Anthony Ryan's Reviews > The Ballad of Halo Jones

Many would put 'Watchmen' or 'V for Vendetta' at the top of Alan Moore's list of achievements, but, for me, it’s this 2000AD strip from the 1980s that stands as his most seminal work. Beautifully illustrated in black and white by Ian Gibson, Moore's sci-fi epic eschews the grand heroic narrative to focus on the life of a single character in a far from ideal space-age future. Halo Jones is neither hero nor villain, neither genius nor idiot, she's just a woman seeking escape from a constricting existence and making a number of good and bad choices along the way, enlisting to fight in a pan-galactic war being by far the worst. Funny, tragic and ultimately uplifting. If you profess to be a comic book fan and you haven't read this, you're really not trying.