Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  Moore was reading by the time he was four or five, with his parents – who, unlike many of their neighbours, valued literacy – encouraging him at every turn. They read little themselves (his father occasionally read pulp novels and some anthropology, and Moore suggested once that the second thing he had ever seen his mother read was one of his Swamp Thing collections) but Alan quickly became omnivorous. He already had a taste for fantasy stories, and the first book he picked out when he joined the library at the age of five was called The Magic Island. He soaked up mythology and folklore.

  ‘I was looked after and cared for and all the other things that a child should be, but in terms of my inner life, or my intellectual life, I was largely left to my own devices. Which suited me just fine. I knew where the library was; I knew where I could find information if I wanted it.’ He was an imaginative, precocious child at Spring Lane, the primary school two or three minutes’ walk from his home. The school took in boys and girls from the streets around Moore’s house, and so he knew every one of his fellow students from his first day there. When he was about ten, he started drawing his own comics in a Woolworths jotter, branding them all as Omega Comics. He charged a penny a read of tales of The Crimebusters, Ray Gun (featuring a character with a ray gun whose secret identity was Raymond Gunn) and Jack O’Lantern and the Sprite. He said at the time it was to raise money for UNICEF, but later admitted it was mainly done in a failed attempt to impress a girl called Janet Bentley. Throughout his early school career he was something of a star pupil.

  This was not an idyllic childhood. Moore has talked about how children would attack each other, often in ways that were genuinely dangerous. In one case ‘they hanged me from a tree branch by my wrists with string’; in another ‘they caved the underground den in on top of me’, leaving him ‘crawling like a lugworm through the smothering black dirt’. But, on the whole, Moore was happy. Tall for his age, he ‘thought I was a miniature god. They made me the head prefect at Spring Lane. I was the brainiest boy in the school and the world was my oyster.’

  This idyll was abruptly ended when Moore sat his Eleven Plus.

  The intention of the 1944 Butler Education Act had been to level the playing field for all schoolchildren. At the end of their primary education, around the age of eleven, every child sat an examination which measured skills in arithmetic, writing and problem solving. Those who passed – around a quarter of students who sat it – went to prestigious grammar schools for a full academic training; those who failed were consigned to secondary moderns and a more rudimentary preparation for working life. The lion’s share of the resources went to the grammar schools, so the secondary moderns, and those who attended them, quickly came to carry the stigma of failure. The theory was that the Eleven Plus was entirely meritocratic, a way to grant a free top-class education to all those who would benefit from it, regardless of background. The system was designed, in large part, to identify and reward intelligent working-class children. In practice, middle-class pupils had many advantages – their parents could, for example, afford to send them to preparatory schools specifically designed to get students through the exam. Some parts of the country had insufficient places for all the pupils who passed; this problem was particularly acute for girls.

  The Eleven Plus, then, was crude and in many ways formalised the inequalities it was designed to eradicate, but it worked exactly as it was meant to for Alan Moore. He passed, and was sent to Northampton School for Boys, known locally just as ‘the boys’ grammar school’ (there was a girls’ grammar school nearby). It was on the other side of town, and took around 500 pupils from the whole of the local area. It was a shock to the system for Moore: ‘Call me naïve, but entering grammar school was the very first time I’d actually realised that middle-class people existed. Prior to that I’d thought that there were just my family and people like them, and the Queen. I had really not been aware that there was a whole stratum of society in between those two positions.’ According to Moore there were only ‘two or three’ other working-class boys at the school and he hardly knew anyone there.

