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Economic Realism in the Worlds of Alan Moore
Rob Salkowitz
We donāt usually think of speculative fiction writers in genres like sci-fi and superhero comics as having much in common with economists, given their different audiences and objectives. In fact, both are engaged in a similar process: creating scenarios realistic enough to model outcomes when variables are introduced into the premise. Economists generally use their models to answer questions like āhow will changes in government spending affect the unemployment rate?ā Authors of speculative fiction in prose and comics tend toward more imaginative variations from current conditions: What if time travel were possible? What if humans colonized nearby planets? What if a nascent technology like robotics or virtual reality became pervasive through the ordinary processes of commercialization and consumerization?
Just as good economic models need to plausibly resemble real world conditions and behaviors, so too does good speculative fiction need to evoke a willing suspension of disbelief in which the reader accepts the premise and underlying world logic so the story can establish an emotional connection. A āmagic asteriskā meant to wave away inconvenient inconsistencies is no more welcome in a good work of fiction than it is in a forecast of economic growth. Even in genres less dependent on scientific realism than science fiction, such as fantasy and horror, authors strive to create, if not realism, then consistency in the settings of their stories so as not to distract from the drama and conflict taking place in the foreground. As the superhero genre has evolved from its simple roots into a more sophisticated storytelling platform, it has grappled with these same issues.
Alan Moore, who burst onto the comics scene in the 1980s, is the pivotal figure in the evolution of comics toward greater economic realism in multiple dimensions. His influential early work like V for Vendetta (1982), Miracleman (1982) and Watchmen (1986) fleshed out the motivations of super-powered characters in greater detail than had been previously attempted, and set those characters loose in worlds that more closely resembled our own.
Mooreās concerns were primarily social, political, psychological and philosophical. The realism he brought to comics raised questions about the nature of power, the deeper motives of vigilantes and villains, the relationship between individuals and institutions, and the heretofore unexamined issues of sexuality and sexual violence in the context of super-powered individuals. However, his approach to storytelling and his personal background required him to ask and answer important micro- and macro-economic questions as a way of fleshing out the worlds he built.
Even when Moore moved beyond superheroes later in his career, he never neglected the role of economics, sometimes giving issues like globalization and gentrification a pivotal role in the plot (as in Big Numbers from 1988ā1989) or using behaviors associated with economic class as a crucial element of characterization (as in From Hell, 1989ā1997). By the mid-1990s, his innovations had been internalized by other comic storytellers whose work laid the foundations for the 21st century boom in superhero stories in mass media.
Another interesting feature of Mooreās innovations from an economics perspective is how closely his creative process mirrored more systematic approaches to forecasting that were evolving in the business world around the same time. The setting of Mooreās stories arenāt just backdrops to conflict and action; they are scenarios that carefully reflect the logical outcome of their underlying assumptions.
Economic realism in superhero comics
The subject of economic realism in fictional works can be approached several ways. Traditionally, critics would say a work is economically realistic if the actions and settings accurately reflect the economic conditions of the real world: People worry about money; they donāt inexplicably have access to things beyond their economic means; the economic class origins of characters influence their attitudes and behavior; and so on.
In genres where the premise or setting departs from ordinary reality in important ways ā science fiction, fantasy, superheroes ā our expectations of realism are both more modest and more extravagant. It may be beside the point for the protagonist to sweat certain dollars and cents details. However, we expect the creator(s) to have thought through the logic of the entire story world so we are not confused or distracted by inconsistencies. We expect them to construct a world where economic relationships are consistent, even if the conditions of that world depart dramatically from what we are used to.
Today, world-building is an important element in superhero stories, arguably more important than any individual character or story set in that world. Superhero properties are taken into other media not one at a time, but as entire universes that can be embroidered and extended infinitely across different products and different media. Because superhero character arcs so often develop along predictable patterns and use many stock story tropes, the richness and integrity of the universe becomes the selling point that keeps readers emotionally invested in outcomes over and over again.
That was not always the case. For the first 30 or so years of comic book superheroes in the United States, from the 1930s to the 1960s, the storytelling was straightforward and unsophisticated in many ways, including the depiction of economics.
