[Was originally going to write this for a publisher’s website as part of an “Illustrations I love” series I had been invited to contribute to – but I procrastinated with such fierce determination that the series winded up before the piece could be done]
Page 24 of chapter 5 of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s stunning From Hell ends with this wide panel, which holds me in thrall whenever I look at it – though there is also a tiny fear that I will be sucked into the scene it depicts.
As you can see, these are the main elements of the drawing: a woman walking along a dark, deserted road, a coach coming up behind her, the silhouettes of two men visible in the driver’s seat– the coachman holding his whip, sitting next to him a man wearing a top hat. Most of the light in this scratchy black-and-white image is behind the coach, giving the impression that it has emerged from some great mist. (Or through a magic portal. There are concentric circles in the portion of the drawing that frames the carriage – swirling fog, or a vortex to hell?) The woman’s features are indistinct but her face is lit up as if by the coach’s lamp, enough for the reader to register that she has only just noticed the vehicle and is looking up at it with childlike curiosity.
The scene could be from fairytale or myth, a version of the Wolf stalking Red Riding Hood, but it is a fictionalised depiction of an encounter that really did take place around 3 AM on August 31, 1888 near the Whitechapel Road in London’s squalid East End. Purely at the level of narrative, this is a crucial panel in From Hell: the first meeting between the serial killer widely known as “Jack the Ripper” and one of his victims (the prostitute Polly Nichols). A full 130 pages (and at least 800 drawings – I’m not counting) into a graphic novel that uses the Ripper murders as a sharp dissection of the Victorian Age, an unveiling of London’s architectural secrets and a foreshadowing of the 20th century, this is the first time we see killer and victim together in the same frame. (No spoiler alert needed – this book is not a whodunit.)
Thematic importance aside, I love the image on its own terms. There is something almost impressionistic about it – no real detailing, just light and shadow used so skilfully (see how the right side of Polly's dress is partly illuminated while the left remains in darkness) that one gets the gist of what is happening without being able to describe the specifics. Elsewhere in the story, including in the panels that neighbour this one, you can see Polly’s features clearly, but that isn’t necessary in this drawing, which has a symbolic function and is also a sort of punctuation mark – dramatically ending a page that has, over the previous six panels, shown us this poor woman staggering along the road, looking for a customer so she can earn the “doss money” she needs to sleep in a boarding house at night, singing a song to herself while the light of the coach slowly, slowly creeps up behind her...and then.
(“I want this to be dramatic, with the coach a large and dark engine of the apocalypse,” wrote Alan Moore in his panel description to Eddie Campbell; you can see the whole page and Moore’s script for it here.)
To really appreciate the drawing, you have to see it not just in the context of the rest of the page, but the rest of the chapter, and finally the whole book taken together. In the scenes that follow this image, the Ripper – cast here as the royal surgeon Sir William Gull – will invite Polly into his carriage, offer her opium-laced grapes and direct the coach to the nearby London Hospital, in the gardens 
of which a lonesome figure – the deformed “Elephant Man”, Joseph Merrick – can be seen from a distance. After asking Polly to say the words “Salutation to Ganesha”, Gull will strangle her, thus commencing – with the blessings of the elephant-headed God – what he sees as a sacred mission. Sir William’s delusion is that by killing these women according to Masonic ritual, he is performing the divinely mandate task of suppressing the “irrational”, feminine side of the human consciousness. In this view of things, the coming together of killer and victim is a moment with cosmic significance: as Gull puts it elsewhere, they are to be “wed in eternity”. (Note: this is true of the Jack the Ripper story even at a more mundane level, beyond the colourful conspiracies involving the Royal family and Freemasons: a never-identified assailant and his destitute victims are entwined for all time in the popular imagination.)
The coach image is also an arresting one given the overall visual language of chapter 5 (titled “The Nemesis of Neglect”). Early in the chapter, there have been a series of pages that have contrasted Gull’s privileged life with Polly’s hand-to-mouth existence. Thus, the doctor wakes and stretches languidly in his plush bedchamber, while the unfortunates of the East End sleep in the cold, sitting up against a wall, with a rope stretched out in front of them to prevent them from falling forward. And Campbell employs different drawing styles to emphasise the divide between the two settings: water-colour drawings make Gull’s world lush, while Polly and her friends are drawn in the gravelly black ink that is more typical of the book.
