Alan Moore, �Captain Britain�
Well, I think it�s time to admit this: I�m losing the battle of the books. I was immensely pleased with myself last week. A full workweek had passed, and I hadn�t put anything on hold for me to buy. �Perhaps,� I thought to myself, �I�ve finally reached a point where I�ve picked up all the books I really care to read! There�s nothing else that interests me! Now I only have to get through the 160 or so books at home and the 10+/- books I have waiting for me to purchase at the store!�
And then, on Friday, ten books came in that I HAD to have. Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck! I�d like to think that I�m saving money by getting an employee discount at my place of work, but I wonder if it would have got this far out of hand if I worked at Starbucks. Worse, I got Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for Christmas, so reading has fallen by the wayside for running through the streets and putting caps in cop asses.
Plus there is the fact that I, for some reason, decided that I needed to set time aside where I read the monster books � books that were over 370 pages, a precedent set by Kevin Murphy at the beginning of this year. There was a reason for this decision � my fiction �to read� bookcase has no room for any other titles.
My options were to either read a lot of things that I could finish quickly � something I could accomplish easily with graphic novels, of which I have 37 still on my shelves. But reading these would only make a little bit of room at a time, hardly making a dent. The other option was to read the big books in order to make room.
I decided to do both. Guess which one this is?
If you don�t recognize the name of Alan Moore, there are two concrete statements that I can make about you: You don�t read graphic novels, and you�re not reading these reviews, because I�ve reviewed a bunch of his stuff already.
As far as I remember, Moore has fared pretty well in my reviews, which is not an easy thing to do. But with Captain Britain, he has a lot going against him. I�ve never read the comic before, and I probably never would have if Alan Moore�s name weren�t on it. It seems like such a knock off of Captain America, another comic that I don�t read. I figure if I need some jingoism, I can turn on Fox News. Knowing Moore�s skill as a plotter and a scribe however, I try and keep an open mind.
And then I discover, as I�m reading, this was originally issued as a supplement to some other comic, and thus was only released six pages at a time. Six pages is not a lot of room to advance a story line, especially with Marvel�s penchant to recap what happened in previous issues (which they fortunately have stopped doing, instead replacing the recap with a �Previously in...� section on the inside cover.). The sudden cliffhanger stop for a story that hadn�t moved very far was very jarring to go through.
Like I said, a lot going against it. And yet, after all of that, I actually got into this story. It�s certainly not the best work he�s ever done, but I do think it�s yet another example of a writer who, working within a system that is very constraining, managed to put out something far superior than anybody expected.
Good for him.
