Over the course of the 1990s, Alan Moore went slowly, beautifully, batshit insane.
You can see it as far back as his early work at Warrior, of course, but the specific transition from his surprisingly good word at Rob Lefield's Awesome Comics to his mind-numblingly amazing work at America's Best Comics (ABC) shows a man on a mission.
Supreme and the unfinished Glory are both pastiches of familiar supeheroes, Superman and Wonder Woman, respectively, that go into the constructed and fictional nature of the characters. Supreme's world betrays, as it would, the fact that he's not only a fictional character, but a product of an industry in which artists change their minds, are replaced on a regular basis, and go through specific, identifiable eras of storytelling. Supreme actually meets his previous incarnations and acknolwedges them as such. The fact that Moore took over the title mid-way through, much like DC's last-minute decision to not let him use the Chartlon Comics characters for Watchmen, is a happy accident that leads to a way to rewrite Supreme, and, in the process, a way to reveal the rewriting itself.
Moore seems devoted to pulling back the curtain, revealing the stitchwork, generally displaying how literature, and by extension symbol and metaphor, actually function, rather than smoothing them over. Gaiman is absolutely brilliant at knitting fictional worlds together in such a way that you'll never see the join. He's a true craftsman, that way. Moore is a little more post-modern; he not only wants us to see the join, but he wants us to understand what the join, seeing the join, and having an artist show it us actually means in regards to how we understand the universe, and (therefore) how the universe functions.
Also, he converted to wizardry as his religion at some point in the late 80s/early 90s. So, you know, batshit insane.
But as he said in an interview on BBC radio last year, although it sounds crazy, magic really is exactly what writers do. They create things out of nothing using only words. The same is true of any artist. And I think he and Gaiman are very much on the same page on this.
Compare the work with symbol and metaphor in fictional fantasy worlds in Moore's Promethea and Supreme to Gaiman's Sandman and Books of Magic: The Prequel, and we will see some very specific common themes.
First, the desire to locate it all within British/European literature, which is a little annoying because it has a tendancy to cast faulty universals onto the rest of humanity. To their credit, both writers extend themselves past the Western tradition and they do so with the same respect and talent as they do with everything, but Moore's magical history of the world in Promethea #12, which follows the birth of the universe through to the post-modern revolution through Tarot cards, Alyster Crowly, and the Kaballah, pretty much assumes that Western history is a universal path, while never once mentioning China or India or anywhere East of, well, Germany. There's nothing wrong with talking about Western history, of course, but I'd prefer a teensy bit more of an admission that is what he's talking about. Gaiman has similar moments, and I have similar complaints about them.
Past that, though, the insistance that it's all metaphor anyway is fascinating. Over and over again, their characters remind each other that we see things a certain way because we are trained to do so. The snake and the woman, for example, are very potent symbols in Promethea, conveniently stand in for the mind (creation, imagination, conception) and the material (the twin snakes of the Cauduceaus become the double-helix of DNA, and therefore of living matter). However, they're just one way to percieve that split, and the very split itself is just one way to see the universe. Despite how heavily invested Promethea is in that particular metaphorical perception of the world, the content of the book still leaves the door open to a different kind conception. The woman/snake image is just this book's way of representing what this book has to say about a particular thing.
The magic is the creation, the fact that a different kind of perception effectively leads to living in a different universe. This is not to claim that the external, objective world actually changes but merely to acknowledge just how powerful our perception of the world is in determining how we function in it and what decisions we make. How we percieve the universe just is as close as we'll ever get to understanding it objectively. No matter how accurate our perceptions are, they're still perceptions, and still bound by the way that humans think, which is based on the filters we create in our brains that allow us to interpret the raw information fed to us by our senses.
So, if our concept of the 'objective' is always based on a conceptual construct, then changing our conceptual construct really does change the world in which we live, because that's all we are, at a certain level, concepts, perceptions, and ideas.
Posted by orion at September 15, 2005 2:13 PM | TrackBack