Cinema Purgatorio

Vol. 4 of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” was meant to be Alan Moore’s big farewell to the comics industry.  He and artist Kevin O’Neill even featured prominently in the epilogue to talk about it.  Which makes “Cinema Purgatorio” the writer’s coda to his work in the medium.  It’s an eighteen-part anthology of stories with the recurring motif of an unnamed narrator going into a theater of the same name to see various stories play out on screen to link them all.  These stories find Moore playing with the history of motion pictures by way of some of its most iconic characters from Hollywood’s Golden Age.  Which is why we’ve got the Keystone Kops in a gleefully savage look at police corruption and brutality, King Kong’s creator telling his own sad story through the mouth of his most famous creation, the story of the Warner Bros. as played by the Marx Bros., and the tragedy of the Black Dahlia done as a musical.  In addition, because this is written by Moore, we also get to see what happens when a by-the-numbers child detective movie goes chthonic.

It’s all very clever.  Is any of it entertaining?  Well, you’ll get more out of the whole experience the more familiar you are with the real and fictional characters that Moore is playing around with.  The Warners/Marx Bros. story is a great example of how these stories can inform and entertain, but it’s hard to get invested in “The Last Temptation of Old Mother Riley” without any knowledge of who she was.  I’m speaking on the basis of my knowledge here and even then it felt like I was being led around by the nose more often than not.  To the point where I felt like I needed to check out the online annotations of this series to make sure that the final story wasn’t based on some real-life story I wasn’t aware of.

So “Cinema Purgatorio” is one for Moore completists rather than his casual fans.  As a capstone to his work in the medium of comics, it and vol. 4 of “League” weren’t examples of his best work (though they’re great showcases for O’Neill’s  dazzling adaptability), but that shouldn’t diminish his standing as one of the greatest comics writers who has ever lived.  He’s done with the medium now and is working exclusively in the field of prose, having just signed a six-figure four-book deal with a British publisher.  I wish him well in this endeavor because if there’s anyone who deserves to enjoy their retirement from comics, it’s Alan Moore.