PULP Pop: David Bowie, the Deconstructing Star

It is 1996, and onto the stage amid flashing spasms of light and a near-deafening crush of guitar noise and thumping drums steps a slender figure in a tailcoat and topped with a red field of spiked hair.

The music is hectic, noisy, industrial, the words paranoiac and obsessing over the end of the century, and the singer—who has made a career out of performing as a schizoid cultural commentator—is David Bowie.

When the album Outside was released in 1995, it was both a culmination of and an attempt at deconstructing the various themes that Bowie had focused on for much of his career. As Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke he had been a single character made out of composite parts, but on Outside he was playing many characters in order to compose a layered narrative. The sleeve notes showed Bowie in the guise of each character—“art detective” Nathan Adler, victim Baby Grace, “female goodtime drone” Ramona A. Stone and old man Algeria Touchshriek—but the songs did not move linearly through a storyline.

Instead, Bowie’s listeners were co-opted into a cyberpunk noir, where Nathan Adler investigated the “art ritual murder of Baby Grace Blue”. The result was a sprawling, overly-long album with spoken word tracks and guitar and drum-heavy textures created in the studio by Bowie and his band—notably guitarist Reeves Gabrels—alongside former collaborator Brian Eno. The fin-de-siècle worries were clear in refrains such as I Have Not Been to Oxford Town’s “Toll the bell, pay the private eye/ All’s well, twentieth century dies”, and it was never clear which character was the voice of each song.

Part musical theatre like Diamond Dogs, greatly performative like Ziggy Stardust, but this time more fragmented, Outside deconstructed David Bowie’s own thematic history and dissected his former personas—Major Tom, Aladdin Sane or the Thin White Duke—until they were mere sonic and verbal fragments of the twentieth century.

From the outset, Bowie had been conspicuously aware of his influences and content to poach elements from other sources in order to create a stage presence. His early albums, David Bowie (1967) and Space Oddity (1969) moved from music hall camp to an attempt at Dylanesque folksiness—Bowie even sporting a sandy blond perm and an acoustic guitar—and then to proto-heavy metal on The Man Who Sold The World (1970). With 1971’s Hunky Dory Bowie wore his influences on his sleeve, with songs for Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, his half-brother Terry and Bob Dylan filling the second half of the record.

But with Ziggy Stardust he became an arch constructor of pop out of fiction, philosophy, music and anything else that was found on the cutting room floor of 60s rock ‘n roll. Ziggy was based primarily on Vince Taylor, a singer whose decline into drugs and religious delusion no doubt played a major part in Ziggy’s messianic message, but Taylor sat alongside Jimi Hendrix and Marc Bolan in the mix. “I’m an instant star,” Bowie has said. “Just add water and stir.”

The first genuine rock star of the 1970s, just as David Bowie was interchangeable with Ziggy Stardust, images of Bowie or Ziggy were interchangeable with the real thing. Performing as a rock star equated, in essence, to being a rock star. As the 1990s red-haired, bespoke-tailored and svelte version of Bowie took to the stage during the Outside tours, there was little doubt that his appearance was referencing the style of both the Ziggy and the Aladdin Sane tours more than twenty years earlier.

During 1996 the Outside touring band took to the studio to record new material that had been written on the road. Released in 1997, the result was Earthling, an album that captured the vitality of the band while infusing some energy into the less accessible parts of Outside. Techno beats and electronic instrumentation were welded to more traditional rock song structures, and where its predecessor included split personas, Earthling focused on Bowie’s status as an ‘outsider’ in a more personal way.

Battle for Britain and I’m Afraid of Americans placed ex-pat angst in the foreground, and Dead Man Walking and Seven Years in Tibet referenced films while in turn acknowledging that, “now I’m older than movies”, this particular earthling had tipped over into his 50s. Little Wonder and Looking for Satellites also poked fun at Bowie’s search for the spiritual other, for escape into the alienesque, all to the pump of jungle beats.

The main contributor to the moody atmospherics and hollow guitar crunch of Outside, Brian Eno was absent for the Earthling sessions. In 1977, Eno had helped breath some electronic life into Bowie’s songwriting by collaborating with him on Low. Though Bowie had killed off Ziggy in ‘73, his spectre lived on through Diamond Dogs (1974) and was only drowned in alcohol and cocaine as Bowie recorded Young Americans and Station to Station in 1975 and 1976. Low amounted to sonic rehab for a rock star whose interest in the artifice of pop music had turned him into a real-life drug-addled wreck.

Drying out in Berlin, Bowie turned to Brian Eno’s synthesizers and eccentric approach to studio musicians to help debunk and banish from the process his various personas. The resultant trilogy, Low, “Heroes” (also 1977) and Lodger (1979) were free of the constraints of a second personality hanging over both Bowie’s songs and the band’s tours. As another step in the recovery program, several Ziggy Stardust tracks were performed on the 1978 world tour in the original album sequence.

And with Mike Garson back on board from the Aladdin Sane era, the Outside and Earthling tours pulled the dust covers off some older tracks and incorporated them into the new sets. Aladdin Sane’s title track resurfaced, as did Andy Warhol, instrumental V-2 Schneider (now a techno track) and Repetition, from the Lodger album. Bowie’s band revisited these songs, often performing them in vastly different versions and integrating into them the industrial noise and desperate drum and bass lines from the two last albums.

By Outside’s release in 1995, Bowie had begun again to take the role of outsider, a role that he had stepped away from during a mostly mainstream and predominantly bad 1980s. He had turned himself into a rock star through pretense and aesthetics, and had then been consumed by Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke until a sonic rejuvenation with the Berlin trilogy. By appropriating his own history and reconstructing it piece by piece with Outside and Earthling, he had performed a similar feat of revival.

Outside juxtaposed Bowie’s commentary on the end of the century, on the end of life and on a new kind of art with dehumanising industrial sounds and overwhelming guitars. When Earthling picked up the baton, lead guitar solos and choruses had returned, the deconstructed sonic landscape had begun to reform, and the album felt more vital, more punchy, happy to be an earthling again, but happier still to remain on the outside, looking in.

A PULP Preface, 2.0

PULPable is where the many points on the graph of cultural modernity bubble just beneath the surface of popular culture.

If you’re wondering exactly what I’m talking about, then you should go immediately and read A PULP Manifesto, but if your attention span is better suited to Lois  & Clark than to Nietzschean “Supermen” then you should keep reading.

