Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months%more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 60^th installment.

Of all the comic book series Alan Moore has worked on, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the only one still showing definite signs of life. Because Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill owned The League, they didn’t have to put it to rest like the other comics in the “America’s Best” lineup after Moore’s decisive break with Wildstorm and DC Comics.

Around 2005, Moore had become estranged from DC (again) after a series of incidents beginning with the pulping of an entire print run of an issue of The League a few years earlier—because of the use of an authentic turn-of-the-century advertisement for a “Marvel Whirling Spray Syringe”—and growing antagonism about the V for Vendetta movie and Moore’s increasingly vocal attempts to remove himself from any association with the film along with DC’s mistreatment of Kevin O’Neill as they pressured him to complete Black Dossier and ultimately released a product that didn’t include a planned audio recording. The Black Dossier friction, according to Moore, stemmed from hostilities that erupted when DC Comics learned that Moore and O’Neill were planning to bring their next chapters of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to the much-smaller-scale publisher Top Shelf Productions, once their previously-promised commitments to DC were completed.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve monthsmore than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics(and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 59^th installment.

Originally planned as a sourcebook like 1982’s Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, or 1984’s Who’s Who in the DC Universe, or 1994’s The Wildstorm Swimsuit Special (okay, maybe not that last one), full of text-heavy informational pages about the world of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the project that was finally released as the Black Dossier was something far more ambitious: an assembly of multiple styles in multiple parodic modes covering the entire history of the League in all its incarnations and providing far more in the way of discursive storytelling than anything in the way of traditional exposition about who the League is and how it came to be.

I recall the project being the most divisive release from the Alan Moore/Kevin O’Neill team, with the widespread opinion that the project was alternately pretentious and self-indulgent balanced out by a powerful minority of voices thrilled by the depth of allusion in every chapter and the exciting eclecticism of the Black Dossier’s influences.

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I first met Karen Berger at one of the early MoCCA Festivals, back when it was still in the Puck Building, but I didn’t really have a conversation with her until the following summer, at the massive San Diego Comic-Con that year. I was hanging out with then-up-and-coming writer Jason Aaron and we were both waiting to head over to a Vertigo Comics panel, he was scheduled to attend and I was scheduled to cover it for a comic book news outlet.

I knew Karen Berger before that, but only through her astounding resume, one that, for many readers who grew up reading comics in the 1980s and into the 1990s, carved a path toward the best kinds of comics available. It’s not just that she had good taste—though that was part of it—what’s more unbelievable is that she was able to shift the direction of the comic book industry towards smarter, more literate stories. She changed the course of the entire industry.

[You’ve probably read something that Karen Berger willed to life, even if you don’t know it.]

Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 58^th installment.

I usually don’t particularly enjoy wordless comics, or they don’t tend to sustain my interest. I can appreciate the artistic displays, but, for me, the power of comics comes from the words colliding with the images. And yet, I think I could read twelve thick collections of a wordless comic featuring Kevin O’Neill’s drawings of Gullivar Jones and John Carter and the Martian wars.

That’s how The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume II begins, with the Martian landscape and Edwin Lester Arnold’s Gullivar Jones and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter and though it’s not completely wordless, the word balloons are mostly in a Martian dialect that’s not translated on the page for us. Kevin O’Neill draws the heck out of it, and we get massive preparations for war and multi-armed Tharks on armored reptilian battle steeds and the red dunes all around.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve monthsmore than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 57^thinstallment.

In every meaningful way, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the oldest of the America’s Best Comics lineup, and yet it’s the last series I’m writing about as I review the Alan Moore work from that Wildstorm/DC Comics imprint.

Why? Because it’s the best, and I’ve saved the best for last. But it’s also the longest-running and most current, with a new volume of the series coming out as recently as last summer and another spin-off—Nemo: Heart of Ice—planned for early next year.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is both old and new, recent and old-fashioned, filled with characters ripped from the pages of Victorian literature and thrown together in quasi-superteam fashion, with the fate of the British Empire at stake! Some folks even pooled their money to make a misguided big-budget fan film starring Sean Connery. Those folks are called 20^th Century Fox, and even though 2013 will be the tenth anniversary of that movie, I suspect you may not hear any celebratory rumblings. But you never know. I can see the tagline already: “LXG times 10! Better than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, at least!”

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 56^th installment.

Mostly, my reread of Tomorrow Stories has made me want to go back and take another look at Rick Veitch’s Greyshirt: Indigo Sunset series from a decade ago. Rick Veitch’s Eisnerian pages from Tomorrow Stories promise so much greatness, and an entire series devoted to the Spirit clone gone wild feels like just the thing to perk me up after slogging through the last six-to-eight issues of Alan Moore’s wacky anthology series.

But I don’t recall Greyshirt: Indigo Sunset holding my interest very long when it first came out—the absence of Alan Moore was palpable—and this still isn’t The Great Rick Veitch Reread, so I suppose we should march onward with these lesser Alan Moore comics. I wish they were better. You deserve it.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 55^th installment.

