The Four Color Media Monitor

Foreign Policy magazine, of all places, wrote a sugary take on veteran Alan Moore, and some of his recent literary projects, which include the idea of "inventing your own god". But first, they couldn't do this without some kind of silly distortion of history:

England’s greatest, weirdest living author lives in a terraced house in Northampton, where he worships a snake god in the basement. Alan Moore revolutionized the comics industry in the 1980s with Swamp Thing, in which a nearly forgotten character was turned into an exploration of the United States’ environmental and historical horrors and glories, and Watchmen, a wildly innovative work often described as the Citizen Kane of comics.

What kind of farce is this supposed to be? Swamp Thing was hardly "forgotten" at the time, what with a movie that came out the same year DC relaunched a solo comic for the plant monster (1982), and while it may not have initially taken off under the late Martin Pasko, who wrote nearly 18 issues before Moore took over, could hardly be called obscure, mainly because it was only about a decade since Swamp Thing even debuted in 1972. That's a beginning example of how a political journal like FP isn't qualified for addressing the arts.

His new book, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, written with fellow comics author Steve Moore (no relation) and illustrated by an wide array of artists, is a self-help manual for a “fulfilling new career as a diabolist.” Like the book itself, this claim is both a joke and entirely serious. The authors want you, the reader, to become a magician—but for them it’s more about creative inspiration than conjuring the spirits of the damned.

Alan Moore is the most prominent of the wave of British talent—including Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, and Warren Ellis—that came to dominate the U.S. comics industry in the 1980s and ’90s. They were mostly young men from working-class backgrounds, few of whom had attended university. Moore himself was kicked out of his secondary school for, as he put it in one interview, being “one of the world’s most inept LSD dealers.”

Gee, now that's something to really force one to take his resume with a grain of salt. It's one thing if somebody becomes an addict, which is dismaying, but worse if you distribute stuff that can harm others. That aside, curious how they cite Gaiman without consideration how he's accused of doing much worse, and even if Ellis didn't do anything as bad, it could still be argued he too is a letdown, if he cheated the women he had affairs with by not helping them get the job interviews he's said to have offered helping out with. Strange they don't offer Jamie Delano - known for first writing Hellblazer, starring Moore's own creation of John Constantine - as an example of a UK writer. As a result, it just makes clear these periodicals are cheap and easy with their research and citations. As for becoming a magician, well, it'd be a lot more appealing if Moore hadn't become such a political letdown himself in the past decade, recalling his recent op-ed at the Guardian. Wouldn't it be better if he became a realist?

Comics, simultaneously culturally undervalued and offering room for wild experimentation, gave this group their canvas. Alan Moore’s detailed, deeply researched, and wildly imaginative stories became instant classics: Watchmen, his most famous graphic novel, sells tens of thousands of copies each year. His takes on iconic characters like Superman and Batman still shape their portrayal today. But, by the 1990s, he was burned out on superheroes, working instead on historical fiction like From Hell, in which he explores the Jack the Ripper murders and the mythologies around them.

Steve Moore, a friend of Alan Moore’s since they were both teenagers, was a comic book writer who left school at age 16. He was also a serious scholar, almost entirely self-taught, of the Yijing—an ancient Chinese divination text—and a member of the Royal Asiatic Society.

He also died a decade ago; this book, due in part to the difficulty in corralling so much artistic talent, has taken over 15 years to put together. It is a compilation, using both art and text, of their shared ideas on magic, society, and creativity—and perhaps the last gasp of a distinctly local take on the occult imagination.

In 1993, when he turned 40, Alan Moore announced in his local pub that he was going to be a magician and took up the ceremonial worship of Glycon, an obscure Anatolian snake god whose cult enjoyed a brief period of popularity in second-century Rome. As they recount in the book, the two Moores formed the world’s smallest magical cabal around January 1994, when they had a joint revelation that “in a space time continuum of four dimensions, every entity and every moment is eternal.” They also had a vision that they had “intruded on a space of blinding whiteness where the discarnate, timeless idea-forms of great magicians resided as a literal illuminati, a convergence of illuminated minds beyond the boundaries of material existence.”

It may be relevant that both authors were extremely high on mushrooms when this revelation occurred.

And of course that's a shame, though nowhere near as bad as dealing the trash, and Moore's far-left politics are one more reason why he's such a frustrating personality. I wonder how it is that drug addiction makes for an "inspiration"? Certainly not if one doesn't recognize why it's hazardous to one's health. Even legal drugs can be dangerous. And honestly, I think it's ludicrous Moore would specialize in writing tales about violent monsters like Jack the Ripper, especially when it's nothing compared to the modern crisis of Islamic terrorism.

