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Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct - Paul Di Filippo
by Jake Speed
Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct is a 2006 graphic novel that collects the last arc in the Top 10 series. This comic is set in a futuristic but dangerous and grime infested city called Neopolis which was built by captured Nazi scientists at the end of the war as a place where those with super powers ("science heroes") and ... robots, ghosts, gods and monsters could all live together away from ordinary people. Ordinary people are not too keen on living next door to monsters or super powered people for understandable reasons. So the inhabitants of Neopolis are outcasts and outsiders and the Top 10 stories have plenty of scope to address themes of prejudice and fear of those that are different. Robots in particular seem to bear the brunt of a lot of fear and prejudice in this strange city. As everyone in Neopolis seems to have unique and special powers it requires a very unusual police force to keep order in the city and that task often falls on Precinct 10 where all of the officers have uncanny powers or unique talents themselves. The comic was created by Alan Moore as a sort of Watchmen meets Hill Street Blues and he was responsible for writing two excellent volumes and two equally good spin-offs (Smax and The Forty-Niners) with fantastic art supplied by Gene Ha.
Unfortunately, Alan Moore, as ever, fell out with the company who produce this series and they decided to continue without him (possibly to spite Moore as when he falls out with a company he doesn't do it in a half-hearted way). So Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct has nothing to do with Alan Moore and however hard you might try you can't replicate the invention and sensibility he brings to a comic. The art by Jerry Ordway is much less of a problem and well up to par but the story by Paul Di Filippo leaves something to be desired and the dialogue and characters are both unavoidably diminished by the absence of the man who created this series in the first place. The story is set five years from the events of the last comic to feature any of the Top 10 characters. The police officers of Precinct 10 are having their annual "labor day" picnic when a large object in the sky known as the Hell Ditch Pilgrim appears. This object appears above a supernatural crevice and is the somewhat clumsy McGuffin that drives the story here.
I should point out that the premise of Top 10 is that it takes place on one of what are many alternative Earths and the all of the alternative versions of Neopolis are ultimately accountable to a central police body on Earth Fifty-Four known as Grand Central. The Neopolis of our world is Precinct Ten in this interdimensional police arrangement and so known by the officers who work there as Top 10. Anyway, the Precinct's resident robot policeman Joe Pi (he looks like a Transformer and has a good sense of humour for a robot) is assigned to investigate a new drug that has been sweeping through the city and being used by the assorted robots who reside in Neopolis. The drug seems to have a connection to the Hell Ditch Pilgrim and this investigation will uncover a dark secret that goes beyond the mortal realms of Earth. Meanwhile, the officers at Top 10 have to deal with a most unexpected and unwelcome turn of events when their beloved Captain Traynor is sacked by the Mayor and replaced by an irritating blowhard called Sean Cindercott. Cindercott places increasingly draconian restrictions on the officers at the station (longer hours, less money, infringements on their civil rights, the focus on tackling subversive elements and terrorists at the exclusion of street level crime) and also demands that they sign an oath of loyalty to him and the city.
With our eccentric band of police heroes threatening resignation and a supernatural avatar looming (quite literally) over the city, things look rather bleak for Neopolis. While this is not as awful as some of the reviews it got on publication would suggest the magic has definitely gone from this comic and the loss of Moore is keenly felt. The story is rather vague and something of a mess. It's like one of those ridiculous plots they used to dredge up in Star Trek and then have conviently solved right at the end in somewhat unconvincing fashion and they do the same here. In the first two volumes Moore weaved a labyrinthine plot and then - in his usual style - moved it all towards a climx where everything seemed to fall together and there were big revelations. This volume just sort of fizzles out in the end and I was never that engaged by the avatar and the ramifications involving subspace and dark energy etc. It did rather seem to me at times that they were just making this up as they went along for the sake of getting another Top 10 series out there and cashing in on the work Alan Moore had done to establish this comic. Moore's amusing dialogue is as a greater loss as his Rubik's cube storylines but the art is good though.
Neopolis is still like Fritz Lang meets Blade Runner meets a German expressionistic film nightmare. A big claustrophobic neon concrete jungle where you literally never know who you will meet around the next corner. It might even be Tintin as Di Filippo continues Moore's penchant for famous cameos. While the art is fine the nuances and bonkers invention and skill of Alan Moore are attributes that Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct was never likely to successfully mimic without him. You get the impression here that the writer was intent to just follow the formula as much as possible and make it feel like the previous volumes as much as he could. What is missing is the sharpness of Moore. All the things you would expect from a Top 10 book are present. Weird characters, a strange threat, cover-ups, corruption, prejudice. The difference is that the characters are not as vivid and quotable this time around and so feel less memorable and interesting. A couple have far too little to do for my liking - especially Jeff Smax, a surly large blue alien who fires energy blasts from his chest. Smax was teamed with Robyn Slinger - a young woman known as "Toybox" for her collection of General Jumbo style toy helicopters and soldiers - in the first issue and although he hates everything and is a grump it was touching the way that Moore developed a believable friendship between the mismatched pair.
