I never thought I'd ever get to see this thing. I'd recommend everyone to check out the album too. This was released as a comic book with a spoken word CD by Alan Moore, featuring him doing a dodgy American accent, pretending to be some CIA spook, recounting the CIA's activities.
I'm listening to it right now. I'm not sure what to make of Moore's enthusiastic American accent yet but it's certainly surprising and unusual, which makes it worth a listen in my book.
>obscure comic reader format
.cbr is not obscure. Even if you don't want to use the a reader for whatever stupid reason you can just rename the file and extract it.
I used some reader or other to get through it tonight, & found it a fairly fascinating piece of work. It was definitely augmented by Alan Moore reading it through on MP3 files. Made the experience immersive, as well as ensuring that I didn't interrupt myself.
This also brought to mind two notable things about him: firstly, Moore has an amazing voice & this was quite clearly one of his works which was driven by a character's sound. He's described in interviews how certain characters just don't *click* until he gets the voice right, as with the diabolic arch-enemy of the Swamp Thing (who he perfected the pretty damn terrifying guttural snarl of in the mirror).
I'd imagine that while dealing with something quite so complex & dense as a 30 page history of the CIA that was hugely helpful. Especially given that the narrator was an anthropomorphised depiction of the Agency itself...
Secondly: it relates interestingly to a comment Moore made on comics vs. cinema, in another interview. He noted here that while in film you get as long to linger as the director allows you, in comics you set your own pace. This distinction creates a completely different experience, he observed, & constitutes one of the major differences that he has sought to emphasise/utilise throughout his career.
This is nearly (but not *quite*) obliterated by the introduction of his audio narrating/acting. You are required to get through the text & absorb the picture before his voice moves on, with or without you. That *could* be mitigated by pausing your media player but frankly, who's going to?
I suppose if I was coming at this via some dogmatically ideological perspective I'd condemn him for this early perversion of the form, but I instead think that in this instance it's highly appropriate: you are forced along the deranged, but factual, tale not at a breakneck pace (or even without pauses), but in writhing jolts, whole fates of nations cleaved through without hesitation.
It wasn't really entirely a surprise to see Alan Moore encorporating this medium, as I'd heard The Moon & Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels & was aware that sections of A Disease of Language (The Birth Caul) were originally spoken word (although I've read but not heard that). This was a novelty all the same, though, & I think it contributed a lot to the work.
>>1886 You make some interesting points about the importance of voice to Moore when he is creating his characters.
However, I am distracted by your insistence on the obscurity of the .cbr format. It's a plain fact that most comics on the internet are in .cbr format. The only other common format that would work would be .pdf but I doubt one of Brought to Light exists because you just don't see pdf comics very often unless it's a preview put up by the the publishers or perhaps one of the New York Times comics http://www.nytimes.com/ref/magazine/funnypages.html or some Marvel crap released by "iNTENSiTY" http://pre.zerosec.ws/?cmd=search&pre=comic
>>1886 How is .cbr obscure? I don't think I've ever seen a comic in any other format, apart from the horribly slow Acrobat. Pretty much what 1887 says. Seriously, take a look around the internet.
Tbh this is one of the first comic I've downloaded. The others were PDF, mostly I read hardcopy or webcomics. Apologies for my presumptuousness, I suppose, it seemed obscure to me.
>>1886 I hate to be a pain in the arse, but the comic and the album were released as separate artifacts - there's nothing that says you have to read the comic whilst listening to the audio, and I'd suggest that even if you do it's silly to read the text on the comics pages since Moore is reading it out to you verbatim... oh, and both 'The Birth Caul' and 'Snakes And Ladders' were originally spoken word pieces; the only parts of 'A Disease Of Language' that're original to the book are the art and the interview (not that this makes the book any less wonderful).
>>1890 Manga scanlations are always released in .zip or .rar format. I don't know why, perhaps someone should tell the translators about the .cbr format.
As for the minutiae of a Disease of Language, I knew that I wasn't being *exactly* accurate when I mentioned it, but I thought to myself: "You know, I'm sure there's no pedant who's enough of an arsehole to pick me up on that?" Clearly I overestimated /com/. My error.
But yes, the book is indeed wonderful. A glorious headache of a thing, the revelation of the ideology underpinning a lot of Moore's other work in all its tangled splendour.