Though one can (and I do) trace PULPable back to the original pulp magazines and even further back to the days of Penny Dreadfuls and mass production, its origins for me were in the literary and musical choices I made as a teenager. PULPable was, to me, the pop culture subtext of a record or a novel, the assumed shared knowledge of a century

A Vogue cover referencing David Bowie's "Aladdin Sane" album

of mass-produced consumables which underpinned the song you had just listened to or the sentence you had just read.

In The Velvet Underground I found Andy Warhol, and in Warhol a critique of the very culture that had created him. In William Burroughs there were drugs galore, sentences that vomited all over the bar and which were as impenetrable as those that  preceded him in Ulysses or The Wasteland. In Raymond Chandler I saw an America of surfaces and style, and in the Pulp magazines he wrote for were the beginnings of superheroes and comic book villains destined to be deconstructed within a century by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman or Jonathan Lethem.

More vital than any other writer, singer or artist in exploring the PULPable style was David Bowie. The list above could go on for several paragraphs, but suffice it to say that the Velvets and Burroughs, as well as Anthony Burgess (and by extension Stanley Kubrick), Christopher Isherwood, Orwell and Huxley amongst others were introduced to me indirectly through obsessive listening to Bowie’s records. He was inspired by that which was considered ‘high culture’ to create that which was considered ‘low’, and in referencing writers and artists, philosophers and bands, he mirrored more closely deconstructive authors than fellow pop musicians.

This sense of an unknown pop culture grid, something that lurked beneath the superficiality of what was ostensibly popular entertainment, piqued my curiosity. Though I read and was forcibly loaned comic books (or, as some insist, Graphic Novels), watched science-fiction movies and TV shows, I also consciously selected books that felt as though they belonged on the graph of culture modernity. If I could piece together Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man with Catch-22, or place A Clockwork Orange alongside L’Etranger then maybe, just maybe, I would be able to begin to connect the points on the graph.

Books, art, music, comics, film: they all interlaced and overlapped. The pop culture surface was immediately graspable,  a series of symbols which began to attain the status of modern myth by virtue of their being instantly recognisable and signifying something near-universal: the Coca-Cola logo, Superman’s costume or Warhol’s “Marilyns”. But beneath the surface, there existed a secondary stream of culture which fed on the popular,

The Escapist comic book cover, based on Michael Chabon's "Kavalier & Clay"

sometimes for entertainment (Bowie and Chandler), sometimes for art’s sake (Warhol strikes again), but more often than not for both.

There is no easy definition, for if there were then we would be immediately constrained, and why should we be forced to choose between Superman and Michael Chabon, between Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas? PULPable is where both live together in imperfect harmony. The mainstream will swim on, and, from time to time, those bubbling under will rise to the surface and take a breath before diving for cover once again.

DLR, October 24th, 2009

PULP Prophets: Philip K. Dick, Battlestar Galactica & Sci-Fi

“Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible.” – Rod Serling

In flashback to a much unchanged Edward James Olmos, wires and suckers taped to Bill Adama’s body send unreliable responses to a polygraph machine. The operator asks “are you a Cylon?” In the context of the audience’s chronology not a ridiculous question: we are on the other side of what Battlestar Galactica began calling ‘The Fall’ and know that Adama could indeed be a frakking Toaster. In fact, anyone could be a Cylon and—what is more—it doesn’t really matter.

Edward James Olmos as Bill Adama

Much to TV critics’ and science fiction fans’ glee, Ronald D. Moore and David Eick’s update of 1970s kitsch dropped the show definitively in a 21^st Century, post-September 11^th world. Debates or at least flickerings of interest in torture, abortion, suicide bombings, religious war and out-and-out nuclear decimation reflected the political climate in the real world. But the real question was: how would you come to terms with your own identity—and that of the society you fit into—if you were uncontrollably drawn into these kinds of situations? In posing that question whilst throwing in space opera, sci-fi dogfights and ungraspable religious ruminations, BSG struck a chord with seasoned pulp viewers and with those who had never had the inclination to watch science fiction before.

But sci-fi has grown always and most successfully during times of identity crisis. Throughout the 19^th Century certainties were slowly being stripped away from the public consciousness, politically, socially and scientifically, and people’s inclination for fantasy and escapism grew in proportion. H.G. Wells and his near-namesake Orson Welles provide a case-in-point: as surety shrank so speculative fiction like Wells’ War of the Worlds increased in popularity; but the decentring of people’s beliefs coupled with actual scientific growth from the 19^th into the 20^th Centuries meant that Welles’ radioplay of the same story led to mass hysteria in 1938 as the public believed that Martians had indeed invaded the planet.

Speculative (or science) fiction came to be a literature all about the problems of (self-)identity. Mass media scattered cultural yardsticks further and wider than ever before and technological advances—many the result of two world wars—expanded the imaginations of budding sci-fi authors such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, L. Ron Hubbard and Robert Heinlein. Without true, modern ‘science’, speculative fiction had been mere fantasy—Verne’s romance and adventure stories, Wells’ social criticism, Poe’s horror and Twain’s fantastical Connecticut Yankee.

In some manner, modernism took what sci-fi wrote about and applied this thinking to how authors wrote, mixing up time frames, perceptions and being ferociously counter-realistic. Just as the Modernist creed preached that there needed to be a break from the ‘realism’ of the 19^th Century in favour of a new way forward, so sci-fi preached that, to say something important about the real world one did not require a realistic milieu. Modernist protagonists were alienated, science fiction protagonists were simply alien. Somewhere in the middle of those extremes the more literary-minded sci-fi authors grew up.

“In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real,” wrote Philip K. Dick.

Dick breathed a certain amount of psychological intrigue into the Pulp world during the 1950s, hitting science-fiction fame with The Man in the High Castle in 1963. A Hugo-award winning novel, it posited many of the questions which went on to permeate Dick’s fiction. Not only the thin line between counterfeit and genuine but also the meaninglessness of those who attempt to qualify ‘reality’: “Who, and what, are the agents behind this interpenetration of true and false realities?” he asks. Dr Gaius Baltar might also want to know the answer to that one.

But he came of age in a time when science-fiction was splitting into two subsets. On the one hand, authors filmmakers and artists were taking the tropes and concerns of sci-fi and using them in a less narrow, more critical way. Clarke and Asimov wrote of the benefits science could bring against the backdrop of cultural anxieties about such progress; Aldous Huxley, Orwell and Ray Bradbury focused on the anxieties against their dystopian futures; space opera such as Dune and surrealism by Samuel R. Delany graced the bookshelves, and Stanley Kubrick went off to make auteur sci-fi a la mode. On the other hand pure entertainment—aliens for the sake of it—hit the airwaves.

