#alan moore

"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea. And ideas are bulletproof"

Tatjana Wood died the other day, at the age of 99. Born to a Jewish father in Germany in 1926, she emigrated to New York City in 1947, where she met and married Wally Wood and began working in the comics industry. They'd divorce before he killed himself. She became a prolific colorist for DC Comics, perhaps now most associated with Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing. Due to how comic book production works, much of the coloring credited to her in the trade paperback collections do not match her original contributions, composed for the printing and paper of the day, and not preserved on film the way the lineart was. Scans of the original issues capture her artistry. Here are some examples, all written by Alan Moore and lettered by John Costanza:

From the DC Comics Presents issue presenting a team-up between Superman and Swamp Thing, "The Jungle Line." Pencils by Rick Veitch, inked by Al Williamson.

From Swamp Thing 44, penciled by Steve Bissette and inked by John Totleben.

From Swamp Thing 53, penciled and inked by John Totleben.

From Swamp Thing 63, penciled by Rick Veitch and inked by Alfredo Alcala. These later issues were printed in DC's "New Format," rather than on newsprint, and the colors are more vibrant. Another book Tatjana colored for DC printed in the New Format around this time was The Question, written by Denny O'Neil and penciled by Denys Cowan, lettered by Willie Schubert. Later in the run it was inked by Malcolm Jones III. Here is a two-page sequence showing Tatjana's coloring on that series:

In the nineties, comics color changed its production process further. This page from the series Brainbanx shows Tatjana Wood working with the computer color separation house Heroic Age:

Despite the obvious political daylight between these positions, Alan Moore exhibits intense professional and artistic respect for what Frank Miller was going for with TDKR in his 1987 write-up for Twilight of the Superheroes; most specifically he praises the act of actually closing out the myth, and the aesthetic commitment to writing in a mythological register when writing the story of Batman's last stand. Here's Beowolf vs the Dragon, here's Robin Hood firing off an arrow to mark his burial site, and here's the Feds dropping the ten-ton hammer on Batman because they cannot suffer a great man to live. But what's equally interesting is how Twilight of the Superheroes proceeds to embrace TDKR's thesis about Superheroes as The Ones Holding The Line As We Fuck Everything Up and reframes it as a horror story from a left wing perspective.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/10/deep-state-wopr/#abelard-snazz

According to an Economist editorial, "AI is breaking the British state" by making it too easy to file complaints, demands and appeals, which will "drown the state" with "demands as well-crafted as a first-class lawyer's":

https://archive.is/VTrj9

Let's pause a moment to appreciate the Economist's touching credulity about AI's coming legal mastery. The law seems to be the area where AI is most prone to "hallucinate" (that is, "produce defective outputs"), which can only be sorted through by skilled practitioners whose experience gives them the discernment to distinguish useful arguments from foolish ones:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

(And this requires those skilled practitioners to avoid the "automation blindness" that afflicts people who are asked to remain vigilant for things that seldom occur, a phenomenon that has turned every TSA agent into the water-bottle-detectingest motherfucker the human race has ever produced, who still misses 95% of the guns that red teams bring through the checkpoint):

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us-airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851

More notable than the Economist's faith-based predictions about the impending army of hyper-competent robo-lawyers is the magazine's proposed solution to this looming crisis: "stop creating entitlements that are ripe for AI-fuelled claims…prune the mass of procedural rights." Above all, replace the bureaucrats who process your "complaints, demands and appeals" with more AI, which will arbitrarily decide who gets what, through "personalised welfare interventions" that are not based on any kind of guaranteed rights.

Writing on his blog, the political scientist Henry Farrell tells us where this will inevitably end up: with AI-based robot wars in which increasingly stingy and pernickety robo-bureaucrats create demand for progressively more aggressive robo-lawyers:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-downside-of-robot-solutionism

As Farrell writes, this end-time was foretold by the prophet Alan Moore with his 1980s 2000 AD character Abelard Snazz, "the man with the two-storey brain":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelard_Snazz

Snazz "solves" the street crime epidemic on the planet Twopp with "Big Police Robots," who spiral out of control, arresting the citizens of Twopp for trivial crimes like wearing brown shoes with a blue suit ("breaking the laws of good taste"). To solve this new problem, Snazz invents "Big Criminal Robots" whose "cunning, efficient" crimes "take up all the police's time."