Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  Although it’s deeply personal, the strip has perennially been overlooked. Partly this is because it’s been difficult to find: it took some years for the series to be collected for the American market (as The Complete Bojeffries Saga, Tundra Press, 1992, an edition that is harder to track down than the original Warriors). That cannot be the only reason for its neglect, though, as Marvelman has been even harder to come by and that has only served to inflate its status. Many readers who lapped up Marvelman and V for Vendetta, particularly in America, have a very hard time ‘getting’ the strip in the other sense of the word: it seems difficult to categorise generally and as part of Moore’s oeuvre in particular.

  The main reason is simple: The Bojeffries Saga is a comedy.

  In 1986, Moore described The Bojeffries Saga as ‘one of the few comedy strips I’ve done’, but from his earliest work onwards, he has written out-and-out comedy whenever he has had the opportunity. At the time he was starting work on Warrior, he was writing and drawing weekly instalments of The Stars My Degradation and Maxwell the Magic Cat. He had written the first Abelard Snazz script as a Future Shock for 2000AD, and that would become a short series. All the Future Shocks and Time Twisters, not just those written by Moore, were meant as light relief. Moore’s best-known comedy series, DR & Quinch, started as out as a one-off Time Twister (‘DR & Quinch Have Fun on Earth’, 2000AD #317, May 1983). The Bojeffries Saga, then, was part of a continuing and major strand of Moore’s work, not some aberration or slight side project.

  Neither, though, was it an obvious fit for any British magazine. While it has werewolves and vampires in it, it’s not a horror strip. It’s not the sort of science fantasy 2000AD might print. One correspondent to Warrior summed up a common reaction in the letters column in #16: ‘I liked this story but it was out of place in Warrior.’ The Bojeffries Saga was featured on the cover of its debut issue, with the strapline: ‘Makes Monty Python Look Like A Comedy … a soap opera of the paranormal’. This was more confusing than accurately descriptive, as it’s not all that Pythonesque, (although Michael Palin would have made an excellent Trevor Inchmale, the Walter Mittyish rent collector who’s the viewpoint character of the first story.) In fact, with a family of supernatural creatures living in a typical home, there is a superficial resemblance to the American TV series The Addams Family and The Munsters (a comparison Moore and Parkhouse have resisted). But The Bojeffries Saga is perhaps most like The Young Ones, a TV sitcom about a houseful of unappealing students which debuted on BBC2 in late 1982 and was invariably described as ‘anarchic humour’. That show was one of the first flowerings of eighties alternative comedy on television, so it was fitting that the Tundra reprint of the series featured a foreword by alternative comedian (and comics fan) Lenny Henry.

  It is more productive to analyse where The Bojeffries Saga fits in Moore’s development as a writer. The real reason it was in Warrior is that Dez Skinn trusted Moore and Parkhouse, and he knew that his readers were keen on Moore. It’s fair to say that The Bojeffries Saga was the first strip published because the writer is Alan Moore.

  Moore would moreover agree with Steve Parkhouse’s assessment that ‘we never realised its full potential’. Four instalments appeared in Warrior, another six would show up in various places over the next ten years. Whereas Moore sees his other Warrior strips as done and dusted, he has shown interest in reviving The Bojeffries Saga, and for many years Top Shelf, his American publisher of choice, have listed a collected edition with new material as ‘forthcoming’. It’s an early series, but one that fits quite comfortably with Alan Moore’s current work.

  Warrior #9 and #10 (January/May 1983) saw the appearance of the second of the three ideas Moore had pitched to Dez Skinn. Moore and Garry Leach’s Warpsmith was a straight science-fiction strip based on characters Moore had first devised back in his Arts Lab days. One of the Warpsmiths, an alien police force, had appeared on the cover of Warrior #4 and in that month’s Marvelman strip readers learned that the Warpsmiths would become key allies of Marvelman. In their own strip, we learn that the Warpsmiths are a race of teleporters, one whose language doesn’t even have a word for ‘distance’ because they can travel anywhere instantly. The story portrays a number of groups of aliens, all with their own distinctive jargon. It is a high-concept, grown-up science fiction idea, but it’s not rooted in the ‘realistic Britain’ Moore was basing his other Warrior strips around, and the strip did not return to the magazine. Warpsmith went on to feature in A1 (1989), an anthology title that Garry Leach would publish (the characters were the cover stars of the first issue) and played an important part in the last book of Marvelman. If Warpsmith had caught on, no doubt it would have become a soaring science fiction epic with a distinct identity. As it stands, the series is probably best considered a spin-off from Marvelman.