  Seabrook suggests that the system had a clear agenda for boys like Moore: ‘The grammar school was, for working-class boys, primarily a door to the middle class. Its unacknowledged curriculum was advanced snobbery and social climbing. It separated those who might, at another time, have been leaders of the working class, politicians or trade unionists, so in that sense, while it advantaged the individuals concerned, it could be said to have impoverished the communities. The school was modelled on public school to some degree, but many of the boys resisted the ethos, although perhaps not consciously.’ Seabrook had noted in The Unprivileged: ‘The public boast that “they make proper little gentlemen of ’em at the grammar school” often conceals shame and perplexity when the proper little gentlemen return home, impatient and critical of the way their parents live. They marvel at the remote and inaccessible places in which their children’s minds move, and as they leaf timidly through a book left on the kitchen table they wonder who this Go-eth can be and whether it is he who is responsible for their son’s alienation.’

  There is no indication that Moore’s parents felt that way, but Moore himself certainly did. For the first time, he was embarrassed to take his friends home. He found the school’s all-male atmosphere uncomfortable and did not share any particular enthusiasm for sports. The emphasis on authority and rules simply didn’t suit his style of learning. ‘The school was an odd mixture of strange Dickensian customs and normal, everyday mid-sixties modernism. It was an unusual environment; it was a school I never liked. The Northampton Grammar School was impersonal and cold and incredibly dull and authoritarian.’

  A more direct blow to Moore’s ego came at the end of the first term, when grades were assigned. He had plummeted from star pupil at primary school to nineteenth in a class of around thirty in the first term at grammar school. He was twenty-seventh in the class by the end of the next term. Some of this was down to his classmates benefitting from the advantages of a better primary education, already having been taught Latin and algebra, subjects Moore had never encountered. Some was a consequence of Moore having been a big fish in a small pond at Spring Lane: ‘I thought I was a genuine intellectual light. I hadn’t realised that actually, no, I was just about the smartest of a pretty crap bunch!’

  Moore gave up academically. ‘I decided, pretty typically for me, that if I couldn’t win, then I wasn’t going to play. I was always one of those sulky children who sort of couldn’t stand to lose at Monopoly, Cluedo or anything. So I decided that I really wanted no more of the struggle for academic supremacy.’ This was not a case of Moore giving up on learning. Instead he became an autodidact, pursuing his own inner life, and he is clearly proud he ventured off the beaten path in his reading. Most of the books seem to have been fiction – he was particularly fond of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, he went through a Dennis Wheatley phase, a Ray Bradbury phase and an H.P. Lovecraft phase. He would soak up what he read, which was eclectic and idiosyncratic. Even at grammar school, he was reading at a slightly more advanced level than his peers, and occasionally found – for example with Mad or, later, Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine – that he was reading things he was a little too young to fully appreciate.

  Less than a handful of his fellow pupils shared his interest in comics, and he failed to impress anyone at the grammar school with his Omega strips, and soon stopped producing them. But Moore continued to read comics. By the late sixties, there was a new batch of Marvel titles like Silver Surfer, Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD and Doctor Strange for slightly older readers, starring characters who were not quite straightforward superheroes in stories inflected a little towards introspection. The storytelling could now be more stylised and impressionistic, and there were innovations like silent sequences and psychedelic spreads. Moore noted, ‘Probably the most remarkable thing that Stan Lee achieved was the way in which he managed to hold on to his audience long after they had grown
beyond the age range usually associated with comic book readers of that period. He did this by a constant application of change, modification and development. No comic book was allowed to remain static for long.’ These titles did not challenge the sales supremacy of Archie or DC’s Superman and Batman titles or become the dominant style of mainstream comics, but they found an avid audience among teenage readers who were starting to respond to the medium in a more sophisticated, knowing way. Comics fans were also beginning to talk to each other.

  Alan Moore judges that British fandom began to ‘catch fire’ in 1966, a couple of years later than in America. While their American counterparts tended towards nostalgia, virtually everything was new to British fans, who celebrated the latest American imports alongside material from the forties and fifties that had not previously shown up in the UK, ‘so we applauded people like Jim Steranko, Neal Adams; people who were actually pushing the medium forward, trying to make it do things that it hadn’t done before. We went berserk when we discovered Eisner, through the Harvey Spirit reprints that were done in the mid-sixties. And EC Comics. But it wasn’t a nostalgia for Eisner or EC – these were things we were discovering for the first time.’