Influenced by science fiction from the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, creators of superhero stories often felt the need to ground their fantasies in some kind of more or less scientific explanation. Superman came from another planet and got his powers because of Earthās lower gravity and more intense solar radiation. The Flash, Captain America and others were the products of scientific experiments that created changes in human biology. Non-powered crimefighters often used advanced technology to give them an advantage.
But while science fiction soon evolved to encompass broader social and economic themes in an effort to make their story-worlds more convincing, comics were slower to do so.1 Comic publishers assumed their audience to be children with a low critical threshold, who would not notice or question the lack of realism. The superheroes themselves were archetypes, not fully realized characters. They didnāt need motives beyond altruism; they didnāt need rich social and economic lives. They just needed good costumes and cool powers.
As superheroes started reaching an older audience in the mid-1960s, the genre began to strive for greater realism in its characterizations, including introducing economic considerations. Spider-Manās alter-ego, Peter Parker, struggled to make ends meet; the Fantastic Four sometimes had trouble paying the rent on their Manhattan skyscraper headquarters. Ill-advised stock market speculation cost Oliver Queen (The Green Arrow) his fortune, and the experience transformed him from a cutout, wealthy playboy to a crusader for social justice (OāNeill and Dillin, 1969).
These details made the stories richer and the characters more believable at the margins, but they rarely addressed the larger question of how extraordinary characters and events might influence the world(s) in which they took place. Technology innovations like Iron Manās suit, for example, were deemed unique and impossible to replicate, except by assorted super-villains. Near-omnipotent characters like Superman occasionally tackled natural disasters, but rarely interfered in world events in a transformative way. Super-powered characters who struggled with their finances hardly ever used their abilities for personal enrichment; that was the mark of a villain, not a hero.
That began to change in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as the more rigorous world-building logics of New Wave science fiction authors like Brian Aldiss, John Brunner and J.G. Ballard began influencing an up and coming generation of comic book writers who had greater literary ambitions for themselves and the superhero genre. Foremost among them was a young English writer named Alan Moore.
Working class (super) hero
Alan Moore was born in 1953 in Northampton, an industrial city in the middle of England. He grew up reading first British and then American comics that made their way to the UK in the 1960s, and was making his own comics by his teenage years. Though his parents were working class, the precocious Moore placed into a grammar (preparatory) school over the objections of its elitist headmaster, but got expelled at age 17 for dealing LSD. From that point on, he read widely and scraped out a living for himself and his young family doing a variety of odd jobs (Millidge, 2011, pp. 18ā41).
Moore soon found work writing and drawing strips for British underground comix in the mid-1970s. Like their American equivalents, these short-run, independently published titles primarily featured sex, drugs, music and left-wing politics. Punk rock arrived on the scene in the late 1970s, adding to the general sense of mayhem and rebellion.
By the early 1980s, Moore had moved higher in the industry, writing science fiction stories for the groundbreaking British weekly 2000 AD and working on characters like Doctor Who and Captain Britain, published by Marvel UK. He also still wrote and drew a couple of weekly strips for the undergrounds.
These experiences shaped Mooreās sensibilities as a writer and made him a unique voice when he rose to mainstream prominence later in the 1980s. In particular, Mooreās British working class background made him far more attuned to economic issues and their relationship to politics and sociology than his contemporaries in American comics, who were largely the product of post-war suburban affluence. He was also more thoroughly steeped in the radicalism of the underground movement relative to others in the superhero side of the business.
V for Vendetta: economic inequality and political violence
Mooreās political and economic concerns soon manifested in his work, culminating in his first masterpiece, V for Vendetta, serialized in Warrior, a new publication spotlighting the rising generation of British creators, starting in 1982. It was eventually completed and collected by DC Comics in 1988, then issued as a collected trade edition graphic novel shortly afterwards.
V for Vendetta, atmospherically drawn by artist David Lloyd, is contemporary dystopic science fiction rather than a superhero story. Itās set in a near-future Britain ruled by a fascist regime that maintains its grip through surveillance, secret police and propaganda. The protagonist, known only as V, who hides his face behind a sinister Guy Fawkes mask, stages a series of acts of resistance as he is pursued by the forces of the state.
