Last War in Albion v4 Chapter 1: Alan Moore at Image (Omnibus) (Patreon)

As promised, the omnibus version of LWIA v4 Chapter 1, less a chunk on Marvel Comics that'll be appearing in Chapter 2 when I get that omnibus out.

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Moore’s issue of Spawn was followed by one written by his protege, Neil Gaiman, who by this time was riding high on the success of what he would later describe in a deposition as “a comic named Sandman, which in 1992 was the single-most acclaimed ongoing series of comics probably that there has ever been in terms of literary rewards received and respect in the industry and personal awards that were coming in for the comic and for the writing thereof.” Unlike Moore, Gaiman would not do a significant amount of work for Image—just Spawn #9 and a three-issue miniseries following up on a character he created for that issue. But those four issues would turn out to have surprisingly large implications for a lingering thread from earlier in the War.

Gaiman’s issue of Spawn demonstrated the same efficient populist instincts that propelled his larger rise, recognizing that Spawn’s cast lacked one of the standard popular aspects of ostentatious action comics aimed at adolescent boys: a scantily clad woman who commits massive acts of ultraviolence. As Spawn was a demonic character, Gaiman decided to counterbalance him with an angelic character who, in keeping with Image’s general attitude towards subtext, he called Angela. As he put it, “I was thinking that the only reason you’d have an army of hell is if the other side were worse. I mean, you don’t have an army to fight librarians and milk monitors.” And so Angela is little more than a ruthless hunter whose prey is Spawns, as Gaiman illustrates in an entertaining opening sequence set in the 12th century in which she lures a version of Spawn in a giant medieval suit of plate armor to his doom. McFarlane, meanwhile, gives her more or less the costume you’d expect—a plate metal bra, drape of fabric to hide her genitals, and little else, alongside a giant spear with a ribbon that provided him the opportunity to draw a bunch of furling and twisting fabric, as was his wont.

Gaiman’s issue—uniquely among the four guest-written issues—was focused on introducing larger amounts of lore to the comic. McFarlane later recalled that “Neil was the most curious of the four as to sort of, you know, continuity in the book and how it all sort of worked,” and asking questions about his future plans with the title. In addition to Angela and the armored Spawn—the first time a historical version of Spawn had been shown—Gaiman ended up creating a third character, Count Cogliostro, a homeless man with an uncanny level of knowledge about Spawn and how he worked. Little about any of this got fleshed out, not least as Spawn #9 was just a twenty-four page comic that had to end in a cliffhanger that let the plot be handed over to Dave Sim, but it laid groundwork that would be paid off in future issues, including Gaiman’s own three-issue Angela miniseries, which ended with Angela quitting heaven’s service to become a bounty hunter with a speech about how “it’s not simply a matter of heaven or hell any more. You don’t have to work for the big two. There are alternatives” that plainly alluded to the larger context of Image’s rebellion against Marvel and DC’s hegemony.

Problems, however, quickly arose. For all their financial success, Image was in many regards a fly by night operation. As Gaiman recalls it, when he asked about a contract for his work on Spawn #9, McFarlane’s answer was that “we don’t send contracts, we treat you better, you know, it’s just that’s not how we do business, we don’t do contracts,” promising instead to “treat you better than DC ever would with their contracts.” This, however, became a notable problem when it came to McFarlane’s continued use of characters created for Gaiman’s issue in things like a crossover team-up between Medieval Spawn and Mark Silvestri’s Witchblade, or Cogliostro’s eventual centrality to the plot of Spawn. In 1996, after McFarlane had put out an Angela action figure and reprinted his miniseries in trade paperback without offering Gaiman any sort of royalties, and in the face of rumors McFarlane was considering selling his company, Gaiman had his lawyers contact McFarlane demanding some clarity to the situation. This is, of course, in keeping with Gaiman’s usual business savvy, but in this case he had a clear ulterior motive in starting up negotiations with McFarlane: Miracleman.

Gaiman’s status as Moore’s protege always had several components—the thanks credit at the start of Watchmen, the fact that Moore had, as Gaiman was always quick to bring up in interviews, taught him how to write comics scripts, and, of course, the fact that Moore had secured his initial meeting with Berger and Giordano. But perhaps nothing had greater symbolic import than the fact that Gaiman was literally Moore’s anointed successor on Miracleman, one of the titles on which Moore’s reputation had been built in the first place. 

In Moore’s recollection, he offered Gaiman the opportunity with the wry comment that “this may well be a poisoned chalice.” Gaiman recalls a rather different warning, namely that “by the end of Miracleman #16 I will have solved all crimes, ended all war and created an absolutely perfect world in which no further stories can occur.” Neither warning deterred Gaiman, who readily accepted. Ironically, despite this offer coming in late 1986, even before his meeting with Berger and Giordano, the Miracleman gig played little to no actual role in Gaiman’s ascent; the extensive delays that wracked Eclipse meant that Moore’s run didn’t actually conclude until March 1989, and by the time Gaiman’s first issue came out in January 1990 he was already six months past the career-making debut of Death in Sandman #8. 

Nevertheless, it was a prestigious assignment, and Gaiman took it seriously. His first arc, entitled The Golden Age, employed the short story structure that Gaiman used to great effect throughout Sandman, opting to paint the utopian world that Moore left him with in a series of miniatures. Unsurprisingly given the lag in publishing—five years elapsed between Moore offering Gaiman the title and the final issue of The Golden Age actually coming out—there is a rather sharp upwards curve in the sophistication of these short stories. They start relatively simple; the first, “A Prayer and a Hope,” tells the story of a set of pilgrims journeying up the vast tower of Olympus in order to offer their petitions to Miracleman. It is poetic—Gaiman spends much of it in first person narration, allowing him to offer a fairly straightforward Moore imitation as he describes things like a hall that “contains nothing but dinosaurs. Skeletons of stone and bone and plastic. Tiny plastic models and huge animatronic reconstructions.” The second, “Skin Deep,” is a similarly straightforward story about a man living in a remote windmill where he carries on a love affair with Miraclewoman. 

With the third, however, this began to shift. Called “Notes from the Underground,” this issue sees a resurrected Emil Gargunza in the hall of the dead where he is tended to by Andek, one of eighteen copies of Andy Warhol who also live in the vast underground complex given over to the resurrected dead. Aside from giving artist Mark Buckingham the opportunity to cut loose with a vast number of Warhol pastiches (he has a particularly large amount of fun with a sequence of nine panel grid pages in which each panel is further divided into a nine panel grid that Buckingham fills with repeated images, some drawn by him, others copied from earlier issues of Miracleman), the issue is simply a firehose blast of wild concepts anchored by a sharp characterization of Warhol himself, who is a once viciously unpleasant and surprisingly vulnerable.

Gaiman followed this with two further issues of formal ambition—one in which large portions are written as a picture book about Winter, the hyper-intelligent infant created by Gargunza, and another that does a paranoid Prisoner riff in the city set aside within paradise for members of the intelligence community, who, as a resurrected Evelyn Cream explains, could find no happiness in paradise because “treachery and betrayal were woven too finely into your lives,” and so were left to live out their days in a city in which literally everyone is a spy, monitoring each other in the course of inscrutable missions for their handlers, all of whom are, in fact, Cream himself. A final issue depicts a festival in which characters from the previous five issues all appear, ending on the pilgrim from “A Prayer and a Hope” as he receives Miracleman’s gift to the populace—the universalizing of the ability to fly. 

