Alan Moore Month - Alan Moore's Wild Worlds

Alan Moore's Wild Worlds
Written by Alan Moore
Pencils by Scott Clark, Carlos D'Anda, Al Rio and Michael Lopez, Jim Baikie and Travis Charest
Inks by Sal Regla, Richard Friend, Trevor Scott, Edwin Rosell, Mark Irwin, Luke Rizzo, Randy Elliott, Jim Baikie and JD
Published by Wildstorm Comics. $24.99 USD

Say what you want about DC, but at least once they bought Wildstorm, they managed to get most of Moore's Wildstorm work into trade paperbacks, and they're still in print. Only a fraction of Moore's Spawn-related work is collected by the McFarlane house of Image Comics, while Moore's Supreme and Judgment Day for Rob Liefeld's Extreme Publishing are available now from Checker Publishing but with poor reproduction.

Wild Worlds is one of the worst introductions to Moore's comics work. There is not a single piece here that is essential or anywhere close to his best work. Even so, Moore at his lowest spark is still capable of some charm, and for those with the inclination, time and money, it's kind of interesting to see him struggle a bit.

Spawn/WildC.A.T.S.: Devil's Day is the first piece here, originally a four issue miniseries written shortly before Moore took on the writing duties of the regular WildC.A.T.S. series. I'd love to know how this one was put together, but I'm speculating Wildstorm founder Jim Lee had asked Moore to take over the book but then asked if he could scramble together a miniseries while the regular creative team got through whatever storyline they had in the works. Whether that's quite how it happened or not, what's pretty clear is that Moore cobbled together a team-up story based on a shaky premise: bored gods drop an amulet of power to a future Earth, where supernatural hero Spawn finds it and uses its power to overthrow his demonic oppressor and take his power, corrupting himself and becoming the evil leader of the world.

Moore takes some ideas from his aborted DC Twilight proposal, which sounds like a good thing, except these are the easiest ideas: have a grizzled, future version of a hero come back to our time to warn the 'C.A.T.S., and many of the heroes of the future will be degraded and debased versions of the heroes we know. Making the tall, skinny redhead Fairchild from Gen13 morbidly obese, or making Void into a prostitute, are uninspired executions of the ideas, and not in keeping with Moore's track record of trying to find something special in other people's characters, or at least to leave them in as good a shape as when he found them. He does okay with the contemporary version of the team, writing them in character and without a hint of any of the status quo-shattering he would be doing in their regular title.

Spawn is another story, though. Despite being the key to the whole story, he barely registers for much of it, having little to do or say. When he does talk, he's tentative, even stammering, and it's only near the end where Moore gives him a would-be affecting scene when the identity of the future Zealot is revealed to have a connection to him. It doesn't work that well, and I found myself distracted and quibbling with Moore's plotting. As in, why not have present-day Spawn fight future Spawn? We know future Spawn won't want to kill him for fear he'll fade out of existence. And the framing device with the strange gods setting the future in motion on a silly whim is sort of irritating. It's just too easy and arbitrary, and so right from the start the reader feels there's nothing really at stake. The other problem is Scott Clark's art, which features ridiculous anatomy, squashed faces and a complete inability to render older characters convincingly.

"Spotlight on Majestic" is a curious science fiction story, terribly over-rendered by Richard Friend but with adequate, if not particularly distinctive, pencils by Carlos D'Anda. In it, a very old Majestic faces the last dying glimmers of the universe with other immortals, and finds love with a vampire. One wishes a little more time was spent with some of the stranger immortals rather than the shticky Wandering Jew, but Moore peppers the story with romantic narration about love sparking while the rest of the universe grows cold. And this on the same page as a joke about syphilis, but that's Moore for you. The story might have worked even better as the last Supreme story, perhaps, as no one had really done enough with Majestic for readers to care that much here.

"Voodoo: Dancing in the Dark" was a four issue miniseries that found the former WildC.A.T.S. member in New Orleans to get away from things, and to, well, make some money stripping. As in Spawn/WildC.A.T.S., our protagonist is caught up in godly matters, but this time it's voodoo gods, and rather than a whim it's a deadly battle, as one club owner tries to bring an evil god into being through lots of blood sacrifice. Priscilla "Voodoo" Kitaen is taken in and coached by a trio of mostly benevolent beings, and with their help finds the strength to finish the four issue miniseries and then wait for another writer to use her. It's a book I skipped when it first came out, not being as much of a Moore completist, and while I didn't really miss much, it's also not as bad as some people have said. The script is routine but at least gives a bit of insight into voodoo lore, Michael Lopez and Al Rio alternate on the art, Lopez having a moodier and somewhat more distinctive and developed style, while Rio is very similar to Jim Lee or J. Scott Campbell, cheesecake but not bad. Another minor effort from Moore but with a bit more style and energy than Spawn/WildC.A.T.S..

Aside from a Travis Charest short (more of an epilogue, from WildC.A.T.S. #50, which was already collected in the Alan Moore's Complete WildC.A.T.S. trade, also published in 2007), there's just one more story in the book, "Deathblow: By-Blows." I did buy this one when it came out. For one thing, I like artist Jim Baikie, who'd done some good work with Moore before, in 2000 AD in the early '80s and later on Supreme. Fans of the Punisher-like remorseless vigilante Deathblow were no doubt surprised that this miniseries has very little to do with him, instead finding a tall, tough, naked woman emerging from a strange egg on a strange world where it's kill or be killed. Could there be a connection between the various people she encounters? Might some be less than trustworthy? In fact, like those long-ago "Future Shocks" stories Moore wrote, this is a science fiction story with a twist ending. Once you accept it's not a Deathblow story, and once you get to the twist, it ends up being a spare but action-packed and fun story that owes at least a little to Harlan Ellison.

Again, the stories included in this volume are among Moore's least-inspired. Like those 2000 AD tales, they are products of a scribe for hire. They're tightly plotted but lighter on characterization, with characters Moore didn't create and with little latitude to develop them. The artists appear for the most part to have been chosen for Moore rather than by him, and the brevity of the stories prevents a real synergy from developing. And yet, they're still Alan Moore, reflecting his beliefs and interests, and while he's only moderately successful at melding those with the needs of the licensed superhero story, there's still some entertainment and interest to be found.

Christopher Allen