3 out of 5

I’m sure, like many, I likely wouldn’t have checked this out if not for Alan Moore’s name being on it.  While my opinion of the writer goes up and down – which I’ll blab about a bit more in a moment – his work has certainly always been worth a read, and the seemingly random setup of an anthology comic headed by a Moore story (…with Kevin O’Neill artwork) was definitely intriguing.

Said story – that shares its title with the series – ended up, perhaps unsurprisingly, being rather similar to Moore’s output of late: a series of spot-the-reference history-of-media reviews, this time focused on cinema.  This subsuming of the world’s fictions (and facts) into his own work has been a passion of Moore’s for quite a long while, producing at least conceptually interesting works, and then occasionally brilliant ones, but the last few years have seen more instances of just straight up fact-spewing, with a narrative barely there to support a list of things that are sorta structured to be read hand-in-hand with annotations.  Seeing the breadth of info jammed in there is notable, but it hasn’t, in my opinion, made for the best reading.

And paired once more with his LXG partner O’Neill – where we can actually track this trend of Moore’s as emerging over its various volumes – Cinema Purgatorio tackles different film genres, and its stars, issue by issue, detailing the horrors behind the shiny spectacle on screen.  The framing narrative of an unseen narrator watching movies that offer up these twisted tales is limp, and if the ‘reveal’ of what the theater is is actually intended to be a reveal after all, then, well, maybe you forgot to read the title of the story itself.

…That said, setting aside how all 18 parts actually work as a ‘story,’ CP’s individual fact-filled entries, read just for the information and O’Neill’s lively art, are a bit more successful than some of the other variations on this theme Moore has done, primarily because the info that’s rattled off isn’t masked by anything: maybe he uses nicknames or only says a celebrity’s first or last name, but there’s enough context here that you can actually follow and appreciate the story’s that have been dug up and displayed, and because they generally focus on one person for each entry, it maintains internal linearity.

So that’s Moore’s bit of CP: not a great overall 18-part tale, perhaps, but interesting in slices.

The other entries in the anthology go up and down in quality over the run, excepting Max Brooks’ A More Perfect Union, which – if you follow the rules of comic book stacks, and putting the books you are really looking forward to on the bottom of the stack – I always read first – and Kieron Gillen’s Modded, which maintained an even-keelled and entertaining silliness throughout.

A More Perfect Union is initially hampered by incredibly stiff art from Michael DiPascale, but it’s not helped by Brooks’ alternate Civil War history that sets up giant ants as the antagonists.  Sure, that’s a fair enough alt-history premise, except… except he forgets to do anything with it.  So there are ants.  Okay.  Every few issues, an afterword will appear to tell us how Brooks altered the reality (besides the ants) to match his story, and it’s… also like he forgot to actually change anything really interesting.  Maybe if you’re a war buff, the subtle name- and event-checking makes this worthwhile, but man, this was just not written to be a comic.  Gabriel Andrade thankfully adds some spice to the art when he takes over, but its not enough to inject energy into the narrative.

Garth Ennis’ Code Pru starts out as a pretty fun little monster-of-the-issue format, spinning up a world where EMTs and the cops are also responsible for treating and policing vampires, zombies, and other creatures… which the rest of the world ignores.  Garth skips over trying to justify this too heavily, allowing him to just have fun poking at tropes regarding each creature and shading the setup with some commentary on prejudice.  He mostly avoids Ennisisms (y’know, sex jokes, excessive everythingness), but its when he starts trying to build background for his lead character – newbie EMT Pru – that the story starts to lose steam, and it eventually does fall back on this feeling like Garth is just making fun of people instead of finding something new within his narrative.  Raúlo Cáceres’ art is fantastic throughout, though.

Christos N. Gage and the eventually double-dutied Andrade similarly start out great and then lose momentum on The Vast, in which the Americans and Russians are dueling over finding baby kaiju monsters to train for when they grow into giant kaiju monsters.  This also takes the POV of a rookie, new to the US kaiju team, the Gabriel’s creature design and actionry panels fuel a really intriguing blend of zaniness and humanity from Gage, but eventually that’s set aside for, like, kaijus just fighting.  Which could be awesome, but, y’know, pages and pages of battle sequences only get you so far.

Modded, from Gillen, tosses us in the deep-end of super-powered beasts and their trainers, eventually revealing itself to be a riff on various video games and their genres.  Gillen’s story survives an artist transition – from Ignacio Calero to Nahuel Lopez – who are pretty different from one another but both end up bringing their own sense of awesome to the strip, and while the story doesn’t feel too out there once you get the gist of what he’s doing, he keeps it fresh and fun by changing up the vibe from issue to issue, but also maintaining a narrative throughline so that it’s not just nostalgia fluff.

Each strip probably boils down to about six regular-sized issues worth of material, meaning they’ll fit into trades pretty well.  While Cinema Purgatorio was a welcome oddity, as the strips don’t necessarily feel linked in any thematic way, picking and choosing your preference in a collected edition might be a better way to go about checking them out.  Altogether, it’s a mixed bag, definitely erring on the side of time-passing entertainment, but nothing that makes you reach automatically for the next issue.