Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  Like Big Numbers, A Small Killing sees a creative person – in this case advertising executive Timothy Hole (pronounced ‘Holly’) – returning to the comforts and frustrations of his working-class roots while struggling to come up with his next big project. It also follows Big Numbers in containing clear echoes of Moore’s own experiences, such as Timothy’s recollection of going home to his parents while coming down from an acid trip, and the story’s central incident: burying a jar full of live insects (something Moore did as a child). Of course, Moore resists the idea that either work can be seen as thinly disguised autobiography, but he was clearly beginning to make conscious use of his own experiences in his writing. Even so, A Small Killing remains one of the more obscure and underrated of his books – although, in this context, that means there have been a couple of years in the past twenty when it was out of print, and that it had to wait two years (until its American publication) before Moore won an Eisner Award for it.

  Moore would come to see the work from this phase of his life – From Hell, Lost Girls, Big Numbers, A Small Killing, ‘The Mirror of Love’, Act of Faith and Voice of the Fire – as ‘one major personal cycle’. It came out of an extraordinary couple of years: he’d gone from living with two women, and raising daughters with them, to living alone. From golden boy at DC to self-exile. From believing his work might change the world to seeing as Prime Minister an immovable Mrs Thatcher who apparently – to use a comics analogy – was employing Bizarro Alan Moore to draw up every single policy.

  One’s reaction to Big Numbers may serve as a Rorschach test for how one sees Alan Moore’s career once he left DC. After nearly two years meditating on the subject, and with a free hand, Moore concluded that the best direction after Watchmen was to self-publish a black-and-white comic in a peculiar square format that told the stories of ordinary people in Northampton who sat around making tea, following timetables and filling in surveys while a giant American shopping mall gradually imposed itself on the edge of their town. There’s a stark choice between mutually exclusive alternatives: either Big Numbers marks a dramatic point of transition for Moore as an artist, and would have done likewise for the comics medium if only it had been smart enough to realise, or it marks exactly the moment he lost the plot.

  ‘At his fortieth birthday party, he declared himself a magician. He wasn’t of course. He couldn’t even do balloon animals. Not long after that, he started worshipping a snake. You can see how we might have worried about him.’

  Leah Moore, Introduction to The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore

  On 18 November 1993, Alan Moore announced to his friends and family that he would be devoting his time to the study and practice of magic – and early the following year, he declared that he had become a devotee of the snake god Glycon. Since then, much of his work has been inspired by his exploration of magic, even ‘subsumed within magic’, while the art itself represents ‘communiques from along the trail’ of his progress.

  Most interviews with Moore and articles about him have made a point of touching on the subject of his belief system. His pronouncements contain clear elements of showmanship and bullshitting – he once told the NME ‘I am a wizard and I know the future’, and fobbed off another interviewer with the reply ‘since the Radiant Powers of the Abyss have personally instructed me to prepare for Armageddon within the next twenty years, this is all pretty academic. Next question’ – but this theatricality is entirely consistent with his brand of magic, indeed is a vital part of the process.

  Moore is a magician who is more than happy to explain what he is doing and what he hopes to achieve: ‘I’m prepared to lay it on the line: if I do something … I’m quite prepared for people to say “Well, that isn’t magic”. Or, “That isn’t any good”,’ he says with a chuckle. ‘I’m prepared to do it in the open, on a stage, in front of hundreds of strangers and they can decide whether it’s magic or not. That seems to me to be the fairest way. Not to put yourself above criticism by only performing in darkened rooms with a couple of initiated magical pals. Do it in the open, where people can see what you have up your sleeve. Where they can see the smoke and the mirrors. And where they can see the stuff that appears authentic.’ Regular revelations in interviews and essays along the lines that he had advanced so far as to be exploring the sixth of ten Sephira of the Tree of Life, or that he had on 11 April 2002 ‘acceded to the grade of Magus, the second highest level of magical consciousness’ have led numerous critics, readers and colleagues (although, tellingly, few friends or family) to wonder if Alan Moore has gone at least a bit mad.

