Moore vs. Claremont

Page from Heroes for Hope. Script: A. Moore. Art: R. Corben.

Selected excerpts from Moore and Claremont speak out on writing, an interview published on Speakeasy n. 54 in 1985.

During the recent visit of the X-Men creative team to the UK, your intrepid reporters from Speakeasy cornered Chris Claremont after his mammoth signing session in Forbidden Planet for an exclusive interview. However, just as he was about to be whisked away in our bullet-proof limousine a familiar, if somewhat sinister figure lurched into view. It was none other than Alan Moore, who had just heard on the phone from the US that he had been voted Second Best Comics Writer in the Comic Buyer's Guide poll. As we rushed to offer our heartiest congratulations, he graciously broke the news to Chris Claremont that he had in fact been voted the First Best Comics Writer in the selfsame poll. Not believing our luck, we also bundled Mr Moore into the back of the limo, took the official Two World's Greatest Comic Book Writers to an exclusive eaterie, and pointed a tape recorder in their general direction. What follows is our transcript of this momentous historic occasion...

WOULD YOU AGREE THAT THE STRUCTURE OF YOUR STORIES IN THE X-MEN, CHRIS, ARE SIMILAR IN FORM TO A SOAP OPERA?

[...]

Alan Moore: I have just started writing the first book that I have ever done that could be remotely construed as a superhero team book. It's got a number of different super heroes in it...

Chris Claremont: The Charlton stuff?

AM: The Watchmen.

CC: What was the Charlton stuff?

AM: That's right. But I am glad that we didn't get the Charlton stuff now because the characters we have come up with are better. With that I found it's coming out like Thomas Pynchon in comics, it's so bloody dense. We've got twenty eight pages in there and Dave's working on a nine panel frame grid, so I've found it quite easy to set it up so that you can get all the characters in there. And also I haven't got Chris's problem in that I have just got to do twelve issues. I don't think that you see a supervillain throughout the entire twelve issues, so it's avoiding a lot of the classic hero/villain formula.

CC: The X-Men Ethiopia book is a nice case in point. Most of the first third of it is basically single character sequences: each of the X-Men as individuals goes through a significant trauma. It isn't until the end that they start acting as a group. In Alan's case he had Magneto. It took me the better part of a month to choreograph it, just because you have to keep track of where everybody's going and what everybody is doing. And depending on how on the ball your artist is, you have to be thinking characterisationally for all six, eight, ten, twelve characters, in terms of how they dress, how they look, what their rooms are like. [...]
One of the things that was so impressive about Alan's Magneto scene was the description of the office, and he lists the three books that Magneto has in the world: Nietzsche's Man and Superman, the other's a book on advanced physics, and the third was Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I thought this is great! Not only is he brilliant and an egotist, but he has a sense of humour.

HOW DID YOU DO THAT?

AM: It was just the spines of the books.

CC: Actually Pychon's the only one that made it onto the panel.

AM: Not to worry. All that stuff is just detail so that other people can get into it. I agree that the establishment of invisible character detail, the stuff that is not on the surface, the stuff that is just subliminal - context - is an important thing. With Watchmen we tried to really go in for that. It's an extension of the technique that I used in Halo Jones, probably a lot different to the clear establishing that Chris was talking about, in that it's an extension of the idea of teaching parallel languages by dumping people in a room full of foreigners. Okay, the first time it's going to be hell and the first time it's going to be incomprehensible, but eventually your understanding of that world will be much more thorough. It's a long shot, but I think it's going to work because we have got a lot of space: we're working on nine panels of page as opposed to the normal six. That gives you half the book again and you've got twenty eight pages so, in effect you're doing a forty two page book or something, which gives you a lot of information. It's not a very big story either. It's a story that I could probably have told in three issues, but were telling it in twelve. It's not going to be padded, it's just that having twelve we've got room to explore all the characters.

YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT THE DETAIL A WRITER OR ARTIST CAN PUT IN OR NOT PUT IN...

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AM: This comes down to one of the big differences between me and Chris, beyond any stylistic differences. It's purely in the way we work, in that Chris writes plots and then writes the dialogue, and I write a full script. I know that Chris has said he would find it very difficult to write a full script...

CC: Just because I'm a lazy sod!

