Bruce Baugh, whose earlier letter triggered yesterday’s critique of Alan Moore, writes again in the writer’s defense:
I have to add this: Moore has been one of the most incredibly responsible people I can think of when it comes to the bad effects of his legacy. He’s very up front about what he was trying to do, his dismay at being copied for bad reasons, and his desire to get attention spread around again. And of course he’s gone on to do work in a lot of different ways himself, not all of it to my particular taste, but all showing the same underlying spark let out through all kinds of different channels. I don’t think it’s his and Frank Miller’s fault that so many people were ready to turn up the grimness dial on superheroics and then leave it stuck there, nor his and Gibbons and Veitch and Totleben and et al’s fault that there was such an audience for super-carefully structured storytelling of the sort he was doing then.
I absolutely love this bit from an interview Moore did for the Onion’s AV Club:
“The gritty, deconstructivist postmodern superhero comic, as exemplified by Watchmen, also became a genre. It was never meant to. It was meant to be one work on its own. I think, to that degree, it may have had a deleterious effect upon the medium since then. I’d have liked to have seen more people trying to do something that was as technically complex as Watchmen, or as ambitious, but which wasn’t strumming the same chords that Watchmen had strummed so repetitively. This is not to say that the entire industry became like this, but at least a big enough chunk of it did that it is a noticeable thing. The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it’s like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we’d got this insane right-wing voter fear running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. So that tended to reflect in my work. But it was a genuine bad mood, and it was mine. I tend to think that I’ve seen a lot of things over the past 15 years that have been a bizarre echo of somebody else’s bad mood. It’s not even their bad mood, it’s mine, but they’re still working out the ramifications of me being a bit grumpy 15 years ago. So, for my part, I wouldn’t say that my new stuff is all bunny rabbits and blue-skies optimism, but it’s probably got a lot more of a positive spin on it than the work I was doing back in the ’80s. This is a different century.”
That’s pretty darned decent, I’d say.
That’s certainly true, though to me the “bad mood I was in 15 years ago” line he frequently employs is a wee bit condescending. It’s not like he’s blaming himself for his work’s limitations, after all–he’s blaming other people for not getting it, basically. Of course, that’s entirely fair, so he has that going for him. I totally agree that it’s completely unfair to blame Watchmen and Dark Knight for Identity Crisis and Spider-Man: Reign.
But I don’t get the sense he’s aware that the meticulous stuff is just as much a schtick now (for himself and for others, though it speaks to his prodigious talent that no one’s been able to pull it off as well as he) as the grim’n’gritty stuff. Most of his later work falls into one of two categories: The stuff you get the sense he regards as being his Important Statements, which do the clockwork bit, and the stuff he’s doing as a somewhat self-conscious Lark, which is all the homagey ABC stuff and Supreme and whatnot. The books that fall somewhere in between, like Top Ten (for the most part) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, are the books I enjoy the most. They tend to be the most loosey-goosey.
What it comes down to is whether you want to decode a work of fiction. Decoding has its undeniable thrills, and I don’t mean to condescend to them or deny them or minimize them at all. The revelatory frisson of noticing all the easter eggs and hidden symbolism and syncronicitities in the days and weeks and months and, frankly, years following my first read of Watchmen is one of my all-time favorite reading experiences. But the problem with works where everything is mapped out and thought through and consciously connected is that you can hit bottom on them. At a certain point, you’ve exhausted their possibilities. Once you’ve cracked the code, the code is cracked. You’ve figured it out. That’s the only way to skin that particular cat. Compare and contrast that with the pretty much boundless possibilities within the unanswered questions of just one Sopranos episode. (Don’t click that link if you haven’t seen the most recent episode, but if you have, I urge you to click it.)
I like the wiggle room, is what I’m saying. I like the message I receive to be more or less up to me, not simply an extremely erudite version of “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.”