Deconstructing Alan Moore’s Deconstructions

“I have no interest in superheroes, they were a thing that was invented in the late 1930s for children, and they are perfectly good as children’s entertainment. But if you try to make them for the adult world then I think it becomes kind of grotesque.”

Alan Moore, interview with Deadline, 2020

—

“Right, it’s surprising how this stuff builds up.”

“Well, if your continuity includes everybody else’s continuity, that’ll happen. All these sloppy comic book “universes” infuriate me, Kev.”

“Al, everything infuriates you.”

Conversation between a fourth wall breaking Kevin O’Neill and Alan Moore, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume Four: The Tempest, 2018

What if superheroes are bad, actually?

This is kind of the main argument, to be reductive, of English comics writer Alan Moore’s most acclaimed work, Watchmen, though it could also describe much of his work critiquing popular culture in general. Never having been a fan of superhero comics, his deconstruction of the genre never appealed to me, but with my interest in pulp literature and cosmic horror, tackled by Moore in his series League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Providence, his ideas fascinated me.

As Moore wrapped up these series in recent years, ostentatiously leaving the comics industry in the process, I decided to read Watchmen for the first time as I finished these other series to better understand his style of genre subversion. After reading these complex, ponderous, some might even say self-important comic series, I appreciate a lot of what Moore accomplishes in these works, what he is going for, but despite working with such fascinating ideas, I must conclude that something about his work ultimately leaves me cold.

Because of the similar themes Moore takes on throughout these three comic series, I’ll be discussing them together here, looking at what they share, and how each goes about deconstructing its specific interest; the world of 20th- century caped crusader comics in Watchmen, 19th and 20th-century popular fiction in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Lovecraftian cosmic horror in the connected stories of Neonomicon and Providence. I also go into more detail for each separately in my StoryGraph reviews as linked above.

In all three of these comics series, Moore’s talents as a comic director come to the forefront, collaborating with artists Dave Gibbons for Watchmen, Kevin O’Neill for the LoEG series, and Jacen Burrows for Providence, to bring a cinematic structure and an unparalleled level of depth and detail to each world. From the fully realized alternate 1985 US of Watchmen, a gritty dystopia following the emergence of caped crusaders in the 1930s mirroring the birth of the genre itself, to the amazingly coherent piecing together all of the disparate, contradictory, characters of classic adventure literature into a cohesive whole in LoEG, to a 1919 New York and New England inhabited by all of Lovecraft’s weird creations, all are bursting with references and intriguing concepts.

All in all, it is fascinating how much each storyline has in common, even spanning more than thirty years of Moore’s career to its conclusion with the last entry in LoEG, The Tempest in 2018. There are various motifs that Moore returns to again and again, and each of these series even share similar formats and structures- chapters advancing the plot interspaced with various supplementary material representing in-universe publications, often lavish pastiches of period mediums. Though some of these ideas add to the meaning of the whole and some peter out or add only set dressing, throughout it all, it is obvious that Moore has a deep affection for and a profound knowledge of what he writes about, even as he turns a critical eye toward the harmful messages these stories may contain.

As a whole, though, more than nostalgic celebrations of pop genres, each concerns how the fiction we create and consume shapes us, and how it shapes our society and the world we live in, especially juvenile or escapist works steeped in nostalgia. Deconstructing the tropes and standards of these styles, Moore subverts expectations by treating them as serious, adult works replete with moral ambiguity, exposing the moral issues and dark implications that undergird them.

“We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.”

Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen, 1986

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“Unlike the Detective Blake and his ilk, we are superhumans. Our very existence corrodes the human spirit.” Monsieur Zenith/Elric

“Wh-what do you mean?” Orlando

“Oh, come. Your longevity, my drug-assisted abilities- these things make us exceptional. Thus, humans envy, worship, and adore us; live through fantasies of being us. And that is all they do. They come to think only impossible beings are capable of greatness. They cease attempting it for themselves.” MZ

“B-but, that’s — yurp!” O

“They abdicate responsibility to us. And one day, when they are become as incapable as children — one day their dreams shall rise up and devour them.” MZ

Monsieur Zenith lecturing Orlando on superhumans while engaging in a sword fight on top of the Paris Opera House, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume Four: The Tempest, 2018

In Watchmen, LoEG, and Providence, Moore hopes to explore what these fictional worlds, from the superheroic to the cosmic horrific, say about their creators and our society as a whole. Popular media affects our perceptions of the world, and, whether superhero comics, action movies, or pulp literature, Moore muses on the boundaries between fiction and reality in these works, both in terms of the relationship readers have to the fictional universes being created for them, and in terms of how the attitudes created by fiction might change their own experience of the world.

