ESSAY: “Major Arcana” and Fictional Comic Book History

Tobias Carroll on Alan Moore’s 'Illuminations,' John Pistelli's 'Major Arcana,' and the way these works parallel and build on each other.

What happens when a reader knows too much about the history that informs a given subject? In 2022, I was reading Tom Brevoort’s always-informative Substack newsletter when I saw Alan Moore’s then-new collection Illuminations mentioned. Brevoort is a longtime editor at Marvel Comics, and to see him discussing the work of a writer like Moore — someone who’s been hugely influential on the medium — wasn’t at all surprising. What Brevoort had to say about a particular work of Moore’s was, however.

Early in this installment of Brevoort’s newsletter, he mentioned that there were a few things he would not be writing about therein. One of those subjects, he shared, was “Alan Moore’s Roman a clef ‘What We Can Know About Thunderman’ in his new short story collection Innovations and how mean-spirited and pointless I found it.”

I also read Illuminations at around the same time as Brevoort, and didn’t have the same issues with it; in fact, it was one of my favorite books of 2022. But I also understood why “What We Can Know About Thunderman” would read very differently to someone with decades of experience in the superhero comic world.

“What We Can Know About Thunderman” is a deconstruction of decades’ worth of superhero comics history. By the second paragraph, when Moore invokes “universally revered publisher’s son-in-law ‘Satanic’ Samuel Blatz,” it’s apparent that this will not be an affectionate portrait of the industry. “What We Can Know About Thunderman” occupies more than half of Illuminations; it’s a short novel in its own right. It’s also a story about frustrated creativity and violent crimes, and one that ends with perhaps the only psychedelic epiphany in literary history to make prominent use of Comic Sans.

In their review of Illuminations for the Ancillary Review of Books, Alex Kingsley neatly distilled Moore’s approach to writing “What We Can Know About Thunderman.”

The story illustrates how in an industry where imaginative (and horny) little boys from the 1950s became the writers of the very characters they grew up revering, they are allowed to never mature. The same characters and plotlines are rehashed over and over again, tinged with political propaganda, just as we see happening in real superhero media. The comic book writers in the story must choose: either meet a tragic demise or grow so disgusted with the industry that they must escape—or perhaps they stay in it long enough to uncover the bizarre secret at the top of the company.

Reading this short novel as fiction is one experience. Reading it and potentially encountering characters based on friends and colleagues would be, I’d imagine, a much different experience. Moore himself has described the process of working on the book as cathartic. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, he explained, “I think that ‘What We Can Know About Thunderman’ was an attempt at an exorcism. I'd been thinking for a long time, yeah, you want to write something about your experiences in the comics industry, but I don't know quite how you could do it.”

One of the most insightful and comprehensive reviews of “What We Can Know About Thunderman” was published by John Pistelli, who delved deeply into its use of real-world comics history.

...how many readers not marinated in the industry’s lore will recognize that Jim Laws is William Gaines, that Julius Metzenberger is Mort Weisinger, that Sol Stickman is Julius Schwartz, that Denny Wellworth is a blend of Denny O’Neil and Archie Goodwin, and so on? And how much work does Moore do to communicate to readers unfamiliar with this context what he means to suggest by invoking it?

This is especially interesting in light of the fact that the closest analogue I can think of to Moore’s “What We Can Know About Thunderman” is a novel written by, well, John Pistelli.

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Specifically, the novel Major Arcana, which began its life on Pistelli’s Substack newsletter before being self-published, and was reissued in early 2025 on Belt Publishing. It’s one of the most prominent examples of a self-published work of literary fiction being reissued on an independent press since Sergio de la Pava’s A Naked Singularity, and it’s for good reason: like de la Pava’s novel, Major Arcana is damn good. In interviews, Pistelli has spoken about his desire to do for late 20th-century superhero comics what Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay did for their mid-century counterparts. It’s a worthy task, and one that Pistelli navigates deftly. But to read this book with a knowledge of the milieu that Pistelli describes is also a bit surreal, because this is also a novel that asks the question, “What if Alan Moore and Grant Morrison were the same person, and also American?”

This is stranger than it sounds. Much of Moore’s work is connected to his hometown of Northampton, including the mammoth novel Jerusalem, which could be accurately described as a maximalist prose evocation of said city. Morrison hails from Glasgow, meanwhile, and loving nods to Scotland have also turned up in their work. More broadly, both writers are part of a generation of writers from the U.K. who had a seismic effect on American comic books in the 1980s and 1990s. All of this adds another layer to Major Arcana: it plays out like an alternate universe’s history of superhero comics, one where some of the biggest changes to the industry never took place.

Major Arcana begins with a death, and soon brings the reader into the orbit of a character called Simon Magnus, described in the first chapter as “[a] writer famed for a few hideous comic books written before the age of 30.” When the novel begins, Simon Magnus is middle-aged and has long since exited the comics world for a stint in academia. Moving back and forth in time, Pistilli introduces a number of other characters, including Marco Cohen, the artist behind the aforementioned “hideous comic books,” and Ellen Chandler, the editor and Simon Magnus’s partner. We see both Ellen Chandler and Simon Magnus in their formative years and decades later, when life and hardships have changed them aesthetically and ideologically.

In Major Arcana, Simon Magnus’s first assignment is for a comic described as “some laughable nonsense about a shambling monster.” This is Marsh Man, the Major Arcana analogue of Swamp Thing, a long-running horror-tinged comic that Alan Moore and Simon Magnus each redefined in their respective ways. Some of the Marsh Man storylines described here also echo Swamp Thing plots, including the “hallucinatory lovemaking” between the title character and his human paramour.

