Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  As DC geared up for the release of the movie of Watchmen, they wanted to market a one-off Black Freighter comic that took the panels of the pirate comic-within-a-comic interspersed throughout Watchmen and wove them together into a complete comic book. Moore said that he didn’t like the idea, but as long as his name wasn’t on it he didn’t mind if Gibbons approved. When Gibbons remarked, ‘DC said that they expected you to be quietly compliant’, Moore’s hackles were raised; he had become convinced that the publisher had begun using his friends against him.

  Steve Moore had not worked for DC for two years, and felt he had been blacklisted. He was surprised, then, to be offered the chance to write the tie-in novel for the Watchmen movie (he had previously novelised V for Vendetta). He was nursing his dying brother at the time, and the book would represent useful income. But shortly after Alan had refused to put his name to the Black Freighter comic, Steve received a letter from Warner Books saying they had decided not to publish a novelisation. Alan Moore believed he saw a connection: ‘At that moment I suddenly understood what they had meant by “We expect Alan to be quietly compliant”. Of course it’s all deniable. That is the marvel of these people, they always have complete deniability, but I know what I think and what I think is that they, knowing that Steve had got a terminally ill brother decided that this would be the thing that would put pressure upon me so that I could not refuse.’ News website Comics Alliance reported this under the headline ‘Alan Moore Goes Beyond Paranoid in His Latest Crazy Old Man Rant’.

  Certainly there were more innocent – and perhaps more plausible – explanations. When anyone except Alan Moore wrote ABC comics, Steve Moore included, orders dropped dramatically. And a number of sources have stated that the Watchmen novelisation was cancelled at the request of director Zack Snyder, specifically because he assumed publishing it would offend the comic’s author. For Moore, however, ‘the only perceptions that were important in this were mine. This was what I perceived had happened … short of an explanation of what “We expect Alan to be quietly compliant” meant, which I’ve never received, that still is the only scenario that makes any sense to me. So I said to Dave Gibbons, “For the sake of our friendship, Dave, I think it would be better if you and I did not discuss Watchmen ever again.” Obviously, it was something that both of us felt a little upset about, but it was the only way that I could stop Dave from ever being used to pass on creepy little messages to me, with or without his knowledge.’

  Moore was engineering a situation whereby even indirect communication with DC was cut off. From Hell and LXG producer Don Murphy saw a pattern: ‘There are some people who aren’t happy if they aren’t complaining. It suits them to be able to blame other people, blame companies and blame the world because that means they don’t have to look in the mirrors and be responsible.’ He cited the example of the ‘twisted logic’ with which Moore had attacked Dave Gibbons, and said the same applied to ‘Steve Bissette, the lovely Karen Berger, Scott Dunbier who ate his crap for years, Marvel, DC, me and many many others. He’s an unhappy person, and that’s a real shame because he is talented as hell.’ Independently, Dez Skinn had reached much the same conclusion: ‘One internet wag said: “Someday the world will run out of bridges, because Alan Moore will have burnt them all.” It would be a terrible waste of talent were that to happen, but unlike say the more politically savvy Neil Gaiman, he does seem to be running out of artists and publishers. Even his audience is far smaller than in the old days.’

  Are Murphy and Skinn right? Moore’s most recent comics work has come from Top Shelf and Avatar, established publishers, but small fry. Avatar, the larger of the two, averages something like a 0.8 per cent share of the retail market, while DC and Marvel each have about a third. That said, Top Shelf were able to place Nemo: Heart of Ice at the top of the graphic novel charts in a busy month that also saw new Batman, Walking Dead and Adventure Time titles and a Doctor Who/Star Trek crossover, all of which did well. Watchmen, The Killing Joke and V for Vendetta are perennial sellers, but his new work does better still: Moore’s only new release in 2011, Century 1969, ranked third in the annual charts, after two Walking Dead collections, and the following year’s Century 2009 was the only graphic novel in the top ten that wasn’t a Batman or Walking Dead title. Moore can still shift more comics than most.

