Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  Once he has an idea of the structure and transitions, Moore draws extremely rough thumbnail images of each page, entirely for his benefit and generally indecipherable by anyone else. These allow him to see the layout of panels on the page and the pacing of his story: ‘I can then transform these incomprehensible scribbles into quite lavish and detailed panel descriptions.’ This was never an entirely cold, cerebral process. Moore has talked about acting out the parts, adopting, for example, the hunched pose and snarling voice of the Demon. ‘I think to write emotionally with any real conviction, you have to work yourself into a self-induced state of near-hysteria, emotionally speaking. It’s a bit like method acting, and it takes a lot out of you.’ He then writes out the script, first as a draft in longhand using ‘biro and scraps of paper’ (for prose pieces, he generally goes straight to his keyboard). When those notes are done, he types them up. He very rarely redrafts his work:

  you have to understand that anything you’ve ever read of mine was probably a first draft. I don’t do rewrites because … god that’s boring! It’s generally been such a grind writing the thing in the first place that the idea of rewriting it is a nightmare. Also, if I was a novelist and I get to chapter eight and suddenly realise that there was something that I wanted to introduce back in chapter one, I could do that, but if you’re a comic writer, then by the time you’re up to chapter eight, chapter one had already been published for about three months. The deadlines are really fast and furious, you haven’t really got time to do multiple rewrites on a story, and it’s not possible to go back and amend or fine tune earlier chapters.

  This is a habit Moore has retained, even when he has had the time to redraft. With his first novel, Voice from the Fire, ‘the first eleven chapters were pretty much exactly as they were when I first wrote them, other than a word here or there that got changed’. Moore stresses that this first draft is ‘a very deliberate and deliberated over first draft’.

  One of the legends about Alan Moore is that his scripts are immensely long. And, like many legends, it has a basis in truth.

  The form a comics script may take varies tremendously, but can be boiled down to a handful of basic styles. The most common way of writing comics in the US in the early eighties was ‘Marvel Method’, the house style at Marvel Comics (it was also used at other companies, although never became popular at arch-rivals DC). The writer gave a very basic plot summary, usually no more than a paragraph per page of finished comic book, so that the script for a comic of around twenty pages might be three pages long. The artist would then decide on the layout of every page and the composition of individual panels. Once the artwork was completed, the writer would come up with dialogue and captions to fit the pictures. Many artists, in particular, favour working this way. Mike Wieringo, who drew for both Marvel and DC in the nineties, said: ‘I prefer using the Marvel method because it gives me more input as opposed to DC’s full script method, where you’re sort of just a hired hand asked to draw the writer’s vision and not able to put any of your own in it.’ That said, on longer or more acclaimed runs, artists have often come to criticise it, because they feel the writer gets disproportionate credit for work where the artist has made so many of the major storytelling decisions. The Marvel Method has fallen out of favour, but still has its champions. As Howard Mackie, another Marvel stalwart, wrote: ‘Just to drive the point into the ground … all of the favorite comic books done by Marvel in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s or 90’s … all the comics that fans and pros reference … were done using the Marvel Method of plot followed by script. There had to have been SOMETHING to it.’

  The approach favoured at DC Comics and most British comics publishers – and by Alan Moore) – is ‘Full Script’, where the writer describes the page layout and the composition of each individual panel, and the script spells out the dialogue, captions, thought bubbles and sound effects. The decline of the Marvel Method was in no small part due to Moore’s success and the spotlight he placed on the quality of writing in comics, alongside the fact that other Britons like Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis, who went on to work in America, directly emulated his style of scripting. Moore was always dismissive of the Marvel approach: ‘If the artist has just got a plot that says “Daredevil talks to so-and-so on this page and at the end, so-and-so will come in”, then from that the artist won’t know what expression to put on the mouth. So if he draws a chap grinning and then Chris Claremont comes along and gives a huge balloon to it saying “my wife and family have just died …”’

  Claremont was the writer of the best-selling comic on the market, The Uncanny X-Men, and in May 1985 he and Moore were interviewed together in London by the fanzine Speakeasy. The readers of Comics Buyer’s Guide had just voted Moore second in the Best Comic Writer category – and Claremont had won. Moore was evidently a little put out by this. He had criticised Claremont’s writing a number of times in the past. Three years before, as Curt Vile, he had told Warrior he parodied The X-Men in The Stars My Degradation because ‘Chris Claremont’s got a whole string of Eagle Awards and I haven’t got any. There’s no justice in that. I must admit, though, I’m not over-enamoured with his writing, and I thought there were enough absurdities in it to get a bit of mileage for some sort of cheap shots and low-minded ’umour.’

