Review: The Mirror of Love

Artist(s): Alan Moore, José Villarrubia.

The Spartan army

In 1988, Alan Moore, fresh from the success of Watchmen, self-published AARGH! (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia), an anthology designed to fight the infamous Clause 28, one of the more homophobic moves of the Thatcher British Government. Moore’s own contribution to the anthology was The Mirror of Love, an eight-page strip recounting the history of homosexuality, drawn by Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch, his collaborators on Swamp Thing.
José Villarrubia, a photograph well-known in comics for his coloring and his sequential work on various comics including Moore’s Promethea, has now created over 40 photographs to illustrate the original script in this new version of The Mirror Of Love, a hardcover book published by Top Shelf (also available from Amazon).
Moore’s text is among his most beautiful and most accomplished. With few words, he manages to engage his readers’ brain with a lot of information about gay & lesbian history, all the while grabbing his their heart with the lyrical qualities of his prose and his depiction of same-sex love throughout history.

Michelangelo and his marble men

Villarrubia’s illustrations are up to par with the writing: sometimes illustrative, sometimes tending toward the metaphorical or the poetic, they are always starkly moving without being melodramatic.
Top Shelf’s production values are always good on their graphic novels, but this time, they’re simply impressive. The annexes, which give further reading resources and sources for the quoted poems, add to the feeling that The Mirror of Love deserves to be in every queer thinking person’s library.
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UP. 07/2010: More about the AARGH! anthology here.
UP. 12/2012: A digital version is now available.

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