  People in the comics industry sometimes have a skewed view of where the ‘mainstream’ is. The best-selling comic in August 2006, the month Lost Girls was released, was Justice League of America #1, a relaunch of a title teaming up DC’s most popular superheroes, written by thriller novelist Brad Meltzer. It sold 212,178 copies. This was an exceptional number (number two on the chart, Marvel’s New Avengers #12, sold 153,970). Nevertheless, at $75 a copy, the dollar sales of the first two print runs of Lost Girls added up to $1.5 million, while Justice League #1 made $846,590. Even in terms of unit sales, Lost Girls outdid the last regular comic books Moore had written for DC the previous year, Promethea #32 (15,833 copies) and Tom Strong #36 (12,193 copies). And it was Lost Girls – and its creators – that got the critical attention. Moore had produced exactly the sort of comic he had been hoping to create as far back as Warrior: daring, personal and utterly uncompromised, with high production values – a showcase of storytelling techniques that couldn’t work in any other medium, and which raked in acclaim while being profitable for all concerned. The fact that there was no chance whatsoever that anyone would ever option the movie rights wasn’t a drawback, it was the icing on the cake.

  So whatever happened to Alan Moore?

  For most of his career, Moore has been physically distinctive, but it would be a serious mistake to think that he was any kind of outsider. He’s best thought of as encapsulating what was going on around him in the comics industry. He wasn’t the only person writing more worldly British comics in the post-2000AD era; or dark superhero comics that appealed to sixth-form boys in the mid-eighties; or who came a cropper self-publishing in the nineties as the market crashed; or who became a demigod to sections of the fanboy population which inherited the Earth in the internet age. Even being a comic book creator who saw movie studios run off with his creations made him part of a crowd; he wasn’t being singled out. Moore wrote landmark comic books that were hugely influential, but if he had stuck to his office job processing invoices for Pipeline Constructors Ltd, Frank Miller would still have written Daredevil and The Dark Knight, Art Spiegelman would still have written Maus, DC would have revamped their line. Karen Berger may not have had the impetus to seek out British writers, but there was a whole cohort of creators at 2000AD who would have built careers for themselves. Batman would still be a major character if The Killing Joke hadn’t been written (though it’s possible the Joker wouldn’t be quite so popular). And for all that Watchmen is an important, beautifully crafted book, and extremely influential, there would still be graphic novels if it had never existed, just as there would still be movies if Citizen Kane had never been made.

  There are many other ‘name’ comic book writers besides Alan Moore. A list limited to British writers often mentioned in the same breath would include people like Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and Warren Ellis. All have creative autonomy, distinctive voices and enough of a following that they can switch publishers, even media, and take a large chunk of their fanbase with them. There are movie versions of their comics, they’ve made efforts to write more than superhero stories, they have done experimental work, they have a satirical streak. Ten years ago, it would have been easy to say Moore was in the same category as these creators, albeit one who came to prominence a couple of years earlier, and whose disputes with his editors were noisier.

  Now, though, Moore really is sui generis. His contemporaries have embraced what wealth and status they can. They’ll be flattered if a senior editor at Marvel or DC headhunts them for a high-profile superhero project. They’ll take transatlantic flights to meet movie producers or attend Comic-Con. There is nothing wrong with this – most freelance wr
iters would envy them such opportunities. What marks Moore out is his wilful rejection of playing that game. He stays in Northampton and self-publishes a magazine with articles about bus lanes and how to make trifle. Without an agent or an attempt to find a publisher, he’s spent seven years (so far) writing a novel that, when finished, will be about the same length as the Old and New Testaments put together, and which he’s admitted may not be readable, conceding that ‘certainly the last chapter, the Lucia Joyce chapter, nobody is going to get through that, it’s brilliant but it’s completely unfathomable’.