This juxtaposition continues for a few pages. And it is apt that the drawing which finally unites ("weds") the two characters has an abstract quality: it definitely isn’t the smooth water-colour style employed for the earlier Gull scenes, but it is dreamier, more poetic than the deliberately coarse style that Campbell uses elsewhere.
Choosing this image to discuss here doesn’t mean it is my favourite drawing in From Hell – there are dozens of others I could just as easily have cited. When I first read this book years ago, I concentrated on the story – on the brilliant wealth and depth of detail Moore brings to his central conceit, and how he fits the facts of the Ripper case to his own speculative fiction. But as I revisit it these days I find myself looking ever more closely at the images and discovering new things in them. (This is even more rewarding if you have the book on DVD and can look at large versions of the pictures – though that is a time-consuming process since there are thousands of them.)
P.S. As a From Hell obsessive, I can't believe I didn't know about this new companion volume. Put together by Campbell, it includes (among other things) many of the detailed scripts Moore wrote for each of the 500 pages - a fascinating insight into the writer's incredible mind, as well as into the process of creative collaboration.
[From my Forbes Life column: some favourite literary treatments – non-fictional and fictional – of true crime]
“Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it,” the 19th century historian Henry Thomas Buckle observed, and indeed if you cast a quick eye over the daily news it's easy to see the many links between a societal framework and the crimes that occur in it. Thus, a series of child-murders takes place in a suburb of Delhi, and shortly afterwards it is revealed that one reason the killers got away for as long as they did was the mutual antipathy between the poor people of the area (whose children were mainly the victims) and the local police; the slum-dwellers, living on disputed land, were wary about going to the authorities to register missing-person reports, and when they did they weren't taken seriously, or were hounded.
Such fissures and barriers to communication exist in any society, and many fine books about real-life crime have dwelt on them. Among my favourites is Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, a reconstruction of a famous 1860 killing in an English country house. A three-year-old boy – the youngest son of the large Kent family – was found murdered, his little body stuffed into an outdoor “privy” (toilet); the killer was almost certainly one of the 12 people staying in Road Hill House - three servants and nine family members, including a woman who had once belonged to the servant class but had, controversially, become the second wife of the patriarch.
Fascinating though the case is in itself (especially for anyone who enjoys a good locked-room mystery), the power of Summerscale’s book lies in its detailing of a society and the subtle changes it was undergoing. On the one hand, the milieu was a conservative one: the violation of a “respectable” family’s privacy (necessitated by the investigation conducted by the first generation of Scotland Yard detectives) was seen as a crime in its own right; a woman’s discarded night-shift, which may have been important evidence, remained unmentioned by the police because they believed the blood stains on it were menstrual and they didn’t want to have to deal with the garment. But at the same time this was a world that enjoyed peeping into others’ private lives. Little wonder that tabloid journalism was in its infancy, holding up a mirror to the hidden prurience of this society.
A century after the Road Hill murder, that prurience was echoed in a different setting. Gyan Prakash’s marvellous book Mumbai Fables includes (among other stories from Bombay’s past) an account of the 1959 Nanavati case, when a cuckolded husband shot his wife’s lover dead. The story, as related by Prakash in his chapter “The Tabloid and the City”, began on an almost genteel note – Commander Nanavati walks into the office of the Deputy Commissioner, confesses to the murder and is offered a cup of tea – but soon it acquired a more unsavoury tinge. Almost single-handedly responsible for turning the case into a long-running soap opera was the tabloid Blitz, helmed by the dashing Russi Karanjia. “The Nanavati case’s life as a media event is a quintessentially modern story of the entanglement of the city, mass culture and law in a single circuit,” observes Prakash.