Dick’s personal life had always affected his writing. The loss as a child of an identical twin sister, Jan Charlotte, alongside a diagnosis of schizophrenia at an early age can only have doubled, then shattered and dispersed, a young man’s sense of identity. External forces were also at work. Dick was within living memory of World War II but also saw the upheavals of 1960s American culture, the Vietnam conflict and the extension of the Cold War first hand. The nation, as much as the author, was experiencing a form of identity crisis. Writers such as Robert Heinlein espoused a libertarian philosophy during those years; Dick on the other hand was exploring the Jungian concepts of the collective unconsciousness and group perception.

Dick wrote of fellow author Heinlein: “Robert Heinlein is a fine-looking man, very impressive and very military in stance…He knows I’m a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love.” Dick’s characters similarly follow the notion that their personal actions and interactions are what determine their moral core. Although characters such as Arctor in A Scanner Darkly do use drugs, it is their perception, the ground shifting beneath their feet, which we follow with most interest. And the collective delusion rather than the illusion of personal freedoms was what interested Dick.

Whilst Dick’s claims later in life that he experienced visions of—and then received the transmissions from—some greater power seemed genuine, they only added to his personal mythical status. These visions extended over time and eventually he claimed that he experienced a double life himself, as both Philip and as a Roman

An R Crumb illustration of Philip K. Dick

peasant named Thomas. These personal identity crises exacerbated those that Dick lived through as a member of society, but in his fiction he almost exclusively explored the greater crisis through the eyes of a single protagonist—Bob Arctor, Rick Deckard, John Anderton to name but three.

With the advent of the 21^st Century the issue of identifying the crisis has become just as, if not more, important than the crisis itself. Battlestar Galactica initially presented its audience with the most basic points around which to orient themselves: humankind (or a variation thereof) are the Good Guys, the Cylons (a human creation gone bad) are the Bad Guys, and after the nuclear holocaust at the beginning of the show, the human race is near-extinct and on the run.

So far, so-so. But we begin to realise as the show continues that everything we view has only a surface meaning, and that getting at the truth is harder than we might imagine. With the advent of Cylons that appear human and act with human emotions and motivations, the lines between counterfeit and genuine, real and fake are blurred to the point that (eventually) they have no bearing on the morality of the characters or their actions. The audience is as unsure as the characters themselves where they are headed and how they fit into this decimated future. Actions and words simply reflect the identity crisis that the characters are experiencing and whenever they attempt to grasp at the truth behind these actions, they come away empty-handed.

It would be too easy, too simplistic and ascribing too much to BSG to call it a direct allegory for a (Western) identity crisis post-September 11^th. Where the difficulty of determining identity, finding a place in the grand scheme of things, had been portrayed by Dick through the eyes of his protagonists, Ronald D. Moore and David Eick focused on how the universe affected its inhabitants.

The polygraph scene I mentioned at the top of this article, featured in a flashback during the show’s finale, sums up a great deal of what the show was about—or at least a great deal of the things that it had been gnostically considering for four seasons. The personal choices that took Bill Adama from a soon to be retired Commander of a defunct military vessel to a father figure for the entire human race. The crescendoing question of identity—who is human and who is Cylon?—and whether that really matters. And most mystically, BSG dared to ask whether personal choices are truly personal or the result of some indeterminate god, fate or greater plan.

Edward James Olmos: Gaff, Replicant or Cylon?

Imagine if you will Edward James Olmos’ voice: “It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?” These words close out Blade Runner. The movie abounds with superficial similarities to Moore and Eick’s show: polygraph tests to determine identity; Detective Bryant’s use of the term ‘skinjobs’; a character named Tyrell creating humanoid ‘Nexus Sixes’; Replicants who believe they are human. But Dick’s tale is as obsessed as BSG with identity and the question of free will. By the end of the movie the audience is not sure whether Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a Replicant or a human and nor is Deckard. Olmos’ character Gaff seems to have some of the answers, but communicates with Deckard only in street language and through origami figures.

This latter motif plants the strongest suggestion at the end of the movie that Deckard may indeed be a ‘skinjob’ himself. Whether he is—and whether Adama could perhaps be a Cylon—are not really the point. We will never be able to pass the polygraph test with 100% certainty, no matter how advanced our technology might become or how certain we might be about the universe; we might not know it, but sooner or later the world might shift under our feet and we might all turn out to be frakking Toasters.

DLR, May 3rd 2009

PULP People: Obama, Warhol & American Secularism

Every line means something Jean-Michel Basquiat

As Barack Obama accepts his new role on behalf of the American people and God, I ask you: What would Andy Warhol do? As jocular an opener as that may be, it hopefully leads the reader to assume a particular amount of PULPable’s tongue is today firmly in-cheek. Academic treatises are, after all, perfectly fine; but how many people read dissertations and how many make it no further than the title and first paragraph before losing interest? Knowing more of Obama’s policies and positions than I have any previous President-elect,

Warholesque Obama

I still doubt that the general populace has investigated their every nuance. They have, however, probably made it as far as Obama the icon—Obama the headline, Obama the first paragraph.

On to the second paragraph. I hope you’re still with me. I have written before of the importance of iconic status—what the advertising world would call branding—for a successful presidential candidate, and much has been written elsewhere on the unparalleled success of the President’s campaign. T-shirts, logos, bumper stickers, viral marketing, YouTube addresses, online fundraising: all of these methods of advertising have gotten through to the public and have furthered Brand Obama. So what would Andy Warhol do? No doubt we would already have several Barack Obamas on our walls and in our art galleries by now.

Warhol understood something more clearly than most: the power and the converse emptiness of iconography. Where true power was found was not in soup cans and Coke logos but in the empty repetition of Jackie Kennedy’s gaze or the multiplying horror of Old Sparky, its jovial nickname and dark palette both concealing and betraying its terrible

Warhol's Old Sparky

purpose. If he were still with us, Warhol would certainly have taken notice of the Obama phenomenon, but what he would have made of it is rather difficult to judge.

