On becoming a full-time novelist and having fun

Below, selected excerpts from an interview published on Inverse.com. 

You can find the complete piece HERE. 

Alan Moore: [...] I started out as a poet, songwriter, and cartoonist before eventually finding that I could make a living as a comic writer. But all the way through that, I’ve been doing other things — recording five or six pretty decent albums, doing a film and a couple of novels, things like that. So, the transition [to becoming a full-time novelist] has been great. I find that I can finally focus upon what I love doing most without all of the distractions of a toxic workplace.

Alan Moore: [...] Characters [in Long London series] like the artist Austin Osman Spare; characters like the racing tipster Prince Monolulu or the king of the Bohemians, Ironfoot Jack; all of the criminal figures, the gangster Jack Spot, Peter Rachman, the Kray twins; marginal figures like the recording genius Joe Meek. And I thought, yes, I really want to talk about these people. I want to give them a second twirl upon the stage because I think that they’ve been forgotten and I don’t think they should have been. I think that they had significance that far outweighed their financial circumstances, and so I needed a narrative that could fit those people into it and could also actually say something about London and could say something about the times that London has been through and how all of that relates to our present moment. Because as with all fantasy and science fiction authors, we might set things upon a distant planet in a far-off nebula or set them in the remote past or the future, but we’re always talking about the present and the here and now.

Alan Moore: [...] I am concentrating entirely upon these Long London novels. I'm doing a couple of little other things that don't really involve me. I think that I will perhaps be doing a print version of the [BBC] Maestro series, which will be very different because I'm going to have to revise most of it.

Largely, I am just focusing upon getting [Long London finished]. This is the first book contract that I've ever had, and so I'm taking it seriously. And I am not taking on work that might detract from getting these books finished. So at the moment I'm doing 500 words a day, which seems to be about right for me, because they're very well chosen words so they take a little time to put in place. But I'm right at the end of [third book in the series] Blow Away Dandelion, in August 1969 precisely. The Troubles are just beginning, with all sorts of things happening in 1969 in August.

So, yeah, I'm very excited about what I'm doing at the moment, and I'm kind of looking forward to, apprehensively, the next book, which is called In England’s Dreaming, which will be set in the 1970s, so it will perhaps be a bit more punk-inflected. And then there's the big finale, which is set in the 1990s after a 20-year gap. For reasons that will become apparent, there isn't Dennis' adventures in the 1980s. We just pick him up again in 1999. So, that's what I've got in front of me, and I'm enjoying it. I think it's coming on rather well. I've just written some very, very good sequences. I'm having immense fun with them and I just hope that perhaps the readers might do too. 

Read the complete interview HERE! 

Meeting Melinda Gebbie

A gorgeous Melinda Gebbie portrait by Joe Brown

Below, selected excerpts from an article by Alistair Fruish who "spent a delightful day with Melinda looking at her work through the decades."

Posted on The Quietus. Read the complete piece HERE. 

 

Melinda Gebbie & Alan Moore –  ‘La Toile’ (2003)

An anthology featuring the Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie Cobweb tale, previously banned by DC Comics from the ABC/Wildstorm anthology Tomorrow Stories. Here it is published in its original form, but due to DC’s copyright, her character has been re-titled ‘La Toile’ (Frenchnfor “The Web”).  

Melinda: ‘La Toile’ investigates the scientist and magician who invented solid rocket fuel, Jack Parsons. This rather metaphysical tale of magical doings,  involved spells, and a scandalous blow-up between Jack Parsons, his wife Betty, and her abandonment of Jack for one L. Ron Hubbard. This image is the most complicated page I’ve ever asked a colourist to do and they came through beautifully on it.

Melinda Gebbie & Alan Moore – ‘Lady of Lavender Lane’ (2023) 

Melinda: This is the latest piece published, created with my husband, although it was made some time ago, long before Roe vs Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court.  It appears in Greatest Fits as well. It’s a paean in song to the neighbourhood abortionist, the Lady of Lavender Lane. Some US citizens may remember with a wistful sigh, the days when a woman had a right to decide if, when, and how many children she wanted, and with whom.   

The complete article is available HERE.  

John Coulthart interview!

Below, selected excerpts from a great interview with the legendary JOHN COULTHART, posted on Retrofuturista.com few days ago. 

You can read the complete piece HERE. Highly recommended!

[...] You have a lifelong creative relationship with Alan Moore and have illustrated multiple works with him. How did he influence the way you physically construct layouts and book covers? Can you share an anecdote about a collaborative creative process that produced unexpected and surprising results?
John Coulthart: I don’t think Alan has influenced any of my approach to book design or cover design but I find his philosophical attitude very appealing, especially his insistence that art is magic. I started to think about this more seriously after some long conversations we had in the 1990s.

The only things that are surprising about any of the projects we’ve worked on have been odd coincidences that continued to surface over the years. Most of these are too slight to be worth recounting but in the mid-90s there was a striking one that occurred when we were working on a project (subsequently cancelled) about Aleister Crowley. Part of the brief required me to draw a room infested with insects, and it was while doing this that my bathroom was inundated for an afternoon with honey bees. I think a new colony had just hatched somewhere and got into the room through a crack in the wall. I wouldn’t say the Crowley project prompted the invasion but it certainly seemed that way at the time.

Working on “The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic” required translating decades of Alan Moore and Steve Moore’s dense, practical, and philosophical ideas about magic into a physical, visual artifact. What were some of the most challenging abstract concepts you had to render as a concrete graphic layout?
I didn’t find any of the occult material difficult to deal with since it was all very familiar, and the descriptions of the required artwork were very clear. One reason I’ve been involved with the Moon and Serpent productions is because of my long-standing interest in occult matters. The biggest challenge with the book was getting all the material into a presentable shape. I was given a folder filled with old Word documents, some of which were unfinished drafts, together with a table of contents that was out of date as a result of decisions to drop parts of the book as it had been planned originally. I was having to work with all this as a designer, typesetter and illustrator which is uncommon for a book of such size and complexity. I didn’t mind having to juggle so many tasks but doing so meant that it took me about three years to get everything finished. [...] 

Read the complete interview HERE! 

