EW Spotlights 'Black Dossier'

October 16, 2007
The Entertainment Weekly Website includes a four-page preview of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier ($29.99), which Wildstorm will release on November 14th, and which promises to be one of the best-selling graphic novels of the fourth quarter (if not the entire year).

EW's Jeff Jensen puts the new graphic novel in the proper perspective with his first sentence: "Long before it became known for being a terrifically crappy movie starring Sean Connery, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a terrifically acclaimed comic book franchise created by one of the medium's most revered scribes: Alan Moore, the British writer behind Watchmen and V for Vendetta."

Jensen lays out the basic conceit of the LOEG series ("the entire genre of Victorian fantasy fiction treated as if it were a cohesive world akin to the Marvel superhero universe"), summarizes the plotlines of the first two books in the series, and then provides some insights into the somewhat obscure literary references (for Americans) included in the full color four-page Black Dossier excerpt ("the Greyfriars School is a nod to a series of popular mid-century stories about a British schoolboy named Billy Bunter"), though he doesn't mention the more obvious allusion to Richard Hannay and The 39 Steps (John Buchan's novel that was made into a hugely popular Hitchcock film in 1935).

All quibbles aside, Jensen provides an excellent introduction to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novels, which should interest additional readers in what is already one of the most popular graphic novel series in the marketplace today.

Simpsons to get Clowes, Spiegelman and Moore

This may be the episode that makes be smash my TV...

First allow me to say that it is possible that I should be discussing Dan Clowes being published in the NYT. I am not going to discuss it because I really don't care.

Here: http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/11274.html

Dan Clowes Comic in 'N.Y. Times'Appearing on 'The Simpsons' in October
September 12, 2007

Starting this coming Sunday (September 16th), Daniel Clowes' new comic strip,
Mr. Wonderful, debuts in the "Funny Pages" section of The New York Times
Magazine replacing Megan Kelso's Watergate Sue, which has finished its run. Mr.
Wonderful, which Clowes loosely characterizes as a "romance," is his first major
comic work since his stunningly brilliant The Death Ray, which appeared in 2004
in issue #23 of Eightball.

Now you can forward it to your hipster friends and discuss it. I'm like that old NFL ex D-Lineman...ok...maybe ex DB, who doesn't want to read about...Young girls finding their way in a balnd suburbia and making sad but true statements about life until Steve Buscemi comes along and tries to seduce one of them.

No. I want to read about the cool investigator chick who gets assigned to solve a murder in a polar ice research facility in Antarctica. She has guns and hates her job and has guns.

Oh and I'll read Captain America. I'm not reading Dan Clowes. I don't care if he wrote the menu at the IHOP at Western and Howard. It's not for me. I tried.

Now then, the part I do care about:

Also, on Sunday, October 7th, Clowes, Art Spiegelman and Alan Moore will all
"appear" in an episode of The Simpsons in which Comic Book Guy's old school
comic store, The Android's Dungeon and Baseball Card Shop, is facing stiff
competition from a new pop culture emporium, Coolsville Comics & Toys, run
by a hipster character named Milo (voiced by Jack Black).

Here's the deal. We all know how this goes. For years, Comic Book Guy has been taking it on the chin for every comic boook geek stereotype in the damn book. Most of them are actually deserved because if I walk into 5 comic shops in this town, 4 of them have guys who rule their little imaginay kingdoms and walk around with a plastic hammer of Thor, looking authoritataive.

The part I'm interested in is the Coolsville shop opening up and the hipster lovefest that must ensue if it involves Alan Moore, Dan Clowes and Jack Black.

I hate the Comic Book Guy and I hate the Hipster (Milo). There is no middle ground here. I'm hoping Spiegelman is there to cause physical damage to Alan Moore. My real problem is that I'm

not sure the Simpsons is really trying hard enough to make fun of everyone. I don't know if the Hipsters will get that they are being made fun of because, for many of them, life began with the Watchmen or at the very least, with Miracleman.

And of course Jack Black is Milo. Jeremy Piven is a tool from what I hear so why would they use him? Actually I thought the episode where Homer went gay was the hipster comics episode too. "Bzzzzzap!"

The only way the point could br driven home further is if Milo wears a different bowling shirt in every frame, only drinks PBR and they play Sparta in the background, the whole episode.

I think it could use a derelict Jack Kirby and set design by Chris Ware too. I need a drink...

Oh yeah, the article also said this stuff and I would read Frankenstein!

In addition to his comic strip in The New York Times and his appearance on The
Simpsons, Clowes fans can look forward to his cover for the new Penguin Classics
edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is due out on September 25th.

Why I Hate Alan Moore

Ok, this is gonna have to be a multi-part series because as soon as one types the words "Hate" and "Alan Moore", one can feel the hate mail flowing from the very folks who make one want to make this post.

So yeah, Part One - Alan Moore Did a Good Thing

He wrote the Watchmen. That's it. And then apparently the world stopped turning.

Well in reality he wrote more than that and contrary to the belief his "Jonestown-esque" followers, typewriters around the world turned into rusted doorstops the day Watchmen was published.

Now don't get me wrong, Watchmen was wonderful. I love the characters. I love nine panel layout (Go Giffen!!!) and I love seeing iterations of some of my favorite characters. Now here's where it gets hinky. It wouldn't have been nearly as good if Moore had used the JSA. This is important.

All of that stuff that happened in Watchmen happened because Alan Moore was free to do whatever he wanted. He was free because he didn't use characters owned by anyone else and I am not even going to get into whether or not DC owns those characters because I really don't care.

I will get into the fact that some amazing stories were written about Super heroes before Watchmen but Moorites seem to want to talk as if they'd out grown stories such as the Avengers vs. Count Nefaria or the Avengers vs. Korvac or Walt Simonson's Thor or the Dark Phoenix Saga or even Moore's own work with Swamp Thing. They discount Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol and Animal Man as well as Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

If one were to make an argument that Watchmen was more complex, i'd have to agree. I'd give bonus points to anyone who made this argument and then told me that they read the Church and State run of Dave Sim's Cerebus AND the Death of Captain Marvel but I can't imagine that there are that many of you out there.

Here is my Alan Moore Truth:
Watchmen - Amazing
Swamp Thing Amazing and in the DCU
From Hell - Amazing

Everything else like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Tom Strong, Promethea, Supreme, Wildcats (yes WildCats), was good to better than good but some of it was written in his sleep and NO, it was not all better than anything else being published at the time.

It's too soon in the series to go into Lost Girls but if you haven't read it and would like to, just grab some crayons and go rent some porn. Then re draw everything you saw with the crayons but instead of whover your porn is about, inject the plot to Truth about Cats and Dogs and make sure the characters are Tootie, Jan Brady and Sissy.

It'll be about the same if not better.

As I said, Alan Moore did good thing. He wroet a Post Modern Superhero story and the world could have used that. The issue for his fans seems to be that they aren't aware that we are now Post Post Modern.

Comics should be done and are now being done in most cases by people who love comics, and not so much by folks with issues with comics. Once you decide that you hate comics and just take exception to what's being published and every publisher breathing then just go to Hollywood. Any one of you have the talent to produce something at least as good as anything Alan Moore doesn't want to claim. As if he'd been writing Hamlet and then someone turned it into a Hugh Grant movie.

More later...