Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  So Skinn left Marvel to produce Warrior under the aegis of his own company, Quality Communications. In April 1981, just before the SSI roundtable was published, he began putting together the first issue, a process that would end up taking about a year. Pragmatically, he wanted the strips in Warrior to be as close as possible to the most popular strips in his old Marvel titles: ‘So instead of Captain Britain, we had Marvelman. Instead of Night-Raven, we had V for Vendetta. Instead of Abslom Daak … we had Axel Pressbutton. And instead of Conan we had Shandor.’ To that end, Skinn was talking to artists and writers he had worked with at Marvel. Many of the small band of established British comic-book freelancers were keen to work for Warrior, and over the next few years they were to do so.

  Skinn wanted a superhero as part of the mix, and had already decided that would be Marvelman – the old character had fallen into obscurity since his titles were cancelled in 1963, but he was a British superhero and fans Skinn’s age would at least remember the name. Skinn originally hoped Steve Moore or Steve Parkhouse would write it, with Dave Gibbons or Brian Bolland drawing. But all four declined the opportunity, although they would all work on other strips for Warrior. Gibbons says Marvelman ‘appealed, but I was too busy’ and this was almost certainly the main reason Bolland declined as well.

  For the writers, meanwhile, a factor in their decision to turn down Marvelman may have been that Warrior was going to allow writers and artists to retain the rights to characters they created. Traditionally, comic book publishers on both sides of the Atlantic had treated creators as hired hands. In 1938, when the American writer/artist team of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster sold all rights to the character Superman along with the first strip featuring him, they had been paid just $130. Forty years on, Superman was big business: Warner Communications now owned DC Comics, the publisher of Superman comics, and their movie division had released the blockbusters Superman: The Movie (1978) and Superman II (1980). Yet the corporation had been shamed into giving Siegel and Shuster pensions and on-screen credits only when it came to light that they were practically destitute.

  There were no millions to be made or blockbuster movie adaptations in British comics, and creators enjoyed no glory for their efforts. Slowly, though, things were beginning to change: soon after 2000AD launched, it had started to put credits on stories, and this revolutionary move had quickly become standard practice. Even so, all the revenue from foreign and domestic reprints, merchandise and other spin-offs remained with the publishers. With Warrior giving writers and artists the luxury of retaining the rights to any new creations, it would make far more sense for them to work on their own characters rather than revive someone else’s.

  Another factor was that superheroes had never caught on in the UK. Since the heyday of Dan Dare in the fifties the most popular British adventure comics had consistently been science fiction. The popularity of 2000AD, the arrival of Star Wars and a spike of popularity for Doctor Who – both the subject of weekly comics published by Marvel UK – had only cemented that in the late seventies. It was science fiction character Axel Pressbutton who would feature on the cover of Warrior #1 – which proclaimed ‘He’s Back!’, although the character’s very first appearance had been all of three years before and he was still appearing every week in Sounds – and it was Pressbutton who Dez Skinn assumed would be Warrior’s signature character. The strip would be written by Steve Moore (using his ‘Pedro Henry’ pseudonym), and abandoned the ‘underground comix’ sensibility of Pressbutton’s previous appearances. Instead he would star in an action series in a very similar vein to Steve Moore’s Abslom Daak, using the same artist, Steve Dillon. Except for having a little more violence and bare skin, Warrior’s version of Pressbutton would not have been out of place in 2000AD.

  Dez Skinn says that when Steve Moore turned down the opportunity to write Marvelman, he mentioned he had a friend who ‘would kill for the chance’. Alan Moore has suggested that Skinn ‘must have seen the thing in the SSI Journal’, and would later recall that when David Lloyd was asked by Skinn to create another series, a ‘new thirties mystery strip’ for Warrior, Lloyd ‘suggested me as writer’. Taken together, these varying recollections leave the actual sequence of events unclear, but all parties agree that Moore was involved with Marvelman before the mystery strip. Skinn says that Lloyd’s recommendation came ‘perhaps a month later’ than Steve Moore’s, and ‘when David suggested Alan … I’d already seen his first Marvelman script’; Lloyd states that Moore ‘had already said yes to doing the Marvelman update’.

