Asked in 2016 to name his favorite fictional hero or villain, comic-book auteur/ novelist/ philosopher Alan Moore said, “I’m afraid I’m rather dubious about the whole concept of heroes and villains, and feel that there are probably more useful and less simplistic groupings of complex human personalities that we could come up with if we put our minds to it.”
For someone dubious, even dismissive, of heroes and villains, Alan Moore has written more and better stories of heroes and villains than perhaps any living author. His medium is comics, which are historically most associated with heroes and superheroes. Yet because of these very doubts, he may also be our best comics writer of all time. His distance—a skeptic, an Englishman writing comics, a form as American as baseball and jazz, the possibility that he is an actual wizard—may be what makes him such an astute observer and chronicler of superheroes and their discontents.
These and many other ironies abound in Kristian Williams’ The Illuminist: Philosophical Explorations in the Work of Alan Moore. Williams has written an excellent academic book for readers who may not like the way academic books are usually written. It is well-paced, free-flowing, and clearly written, indicative of his broad reading and thinking.
I appreciate the wide-ranging approach. But more than discursive, the analysis is recursive. Williams begins with, and continues to return to, Moore’s superhero masterpiece, Watchmen, published originally in 1986-1987. It is such a fertile work that it allows Williams to shape his book around it thematically and textually. All analyses stem from, or lead back to, Watchmen. Sometimes, other books and films segue into it. At other times, Alan Moore’s other works lead Kristian Williams back to it. Like Watchman’s superpowered, nigh omniscient Dr. Manhattan, the reader experiences time circuitously, yet with new context and knowledge at each return.
Williams says that his book is “less a sustained argument than a series of observations, meditations, and approaches to Moore’s work” and that it is not “a monograph, which builds a single case in linear fashion to support a clear thesis” but rather a “series of essays” without “a totalizing thesis”—hence the title’s “explorations”. However, Williams eventually proposes a thesis: “Moore has shown us a lot about how stories work and why they matter to us, therefore also revealing the architectures and codes of our broader culture, our collective psyches, and (if he is to be believed) the very structure of reality.” He’s right—but this observation comes late in The Illuminist. Williams wants to prove the point first, rather than merely state it, as I have.
To get to that point, Williams deploys frequent and wide-ranging cultural references, from Plato to Kant, Hannah Arendt to Susan Faludi, and films like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) to Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe (1964). Taken together, we get different contexts for Alan Moore’s worlds and the ideas and stories that function intertextually within those worlds.
Alan Moore’s Watchmen
The Illuminist‘s first chapter focuses entirely on the Watchmen comics series, but not where most critics would begin. Watchmen proffers a dark revision of superheroes, a Reagan/Thatcher Cold War-era thought experiment pondering what life might be like if superheroes were real. Alan Moore arranges his large cast of characters across a broad cultural and political spectrum to demonstrate that great power may or may not come with great responsibility. Probably not.
Yet, despite that there may be “more useful and less simplistic groupings of complex human personalities” than heroes and villains, to cite Alan Moore again, Watchmen still works well as a red-meat superhero romp, complete with costumes, powers, and fight scenes, plus a noir-ish detective story to boot. It’s a banger—but then it makes the reader squirm for thinking so.
Williams leaves all that aside to focus on two small moments: when the unhinged, masked anti-hero Rorschach, speaking to his prison psychiatrist, cites the real-life Kitty Genovese murder, infamous for bystander apathy, although Williams corrects this notion, as his inspiration to fight crime. Much later, with the symmetry befitting Rorschach himself, that same psychiatrist decides to intervene in stopping a crime at great personal expense. This might be the least obvious place to begin an analysis of Watchmen, almost a deconstruction of a text that is already a deconstruction. However, the juxtaposition is perfect.
I thought The Illuminist‘s first chapter would cover the Watchmen series, and each subsequent section would cover additional works by Alan Moore, as befitting a monograph. However, this is no monograph.
In the next chapter, Williams charts the course from the novella Heart of Darkness (1899) to the film Apocalypse Now (1979) to Watchmen, as Joseph Conrad’s and Francis Ford Coppola’s titles could easily apply to Alan Moore’s creation. This method develops a seemingly throwaway line from Rorschach—“We are approaching heart of darkness”[sic]—demonstrating that Moore doesn’t have any throwaway lines. It also provides the perfect segue into Watchmen’s incorporation of the horrors of the Vietnam War into its heroic fantasy. In Watchmen, heroism is always a fantasy.
Reading the end of the Watchmen series, Williams charts the human and moral catastrophes and the open-endedness of the comic’s final panel. “There are no superheroes, there are no extra-dimensional aliens,” Williams says, “but there really are nuclear bombs, and powerful people who lie to us, and secrets that cost lives. The last line of dialogue can be read as a plea, from writer to reader, urging us to draw our own conclusions and to take responsibility: ‘I leave it entirely in your hands.’“
Williams moves on to Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the novel, initially published in 2005) and Mad Max (George Miller’s original film of 1979), back into Watchmen. Yet now, we get an even more multi-layered comparison, to contrast the twinned problems of responsibility and redemption in V for Vendetta (published between 1982 and 1985). Williams notes, “The transformation of victim into avenger is central to revenge stories, of course, but in each of these three cases that transformation is also treated as a kind of loss.” We can see Alan Moore’s moral complexity: the dual problem not just of heroism gone wrong, but its flipside, of terror as potentially just in an unjust world.
The Imaginary Illuminist
The Illuminist continues along these lines, pulling in Alan Moore’s imaginary story (i.e., outside of canon) for DC Comics’ Superman: Man of Tomorrow (1986) and his revisionist take on the horrific Swamp Thing (ivid, 1984-1987) for further discussion or Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan, demonstrating the intertextual, metatextual nature of Alan Moore’s entire body of work. Again and again, Moore employs gods and monsters to investigate what it means to be human.
Part of that metatextuality comes from Alan Moore’s self-awareness, not just of genre conventions, but also of seeing his works as stories about stories. Graphic novel Lost Girls (1991) incorporates children’s literature in the way one would least expect; The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series appropriates and rewrites characters from Victorian-era novels; and the Providence series provides Moore’s take on H.P. Lovecraft’s imagined world. Then again, Watchmen and Man of Tomorrow—and certainly From Hell and even V for Vendetta–are stories about stories in their own ways.
While Moore frequently writes about magic, particularly in Promethea (1999 to 2005) and Providence (2015), he also knows where the real magic lies: in the stories themselves. As Williams writes, “Magic may not be real in the way that toothbrushes and parking meters are, but stories are real; symbols are real. They may only exist in the mind, or in the culture, but they have real effects.” Williams’ conclusion takes those effects into distinctly non-comic territory, analyzing the insurrection in Washington, D.C., on 6 January 2021, an event Moore has written about, but the insurrection itself feels like something that Moore himself could have written.
Despite the title, The Illuminist: Philosophical Explorations in the Work of Alan Moore is less an exploration of Moore’s philosophy than a rich literary study, which is even better. Moore is many things, but I like him best as an old-fashioned author: visionary, brilliant, and crotchety. The Watchmen comics series is also many things, but it is, at bottom, nothing less than the Great American novel itself. Even though Alan Moore is not American. Even though Watchmen is not a novel.