Four-Color Critiques #7: Alan Moore and Dengar’s Best Man

Four-Color Critiques #7: Alan Moore and Dengar’s Best Man

Feb 24

Hearing that Alan Moore once wrote Star Wars stories was like hearing about a long-lost collaboration between Dylan, McCartney, Lennon, Jagger, and Pat Boone. It blew my fragile little mind.

So yes, that’s the shocker, if you didn’t know already–over the course of late 1981 and much of 1982, Moore had a handful of short comics stories published in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Monthly, produced by Marvel UK. I believe one of them represents his first published collaboration with Alan Davis, but I could be wrong on that.

Today, the prospect of Alan Moore dipping his wrinkly toes into the Lucasfilm sandbox would be occasion for much marketing fanfare, tantamount to Spielberg directing a prequel or Georgie boy himself penning a sequel to Watchmen. (I can’t even imagine what such a thing would constitute.)

Back then, Moore was a newbie starting in comics, and Marvel UK had a hungry maw to feed each month with stories from a galaxy far, far away, and so these stories were born.

Reading them today, they’re remarkable not really as Alan Moore stories, but as Star Wars stories. Which is shocking to me–surely, even as a baby writer, Alan Moore had the power to turn the very Star Wars universe upon its ear and depict raucous sex scenes between Leia and a Jawa, or the dark secret truth behind Chewie’s blood oath with Han Solo?

Not so much. They’re clever little UK sci-fi shorts, very much in the mold of the same type of stories Moore and others wrote for 2000 A.D. They’re surprisingly esoteric, even for UK sci-fi–"Tilotny Throws A Shape" is about some kind of strange space spirit who transports a pack of stormtroopers 8,000 years into the past after turning Princess Leia’s heart into a diamond. (SPOILER–Another spirit appears and changes it back.)

Perhaps the most disturbing tale is "The Pandora Effect," in which Han, Leia, and Chewie innocuously stumble upon an interstellar death cult that worships an evil demon. These folks, known as "the Five," give off a vibe like Sir Miles and the Outer Church in Morrison’s Invisibles–sick, twisted, sadistic fucks. And they’re the bad guys in a Star Wars story! They seriously make Vader look like Gandhi.

And that’s what’s still shocking, coming up on thirty years after these stories were originally published–you can look at the reckless creativity even in these nasty little shorts and compare it to the Star Wars stories of today, and you can watch the fossilization of imagination taking place before your very eyes.

I guess that’s not really news, but seeing it underlined so pointedly still brings me pause. Examine any of the major media properties–jesus, they’re even known as "major media properties" now–and their modern stories define the term "safe." When someone like Grant Morrison is given free rein to tinker with an iconic franchise like Batman, it’s jarring, but also refreshing; you get to see him actually break the toys. Sure, they’ll be fixed eventually, possibly by Morrison himself before he finishes his work on the character, but still–they’re broken! Bruce Wayne is "dead"! Someone else will be Batman, maybe for a few months, or a year tops! ANARCHY REIGNS!

Star Wars, though…man. Star Wars. The Star Wars "expanded universe." It’s the most egregious example of a dead living thing in the geek pantheon; new books, comics, toys, and on and on, hitting shelves on a near-daily basis–and yet the last real "creativity" happened probably twenty-plus years ago? Maybe? Return of the Jedi? The prequels? Plenty of creations, sure, but all under the iron bootheel of Lucas, and even then, only furtive glimpses along the fringe–Obi-Wan allowed to be a bad-ass in Attack of the Clones, Padme given some actual scenes to play in Revenge of the Sith.

Back in the day, you could create work as part of a larger media empire and it could still be strange and obscure. In its way, Alan Moore’s work in Star Wars was fringe, too, just like Alan Dean Thomas writing Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, or Roy Thomas and Carmine Infantino going batshit crazy in the US Star Wars comic, or even the goddamned Holiday Special–say what you will about it, for it is shitty, but damn if it’s not busting at the seams with ideas. The Wookiees live on a tree planet? There’s an armored bounty hunter out to snare Luke Skywalker? Diahann Carroll is a masturbatory fantasy in a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away? YES PLEASE.

We pay our money and buy our tickets and our comics and our two-disc special editions, and man some of it is so great, and some of it’s just fun escapism, but I have to constantly remind myself: It’s all PRODUCT, plain and simple. The most creative person on the most creative day of their creative life cannot really CHANGE the Star Wars universe. Grant Morrison cannot really KILL Batman. The money machine can never stop churning, and so we get mostly antiseptic storytelling that sells action figures and beach towels and underpants. Even when it’s brilliant, that’s all it is.

I’d love to see Alan Moore attempt a Star Wars story today–he’d probably fly over to Marin County on his own dime and strangle Lucas with his bare hands. And maybe he should–maybe a few of these corporate properties need to get good and DEAD before anything interesting can happen again.

But then, that’s the way the mainstream Oreo-brand cookie crumbles, isn’t it? If you want the pure good stuff, to find out where the Next Big Thing is lurking, or even just something small and wonderful, you head for the fringe. Tiny “vanity” publishers; indie filmmakers; bands churning out mp3s for a select audience of netheads who may fill the bathroom of a tiny club someday.

Wasn’t there a time when you could take chances in the mainstream, though? And wasn’t that time approximately 1970-1979? And isn’t it a shame that today, a movie like Watchmen is "a risk," when it’s actually just a big-budget action thriller based on one of the most recognizable original concepts in the history of comics? How is that a "risk," really?

I blame it on Dengar. Maybe you haven’t heard the story–about how Dengar discovered Boba Fett in the Pit of Carkoon on Tatooine, still alive after his encounter with the Sarlacc, and was so happy to see the bastard that he asked him to be BEST MAN IN HIS WEDDING.

That’s right. Dengar got married, and the one person in the entire galaxy who just happened to be his best man is not only a character we have already met, but one of the most inexplicably popular characters in the Star Wars universe–Boba fucking Fett.

Why do they even bother to call it the "Expanded Universe"? It’s a shrinking universe, if anything, ready to implode upon itself when Luke Skywalker finally meets up with Dengar and his wife and they travel to Dagobah to live in Yoda’s hut with their pet alien, E.T.

Our entire creative universe, the stuff we all love and geek out over, seems to be constantly shrinking too. Everything has to relate to everything else; ideas rarely if ever EXPLODE anymore, wholly original, totally new and fresh. There is nothing new under the sun, true, but I thought it was the job of genre entertainment to help us forget that. Instead, we get too much corporate product, and not enough alien spirits turning our hearts into diamonds.

Images courtesy the wondrous Wookieepedia