Abelard Snazz

Abelard Snazz was The Man With The Multi-Storey Mind, a super intelligent 2000A.D. character created by Alan Moore, and first illustrated by artist Steve Dillon.

Character history

Abelard Snazz A.K.A. "the man with the two-story brain", is a genius whose plans nevertheless do not work quite as intended. His first name was likely inspired by Moore's half-memory of having read about the philosopher Peter Abelard, but no specific link was implied. Snazz was Alan Moore's first recurring character for 2000A.D., and appeared in eight progs between 1980 and 1983. Snazz first appeared in Moore's third Ro-Jaws' Robo Tales strip for 2000A.D. (and third work overall for that publication), in the two-part story "The Final Solution", in Progs #189-190. Moving briefly into the Tharg's Future Shocks for his second storyline (third appearance) in Prog #209, Snazz then gained his own short-lived strip in Prog #237. Abelard Snazz, 'the man with the two-/multi-storey mind' had two brains and two sets of eyes (occasionally adorned by two sets of glasses). Convinced of his own genius, he "offer[ed] to handle complex problems with even more complicated solutions," and shared many character traits that Moore would return to with the America's Best Comics character Jack B. Quick in his Tomorrow Stories anthology comic, two decades later.

Typically his innovative solutions build upon one another to great comic effect as his initial errors are compounded in ever-more bizarre ways. Joe "Jog" McCulloch describes the logical progression of two of the strips in the following way:

"Upon inventing ultra-sophisticated police robots to rid crime, Snazz winds up reducing a planet to a police state, so he invents complimentary robot criminals, but then innocent citizens are getting caught in the crossfire, so he invents robot civilians to be harmlessly wasted, and eventually the robots crowd the humans off the planet. In another scenario, he creates a Virtue-Converter to transmute the unlimited selflessness of the beatific Farbian Crottle-Worms into a lucrative source of energy, at least until his callous attitude toward his beaming work-force engenders Pride within them, counteracting their virtue and spoiling the plan."

Snazz is regularly accompanied by his robot sidekick Edwin, whose dialogue tends to revolve around variations on the phrase "You're a genius, Master!", serving to stroke the ego of Snazz spurring him to ever more unlikely feats of "intelligence", while also underscoring the humour for the reader.

Abelard Snazz pales in significance when compared to Moore's better-known 2000A.D. work - Skizz, D.R. & Quinch and The Ballad of Halo Jones - but, despite it's relative lack of exposure (and page count), it formed a cohesive whole, with "a fairly tight continuity, with earlier adventures referenced later on, and even an ending of sorts."

Bibliography

Original run

The character of Abelard Snazz appeared in three Progs (two short strips) before getting his own eponymous strip, which ran for a further five Progs (four complete storylines). All were written by Alan Moore:

• Ro-Jaws' Robo Tales: "Final Solution", art by Steve Dillon, in 2000A.D. Progs #189-190 (1980)

• Tharg's Future Shocks: "The Return of the Two-Storey Brain", art by Mike White, in 2000A.D. Prog #209 (1981)

• Abelard Snazz:
  • "The Double-Decker Dome Strikes Back", art by Mike White, in 2000A.D. Progs #237-238 (1981)
  • "Halfway to Paradise", art by John Cooper, in 2000A.D. Prog #245 (1982)
  • "The Multi-Storey Mind Mellows Out!", art by Paul Neary, in 2000A.D. Prog #254 (1982)
  • "Genius is Pain", art by Mike White, in 2000A.D. Prog #299 (1983)

Reprints

The first two Abelard Snazz stories were reprinted in Eagle/Quality's 1986 2000 A.D.(2nd Series) reprint comics. "Final Solution" featured in issue 4, and issue 5 reprinted "The Return of the Two-Storey Brain".

• 2000 A.D.(2nd Series) #4 (Eagle, Jul 1986)
• 2000 A.D.(2nd Series) #5 (Quality, Aug 1986)

Moore's short Future Shocks stories were collected in the late 1980s and reprinted in two volumes by Titan Books as Shocking Futures (1986) and Twisted Times (1987). All (bar one) of the Abelard Snazz strips feature in the second of the two volumes, but "The Return of the Two-Storey Brain" did not because, as Moore says in the introduction of "unintentional plagiarism" on his part from a story by R. A. Lafferty.

• Twisted Times (Titan, 1987) (ISBN 0-90761-072-2)

This story was nonetheless restored when Rebellion published all six Abelard Snazz stories, alongside Moore's other "Future Shocks" in the 2006 trade paperback:

• The Complete Future Shocks (Rebellion, 2006) (ISBN 1-904265-88-X)

External links

• 2000 AD profile
• Alan Moore's Twisted Times (1987) Content at FantasticFiction
• Abelard Snazz information; Grant Goggans' Touched by the hand of Tharg Part One