Pictopia by Alan Moore & Don Simpson (No. 92)

Pictopia (1986)

by Alan Moore & Don Simpson
with Mike Kazaleh, Pete Poplaski & Eric Vincent

REVIEW BY RICH KREINER:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
Alan Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns were no more to blame for the increasing cruelty and violence in superheroes in the later part of the 1980s than Moore and Miller were to blame for the increasing ruthlessness and greediness of Thatcher's and Reagan's social policies of the same period. But writer Moore and artist Don Simpson would critique society's sanctioned heartlessness using brutal superheroes as a metaphor. Along the way, they would raise a lament to the demise of comics themselves, both as a social institution and as a valued industry. That's a lot to pack into a 13-page story, one of the shorter works in this list of 100.

Moore, a clever student of comics' history and already a jaded hand in the field, was at his most trenchantly concise and riding high dudgeon. Simpson, all-too-familiar with the inherent absurdity of superheroes and the comics industry through his own Megaton Man, acted as the hammer. 

Here Sammy Sleepyhead rouses neighbours with his incestuous nightmares. Red Dimstead, driven to hooking, brings home South Seas Sullivan the sailor as her husband Deadwood dries out in alcoholic read. Elections are contested among political caricatures. Out on the streets, resident but out-of-work residents of the Funnies Ghetto, acting as society's geeks, "let you disfigure them for a buck." Holdover characters reluctant to get with the program are threatened with no longer fitting into "continuity".

As an indictment of a literate public and soured public taste, Pictopia is as sharp, poignant and hilarious a prosecution as comics has yet levelled against itself. As a jab at larger societal problems, it foreshadowed Moore's and Sienkiewicz' visually explosive and politically explicit Shadow Play: The Secret Team from 1989's Brought To Light.

READ THIS COMIC:
Pictopia first appeared in the comics-anthology Anything Goes #2 (1986), published by Fantagraphics Books, which was designed to raise funds for their legal defence costs in a defamation suit brought against them by Michael Fleischer for comments made about him by Harlan Ellison in The Comics Journal #53 (1980). A deluxe, oversized edition of Pictopia was finally published in 2021 by Fantagraphics Books. Pictopia was also reprinted in Brighter Than You Think (2017), a collection of 10 short comics written by Alan Moore accompanied by insightful analysis by Marc Sobel, published by Uncivilised Books.

FURTHER READING:
Alan Moore World
Don Simpson, Cartoonist At Large