A striking detail in his account involves the voyeuristic participation of “ordinary” people: the city’s teenagers, for instance, put new words to the tune of a popular song – “You’re not going to hang, Nanavati/You don’t have to cry.” Similar ghoulishness has pervaded other cases of high-profile crime. After the unmasking of the killer/grave-robber Ed Gein in 1957, local kids chanted variations on Christmas carols (“Deck the halls/with limbs of Molly”). Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho is about the classic film (loosely based on Gein’s crimes) but it includes a very creepy account of the arrest of the middle-aged recluse whose gruesome escapades shocked a cosy Wisconsin community - and an equally disturbing insight into the underpinnings of the American dairyland. “The Gein farmhouse,” writes Rebello, referring to a house of horrors filled with disembowelled human cadavers, “offered testimony not only to man’s fathomless capacity for the barbaric, but also to the ability of an entire community to deny its existence.” Anyone acquainted with Gein had more than enough evidence that the man was not right in the head – yet they had chosen to disregard the obvious, even in light of the many mysterious disappearances in the neighbourhood.
****
Nearly 50 years after the Nanavati incident, another crime of passion involving three people caught Mumbai’s imagination. But it was a less refined age, a time of much more extensive media coverage, and this was a post-liberalisation society made up of people straining for more glamorous lives. The protagonists were a young TV executive named Neeraj Grover, a wannabe actress, Maria Susairaj, and her naval-officer boyfriend Emile Jerome. In Meenal Baghel’s Death in Mumbai, the intersecting stories of these three people becomes a commentary on modern India and its multiple divides: between towns and cities, celebrities and celebrity-aspirants. It also extends beyond the immediate details of the case and covers such disparate material as film director Ram Gopal Varma’s appetite for kinkiness and Ekta Kapoor’s teenage fascination for American soap operas, which eventually spawned a giant dream industry.
“This shop, it was his. Isn’t this world enough?” Such is the lament of a murder victim’s father trying to understand why his son needed more than the life he had in Kanpur. Death in Mumbai is a cautionary tale about what might easily happen to people for whom the world is never enough, and yet it passes no facile judgements. It also refuses to get unduly sensationalistic about topics that seem to demand sensationalism. And so, it’s interesting that at a literature festival in Mumbai, Baghel reflected on Janet Malcolm’s remark about the “moral indefensibility” of journalism and recalled a time when she found herself chasing a distressed old man down a spiral staircase in a courthouse, then stopping to ask herself “WHAT am I doing?”
Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer had sharply raised issues of ethics in reportage, using the work of the non-fiction writer Joe McGinniss as a focal point. While researching the 1970 killing of a pregnant woman and her two children, McGinniss spent time with murder accused Jeff MacDonald, husband and father to the victims; he gained MacDonald’s confidence, convinced him that he believed in his innocence, but eventually published a book – Fatal Vision – portraying him as a psychopath who was well capable of the murders.
One of the most celebrated of all true-crime books – Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood – has a comparable back-story. As a high-profile member of New York’s literary circles in the late 1950s, Capote became deeply interested in the Kansas murder of the Clutter family, and ended up bonding with one of the arrested killers, Perry Smith. Over a series of meetings Truman won Smith’s trust, even helping him find lawyers to appeal his case. But later, he worried that the murderers might not get the death penalty – and that this would prevent his book from getting the dramatic ending it needed.
This makes In Cold Blood a work of deeper violence than is contained in its subject matter; beneath its narrative is a story about a man sacrificing his humanity at the altar of his art. And yet – this is a function of Capote’s immense talent – it is an empathetic, moving book, as in the passage where Mr Clutter genially gives a group of people permission to hunt pheasant on his land. “I’m not as poor as I look. Go ahead, get all you can,” he said. Then, touching the brim of his hat, he headed for home and the day’s work, unaware that it would be his last. And the final scene, where a detective meets one of the victim’s friends near the four graves, is as elegantly novelistic an ending as you can imagine.
