The Alan Moore Storytelling Masterclass Masterclass
In an effort to achieve this newsletter's ultimate goal, which is a complete takeover of the American comic book industry for the purpose of revenge against everyone that has ever said anything negative about the comic book miniseries Heroes in Crisis, I have taken it upon myself to learn the arcane ways of comic making, the lost secrets of the craft that could turn me from untalented aspirant to most powerful keeper of the order. It's a long and arduous process, as one might expect, so any help is welcome. As it happened this week, help was on the way, in the form of an online masterclass on storytelling published by the BBC, and taught by none other than Alan Moore, man of many legends.
Here's the thing, however: as with the rest of his work, this is a masterclass that is often too dense for its own good, and far too amused by its tangents, whether or not they're artful enough to please. The man has many thoughts, and he loves to entertain them. In some ways I get it, this is part of his charm, but it can be too much. But this is where I come in, dear reader: in exchange for your absolute loyalty in the times that are ahead of us, I am willing to part with the great wisdom I gleaned from an elder most illustrious, and I am willing to put it in a form that you may use in your own storytelling projects. You're welcome.
TIP ONE: MAKE IT SO OLD COMICS WERE FAKE ACTUALLY
An essential quality of all great stories is their ability to challenge the familiar. The beauty of it is that you do not have to use allegory or metaphor to do so. The secret to making a work challenging and therefore great is to simply state or imply that everything that has come before your work is fake, and bad, and also wrong. The old Marvelman comics? Fake. Swamp Thing being about Alec Holland's quest to reclaim his own humanity? Fake. The turn-of-the-20th-century literary canon? Real, but mostly fake! As you can see, there are complexities to it, but if you start from the assumption that you're right and they're wrong, and you say it in the work, you're challenging the status quo, and that's how classics are made.
TIP TWO: ADD SEXUAL VIOLENCE
All great stories are about society in some way, and, society, at its heart, is a relationship enforced by violence. The question any storyteller worth their salt should be asking, then, is how to make that violence visible to people that have been immersed in society their entire lives? Regular violence isn't going to cut it, because regular violence is the way of the world. You have to find some way to make the violence just a little bit worse. And that's where sexual violence comes in. It's violence, but it's graphic and shocking enough that people will take notice. So, go ahead, add some sexual violence to your comic. That way, people will know: it's about society.
TIP THREE: EVERYTHING MADE AFTER 1968 IS IRREDEEMABLY SHIT
Now, this isn't really a storytelling tip as much as it is a stone cold fact: all culture stopped being worthwhile after 1968. We do not know why or how. No one has been able to explain it. Scientists have looked into it, and they have found that nothing good has been made after January 1st, 1969. It's all been trash, terrible stuff, and it is why society is so bad now. Again: there is no explanation for this. Culture just used to be better, and your duty as a storyteller is not to question that in any way. Does that mean you're doomed to be awful? Yeah. Sorry.
TIP FOUR: SOME RACISM IS GOING TO GET IN
Part of being a great storyteller is making peace with the fact that yeah, as much as you're going to try, some racism is going to get in. You're going to cover the whole history of fiction, you will have the Golliwog in there, across multiple volumes. That just happens, and it will be weird, but it is in no way your fault. You're a great storyteller, and, on occasion, there will be something massively racist in there that is fully out of your control. But that's how it goes sometimes! I'm Alan Moore! I wrote Neonomicon! See ya!
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: I HAVE NEVER LEARNED ANYTHING DOING THIS AND I'M NOT ABOUT TO START
There are a lot of interesting contradictions making up We Have Demons #1, Greg Capullo and Scott Snyder's newest, finally released on paper at Dark Horse after a few months as a Comixology (rip) Original. The biggest one is of course the setup, an attempt at putting ideas and iconography borrowed from Christianity into the decidedly secular framework of the action-adventure serial. Past the ancient cosmologies, the origin stories and the creation myths, this is a story about angels fighting demons with a variety of cool bladed weapons. With an awkward earnestness, it tries to gesture at being something deeper, faith in a context other than the religious. It struggles, because, well, the twisted flesh abominations getting cleft in twain by magic swords don't leave much room for discussing anything beyond how cool it would be to own an axe that could glow if you believed hard enough. It's a cartoon, with a few extra cusses. And it is mostly great at that, because Greg Capullo can do this all day and make it look effortless.
