ALAN MOORE: CONVERSATIONS Conversations with Comic Artists M. Thomas Inge, General Editor Alan Moore: Conversations Edited by Eric L. Berlatsky University Press of Mississippi Jackson CONTENTS Introduction Chronology From the Writer’s Viewpoint David Lloyd / 1981 Garry Leach and Alan Moore David Roach, Andrew Jones, Simon Jowett, and Greg Hill / 1983 Alan Moore Guy Lawley and Steve Whitaker / 1984 Alan Moore Christopher Sharrett / 1988 Alan Moore Interview Matthew De Abaitua / 1998 Moore in The Onion Edits Tasha Robinson / 2001 The Craft: An Interview with Alan Moore Daniel Whiston, David Russell, and Andy Fruish / 2002 Alan Moore Interview Jess Nevins / 2004 Moore: “We Wanted to Do Something Which Solved a Lot of the Abiding Problems That Pornography Has.” Chris Mautner / 2006 The Mustard Interview: Alan Moore Alex Musson and Andrew O’Neill / 2009 Index INTRODUCTION Alan Moore’s privileged position in the history of comics is certain. It is also complex and contradictory. He is, perhaps, still best known for Watchmen (1986–87), though his prodigious output since has reduced that epoch-making series to just one of his many accomplishments in the field. Watchmen itself is a contradictory text, a superhero story about the dangers of heroism, a Cold War tale that also eerily predicts the events and aftermath of 9/11, a meditation on the philosophy of time that presents the reader with two seemingly mutually exclusive temporalities, sequential and simultaneous. It is a series that was originally published in the United States, takes place there, and comments on its status as a Cold War superpower, but is written and drawn by two Englishmen. Created for one of the “big two” corporate comics companies, whose copyrighted characters and work-for-hire contracts often allow little room for creative freedom, it is written by one of the most iconoclastic, rebellious, and freethinking figures in the medium. These tensions and ambivalences helped make Watchmen that great rarity, a text that is both widely popular and critically lauded. Its selection as one of Time magazine’s “100 Best English-Language Novels since 1923,” merely cemented the broad consensus about the book’s quality and importance. Along with Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning Maus and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, both also published in 1986, the book has been frequently credited with kickstarting the newfound perception that comics were “not just for kids anymore” and would henceforth be taken seriously. While comics may have taken several steps backward before reaching its current position, wherein sequential juxtaposed images are all but assumed to be a valid and interesting aesthetic medium, and even a commercial draw, Watchmen certainly played a significant role in this cultural transformation. For Moore, however, the contradictions and complexities go well beyond his most popular and fêted creation. Known as the single most important figure to shift the balance of power and influence in mainstream comics away from the artist and towards the writer, he began his career as a little-known and most often pseudonymous “cartoonist,” responsible for both the words and images in his weekly funny-animal newspaper strip, Maxwell the Magic Cat (under the name “Jill de Ray”) and a weekly half-page feature in Sounds, a national alternative music magazine (under the name “Curt Vile”). These strips find Moore primarily as a humorist, architect of wryly dark and off-kilter gags (Maxwell) and a series of giddy, trippy parodies of the mystery and science fiction genres (Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation, respectively). The inventive, if occasionally cramped, use of page space in the two Sounds strips prefigured Moore’s innovative breakdowns in his later work, despite the fact that by then, he was no longer his own artist and was directing layouts in legendarily elaborate full scripts. In contrast to these humble beginnings, his worldwide renown was built on the brief period during which he was writing superheroes for DC Comics, from 1983 to 1989. During that time, DC published Watchmen, V for Vendetta (begun for Warrior magazine in England), Batman: The Killing Joke, almost four years worth of the monthly horror/superhero series, Swamp Thing, and a variety of smaller projects. Before coming to DC, Moore wrote superheroes for Marvel UK (Captain Britain) and Warrior (Marvelman) in England. Indeed, at one point during 1982–83, he and Alan Davis (illustrator of both strips) had a monopoly on superhero comics created in England. From this, it might seem that Moore was inevitably married to the long-underwear adventure stories that dominated the industry since the 1960s. In fact, however, Moore’s relationship to superheroes was always an ambivalent affair. While Captain Britain (and Swamp Thing) functioned within the boundaries of superhero genre tropes, if intelligently and intricately so, both Marvelman (called Miracleman in the U.S.) and Watchmen took the genre apart from the inside. Moore’s restlessness with superheroes could be seen elsewhere, as well. It came forth in a feminist essay about the poor treatment of women in mainstream superhero comics, in an “affectionate character assassination” of Marvel boss Stan Lee (both essays in Daredevils, a 1983 Marvel UK comics magazine), and in his unwillingness to be confined to that genre, despite its market dominance. In the admittedly more flexible British market, Moore wrote straight science fiction (Future Shocks, Skizz, Dr. Who, and Star Wars shorts), feminist space opera (Halo Jones), sci-fi comedy (D.R. and Quinch), horror-comedy (The Bojeffries Saga), and dystopian noir (V for Vendetta) in addition to Maxwell and the Sounds strips. On the other side of the Atlantic, his mainstream superhero work was spliced with horror, noir, and science fiction, while he kept a hand in smaller press adventure comics and the occasional creator-owned “alternative” foray. His much-publicized departure from DC in 1988–89, and his short-lived abandonment of superheroes was then less a sudden career about-face than it was a conscious choice to emphasize certain elements of his trajectory over others, sacrificing a measure of economic security for creative freedom when it seemed these two strands were no longer reconcilable. The conflict between economic solvency and creative liberation did not spring suddenly on Moore in the late eighties, however. Rather, it had continually been present in his working life for nearly the entirety of the previous decade. A proud member of the Northampton working class, Moore was heavily influenced in his comics- reading youth both by the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Marvel Age and by the underground comix of Robert Crumb and his contemporaries. While Mort Weisinger–era Superman was an admitted moral exemplar for the young Moore, among his creative idols were the iconoclastic writer, William Burroughs, and the avant-garde musician/composer, Brian Eno. Faced with economic hardship quite often in his youth, especially in the aftermath of his expulsion from secondary school for dealing acid, Moore was continually faced with the choice of money or creative freedom. He tended to choose both. In the early part of the eighties, Moore split his time writing between the corporate UK sci-fi weekly magazine, 2000 AD, and Dez Skinn’s newly founded Warrior magazine, which offered the possibility of creator-owned strips. While Moore’s participation in Warrior derived partially from dissatisfaction in the ways creators were treated in the corporate environment of 2000 AD, the subsequent jump from Warrior to DC was precipitated, at least somewhat, by dissatisfaction with the economic rewards that Warrior finally yielded. Indeed, Moore was willing to sign away his rights in V for Vendetta for the remuneration offered by DC. So, while Moore’s move to DC was never a wholesale move to “large” corporate comics, his later departure was also never a complete abandonment of superheroes or the steady income they offered. The conflict between profitable superhero genre work and “serious” creator- owned material continued through the nineties, despite Moore’s rejection of both Marvel and DC. With the emergence of Image Comics as a third “major” superhero publisher, Moore was able to finance his longer, more complicated projects by writing 1963 and Spawn (for Image), WildC.A.T.s (for Wildstorm), Supreme (for a variety of publishers), and related titles. The real work of the decade, though, was on the creator-owned side of the ledger with Big Numbers, From Hell, and Lost Girls. Big Numbers (with Bill Sienkiewicz) was perhaps the most ambitious project, focusing on the arrival of a U.S. style shopping mall in a thinly veiled replica of Moore’s native Northampton, but the book became an economic sinkhole, forcing Moore to abandon his recently established independent publishing venture, Mad Love. From Hell, a metafictive retelling of the Jack-the-Ripper murders and aftermath, took nearly ten years to complete and shuttled from publisher to serial publisher, as did Lost Girls, a lengthy pornography starring Alice (from Wonderland), Dorothy (from Oz) and Wendy (from Peter Pan). The latter volume took sixteen years to see its way to final publication. The delay of the full-length book versions of From Hell and Lost Girls until 1999 and 2006 respectively made most of the nineties seem like a comparatively creative fallow period for Moore, at least for those not following the small presses’ inconsistent serialization of these works. The two giant volumes are testimony, however, to Moore’s pursuit of independent and creative projects outside of the superhero mainstream. From Hell’s focus on magic, masonry, and murder in grisly anatomical detail and scratchy black and white Eddie Campbell pencils signaled a rejection of the mainstream’s preoccupation with four-color superheroics regardless of how “grim and gritty” they became in Watchmen’s aftermath. Lost Girls’ explicit depiction and examination of the conflicting natures of sex and violence (in lush Melinda Gebbie inks and colored pencils) did the same, if in a decidedly different direction. For that reason, it was certainly surprising when Moore returned to monthly superhero comics almost full time, indirectly for DC no less, with his line of “America’s Best Comics” (ABC) in 1999. It was, perhaps, less shocking when he “retired” from mainstream comics again in 2005, once more over corporate interference and misuse of his creative properties. More recently, Moore’s focus has been on his performance art and music (always a part of his repertoire), his Northampton “underground” magazine, Dodgem Logic, and his as-yet-incomplete second novel, Jerusalem. This final (?) turn away from corporate comics has also been a turn away from and against film (after disastrous Hollywood adaptations of several of his works) and even a turn away from the comics medium itself, with only very occasional installments of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (originally linked to ABC but owned by Moore and Kevin O’Neill) and 2010’s Lovecraftian miniseries, Neonomicon, to sustain his comics followers. The struggle between independence and creativity on one hand and the economic rewards of corporate hire seems to have been won, at this date, by the former, although such a victory would likely not have been possible without investment in the latter. While this dichotomy in Moore’s working life sheds significant light on the nature of each individual project, it too is not the end of the contradictions and paradoxes an overview of his career yields. Also important, for instance, is Moore’s simultaneous fascination with contemporary science and mathematics and his seemingly contradictory 1993 conversion to “magic.” Declaring himself a wizard/magician on his fortieth birthday, Moore began (by his own claim)