Also novelistic – if not quite as skilfully constructed – is S Hussain Zaidi’s Mafia Queens of Mumbai (co-written with Jane Borges). Zaidi is best known for his Black Friday, a meticulous reportage-oriented work about the planning, execution and aftermath of the 1993 terror attacks on Mumbai, but even more engrossing from the human-interest perspective is this book about the forgotten women of Mumbai’s underworld. It weaves together 13 stories, beginning with a profile of the iconic Jenabai Daruwalli, the “wily old woman of Dongri”, who was like a sister to Haji Mastan and a surrogate mother to Dawood Ibrahim. Jenabai’s role in effecting a compromise between “Mumbai’s warring gangsters” in Mastan’s bungalow is a key passage here, and the narrative includes minor stylistic flourishes, alternating from a reporter’s detached perspective to first-person accounts by such figures as Abu Salem’s moll Monica Bedi.
In such works of non-fiction, we see how the line between journalism and dramatic embellishment can get blurred. But true crime has also been given insightful fictional treatment, as in Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George – the story of two men whose paths briefly crossed in a case that made headlines in early 20th century Britain. George Edalji was convicted (on flimsy evidence) of mutilating farm animals and spent three years in prison; on his release he appealed to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, who proceeded to turn detective himself and helped clear Edalji’s name. In Barnes’s hands, this story becomes a thoughtful examination of the ambiguities that govern human actions, the interior lives of two very different men and the conflicts between faith and knowledge. What can one ever truly know? – this is a question that rears its head repeatedly in this narrative; Barnes contrasts the facile workings of detective fiction with the many uncertainties of the real world. (“Holmes was never obliged to stand in the witness box and have his suppositions and intuitions and immaculate theories ground to fine dust...”)
In True History of the Kelly Gang, that master of voices Peter Carey creates a thoroughly believable portrait of a person, the times he lives in, the world he comes from, the rituals and inner workings of that world. In the process, he takes a figure from misty legend – the 19th century Australian outlaw Ned Kelly – and brings him alive in a scarily immediate way. “God willing I shall live to see you read these words to witness your astonishment and see your dark eyes widen and your jaw drop when you finally comprehend the injustice we Irish suffered in this present age,” writes Carey’s Kelly, addressing his daughter. This is a story about a social setting that becomes a springboard for crime, about modernity cautiously brushing against the law of the jungle, and apathetic authority figures who are unwilling to provide even-handed justice. But its real achievement is the breathless, unpunctuated, colloquial style used to suggest how the barely literate Kelly might have told his story.
Something comparable is achieved by Robert Graves in I, Claudius, about crimes that are somewhat different from those in the books mentioned above – crimes that were, in fact, committed within the aegis of authority. Graves takes a magnifying glass to the violent excesses and decadence of the Roman Empire – the homicidal megalomania, the almost casual poisonings and betrayals – and provides, among many other brilliant touches, a riveting portrait of the monstrous Caligula, aspirer to God-status. Like Mario Puzo did in The Godfather, this book places us right in the midst of a violent family’s life, making it intimate and easy to relate to, even when we disapprove of the characters’ actions.
But my favourite fictionalised take on true crime is the sprawling graphic novel From Hell, written by that giant of the form, Alan Moore, and masterfully drawn in sooty black-and-white by Eddie Campbell. From Hell is nothing less than an examination of Victorian society through the prism of the notorious Jack the Ripper murders, which held London in thrall through the second half of 1888 (and created urban legends for decades more). But it is also a commentary on the complex history of London, the vast class divide and the exploitation of women. Moore’s knack for linking events through time and space allow him to throw in fascinating, multilayered asides involving Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man, Queen Victoria, Oscar Wilde and even Adolf Hitler (who was conceived around the time that the Ripper killings began, and who would become the poster boy for a century of very different horrors that lay ahead).
"The Ripper murders, happening when and where they did, were almost like an apocalyptic summary of that age,” Moore said once. In his view of things, the murders were also a dark, mystical foreshadowing of the 20th century – an age that was expected to be more civilised but in which incomprehensible crimes would continue to be committed, and a variety of books - introspective, gratuitous, mournful, sensationalistic - would continue to be written about them.
[An earlier Forbes Life column about popular-science books is here]
A reminder for comic lovers about Eddie Campbell’s superb blog The Fate of the Artist. It’s a real treasure-trove for fans of From Hell (though there's plenty else too) - Eddie has been putting up pages from that book along with the panel-by-panel scripts sent to him by Alan Moore. (Some examples here, here, here and here - well worth looking at even if you know nothing about From Hell.) Read some of Moore’s visualisations for each page, you’ll be astonished at the intensity and vividness of the descriptions (remember that this wasn’t written for publication, it was a personal exchange between a writer and a cartoonist. And the finished book ran to nearly 600 pages).
