Feminist dystopian science fiction, and officially one of my favorite comic books ever. ( )

That was ace, really fun and interesting.
The art was a bit difficult to start with, dark and dense, but it either improved or I got used to it and then it was brill all the way through. ( )

I had always assumed Halo Jones was a bit cheesy, but I ended up liking it quite a bit. Lots of fun experiments by Moore, and a crazy variety of stories. The art is so very 80s, but once you adjust to that, it's nice. ( )

This was my first encounter with Alan Moore and I really liked it. I liked being plunged directly into a new world and learning about it as the story unfolded. I enjoyed the social commentary on materialism, media inanity, wars off stage conducted for bad reasons, and the demonisation of the unemployed. The comic first appeared in the ultra materialist Thatcher years, but it feels very relevant still. The characters were all believable, and there was a good mix of action, tension and pathos.

Halo is an intriguing character. I liked her because she was normal, average, unremarkable in so far as she was aimless in her boredom, innocent of the worst aspects of other people, liked shopping and clothes but wasn't that bothered about shopping and clothes, and was gauche around men, unfazed or oblivious to celebrity. I liked her because she realised that her life on The Hoop wasn't enough and she took control of her life in order to change it. I liked her because she was true to herself, even when she didn't know she had anything to be true to and was stumbling through life. I liked her because she startdd to wake up to what was going on around her and because, even when it seemed that she'd lost everything, she didn't give up. She still saw that she had a future. She never had a game plan. Her only ambition was to live, and to live to the best of her ability. I like her most of all for that. It's what we all should do, whatever circumstance we find ourselves in.

It was really obvious that Moore and Gibson had put a lot of work into creating the world that Halo inhabits. The story builds gradually, and drops in hints of what has gone before without laying it all out on a plate. With each new plot development, too, just enough is said to allow links to be formed and anticipation for the next chapter to build. It's such a shame that legal wrangling with the publishers meant that Moore and Gibson stopped after three books, rather than completing the nine they originally intended. ( )

This trade volume collects the entire run of "The Ballad of Halo Jones" from the English comics weekly 2000 AD. This mid-1980s material was some of Alan Moore's early work, and it shows him tackling class oppression, military imperialism, personal trauma, and cultural anomie, all in the context of a 50th-century dystopia-cum-space opera. Protagonist Halo is an underclass nobody whose discontent carries her across the galaxy. The real moral heft to these stories keeps them from being careless and speedy reads. At the end, the major plot elements have all been resolved, but Jones is on her way out to some new experiences, having survived nearly everyone with whom she has been involved during the three major parts of the story: her origins in the floating "Hoop" off the New York coast, her adventure off-planet as staff on a space liner, and her military service in the Tarantulan War. Moore clearly left room for more story, although he never filled that room.

Ian Gibson's art is effective in the black-and-white panels, and the pages reproduce well enough at the full-page magazine size used for this volume.