It's disconcerting to think that many kids reading comics today think of Alan Moore simply as "the guy who writes WildCATS". Was it really a whole ten years ago that he and Dave Gibbons created WATCHMEN, and re-defined what was possible in the medium of comics? Thoughts like that make me feel awfully old...
A serious contender for the title of most talented comics writer in the world today, Alan Moore is a man who makes connections: between words, images and ideas. Nobody else has Moore's sheer range of styles, from rib-tickling humour to existential horror, and his impact upon the comics industry cannot be underestimated. His talent for creating stories that were both complex yet accessible brought a new generation of literate readers to comics, and awakened creators to the potential of their medium.
After WATCHMEN, Moore turned his back on mainstream comics, devoting his energies instead to less genre-based work - such as FROM HELL, an exhaustively researched analysis of the Jack The Ripper murders, and LOST GIRLS, a work of erotica in comic-book form. Then a couple of years ago, his name started appearing on Image superhero titles such as SPAWN, VIOLATOR, WildCATS, and now SUPREME.
So, what gives?
Alan Moore: WATCHMEN included, I don't think that the superhero genre is the place to try and express ideas that are of any real social human importance. The guy in the tights just gets in the way. However, that does not mean that superhero comics have no value. They seem to me to have a great value if you're a thirteen year old boy, or around about that age. I've got no problem with doing enjoyable stories for thirteen year old boys. In fact, I think that it might even be quite helpful and healthy for the comics industry if there were a few more well-written stories for thirteen year old boys.
Much as, say for example, the comic critic elite of the COMICS JOURNAL affects to despise all superhero titles as escapist adventure fiction for young men, if you look at the line-up of people who would be considered to be the most important amongst the alternative cartoonists, most of them became involved in comics at a very early age. I started getting into comics when I was seven. Although it's not fashionable to admit these influences now, I would say that if I were seven, I wouldn't want to read EIGHTBALL, I wouldn't want to read HATE. Fine though these works be, they're inaccessible to a seven year-old. So if there were no good children's comics around, I might not even get into comics.
I think it's important that there are good children's comics - but I don't want to express anything other than the concerns of adolescent superhero fiction in those comics. They're about fights between good characters and evil characters, and there is no meaning beyond this. At the same time, that's worthy and helpful and healthy, if you're a thirteen year-old boy. I don't expect comic critics to find anything of worth in them - I'm not aiming these at comic critics. If a comic critic wants a work of mine they can get their teeth into, there's FROM HELL, there's LOST GIRLS, and the work that I shall be doing in future. These are two separate things. I've got no problem with superhero comics in their place, nor ever have had. As to why I'm doing so many of them, they pay very well - you cannot make a living out of FROM HELL and LOST GIRLS. You get a lot of awards, but they won't take these round the shop. These are not currency.
To some degree, doing the Image stuff gives me a quick, easy and above all very pleasurable and light-hearted way in which to finance myself to do the projects that I'm more interested in. In fact it frees me up completely in a way that I've never been freed up before. Now, because I'm financially secure as a result of this regular Image work, I can do things that are much madder, much more extreme than I've ever attempted before, because I don't really have to worry whether they're going to sell or not. And at the same time, they're almost like a refreshing sorbet in between courses.
With the 1963 series, there were some reviews that said these stories gave the eerie and overwhelming impression that this was the way comics should be. Which I thought was great, that was a really nice little compliment. That's what I wanted, to suddenly give the impression that comics should be these wonderful things full of wonderful, stupid ideas, that thrilled you and gave you something to think about. This was the appeal to me of superheroes when I was young. Yeah alright, I know the feminist critique of superheroes, that these are all purely boys' power fantasies and nothing else, revenge fantasies of the impotent. Yeah, there might be something in that, that's true, but that's not the whole of it. That's not why I was buying Superman when I was twelve.
Of course, it was a nice idea that the school bully who picked on you wouldn't pick on you if you turned into the Incredible Hulk. There was an element of that, but the reason I was into Superman, and probably all superheroes, was because Superman lived in the most perfect den in the Universe. He'd got this beautiful fortress in the Antarctic. And he'd got the best doll's house in the Universe, he'd got a whole miniature city. None of these toy soldiers for Superman, he'd got real people in a real tiny city. And he'd got a group of teenage superheroes from the future who were his pals. And he'd got a dog that'd got the same powers as he had. And he could go back in time and have a battle with Hercules or Achilles.