I also liked this post where Eddie discusses “the problem of the cinematic principle” when it comes to creating graphic novels – namely “the idea that we’re always looking through a camera. In a comic book script it shows itself in ways that we have long stopped being conscious of. For instance, we will tend to automatically describe a view as being in long-shot or close-up. We have forgotten that these are movie terms…My idea was to take ‘cutting’ away and replace it with a keen observation of body language.”
For a demonstration, see this page – read Alan Moore’s descriptions of how each panel should look and then see how Eddie does the drawings his own way, showing the same view of the two figures throughout (instead of cross-cutting between them) but subtly altering their body language and their relationship to each other as the conversation progresses.
Trying to formulate the many things I want to say about Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's magnificent graphic novel (or comic book, take your pick) Watchmen, it occurs to me that it's so much easier to review a book that's all text. When both the subject of the review and the review itself deal entirely in words, the process is more straightforward: among other things it's possible to indicate what an author is trying to do by quoting passages from his work in context and commenting on them. But it's a very different ballgame reviewing a work where words and images act in conjunction (or in contrast) to create a very particular effect, or where multiple narratives converge in a single panel. Just describing some of Watchmen's denser passages can be twice as hard as reviewing a difficult novel.
Not all top-quality graphic novels pose this problem. Art Spiegelman's Maus, for instance, is easier to discuss because it has a fairly chronological narrative structure – and also because the visuals usually take second place to the writing (even though the simplicity of Spiegelman's drawings is often deceptive). But Alan Moore's major works (of which Watchmen and From Hell are pre-eminent) are much more complex beasts. Here is an author who delights in making all sorts of connections, both visual and textual, between seemingly unrelated things: running two or more narratives together, intercutting scenes so that the dialogue from one scene provides a voiceover for a panel that depicts another event. There’s a lot of prefiguring in his work, the casual incorporation of phrases and images that will acquire a deeper resonance later in the story. Moore has used all these devices in his collaborations with artists like Gibbons (who drew Watchmen), Eddie Campbell (From Hell), David Lloyd (V for Vendetta) and Kevin McNeil (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and these books demand to be experienced firsthand. The most effective thing a reviewer can do is to grab the potential reader by the scruff of his neck and drag him to the comic. Describing their effect can work only up to a point.
So now I’ll try to do just that.
The plot
Watchmen, originally published in 1986-87 in the form of 12 comics of approx 30 pages each, is among other things an inversion of the standard superhero comic format. It's set in an alternative America where real-life costumed heroes succeed in tackling minor crimes but find themselves becoming increasingly irrelevant in the face of the world’s more complex problems (most of the story is set against the background of the Cold War and the nuclear race between the US and Russia).
The story isn't chronologically told but here's a simplified synopsis: The novel's "present" takes place over a few days in October-November 1985 with a vigilante crimefighter named Rorshach investigating a murder and reestablishing contact with his former colleagues, most of whom retired eight years earlier when costumed heroes were outlawed. But we also learn of related events going all the way back to 1939, when the first band of masked adventurers (collectively known as the Minutemen) came together to fight crime. Through flashbacks and other expository devices such as excerpts from books and articles written by and about these characters, we learn of the tragedies that struck the original group and about their eventual disbanding; the formation in the mid-1960s of a new group of Crimebusters who, among other dubious achievements, helped the US win the Vietnam War; and the Keene Act which banned these crimefighters from operating independently though allowing some of them to work as government agents.
And we meet the protagonists, each with his or her own set of personal demons – including the amoral Edward Blake/The Comedian (a character about whom I would have liked to learn more) whose death sets the plot in motion and the two erstwhile Nite Owls who meet on Saturdays to reminisce about glories past. The only character in the book who actually has supernormal powers is Dr Manhattan/Jonathan Osterman, who developed extraordinary control over matter following a laboratory accident. While the classic superhero comic might have used Dr Manhattan to great effect in action scenes, his function here is different: he serves as a dispassionate observer/commenter on human affairs. (Of course, he is also being used as a weapon by the US – a dubious move, since his very presence in the world encourages the possibility of mutually assured destruction.)
