Brighter Than You Think: 10 Short Works by Alan Moore: With Critical Essays by Marc Sobel (Critical Cartoons)

Its great to be able to have a collection of early works by Alan Moore, But the presentation does seem a bit sloppy. The colors are faded and lackluster as if the original prints had been stored in the back of a dumpster. The stories themselves are great and I enjoy Marc Sobel's explanations on why they are special and well ahead of their time, but most of Marc's essays contain long drawn out wankfests about how he is a way superior comic nerd than you. Overall good read.

Not just for the Alan Moore completist. This book has "The Bowing Machine" and "Brighter Than You Think," two of his best short works. The introductory text is really helpful, too. You learn where each piece was published and the circumstances that made it happen. This book is pretty fantastic.

Great collection of long out of print early works by comic book writing legend, Alan Moore.

A great Moore collection. Not one of these was I already familiar with. Shows the wide scope of his work and talent. Though, Moore's art is so good that the essays are not needed. However, I like to study and the getting into these stories and what spawned them is a fantastic bonus.

Thnak you

First of all, I'm glad to have these stories -- there are a few in the collection that have been nearly impossible to find, and I'm grateful to finally see them in printed form. However, this collection feels like a missed opportunity. Mainly because of the print quality -- it's fine, if not terribly sharp, on the b/w line art, but very poor on the 4-color pieces; they look like they were scanned from the halftones -- the blacks and the details are completely blown out. See the attached photos from 'Pictopia' for comparison-- the sharper/brighter one is from Fantagraphics "best of the 80's' volume; the version in this volume completely butchers the art. The essays are are interesting and give a thorough context for each story; they are very heavy on the citations though, with apparently no original interviews, and come off as patched together from a few key sources that most die-hard Moore fans will have already.

This book is worth it for the collection of long out-of-print stories alone. It is fascinating to see Moore's voice and storytelling evolve over time. I also found that Sobel's accompanying essays were critical to my enjoyment and appreciation of the stories. The essays provide a detailed historical account of the social context and issues about which Moore was writing, as well as what was happening in Moore's life at the time which may explain certain aspects of each piece. It is difficult for us now to understand why homosexuality and/or the AIDS epidemic were huge taboos at the time, for example, and the essays help enormously in contextualizing and enriching the stories. He discusses the talented artists and their work with Moore, as well. The stories show a range of Moore's work from historical, social critique, personal, and purely humorous. An excellent addition for any collector of Moore's work, comics art, criticism, and/or powerful storytelling.

While it has pretty great stories as expected they aren't released in the greatest looking printed form.

Some of the stories printed in this collection of short stories I already had with some older comic books and anthologies I possessed. After reading through this collection and the subsequent essays it gave me a better understanding of the stories and insights into what they were trying to covey as well. Additionally it also gave me further insight into Alan Moore as a writer whose works I have been reading since my mid to early teens and continue to read to this day. Currently reading Jerusalem and that is a fairly dense bit of literature with what little I have read so far. Overall this gave me more insights into Moore's writing, his life, and why he had the falling outs with the big 2. If you are a fan of great writing and a fan of Moore I would highly recommend this book to you, and to be honest to any one in general. Overall a really fantastic read.

Gran colección de obras de Alan Moore, casi todas son joyas por si mismas y los ensayos son muy valiosos!

Really good edition for a paperback, the stories by Moore are - as often is the case - a thing of beauty, and the essays provide excellent reference material - social context, publication history, other works' influences, that sort of things. However, I was slightly disappointed by the fact that they do not really qualify as academic criticism, literary theory is never coeherently employed in the analysis of these stories, and that's definetely a pity and a wasted occasion.