Flashback February: Alan Moore

“At the moment, if it carries on like this, I’m happy to continue because I’d like the ABC line to continue”, Alan Moore informs me in the surroundings of his favourite pizza restaurant in the centre of Northampton. This is the same place that we visited the last time that I interviewed him and I was beginning to experience a sense of deja vu about the whole day.1999 was a very interesting year for Alan Moore and it seems as if he’s come to terms with dealing with the devil, figuratively speaking, in DC’s publication of his America’s Best Comics line: “I’ve invested a lot into it, as have the readers and the artists and what I’d really like in an ideal world would be for me to able to continue doing ABC for another few years and establish it as a thriving, vital comic line.”

After the first year of America’s Best Comics, Moore has decided to bring in some other writers to enable him to continue the momentum of the line. This decision has meant that the Net is rife with rumours that he’s not going to be writing the titles anymore and even his frequent collaborator Eddie Campbell commented on this recently to him: “I asked Eddie if he fancied trying his hand at writing a Tom Strong story and he reacted by enquiring whether the rumours were true. He had heard rumours that I was using ghost writers which obviously isn’t true. Having said that, I am going to have to get other writers in but hopefully I’ll be able to work closely enough with them to keep the stamp of what makes an ABC comic consistent.”

2000 sees some changes in the ABC line and Moore is happy to share the news during mouthfuls of garlic bread: “I have to preface what I’m about to discuss by pointing out that at the moment I am completely at the end of my rope in terms of deadlines. I’m under such tremendous pressure so the fact that I’m talking about additional work sounds suspiciously mad to me, so the readers should bear in mind that I might very well be incarcerated and sedated by the time this stuff comes around,” Moore informs me, with only a slight glimmer of mischief in his eyes.

“Firstly, it’s very likely that Tom Strong will be going bimonthly simply because Chris Sprouse isn’t able to keep up with a monthly schedule but he would still like to draw the whole book himself. However, Tom Strong is the most popular book in terms of sales, as far as I know, and in some ways, he’s the line’s flagship character. So I wouldn’t want to give any signals that suggested that we were less enthusiastic about the character. With that in mind, what we’re planning to do is launch another Tom Strong bi-monthly book, with a working title, at present, of Terrific Tales.”

Moore pauses to take some mineral water but, buoyed by his own enthusiasm, he resumes soon after:

“Terrific Tales would have three stories in it every issue. Two of which would feature Tom Strong and one which would be Tom Strong-related. The plan, as they stand at the moment, is that I would write the lead story, which would be illustrated by Alan Weiss. This lead story would be a series of 8 page self-contained adventures. Then we have a backup strip, written by Steve Moore. I’m getting him in so that we can work out concepts between ourselves and Steve would then script them because I am going to need some help. The first backup would be ‘Young Tom Strong’, which would detail Tom Strong’s adventures between the age of 8 and 20, growing up on Attabar Teru. The subject matter of this is pretty irresistible, natives and jungles. The third strip would also be written by Steve, co-plotted by me and this would be a science fiction strip. We thought that the ABC line was missing a pure rocketpack and raygun sci fi comic. Science fiction in comics has had a very spotty career. There have been some excellent highlights and yet it never seems to actually work in the present day. So we’re looking at our favourite comic sci-fi: A lot of Adam Strange, Wally Wood and the early stuff from Avon. So we thought that we’d try and distil some of that and mix with some more exotic elements. So the strip that we’ve come up with is called Jonni Future. The idea is that Terrific Tales is to Tom Strong what Action Comics is to Superman. I used to like Action Comics back when you had a couple of Superman stories in the front and at the back you had Aquaman, Green Arrow or another character. Myself and Steve have got ideas loosely plotted for about two years on a bi-monthly schedule.”

The change to Tom Strong isn’t the only one for America’s Best Comics either. Top Ten, perhaps ABC’s oddest title, is seeing some alterations ahead, as Moore explained to me:

“Gene Ha is starting to feel a little bit burnt out, understandably with that amount of detail needed in every issue of Top Ten. He would like a break, so the plan is at the moment, Top Ten will be ending with #12. We’re calling it the end of Season One, to carry on the cop show analogy. There’ll be a hiatus for a while but Top Ten material will appear. Gene and myself will work on a graphic novel which is provisionally called ‘The Forty Niners’, which would be set in 1949 and chronicle the building of Neopolis. It would have an Untouchables vibe with superheroes thrown in for good measure. The oldest Top Ten characters would appear as youngsters and you’d get the chance to see a lot of people who’ve been mentioned but never seen as yet. Also, so that Zander [Cannon] is kept in gainful employment, the plan is to produce a three issue Jeff Smax miniseries drawn by Zander. In it, Smax has to return to his home continuum to attend his uncle’s funeral. The working title, which probably won’t be the final name, is Smax The Barbarian.”

