Alan Moore's Punishment

Jerry Christensen is totally right.

For those few readers who are not of the UCI persuasion, right now I’m taking a class with our department chair, Jerry Christensen on Classical Hollywood Cinema. J. C.’s basic thesis is that we should not read films as works of an individual (as auteur theory would teach us) or even as a collaborative work (as common sense would teach us) but as an expression of corporate speech (as J. C. is teaching us). As such we have been looking at what elements compose a studio style. Typical questions have been: What makes this an MGM film? How would this be different if Warner Brothers were the studio? On the whole I’ve found this class to be engaging and ever since I found out about J. C.’s ideas about corporate authorship last year in the 1950s class he co-taught, I’ve been curious to see how they might apply to America’s other great corporate art, comic books.

Such an expression can be found on DC Comics recently launched website 52thecomic.com. Established to support their new weekly series 52, the website is designed to appear to be the online addition of that great, fictional, Metropolitan newspaper, The Daily Planet. As such it is replete with advertising and stock quotes from the fictitious corporations that appear in the DC Universe. As such we see ads for LexOil, The Halo Corporation, and Sivana Industries. While we might want to take note of how many of these companies are controlled by super-villains, all of these conglomerates have appeared in the pages of DC Comics before. However, besides LexOil, the most prominent “ad” on the website is for Sundoller Coffee, a company never before introduced in any of DC’s titles.

While the mock-article on the website would turn Sundoller Coffee a playful but weak joke at Starbucks expense, it nonetheless seems to be an attack on comics auteur Alan Moore. While the Sundoller logo resembles the iconographic style of Starbucks, it also bares a striking resemblance to the symbols that frequently appeared in Moore’s recently finished series, Promethea. To your right you’ll see the cover of issue thirty of the series. Note the similarity between that and the ad for Sundoller Coffee.

The reason for such an attack has a storied history. Moore has long feuded with the company over their continued ownership of V for Vendetta and Watchmen and has not worked with the company since V was completed in 1989. At the heart of this feud is the fact that Moore feels cheated by the company. When he published V and W he signed a contract that stated that if DC ever let the works fall out of publication, the rights would revert back to him and his collaborators. Unfortunately, twenty years after Watchmen’s initial publication it is still reprinted and continues to not only be a big seller for DC, but is the work that Moore is most associated with. The two are trapped in a symbiotic relationship. DC needs Moore’s old work to maintain some semblance of cultural legitimacy and Moore, at least at one point, was reliant on them to make his name.

However, Moore has long been an established star, and while his name is still heavily associated with his earlier DC work, he has long been able to produce his own material and work on those projects he wanted to. In the mid 1990s he founded America’s Best Comics (ABC) line for Wildstorm studios and created such books as Promethea and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It is fair to assume that when Moore began working for Wildstorm, he never expected Wildstorm to move from Image Comics and sell to DC. When such a merger occurred, all the copyrights that Moore had produced for the company (excluding Extraordinary Gentlemen) became the intellectual property of DC. While Moore begrudgingly stayed on to finish his longer storylines within the “ABC Universe” he kept his distance from DC editorial and interacted with Lee only. This feud, combined with Moore’s own erratic rates of production, meant that his work did not receive much support from DC and really only sold successfully in collections.

The feud between the creator and the company flared up most recently with the adaptation and release of V for Vendetta for Warner Bros., DC’s parent company. Feeling that the work had drifted too far a field from Moore’s original intention and politics, Moore demanded that his name be taken off the film and that his share of the royalties be given to the artist for V, David Lloyd. While Moore did not explicitly tell people to avoid the film, he did condemn the movie and referred to DC Comics in interview as the company that “cheated me out of the ownership of my work and then peddled it to another part of their parent company.” Statements like this, soured fandom’s reception of the film and fostered the creation of Anarchist anti-V websites like this one.

As such, it is easy to see why DC Comics would not be all that happy with Moore. And so it would appear that the words on the Sundoller ad seem specifically chosen to reflect DC’s hostile attitude towards Moore. Picayune is the name for a Spanish coin, but it usually infers something of little value or trivial. This may refer back not to Moore’s older work but to the book that the Sundoller logo takes its basic shape from, Promethea (not exactly a hot commodity). Milieu is clearly the hardest word to place as an insult but according to the OED it may refer to the criminal underworld of France. While there is nothing French about Moore, his work, or DC Comics, this word might be here to invoke Moore’s present outsider status. The second supposed coffee size is called “Malocchio.” While the word has a certain similarity to cappuccino, the word is Italian for the “Evil Eye.” Given Moore’s interest in the occult and particularly its role throughout Promethea this seems the most referential of all the smaller words to Moore. However more probably we can view it as DC giving Moore the Evil Eye for his most recent behavior regarding the release of V. Finally, the word “ego” in big bold print seems to be an obvious marker for Moore, who as an auteur who refuses to work for either of the two major comic book companies seems to be marking himself as somehow “bigger” than perhaps he should.

The advertisement, taken in conjunction with the brief biographical sketch that I’ve traced above, appear to be the first instance of a “genre” in comic books that J. C. has defined as “star punishment.” In classical Hollywood cinema star punishment consists of insulting or punishing characters played by actresses for having gone against the wishes of the corporation. By turning his “star property” Promethea – a clear work of religious devotion if there ever was one – into the subject of a fake advertisement, DC appears to be making a claim for the superiority of publication power and intellectual property over individual creator rights or independent innovation. It can all be replaced to parody and throwaway continuity in the crass world of superheroes.

Wasn’t this better than writing head notes for comps?