On creating, Long London tv series & Dennis' fate

Below, selected excerpts from an interview published last week on Syfi.com.

The complete interview is available HERE.  

Alan Moore: [...] I experience my own creative processes as being something like a particle collider, where thousands of half-baked, half-finished or entirely forgotten concepts whiz around invisibly at unsafe speeds until, inevitably, one unworkable idea will smash into another, quite by chance, and in the often-beautiful ensuing mess of particle decay trajectories is sometimes to be found a stage performance, poem, film, or series of peculiar urban fantasies. [...]

By the 1950s and I Hear a New World, we can see London, and to a degree the world, attempting to update itself by dressing up in noisy, flashy, hard-edged Brutalist modernity, with genuine innovators like Joe Meek attempting to invoke the new world by imagining its music and, in doing so, making the technical advances which that new world would depend on. [...]

Over this last couple of decades, the emergence of the long form, high quality television series has made lots of things seem suddenly more possible, and when asked if I might consider making the Long London books available as possible film properties, my answer was a cautious yes. [...] To this end, when I was approached by Playground, the production company behind the marvelous adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, I gladly acquiesced. I know enough about the world of television and its uncertainties to manage my expectations, but I’m optimistic and, whatever its eventual fate, confident that my work is in the very best of hands. So, fingers crossed. [...]

I can promise readers that my reluctant protagonist [Dennis Knuckleyard], despite his clear lack of enthusiasm for my plotting abilities, will be allowed a happy ending. He probably doesn’t deserve it, given his rather lackluster and timorous performance, but he’ll get it because that’s the kind of generous-spirited author and employer of imaginary people that I am. 

Read the whole interview HERE! 

Long London, Magic, comics and dystopias

Art by Carlos Dearmas

Excerpt from an interview published on the Observer the 1st of May. 

You can read the complete piece HERE. 

What is the idea behind Long London?
Alan Moore: I had an urge to investigate shadowy London, the horse tipsters, gangsters, record producers and other lowlife characters. I’ve created a narrative that could include them, which collides happily with the idea of another London hidden behind our own. There’s a wonderful short story called N by Arthur Machen that suggested our London was a flimsy curtain hung before a blazing, eternal paradisal London.

A sort of Platonic shadow of London?
Exactly. It starts in 1949, when London had been physically and psychologically reduced to rubble. I was born in 1953, and it took me decades to realise that the adults I was growing up among were suffering from PTSD. [...]

You are ‘divorced’ from your earlier works like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, but they are powerfully predictive, rather than histories.
They were never meant to be predictive. Friends want me to write something nice. Why do I have to keep doing these terrible dystopian stories that then actually happen? [...]

You have become a magician, and not the rabbit-out-of-a-hat kind. Do some ideas have magical properties?

When I became a magician at the age of 40, I took it very seriously, and it has transformed my life. There’s no difference between magic and creativity. One part of magic is changing the consciousness of other people. Writing has always been the best way of doing that. [...] I think a lot of us have forgotten what art is for. It’s an engine of human progress. Art and culture stay with us. It’s the wars we’re ashamed of.

The complete interview is available HERE.

NPR N.6: Alan Moore is IN!

Portrait art by Tom Harding

Northampton Poetry Review ISSUE 6: Rejuvenation includes a great interview with Moore (pp. 85-93) mostly focused on his poetry interests, writing and... more!!!

You can find all the info HERE. Pdf of the whole issue is available HERE for downloading.

Northampton Poetry Review returns with the theme of Rejuvenation. We’re rekindling old energies, awakening deep roots, and sustaining ourselves through strange and wearing times—with hope for renewal.

We offer poetry from voices both near and far. And we are honoured to present a deep and wide-ranging conversation with Northampton’s own Alan Moore—a giant, a guru, and a guiding light in these dark and mysterious times.

Below, some selected excerpts from the interview! Highly recommended!

Q&A with Alan Moore
The following is an interview with Alan Moore— Northampton notary, master, magician, guru and guide; a leading luminary and multimedia Renaissance man of our times. Alan generously gave us this interview back in 2022. Due to the buffeting winds of independent publishing, it finds its way to you only now.
He shares his thoughts on a wide array of cultural, political, and creative concerns—and we are truly honoured he took the time.

Alan Moore is a legendary comic book writer, novelist, filmmaker, and boundary-defying artist. Known for seminal works such as Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, his work has shaped the landscape of modern storytelling and continues to be an uncompromising artistic force across a variety of mediums.

Alan Moore: [...] I'm continually drawn back to Blake, Clare, and, with his very recent death, to Brian Catling’s magnificent The Stumbling Block. Also, if I ever again locate my copy, I want very much to re-immerse myself in Mervyn Peake’s The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb, which I remember as having Stanley Holloway rhythms and a marvellous idiosyncratic grandeur. Oh, and Chris Torrance’s The Magic Door always rewards a reopening. [...] 

[...] if it’s an idea, it will most probably emerge at some point as part of a story, whereas if it’s a tenuous soap-bubble impression, and if I can get a few words down before it pops from memory, it will more likely end up as a poem. [...] 

[...] Trying to define one’s own thought processes is always slippery, but it might be as if each project is a separate Memory Theatre in some by-now sprawling and overgrown multiplex.
Many of those theatres I need never visit again, although they still remain standing, obsolete warehouses rusting in some bleak, industrial-estate outpost of my awareness. There are a few abandoned palaces amongst them – works that for various reasons remain uncompleted or will never see daylight, like my John Dee opera or the detailed five season outline for The Show television series – that I find slightly haunting and will more often return to in idle moments. You shouldn’t, however, be misled by this talk of Memory Theatres into thinking my mental processes are anything like neat or orderly. In practice, it feels like some sort of cloud-chamber, and I have no real idea how it works. [...] 

[...] A key difference between prose and poetry lies in the ways that they engagé with time. [...] Poetry can dispense with time altogether, and allow us to see what is left when time is gone. As for the importance of time in my own work, I feel that along with space and consciousness, time is one of the three fundamental elements that a writer has to work with, so I like to get as much fun and meaning out of it as possible. [...] 