Smax was one of the funniest characters (in deadpan fashion) in the first two volumes but here he is thrust into the background far too much. Slinger is given a pivotal role in the story but other characters too like Sergeant Caesar (a talking Doberman dog who wears a steel exoskeleton) feel less essential in the hands of the new writer. One of the most interesting characters in Moore's Top 10 was Girl One, a bio-engineered back-flipping woman with metallic and fluorescent pigments on her skin that make it look like she is wearing clothes (when actually she isn't). Girl One was killed off by Moore but they bring her back here as "Girl 54" and then do absolutely nothing with the character at all. It doesn't really make any sense. There is a heavy-handed political subtext too that was very clunky. The new charter at Top 10 and the knuckleheaded Mayor and Captain all very George W Bush and war on terror. Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct is readable and completists will probably want to get hold of a copy but it does suffer badly in comparison to the work Alan Moore had already done on this series. This runs to about 90 pages (feels a bit of a skimpy read) and at the time of writing will cost you about £10.
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Pocket Essentials: Alan Moore - Lance Parkin
by Jake Speed
The Alan Moore Pocket Essential was published in 2009 and written by Lance Parkin. I think it was first published earlier but my copy is a 2009 revised edition. I should point out it's a non-fiction text book and not a comic book. The Pocket Essentials series of books are quite good fun although never anything terribly earth shattering. ... They are, as the name suggests, small guides to all manner of things (Tintin, Jackie Chan, Conspiracy Theories etc, etc) and usually about 150 pages long. This one is about Alan Moore, the most celebrated writer in comics today and the most famous resident of Northampton. The long haired and scraggly bearded Moore is the eccentric genius responsible for some of the greatest and most influential comics and graphic novels ever published like Watchmen, From Hell, V For Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series. He is famous for deconstructing traditional superhero comics and making the medium more adult and literate. The Alan Moore Pocket Essential offers a quick trawl through his work and life (Moore is apparently a 'magician' in real life but not of the Paul Daniels variety) and is a decent if unavoidably slender read for anyone interested in this bushy bearded icon.
This is about 160 pages in total and can be read in an hour or so if you go straight through. The Tintin Pocket Essential was longer if I recall so it's a slight shame that this one feels a bit perfunctory and brief in comparison. It's always quite interesting though - although unavoidably feels like a quick Alan Moore crash course rather than a proper book at times. I'm familiar with Moore's most famous works but there are huge swathes of his career that I've never encountered or am sketchy about (he did start in the sixties so he's been at it for a long time) so perhaps the best thing about this is the detailed bibliography that takes up the last part of the book. This is very handy and interesting to browse through. There is an introductory chapter about Moore at the start and then the guide moves onto things like his most salient roots in comics, working on things like 2000 AD and Captain Britain. This stuff is certainly very readable for anyone interested in British comics.
One thing I did find interesting here were the passages relating to the film versions of Moore's work and his own thoughts on this. Moore believes that his work is generally unfilmable and designed for the page not the screen. He now has nothing to do with any adaptions of his work by Hollywood and absolutely hates what they've done to his comics. The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, for example, his brilliant steampunk tale of a group of Victorian superheroes drawn from the world of classic adventure fiction (Alan Quatermein, Captain Nemo, The Invisible Man etc), was dark and complex but Hollywood turned into a stupid action film, even putting Tom Sawyer into the story because they felt they had to have at least one American in there! Moore was especially annoyed that his sarcastic and world weary Frederick Abberline of From Hell was turned into an absthine swigging Johnny Depp in the film! Moore seems too to have had a fractious relationship with some of the comic companies he's worked for.