  MOORE:

  This comes down to one of the big differences between me and Chris, beyond any stylistic differences. It’s purely in the way we work, in that Chris writes plots and then writes the dialogue, and I write a full script.

  CLAREMONT:

  Just because I’m a lazy sod!

  MOORE:

  The only difference is that I wouldn’t like to do it your way you know because of the amount of control. I write very, very full scripts.

  …

  CLAREMONT:

  The conscious decision I made was to sacrifice a measure of that control for the advantage of the artist’s contributory creativity. I find when I am working with someone like Frank (Miller) or Walt Simonson or (John) Byrne or Paul Smith or John Bolton, to name just a few, that there is a barrier: their suggestions, their thoughts of pacing. They know better how to visually construct a scene than I do.

  MOORE:

  My attitude is the same as Chris’s. I value serendipity, and I value the artist’s input a lot and with every script I have written, I write a full script and then say ‘throw it out’.

  The skill of the Full Script approach is in choosing the best moment to depict, and in relating each panel to those around it. It is a format a lot like scripts for television or cinema. As Moore noted, ‘comics are spoken of in terms of the cinema, and indeed most of the working vocabulary that I use every day in panel directions to whichever artist I happen to be working with is derived entirely from the cinema. I talk in terms of close-ups, long shots, zooms, and pans’. Something about this nagged at him, though. ‘If you see comics only in terms of cinema, then all it can be is a kind of cinema that doesn’t move.’

  Ultimately both the Marvel Method and Full Script are meant to produce compelling stories, and whichever approach is used comics will always be collaborations between a writer and an artist. There’s no right or wrong way to format a script. A team can employ the Marvel Method to create experimental, intricate work or derive a linear, plodding comic from a full script. The reason British comics prefer full scripts and Marvel Comics developed their own method was nothing to do with concern for the quality of the finished result, and everything to do with the circumstances of production.

  Marvel’s ‘Bullpen’ was actually a studio in Manhattan where the writers and artists worked together and comics were assembled. When the company launched its range of superhero comics in the 1960s, publisher Stan Lee oversaw them all. They were drawn by established artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, who had a genius for strong graphic design and dynamic images. Their version of the method was quite casual: Lee would occasionally not even write down the plot summary, instead simply spelling out its even
ts in a brief conversation or phone call, while for his part, Kirby has admitted he would draw individual pages of fight scenes and shuffle them around or retain them for the next issue. As Marvel expanded, bringing in more writers and artists, the method became more formal, with an editor checking the plot summary and adding notes before passing it on to the artist, but the basic principle remained that the artist had a huge amount of involvement in how the story was told. The method perfectly suited an arrangement where the artist could call the writer over from the other side of the room to ask if the picture he was working on was what the writer had in mind. By the early eighties many artists were working from home or their own studios, but the Bullpen still existed as a large, central room at Marvel’s offices where final amendments were made to pages.

  Creating British comics was always a far more compartmentalised, one-way process than it is even at American companies like DC. The writer’s job was finished once he sent in his script, the editor having assigned an artist to draw it. And like the writers, the artists were freelancers working from home. They were expected to follow the script, although they had licence to make changes if it would give the pages more impact. The final stage, the lettering – when the speech bubbles were added – was usually done at the publisher, with editors routinely cutting out or adding captions to fit the art if they felt the storytelling needed improvement. At this stage, artwork could be altered by someone on staff. (Images involving smoking and drinking were often redrawn, as were pictures deemed too gory or sexy.) Writers and artists wouldn’t always see the finished pages, or know what had been changed, until they were published. In the interests of diplomacy, if major changes had been made, a writer might be informed, but could do little about it except ask for the strip to go out under a pseudonym.

