You gotta know something about the world of ideas. It’s like, y’know, where do they come from? Where does the idea of anythin’ come from? See what I mean? It’s a tough question.
SUPREME:
I think I may understand a little of what you’re saying: I myself have access to a realm called ‘Ideaspace’ …
MONARCH:
Yeah, yeah, that’s good. ‘Idea Space’. Only the name should be punchier. Something like, I don’t know, the Psychoverse, or the Cognitive Zone, or whatever. Me, I call it home.
SUPREME:
Home? You mean you’re a native of imaginary space, like some of the demons, gods and angels I’ve encountered?
MONARCH:
Nah, I’m just, like, this guy who commuted to Idea Space when he went to work every day.
Shortly after Moore started work on Supreme, Liefeld fell out with the other Image partners. He immediately set up a new studio, Awesome Comics, to publish his existing titles and hired Moore to revamp the whole line. Moore wrote his customary long discussion documents and scripts for existing series Glory – a Wonder Woman style character – and Youngblood – a team of teen superheroes akin to the Teen Titans or X-Men. The first few issues scripted by Moore appeared at the end of 1997 and the beginning of 1998, along with Judgment Day, a series designed to widen out the fictional universe that they and Supreme inhabited. Moore also worked on two other series, War Child and The Allies.
In March 1998 he received a phone call from Scott Dunbier, who he had known since meeting him in San Diego in 1986. Dunbier was now an editor at Wildstorm, the Image studio owned by artist Jim Lee, and he asked if Moore was interested in working for them. Moore said he was happy at Awesome … at which point Dunbier broke the news that Awesome had hit serious financial problems after losing its main backer. Publication schedules had slipped. Moore had written six issues of Youngblood, which was meant to be a monthly publication, but only three were ever published, in February and August 1998, and August 1999. The books received glowing reviews, but the erratic schedule made it hard for comic shops or readers to maintain their enthusiasm. By April 1999, Liefeld had resorted to publishing Alan Moore’s Awesome Universe Handbook – the pitch documents for Glory and Youngblood.
Moore told Dunbier he would draw up a proposal. A couple of years before, he had come up with an idea for a series initially called The League of Extraordinary Gentle-Folk, a ‘Justice League’ style super-team of characters from Victorian adventure fiction, such as Allan Quatermain, the Invisible Man, and Jekyll and Hyde. In late 1997 he approached Kevin O’Neill, a 2000AD veteran who’d worked with him on Green Lantern Corps (and an abortive Bizarro World series) when Moore had been at DC.
Moore decided to create a whole comics line from scratch. Searching his old notebooks, he found a string of names for characters he had forgotten writing, including Tom Strong, Promethea, Cobweb and Greyshirt. He’d given them no previous thought, but quickly came up with an idea of what characters with those names would be like. In each case, it was a question of matching the name to an existing superhero archetype – Tom Strong was Superman; Promethea was Wonder Woman; Top Ten would be a super-team. It occurred to Moore that now Awesome had gone under, a lot of the artists he had been working with would also be looking for new assignments, and he had devised the characters with those illustrators in mind: Tom Strong for his Supreme artist, Chris Sprouse, Promethea for Glory’s Brandon Peterson, Top Ten for Youngblood’s Steve Skroce.
In the event, Peterson had been snapped up for a variety of X-Men projects by Marvel … as had (somewhat to Moore’s relief, given their history) Dunbier’s next choice, Alan Davis. Bruce Timm and Alex Ross also turned Promethea down, though Ross suggested J.H. Williams, who was delighted to accept. Skroce was also busy, working on storyboards for the movie The Matrix (he would later work with its directors, the Wachowskis, on storyboards for the V for Vendetta movie). Moore further extended the community he was building by coming up with characters for some of his oldest friends in the industry (they’d all also worked with him on Supreme): Cobweb would be a sexy crimefighter, drawn by Melinda Gebbie; Greyshirt would be similar to The Spirit, drawn by Rick Veitch; The First American would feature art by Jim Baikie. All of these projects would be developed by Moore and his artists, who would be credited as co-creators. Wildstorm jumped at the chance to publish what was now titled The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and four monthly books by Moore: Tom Strong, Promethea, Top Ten and the anthology series Tomorrow Stories, which featured Cobweb, The First American, Greyshirt and Jack B Quick. They were branded America’s Best Comics, which Moore liked because ‘if it turned out to be crappy then I could claim that it was ironic’.