[...] I’m sure I’ve been a multiplicity of people in my time, but from my own perspective it feels very much like an unbroken continuity of self. The biggest shift of personality came, probably, with my decision to engagé with magic, back in 1993, but this seemed more like an expanded comprehension and intensification of ideas and processes that were already there than it did a huge psychological change. When I think back to previous incarnations of myself, I find that they’re all still me, only stupider, better looking, and with more intimidating physical energy. [...] 

[...] tend to enjoy works that are a few paces beyond my personal boundaries, that will entail a little bit of personal effort, which will therefore expand those boundaries. I believe that the most affecting kind of art is one where the audience does part of the work, making the experience almost a collaboration between reader and writer. To that end, I try to make my work as understandable as I can, while also subscribing to the idea of literary difficulty, whereby you are prepared to potentially alienate part of your readership in the knowledge that those who remain will have been made to engage with the work on a deeper and hopefully more rewarding level. I always try to pitch my work at a level that won’t be beyond the reach of an averagely intelligent person. [...] 

More info HERE. Pdf of the whole issue available HERE.

Magic, Comics and... Long London upcoming books

Art by Nicola Testoni

Excerpts from an interview posted yesterday on RetroFuturista.com. A great one! 

Highly recommended! 

Alan Moore: [...] My understanding of magic has evolved massively over the thirty-three years since I commenced my study and practice. For one thing, I have come to understand that magic and the arts, particularly writing, are to all intents and purposes synonymous. Thus, while magic is the way in which I see the world and therefore affects every area of my life, nowhere is this more true than in my writing. Indeed, these days, writing is pretty much my only form of magical expression. My guess is that this, writing being the most powerful instrument of magic, has been true for most self-identified magicians – and what other kind is there? – since the dawn of human consciousness. [...]

Nothing against middle-class people, of course. It’s simply that the comic strip form was originally conceived as by, for and about the working classes, who were its audience and, for my money, its very best creators. That is the comics field I’d like to see, brimming with new ideas and available to everyone, but, realistically, I don’t imagine that is ever going to happen, so I’ve chosen to put my remaining energies elsewhere. [...]

If you like, I see myself as a piece of language that is somehow generating other pieces of language. [...]

To be honest, I’ve never really thought about the audience’s reaction too much, as it’s something I have no say in or control over. The only audience I’ve ever been attempting to please is, perhaps selfishly, myself. [...]

I’m currently nearing the end of the third book in my Long London quintet, this being titled Blow Away, Dandelion and set in the late 1960s, whereas the next book, In England’s Dreaming, will set in the late 1970s. The final book, And No River of Fire, will be set in 1999, on the eve of the current millennium. I have genuinely no idea what I’ll be doing after that point, so we’ll all just have to wait and see.  

Read the complete interview HERE! 

Big Numbers: Sienkiewicz and Moore

Art by Bill Sienkiewicz

Excerpts from BIG NUMBERS: The Mathematics of Mankind included in Speakeasy magazine, issue n. 108 published in April 1990. 

Alan Moore: "What I want to do now is - well, it’s a trend you can see in V and in Watchmen and in Swamp Thing and in Miracleman, you can see it in all of them, there’s a trend towards a gradual fascination with people on street corners. It’s very often the ordinary people who come to fascinate me more than the people in the costumes, which must be very obvious to people. It might be seen as an annoying indulgence ore terribly boring, but it’s what I’m fascinated by, and that is the way my work will probably take me in the future. Not in a Harvey Pekar, Eddie Campbell sense - much as I love those people’s work I don’t think I could do that, I don’t think my life is interesting enough to do that with."

 

[...] "I feel I need a louder and clearer voice, and I think that one thing which would make it clearer is to tear away from the tissues of fantasy and mystery and imagination that I tend to plant my work in. I don’t want to do dull comics, I want to show how fabulous and weird and exciting the real world is without distortion, without giving anyone psionic powers and mutant abilities." [...] 

Bill Sienkiewicz: "I suppose in some ways, it’s much more classic in its approach. Alan and I were just talking about the fact that it’s much more reminiscent of something like Gasoline Alley or Krazy Kat than anything in the superhero genre at all. In that respect, I suppose it’s going back to the basics of the medium, with the new math of the future, and coupled with things that have been done recently in terms of things like Watchmen and Elektra and other books like that. It’s more subversive, I suppose, it’s destroying from within, you know, by wearing a suit and tie, destroying the establishment from within. But that’s not really our intention, our intention is to do something that’s really accessible to everyone.

Alan was telling me that he was showing it to his mother and some of her friends, and people who are not familiar with the vernacular or the mechanics of reading current comics, and they found that they really enjoyed it, and Alan said they laughed in all the right places, and had the response to warrant it feeling like it’s something that is not going to be just simply a book for the comic readers, the people who know the language and the vocabulary, but for a bigger, wider audience, not specifically for comics, but for comics as a valid medium, separate and apart from what we in the field, readers and professionals, know it as." [...]

Don’t be silly

Cover art by Philip Bond

Excerpt from a fundamental text written by Moore in the 80s. 

You can read it in full at Paul Gravett site, here. 

 

Alan Moore: No More Sex

The following editorial was written by Alan Moore and appeared in Escape Magazine #15 (edited by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury) in 1988.
At that time Alan Moore had just set up a publishing company, Mad Love (together with Phyllis Moore and Debbie Delano), and was working on its first release, a 72-page benefit comics-anthology of work donated by the world’s top comic creators entitled AARGH: Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia.
All the profits from AARGH were donated to the Organisation For Lesbian And Gay Action to safeguard the legal rights of Gay people persecuted by Section 28 of the Local Government Act. This was a piece of legislation enacted in 1988 by the Thatcher Government which stated that a local government authority"shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." 

Firstly, forget God. If God exists, it’s unlikely that SpaceTime’s creator worries about our love-lives. A God who’d forego super novas to catch Sol III’s microbes having oral sex is just plain creepy, and has no place in this discussion. Neither do our Jimmy Swaggarts, claiming to represent the deity between visits to the knocking shop. While discussing human desire, let’s ignore superhumans and subhumans.

