#10 “Music for the Dead” (Jan 2001)

Cover Tag: Officer Down

The Boots and Saddle Case: Toybox and Smax catch up with teen pop star Bluejay on the floor of Club Eternal. He’s a supposed suicide, but not a good fake, since the bullets came from behind him. Police Commissioner Ultima comes calling. She’s dismissive to the police staff, calls Micro-Maid a “Nubian” (i.e. negro), and seems generally insufferable. Synaesthesia recognizes the sound (i.e. the aroma) of Ultima’s perfume from the corpse of Saddle Graczik, which means Ultima, the boss of all police, is the criminal mastermind. Gulp! But she's not one to back away from doing her sworn duty...



A fight breaks out in the cafeteria, and before Ultima is subdued, Sung Li is dead, and Toybox is wounded and trapped under rubble… with the fabled Rumor.



The Libra Case: M’rrgla Qualtz is another casualty of Ultima’s battle with the police. The end?

Other Story Stuff: Captain Traynor gives Kemlo Caesar dating advice: “Follow your heart.” Thanks, boss!

My Two Cents: This issue is all about Ultima, but mainly about fighting her. I like how the characters come in such a wide range of heights; Ultima and Smax must be nine or ten feet tall, though the world around them isn't consistently shown to be large enough to handle such goliaths. What would motivate a police commissioner to go rotten? "Drugs" is a pretty reasonable answer.

The name of Ultima's perfume “Joy” is a pun, since as a perfume it would be “Eau de Joy,” i.e. “Ode to Joy.” This is a section of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the melody of which Synaesthesia hears when she smells the Joy perfume. This melody is used in the hymn “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee.” The issue title "Music for the Dead" thus refers to Synaesthesia hearing "Ode to Joy" when she smells "Eau de Joy" on both Ultima and the dead body of Saddle. Alan Moore loves puns. This also recalls the Beethoven joke in "V for Vendetta," in which one of the many meanings of "V" was the Roman numeral V, representing 5 in Beethoven's fifth symphony:



Speaking of the number 5, Back in Top Ten #5, I wondered aloud if it was taking place at Halloween. The first panel of this issue specifies “October 14th, 1999” so the answer to my previous question is “No.” I guess that robot kid just likes doing a cosplay mashing up Dr. Doom and Charlie Brown.

The Rumor “reveal” is anticlimactic. We heard of his possible existence in an early issue. OK, now we see that he exists, but he doesn’t actually do anything, and when Toybox later mentions having seen him, others just shrug. It seemed like Moore, having mentioned The Rumor in an early issue, felt obliged to close that loop by having him make a cameo, no matter how inconsequential, but it would have been nice for him to contribute to Robyn's rescue in some fashion.

Easter Eggs: 

p.3: A hallucinatory pixie circling Bluejay’s corpse looks like Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld. His gun is called a “shooter.” Jim Shooter perhaps? (And if so, does the gun also resurrect dead characters so that they can be re-used before their trademark lapses?)



p. 5: Will Shakespeare roams the hall of the precinct house.



p.9: A mural of former super-cops is said to be by “King,” surely a reference to Jack “King” Kirby. One of the officers looks like Jor-El, and another like Joan of Arc. The mural is a teaser for the characters of the Forty-Niners graphic novel. One of them is Toybox's father Colonel Lilliput, but nobody treats Robyn like the daughter of a man famous enough to have his painting in the lobby.

#11 “His First Day on the New Job” (May 2001)

Cover Tag: His First Day on the New Job… (This is the first time the same text was on both the cover and page 1.)

The Libra Case: All of the members of the Sidekix boy band were indeed former sidekicks of heroes. Now one of them, Bluejay, has been murdered right before giving a big story to the newspaper. Before her death, M’rrgla Qualtz had implied to Captain Traynor that her team-mates in the Seven Sentinels had molested their teen partners. Coincidence?

The Boots and Saddle Case: Our heroes assess the damage from the big battle with Police Commissioner Ultima last issue. There would be tons of paperwork, Internal Affairs interviews, and media coverage for an event like that, but we don't see any of it.

The replacement for deceased Sung Li is a robot cop named Joe Pi who looks like a Shogun Warrior. He endures frequent episodes of anti-android prejudice with grace and wit, getting way more dialogue than anyone else this issue. Shock-Headed Peter, on the other hand, lets his racism against "clickers" (A.I.s) all hang out.



