July 2, 2009
Mad Love
Sometime after Watchmen finished, back in the late 1980s, I remember reading an interview with Alan Moore in which he said something to the effect of having ultimately found himself more interested in the little people on the street corner than the big guys in spandex hitting each other to save the world -- and that he was going to concentrate on writing about them instead. The product of this effort was, IIRC, originally to be called The Mandelbrot Set until Benoit Mandelbrot complained that this would contribute to the trivialisation that then attended public mentions of his work (and continues to to this day); it eventually emerged as Big Numbers -- but not for long. Of the planned 12 issues, just two saw the light of day. I'm still not clear what happened -- I remember Dave Sim presenting it as a study in the difficulties of self-publishing, for example, which I'm pretty sure was not the real issue, and there were rumours of illness and madness afflicting the artist Bill Sienkiewicz, also dubious -- but in any case, the wait for issue 3 stretched from months to years and the whole episode was eventually forgotten.
I say we've been married forty years, we've never had call to use language, have we, Edie?
Except, not quite. While most of the series was never put down on paper and now exists only in Moore's own mind, it turns out that #3 was not only written but pretty fully drawn and lettered. By some marvel a photocopy turned up earlier this year and is now available -- with Moore's permission, it seems -- on (of all places) LiveJournal and Flickr:
I'm not sure I can express the impact of this find for a certain, admittedly small, class of people like me. It's like a new Shakespeare play or Beethoven symphony arriving out of nowhere. Except in those cases there would be much quibbling over authenticity, whereas here there is really none. The copy is a tiny bit rough, but the authorship and continuity is unmistakable.
And while in a sense this just makes one yearn even more for the alternate universe where the remaining three-quarters made it to press, it is wonderful to be able to read another piece of the intricate puzzle after all these years. Do it now.
Posted by matt at July 2, 2009 11:52 PM