One of the most interesting narrative devices is to include a comic-within-the-comic in the form of a story titled "Tales of the Black Freighter", being read by a young boy sitting outside a newsstand: this is a pirate thriller told in the voice of a man who encounters a ghost ship and hurries back to his hometown to warn his friends and family of impending doom. Though my first instinct was to not pay too much attention to this embedded narrative (so much concentration is required for the main story alone), I gradually came to appreciate the ways in which it comments on the main plot and helps us understand the personal conundrums of some of the characters. (Incidentally, I enjoyed the way the line “I will give you bodies beyond your wildest imaginings” in a bodybuilding advertisement on the back cover of the comic acquires a dreadful new meaning in the final chapter. Just one of the many blink-and-you’ll-miss-it tricks on view here.)
As usual, Moore repeatedly references works of literature and popular culture. Each of Watchmen’s 12 chapters has as its title a phrase or quotation that is placed in context at the end of the chapter. Among these are “At Midnight All the Agents…” (from Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row”), “Fearful Symmetry” (from William Blake’s “The Tyger”) and “The Judge of All the Earth” (from a line in Genesis) – each title alludes to at least two or three separate things mentioned or depicted in the chapter.
Themes
Watchmen is a very complex work that needs to be returned to at least 3-4 times before you can fully appreciate the wealth of detail on each page and the magic jointly woven by Moore's writing and Gibbons' illustrations. It addresses too many issues for me to take stock of here, but a notable recurring one is that all idealism is eventually corrupted, or at least diluted. We've all seen examples (in every sphere of life) of how groups or organisations, even the ones that begin with the best of intentions, gradually change as they become bigger, more mainstream. Ulterior motives enter the picture and equally importantly there is imputation of ulterior motives where none might originally have existed – which creates a never-ending cycle of distrust and misunderstanding.
But what's even more poignant is the loss of idealism in individuals, which can be seen in the personal stories and disillusionments of many of the aging, pot-bellied "superheroes" in Watchmen. As youngsters they had fixed notions of right and wrong, they were clear in their minds about what they would and wouldn’t stand for. But as time passes they understand the importance of compromise, become more aware of their own failings and latent hypocrisies. Like most of us, they eventually become content with doing the best they reasonably can in a world where too much idealism is not just impractical but dangerous. (It’s interesting to note that Rorschach, the only crimefighter who continues to see things in strict black and white terms, is more unstable than any of the conventional “villains”.)
These themes repeatedly crop up in Watchmen - as in the scene where the aging Sally Jupiter (who masqueraded as the glamorous superheroine Silk Spectre decades earlier) is touched when a fan sends her an old porno-comic featuring her character. In her own younger days Sally would undoubtedly have knocked the "perv" out with a swift left hook if she ever ran into him. But to the lonely old woman that she is now, this reminder of her fame is something to be cherished. “Laurie, I’m 65,” she tells her indignant daughter, “Every day the future looks a bit darker. But the past, even the grimy bits of it…well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.” (Here the visual synchronises with the words "keeps on getting brighter" as the panel depicts a camera flash going on - the cue for a flashback to a superheroes' photo shoot from the good old days.)
A closely related theme is that each idea (and perhaps each manifestation of idealism?) has a short life-span, that it must eventually be replaced – and that the people who pave the way for a new world often find that once their part is played they themselves have no further place in it. (This is also explored in Moore's V for Vendetta, about a Guy Fawkes-like anarchist spreading terror in a totalitarian Britain. "Anarchy wears two faces, creator and destroyer," V tells his protégé Evey at one point. "Thus destroyers topple empires, make a canvas of clean rubble where creators can then build a better world. Once the rubble is achieved, away with our destroyers! They have no place within our better world.")
Everything is transient, Watchmen reminds us; it’s no coincidence that the most important character of the final two chapters gets his name from Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”, about the temporariness of power and hubris. But also, as Dr Manhattan cryptically says to Ozymandias in the closing pages, “Nothing ever ends” – which can be taken to mean that no one ever has the final word on anything. The two ideas are not as contradictory as they might appear to be, and both are vital to the Watchmen universe.
