The creator of Watchmen takes a swipe at the comics industry’s populist fascism in America, a kind of savaging of the superhero mill. This collection of Alan Moore’s short fictions contain eight stories, four published in smaller Indies print venues and four entirely new works.
The book opens with a queer surrealist revenge tale written in 1987, where a real ghost takes revenge on a con artist who performs fake seances entitled, Hypothetical Lizard. Then, in Not Even Legend, a strange creature moves back through time infiltrating a group of friends who investigate supernatural phenomena. Got to love the Improbably Complex of the High Energy State, a tribute to 1960 new wave science fiction, that chronicles the sexual escapades of a Boltzmann brain in the first femtosecond of creation. Lastly, American Light: an appreciation in which Moore boasts of his ability to capture the essence of American beat poetry and 1980s literary criticism whilst undermining both.
In the original novella, What We Can Know About the Underman, carries the thrust of its savage heart, and not because it takes up more space than all the stories combined, reconstructing the American comics industry itself, like Moore’s Watchmen did the same to the superhero genre. Says the author, “The comics business dehumanises people, drawing them into an insane alternative reality ‘akin to cocaine addiction ‘.
The narrative begins at a New York diner, where four fans turned comics writers chew the fat over industry gossip revealing that the fictionalised comics business in which they toil is a thinly veiled allegory for the real industry in which Moore himself became famous, in which our very own Superman is the story’s titular Thunderman and where Marvel and DC Comics are replaced by “Massive” and “American”. The dinner is halted by the discovery that the American’s editor-in-chief, Brandon Chuff, has been dead through the entire conversation, despite his smiling presence at the table. Chuff’s death promotes Worsley Porlock to take the reins during the dark years of the Trump Administration and the Covid pandemic.
Alternate chapters explore fictionalised versions of key moments in the comics industry history such as the testimony of publisher Jim Laws at the 1954 Senate subcommittee hearings into juvenile delinquency. Another scene, set in 1960 suggests that “satanic” Sam Blatz ( Moore’s satirical take-off Stan Lee), received covert instructions from the CIA to mobilise superhero comics in the service of pro-American, pro-corporate cold war propaganda. Though many of the elements are highly fictionalised, part of the story’s pleasure lies in Moore’s insider knowledge of the industry where a kernel of sordid truths lie within each satirical piece, almost like airing dirty laundry for the world to see.
Moore zooms in on each detail with the same uncomfortable and savage tongue lashing, honing in on the theory that the business dehumanised people, executives exploit working-class creators for the benefit of shareholders, and corporate oligarchs. The shallow truth is that modern-day creators, are largely middle-class former fans who have become brand-oriented, which is code for selling-out, generating mass cultural addiction to shallow escapist fantasies.
And all of this, Moore asserts, runs parallel to the rise of populist fascism in the US. If the comics industry is a ‘metaphorical microcosm for the whole of society’, then comics fans and Maga reactionaries reveal how blurred the line separating fact from fiction is for many people, and what drives this home, pointing out in nine chapters where Porlock watches the 6 January Capitol riots on TV, musings that when Trump is elected in 2016, “ six of the biggest grossing movies were superhero films”. America’s “post-truth” departure from factual objectivity, a.k.a when Trump’s hard-core fans revolted against the Inconvenient Truth of Biden’s electoral victory, in an effort to expose some fact as fiction while establishing the picture-story narrative as universal fact.
Moore argues that this departure from factual objectivity is a consequence of its near wholesale embrace of fascist mythology, a mythology endlessly rearticulated within mainstream corporate superhero fanatics and reactionary political subcultures. This collection of stories demonstrate that although the Watchmen may be Moore’s best work, his storytelling has transcended its origins in the vexed commercial milieu he now conscientiously eschews. Love his mind.