At Sung Li’s funeral, her police friends meet the two inventors who bio-engineered her, “Weird Science” style. Both of them have alliterative comic book names:



The Incredible Case: Back in issue #1, we met the aged stretch-guy, Mr. Incredible. Later, we saw him arguing on the street after a fender bender. Now he’s a stretchy corpse in an alley, with sand in his lungs. His wife Beach Bunny is an obvious suspect.



My Two Cents: Smax visits Toybox in the hospital. She’s been kept for observation for a week, which shows some combination of “how medical care has changed since the 90s” and “Alan Moore doesn’t know much about medical care” since her injuries (apparently, a concussion and broken ankle) are nowhere near enough to justify that length of stay. People don't tend to spend weeks in traction for broken limbs anymore; they get internal metal rods to hold their healing bones in place. But Moore clearly wants Toybox sidelined to make room for his new favorite, Joe Pi. He even steals her "First Day on the Job" tag line. Poor Robyn! But Joe Pi is worth it, getting lots of good moments in both plot and character.

Easter Eggs:

p. 1: Will Shakespeare makes another appearance. Joe Pi is from Turingville, a reference to Alan Turing, the computing pioneer.

p.6: “Plastic Stan’s Furniture” has a Stan Lee head on its sign. A man shambles away from a trash can holding a super-hero costume, recreating a famous Spider-Man cover image (and all of its subsequent homages).



p.7: Graffiti mentions Tetuso from the anime Akira. Shock-Headed Peter sings a parody of Jimi Hendrix’s song “Hey Joe.” (image above)

p12: A billboard advertises “Soylent Green: For people who like people” (chortle) Tarzan swings through the city in the distance. Doctor Fate is a physician (right side of the panel in the hospital window). The bandaged men in the lower left are probably Negative Man (from the Doom Patrol) and the Unknown Soldier. Is that red bi-plane from Laff-O-Lympics? There should have been a bigger hospital shot than just this one, to fit in all the different "Doctors" of genre fiction. Doctor Who, Doctor Octopus... the list goes on.



p.21: Beside the tomb of Oscar Wilde stands his creation Dorian Gray, as well as The Hanged Man from Astro City. Well, the Hanged Man is more floating than standing, as usual.



p22: Three color-coded super-girls fly through the air. Are they the Powerpuff Girls? Lots of graffiti on a bridge, including “Justice League of Akron.”

Yes, "right hero, wrong color" is the general rule in Top Ten.

I think the vehicle is the Top Ten version of a police motorcycle.

#12 “Court on the Street” (October 2001)

Cover Tag: Court on the Street



The Libra Case: Phantom Jack and Peregrine watch hours of Seven Sentinels newsreel footage to get clues about possible sexual abuse of their sidekicks. Not only do they find vivid evidence of such abuse, they also realize that the Sentinels’ alleged triumphs over evils in outer space were all faked.

The Boots and Saddle Case: Top Ten raids the Seven Sentinels and finds that Boots Wesson has been recently recruited as a junior Sentinel. See, we knew these two cases would come together eventually!



Most of the Sentinels are caught with their pants down (literally, in a giant Jacuzzi) and arrested without incident. Two others go down fighting. The Young Sentinels are taken into protective custody as witnesses. Atoman poses the biggest threat, holed up in an impregnable fortress, but Joe Pi goads him into committing suicide.



Cat and Mouse Game: The battle between the Ultra-Mice and the Atom Cats has altered the timestream so that their epic battle never happened. So when the Ex-Verminator comes back to get paid by Duane’s mom, nobody knows what he’s talking about. Bummer! Note that the Ex-Verminator’s leather gimp mask consists of the letters “X” and V.”



Other Story: Joe Pi helps Mr. Geddon the precog get a job with a physics lab, and tactfully distracts the Geddon kids when they start asking about the noises that mommy and daddy are making together upstairs.

My Two Cents: Joe Pi steals the show of these final two issues, making me wonder why he wasn’t introduced earlier, even made the star of the whole series. Moore seemed to lose interest in apparent protagonist Robyn “Toybox” Slinger after the first few issues. Her toys weren’t put to their obvious reconnaissance uses even when they would have been helpful, as in looking for M’rrgla in the sewer. They were probably all crushed in the rubble at the end of #10, too. Does she still have a job without them? I guess Captain Traynor has no super-powers either, though in The Forty-Niners, we'll see that he does have an airplane.



