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Moving back in time from the DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore, comes The Complete Future Shocks, recently released, whose first shock is — it’s not complete! Alright, so the two missing stories, “The Dating Game” and “The Killer In The Cab” were not Tharg’s Future Shocks or Time Twisters, being Ro-Jaws’ Robo-Tales, but as this volume does contain other one-off strips Moore did for 2000A.D., it’s a pity to have them missed out, as they’re unlikely to find a home in any other sort of collection. (But they are available online, at the 4ColorHeroes Alan Moore for Free page.)

The first thing that struck me about this nicely-put together volume was how some of the panels had stuck in my memory from when I read them originally in 2000A.D., even though the stories hadn’t. The one pictured above, for instance (from “They Sweep The Spaceways”, first published in July 1981). As soon as I saw it, I remembered coming across it for the first time and feeling vaguely disturbed at the thought of a lollipop getting stuck in someone’s beard. Well, I was ten years old at the time, so perhaps the idea of a lollipop getting stuck in a beard was important to me back then.

It’s interesting to trawl these short strips that mark Alan Moore’s first real steps in the comics world for signs of what was to come. The strip “Bounty Hunters!”, for instance, includes the idea that the shape-changing creature the titular bounty hunters are after may have transformed himself into the very planet they’re searching for him on. It turns out he hasn’t, but Moore went on to use that idea in the Tales of the Green Lantern Corps story “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize” — though the earlier tale used the idea in a more knowing way. Another early appearance of an idea later used when writing for DC is the story “Bad Timing”, which is basically a joke on Superman’s origins without actually being able to use the Superman character (Krypton becomes Klakton, etc.) The idea of “Superman’s” father being wrong about the destruction of his home planet is here a joke, but Moore later used it to serious effect in the Superman Annual story “For The Man Who Has Everything”. The idea of a life being lived backwards is used in “The Reversible Man” (a story that apparently had some of the secretaries at 2000A.D.‘s offices in tears when it first came out), and of course would be used again in 1995’s The Birth Caul.

I’m always interested in finding themes that permeate or emerge throughout a creator’s work. Moore’s oevure is incredibly diverse, which makes it hard to find such repeated themes (though the image of the transformed man emerging from flames, often naked but increased in power, occurs a lot in Moore’s more serious superhero work). Another theme I can see starting to develop in these early stories is super-intelligence, often going wrong. Moore has written a number of super-intelligent characters (Ozymandias in Watchmen is perhaps the apotheosis of this idea, a man whose cold rationality brings peace to the world at a price no merely feeling human being would ever countenance), but here we see super-intelligent characters who are rather too clever, and who get a corresponding comeuppance, such as Abelard Snazz, whose genius always lands him in trouble, and the Squonge-wearing humans in “Mister, Could You Use A Squonge?”, whose enhanced intelligence is plain faulty. Jack B Quick from the Tomorrow Stories comics is a later example from Moore’s work of over-cleverness leading to trouble.

Best tale of the bunch, for me, has to be “Eureka”, about how a mere idea can become a form of almost unstoppable alien invasion. The power and communicability of potentially transformative ideas, of course, could well be used to describe another of Moore’s interests that would develop later in his career — magic.

This volume collects Moore’s miscellaneous work for DC, from April 1985’s Green Arrow two-parter Night Olympics to 1988’s Killing Joke, along with a few thoughts from his collaborators such as Dave Gibbons and Brian Bolland. (And of course there’s a distinct lack of comment from Moore himself — understandable, considering his current relations, or lack of them, with DC.)

You get a real feel of Moore the jobbing writer from this book. The strongest of the short tales are those whose format most resembles the Future Shocks and Time Twisters of his early days with 2000A.D. — these being the Tales of the Green Lantern Corps, and the two Vegatales. But even Moore struggles to come up with something interesting to do with such nobodies as the Vigilante and Green Arrow. Both of these stories seem to be teetering on the edge of Moore going into a debate about the point of superheroes themselves, with the Green Arrow Night Olympics putting this most explicitly: “I don’t know… There’s something about crooks these days. They’re kinda pathetic…” (Which of course reflects on the heroes who fight them.) Whereas the Vigilante story never quite manages to get into the debate about authoritarianism versus liberalism that’s hovering on its sidelines. Perhaps Moore just knew he’d done all this, and far better, in Miracleman and V for Vendetta. (Watchmen was still in the future at this point.)

The Superman tales are much more successful, as Moore tries to find new directions in which to push the Man of Tomorrow to keep this, potentially the most bland (because so perfect) of heroes, interesting. In all three of the Superman tales collected here — For the Man Who Has Everything, The Jungle Line (also featuring Swamp Thing), and the two-part Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? — Superman’s real enemy is himself. In the first two, this is because Superman is locked in either a dream or a hallucination, and so is only battling himself. In the last, the tale in which we get to find out just how the career of the greatest of all superheroes comes to an end, it is Superman himself who lands the final blow.

The real standout of the book, though, is of course The Killing Joke, not only because of its stunning Brian Bolland artwork. Moore’s take on the Joker’s origins seems to have become a bit of an albatross around the great man’s neck, as he speaks elsewhere of how its success came to infect the whole comic book industry with a rather superficial echoing of its nihilistic darkness, leading him to feel everybody had somehow missed the point. But the story’s ending is really almost upbeat, as Batman and the Joker manage to communicate, sanely, for just a moment. The joke told at the end, about two loonies trying to escape an asylum, comes as a rather affecting commentary on Batman and the Joker’s relationship. In the joke, one madman escapes the asylum by jumping to a nearby roof. The other madman can’t make the jump, so the first turns on his torch and says he should walk along its beam. The first says, “What do you think I am, crazy? You’ll turn it off halfway!” Batman is the loony who escaped the insanity of his parents’ death and who is now offering to help the Joker escape, too. But the Joker can’t trust anyone — even someone as like him as Batman — not to take away the helping hand when it’s needed the most. He’s beyond help.