Secondly, forget ‘unnatural’ sex. Most natural creatures, excluding a few Presbyterian termites, will hump anything within reach if inclined, ignoring gender, species and family relationship. Lacking a hunky tom within pheromone-range, Tabby will back onto your winklepickers without embarrassment. Besides, since when does humanity do things naturally? Camels don’t wear polyester slacks. Amoebas know nothing of Shake’n'Vac. Every other human enterprise flaunts nature, so why is sex special?

Because it’s powerful. Along with death, it’s life’s propelling force. Control sex and death, and controlling populations becomes simple. Death’s easily subjugated: William Burroughs observed that anyone who can lift a frying pan owns death. Similarly, those owning most the pans, troops, tanks or warheads own most the death, and can regulate the supply accordingly. Death’s a pushover, but how do you control desire?
 

[...]

Sex exceeds politics, right or left (assuming you still differentiate). Mary Whitehouse or Andrea Dworkin may outlaw pornography, but can’t stop people wanting it, regardless of legality. Similarly, Section 28 cannot remove the desire for homosexuality. Consenting sex cannot be prevented. There’s regrettably little evidence that even un-consenting sex can be curtailed by legislation alone. Perhaps desire is better comprehended than contained? Perhaps sexual openness would mean less morbid longings, festering alone in darkness?

Despite a panic-stricken ‘moral’ backlash, we progress slowly towards tolerance, understanding. Our sexual turbulence and shattered preconceptions may resolve themselves into a new approach to sex, more various and humane, accepting different loves and lusts without reshaping them into Meccano for our social scaffolding. Sexual awareness rides an upward exponential curve, uncheckable by politicians, popes, police-chiefs. But what of plague?

Is AIDS sufficient to keep the erotic genie in the bottle? Televised health warnings seem increasingly less anti-disease than anti-sex. A youth writhes, unnerved by the ominous soundtrack, while his fishnetted date lounges invitingly. Rather than donning a condom and squelching deliriously till dawn, it’s implied that he should go home to sleep with hands above blankets

Novelists, who should know better, bemoan the inevitability of less sex in fiction. Surely AIDS isn’t transmitted by smut? The only virus afflicting literature are viral ideas of censorship, spreading through parliament, press, publishers and public, leading art towards the terminal ward. Obviously this over-reaction doesn’t make AIDS less terrifying. Quite simply, it will decimate us. While experts demand less discrimination to facilitate monitoring the virus, our government responds with Section 28. Remember that Britain is relatively enlightened concerning AIDS, and shudder.

So, no more sex? On screen, between soft covers or especially in reality? I don’t believe it. Sex survived horrific syphilis epidemics, aroused blood rushing from the brain, ensuring sex continues whatever the dangers. We’ll die of sex or live with it, but never stop it. Even preventing all physical contact wouldn’t prevent sex, which occurs more in minds than mucous membranes. We think about sex approximately every twenty minutes. Lacking physical contact, we’d just think harder. Thermonuclear war would barely slow sex down. Within billennia, cockroaches would rewrite the Kama Sutra.

AIDS may even hasten sexual enlightenment, this sexual crisis mirroring similar crisis in our environment and economies, all forcing a simple, brutal decision: change or die. Change our environmental policies or starve. Change our sexual furtiveness or die, as they say, of ignorance. Up in arms or down in flames, the choice is still ours. Our bodies are ours. No more sex?

Don’t be silly.

Bonus text, excerpt from a 2006 interview by (again) focused on Lost Girls.

Back in 1988, in Escape Magazine, you wrote an editorial piece for me entitled No More Sex in which you said, "Consenting sex cannot be prevented and there’s regrettably little evidence that even Un-consenting sex can be curtailed by legislation alone. Perhaps desire is better comprehended than contained? Perhaps sexual openness would mean less morbid longings festering alone in the darkness?"
Alan Moore: That is exactly how I feel today. In the context of that Escape editorial, where we were talking about AIDS, I also probably said that AIDS would probably decimate us before it was done. And the figures suggest that it is well on the way to doing that. One thing that might conceivably be "helpful" in an AIDS epidemic, or pandemic, would be presumably a higher standard of pornography with human values. You cannot get much safer sex than pornography. 

Business of education and the perfect art form

Excerpts from The Face n.91, November 1987. A gorgeous George Michael was on the cover. 

We were in the midst of the Watchmen phenomenon, of course! 

[...] Back in Northampton the career of the Watchmen maker has followed a curious parallel lo Dr Manhattan’s - a junior lab technician who accidentally steps into an Intrinsic Field Generator, to be instantly transformed to a superman. Beginning his literary life - according to his biography - at the Co-op Hide and Skin division hacking up sheep carcasses, Alan Moore is now all too accustomed to badgering journalists (to whom he is very polite) and TV teams. They come, lured by his six foot, hair-filled features and his unique literary offering to the comic book audience - a moral interpretation of their world. However, fame has effected little change on his outlook. 
"In many ways I see myself in the business of education, there's a huge, hungry audience out there — particularly kids — looking for knowledge that the education system just isn’t providing. Children are maturing faster now because they have to, it's a survival trait in this day and age. I think that parents will soon stop looking misty and forlorn saying ‘Oh they grow up so fast these days’ and accept we're heading into the most rapidly transforming period in human history. Industrial society is now on the way out and something new is coming in. We must have the mental apparatus to deal with it." 

After some brief forays into the media apparatus, including Fashion Beast, a screenplay for Malcolm McLaren, Moore now seems fully redeemed to the comic strip as his genre. There is talk of more novels. 
"The comic seems to me the perfect art form for the Eighties. It's a very small package, and information tends to come in smaller and smaller packages these days. Comics combine the best of novels and films in that they have an engaging, involving visual track, but are capable of greater density than a film. A complex film may require several viewings to pick up all the details, but a comic is in the hands of the audience: you can enjoy it at your own speed." [...] 

On Fashion Beast, deities for the 80s and celebrity

Below, selected excerpts from Fear magazine, issue n.3, November-December 1988.  

Alan Moore: [...] I did write a screenplay recently [Fashion Beast]. It was an enjoyable enough experience but I didn’t get anywhere near the same control in working in the movie industry that I do producing comics. Control is the most important thing, so I think the prospect of any films in the near future is a slight one. But that's not to say that I mightn’t mess around in various media.