Easter Eggs:

p. 4: The band “Blues Beetles” recreates the famous Beatles rooftop concert. Band members include Beetle Bailey and Blue Beetle, but Ringo is still on drums.
p.15: The “Green Apple/Green Grocer: Neal O’Neil, proprietor” marketplace is my favorite sight gag yet. “Good Vibranium” pales in comparison.



p.17: The Hound’s secret dog-cave includes a giant fire hydrant and a dog-catcher’s net. His spare costumes include “Aquadog” (underwater), “Space Dog” (astronaut), and “Hot Dog” (fireman).



p.25: Amazo Copies and Stanley Lieber’s Hyper-Bowling. You know, it’s striking for a DC comic (the Green Apple joke above notwithstanding) that few of the Easter eggs are about Weisinger, Swan, Perez, Aparo, Levitz, Siegel, Finger, etc.

p.27: The Evel Knievel bus drives by.

p.30: A newspaper warns: “Global Vampire Alert!” Goku (from Dragonball Z) works in the kitchen at Topo’s restaurant. There have been relatively few anime references in Top Ten, all things considered. I guess it's a big genre all its own.

Looking at the pic, seems like they're going for a JSA vibe with the Sentinels... The one in the air has a Starman-like rod... Dogman definitely reminds of Wildcat... there's an Atomman, and the one on the right has an pretty Hourman-like costume. Then there's Popeye, but that's ok, he's cool

The Forty-Niners (2005) Chapter 1: What Is Believable After War



The German Story: Steven “Jetlad” Traynor was a child prodigy at shooting down Nazis from his airplane. Now the war is over, and he’s a sixteen year old coming to Neopolis (I had to correct myself after instinctively typing "Astro City" first), a wonder-city constucted by German scientists who came to America after the war. Jetlad hopes to join a famed flying squadron The Skysharks. On the train, he meets his former opponent Leni “Skywitch” Muller, a German broom-flier who defected to the Allied cause in 1943. They commiserate over their low status compared to the defected German scientists who are treated like royalty, including Professor Gromolko. Mayor “Johnny Q. Public” Genovese warns an auditorium of new arrivals not to try to play vigilante.



The Vampire Story: Steven and Leni happen upon a bar containing the Skysharks, who immediately offer Steven a job as their mechanic. Leni only gets a suggestion to become a club singer. Then a couple of vampire toughs from the Irenescu gang try to extort protection money from the barkeep until super-cops Steelgauntlet and The Maid intervene.



My Two Cents: This graphic novel contains four chapters weaving together two main cop stories, as did the original Top Ten series. Alan Moore still writes. Gene Ha is alone on pencils and ink, with Art Lyon on colors, mainly in sepia-looking watercolor hues intended to evoke the era through faded photographs. It looks great while setting a mood which is less whimsical and jocular than Top Ten, with fewer sight gags and a tighter focus on Steven primarily, and Leni secondarily.

Leni and Steven take separate rooms in the same boarding house, but I’m pretty sure boarding houses were segregated in our world in the 1940s. Being an Alan Moore story, we get our first mention of prostitution within a few pages, as it’s suggested that nightclub singers moonlight to make some money on the side.

After the thoughtful portrayal of race relations in Top Ten, this story seems like a step back. All Eastern Europeans are Vampires, and all Vampires are evil people who will only be accepted in society if they can be contained. Some races are just bad, apparently.

Easter Eggs:

p.8: A store is named after artist/editor Carmine Infantino.

p.9: “David Goodman Croley” is said to have been the president (of the USA). Martin Goodman published Marvel Comics, but I don't know if that's the reference that Moore intends here.

p.10: Bluto is on the steps of City Hall. A War of the Worlds tripod stalks the streets.



p.14: The Rocketeer’s helmet sits on a shelf.



The older Oriental woman seen in the bar on pages 16-22 is called “The Jaguar Lady” at one point, which may not be what she calls herself. Impact Comics did have an early 90s female character named “The Jaguar,” but she was Brazilian, not Asian, so I don’t know who this Jaguar Lady is.

Re: the gangsters. If memory serves, Alan Moore debuted the Romanian vampire gangsters in the America's Best Comics Special. He basically wanted vampire gangsters and making them Transylvanians worked well. I don't recall if he showed any non-gangster ones. Their use is to flip the stereotype of the Italian gangster. Really, ethnic mobs and gangs were common through the early half of the 20th Century, with the Italian mafia, the irish mobs, the Jewish gangsters (Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel) and the Chinese tongs and triads. There were Eastern European gangsters, though not as prominent, apart from the Jewish gangs. I don't think you can wholly tar and feather Moore for the use of an ethnic gang, given the history of the period. His focus was less on them being from Eastern Europe and more that they are vampires, which made them vulnerable to the Maid's light, given its alleged divine origin. Yes, it would help if there were prominent non-gangster Eastern European or vampire characters; but, Moore didn't have the same space he had with Top Ten.