This was wonderful, this was the stuff I bought it for. Krypton, the Jewelled Mountain, the Gold Volcano... These are marvels, these are things that I would think about all the time. What a wonderful idea, a Gold Volcano, the Scarlet Jungle, these mythic places. There was a magic in them, there was something that fired the imagination, and I see that being one of the ingredients that's conspicuously missing from modern comics. In an outdated term, you'd have to call it a sense of wonder. There's no sense of "Hey, that's a cool concept" any more, because there aren't any cool concepts. There's clever post-modern concepts, and there's lame regurgitated Stan Lee/Marvel concepts from the Sixties, but no new concepts, no new ways of doing this stuff.
With SUPREME, I've tried to fill it with as many marvellous ideas as I can - silly ideas, a lot of them - because the Superman ideas were silly. But they were marvellous anyway. I want to bring that sense of the miraculous and the wonderful and the absurd back into comics with the Image stuff. And I think that would work. I think it was when I was doing 1963, and I was half way through HORUS, and I thought "Well hang on, this is not just a good Marvel pastiche comic, this is a good comic." All this stuff about the Great Barge of the Sun, and how actually the barge isn't moving, but when you turn the wheel, the whole Universe moves a degree. That's something I would have loved to have read when I was twelve, because I'd have sat there and thought, "Wow..." It's a big, mad idea, just thrown in. It was one line of dialogue. But there were a lot of things like that in HORUS. There were a lot of little jewels - inconsequential jewels, but jewels nonetheless - of little ideas, that I'd hoped would fire the imagination of the readers.
As for the other Image stuff, from the fans themselves - which are the only ones I'm interested in - the reaction seems to be very good. These are people who are not responding to my name, because most of them were only a random series of signals in the gene pool when I wrote WATCHMEN. Reputation's not a factor, they just want to know whether it's a good story. Now the response from the, shall we say, the self-appointed higher end of the critical spectrum has been one of baffled disappointment, if not outrage. I believe Gary Groth actually invoked the name of the Deity, so great was his incredulity. He said "Alan, in God's name how can you do an issue of SPAWN?" Gary, in God's name why not? There was an article in the COMICS JOURNAL called Whatever Happened to Alan Moore? which to be fair was a very fair, sympathetic article, from a point of view that was very understanding about my situation, but still disappointed that I didn't save the comics industry. It all looked so promising, didn't it? You know, 1987, Bam Sock Pow - The Comic Grows Up At Last - all of these headlines in the paper. It looked for a moment like some comic book messiah had risen up and was gonna save the medium - and what a disappointment I turned out to be. All I did was a good book, and then completely turned my back upon pop culture and its demands - which was one of the things that the guy writing the article seemed to be a bit upset about.
That if I could have somehow stood it a bit longer, I could have gone on a few more quiz shows, chat shows, game shows, things like that, then maybe I could have kept comics in the public eye. If only I hadn't been so disgusted at the triviality of pop culture, if I could have put aside my fastidiousness, then I could have done service to comics.
I don't believe that for a moment. I believe that I did quite enough damage before I realised what was happening, thank you, and I think that if I'd have carried on doing that it would have been even worse than it is now. And I think it's very bad now. There seems to be a lack of vision and direction in comics. Even in the alternative comics there's a sense of "Well where do we go now? What was the point to all this? We can't remember." In some ways I've quite enjoyed the whittling down of my inflated reputation within comics - which I never asked for, it's always been an encumbrance, and I am very very glad to be rid of it.
Most of the Image stuff that I've been given, I've been given other people's characters. These are characters with pre-existing personalities and milieux. If I were to change the characters too much, I wouldn't be doing my job properly. What I've tried to do is change the thrust of the stories. With SUPREME, where they did give me the opportunity to re-design Supreme from the ground up, what you're gonna find is an almost absurdly moral character, a character who is entirely good. None of this Marvelman doubt about the morality of the ubermensch. This is not a real person, this is a superhero. He's a myth figure, he can be entirely good. Superheroes are mythical characters. This ironic and cynical superhero world, which I am to a large degree responsible for creating... I don't like it. What to me was an experiment on a couple of books has now become an industry, a genre; the grim superhero. I think it's tired, I think that one got real tired real quick. I'm not interested in that now, I'm interested in the pure form of superheroes, pure myth, and seeing what can be done within the confines of that.
