SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (5)

By: Douglas Wolk
July 15, 2021

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite unfinished masterworks, legendary obscurities and cherished almost-weres.

BIG NUMBERS

In 1990, Big Numbers looked like it was going to be one of the greatest comics ever created, Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz collaborating on the most audacious project either of them had ever attempted. The first two of its proposed twelve issues were published that year (in an unusual square format) by Moore’s imprint Mad Love, and they’re extraordinary: the beginning of a massive ensemble story that showed off Sienkiewicz’s protean stylistic range. Its subject is the intersecting lives of about three dozen characters in a town in northern England where an American firm is about to build a shopping mall; its central metaphor is fractal mathematics. There’s nothing else like it.

In 2002 and 2003, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund auctioned off a few signed copies of Moore’s script for Big Numbers #3. I won one of them, and I treasure it. It’s for a forty-page comic story, like #1 and #2. The script itself, though, is well over three hundred pages long — effectively a letter to Sienkiewicz that’s the length of a substantial prose novel. It’s unbelievably demanding, not in the micro-precise clockwork detail of Moore’s Watchmen scripts, but in the psychological depth it calls on Sienkiewicz to communicate. (Sienkiewicz has described Moore’s scripts as “brilliant, layered, nuanced, variegated, textural, beautiful and daunting. Simultaneously so.”) It begins with a declaration that the issue’s visual theme is “paper getting screwed up.”

That became the curse of Big Numbers. Mad Love collapsed, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman’s company Tundra took over trying to shepherd the series along. Sienkiewicz, overwhelmed, quit after drawing the third issue. His assistant Al Columbia took over for him but burned out too: he drew the fourth issue, then destroyed his artwork before it could be reproduced. (I should note that I released the record mentioned in that link on my label in 1992, and I’m pretty certain its cover art is not Columbia’s work.) No issue of Big Numbers beyond the first two was ever published.

Not officially, anyway. In 2009, the Moore expert Pádraig Ó Méalóid won a mysterious auction on eBay for a multiple-generation photocopy of Big Numbers #3; he posted it on his LiveJournal, where it remains. The final two-thirds of Big Numbers were never fully realized, but the whole superstructure of the series and every character’s role in it had been present from the start, famously outlined by Moore on a gigantic sheet of paper that finally appeared in print in Gary Spencer Millidge’s 2011 book Alan Moore: Storyteller. Big Numbers’ form ended up echoing its metaphor — it’s a screwed-up, fractal shape, shredded and crumpled and discarded, but secretly more whole than it appears.

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SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (5)

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