Words by Alan Moore
Art by Eddie Campbell
Published by Top Shelf Productions

Ordering Info: http://www.topshelfcomix.com/catalog.php?type=13&title=228

What with all the comic to movie and movie to comic things floating around currently (including the forthcoming V For Vendetta, adapted from Moore's work) how refreshing it is to find a spoken dramatic monologue that was set to music and released as a CD and then became a comic. Erm, wait a minute.
Sounds a bit arty and indulgent doesn't it? Yet the names of Campbell and Moore, the same team who gave the brilliant piece of mature cutting edge comic's work that was From Hell (not a bad movie either) reassure us and prompt us to give it a chance.
Moore's mother died in August 1995. Going through her things at her council house afterwards, he found her birth caul. A caul is a membrane made of amniotic fluid that encases a baby while in the room. Sometimes it drapes itself over the baby's head and the child enters the world wearing it as a cap and veil. Believed to bring good luck to whoever owns it, they were kept and stored away in older times.
Considering this strange relic, Moore was moved to pen a monologue about it which he performed only once at his own 42nd birthday in November of that same year. And now it's a comic.
So what is it exactly? A weird, wondrous and at times deeply moving collage of images underpinning Moore's rich and striking prose. The caul is a map of something we have lost, a diving bell that kept us pure and perfect and untouched. It is described as the opposite of the death mask and likened to the marriage veil, in that we cover the human face at moments of transformation and change. Like Shakespeare's seven ages of man in reverse, Alan Moore charts the different stages of life, beginning with middle age drudgery, finding that something has already gone wrong and taking a step back. "How did we come to be these wraiths in treadmill corridors"? We regress into the womb, carried along by swirling tides of text and chains of images that have no narrative but echo Moore's evocations, sometimes literally, sometimes with metaphor of varying complexity.
Moore's prose is florid and uses flowery vocabulary, sometimes becoming morose or excessive but he always manages to slip in enough engaging lines and observations to keep us wondering. In his description of adolescence for instance he writes: "Hearts on our sleeves and politics on our lapels, we talk the way we dance: self-consciously and without pattern, for its own sake. Boys speak of guitarists, girls of people they know personally." In isolation it may not seem much but the steady trickle of subtle and true comments about our society have a cumulative and profound effect. Towards the end when describing early childhood, Moore adopts a childish style, at once cute and poignant: "Us family is mum and dad and gran and budgie in a cage and other baby and furniture who lives we with."
Campbell is great, never stepping on Moore's toes and never floating away from him. He helps make the text more accessible (as is usual, Moore can be quite esoteric at times) yet he does not rob it of its mystery and art, a tricky thing to do. His black and white art adds to a somber monochrome tone and there is a deep honesty to the way he renders the disillusioned and confused faces of the characters. He is a very frank artist and as such the depiction of the splashes of Moore's grandmother's blood on the paper where the caul is kept and some of the birth imagery may come across as carnal to some but then they are carnal subjects. It would've been easy for Campbell to spiral off into surrealist dada land given his text but for the most part he keeps it reeled in and remembers to focus the images on the themes, making each frame like a fragment of your own past. There are a few dud panels that seem to be disconnected from those around them or just don't show much of anything, but they are rare.
If you're thinking that this sounds like a pretentious art house comic, you're right. It is. But there are those of us who find pretentious art housework intriguing. The real appeal of The Birth Caul is not so much what is on the page, but what it will unfurl in your own mind as you ponder your own life choices and history and nature and purpose as you read this catalogue of things which makes us lose the nature of what we are at birth. Spell like at times, The Birth Caul has a strange magic, which will not be for everyone but is captivating for those who wish to see that the comic book medium is capable of genuine, valid, poetry.

mq432000@yahoo.co.nz