All of these issues featured a brief, one or two page backup story entitled “Retrieval” that, it gradually became clear, depicted the process of resurrecting Dicky Dauntless, the Young Miracleman, who had, in Moore’s continuity, perished in the same 1963 explosion that wiped Micky Moran’s memory of his magic word and superhero identity. This would prove the heart of his second arc, The Silver Age, which dealt with the aftermath of his resurrection and his conflicted feelings about Miracleman’s utopia. But by the time this arc began, Eclipse’s longstanding problems were rapidly catching up with it. The Golden Age came out on a schedule that was in fact slightly better than the one Eclipse had managed for Moore’s last arc, producing six issues in twenty months, as opposed to twenty-two for Olympus. (Gaiman would eventually outdo both by taking twenty-three months to publish all of Sandman: Overture.) But a full year passed between its conclusion and the start of The Silver Age in issue #23, and another year elapsed before the second issue came out. This issue, which ended with Dicky fleeing Olympus in horror after Miracleman’s ill-advised attempt to kiss him, would prove to be the final one published by Eclipse.

This was not especially surprising. Eclipse had been struggling ever since the 1986 flood that had necessitated converting Miracleman #8 into an issue of old 1950s Mick Anglo reprints. As Gaiman tells it, the situation while he was working on the book was bad enough that he “wouldn’t start writing til we got paid for the last episode. I would stop writing and Mark wouldn’t start drawing. It wasn’t that we were a year late. It was like one day our checks would turn up and then we start working on it because the checks were so amazingly unpredictable about it.” And around the time Miracleman #24 came out the situation deteriorated further when Dean Mullaney and cat yronwode, the two owners of the company, split up. (As yronwode put it in a 101 line acrostic poem in Comic Buyer’s Guide, “Dean has left me for a woman named Jane Kingsbury who has bone chips in her brain.”) From here the situation unraveled rapidly, with multiple accounts of exactly what happened. Mullaney claims that the only problem was HarperCollins’ failure to pay out royalties owed on graphic novels, yronwode claims Mullaney emptied out the company bank accounts, and Gaiman says it fell apart when Toren Smith, who had been translating manga for them, obtained evidence of accounting fraud and sued them for a $100,000 judgment. Regardless, it proved the end of Eclipse’s ability to publish. Issue #25 was completed and in their hands, but as Gaiman recalls “I don’t think they even had the money to color it and I don’t think they had the money to print it, either,” and eventually yronwode returned the art to Gaiman, in part out of fear that otherwise Mullaney would sell it off. 

At the end of 1994 Eclipse finally went bankrupt, and in early 1996 its assets were bought at auction by Todd McFarlane, who paid $25,000—a quarter as much as he’d paid Gaiman for Spawn #9. This consisted of two pallets of actual property and a pile of trademarks and copyrights, but by almost any standard the only actual valuable part of this was Eclipse’s interest in Miracleman. These were generally understood to be a 70% share in the character, a figure that dates back to the 1982 publication of the early installments of Moore’s run in Warrior. There the copyright on the strip had been split 40/40/20 among Moore, Garry Leach, and Quality Communications, which is to say Dez Skinn. This was later modified to reduce everyone’s share by 10% so as to give a 30% share to Alan Davis. Leach, Skinn, and Davis all opted to sell their shares to Eclipse, resulting in a 70/30 split between Eclipse and Moore. Moore, in turn, passed his share on to Gaiman and Buckingham when they took over the comic. A variety of reversion clauses complicated the situation—Gaiman and Buckingham’s share was to either be passed along to the next creative team or returned to Moore, whereas Eclipse’s share was covered by a clause declaring that they “shall not assign or otherwise dispose of its rights in the Ownership hereunder to any third party except to Rights Holder, or a new corporation or entity in which the majority stockholders of Eclipse are and remain the majority stockholders or managing partners.” But broadly speaking, at least in 1996, it was widely agreed that Todd McFarlane had purchased a 70% share of Miracleman. 

And so when Gaiman began pushing McFarlane for a resolution to the royalties and copyright situation around his work on Spawn, a clear resolution presented itself: a straightforward swap in which McFarlane would get all rights to Cogliostro, and Medieval Spawn, and Gaiman would get the remaining 70% of the Miracleman rights, with Angela being governed on terms equivalent to Gaiman’s contract with DC. This exchange was intended to take place in July 1997. Three months later, however, McFarlane filed trademark registrations on Miracleman, and in 1999 McFarlane wrote Gaiman insisting that the previous offer was null and void, and offering instead to swap Gaiman’s interest in Angela for Miracleman, with the assertion that Medieval Spawn and Cogliostro were and always had been his. Gaiman did not agree, and McFarlane got progressively more aggressive in his position. In March 2001 he introduced a character called Mike Moran into the Spawn comics, and then in June asserted in an interview that he owned the character outright and declaring that he’d be using him in upcoming issues. 

At this point, Gaiman put his Scientology background to good use and went nuclear. A few months after McFarlane’s assertion that he owned Miracleman, Marvel Comics announced that Gaiman would be penning a series for Marvel, with all profits from it going to a company called Marvels and Miracles, LLC, which Gaiman formed in order to sort out the Miracleman rights for once and for all, with the clear implication that once they were the series would start up again under Marvel. And in December Gaiman took to his blog to blast McFarlane, reporting that he’d spoken to Joe Quesada, who reported that “‘Todd McFarlane says to tell you that on this Miracleman stuff, he’ll take it all the way. He’ll take it to the mat,’ he said. ‘He told me to tell you, though, that if you could sort it all out by just getting in a room with him, man to man, and hammering out an agreement. And he made me promise to say that, if Neil keeps up, Todd’s going to go public with all the dirt on Neil he can find, and Neil’s fans won’t like him any more.” (This was not quite the threat in 2001 that it would eventually become.) Gaiman, for his part, declared that “the last lingering shreds of respect I had for McFarlane just went away, like that,” demanding that McFarlane adhere to the 1997 agreement, pay both for Gaiman’s legal expenses and for an audit of the accounts regarding Angela, publicly apologize, and give the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund a “hefty donation,” closing his offer with the snark that “A few years ago, I’d have said a million, maybe half a million. These days it’s not clear that you’ve still got that kind of money, so it’s negotiable.” A month later, he filed suit against McFarlane.

The case moved at the speed such things do, not resolving until February 2004, with Gaiman ultimately judged to have a 50% stake in all three of the Spawn characters under dispute. A follow-up case in 2010 saw McFarlane take another loss for attempting to create characters such as Dark Ages Spawn and a pair of angels, Tiffany and Domina, who were similarly obviously derived from Angela (in an interesting detail, Domina’s role in Spawn is to lead a host of angels into battle against Urizen, who McFarlane reinvented as a soul-devouring demon), and the matter was finally resolved in 2012 with McFarlane getting full ownership of Medieval Spawn and Cogliostro, while Gaiman kept Angela, who he gave to Marvel, where she became integrated into their idiosyncratic version of Norse mythology as Odin and Freyja’s eldest daughter.