I think it'll work, despite the obstacles that have been placed in my path - like having to take part in this fairly inane WildStorm crossover, which never makes sense, they're always a bad idea. If they'd done it how I told them there would have been no problem, but would they listen? I said "Look, just tell me what you want this crossover to achieve - it doesn't really matter what it is, just give me a list of what you want it to do - and leave everything else up to me. Then I can do it properly, I can make it work. There is a way to do it." And on that understanding I agreed to do the crossover. The next thing I got was the complete plot for the crossover, almost page by page. It didn't work, they totally fucked it up, they've had to re-write the ending about six times because it didn't work. But that's more or less over. So I can put that behind me and get on with trying to tell the story that I wanted to.
After that, I'm planning to maybe just take on a creator-owned book, come up with my own idea. I've got an idea for this story called THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEFOLK, set in the Victorian era, but not the Victorian era of FROM HELL. This would be the Victorian era of Victorian fiction, and the group would be made up of Allan Quartermain - the hero of KING SOLOMON'S MINES - Henry Jekyll, and occasionally Edward Hyde, Captain Nemo, John Griffin - the Invisible Man, the Time Traveller from THE TIME MACHINE, and Mina Harker from DRACULA. And this would be The League of Extraordinary Gentlefolk. And it struck me that you could have such a lot of fun, there's such a lot of possibility in that world of Victorian fiction.
As a possible story, say for example that this League of adventurers was approached by a distraught Professor Cavor, from THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, who reveals to them that yes, he has travelled to the moon in a private experiment using this miracle metal, Cavorite. Of which, when his moon craft was destroyed, he kept a small sample of Cavorite. Say the small sample of Cavorite has been stolen by the infamous Kapiten Moore's Luftpiraten. This was an 1890s German pulp science fiction character, it means Captain Moore's Air Pirates. He had an airship, and this was before we had airships, so it was science fiction. But Captain Moore the Air Pirate has stolen the sample of Cavorite and is going to sell it to the Germans, making the nightmarish threat of aerial bombardment possible. They've got to get it back from him, but how do you get up there? But luckily one of them knows a retired adventurer, Phileas Fogg, who still has the hot air balloon. You can see the possibilities.
Conan Doyle's Lost World, where all the dinosaurs hang out; if when Professor Challenger abandoned the Lost World, what would happen if Doctor Moreau found it? Doctor Moreau trades one island for another, now he's got dinosaur DNA to mess around with.
Fun Manchu - who was Fu Manchu? Could he have been, say, someone who was a child during the Opium Wars? Someone who saw the British come in and massacre his people so that his people would have to buy their opium? And the British did not behave well during the Opium Wars; they were raping corpses. You can see how you could grow up with a bit of a prejudice against British imperialism. There might be a story there - Fu Manchu, who was he?
I'd leave out Sherlock Holmes because he's too fucking obvious. I might have Mycroft Holmes in there, he's a much more interesting character and much more obscure. I think I'd have Sherlock Holmes as an off-stage presence: "The great detective is currently in Austria." I'd also like to have places like Lady Constance De Cumming's Correctional Facility for Young Gentlewomen, these places from PEARL and Victorian erotica. These are real as well, they're all part of the story.
It struck me that you could do a rip-roaring romp as they used to say, that would be funny and adventurous and exciting and full of marvellous inventions and thrills. So that's a possibility. Everyone seems to like that idea, there's a couple of publishers who are saying "Will you do that for us?" So that's possible, that's likely. What I'll probably do is bring my work Image down to that, and maybe a superhero title or something like that.
Alan Moore's talents extend far beyond the confines of the comic-book medium. His recent work has included two CDs, entitled THE BIRTH CAUL, a harrowing, mesmeric tone poem set to music by Tim Perkins and David J, and THE MOON AND SERPENT GRAND EGYPTIAN THEATER OF MARVELS, which he is currently turning into a mind-bending, mystical interactive CD-ROM with Dave Gibbons and Tim Perkins. Moore hopes to take the CD-ROM experience "to a new level", fully exploiting the potential of a new medium which he feels to date has been, like most new technologies, overly influenced by those which came before. He describes this latter project as "megalomaniacially ambitious" - when asked what it will be about, Dave Gibbons replied, "Everything..."
After five years of work, Moore has recently completed his first novel, VOICE OF THE FIRE, published by Victor Gollancz. Whilst BIG NUMBERS has ceased publication due to the departure of Bill Sienkiewicz as artist, it looks increasingly likely that it will be turned into a British TV series by award-winning producer Alex Usborne. Alan Moore wants to be more than simply a comics writer; indeed, more than simply a writer. As he becomes increasingly fascinated by the nature of language, reality and magic, Moore has decided to re-invent himself... as a magician. But it seems that, for the moment at least, comics will be occupying a large part of his attention.