  By the time of his later Future Shocks, Moore would often know who his artist was going to be, and could write to their strengths. Knowing he would be working with, say, Dave Gibbons, an artist who specialised in panels that were crammed with detail, he came up with ‘Chronocops’ (2000AD #310, April 1983), an intricate time-travel story where the same events recurred with slight variations, as indicated by some clever sight gags.

  For longer projects, although editors wanted to remain party to any discussions, Moore and his regular artist would have long telephone calls and exchange bundles of notes and sketches. They could take the opportunity of comics marts and conventions (usually in London) to meet over drinks, and would occasionally even visit each other at home. The reality, though, was that once a series was underway, maintaining a weekly schedule took up a lot of time, particularly for the artist. There were few people, particularly those early in their career, who worked in comics full time. Alan Davis, for example, saw drawing Captain Britain as ‘a bit of extra cash and a lot of fun’ and had a day job working in a warehouse. Jamie Delano was a taxi driver, Eddie Campbell a metal fabricator. It left little free time in their schedules. If an artist fell behind, he would be replaced, not always temporarily – though this only happened to Moore once, when Garry Leach stepped down as the artist on Marvelman.

  As a rule of thumb, then, the only opportunity a British comics writer had to communicate with their artist was through the script itself, and so anything the writer wanted to get across needed to be in his script. It is fair to say that Alan Moore has taken this to an extreme. While most comics scripts are no-nonsense descriptions of what the writer would like to see in each panel, Moore’s are often far more discursive, explaining the exact effect he is trying to achieve, framing things in terms of longer-term planning, listing his influences and making jokes. The most obvious attribute of his scripts is that they are extremely long. For example, here is the first panel of The Killing Joke, published in 1988 with art by Brian Bolland:

  And here is Alan Moore’s script for that panel:

  PAGE 1, PANEL 1:

  WELL, I’VE CHECKED THE LANDING GEAR, FASTENED MY SEATBELT, SWALLOWED MY CIGAR IN A SINGLE GULP AND GROUND MY SCOTCH AND SODA OUT IN THE ASHTRAY PROVIDED, SO I SUPPOSE WE’RE ALL SET FOR TAKE OFF. BEFORE WE GO SCREECHING OFF INTO THOSE ANGRY CREATIVE SKIES FROM WHICH WE MAY BOTH WELL RETURN AS BLACKENED CINDERS, I SUPPOSE A FEW PRELIMINARY NOTES ARE IN ORDER, SO SIT BACK WHILE I RUN THROUGH THEM WITH ACCOMPANYING HAND MOVEMENTS FROM OUR CHARMING STEWARDESS IN THE CENTRE AISLE.