End of blah blah
Reading the last few paragraphs, I realise they make the book sound preachy and provide little sense of how dynamic it is – above all, what a great comic book it is. I’ve also probably focused too much on Moore’s writing without discussing Gibbons’ contribution. But then, like I said, I have no real idea how to review a work like this.
So to wrap this up let me just mention one captivating sequence among many: the passage where Dr Manhattan (who can simultaneously experience the past, present and future) reflects that the world is a clock without a craftsman. In a good novel this thought, not in itself exceptional, would be given weight by the context and the treatment, by the quality of the words used to describe it. But here it develops gradually over a number of pages where words and images combine and collide to create meaning. Dr Manhattan/Jon reflects on various incidents in his past, on the permutations of events that brought him to this moment – and all of this leads up to a crescendo at the end of the chapter (which incidentally is titled "Watchmaker" – derived from Albert Einstein's remark that if he had known about the consequences of atomic power he would have chosen to work in a watch manufacturing plant).
It’s a brilliant segment and a fine example, one among many in this book, of how visionary and far-reaching the comic-book medium can be. Like a watchmaker’s most intricate creations, Watchmen is greater than the sum of its interconnecting parts.
Links: The Wikipedia entries on the book and some of its characters are among the most comprehensive and incisive that I've read on that site (an indication of how intense Watchmen's following is). Do read these articles for a much more wide-ranging analysis (though preferably after you've read the book – there are quite a few spoilers). Also, this excellent piece by Curt Holman for Salon.com – mainly a review of From Hell but also a part-profile of Moore. And this dissenting essay from Slate magazine where the author, even while acknowledging that Watchmen was “unquestionably a landmark work, a masterpiece even”, asks the question: “Did the comic book really need to grow up?”
Bookwise, the major recent acquisition has been The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume II (known as LXG-2 within the comic-lovers’ fraternity). Samit had told me it probably wouldn’t be available here for a while so I pirouetted like a pixie on steroids when I saw it in The Book Shop, Khan Market, placed neatly in (AARRGHH!) the children’s section. Much fun if one of those sweet little kiddilies were to open the book right to the much-anticipated (and very funny) sex scene between Allan Quatermain and Mina Harker.
[For the uninitiated: this is the sequel to Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s masterful graphic novel/comic/what you will about the coming together of a band of heroes from 1890s adventure fiction – Mr Quatermain from King Solomon’s Mines, Ms Harker from Dracula, Hawley Griffin from The Invisible Man, Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The first book was made into a film that was amazingly bad, especially given that Moore/O’Neill’s storyboard approach should have made it easy for any director trying to transpose the story to celluloid.]
I’ve finished my first reading of LXG 2 – that is, the one where I just get through the story. Will need at least a further two for a proper appreciation of the thing. Graphic novels of this quality are so rich in detail, each new perusal shows you things you’d overlooked the previous time, and besides, you have to assimilate them at two entirely different levels. Personally, I find the intensity of effort required higher than while reading most conventional texts (which is just one of the reasons it’s ironical that the genre is sniffed at by high-literary types).
One of the things I like most about the second book so far is the increased importance given to Mr Hyde. Realising that Dr Jekyll was always going to be a dour presence, the authors decided to do away with him altogether and hand the stage to his Gentleman-Monster alter ego. It works spectacularly well, especially in Hyde’s amusing attempts to be courtly with Mina, the grisly comeuppance he wreaks on the traitor Griffin and his rousing final heroics.
Incidentally, LXG 2 references The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds but I didn’t get all the nods. Will get back to it now to work them all out. Needless to say, both LXGs come with the highest recommendation, just don’t gift them to your little ’uns. (As the Samuel L Jackson character says in Unbreakable, “This is Art. But you must think you're in a toy store, because you're here shopping for an infant named Jeb. Do you see any Teletubbies in here?”)P.S. Only tangentially related, but great post here by Gamesmaster on Batman, Robin and alternate sexuality.