“What on Earth is wrong with anthology books?” Alan Moore asked, rhetorically, to interviewer George Khoury. “Do any of these people who say, ‘Oh, we don’t like anthology books,’ do they realize where the comic industry came from?”

When “American’s Best Comics” launched, Moore made sure the lineup included an anthology series, and Tomorrow Stories was it (though Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales would be added to the imprint, giving Moore two regular anthology series to work with). With Tomorrow stories, Moore would have a chance to work with a variety of recurring features and a handful of artists who might not have been able to produce full-length monthly comic book work. He also just really liked the flexibility that anthologies offered.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months  more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 54th installment.

After following up the twelve-issue Top 10 series with the tonal shift toward cartoonish and powerfully-entertaining parody in Smax, Alan Moore reunited with artist Gene Ha to explore the early days of Neopolis in a hardcover graphic novel set five decades before the events of the original series.

Like many of Alan Moore’s projects from the “America’s Best Comics” era with Wildstorm, I’m having trouble figuring out an angle of attack for writing about the book. With the exception of the essayistic Promethea, most of Moore’s work at the time is, simply put, highly-competent genre storytelling with a more-intelligent-than-average sensibility. That makes the comics exceedingly readable, and occasionally thrilling, particularly when Moore takes a stale genre trope and provides a witty or unexpected twist, as he often does.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 53^rd installment.

Two thoughts spring to mind when I flip back through the five issues of Smax, the Top 10 spin-off comic by Alan Moore and Zander Cannon: (1) This comic is the most deserving of the “Hey, Tor.com readers, this an overlooked series that you should definitely check out because you would probably love it” award, and (2) I’m not sure how well this series works on its own, without the history of Top 10 powering its character moments.

Smax is tonally a completely different beast than Top 10. The twelve issue main Top 10 series had its moments of humor, but it was also a melodramatic police procedural first, and the humor often had a savage tragedy to it. Smax is a comedy romp first, a parody of fantasy quest stories, and an intimate character piece, well, barely at all. It’s not a Mad Magazine goofball explosion of annoyingly in-your-face hilarity, but it’s closer to that than it is to the first Top 10 series. Actually, what it reads like is some amazingly well-produced independent comic from the late 1990s that took the spirit of Bone and mashed it with a superhero backstory and was written by a guy who played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons in college and had tons of fun mocking it.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 52nd installment.

When I first began “The Great Alan Moore Reread,” this fifty-second post was expected to be my last. “I’ll do all the Alan Moore comics in a year,” I thought. And that number “52” may have been on my mind because of the DC goings-on from last fall.

But I soon realized that, even skipping some minor Moore works and all of the prose and spoken-word pieces, I’d still need more than a year. So here we are, one year later. More Moore on its way. The goal now is 64 posts, with the rest of the “America’s Best Comics” line and extended League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and some Lost Girls and Neonomicon still to come, along with a couple of posts at the end looking at the best of everything and a few final thoughts on Alan Moore’s career. This reread has consumed a massive part of my life since the fall of 2012, and it’s a testament to Moore’s talent that my interest in his work has only grown since I’ve started this project. I’m not done with Moore yet, and I hope you aren’t either.

On to the final half of Top 10!

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 51^st installment.

With Tom Strong as his riff on Superman-meets-Doc-Savage and Promethea as his meditation on magic and reality via a Wonder Woman gateway, Alan Moore had jumped into comic book/myth/pulp history to create relatively simple archetypes around which to build his ideas. With another entry into the “America’s Best Comics” line for Wildstorm, he decided to draw from a different well of inspiration: television. Specifically, the large-ensemble police procedural.

Moore conceived of Top 10 as a way to do a superhero team book without the normal superhero team book clichés: no weekly meetings, no secret headquarters, no “monitor duty,” none of that typical Justice League/Avengers/Teen Titans kind of stuff. Instead, he replaced those things with tropes from shows like Hill Street Blues or NYPD Blue, or your other television shows created by Steven Bochco and featuring the color blue.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 50th installment.

One of the things I really love about doing this reread, thinking about and pouring over Alan Moore comics methodically, month after month, is that it forces me to address each comic—or each collection—without an easy escape hatch. Normally, with so many other things to read and do, and so many other opportunities pressing me for attention, I could hit a series like Promethea and maybe not spend enough time with it. I’d read it—after all, I have read it all before, years ago—and I’d get what I could from it, but I wouldn’t really grapple with it in any substantial way.

Last week I talked about my inability to confront Promethea directly—or my reluctance to—and the week before that I admitted that I didn’t even know if the series was “enjoyable” by any usual sense of how that word is used.

But the truth is that my time spent with Promethea, first rereading the whole series in a relatively short period of time at the end of the summer, then going back into each collected Absolute edition week-by-week as I reflected and wrote about my reactions, has made me appreciate it immensely more than I ever did.

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Though Marvel may not openly admit it—or maybe they have and I just missed their blatant honesty—the upcoming Marvel NOW! Initiative seems like a direct response to DC’s New 52 relaunch from a year ago.

