Because there just doesn't seem to be enough posts about print comics in here:

What's your favorite comic by Alan Moore?

I gotta say for it's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, especially the Black Dossier.

I just started reading From Hell. Thick reading man.

If you mean Alan Moore-created, then I'd say League of Extraordinairy Gentlemen

But he did some Superman stories that I like better ~ he writes such a good superhero tale when he gets a chance

Lost girls! I'm kidding I haven't even read it or seen it at stores.

Anyways yeah favorite book is the league just all the references and art are awesome!

I've only read some of his DC stuff like the Killing Joke, which disturbed me greatly.



I saw it once at a comicbook store in a small hippy commune/college town in upstate NY. I should've bought it then damnit.



League is like porn for english students.

True dat
And the Black Dossier is the money shot (ewww I'm grossing myself outtt)

But since all of literature is connected according to LXG ~ makes me wonder if we're all just figments in his systematically organized fictional universe... @_@

Oh, and I believe Alan Moore wrote some pretty good Green Lantern stories, if I recall.

The f sharp bell!

also aye about the league!

hmm... I'd say Promethea and From Hell AND Black Dossier :D

his Green Lantern run is limited to couple short backup stories if I remember well, generally most of superhero stuff he did at DC was either shorts or singles (with the exception of Watchmen of course).

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - but then, it's pretty much the only Alan Moore comic I've read. No, wait, I've read Watchmen too (I think my brother still has it somewhere - I'll reread it one of these days) but it was so long ago that I hardly remember it at all.




(Completely OT:.... Alan Moore looks so scary. Seriously. He looks like Rasputin come back from the grave to take revenge. Look!)

Oooh - how to choose?!

Wasn't so fond of From Hell or Promethea. I put those in his "I'm now so important I can be self-indulgent and to blazes with editorial control (and readers!)" category. In his best work he puts across clever ideas but in a way that's also fun to read. In those two books, the ideas are still there but I found whole chunks just a chore to wade through.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is excellent and so is Top 10 which doesn't often seem to get the recognition I think it deserves. I also love the The Ballad of Halo Jones from his 2000 AD days. As a satire on Eighties society, it is sooo superior to the over-hyped V for Vendetta.

Really, though, as much as I hate to be boring and predictable, it has to be Watchmen doesn't it? (Hint: Yes, it does!)

Top 10 definately deserves love. Although not his best work, you can really tell Moore was just having fun with that comic. I dare say for him i think that's the closest he'll ever get to "light-hearted".

He also did a collection of kabbalah evocations for HPL's Great Old Ones, which are just poetic.

I need to read from hell...I need alot of his books...he's just so damn good and talented

A toss-up between Batman: The Killing Joke and Excalibur. Can't forget Watchmen, though it was merely interesting to me.

Man, only one person mentions Watchmen? I thought EVERYONE read that. Regardless, everyone who wants to be a comic book writer should read it simply because it serves as the best example of literature in comics. It's ridiculous how there are still very few comics that use multi-layered dialog and metafiction.

of course everyone should read it.
I know I love it, but really I would rather V or League. The thing is to say Watchmen is great is just so obvious...but then again it's Alan Moore everything he does is really good.

That just goes without saying.

It does, however bring up another possible discussion topic (although it might have already been discussed in an earlier post):

Recommended/Required reading for comic book writers/artists.

Watchmen is definately at the top of that list.

Top 10 is a really fun read, and I agree that it doesn't get the respect that it deserves. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books are also really good (I haven't read Black Dossier yet, just the first two). The traveller's almanac at the end of the second book struck me as one of Moore's self-indulgences, though. It was near 50 pages of pretty much continuous literary reference that was kind of interesting but mostly a chore to read.

I also kind of find that a lot of people tend to ignore his flaws because he's such an acclaimed writer. As much as I enjoy Moore's work I also find that he has a tendency to become blatantly self-indulgent. I know other writers do that as well but I find that when Moore does it his work really suffers because the actual narrative often just grinds to a halt while he wanders off on a tangent. It also seems like he either doesn't leave his artists much room to play with the layouts or only works with artists that stick to fairly traditional layouts. While there's nothing wrong with traditional layouts it also makes a lot of Moore's books look very similar.

Well if your asking I thought I would toss my two cents. Watchmen is one of his best. Not so much his best written. killing joke has that hands down. But because even after. What? 20+ years I still remember scenes from it that stand out it my mind. I dare anything being put out by marvel or DC now to be able to do that. I just hope the movie is even a tenth the impact . I kindah doubt it though. To do it justice it would have to be along the lines of Lord of the Rings and be almost 8 hours long. I still can't see them doing it without cutting it to ribbons.

Well, to stick with the Alan Moore theme, I'd recommend Supreme: The Story of the Year. I've seen it dismissed as a simple Superman parody (and that's certainly in there) but, to me, it's also a history of comic books cleverly combined with lots of "how to" hints.

Definitely worth a read for anyone who wants to learn how to write for the medium but be entertained at the same time.

I don't know if it should be required reading - it's probably not on par with Alan Moore's long list of comics - but Castle Waiting by Linda Medley is an example of a very well-written and well-illustrated black and white comic. It's a story of what happens after fairytales end.

Another on the list is Neil Gaiman's Sandman, for reasons oft repeated. Very well written, large cast of characters, good art, the whole shebang.

Watchmen and V for Vendetta with David Lloyd.