Alan Moore: I would like to do a work about magic. This is born of my recent interest in the subject. It strikes me that the history of magic - whether one has any belief in the actual concept itself or not - no-one can deny that the history of magic is fascinating and filled with incredible characters. These occultists, these lunatics, frauds, maniacs... it's a colourful cast, and it touches upon some very surprising areas.
I've also thought of maybe structuring it so that there are three or four strands to the book, with one of them maybe being a history of magic, told in a documentary comic strip style; one of them maybe being a personal autobiography in comic form, about my own experiences, or apparent experiences, with magic. Which I think would be like... Harvey Pekar meets Doctor Strange. Another strand would be maybe purely a theoretical strand, explained in comic form. It would be the theory and science, as perceived by me, of magic. And maybe I'll work these three things together into some sort of Grand Grimoire, a comic-book grimoire.
I've got ideas about what the comic strip is, that have developed over the last few years. I've always understood that the comic-strip is apparently the form that is most useful for presenting information in a way that's likely to be absorbed and remembered. But it only struck me recently a possible reason why this might be. Maybe the word is the unit of currency of the left brain, maybe the image is the unit of currency of the pre-verbal right brain. Maybe part of the reason for the efficacy of comics is the fact that they simultaneously engage both lobes. You're firing on both cylinders. Now that strikes me as an interesting principle, and one that could stand some application to magical subject matter - which is very much about the interaction between the rational left lobe of the brain and the magical right lobe of the brain. The right lobe is the dark side of the brain, we know nothing about it. It seems to be the seat of the unconscious, the underworld if you like.
The other possibility, which in fact excites me a little bit more, is something that came to me after various ponderings. I've currently been looking at the end of the century, the approach of the millennium, the 1990s, the fin de siecle. Now the last time that we had a siecle that had a fin was the 1890s. A comparison between the two decades is pretty depressing. They had Purcell, we have Noel Gallagher. They had Oscar Wilde, we have Martin Amis. They had the Symbolists and Pre-Raphaelites and Art Nouveau, we have David Hockney's pictures of his dachshunds. I'm sure they're lovely dogs, Dave, but Jesus Christ...
There was something grand about the way in which the 1900s rose to their climax. I don't see much that is grand today. So what I thought was, what about a visionary magazine, a magazine of vision, however you choose to define that term. Something that has a bit more than a mere commercial application. Like RAW - that was a magazine of vision. Each of those artists had got their own vision and Art Spiegleman gave them the space to display it.
And I've been talking to people, and there's a lot of people who think this would be a good idea. Neil Gaiman would like to be in on it, Oscar Zarate, Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland. I could see a people like maybe P. Craig Russell, Charles Vess, ones who have kind of a visionary quality to their work. I would also like people from outside comics, writers who I consider to be visionary - certainly people like Iain Sinclair would be at the top of the list, Brian Catling, Aaron Williamson. Peter Ackroyd, I'd probably go for him - he's got something. I'd go for people who seem to me to have a vision that is sympatico with my own. Dennis Kitchen's very interested in publishing it.
I don't know where it'll go yet, but we're thinking of something large format, beautifully produced, a limited edition, very expensive, like RAW. Something where it might cost twenty quid a throw and you maybe only produce five thousand or something. But you make it good enough so it'll be worth twenty quid - or ten quid or whatever it turns out at. So that it'll be a real artifact and a thing of beauty. Because I think that the printed word, encroached upon as it is by cd-roms, computers, virtual reality, all this sort of stuff, will probably soon become a kind of specialist item anyway. I can see books becoming more art objects, wonderful little things that it is beautiful to own.
As for LOST GIRLS, it's been out in America. The first two issues are out, third one's on the way. But you're not going to see it over here [in Britain] for ages - over here we're just not mature enough to read this stuff, apparently. It's been decided. No comic shop is gonna take the risk of trying to import LOST GIRLS and having some of those born-again fuckwits that they seem to employ at the Customs and Excise seizing it - because they can. They don't have to declare their religious beliefs when they start that job, but there seems to be an unnatural number of born-again Christians who work there, and who will decide that anything from Wonder Woman's cleavage, to whatever they happen to feel about on that day, is the Mark of the Devil.
Melinda [Gebbie, artist on LOST GIRLS], when she first came over to this country, was welcomed by a book-burning. They ordered FRESH DISEASES, her comic, to be burnt. "Welcome to England, Melinda - this is how we do things here." There is a plan by Tony Bennett - the indefatigable and noble Tony Bennett - he's gonna try and print an edition of it over here to bypass Customs.
