“Major Arcana” and Fictional Comic Book History

What happens when a reader knows too much about the history that informs a given subject? In 2022, I was reading Tom Brevoort’s always-informative Substack newsletter when I saw Alan Moore’s then-new collection Illuminations mentioned. Brevoort is a longtime editor at Marvel Comics, and to see him discussing the work of a writer like Moore — someone who’s been hugely influential on the medium — wasn’t at all surprising. What Brevoort had to say about a particular work of Moore’s was, however.