If you haven’t heard, the plans for Marvel NOW! involve relaunching most of the company’s core titles with brand new #1 issues beginning in the second week of October, with new creative teams, presumably to get the same kind of media attention and sales boost that DC saw with their New 52 lineup.

The war of escalation between the two companies usually revolves around major line-wide event comics—“I’ll see your Final Crisis and raise you one Secret Invasion”—but now the new mode of operation looks to be a battle of who can get the most attention for their #1 issues. As we saw with the New 52 relaunch—a revamp of character continuities and alchemical mixture of creative talent—the promise of thrilling new first issues didn’t exactly carry over to promises of high quality for the following year. Some series remained excellent, but many of the New 52 floundered in their first year, with heavy-handed editorial mandates driving some creators away from the company or frustrating others enough that they spoke out about their problems working on the first year of revamped comics.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics(and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 49th installment.

I’ll admit it: I still don’t think I’m prepared to tackle everything that Promethea has to offer. After completing almost 80% of the Great Alan Moore Reread, and mainlining the work of the Magus of Northampton every week for almost a full year, I find myself in an odd situation. I don’t have an angle of approach for Promethea. Not an honest one anyway.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 48th installment.

Alan Moore was supposed to work with Brandon Peterson on this, the Wildstorm-relocated expansion of his original plans for Glory – the abandoned Wonder Woman analogue comic conceived near the end of his tenure at the Extreme Academy of Comic Book Arts and Sciences.

But Promethea became something else when J. H. Williams III joined the collaboration, and the artist let the writer know that he preferred to work in double-page spreads instead of single-page layouts.

Promethea became more expansive than it might have once Williams III was paired with Moore. It took a while for Moore to completely tap into the potential Williams III was capable of, and to use the double-page, richly-ambitious double-page layouts as a complex tapestry of ideas, but their collaboration led to distinctive comics right from the beginning.

Promethea, 32 issues filled with gorgeous artwork, running from the final months of the last century into the early months of 2005, is an astonishing, amazing comic.

But I’m not sure if it’s enjoyable.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 47^th installment.

Alan Moore did more with Tom Strong than just write twenty-three of the thirty-six issues in the Tom Strong series. He also spun the character off into various short stories, first in the celebratory, early-in-America’s-Best-lifespan America’s Best Comics Special from 2001 and then in his recurring opening short stories in the Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales anthology.

Tom Strong, of all the America’s Best characters, seemed to most easily lend himself to different kinds of stories. As somewhat of a bland character himself—though one with plenty of gusto and a fine problem-solving mind—Tom Strong could participate in any kind of adventure without sticking out. His globe-trotting, dimension-hopping exploits allowed such narrative diversity, but if Strong were a more specific, well-defined type of character, it would be more difficult to give him the range of adventures you see in his own series or in the various spin-off shorts.

[He’s kind of like Will Eisner’s Spirit that way]

Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 46^th installment.

Alan Moore walked away from Tom Strong after issue #22 while he continued to work on other “America’s Best Comics” properties, including Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales, and anthology series in which Moore wrote at least one story about Tom Strong in each issue.

But his lengthy run on the main Tom Strong series had come to an end, and the only thing he had left to add was a one-issue epilogue that would appear in issue #36, the final issue of the series.

Between the time he left and his one-part swan song, other writers hopped in and out of the series, doing their own versions of the characters of Millennium City and the family Strong.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 45^th installment.

One thing I didn’t mention last week, but is worth making a note of, just for the sake of context, is that part of the approach Alan Moore ended up taking with Tom Strong seemed to originate from his abandoned plans for Awesome Entertainment’s Prophet. These days, Prophet is one of the best serialized comics on the stands, thanks to Brandon Graham’s elliptically enchanting approach to the story and a decidedly unconventional flair to the artwork by Simon Roy, Farel Dalrymple, and Giannia Milonagiannis.

But Prophet was once a practically incoherent space barbarian superhero comic that spun off from Rob Liefeld’s original Youngblood series.

Alan Moore’s take on the character – seen only in a brief cameo in Judgment Day – was to recast him as a long-lived pulp adventurer. A “Man of Marble” according to that miniseries, clearly as a nod to the Man of Bronze himself, Doc Savage.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 44^th installment.

According to Alan Moore, within half an hour of hearing that Awesome Entertainment went “belly-up,” he was contacted by other publishers, courting him to write something for their companies. Jim Lee’s offer was the most attractive at the time, and Moore jumped at it, pulling from a list of names from one of his notebooks to develop an entire line that would be called “America’s Best Comics.”

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 43rd installment.

Alan Moore certainly loved the work of Will Eisner.

Looking back on Moore’s comic book influences, and considering how much he built on the stories he’d read as a youth—which, sometimes, seems like all of them—it’s difficult to say what had the biggest impact. Was it the work of Jerry Siegel and Edmond Hamilton and Wayne Boring and Curt Swan from the Superman comics of the Silver Age, filled with one imaginative twist after another?

Was it Steve Gerber’s weird horror blended with the fantastic? Jim Starlin’s gritty mythopoeia? Lee and Kirby’s monsters mixed with humanity?

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