DeMatteis and Muth’s Moonshadow
There was a time in the 1980s when it looked like Marvel and DC Comics might slowly evolve into something like mainstream book publishers: publishers who gave creators fair deals respecting copyright, and who lived off of the publication of new titles rather than the exploitation of intellectual property from decades previous. That hasn’t really happened, so far as I can see. Both companies dabbled in various kinds of creator ownership, but both appear mostly to have retreated to the relative safety of work-for-hire deals in recent years. Vertigo, a DC imprint featuring better deals for creators, seems to have become more strict in their contracts, and the recent departure of their founding editor doesn’t seem promising for the imprint’s future. Epic, Marvel’s attempt at a creator-owned line, largely faded away in the 1990s (though Marvel does still occasionally do some creator-owned work through their Icon imprint). Before it died, though, Epic published what might have been the best comic series in the 1980s to be printed with a Marvel Comics logo, up there with Walt Simonson’s run on Thor: J. M. DeMatteis and Jon J. Muth’s twelve-issue series Moonshadow. Later reprinted by Vertigo, with a slightly changed conclusion, Dematteis and Muth also created a sequel, Farewell, Moonshadow, now reprinted along with the original series in a paperback collection of the whole work, The Compleat Moonshadow. It’s a weird, heady mix of science fiction and fantasy, of fairy tale and scabrous parody. I want to talk a bit about it here.
Moonshadow is a curious coming-of-age story. A hippie named Sunflower is abducted from Earth by smirking balls of light called G’l Doses, who have the power of gods and utterly inscrutable motives; one of them impregnates her, and their child’s named Moonshadow by his mother. The book is his story, told by an aged Moonshadow recalling his youth. He remembers his growing up in the G’l Doses’ ‘zoo’ before his exile in company of his mother, his cat, and a faceless furry humanoid named Ira who’s all id: sex drive and scatology. They kick around the universe, and Moonshadow becomes orphan and outcast; alternately soldier and nanny, confidant of kings and outcast untouchable. He grows older, encounters sex and death and things of the spirit. It’s picaresque on a grand scale, the plot loose, characters fading in and out, recurring and being abandoned.