  Skinn had been keen to work only with people he knew, but was surprised to find he already had Alan Moore’s name in his address book. Around eighteen months before, Moore had drawn a couple of pages of single-panel Christmas-themed gags for Frantic, a Marvel title Skinn had been editing. And Moore knew all about Dez Skinn. He had subscribed to Skinn’s fanzines a decade before, and had ‘seen him then, although I probably hadn’t necessarily met him’ at various comics marts and conventions. He thinks he first met Skinn when he hand-delivered his art to Frantic, but Skinn doesn’t recall this, and we should probably concede his point that most people who meet Alan Moore remember doing so.

  Moore was not an old colleague, or anything like as seasoned as the rest of the creators being lined up for Warrior, but if he was as well-known in the industry as David Lloyd said, shouldn’t Dez Skinn have heard of him? Skinn did not remember Moore’s Frantic work, and says at the time he wasn’t reading Doctor Who Weekly or 2000AD, where strips by Moore were now appearing. Steve Moore was talking to Skinn about using the Pressbutton character. Wouldn’t Skinn have been aware of Alan from the Sounds strip Pressbutton appeared in, given that he was its artist? ‘You’d expect so, but to me Alan had been very much an “underground” one-off contributor (to Frantic). I’d even put such after his name in my mammoth address book so I’d remember who he was (failed though!) … Steve Dillon was to draw the strip, so Alan’s relevance was purely historical, no more than Mick Anglo and Marvelman.’

  At Skinn’s request, Moore prepared an eight-page pitch document for Marvelman, which outlined the main characters and the backstory in some detail. Moore was clearly not in the loop at Warrior at this point: at the end of the pitch, he suggested Dave Gibbons or Steve Dillon as suitable artists, unaware Gibbons had already turned down the opportunity, and that there were other plans for Dillon. But the pitch led to a phone conversation, which persuaded Skinn to request a full script for the first instalment, although he made it clear that this was ‘on spec’ – in other words, Moore wouldn’t get paid if Skinn didn’t like it.

  One of the first things Skinn had done when he started putting Warrior together was approach David Lloyd asking him to create a ‘Night-Raven-type’ series. Night-Raven was a prime example of why Skinn had been frustrated at Marvel UK. A Marvel comic from America was, and still is, typically a monthly printed in full colour, with around twenty-two pages of one story featuring one character (Captain America, say) or one team (such as The X-Men). A typical British title was a black-and-white weekly with larger pages and around half a dozen short strips, each featuring a different character. Some comics were padded out with text features – articles about the characters, prose fiction. Marvel UK’s comics were mostly straight reprints of American material (often broken up into shorter instalments, and always in black and white), but there would also occasionally be new material by British writers and artists featuring Marvel’s American characters like the Hulk. There were even some original characters. British readers were treated, for example, to the all-new adventures of Captain Britain.

  Night-Raven was one of these characters. Created in 1979 for Marvel UK’s Hulk Comic by Skinn and assistant editor Richard Burton, it was written by Steve Parkhouse, drawn by Lloyd, and saw a masked vigilante take on gangsters in the 1930s. It owed a clear debt to venerable characters The Shadow and The Spirit, but had a distinct identity of its own, and while the stories notionally took place in the same ‘Marvel Un
iverse’ as Fantastic Four, Iron Man and the rest, the series was set fifty years in the past, so it could plough its own furrow. Night-Raven was the favourite strip of many people working for Marvel UK. Despite this, Marvel’s American publisher, Stan Lee, insisted on changes after only a few months. He disliked Lloyd’s ‘blocky’ drawing style, and so John Bolton became the new artist. Lloyd was kept busy on other projects, including Star Wars, Doctor Who and an adaptation of the movie Time Bandits. The Night-Raven story was moved forward to the present day and the violence was toned down. Skinn saw this as symptomatic of the problems with the industry and, keen for Warrior to be a place where writers and artists would not be forced to make such compromises, he invited Lloyd to come up with a new series. Lloyd ‘knew it would be a much better piece of work if Alan was on board. I would have been happy to do something, but it would have had nothing like the depth that Alan would add to it.’ Many of the foundations of this ‘thirties mystery strip’, including its artist, had therefore been in place before Alan Moore was involved. Yet it would evolve into one of the series he is best known for: V for Vendetta.