There has apparently been some debate amongst atheist America as to Obama’s use of the phrase “so help me God” during his inauguration. For some, the wall of separation that Jefferson wrote of has always had cracks in: “Considering the separation of church and state, how is a president justified in using the word ‘God’ at all? The answer is that the separation of church and state has not denied the political realm a religious dimension.” This was Robert N. Bellah writing on John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, but the same holds true now. But this God Dimension is just as much pseudo-religious as explicitly, actually religious.

What would Andy say? A practising Catholic to the end, son of a Polish immigrant family, he was quintessentially American in his treatment of religion in daily life. He was free to worship as he chose but did not associate religious belief with his work or his public persona (and, though our public personas might not match the outré nature of his, they are nonetheless personas we don just like Andy).

Looking for Andrew Warhola

Hopping back to Jefferson and his wall of constitutional separation, it is not a huge stretch to see that a nation in which people are free to do whatever they want with whichever gods they want would inevitably lead to a heterogeneous cultural landscape. But when mass media began to rear its head, there were suddenly icons for a homogenous nation.

Warhol began his career drawing women’s shoes and department store consumer items. ‘Art’ aside, he realised at a young age that he wanted to reach a wide audience and that, though producing advertising copy was not terribly exciting, it would certainly achieve this end. His transformation into producer of ersatz-religious icons spliced together from mass media advertisements and consumed celebrities owed as much to advertising as to the comic books and movies of the high Pulp era. For the most part wordless, his images hark back to adverts’ predecessors—a cobbler or butcher featuring an image to explain their trade to the illiterate—but also suggest that the non-verbal world of comic books and films were making consumers just as illiterate. There was an unmissable

Political PULP

emptiness behind these icons.

If Andy were a 21^st Century man, he would either be a street-art and guerrilla marketing impresario or else would be the genius behind the reinvention of infomercials. The age of conspicuous consumption has brought us even closer to explicit product worship, with cultural niches forming around consumer items as much as around religion, geographical location or political ideology. The rise of religion in politics has been largely a thing of the past eight years, and whether God so helps Obama or not, we can only hope that his governance will be as strategically sound as his branding, and that the Obama phenomenon is a target for just the right amount of lampooning from today’s cultural iconoclasts. And sadly, we can only imagine what Andy would do.

PULP Pictures: B0dy M0ds #002

B0dy M0ds is a new weekly web-comic about sci-fi body modification and relationships, from PULPable contributor Jacob Z. Clinton

B0dy M0ds #002

Click on the strip to enlarge.

PULP Pictures: B0dy M0ds #001

B0dy M0ds is a new weekly web-comic about sci-fi body modification and relationships, from PULPable contributor Jacob Z. Clinton

B0dy M0ds #001

Click on the strip to enlarge. Go to www.bodymods.wordpress.com for more.

A PULP Manifesto, Version 2.0

Go to A Pulp Manifesto, Version 1.0 to see how it all started.

LIKE THE BEST LITERARY FICTION, THE BEST PULP FICTION has had a profound impact on both the content and the texture of the arts in the Twentieth Century and beyond. The original Pulps grew out of their Nineteenth Century predecessors, converging at the peak of their popularity in the 1920s and 1930s with both a new direction in ‘high’ culture and arts, and with new technologies allowing for the replication and national distribution of media.

Unwittingly, Pulp took its first lungfuls of air as both Modernism and Popular Culture came to define the century. But what was the original Pulp? And how did it go on to impact ‘high’ art and become a part of the Modernist and Post-Modernist ethos? And how does “PULPable” material survive in the creative consciousness today?

THE PULP CRUCIBLE: GROWTH & CHANGE
Though the term “mass media” was coined in 1920, the previous century had seen technological leaps allowing communication, production and distribution to become cheaper and easier than ever. Photography, telegraphy and telephony, audio and visual recording technologies: all of these were in their infancy but clearly pointing the way forward. And alongside technological developments, the intelligentsia was beginning to question the social model that had held together for so long.

Where Realpolitik and the Realist movements were once the benchmarks for pragmatic thinking, now proto-Modernists like Flaubert, Manet and Baudelaire were moving into more subjective territory, presenting a more fragmented, fractured human experience.

A Bar at the Folies - Edouard Manet

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution began to undermine religious faith; Marx proposed that the capitalist doctrine was untenable; and Nietzsche’s Übermensch (Superman) in 1883 predated Hitler’s birth by six years and Clark Kent’s by 55. Man’s faith in religion, literature, and philosophy was increasingly decentred.

As the Twentieth Century got into full swing, mass media bloomed. By 1927 we had the world’s first ‘talkie’ in The Jazz Singer, and commercial radio and television was broadcasting from New York and London by the ‘30s and ‘40s. A simultaneous explosion in disruptive counter-realism paved the way in ‘high’ culture: Picasso’s Cubism and Mondrian’s lines and squares, Schoenberg’s atonal codas and Eliot’s Wastelands were all modern and Modernist by being contrary, and anti-progressive by being counter-historical. At the same time, half a century of disruption and worldwide violence were going to be made both more distant and more shocking via radio, newspapers and television.

LET ME ENTERTAIN YOU: THE ORIGINAL PULP FICTION
Whilst ‘high’ culture disseminated this social upheaval and turned political, mass entertainment and the Pulps were born. Duplication and linear production methods had finally made it cheap and easy to print books and newspapers, and by the 1830s pulp predecessors were already providing for the masses.

Victorian ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ usually focused on lurid, sensational news stories or took Gothic novels such as The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole and rewrote them for the semi-literate.

Sweeney Todd & his fellow Penny Dreadfuls

The upper classes saw them as subversive, ‘low’ nonsense, but they introduced the likes of Sweeney Todd and Dick Turpin to the general public and in pulping ‘high’ art—both literally and literarily—they predated pulp’s tendency to mix and match literature and entertainment. On the other side of the Atlantic, Beadle’s ‘Dime Novels’ appeared in 1860. Their articles were soon replaced by fictionalised accounts of frontiersmen migrating into the Wild West, though the Buffalo Bill ‘cowboy’ archetype eventually gave way to the first pulp ‘detective’ characters and ‘sleuths’.

One of the first Pulp magazines, The Argosy began in 1882 and ran until 1978. Native Mainer Frank Munsey had moved to New York City and, despite financial difficulties, managed to get his Boy’s Own rag off the ground; by 1894 it was publishing solely pulp fiction written by authors more eager to get published than to get paid. Munsey’s innovation was in combining cheap production and distribution methods to provide affordable mass entertainment, and at its peak each issue reached one million readers.