[...] I don't know if it will ever be made. Hollywood, to some degree, is like a Bermuda triangle for screenplays — a lot of them go in and are never seen again. I don’t know what the odds are of any film being made. The Watchmen film might be made or might not. The same goes for Fashion Beast.
The idea, as presented to me by Malcolm MacLaren, was to do a reworking of the Beauty and the Beast fable but to tie it in with the life-story of the designer Christian Dior and to come up with something aimed at a very young teenage audience. Malcom said he wanted the film to have the depth, power and dark resonance of a film like Chinatown and the youth appeal of a film like Flashdance.
I don’t know whether the thing fell through or not. It's something I did for the artistic experience of writing a film, to see what it was like, and I was satisfied, I got out of it what I wanted and I was paid really handsomely.

[...] you mentioned how interested you are in mythology, but in Superman, Batman and the Swamp Thing you've taken individual mythologies and twisted them around; and with the Watchmen you did this to the whole superhero genre. Why?
Alan Moore: Because the old ones don't work anymore, because mythology, as a pure thing in itself, is powerful nd potent—but not as much as it was. We can imagine the power that those myths had when they were more current and contemporary.
Doctor Manhattan [from the Watchmen series] is an attempt to portray a quantum god in much the same way that Swamp Thing was an attempt at portraying an environmental god. They owe a lot of their aura, if you like, to the gods and legends that I read about as a child. 
At the same time they're expressed in a way which is wholly modern. Before the atom was split you could not have had a quantum god; quantum thinking is a modern phenomenon. In the last book of Miracleman I explored that very thoroughly, in that we have a super-heroine who is taking on the role of a modern Aphrodite. She runs a cable porn network. As devotional objects she distributes pornographic videos of herself and Miracleman. She has a computer network which is basically a global lonely hearts network which works at 100 percent efficiency and, basically, she’s trying to heal the sexual and emotional problems of the entire planet.
It's deities for the Eighties, and if you're working in the superhero genre, it’s important to remember that the actual root of the superhero stories is in mythology.

[...] I don’t think there's any need for me to be a big celebrity. I think the only real need for me is to be a better writer and I don’t see that the two things are connected in any way. So I'm much happier sitting behind a typewriter than sitting in front of a set of lights in some studio. I've got a blissful home life with a wonderful family, I've got my work which is a tremendous source of pleasure and I've got friends, so I don't really need to be on the Jonathan Ross show. 

On censorship, Rambo and the evils of the world

Below, excerpt from Comics Scene n.7, 1989. 

I think it's a really important piece that resonates even to the present day.

Alan Moore: My feelings upon censorship are that it is wrong, full stop. It is a thing which I utterly oppose. I believe that there is nothing in this world that is unsayable. It is not information which is dangerous; it is the lack of information which is dangerous.
The example that I always cite is still the one which means the most to me. When she was five, my daughter came home from school, asking for some money for a collection. I assumed it was for collie dogs for the blind or something like that, and I gave her some money and asked what it was for. She said it was for a school friend of hers who was in the hospital. I asked what was wrong with him, and apparently, his older brother had gone berserk with a bread knife and killed his mother and then turned upon him. And I stood there with my jaw hanging open down to my chest. This was a five year-old telling me this, and there is no way short of following my daughter around in an armored car or putting her in a bank vault for the remainder of her life that I can protect her from knowing about the sort of stuff that goes down in this world.
Now, the only thing that I can give my children that's going to be of any help to them in life at all is information, to tell them what exists in the world and to give them a concrete text by which they can approach and understand it.
Amber is only just starting to comfortably read, and Leah, the older child, can read almost anything. She has read Watchmen four or five times. she has read Art Spiegelman's Maus. If she comes in and happens to see an underground comic with a bright cover and asks to read it. if there is any, say, ugly or distressing sexual content in it, I'll tell her that there is, that the sex stuff in it isn't meant to be taken literally, and that she might not want to read it.
I'll tell her that if she wants to read it, she can, and that if there's anything in it that bothers or puzzles her, she should come to me and talk about it. I would like to think that l have a relationship with my children within the framework of which l can talk about anything. If that means that my children might eventually come across had pornography or bad material of another nature, then I would prefer to have built up at relationship with them so that they'll have a context in which and by which to lodge that sort of material.
I prefer doing that to getting into the dangerous territory of saying that I wish to suppress this material so that my children can't see it or so somebody else can't see it. Because when you get into that area, you're really starting to head into troubled waters.
I've heard an awful lot of feminists, for example, calling for a ban on pornography because they perceive it as being insulting and degrading in its approach to women. No doubt with a lot of child pornography, that's absolutely true. But you're taking a dangerous step if you go on from there and ban the material because then you are in effect saying that all censorship is right, and you cannot turn around if someone starts to censor you and say, “Hey, look, this isn't fair!"
You must be consistent about it. Feminists who wish to censor pornography should think what it would be like in a fundamentalist society that believed a woman's place was as according to the Bible: under man and in the kitchen.
If the feminist literature was seen to he socially corrosive, then I could imagine that there are several right-wing groups which could make just as persuasive an argument for the banning of all feminist literature as feminists can make for the banning of all pornography.
Now, unless we’re going to have total silence, the only other option is total noise. One of my responsibilities as an artist is to keep the noise level up. If I dislike the Rambo films, then I've got the option of making as much noise as I can in an effort to redress the balance. If the Rambo films are putting over one view of the world, I can use whatever means are upon to me to put forward a countering view of the world. And that is all that I have a moral right to do. I don't have the right to picket Sylvester Stallone films. I don't have the right to try and stop films like Rambo from being made, much as I despise them.
If I were to insist upon that right for my own reasons, then I couldn't expect my own right to free speech to continue being extended to me. 
That, to me, is the essential thing. If there is something you do not like, presumably you can articulate your reasons. If you really believe in what you're saying, presumably you can put as good a case against the values shown in any particular work as that work itself puts for its own values. That is the proper way to do things, not t.o try to get a government body to do your moral policing for you, not to hand responsibility for what you or other people can or cannot read to some outside party and let them make all the decisions. That is very, very dangerous. We already have certain strict information controls within our society. I don't think we realty need to add to them. 