In the United Kingdom today, localism is often associated with a spirit of “Little Britain”—a pinched, xenophobic, and Brexit-esque view of the world. The Moores’ work comes from an entirely different tradition, where digging into the layers of the place you come from, and your own mindscape, can reveal ideas and emotions shared with the entire world. There aren’t many writers doing that kind of digging today, especially from the political left. (Alan Moore has always been a fierce activist, including for LGBTQ+ rights.)

As a history of magic and religion, the book should be taken with a healthy dose of salt. Take the figure of the “sorcerer” that bookends the work. This is a famous image from a prehistoric cave in France, purportedly showing a dancing magician who mixes aspects of animal and human. Unfortunately, though, the cave painting looks different in reality, and the image seems to have been largely invented by a French archaeologist in the 1920s.

What about Moore's past conduct? Shouldn't that be taken with some salt? Also interesting how this article predictably makes Brexit out to sound like a bad thing, when all it's really about is maintaining self-determination without the EU interfering in UK affairs. Not that any British governments till now have actually made things better, and as recent incidents make clear, the situation in the UK remains very dire, and even Moore doesn't seem particularly concerned.

There are some sweeping claims that should give a reader pause. I don’t think, for instance, that “the union between Jews and Protestants that Christian Kabbalah made possible would be a significant factor in the creation of the state of Israel.” For a detailed, scholarly take on the influence of the occult in England, I would turn instead to Ronald Hutton’s work, such as Witches, Druids, and King Arthur, or Francis Young’s political history, “Magic in Merlin’s Realm“.

But the authors are aware of how blurry the lines are around the histories they relate—and how the fiction can be more important. The magician whose history is related at the greatest length is Alexander of Abonoteichus, a second-century charlatan and the creator of the snake god that Alan Moore himself worships, Glycon, who in real life was a drugged python in a blonde wig. Alexander’s life is told in a series of Mad magazine-style comic strips that dub him the “quack with the knack” and the “fake with the snake.”

For Alan Moore, as he described at length in one story, Glycon’s great advantage as a god is that he is verifiably false. As he has “Glycon” say, “This is the only way gods manifest, in paint, and props, and poetry. I am not the docile python, or the false head, or the borrowed voice. I am the idea that generates these things.”

Some people might one day describe Moore as a false god. I just hope he didn't take a negative view of Israel. But, as the following item from the Irish Times notes, Moore's writing resorts to the now tiresome cliche of attacking Christianity, and even seems to believe magic itself was only depicted in one angle for ages on end:

“Right from the start, me and Steve said magic is not this big, spooky, dark thing that’s intimidating and full of nightmares and horrors. We thought of magic as something that was quite beautiful and which, at times, appears to have a sense of humour. I mean, magic has got to have a sense of humour just to put up with the spectacularly absurd parade of magicians that have emerged over the centuries.

“We also wanted to dispel all this exclusivity. If we were to have a book of magic, it would have to be the kind of thing where, whatever age you are, if you were to look at it, you would think, ‘Yeah ... that’s a book of magic!’ Even a seven-year-old, because the child’s perspective on magic is, I think, just as important – it’s where most of us get our attachment to magic and magical ideas. It’s not for children, it’s clearly for adults, as we say on the back cover. But we also wanted to have the ‘best children’s annual ever made’ kind of feel to it.”

Throughout, we encounter notorious sorcerers in sections titled Old Moore’s Guide To The Great Enchanters, which offer nutshell biographies of practitioners like Solomon and Merlin as well as later figures like Johannes Faust, Simon Magus, John Dee and Aleister Crowley, listing their lives and works, as well as the propaganda efforts put in place by a Christian church in ascendancy to make magicians seem wicked and evil.

Seriously, it's beyond boring already when Christianity is made a villain for tales like these. If Moore really cared, he'd take notice of how there's Islamic societies where magic and witchcraft are considered capital offenses. And for heaven's sake, there've been plenty of fantasy stories over past centuries where magic isn't just depicted as something monsters practice. Haven't they ever seen Elizabeth Montgomery in the 1964-72 sitcom Bewitched? If you want magic with a sense of humor, that's definitely one place to go searching. I think Moore's choice of whom to depict as baddies says all you need to know he's the kind of writer who's out of touch with the times in his old of age. Besides, for somebody who's making the Church a crook in his story, Moore apparently doesn't understand he's doing a certain form of excluding himself. What a shame that again, Moore's proving a most disappointingly insular type of writer many years after he was in his prime. The magic is long gone.

Labels: Europe and Asia, history, islam and jihad, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics