You can read the complete piece HERE.
The imagery in The Great When is so arresting and vivid. Did working with great artists over the years, like Kevin O’Neill in League, influence your descriptive writing?
Alan Moore: Yes, I've certainly learned from some of the creators that I've worked with, but you have to remember that I had described those pictures for the artist. I've got the visual imagination, but I just didn't have the artistic chops to realize it as beautifully as I saw it in my head when I made the shift from cartooning to writing comics. My descriptive passages that were intended only for the artist are famously long-winded, and sometimes go on for pages for a single panel. Generally speaking, one page of comics would be about three pages of my script, because I was trying to describe everything that I could imagine in a particular scene.
So working in straight prose fiction, it's always been using the same sensibility and using the same descriptive of abilities, but just shifting the register up so that you are not just writing practical descriptions for an artist. You are actually writing literary descriptions that are meant to entertain and hypnotize the reader.
But it's basically the same process I have. I became very conscious around the time when I was writing Jerusalem, that yes, alright, I'm well-known for being a comics writer, and people have come to expect illustrated narratives from me. So in my prose, I want to really make up for that. If anything, I was being more keen upon generous descriptions to try and compensate for not having an artist like Kevin O'Neill or Melinda Gebbie or any of the other great artists that I've worked with.
And since I happen to be lucky enough to be married to Melinda, she has been very, very useful coming up with colors. If I want to talk about blue, and I've already used ‘blue violet’ and ‘indigo’ and ‘sapphire,’ she'll say, what about ‘lapis’? Oh, that's a lovely word. So that has been very handy.
Read the complete piece HERE.
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