I plan on writing some journals spotlighting some really interesting comic series that people may be unaware exist. Today I start with Big Numbers.

To those who have never heard of Big Numbers this was a self published series by Alan Moore that was poised to be his "magnum opus". What, you've never heard of Alan Moore's greatest comic ever? There's a reason why.

Published in 1990 the series teamed up comic's greatest writer with one of comic's greatest artists, Bill Sienkiewicz. I haven't loved everything Sienkiewicz has produced but when he's on his A game there are very few better and despite being in black and white this is the best work I've ever seen from him. The comic is absolutely stunning. The story is about the effects of a US-backed shopping mall on an English town (much of what I'm writing here is cribbed from Wikipedia). Moore would analyze the effects through fractal geometry, chaos theory and the mathematical ideas of Benoit Mandelbrot. Sounds cool? It is.

So what happened? Apparently the strain of producing the magnificent photo realistic art was too much for Sienkiewicz and he bailed out of the project after just two published issues. Years later ten pages of art for issue #3 were published in the magazine Submedia. The task of finishing the series was passed to Sienkiewicz's 19 year old assistant, Al Columbia. For those unfamiliar with Columbia let me just say he may be the most enigmatic comic artist of all time and I will speak of him more in future journals. Columbia also bailed out and supposedly destroyed or absconded with all the art he produced. A complete lettered art for issue #3 was found and posted online.

It's a shame because if you read the first two issues it's clear this series had monster potential but alas maybe it was more than the world could handle.

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