Alan Moore’s Best Comics

circa 1997-1998 @ AnotherUniverse.com

It takes some guts to call yourself America's Best Comics. But if anyone has the right to try, it's Alan Moore.

Following the end of his Awesome Comics commitment, Moore has decided to take the opposite approach to comics: instead of the history-soaked reconstructionism of Supreme, Glory, Youngblood and Judgement Day, America's Best Comics will cut loose from comics tradition altogether, to imagine what comics would look like if there weren't any 60-year history to draw upon.

"If anything, [ABC] hearkens back not to comics so much as to pulp magazines, pulp science fiction, the newspaper strips; it draws inspiration from all the things comics themselves drew inspiration from in the first place," Moore says. "We're encouraging each of the artists to make their own strips as distinctive as possible. Really personalize, it, so we get the exact opposite of a house style.

"Nor will these characters even appear to exist in the same universe as one another. There won't be, at least not for a long time, crossovers or anything like that, because who says they're a good idea? If we do have a crossover eventually, it'll be a really big deal.

"Also, I want to play a bit fast and loose with continuity. Not the point of being deliberately perverse, but I don't want to be bogged down in pointless continuity. There was very little actual continuity in the Mort Weisinger Superman books, until he invented recurring elements, and then each element was added one at a time, and only because it was fun. We're going to try and slough off all the bad habits comics have gotten into, things we've fallen into doing just by reflex."

Scheduled for late 1998 from Wildstorm, ABC will consist of four titles, all initially written by Moore:

Tom Strong Adventures stars Tom Strong, a genius whose parents arrived on the island of Attabar Teru circa 1899 and lost young Tom to the jungle. Growing up in isolation, Tom developed a Herculean physique to accompany his amazing mind, and then came back to civilization, as detailed in the first issue, "How Tom Strong Got Started."

The whole first issue, incidentally, is told as excerpts from an introductory packet sent to the members of the Strong Men of America, a boys' club based in Millennium City, where most of Tom's adventures are laid. Tom Strong's cast of characters includes his lovely wife, Dhalua; his daughter Testa; his steam-powered robot manservant, Pneuman, and a surgically altered talking gorilla named King Solomon.

A talking gorilla?

"We're aiming for a certain amount of humor and levity," Moore said, "not to the point of being inane, but just to introduce a breath of fresh air. What I'm hoping is to break down the division between mainstream and alternative comics, since comics as a whole are too small an industry these days to sustain that fine a distinction, and get back to comics' greatest strength, which is its diversity. [We're] trying for comics that can be read on one level as entry-level comics, so exciting and direct that a 12-year-old can read them and enjoy them as adventure stories, and at the same time appeal right across the spectrum."

Tomorrow Comics is an anthology title with four stories planned for the first issue, after which the features may rotate monthly. Rick Veitch has finished drawing the first 8-page Grayshirt story, called "Amnesia", in which the masked adventurer Grayshirt actually plays a very minor role. It concerns a citizen of Indigo City, the center of Grayshirt's adventures, with Grayshirt lingering in the shadows., much as Denny Colt didn't actually have much to do with many of the best Spirit stories.

"Working on the Eisner Kitchen Sink book caused me to reevaluate what was so bloody good about his Spirit stories. They're so central to comic expression that they're part of the furniture, almost. We've tried to make it, in 8 pages, a story that will be really memorable. I didn't want just to do a story that was of Eisner quality, but of Grade-A Spirit quality."

Another feature, Cobweb, drawn by Melinda Gebbie, "is as if the Phantom Lady had been any good," Moore said. "I can remember how eroticism has always been, at least subliminally, a part of comics. That's why the Phantom Lady is fondly remembered; these days, she'd have been ghettoized off into Eros Comics, or something. It'll have a cheesecake, a pinup element to it, but with that element worked into good stories.

"Cobweb is a female adventuress in a sort of see-through diaphanous gown, so she partakes of that whole sort of archetype, but we're trying to blend that with elements of fantasy and experiment in the storytelling process itself. A section of the first story will be photographic - we'll be actually using photographs, if that all pans out. It's important to me that these stories have the liveliness of the middle Sixties, which I remember as one of the liveliest periods of comics. Looking back at the past for inspiration, but not just copying the past, but using that energy to forge a new positive future."

The other strips in Tomorrow Comics are a 6-pager drawn by Kevin Nowlan called Jack B. Quick, Boy Inventor, and Future American, probably drawn by Jim Bakke. Moore describes Jack B. Quick this way:

"If you think Ray Bradbury, small town, I wanted a kind of vehicle _ for sort of charming, kid-based science fiction, but unlike a lot of science fiction you get in comic books, I'd like to take the elements J from science fiction that I enjoy, which is not so much the rockets, rayguns and robots, but the ideas that Bradbury and my other favorites were so adept at using.