  FIRSTLY, SINCE I’M NOT ENTIRELY SURE HOW THESE GRAPHIC NOVELS ARE SET OUT, MIGHT I SUGGEST THAT IF THERE ARE END-PAPERS OF ANY KIND THEY MIGHT BE DESIGNED SO AS TO FLOW INTO AND OUT OF THE FIRST AND LAST PANELS OF THE STORY. SINCE BOTH THE FIRST AND LAST PANELS CONTAIN A SIMPLE CLOSE-UP IMAGE OF THE SURFACE OF A PUDDLE RIPPLED BY RAIN, THEN MAYBE A SIMPLE ENLARGEMENT OF A BLACK-AND-WHITE RIPPLE EFFECT TO THE POINT WHERE IT BECOMES HUGE AND ABSTRACT WOULD BE IN ORDER? AS WITH ALL MY VISUAL SUGGESTIONS, BOTH HERE AND IN THE PANEL DESCRIPTIONS BELOW, PLEASE DON’T FEEL BOUND BY THEM IN ANYWAY. THEY’RE ONLY MEANT AS WORKABLE SUGGESTIONS, SO IF YOU CAN SEE A BETTER SET OF PICTURES THAN I CAN (WHICH I’D SAY IS QUITE LIKELY, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED) THEN PLEASE FEEL FREE TO THROW OUT WHAT I’VE COME UP WITH AND SUBSTITUTE WHATEVER YOU FEEL LIKE. I WANT YOU TO FEEL AS COMFORTABLE AND UNRESTRICTED AS POSSIBLE DURING THE SEVERAL MONTHS OF YOUR BITTERLY BRIEF MORTAL LIFESPAN THAT YOU’LL SPEND WORKING ON THIS JOB, SO JUST LAY BACK AND MELLOW OUT. TAKE YOUR SHOES AND SOCKS OFF. FIDDLE AROUND INBETWEEN YOUR TOES. NOBODY CARES. ANOTHER GENERAL NOTE WOULD REGARD STYLE AND PRESENTATION. I’VE ALREADY GONE INTO THIS IN THE SYNOPSIS, SO I WON’T DWELL ON IT TOO MUCH HERE, EXCEPT TO UNDERLINE A COUPLE OF THE MORE IMPORTANT POINTS, ONE SUCH POINT WOULD BE OUR TREATMENT OF THE BATMAN AND HIS MYTHOS, INCLUDING THE BATMOBILE, THE BATCAVE AND WHATEVER OTHER ELEMENTS MIGHT FIND THEMSELVES INCLUDED IN THE STORY BEFORE ITS END. AS I SEE IT, THIS STORY ISN’T SET IN ANY SPECIFIC TIME PERIOD. WE DIDN’T SHOW ANY CALENDARS, OR ANY NEWSPAPERS WITH HEADLINES CLOSE ENOUGH TO READ THE DATE. THE ARCHITECTURE AND THE SETTINGS IN GENERAL THAT WE SEE ARE EITHER OBVIOUSLY OLD AND DATED, AS IN THE CARNIVAL SEQUENCES, OR HAVE AN AMBIGUOUS SORT OF LOOK TO THEM THAT’S BOTH FUTURISTIC AND ANTIQUE AT THE SAME TIME, AS WITH THE FLEISCHER-SUPERMAN/LANG’S METROPOLIS LOOK THAT I SEE OUR VERSION OF GOTHAM CITY AS HAVING, AT LEAST ON IT’S UPPER LEVELS. THE LOWER AND SEEDIER LEVELS OF GOTHAM ARE MORE INCLINED TOWARDS A TERRITORY SOMEWHERE BETWEEN DAVID LYNCH AND THE CABINET OF DR CALIGARI, ALL PATCHES OF RUST AND MOULD AND HISSING STEAM AND DAMP, GLISTENING ALLEYWAYS. I IMAGINE THIS STRIP AS HAVING AN OPPRESSIVELY DARK FILM NOIR FEEL TO IT, WITH A LOT OF UNPLEASANTLY TANGIBLE TEXTURES, SUCH AS YOU HABITUALLY RENDER SO DELIGHTFULLY, TO GIVE THE WHOLE THING A REALLY INTENSE FEELING OF PALPABLE UNEASE AND CRAZINESS. SINCE I KNOW THAT YOU LIKE USING LARGE AREAS OF BLACK ANYWAY, THEN MIGHT I SUGGEST THAT WE USE THE DARK AND SHADOWY NATURE OF OUR BACKDROPS AND THE BLACKNESS OF THE BATMAN’S COSTUME TO GIVE US AS MANY INTERESTING PRIMARILY BLACK COMPOSITIONS AS WE CAN GET AWAY WITH? THE FACT THAT THE JOKER IS SUCH A BLEACHED AND BLOODLESS WHITE PLAYS OFF INTERESTINGLY AGAINST THIS, I RECKON, SO PLEASE FEEL FREE TO GO COMPLETELY LOOPY WITH THE QUINK ON THIS ONE. AS FAR AS THE CHARACTERS THEMSELVES GO, I’LL DESCRIBE THEM IN DETAIL WHEN THEY MAKE THEIR APPEARANCES, BUT MY ONLY GENERAL NOTE WOULD BE THAT LIKE THE LANDSCAPE AND THE VARIOUS PROPS, THEY HAVE A SORT OF TIMELESS AND MYTHIC QUALITY TO THEM WHICH DOESN’T FIX THEM FIRMLY IN ANY ONE AGE RANGE OR TIME PERIOD. THE JOKER LOOKS EITHER OLD OR BADLY DEPRAVED, BUT THEN HE’S ALWAYS LOOKED THAT WAY. THE BATMAN IS BIG AND GRIM AND OLDER THAN WE ARE, BECAUSE AS I REMEMBER THE BATMAN HE’S ALWAYS BEEN BIGGER AND OLDER THAN I AM AND I’LL FIGHT ANY MAN THAT SAYS DIFFERENT. GIVEN THIS TIMELESS AND MYTHIC QUALITY, IT ALSO STRIKES ME THAT THERE ARE CERTAIN ELEMENTS OF THIS STORY THAT HAVE STRONG OPERATIC ELEMENTS. BOTH THE BATMAN AND THE JOKER HAVE A POWERFUL OPERATIC QUALITY TO THEIR APPEARANCE IN THAT THE JOKER IS AN EXTREME VERSION OF THE HARLEQUIN FIGURE WITH THE BATMAN’S CAPE AND MASK LOOKING LIKE SOMETHING STRAIGHT OUT OF DIE FLEDERMAUS. I DUNNO WHY I MENTION THIS EXCEPT TO UNDERLINE THE SORT OF GRAND EMOTIONAL INTENSITY I WANT THIS BOOK TO HAVE WITH BOTH THE BATMAN AND THE JOKER BECOMING POWERFUL AND PRECISE SYMBOLIC FIGURES I
N A NIGHTMARISH AND ALMOST ABSTRACT LANDSCAPE. ANYWAY, BEFORE I WANDER OFF INTO A COMPLETELY IMPENETRABLE AESTHETIC FOG I SUPPOSE WE OUGHT TO ROLL OUR SLEEVES UP AND GET STRAIGHT DOWN TO BUSINESS WITHOUT FURTHER ADO.