  One of the most prominent of the British comics fans was Steve Moore. He is four years, five months older than Alan, and by the late sixties was working for Odhams, a publisher reprinting Marvel strips for the British market and replicating the Stan Lee formula so slavishly that he was referred to in editorials as ‘Sunny’ Steve Moore. Along with fellow editor Phil Clarke he also published two issues of what is thought to be the first British comics fanzine, Ka-Pow, and organised the earliest British comics conventions. Alan Moore was buying Odhams’ Fantastic, mainly for its only original strip, Johnny Future – written by Alf Wallace and drawn by Luis Bermejo – the adventures of a surviving missing link between modern human and Neanderthal who falls into a nuclear reactor to become a super-evolved being capable of great feats of strength and astral projection. And Alan didn’t just subscribe to Ka-Pow, he began corresponding with both Steve Moore and Phil Clarke.

  Alan Moore and Steve Moore have been friends ever since, and, as we will see, Steve’s influence on Alan’s life cannot be overestimated. Alan has described him as ‘the most influential figure in my life in many ways, this was the guy who taught me how to write comics, got me into magic and is in many ways responsible for completely ruining my existence’. Steve Moore appears unassuming, particularly when standing next to his namesake, but Alan has worked hard to disabuse people of this notion, writing a short story, Unearthing, a candid biography that starts at the moment of his friend’s conception and encompasses the wide variety of weird encounters he has had. Steve Moore admits to being ‘bewildered by all the attention it’s getting … the whole thing has rather surprised my friends and relatives!’, possibly because Unearthing includes details of his erotic relationship with the moon goddess Selene.

  Alan Moore was a ‘supporting member’ of the first British comic convention, Comicon, at Birmingham’s Midland Hotel in August 1968. He did not attend (he was only fourteen), but helped it financially by buying a fundraising magazine, and his name appeared in the convention booklet alongside those of many people who would go on to work in the British comics industry, either creatively, in editorial or by running comics shops and distributors (see next page).

  He was, however, present at the second Comicon, the following year at the Waverley Hotel in London: ‘There were sixty or seventy people there and that as far as we knew was the entire number of people who were remotely interested in comics in the British Isles.’ The convention was the first time that Alan and Steve Moore met, after a year or so as penpals. Alan also encountered Frank Bellamy, who’d drawn strips like Dan Dare and Fraser of Africa for the Eagle (the veteran artist was a little taken aback to learn that people discussed his work). The main guests were two British artists who had worked for Marvel in the US: Steve Parkhouse – who remembers their meeting: ‘I was struck by Alan’s demeanour. He was very, very young – but very, very funny. He was undeniably a performer’ – and Barry Windsor Smith, who the following year would start an acclaimed run on Conan the Barbarian (a comic avidly read by a young Barack Obama). Comicon became an annual event. At this and subsequent conventions, as well as through reading and contributing to fanzines, Alan Moore would come to know (if not always actually meet) many people a little older than him who were starting what would be long careers in the comics industry, and who would end up working with him in the eighties – people like Jim Baikie, Dez Skinn, Kevin O’Neill, David Lloyd, Brian Bolland and Dave Gibbons.

  Moore’s fascination with America, and his avid reading of material like Mad, meant he became aware of the counterculture a number of years before it was given that name. He liked what he saw. When asked, ‘So would you say the sixties was a really important time for you in terms of your political development?’, Moore answered: ‘For me it was absolutely formative, if I hadn’t have been growing up during that time I certainly wouldn’t be the same person that I am today.’ Sixties culture, he said,

  seemed to have blossomed from nowhere … it was a convergence of several different social trends, there was an awful lot of increase in technology that took place during the war; there was an economic boom after the war; there was a massive generation, the biggest human generation that has ever existed was born in the wake of the war; and all of these things came together in around about the early sixties, so there was this fairly unprecedented explosion of ideas and I think initially the counterculture, as we referred to it then, it was left-leaning but it was it was a very radical take upon even leftist ideas. It tended to reject all kind of authoritarianism and it was much more pleasure based, much more centred upon joy, ecstasy, it was very enlightened in my opinion.