There’s another connection to Moore here: as Pistelli writes, “Simon Magnus’s meticulously detailed scripts tended to exhaust artists.” This will sound very familiar to readers of Moore’s work; in an interview with the magazine Jack Kirby Collector, Moore explained his approach to writing comics.

I always work in full script—and not only full script, fuller than normal scripts. My scripts are gigantic. They are huge amounts of detail and description that the artist is quite free to ignore if they want to. It's sort of just there if they could use it. So yeah, they are very lengthy scripts.

It’s with the critical acclaim of Marsh Man that Simon Magnus’s career receives a boost, leading to a new assignment: Fools’ Errand, a graphic novel featuring “marquee character” Ratman and his nemesis, The Fool.

Simon Magnus reimagined the villain as a pale and lanky sociopath with purple-dyed hair and a parti-colored suit — puce and maroon, grasshopper and mint — a black string-tie ragged and wild. Simon Magnus even had Simon Magnus’s version of The Fool cross-dress in the book’s most notorious scene, his bare white legs sprouting from a pink tutu, his ivory penis lifting the tulle fringe.

To these eyes, Fools’ Errand reads like a combination of two acclaimed Batman graphic novels: The Killing Joke, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Brian Bolland, and Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Dave McKean. In the latter book, Morrison’s original vision for The Joker involved the character wearing a Madonna-esque bra, something that was eventually reduced to a pair of high heels.

From there, Simon Magnus works on a third iconic superhero: Overman. The book on which Simon Magnus and Marco Cohen collaborate, Overman 3000, reads less like a pastiche of any specific comic and more like a collage. The title evokes Mike W. Barr and Brian Bolland’s Camelot 3000, while the decision to tell a story reinventing an established superhero in a futuristic setting echoes Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Overman is a clear Superman analogue, and both Moore and Morrison have written acclaimed takes on the character. There’s also a bit of Brave New World in the futuristic society where Overman 3000 is set; among Morrison’s recent projects was a streaming adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s novel. And the deconstructionist approach applied to a superhero can’t help but bring back memories of Alan Moore’s time reinventing the superhero known as both Marvelman and Miracleman.

Simon Magnus’s bibliography isn’t the only way Pistelli evokes both Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Both Moore and Morrison have written extensively about magic; several characters in Major Arcana have an interest in sigils, archetypes, and the art of altering reality. As befits a novel that takes its name from certain Tarot cards, Tarot readings also play a significant role in Pistelli's novel; Simon Magnus makes a compelling argument for Pamela Colman Smith — the artist whose work can be seen on the 1909 Rider–Waite Tarot — as a comic book pioneer. Simon Magnus’s approach to gender in Major Arcana is another way that Pistilli nods in the direction of Morrison. In an interview with Mondo 2000, Morrison shared their own experience of gender:

[W]hen I was a kid there were no words to describe certain aspects of my own experience. I’ve been non-binary, cross-dressing, ‘gender queer’ since I was 10 years old, but the available terms for what I was doing and how I felt were few and far between.

There are echoes of this in Simon Magnus’s approach to gender. At one point, of the young Simon Magnus, Pistelli observes that “Simon Magnus did not want to be a girl. Simon Magnus did not want to be a boy.” Eventually, this leads to Simon Magnus, later in life, opting to “[sight] a new horizon: the abolition of the pronoun per se.” Which means, among other things, that Pistilli occasionally uses words like “SimonMagnusself” in the course of telling this story. This works more smoothly than it might sound; in doing so, Pistelli gives the reader a sense of what it’s like to experience the world through Simon Magnus’s very idiosyncratic worldview.

Pistelli isn’t the only writer to find parallels between the works of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Since 2013, writer Elizabeth Sandifer has been engaged in what she refers to as “an ongoing critical history of the British comics industry focused primarily on the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.” If that sounds ambitious, it is — but the project, Last War in Albion, lives up to that ambition and then some. Sandifer is, for my money, one of the most insightful critics writing today, and her project provides another lens with which to examine Pistelli’s novel.

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While Simon Magnus’s writing credits echo those of both Moore and Morrison, there are also ways in which their biographies are radically different. One of the ongoing motifs in Major Arcana involves Simon Magnus’s exile from writing after finishing Overman 3000, with one very notable exception. There’s also Simon Magnus’s Americanness — though Pistelli giving Simon Magnus roots in New England is both a subtle nod to the character’s real-world antecedents and a way of connecting Simon Magnus to the Gothic and horrific traditions of fiction from that region.

There’s also a contrarian impulse present in Simon Magnus’s dealings with the world in the present-day sections. It’s not hard to imagine the character going on “anti-woke” social media rants — though that seems to be a case of Pistelli showing Simon Magnus going through some things as opposed to presenting this character as a kind of unvarnished truth-teller. Which, thankfully, makes for a much more interesting read.

Had he wanted to, Pistelli could have ventured even more deeply into the alternative history of superhero comics he’s created here, one where the “British Invasion” of the 1980s and 1990s didn’t necessarily take place. Fundamentally, Major Arcana is a book about stories and magic more than it’s about publishing comic books — but it’s still fascinating to think about what the prominence of Simon Magnus et al. means for the art created in this world. At times, it echoes Salman Rushdie’s reimagined history of rock and roll in The Ground Beneath Her Feet — another memorable novel where great art can change the world.