Alan Moore: Conversations

264 Pages·2011·2.25 MB·English

by  Berlatsky

ALAN MOORE: CONVERSATIONS
Conversations with Comic Artists M. Thomas Inge, General Editor
Alan Moore: Conversations
Edited by Eric L. Berlatsky
University Press of Mississippi Jackson
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chronology
From the Writer’s Viewpoint
David Lloyd / 1981
Garry Leach and Alan Moore
David Roach, Andrew Jones, Simon Jowett, and Greg Hill / 1983
Alan Moore
Guy Lawley and Steve Whitaker / 1984
Alan Moore
Christopher Sharrett / 1988
Alan Moore Interview
Matthew De Abaitua / 1998
Moore in The Onion Edits
Tasha Robinson / 2001
The Craft: An Interview with Alan Moore
Daniel Whiston, David Russell, and Andy Fruish / 2002
Alan Moore Interview
Jess Nevins / 2004
Moore: “We Wanted to Do Something Which Solved a Lot of the Abiding
Problems That Pornography Has.”
Chris Mautner / 2006
The Mustard Interview: Alan Moore
Alex Musson and Andrew O’Neill / 2009
Index
INTRODUCTION
Alan Moore’s privileged position in the history of comics is certain. It is also
complex and contradictory. He is, perhaps, still best known for Watchmen
(1986–87), though his prodigious output since has reduced that epoch-making
series to just one of his many accomplishments in the field. Watchmen itself is a
contradictory text, a superhero story about the dangers of heroism, a Cold War
tale that also eerily predicts the events and aftermath of 9/11, a meditation on the
philosophy of time that presents the reader with two seemingly mutually
exclusive temporalities, sequential and simultaneous. It is a series that was
originally published in the United States, takes place there, and comments on its
status as a Cold War superpower, but is written and drawn by two Englishmen.
Created for one of the “big two” corporate comics companies, whose
copyrighted characters and work-for-hire contracts often allow little room for
creative freedom, it is written by one of the most iconoclastic, rebellious, and
freethinking figures in the medium. These tensions and ambivalences helped
make Watchmen that great rarity, a text that is both widely popular and critically
lauded. Its selection as one of Time magazine’s “100 Best English-Language
Novels since 1923,” merely cemented the broad consensus about the book’s
quality and importance. Along with Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning Maus
and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, both also published in
1986, the book has been frequently credited with kickstarting the newfound
perception that comics were “not just for kids anymore” and would henceforth
be taken seriously. While comics may have taken several steps backward before
reaching its current position, wherein sequential juxtaposed images are all but
assumed to be a valid and interesting aesthetic medium, and even a commercial
draw, Watchmen certainly played a significant role in this cultural
transformation.
For Moore, however, the contradictions and complexities go well beyond his
most popular and fêted creation. Known as the single most important figure to
shift the balance of power and influence in mainstream comics away from the
artist and towards the writer, he began his career as a little-known and most
often pseudonymous “cartoonist,” responsible for both the words and images in
his weekly funny-animal newspaper strip, Maxwell the Magic Cat (under the
name “Jill de Ray”) and a weekly half-page feature in Sounds, a national
alternative music magazine (under the name “Curt Vile”). These strips find
Moore primarily as a humorist, architect of wryly dark and off-kilter gags
(Maxwell) and a series of giddy, trippy parodies of the mystery and science
fiction genres (Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation, respectively).
The inventive, if occasionally cramped, use of page space in the two Sounds
strips prefigured Moore’s innovative breakdowns in his later work, despite the
fact that by then, he was no longer his own artist and was directing layouts in
legendarily elaborate full scripts.
In contrast to these humble beginnings, his worldwide renown was built on
the brief period during which he was writing superheroes for DC Comics, from
1983 to 1989. During that time, DC published Watchmen, V for Vendetta (begun
for Warrior magazine in England), Batman: The Killing Joke, almost four years
worth of the monthly horror/superhero series, Swamp Thing, and a variety of
smaller projects. Before coming to DC, Moore wrote superheroes for Marvel UK
(Captain Britain) and Warrior (Marvelman) in England. Indeed, at one point
during 1982–83, he and Alan Davis (illustrator of both strips) had a monopoly
on superhero comics created in England. From this, it might seem that Moore
was inevitably married to the long-underwear adventure stories that dominated
the industry since the 1960s. In fact, however, Moore’s relationship to
superheroes was always an ambivalent affair. While Captain Britain (and
Swamp Thing) functioned within the boundaries of superhero genre tropes, if
intelligently and intricately so, both Marvelman (called Miracleman in the U.S.)
and Watchmen took the genre apart from the inside. Moore’s restlessness with
superheroes could be seen elsewhere, as well. It came forth in a feminist essay
about the poor treatment of women in mainstream superhero comics, in an
“affectionate character assassination” of Marvel boss Stan Lee (both essays in
Daredevils, a 1983 Marvel UK comics magazine), and in his unwillingness to be
confined to that genre, despite its market dominance.
In the admittedly more flexible British market, Moore wrote straight science
fiction (Future Shocks, Skizz, Dr. Who, and Star Wars shorts), feminist space
opera (Halo Jones), sci-fi comedy (D.R. and Quinch), horror-comedy (The
Bojeffries Saga), and dystopian noir (V for Vendetta) in addition to Maxwell and
the Sounds strips. On the other side of the Atlantic, his mainstream superhero
work was spliced with horror, noir, and science fiction, while he kept a hand in
