Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  To his mind, it was a replay of Marvel’s threats to Warrior over the Marvelman name – a big American company acting like a bully and showing more concern for what was legal than for what was fair. It was all the more hurtful, given that DC had seemingly been so supportive and had apparently been making progress with creators’ rights. Up until now, Moore had won his battles – notably when DC ran Swamp Thing #29 despite its failure to be approved by the Comics Code Authority. They had supported Moore then, and losing the CCA label had done nothing to dent the rise in sales – his last issue of Swamp Thing, #64 (September 1987), sold six times as many copies as his first.

  But there is little doubt, when Dick Giordano told The Comics Journal that labelling comics ‘wasn’t a moral issue for me and there was no way I could respond to people who were becoming so emotional about what seemed to me a very simple marketing device’, that he was talking about Alan Moore. Clearly Moore’s personality is a factor here. We might recall Jeremy Seabrook’s description of the working class of Northampton: ‘narrow, suspicious, mean, self-reliant, pig-headed, but generally honourable and as good as their word’, along with Moore’s own admissions that if he can’t win he doesn’t want to play and that ‘reconsidering things is not really generally one of my strong points’. The breakdown with Dez Skinn followed the same pattern: Moore works with someone if he trusts them, and if he loses that trust, he does not want to negotiate, he wants to get out as soon as possible.

  This of course would be to place the blame for everything that happened solely on some personality defect of Moore’s. If that were true, the implication would be that the multimedia giant TimeWarner, used to dealing with pop divas and movie stars, had been caught out by the stroppiness of a single successful creative person. Without assigning ‘blame’, it seems more likely that DC management knew how Moore would react to the ratings system, but went ahead anyway.

  One problem was that Moore and DC dealt over the telephone rather than face to face. The other big-name freelancers such as Miller, Chaykin and Wolfman, along with the vast majority of the comics community at the time, were based in or around Manhattan and saw each other regularly, during office hours and afterwards. Like the British comics industry, the world of American comics was a small one that tended to sort things out over drinks, and the creators and editors based in New York were able to come to an understanding. At the San Diego Comic Con, held over the weekend of 6–9 August 1987, Chaykin said: ‘I got bored with the ratings system argument soon after it started as a result of my inability to take it personally.’ At the same event, Miller joined Dick Giordano on a panel and declared ‘the issue resolved’.

  On the other hand, Moore was receiving his information via phone calls, hearing rumours, Chinese whispers and wild stories from comics journalists eager for quotes. As he admitted, ‘I’m relying upon second-hand information for this.’ Left to stew, Moore joined up whatever information he had. He may well have inferred more Christian fundamentalist involvement than there had actually been – Buddy Saunders, who wrote the original letter raising his concerns, has said he’s ‘not particularly religious’, and neither is Steve Geppi.

  Giordano’s Comics Journal interview repeats something that may hint at the true source of the problem (my emphasis): ‘We thought the labelling was an appropriate marketing device. We really did think of it as mostly that … it seems to me that that was a simple marketing device, and I really was quite surprised by the emotionalism that came from it …’ There is a great deal of evidence that the received wisdom at DC is that Watchmen is a good comic, but that it was DC’s marketing prowess that enabled its success and cemented its reputation.

  Moore has expressed disgust that some at the company credited the success of Watchmen and Dark Knight to the format the comics were printed in, rather than their contents:

  if it wasn’t for the enthusiasm that decades’ worth of writers and artists have invested into, say, Batman, then what’s so great about Batman? … some guy who dresses up as a bat to fight crime. And well, it’s not Tolstoy, is it? … I remember that the buzz in the DC marketing department was that what had made Dark Knight #1 a success was the format. Not Frank’s art, not the storytelling, not Lynn’s colouring, nothing like that – the approach to superheroes. What had made it a success was the only thing the marketing department had contributed to, which was what size it was and what kind of cover stock it had. So it would be inconceivable that they would say ‘hey, you think that Dark Knight thing – do you think it sold because of the quality of the material?’ They could not even consider that concept; it had to be something that they had done.

