Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months 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 29th installment.

Here’s an unusual case.

Before the preponderance of blogs and Tumblr accounts, the only way that you would have ever come across Alan Moore and Don Simpson’s 1986 short story, “In Pictopia,” is if you had chanced upon issue #2 of Fantagraphics Anything Goes anthology, or in The Best Comics of the Decade 1980-1990 Vol. 1, also by Fantagraphics, or maybe in George Khoury’s book-length interview/overview The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months 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 28th installment.

My sense of chronology continues to become increasingly wonky as we jump from the early-to-mid-1990s From Hell of the last two weeks to a collected edition of a group of short stories written a decade before From Hell reached its climax. D.R. and Quinch this week. Straight out of the pages of 2000 A.D.

Or, straight out of the reprint edition which pulls all the stories together in one place.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months 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 27th installment.

Last week, I explored the first half of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s hefty From Hell collected edition, and this week will bring us to the final chapters and the illustrated post-script, where Moore provides a reflection on the fractal complexity of Ripperology, and where it leaves us in the end.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months 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 26th installment.

On our ongoing Alan Moore timeline, we’re jumping ahead to 1991 for the beginnings of From Hell, his novelistic, serialized retelling of the conspiracy behind the Jack the Ripper murders of a century earlier. Produced with artistic collaborator Eddie Campbell – who had already established himself as a pioneering artist in the field of memoir comics and also dove into iconoclastic mythological retellings for a period — the “From Hell” strip began in the early issues of Steve Bissette’s Taboo anthology.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months 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 25nd installment.

When it comes to Batman and Alan Moore, most people immediately think of his work with Brian Bolland on 1988’s Batman: The Killing Joke, and rightly so, as that was a particularly high-profile release from the (by then) famous writer of Watchmen and the most meticulously detailed superhero artist of his (or any) generation.

The Killing Joke marks Moore’s last major work for DC Comics, if we exclude his wrapping-up of the much-earlier-begun V for Vendetta and his later unplanned and undesired return under the company umbrella when DC purchased Jim Lee’s Wildstorm production company, and Alan Moore’s America’s Best Comics along with it.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months 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 24nd installment.

“Marvelman” and “V for Vendetta” were nearing the last pieces of their runs in Warrior magazine. The fallout from “The Anatomy Lesson” was rumbling through The Saga of the Swamp Thing. Captain Britain was involved with something massive, I’m sure, omniversally-speaking.

We’re talking July, 1984, or so the cover-date of 2000 AD prog 376 would have us believe.

That’s when Alan Moore and Ian Gibson launched a bold new series in the pages of that sci-fi boys adventure magazine. A recurring five-pager called “The Ballad of Halo Jones.”

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A single survivor climbs up out of his bunker after an apocalyptic event. Clad from head-to-toe in his radiation suit, he climbs atop a shattered mass of rock and fallen trees. He sits. Opens up his sketchbook. And begins to draw.

That’s a page from the first half of Brian “Box” Brown’s The Survivalist, a 42-page, magazine-sized graphic novel published by the U.K.’s Blank Slate Books in late 2011. The book was supposed to make its American debut at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival last December, but printing and shipping delays didn’t allow that to happen, so Box Brown was left standing behind his festival table with only his vast array of self-published minicomics and his entire Retrofit Comics line to console him. As always, he was in good spirits, and he enthusiastically pointed out his newest, hand-stapled endeavor: the first chapter of Roussimoff, a planned longform comic book biography of wrestling legend Andre the Giant, presented warts-and-all.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months 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 23nd installment.

As Alan Moore was settling into his legendary Swamp Thing run after the first year on the DC job, as we saw last week – and with my look at the Superman stories – he branched out into other superhero properties with quick hit stories that carried resonances that have lasted until today.