As for Miracleman, it eventually emerged not only that McFarlane had never owned any of rights to the character, but that Gaiman, Buckingham, Moore, Leach, Davis, Eclipse, and Quality had never owned them either because Dez Skinn had never actually bothered to legally acquire them from Mick Anglo, meaning that all Marvel had to do in order to get the rights to the character was go buy them off a ninety-three year old pensioner, which, in 2009, they did. It still took an additional five years to clear away all the other legal concerns, as the revelation that nobody had actually held any rights during the Moore/Gaiman runs meant that every writer and artist involved needed to be individually negotiated with, but in 2014 Marvel finally commenced reprinting the by then decades out of print comics in the first successful monthly series featuring the character since the 1950s. (Characteristically, Moore refused to have his name on it, with Marvel instead crediting his issues to “The Original Writer”) 

These reprints were intended to be followed by a completed version of The Silver Age, however more typical Miracleman scheduling quickly took hold and fully six years passed before this started, with Buckingham redrawing the first two issues so that the art style would be consistent throughout. This came out at the rate of seven issues in fourteen months—relatively brisk for both Miracleman and late-career Gaiman, although the latter was probably helped by the fact that Buckingham took a cowriting credit on everything after the three issues that had been written back in the 90s—culminating in the reveal that Dickie Dauntless had been repeatedly sexually abused in an orphanage (including a chilling image of Dickie being taken out for ice cream after and “sitting with a melting ice cream in your hand… unable to process what they just made you do” that provides an unsettling reminder of Gaiman’s intimate familiarity with the subject) and his declaration that he would serve as “the opposition” to Miracleman’s dominion, declaring that “if this is Eden, I’m going to be the serpent.”

The series ended with the declaration that it would continue in Miracleman: The Dark Age, although nothing was solicited, and as of early 2025, when publishers were rushing to announce that they had cut ties with Gaiman, Marvel declared that they had “no new books forthcoming” with him, Buckingham having purportedly ceased work on the project in summer 2024 when reports of Gaiman’s abuse first arose. As it stands, it appears that forty years of legal wrangling, dubious contracts, and breathless hype will end with no conclusion beyond Gaiman’s description in an interview of how the final arc would take place a thousand years later than The Silver Age, feature the return of Johnny Bates, and end with an issue titled “Two Voices” that would feature “two people having a conversation on a fairly ruined planet while they wait for the last sun to come up.” Then again, Marvel Comics deciding to employ a notoriously abusive sex pest wouldn’t exactly be surprising, especially by the standards of what’s already passed in the War’s most convoluted subplot.

As for Moore, he settled into a several year period of fairly extensive work with Image—all told, in addition to Spawn #8 and 1963 he’d pen more than seventy issues for Image and Rob Liefeld’s short-lived spinoff company Awesome—more, ultimately, than he penned for DC, albeit over seven years instead of four. Little to none of this work, however, has anything like the critical acclaim of Batman: The Killing Joke or “For the Man Who Has Everything,” little yet of something like Watchmen or his Swamp Thing run. Some of this is due to the spotty availability of large amounts of this work in trade—the majority of it is long out of print, if it’s been collected at all. But that was true of Miracleman for decades, and if anything this only helped its reputation. The real problem is simply that these comics are disposable cash grabs that see Moore taking full advantage of the amounts of money on offer from Image. Moore made no particular effort to hide this fact, describing his image work as “frankly brainless garbage” and freely admitting that “I’ve sold out and prostituted myself to the Yankee dollar.” 

Equally, however, Moore was adamant that “I have never done anything purely for the money. If I couldn’t enjoy the project, then I wouldn’t do it.” And Moore stressed in multiple interviews that he did in fact enjoy his Image work, describing it as “a great deal of fun, because it is such a romp,” reveling in the opportunity “to cut loose of your own reputation,” praising the “brattiness of it all,” and characterizing the work as  “almost like a light, frothy sorbet to cleanse one’s palate between main courses.” These comics are, in other words, largely Alan Moore goofing off for money. 

This, perhaps, explains the ironic fact that although it was Jim Valentino who initially brought Moore to Image, Moore ultimately did next to no work for Valentino’s Shadowline imprint—aside from 1963, there’s only a nine page story in the 1995 Shadowhawks of Legend about an Ancient Egyptian Shadowhawk. His initial wave of work for Image was instead with Todd McFarlane’s studio, where, aside from Spawn #37, which he wrote from a plot by McFarlane,  he wrote a series of Spawn spin-off miniseries, all of them featuring the character of Violator. Violator was in many ways the primary antagonist in Spawn—a demon with a propensity who periodically took the human form of a fat and balding four foot tall clown. This, in fact, is the form in which he first appears, in a splash page opening the second issue of Spawn where he explains to an alleycat that if Spawn “begs me really, really nice like, I might only amputate one leg. But! If he puts up a fight I’m gonna have to rip his innards out, make fillets outta his lungs, make a milkshake outta his heart, and soft-boil his eyeballs, ‘cause I’m the Violator!” It’s a grotesquely funny scene—a disheveled clown with his belly hanging out ranting about insane levels of violence in massively stylized lettering (“Violator” occupies nearly a quarter of the page)—and sets the tone for the character, who spends most of the issue murdering mob bosses and ripping their hearts out while cracking wise.  Moore takes to this dialogue with aplomb, writing it in the same over the top register in which he typically delivers “Old Gangers Never Die” or the spoken word version of Brought to Light—the same voice in which one imagines him delivering his account of Todd McFarlane calling to ask if he wants to write “SPORN!” 

Moore did not actually use Violator in Spawn #8, but he did introduce his younger brother Vindicator, who proves to be the true identity of the little girl who entraps the pedophile main character, and who introduces himself as “one ‘o the five famous Phlebiac Brothers.” This proves the basis of his first miniseries, a three-issue Violator series that he describes as “what, for want of a better word, could be termed his origin story.” Moore opens by reintroducing the Vindicator along with the remainder of the family—the Vandalizer, the Vaporizer, and the Vacillator (the latter being largely used for comedic relief as he steadfastly refuses to take any sort of firm stance on anything)—as they peer into a gigantic pool of blood scrying for their wayward brother. This proves a frustrating process as the blood periodically coagulates, requiring them to go grab another human and murder them to freshen it, with extensive commentary on the comparative viewing properties of different blood types. (Type O has bad picture and problems with the vertical hold, while AB is especially clear.) 