AM: The only difference is that I wouldn't like to do it your way you know because of the amount of control. I write very, very full scripts. For the first episode of The Watchmen, the manuscript was 164, pages but that meant in each panel you've got a lengthy description and I'm describing everything in the panel. There's a scene where a character goes home and finds Rorschach, one of the other characters, waiting for him in his kitchen. It's a conversation and I knew how the character who found Rorschach there would be reacting, but I needed something for Rorschach to do. It's not a big thing, but while he's talking to the other guy Rorschach goes into the kitchen, goes over to the work surface, takes a sugar jar. He's just carrying on talking and in three panels you see him unscrewing the top of the sugar jar, then he just tips out all the sugar cubes while he's still talking to the other guy, and escapes them all into the pocket of his raincoat, and then just carries on talking. There is no more mention of the sugar cubes until about two scenes later, you're in another character's house and Rorschach's turned up there and while he's talking he pulls his mask up over his nose, reaches into his pocket, takes out a sugar cube, unwraps it, puts it in his mouth, pulls down the mask and just stand there going crunch crunch crunch while he's talking, and drops the paper on the floor. Four pages later you see the woman who is in the house frown, and pick up this piece of paper from the floor and dump it in the litter bin. It's an unimportant bit, but it establishes a couple of characters by a bit of business. Again with Watchmen we have to have an advert hoarding in the background. I told Dave (Gibbons) what the product is, we made up a perfume called Nostalgia and we see it on a hoarding in the first issue. In the second issue somebody's got a bottle of Nostalgia on their dressing table and that is the sort of depth and complexity that I find it easy to get doing a full script, which is one of the reasons I wouldn't be at home with a plot. It's a similar thing to what Chris is saying. It's a matter of control, making sure that everything is there for a reason. Nothing that is just "Oh well...". You think what sort of clothes is he wearing - "well it might be this, it might be that, it doesn't matter." If you know the character well enough you know what sort of clothes he is wearing.

CC: The conscious decision I made was to sacrifice a measure of that control for the advantage of the artist's contributory creativity. I find when I am working with someone like Frank (Miller) or Walt Simonson or (John) Byrne or Paul Smith or John Bolton, to name just a few, that there is a barrier: their suggestions, their thoughts of pacing. They know better how to visually construct a scene than I do; I know how I want the beginning, the middle and the end to go, but how we get there is mutable. [...] It's sacrificing a measure of control to hopefully gain a measure of creativity. The down side is that you end up sometimes having to write obscenely huge blocks of copy to cover screw ups.

AM: My attitude is the same as Chris's. I value serendipity, and I value the artists input a lot and with every script I have written, I write a full script and than say "Throw it out". That's all that they need, if you say that "Here's my full script; this is everything that I can think of that would look good in here. If you've got a better idea or if one of my ideas is bad and you think that you can do it better, then change it"; which means that all I am doing really is giving them something they can use as a jumping off point. With the Magneto sequence, at the beginning Magneto is looking at his reflection in the Cerebro helmet, and in the last panel you have a corpse looking at their reflection in the old Magneto helmet. That gives the three pages a symmetry that binds it together. If I'd just worked from the plot, it would be unlikely that you would get that. That is the sort of thing that I value, the fact that you can impose a structure and then let the artist... Well, take Steve and John: they come up with some incredible weird shit. It's what I ask for - I might say "Now we want some horrible sort of war fantasy" and make a few suggestions - but they will be putting their own minds into it. I think it's the job of the writer to inspire the artist in one way or another.

[...]

DO YOU THINK THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE WRITER IN THE COMICS FIELD IS UNDERRATED?

CC: Oh I think they are. [...] I think any good artist worth half a damn will tell you this, that we're the ones who start the story. The artist may come in and say "I've got a brilliant idea for a story", but the writer is the one who hammers it into shape. The major flaw I used to find among artists who write was that they would come up with great individual stories, but it would not hold as a series. If you talk to people like Frank and Walter and John and Howard, who are writers, they will more often describe themselves as writers who draw as opposed to artists who write. The misconception is that our job is to put the words on the page, and it isn't. Our job is to tell the story that puts the art on the page. What we're there to do is to give the artist the framework, the images, whatever, that he or she converts into the pictures. Then we take the words to point the pictures in certain directions but it's getting the pictures on the page first that's important and that's where we earn our money. That was always the polarity in Marvel because you were paid $25 for a plot and $480 for a script, and the first thing that Shooter did was to reorient that and establish that we have a plot rate and a script rate, and the plot rate is half the script rate. In my case that's where I do 90% of my work; scripting is easy because for me anyway 90% of the work is about when I write the plot.