What does it mean when some of our most popular fictions engage in such simplistic power fantasies? What does it say when one of the most prominent corporate properties of the moment remains a cinematic universe where private superhumans are all that stand between humanity and oblivion? Who watches the watchmen, indeed? These are engaging questions that continue to stay relevant. Moore’s prognosis for all of this, though, is bleak, despite any affections he has for them.

A common element throughout the series are plots hinging on conspiracies manufacturing a story for societal control. In Watchmen, for instance, “smartest man in the world” Adrien Veight, aka Ozymandias, engineers his own personal “trolley problem” in the form of an alien attack to prevent nuclear war between the US and Russia, an apparently successful ploy. In the first volume of LoEG, British intelligence director M (Dr. Moriarty) manufactures a war with racist stereotype Dr. Fu Manchu in London’s East End to build state power.

Both of these events claim the lives of thousands in New York and London, and things only get worse from there. An apocalyptic event that claims most or all of the world’s population concludes the latter two stories. In The Tempest, Shakespeare’s wizard (and Alan Moore proxy) Prospero unleashes the full terror of humanity’s dreams and nightmares from the repository of human imagination, The Blazing World, while in Providence, a cult has contrived to bring their cosmic beliefs into reality, through the work of a “Redeemer”- one H.P. Lovecraft. By the end of the series, the stars come right and humanity is driven mad heralding the birth of Cthulhu. The fortunate, enlightened protagonist survivors of these events look on blandly as the pathetic mass of humanity suffers for the dreams of their creative types. The conclusions Moore provides to the questions he presents throughout these works are dire, offering little hope for humanity, particularly the latter two.

Moore, in fact, seems to see little difference between our fiction and our reality, both being worlds we create. The fourth wall is porous throughout all three, with Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan, the superhuman omniscient former physicist, providing a good case in point. Being able to perceive all time as happening at once, Dr. Manhattan is aware of the artificiality of the other character’s view of themselves, in effect realizing that he, like all of them, are characters in a fictional universe following a specific plot. Alan Moore himself appears as a character in the last volume of LoEG along with artist Kevin O’Neill, a swan song to their collaboration in comics and a critique of the current state of comics and popular culture in general. How did these deconstructions come to such a pessimistic conclusion?

“All those people insisting the Necronomicon was real; all the hoax editions, all the writers playing along… think about it. Has that ever happened before, with any work of fiction?”

“Huh. Well, probably not since the first Christians didn’t realize the gnostics were being symbolic.”

“Y’know, Barstow, that’s not a bad comparison. Religions are fictions that modify the world. It’s just this fiction is more radical and aggressive.”

Conversation between FBI agents out of their depths, Providence #12, 2017

Part of the answer stems, I think, from Moore’s method of deconstructing the fiction he is choosing to engage with. A major tool used by Moore throughout these series to prompt the audience to question the role escapist media have in building their worldviews is to unflinchingly depict their logical ends if taken seriously. In general, he plays the tropes and problematic elements of the mediums he’s working with straight, at face value, only exposing what would be glossed over in the originals — the sex, the violence, the bigotry. Well, in the case of the last one, he simply leaves it intact. Therefore, he depicts all of the horrifying rapes of Hawley Griffin, the Invisible Man, explicitly while simply showing off the ugly, dastardly depictions of Arabs and Chinese in Victorian society (while also including culturally accurate uses of Arabic and Mandarin in their dialog). The streets of New York are awash in crime. Moore claims that his goal in Neonomicon was to “put the sex back in” to “the sexually squeamish” Lovecraft’s work. This is a type of strategy that I would call “light is the best disinfectant,” and I don’t think it is always the most effective.

As a whole, this tactic does not actually challenge the problematic aspects of the source material and can serve to accentuate them. This is illustrated, in particular, by the ongoing use of violent sexual abuse and rape as a theme throughout all of his work. Moore is not subtle about portraying these aspects as being “bad” but as part of the “gritty realist” style of his deconstructions, they become part of the ambiance of what a “realistic” depiction of any story must entail. If we’re going to have a serious, mature exploration of this work, we’re gonna have to include graphic sexual violence, right?

This also does not touch on the danger of the way the narrative frames the plot, in a way that, if you are only interested in the aesthetic “maturity” of Moore’s styles in these deconstructions, it’s all too easy to misinterpret despite Moore’s blunt indictments of them. As much as many readers confused or lost his critical message, the “coolness” of taking a nostalgic caped crusader setting or a “Bloomsbury Justice League” and making them “mature” certainly was not lost on them.