smaller press adventure comics and the occasional creator-owned “alternative”
foray. His much-publicized departure from DC in 1988–89, and his short-lived
abandonment of superheroes was then less a sudden career about-face than it
was a conscious choice to emphasize certain elements of his trajectory over
others, sacrificing a measure of economic security for creative freedom when it
seemed these two strands were no longer reconcilable. The conflict between
economic solvency and creative liberation did not spring suddenly on Moore in
the late eighties, however. Rather, it had continually been present in his working
life for nearly the entirety of the previous decade. A proud member of the
Northampton working class, Moore was heavily influenced in his comics-
reading youth both by the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Marvel Age and by the
underground comix of Robert Crumb and his contemporaries. While Mort
Weisinger–era Superman was an admitted moral exemplar for the young Moore,
among his creative idols were the iconoclastic writer, William Burroughs, and
the avant-garde musician/composer, Brian Eno. Faced with economic hardship
quite often in his youth, especially in the aftermath of his expulsion from
secondary school for dealing acid, Moore was continually faced with the choice
of money or creative freedom. He tended to choose both.
In the early part of the eighties, Moore split his time writing between the
corporate UK sci-fi weekly magazine, 2000 AD, and Dez Skinn’s newly founded
Warrior magazine, which offered the possibility of creator-owned strips. While
Moore’s participation in Warrior derived partially from dissatisfaction in the
ways creators were treated in the corporate environment of 2000 AD, the
subsequent jump from Warrior to DC was precipitated, at least somewhat, by
dissatisfaction with the economic rewards that Warrior finally yielded. Indeed,
Moore was willing to sign away his rights in V for Vendetta for the remuneration
offered by DC. So, while Moore’s move to DC was never a wholesale move to
“large” corporate comics, his later departure was also never a complete
abandonment of superheroes or the steady income they offered.
The conflict between profitable superhero genre work and “serious” creator-
owned material continued through the nineties, despite Moore’s rejection of both
Marvel and DC. With the emergence of Image Comics as a third “major”
superhero publisher, Moore was able to finance his longer, more complicated
projects by writing 1963 and Spawn (for Image), WildC.A.T.s (for Wildstorm),
Supreme (for a variety of publishers), and related titles. The real work of the
decade, though, was on the creator-owned side of the ledger with Big Numbers,
From Hell, and Lost Girls. Big Numbers (with Bill Sienkiewicz) was perhaps the
most ambitious project, focusing on the arrival of a U.S. style shopping mall in a
thinly veiled replica of Moore’s native Northampton, but the book became an
economic sinkhole, forcing Moore to abandon his recently established
independent publishing venture, Mad Love. From Hell, a metafictive retelling of
the Jack-the-Ripper murders and aftermath, took nearly ten years to complete
and shuttled from publisher to serial publisher, as did Lost Girls, a lengthy
pornography starring Alice (from Wonderland), Dorothy (from Oz) and Wendy
(from Peter Pan). The latter volume took sixteen years to see its way to final
publication.
The delay of the full-length book versions of From Hell and Lost Girls until
1999 and 2006 respectively made most of the nineties seem like a comparatively
creative fallow period for Moore, at least for those not following the small
presses’ inconsistent serialization of these works. The two giant volumes are
testimony, however, to Moore’s pursuit of independent and creative projects
outside of the superhero mainstream. From Hell’s focus on magic, masonry, and
murder in grisly anatomical detail and scratchy black and white Eddie Campbell
pencils signaled a rejection of the mainstream’s preoccupation with four-color
superheroics regardless of how “grim and gritty” they became in Watchmen’s
aftermath. Lost Girls’ explicit depiction and examination of the conflicting
natures of sex and violence (in lush Melinda Gebbie inks and colored pencils)
did the same, if in a decidedly different direction. For that reason, it was
certainly surprising when Moore returned to monthly superhero comics almost
full time, indirectly for DC no less, with his line of “America’s Best Comics”
(ABC) in 1999. It was, perhaps, less shocking when he “retired” from
mainstream comics again in 2005, once more over corporate interference and
misuse of his creative properties.
More recently, Moore’s focus has been on his performance art and music
(always a part of his repertoire), his Northampton “underground” magazine,
Dodgem Logic, and his as-yet-incomplete second novel, Jerusalem. This final
(?) turn away from corporate comics has also been a turn away from and against
film (after disastrous Hollywood adaptations of several of his works) and even a
turn away from the comics medium itself, with only very occasional installments
of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (originally linked to ABC but owned
by Moore and Kevin O’Neill) and 2010’s Lovecraftian miniseries, Neonomicon,
to sustain his comics followers. The struggle between independence and
creativity on one hand and the economic rewards of corporate hire seems to have
been won, at this date, by the former, although such a victory would likely not
have been possible without investment in the latter.
While this dichotomy in Moore’s working life sheds significant light on the
nature of each individual project, it too is not the end of the contradictions and
paradoxes an overview of his career yields. Also important, for instance, is
Moore’s simultaneous fascination with contemporary science and mathematics
and his seemingly contradictory 1993 conversion to “magic.” Declaring himself
a wizard/magician on his fortieth birthday, Moore began (by his own claim)