Eye for interestment

Alan Moore is credited with stretching the boundaries of what comics cover. He brought a literary sensibility to their themes and wasn't afraid to make the characters perversely human. His politics are a bit unusual but Moore kept the sense of magic even when the stories were deeply cynical, like V For Vendetta. His Jack the Ripper book, From Hell, is better researched than many and probably the single greatest comic ever in my estimation.

Anyway, I'm introducing Alan Moore because I was researching him online and found a document that's alleged to be a pitch he wrote for a fairly extensive reimagining of the DC comic book universe. It draws on the direction taken by another progessive comic writer, Frank Miller, and this quote prompted me to think about the relationship between television and film because TV is mostly serialised like comics:

As I mentioned in my introduction to Frank's Dark Knight, one of the things that prevents superhero stories from ever attaining the status of true modern myths or legends is that they are open ended. An essential quality of a legend is that the events in it are clearly defined in time; Robin Hood is driven to become an outlaw by the injustices of King John and his minions. That is his origin. He meets Little John, Friar Tuck and all the rest and forms the merry men. He wins the tournament in disguise, he falls in love with Maid Marian and thwarts the Sheriff of Nottingham. That is his career, including love interest, Major Villains and the formation of a superhero group that he is part of. He lives to see the return of Good King Richard and is finally killed by a woman, firing a last arrow to mark the place where he shall be buried. That is his resolution. You can apply the same paradigm to King Arthur, Davy Crockett or Sherlock Holmes with equal success. You cannot apply it to most comic book characters because, in order to meet the commercial demands of a continuing series, they can never have a resolution. Indeed, they find it difficult to embrace any of the changes in life that the passage of time brings about for these very same reasons, making them finally less than fully human as well as falling far short of true myth.

Reading this was one of those eureka moments for me, I suddenly realised why a film like Gladiator has a resonance beyond what a similar TV show like Hercules could muster. Okay, maybe that's not a fair comparison but Moore's quote is still an interesting observation that may have some parallels with narratives in media other than comics.

The other thing I've been interested to see Alan Moore discuss in the press is his unhappiness with having people film adaptations of his work. He runs the risk of looking petulant but it's rare to see someone argue that the pride in the work and his original vision is more important than financial gain.