But Rob Liefeld was not happy:
Much of the ABC line is made up of poorly masked Awesome characters and story outlines he prepared for us. If I was as sue-happy and litigation driven as some suggest I be, I believe I could draw direct connections to many of the ABC characters and their origins coming from pages of Awesome work we commissioned from him. In short order, Tom Strong is Supreme mixed with his Prophet proposal. Promethea is Glory and the rest I honestly don’t pay much attention to. Don’t have the time or interest. Simply put, there is no ABC without Supreme and the Awesome re-launch.
There’s an element of truth to this: Tom Strong, particularly, is drawn by the same artist as Supreme and has the same basic concept, that of a long-lived Superman archetype who we see in a complex present day, as well as in flashbacks to a more carefree past that act as homages to old comics. Strong, though, was more like the earliest incarnation of Superman, who was tough, but couldn’t fly or fire heat rays from his eyes. Siegel and Shuster had based their creation on pulp magazine hero Doc Savage (a character with a Fortress of Solitude and the first name Clark), and Tom Strong looked a lot more like Doc Savage than Supreme. Other series diverged further: Top Ten changed beyond recognition from a superhero teambook into a Hill Street Blues-style police soap opera set in a city where everyone – police, criminals and bystanders – has superhuman powers (we see a billboard advertising a movie with the tagline ‘You’ll Believe A Man Can’t Fly’). Most people would have assumed, like Liefeld, that Promethea was where Moore was going to reuse his ideas for Glory (Awesome Comics had only published a short preview issue before going under), but in fact it became one of Moore’s most personal, difficult mainstream comics. Most of Moore’s Glory notes are simply concerned with coming up with close analogues for Wonder Woman characters and concepts like Steve Trevor, the Holiday Girls and the invisible plane; while the pitch had mentioned the Qabalah, it was only as a framework for mythological stories that would be ‘flexible enough to take the whole spectrum of possible gods, demons and monsters and still [remain] clear and coherent’.
There was a twist in the tale. By the end of August 1998, Jim Lee had decided to sell Wildstorm to DC Comics. He knew Moore had vowed never to work with DC again, and rumours of the sale broke on the internet while Moore was on holiday at his Welsh farmhouse. Lee and Dunbier jumped on a plane, wanting to give him the news face to face before he heard it from anyone else. Moore met them at the railway station: ‘I remember getting out of the cab with my customary snake-headed walking cane, and apparently Jim thought that I’d already heard the news and brought the stick to inflict some kind of physical damage upon him.’ Moore was suspicious that DC had bought Wildstorm specifically to co-opt the America’s Best Comics line, and it was true that the company had made their move very soon after the ABC contracts had been signed; as the Daily Telegraph put it, ‘When he fell out with the largest comics publisher in the world, the New York-based DC, he found a home with an American independent publisher, Wildstorm. DC dealt with this defection in a remarkably straightforward way – they bought Wildstorm in order to get him back (an experience Moore describes as like having “a really weird, rich stalker girlfriend”).’ Around the same time, DC tried to buy out 1963 but Moore and the other creators unanimously rejected the offer.
&
nbsp; There were, however, other reasons DC might want to buy Wildstorm. The studio was a pioneer in the use of digital colouring of comics, while Jim Lee himself was a popular artist who had managed to steer Wildstorm through the collapse of the comics market in the nineties, attracting top talent and publishing successful titles like The Authority, Astro City and Danger Girl. But despite Paul Levitz’s assertion to the New York Times that ‘we did the deal on the assumption that Alan would be gone the day it was signed’, gossip site Bleeding Cool sums up the industry consensus: ‘it was generally agreed they wanted [Wildstorm] for three things. The colourists. Jim Lee. And Alan Moore.’
