Moore makes artists like the Chapmans look like the middle-class entertainers they are. Well, we're always being told art should disturb. In fact he appears to believe that fictional personae have their own existence in some spiritual realm he can access through magic. In Black Dossier his characters end up in a mystic alternate reality which he seems to be claiming is a real place, not a fiction. He believes in the occult and is a practising Magus. The reason the films of From Hell and the League are so awful is that they remove all this rich cultural architecture.īut I wouldn't want to make him sound respectable.
In From Hell there's a guest appearance by William Morris, and in the recent League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier he pastiches Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and PG Wodehouse. Is this low art or high art? Hard to tell when, in Lost Girls, you witness an orgy taking place among the audience at the first night of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. He's also massively erudite, and in ways that constantly shift the ground the reader seems to be standing on. His humour has a kind of lovely crassness that saves him from the pretension to which American graphic novelists are prone: in Lost Girls for example there's a irritating fool whose name happens to be H Potter. One of his best jokes involves HG Wells and Rupert the Bear. There is the monstrous From Hell, his terrifying yet compulsive meditation on the myth of Jack the Ripper his hilarious League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with its fabulous cast of Victorian superheroes and now Lost Girls in which he takes on the delights of decadence.
Lost Girls is one of a sequence of comics in which Moore has delved ever deeper into the late nineteenth-century psyche.
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