fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3075 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3075 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Spy]

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[Eurovision]

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[Captain America]

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14. [SPOILERS for Steven Universe]

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15. [SPOILERS for Age of Ultron]

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16. [SPOILERS for Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and DragonFable]

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17. [WARNING for sexual abuse]

(Duggar Family, 19 kids & Counting)

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18. [WARNING for incest]

[A Redtail's Dream]

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19. [WARNING for rape]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #439.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Alan Moore was the king of the "clever little monkey" and/or "pretentiously literary" schools of comic-book writers. Those who want to prove what clever little monkeys they are; and those who want to prove how highbrow and good with words they are, or something.

But after the success of his (disrespectful) Marvelman revival and his (admittedly very clever) Swamp Thing revamp, he fell into the trap of trying to do more weird revisions of other people's characters, because that's what he was known and praised for. Watchmen grew out of that, as did League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But that meant he was typecasting himself as "mean-spirited re-imagining guy."

I think he came to resent the very crowd he spent all that time playing to, even as he kept trying to go to the same well long after people got tired of, "Alan Moore knocks your childhood into some sewage."

This is both wrong, and anti-intellectual as shit

That was "anti-intellectual"?

Look, I like some of his stuff a lot. But he really needs to lay off other writers' characters, because he mostly writes them like he hates them.

The part that was anti-intellectual was the part where you said that people (or at least Alan Moore) only attempt to write serious comics because they're pretentious and trying to show off how clever they are.

That was anti-intellectual.

It's fine to dislike what Alan Moore wrote, I don't give a shit (even if I disagree), but he was trying to create good work. He wasn't trying to get people to think he was smart. Like I said, I think that it's incorrect, and I think it's anti-intellectual to take that attitude towards it. Because that way of thinking leads towards dismissing the whole idea of taking things seriously and writing complex things and making the kinds of things that get called highbrow.

Ah, you misunderstand me. I'm plenty intellectual, and I can appreciate his intellectual tendencies. I mostly disagree with a particular trope, a strong tendency in his work:

Marvelman
Swamp Thing (though it worked here)
Watchmen (in the original pitch, where Osterman was a fanfic version of Captain Atom)
The Killing Joke
Lost Girls
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

He repeatedly takes other people's characters and "reinvents" them in a deliberately sordid way. Is that intellectual, or something else? It's not that these works don't have good points. They just have a thread of nastiness if not contempt.

Now, The Ballad of Halo Jones, that was pretty neat, I thought. His Green Lantern Corps stories are mostly good, at least the ones where he created new ringbearers. And his Swamp Thing is genuinely really clever, creepy horror for the most part.

But he has relied an awful lot on taking other writers' work and saying, "Let's make this dark and twisted." It's a crutch, and it became an obvious trope with him. I think his work suffers for relying so much on existing properties and earlier writers while treating them all with an ornately developed contempt.

If that's not a toxic pretension, I don't know what you call it.

So do you or do you not think that "Alan Moore was the king of the 'clever little monkey' and/or 'pretentiously literary' schools of comic-book writers. Those who want to prove what clever little monkeys they are; and those who want to prove how highbrow and good with words they are, or something."

It's fine to think that the method of reinventing existing properties is not a good one (although I disagree, in part because, you know, we're talking about comic books) but that's the main sentiment that I find really objectionable here

In the sense that he led to the success of Morrison, Delano, and Hickman, obviously he's a very bad thing. ;P

But I said he was the king, and then he fell. Into the trap of doing work both derivative and contemptuous of others.

DA But comics is all about taking other people's (well, a company's) characters and re-inventing them in your own way. And Lost Girls wasn't sordid at all, I found it quite touching. The re-imagining is one part of Alan Moore's work, and I think not his best (apart from Swamp Thing), but it's hardly the desperate showing-off you're attributing to him, especially as it's a relatively small part of his enormous output over the decades.

If you want "mean-spirited re-imagining guy" Frank Miller is right over there.

And what I'm saying is that Moore was better when he was working on his own characters, rather than dredging up other people's characters and saying, "Look! This character was actually a massive social deviant! Bet you can never go back and reread that story without thinking of me, and the giant glob of filth I dumped on it! You're welcome!"

He's an ass.

[ SECRET POST #3075 ]

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT ALAN MOORE

Re: LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT ALAN MOORE

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