Moore was keen on the ABC project and ‘decided it was better to forego my own principles upon it rather than to put a lot of people who’d been promised work suddenly out of work.’ So Lee had Moore list his concerns, then came to an agreement: Moore would have no contact whatsoever with DC. A new company, Firewall, was set up so that DC’s name didn’t even appear on his cheques. Dunbier would edit the books and be the only person to contact Moore about them. But amid all this wrangling, Moore made a decision that was oddly at variance with his views on creators’ rights. As Don Murphy, a movie producer who’d optioned a number of Moore’s books, put it: ‘Jim Lee showed up with a contract that bought everything from Moore for a slightly higher page rate. Alan was happy to have it. Later Paul Levitz would actually be stunned that the grand complainer Moore would have made a stupid deal for himself again. But because the film rights for League were tied up with Fox and me they didn’t include that in the ownership package. So for all the hate Alan feels about Hollywood and me, he would have sold League to Jim Lee for an extra $20 a page, too.’
Moore understood the deal and knew he was in a good position – the project could not go ahead without him. Jim Lee and Scott Dunbier had shown up willing to negotiate. Why then did he sign work-for-hire contracts for Tom Strong, Promethea and the other properties? Moore admits,
Yes, I can see that does seem a bit puzzling. At the time, I was largely doing these scripts with Jim Lee’s company and I was mainly doing them for my collaborators, after the collapse of Awesome Comics. At the time, it seemed to me that, without knowing what the strips were, there would probably be more money for my collaborators with a deal like that, and I felt at the time that dealing with Jim Lee had never been any problem, he seemed to be an agreeable and amenable man, and it struck me if there were serious disparities that arose from any of those strips, he would probably be amenable to a renegotiation. I wasn’t worried about the strips while the deals were made purely with Jim Lee. It was after I signed those deals that Wildstorm was bought by DC Comics. So, yeah, it was probably a stupid thing to do, but that was the reason why I was doing a stupid thing. For what that’s worth.
The extra money, even accumulated across all the books, would have little effect on Moore’s personal finances. It would, though, be a significant, immediate boon to his artists. The Wildstorm contracts of the late nineties were more accommodating than the old work-for-hire arrangements and other ABC co-creators, like Rich Veitch and Chris Sprouse, weren’t rubes; they signed the contracts with their eyes open, seeing them as a relatively good deal. Ultimately, both sides must have understood that the whole point of the ABC line was that Alan Moore was the guiding creative force behind it, that DC had to keep him on side and had no incentive to produce ABC books he disapproved of. Likewise, Moore was not going to find another publisher with deep enough pockets to put out the whole range of comics he envisaged, then turn them into lavish collected editions that stayed in print. In fact he became immersed in ABC, saying it ‘required more work than I’ve ever turned out even back when I was in my twenties and early thirties … I’m smugly proud of having been able to do that.’
Alan Moore’s belief in magic has provided, for twenty years now, a framework within which he’s been able to create complicated, difficult and soaring works. There is an element of calculation, an element of showmanship and more than a whiff of folly about it, but it all makes sense if it’s seen primarily as a way in which Moore can both spark his own creativity and explore the creative process in his art.
If we’re inclined to credit Moore’s productivity to his magical beliefs, we have to balance the explosion of output in the first ten years after declaring himself a magician with the caveat that the second ten years saw a marked decline in the quantity of work produced. Most of his creative energy was consumed by his magazine Dodgem Logic (2009–11), as well as two big projects that haven’t yet been completed, the vast novel Jerusalem and the grimoire The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. Although Moore clearly hasn’t been slacking off – a couple of projects fizzled out through no fault of his own, like the libretto of an opera about Elizabethan magus John Dee for the Gorillaz, the ‘virtual band’ created by Blur’s Damon Albarn and Tank Girl co-creator Jamie Hewlett – those who only keep track of his comics were not kept busy from 2003 to 2013. This period saw the winding down of the ABC line, a handful of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen sequels; Neonomicon, and a giveaway with the second issue of Dodgem Logic called Astounding Weird Penises. The performance art slowed down, too, with no major activity in the period, though Moore did write the screenplay to a movie, Jimmy’s End.
