Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  Of course, Moore was now far from happy about the idea of working with Skinn, and took active steps to ensure he would not have to. In October 1985, Skinn was in America. There mainly to liaise with Eclipse about Miracleman, he had met with DC and understood he had been offered an editorial job there. An article on Skinn’s blog explains:

  Dick Giordano was an old friend from the days of Neal Adams’ Continuity Studios, and told me he welcomed me taking on the job – especially as he’d spent the last few years using Warrior and my address book as a takeaway menu for getting hold of new DC contributors! A match seemingly made in heaven. Except it wasn’t to be. Immediately prior to the meeting, Jenette [Kahn – DC President] had excitedly called one of my old Warrior team and announced that he’d be able to work with me again soon as I’d also be joining DC’s ranks. His response is said to have been ‘If Skinn works for DC, I quit!’. I also discovered later that Dick had kindly mentioned, almost prophetically, he thought I’d be a safer long-term bet. But unbeknownst to me at the time, Jenette could obviously see the immediate revenue her star Brit writer was bringing in and so our somewhat brief and terse meeting went nowhere. A month or two later Mike Gold got the job.

  It’s not hard to work out who the ‘star Brit writer’ was, but Moore says ‘it was a little more nuanced than that. I had Jenette Kahn in the middle of a dinner say that she was very excited because they’d got this British professional who was going to be working for DC and it was Dez Skinn, and what did I think of that? And I said to her that she really ought to ask somebody else because personally I really didn’t like Dez Skinn but that might not be a fair appraisal. I said that I didn’t want to work under Dez Skinn, not that I’d quit DC.’ Skinn elaborates: ‘What happened? Jenette went with the short-term option so I wasn’t able to take all the gang over to US comics in the same way I’d taken them into Marvel UK a few years earlier. Of course they pretty well all made it later under their own steam, they were a talented bunch. But it was more diffused, diluted without their little old catalyst to whip up a storm for them.’

  As 1985 drew to a close, Skinn and Eclipse needed new material for Miracleman #7, due to be published in March 1986, but Moore still hadn’t supplied his scripts. He says

  I wanted to be absolutely sure that the artist at that time, Alan Davis, was happy about his work being reprinted. And I told them that I could not commence writing any new work until they had got that affirmation. They finally left it until the last minute, and then asked me why I hadn’t got the new Marvelman work in, at which point I reiterated my request for some proof that Alan Davis was okay about the whole thing. They said that they were getting this proof – and that they really needed me to start work – that this proof existed, that it was on its way, and they would be showing it to me as soon as possible. I started work because I believed that they were telling the truth. I later found out this was not the case.

  Davis has a scathing response to that: ‘When I first read the above, I felt really sad that Alan’s work had been so badly impaired by deep concern over the legality of Eclipse publishing my art. He was so distraught in fact, that he must have forgotten he had my address and telephone number, or if he was too nervous to call, could have contacted me via a mutual acquaintance, like Jamie Delano, rather than suffer such creatively debilitating doubts. But I suppose Alan’s recollection, for what it’s worth, proves my case. The reason Eclipse could not furnish the proof Alan required to commence work is because it didn’t exist … I had withheld my permission to have my work reprinted.’ Moore says, ‘By the time I was enmired with Eclipse I wasn’t in contact with Alan Davis, and I was totally at the mercy of what I was being told … genuinely the reason I was stickling over delivering new work to Eclipse was because, while I didn’t much like Alan Davis at that point, and I thought he was a bit of a grumpy person who I hadn’t got any interest in talking to again, I didn’t want him to be cheated. I didn’t want anyone to be cheated. I perhaps should have done more. In retrospect I should have demanded.’

  Dez Skinn’s suggestion that someone besides Moore could write the continuation material was given short shrift by Eclipse. It was now obvious, if it hadn’t always been so, that the publisher was interested in Alan Moore writing a dark superhero series for them, not in forming a strategic partnership with Dez Skinn to reprint Quality Communications’ back catalogue. By February 1986, Skinn, Garry Leach and Davis hadn’t been paid for the Miracleman reprints, even though the series had started monthly publication in August 1985. Eclipse now offered to buy both Skinn’s and Leach’s one-third shares in Marvelman for $8,000. Both were happy to wash their hands of it. Everyone involved now believed Eclipse and Alan Moore owned a two-thirds and one-third share in the character respectively. Moore and Eclipse signed a new contract, formalising this and laying out terms for Moore to continue writing the series for another ten issues, with Eclipse given world publication rights.