  Only two years later, when Moore wrote a ‘behind the scenes’ feature about the origins of V for Vendetta, he admitted that when he and Lloyd were asked where they got their ideas from, ‘we don’t really remember’. Once Skinn set them to work, however, they quickly had numerous telephone conversations and ‘voluminous correspondence’; both were clearly on the same wavelength and throwing a lot of ideas around. It was a true collaboration, with the artist working on some of the key story points and the writer putting a lot of thought into the visual style. ‘“Alan and I were like Laurel and Hardy when we worked on that,” Mr Lloyd said. “We clicked”.’

  Recalling the ‘freakish terrorist in white face make-up who traded under the name of the Doll’ he had come up with for a DC Thomson competition about five years before, Moore suggested to Lloyd that the series could be about a character called Vendetta, along the lines of the Doll, rooted in a ‘realistic thirties’. This plan was quickly vetoed by Lloyd, who knew from experience that he would not enjoy the level of research and other restrictions this would entail. Lloyd had recently been approached by Serge Boissevain, a French editor who was preparing his own lavish adult comic for the English market, pssst! and Lloyd had come up with a single page for a proposed strip called Falconbridge. ‘The editor was crazy, he was this Frenchman and it was great he wanted to recruit people, but he had this rebellious attitude, and he would say “heroes are dead, so we’re not having heroes in my magazine” … So Evelina Falconbridge I just imagined would be an urban guerilla fighting these future fascists … It was just that one page. I sent it in as a sample, I did it in a kind of French style, used a shading technique on it that was a bit sub-Moebius. It didn’t work out.’

  Moore and Lloyd agreed that, like Falconbridge, the series would be set in the 1990s, in a future totalitarian state. The writer, artist and editor were all keen to have a British setting, rather than an Americanised one. The initial idea ‘had robots, uniformed riot police of the kneepads and helmets variety’. Lloyd began coming up with character sketches for a rogue ‘future cop’ called Vendetta, incorporating the letter V in the costume. Vendetta would conduct a series of ‘bizarre murders’ in a plotline reminiscent of the Vincent Price movie The Abominable Dr Phibes. Lloyd was unhappy they hadn’t settled on a motive for their protagonist, and felt that without knowing what made him tick, it was impossible to come up with the right ‘look’ for him.

  The world of the series had been devastated by nuclear war, but there wouldn’t be mutants or radioactive deserts. Not only were these clichéd, but the main issue was that 2000AD mainstay Judge Dredd was a future cop living in a corrupt post-apocalyptic city. While Skinn was keen for his characters to mirror existing successes, this would have been a little too close for comfort. But as V for Vendetta became less ‘futuristic’, more austere and Orwellian, it began instead to resemble another early 2000AD strip, Invasion!, about Bill Savage, fearless resistance leader of a near-future Britain invaded by a very thinly disguised Red Army. Most new comics series are built around combinations of old ideas, but Moore and Lloyd knew they needed to find a way to make their series more distinctive.

  Getting to this stage had only taken a couple of weeks. A planned holiday at the end of June to the Isle of Wight with Phyllis, Leah and five-month old Amber now became a working break. Moore wrote the first Marvelman script and, as he put it in a handwritten comment on his covering letter to Skinn, a ‘rough synopsis for The Ace of Shades. This is only a first draft. It will hopefully have shaped up into something more complete by the time Dave gets my first script.’ Not even Moore liked the new title, which did not survive long. While he was writing up his notes, Skinn and his business partner Graham Marsh – not knowing that Moore and Lloyd had previously tossed around the title Vendetta – twisted the Churchillian slogan ‘V for Victory’ to come up with the title V for Vendetta. A memo by Skinn dated 24 June 1981 outlined the plans for Warrior and referred to ‘V for Vendetta, written by Alan Moore, drawn by David Lloyd. Set in a future Britain, around 1990. A totalitarian government, Big Brother sort of system. A mystery figure, Vendetta, takes on the system.’