  Has Moore been forced into the position in which he finds himself? Not by others. He and DC may have had their differences, yet, according to Moore, the publisher offered him ‘probably a couple of million dollars’ to work on Before Watchmen. Recently Marvel bought the rights to Marvelman, and it’s hard to imagine they would do anything but bite Moore’s arm off if he wanted to return to the character. But there’s little either company can offer him, and he evidently has no interest in Hollywood. He works only with people he wants to work with. He carefully reads his contracts with Top Shelf and Avatar, but admits ‘I still don’t get a lawyer to look at things, because that seems to me mistrustful. Yes, I know that sounds stupid, given that it’s obviously an industry I mistrust, but I do really prefer to be working with people on the assumption everyone’s being honest with each other. I’d rather not work with people than be in a continual state of mistrust.’

  So is his situation the result of a quirk of personality? At the end of 2012, Moore recounted a little family history to the Observer:

  He hates being coerced, whatever the financial incentive, and it may well be something in the blood. His great-grandfather Ginger, the hard-drinking cartoonist, was at the turn of the twentieth century offered the chance to become the director of a glass company in town, Moore claims. He was told: ‘You’ll make millions! The only condition is that you stay out of the pub for two weeks.’ The answer, inevitably, was no; and Vernon spent the rest of his life walking past the mansion of the man who took the job. ‘But I’m immensely proud of that. Turning something down because it wasn’t what you wanted to do. This stuff … it’s probably in the genes.’

  Moore sees the rejection of money as virtuous: ‘You can’t buy that kind of empowerment. To just know that as far as you are aware, you have not got a price; that there is not an amount of money large enough to make you compromise even a tiny bit of principle that, as it turned out, would make no practical difference anyway. I’d advise everyone to do it, otherwise you’re going to end up mastered by money and that’s not a thing you want ruling your life.’

  It’s easy to talk about not selling your soul to the corporations if you don’t have to worry about money. Moore’s first professional sale was an illustration of Elvis Costello, who sang of John Lennon (in ‘The Other Side of Summer’), ‘Was it a millionaire who said “imagine no possessions”?’ It’s an awkward fact that Moore has been financially secure, and able to work on long-term or uncommercial projects, thanks in large part to the income he’s had over the years from his DC work like Watchmen. Lennon lived in an apartment overlooking Central Park with a refrigerated wardrobe for his fur coats; Alan Moore does not. ‘I’ve got enough money to be comfortable. I live comfortably, I can pay the bills at the end of every month.’ It’s true that he has chosen not to be rich by turning down ‘millions’, but he’s not sitting on a miser’s hoard. When he finds himself with a surplus of cash, Moore has used it to donate Christmas hampers to poor residents of the Boroughs, and he sponsors the Northampton Kings basketball team, made up of kids from the same deprived area of the town.

  Alan Moore is in a position now to do what he wants. So the question becomes whether what he wants to do is worthwhile, and – perhaps easier to judge – whether he’s succeeding in the terms that he’s laid out for himself.

  When America’s Best Comics started out, Moore was prolific, imaginative and versatile; it’s a range that includes some of his most baroque formal work, but also some of his most enjoyable action-adventure romps. But it failed in at least one of the terms Moore set for it. In April 2000, he told Tripwire, ‘What I’d really like in an ideal world would be for me to be able to continue doing ABC for another few years and establish it as a thriving, vital comic line.’ After falling out with DC, however, Moore chose to end the ongoing story in an event that saw all the other ABC characters team up but fail to prevent Promethea from ushering in the Apocalypse. DC have since shown little enthusiasm for continuing the line without him, and have cancelled a couple of follow-up titles by the series’ co-creators mid-series. They have kept all Moore’s material in print, but taken the ABC branding off later reprints, so The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Promethea have joined V for Vendetta under the Vertigo banner. ABC feels a little like ancient history.

  So if Moore is not a comics writer now, what is he? Any answer to that has to tackle the issue of Moore the magician. Even if ‘magic’ is thought of simply as an oblique strategy Moore uses to improve his creative output, the problem remains that his concept of magic is broad enough to allow him to claim kinship with any creative person he chooses to: ‘If you start looking beyond the confines of self-declared magicians, then it becomes increasingly difficult to find an artist who wasn’t in some way inspired either by an occult organisation or an occult school of thought or by some personal vision.’