Moore intends to use the gap created by Top Ten not to relax but to script another ongoing title:

“With Top Ten off the schedule, I can probably write another regular title. My idea for the new title is something that I’m currently calling America’s Best Comics Cascade, which’ll be a showcase title, featuring two or three part stories drawn by artists who wouldn’t be able to commit to a longer run.”

Moore then proves that ABC’s been very beneficial for his creativity, as, announcing the departure of a strip from Tomorrow Stories, he then proceeds to fill me in on its replacement:

“As of Tomorrow Stories #12, as it stands at the moment, Rick Veitch will be leaving Greyshirt”, he informs me as we are halfway through the main course, pasta for Moore, “I understand that Rick still has some unresolved problems with DC and he feels that when he’s done his twelve issue stint, he’s honoured his commitment. So, rather than get someone else in to draw it, we have a space in Tomorrow Stories, which will be filled by two alternating series. John Totleben called me recently, he’s now got two kids and he pointed out that we haven’t worked together in ages. He likes the ABC stuff and he’s been hinting about an underwater character, probably a woman because he loves drawing women. I happen to agree with him that the underwater landscape in comics has never been exploited to its fullest potential. So we came up with a character idea and a name, Pearl Of The Deep, which for me, is a great name. It’s a great name because it sounds familiar and new at the same time.”

He stops speaking for a minute to collect his thoughts and then continues like the proverbial steam train:

“On the other strip for Tomorrow Stories, I would be working with John Coulthard and this would feature a female occult investigator or adventuress from around 1910 and the name of this figure, as this is very much the symbolist, decadent period of art, is The Soul. This is what they used to call the young women who were the models and the inspiration for the symbolist artists. John’ll be illustrating it digitally, which is something that seems to be a little bit in vogue at ABC at the minute, because we’ve got digital artist Jose Villarubia illustrating a section of Promethea as well as John drawing his strip that way. It strikes me that, if it’s used properly, you can do something wonderful with the technology. If the ABC line is about anything, then it’s this synthesis between past and future. “

Moore finds the hectic pace that he has been writing at strangely stimulating:

“The way that things are getting in terms of writing has meant that I’ve been pushed into new areas. There’s a sort of frantic desperation and energy to the work because you’re working too fast and the conscious mind can’t edit. You tend to get a raw, unfiltered gush that comes straight out of your unconscious. Generally, if something feels fresh and funny, then I’ll go for it and worry about how I’m going to validate it later. It seems to be working, as the buzz on The Net, so I’ve been told, has been pretty positive so far.”

Now that the dust has settled and the titles have been coming out for a number of issues now, each title seems to have found its feet. Moore seems to be pleasantly surprised by the way that the readership breaks down: “We tend to get a lot of women reading the books and enjoying them. Top Ten, incredibly, has got a phenomenal amount of gay supporters, which I wasn’t expecting at all. “

Moore hopes that America’s Best Comics will encourage other people to look at what they create in a different way and he sees a lot of the problems of today caused by creators stuck in an old mindset:

“A lot of what was thought of as forward thinking that was decided upon sometime in the eighties, fifteen or twenty years ago. A lot of comics still seem to be mired in eighties thinking. I feel that there is an energy about the ABC line which is fresh. People should create comics that aren’t bogged down in ideas that somebody else had fifteen years ago. It’s time to change that.”

It’s a subject that Moore obviously feels very passionately about and he appears to feel that the comics industry has got what it’s deserved in terms of the size of the market and the quality of the titles out there at present:

“In the comics industry, people tend to talk about ‘The State of The Market’ as if it was something that was being done to them. They are responsible for it themselves. Unfortunately, most people do tend to play it safe and wait for somebody else to take the risks, so that they can rush in and do a cheap copy of it. Having said that, there are people out there doing some amazing work.”

Moore is more than happy to talk about those creators who get him excited:

“If you look at Chris Ware and he was the only comic creator you saw, then you’d think ‘My God! Comics must have reached an Olympus!’. But, as the football terrace chant goes, there’s only one Chris Ware. The Hernandez Brothers are also doing great stuff.”