We're living in a world where we have a capacity to annihilate the entire population, something we pay our tax dollars and pounds to support. Our own government and those of other countries carry out this lethal, hideous, grotesque ballet, often in secret, to support their interests, involving the deaths of thousands of people and the erasing of square mile upon square mile of property. These things can happen, and somehow, we don't seem to get too excited about the fact that they happen and continue to happen. We don't put a strong effort into actually eradicating some of the looming social evils that are actually destroying people's lives. But censorship... Let somebody show a nipple in the wrong place, let somebody use language that offends good Christian, Presbyterian values, let somebody refer to a sexual act which, though millions of people worldwide might carry it out regularly in the privacy of their own homes, is still not fit to be mentioned, and people will suddenly find the energy to rise up in arms and take up moral cudgels against this atrocity. I find it very suspect that people can get so excited about things so relatively unimportant when they can only respond with apathy to the genuine evils of the world.

TGW, comics and... mass infantilisation

Transcript excerpts of an audio interview from BBC Front Row program, conduced by Samira Ahmed. The episode, on air the 15th of September, can be listened here and downloaded here. Moore segment starts around minute 28. 

The interview is mostly focused on The Great When with incursions in other territories of interest too.

Alan Moore: [about his fascination with post-war London] I think that the main reason why I wanted to write The Great When was because I'd noticed in my readings that all of my favourite London characters were essentially low-life characters who had slipped through the cracks of conventional history. People like Iron Foot Jack or Prince Monolulu or particularly Austin Osman Spare.

I thought that these people suggested a different history of London and it was that that I wanted to pick out in The Great When. 

Samira Ahmed: You know reading the prose of this book from the very first paragraph it feels like you're revelling in painting vivid pictures in words. Is it liberating not writing for comics or did comics liberate you to write this freely? 

AM: I think that comics probably certainly affected my writing. Certainly in my later books, in books like Jerusalem, I was very aware that I am known mostly as a comics writer - which is something which I am probably not that happy about and which I'm trying to rectify - but I was aware that I might be seen as a comics writer who suddenly hadn't got an artist. 

So I think that I wanted to compensate to make the pictures inside the reader's head and I've come to realise recently that probably the major influence upon all of my prose work would probably be Mervyn Peake. 

Mervyn Peake

SA: Do you know I was thinking of him? Yeah, the Titus Groan books. 

AM: I've just been reading them to my grandchildren recently and that has reacquainted me with them and I've suddenly realised that he's drunk on language. 
He takes off on all of these ridiculous flights of fancy and they are... they're immaculate. The language is perfect, it drips like jewellery and... I was reading them again that I suddenly realised that Mervyn Peake was probably where I got my prose style from. I also realised that I probably got all of my approach to humour, as applied in The Great When, because he is quite funny in places. 
But I think I got all of my approach to humour from Galton and Simpson. I was watching The Complete Steptoe a couple of years ago and realising that so many of the tropes and the approaches of that working class humour were exactly what I was playing with in The Great When. 

SA: So in The Great When the plot revolves around a fictional book that appears in the work of Arthur Machen, a real writer from the early 20th century whose horror stories earned him a cult following particularly amongst writers like yourself and Stephen King. 
But there's this whole joke in the book about how he's gone out of fashion for being a fascist sympathiser. It feels like a very knowing joke given everything we know about how writers are assessed against their views these days. Tell me why he was a focus for the story.

AM: Well I mean the reason that Machen was the focus of the story was that he's one of my favourite London authors and I noticed that in a couple of his works he seems to be talking about a truer London, a more blazing London that exists behind the facade of the earthly London. So I thought that this would give me access to some of the ideas that I wanted to play with. 
The thing about Machen's fascism... this was during the 1930s when Machen was a very old man. Arthur Machen, amongst others, came out for Franco. This has been a bit of a problem for me, squaring that with the Arthur Machen that I've loved in all of his other fiction. I don't think that he'd necessary thought it through and I don't think it's a major factor in Machen's writing but it was one that I felt ought to be addressed. 

 

[...]

 

SA: You've spoken out about the double nature of fandom, that it can feed obsessive and toxic behaviour and I wonder... do you sometimes look at the modern world, look at the news and think it looks like an Alan Moore comic come to life? 
 

AM: If it had been an Alan Moore story come to life it would have had much better dialogue and it would have been building towards something with genuine meaning rather than absolute incoherence. No, you can blame me for an awful lot of things in the modern world. I will put my hand up and yes I do have an upsetting habit of being right in my dystopian projections for the future. 

SA: What do you think you've got right most famously? Because I have to confess I have watched the film V for Vendetta - as well as having read the comic - and I watched it during lockdown and I was struck by how it imagined a revolution after 100,000 pandemic deaths and in fact we'd had more than twice that in the UK from Covid-19 and no revolution. 

AM: Well I think that I managed perhaps in V for Vendetta where I was talking about a dystopia in the future that is all centred upon a centralised computer network. We didn't have the word hacking back then but, yeah ,I think that that's a fairly good prediction of what was actually to come. And I would also say that when in 2011 I made my apparently very upsetting statement that there was something wrong with the masses of people going to see superhero movies that this spoke to me of a kind of mass infantilisation which I thought was politically worrying and this has earned me my reputation as a crazy angry old man who is just angry with everything you know I'm angry with my bowl of Shreddies in the morning because actually that's a lot easier than actually addressing any of the points that I was making. 

SA: Some of your most acclaimed comics - Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta - have been adapted into films which you've disowned and refused to watch. The Great When is going to be adapted, isn't it? Why do you feel differently about this one? 

AM: Mainly because I actually own this one and it is not an unauthorised work being made into a film that I didn't want it to be made into. Also because I believe that The Great When might actually make quite a good film or TV series, well specifically a TV series, because this is the modern extended television series, is a new format that has arisen since I was complaining about the film adaptations. 

One of the reasons I was complaining about them was that you cannot get an extended work into the couple of hours needed for a film. Also because of the way that The Great When is written it's not a comic strip with most of those comic strips that you mentioned I was deliberately trying to do things that could only be done in the comic strip medium so I've got quite high hopes for this potentially forthcoming Great When television series. 

