It Seems I Remain Serious In My Belief that Shakespeare's As Good As Alan Moore.

Nice to see this all set out.

 I'd forgotten how intertwined my love of Shakespeare was with my love of Alan Moore. I fell in love with the both at about the same time, when I was thirteen, and coming back to the full works of Shakespeare now, I'm struck again by how many strengths I see him sharing with Moore's eighties output. Both writers moved from working in slaughter-houses to working in a popular medium derided as poisonous trash. Both took the plots and themes of contemporaraneous fantasies – chivalric love in Shakespeare's case, super-heroes in Moore's – and tested them in a real world populated by knowable characters, with often distressing consequences. Neither seemed particularly interested in heroes either, yet both seemed to believe heartily in sociopathic villains, to the point where they becoming the most fully rounded characters in any story would be a given.

 

 None of this has anything to do with the fact Moore gave his final comic the same name as Shakespeare's swansong, by the way. I've only just realised that.

 Both love words, and use loads of them, and equate writing with magic and magic with world domination, producing not just genre-defining but medium-defining works of cosmic ambition, beauty, and fun, never forget fun – works full of lines I wanted and still want to say, and references I didn't and still don't get. But also, ultimately, merciless works, unmistakably angry that fantasy isn't realisable. Angry, and basically frightened. Still, it didn't occur to me that Shakespeare's first comedy might prove a more disturbing read than Defoe's account of London in the Plague, but that's because I'd forgotten why I loved Shakespeare so much. Here's today's bit then, and after that you'll probably wonder what the fuss was all about. Soho takes its name from the hunting cry used here by Lance by the way. (And, like Lance, I also love crusts.)