  Moore ended up taking his third idea, Nightjar, to Bryan Talbot, a writer/artist who had been part of the Birmingham Arts Lab and had an extensive background in underground comics, but was now looking for more mainstream work. After drawing a single illustration of Adam Ant for a magazine he found, somewhat to his bemusement, that he had been ‘branded as “the Adam Ant artist” and spent most of a year producing pics and logos for various Ant publications’. Comics connoisseurs knew Talbot as the creator of the extraordinary The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, a sexy, intricate epic about a war fought across parallel universes. This had begun in 1978 in Near Myths, an Edinburgh magazine that also featured some of the earliest work by future comics superstar Grant Morrison. Near Myths, though, only ran for five issues. As Moore and Talbot started working together on Nightjar, pssst!, the magazine that had rejected David Lloyd’s Falconbridge, had just agreed to reprint and continue Luther Arkwright (starting from #2, February 1982) and Moore’s initial letter to Talbot congratulated him for that.

  The letter seems to have been written just after the launch of Warrior. Moore had thought about Talbot’s strengths as an artist – his use of white space, his ‘sense of Englishness’ and familiarity with art beyond the world of comic books – and sensed a kindred spirit, because of a shared background in underground comics. The strip they were to collaborate on was to serve two purposes. First (as we might guess by now), ‘I’d like a very believable and realistic 1982 setting’. This would involve a portrayal of magic that was ‘more low-key and less pyrotechnic … I’d like to suggest a sort of magic reality by the use of coincidences and shit like that’. Moore was interested in featuring working-class magicians. Second, he envisaged ‘a vehicle for semi-experimental storytelling devices … I should imagine from the episodes of Arkwright that I’ve seen this is pretty dear to your heart as well’. He said he wanted to emulate Eraserhead, Nic Roeg and Kubrick.

  Moore had a clear advantage over Talbot in his experience of what the readers of Warrior, and perhaps more pertinently its editor, would want. He told Talbot that Warrior was for ‘a 12 to 25-year-old audience’, and saw it as important that a series with a female lead should ‘educate some of the pre-teen misogynists in our audience about what women are like’. He wanted their protagonist to be unconventionally attractive, though conceded that ‘we do have to appeal to people with base sensibilities. Dez for one, 40,000 readers for another.’ Indeed, Skinn’s pragmatism looms large: Moore advises Talbot that his editor will want a ‘broad commercial approach’ and an instantly recognisable lead character, and art that can easily be coloured for foreign editions; he suggests they plan for three episodes and then assess ‘the Dez/reader reaction’. Moore visited Talbot for a couple of days at home in Lancashire before starting the script and they discussed the concept in more detail.

  The results can be seen in the first instalment, which efficiently sets up the premise. Harold Demdyke (‘he looks like everybody’s dad after Sunday dinner’) dies in front of his young daughter, Mirrigan. Years later, her grandmother announces that he was ‘Emperor of All the Birds’, the most powerful of sorcerers, and that he died at the hands of seven other magicians.
Mirrigan is to kill them and take the title for herself. We see the seven antagonists, including the current Emperor of the Birds, the MP Sir Eric Blason (‘this guy is about power on a level that drug-addled ninnies like you and I can scarcely conceive’, Moore tells Talbot). In the letters column of Warrior #8 (December 1982), Skinn was able to announce that ‘Bryan Talbot is working on a contemporary sorceress strip from an Alan Moore script’.

  But by then the project was clearly on the back burner for writer, artist and editor alike. Skinn admits, ‘I was never very keen on Nightjar (hated the name) and Bryan was another slow – or busy – artist, so it would never have happened in Warrior which had to hit deadlines or there’d be no money in the kitty to pay contributors.’ By the time Warrior folded three years later, Talbot had completed just two and a half pages of the eight scripted and pencilled one other. He simply got a better offer: Pat Mills had approached him to replace Kevin O’Neill as the regular artist on 2000AD’s Nemesis the Warlock. He would follow that with stints on Slaine and Judge Dredd that would keep him occupied for the next four years (it’s worth comparing Talbot’s progress on Nightjar with the five or six pages a week he was completing for 2000AD).