SA: Excellent. And you'll know that Watchmen in particular is regarded as perhaps one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, let alone a comic. 
I think Time Magazine listed it as one of the kind of 100 best novels and as someone who grew up with comics has been such a major figure in them you'll also be aware that there's great anxiety over the past decade about whether comics - particularly the big brands, Marvel, DC - have lost their way amid the culture wars especially in the US and become bogged down possibly in identity politics and I wonder what you think has happened to comics whether they still have a future. 

AM: I have disowned about nine tenths of my comics work including Watchmen, V for Vendetta simply because I'm not allowed to own them and because those works can now be made into any adulterated or ridiculous thing and I have no say in that and so I am also.. I don't really wish to be associated with comics anymore. I realise it's a bit late for that and that yes in the first line of the obituary they're going to be talking about Rorschach. 

Nobody's really interested in comics anymore, they don't sell. The only thing that people are interested in is superhero movies. I think that superheroes have grown over the entire comics medium. The comics medium is a wonderful thing, the simple thing of telling stories with a mixture of pictures and words it allows for all sorts of effects that people have barely scratched the surface of. And yet when people talk about comics these days, when people say that they're comics fans, they don't even necessarily have to have read a comic: they just went to see the last Avengers movie. 

 

I think that there are some wonderful talents working in the industry but the industry does not deserve them. Comics have never grown up properly and they insist upon treating their readership and the creators that work for them as if they were children. You know, there has never been an American billionaire who has been traumatised as a child and has decided to go out and fight crime and defend people dressed as a giant bat. 

 

Listen HERE - Download HERE 

Beautiful like a Cadillac

Excerpt from a short article focused on Moore's then upcoming WildC.A.T.S run and his plans on the series. Published in Hero Illustrated n. 25, 1995. 

Alan Moore: [...] In issue #21 -  which is the first issue that I'll write - the entire issue is dedicated to the putting together of the replacement WildC.A.T.s team, and it's only after that, with issue #22, that we break into 16 pages of the original team in space and then eight pages of the new team back on Earth; but the two stories will run in parallel and will hopefully coincide in, oh, about seven or eight issues time. 
The lineup of the new team is Majestic and Savant, who have both been seen before. There'll be kind of a replacement Grifter in the form of his brother Max Cash who turned up in the Jim Lee/Savage Dragon crossover.
He's a nastier character than his brother. In my script notes, I've said that he shouldn't be quite as corrupt as Harvey Keitel in The Bad Lieutenant, but he's getting there. The code name that he works under is Condition Red, and he'll be getting a new look to go with it.
Then there are two new characters that I've created for the book. One is a genetically engineered character called Tao, which stands for Tactically Augmented Organism. The other character is called Ladytron, which is in fact named after one of my favorite tracks on the first Roxy Music album. 
It seems to be about a woman but you suspect that it's probably about a car, and this character sort of combines some of the best elements of both. It's a female cyborg. with a lot of serious personality problems. She's beautiful like a Cadillac.

3 novels and The Great When

Transcript of a video posted yesterday on YouTube. You can watch it HERE. 

Moore visited his local Waterstones in Northampton to reveal more about The Great When, and three novels that played into his writing of it.  

The Great When has just been released in paperback format. 

Alan Moore: [...] The Great When is the first of five books in the Long London series which is an excavation of some of the more marginal and little known points of London's history that is all stirred up into a very very  baroque fantasy. And there's been a lot of books that have actually very much played into the writing of The Great When. 

 

I mean one of them is Pariah/Genius by my very good friend Ian Sinclair; for my money one of the best writers in the English language. And in Pariah/Genius he's  following the story of John Deakin, who was the photographer that Francis Bacon actually got all  of those images from. And not a very likable man, but a very, very interesting man. And Ian has done this wonderful story about John Deakin. He's already dead when the book opens and the rest of the book is the thought going through the mind of this extraordinary dying man. 

 

Other books that have played into The Great When would include Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman, probably  one of my favourite novels ever. The main thing about Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is it's very, very strange and quite frightening in places but it's very, very funny. And that was something that I was trying to keep in mind while writing my book that there's no reason why  everything has to be straight-faced. There's no problem with having a laugh once in a while. 

 

And the third book that certainly was a huge inspiration was Brian Catling's The Vorrh. This is the first book of a trilogy. But having read this, I realised that Brian had really raised the bar  for fantasy writing because fantasy, as I see it, really shouldn't be about things that you already  know about. I mean, I've got a lot of room for magicians and dragons and all the rest of the fantasy paraphernalia, but I would prefer a fantasy that gives you things that you've never even imagined before. And certainly in the Vorrh trilogy, Brian does that in spades. 

 

So while I  was writing my books, I was thinking of all of these authors and trying to make sure that my book  was at least in the same ballpark as these greats. 

Watch the video HERE.   

Made of Writing

Excerpt from a 2-part interview published on Flaming Hydra site, under paywall (Part I - Part II). 

Zach Rabiroff: All your novels to date have been concerned to a great extent with a sense of place—with Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem, it was Northampton, which allowed you to draw on personal experience. And now in The Great When you’re dealing with London. 

Alan Moore: I like to think that wherever I’m writing about, and in whatever form, I have always tried to pay attention to place, whether in my comic work or other work. I was quite pleased to get a lot of letters from American readers asking how long I’d lived in Louisiana [after using it as a setting in Swamp Thing]. That was touching. But no, actually it was just all research, and then imagining myself into the place. And of course with things like From Hell, it was immersing myself in London. 

[...] The majority of comics—when I started working in them—were set in America. So it felt quite radical to set some stories in London. When I did Voice of the Fire, that seemed to me to be quite audacious in that it was setting a whole novel in Northampton, which is largely a place that nobody cares about, and that doesn’t even get a mention on the local weather maps. And the same with Jerusalem, where I did it much more intensely. But that doesn’t mean that I exhausted London. The nature of a place like that means that you probably never could exhaust it. It’s infinitely deep with stories. [...]

I was actually going to ask whether you consider writing— artistic creation—itself an act of magic.