All too often, it seems, people looked to the darker, edgier mode Moore works in without understanding the rejection of the power fantasy elements he focuses on, so for me, it seems Moore failed in his goal to make comics fans think more deeply about the genre. This, along with the loss of creative control regarding tone deaf, literalist, and exploitative interpretations of Moore’s work through cinematic adaptations, particularly The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) and Watchmen (2009) added to an air of bitterness that has persisted in his later work.

In the end, this makes much of his later work feel fatalistic, with a distinct misanthropy that felt far less pronounced in even the bleakest sections of Watchmen. At the same time, the comprehensive knowledge Moore infuses with his pop-cultural reimaginings begins to deteriorate and his awareness of the current zeitgeist feels out of touch, such as his continued use of gratuitous sexual violence as though the “women in refrigerators” trope hasn’t become one of the most well known sexist tropes in comics. It feels increasingly like an “old man yelling at clouds” rather than the informed critiques of a person with valuable insight into pop culture.

Moore, as always, continues to make some valid points. Pop culture saturation, as various media companies consolidate nearly everything under just a few outlets, is reaching a bit of a critical mass, some having described it as a “gray goo.” If our fictional worlds reflect the state of our culture, and our culture controls the fiction people consume, then it could be argued that today’s fiction is void of imagination. It is certainly what Moore argues throughout the later volumes of LoEG, in particular Century and the Tempest. Most infamously, for Century, the occult plot the League spends most of the twentieth century opposing ends with the birth of the Antichrist, an ersatz Harry Potter. As a whiny millennial, Potter is supposed to represent the degeneration of commercial storytelling from the likes of Alan Quartermain, but I’m not convinced by the argument. Harry Potter is a property that is certainly open to much criticism, especially now, but Moore’s interpretation of it is as commonplace as possible and it feels like he doesn’t care to know more. His ultimate point is not merely that popular work is shallow or uninspired, it seems, but that the whole of contemporary culture and storytelling is banal, lacking the artistic merit of earlier eras. However, I don’t buy this, and Moore’s lack of personal knowledge or interest in anything older than, say, the early ’90s doesn’t help.

Even if we take it for granted that vintage literature was superior in its craft, it presumes that the endemic racism, xenophobia, and misogyny that Moore has spent the last volumes expressing are of less importance than this supposed derivative lack of imagination in contemporary works. I don’t even buy that either of these problematic aspects are even problems unique to one time period or the other.

Rather than challenge the banality or corruption of the status quo, the infusion of creative energies to the human world (from the Blazing World in LoEG or the Dreamlands, the natural home of the Great Old Ones in Providence), causes the regular mundane world to die horribly. Like, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” right, but it feels like in each case the lack of a more “radical” outcome feels reactionary, particularly in Providence.

Like Harry Potter, Lovecraft fandom is certainly ripe for criticism but the way that the forces of the Cthulhu Mythos are framed throughout the series renders Lovecraft’s fears as being, in essence, correct. Rather than say, arguing that Lovecraft’s racism and xenophobia, depicted unflinchingly in the comic, were misinterpretations of the creative energies of the Dreamlands, his disgust of those not like himself feels justified as it is those weird outsiders, sexual minorities, and foreigners that bring madness to the world at the end of Providence. By having the closeted gay, secretly Jewish journalist Robert Black (an amalgam of several of Lovecraft’s gay and/or Jewish friends) provide Lovecraft with the raw material he needed for his stories to seed reality for its reclamation by the Dreamlands, it feels like his bigotry is excused. His fears of a multicultural, diverse world were, in the context of Providence, well founded. There have been a lot of recent works grappling with Lovecraft’s racism that have much more interesting and novel interpretations that work like Providence feels somewhat antiquated.

The final message appears to be claiming that fiction, particularly fiction for children, was once vibrant and ingenious, even with its toxic messages of racism and jingoism, whereas stuff today is anodyne, soulless garbage. Such popular storytelling always reflects its society in its worldviews and some stoop only for the lowest common denominator, regardless of the time period.

There are so many aspects of modern culture that Moore completely fails to touch upon, making his endings of the “pitiful human race” drowning in their “own dreams as nightmares drag you down” seem petty. The connotation appears to be that people passively let their entertainment take over their lives, but what if the opposite is true? The very properties Moore rails against spawn reams of new fiction out of their fandoms. In social media, people become their own fictional characters. Video games allow people to inhabit virtual worlds in ways never seen before. Conspiracy theories have taken over much political belief in the world, as pulpy horror stories are taken as reality for many.

All of these are scary, dangerous, and intriguing aspects of contemporary life, worthy topics of satire and subversion, but, it seems, Moore is uninterested in any of them. Oh well. I don’t buy that there are no original popular storytellers anymore, and there are many authors, I feel, exploring just these very questions, in comics and other mediums, such that we no longer need Moore as a luminary of the field.