  Since walking away from DC, Moore had worked on Big Numbers, From Hell and Lost Girls, all projects defined both by great artistic ambition and a vicious circle of massive delays and funding issues. He had been writing his prose novel, Voice of the Fire, but this was also proving to be slow going. Nothing came of his plan to illustrate Steve Moore’s Victorian-set graphic novel Endymion. And though a book recommended to him by Neil Gaiman – Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman’s London Under London – inspired plans for Underland, a graphic novel for older children set in a magical subterranean kingdom beneath London populated by weird fantasy characters, this was scuppered when Moore learned Gaiman himself had a very similar project underway, which became the prose novel and TV series Neverwhere.

  As the publisher of Big Numbers, Moore had sunk his own money into the series, including $20,000 to the artist Bill Sienkiewicz, but its publication had ground to a halt after two issues. In an interview published in November 1993, Moore described it as ‘a catalogue of misfortune from start to finish. I have written about 200 pages of it. Five episodes. Bill Sienkiewicz, after completing three episodes, felt defeated and was unable to continue it … Al Columbia stepped up. I believe Al completed one issue, but I’m not sure what happened to that … I seem to be leaving these artists as smouldering wrecks by the fire.’ With nothing to sell, Mad Love could generate no money. This frustrated Moore: ‘We were selling tons! For a black-and-white book that isn’t about superheroes, the first issue sold 65,000 copies, which is better than most DC titles, I believe. There was a potential there for establishing alternative comic publishers as a real force … but unfortunately the perception will be that Big Numbers isn’t out anymore so it must have been a commercial failure. It was by no means a commercial failure. It was a massive success that earned me more money than any other comic I’ve ever done.’

  From Hell and Lost Girls both featured in the horror anthology Taboo, published in America by Moore’s friend and Swamp Thing artist Stephen Bissette. Taboo had begun publication in 1988, and attracted top talent from the worlds of both comics and horror like Ramsey Campbell, Moebius, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Charles Burns, Dave Sim, Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman. Yet it was soon mired in similar problems to Big Numbers, and only seven issues were published in five years. Moore had agreed to split a fee of $100 per page with his artists for his work on the anthology, but to pay even that Bissette and his family were forced to exist on a diet of macaroni and cheese.

  To add insult to injury, the mainstream comics industry had boomed, and a lot of freelancers who had stuck to writing superheroes were making unprecedented amounts of money: there were rumours that X-Men writer Chris Claremont had bought his mother a private jet. The artist on that series, John Byrne, would later testify in court that Marvel had paid him around $5 million in the eighties, that he had made ‘a couple million dollars doing Superman’ and ‘four or five million doing the Next Men’ (a creator-owned series published through Dark Horse starting in 1991). Grant Morrison was another to benefit: he wrote Arkham Asylum, DC’s first original hardback graphic novel, a Batman story with fully painted art by Dave McKean which came out in time for Christmas 1989, the year Tim Burton’s Batman movie was the biggest summer blockbuster and then the best-selling videocassette. On the basis of pre-orders alone, DC were able to cut Morrison a cheque for $150,000, and royalty payments quickly bumped that up to half a million. It remains the bes
t-selling original graphic novel of all time.

  If not so awash with cash, the British comics scene was equally fevered. When Alan Grant, John Wagner and Simon Bisley signed copies of a Judge Dredd/Batman comic at the Virgin Megastore in Oxford Circus, they proved to be the store’s biggest ever attraction, beating the record set by David Bowie. Extra police had to be drafted in to manage the crowd. The big success story, though, was Viz. A scatological parody of kids’ comics like the Beano and Dandy, Viz had started life as a photocopied fanzine sold in Newcastle pubs and record shops. By 1985, 4,000 copies of each issue were sold and it came to the attention of Virgin Books, who began distributing the magazine in Virgin stores nationwide. Three years later it was selling half a million copies a month; by 1990 sales had doubled again and it was the fourth best-selling magazine in the country. It spawned many short-lived imitators like Poot, Smut and Zit, as well as Brain Damage, which used veteran underground comix creators like Hunt Emerson and Melinda Gebbie, and Oink!, a deceptively smart, rude children’s comic. Viz was a true phenomenon, in the way Mad magazine had been in America in the fifties.