It is. I believe that all art and creation is an act of magic, consciously or unconsciously. But I believe that writing, specifically, is the closest to actual magic. If you look at the magic gods of most cultures, they are also gods of language. Hermes is the god of magic, but he's also the god of communication. The Egyptian magic god is also the scribe god, which tends to suggest that there is something, a rather intimate connection, between writing and magic. 

[...] with writing, just writing straight prose, which is all I'm doing now, I think that that has got to be the most elegant form of art. You can do so much with so little. All you've got are 26 characters peppered with punctuation.

You’re summoning reality into being with an incantation, so to speak.

You can create the whole universe from those 26 letters, any conceivable universe. And that is the immense power of writing. In writing Long London, I'm actually building that space. This is something that I learned that you can do. I probably learned it from Mervyn Peake, when I first read the Gormenghast books, and I thought, this is incredible—actually creating an architectural space in my mind. Even at this late age, I remember Gormenghast a lot better than I remember places that I've actually been. Better than places in the real world. 

Magic has got to be the art of causing changes in people's consciousness, including that of the practitioner. And anything that you can do with magic, you can do with writing. [...] You can be anything as a writer. [...]

We can never know another human being; that is the sorry fact of our existence. We can never know anything outside of our own skulls. And so, to a degree, everybody around us, the people that we love the most, are fictions that we have made up. We are fictions that we have made up. I can almost remember making me up when I was about 13 or 14. I can almost remember thinking that this childhood personality I have is going to be no use at all; if I want to have a girlfriend, I better write a new one. [...]

I wish I was made of writing, because then I wouldn't be in such a stage of physical collapse, and I would still be as gorgeous looking as I was 40 years ago instead of just almost as gorgeous looking as I was 40 years ago. If I was made of writing, I would be in perfect condition forever. And also, our fictional characters are going to meet and interact with a lot more people than we are, and for a lot longer time. Our fictions have a great deal of importance, I believe, not just as entertainment, but because they provide part of the infrastructure and armature of our world. 

Image Days

Excerpts from an interview focused on the Spawn/WildC.A.T.S. crossover published by Image with art by Scott Clark in January 1996. The interview - which also involved Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee - was included in Overstreet's FAN n.6, released in November 1995. 

Alan Moore: [...] I think I'm in danger of becoming the Image Crossover King! It followed from doing the Badrock/Violator crossover. It was figured that since I had written Spawn, and I had shown that l could handle the WildC.A.T.S in the 30 pages that exist of the 1963 80 Page Giant Annual which is still in limbo and waiting to materialize, that my name was pulled out of the hat on that one. It sounded like a fun idea, and I went for it. I actually wrote it before they asked me to write WildC.A.T.S. In some ways I wish I'd done a few issues of the regular book before doing the crossover, because I would have brought the nuances of the characters out a bit more sharply. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Spawn/WildC.A.T.S crossover, but I hadn't quite gotten the handle on the characters that I have now.
As with all of the Image work, I've been trying to find my way into a milieu which is not entirely second nature to me. When I was writing superhero books before, I was writing for an older audience, a smaller audience. So consequently, I missed out upon some comics development over the past six or seven years, because my interests have been elsewhere.
It‘s quite strange to plunge headlong into this hyper-kinetic “Imageworld," where there’s two or three panels a page, where the pace of the story is an awful lot faster, where there's constant kinetic action.What I want to do, is take that basic formula, which is an unusual one for me, and just add a few elements that make it more like something of mine. lt‘s a delicate piece of cookery, but I’m starting to feel like I'm getting results.

With the plot, I've taken a recurring comic book theme, the idea of the dystopian superhero future.With this one, there’s a future world where Spawn has become awful. This Spawn has killed the demon-god which holds him in thrall in the regular Spawn books, and thus receives unlimited power, rather than the limited power which currently hampers him. As a result of this, he’s become the total ruler of America, which has become a massive feudal state under this omnipotent Spawn. So this is the future that the present day WildC.A.T.S have to go into to help their counter-parts, who are in a pretty sorry state. They live in this literal Hell-on-Earth that America has become. [...] 
They're going to kill Spawn before he can become this demon, the Ipsissimus. The name is one of the magical grades in traditional magic theory, the highest grade of all. So if you become the Ipsissimus, you're just slightly ahead of God. [...]

There’s a journey through this world, and a final confrontation with the Ipsissimus, and a little bit of stuff that ties up the time-paradox threads that run through it. So l hope it's entertaining.

[...] The thing that was the most interesting for me, that l had the most fun with, was playing with possible alternative futures for some of the image characters.We get to see references to image characters and what they are doing in this future that would probably tantalize me if l was thirteen. I've seen stories in the past,"imaginary stories,“ where they'll suddenly refer to some other character. In Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, for example, the sudden appearance of Green Arrow was a real thrill for me. it connected up with childhood memories about the character that put him in a new context. In the course of Spawn/WildC.A.T.S, we get a couple of guest appearances, and walk ons. Gen 13 turn up in the third issue, but they're all very different. It’s all very amusing. There's some of my sense of humor in there which is dark and nasty some of the time.

[...] The artwork that I've seen is absolutely stunning! It's really stylized. It's taken me awhile to become familiar with the Image artist because I have been out of the mainstream for a while, but I'm surprised by the level of quality. The nearest thing that I can remember to it is from the start of my career when I was working for 2000 A.D. and it was a wonderful period where it seemed like every artist they had was a Kevin O’Neill or a Brian Bolland or a Dave Gibbons. As a writer, you felt spoiled. 

I've got some of the same feeling working for Image, because there’s such a joy of drawing. It's got a youthful enthusiasm that you can't buy.They're not aimed at me, as an audience.They're not aimed at a 40 year old, quasi-intellectual, they're aimed at a 14 year old male audience, that's fair enough. But they sure do have a lot of energy! It‘s just a matter of channeling that energy into the right kind of vehicles, and that’s what I'm trying to do. [...] 

 

[Talking about writing WildC.A.T.S regular series]It's a great deal of fun, because I got to create a couple of them. It's always more involving to work with your own characters. It's an incredible break between From Hell, and my novel and all of the heavy and serious stuff like that. It's like a sorbet between courses. And a sorbet's not an insubstantial thing. There's an art to it.