Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  This isn’t to say that being the artist on a project written by Moore is free of tension. The root cause for most disputes between comic book writers and artists is that it is almost always far easier, and faster, to write a page than it is to draw one. Naturally, different people work at different rates, but as a rule of thumb most artists working in American comics can just about maintain a monthly schedule of delivering one complete comic a month – around twenty-three pages, so one completed page every weekday. For example, on Swamp Thing, Stephen Bissette has said ‘John [Totleben] and I took five weeks to do an issue’, whereas Moore ‘did eight pages a day, handwritten and then typed’. It means that writers can work on three, four or five books a month (and often do, if they can find someone who’ll commission them), but artists work very strictly on one title at a time. Alan Moore’s career presents a textbook example of this: the America’s Best Comics line published by Wildstorm from 1999 to 2005 included four regular titles (and various specials, miniseries and spin-offs), initially all scripted by Moore, but each book had its own art team. In the meantime, Moore was also able to finish off Lost Girls and work on other projects.

  Melinda Gebbie, artist on Lost Girls, acknowledged the problem: ‘He had to work quite hard at any one time on seven or even eight other projects, while he was working on Lost Girls as well, so he had a very, very rigorous schedule, and I needed time to work on Lost Girls … Being an artist was quite frustrating because, I mean, he was able to do so much work during that period, many different things, and I was only able to do that book.’ Bissette raises a more long-term issue: ‘Alan could do Swamp Thing in a week to a week and a half, and he still had two and a half to three weeks to do other stuff. Like Watchmen. And as we watched Alan’s career skyrocket, you know, we were still the lowly Swamp Thing cartoonists. So that was a schism.’

  The vagaries of publishing mean that working with Alan Moore might not be the biggest payday of an artist’s career, but they tend to find it is the work that endures the longest and which they are asked about most often. The majority of artists who have worked with Moore are already successful in the comics field, and have racked up other high-profile work. Many are, or go on to be, writer/artists. The list of artists who have done substantial work with Moore but who are better known for something else – a highly contentious call to make, complicated by the fact that some comics haven’t travelled well across the Atlantic – might be said to include Bryan Talbot, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane and Brian Bolland, but surprisingly few others. Some artists are clearly a little resentful that their own work or projects with other writers have been overshadowed, that they are known mainly as one of Alan Moore’s artists. Very few, even those who have fallen out with the man, seem to blame Moore himself for that.

  When Avatar Comics reprinted the On Writing for Comics essay in 2003 (as Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics), Moore wrote a new afterword in which, having re-read his old essay, he describes his younger self as a ‘far less complex individual, someone a few years into his career attempting to describe the processes of his craft as honestly and lucidly as he was capable of doing at the time’. He warns established authors they are ‘in danger of becoming a joke’ if they repeat their stylistic tricks too often and suggests ‘make things hard for yourself’.

  Certainly Moore’s methods worked and he swiftly built his reputation. Having started 1982 as the writer of a handful of one-off strips, he ended 1983 as the award-winning writer of five regular series, with a steady stream of work from three British publishers.

  In 1982 and 1983, Moore wrote a string of short prose stories, numerous non-fiction articles – including pieces on haunted houses and CB radio for the Scooby Doo and BJ and the Bear annuals – and a script for a video science fiction project, Ragnarok. March 1983 saw the last of his strips for Sounds: The Stars My Degradation, which had been winding down, and he had thought about producing a new strip centred on Mycroft the Crow from Roscoe Moscow, but in the event he was getting so much writing work that he simply didn’t have time to continue drawing a half-page strip every week (for the last year, Steve Moore had been writing the series). Happily, though, Moore did find the time to continue writing and drawing Maxwell the Magic Cat for the Northants Post, even managing to negotiate a pay rise … from £10 to £12.50 a week.