  Watchmen acted as the spearhead that encouraged every bookshop to dedicate a shelf or two to comics, but Moore had failed in his attempt to define the ‘graphic novel’ in terms of technically complex, personal work like Big Numbers and A Small Killing. Instead, it came to refer to paperback albums collecting around half a dozen comic books, and comics companies adjusted their business plans – although not always their contracts – to factor in such reprints.

  Thanks to deals that gave him royalty payments for Watchmen, V for Vendetta and The Killing Joke, all of which remained bestsellers, Moore did not suffer the fate of the comics creators of previous generations. He also benefited from the many comics shops which had opened, establishing a vast number of outlets for Big Numbers and Taboo, with almost every customer aware of Moore’s name. And although he had sworn off appearing at comics conventions, Moore continued to be interviewed by both the booming comics press and the mainstream media. As one might, he grew increasingly resentful of other people’s material success, especially as much of it was achieved by copying his methods (even John Byrne’s Next Men had followed the lead of V for Vendetta and Watchmen in abandoning thought balloons and sound effects), but his main frustrations seemed to be artistic rather than financial: ‘I could see stylistic elements that had been taken from my own work, and used mainly as an excuse for more prurient sex and more graphic violence … I felt a bit depressed in that it seemed I had unknowingly ushered in a new dark age of comic books. There was none of the delight, freshness and charm that I remembered of the comics from my own youth.’

  Despite the money pouring into the industry from graphic novels, many creators working for the big comics companies continued to conclude that the terms on offer did not give them a fair slice of the pie or enough creative freedom especially in Britain. By failing to offer high page rates or royalties, 2000AD had suffered a huge talent drain; as the eighties drew to a close, they were simply unable to retain even the services of new writers and artists unless they had a sentimental attachment to the magazine. Warren Ellis, for example, wrote one Judge Dredd story before beginning a lucrative career in US comics. Conversely, in America, some creators were able to thrive within the existing corporate structure. When his Sandman series proved to be a mainstream hit, writer Neil Gaiman managed to convince DC to extensively renegotiate his contract, retroactively granting him co-ownership of the characters and licensing rights, as well as improved royalty rates on the graphic novel collections of the series.

  It wasn’t lost on some commentators that this was exactly what Alan Moore had asked for and not received with Watchmen. Stephen Bissette drew a direct connection:

  Neil takes good care of himself. He’s very pragmatic in his company dealings. Believe me, there were plenty of times in the past when DC crossed the line with Neil. He was always diplomatic; he did not give ground, but he would allow them room to ‘save face’, as he put it. Things went better for Neil and Dave McKean and Grant Morrison and Michael Zulli, who is now doing a lot of work with Vertigo. I think DC learned an important lesson with Alan. When Alan walked, they couldn’t quite believe it. I think pressure came down from Warner on some level. This is all supposition on my part, but there had to be a point at one of those board meetings where somebody upstairs said ‘When’s the next Watchmen coming out?’ and they had to admit that they had lost Alan.

  Bissette would later quote Gaiman as saying: ‘I saw an interview with Ice-T … and he pretty much summed it up by saying something like “If a creative person is a whore, then the corporation is the pimp and never think your pimp loves you. That’s when a whore gets hurt. So just get out there and wiggle your little bottom” … I’m a whore and a very good one at that. I make my living selling myself … DC doesn’t love me and I don’t love them. So we work together just fine.’

  The contrast with Moore’s attitude could hardly be starker. With a career that has neatly segued into novels, movie scripts and television, Gaiman has stated that he learned the art of writing comics from Alan Moore, but it seems just as fair to say that when it comes to the business side, he’s thrived by doing the exact opposite. Or, as Gaiman put it, talking about his dealings with the movie industry, ‘You can learn from your experience, but you can also learn from your friends’ experience, because your friends are walking through the minefield ahead of you and you go, “Ah-ha, don’t tread on that”.’