Thus broadly sets the tone for the comic, which sees Violator pursued by both his brothers and a musclebound parody of Frank Miller-style vigilantes called the Admonisher who gives people “a good telling off” by shooting them in the head. It’s gruesome and ostentatiously violent—enough so that Moore expressed some reservations, saying, “I don’t really like the violence in a lot of comics, because it’s all very very grim and depressing. It’s not really necessary, a lot of it. This is unnecessary violence as well, but at least it’s funny. They’re all great big demons who can have their brains blown out without it affecting them greatly, so there’s lots of brains being blown out, people being ripped in half… fun stuff like that.” And he’s right—it is fun, in a squelchy and splattery ultraviolent way. It’s a breathtakingly stupid comic, but like all great works of puerile stupidity it’s not assembled stupidly—it’s still Alan Moore, with all the basic coherence of plot and pacing that entails. At every turn it’s wildly better than it needs to be, which was largely Moore’s goal—to write “better-than-average stories for 13-to-15-year olds. I’m trying to make them a bit funnier, a bit more stylish, put a couple of storytelling quirks in there.” 

A year later Moore returned to Spawn with a pair of miniseries, which launched two weeks apart. The first was another Violator miniseries, Violator vs. Badrock. As the title suggests, this saw Violator face off with Badrock, one of the heroes in Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood series. The plot sees Badrock hired to run security for the Whiteside-Parsons Institute’s “Project Dante,” which involves capturing Violator in order to open a gate to Hell so that it can be explored and researched. After an attack by an angel, however, the entire facility is transported to Hell, allowing Moore to do another round with the Phlebiac Brothers and some of his other concepts from Spawn #8 before Badrock manages to sort everything out.

The comic starts from the unenviable position of not being quite as good as Violator. Moore’s script is less tight, and he misjudges just how much comedic mileage he can get out of Dr. McAllister, the institute’s director, and her absolutely unhinged determination to treat Hell as nothing more than a promising research opportunity. There’s still plenty of good bits—Violator is particularly fun in it—but by Moore’s own admission “it's probably not as violent as the Violator miniseries. That's just the way this one turned out,” and there’s just not anything to replace that gonzo energy.

A larger problem, however, comes in the art from Brian Denham. On Violator Moore was first paired with Bart Sears, a skilled artist with a knack for the dynamically grotesque, and then for the final issue with Greg Capullo, McFarlane’s chosen successor on Spawn itself. Denham, in comparison, is a far stiffer artist whose main stylistic distinction is that his drawings of women are exploitative and hypersexualized even by the standards of Image—there’s a fair case to be made that Dr. McAllister would be a far more workable character if Denham were not primarily interested in drawing her breasts, which, puzzlingly, he seems to think should be conical. 

Artists, in fact, were something of a recurring problem for Moore at Image, and one that required a significant adjustment to his approach. When working with McFarlane on Spawn #8, Moore recalls how he “figured that maybe Todd wouldn’t want to wade through the vast amount of verbosity that usually fills my scirpts. In fact, I think he saw one of Neil’s scripts, which are considerably slimmer than mine, although they’re pretty big. I think Todd got a bit alarmed. It’s a lot of work wading through all that stuff, especially if you’re used to a more informal way of working.” Moore’s solution to this was to write a far sparser script and provide thumbnail layouts for the artists—a practice he maintained for subsequent artists. But this created its own problems. For one, it cut against the primary appeal of working for Image, namely that it was easy. Instead, as Moore noted, his Image work was sometimes “harder physical work, because I have to draw all of these little layouts, which is not something that I find terribly easy.” On top of that, Moore quickly grew frustrated by how closely artists followed his layouts, complaining that “it gives me too much control. I don’t think the story ends up the worse for it but personally… I wish they’d sort of not follow the pictures so closely all the time. They do a wonderful job of it; I just wish there was more of them in and less of me.”

Moore’s other 1995 miniseries—an actual Spawn miniseries called Blood Feud (although Violator makes a memorable guest appearance in the third issue)—saw him paired with Tony Daniel, a quite strong artist who would eventually handle a large chunk of Grant Morrison’s Batman run, and who, better yet, was perfectly willing to depart from Moore’s thumbnails when he saw fit. As with Violator vs. Badrock, however, Moore’s pacing lets him down. The plot concerns an effort to paint Spawn as a vampire—an effort that even Spawn himself finds unsettlingly plausible given that he’s experiencing periodic blackouts that seem to coincide with strange vampiric murders. Ultimately it turns out that the police consultant behind the effort, John Sansker, is the real vampire, which is a perfectly good reveal, except that it’s fairly obvious as of the second issue when he gets into a fight with Spawn and has obvious superpowers, and blatant as of the third when he comments that running water doesn’t agree with him, meaning quite a lot of the series is spent waiting for the plot to catch up to where it’s obviously going. On top of this, there’s an awkwardly long series of scenes in which Spawn rejects then reunites with his costume, which is asserting its own personality (it’s apparently named Leetha, daughter of the Seventh House of K). It’s not that these scenes are bad—indeed, they’re a charming return to Moore’s most over the top register (“a realm of the discarded, given up to rust and only seen by blind fish or drowned kittens,” thinks Spawn as he dives underwater to retrieve the costume after he attempted to seal it away), which he’d largely discarded after Swamp Thing—but as with the vampire mystery there’s just an awful lot of them.

This reflects one of the underlying weaknesses of this material above and beyond its disposability. As Moore noted when discussing the fact that he was writing for a younger audience than he was with things like Big Numbers, “I came into this business writing kid's stories. The audience that I started writing for in the industry-this is back when I started writing Captain Britain for Marvel UK or writing those early Time Twisters—I was aiming at an audience that was probably between 9 and 13.” And indeed, Moore relies on a lot of the tricks and structures he honed in those early days for his Image work. But many of those approaches were designed for short stories or ones serialized in short installments. It’s worth making the comparison to “The Pandora Effect,” an early career Star Wars story of Moore’s that felt similarly unsatisfying for the simple reason that it was fifteen pages long, and Moore struggled to adapt to the length. In a real sense, the biggest advantage Violator has over Moore’s other Spawn miniseries is simply that it’s only three issues, as opposed to four.  

While it was undoubtedly to Moore’s advantage that the comics industry in the mid-90s was a place where he could rake in easy paydays for these dodgily paced larks, the massive figures Moore was earning off this material was not a sign of an expanding industry in good health. Quite the opposite—the early 1990s saw the comics industry caught up in a massive financial bubble, the endgame of which was the same as all financial bubbles: a massive crash. This happened just as Moore began regular work at Image in 1994, as fully 40% of American comic shops went out of business. By the time the death spiral reached its bottom, that number had grown to 90%. There is ultimately no singular reason why this happened so much as a tangle of factors—the inevitable consequence of a decade of cumulative decisions, most of which were massively profitable at the time. But in almost every case Image Comics served as an effective microcosm of the whole.

Perhaps the best place to start is simply the absurd amounts of money in play. The $100,000 payday that Moore netted on Spawn #8 was, notably, around the same figure that had caused Karen Berger to phone Grant Morrison four years earlier to inform them that they were rich. But Morrison’s success had been for a full length graphic novel; Moore was getting paid the same amount for a single issue that he wrote in an evening. And though his rates declined, he remained Image’s top paid writer, cashing in paydays in the tens of thousands of dollars for every one of those seventy some-odd issues. This simply was not a reasonable amount of money to pay for Violator vs. Badrock. 

