mark monday's Reviews > DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore

Green Arrow: "That's my whole point... it's like Darwinism or something... we're gradually weeding out all the just-plain-average goons, gradually improving the strain..."

superstar Alan Moore visited the DC Universe many times - and tore shit up with each visit. this graphic novel collects his takes on various iconic figures, including Superman & Batman & the Joker & Brainiac & lions & tigers & bears, oh my. he destroys and he rebuilds and then he exits - leaving everyone else to live in worlds of his own design. vastly improved worlds... but darker ones.

Phantom Stranger: "Blunting the sharp pebbles of memory with ten thousand years of footsteps, I walk."

Moore visits the past and re-shapes it - yet nothing is lost and everything is gained. flimsy characters - conceits, really, like the Phantom Stranger - achieve surprising depth and are given lives filled with tragedy and despair and much else under his stern eye. and his revisions make so much sense that they were not only accepted by mainstream audiences, they served to guide those characters' destinies for many years to come. and happily, these tragic backstories are all delivered with a healthy dose of humor and irony. Moore is that charming guy who will crush your tidy worldview with a few choice bits of off-center insight into the true nature of things, and then will cap it off with some amusing banter so that you won't feel hollowed-out. well, not completely hollowed-out. just a little.

Vigilante: "And nothing's anybody's fault, right?"

Moore can be ruthless, and in a way that i really do not like. to me, there is a difference between showing the true misery of the real world... and wallowing in it. not challenging that cruelty and sadism, but getting right in there, rolling around in the muck, wearing it like new clothes. and they were new clothes - it was visionaries like Moore and Frank Miller who understood that to achieve depth you have to show what is sordid and unclean. you have to achieve tragedy in real, understandable ways. i get it, but i don't have to like it, not all the time. the Vigilante story included in this collection is extremely distasteful - it has a callousness that comes across as almost complacent to me. and the most famous tale "The Killing Joke" is more of the same. that story is justly famous. indeed, it is brilliant. but it is also extremely disagreeable.

i have a friend who is an artist. once he made a piece of... i suppose you could call it "art". it was an old tv and on the screen he had put a print of that classic photo from the Vietnam war of a naked vietnamese child running away from a napalm attack, burned and crying. then he placed it where the tv that he had thrown out the window used to be, and kept it there for all to see, as a comment on violence and the media. i got the point. fuck, it was practically shoved right in my face. yeah, i got the point but i didn't appreciate the brutality of how that point was made. you can make a point without punching me in the head.

Swamp Thing: "Forget the scarlet and the heat... touch my hand and let the inferno within you be... extinguished... by cool darkness... by endless green..."

fortunately, Moore is a lot more than a cynical guy who donkey punches you. his vision is usually bleak, but it is also often full of tenderness, a wry take on things, a true love for his characters and an understanding of what makes them icons. i was not too into Moore + Batman, but Moore + Superman is something else altogether. there i can see the complete vision - one that includes darkness and ugly irony and tragic trajectories, of course, but it is a vision that can be forward-looking, full of warmth and understanding, full of compassion for mortals and immortals and everything inbetween. it is possible to strip everything bare, to take away sentiment and easy comfort and cliche... and to still reach for truth, or a kind of truth, and so be lifted. it doesn't always have to be ugly; it can also be transcendent.

that is the Moore that i love.

Abin Sur: "Begone, illusions. You have nothing that I desire."