Hypothetical Lizard” – The oldest story in the collection and also the only that isn’t wholly a Moore original – written as part of some shared universe anthology in the 1980s, of which I know jack sh! That’s why I completely freaked out when I got my newest ARC from the man, the mystical, the legend! In A Hypothetical Lizard, two concubines in a brothel for fantastical specialists fall in love, with tragic ramifications. But for a man who's complained about how heavily comics is still influenced by a bad mood he was in during the eighties, it would surely be healthy for all concerned if he could maybe move on from being in a bad mood about comics to quite this extent. Gaiman describes it as "a scabrous, monstrous, often hilarious unmasking and reinvention of the people who made the comics, and the lives destroyed by the four-color funnies.

Side note: I just read Moore’s Fashion Beast and I definitely got the feeling these were written around the same time in his career. Diria que o tom do conto é Moore a purgar as suas frustrações e a vingar-se, com imenso bom humor, sobre o comercialismo da indústria. A bit of a mixed bag, but a mostly solid collection of stories, I can say that even the installments that didn't really ring with me were still addictively written and I didn't find my interest waning throughout this book.

Illuminations” di Alan Moore è una raccolta di nove racconti che spazia e si muove tra vari generi del Fantastico. But the short stories in this book also turn out to be a sort of camouflage, or a frame, for 'What We Can Know About Thunderman,' a short novel that's a scabrous, monstrous, often hilarious, unmasking and reinvention of the people who made the comics, and the lives destroyed by the four colour funnies. His punishment for this desire, should he achieve it, will be to leave behind, down in the Marvel Bullpen, the merely conflicted liberalisms of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for the much more exalted slopes of Parnassus, where figures as troubling (and as obsessed with heroism) as Blake, Nietzsche, and Yeats will tell him what Walter Benjamin long ago told us all: "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. To add to the fact, I go in for anthologies with certain length expectations as I read the stories whenever I can squeeze a few minutes out of my schedule.

Alternate chapters explore fictionalised versions of key moments in the history of the comics industry, such as one scene in which publisher Jim Laws (Moore’s stand-in for EC Comics editor and publisher William Maxwell Gaines) testifies at the 1954 Senate subcommittee hearings into juvenile delinquency. I read the first 6 stories out of 9 and each one of them made me increasingly annoyed as I turned each consecutive page. Now, by this point anyone who's been paying attention knows Moore's feelings on the subject, and yet we're still in this situation where people who haven't, or are placating their editors and the curse that is SEO, or just feel like poking the wizard, feel obliged to bring it up in every damn interview, and through a combination of irritation and playing his part, Moore will obligingly trot out a quote about how superheroes are fascists for bedwetters, or something along those lines, and so the dance continues. I’ve read enough histories of comics to know that many of the people involved, especially in the early days, were somewhere between unpleasant and criminal, that they cheated creators (few more than the cheated Alan Moore), that the whole business model was a fly by night that somehow became an institution.I don't want to say anything else about this one because it's just a really nicely told story about how the past affects the present, and how the present impacts how we see the past. Sometimes Moore has a clever idea, and milks it to its logical conclusion, but the result is predictable. Some time in the late twelfth century, some men raid a church sanctuary and grab someone who’s hiding out in there. The opening story, Hypothetical Lizard, is a queer surrealist revenge tale written in 1987, while in Cold Reading, originally published in 2010, a real ghost takes revenge on a con artist who performs fake seances.