AM: Going back to what you were saying about an artist's considerations when it comes to write - this is not a general slur of all artists - but a lot of artists will obviously think in terms of visual considerations because they have got to sit there and draw the book, which is about five times the actual physical labour that me and Chris have put in. So they are going to think "I want something nice to draw". Just as a random example, with Captain Britain when I was working with Alan (Davis), since he has been doing the script before me, we both had lots of input into it. Alan liked the idea of drawing a lot of super hero characters. He liked the idea of bringing in the Special Executive and adding about six more members to them, and he liked the idea of having lots of characters around because it gave him new characters to design, new characters to draw. After a while I found when I was writing it - I wanted to give Alan everything he wanted - but I found that you were eventually getting a script that was swamped in characters, because once you created these characters who look good for their five panel introductory fight scene, they are still hanging around. Unless you are going to have them to just dematerialise then you have got to think of something to do with them, and the more characters you get the more difficult it becomes. I read an interview with Alan where he was saying that he got bored with some of the Captain Britain stories because Captain Britain was becoming a background character, and this is the difference between artists' thinking and writers' thinking. Writers have to think in a tapestry, they have to think "Well okay, I could do this now and it would be really really flash and it will be really good for these three pages, but it would diffuse something I've got coming up in a month's time, something I've got coming up in two months' time, it would spoil this little relationship I've got building there: it's not worth it". You tend to think in the long term, in the overall picture, rather than in terms of what is going to be good for that week's work.

[...]

AM: I like to brutalise the readers emotionally as much as possible, because so much culture is deadening, so much culture has no emotional impact. Culture is more to do with avoiding emotional impact - muzak culture, where all of the emotional high peaks have been edited out. If I was going to do anything in comics, I would like to think that I was going to do something that was going to upset people in one way or another.

CC: Make them think. A friend of mine in Michigan sent me the xeroxes of Alan's run on Captain Britain. I read it in one sitting, and I said to myself "Shit, I created this little book?" It bore no resemblance, but what was flattering was that Alan built on the stuff that I set up. [...]

AM: With the Captain Britain stuff, when I read it through - I mean, after you left the book there was there was an awful lot of, I mean really...

CC: Well, when I was on the book it wasn't all that great.

AM: You were limited to start with because you had got a cross between Spider-Man and Captain America in Britain, but when I went through it I felt that my job is to accept that all this is real on some level, and that all this happened - much as I wish most of it hadn't - and try and come up with some overstructure that will accomodate all that, while emphasizing the better elements.

CC: When I got to the end my first reaction was "Wow!" this is like a great roller coaster ride, this is neat! [...] To me, the way to do it is through the emotional context: I was caring about Brian and Betsy and, Christ!, even Saturnyne and the Crazy Gang I felt so bad when they all got chewed up. And when this little tadpole got himself incinerated right off the bat. Actually, I felt sorry for the Fury - aww, poor little unstoppable killing machine!

AM: What can you do if you're an unstoppable killing machine? You're not going to have many options, are you?

CC: But it was challenging, it was exciting. Ronin was, almost. Eisner, if you want to go back to basics.

AM: Love and Rockets - good emotional character stuff there.

CC: And a woman who is getting fat.

AM: That's good

CC: The reason I love Love and Rockets is because Maggie is getting fat. I am doing it with a boy: Sunspot is becoming a chocoholic, he's going to gain weight, but that's a boy. Boys's get fat. Karma got fat, but it was a joke.

AM: It's not taboo to have an ugly boy in comics. It's not taboo to have a less than physically perfect boy. To have an ugly girl that is sympathetic is a move that I'm waiting for. With Captain Britain, it was mainly Alan (Davis), but when he made Cobweb really, really ugly and really, really interesting and nice, I thought that was great. That Megan character - I must admit the latest ones that I've seen she is made a lot more attractive, and I think that's a shame. From my point of view, the more ugly, sympathetic people in comics the more that we can get away from this perfect ideal of blemishless, acne-free teens, the better.

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