  From an accountant’s eye view, though, the format did play a part in making Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns the successes they were. In 1986, regular comics cost 75¢. Watchmen was printed on higher quality paper and cost $1.50. With its glossy pages and square binding, the cover price of Dark Knight was $2.95. The marketing department at DC had found a way to quadruple their prices and increase their unit sales. Comics that had been intended as oversized regular editions (including Moore’s The Killing Joke), were published instead in the new square-bound Dark Knight Format, which soon became known as Prestige Format. Rather than complain, comics fans lapped up these new books. Indeed, they proved willing to pay far more than cover price for comics – back-issue prices soared, and speculators hoarded copies of ‘key issues’ (the first issue, the first appearance of a new character, the first with a new creative team, most books in Prestige Format).

  There is an episode of The Simpsons, ‘Flaming Moe’s’, in which Homer comes up with the recipe for the perfect drink, which Moe the bartender then takes and sells at his bar. It becomes hugely successful and lucrative, and Moe refuses to give Homer any credit or reward. When challenged, he counters: ‘Hey, Homer came up with the drink, but I came up with the idea of charging $6.95 for it.’ Alan Moore may have written a good comic, but DC’s marketing department came up with the idea of doubling the price. They also had the ideas of getting people to pay for the buttons that had previously been given away, and selling the comic to them a second time as a hardback collector’s edition. It was the marketing department who were planning to release the paperback graphic novel version; who pushed for Watchmen spin-off comics to be written and drawn by other creators; and who came up with ‘Watchmen Month’ to tie in with the release of the graphic novel, filling comic shops with art portfolios, T-shirts and smiley-face Watchmen watches.

  But do the people at DC really credit the marketing department with Watchmen’s success? Paul Levitz has worked for DC for over forty years. He was executive vice-president when Watchmen was published, and rose to become publisher from 1989 to 2002, then president from 2002 to 2009. His 2010 book 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking is, then, the nearest we can get to the party line on the company’s history of the period. And the book’s description of Watchmen spends three times longer discussing the format than it does the contents:

  As with The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen set off a chain reaction of rethinking the nature of super heroes and heroism itself, and pushed the genre darker for more than a decade. The series won acclaim, including becoming the first comic to win science fiction’s prestigious Hugo Award, and would continue to be regarded as one of the most important literary works the field ever produced.

  Arguably, though, Watchmen would not have continued to achieve such recognition (and certainly would not have reached most of its readers), if not for another important step DC took. For ten years, DC had explored formats to offer its best work for continuing sale, unlike its fading tradition of occasional magazine-format reprints like 80-Page Giants and 100-Page Super-Spectaculars.

  These experiments had failed, but in 1986, DC launched a line of trade paperback editions designed to be continually available for sale, as was typical of ‘real’ books. Beginning with The Dark Knight Returns (in a limited edition hardback and trade paperback), this line enabled these key title
s to stay continuously in print, showing off the best comics DC ever published and attracting thousands of readers who didn’t have a chance to read the initial publication. Initially reaching bookstores through a partnership with sister company Warner Books, and later on its own, DC became the unquestioned pioneer of what would be known as the graphic novel format. Watchmen would become the best-selling American graphic novel, and its original form as a periodical would become a footnote to the legend.

