The Compleat Moonshadow by J.M. DeMatteis

The feel of the work is more fantastic than science-fictional, more dreamlike than either. What strikes truest is the book’s depiction of a universe full of the purely unpredictable wonder, horror, crassness, and all those things that cannot be known. Oddly, the insistence on a not-entirely-convincing pose of cynicism is perhaps the most adolescent thing in the book. Young Moonshadow’s a naïf old Moonshadow is world-weary, and almost obsessively undercuts his younger self’s ideals. Stylistically, the book has a distinctive tone of jaded romanticism. It’s picaresque on a grand scale, the plot loose, characters fading in and out, recurring and being abandoned. He grows older, encounters sex and death and things of the spirit. They kick around the universe, and Moonshadow becomes orphan and outcast alternately soldier and nanny, confidant of kings and outcast untouchable. He remembers his growing up in the G’l Doses’ ‘zoo’ before his exile in company of his mother, his cat, and a faceless furry humanoid named Ira who’s all id: sex drive and scatology. The book is his story, told by an aged Moonshadow recalling his youth.

A hippie named Sunflower is abducted from Earth by smirking balls of light called G’l Doses, who have the power of gods and utterly inscrutable motives one of them impregnates her, and their child’s named Moonshadow by his mother. Moonshadow is a curious coming-of-age story. It’s a weird, heady mix of science fiction and fantasy, of fairy tale and scabrous parody. Later reprinted by Vertigo, with a slightly changed conclusion, Dematteis and Muth also created a sequel, Farewell, Moonshadow, now reprinted along with the original series in a paperback collection of the whole work, The Compleat Moonshadow. Before it died, though, Epic published what might have been the best comic series in the 1980s to be printed with a Marvel Comics logo, up there with Walt Simonson’s run on Thor: J.

Epic, Marvel’s attempt at a creator-owned line, largely faded away in the 1990s (though Marvel does still occasionally do some creator-owned work through their Icon imprint). Vertigo, a DC imprint featuring better deals for creators, seems to have become more strict in their contracts, and the recent departure of their founding editor doesn’t seem promising for the imprint’s future. Both companies dabbled in various kinds of creator ownership, but both appear mostly to have retreated to the relative safety of work-for-hire deals in recent years. That hasn’t really happened, so far as I can see. There was a time in the 1980s when it looked like Marvel and DC Comics might slowly evolve into something like mainstream book publishers: publishers who gave creators fair deals respecting copyright, and who lived off of the publication of new titles rather than the exploitation of intellectual property from decades previous.

The Compleat Moonshadow by J.M. DeMatteis