But there is another contradiction that I am more interested in. As I've said earlier: this is the print version of a comic that was released in digital form first. The ways in which this changes the shapes and the layouts on every page are worth looking into, because to me they highlight the uneasy middle point at which the bulk of digital comics currently sits. The economics of comic book publishing make a purely digital format leveraging the unique freedoms that would entail so risky as to be unthinkable but for the most dedicated, and so unusual that only a handful of artists would know how to make it readable. So you have to make something that fits within the traditional confines of paper comics. The problem is that paper comics don't work in the same way as digital comics, and the tricks at your disposal to make one behave more like the other force you to work in a certain way.
To ensure maximal compatibility with Comixology's Guided View, for instance, the layouts have to be kept relatively tight and neat. Panels can't overlap, not really, and they have to maintain a rectangular shape. Getting any weirder with it would be a waste of space, and that waste of space would make the printed full page worse off. Similarly, for ease of reading on most devices, you want to stick to a presentation in either portrait or landscape, and almost never change it. We Have Demons opts for landscape, and mainly expresses itself in wide horizontal panels, which would be fine, if but a bit repetitive, except for the few times it doesn't. Some are full page splashes that are hard to avoid. Others get a little more complicated, and we'd have to take a long tangent into how space on a comic book page represents time to fully examine them.
The compromises would be disappointing from any other team, but from Capullo and Snyder, who took all of five issues in their legendary run on Batman before breaking out the kind of powerfully transcendent tricks that you could only do with a comic-shaped object? It's kind of a heartbreaker. The current landscape of digital comics works best if you have a rigorist, old-school mode of comic book storytelling, and this is just about the least interesting way of making comics in 2022. It doesn't make We Have Demons bad, how could it, it's Capullo doing fucked up monster violence, but it makes it not as good as it could be.
I have talked before about how exhausted I was by Marvel Comics' strategy of events and crossovers on top of events and crossovers. Well guess what? DC Comics decided to join in, as part of their pre-Dark Crisis everything-must-go climax clearance sale. In that context, it's worth looking at Trial of the Amazons, War for Earth-3, and the upcoming Shadow War comparatively, because we have a situation here that can only be described as "Goofus, Gallant, and Way More Gallant".
Goofus will be represented by Trial of the Amazons, and exemplified with this week's Trial of the Amazons: Wonder Girl #1, a comic that I found particularly incoherent, and made worse by the perpetual air of suspicion hanging around every single comic Joëlle Jones will draw from now until forever. Is it a tie-in? Is it a part of the crossover? Sure, I guess. It's basically three comics compacted into one another with no real art or grace. One is a short recap of the first seven issues of Wonder Girl, re-introducing the Esquecida to what is sure to be a huge number of latecomers. Another is about Cassie hunting down some leads in the crossover's big murder mystery, getting yelled at and finding something out, but nothing we should be privy to at the current juncture, for reasons. A third one is about introducing Yara Flor to Themyscira and the Amazons, which is fine, if a bit too inconsequential. None of it works together, or achieves anything of note. I don't really get who it's for or what it's for, and by the time it ends, we're right were the previous issue of the crossover left off. It's a baffling issue, in an event that has struggled to make the case for itself.
Compare and contrast with Teen Titans Academy #13, our Gallant. It's as basic as it gets, the comic book equivalent of going to the store and picking up your groceries. There's no big twist, but there's also no overlapping flashbacks that would confuse the action in any way. It's a simple wrap up of the previous arc, which then heads into the crossover. It doesn't do much, but it does it in a very tidy way, and its cliffhanger is as charmingly goofy as the rest of the event. It's the base level of competency. I like it just fine.
And then, there's the matter of Shadow War. Having the luxury of crossing over with himself, to build up to his own massive event, Joshua Williamson gets to go into Shadow War with perfect clarity. Robin #12 and Deathstroke Inc. #7 give everyone some very easy to parse motivations, all ready to get followed up in next week's big dumb comic release. It's very clean, it's very designed, and it's really neat to see. It works in the way it should, and I'm really looking forward to next week. That's the big point.
This newsletter is long enough as is, but, on the topic of Williamson, I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up the total blast I had reading Rogues #1, in which he and Leomacs take the great thing about Flash's approach to costumed villainy, that of a social phenomena that happens because sometimes crime is the only way people get to make a living for themselves, and just go a bit further down the timeline to a point past the Rogue's prime. The result is pretty dark, but pretty funny. It's cool and it's weird and it might be a little satirical. I sincerely liked it and I wish I could talk about it for longer without testing your patience so hard. Ah well! I'm Alan Moore! I wrote 1963! See ya!
Okay so I'm not Alan Moore, I lied. But the newsletter is over for the week. That part is true. Thank you so much for bearing with me through the goofs and spoofs, we'll see you next time with more. Until then, you do the usual! You get the word out, you tell your friends about this, you subscribe if you haven't already (putting numbers on it all genuinely does help), and then, when the day is done, you HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!