Big Numbers #1-2
Published by: Mad Love – 1990
Written by: Alan Moore
Illustrated by: Bill Sienkiewicz
If the clear, clever, and insightful writing in Big Numbers doesn’t make you swoon—which it should—the art will, and it will entice you to revisit certain pages both before and after reading them simply to absorb their understated beauty. It is a disappointment—nay, a travesty—to live in a universe where Big Numbers is unfinished and looks like it will remain so. Alan Moore (writer) and Bill Sienkiewicz (illustrator) originally planned Big Numbers as a twelve issue miniseries published by Mad Love in 1990, but only the first two issues ever saw the light of day and can still be found for sale online at a reasonable price. The third issue was apparently completed but never published and—via a quick Google search—some scans of what purports to be poorly reproduced Xerox copies of the finished, lettered artwork can be found online.
If only Moore were compelled by money (Moore has shown time and again that money cannot sway his convictions, having foregone millions of dollars by disallowing his name to be associated with any adaptations of his work into other mediums) the public might be able to persuade him to finish Big Numbers, but, as is, all we can do is sit back and hope his benevolence will take pity on us—his readers—and he will seek to complete his unfinished masterpiece. It is in the interests of mankind to have more comics live up to the heights and potential of Big Numbers—and this is after having only read the first two issues and imagining what was to come, where the story and art would’ve gone from there.
At both its heart and on its surface, Big Numbers is about people and their lives. Describing it thus may seem simplistic as such a description can be applied to nearly every story ever written, but in Big Numbers the focus is on the human—whether it is a woman returning to the town she grew up in only to find her family and friends too preoccupied with their own lives to give her the welcome she longs for, or a cab driver whom repeatedly brings up, unprompted, a painful chapter in his life only to claim to not want to talk about it, clearly yearning for connections deeper than the “single-serving friends” he encounters on his route.
The plot is only hinted at in the first two issues, but appears to be a down to earth slice of life free of the supernatural and sensational. In a small British town, a woman author returns to her childhood home after a long absence in search of peace and quiet in which to write her next book; her sister goes on a date and works as a clerk in a local government office; her mother plays bingo; her father, whom lives alone, harasses a minister; an elderly woman is released from jail after serving her sentence for theft; a young black man goes to school and studies advanced science while his father struggles with depression; two psychiatric patients have been released from an inpatient treatment facility into the community-at-large for “community care;” and the family of an American architect prepares to relocate to the U.K. town as construction on a new shopping mall begins there.
None of these are spoilers because they are fairly generic premises; what makes them remarkable is how they are conveyed, both in words as well as in Bill Sienkiewicz’s remarkable black and white artwork—a mixture of pencil, pen-and-ink, painting, and airbrushing which seems like it must have required photographic reference due to its mixture of detailed realism and dynamic stylization, striking a balance as only Sienkiewicz can. All the words are dialogue—there is no narration—meaning everything is “shown” rather than “told,” an “old-to-the-point-of-cliché” edict for writers. Supposedly, Big Numbers was to be Moore’s opus and I think the same could’ve been said of Sienkiewicz. Even unfinished it is an impressive accomplishment for both.
Big Numbers is intelligent without pretension. Case in point, there is a great exchange where a young man summarizes the scientific text he’s been reading by saying, “Apparently, life is a fractal in Hilbert space,”—an obscure reference to mathematical ideas with applications to theoretical physics—to be rejoined by his father’s statement, “Ah, well. I knew it’d turn out t’be somet’in like dat. I knew dat couldn’t be right, about the bowl o’ cherries,”—an obvious reference to the old saying, “Life is a bowl of cherries.” You don’t have to understand the math to understand the joke. The joke juxtaposes two worldviews: that of trying to understand life in the conceptual sense, and that of trying to live life on its own terms, the simple and the complex, and the nobility of both.
As evident in the preceding excerpt, the phonetic spellings of the British accents can, at times, be a little difficult to parse—though, to provide context, it is not nearly as difficult as in Dave Sim’s Cerebus—but, once you fall into the rhythm of the words, it imbues each character with a distinct and realistic voice to match their personality and appearance as no two characters speak quite the same—much the same as in Cerebus.
Big Numbers is mostly appropriate for a general audience. There is much to admire and little to offend. It would be believable that one could even enjoy the comic for its art alone without understanding the gravity of, and fascination with, the faithful, clever, and insightful rendering of daily life, thus the comic as a whole could appeal to even those too young to grasp its full depth. Though, it should be said, there are two brief isolated scenes of imaginary—yet graphic—violence, meaning “those too young to grasp its full depth” should still be in their teens at the least.
Big Numbers is printed in an unconventional square format—meaning it will have to be stored with your copies of Dave McKean’s Cages in an old shoebox instead of with the rest of your comic or graphic novel collection. Each page is aligned on a three-row, four-column panel-grid—a convention similar to the nine-panel grid Moore and Dave Gibbons used in Watchmen. This strict panel arrangement lends itself to repetitions, symmetries, and physical correspondences of panel contents.
Recommendations:
Anyone interested in Sienkiewicz should look at his illustration of Elektra: Assassin and Daredevil: Love and War, both written by Frank Miller, and Stray Toasters—which Sienkiewicz also wrote. Sienkiewicz’s work with Miller has the benefit of clear and clever writing, whereas Stray Toasters, as a narrative, can be confusing, compelling it to sometimes be seen as an artistic artifact rather than a narrative one.
Anyone whom enjoys Sienkiewicz’s art should also find Dave McKean’s interior artwork appealing. McKean is best known as the cover artist of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series—which featured mixed-media “combines” incorporating painting, drawing, photography, collage, and sculpture—but his interior work shares many aspects of style and technique with Sienkiewicz; McKean was even considered as Sienkiewicz’s replacement on Big Numbers when Sienkiewicz decided to leave the book. McKean’s comics Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (written by Grant Morrison), Black Orchid, Violent Cases, and Signal to Noise (all written by Neil Gaiman), and Cages (written by McKean himself) have gained a reputation as great works of literature as well as unique and impressive works of art.
One work to note is Signal to Noise, by Gaiman and McKean. Its plot shares the limited, naturalistic, scope of Big Numbers—nothing supernatural, no superheroes—and shares in the general style of muted colors and mixed-media illustration ranging from photo collage to pen-and-ink and painting reminiscent of Sienkiewicz. The story and its protagonist are believable and the life and death stakes are ones we will each eventually encounter. Signal to Noise follows a movie director during his fight with cancer and the scripting of what will be his final movie. It’s only real “flaw” is that, though complete, Signal to Noise is short—roughly fifty or sixty pages of narrative art subdivided by filler content—and leaves one wanting more—not as vociferously as with Big Numbers, but to a degree that to sate one’s desire for more, one might seek out other works in the same visual and narrative style. Gaiman and McKean’s other work, independently and as a duo, is the obvious first place to start such further exploration.
Alan Moore is a writer in a class of his own, credited with helping mainstream comics mature in the 1980s from the typical adolescent-male power fantasies and superficial superhero and science-fiction tropes of the Silver Age. However, much of his most influential work—Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen—focuses on the impossible, superheroes, and science-fiction; naturalistic narratives are rarer—though From Hell (a collaboration with artist Eddie Campbell) comes to mind.
Brian Bigelow
November 18, 2016
