# Abelard Snazz

Abelard Snazz was a fictional comics character, created by Alan Moore, and first illustrated by artist Steve Dillon. A super intelligent man, nicknamed "The Man With The Multi-Storey Mind", he appeared on the pages of British magazine 2000 AD.

## Publication history

Abelard Snazz, also known as "the man with the two/multi-storey 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 2000 AD, and appeared in eight issues between 1980 and 1983. Snazz first appeared in Moore's third Ro-Jaws' Robo Tales strip for 2000 AD (and third work overall for that publication), in the two-part story "The Final Solution", in issues #189-190. Moving briefly into the Tharg's Future Shocks for his second storyline (third appearance) in #209, Snazz then gained his own short-lived strip in #237. 'The Man with the Double-Decker Brain' is a mutant with two brains and two sets of eyes (occasionally adorned by two sets of glasses). Convinced - with some accuracy - of his own genius, he acted as a consultant inventor, "offering 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 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 complementary 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. Eventually, Snazz himself is frustrated by Edwin's cloying, servile flattery. Five of the six Abelard Snazz stories end with characters turning against Snazz and leaving him in a cliffhanger-style predicament.
The Abelard Snazz saga pales in significance when compared to Moore's better-known 2000 AD work - Skizz, D.R. & Quinch, and The Ballad of Halo Jones - but, despite its 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."