  He was also involved in various musical projects with Northampton bands, the outcome being a number of commercial releases. He wrote songs for the Mystery Guests – Mr Liquorice, Alex Green and Buster Skinner: ‘The Merry Shark You Are’ and ‘Wurlitzer Junction’ (1980). He composed and recorded a poem used by Bauhaus in the sleeve notes to Masks, on the cover of the album This Is For When … Live and as a taped spoken introduction to live performances of ‘Double Dare’ (it appears on the live album Press the Eject and Give Me the Tape). And the Sinister Ducks reformed – their line-up was Moore, David J and Alex Green – for three live performances, and to record ‘March of the Sinister Ducks’ and a version of ‘Old Gangsters Never Die’ (1983). Moore even wrote a song for V for Vendetta, ‘This Vicious Cabaret’, which David J set to music and released, with other compositions inspired by the comic, as the V for Vendetta EP (1984).

  His most high-profile work, though, was in comics, where he wrote in excess of six hundred pages of material over two years. He was inarguably prolific, but it is worth noting that the weekly schedule of British comics kept a lot of writers very busy. Steve Moore, Steve Parkhouse, Angus Allan, Alan Grant, Pat Mills and John Wagner certainly all wrote more in the same period. Alan Moore was not at all unusual in being a freelance writer working on many projects for ‘rival’ publishers. If anything, it was unusual that virtually everything he was writing fell within such a narrow waveband of science fantasy aimed at teenage boys (with a high proportion of it quirky and comical in nature). Most comics writers were happy to take work where they could find it in titles aimed at very young children, girls, or about football, horror or war.

  One way in which Alan Moore was exceptional was that he became one of the stalwarts of the British comics industry remarkably quickly. There were other people in comics who enjoyed a rapid rise, but these tended to be artists: Steve Dillon, the artist on Pressbutton in Warrior and Abslom Daak for Doctor Who Weekly, had been sixteen when Dez Skinn first commissioned him for Hulk Weekly in 1979; Alan Davis, Moore’s co-creator on three series in this period, made his professional debut after Moore, in 1981. Even for artists, though, this was unusual. Kevin O’Neill, David Lloyd, Dave Gibbons and Brian Bolland all served lengthy apprenticeships on obscure publications before getting regular work.

  Because he produced so much material for so many publishers in such a short period, it is hard to give specific examples of a neat chain of cause and effect where Moore was given a job because of a particular previous piece of published work. We know the publication dates, and we know that typically it would be four or five months between a script being accepted and its publication, but that doesn’t always represent when Moore first had an idea or pitched it to an editor, when he was commissioned or when the script was handed in. One-off strips in particular could be put on file and used to fill gaps in the regular schedule. British comics publishing in the early eighties, as now, was a small, interdependent world. The editors of one British comic typically would not only have read the other comics Moore was writing for, they would usually have a pretty good idea of their rivals’ plans, and what everyone was busy with. Moore was just as likely to get work based on advance word of what he was working on as from an editor reading a published comic and getting in touch. We can say for certain that Moore got the chance to write for Captain Britain on the strength of his Marvelman work, but beyond that, Moore has confessed he is unclear himself of the exact order he wrote this material, and that as far as he’s concerned, ‘It all started to happen at the same time … once 2000AD and Marvel knew I was being given series work by somebody else, they became more inclined to give me series work as well.’

  Many of
the people who read 2000AD in the early years are hugely nostalgic about it now, but they remember Judge Dredd and his supporting cast, Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper, Slaine, perhaps Flesh, Nemesis the Warlock and Ro-Busters … not the Future Shocks. Moore’s work from this period is often very entertaining, and some of the short pieces like ‘Chronocops’, ‘The Reversible Man’ and ‘Sunburn’ are excellent, but much of what he wrote was not leaps and bounds ahead of other material and rarely so distinctive as to be unmistakably his work – indeed, there is some dispute about whether a number of Future Shocks written under a pseudonym are by him. Likewise, a number of Doctor Who stories credited to ‘Moore’ are by Steve Moore, but appear in some reference books as the work of Alan Moore. Even working across so many titles, if Alan Moore had quit comics at the end of 1982, it is doubtful that anyone would really have noticed.

  We can look down the list of credits of pretty much any issue of 2000AD from the early eighties and it now looks like a Band Aid-style assembly of comics superstars. It was a time when many talented creators, many of whom have now been the biggest names in comics for a generation, were emerging. How did Alan Moore manage to move to the forefront of this strong field?