The author is clearly a big fan and praises most of the Moore works to the heavens, which is something I liked. The Tintin Pocket Essential was a bit strange at times because they kept giving the books 2/5 in their final analysis but there is little sniffiness or harshness on show here. The book looks at Moore's themes and style and much of this is mildly interesting although the Moore books mostly speak for themselves. A lot of Moore's work expresses an extreme distrust of governments and stresses the rights of the individual. There is a Rod Serling quality to some of Moore's work and the twist in the Twilight Zone episode The Old Man in the Cave may have inspired the information centre in V For Vendetta. V For Vendetta, a brilliant comic by Moore in the eighties about a fascist regime taking control of Britain in the aftermath of a nuclear war, was inspired by Moore's extreme dislike of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives. Moore felt Britain was turning into a police state where minorities were being picked on and it led to him writing V For Vendetta.
The Alan Moore Pocket Essential never really has the time to dwell on anything for too long but you can skirt through his varied work in comics over the years. Creating The Ballad of Halo Jones for 2000 AD, writing for Batman and Superman, Swamp Thing, and of course his seminal Watchmen, arguably the most influential comic ever written with its roster of dysfunctional costumed heroes (most of which have no powers whatsoever) trying to exist in a world that is darker and more realistic than the superhero comic genre was familiar with at the time. Because Moore has written so many different things for so many different titles over such a long time, it is undoubtedly nice to have a list of these to hand in the form of a book/guide and it's the bibliography that probably makes this worth getting hold of for Alan Moore fans rather than any profound observations or eye watering prose on the part of the author. The good thing about the Pocket Essentials is that they are very cheap and also very easy to carry around if you want something for a dull train journey.
I don't think this is exactly an essential purchase, even for Alan Moore fans, but it's quite good fun with some interesting bits and pieces about Moore's life and work. It's readable enough and there are some good observations although there isn't enough space to ever go into too much detail. This is not the best Pocket Essential I've read but it's certainly not bad. Anyone looking for an introduction to the work of Alan Moore could do a lot worse.
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London Deep - Robin Price
by shroud
Global warming has caused the seas to rise and rise, swallowing entire cities in its wake. London is underwater, literally, and anarchy has followed upon this disaster. Well, so the police would like you to think. They want you to think it is so bad, they need not one, but two police forces- the adult police, for grown ups, aka the ... 'Dult police, and the YPD, Youth Police, for kids. No, no, this is not sending a kid to juvenile detention as we know it, this is a police force ran by actual kids. Think kids aged 7 and upwards with truncheons, police boats, and their own galley ship, not to mention the prison fortress they territorially defend from the 'Dult Police. Yes, the two police literally have an uneasy truce that often erupts into violence it seems. Into this world we step and meet Jemima Mallard, the daughter of the Chief Inspector of the 'Dult Police. If just entering puberty was not bad enough, her life takes a definite turn for the worse. Her first boyfriend literally dumps her, and then two kids come along and sink the houseboat she and her father live on. Then a member of the YPD manages to knock her air tanks into the Thames, and when she goes to retrieve them, she ends up branded a criminal by the YPD who thinks she is mixed up with a strange shadowy figure called Father Thames. It is either help them, or face the consequences, and her only clues as to what is going on rests with mysterious lotto style scratch cards found on the Thames and little white ducks.
If the premise of the story is not unusual enough, let's take a look at its execution. Robin Price's writing is quirky with a bit of an edge to it that greatly adds realism to this dystopian version of London. Jemima is pretty typical for her age; she is a fairly nice kid, but has a bit of a know it all attitude when dealing with others, yet is always internally questioning herself and what is going on. Add in the gritty illustrated comic panels by Paul McGrory and you find this is indeed something quite new, not only in plot, but in style. It's not just an illustrated novel, nor is it quite a graphic novel. It is a hybrid between the two. While the Japanese have their light novels with easy to read text and full page illustrations, this fits somewhat between that idea and the graphic novel/manga concept. As such, it works quite well for the younger market. Children aged 9 and above who are reluctant to read but love comics will find the shorter full text sections easy to get through, with the comic panels adding punctuation to the action occurring within that part of the chapter. It almost reminds me of the old Batman TV show, where live action footage was suddenly mixed with comic book graphics at key moments.
The subject matter itself is timely, being a look forward at a future where we let global warming go unchecked, but where current politics nannies everyone to the point that most go without electricity and other necessities to limit the damage, despite the green options. Indeed, this is the first book of a series which promises to look closer at the politics and machinations of Jemima's world, as well a further exploration of Jemima's own past. With the slightly sarcastic wit and tongue in cheek puns and jokes within the text, I look forward to seeing how the rest of the storyline pans out. I simply don't think I can look at a duck quite the same again, never mind a scratch off card.
****. I would like to thank the author for taking time to chat with me at the Midlands Expo 2010 and for providing me with a (signed!) review copy.****
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