  Alan Davis’ career as an artist of US comics has continued for thirty years and encompasses Detective Comics and the Justice League for DC, and long stints on many Marvel titles including The Avengers, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Captain America and Wolverine – as well as an adaptation of the first Spider-Man movie and a continuation of Captain Britain’s story in Excalibur. But he was left feeling battered by his dispute with Moore: ‘My memories of the creative process have been tainted by the petty politics, inflated egos, and, ultimately, the fact my Marvelman work was published against my wishes by Eclipse Comics. The fact that I was never paid is secondary to the fact people I trusted behaved so shabbily.’

  Skinn soon set up Quality Periodicals Inc, a company that would repackage British material (mainly from 2000AD) for the US market. He told The Comics Journal he planned to relaunch Warrior under the new imprint, and The Comic Buyer’s Guide that he would eventually be releasing the original titles Intruders, Liberators, Projectors and Warworld, but while Quality continued to reprint 2000AD strips for the next four years (including a twelve-issue run of Halo Jones), no new material ever appeared. According to Skinn: ‘Bryan Talbot said to me a few years later, during an industry party that both Alan Moore and I were attending, “This industry isn’t big enough for a feud. Why don’t you two make up?” I thought that seemed reasonable so I went to the bar, tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Alan, why don’t we just make up?” He replied (rather wittily), “Dez, why don’t you just fuck off!”’

  Moore evidently regrets the fallout from the dispute, though. He was not alone in finding Cat Yronwode a little abrasive at times, and lamented that ‘there had been lost friendships in the course of Miracleman. There had been a lot of things that kind of soured the project.’ He would finish Book Two of Miracleman with #10 (December 1986). Book Three’s publication history was far more erratic, but Moore completed his story – and his contractually stipulated ten issues – with #16 in December 1989. He wrote other pieces for Eclipse, and is proud of his work as part of the Real War Stories project (1987), a venture which put combat veterans and comic book creators together to depict the realities of modern warfare and its psychological aftermath. In 1989 Eclipse stepped into the breach and published Moore’s Brought to Light after a number of other publishers got cold feet.

  By the time he resumed writing Miracleman, though, most of Moore’s creative energy was going into a project with a working title Who Killed the Peacemaker?, his and Dave Gibbons’ creator-owned superhero book for DC. There had been a vast amount of preliminary work: it had taken almost a year between the initial discussions and Gibbons receiving his first script from Moore on 27 March 1985. Gibbons was rather surprised to find that script ran to ninety-one pages, but completed the art by late June. The first issue would however not be published until May of the following year; Moore explained at San Diego that they wanted to complete six issues before it was launched, to ensure the series maintained a monthly schedule.

  And along the way the comic had changed its name to Watchmen.

  ‘Yea
h, I know I have done some quite horrible comics, and certainly some with very adult themes, but that’s not all I’ve done.’

  Alan Moore speaking at N. I. C. E. (2012)

  Much has been written about Watchmen, including the definitive account of the development of the series, the book Watching the Watchmen (Titan Books, 2008), by its artist and co-creator, Dave Gibbons. For good and ill, Watchmen came to define the changes in the comic market in the mid- to late eighties. It propelled Alan Moore from star to demi-god within the comics field and attracted unprecedented attention outside it. It was showered with honours, including many that no other comic has received before or since. It attracted extensive attention from academia, where it’s since been the subject of conferences and has generated books with titles like Watchmen and Philosophy, and Watchmen as Literature. It was reviewed and continues to be discussed in the mainstream media. It has been a consistent bestseller since publication. Watchmen is, simply, as the trailer for the 2009 movie version puts it, ‘The Most Celebrated Graphic Novel of All Time’.

  Thanks in large part to Watchmen, the word ‘serious’ appears a lot when Alan Moore is discussed. Moore, we’re told, creates stories where superheroes are ‘taken seriously’, and forces even those sceptical of comics to take the medium ‘seriously’. He is a ‘serious writer’ who deals with ‘serious issues’. Comics fans, ever sensitive to charges that the superhero genre is childish, are eager to stress how ‘adult’ and ‘sophisticated’ Watchmen is. Academics’ textbooks on Moore invariably start with an introduction explaining that yes, Watchmen and From Hell are comic books, but despite this they are worthy of ‘serious study’.