  THIS FIRST PAGE AND A COUPLE OF THE SUBSEQUENT ONES HAVE NINE PANELS APIECE, ALBEIT WITH VERY LITTLE OR NO DIALOGUE TO CLUTTER THEM UP. I WANT THE SILENCE AND THE METRONOME-LIKE VISUAL BEAT THAT THE PANELS WILL HAVE TO CREATE A SENSE OF TENSION AND INTRIGUE AND SUSPENSE WITH WHICH TO DRAG THE READER INTO THE STORY, WHILE STILL LEAVING US ENOUGH ROOM TO SET UP ALL THE NARRATIVE AND ATMOSPHERIC ELEMENTS THAT WE WANT TO ESTABLISH. IN THIS FIRST PANEL, WE HAVE A TIGHT CLOSE-UP OF THE SURFACE OF A PUDDLE. (SEE? AND THERE WAS YOU ALL WORRIED THAT I WOULDN’T GIVE YOU ANYTHING FASCINATING TO DRAW.) WE ARE SO CLOSE TO THE PUDDLE AS TO SEE IT ONLY AS AN ALMOST ABSTRACT IMAGE OF WIDENING RIPPLES SPREADING ACROSS A SHADOWY AND BLACK LIQUID SURFACE. IT IS NIGHT TIME, AND THE RIPPLES THAT WE SEE IN THE FOREGROUND ARE CAUSED BY LARGE DROPLETS OF RAIN THAT FALL THROUGH THE FOREGROUND IN DIAGONAL SLASHES. MAYBE WE CAN SEE ONE DROPLET AT ITS PRECISE MOMENT OF IMPACT WITH THE PUDDLE, SO CLOSE ARE WE TO IT. ALTHOUGH I DON’T SUPPOSE THAT THIS INFORMATION WILL MAKE MUCH DIFFERENCE TO THIS CURRENT PANEL, FOR YOUR FUTURE REFERENCE IT IS MID-NOVEMBER AND BITTERLY COLD. HERE, ALL WE SEE IS THE RAIN SPLASHING INTO THE PUDDLE AND THE SILVERY WHITE RIPPLES SPREADING OUT ACROSS THE DARKNESS.