As for the quality of this output, that’s always going to be subjective. From Hell, Lost Girls, Voice of the Fire, Tom Strong, Supreme, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Birth Caul, Promethea, Dodgem Logic and Unearthing are clearly all ‘major works’, and they run the gamut from ultra-accessible action-adventure comics to idiosyncratic and resolutely uncommercial spoken pieces, from deeply serious to colourful romp. Judgement is made all the more difficult by the knowledge that Moore is most proud of his performance art, which by its very nature is his least accessible work. Some of that is simply a matter of logistics: the performances themselves are designed as one-offs, tailored to the date and location they are performed. The recordings may represent the soundtrack, but not the entire immersive, hypnotic experience – and in any case, they are very hard to come by. The Birth Caul, for example, was issued in a limited edition of five hundred copies. These are never going to be widely available, mass-market products in the way even small-press novels and comics have the potential to be, and there has to be some suspicion that this is precisely why Moore is so proud of them.
Moore is not attempting to convert us to his snake cult (‘Glyconism … there’s only me and I’m not looking for members’) Many of his recent works talk directly about the occult, others do so indirectly, but it’s not the only thing Alan Moore is writing about. You can acknowledge the magnificent technical achievements represented by Promethea or Lost Girls even if you find the subject matter baffling, just as you can with Watchmen. His work in the past twenty years has been diverse, but is all clearly created by the same author. Moore may very well not be a ‘real magician’, but using magic has meant he’s done what he set out to achieve. As he put it himself: ‘I was saying to my musical partner a while ago, that actually if we continue to get material like this, it doesn’t really matter whether the gods are there or not.’
‘Do we need any more shitty films in this world? We have quite enough already. Whereas the $100 million could sort out the civil unrest in Haiti. And the books are always superior, anyway.’
Alan Moore, Total Film
There is an urban legend in Northampton – a tale the details of which change a little depending on who tells it – that Johnny Depp once showed up unannounced at Alan Moore’s house, but no one was in. The movie star sat patiently on the doorstep for three hours, signing autographs, before Moore eventually returned home carrying his shopping, and the two of them went for beers at the White Elephant.
This is only the most literal example of Hollywood beating a path to Alan Moore’s door. Depp was the lead actor in the movie version of From Hell, the first of four adaptations of Moore’s work to reach the screen in the first decade of the twenty-first century. From Hell
(2001) was followed by The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (also known as LXG, 2003), V for Vendetta (2006) and Watchmen (2009). Moore was not involved in the production of these adaptations. He says he has never seen any of the movies, a claim corroborated by all his friends and family. Latterly, he has refused to take any money from the projects, and has arranged for his share of the revenue to be sent to the artists of the original comics instead. Yet he was not always so hostile to movie versions of his work. His attitude has evolved almost exactly in parallel with his approach to the comics industry: initial excitement has given way to indifference, eventually hardening into suspicion and now open antipathy.
When Moore was starting his career in comics in the early eighties, the prospect of a cinema version of a British comic book character was a pipe dream. A few TV cartoons were based on children’s comics and newspaper strips, such as Fred Bassett and Bananaman, and there had been talk of a Dan Dare film for many years, although it never materialised. David Lloyd says that he and Moore put some effort into getting V for Vendetta on to television: ‘The only thing that me and Alan thought about that might make us rich was if we could sell it as a TV series or a movie, and we were actively involved in trying to do that.’ Both he and Moore sent out a variety of proposals, but ‘There was never any possibility of it happening … We never had any approaches.’
In America, the situation was a little rosier: there was a long roll call of Saturday morning cartoons based on comics, while the Superman movies had been a success and there were TV shows like Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk, which tended to be camp and colourful. But the Superman franchise stumbled with a noticeably cheaper third movie (1983) and a disastrous Supergirl spin-off (1984), and though a handful of filmmakers and producers knew the comics readership was getting older and the storytelling more sophisticated, they found it impossible to convince the studios. It did not help that a major movie based on a ‘grown-up’ comic, Howard the Duck (1986), proved a huge flop which critics almost unanimously declared to be one of the worst movies of all time. Other films, while not officially based on comic books, took their cues from the more sophisticated examples of the medium, but even here the results were mixed – Robocop (1987), unmistakably influenced by Judge Dredd, was a big success, despite an R-rating that – in theory at least – barred children and teenagers from seeing it, but He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1987), a covert homage to Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comics, lost a lot of money.
Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore Page 36
