When you add in Silk Silk Spectre getting kicked in the crotch, man was Moore a mysoginist (sp?) or what back in the day?

He is a great writer...but sometimes he just needs to get over himself. His tirades about the EVIL that is Stan Lee just makes me think what a petty man he is. Not like DC was all that much better during that time also, so why no beef wit DC?

I just want to know how the story ends!!!

Curse mini-series that end on a cliffhanger!!!

Must I continue to wait past 14 years!!!

Argh!!!

I’m not sure that the 1960s were about feel good comics as much as good value comics. They appealed to all ages...

I don't really think that's accurate. Those comics were written for children, and it shows. Most adults don't need that much exposition.

As for "sell out" period...not necessarily with 1963, or his work for Wildstorm (like WildCATS) but the stuff he was doing for Maximum/Awesome/whatever Liefeld's Group Was Called (such as Badrock vs Violator) was pretty much for booze money according to a M/A/WLGWC staffer/artist I knew at the time.

Lesson better English offered speaking mail.

Improve! Speaking my has, also!

Genius man, smart.

I think it was the freedom afforded by Image that appealled to him, and Moore is one of the reasons that Image became the solid company it is today, as opposed to a vanity project for Liefeld and MacFarlane.

That last part is one hell of a statement.
Got any proof for that one, or did he just change your opinion, and there for everybodies?

All that said, I don't actually dislike 1963...but I do see it as a work with a pointed agenda.

To answer one point you raise, as far as I know Moore and the artists worked "Marvel style" on these books -- Moore wrote plot synopses which the artists broke down into pages and panels, then Moore scripted the dialogue to suit the finished art -- so a lot of the visual appeal of the package is down to his collaborators.

The real satire of 1963 doesn’t become apparent until you read this: http://www.comicon.com/moore/interview_affable.htm"

I can't handle all that alliteration. Care to summarize?

I collected these books well after the fact, and I always thought of them as equal parts tribute and parody of the Marvel Age. The letters column and bulletin Items! made it clear that they were stickin it to ol' Smilin' Stan, but I found the stories themselves to be fun and enjoyable, especially Tales From Beyond.

That would have been an interesting project, but it's not quite what Moore was doing. The winks to the modern reader are one thing (besides the crossover with the modern Image universe, there are the heavy-handed attacks on Stan Lee, among other things), but at least one of the stories would never have come out in 1963: the USA story with the Kennedy/Oswald parallels. Not only would such a story never have been printed back then, and not only is it very unlikely that a comic related to the assassination could have come out in 1963 given how late in the year it took place, but it was clearly a story that could only have been written years later and with the benefit of obsessive study of the Zapruder film.

It's possible that this would have been dealt with in the 80-page giant, but without that I'm not sure what Moore was trying to do (trying to produce a story that looked like it accidentally paralleled real-world events by coincidence, or indicate that history had been affected by time travel, or what) apart from massively breaking kayfabe. Fortunately, it's the only story like that (apart from the end of the last issue), although Moore did draw on Marvel concepts that hadn't been introduced in 1963 (there are analogues to SHIELD and Galactus, for example).

On a more positive note, the attention to detail is truly impressive. CBG pointed out that the colorist mimicked the style of the time by using relatively little yellow, which wasn't used as much because it was more expensive. That's the kind of detail that's easy to overlook but really contributes to the proper feel.

The real satire of 1963 doesn't become apparent until you read this: http://www.comicon.com/moore/interview_affable.htm

And of course, the basic ideas behind 1963 were developed further in Supreme, which then led to Tom Strong. I reall don't think you can call that the "sellout" period--if Moore had wanted to sell out, he could have kept working for DC. I think it was the freedom afforded by Image that appealled to him, and Moore is one of the reasons that Image became the solid company it is today, as opposed to a vanity project for Liefeld and MacFarlane.