Cadence (The Ballad of Halo Jones Book 3 - Alan Moore)

Member Name: Frankingsteins

Product:	The Ballad of Halo Jones Book 3 - Alan Moore
Date:	13/10/07 (78 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The longest, most focused, most action-packed and most tragic volume yet.

Disadvantages: Falls for the war story clichés at times, and lacks the humour of the previous books.

The third story in the saga of “ordinary” 50th century space adventurer Halo Jones was never intended to be the last, but its open ending feels like a satisfying conclusion of the character’s early life that really could go anywhere, though writer Alan Moore has failed to betray his principles and write a sequel for over twenty years (and to be fair and understating, he has been concentrating on a couple of projects in the meantime). 2000AD publishers IPC Media, whose comic hosted the series in its original five-page weekly form, continued to add irritating pressure and unrealistic guidelines for Moore’s increasingly popular story, and to his credit Moore once again reached a compromise that didn’t impede on the quality of the finished product, even if the greedy and unreasonable attitude of the publishers effectively put an end to the series and saw Moore jump channel to the American market, with which he would become equally disillusioned in due time.

While the action scenes of the intermediary Book 2 felt somewhat superfluous, never really hiding the fact that their inclusion was due to publishing pressure, Book 3 very naturally finds the series moving into the popular genre of full-blown futuristic war, providing readers with Moore’s self-described “slightly different” take on the subject. The third ‘book’ was extended from the previous ten strips to fifteen, a compromise on the publishers’ preferred twenty, and is all the better for the extended focus and added depth this provides. Book 3 is almost undoubtedly the best of the three books (though I still enjoy the small-scale domesticity of the first book as a nice contrast), with the plot reaching its height, long-running loose threads being tied up and exploding all over the place, and a great step up in the quality of Ian Gibson’s art, which even the artist felt was a little rushed and half-hearted in the preceding offering. Moore and Gibson learn from their earlier successes and failures and unleash a horrific, action-packed and deeply personal story that manages to cater for even the 2000AD readership’s lowest common denominator; the carnage-hungry adolescent.

Where the previous two collections published the same year by Titan featured cover art from Gibson depicting Halo in relevant civilian attire and kinky stewardess gear respectively, the third promises some long-awaited action heroine carnage and shows Halo armed with a massive space gun. True to form, there is a substantial focus on war in this story that makes clear parallels to the American invasion of Vietnam by keeping all the fiftieth century technology distinctly 1970s at its foundations – but being able to hover, and stuff like that. Gibson renders everything to look particularly menacing and almost alive, from the initial recruitment ‘Glory Barge’ swallowing Halo into its maw to the great-looking gravity suits required to survive on Moab, which resemble overgrown frogs from a distance and are pretty unique. The story follows a fairly standard and predictable course of events for a war story told from a deeply personal perspective, leaving several issues at the end for the necessary moralising analysis on the futility and inhumanity of all conflict and its personal effects on the conscience, set up by some telling sarcasm in the earlier sections where Halo despairs at her new career path but figures, “things could be worse – at least it’s a job.”

A prologue (labelled as ‘Part 0’) again opens the story, but this time fills readers in on Halo’s actions over a ten-year period since the second book, assuming that everyone is already familiar with who she is, or at least doesn’t require a patronising and unnecessary introduction to that end, as was provided at the start of Book 2. Although it flashes past, this manages to be one of the more interesting parts of the story for the sheer amount of information and ideas it packs in, from the bleak desolation of Pwuc at the figurative rear-end of the universe where scarce jobs are allocated according to a lottery, to the hideous and fascinating self-preservation measures taken by the trees of Vescue that form screaming human faces in their bark and emit a natural howl upon destruction as a successful biological deterrent against tree fellers, a career that Halo, with her ever-developing conscience, was only able to hold down for three days . While Moore feels obligated to spell out his themes in so many words without the unpopular subtlety of the first book – namely, “she’d escaped the Hoop to find a bigger prison waiting outside” – the scene is painted fantastically with words, and just as impressively with the pencils and inks of Ian Gibson whose much greater use of shadows here adds a distinctly darker tone to this book than has been found previously, while also making it a black and white success that for the first time would be spoiled by colour, rather than improved.

The tale begins in earnest when the army’s recruitment barge arrives at Halo’s latest hell-hole to find willing/desperate recruits for the continuing war in the Tarantula Nebula, where she is reunited with her former roomie Toy and is enlisted into a trainee troupe of all-new characters, less ridiculous and more compelling than those of the previous book. The nervous, stammering Mona is a great human focus who fills the role of cute supporting character you least want to be killed off, while the long-awaited appearance of General Luiz Cannibal himself is particularly striking and disconcerting. The female bonding is enjoyable to follow due to Moore’s flair for natural and often humorous conversation, and the little details such as Toy’s love of holo-soaps, which she can now receive direct into her artificial left ear after an accident robbed her of her previous one, keep things firmly (if stereotypically) feminine, without reducing the characters to mere men with breasts. Probably enormous ones at that.

‘Halo Jones’ was never a straightforward sci-fi action story, and it’s always apparent that every scene of carnage and tragedy is intended to strike a nerve and make a heartfelt point. Halo and her team take out hostile snipers who appear to be only children, while the character’s eventual descent into shock is carried off fantastically, in one of the plot’s more memorable phases. The longer duration of this book is used to its full extent to put Halo through hell on numerous occasions and really examine the effects and her own changing personality and objectives, while also allowing time to examine some nifty sci-fi concepts involving the effect of extreme gravity on time. There are, as usual, plenty of background details and minor sub-plots glossed over that make Halo’s universe all the more intriguing and believable, from the Moabite’s adoption of Puritanical Christianity to the statement (after hints way back in Book 1) that humans of the future have all evolved into vegans, either through a shortage of meat or as a natural progression of values. As a limited, self-contained story with a rather narrow focus (at least compared to long-running 2000AD series such as ‘Judge Dredd’), it’s usually easy to spot the details being hammered into the reader’s consciousness at an early stage that are all going to pay off later, and although most of these are tied up very nicely by the end of the book, there’s enough left to whet appetites for future stories that will sadly never arrive.

Alan Moore and Ian Gibson achieved a commendable feat in taking ‘Halo Jones’ fully into the genre of future war without losing any of its thoughtful and compelling attitudes towards humanity and the struggle for existence. This third book is an improvement over its predecessors and a work that should satisfy readers who would be put off by the low-key or uneventful nature of the previous stories, though those who still object to the almost entirely female cast are best left to their primitive macho publications in any case – we don’t need their input (and as Alan Moore asked in his baiting introduction to Book 1, “what’s the matter? Don’t you like girls?”)

The original three volume publication by Titan Books in 1986 proved extremely popular, selling out in pre-orders before the books even hit the shelves, and this separation of the distinct stories into individual volumes is the most satisfying way to read the saga. Those editions have long since been deleted, meaning that the more affordable and available complete editions are a fine alternative, which tend to be updated every decade or so with a new front cover. This original version features the usual introduction by Moore (replaced with one by Gibson in newer editions, I believe), as well as black and white reproductions of the several 2000AD covers that featured the series during its original run. It’s a shame there wasn’t more ‘Halo Jones,’ but at least it goes out with a bang, and everyone likes a nice trilogy don’t they?

Summary: Originally published in 2000AD 451 to 466 (1986), collected by Titan (1986).