Notes on some other Alan Moore comics

Miracleman
 
    Quidquid luce fuit, tenebris agit [What occurred in the light, goes on in the dark]:  but the other way around, too.  What we experience in dreams--assuming that we experience it often--belongs in the end just as much to the over-all economy of our soul as anything experienced "actually":  we are richer or poorer on account of it, have one need more or less, and finally are led a little by the habits of our dreams even in broad daylight and in the most cheerful moments of our wide-awake spirit.
    Suppose someone has flown often in his dreams and finally, as soon as he dreams, he is conscious of his power and art of flight as if it were his privilege, also his characteristic and enviable happiness.  He believes  himself capable of realizing every kind of arc and angle simply with the lightest impulse; he knows the feeling of a certain divine frivolity, an "upward" without tension and constraint, a "downward" without condescension and humiliation--without gravity! How  could a human being who had had such dream experiences and dream habits fail to find that the word "happiness" had a different color and definition in his waking life, too?  How could he fail to--desire happiness differently?  "rising" as described by poets must seem to him, compared with this "flying," too earthbound, muscle-bound, forced, too "grave."
--from Jensuits von Gut und Boese:  Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft [Beyond Good and Evil:  Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future], by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann, p. 106 (section 193).

    Considering that Moore places a long (not particularly apposite) Nietzsche quotation at the head of The Red Queen Syndrome, and that Book I is titled "A Dream of Flying," I strongly suspect that Moore had the above quotation in mind while working on Miracleman.



 
Though from the devastated streets there rose in time an edifice that was no less than Albion, than Camelot fulfilled, we still retain these killing fields.
We have not turned them into hushed memorial parks, drawing a veil of quiet discretion over bloody fact:  here, there are coral reefs of baby skulls, and worse.
Much worse.
These charnel pastures serve as a reminder, a memento mori, never letting us forget that though Olympus pierce the very skies, in all the history of Earth, there's never been a heaven; never been a house of gods...
...that was not built on human bones.
        --Book Three, Olympus, p. 92.
    I was reminded of this passage when I heard that a Rwandan church, the site of a massacre during the 1994 genocide, has been preserved untouched and corpse strewn.
 

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