  This version of events contradicts Len Wein’s line that it’s not DC’s fault Watchmen continues to sell, instead attributing the comic’s success to cunning marketing. Wein, though, another forty-year veteran at DC, made a very telling remark (my emphasis): ‘I am aware of Alan’s rewards for being part of the original process and I would happily trade with him.’ Moore’s position is that he and Dave Gibbons were more than merely ‘part of the original process’. As he himself has noted, ‘We got 8 per cent between us for Watchmen. That 8 per cent bought this house, the car, the worthless broken-down CD player in the corner and all the rest of it. For a while you’re dazzled by this shower of money you find yourself in … you think “this is wonderful, I’ve got more money than I’ve ever had in my life! What kind people they are to give us all these royalty cheques.” And then you think hang on, 8 per cent from 100 per cent leaves 92 per cent. And that, as far as we can see, DC have taken as payment for editing mistakes into Watchmen and getting it to the printer on time. In one instance they cut up balloons, leaving a word out so it no longer makes any sense. I don’t want to get into an embittered rant, but we’re barely getting anything from the merchandising. What we do get is a fraction.’ Moore believes that DC marketing efforts during the late-eighties boom ended up damaging the comics industry by looking for the quick buck instead of developing a long-term strategy based on the quality of the product. When the first wave of ‘graphic novels’ were a success, DC ‘could only see another fad to be exploited and effectively driven into the ground, milked dry’. That, in other words, the marketing department were causing problems, not solving them. It was a clash between the creator and marketing, philosophically, as a business calculation and, ultimately, at the personality level. As Moore put it, ‘there was no longer any possibility of me working for DC in any way, shape, or form’.

  For their part, DC offered several concessions. Notably, they ended the ratings plan in July 1987, replacing it with a simple ‘For Mature Readers’ label on standard-sized comic books that contained particularly violent or sexual content. And they stressed that this would not be imposed on creators (‘we want to assure you that the determination to label a book “mature” will be made by an editor only after consultation with the creative team on the book’). Miller, Wolfman and Chaykin all agreed to resume working for the company. Alan Moore didn’t, explaining that he hadn’t been threatening to leave as part of a strategy to get them to drop the labelling scheme; he simply didn’t want to work for a company that did things like impose one unilaterally, or that would sack Marv Wolfman for speaking against it.

  The same month, Dave Gibbons reported that he and Moore ‘now have a categorical assurance from DC that they won’t do anything with the Watchmen characters unless Alan and I are the ones doing them’ and that the prospect of the suggested Minutemen prequel was now ‘more and more remote’. This was confirmed in a 1988 Comics Journal interview with Dick Giordano. Moore says he was also ‘offered better financial deals’, which would seem to mean DC promised a bigger slice of the pie for future projects, rather than revised terms for his existing publications. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he felt insulted by this, seeing the ratings issue and his other concerns as points of principle and entirely separate from his level of compensation.

  He had, in any case, already burned his bridges. In an essay, ‘The Politics and Morality of Ratings and Self-Censorship’, that appeared in the Comics Buyer’s Guide (13 February 1987) and was reprinted in The Comics Journal #117 (September 1987), he writes that comics creators had been insulted as ‘part of what I can only perceive as a politically motivated manoeuvre of the crudest sort … we have been accused of producing work that is negative, unwholesome, and likely to damage the mental well-being of children’. The position he sets out is essentially that ‘it is an act of cowardice for any parents to expect creators or comic companies to do their moral policing for them’, and that those behind the campaign to restrict comic books are the same people who ban books from school libraries: ‘There is only one group which would ever call for the banning of The Diary of Anne Frank, and I don’t care what they happen to be calling themselves these days.’ The essay ends with an announcement: ‘Since I cannot be a party to this kind of behaviour, with the conclusion of the work that I am actually contracted to do, I shall be producing no work in the future for any publisher imposing a ratings system upon its creators and readers … Looking like a shrill, over-reactive prima donna is something I can live with. Compromising my integrity to appease a bunch of political thugs is something I can’t.’

  Why, though, did DC allow Alan Moore to slip through their fingers?

  Many commentators have treated the Watchmen contract as if it was written in stone, have and suggested that even if those at DC wanted to change it, their hands are tied because ‘a contract is a contract’. This is not the case. Publishing agreements are routinely revisited. Ebook rights are not, for obvious reasons, usually included in contracts signed before the 1990s, and recently most publishers have gone back to their existing authors to renegotiate terms to include them. Publishers will also revisit early contracts with their major authors rather than lose those authors to a rival.