His Swamp Thing run, especially "The Anatomy Lesson" was amazing. You can see really good "comic" book stories that have a hint of something greater behind them there and in the DC Stories of Alan Moore collection. The death of the Man of Steel was something I read as a kid and was fascinated by. I didn't know who Alan Moore was at all or even Superman much but it was cemented in my mind. I'd argue these early ones show more human compassion than the later stuff.
Loved Watchmen. The ideas presented are amazing. I was not into the pirate episodes though. They bored me too death and were annoying. Sorry.
The stuff with League is fun and clever. I think he's great. His newer stuff is all very clever to me, which is a praise and criticism.

Heh - me, too!

From Hell being a chore? A chore to stop reading, perhaps
Had difficulties putting the book away and going to sleep.
Similarily Promethea, but I had a bit of a problem to get into it and needed about 3-4 issues before the book "clicked" with me. From that point I was doing few hundred pages in one sitting.

On the other hand Watchmen had couple of spots that slowed down the reading for me, sometimes to a screeching halt (the Dr. Manhattan issue for example).


Ha, I was just going to mention Supreme. Written by him, Supreme makes better Superman than Superman :D

Also, as good as Watchmen may be, it also spawned (together with Dark Knight Returns) the whole wave of badly written "grim and gritty" superheroes, which culminated in the 90s as overmuscled barbarians with vacuum cleaners modded into guns shooting elephant ammo :P This was the reason why he went with Supreme in the exactly opposite direction.



What would be non-traditional layouts then? Or are you just complaining about his liking of the 9panel grid?

Have you read any Promethea? This thing has some of the most insane panel layouts ever.

I've noticed that the best reads usually come from the writers who understand the visual side of comics well. Alan started as a cartoonist drawing strips for some british magazine, but decided that he can't draw and focused on writing. He does seem to have great understanding of the page and his scripts are insanely detailed BUT always offering some choice to the artist. He writes down what should be on the panel and WHY it should be there, the artist can choose between what's in the panel description OR between his own vision, if he sees the potential of doing something better. A lot of people consider these scripts to be more interesting than the finished product

all right, done with the random rant

Yup! That whole tedious coach ride in which he explains that all the 17th Century Hawksmoor churches were part of a great occult conspiracy ... *Yawn!* Peter Ackroyd (I think) had already ploughed that particular furrow and he did it in a way that was actually entertaining. Moore's made me feel like I was reading the text of a dry sermon. I put the book down several times.

Ha - exactly the opposite experience for me! I initially found Volume 1 to be a little lightweight but nevertheless a fun twist on the super hero genre. By Volume 2, I was hooked. I think Moore says more about story-telling in those two volumes than Gaiman did in all eleven Sandman books. But then ... does anyone really need two and a half volumes which do nothing to advance the story but are simply an illustrated guide to every tarot card and every letter of the Hebrew alphabet?

As I said in my earlier post, at his best Moore can explore these types of ideas and integrate them cleverly into the story. In these two examples, I found they stuck out like sore thumbs and brought the momentum of the story to a grinding halt. (But that's just me!)

You should be sorry. I loved the Tales of the Black Freighter- totally unnecessary, but gruesomely awesome.

First, let me state that, IMO, Moore has done more to push American comics into the adult arena, has done more to stretch the medium of comics writing, than any other writer.

That being said...

Black Dossier was a chore. Sorry, but it was. I enjoyed it, sure, but it felt VERY self-indulgent. The first LOEC was incredible, the second, almost as much, but had a lame ending.

The Killing Joke, IMO, was also very overrated. It's pompous & bloated. Moore seems uncomfortable in the shoes of a corporate book. He wants to tell a great story, but the Batman canon befuddled him. He makes up for his discomfort by over-doing his job.

Top Ten is amazing. Solid work.

But, for my all-time favorite Moore book, I have to go for his Swamp Thing revamp. Powerful and innovative.

That's my 2 cents.

Later,
Chip

LOL, these two are some of the BEST parts for me :D
But then again Promethea is a manual for "Alan Moore's magical/belief system" disguised as a storyline.
On the other hand he's probably the only comics writer who could get away with something like that... well, I guess Grant Morrison and Peter Milligan too (sad thing is that both spend more time on superheroes than anything else recently, and while Grant seems to manage that quite nicely, Milligan's superhero stories are kinda bland... entertaining but nothing to faint about).

To digress even further: I think Milligan is an underrated writer... his 70 or so issue run on Shade the Changing Man is brilliant and so's his Enigma miniseries, and I'm still looking for some of his other Vertigo works.




I think it's good that people like different works of his. First of all, it gives a reason for a nice discussion :D
And also, it shows that he changes from book to book and that each of these is gathering some audience. There are people who claim that the last good books he wrote were Swamp Thing and Watchmen, others claim that he did his best work in the "independent" phase (that would be From Hell), while others yet prefer his ABC works.

Neil Gaiman may be behind him in that regard by a matter of seconds. In fact, whether it be justifible or not I think Gaiman is more widely credited with making high-brow literate comics than Moore. I know i've read more scholarly dissertations about Gaiman's work than Moore's Although 90% of those critical essays are specifically about The Sandman.

With all due respect, Gaiman is, at best, a pale comparison to Moore. Gaiman may have created Sandman, a truly unbelievable piece of literature, but, while he has created some solid work, his body of writing is far less groundbreaking than Moore's. The Dark Knight Returns, Swamp Thing, V For Vendetta, Lost Girls, The Killing Joke, LOEG, his Superman work, and a ton I'm sure I've forgotten.

Sandman, & it's universe (except the second Death mini series) is phenomenal, but outside of that Gaiman's work is VERY hit and miss, & none of it really approaches the statis of Sandman.

But that's just my opinion.

Later,
Chip

The Dark Knight Returns is Miller's work...but other than that man he's a done of stuff and lots of it is pretty strong