Once There Were Daemons: From Warp Wizards to Warpsmiths
The core idea behind Alan Moore’s Marvelman run came to him when he was just 13 years old. According to Lance Parkin’s biography of Alan Moore, Magic Words, Moore picked up an old issue of the Mick Angelo Marvelman series on the same summer day that he bought a MAD magazine anthology that had the famous “Super Duper Man” parody in it. Moore came up with his own idea for a Marvelman parody where Mickey Moran was grown up and can’t remember the magic word that turns him into Marvelman. Moore held on to that idea from when he was a kid all the way up to the launch of Warrior magazine in 1982, when he was around 29 years old.
But that’s not the only idea in Warrior from Moore’s teenaged brain. His first known published comics work was a story he wrote and drew called “Once There Were Daemons” in issue 5 of a poetry magazine called Embryo that he edited as a teenager. The story is hard to follow but it includes a character who refers to himself as a “Warp Wizard” who is being held captive by “the Qys” on a space ship. Warrior issue four includes a story that takes place in the future featuring a character referred to as “Warpsmith.” In issues 9 and 10, the Warpsmiths get their own strip that reveals that they are in conflict with an alien race called the Qys. The Warpsmiths and the Qys would go on to be important parts of the Eclipse Miracleman series where we learn that the alien technology used to create the Marvel/Miracle family came from the Qys.
V for Vendetta’s roots in Sun Dodgers and The Doll
When Moore was 22, he wrote a script for a writing content held by British comics publisher DC Thompson for an idea called “The Doll.” Moore explained the concept in a text piece in Warrior issue 17: “a freakish terrorist in white-face make-up who traded under the name of the Doll and waged war upon a totalitarian state sometime in the late 1980s.” Parts of this idea obviously popped up again in V for Vendetta, and there may be traces of it in Fashion Beast, which features a character named “Doll” (I’ve not read Fashion Beast and don’t know how much similarity there is).
Moore also told Parkin about an ambitious early project he never quite got off the ground called Sun Dodgers: “They were a group of superheroes in space, with a science fiction explanation for each of these characters.” He told Parkin: “There was a character whose name was Five, and I don’t think I ever got around to drawing him, but my vague idea was that he was a mental patient of undefined but unusual abilities who had been kept in a particular room, room five.”
Hmmm…
Sun Dodgers and the 4D War find their way into Marvelman and Captain Britain
Another Sun Dodgers character was Wardog, who appeared in Moore’s “4D War” stories (drawn by V for Vendetta artist David Lloyd) in Doctor Who Magazine in 1980 and 81. Wardog was a member of a super-powered team called the Special Executive. Wardog and the Special Executive also later appeared in Moore’s Captain Britain run.
There’s a possible tie-in between the “4D War” and Marvelman as well. The 4D War (which was quite possibly an inspiration for the larger Time Wars) was between the Time Lords of the Doctor Who universe and a group called the Order of the Black Sun. We don’t learn much about the Order, but Moore has compared them to the Green Lantern Corps.
Alan and Steve Moore (no relation) made a big timeline of major events in the shared Marvelman/V/Pressbutton universe. This was eventually published in George Khoury’s Kimota! The Miracleman Companion and is now available online. One of those events: “1700 – The Chronarchy (a race like Earth-2 Time Lords) attack the Warpsmiths of Hod. Warpsmiths wipe out all but a few of the Chronarchy with Death-Cats, the ultimate weapon provided by the Rhordru Makers.” Huh! (You can read more about these linkages on the Doctor Who Fandom site.)
I don’t get the sense that the Order of the Black Sun were particularly similar to the Warpsmiths, apart from both being guardians of a sort. But it’s clear that Moore was incorporating ideas from the 4D War, which included ideas from Sun Dodgers, into the Marvelman universe and into the Marvel universe through Captain Britain. You could also see the Captain Britain Corps as a stand-in for the Black Sun, and the Dimensional Development Court as stand-ins for the Time Lords, though I think that’s a stretch.
There’s another brief mention of the Chronarchs in a letter Moore sent to Warrior editor Dez Skin sometime around the time Warrior issue 5 came out:
Tales of the Warpsmiths, in which we can run individual stories and maybe also short little info pieces… the building of the artificial planet Hod, the war with the Chronarchy (back in 1700 our time) tales of the black Warpsmiths etc. etc. etc.
That suggests Moore still wanted to finish telling the 4D War story.
Where else did these early ideas crop up?
What’s interesting to me is that Moore held onto these ideas and found ways to use them many years after his initial attempts. I haven’t read much of his Image/Wildstorm era work, so I don’t know if any of his early ideas crop up there. Both the Warpsmith/Qys conflict and the Daemonite/Kherubim conflict from WildC.A.T.S are analogous to the Kree/Skrull conflict, so I wonder if any of Moore’s old ideas found their way into his WildC.A.T.S run, which I’ve not read. I’ve also not read Moore’s Supreme run nor many of his ABC books, but I’m curious whether any elements of Marvelman universe carried over. Top Ten seems like a natural continuation of the idea of a world where practically everyone has super powers seen at the end of Miracleman (though, based on that letter to Dez Skin, it’s not the direction Moore originally intended to go). Do any other Daemons/Sun Dodgers/4D War/Marvelman elements show up in Top Ten or other ABC books?