Masters of comics: Alan Moore

Contents

Masters of comics: Alan Moore

Early days and fanzines

The 1980s: V for Vendetta and Watchmen

The 1990s: Alan Moore the ‘magician’

Alan Moore, a unique author

Masters of comics: Alan Moore

Alan Moore is a British author who is one of the most important and influential writers and cartoonists in the world. He is best known for writing comics and graphic novels including Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, and is a great innovator, both in the topics he covers and his storytelling. Colleagues, critics and readers describe him as one of the best British authors of all time.

As well as creating a series of great works throughout his life, he’s also worked on popular characters like Batman (Batman: The Killing Joke) and Superman (Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?). His career has therefore featured both mainstream comics and more leftfield periods that produced works complex enough to be called drawn literature.

Alan Moore is also a rather controversial figure, who has frequently aired his issues with Hollywood and the film versions of his works, although his books have nevertheless inspired several successful films. Overall, he has lived an extraordinary life, providing some memorable stories to a grown-up and well-educated audience and raising the status of comics across the world.

Early days and fanzines

Alan Moore was born into a relatively poor family in Northampton, UK in 1953. He grew up in a deprived area, and started reading comics as a child, devouring them from the age of five, particularly humorous British titles like Topper and The Beezer, before discovering superheroes in 1961 with The Fantastic Four and Superman.

In his teens, he began working on various fanzines – independent comics – and created one of his own towards the end of 1960s called Embryo, which featured his very first works.

During this period he displayed little interest in school, and began taking hallucinogenics. Moore said: “LSD was an incredible experience. Not that I’m recommending it for anybody else; but for me it kind of – it hammered home to me that reality was not a fixed thing. That the reality that we saw about us every day was one reality, and a valid one – but that there were others, different perspectives where different things have meaning that were just as valid. That had a profound effect on me”. This concept of reality was clearly reflected in his subsequent works and also in his personal life.

At 17 he was expelled from school for selling LSD, and started working in a wide variety of jobs, from a toilet cleaner to a doorman. In 1973 he married Phyllis Dixon, a girl from his hometown, and the couple had two daughters in the following years. He continued working, while dabbling in both drawing and writing in his spare time.

Finding his work unfulfilling, he decided to dedicate himself full-time to comics and illustration. He sent various proofs to publishers, and one of his first paid works appeared in the music magazine Sounds: two episodes of a strip entitled Roscoe Moscow, the story of a private detective, although he published it under the pseudonym Curt Vile. His next job, the strip Maxwell the Magic Cat for the local paper the Northampton Post, was also published under a pseudonym – Jill Deray – and continued for over seven years.

Over time, Alan Moore focused increasingly on writing, and his first breakthrough came thanks to his friend Steve Moore, a scriptwriter for Marvel UK. He began writing his first stories for Dr Who Weekly and 2000AD, a leading British comic book magazine, writing various episodes of Tharg’s Future Shocks as well as creating the character Abelard Snazz.

The 1980s: V for Vendetta and Watchmen

These were perhaps Alan Moore’s most important and prolific years as a comics writer, and he continued to apply his broad literary sensibilities to the medium, including some challenging, adult themes. 1982 saw the launch of the magazine Warrior, for which Alan Moore wrote and published two very important series.

The first of these was Marvelman (later renamed Miracleman due to rights issues), which revisited a character who had appeared in various 1950s British comics. The author made the story darker and more adult, creating a genre that became known as superhero revisionism: taking classic superheroes and inserting them into more realistic and gritty stories (a technique that would later also be used in Frank Miller’s Batman, for example).

One of Moore’s most important works appeared between 1982 and 1985, again in Warrior magazine: V for Vendetta, illustrated by an inspired David Lloyd. The story is set in a dystopian 1997: after a global nuclear war, Great Britain has become a fascist state opposed by a lone masked anarchist, Guy Fawkes. The historical period the writers were living through weighs heavily on the work’s themes: Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government and the real prospects of a world where all ethnic and sexual minorities had been more or less wiped out.

V for Vendetta was one of the the twentieth century’s most important comics, with its influence spreading beyond the work itself. It created an icon, the main character V’s mask, which became the emblem of various anarchic and protest groups (and often, unfortunately, conspiracy theory groups too). The star of the story is an extreme version of a superhero, a masked man who does not seek to restore order like Batman or other vigilantes, but instead completely rejects authority.

This work, along with Watchmen that followed it, which we’ll discuss later, made a huge contribution to the comics world: Moore effectively rewrote the role of superheroes in society, turning them from vigilante puppets in the hands of the government or a utopian desire for order to human beings pursuing their own goals. Guy Fawkes is a stock character, as is clear from the name: ‘guy’, of course, can also mean a standard bloke. Practically anybody could be V, and it is therefore impossible to identify who he is working against.

In the meantime, Alan Moore was also working for Marvel UK on the character of Captain Britain. Another major turning point was his collaboration with DC Comics: in 1983, Leo Wein, the man behind Swamp Thing, asked Moore to help him write the series, which had been paused since 1976 due to poor sales.

The author turned the world of Swamp Thing upside-down, introducing social and environmental themes alongside the horror the series was known for. Many people saw the series’ new incarnation as nothing short of a philosophical and anthropological treatise, which also revolutionised the methodology employed when writing and drawing comics.