The Argosy, at its peak Pulp power

But a move in the late ‘40s from pulped to glossy paper was as symbolic as it was financial—The Argosy had gone back to its roots and was once more a non-fiction title.

Perhaps the most famous Pulp magazine (and the inspiration for Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction), Black Mask ran from 1920 to 1951 alongside a burgeoning Modernist movement and through World War II. But it was the Great War which may truly have shaped it: industrialisation and mass production had simply made it easier to kill more people more quickly, and Modernists felt that the War was an indictment against those who had advocated the cultural ‘progress’ of the Nineteenth Century. In an age before the media could define the course or motivations of a war, it was also much simpler to define the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’, and these fictional archetypes of heroism were soon transposed into the Pulps.

Black Mask, in grand pulp tradition, was started in order to cover losses for another magazine: editors H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan also published The Smart Set, whose contributors were paid much more, and which sold far fewer copies.

Black Mask staff & writers: on the back row, Chandler is second from left, Hammett is far right

After eight issues, Joseph Shaw took the editorial reins and the era of hard-boiled detective fiction began. Carroll John Daly’s story Three Gun Terry is widely considered the first in the genre, but Dashiell Hammett’s Arson Plus came in 1923 and Raymond Chandler was a late starter with Blackmailers Don’t Shoot in 1933.

One thing that Joseph Shaw shared with his authors was a past in the armed services. They had worn their uniforms during World War I—Shaw as an officer, Chandler in the Canadian services, and Hammett as a medic—and they now wrote of urban soldiers back from battle, wearing a trench coat in place of fatigues and a fedora in place of a helmet. “Once you have led a platoon of men into machine gun fire, nothing is ever the same again,” said Chandler; Marlowe and his contemporaries were lucky enough to be up against mere gangsters and femme fatales. “Having seen atom bombs go off, [people] were ready for something a little stiffer than drawing room mysteries.”

Elsewhere, another type of uniform was being donned by altruistic detective characters turned supernatural: Doc Savage, the Phantom and the Shadow sprung from the pages of Pulp magazines into comic books.

Action Comics #1: Superman launches a wave of superhero tales

In 1938, an old strip created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster made the front cover of Action Comics, and Superman launched superheroes worldwide.

But as television, movies, radio and paperbacks took over in the 1940s, Pulps and comic books waned, while authors moved on to screenplays, long form fiction or journalism. Started in 1941, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine survived only by attempting to combine the literary tendencies of some Black Mask authors with the need for pulp entertainment. As Modernism began to fuse with popular culture, so Ellery Queen fused ‘high’ art with the Pulps’ sense of fun.

FROM MODERNISM TO POST-MODERNISM: FROM PULP TO PULPABLE?
As the Second World War drew to a close, reality began to determine modern innovation: rations continued through the ‘40s, whilst mass production helped to rebuild ruined cities. Paper shortages during the War, coupled with the growth of television and the bankruptcy of major Pulp publisher the American News Company, brought Pulp’s heyday to an end in the late ‘50s.

But their cultural echoes—and the evolution of “PULPable” material—were near at hand. What was modern was now also popular. British ‘Mods’ listened to Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones or the Who referencing Modernist poets and poetry in their lyrics. In the United States, ‘high’ art fused with popular culture as a young Andy Warhol exhibited mass-produced,

High & low converge: Dylan at Warhol's "Factory"

multiple images of consumer items and consumed celebrities, Warhol—like Lichtenstein—using the dot-printing method that comic books and the illustrated Pulps had used.

Vietnam also became the first ‘living room war’ and paved the way for a darker, more cynical view of the black and white heroism of the Pulps. Where comic books had once been the domain of supernatural detectives, they now became more complex or more issue-driven—Stan Lee’s X-Men were a thinly-veiled allegory for the civil rights movement—whilst on television pulp echoes were similarly felt—Star Trek went boldly, and Batman went camply.

Those working in the popular spheres drew on both the new mythology of Pulp entertainment and the ‘high’ culture preceding them to create a cut-up view of the world. Central to this became self-conscious referentiality: on the one hand, Warhol’s pointillised Marilyns referenced popular culture in ‘high’ art, whilst Dylan’s lyrics about Eliot and Pound referenced ‘high’ culture in popular music. Modernism had flourished in consumer and capitalist societies, and the Warhols and Dylans were the beginning of “PULPable” artists.

The fusion of ‘high’ and pop culture brought a new, post-modernist creative philosophy: a lack of objectivity, complex and inter-referential texts and an undermining of one’s own authority via parody, pastiche and irony did away with Modernism’s central ethos. But where the Post-Modern and the “PULPable” differed was the choice of cultural yardsticks. “PULPable” creators took the comic books, movies, television shows and mass entertainment of the last half-century and jumped right in:

The Onion magazine: a post-satire world?

as David Foster Wallace put it, “about the time television first gasped and sucked air, mass popular US culture seemed to become High-Art viable as a collection of symbols and myths.”

As artists became “products of more than just one region, heritage and theory, citizens of a culture that said its most important stuff about itself via mass media,” a reference to Superman or Jimmy Stewart bore as much endowed meaning as a reference to anything predating them. And as mass media reached even more people, it became inevitable that these references would form the basis for an important arm of the creative arts.

PULP IS DEAD! LONG LIVE PULPABLE
As the original Pulps had come of age against the cultural and technological developments of the Nineteenth Century, so their “PULPable” influence has lived on in the nexus between ‘high’ and popular culture. Pulp magazines and comic books saw many ‘literary’ writers producing Pulp fiction—Tennessee Williams, Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain, and Rudyard Kipling—but also saw those such as Raymond Chandler, Isaac Asimov, William S. Burroughs and Arthur Conan Doyle move out of the popular and onto the periphery of the literary canon.

Mass production and distribution turned those authors, but also their characters, into modern-day icons, and as Modernism twisted into Post-Modernism, they became a recognisable frame of reference for the disjointed narratives presented by their successors. Though the direct descendants of the Pulps live on in the form of unironic comic books or adventure films such as Star Wars, it is the “PULPable” philosophy—Post-Modernism with a popular twist—which fuels much of the creative arts and remains most fascinating.

So somewhere in a self-conscious nexus between ‘high’ and popular culture, Alan Moore is writing a comic book about an un-hero, David Bowie is writing a song about a sci-fi novel, and Joseph Heller is writing a novel about a novelist writing a novel about a novelist. So sit back and realise that—no matter how hard you pray to Superman—there is no certainty, that—unless you are man from Mars—Pulp is your most handy frame of reference and that—if you were in a Tarantino film—this would be the beginning of article again.

