Link Yaco has written comic books for several publishers. He wrote the recent Marvel-authorized "Science of the X-Men," which is now in its second printing. He has a short story in the science fiction hardcover collection, "Deprivers" (iBooks), which sold out in 21 days. He also scripted the recent graphic story album, "SpaceChicks & Businessmen" (EROS/Fantagraphics). He has written a number of features for The Comic Book Marketplace and other industry journals. Link is a webpage editor for blue chip firms. He has been a newspaper journalist and technical writer. He has a Masters' degree in Telecommunications and was a technical manager at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for five years. Do a search for his name on www.amazon.com and you'll find his books.

Alan Moore is a Post-Modernist-there can be no doubt. PoMo (Post-Modernism) was first defined in a 1942 issue of the Architectural Digest as a mixture of Classical Realism and Abstract Modernism. There have been many arguments in the ensuing 58 years as to whether this architectural usage of the term applies to literature, music, and the visual arts as well. Whatever the definition, it is certain that there are many schools of PoMo. And Moore fits into several of them. There is Deconstructionism, and Moore certainly fits into that school. Defining Deconstructionism is as problematic as defining PoMo. However, a rough working explanation is that Deconstructionism is about revealing the inner workings of an art-revealing the clockwork gears that make a piece of art tick. Most people are familiar with the building at the Louvre with the plumbing on the outside. Jacque Derida is a major proponent of Deconstructionism, although he refuses to be pinned down as such.

But Moore fits better into another major school of PoMo-Metafiction. Borges is the grandfather of this school. It is similar to Deconstructionism in that it takes apart a piece of fiction, but rather than simply pull apart the work, it creates a work within a work-a series of nested loops (as computer programmers say), an infinite regression much like a hall of mirrors. The narrative voice of the fiction comments upon the work and upon its comments...and upon its comments on its comments. It is much like the Cabala, a theological writing where the comments of theologians are inserted into the text and then comments on the comments are inserted as well...and so on. "Meta" is a Greek prefix meaning "above," "next to," "beside," or "transcending." The possibly apocryphal story goes that at the great library of Alexandria, the term "metaphysics" was given to works of philosophy simply because they were stored NEXT TO, or BESIDE the works of physics. It is a bit more likely that the term was given because philosophy TRANSCENDED the physical sciences.

The term "Metafiction" therefore, means a work that transcends fiction. A more familiar example of Metafiction is John Fowles "The French Lieutenant's Woman." James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" is arguably the ultimate Metafiction, but then it is arguably the ultimate fiction in any category, unreadable as it is. One of the curious features of PoMo in general and Metafiction specifically is that it has many of the features of parody but has affection for its subject matter, not disdain. In that regard, the early EC Mad comic book was more Metafiction than pure parody, for it warped its subjects almost out of recognition, put them in contexts that made them seem absurd, but always did it with a sense of play, not malice.

This is what Moore does with his characters. He has said that he regrets that his seminal work, "Watchmen," so influenced comics that the original spirit was permanently degraded. There is nothing left to parody. Moore's current work explores his original source material (Jack Kirby's work in "New Jack City," Victorian adventurers in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen") with great fondness. Although there is an ever-present sense of commentary-a feeling that the narrator is metaphorically winking at the camera-Moore endeavors to reconstruct the source material, to restore its original narrative power, and EXPLAIN why it works and the nature of its virtues.

The reason this works so well for many of us is that we get to enjoy the somewhat guilty pleasure of reading comic books because an intelligent adult viewpoint is overlaid on the visceral thrills of the material. We have the best of both worlds-a youthful sense of wonder and a mature reflection upon it.

Moore seldom indulges in the sophistry of infinite regression, where the author comments upon his own comments. This hall of mirrors approach was deemed the essence of cleverness 30 years ago when the avante-garde first began to become assimilated into the mainstream, but it has certainly worn out its welcome by now. Moore's two-level approach still has its appeal, but-as with any aesthetic approach-it depends on the skill of the author to make it effective. Moore certainly does that. It is his specialty-his niche

in the world of comics-and he is the master of the form. When others attempt it, the result seems myopic, juvenile, and self-indulgent. When Moore applies his metafictional technique, he opens up the form, rather than closes it down. His work is accessible to anyone who reads it, whether or not they are hardcore comics buffs. One doesn't have to be steeped in the history of his source material to understand what he is doing with it because he reinvents it from the ground up and, to a great degree, makes it his own. Each generation of artists absorbs its influences and synthesizes them into a new whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Or that is what SHOULD happen. That has NOT happened in the degenerating world of comics in 30 years (the same span of time since the avante-garde became passe).

Only a very few creators, such as Moore, have stood out from an overcrowded field. Curiously, it is a writer, not an artist, who stands out in the field. This has not happened since the early 1960s, when Stan Lee revolutionized the field, and a decade before when EC comics' Al Feldstein, Bill Gaines, and Harvey Kurtzman brought a never surpassed level of quality to American comics. As well, we might possibly include the most successful of the crime comics creators, Charles Biro. We might include the legendary Will Eisner who, though an illustrator as well, repeatedly won acclaim on the merits of his work as literature. His career, amazingly, spans the entire history of comics, from the very beginning to the present, and he continues to write works. Most obscurely, in the past few years he has translated many of his works to his first language, YIDDISH, and managed to get them published in Holland.

Moore ranks with all these greats. As the oddball genre of comics keens its death knell, Moore's is a perfectly appropriate approach. His is the last bloom of greatness in a dying field.

It is an ongoing disappointment to me that the illustrators of Moore's work seldom match the pictures his words paint. But since the greater part of comics history is filled with illustrators who overwhelmed the flimsy scripts they had to work with, it is only just that the balance is tipped for its final couple of decades.