTBATB.
Good comment. It's sort of like what the guy from Monty Python said,
about wanting to create comedy that got away from punchlines and the traditional structure of sketch comedy and creating something that had
no shape......and the fact that the Oxford dictionary contains the
word "pythonesque" as an adjective describing similar comedic phenomena
is proof of the extent to which they failed.
(However, at least the stories he wrote, whether they achieved his aim or just became part of the structure he was attacking, were damn good reads, which really is the important bit. I think we judge the distinction between artistic brilliance, and artistic flop by the degree to which the art itself succeeds, from an audience's point of view. )
I suppose we can credit Moore with a degree of freshness, I suppose I keep banging on about MiracleMan (and to clarify for those of you in the UK, MarvelMan, because for legal reasons he couldn't be called MarvelMan in North America), it was an extension of what he tried to do with Captain Britain, to deconstruct the hero, show how foolish the character is....which is something he put in, quite subtly into the end of "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow."
Miracelman is dark in places, but also has its touches of humour (some of it quite black), and also a fair bit of warmth - something I haven't seen in a lot of Moore's work since then, but I haven't read as much of it as some of you, so if it's there let me know (didn't feel much warmth from L of EG in any of its incarnations).
Never read 1963.
Killing Joke.....yeah, it's hard to say what Moore was really trying to achieve there. There was certainly some boundary pushing (which Brian Bolland executed brilliantly). Reading it way back in the 80's I was never really convinced that they'd have a laugh, after all the terrible things the Joker has done. It was a stretch too far for me, almost as if Moore didn't know how to end it, and thought that up on the spur of the moment.
I remember feeling rather unsatisfied by the ending. Perhaps I'm just not a particularly sophisticated reader, but it didn't seem to gel with the rest of the story.....unless Batman had laughed, and then proceeded to kick seven kinds of **** out of the Joker -which would be more consistent with the character.
I know that Moore himself was never completely happy with it, but then what was he happy with.
For whatever reason the "straight" super-hero stories of Tom Strong never really grabbed my attention.
BTW since we have lots of folks in this thread who are interested in discussing the deconstruction of super-heroes, or at least savage parodies of them, anyone interested in a Marshall Law thread ? If you haven't read it, Marshall Law was on par with Moore for sex and violence (maybe a step further on the violence front), and probably the least-subtle and most savage parody of super-heroes ever ?
Any takers ? Just don't want to start a thread and end up talking to myself.
Or......what would the Invisibles have been like, if Moore wrote it instead of Morrison ?