DLR 02.11.08

PULP Precedents: Putting the Detective into Detective Fiction

Part psychoanalyst and part physical detection, part author of his own tale and part a product of his own time, the Detective has long been a symbol for the modern era of science, justice and the search for meaning in an increasingly anarchic world.

Old Scotland Yard

The Detective archetype also plays a pivotal role in some of the most famous Pulp fiction, from the original Bat-Man in Detective Comics and the first mention of the Continental Op in a 1923 issue of Black Mask magazine to The Maltese Falcon in 1941 and Polanski’s Chinatown, through to its numerous incarnations on the CSIs and investigation shows enthralling audiences worldwide. From their inception in England in 1843, the literati were already ascribing a specific character to the “detective police”; Andrew Wynter:

Stiff, calm and inexorable, an institution rather than a man… a machine, moving, thinking and speaking only as his instruction book directs… He seems… to have neither hopes nor fears.

Illustrations from a physiognomy text book: how to assess despair from appearance alone.

And more than this, they were the height of modernity. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) was yet to be published, but it was only the centre of a storm of scientific curiosity and academia; phrenology - the study of the human skull to determine the facets of the individual’s mind – had become an almost-accepted science; and physiognomy told the intelligentsia that character could be assessed from outward appearance alone. The original detectives, with little recourse to forensic science, had quickly to learn how to be both physiognomist and phrenologist. In 1860, Darwin predicted a time

when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor.

Summing up with science and pseudo-science could have been a job description for the original detective police officers. Of the eight men who were initially assigned to the group, the most convincing case for the origin of an archetype has come in Detective Inspector Jonathan ‘Jack’ Whicher, whose profile in Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is as compelling as those of his fictional counterparts. Whicher was described by his colleagues as intelligent, quiet, of a perfectly ordinary stature and appearance, but full of the gall required to bluff out pickpockets and con artists. To Whicher, “finding out” a murderer was all about the “summing up of many contrivances”.

Constance Kent, prime suspect in the Road Hill murder case investigated by Whicher.

The case that Summerscale covers involved an unsolved child murder at a country house in Road – a town near Bath – and the various family secrets and psyches that came to light during the investigation. Whicher was, at the time, in correspondence with Charles Dickens, whose interest in the detective phenomenon had begun almost as soon as their existence was made public. He eulogised them in an 1850 magazine piece as

respectable-looking men of perfectly good deportment and unusual intelligence… with an air of keen observation and quick perception when addressed.

But his primary fascination was with their psychological make up – what made them so effective at their jobs and why they above all others could ‘find out’ a suspect and convict them on the basis of nothing more than “keen observation”. Whicher reportedly told Dickens the tale of his apprehending a horse-thief on the basis of appearance alone. Whicher, alone in a country pub, told the man:

It’s no use. I know you. I’m an officer from London and I take you into custody for felony. I’m not alone here, whatever you may think. You mind your business, and keep yourselves to yourselves. It’ll be better for you.

Dickens’ Bleak House featured Inspector Bucket, a character based on Whicher’s colleague Charles Frederick Field; the first fictional police detective, he was a “sparkling stranger”. Though, like Whicher or Field, Dickens focussed on outward appearance and physical attributes (as well as names) to determine character, he also acknowledged in the unfinished Edwin Drood that “circumstances may accumulate so strongly even against an innocent man, that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him”.

The Whitechapel murders launched detective fever which surpassed even the tale of Road Hill. Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone pitted detectives and local investigators against a country house theft of a precious gemstone, and protagonist Sergeant Cuff’s investigation turns on psychology. He asks a suspect:

Do you feel an uncomfortable heat at the pit of your stomach, sir? and a nasty thumping at the top of your head?… I call it the detective-fever.

But Collins also wrote in 1860 in high praise of Eugene Vidocq, a French master criminal turned detective, who was “impudent, ingenious and daring”, and who went on to be the basis for Victor Hugo’s Inspector Javert and Jean Valjean. As in the Jack the Ripper case, the alluring detective had to share the stage with the equally intriguing criminal whose ingenuity kept his crimes under wraps.

The Detective had, in the minds of Dickens, Collins and many more authors, become one of the most interesting ‘metatypes’ that they had encountered. Their primary function echoed that of the authors they intrigued – creating a plot from nothing, following the clues that were laid out for them until they could string together what had happened, until they could introduce a coherent narrative.

A Holmes illustration, Strand Magazine 1891

The concept of ‘detective as author’, perhaps most evident in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, brought the archetype into the public consciousness, made it fascinating, and dropped it into popular pulp fiction. The metatype went on to find its way, via Doyle and other writers, into the Pulp magazines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The very British institution of the closed-house murder or theft (a la Road Hill or Collins) hit its peak with the Hound of the Baskervilles tale, but Doyle’s stories sat alongside those of Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse. The psychological elements of the type did also find their way into American adventure periodicals such as the Argosy.

It is not surprising that tales of the stoic, observant Victorian police officer might merge into the mythos of the lone, law-keeping sheriff in the new West of the United States. Fanciful Dime Magazine tales of those heading in a westerly direction played up the same sense of mingled familiarity and exoticism which attracted the British public to horrific murders resolved by ordinary, plain-clothed men. And like the Penny Dreadfuls in England, Dime Magazines exalted in the tales regardless of their accuracy. Amidst Westerns and Detectives, others such as HG Wells were exploiting this

Beadle's Dime Novels, the origin of a name

familiar/exotic fascination with ’speculative fiction’, the precursor to sci-fi.

Born in 1888 in Chicago, Raymond Chandler started out writing (by his own admission) terrible poetry in British literary magazines. But after his move back to post-World War I North America, he moved into the Pulp realm with stories in Black Mask magazine. Uniquely situated as a trans-Atlantic Pulpist, his Philip Marlowe embodied the very essence of the original detective police with an American twist. The thoroughly modern city-dweller, the lone sheriff, but also an aspirant criminal psychologist and complex character.

What is more, Marlowe – and by extension Chandler – also used a very Dickensian method of character assessment: physiognomy is alive and well in the wealthy world of 1930s LA. In The Big Sleep, he describes General Sterwood:

an old and obviously dying man watched us come and go with black eyes from which all fire had died long ago.  His long narrow body was wrapped… in a travelling rug and a faded red bath robe.