  Moore was fortunate not only that he had arrived on the scene just as writers and artists were starting to receive creator credits but that the market in the early eighties supported three publishers producing the boys’ science fiction adventure magazines he wanted to write: Quality (Warrior), IPC (2000AD and Eagle), and Marvel UK (a number of titles, including The Daredevils and The Mighty World of Marvel). The most obvious advantage was that there were plenty of pages that needed filling. Working for three publishers, though, also meant Moore’s career was not dependent on the patronage of one editor, or the survival of one magazine.

  All this was equally true for everyone else. But Moore’s analysis in On Writing for Comics was fair: the world of British comics was a staid one, in which even the new generation had accepted a lot of received wisdom. A good example was Marvelman. The smart money had made its judgement: British audiences didn’t like superheroes because they were inevitably very silly; Marvelman was a horribly derivative, hokey example of the breed; science fiction stories with dashes of black comedy were the way to go. At one level, the received wisdom was proved right – for all the talk of Freedom’s Road, you would never make your living writing for Warrior. Nevertheless, Moore arrived fired up with an entirely original, extremely clear vision for the character and, with his first chapter of his first regular series, created a template for superhero storytelling that would prove to be the most important contribution to the genre since Lee and Kirby’s first issue of Fantastic Four.

  But in the British comics industry of the early eighties, success for a writer still depended in no small measure on being a good script robot: someone who could deliver thoughtful, imaginative work to a deadline and who never seemed to have too much work on his plate. And Moore was an exceptional script robot. He wrote stories that fitted perfectly with the publications he was writing for, and when talking to his editors he was enthusiastic and constructive. Dez Skinn remembers, ‘Alan was never off the phone! He’d call up at all hours, often saying “Got you out of your pit, have I?” if I sounded blurry after a late night. He’d mail a script in and then phone me to tell me the entire story. He was very enthusiastic and yes, very flexible – hence the Big Ben appearance in Marvelman as a springboard for a character I’d been dragging around with me for years. He even suggested to his Sounds editor that I’d be the perfect person to put together an intended comic they wanted to launch.’ Bernie Jaye agrees: ‘Alan Moore used to pop into Marvel when he was in London for conventions or meetings, as did many other writers and artists. We exchanged a few home visits. He was a consummate professional. He was conscientious, answered lots of mail from fans. Nothing was too much trouble. He was especially brilliant on panels, articulate, thoughtful, humorous and entertaining. He worked well with Alan Davis and their pages were always in on time. You couldn’t have asked for a better contributor.’

  One thing that Moore, unlike his peers, seems to have noticed was that while 2000AD, Warrior and The Daredevils were very similar, they were not interchangeable. Each offered distinct opportunities and allowed him to demonstrate different talents. Moore is fond of Brian Eno’s remark that only a few hundred people ever listened to the Velvet Underground, but they all formed bands, and that’s the perfect description of Warrior’s place in the history of British comics. Writing for Warrior had given Moore his first opportunity to write regular strips, while learning the benefits of collaborating closely with an artist on longer project – V for Vendetta in particular.

  Writing for Warrior would not, however, confer the other obvious advantage of having regular work – a regular income. The publication was already paying less than its competitors – Moore received just £10 a page for his Warrior work. As Dez Skinn says, ‘The rates increased after the first year, but I based them on being two-thirds of 2000AD’s rate. Cheaper because I wasn’t IPC! And I was only buying first publication rights. Profits would come from syndication and merchandising, both of which we achieved. The badges alone earned the creators a lot of money’. Artists were paid £40 a page at Warrior, proportionately less than at IPC and Marvel. What’s more, Warrior was on a monthly schedule, whereas 2000AD was weekly – a regular strip in 2000AD meant more pages to write and draw, but the combination of extra work and higher rates meant that you could expect to earn ten times as much working there. Writers and artists still had reasons to work for Warrior, but many were highly sceptical of Skinn’s promise of future profits (he’d said in one memo to contributors that Warrior would be ‘not only fun to produce, but lucrative to us all’). As David Lloyd observed, ‘If you spoke to anyone involved with Warrior who thought it would make them rich, I’d love to know who they are. Dez might have thought he was going to be rich at some point. I can’t imagine anyone else thinking that. We were pleased to be working on something that we owned and had freedom to do.’

