1997: Word of Moore

Excerpt from an interview pubblished in 1997 on Feature Magazine Volume 3, Number 2.

FEATURE: Where do you see yourself moving as an artist?  What sort of legacy are you trying to build, what kind of body of work are you trying to create?

ALAN MOORE: I've never really thought much of a legacy. I suppose that I don't know, I'm just trusting the process. I look back at the early work that I did. I look at Watchmen, and I must admit I feel a certain amount of unworthy embarrassment.  It's nothing that I should feel, but just the fact that it was a superhero comic. I was trying to say something serious in a fairly lightweight form. Like I say, I wouldn't do that now.  I'm still very proud of Watchmen, but I'm prouder of stuff outside that genre like From Hell, like Lost Girls. There's a progression going on here. It's only a progression of ideas in my head, but they're following a kind of path. I'm on the path, I don't know where it's going, and I don't really have a destination in mind. There's no plan here, there's just a path which I am trying to uncover and interpret as I go along. My works are, I suppose, a series of communiqués from along the trail. My works will tell you more or less where I am at any given point along that trail. What lies further down the road... I mean, my list of things that I'm gonna be doing in the future, I suppose should be considered directions that look to me promising to head out in. I don't know what I'll find when I get there, and I don't know what path will lead from there. I don't know where I'll be going after that.

I have my own sort of preoccupations, they tend to veer towards getting further in to something. When dealing with mainstream comics, I'd perhaps try and look at the politics or the morals that informed the other situations in these books, trying to get under the surface of that. When I'd explored that for a bit, I'd try to get under the surface a bit further still. To talk about politics in a more general sense and just relating them to a funny book world. There's a point where you want to go further still. It's a sort of burrowing, I suppose. That's the best way that I can describe the process. I want to try and penetrate the different layers of meaning that there are in the world as deeply as possible. Whatever tools or whatever avenues seem to be most productive towards that end are the ones that I shall be taking. But this is a very subjective thing. It's a totally unpredictable process inside my head. I shall just have to see where it takes me. I try not to second guess that sort of stuff.

I guess when I finally drop dead over the typewriter, then, and only then, I'll be able to see what body of work I've left behind. I'm sure that eighty percent of it will be crap, but there'll probably be a couple of good things in there that will endure and they'll probably be the last things that I ever thought they'd be.