E.T. II: Escape From Birmingham! (Skizz - Alan Moore)

Member Name: Frankingsteins

Product:	Skizz - Alan Moore
Date:	02/12/07 (79 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: An entertaining, Brummed-up version of Spielberg's heart-warming film, with more explosions.

Disadvantages: Short, a little inconsistent and unadventurous.

Another fondly remembered series from the early bibliography of Alan Moore (at least fondly remembered by people who were born at least a decade earlier than I was, lucky gets), 'Skizz' is one of the major limited series he wrote for London-based sci-fi comic 2000AD before really hitting his stride with more ambitious projects, re-inventing the mature comic format and sodding off to America. This twenty-three part saga, originally published as five-page parts of a weekly serial, was primarily demanded of the writer by the comic's editor to be an unapologetic and shameless cash-in on the popularity still riding from Steven Spielberg's blockbuster 'E.T.', released the previous year. Moore's take on the tale chronicles the sympathetic struggle of a funny-looking alien who had the rotten luck to crash-land on a surprisingly aggressive, hellish planet populated by the brutish descendants of apes. We finally really did it - you maniacs! God damn you all to hell! Spaghetti Junction twirls across the skyline and we realise it was Birmingham all along.

Moore knows full well that it's a bit cheap to make a straight E.T. rip-off, and makes sure to explicitly reference that film in dialogue, along with other alien-on-Earth clichés, to prevent himself from slipping into lazy parody. Although the restrictions of deadline, format and target audience keep this from reaching the artistic heights of his later 'V for Vendetta' and the numerous major successes that followed, or even the more modest achievements of his later, more liberated 2000AD series 'The Ballad of Halo Jones,' Moore's talent is still strongly evident in the interesting characters, dialogue and later elements of the plot, even if the whole endeavour does feel disappointingly pedestrian and family-friendly compared to the mad stuff he was writing at the time for Sounds magazine. The story of Skizz is the story of E.T., but slightly different - set in Brum of the early eighties against a subtle background of recession, with an intrepid cast of unlikely, unemployable heroes. They may not have a flying bike, but they have a minivan and they still have their pride.

If E.T. was largely about the divide between adventurous, loving childhood and cynical, paranoid adulthood (I actually can't remember, I haven't seen it since I was about four), 'Skizz' replicates this without much embellishment, ageing the main character to fifteen-year-old punk Roxanne and adding an irritatingly stereotypical arch villain in the form of Jan Van Owen, whose presence (and strange German accent) only serve to undermine the serious messages as the captured alien is subjected to testing and forced to reveal its non-existent violent agenda. Upon crashing outside Birmingham at night-time, Skizz (real name Interpreter Zhcchz of the Tau-Ceti Imperium) stumbles into its busy, crowded centre in a daze brought about by Earth's unusually low gravity and high concentration of oxygen, and witnessing punks engaged in a street brawl, forms his first impression of the human race. The question the reader is invited to ask is, was this just an unfortunate stroke of bad luck in terms of keeping up appearances, or was this incident of human conflict a more honest, unadulterated depiction of the truth behind our species' diplomatic veneer? It's fortunate that the shed he finally selects as shelter is owned by the family of the more accepting Roxy, whose parents are spending the weekend at Scarborough, and whose startled reaction of disbelief is tempered by her knowledge that this is clearly just a dream. A dream that seems to be lasting for quite a long time, even after she wakes up.

The larger plot suffers a little from this being a weekly serial composed of relatively short episodes that need to be self-contained to some extent, to prevent casual readers from feeling too alienated. There are some oversights as cliff-hanger endings from the previous week occasionally fail to be really addressed in the next, or the time span between instalments is assumed to be longer, particularly as Skizz first enters Roxy's care and learns to adapt to his new environment, which seems to be over far too quickly on the page for her to develop the attachment and devotion she displays through the rest of the story. For the most part, the deadlines don't affect the quality, and Moore's script, though naturally evolving to some extent with each issue rather than being set in stone from the start, features the level of consistency and pay-off to earlier set-ups that would be expected of a substantial serial such as this. Characters are consistent and entertaining, particularly Roxy's adult friends Loz and Cornelius who prove their worth, ingenuity and brute strength when required, and it's ensured that everyone will be rooting for the innocent, helpless Skizz to escape from the mad German's clichéd clutches.

I'd say that it's still primarily a story for younger readers (I'm thinking more the teenage audience, often stupidly classified as 'young adults'), considering its status as a beefed-up (and Brummed-up) E.T., but as ever, Moore makes things interesting for a wider audience. His stories for 2000AD usually tried to avoid the comic's trademark space wars and macho metal violence, and this is a great example of a sci-fi story based around human themes and interaction. Even the necessary technobabble in the opening crash sequence seems noticeably tongue-in-cheek in its excess, inaugurating yet another arbitrary lexicon of alien gobbledygook for the 2000AD multiverse, and the usual plot clichés are all dismissed during the alien's interrogation: his ship "just happened" to crash on Earth because he naturally directed its failing systems to find the nearest planet capable of supporting life, and he picks up the English language with speed due to his job as an Interpreter. Despite the significant drawback of learning it from Brummies. (I'm only joking, though I have to admit to getting an enhanced level of amusement from taking the time to imagine all of the characters speaking their lines in the quite frankly hilarious dialect of that great city).

I've gone over the top in praising Alan Moore without even mentioning the excellent art of Jim Baikie, which is striking in the publication's customary black-and-white format, and fulfils the requirement of rendering humans and aliens with the same degree of skill as the natural and industrial backdrops. Apart from some gratuitously indulgent double-page spreads at the most dramatic bits, which are ace, Baikie's most impressive feat comes in defamiliarising the modern structures we take for granted through the eyes of an alien who really is very alien; Baikie's electrical pylons and cooling towers really do look like "horrifying monuments." Like 'Halo Jones,' and I presume, much of the 2000AD canon, this is a series I can't imagine looking better in colour as the shading is enough. Anyway, the front cover shows that Skizz is sort of brown, so you don't have to read the whole book in tense frustration before that is revealed (for some reason he looks purple on DC's re-issue, but that might be the light).

Baikie went on to both write and illustrate a further two series of 'Skizz' for 2000AD in the early nineties, but trade paperbacks seem to focus solely (and thus I assume, wisely) on the original written by Moore, coming in at just over a hundred, nicely thick, black-and-white pages and retailing around the £10 mark, though probably a bit more expensive today. The complete series is presented back-to-back with only the unavoidably tell-tale 'Next Prog:', title bubble and repeated writing/art credits seeming amiss in this format, and the book is kick-started with a three-page 'The Making of Skizz' from the 2000AD annual that came out that year, a fair substitute for a more recent, original introduction by Moore or Baikie, and one that follows the comic's recurring joke of casting its production team as androids, keeping the whole thing light-hearted and semi-truthful to the point of intrigue. The only real flaw, that has gone uncorrected no matter how many times this is released, is the glaring error by letterer Tony Jacob in which he presumably wrote the wrong species of marsupial into a speech bubble that was later amended to 'wallabies' with an oblong sticker that failed to be masked by the photocopy. It's these sorts of unprofessional errors and rushed-to-deadline scripts that make me so fond of the humble early work of (later) legendary writers, and I'm sure the various companies licensed to reprint 2000AD material are similarly glad that the opportunity presented itself.

Summary: First published in 2000AD 308 to 330 (1983), collected by Titan (2002).