  The result of taking Moore’s work so seriously is that even when he writes a comic called The Killing Joke that ends with the Joker, a man dressed as a clown, telling a joke in a funfair before collapsing in fits of laughter … his most avid fans and his most highly trained critics fail to allow for anything but high seriousness. Likewise, Watchmen starts and ends with a bright yellow smiling face. Dave Gibbons explained the bad guy’s plan in these terms: ‘in the end, what Veidt did was a joke, a hoax, a bloodsplattered joke, which is what the smiley badge is’. By treating Watchmen as a work of great solemnity, this scholarly attention, the subsequent imitators, and the movie version have almost universally missed the point:

  Alan Moore was joking.

  The publishing industry is keen to pigeonhole works into genres. Moore has sharply critiqued this tendency, initially during an interview in Mustard magazine, and his words have been turned into an inspirational greetings card by one American company – ‘My experience of life is that it’s not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science fiction cowboy detective novel’ – although that version omits the punchline: ‘You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky.’ Yet academics, publishers, critics and comics fans all like sharp categories, and under their taxonomy, Watchmen is a superhero story that treats the genre seriously. It is an exercise in articulating comics history, a deconstruction of existing superhero story conventions, a warning against applying ‘comic book’ views of good and evil to the real world, as well as a masterclass in the use of, and subversion of, techniques of comics storytelling.

  That’s plenty for people to get their teeth into, but still it sells the story short. Watchmen is also a science fiction story. It’s a detective story, a conspiracy thriller, a political satire, a historical family saga. It has elements of romance stories and war stories. It contains a comic-within-a-comic, a pirate adventure. It is packed with all manner of jokes: sight gags, running jokes, ironies, satire, parody, pastiches, characters telling each other jokes or making witty remarks, both intentional and obvious only to the reader. The book is soaked in verbal and visual puns. It is also unarguably, very dark in places.

  It’s worth noting that Watchmen is not literally a dark book. In the movie version, the colour palette is muted – blacks, greys, dark greens, browns and blues, and even people who are very familiar with the comic probably think the movie is faithful to the source material. But the pages of the comic, even when they depict scenes set at night, are made up of vivid greens, reds, blues, oranges and yellows. It’s more reminiscent of the garish Batman TV series (1966–8) than Christopher Nolan’s more recent Batman movies. Often, there is a narrative reason for such gaudiness – for example, Moloch’s apartment is intermittently lit by the neon sign from the nightclub next door – but just as often the colours used make no pretence at naturalism. As Watching the Watchmen makes clear, colourist John Higgins worked hard, and closely with Gibbons, on the colour scheme for the book. It’s fair to say the printing techniques that comics used in the mid-eighties were limited: however, when Higgins took advantage of advances in technology to redo the colouring for the 2005 Absolute Watchmen edition, he retained the overall palette, even if he made many small alterations. Compare that with the 2008 re-release of The Killing Joke, where artist Brian Bolland dramatically reworked the colouring, making it far more subdued than the original release. The candy colours in Watchmen are an artistic choice.

  The creators themselves nevertheless called Watchmen ‘grim’. Before it was released, Dave Gibbons described it as ‘gritty, grim, rugged and realistic, the title all you superhero fans have been waiting for’. Moore has described the series as a ‘dark take on superheroes’, and in 2002 he bemoaned the way many other superhero stories aped it: ‘Get over Watchmen, get over the 1980s. It doesn’t have to be depressing miserable grimness from now until the end of time. It was only a bloody comic. It wasn’t a jail sentence.’ Moore almost instantly regretted Watchmen’s effect on the superhero genre. But when he surveyed mainstream comics in 1992, five years after Watchmen was published, he made an important distinction between his grim and gritty series and those that had followed: ‘Now everywhere I turn there’re these psychotic vigilantes dealing out death mercilessly! You know? With none of the irony that I hoped I brought to my characters. And I felt a bit depressed in that it seemed I had unknowingly ushered in a new dark age of comic books … there is now this sort of nihilism in comics. Which is all right if you’re a smart, cynical adult: you can chuckle at the violent behaviour. But if you’re a nine or ten year old, I wonder what sort of values that opens up?’ Watchmen was intended for an adult audience – one that would recognise ‘irony’ and ‘chuckle at the violent behaviour’.