  There was no company policy at DC that banned returning to a contract. Shortly before Moore’s dispute, Frank Miller had a rights reversion clause retroactively added to his Ronin deal. Soon afterwards, the company would agree a sweeping renegotiation of Neil Gaiman’s contract for The Sandman. If DC, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had all wanted to change the terms of the Watchmen contract, they could have drawn up an addendum to the original document, signed it, and the terms of the contract would change. This was apparently all Moore and Gibbons asked for when it initially became clear the plan was to keep a collected edition of Watchmen in print (attempts to paint the problems as stemming solely from Alan Moore’s personality usually fail to take into account that Gibbons co-created Watchmen and was arguing for many of the same things). A couple of years later, Gaiman suggested to all parties that they should adopt the revised Sandman terms for Watchmen and V for Vendetta. Reportedly, Moore agreed but DC flatly refused.

  While Dick Giordano said of Moore and Miller’s departure in protest at the ratings sytem, ‘We miss them as creative people … we’re certainly going to miss the revenue that we won’t have from Alan’s projects, because everything that he did for us sold very, very well’, it is clear that some at DC weren’t so sorry to see him go. Alan Moore did not exist in a vacuum; he was by no means the only ‘name’ creator. Swamp Thing and Watchmen were not DC’s biggest-selling comics. The Man of Steel, a 1986 miniseries that relaunched Superman, written and drawn by John Byrne, was released concurrently with Watchmen in the summer of 1986, and outsold it at least fivefold.

  Byrne had been a star performer at Marvel, coming to prominence as the artist on The X-Men, then moving on to become the writer and artist on Fantastic Four. DC had poached him specifically to relaunch Superman, and Byrne was paid over $2 million for his work on the character. In 1985, DC’s fiftieth anniversary, the company had taken the opportunity to revamp their entire line, bringing in new creators – and unceremoniously dumping a number of writers and artists who had freelanced for the company for decades. The comics industry was changing fast, and there were those who were not impressed by ‘golden boy’ Alan Moore. Byrne certainly had no love for Watchmen: ‘I was not impressed. I loved Dave Gibbons’ art, but I found the story (if it can really be called such) increasingly hard going, and when we came to the revelation that Ro
rschach had been crazy even before he put on the costume, I gave up. It was all too negative and nihilistic, and completely at odds with what superheroes are supposed to be. Like using a baseball bat to beat somebody over the head. Sure, you CAN do it, but does that mean you SHOULD?’

  And as for another high-profile Moore project (my emphasis): ‘The Killing Joke is a self-indulgent piece of masturbation, in which a writer who has risen above editorial control, was allowed to bring his own “vision” to the characters without any consideration of their past or future. It added absolutely nothing to the Joker, and in fact subtracted a great deal.’

  Byrne was neither on the staff at DC nor party to any of the editorial decisions, but it is not hard to infer that there were editors also worried that certain writers and artists were being ceded too much power, and taking established characters down the wrong path. Giordano had encouraged Moore to develop Watchmen and was happy to say Dark Knight was ‘born in my office’, but he was aware that he had more to worry about than keeping one creator onside. When asked why he had not consulted Miller and Moore before imposing the ratings system, he replied: ‘If we’re going to consult the creative community, [who] do we consult? [do we consult the] 300 that’s on my list? Or do we just consult Frank Miller and two or three important ones, further alienating those people who feel as if we’ve already bestowed more attention and love on the Frank Miller and Alan Moores of the world?’ Giordano went on to talk about having to manage ‘middle-level creators’ in an environment where star creators were getting the plum jobs.

  Here there is a gulf between attitudes. Moore has edited publications where he’s the main creative force behind the project – Embryo, AARGH! and Dodgem Logic – but this is not the same job as being a staff editor at IPC or DC. Alan paid close attention when Steve Moore advised him about writing comics scripts, but consciously avoided the career path taken by his mentor. Alan Moore simply has no time for ‘middle-level creators’. He believes what he said back in On Writing for Comics: ‘if you want better comics, you need better writers.’