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In which we look in once more on the brave souls of Parallel Ten…but without Alan Moore.

When Alan Moore launched his America’s Best Comics line for WildStorm comics back in 1999, it was the wild card of the bunch, the one series that no one really knew what to expect from. Promethea, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Tom Strong, even the ad hoc assemblage of stories in Tomorrow Stories, had name creators (Rick Veitch, Kevin Nowlan, J.H. Williams III, Chris Sprouse) and high concepts…but no one really knew what to think about the title which seemed to be, at face value, merely Hill Street Blues with superheroes, illustrated by a pair of artists that few were familiar with. But typically, Moore took an ordinary concept and expanded it into something brilliant, contrasting the mundane day-to-day duties of the colorful cast with sudden and well-orchestrated bursts of action, as well as a skewed sense of humor and even some wonderfully touching dramatics…and he had the perfect collaborators in Gene Ha and Zander Cannon, whose prosaically static, deadpan figure drawings actually worked to enhance the humor, drama or action inherent in each situation, and who showed wonderful imagination and wit by working in hundreds of “Easter eggs”, little visual puns that more often as not were just-recognizable-enough representations of characters from different comics publishers and other pop media.  It turned out to be, for a lot of people (including me), the highlight of the line.

Of course, then things deteriorated rapidly as Moore found himself, through no wish of his own, working for DC Comics again when the company acquired WildStorm, and not long after he abandoned every one of the titles in the fledgling ABC line. Of course, this meant no more Moore Top 10 either, although he left on a high note with the excellent prequel graphic novel Top 10: The Forty-Niners, and a miniseries featuring two of the characters on their own, called Smax. The ABC line itself carried on for a while with other writers, but it just wasn’t the same and soon it was no more. There was one later attempt to restart the franchise; in 2005 a miniseries titled Beyond the Farthest Precinct came and went; it featured the cast five years later, dealing with a number of threats from within and without. Written by Paul DiFilippo and illustrated by Jerry Ordway, it utterly failed to capture that certain something that made the Moore issues so special.

So now we come to this, which is now written and laid out by the first series’ inker, Cannon, and drawn by Ha again, reuniting 2/3 of the original team…and while I feared something like the Who without Pete Townshend, it turned out better than I expected. Cannon manages to capture the down-to-earth tone of the character interaction very well, along with the whole vibe that Moore established in general, and the principals remain true to the personalities I remember them having (I’m long overdue to reread the original series). Despite the occasional clunker dialogue-wise (mostly in the form of probably-necessary exposition), he does a good job overall. Certain plot elements are borrowed from Farthest Precinct, curious because that mini was supposed to be set five years later, where this one takes place immediately after V1 #12…I hope this means that they’re treating the former as non-canon. Guess we’ll see. Cannon also works in some clever ideas; there’s a scene in which a character is caught crossdressing as another character (in panty hose, no less), and the new guy “Slipstream Phoenix” is interesting, if a bit of a cipher. His scenes with his new partner, the multiple-bodied Jenny McCambridge aka Multi-Woman (she’s never been drawn sexier), takes some interesting turns, especially when she reveals, somewhat bemusedly, that she’s never had a partner before- because she has always been her own group of seven people. There’s an intriguing mystery that literally pops up at the very beginning, but in time-honored Moore fashion (and I’m sure, many other writers) it then immediately withdraws into the background, serving as a springboard for interaction between the investigating officers. As far as the other half of the equation goes, Ha’s art is solid overall, but suffers a bit from the curious decision to render most of his figures with a soft-focus kind of technique, resembling pastel chalks or watercolors (or lenses smeared with Vaseline even), and it conflicts with the objects- armor, buildings, backgrounds, etc.- that are rendered with a more traditional hard-edged ink line. As I recall, he used this soft-focus effect more consistently in The Forty-Niners, working in sepia tones, and it seemed to work a lot better there, perhaps because of the more limited color palette. I’m happy that he’s experimenting and trying out new techniques and trying to grow as an artist, but this is an odd place to do it.

It’s too early to tell if this is going to be as good as the original; hell, it probably won’t but Moore is a hard act to follow, especially on this title. This is a very good start, I believe, and while it remains to be seen if I’ll get used to Ha’s technique, I’m looking forward to the rest.

Top 10 Season Two #1
“Corpus Delicti”
Script/Layouts: Zander Cannon with Kevin Cannon
Pencils/Inks: Gene Ha
Colors: Alex Sinclair
Letters: Todd Klein

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