Chasing down serial killers in Neopolis
Set in the futuristic world, Neopolis, Alan Moore’s Top 10, is a series about a city where everyone, including the children and pets, has superhuman powers. The function of Precinct Ten or Top 10, the police station in Neopolis, is to maintain law and order in this bizarre state of affairs.
Moore’s world is extremely advanced, with all the futuristic parapharnelia that one has come to associate with any science fiction
setting. Space aliens, prostitutes with impenetrable immune systems, robots, talking dogs — Neopolis has them all.
To top it all, all the city’s inhabitants possess varied superhuman powers. Time has gone by but basic human nature and urban lifestyle patterns are still the same, due to which Top 10’s cops spend their time chasing down serial killers and drug-dealers.
Like any other comic book series, Book 1, which collects issues 1-7 of this 12 issue series, is introductory in nature except of course, unlike any normal comic-book series, Top 10’s Book 1 is essential reading before picking up Book 2. After books like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, Alan Moore shows us that he is as good, if not better, with lighter material.
Top 10’s plotline is like any other cop drama with the cases being a lot more wackier, but ultimately the same at ground root level. The inbuilt craziness of Moore’s characters and narrative rids it of the soap operaish air that the plotline almost gives it. And quite unlike a normal superhero comic-book series where superhumans are the larger-than-life gods and normal people are depicted as lesser mortal beings, here everyone is at the same messed-up level.
The stories are all connected but Moore isn’t too strict about regularity or periodicity in his writing style. Moore’s creative background settings and his references to pop culture steal the spotlight from his plotlines. Moreover, what makes the series different is undoubtedly its characters, each of who is stranger and weirder than the next. Book 1 is incredible, with the dialogues being the wittiest and most humorous when something terrible and plot-changing is happening, like a gigantic monster being slain in the background.
Neopolis is beyond any kind of description, where the city-dwellers’ biggest fears are being puked upon by a humungous lizard called Gograh and picking up a virus called S.T.O.R.M.S in dark alleys, while chasing prostitutes; similar in nature to AIDS but much more grotesque and terrible.
Gene Ha and Zander Cannon’s artwork tells us a lot about the personalities of the characters. But, like X-men, the vast number of characters impose an absence of any specific protagonists and the artwork is adapted to suit this purpose.
Jeff Smax and Jackie Phantom, two of the Top 10 cops, for instance, are drawn beautifully but they aren’t particularly memorable for all that. Ha and Cannon emphasise the point that this is Neopolis, where everyone has super powers and that there are no specific, differentiating features.
Top 10 is far from being Alan Moore’s best work and it is almost always difficult to keep track of what is going on; the plotlines intermingling and overlapping constantly but if you are looking for a humorous, fun-filled comic book where everything is over the top and even the sad events require some amount of effort to be perceived as serious and melancholic, Top 10 fits the required conditions perfectly. This is escapist fantasy at its best.
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