  Alan was ‘relatively drug-free, fresh-faced and squeaky clean’ in 1969 when he first met Steve Moore, but there was a distinctly psychedelic tinge to the comics scene. ‘Most of those early English comic fans were hippies, or at least proto-hippies or would-be hippies. They were all hanging out at the only comic and science fiction shop in Britain, which was called Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed, named from a Ray Bradbury short story’s title.’ Alan’s first published work (outside school magazines) was an advert for the shop, an illustration that appeared in the September 1970 issue of the magazine Cyclops. He wasn’t paid.

  Others attending Comicon went on to open comic shops and mailorder businesses. Many published fan magazines, usually fairly eclectic publications that included essays, short stories, illustrations and cartoons about whatever interested them. The print runs of these fanzines very rarely reached three figures: they were almost all made on mimeographs, small machines that used an electric spark to burn type into a wax stencil (hence the alternative name for the device, the electrostenciller). Most schools, churches and offices used them to produce newsletters or flyers. Once they were printed, the editor would collate and hand-staple the result.

  Moore contributed to a number of titles. He ‘spent a hell of a long time gathering material’ for an essay about pulp character The Shadow for Seminar (1970). He made a couple of contributions to Weird Window: a book review, various illustrations of monsters and the poem ‘To the Humfo’ appeared in #1 (Summer 1969); #2 (March 1971) had an illustration of a Lovecraftian Deep One by Moore and a prose story, ‘Shrine of the Lizard’ (‘I’d just read Mervyn Peake’s excellent Gormenghast books at the time, so all the characters have names like Elly Blacklungs and Toziah Firebowels’). An eleven-word letter by Moore appeared in Orpheus #1 (March 1971) and he contributed to the horror fanzine Shadow.

  Soon, though, he wanted to produce his own magazine. ‘Myself and a couple of other kids of my age, some from the grammar school that I attended, some from the girls’ schools, we decided spontaneously to put together a magazine of bad poetry basically. It was called Embryo, it was originally going to be called Androgyne, but I found that I couldn’t fit that lettering onto th
e cover so I shortened it. It was very ramshackle.’ Its covers were printed on coloured paper, and it sold for 5p, rising to 7p by #5. Moore produced covers, illustrations and poems for Embryo. ‘I was writing what I thought was poetry. Usually angst breast-beating things about the tragedy of nuclear war, but were actually about the tragedy of me not being able to find a girlfriend.’ While it was not a comics fanzine, the last issue featured a four-page comic strip written and drawn by Moore, ‘Once There Were Daemons’. Whatever Moore’s reservations about the quality of his verse, his work on Embryo brought him to the attention of a local poetry group, which he joined.

  While Moore had been set back academically, he had never got into much trouble at school; he started smoking, and he would occasionally bunk off to ride a friend’s motorbike around the grounds of the local psychiatric hospital. His parents knew he was different, but found this easy to accept:

  I was regarded almost from the outset as unusual, but this was within a family tradition where unusual people were not actually that unusual. There had been previous people in the family line, mostly on my father’s side, who were quirky, talented and in certain instances certifiable. Generally my parents seemed to be very impressed that I could draw a picture and string words together, sometimes in rhyme, in a way that they did not feel competent to … My family accepted me as, in my mum’s phrase, ‘a funny wonder’. This was an all-embracing phrase that incorporated an awful lot of things. It was something that was wonderful, but funny in the peculiar sense. Such people were not unknown in the bloodline. ‘Oh, we get one of these every hundred years or so.’ I always had an odd relationship with my family, because turning out to be someone like me did sometimes bring problems with it. It sometimes changes things, luckily with my close family I don’t think it did.