As a teenager, after having read "V for Vendetta" and "Watchmen," I went on a tear to uncover other Alan Moore scripted comics sleeping secretly away in the back issue bins of my local comic book shops. This was in the mid-Nineties and the great glut of product from the independent publishing boom of the late Eighties was still lounging around most shops where you could very often buy full runs for just a very few dollars. Thus it was with me and Miracleman. The comic had been published in the U.S. by the now defunct Eclipse Comics and no one cared much about it since it didn't feature a W.I.L.D.Cat or a Spawn or something of that ilk. But these were little treasures to me. I scoured dollar bins and even less that dollar bins and eventually assembled every issue for my collection.
Miracleman still stands as one of the best things I've ever read in comic book form. It so perfectly takes the bizarre logic and mythology of the Golden Age and turns it around into a modern and very human masterpiece. It's a great series that deserves to be sought out and held up as a great achievement in revisionist superhero comics along side "Watchmen" and "The Dark Knight Returns."
This drawing is on 6x9 sketchbook paper, made with brushpens, india ink, white out and markers. Available for purchase for $5.00 by writing me at hank@ohthehumanatee.com.
What kind of Alan Moore topic could we have and not mention Jack B. Quick?! My favorite character created by Moore, Jack B. Quick is one of the most entertaining comics I've ever read. Maybe it played on my Calvin & Hobbes heartstrings longing to be pulled, or maybe it's just the midwestern charm coupled with the scientificly absurd...all I know is that I wish, more than any of his other creations, that we'd see more of ol' Jack.
A few weeks late, but I finally got around to inking this one! Not as happy as I was with the Jabiru, but I'll take it! I'm hoping to either catch up or jump to the next letter. These are a ton of fun and a welcomed break from superheroes!
Rorschach blew my 12 year old mind. I'd never seen anything like him in my short time of reading comics. I remember picking it up off the shelf of my LCS way back in the day. I'd heard a lot of people talking about it at the shop so I thought I would give it a shot. I flipped through those issues, but Moore's writing and Gibbons art was wasted on my sensibilities of the time. Yet I gravitated towards the Rorschach character. He seemed like a perverse Batman that did what you thought Batman wouldn't do. While the character was intense and demanded my attention, the story lost me. It was deeper than what I was used to reading and the story felt dirty, so I stopped buying the issues. I didn't read Watchmen as a whole until later in high school and it set my comic book world on its ear. That being said, I don't hold it in as high esteem as most critics do, but I see the importance of it. It'll hold it's place of critical acclaim in just about every discussion relating to comics. But it won't be on my desert island reader's list.