Moore himself has, of course, repeatedly criticized modern corporate comics for strip mining his work rather than generating new ideas for contemporary audiences, and in the years before any specific announcements about anyone trampling over the corpse of Watchmen, he targeted DC’s Blackest Night summer event as an egregious example of “the comics industry going through [his] trashcan like raccoons.” Moore also provided this indignant and/or bemusedly mocking commentary on the subject: “I was noticing that DC seems to have based one of its latest crossovers in Green Lantern based on a couple of eight-page stories that I did 25 or 30 years ago. I would have thought that would seem kind of desperate and humiliating.” He went on to say, “When I have said in interviews that it doesn’t look like the American comic book industry has had an idea of its own in the past 20 or 30 years, I was just being mean. I didn’t expect the companies concerned to more or less say, ‘Yeah, he’s right. Let’s see if we can find another one of his stories from 30 years ago to turn into some spectacular saga.’”

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Though now significantly less famous than his pistol-wielding competitor from Street and Smith Publications, the Spider – the “Master of Men” – once shared the pulp newsstands with the ominous and deadly character known as the Shadow.

Dynamite Entertainment is soon bringing the Shadow to life in four-color glory with new scripts by Preacher scribe Garth Ennis, but I’m more interested in the lesser-known kind-of-Shadow-knockoff character who went by the name of the Spider all those years ago. The subject of over a hundred pulp novels and a couple of movie serials, the Spider brandished a pair of deadly .45 automatics and unleashed his terrifying sense of justice on the weirder corners of the criminal underworld.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months 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 22nd installment.

In my continuing attempts to confuse everyone by charging almost-chronologically-but-not-quite through the comic book works of Alan Moore, this time I’m jumping back to 1985, when Moore was first garnering attention at DC and getting a chance to turn his Swamp Thing popularity into a chance to write tiny back-up strips in other superhero comics and television dramas in the form of vigilante stories.

This is a guy, mind you, who had already exploded any minds (that were paying attention) with his “Marvelman” and “V for Vendetta” at Warrior and the patent-pending Most Amazing Comic Book Single Issue of All Time in Swamp Thing #21.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months 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 21st installment.

Though the Paul Levitz-era DC Comics delayed the (unfortunately) inevitable, more Watchmen comics — by decidedly un-Alan Moore, un-Dave Gibbons writers and artists — are on the way. Shortly after the announcement about Before Watchmen was made, I wrote a piece about the new Watchmenverse comics here at Tor.com. 

After rereading the entirety of Watchmen, I have a slightly different perspective than I did when I wrote that post.

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Last week, we presented you with a glimpse of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’s new comic series Saga #1, and, since that time, I’ve had the opportunity to read an advance copy of the first issue and throw a few questions at the writer to find out more about the ideas behind the attention-grabbing comic. (The comic itself comes out this Wednesday.)

The first thing you’ll likely notice about Saga #1, if you flip through its pages, is the way it weaves a picture-book narration into a decidedly adult story. The genre at work here may be high-fantasy and space opera sci-fi (complete with magical invocations, lasers, talking cats, and robot princes) but Vaughan and Staples reject the traditional faux-innocence that goes along with such tales and throw the reader into a galaxy where sex and violence are as explicit as the foul language spewing from the characters’ mouths.

This is no Disneyfied cosmic adventure, though there is a deep earnestness at its core. Saga’s two rebellious heroes, Marko and Alana, may be on the run from their own homeworlds, and they may struggle against the cynicism that surrounds them, but they will do anything to protect their infant daughter. It’s a not-so-thinly veiled parable of parenting, with a massive scope, and entire cultures at war around them.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months 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 20th installment.

The overarching structure of Watchmen starts to fall apart in the second half of the series. Or, perhaps it’s fairer to say that the schema changes as we enter more deeply into Act II. The odd-numbered plot-heavy issues and the even-numbered character background issues don’t quite continue into this second half of the series. The pattern becomes a bit more fragmented, and we spend less time on plot mechanics and more time with the underlying emotions of the characters themselves.

