Alan Moore, The Anti-Diluter

Hinckley provided a link to an English fan's loving review of From Hell, among other things Alan Moore-ish.

This got me thinking about how deceptively-dense Moore's writing often tends to be. It seldom feels dense (although one could point to a chapter or two of the aforementioned From Hell as being a bit ponderous) because much of what the author puts into the story remains below the surface and gets absorbed by the casual reader osmotically, as it were. As I was reading over Eddie Campbell's blog recently, on which he posted some script pages from From Hell, it struck me that Alan informs and delights us very subliminallly. An example was the scene in which the poor have paid a penny for the 'privilege' to sleep sitting up, with a clothesline tied across their chests to keep them from falling forward. This is in no way a main plot point in the story; it's simply part of the scene-setting that the author does, to familiarize us with the time and place in question, and draw us into it. He does this because he knows how much more effective his tale will be if the reader emphasizes with the characters, rather than regarding them dispassionately from a distance, as through a microscope, or telescope.

The other thought that struck me was how unusual it is to find a comic writer like Moore still so popular today when most of the top-selling genre writers are practicing what is, in essence, the opposite approach: diluting their stories in order to stretch them out. We see this in the form of fewer panels per page, less story development, decreasing contextual references and even sometimes less dialogue. Each of these stylistic choices speeds up the job of writing a 22-page comic tale, allowing writers to work on more titles - and thus make more money - as well as expanding two or three issues' worth of story to fill twice that much space. Logically, artists also have less work to do, which would be considered a good thing by them, too.

I do think a few good things have come out of this trend. For example, verbose writers are out of vogue, meaning I don't have to suffer through the sort of verbal diarrhea that Chris Claremont patented in the late 80s, and which eventually drove me away from the once-beloved Uncanny X-Men. There was a guy who took the whole "picture is worth a thousand words" just a little too literally, if you know what I mean! Also, the writing-to-fit-into-collected-form trend has actually shortened the odd storyline, since it's hard to package up a rambling 15- or 20-part tale in a single trade paperback, thereby forcing more writers to have a beginning, middle and end in mind when they start each saga. And most comics today do read like they've been written with trade paperback treatment in mind, as opposed to fulfilling the basic requirement of just telling a great story, whatever the page count.

But mostly what I see in my weekly comic haul is light-weight writing. There's very little substance to most of the stories, compared to the number of pages involved, which is never the case when reading an Alan Moore masterpiece. He tended to put more thought, research and detail into each issue of a comic of his than most writers currently inject into a six-issue epic! From a value point-of-view alone, I definitely feel like I got more bang for my buck when I bought an Alan Moore comic. I guess now I know how drinkers feel when bartenders water down their booze...