Review by Ian Keogh
Neopolis was to be the city of the future, but instead is the usual result of good intentions crashing against budgetary imperatives, so it’s massive, sprawling and visibly decaying in places. It’s on a world where super powers are abundant and varied, and incorporate sentient animals and robots.
Although it takes a very different approach, Top 10 explores a theme also integral to Alan Moore’s far more famous Watchmen, literally asking who polices a world where superpowers exist. Rather than the Justice League, it’s super powered folk assigned to police precinct houses, in this case the Neopolis tenth precinct, colloquially known as Top 10. Moore bolts on the approach of massively influential 1980s police drama Hill Street Blues, where the diverse personalities were as important as the detective work and action, and the way into the precinct is via newcomer Robyn Slinger, who’s just graduated from the academy. She’s teamed with the almost invulnerable and perpetually surly Smax.
Just as there’s an incredible density to Neopolis and its inhabitants, such is the density of the art it requires Zander Cannon providing layouts for Gene Ha. Whether from Moore’s famously detailed scripts or from the imagination of the artists there’s so much creativity on show. In addition to the individuality of the cast, take a look at the complex design of the police car on the sample art, and the Graeco-Roman surroundings of the precinct building. Other featured police include a dog in a Hawaiian shirt, a synaesthesic detective, a winged woman, a voodoo priest, a woman in armour with missiles, a woman who phases through walls, a shrinking pathologist, a cyborg cowboy, a naked purple gymnast, the electricity-generating Shock-Headed Peter and more. Additionally, backgrounds in every location are filled with other characters, all of whom need to be designed, meaning every chapter is like a volume of Astro City. Cannon and Ha didn’t sign up to slack off.
With the main cast efficiently introduced in the opening chapter, they’re followed in assignment pairs over the remainder as they work their way through assorted problems. While Top Ten isn’t as intense as Watchmen, although it has its moments, there’s so much going on at any time that it probably required even greater application from Moore. Combining what had previously been Book 1 and Book 2 shows how diligent the plotting is. What seem trivial characters or passing TV reports running in the background grow to considerable prominence as topics ebb and flow.
When originally serialised, Top 10 was popular enough to win awards, yet it’s no longer as revered as Moore’s other material, perhaps because he consciously sets the darkness against far more personal drama over a wider cast and contrasts it with the absurd. Yet the same conceptual preparation is applied to twelve chapters that remain very fresh, funny and entertaining, and seem effortlessly clever. Such is the creative density that someone who’s enjoyed this a dozen times can still notice something new. It’s better experienced in this complete volume than separated over two books for showing how everything has been so neatly plotted for twelve satisfying chapters.
Latterly Moore’s version of Top 10 has been combined with the work of others, and Moore’s connected projects as the Top 10 Compendium., and before that there was an incomplete hardcover slipcased Absolute edition.