Maybe it’s better to say that the crystalline structure of the series becomes more organic as it develops, as the characters come to life on the page as more than just analogues for mostly-forgotten heroes of the past.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months 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 19th installment.

I barely mentioned the back-matter in the opening three issues of Watchmen last week, but the excerpts of former Nite Owl Hollis Mason’s Under the Hood — his fictionalized memoir as written by Alan Moore — are essential pieces of the Watchmen text. In the three excerpts Moore provides the connective tissue for the world building that’s of such fundamental importance to the overall story of this alternate reality. Mason’s memoir gives more information about the early days of the superhero, from the down-to-Earth perspective of someone who actually lived through it.

And Mason’s distinctive point of view is important too, because even though Moore and Gibbons try, throughout the series, to wrestle with the conventions of comic book storytelling and provide a sense of seeing the world through various sets of eyes, comics, like cinema, are forced to present an objective depiction of reality. We see what’s in front of the camera, or inside the panels, and it’s difficult not to take it literally. We can speculate on what happens between the frames, but what’s shown is reality as far as we know.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months 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 18th installment.

The Watchmen: Absolute Edition from 2005 reprints important supplemental material from a limited edition Graphitti Designs hardcover, where we get to see the early versions of the ideas that would inform the final miniseries. In Alan Moore’s original proposal for the series – even the original character descriptions – there was no Dr. Manhattan, or Rorschach, or the Comedian. Instead, Watchmen was conceived as a revamp of DC’s then-recently-acquired Charlton Comics characters. Captain Atom. The Question. Peacemaker. Etc.

Those Charlton characters were long gone by the time the first issue of Watchmen hit the stands in the late summer of 1986. Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons created their own original characters to replace the Charlton archetypes. But Watchmen was never really about those specific characters. It was about a superhero universe in decline as a reflection of a modern world in decline.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months 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 17th installment.

September 1986 was an enormously important month for American superhero comics. Quantum, Zzzax, and Halflife teamed up to battle the West Coast Avengers. Starfire learned about racism in the pages of Teen Titans spotlight. Swamp Thing came to Gotham City. Watchmen #1 debuted. And Alan Moore killed off Superman forever.

Okay, some of those things may not be that important in retrospect. And some of them are not even true. I mean, those comics had a “September 1986” cover date, but they would have come out a few months before that, and with the vagarities of cover-dating and release schedules, they may not even have hit the stands during the same month, in real life.

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Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months 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 16th installment.

Halfway into his multi-year Swamp Thing run, Alan Moore contributed a very special story to the Superman team-up book called DC Comics Presents. Guess who Superman “teamed up” with? I’ll give you a clue: he used to think he was Alec Holland until Moore showed up on the scene.

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Yesterday, I wrote a light lamentation on the six DC Universe titles that will reach their end with issue #8, and I mentioned that six new ones would take their place, in the 52 rotation.

Now it’s time to take a look at what’s coming in the six new series, to reflect on what we know about them and to play the speculation game: which of these new series are worth checking out right away, which ones are worth waiting for, and which ones are completely skippable?

The most prominent of the new six is the long-awaited return of….

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Last summer, I previewed all 52 of the New 52 DC Relaunch titles, and then provided a play-by-play of what the first four weeks looked like as summer turned to fall. Half a year later, we now have a much clearer idea of what these series have developed into. Which ones have worked, which ones haven’t worked as well. The ones I’ve continued to read, and the ones that have been dropped after the first month or two.

And we now know that with April’s #8 issues, a handful of relaunched series will come to an end. DC, it seems, is sticking with the 52 branding as much as possible, and launching six new series to replace the ones that have met their demise. But I’ll talk more about the six new May launch titles tomorrow.

Today, I want to check in on the quality of the current lineup of 52 and provide lamentations, or “nice-knowin’-yas,” for the six cancelled series.

First, a list! Or two!

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