Mindless Ones

Astounding Weird Penises 258
by Alan Moore, Rational Comics/Dodgem Logic

Because of course the comic’s primal ancestor isn’t cave art – stop being so pompous – it’s the bored schoolboy’s notebook, the dirty little doodle hiding between the sums and spelling notes.

It’s a medieval idea, of course, and it shows, but The Magician, so it goes, is always ‘male’ – active, singular of intent, direct, penetrative. In his first, short, and probably last adventure, Astro Dick, a little magic wanderer, takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the magician’s eternal journey. Y’know, with fannies and that.

On a moon of naked (but for capes, straps and oil) Prometheae, Astro Dick defeats the Brainosaurus and earns their physical favour. As a perfect fool and seeker of the truth of the self, or something, and eschewing the pleasures of the mind’s flesh (sex is always as much a psychic, phantasmic phenomenon as a bodily one, remember, so perfectly fitting for the lunar sphere), he heads via the creative, resplendent and… err, mercurial planet of Mercury (yes, there is a Metal Men cameo. He doesn’t hate comics as much as he likes to say) on to the heart of the sun. Wielding yet another magic wand, he bashes out the sun’s alchemical head, revealing the true sun hiding behind the sun’s son, the sublime and inconceivable techno-glorious awe-staggering gold icon of it, and understandably ballshrunk, heads back to the moon where the ladies of pulchritude still await his attention, which, magicianly ambitions floppily defeated, he is only too pleased to grant them. Brainosaurus comes back and Astro Dick is needed in the fray, and this is the big bad joke, and it goes through the boundary of bad jokes at lightspeed and comes out the other side and ends up being kind of funny, I think, so spoiler warning I suppose:

Having been where he’s been his space helmet (helmet!) is so slathered with ladyjuice that he can’t see what he’s doing, and Brainosaurus wins. End.

Given away as the free space-spinning sweetener with the second issue of his current project, the OZ-redux alt.lifestyle mag Dodgem Logic, Astounding Weird Penises is, apparently,  the first published comic to be both written and drawn by Alan Moore.  He can do what he likes, you can almost hear him thinking, and if that happens to be a sixties throwback undieground porno joke comic, where he satirises his own best comics work and personal religion with lots of pics of ladyparts, manparts and fallen lunar Greeks, then that’s just what he’s going to do. It’s kind of fingers-in-poo, kind of compelling, kind of awful, kind of funny.