Ten Things #7: Moore’s Logic

Ten Things is a collection of magazines, thoughts and ephemera that have been sitting on my desk for a few months while I caught up with deadlines. And apologies about the quality of the photos in this entry.

Dodgem Logic is best described as the brain of Alan Moore as nailed onto a sheet of paper and buried at midnight until it’s ripe. And it’s (mostly) great.

Under the heading “Colliding ideas to see what happens”, Dodgem Logic is the closest thing to a modern-day Oz as you’ll find. It’s unpredictable, unabashedly left wing, and lo-fi. A handdrawn page on guerilla gardening could be followed by a piece on genetically modified crops or a burlesque photoshoot or a recipe for lemony rice pudding or an obscene cartoon strip. It’s in turns daft and serious, and as English as a bowler-hatted cup of tea in the gloved hand of a boarding-school matron.

In the first three issues (I’ve not read four or five yet – five has a lovely spoof Vanity Fair cover), a few regular features appear. Each mag opens with three “great hipsters in history” (pen portraits of remarkable artists and radicals) followed by a few thousand words by the magazine’s founder/writer of Watchmen, V For Vendetta, From Hell/Neopagan/occultist/beard Alan Moore on the history and ideology behind a particular topic; the first three were radical publishing, anarchism and magic. (Mag fans should buy the first issue for the underground publishing piece alone.)

Other regulars include a surreal tabloid spoof called The Daily Mustard, an unusual stitching pattern, recipes, retooled anti-communist propaganda, and a hand-drawn comic by Josie Long. There’s also an insert about political scandals in Moore’s home city, Northampton; the original concept was that other publishers could create their own alternative local media, and insert it in copies to distribute in their area. I’m not sure if anyone’s taken him up on the offer.

As you might expect from all that, it’s wildly uneven. The design by Wallace Create is pretty amateurish in most places (apparently in a nod to Oz and its ilk, but we’ve moved on since then for a reason) and the writing veers from brilliant satire to whiny old radical/pervert.

When Dodgem Logic is good, it’s disturbingly brilliant, such as with Moore’s cover for issue 3.

Other times, it seems puerile and gratuitous, such as Moore’s “first ever entirely solo” comic Astounding Weird Penises. But hey, it’s his toy, and he can play with it however he likes.

At just £3.50 a copy (£2.50 for the first two editions), there’s really no good reason not to buy Dodgem Logic – and all back issues are still available online. It has a design, an energy and a sense of societal injustice that feels outdated – which is a very depressing statement to make. Well-made alternative publishing is all the poorer for having lost its radical edge.

More fun than Adbusters, more parochial than Mother Jones, DL is above all genuinely good fun, and Moore’s introductory letter alone is worth the cover price.

As the first line of the first issue says, “Welcome to Dodgem Logic. Price of admission: Your mind. And £2.50.” Get yourself some copies, fill your teapot and enjoy.

(PS Click around the borders of the website, and have your sound turned on. As with most things Dodgem Logical, there’s more there than meets the eye.)