We have the same problem with FROM HELL, which has been seized and banned in almost every major country in the world. Not because, as you might expect, it shows a lot of women getting chopped up - nobody minds about that - but it occasionally shows a couple of erect penises. And these are Eddie Campbell erect penises, which are a squiggle of ink, a mere representation. Because I refused to do a strip about serial murder, where it was okay to show someone dissecting a woman but not okay to show two people having consenting loving casual sex. This is the human world, and I'm a grown-up now. I think I should be allowed to write and draw whatever I want. I don't have to go to bed at any special time, and I don't like being condescended to by people who very often I consider to be my intellectual inferiors.
Arrogant I know, but - shit, I'm not telling them what to do.
The Obscene Publications Act relies upon this word "obscene" which is a sort of Victorian, Biblical word. What is obscene? Nobody can come up with a satisfactory definition. The Customs say, "Well, you try importing it, and we'll tell you whether it's obscene." That's what they say. "We're asking you to play Russian Roulette here. We won't tell you what you can or can't import. You try importing it, and if we don't like it, we'll seize it and burn it. You can appeal against that, but if you do appeal and lose, you might have to spend time in prison."
FROM HELL has been seized from comic shops in London, in America, in Australia, in Canada, or it's been seized at the borders. Australia was one of the good ones, they actually gave it to a review board - which included a number of women - who sensibly said that there are two or three panels of explicit sex in hundreds of pages of Victorian detail. It is clear that the purpose of this book is not to arouse people pruriently. It is clear that there is a lot more going on here, this is not likely to attract younger readers. They wouldn't understand this, they'd give up after three pages. And they said this is perfectly acceptable. Good for Australia.
The same was not the case in a lot of the other countries where it got seized. South Africa, that was a good one. I got phoned up by THE TIMES about that - How did I feel that my work had been seized and banned in South Africa? I said, "Well, unsurprised. Everything that's any good has been seized and banned in South Africa. The thing that surprises me most is why you're phoning me up. You didn't phone me when it got seized in London, you didn't phone me when it got seized in Canada, or Australia, or America. At least the South Africans admit that they are a fascist police state and they behave like one. There are no surprises. It's more surprising in these countries that are supposed not to be fascist police states, but you never called me about that. Why is that?" At which point they lost interest in the interview. I think they wanted me to say "How shocking, this brutal regime, those South Africans, what a bunch of bastards." Which goes without saying, but that wasn't the point.
LOST GIRLS now occupies most of my attention at the moment, that's two-thirds finished, and I'm pleased with it. Mainly pleased with the reaction that we've had from women, which has been universally favourable. The reaction from women has been wonderful. We're going overboard on the girliness of this. This is not a girlie book in the sense of a book with pictures of sexy women with no clothes on; this is a book for girlies. This is why we put boxes of chocolates on the front, because everyone knows that women are sexually aroused by chocolate. In fact, women like chocolate more than sex.
But I think it's fun, it's witty, it's got style, and Kitchen Sink are doing us proud. It's an all-women editorial team, who are just as girly as we are. They stick all the little bits of lace and things like that around the stuff, they love doing it. They don't very often get the chance to do a comic that can have flowers all over it, and things like that. LOST GIRLS - we're not pushing it as a comic book. It'll probably get a few meaningless awards, and sell about twenty thousand copies like FROM HELL does.
When we bring it out as a book, however, then we're going to push it to the mass market. Because I think that sex is a big crossover. Superheroes, no. Nobody outside comics really cares much about them. Sex, yeah, that's generally guaranteed to get people's attention. So yeah, LOST GIRLS is the one surviving big project that I'm working on, before I launch myself into my next one.
As for other the work I'm doing, there will be a second appendix to FROM HELL in comic strip form, the DANCE OF THE GULL CATCHERS, which I'm just about to start on, and that'll come out as a separate little twenty-four page comic later this year. VOICE OF THE FIRE will be coming out later this year. FROM HELL's taken me six years, seven years - I started in the Christmas of 1988. VOICE OF THE FIRE, the novel, has taken me five years.
These are long slogs, it's like swimming the English Channel; there's a point half way where you can't see the beginning and you can't see the end any more, and you're very disoriented and lonely. It gets very hard, but they're finished. It's been a time of endings, and exciting possibilities for new beginnings. It's one of those pauses. I don't get them very often.