Moore decided it was time to update some of the old comic-writing conventions. For example, he removed exclamation marks from the end of sentences, something which was commonplace in American comics. He also altered the entire creative process, giving rise to a two-way collaboration between the scriptwriter and artist. His scripts divided each page up into scenes, describing each panel in detail and asking the artists to correct his ideas or make suggestions. Previously, the scriptwriter would give a rough idea of the page’s contents, stating simply ‘this happens’, and leaving the cartoonist to interpret it.

The new approach changed everything, with the narrative becoming much more cinematic and precise. Swamp Thing featured complete freedom in the way the page was constructed, moving away from a series of boxes to feature full-page double splash pages, circular scenes and streams of consciousness in image form. This all had a huge and irreversible impact on the comics world. Following Swamp Thing‘s success, America witnessed a ‘British invasion’: US-based publishers went in search of other talented British writers, who came to dominate the market. It was in this period that other mainstays of quality comics writing like Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison emerged.

After writing several stories for Superman, between 1986 and 1987 Moore wrote one of his greatest ever masterpieces, published by DC Comics: Watchmen, with Dave Gibbons as illustrator. The story is based on an alternate history, where the United States is on the verge of war with the Soviet Union, and where superheroes are real, reaching peak popularity in the 1940s, before being outlawed in the 1980s: Watchmen‘s great innovation is that the superheroes, with a few exceptions like Dr. Manhattan, do not have superpowers, but are simply masked vigilantes. The superheroes are not the good guys; in many cases they commit all sorts of crimes and atrocities.

Moore deconstructs the archetypal superhero in a meta-narrative featuring a large cast of characters. This time the pages are laid out in a fairly fixed grid, with three rows of panels. The work is packed full of symbolism, particularly regarding humanity’s self-destruction, and often includes philosophical discussions on the human race and an almost nihilistic vision of life. There is also a clear political undercurrent to it; after all, it was written at the height of the Cold War.

The 1990s: Alan Moore the ‘magician’

In 1993, on his fortieth birthday, Moore declared himself to be a ceremonial magician, describing this step as a ‘logical conclusion to my writing career’. The idea came to him while writing From Hell, a comic miniseries drawn by Eddie Campbell and based on the story of Jack the Ripper.

Alan Moore’s new spiritual journey had its roots in a dialogue he wrote in From Hell, which stated that ‘The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds’. Moore organised his life around this revelation, associating magic with writing. He believed that writing, art, music and sculpture are quite literally magic: the science of manipulating symbols, words and images to alter readers’ consciousness.

The author also pondered the limitations of monotheism, and studied the Jewish Kabbalah, connecting his esoteric beliefs with his career as a writer, all of which had a lasting effect on his later works.

However, in the 1990s he continued to write for popular comics, namely various miniseries for Spawn, some stories for WildC.A.T.s for the Wildstorm label and the Supreme stories. In addition, he also wrote several plays, which he described as true ‘magical rituals’.

He then worked on another extremely prestigious project, America’s Best Comics, at the behest of the renowned cartoonist and Wildstorm founder Jim Lee, leading to important series including The League of Extaordinary Gentlemen, Top 10 and Tom Strong. The most interesting of these, and the only one that Moore persevered with, was The League of Extaordinary Gentlemen, illustrated by Kevin O’Neill, which revisited the great Victorian novels, bringing together characters like Captain Nemo, Doctor Jekyll, Mina Harker, Allan Quatermain, the Invisible Man and Mycroft Holmes as a group of superheroes who have to save the world.

The author’s occultist, anarchic and ‘magical’ nature also emerged strongly in the series Promethea, which tells the story of a teenage girl, Sophie Bangs, who is possessed by an ancient pagan god. The series explores various occult themes, particularly Kabbalah and the concept of magic.

‘I wanted to be able to do an occult comic that didn’t portray the occult as a dark, scary place, because that’s not my experience of it… [Promethea was] more psychedelic… more sophisticated, more experimental, more ecstatic and exuberant’, he declared. It is one of his most personal works: I would highly recommend it.

Alan Moore, a unique author

Alan Moore continued to write during the 2000s, completing the America’s Best Comics project in 2008. In 2009 he went back to being independent and published various things, including a spin-off from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, called Nemo. He retired from the world of comics in 2016.

Over time the British author has undoubtedly become a true icon, both in the comics industry and beyond. Drawing on his knack for storytelling and his intellectual nature, Moore created some extraordinary and pioneering works that pushed the medium’s boundaries and redefined the concept of the graphic novel. In recognition of this, he won countless prizes throughout his long career, including numerous Jack Kirby Awards, Eagle Awards and Hugo Awards.

He has dealt with extremely complex topics, often packed with philosophical and occult elements, and stood out for his creative genius, authenticity and artistic integrity. He has never bowed to the publishing industry, always following his own path instead. He has often railed against Hollywood and the film adaptations of his works, claiming that comics should enjoy cultural and technical independence from other art forms.

His influences certainly include Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Kirby, and he in turn influenced a long list of authors both within and outside the comics world, including Neil Gaiman, Joss Whedon and Damon Lindelof.

His dedication to artistic expression, combined with an incredible imagination, has created some unforgettable words, which will continue to be admired and analysed for many years to come.

Alan Moore will always be a legend: the supreme magician of words and images.