First Issue Collector’s Item is a periodic, ongoing look at that most illusive (and, in many instances, ultimately valueless) pop-culture artifact: The first issue of a comic book series. This week, Alan Moore returns to monthly comic books with Fashion Beast #1.
I can’t exactly say I was shocked to learn that the genesis of Fashion Beast was an unrealized script from the mind of punk rock provocateur Malcom McLaren. Afterall, McLaren had as chaotic a relationship with film as he did with music. In 1977, McLaren hired Russ Meyer to make a movie about the Sex Pistols. Meyer, in turn, hired Roger Ebert to write the movie, and the two men responsible for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls set out to create a film about a band neither had listened too. Ebert’s brilliant script, Who Killed Bambi, includes scenes wherein Johnny Rotten confronts a religious group quite like the Church of Scientology and Sid Vicious shoots heroin with his mother. When Russ Meyer—whose tastes were good and clean, if perverse—asked McClaren if Vicious would be up for that sort of thing, he shrugged the question off entirely. “Why wouldn’t he?” McClaren said. “It’s all based on fact.” Why not, indeed? McClaren, after all, was just throwing every idea he had into a manic, potentially unfilmable script. (more…)