Ramon Vitral: We are living in very strange times all over the world, but Brazil is going through an extraordinarily catastrophic period. We have a far-right president, a man who has repeatedly expressed (and acted on) his authoritarian and anti-democratic views. It seems to me that the situation in the UK is not as catastrophic, but you are still living in the aftermath of Brexit and Boris Johnson's period as prime minister. I say this to express how the publication of your new book and the opportunity to talk to you are a breath of fresh air amidst all this obscurantism.
Here are my questions:
The word “Illuminations” sounds extremely pertinent in this dark period we are experiencing. Is there any light that allows you to feel some optimism about the future of humanity?Alan Moore: Optimism, whether justified or not, is the only functional position, and pessimism, no matter how well-founded, is almost always useless; a surrender to circumstances that makes those circumstances all but inevitable. On nearly every front – the continuing destruction of our environment; the obvious intent of the world’s billionaires to hoover up everyone else’s money; the intrusion of surveillance culture into every human life on the planet; the destabilisation of consensus reality beneath a landslide of ludicrous bullshit; the rise of something that isn’t even fascism; the mass desire to escape into fantasy, or Second Life, or the Metaverse, as if that was existentially possible – our species’ situation appears hopelessly terminal. My own optimism, such as it is, is born of my perception that human development may be following the alchemical formula of
solve et coagula, where
solve is the process of analysis, of taking something apart to its smallest component in order to fully understand the whole, and
coagula is the process of synthesis, of putting the components back together into an improved form. It is my hope that the fragmentation that we see almost everywhere in society is the last, necessary stage of
solve, of the dismantling of the old world, in order for
coagula to begin with its building of the new. It may be a fragile hope, but it is the one source of illumination that I can discern in this otherwise pestilential moral blackout.
Ramon Vitral: Literature, science fiction, comics and other art forms are often spoken of as part of the “entertainment industry.” What is your opinion of this co-option of artists and their works by an industry?Alan Moore: If art is not on some level entertaining then it will have great difficulty in conveying its message to all but a tiny audience. On the other hand, if it is only empty entertainment then it loses all its power and meaning as art, making the enterprise pointless save for commercial purposes. What I propose is art powerful enough to shake the city walls, and popular enough to engage with a multitude. I hope that my work is sufficiently entertaining for the reader to absorb its content, but I have never seen myself as an entertainer. Fortunately, my critics assure me that I need have no worries on that score.
Ramon Vitral: You have already classified superhero comics as “unhealthy escapism.” Why do you consider them “unhealthy escapism”? And what do you consider to be “healthy escapism”?Alan Moore: I think that in the 1980s people were declaring that comics had grown up, when actually they’d just met the emotional age of the audience coming in the opposite direction. At their very outset, with Siegel and Schuster’s Superman, superheroes were much-needed Depression-era fantasies of working-class empowerment, by working-class creators in what was then a working-class medium intended for working-class readers. Now, comics are priced and packaged pretty much exclusively by and for middle-aged and middle-class hobbyists, and therefore serve as empowerment fantasies for the already-empowered. I think that their protracted existence into the present day is part of a panicked reaction against the world’s mounting complexity: people become scared and anxious, understandably, when faced with a world too complicated to be understood or controlled. When the narrative of modern life becomes too complex to be endured, perhaps many people feel the compulsion to retreat to a simpler narrative which, though it may be delusional nonsense, they can at least understand. The conspiracy-theory jamboree of the Trump years provides a perfect example. The QAnon concept of subterranean Democrat paedophile demons feasting on the adrenal glands of children poses a ridiculous, simplistic and non-existent comic-book threat, which can only be averted by an equally ridiculous, simplistic and non-existent comic-book hero, namely ‘The Donald’. Superheroes in their current incarnation, children’s stories that are seemingly the only narratives that today’s reluctant adults are prepared to engage with, have played a major role in the infantilization of western culture during this last decade, which I would argue has contributed greatly to the rise of populist fascism during the same period. Since-disowned works such as Marvelman and Watchmen weren’t intended as a revitalisation of this flagging genre so much as a satire and a criticism of it. The superhero today can only be an invulnerable compensatory figure for a nation afraid to sleep without a handgun on the night-table, or a proudly-brandished embodiment of American exceptionalism. I presume they will only finally die or fall out of favour when the psychological need for them dies, which, given the current state of culture and society, may be some time.
