1996: Image, Supreme, the Extraordinary Gentlefolk

Original Supreme n.41 cover by Jerry Ordway. More details here.

Excerpt from an interview by Andy Diggle, published at www.comicsworld.com in 1996.
The complete article is available at Internet Archive: here.

Andy Diggle: [...] 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 f*cked 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 f*cking 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. [...]