  In practice, he has identified a fairly narrow artistic, mainly literary, magical tradition. In an introduction to a comics adaptation of William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland, Moore praises the novel for ‘the aura and charisma that surround it, evident before the book is even opened. The mad whirlpool of fantastic imagery and wildly, apocalyptic notions it contains.’ He declares it to be part of ‘a buried treasure seam of literature which might immeasurably enrich our current largely moribund cultural landscape, if only it were not buried, had not been ruthlessly buried alive in the first instance’, and goes on to name Poe, Lovecraft and Stoker as belonging to this tradition, as well as the less well-known Hodgson, Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, Arthur Machen, M.P. Shiel, Algernon Blackwood and David Lindsay, and more recent exponents Angela Carter, M. John Harrison, Jack Trevor Story, Mervyn Peake and Maurice Richardson. Elsewhere, he’s described Robert Anton Wilson, Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock in similar terms, and talked of ‘Dee, Machen, Blake, Dunsany, Hodgson, Bunyan, the Duchess of Newcastle. Stenographers of the apocalypse’.

  Academics have also attempted to locate Moore within an existing tradition. Annalisa Di Liddo concludes her study of Moore’s work, Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel, by placing him alongside Angela Carter (Di Liddo wrote her thesis on Carter), Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, with honourable mentions for Michael Moorcock and Kathy Acker, all of whom have ‘a significantly shared artistic terrain, the main focus of which ultimately is reflection on the idea of identity: hence the recovery of tradition through new codes and modalities of representation; the focus on gender, ethnic and class trouble; the consideration of otherness and its contribution to the evolution of the UK; and the examination and reassessment of the locations of Englishness’.

  This makes for a long list, but the artists on it have many shared characteristics and literary interests. More relevantly, an examination of their lives and work allows us to triangulate a sense of what Moore now aspires towards.

  In 2002, Moore wrote an introduction for an edition of one of his favourite books, Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (1876–1945), a phantasmagorical allegory about a man transported to an alien world. He ‘demands that David Lindsay be considered not as a mere fascinating one-off, as a brilliant maverick, but as one worthy and deserving of that shamanistic mantle; of the British visionary and apocalyptic legacy’. Again, he seeks to place an apparently outlying author firmly within an existing tradition. After mentioning Henry Treece and Nicholas Moore, he invokes ‘the Britannic honour roll of seers and suckers and transported
ranters, in that noble foam-flecked crew with Bunyan, Moorcock, Bulwer-Lytton, Machen, Lord Dunsany, Robert Aickman, Iain Sinclair, M. John Harrison, Hope Mirrlees and William Hope Hodgson, and there is David Lindsay, one that almost got away’. He goes on to describe the qualities that he feels make Lindsay’s book noteworthy:

  There is more to this than run-amok fantasy trilogies turning the marvellous into the irritatingly ubiquitous, that carpet every bookchain. There is more to this than fiction. These are crystal-gazings, reconnaissance missions, unmanned camera-drones to map the dreamtime from high-altitude, to overlook the Overworld. This is Revelation as a cottage industry, a local craft tradition. Burning, screaming angels at the bring-and-buy … In A Voyage to Arcturus it is not difficult to glimpse the heavily-masked blueprint for an idiosyncratic, beautifully deranged utopia. Civilisation suddenly illuminated by an understanding of its own enslavement in the Empire of the Senses. Men and women made free from the limits and restrictions of their psyches, their identities, able to grow new spiritual appendages or apertures to counteract the vagaries of their existence, of Crystalman’s treacherous and endlessly refracting mirror-maze dominion … There are other tentative utopian suggestions in the text, occasions when one might conclude that Lindsay is attempting to float his own scientific theories in the guise of fantasy.

  Needless to say, Moore is describing himself as efficiently as he is Lindsay. Moore often stresses his kinship with the lives led by the authors on his list, not just the contents of their books. Most (although not all) were writers of genre stories rather than great literary works, but to Moore that’s a strength. Comparing himself to H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), he’s said, ‘We’re both pulp writers trying to express our vision of the truth … you tend to work faster as a pulp writer and you’re absolved of literary obligations and pretentions. Your vision is purer’.