欧宝娱乐

When I was around 10, my uncle gave me three phonebooks each featuring the adventures of Batman, Superman, and Captain Marvel from the 30s to the 70s. I loved reading and re-reading the volumes, but the stories were meant for children and four years later, they seemed juvenile to me.

Alan Moore is one of the few writers whose work, when I read it today, makes me feel as if I am a kid picking up a superhero comic for the first time. Moore's stories are filled with the usual explosive antics, but there are always consequences that feel very real and serious and that, however unpleasant, his heroes are forced to confront. Reading Moore's superheroes is like looking at something familiar in a very strange light.

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? is a case in point. It has all the familiar, goofy aspects of an old-school Superman story. It has dialogue like "Great Scott!" There's a supervillain team-up between Lex Luthor and Brainiac. Lana Lang takes a radioactive bath and gains super powers (love it when that happens).

But the Luthor-Brainiac team-up is parasitic and disturbing, happening when Brainiac latches onto Luthor's head and drills into his brain. And after super-strong Lana Lang snaps Luthor-Brainiac's neck (Yes. She does that), Brainiac discovers he's unable to puppet the corpse once rigor mortis sets in.

What makes reading this story particularly odd is that it's illustrated by Curt Swan, who pencilled most of the Superman comics from the 60s to the 80s. His style is associated with more clean-cut, simplistic representations of the character.

Anyway. This collection includes all of the one-shots and individual issues that Alan Moore wrote for DC. There was a previous compilation, but it left out both Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? as well as Moore's seminal one-shot The Killing Joke. This volume is complete.

There are also two or three short introductions to selected chapters that offer a little bit of historical context, just in case you were wondering why in the hell Alan Moore wrote a Green Arrow story.

Some stories are slighter than others, but that diversity is one of the strengths of this anthology. After all, comparing these stories to the epics and prolonged narratives that made Moore famous is pointless. With the exception of the Killing Joke, Moore was mostly a guest-writer and he probably treated the majority of these stories as one-offs. So it's sort of surprising how good most of them are. This collection is highly recommended both for people who enjoy superhero comics today and for people who only read them when they were children.