  Talbot’s first work for 2000AD had been a short strip written by Moore (‘Wages of Sin’, #257, March 1982), and they would soon work together on ‘Old Red Eyes Is Back’ (a Ro-Busters story for 2000AD Annual 1983, August 1982), but Talbot hasn’t drawn another Moore strip. They did work together on a video project, Ragnarok (1983). In the late eighties Talbot completed The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, with Moore writing the foreword to the second volume of the collected edition in December 1987 (‘he created a seamless whole, a work ambitious in both scope and complexity that still stands unique upon the comics landscape’). Talbot became a semi-regular artist for DC Comics in America, his most high-profile work being on Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. From there, he returned to original graphic novels that he both wrote and drew, cementing his reputation as one of the most important and interesting British creators – The Tale of One Bad Rat (1995), Heart of Empire (1999, the sequel to Luther Arkwright), Alice in Sunderland (2007), Grandville and its sequels (2009–), and Dotter of Her Father’s Eye (2012). In 2003, William Christensen, editor-in-chief of Avatar Press, contacted Talbot about Nightjar, and Talbot was surprised to find he still had the script and pages. Avatar commissioned him to finish the first chapter, then reprinted it along with the script, the initial notes and an essay by Talbot in Yuggoth Cultures, a series dedicated to Alan Moore rarities.

  Warrior #1 appeared in newsagents in March 1982, and featured the opening instalments of Marvelman and V for Vendetta, Steve Parkhouse’s Spiral Path, and four strips written by Steve Moore: Prester John, Father Shandor, Laser Eraser & Pressbutton and A True Story (a one-off with art by Dave Gibbons). The last two pages of the magazine were dedicated to short biographies and pictures of the contributors. Alan Moore is represented by a photograph that makes him look particularly demented (see opposite page) and a profile, clearly written by Moore himself, which gave a short recap of his career to date, including the work of his pseudonyms, Curt Vile, Jill de Ray and Translucia Baboon – the latter being an identity adopted by Moore for the early eighties relaunch of The Sinister Ducks.

  The second issue contained the same regular strips, with the addition of Paul Neary’s The Madman. It had a Marvelman cover and a text feature on Axel Pressbutton with contributions from Moore as Curt Vile. It also included its first letters column. The letters pages of Warrior were a vital part of the reading experience. As he had in his fanzine days, Skinn published correspondents’ full addresses, allowing comics fans to get in touch with each other directly. And the creators of the individual strips often replied directly to a specific point raised: in #6 (October 1982) Moore asked one reader who complained about the use of ‘Christ’ as an expletive why he hadn’t complained about all the violence. It is clear that the readers, at least those who wrote letters, were keen on Pressbutton, Marvelman and V in roughly equal measure, and less keen on the other stories. For his part, Skinn ‘always thought of V as a sleeper hit, like the album track which only grows on you slowly, off the back of more commercial tracks. So I very much saw Marvelman and Axel as our frontrunners.’

  The first three issues of Warrior came out on time and to plan but did not sell as well as hoped, with Skinn later noting ‘if I’d been an accountant, I’d have … cancelled the magazine when I saw the returns on issue one’. While 2000AD was selling ‘a rock solid 120,000 copies a week’, sales of Warrior fluctuated but it had a reported print run of around 40,000 and, although it failed to make much of a stir across the Atlantic at first, it sold better than expected in America, with US sales accounting for a quarter of the total. Nevertheless, money was tight. Garry Leach said of his position as Warrior’s art director: ‘That sounds pretty glamorous and high powered, doesn’t it? Quality Communications ran from a sleazy little basement beneath a seedy comic shop in New Cross; a rundown low-life area just outside central London. It was festering and alarmingly cheap – which would sum up the entire operation! … Dez always had about two thousand reasons why he couldn’t pay you that week.’ It is a description which makes the ‘revolutionary’ Warrior sound remarkably like the old IPC as described by Steve Parkhouse.