Basing his summing up on both outward appearance and assessment of inward character, Chandler echoes – albeit less directly – Dickens’ style. Miss Havisham had

bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white… I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.

Marlowe is both a detective like Whicher and Field, and a Pulp hero interacting with outlaws and bandits in a new world. Chandler’s strength as a detective writer was in his balancing the depressing realism of a Whicher (taking on the tawdry characters in LA, the vicious killings, the adultery and indiscriminate relationships) with the romantic magic of Pulp westerns and superheroics (the style he employed in describing Marlowe’s world.)

But it was only with movies such as The Big Sleep that the detective became entrenched in the public consciousness.

Humphrey, in a shot from The Big Sleep.

In turn, the tropes of film noir – stark chiaroscuro, stock types (gangster, detective, PI, femme fatale) and convoluted plot – came directly from the fusion of expressionism and Pulp stories. The archetype that leading men such as Humphrey Bogart embodied almost became the standard for generations of quiet-but-tough title characters. The style also played into a greater interest in the underlying psyches of the detective characters. Post-Freud, the eroticism and repressed violence often bubbled over into the action. Freud compared his role to that of the detective:

the task of the therapist is… the same as that of the examining magistrate. We have to uncover the hidden psychic material; and in order to do this we have invented a number of detective devices.

From phrenology to physiognomy to psychoanalysis, the modern Pulp Detective was born. In reality a complex character, but also an archetype appropriated by Victorian authors. Like Dickens and Wilkie Collins, the “detective police” had to be great readers of men. Post-Darwin, post-modern and post-science, their task was to find out the culprits on the basis that everyone was a product of their own character and experience, that personalities were cut-ups. Author of their own work, the detective remains one of the most important – and most modern – Pulp icons, from Jonathan Whicher and Darwin to Philip Marlowe and Freud, all by way of Pulp fiction.

DLR 10.09.08

A PULP Manifesto

What is Pulp? Mass entertainment, or something more specific perhaps, such as film or television? If a comic book is Pulp, does that mean a novel cannot be? Does Pulp still thrive, or was it just folly for the Raymond Chandlers, Andy Warhols and superheroes of the world?

‘Pulps’ were the younger, spottier and less refined brother of paperback fiction, and the whelp sons of nineteenth century ‘Penny Dreadfuls‘. These lurid tales of Victorian depravity – whether it be sexual, psychological or criminal (and often all three at once) – laid the groundwork for a new century of mass-produced, mass-marketed fiction. But alongside such ‘low’ fare as these pamphlets were equally high-art ciphers for the fin de siecle anxieties of a declining empire such as Dorian Gray and Dr. Jekyll.

Across the Atlantic the travails of the 1800s were subsiding, the US was further industrialising, turning away from its foreign interests and sliding into the new century under a new presidency. Dime Magazines such as The Argosy were appearing on newsstands and they quickly found an audience for their tales of intrigue, detection, speculation and adventure.

The magazines both in the US and Europe attracted those eager to get published, with many of their one-time writers going on to illustrious careers of their own. Most famously, Dashiell Hammett and his Continental Op, and Raymond Chandler with his proto-Marlowes; but also science fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein; as well as ‘literary’ authors the likes of Upton Sinclair, Arthur Conan Doyle, William S. Burroughs and even Tennessee Williams. On the more fictional side of the table sat Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, Zorro and Tarzan.

From the beginnings of Pulp as a self-contained genre, we can trace the lines of succession. From Detective Comics in 1934 to The Dark Knight in 2008, from H.G. Wells to Arthur C. Clarke to Stanley Kubrick, from a young William Burroughs earning a living to David Cronenberg’s 90s’ Naked Lunch. It’s safe to say that, without the quick-fix melting pot of Pulp we would not have quite the same culture at all – whether Batman or the Beats, a Streetcar Named Desire or the Starship Enterprise, there’s a little bit of Pulp in us all.

But Pulp is more than a collection of namedroppings; it is a way of working, a way of writing or singing or painting, but above all a way of thinking. It is the hand-edited, cut-up versions of the Shakespeare folios whose authority we can never determine, and it is the intellect of a Laurence Sterne deconstructing the very act of writing with Tristram Shandy in the eighteenth century.

If we swing our way past the fulcrum of the early twentieth century ‘Pulps’, it is a pop-culture synthesiser such as David Bowie, or the endless ‘reimaginings’ and cover versions of films and songs. What links them all, for better (Bowie) or worse (Planet of Tim Burton’s Apes), is their ability or tendency to assess the creative process, take it down to its basic cultural building blocks, and relayer it with the thoughts and concepts of others until you can Frankenstein yourself a new creation, whole and fully formed and yet standing on the shoulders of giants.

Whether you see it as a phenomenon specific to the ‘Pulps’ and to Boy’s Own adventure, or rather as a cultural, creative philosophy – a way of working – there are still a large number of Pulpists plying their trade. Only the juiciest Pulp has been covered already by PULPable, but in the meantime you can go and re-watch Star Wars, read The Long Goodbye or tackle Finnegans Wake. Though that last one might take a lot of reconstruction.

DLR 30.08.08

PULP Pictures: Alan Moore & “V for Vendetta”

To some degree you have to kind of create a credible world in all of its detail when you’re writing something, which means that you have to have at least a slender grasp upon what the real world is like, the engineering of human personalities.—Alan Moore

 

The urge to write is something which few people manage to conquer with any success. There is the constant struggle to bring words to life in a way that is both original and a “coherent whole from such disjointed parts.” Alan Moore brought a more novelistic approach to comics during the 1980s and 1990s, having his first successful serialised strip in 1981’s V for Vendetta. From his cut-up Pulp mind, V was borne out of “the sensation of there being something incredibly good just beyond your fingertips.” It is a sensation with which anyone on the brink of a good idea is familiar.

 

Deconstructing and reconstructing the inner monologues—informed by the various experiences we have and the media which have shaped our thought processes—is certainly part of this. The very act of writing and reforming thought verbally is an exploratory one, and for those good enough at this process their output speaks from their own worlds into the real world and through to the inner world of others. Moore’s penchant for Victoriana, political statements and the America of Beat Generation authors such as William S. Burroughs (or more precisely how they viewed the world through language) are clear influences on his writing. But when V for Vendetta appeared in ’81, some of these influences began to merge and create the coherent whole he was after.

