Back when oi were a wee young feller-me-lad (well actually it was much later than I thought, 1990 in fact, the year in which I moved to Melbourne and got married) Mad Love Publishing put out the first two issues of what was to be a 12-issue comic book called "Big Numbers", written by Alan Moore and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz. There was no Internet then, and no real way to find out what was going on. But we waited for the third issue to appear. And waited. And waited. Until eventually we got interested in other things and gradually forgot all about it. Except we didn't quite forget all about it: we held those first two issues tightly to our chest, and maintained a foolish hope, year after year, that perhaps we would one day wake up as if from a dream and find out what happens next.
The story of the story, as far as we can piece it together:
"Big Numbers" seems to have been something of the equivalent of Terry Gilliam's attempt to film "Don Quixote". Moore wanted, typically, to produce something bigger in every way than anybody else could ever have imagined or conceived, let alone pulled off. A 360-page comic book, chronicling the attempt by an American corporation to build an enormous shopping mall in the middle of middle England (Northampton, to be precise, Moore's own tramping ground). And the locals' attempts to fight against it (shades of "Local Hero"?), come to terms with it, live their own lives, and more or less everything else he could get into it, possibly including the kitchen sink. He was also thinking, as we all were then, about chaos theory, and the idea to build this mall may have been Moore's proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon basin or whatever. I seem to recall reading that he was planning on calling it "The Mandelbrot Set". The first issue was all black and white. The second had one splash of colour. By the end of the series, it was going to be all colour. Moore had an entire wall of his house covered with the various plot lines and intersections, and how it might all come together.
Something happened to Bill Sienkiewicz's eyesight somewhere around the making of issue 3. He had to walk away from the project. Mad Love Publishing, which was a by-product of the untold riches made by the creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, may have run out of money. The replacement illustrator, which may or may not have been Al Columbia, left the project in "mysterious" circumstances while either working on, or having finished, issue 3, or issue 4, or not, and having destroyed, or not, the entirety of issue 3, or 4, or both, or neither. Moore's hyperactive brain moved onto other things. In short, "Big Numbers" stalled at issue 2 and was never going to progress any further.
Until:
The Freaky Trigger side bar, which has long been the source of most of the best unknown (by us) Internet marginalia and wonder, was updated some time last week with the cryptic words "Big Numbers #3". Those words scratched an itch in our brain. No, we thought, surely not, it's a coincidence, it's something else entirely. It must be. A giant number 3 or something. Somewhat tentatively, we clicked, thinking we would probably wish we hadn't. But as a result of that click we have been able to print out, and savour, and marvel over, and scratch our head in wonder about the provenance of, issue 3 of "Big Numbers". Only 18 and a half years after the appearance of issue 2.
It seems that somebody else with a long memory found on eBay a package deal with issues 1 and 2 together with "rare unpublished xerox Alan Moore". This person took a punt, was the only bidder, and presumably fell off their chair upon opening the package. After apparently seeking Moore's permission, they had it scanned and uploaded. (For which we say, Thank you.)
But what is it? To our amateur forensic eye, it is, clearly enough, "Big Numbers 3". The page count is right, the page dimensions are right, the story follows on, or would appear to, from issue 2, and crucially, it matches panel for panel Moore's own detailed instructions for the first eight pages, which have been floating around cyberspace for a while now. It is only in black and white, so there are no clues about the further use of colour. It doesn't have a cover. The artwork appears to be something more than a rough draft, but something less than the finished article. I would venture that some of it is Sienkiewizc, some of it not. But in the end it doesn't really matter. It is the comic book equivalent of somebody finding manuscript pages in J D Salinger's rubbish bin: the fact of its existence is at least as significant as what it actually says. Sure, it continues the story, but we are still only a quarter of the way through, and presumably that is as far as we are ever going to go, so it doesn't exactly add much to the sum of human understanding.
Unless.
Unless the groundswell of excitement that the past few days have seen on message boards etc. sparks something in Moore, or Columbia, or whoever, to move things along. The story is a time capsule, sure, but the nature of the story is that that would be what it became anyway, Moore would have known and most likely intended this, and its completion 20 years later would really be neither here nor there. And Moore is so notorious for providing novel-length storyboards for his comics that, if they exist for the rest of "Big Numbers" (another mystery), well, any exceptionally talented artist could turn them into comic books if somebody could pay for the printing.
Sigh.
