Alan Moore: I guess that I was influenced the most stylistically by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner. […] Those two are right up there at the top. Those are the two main gods in my comic book writers' Pantheon. The stuff I grew up with was the Julie Schwartz era of DC Comics and the Stan Lee, Kirby/Ditko stuff at Marvel and all the other stuff during the 60s.
[…] I think the main thing that gave me the idea that I could write stories for comics that would interest me was the work that was appearing from Pat Mills and John Wagner in 2000 AD. When it was in its early heyday, you had people like Brian Bolland doing Judge Dredd. Most of the better stories, with a couple of exceptions, seemed to be written either by John Wagner or Pat Mills, or under one of their many aliases. And there was something in them that said that these stories were being written by grown-up people who had a high degree of intelligence and had a high level irony and humor, which attracted me, and I began to think that maybe there was some possible slot for me within the more fruitful kind of ground that comics seemed to be turning into.
[…] The waters of that particular question have become more murky recently, but if there is some clear feature that separates British comic book writing from American, especially at that time, it might well be the sense of irony, the kind of cynicism that really only comes from being in an empire that is well into its decline. America is headed towards its decline.
Give it another few years, and you'll have that deep-seeded pessimism of the soul. It's sort of a post-empire state that brings this strange, wry melancholia to some of the British work. It has something to do with how the history of a place defines the consciousness of its inhabitants.
[…] In the town that I live in, there are buildings that are a thousand years old. In America it's a completely different dynamic. The difference between Britain and America was once described to me as, in Britain, a hundred miles is a long way, and in America, a hundred years is a long time. When you've been marinating in your own black juices for a couple thousand years, there's a different tone, a different flavor to things.
[…] The opportunities that were presented when I was offered Swamp Thing were really stunning. In Britain, the most that you could hope for was a black and white strip with five pages a week, something like that. Whereas in America, you had the opportunity to write things that seemed of incredibly sprawling length. You could do a story in 24 pages and it would be printed in color! I remember putting some really serious thought into how to revise the story structures I'd been doing because they'd been devised to break down into 5 or 6 page episodes.
[…] I grew up reading American comics. We had very many great British comics at the time, but American comics were something different. They showed me a world that was already fantasy before the superheroes turned up. New York City was a science fiction landscape to me before you even had Superman leaping over the tall buildings. It's a thing where, when I was offered the chance to work at dc, all of the sudden there was the chance to tap back into these comic reading experiences which had been very formative for me.
[…] When I entered the field, certainly in this country, there was no job less glamorous than comic book writer. That wasn't what I got into the field for, though. It was purely because I wanted to write comics. It was only in the kind of explosion that followed that, when it got slightly tarnished for me because it became about other things than writing comics. It became about having a certain position in the industry or reputation, image, things like that. It these things that made me take a more reclusive position in the industry. In fact, the industry itself, I have no interest in. I suppose that might be the sort of position of an embittered, cranky, old guy, but…
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