Though well plotted and gripping, the foreground action of V for Vendetta is just window-dressing for the political themes that were very much in the air in the early 1980s. The world of Vendetta specifically reflected concerns about Margaret Thatcherās Tory government, which profoundly disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers in bringing deregulation, privatization and the animal spirits of free market capitalism to British shores. Moore, hailing from the Midlands, saw the impact of those policies all around him. He grasped the relationship between wealth, political power, control of the narrative and economic policymaking, and used the medium of comics to conjure a vision of one possible outcome of right-wing policies and attitudes taken to their logical conclusion.
Totalitarian dystopias are a dime a dozen in the speculative fiction genre, and the dissident rebel protagonist can easily veer into clichƩ. What distinguishes Vendetta is how methodically Moore extrapolated from the current economic and political environment of early-1980s Britain to create a future in which the citizenry would plausibly hand over their liberty to a despotic regime.
The dictatorship in Vendetta more closely resembles Chile under Pinochet ā a regime that used police-state violence to safeguard market-driven economic inequality ā than other types of fascism motivated by ideology such as Nazism. The Leader isnāt a charismatic madman or crackpot; heās a deft manipulator of the levers of power who rose gradually as panic set in around a crisis. He governs behind the rhetoric of nationalism: āthe duty of every citizen is to seize the day and make Britain great againā (Moore and Lloyd, 1990, p. 10). To perpetuate his rule he maintains institutions that legitimize his government like Parliament and the Crown while hollowing them out, and projects force under the guise of maintaining law and order.
The repressive politics in Vendetta lead to a society in which the corrupt and incompetent prosper, the favored class of elites and professionals enjoy every privilege, and arrogant brutes perpetrate injustices on ordinary people with impunity. V, the dissident anarchist in the Guy Fawkes mask, responds to the covert violence of this social order with overt violence. It makes for an exciting, emotionally engaging and cathartic story, treading on terrain that had, until that time, rarely been explored in mainstream comics.
Miracleman: the economics of a superhero utopia
At the same time Moore was sharpening his political critique in V for Vendetta, he launched a different kind of storytelling revolution in Marvelman, also serialized in the pages of Warrior. Marvelman was a character created for the British market by Mick Angelo in the 1950s, modeled heavily on Captain Marvel, a popular character from the 1940s published by Fawcett (later purchased by DC and rebranded āShazam!ā). Like American comics from the same era, Marvelmanās original adventures were innocent and unsophisticated, even corny, but Mooreās generation remembered them with nostalgic affection.
Dez Skinn, publisher of Warrior, believed he had acquired the rights to the character2 and wanted to relaunch an updated version. Alan Moore, in the midst of a highly successful run on the āotherā native British superhero, Marvelās Captain Britain, was recommended for the job, paired with Gary Leach, an artist with a realistic style to complement Mooreās reimagining of the character. For legal reasons, when Eclipse Comics began publishing the series in the United States in 1984, the title and character were renamed Miracleman.
From the first page of the new series, it was clear that Mooreās ambitions extended beyond anything previously attempted in mainstream superhero comics.3 He began poking at the familiar tropes of the genre inherited from the first generation of creators: tropes that anchored superheroes in a world of simplistic morality, juvenile concepts and inconsistencies that no longer rang true to more mature readers. He addressed a number of questions that had inhibited fansā suspension of disbelief as superheroes had struggled over the preceding two decades toward greater sophistication, for example:
ā¢ If every story in a characterās 40+ year history is considered part of a canonical continuity, how can more complex present-day interpretations of the character be reconciled with some of the sillier concepts and behaviors from bygone decades?
ā¢ How do superheroes maintain adult romantic relationships with ordinary humans?
ā¢ Why donāt governments take more of an official interest in superpowered people?
ā¢ Considering how much death and destruction supervillains cause, and the fact that they always manage to escape from prison, why donāt the heroes j...