 

The movie version of V mainly went to prove that, once you have boiled the story down to its basic plot elements, you have the workings of any common or garden science fiction adventure. Set in a dystopian 1990s England, a fascist party coalition named Norsefire is in power, having taken office after a nuclear assault on Britain during an unnamed war. ‘Leader’ Adam Susan controls the country from a vast computer-bank simply named ‘Fate’ (and with which he has a pseudo-sexual relationship), whilst the arms of totalitarian government dealing with propaganda, policing and the like are named after the five (V) senses: The Nose, The Eyes, The Ears, The Mouth and The Finger. ‘V’, a Guy-Fawkes-masked terrorist whose past reaches back to Resettlement Camps after the war, begins a campaign against those who hurt him and others, and against the fascist system itself. After infiltrating it, Evey Hammond—a girl whom he takes under his wing—comes to learn from V just how to attack and subvert the totalitarian state through his teaching her lost culture. Moore pitches the plot and backdrop alongside other

 

“Pulp Magazine Adventures…rooted in the exotic and glamorous locations that the stories were set in…seedy waterfront bars, plush penthouses dripping with girls. All the magic of a vanished age. It struck me that it might be possible to get the same effect by placing the story in the near future as opposed to the near past. If we handled it right, we could create the same sense of mingled exoticism and familiarity.”

 

But as an arch-synthesiser, Moore’s writing at the time sprung from the interplay between his various interests and was less a conscious process than a reference work-in-progress over a six-year run. The medium of comic books (Moore rightfully doesn’t care much for the marketing term ‘graphic novel’) also provided the perfect Pulp genre for him to play with: collaborating with artist David Lloyd—whom Moore admits came up with the concept for V’s Guy Fawkes costume—brought another level of co-authorship. But Moore’s words referenced everything from Shakespeare to the Velvet Underground to Orwell to The Phantom of the Opera, from Judge Dredd to Leviathan to Batman. Lloyd’s pictures, most of which were carefully panelled by Moore, nonetheless portrayed an interpretation of the reference-laden script, a Pulp representation of those ideas just beyond Moore’s fingertips. When Lloyd suggested Guy Fawkes, Moore thought

 

“Firstly, Dave was obviously a lot less sane than I’d hitherto believed him to be, and secondly, this was the best idea I’d ever heard in my entire life. All of the various fragments in my head suddenly fell into place behind the single image of a Guy Fawkes mask.”

 

Initially the artwork was solely in black and white, later inked for the collected (‘graphic novel’) version. Playing against monochrome pens, Moore’s wealth of storylines and characters already covered a larger range of emotions than was standard fare for comic strips. On the one hand, V crusades in the name of anarchy against a fascist police state, but on the other, “fascists are people who work in factories, probably are nice to their kids, it’s just that they’re fascists. They’re just ordinary, the same as everybody else except for the fact that they’re fascists.” Though we may now think of more nuanced interpretations of our favourite comics characters, such a novelistic and humanistic presentation of the ‘bad guys’ was not the norm for comics in the early ‘80s. Some things might be black and white—V’s anarchism has to triumph over Norsefire’s fascist state—but people are far from one-dimensional.

 

Nevertheless ideas remained at the forefront of V for Vendetta. One of the better moments in the film adaptation was when V confronts his police pursuers. He allows them to fire upon him but—seemingly miraculously—does not succumb to the bullets. In the comic version, Evey Hammond’s internal monologue tells us that “whoever you are isn’t as big as the idea of you… Your foes assumed you sought revenge upon their flesh alone, but you did not stop there… you gored their ideology as well.” Hugo Weaving’s V tells his pursuers that “you cannot kill an idea. Ideas are bullet-proof”. Evey’s taking V’s place proves that his ideology lives on, whilst Mr. Finch (played by Stephen Rea and with a different character name in the movie) leaves not only the ruins of London but also the personal ruins that The Leader’s party left behind. But the moral dubiousness of the ending is clear: the physical ruins of Downing Street (not the Houses of Parliament, as in the film) and the personal costs exacted upon Helen Heyer both come down to V.

 

“The central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn’t want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history.”

 

In the end what draws the writing together is Moore’s grasp—conscious or not—of the interplay between references both high and low and his creating a novelistic ‘net’ of ideas within which the plot works. V’s underground home, named the Shadow Gallery after the Phantom of the Opera and situated near the Victoria Tube station, provides his cultural reference base: a jukebox, film posters, a piano, and many books banned by the state. Both the comic and movie begin with an extended Shakespeare quotation from Macbeth, praising “the multiplying villainies of nature…” which Macbeth has shown in battle, and the majority of V’s dialogue throughout the strip continues in iambic pentameter. References to the letter V or the number five are everywhere: each chapter title, V’s room number at the Resettlement camp, Beethoven’s Fifth, Evey’s name, the substory of Valerie, and V’s favourite Latin motto: Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici (“by the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe”).

 

Much like this motto, originating from Goethe’s Faust, Moore likes to complicate the reader’s relationship with V through allusion. Has he sold his soul for a false ideological battle? He certainly does commit atrocities in the name of justice, and drives Evey to the brink of death in order to transform her into the idea that he represents. Or do we burn the image of Guy Fawkes when we should be celebrating his attempts at a republican coup d’etat. And Moore’s ideas do take on a life of their own:

 

“If you could get an idea that was complex enough, self-referential enough, could it become aware? They say that awareness is an emergent property of complexity. Could that be true on a purely immaterial level, about ideas? Could you have things that were ideas but were alive?”

 

V for Vendetta is if nothing else a complex, self-referential idea. To Moore, the filmic V was “a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country” featuring a one-dimensional protagonist. For David Lloyd, “it’s a terrific film. The most extraordinary thing was seeing scenes that I’d worked on and crafted for maximum effect in the book translated to film with the same degree of care and effect.” The medium and the message go hand in hand, but whilst the Pulp comic book adventure might work as a movie in Lloyd’s eyes, Moore won’t be allowing his name on any adaptations of his work which water down the message.

 

“[V and Watchmen] just started a whole genre of pretentious comics or miserable comics…trying to sort of lift riffs from Watchmen, Dark Knight. It was like looking at your deformed bastard grandchildren or something like that. I think that David Bowie once referred to himself as ‘the face that launched a thousand pretensions’. You can somehow kind of feel the same way when I saw the actual effect of Watchmen upon comics was probably a kind of deleterious effect.”

 

When the Watchmen movie comes out next year, it will be interesting to see Moore’s take on what happens to his most famous piece of writing. “To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate—unlike most films.”