  Alan Moore was soon getting plenty of regular work beyond Warrior, but Dez Skinn was an editor who encouraged him. Moore was being noticed by Warrior’s readers – he was often singled out for praise by letter writers – and he retained ownership of the characters he created (he was granted part-ownership of Marvelman). Moore was learning, with V for Vendetta particularly, that the comics medium was an alchemic one, where the finished product was more than the sum of the writing and art, and that a running series could progress, adding layers of meaning and resonance.

  In late August 1982, around the time Warrior #5 was published, Moore wrote to Skinn with suggestions for spin-off series. Vignettes would be set in the London of V for Vendetta but would tell ‘little Eisneresque stories about ordinary people living in a very tough world’. Untold Tales of the Marvelman Family would build on the backstory of that series, with Moore suggesting ‘we could do a story about Gargunza … maybe one describing how he came to build the FATE computer’ (FATE was the all-seeing computer from V for Vendetta, Gargunza the evil scientist who created Marvelman). At this point, Moore saw the two strips as linked, and he and Steve Moore had come up with an elaborate future history that saw ‘the Warpsmith takeover of Earth, the Rebellion against the Warpsmiths and their subsequent destruction, the Golden Age of Earth, the Superhero purges, the Exodus of the Marvelmen, the war between FATE and the Rhordru Makers, and so on and so on’. The story continued, in fact, beyond the far future seen in Pressbutton.

  Only a year or so before, Alan Moore’s declaration of intent in the Society of Strip Illustration round table had seemed over-ambitious and a little naïve, but he had already achieved many of those goals. Moore’s ‘greatest personal hope’, writing a revamped Marvelman, had proved to be the quickest and easiest part of it.

  ‘Script robot Moore found 2000AD to be an excellent outlet for his ideas. Amongst his work for the Mighty One: many unforgettable Future Shocks, Abelard Snazz – the Double-Decker Dome and the scrotnig series, Skizz.’

  ‘Meet the Droids’, 2000AD Annual 1983

  One of the conceits of 2000AD is that it is edited by an alien from Betelgeuse, Tharg the Mighty, and that all the actual work is done by an army of malcontent, feckless droids – script robots, art robots, lettering robots. Over the years, occasional biographies or caricatures of individual droids have been published. Script Robot Alan Moore appeared in a poster in #322 (25 June 1983), drawn by Robin Smith (see overleaf).

  The image of comics creators as production-line workers under the lash of an alien taskmaster was clearly a joke, but one that contained more than an element of truth. Comics follow a relentless schedule – weekly in the case of 2000AD – and the c
reation of most entails a strict division of labour. A writer prepares a script, it is sent to an artist who draws the pages (in American comics, this task is often further split between a penciller, who prepares the layout of the page, drawing in pencil, and an inker, who draws over the pencil art in ink. The inker may have considerable leeway to add details, and is often responsible for adding backgrounds). The word balloons, captions and sound effects are added by a letterer. If it is a colour comic – unlike the vast majority of Moore’s British work – a colourist prepares colour guides for the printer. All of this is overseen by an editor, who hires and fires, and who has the right to alter the script or the art as he or she sees fit. According to Stephen Bissette, an artist who would work with Moore on Swamp Thing and 1963: ‘they were assembling comics like we were auto-plant workers. And that’s how they saw us. I did the frame assembly, as the penciller. Alan was the car designer. John Totleben put the doors on. Tatjana Wood sprayed the paint on. You name anyone in the process, and we were assembling a car, and that car that had to be out every four weeks was the new issue.’

  The arrival of computers in the late eighties allowed better communication and more flexibility at every stage, but the production line has been retained. David Lloyd thinks that this has a negative effect on the value of the final product, that ‘the industry depends on the industrial process of creation, which I think is sad. It happened by accident in the old days that jobs had to be split up because they wanted to produce more and more books, so they had finishers, inkers, pencillers and everything was busted up. So in reality you can hardly describe most comics as art because the creative process is fragmented. It’s craft, there’s excellence in craft, but as artistic expression it falls short.’ Watchmen’s artist, Dave Gibbons, disagrees: ‘Comics is an artform. It’s a collaborative artform, usually, although in certain cases the whole writing and drawing is all done by one person. It’s an artform along the lines of opera or film, and I don’t think there’s anything second rate or anything childish about the actual form of comics. It’s just that traditionally – and more so in this country than even in the States – they’ve been used merely to service children.’