Superheroes in graphic detail

Published on Sunday 11 February 2007 00:18

Albion

Alan Moore

Titan Books, 9.99

WITH his inspired twin volume graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Alan Moore reimagined the cast of Victorian fantasy fiction as a team of superpowered secret agents assembled by HRM's government to defend Great Britain's green and pleasant land. It made for terrific ripping yarns that were at once steeped in literary references and saturated with ribald satire.

Moore, who also wrote the seminal strips The Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell and who is surely the world's greatest living comic book writer, has now done something similar with his new book.

Set in present day Britain, Albion follows a couple of young dropouts, who also happen to be comic book fans, from Liverpool to Manchester and on to Scotland as they uncover the truth about the inspirations for the rogues' gallery of bizarre characters that appeared in the pages of long since defunct 1960s British comics Valiant, Smash! and Lion.

Albion posits the intriguing idea that the likes of The Spider, The Steel Claw, Robot Archie, Dolmann the master puppeteer, Gogra and his giant mechanical ape Mytek the Mighty et al were as real as the comics they appeared in that were churned out by the Amalgamated Press. Exactly what happened to this colourful cast of characters after the magazines were discontinued is detailed in a typically clever conspiracy theory from arch mythmaker Moore which readers ought to discover for themselves

Albion's pages are peppered with references, some obvious, others oblique, to what's already an obscure milieu. Those with some knowledge of the AP/IPC comics' characters will delight in spotting them; newcomers will marvel at the surprisingly fertile creativity of the period (especially given America's domination of the comics marketplace with superhero titles such as The Amazing Spider-Man and The Uncanny X-Men).

Albion, however, is not purely a nostalgia trip. What Moore does here is nothing less noble than reviving these characters for our modern times. His sixth-chapter tale is designed to reintroduce the characters, setting the scene for their further adventures (and Moore himself is rumoured to be at work on new Steel Claw tales).

As the years have passed, Moore, who came up from the pages of the British science fiction comic 2000AD (a descendent of Valiant and its siblings, being an IPC title launched in 1977), has combined greater quality of writing with greater quantity of it.

He's arguably at his creative peak and busiest period, and it's possible that accounts for Albion being a collaboration with his daughter Lea Moore and her husband John Reppion (him masterminding the plotting, them scripting). Whatever the case, the co-writers are well served by artists with an eye for detail, Shane Oakley and George Freeman.