  And while Moore and Lloyd maintained a monthly schedule on V for Vendetta, all the other strips soon saw some sort of disruption. Within the first year, Garry Leach left Marvelman; The Madman ended abruptly; Steve Parkhouse ended The Spiral Path (halfway through the run, he brought John Ridgway onto the strip to assist with the art), and Steve Dillon’s contributions to the Pressbutton strip began to dry up. Warrior #4 was planned as a Summer Special but was quickly retasked, a clue that regular material was already running late.

  Skinn believes ‘creator ownership was both the blessing and the curse of Warrior. Initially it was a blessing. People tried harder because they owned it! If you’re making something for somebody else, whether a wardrobe, a suit or a comic strip, you look first at how much they’re paying and time yourself accordingly. But if you’re doing it for yourself, you know that the better it is the more you’ll benefit long term. I was the editor/publisher. But, as I soon realised, for the first time I had no way of exercising my role. Usually if an artist disappeared, you’d find a replacement. If a writer lost his way, you’d either help him get back on track or once again replace him. But we had creative anarchy going on. We were banned by [the newsagent] W.H. Smith for being too “naughty” for a mere comic. One artist disappeared for over six months halfway through a serial. One writer totally frustrated an artist by a cop-out plot twist (as the artist perceived it).’ Skinn nonetheless took on a bullish tone in editorials and letters columns. Teething troubles were to be expected, they were learning from their mistakes. Besides, Alan Moore was still there, eagerly filling any gaps that emerged with scripts for Young Marvelman, Warpsmith and The Bojeffries Saga.

  With a steady flow of commissions from Marvel UK and 2000AD, and with more to prove than his more established contemporaries, Moore could afford to keep working at Warrior. It brought him renown, or at least the UK comics industry equivalent; in 1982 he won two Eagle Awards for V for Vendetta (Best Comics Writer, Best Sto
ry), as well as helping Warrior to Best UK Title. In 1983, he won Favourite Writer, Favourite Comic Character (Marvelman), Favourite Villain (Kid Marvelman) and Favourite Single or Continued Story (Marvelman), while Warrior won Favourite New Comic and Favourite Comic Cover. Moore was later fairly dismissive of the awards, saying, ‘they’re voted for by a couple of hundred comic fans … it’s no indication of quality, but I won them for two or three years running which didn’t mean anything really’. He was clearly proud of winning the awards at the time, though. He’d had the ambition to win them, they certainly did no harm to his career and he saw the positive reaction to his work as confirming his instinct that he was on the right track.

  A regular strip or two in 2000AD was the grand prize for a British comics writer in the early eighties. The anthology comic was the epicentre of the British comics scene, the place to find virtually all the top creators and characters.

  2000AD had been smart enough to grow up with its audience. It had launched in 1977 as a science fiction adventure comic for ten or eleven year olds who loved Doctor Who and Star Wars, and the magazine was brash and surprisingly grim. Five years on, its readers were now teenagers facing their own dark future of mass unemployment and Thatcherism. Strips in 2000AD became a parade of stories where ordinary people and friendly robots were ground into the dirt by mean bosses, fascist policemen or crazed tyrants, or just swept away by a brutal universe. It is possible to pick out specific instances of topical satire – Nemesis the Warlock’s parody of the royal wedding of Charles and Diana, for example – but the most subversive thing about 2000AD was that virtually every strip rammed home that the world isn’t fair, life is cheap and people are mean.

  Once again, Alan Moore made himself very useful to his editor. He may not have had a ‘regular series’, but his Future Shocks and Time Twisters appeared in nearly half the issues of 2000AD in 1982 and 1983. When he pitched a Judge Dredd spin-off, Badlander, it was not accepted, but instead he was rewarded with his first regular series.