  In his ‘rough synopsis’, Moore had come up with a detailed backstory for the series, directly grounded in contemporary politics. A few months later, he would explain his working method to fellow artist and writer Bryan Talbot: ‘A sort of experiment I’m trying is to try and build the story from the characters upwards. This means that before I start on the actual script, I have to know who all the characters are and have a more or less complete life history for each one firmly established in my head.’ He would later tell the fanzine Hellfire, ‘what I did first was sit down and work out the entire world, all the stuff I’m never going to use in the strip, that you never need to know … once I’ve worked out the politics of the situation, how the government works and all the details like that, I can start thinking about the actual plotlines for individual episodes.’

  The results of this cogitation were soon apparent. Moore sent Lloyd a detailed extrapolation of the consequences of a future Labour government unilaterally disarming the UK’s nuclear weapons; the Soviet Union was thus emboldened, leading to a nuclear war that left only the UK and China standing. The document got no closer to establishing their main character, though – Lloyd wrote on the sketch of ‘Vendetta’: ‘Just got your notes (28th June) so that makes all this redundant, but my general thoughts and opinions on the character remain unchanged. I’ll buzz you at the weekend,’ and sent it to Moore. The two of them were acutely aware that they were on to something. Moore had a list of things he wanted the strip to be like – including Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Shadow and Robin Hood – while Lloyd was coming up with a radical visual style for the series. Each panel would be a regular size, and pictures wouldn’t ‘bleed’ from them. It was a more extreme version of the ‘blocky’ art that Stan Lee had disliked so much. They were tantalisingly close, but still the strip was failing to crystallise.

  Marvelman was proving far more straightforward. Moore submitted the first script to Dez Skinn, along with a cover letter apologising for ‘all the errors of typing, grammar and basic literacy that one must expect from a truly great artiste such as myself’, as well as for the fact that the story was a page longer than agreed, the ending was a little rushed and ‘some of the frames are a little word-heavy’. Skinn read the script on the bus and thought it was ‘stunning’. It followed the idea that had occurred to Moore back when he was a teenager: the boy Mike Moran had forgotten the magic word which allowed him to transform into Marvelman. Moran, now middle-aged, ended up in the middle of a heist to steal plutonium from a power station, whereupon he remembered his magic word, transformed into Marvelman and saved the day almost as an afterthought before flying off proclaiming his return.

  It was a little under a year before Warrior #1 debuted, and when it did, the introduction to Marvelman
was practically unchanged from Moore’s spec script: the main plotlines and most of the details were in place before the artist was assigned. Skinn assigned another relative newcomer, Garry Leach, to draw the story, showing Leach the completed first script to persuade him to come on board. Leach did a lot of work redesigning the costume and thinking through the ‘look’ of the strip; he modelled Marvelman on Paul Newman and Liz Moran on Audrey Hepburn. Leach has said ‘Alan never objected to you pitching an idea in if it was relevant or enhanced the story’, and Moore was very happy to adopt some of the suggestions Leach had for improving the visuals – Marvelman acquired a glowing force field that allowed Leach to play with lighting effects, Leach had detailed thoughts on an early fight sequence, and he would call the writer whenever he felt he had other good ideas.

  It’s fair to say Marvelman was less of a collaborative effort than V for Vendetta. This isn’t to diminish Leach’s contribution, but the idea of how to revamp Marvelman had been brewing in Moore’s mind for fifteen years, and the initial pitch document contained material that would carry the strip for over a year. Leach reorganised a few of the images, but left Moore’s captions and dialogue intact. There were only very minor changes: someone exclaims ‘Christ!’, when it’s ‘Jesus!’ in the script; a caption description of ‘cold granite’ dawn has become ‘cold grey’. Moore asked the artist to establish that the Morans didn’t wear anything in bed, and to ‘make it really casual and no big deal, so as to avoid that sort of faintly smelly Conan-type voyeurism’: Leach has a full-length image of Liz Moran naked, with her back to us. Overall, he does a superb job of bringing a complicated script to life, and squaring the circle of having a flying man in a sparkly leotard appear ‘realistic’.