Jesus Christ.

As I was reading this, and putting the pieces together on what Moore was doing, I was a little skeptical.  Grant Morrison (and others) have criticized some of Alan’s work as diverting into cop out endings masked by poetic writing; I haven’t felt the same, but I would say you can classify Moore’s comics as falling into some primary themes that he repeats.  Which is true of a lot of guys (especially Morrison…) but it’s interesting that Alan has almost rewritten the same tale from a few different perspectives, like giving it another go to see if he can make it stronger.  And so with Crossed Plus 100, I felt, for the first time, like this was a detraction, the direction things were going lifted from other sources, as well as Moore’s other Avatar works, in a way.  This didn’t make it bad by any means, just not as strong as I felt it could be.

And then, as with the best stories by the best story-tellers, while I wasn’t wrong in my plotting predictions, the precision of the composition to get us there became more and more apparent.  If I was just trying to guess the ending, sure, I’d be disappointed, but once I considered Moore’s narrative structure – an “archivist”, 100 years into mankind’s future of the Crossed world as we’ve seen it previously, whose job, in the re-burgeoning human society is to catalogue the remains of our past, mentioning classic (and relevant) sci-fi books that she discovers, giving each chapter of the arc its title – I was *moved* to a true state of *fright* by the story.  Which is what made
Garth’s original entries so much more effective than a lot of the gorefests to follow: that he plumbed deep into his criticisms of human nature and really made you feel hollow as you turned the pages.  Several contributions like this, though, and it seemed like he ran out of steam, switching tactics for the last (as of now) storyline he worked on, which was a bloated sort-of origin story.

So where else to go?  And initially it seemed like Alan had just latched onto the idea of extrapolating the timeline, seeing how humanity would (inevitably) bounce back after awhile.  This in itself *is* incredibly fascinating, Moore building a convincing world (or the glimpse we see of a few settlements) and tactfully showing us how managing resources works, how the archiving works, how concepts gender and sex and language have all massively shifted in the wake of the horrors of “the surprise.”  And unlike a lot of sci-fi (as Moore billed this in the preview book) with made up jargon and concepts, it’s not just wholesale gobbledygook that you decipher via an index: the
foreigness of the world is a story-telling device, and gradually understanding it through context is intensely satisfying.

But, again, it’s once the true horror of the story hits – once the patterns and themes fit together, and make sense – that it all comes together (or falls apart).
I realize I should mention the art.  Gabriel Andrade did an excellent job realizing all of the details specified by Alan.  But for some reason I didn’t feel compelled to sit on any particular page beyond studying these points which I know were scripted.  Jacen Burrows’ work on Alan’s Courtyard stuff is a good example of an artist who can bring extra mood to the scene.  He gave Courtyard (and its sequels) a sense of creepiness; with Crossed his work added to the sense of desolation and utter hopelessness.  So while Andrade’s work is technically stunning, and I definitely got a sense of character from everyone, for whatever reason, I never felt that extra dose of mood.  I’m not sure why, unless it’s just new for the artist to be working from such a detailed script, and maybe it didn’t give him extra room (he felt) to personalize.  Certainly not a detraction, as you can’t knock the work otherwise, just a note.

So: I closed the cover on the last issue in shock, as I did with those first Garth Ennis issues.  True, I enjoy things that make us feel hopelessness or worthless, but I “enjoy” it more when it seems like the writer is truly challenging us to accept it, and not just shock us into a depression.  I love discovering that there are still new ways to go about doing this, especially via a title that one would think has already been wrung for all potential degradations.