But at least on those early issues the sales largely justified it. Moore and Gaiman’s issues of Spawn moved upwards of a million copies—Gaiman noted that he agreed to the $100,000 figure because it was “the kind of royalty that you would have got from any publisher on those kind of sales.” But those kinds of sales—and the ones on things like Spider-Man #1 and X-Men #1 that had spurred the Image founders to strike out on their own—were largely artificial. Spawn #8 may have moved over a million copies, but it didn’t have anything close to a million readers. For one thing, that sales figure represents sales to comic book shops—it is, in effect, a record of how many copies retailers thought they could sell. But more to the point, in the early 1990s a significant number of people buying comics weren’t actually buying them to read them.

It’s instructive to look back at McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1—the 2.5 million seller that began the wave of massive-selling Marvel comics that eventually led to the founding of Image. McFarlane’s cover—Spider-Man perched within a knotted and ragged web as spiders crawl over it and him—was striking and iconic, yes. But in some ways the most revealing part of the cover is the red banner at the top reading “1st all-new collector’s item issue.” The point is emphasized even further in the two variant editions that shipped in sealed plastic bags with two giant circular seals reading “Issue #1: Collector’s Item,” the bag being intended to remain sealed so as to demonstrate that the issue had never been read, and thus that it was still valuable.

This treatment of comics not as a medium for telling stories but as a commodity was widespread in the early 1990s, spurred on by a deluge of media hype. This ranged from national publications like the New York Times running articles with headlines like “Collectors Read the Bottom Lines of Vintage Comic Books,” a strange hybrid of a piece that opened by covering the publication of a bunch of coffee table books about comics history before moving on to covering a Sotheby’s auction of vintage comic books, making much of eye-watering figures like the $28-38k expected sale price of Action Comics #1, with quotes from comic book retailers about how “when we opened our store in 1974, an average copy of Action 1 would have gone for about 400,” but “today a good copy is $6,000 to 7,000,” to pieces in local papers like the Rockland Journal-News, which breathlessly declared that “like fine art, stocks or bonds, comic books have become worthy investment opportunities,” focusing both on the huge prices of major vintage comics and on newer things, like Image’s then six-month old Gen-13, which they note “was released with a cover price of $1.95 per issue” but “was under-ordered and now copies go for $40 each,” or The Paducah Sun’s “Not a funny paper investment,” which talked about how Superman #75, featuring the famous “Death of Superman” stunt, was worth double its cover price literally the day it came out, ending with a story about a local fan who bought every issue published by Jim Shooter’s Valiant Comics, calling it “by far the best investment I ever made. I have probably close to a dozen different titles now and some of the first ones are worth over $100.” (This latter piece was printed besides one about the billion dollar baseball card industry, a page of financial advice so staggeringly bad that it is plausibly capable of explaining every economic misfortune to befall Paducah, Kentucky since.)

This tone was mirrored in the comics industry press such as Wizard, a comic magazine that launched in 1991 and dedicated more than a third of every issue to a price guide, augmented by columns like the Tip Sheet, with a listing of books that “had not experienced price changes, but were selling briskly. These books are picking up steam!”, the Top 10, offering the ten best-selling books on the secondary market that month, a list of the month’s first issues (“Number one and zero issues have been known to appreciate considerably when a series becomes popular”), Comics Watch, offering a selection of books investors might want to target because of their anticipated increases in value. All of which fueled the conditions in which Spawn #8 could shift a million copies and Alan Moore could get paid enough for writing it to buy three copies of Action Comics #1 at auction if he wanted to. The only problem was that all of this was extremely stupid.

Yes, Action Comics #1 fetched tens of thousands of dollars. But its print run in 1938 was 200,000 copies, and because it was not seen as anything other than a disposable piece of mass entertainment, only about a hundred copies are thought to survive. That’s a very different situation from a comic that sold 2.5 million copies, large numbers of which were bought specifically as investments and left immaculate in their sealed polybags. More to the point, the comics that fetched top prices weren’t just first issues, they were debuts of major characters. Amazing Spider-Man #1 was, in 1994, estimated by the Overstreet Price Guide (because the market was so overheated that there were in fact multiple price guides being published) to sell for $13,500 in near mint condition. But this was already much lower than Amazing Fantasy #15, the character’s actual debut, which was estimated at $20,000. The first issue of Spectacular Spider-Man, meanwhile—the character’s secondary series, which began thirteen years later in 1976—fetched a mere $44, a fact that ought have given pause to anyone scooping up one of the 2.5 million copies of his fourth series, which by 1994 was only fetching $4.75 even if it was still in its bag. 

There were still comics—even recent ones—that appreciated in value. Those who got in on the ground floor and picked up Saga of the Swamp Thing #20—a group that consisted almost entirely of people who had just slogged through nineteen issues of Martin Pasko that were mostly worth less than their cover price—could be rewarded by a $19 sale if they’d kept it in good condition, and most of Moore’s run appreciated at least some. Sandman #1 was all the way up at $55. These mostly even continued to appreciate in value—even after Gaiman’s reputation went down in flames, copies of Sandman #1 were selling hundreds of dollars. But these aren’t numbers that were making anybody rich. 

More to the point, the reason these comics were valuable was, at the end of the day, that they were good and people wanted to read them, just as the value of Action Comics #1 or Amazing Fantasy #15 was that they had introduced iconic characters that immediately became massively popular. This simply was not the case with the overwhelming majority of comics coming out in the early 90s. Moore’s judgment of mainstream superhero comics is always on the harsh side after Watchmen, but it’s genuinely hard to argue with his assessment of writing for Image that “the bulk of the audience really wanted things that had almost no story, just lots of big, full-page pin-up sort of pieces of artwork.” And this went well beyond just Image.  DC—which Moore savaged at the time as “the work of the devil. It’s gratuitous sadism. I fondly believed that shock could be used as an implement with which you could actually affect people. You could cut through their dulled sensibilities and actually say something. And I like to believe that I used shock responsibility. But of course you have to be responsible for all the people who come after you as well. And there’s an awful lot of DC comics in which—‘Ah… dunno—it’s getting a bit dull… let’s chop off a two-year-old’s finger.’ It’s nasty. There’s something depressing about it.” Moore exaggerates for comedic effect, but it’s true that DC’s output was inordinately fond of violent stunts. The best known of these is, of course, the Death of Superman arc, which responded to the character’s declining sales in the face of the Image aesthetic by having him get beaten to death by a newly created muscular brute villain called Doomsday and temporarily replaced with a new, more violent version, although of course the original was brought back within the year. Shortly thereafter a similar arc unfolded in the Batman books called Knightfall, in which Bruce Wayne has his back broken by a newly created muscular brute villain called Bane, allowing him to be temporarily replaced by a new, more violent version, although of course the original was brought back within the year. Similar arcs unfolded for other characters—Wonder Woman was temporarily usurped by another psychotic new version, Green Arrow was killed off and replaced with a not actually all that psychotic version, and Green Lantern went insane and became a villain after his home city was destroyed. Even Aquaman got his hand eaten off by piranhas and replaced it with a harpoon, although in comparison that’s getting off easy.