  When the revolution came, though, it was not fomented by British writers with literary ambitions. It didn’t lead to the dismantling of the corporations in favour of small press, black-and-white anthologies and creators keen to eschew musclebound spandex-clad clichés for more personal, difficult work. Instead, a group of ‘hot artists’ who’d been working for Marvel left to create their own superheroes.

  While DC were winning awards and encouraging readers to send in their poetry, Marvel were selling a lot of monthly comics in which superheroes beat up bad guys and lived sprawling science fiction soap opera lives. A new generation of artists was now drawing some of Marvel’s most successful books, including Spider-Man (Todd McFarlane), The Amazing Spider-Man (Erik Larsen), X-Men (Jim Lee), X-Force (Rob Liefeld), Wolverine (Marc Silvestri) and Guardians of the Galaxy (Jim Valentino). They shared a broadly similar style, derided by older fans for its single-panel pages, contorted anatomy, speed lines and snarling faces, but it was dynamic and distinctive and by 1991, such comics were selling in vast quantities. The artists were young – only Valentino was over thirty and Liefeld was twenty-four; Lee was drawing X-Men comics while still at medical school – and barely had a professional credit between them five years before. Yet the first issue of a new Spider-Man series, written and drawn by McFarlane, sold 2.5 million copies in 1991, and a few months later, Lee was co-writer and artist on X-Men #1, which became the best-selling comic of all time with over 8.1 million copies sold. Even without these crazy numbers, regular monthly sales of the top books were in the high hundreds of thousands.

  So the artists came to a familiar conclusion: although Marvel paid better page rates than DC, the company wasn’t giving the creators enough credit for their contributions, or a fair share of revenue for merchandise like posters. It was clear that in the nineties superheroes would become multimedia properties, the subjects of movies, television series and cartoons. Superheroes were a natural fit for videogames, in particular. Marvel were not only slow and poorly positioned to exploit this, the existing contracts would not reward the artists when they got round to it.

  An unintended consequence of assigning books featuring D-list superheroes to the young British writers had been that when those books did well, DC couldn’t argue that it was just because people wanted to read about the character. Sandman’s success was inarguably down to Neil Gaiman, people bought Doom Patrol because Grant Morrison was writing it. Even though just as many people – more – were buying Spider-Man because Todd McFa
rlane was drawing it, Spider-Man was a perennially popular character, and both Marvel and McFarlane knew that however ‘hot’ an artist was, he was replaceable. This limited the artists’ bargaining power. The solution was a radical one: the six left Marvel to set up Image Comics, an umbrella organisation within which each of them ran their own company, or ‘studio’, sharing marketing, printing and other costs. The creators would retain all the rights to their characters and would aggressively seek to license their intellectual property. There was a certain inbuilt rivalry between the creators, but also a huge amount of creative energy. Liefeld’s Youngblood, Lee’s WildC.A.T.S., McFarlane’s Spawn and Larsen’s The Savage Dragon debuted in the first half of 1992, and sold in huge numbers. The canniness of the operation can be extrapolated from those titles – racked alphabetically, McFarlane’s and Larsen’s comics sat just before Spider-Man, the Marvel character they had been most associated with. Meanwhile, WildC.A.T.S. and Youngblood bookended the best-selling X-Men comics.

  Very soon, however, a critical consensus emerged that the Image books tended to have striking art but terrible stories, thin characters and poor dialogue. Spawn had been an instant hit – the first issue had sold 1.7 million copies – but the book’s creator Todd McFarlane hoped he’d created a superhero who would endure as long as Superman or Batman. He understood he would need to find ways to sustain interest in the character. The solution was simple enough for a company awash with money: in the summer of 1992, McFarlane phoned up the top comics writers and made them offers they couldn’t refuse. He signed deals to write a single issue of Spawn with Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, Dave Sim … and Alan Moore. The issues appeared between February and June 1993, and the writers were paid staggering sums for writing a single comic book: $100,000 up front, plus royalties.