4 out of 5

For those of us who started out on Alan’s more serious fare like Watchmen or V for Vendetta, you generally get a slight taste for his appreciation of classic comics or pulp when reading the extra material in Watchmen, or if you venture into straight superhero territory with his Whatever Happened… Superman tale.  And, fair enough, a lot of us stop there.  There’s a lot of comics to read.  But those who keep exploring will undoubtedly run into another side of Moore that’s not so far removed from his most celebrated works but might not be the first guess as to what ended up kicking around in a lot of ABC’s published corners: silly kitsch.  Tom Strong is an “honest” version of this, but then you had the maxi-series anthology Tomorrow Stories, which, at its yuk-yukiest, recalls the rampant creativity and giddiness of Moore’s 2000 AD Future Shocks and other creations like BoJeffries.  Each Tomorrow Story issue – the first six are collected in this volume – is split into 3 or 4 unconnected stories, each written by Moore in a slightly different style, and each match with an artist perfect for the tone.  Kevin Nowlan gives the world-destroying innocent hijinx of boy genius Jack B. Quick a polished but expressive look that makes the insanity a joy to read (and easy to read, thanks to Nowlan’s composition skills); Rich Veitch blankets most of noir hero Greyshirt with odd angles and shadows; Melinda Gebbie lets Moore’s Victorian bodice-ripper poetics loose with her mishmash of collages, or photostats, or bubbly, colorful cartoon heroines in Cobweb; Jim Baikie meshes 90s excess with an energetic slapstick vibe for the muscle-tights hero-baiting The First American and U.S. Angel; and Hilary Barta is Hilary Barta in the generally silly Splash Brannigan – a hero made out of ink.

Appreciation of the series will vary depending on your tolerance for Moore’s different voices and styles of humor, with Quick the most “intelligent” strip and Greyshirt an entertaining shadow sendup with some truly impressive panel story or panel structures, while First American is all dumb or perverted yuks, and Cobweb – well, it’s the bit in each issue I didn’t look forward to, but if you like prosaic Moore, you’ll like it, I suppose.  The lack of a fifth star, though, is more for the lack of consistency within each story.  Quick and F.A. stay pretty tonally consistent, but Cobweb is all over the place and Greyshirt flip-flops between science hero, noir, and pulp.  Also
starting about halfway through, most of the characters seem to get meta all of a sudden and make references to panels and pages.

But the sheer energy and jam-packed-with-content nature of the series – each vignette in each issue feels more eventful than some full mini-series you’ll read – keeps it rewarding and absolutely entertaining, and a wonderful refresher in the knowledge that Moore can be a truly funny guy while whipping out brain-warping concepts at the same time.  The hardcover is also quality in terms of construction, and the slipcover looks good.  Plus there’s a nice sewn-in bookmark.  Bonuses: some extra story summary dividing pages (I think), one of the variant covers, and a few extra sketches.