This aesthetic proved as ephemeral as the speculator boom, however. In time Aquaman got his hband back, and al the psychosis-laden new versions of characters were retired in favor of the originals. As for Image, with a handful of exceptions, of which Spawn is by far the most notable, none of the characters they launched had any sort of long-term cultural legacy. Part of this, of course, was that they were often struggling to actually put the books out. The 1963 Annual is of course particularly flagrant example, given that it never came out at all, but Image was rightly infamous for the chronic lateness of their books. In 1993—their second year of publishing—less than a third of their comics actually made their announced release dates. Jim Lee’s WildC.A.T.S saw two month gaps between its first three issues, followed by three for its fourth before it went on an eight month hiatus, Youngblood started with three month gaps, which grew to a five month gap between issues 4 and 5 (the latter of which wasn’t even drawn by Liefeld), and a full year between it and issue 6, and Spawn managed to have its production schedule grow so convoluted that issues 21-24 came out before issues 19 and 20, which released in October 1994 on either side of issue 25. Whilce Portacio’s Wetworks, meanwhile, simply didn’t come out at all until two years after it was first solicited. One of the most infamous problems came with a crossover between Image and Valiant Comics called Deathmate, a four issue series in which Valiant’s two issues came out in the summer of 1994, while Jim Lee’s issue lingered until October and Liefeld’s all the way in December, coming out after the nominal final issue of the event, causing orders on it to crash from an initial half million down to 180,000, large quantities of which failed to sell once they got into retailers’ hands. 

For all the company’s large failings, however, Image proved a relatively stable home for Moore, who as late as 2003 Moore was still describing Jim Lee “a nice guy” who he “always liked.” Moore’s work for Lee began in mid-1995 when he took over as the writer on WildC.A.T.s.. This, as the advertising breathlessly reiterated, marked Moore’s first ongoing series since Swamp Thing. But in a larger sense it marked a significant shift in Moore’s work at Image. His work at McFarlane’s studio had largely focused on spinoff characters, and even when he wrote a straight-up Spawn arc it was siloed on its own miniseries. The effect was to keep Moore slightly siloed within the larger Spawn line—a high profile sideshow distinct from McFarlane’s main attraction. Here, however, he was doing an extended run on on Jim Lee’s flagship book.

Born in Seoul before moving to the United States as a child, Lee was one of the generation of comics readers who saw their love of the genre reignited in the mid-80s by Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. After a fight with his parents Lee postponed his plans to go to med school after Princeton in favor of spending a year trying to break into comics. After impressing Archie Goodwin at a convention he found work at Marvel, starting on Alpha Flight, Marvel’s collection of Canadian superheroes, before helping establish the secondary Punisher title The Punisher War Journal and filling in for Mark Silvestri on Uncanny X-Men, which he took over as regular penciller in 1990. By this time he’d honed his trademark style defined by a fine line that gave everything a kinetic sketchiness, and, propelled by the wild popularity of the X-Men line, he quickly became the top artist in the industry.

While Lee made his name on the X-Men books, WildC.A.T.s is not a straightforward X-Men pastiche in the way Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood was. Based on a pitch Lee had developed while trying to break into comics, it was an altogether more eclectic book, grabbing influences from across comics. There’s Lord Emp, a billionaire team leader in the style of Justice League’s Maxwell Lord, Grifter, a gunslinging mercenary akin to the Punisher with a mask rooted in Rob Liefeld’s design for Deadpool, Maul, a towering strongman whose intelligence decreased as his size increased just like the Hulk, and Zealot, a member of a group of female warriors with unapologetic debt to Wonder Woman. Like most Image titles, the writing was messy and ill-paced, with the core of the plot revolving around the centuries old secret war between the alien Kherubim, from whom most of the team’s powers derived, and the Daemonites, who, as their name suggests, were the bad guys, with the first arc centering on the admittedly phenomenal hook of the Daemonits corrupting Vice President Dan Quayle. 

Lee had a restless streak, however, and quickly began bouncing among other projects. After nine issues co-written with his old friend Brandon Choi, he did a final four issue arc with his old X-Men collaborator Chris Claremont that introduced the Superman clone Mister Majestic before departing the book, with James Robinson taking over on writing and Travis Charest on art. That run culminated with an issue tying into the ten part Wildstorm Rising crossover, which ended with the bulk of the team seemingly perishing while trying to defuse an exploding Kherubim spaceship.

The effect of this was that when Alan Moore took over from Robinson with WildC.A.T.s #21 he was, for the first time, in the position of having a blank slate handed to him instead of having to kill a bunch of characters off himself, meaning that he could get right to the task of having Mr. Majestic and his daughter, an archeologist going by the name Savant, create a new team consisting of Condition Red, Grifter’s kid brother, Tao, a genetically engineered supergenius, and Ladytron, a violent cyborg named after a Roxy Music song, because Moore can never resist a Brian Eno reference. 

More interesting than the team itself, however, is how Moore goes about introducing his new status quo. The issue moves back and forth between a sequence at a chintzy US Presidents themed restaurant in Chicago where the new team’s first op is unfolding and the days leading up to it in which the team is assembled. It’s an effective structure on several levels. For one, the cutting allows Moore to avoid having to introduce all of his characters in a series of consecutive recruitment scenes. Instead he structures the Chicago scenes so that characters are introduced there alongside their flashback recruitment scenes. So the first scene—a Chicago scene—sees a character the audience doesn’t recognize in a George Washington costume seating a guest at the restaurant. The second is set four days earlier and sees Savant recruiting Condition Red. The third then cuts back to the restaurant and establishes that the George Washington fellow is Condition Red working undercover, while also introducing Savant, dressed up as Jackie O. The issue continues in this basic fashion, such that everything moves towards the mission’s actual point, the recruitment of Ladytron, who the team expects to attack a drug deal going down in the restaurant.

This accomplishes several notable things. For one, it’s simply a hell of a lot more intricate than Image readers would have been accustomed to. Lee’s first issue of WildC.A.T.s engaged with some time jumping, but it far milder. More to the point, it was far less coherent—Moore goes to considerable length to hold the reader’s hand through the issue. Not only does every time jump have a nice handy date and timestamp, scenes typically include a brief caption summarizing what’s about to unfold—“Mr. Majestic looks for the perfect woman,” for instance, in a scene prior to the discussion of whether to recruit Ladytron. Moore also accomplishes the increase in formal complexity without a significant departure from Image’s house style, which Moore noted was characterized by “the fact that these artists prefer to have two or three panels a page, rather than six or nine. That changes the way I tell a story, and changes the nature of the story. You have to have a fairly high adrenaline level, a fairly constant flow of action-all that puts certain restraints on it.” For all its nonlinear structure, WildC.A.T.s kept to an average of just under 3.5 panels per page—in fact a decrease from the 4.5 that James Robinson’s last issue averaged. There’s a real effort being made here to balance Moore’s desire for smarter and more thoughtful comics with the expectations of Image readers.