  The whole of Watchmen is soaked in a brand of black comedy that’s distinctly recognisable from Moore’s more overtly humorous work … if you’ve seen that other work. Moore had written plenty of funny comics before Watchmen, but it’s understandable why 90 per cent of its audience would be unaware of that. His work for the American market ran seamlessly from the horror series Swamp Thing to Watchmen, The Killing Joke, then on to the completion of both V for Vendetta and Marvelman. Most of his fans had not seen the counterbalance, the strips for Sounds, Maxwell the Magic Cat and The Bojeffries Saga. Some of his work from 2000AD – including his Future Shocks and his best-known comedy series, DR & Quinch – was reprinted for the American market but it appeared in a scattershot way, and Moore’s name never appeared on a cover. In the eighties, he wrote plenty of short strips for smaller American comics companies, and these were often humorous – but they were seen by a fraction of the 100,000 readers buying Swamp Thing, Miracleman or Watchmen, and were easy to dismiss as a serious artist letting off steam.

  The book Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel strays from the beaten track of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, and has an admirably extensive analysis of what it calls ‘Moore’s lesser-known output, such as Halo Jones, Skizz, and Big Numbers’. But it barely touches his comedy writing. It only namechecks Maxwell the Magic Cat, and doesn’t find room to even mention The Stars My Degradation, DR & Quinch or The Bojeffries Saga. When the book explores Moore’s America’s Best Comics line, it dismisses the five comedy series in Tomorrow Stories: ‘The mannerist quality of many of these
episodes gives the impression that Moore considered them a sort of formal exercise to be dutifully performed while he concentrated his efforts on fewer important elements in works such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Promethea. The latter are part of ABC too, but despite sharing their frequently playful atmosphere with the other serialisations, they are the sites for Moore seriously to explore themes like identity and magic.’ The supposition that Moore churned out Jack B Quick, First American or Cobweb due to some sense of obligation is not supported by what he says in interviews: ‘They’re so intense, and doing Jack B Quick, to follow that example, was really difficult because to write Jack B Quick you have to sort of get your mind into this completely irrational state. You have to take scientific ideas to absurd lengths. You have to be able to think in a certain way to do those stories. I couldn’t do them all the time, and I certainly can’t see myself being able to do ones that are more than six to eight pages long.’ The strips that Moore drew as well as wrote, mostly early in his career, were almost without exception comedies. The very early underground work, which merged into the work for Sounds, is made up of savage parodies. When Moore introduced the ‘Ex-Men’ into The Stars My Degradation, he – or rather Curt Vile – explained, ‘I suppose what I was trying to do in my own pathetic and puny way was to sting people into re-evaluating the X-Men rather than just coasting along out of loyalty to the creative team or the characters … In fact I suppose you could say that my entire limited concept of satire revolves around kicking a man when he’s down. I don’t have to be nice. I’m handsome.’

  Moore’s early stories do tend to have very bleak endings. St Pancras Panda ends with a fictionalised version of Moore shooting himself in the head, as does his one-off strip Kultural Krime Komix. The Stars My Degradation ends with the accidental obliteration of the universe. Roscoe Moscow goes insane, Three Eyes McGurk and Ten Little Liggers end with the detonation of nuclear warheads. When Moore wrote for the younger 2000AD audience, his contributions were mostly twist-ending stories of the EC Comics or Roald Dahl variety – concisely portraying a world of just desserts, where the protagonist always found himself condemned to some terrible, and usually terminal, fate. Moore has accounted for his return to end-of-the-world themes by saying ‘it’s the equivalent of the sick but understandable jokes that kind of spring up like a rash when there’s any public disaster’. Around the time he was writing Watchmen, Moore added that he was worried his audience wasn’t getting the joke: ‘I started to question the ethics of doing humour based upon nuclear weapons because I wasn’t sure that my audience was understanding it with the heavy irony that was intended and, in fact, sometimes I wasn’t even sure that I was understanding it with the heavy irony that it really needed.’