Comic book review: Sherlock Holmes- Moriarty Lives #5- Occupy Moriarty?

Writer: David Liss
Artist: Carlos Furuzono
Cover artist: Francesco Francavilla
Publisher: Dynamite Comics
Released: 30th July 2014


This concluding issue of the re-emergence of Professor Moriarty, after his near death at the Reichenbach falls, offers one slightly confusing misdirection, before wrapping things up in a slightly disappointing, and pedestrian manner.

There's our hero, with a nice little hipster goatee

That’s not always a bad thing of course. Endings that twist and shock but make no sense are far worse than endings that fail to surprise. And anyway, the entire purpose of this book was to explore the character of Professor Moriarty, his philosophy, his morality and his methodology as well. It achieves those goals and along the way there was some fantastic dialogue coming from the mouth of the Professor himself.

Unlike a lot of real world (top-level) criminals that operate through the secret occulted family blood-lines that control modern day finance, corporations and government, Professor Moriarty appears to be a self-made villain. He might have inherited his evil in a genetic sense, but he didn’t need to be born with a silver spoon in his mouth to get where he is today. Everything he achieved in this book was without outside assistance. Surely if the man operated a global criminal empire of such power and influence he would be able to get word out, and get some help in the little town he found himself washed up and alone in?

No help came his way, and he didn’t ask for any either. Is he doing this to prove himself? Or is his criminal empire not as powerful as we might think? You’d think that the main spider in the web of criminal evil would be more powerful, wouldn’t you? You don’t see that here. What you see is a self-made man, the ultimate capitalist.

You can criticise the underlying ideological and socio-political assumptions made here. You can even call it out for naivety. Writer David Liss has bought into the idea that the world is full of self- made men, battling for control on a level playing field. I would strongly disagree, and argue that this is not the case. The world is ran by a tiny minority of rich families and populated by billions of poor families. It is a slave colony. The rich families get richer, and the poor families get poorer. And the middle families, they get sucked further down, not further up. Sure, there are exceptions to this rule, but exceptions just prove the rule itself.

The villain is a big fan of Guantanamo Bay

Occupy Wallstreet talked about the 1%. That 1% is not one man. It is a group of families that own everything and everybody. If Professor Moriarty really was the spider at the centre of a global web of crime, as described by Sherlock Holmes, he would be a part of the 1%, not just another 99 percenter, as he appears to be in this book.

Our crony capitalist playing field is not level, and these days it’s hard to argue that it is. It is a field where you can battle against the bloodline elite’s, or you can join their anti-human, satanic control system. Most chose to join it, some consciously, most unconsciously. From politicians, to bankers, to corporate leaders, to drug cartel kingpins, to child traffickers, to child ‘educators,’ to television ‘programmers,’ the evil that exists in this world today is organised evil, not a self-made lone evil as represented by an individual like Professor Moriarty.

That was kind of the point in Conan Doyle’s original stories, at least as I read it. Moriarty was rarely seen, and when he did appear he was an abstract figure who only communicated with Holmes, not Doctor Watson, the writer of the stories. Did Moriarty even exist? I would argue that no, he didn’t exist at all. The ‘Moriarty’ system operates through its agents, and one of those agents battled Holmes at the Reichenbach falls, but the system is not one man.  Moriarty represented a hidden power, rather than a hidden individual. It was not about him, it was about something deeper, more occulted than that.

The slaves are starting to question their masters

It’s a mainstream idea that the world is fair, and that the strong can rise to the top. All of the research and reading that I’ve ever done indicates that this is not the case. There is scope for change at the lower levels, and you can advance your position, but the top is fixed. You can join it of course, but you will be a servant, not a master. Just another slave to the control system, no matter how big your house is, no matter how pretty your wife is, and no matter how much money you have in your bank account.

‘Moriarty’ is not a man. He is the criminal system itself. The one percent that the Occupy movement have been trying to tell the world about.

Narratively speaking, this concluding issue of Moriarty Lives wraps things up in a fairly formulaic manner. The bad guy is defeated; there is some misdirection (that confused me, so it didn’t work), and a promise that perhaps we’ll see more of the Moriarty character in future Sherlock Holmes books.

I enjoyed the dialogue more than anything else in this run. It was very good, insightful even. The underpinning societal assumptions were problematic to me however. The art was average, at best, and the narrative ends on a slight down, rather than the up you would need to get readers really enthusiastic and demanding more from the Moriarty character. It was still a good read though. I enjoyed the interpersonal dynamics between Moriarty and his young apprentice, there are some valuable life-lessons in the earlier issues as well, and the cover artwork by Francesco Francavilla has been gloriously gothic, atmospheric and consistently excellent throughout the entire five-issue run.

Rating: 7/10