Indeed, WildC.A.T.s #21 is notable to a great extent for just how much those existing Image readers are the primary audience. One might have expected Moore and Image to use his presence on the book as the occasion for a high-profile “great jumping on point” to attract new readers. But Moore’s script clearly assumes a reader familiar with not just WildC.A.T.s but the larger Wildstorm line—he makes no real effort to explain what happened to the old team, despite the fact that their apparent death happened not in the previous issue of WildC.A.T.s but in the Wildstorm Rising book—a book that WildC.A.T.s in fact outsold. Indeed, reflecting on his WildC.A.T.s run after the fact, Moore identified this as an error on his part, saying that “I was imagining that there was a whole bunch of WildC.A.T.s fans out there who really wanted to see these characters treated in a specific way,” and “trying to work out what the audience wanted, which is a terrible mistake and I don’t know what I was thinking.”

But for all that Moore was trying to pander to the Image audience, there were clear ways he was pushing against their expectations as well. There was, of course, his move towards mild formal complexity, but a more subtle point comes in the form of who among the new cast Moore highlights. The issue’s point of view character, for instance, featuring in virtually every scene, is Savant. She’s the one who actually heads up the recruitment effort for Mister Majestic, and so is the one who is most often reacting to new information and making decisions. She’s also a considerably more dynamic character than Mister Majestic, who spends the issue resisting her efforts to recruit people like Condition Red, who he describes as “some amoral little gutter rat.” And, most importantly, she’s clever and charming. Her opening scene is a conversation with Condition Red that takes place over six panels in which neither character actually appears, the art instead panning from the entrance of a building up through some stairs to a swimming pool, all massively splattered in blood. Savant remains cool in this conversation, pointing out that Condition Red is “in way over his head with cops, mobsters, just about everybody.” It’s a good scene that establishes her as competent and in control.

The other character to shine, meanwhile, is Ladytron. The alternating structure means that the whole issue builds towards her arrival at the restaurant, which takes place as she crashes a convertible through the wall, guns blazing, as she shouts “your money and your life, optimists!” She subsequently spends several pages kicking ass and delivering lines like “Okay! Anybody who doesn’t want this place redecorated in ‘hint of brains’ better chill out!” before she’s finally rendered unconscious by Tao, who explodes a bag of heroin near her head. It’s an absolute showcase for her, and makes sure to foreground the transgressive ultraviolence of her character, establishing her as a fun character in precisely the way the Image aesthetic demands. But this combination also has the effect of making the book’s female characters its most interesting ones—a distinct departure from that aesthetic.

The issue’s most interesting move, however, comes on its final page, when, after an issue of doing his usual wrecking ball establishment of a new status quo, Moore played the final card in his hand and revealed that the original WildC.A.T.s team had not, in fact, died in an exploding spaceship, but were alive and well in outer space. Indeed, contrary to the impression given by its first issue, Moore’s first arc on WildC.A.T.s would be primarily focused on this team, with the bulk of its issues split so that the original team got the first sixteen pages and the new team got eight pages in the back, the exception being issue #25, which was double-sized and gave a full length story to each of the two teams. 

This surprise main plot begins on a comedic note, with Lord Emp smoking a celebratory cigar as they approach Khera and waxing poetic about “the utopia that Zealot and myself left eons ago” whilst Zealot desperately communicates in song with the planet, stammering as she finishes that “th-they’re giving us permission to approach and land. I-I must have gotten the words right.” Her teammate Voodoo inquires whether getting the words wrong would have been so bad, to which a furious Zealot replies, “Don’t be stupid, girl. They would have vaporized us!” But the underlying darkness of this bit—the sense that Khera has an astonishingly harsh culture—is quickly followed up on. As Lord Emp and Zealot—the only full Kherubim on the team—are whisked away to their estates, their “underlings” (as the officials greeting the ship rather ominously call the rest of the team) are given a genetic screening, after which Voodoo is quietly whisked away. The rest of the team proceeds to their hotel (the Coincidental Mansion—they’re instructed that “if two of you start humming the same tune or speaking the same sentence, then you’ve found it”), although not before seeing a protester pleading about how native Kherans “must have medicine and schools, just like the coldeyes have.” Voodoo, meanwhile, is dragged off to Containment Block Seven—a slum for Daemonite refugees—on the basis of her part-Daemonite DNA.

The arc spends its remaining time on the tarnished nature of this utopia, and it’s not subtle about it. The Daemonite slum is compared explicitly to the South African apartheid regime, the indigenous Kherans (the dominant population that Emp and Zealot belong to being settler-colonists) are described as being “stuck in overcrowded reservations,” and Coda, Zealot’s group of female warriors, are “like the Ku Klux Klan, but with better costumes.” As for the Kherubim/Daemonite war that had underpinned so much of WildC.A.T.s’ plot up to this point, it’s revealed that the war ended centuries ago with a Kherubim victory, and that the characters simply didn’t know this because Earth was too much of a far away backwater for the news to reach them. It’s a comprehensive deconstruction of the existing lore, but more to the point, it’s an angry deconstruction focused heavily on satirizing American imperialism and state propaganda. There are ways in which this marks the purest reaction to Watchmen and its fallout of Moore’s career—almost all of his other post-Watchmen superhero work follows in the tradition of 1963, either by being fundamentally a bit of a lark or by foregoing deconstruction in favor of a neoclassical embrace of the innocence of superheroes. But in trying to discern what it was Image readers might want, Moore seems to have settled on an extension of Watchmen’s most thematically aggressive instincts. Instead of simply having individual characters like Rorschach or the Comedian, Moore crafts an entire world that works according to the bleak logic underpinning those characters, with the bulk of heroes being either willing participants or hapless rubes in the face of it. The comics may be disposable hack jobs for a fast paycheck, but the fact remains that, more than anything else among his post-Watchmen work, they prefigure the position on superheroes that he would eventually arrive at in “What We Can Know about Thunderman.” 

Inevitably the Khera arc ends with the scales falling from everyone’s eyes and the team decamping to return to Earth, where his backup arc has been detailing his new team’s formation and initial missions in the course of a new campaign, suggested by Tao, of “taking the offensive against supervillains.” Here too there’s an aggressive cynicism to proceedings—one issue sees Condition Red fatally shoot a cyborg in the course of a fight, while the next sees the WildC.A.T.s crashing the cyborg’s funeral, with the final panel showing the victorious team standing over his sobbing widow. By the arc’s end, this sort of reckless and sociopathic aggression has backfired on the team in a big way, with a supervillain gang war on the brink of breaking out. Before Moore could deal with the implications of this, however, he had a crossover to deal with. 

This was entitled Fire from Heaven—a twenty part storyline that wound through all of the Wildstorm books alongside three bespoke books created for the event, the main one of which was written by Moore. And there were, by this point, a decent number of Wildstorm titles. Lee had proven to have a restless streak, and after getting WildC.A.T.s established, he moved on to creating new titles. Some of these, like Deathblow (a special-ops military type) and Gen13 (a teen superheroes book) he drew early issues of, but he was less involved in others. He co-wrote the early issues of Stormwatch (a special ops team rivaling the WildC.A.T.s) with Brandon Choi, and in the course of doing so co-created a character called Backlash who was spun into his own book. A sixth title, Wetworks, had no real involvement by Lee at all, instead being created by Whilce Portacio, who had intended the book as a launch title before stepping back as one of Image’s cofounders due to a family illness. But the result was a fairly hefty publishing line, and one that had grown quite quickly. 