"The Future American is, quite honestly, the idea of Jack Kirby's Fighting American, but whereas that was a beautiful vehicle to look at the absurdities of the 1950s, I'd like to boost up the satire a bit, turn it all towards the 1990s, which surely have much more potential for satire than the 50s ever did. If you recall the Fighting American stories, you don't recall the Fighting American; you remember the bizarre villains. He was really something of a cipher, as he needed to be if you're going to use him as a vehicle for satire."

Top Ten, drawn by Gene Ha, may be the most radically different book of the bunch. Imagine Hill Street Blues, or another of Steven Bochco's cop shows, in a city where almost everyone is some kind of superhero or supervillain. The city's called Neopolis, and it's where superheroes tend to congregate, much as retirees used to congregate in Florida.

"Given that most of the population are previous or former superheroes, you still have police being called to domestic disturbances, except that the husband might be a retired supervillain, and the wife might be a retired supervillain, and the police who respond will be superheroes ... there are still hookers, they've got superpowers, their customers have superpowers, their pimps have superpowers ... we've all got superpowers here, and so what? We've still got the same sort of problems.

"It'll be about police precinct 10, and the main cast will be the cops of the precinct. The problem with superteams is that you can't spend much time on any one character. One solution I tried in Youngblood was to have a very small number of heroes, whereas in Top Ten, you'll be cutting back and forth between characters a lot. There'll be ongoing stories, stories that conclude in one issue, character bits that run two or three issues and then get resolved.

"We've got this black character called King Peacock. Gene Ha suggested Paul Robeson as a model for the character's personality, so there's a good chunk of Paul Robeson in King Peacock. I've also been reading a book about Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. He was a genuine hero; he had his human side, he had his problems, but he was an incredible hero, who ultimately was probably too much his own man for the Soviets' taste. So there's another character whose working name is the Spaceman, who's a Russian character, based upon Gagarin.

"We've a whole string of male and female cops, detectives, uniforms, specialists ... we've got a senior desk sergeant who's called Kemlo Caesar, or the Hyperdog. He wears a human-shaped robotic bodysuit and works the desk."

"And it won't be about the superpowers, but about the characters. Yes, all the cops in the station have superpowers, but that doesn't matter. It's like one guy has a magnum and another has an automatic - it doesn't have anything to do with their characters most of the time.

The fourth title, Promethea, has no artist assigned as yet. A young woman doing her final thesis in college on folklore and urban legends finds out about a little-known American folklore character called Promethea. She finds apparently random, disconnected references to this character in 19th-century Spencerian poetry, and then in a 1920s Hearst newspaper strip called Little Margie in Misty Magic Land, the title character is protected by a kindly, beautiful amazon named Promethea.

Then there's a seemingly unconnected character named Promethea, the warrior princess of Huy-Brasil, in a series of bad pulp novels from the 1930s and 40s. They have these beautiful painted covers by a female artist, and at some point the pulp company was bought out by a comic book company, and so there were comics based on pulps, "the way Planet Stories became Planet Comics, or Jungle Tales became Jungle comics, that sort or thing.

So this minor character from the pulps gets her own comic book, and it's handed to this young artist who writes and draws his own stuff for 20 years, and then in the Sixties it's handed off to another young writer, and so on.

Also, in reports from the trenches of the First World War, and the battlefields of the Second World War, there are legends of this beautiful angelic figure helping people, and urban legends from the present, and so on. Promethea appears in all sorts of fictional venues, in many guises, and no one's put it together before this young student, who finally unravels the mystery and actually gets to meet Promethea.

"It isn't Wonder Woman," Moore said, "although I suppose any strong solo female character who has a touch of the mystical in her origin will be compared to some degree to Wonder Woman, so in that sense they're kindred characters. But it's more a strong solo female character who exists half in the real world, and half in a different world, and the line between what's real and what's imaginary."

Moore plans to write the first half-dozen issues of each title, and then hand off some of the features to other writers who can carry on in the same vein. Neil Gaiman has shown interest in writing a story for ABC at some point, Moore said; at this point, six months out, he hasn't lined up any regular writers yet.

"I'd like to wait and see, six months on, which features have become sudden favorites and which I can't bear to let go of," he said. "Hopefully, that'll be the case with all of them."

One could do worse than a line of comics all written by Moore. In which case, will ABC stand for Alan's Best Comics?