Digging up legends

Today: Please join us in welcoming new Hydra Zach Rabiroff, a writer on books, comics, and culture living in Brooklyn, New York.

Issue No. 225

The Long Memory of Alan Moore, Part I
Zach Rabiroff

The Long Memory of Alan Moore, Part I

by Zach Rabiroff

Fascist boots march through English streets in the first chapter of Alan Moore’s latest novel, The Great When. It’s a scene from the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, in which hordes of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts careened into a neighborhood of Jews, immigrants, socialists, and leftist laborers, and a new chapter in the hell of British history broke loose. It’s a vertiginous glimpse of a past that feels alarmingly like our own present.

Moore first made his name in the early 1980s, when he helped revolutionize comics both in his native U.K. and in the United States. To titles like Marvelman, V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, and Watchmen, he brought a high-minded, sharply literate sensibility, a sophisticated intricacy of plot and structure, and an undercurrent of frustrated, sincere humanism that redefined the possibilities of the medium.

Later, after a less-than-amicable break with the work-for-hire comics industry, Moore’s work grew even more complex, personal, and steeped in the arcane details of magic, philosophy, and history. In 1988’s Brought to Light, he outed the shadowy details of CIA criminality; in 1999’s Promethea he gave a guided tour of Kabbalah mysticism; in 2006’s Lost Girls, he cast beloved characters of children’s literature in surprisingly dainty, mannerly erotic adventures.

Moore’s third act, as a writer of longform prose fiction, burst onto the stage with the publication of Jerusalem, a sprawling 1,200-plus-page work of historical magical realism. An epic about a single neighborhood in Moore’s lifelong hometown of Northampton, it reads like James Michener by way of Thomas Pynchon—an intoxicating rush of words and images that swells into a full, clear portrait of Britain’s past.