This meant that a big crossover involved quite a lot of plot threads. This posed a problem, given that the basic idea of a crossover is that it should attract more readers. But with six books worth of characters, few of whom were especially well established, Fire from Heaven ended up being quite thorny and inhospitable to new readers. The plot splits its focus between events on the island nation of Gamorra, ruled by a despot named Kaizen Gamorra who’s obsessed with developing his own superheroes, and the impending arrival of Damocles, a villain from another universe. These plots intersected only hazily, however, resulting in a deeply unsatisfying pace for the event, which instead of coming to a straightforward climax instead does two separate big confrontations back to back. 

On top of that, Image’s scheduling problems quickly reared their heads. Nominally the crossover was supposed to take place over two months. Instead it spanned four, with a monthlong gap between Chapter 14, the end of the main stretch, which came out on June 19th, and the three books comprising the Finale, all of which came out on July 31st, more than four months after the crossover began. One of the books responsible for this delay was the final issue of the main Fire from Heaven book, which saw Jim Lee take up art chores so that it could be promoted as the first pairing of him and Alan Moore. The result was a flop of a crossover that quickly found itself being mocked in the pages of Wizard for just how uncollectible it proved to be.

Moore, for his part, was not thrilled with what he referred to at the time as “this fairly inane WildStorm crossover” despite the fact that he was writing both the main book and the two WildC.A.T.s tie-ins. In his account, he only agreed to write it on the condition that they’d provide him “a list of what you want it to do and leave everything else to me,” only to recieve “the complete plot for the crossover, almost page by page. It didn’t work, they totally fucked it up, they’ve had to re-write the ending about six times because it didn’t work.” It’s perhaps unsurprising, then that the two actual Fire From Heaven issues mark some of the most half-assed work of Moore’s career, particularly the second one, which sees him writing sparkling dialogue like having a character proclaim that the moon “may be a cold, lifeless chunk of rock. But it’s our cold, lifeless chunk of rock. Let’s take it back.”

Moore’s two actual WildC.A.T.s issues in the crossover have a somewhat easier time of it. His first pulls double duty as the issue in which the two WildC.A.T.s teams actually meet each other, which takes up about half the issue. The two teams then split, with the old team going to deal with the crossover while his new team stays to sort out the impending gang war, and the issue then splits its attention between the two teams so that the actual crossover portion of the issue is effectively confined to its final seven pages. Unfortunately this luck doesn’t hold for his second issue, which is almost entirely crossover nonsense, although he still puts more effort into it than he does in Fire From Heaven #2.

An interesting footnote to the crossover comes in a two-part miniseries created for it called Sword of Damocles, which has the unenviable task of trying to flesh out Damocles’s henchman, who is of course named Sword. But it has the luck of being written by Warren Ellis, a tedious sex pest who was in many ways the first of the second generation British invasion writers. By this point he was only a few years into his career, so far having mostly written d-list Marvel titles after getting started with a serial called Lazarus Churchyard written for the dying remains of the British industry, and these two issues marked his first work for Image. But he threw himself into the task, doing all that he could to give Sword a distinctive narrative voice and to build him up as a threat. The result doesn’t rise to the level of quality—Fire From Heaven is ultimately too much of a mess for quality to be a plausible outcome—but it’s a night and day improvement compared to the other writers Lee is using in the crossover, and demonstrates that Ellis is both a skilled writer and one who will make the most of even a mediocre opportunity. He is, in other words, clearly a writer with ambition, and it wouldn’t be long before he started to fulfill them. 

Moore stuck around for four more issues of WildC.A.T.s after Fire from Heaven—enough to tie up his supervillain gang war plot, which turns out to have all been a nefarious manipulation on the part of Tao, who was a villain all along whose intelligence was matched by a superhuman persuasiveness. His final issue makes sure to put things back the way he found them, sidelining the new team and restoring the WildC.A.T.s to more or less their original lineup, although he’s still far cleverer than he needs to be with it, structuring it by cutting back and forth between the climax of the gang war and a funeral for an unknown member of the WildC.A.T.s, using people’s arrival at the funeral to gradually remove them as suspects for who died. In the end, though, it’s revealed that the team is just burying Tao, and Moore departs his grand return to ongoing superhero comics with no real impact or consequence to speak of.

Amidst his WildC.A.T.s run Moore did a final Spawn miniseries—a four issue crossover with WildC.A.T.s called Spawn/WildC.A.T.s: Devilday. This, more than any of his other miniseries, highlights the degree to which his early Image work was an heir to his early career short work. It opens with a three-page sequence set beyond the edge of the universe in “the nowhere and the no-when… the place that has no place to be yet, on the day before time starts and days begin” where a coterie of extradimensional entities play games—a gothic reworking of “Tlotny Throws a Shape,” then goes into a time loop plot in which WildC.A.T.s from the future recruit the present day team, along with Spawn, to save their future, in which Spawn has become a tyrannical dictator who has plunged New York into hell. (The Phlebiac Brothers are, of course, now the police.)

Although there’s an obvious debt to Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s 1981 X-Men storyline “Days of Future Past,” complete with wanted posters of superheroes, Moore’s denouement, which turns into a bootstrap paradox in which bringing Spawn to the future turns out to be what corrupts him, is emphatically the sort of thing with which he routinely resolved his old Time-Twisters. Much of the middle, meanwhile, which sees Spawn and the WildC.A.T.s exploring the dystopian future, are very much in the tradition of Future Shocks like “Sunburn”—stories that Moore described as a “list story, in which you just think of an absurd topic or situation and then list as many funny or engaging ideas as you can relate to it.” There are of course significant differences, most obviously in the florid captions bout “the Great Crow Banquet at Fifth Avenue, and the Cremation Fields of Central Park. Huge drifts of blow-fly husks on Broadway. This is the torture marathon. These are the boulevards of smoke and mourning.” But it’s very much the same infrastructure.

Thankfully it works better than it did on his previous couple of projects in this vein. Part of this is the list story aspect, which allows Moore to keep moving the story on better than his previous two efforts. He’s also got substantially more characters—the entirety of the WildC.A.T.s along with their future versions—which allows the narrative load to be spread out a bit. The result is a book without the sorts of pacing problems that hobbled some of his other Image work—one of the finest executions of his “better-than-average stories for 13-to-15-year olds” goal. But as Moore admitted in virtually every interview he did about his Image work, this was a lesser aesthetic goal. For all that he was adamant that “I don't really feel that I should be compelled to make a choice between doing intensely serious fiction for the rest of my life or doing fairly inconsequential but entertaining pieces for a younger audience. I don't see why I can't do both,” his passion plainly lay in those more serious projects that he was using Image work as a break from. In this regard a far more interesting question than the comparative merits of Fire from Heaven and Violator vs. Badrock is the merits of the work that he was bankrolling with these cheerily inane larks.