Is Alan Moore’s Big Numbers The Greatest Unfinished Comic Of All Time?

Number Crunching

Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Big Numbers only published two issues via Moore’s shortlived Mad Love and Tundra picked it up. But it never got past its initial two issues. Bill Sienkiewicz just shared a fascinating video with three artists talking about whether it could be the greatest unfinished comic of all time and we thought it would be fun to share it here…

3 artists discuss Alan Moore and Big Sienkiewicz’ BIG NUMBERS. We discuss the behind the scenes drama, the beautiful art and storytelling and Moore’s intentions for where he was going to take the story.

Here’s wikipedia’s entry on it: Big Numbers is an unfinished graphic novel by writer Alan Moore and artist Bill Sienkiewicz. In 1990 Moore’s short-lived imprint Mad Love published two of the planned twelve issues. The series was picked up by Kevin Eastman’s Tundra Publishing, but the completed third issue did not print, and the remaining issues, whose artwork was to be handled by Sienkiewicz’s assistant Al Columbia, were never finished.

The work marks a move, on Moore’s part, away from genre fiction, in the wake of the success of Watchmen. Moore weaves mathematics (in particular the work of mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot on fractal geometry and chaos theory) into a narrative of socioeconomic changes wrought by an American corporation’s building of a shopping mall in a small, traditional English town, and the effects of the economic policies of the Margaret Thatcher administration in the 1980s.