When I Was Cruel

Alan Moore — pagan, anarchist, wildly bearded author of V for Vendetta and the terrific superhero-deconstruction comic Watchmen — is not the person one might expect to write a poignant story of homecoming, conscience, repentance, and renewal. Then again, he is just the sort of person to write a horror comic about an advertising designer being stalked across the Atlantic by a murderous child . . . and A Small Killing, the book Moore created with artist Oscar Zarate, is both.

The story is simple: Adman Timothy Hole returns to England from America for a brief stop in his hometown of Sheffield before beginning a major campaign to sell cola to the Russians. But everywhere he goes, he sees the same demonic, smirking little boy — and the boy seems to be trying to kill him. As Timothy’s wits fray and his stream of consciousness becomes more confused, he revisits all his past crimes, all the way back to the very beginning: the first time he consciously did evil; the first sin.

Most of the book’s symbolism is fairly blatant. The child plays a number of symbolic roles: He’s Timothy’s doppelganger, his conscience, his younger self, his sin; his picture of Dorian Gray; even, perhaps, the child Timothy’s lover aborted years ago — and all of these aspects are made clear fairly quickly. The symbolism of abortion suffuses the comic: In one of the very first scenes, a box of birds’ eggs is broken, and the redemptive coda of the book hymns, “There’s a new yolk in the blown egg. There’s a new pulse in the scraped womb. Everything is pregnant.” Interestingly, although the interview with Moore and Zarate at the back of the 2003 edition spends a great deal of time laying out the comic’s really well-done left-wing political context, the even more prominent, all-pervasive abortion narrative gets only the briefest mention. (The abortion storyline should also indicate that this is not a comic for kids, and many adults will also want to avoid it due to its characters’ use of obscenity and an explicit, if somewhat stylized, depiction of masturbation.)

At times Moore’s obsessive repetition of imagery can seem heavy-handed, a little too “on the nose”; this tendency was present in Watchmen as well, but mitigated by the fact that Watchmen‘s greater length allowed it to set up more internal resonances from chapter to chapter, giving a sense of symmetry rather than mere repetition.

But that’s the only flaw in an otherwise frightening, lovely, and creepy comic. Zarate’s art is hallucinatory, all swirling colors and infernal nearly faceless crowds; there are echoes of cubism and Chagall. Comics are the perfect medium for stories of memory and its distortions, since the control of time is one of the biggest distinctions between comics and other art forms like music, literature, or movies. A comics spread simultaneously presents movement, the flow of time from panel to panel; moment, each individual panel taken separately; and an overall picture of the page as a whole. Decades can pass in the gutter separating one panel from the next . . . or several panels can be used for one split second as a bullet speeds closer and closer to its target. A Small Killing uses its art to anchor the reader, giving us a thread to follow in the collapsing labyrinth of Timothy Hole’s memories.

A few other elements make this comic especially noteworthy for Catholics. The comic focuses on the remorseless, self-destructive force of conscience suppressed and denied; but the concluding interview notes that Moore wanted to write a “happy ending” that was hopeful without being saccharine.

He succeeded, perhaps as much as one can succeed in an inherently difficult task. One of the horrors of human life — maybe the central horror — is that we can commit irrevocable acts. We can do things that we can never take back. Even the Christian promise of salvage can seem incomprehensible: Can even God heal the damage I’ve done, redeem and repair and transform what’s been broken?

Without Christ, without afterlife, without baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, salvage is, if possible, even harder to comprehend. Without Christ to cut the Gordian knot of sin, any redemptive ending that rests too heavily on a cruel character’s personal rejection of cruelty, adoption of honesty, and resulting sense of hope risks coming off as an attempt to ignore the past, as if to say, “Let’s move on, and forget the broken marriage, the betrayed friendships, the aborted child. Timothy feels better now — isn’t that enough?”

Fortunately, Moore and Zarate don’t give their protagonist an easy out. He encounters his ex-wife, with her children from her second marriage, and receives her forgiveness. (Just as in Watchmen, forgiveness is granted primarily by women.) He must undergo a horrific confrontation with the murderous child, in a pit filled with giant insects. He must let go of his plans for material success, symbolized by the Russian cola campaign, and recognize their unimportance. (I think Moore and Zarate want the campaign to appear actively bad — capitalism, boo hiss! — but in the final confrontation I found that the campaign’s triviality and Timothy’s venality were the main issues, not the mere desire to sell Coke in Red Square.) Most of all, he must acknowledge a lie he told years ago — a lie that compounded his first sin by hiding it. What can’t be confessed can’t be repented; and what can’t be repented can’t be redeemed. All these trials (penitence hurts!) make the note of gentleness and hope at the comic’s end feel earned and real.

A Small Killing isn’t Moore’s best work; Watchmen is simply something spectacular, a terrific tale of the search for meaning, justice, and forgiveness in a world that seems ruled by arbitrary cruelty and power. A Small Killing is a smaller book, despite Zarate’s wild, exuberant artwork. Nonetheless, it has an integrity and poignancy that make it unique. I’m not sure I’ve seen any other comic quite like it.