Alan Moore’s Snakes and LaddersAlan Moore’s Snakes and Ladders was one of his first major works dealing specifically with his unique approach to magic, following his revelation in 1995 that he himself was, in a very real sense, a magician. Many of us comics readers have since come to a new understanding of this prickly, intense and deeply spiritual eccentric wizard from Northampton who used to write superhero comics through this and other psychedelic pieces. Unearthing, written with Mitch Jenkins, is probably the most successful adaptation of Moore’s live performances to comics, but Snakes and Ladders is a true multi-media piece, involving music, spoken word and visual images. The purpose of such pieces of art, Moore freely states, is to confuse and confound the senses and draw the viewer/reader/listener into a contemplative and fundamentally psychedelic state, in which they are open to new ideas and new ways of seeing the universe. The Alan Moore who wrote Watchmen is emphatically the same Alan Moore who created these pieces, and if a reader sees the obvious authorial links between the works, they truly understand Moore as an artist. (If they don’t, they haven’t truly understood Watchmen, for one thing.) But it seems that many in comics have an impatience with Moore’s precious artfulness and see it as indulgent and overtly intellectual. Indulgent, perhaps. Despite the fact that Snakes and Ladders is in some ways quite intellectual, its true power is actually emotional, if one has the right mindset.
Eddie Campbell, Moore’s collaborator on From Hell, adapted the spoken word performance recorded in 1999 to comics form in 2001. A CD was released in 2003, and the inevitable fusion of those two is now being presented on Vimeo in five parts, the first of which is available for anyone to view. It’s fairly close to representing Moore’s original mode of presentation, and in the right setting, a deeply hypnotic experience.
Chapter 1: The Gate of Tears
https://vimeo.com/143329742Chapter 2: Stars and Garters
https://vimeo.com/143710027
Topic: The Entertainment Thread