Moore seems to have a theory as to how modern comics could be helped:

“I believe that the only real sustainable way out of our difficulties is to have a healthy comic mainstream, both financially and creatively healthy. If you’ve got a creatively healthy mainstream, then the money side will look after itself. The biggest problem is that we’ve ghettoised ourselves and comics is too small a medium to do that. You need to be able to show the wonderful beast that is comics in its entirety and although the devices that we use in Grayshirt would be more at home in something like Chris Ware’s work, why not bring these devices into the mainstream?”

“Something like Watchmen has got a lot of plot, continuity and background and I’ll probably never do another project that’s as dense or complex. Having said that, I’ve just done From Hell, so give me a couple of years and I’ll probably do something equally as demanding. But at the moment, there’s a nice whiff of ozone with the ABC stuff and a continuity if I can remember it.”

As the writer of Swamp Thing, it could be argued that Moore was the progenitor of the Vertigo line but his comments on Vertigo are less than glowing, he revealed:

“Atmospherically, you could talk about a ‘Vertigo’ book and people would know what you were talking about. I think that atmosphere is now old and it was something that was exciting and novel back in the eighties. It’s something that was avant garde twenty years ago and the avant garde is supposed to be a moving phenomenon. There’ve been some great pieces of work, having said that. Work like Garth Ennis’s Preacher, for example, but I can see why he’d want to pack it up this year because he’s being doing it a long time and there’s no concept that you could carry on indefinitely without it getting stale. If this is an illegitimate child of mine, it’s one that I’ve not acknowledged, doesn’t resemble me and I’ve not submitted to a blood test. When I wrote Swamp Thing, as well as the dark horror, I put in stories like ‘Pog’ or ‘Rite Of Spring, which were lighter tales. You have to get some balance otherwise, to use a musical comparison, they’re just playing the notes down one end of the piano. Personally, I find Vertigo a one note line, atmospherically and emotionally. Having said that, I don’t want to dismiss it completely, as there’s some good writers and artists who work for them and Karen Berger’s a very nice woman, who I still like and still speak to.”

One of Alan Moore’s most highly regarded works, From Hell, was collected in a single volume last year. He still has some engaging things to say about it:

“I was really pleased with it and I think that’s a work I would stand behind. But I never want to do it again because I never want to go somewhere that dark for ten years again. It intruded on my life for that length of time because you’re reading books about nothing but bloody serial killers who are the most boring and ugly individuals in the world. “

Moore sounds quite unnerved when speaking about the book. Although described by some as a study of The Ripper, Moore sees it as less a work about the Whitechapel murderer than the social climate at the time:

“It’s a fascinating phenomenon. From Hell is not looking at Jack The Ripper so much as it’s looking at the phenomenon of Jack The Ripper. I took suppositions and downright lies and tried to put all of the pieces together in one big picture.”

It was announced recently that From Hell is being made into a Hollywood film. Moore seems fairly sanguine about seeing one of his most ambitious works end up on the screen:

“I believe that the filming of From Hell started in Prague in June, and it stars Johnny Depp, Nigel Hawthorne and Heather Graham, who plays the chirpy cockney prostitute Mary Kelly. I thought that perhaps we could do it as a musical and get Dick Van Dyke to reprise his charming cockney accent. But seriously, there’s also Robbie Coltrane as Netley, even though I would have cast him as Abberline. He’s a good actor. It’s directed by the Hughes Brothers, who made Menace II Society and Dead Presidents. To their credit, they’ve gone out and bought hardbacks of From Hell for all of the cast, so they’re at least trying to get them into the book’s atmosphere. I’m sure that it will be, as Hollywood films go, good fun. But that’ll be more down to the Hughes brothers and the cast rather than me because it’s not really that connected with my work.”

Alan Moore is well-known as a believer in magic and mysticism. He feels that it plays a very important part in his life:

“The most overt stuff in my writing is in Promethea, which is becoming a tract for my insane ideas. Magic becomes more important to me every day in a lot of respects. I believe that the concepts that it offers are probably vital in steering through this new world that we’re in.”

Moore sees magic as something not only significant but actually very pragmatic to follow:

“I think that it grounds people to reality. People might think that statement is strange, when we’re talking about something that’s infested with gods and demons. For me, magic isn’t about new alien worlds, it’s about different ways of seeing this world and those ways of seeing it are often more sophisticated than current methods.”

You may have thought that Moore might have been drinking or at least smoking something at this point but the only thing that he’s touched is mineral water and coffee, amazingly.

Moore actually sees magic as rounding off his personality:

“I diverge from a lot of magicians who feel that to work magic is to become a god, whereas I’d say that to work with magic is to become a complete human being. Also, when I think about art, I believe that creativity itself is magical. The next spoken word album that I release will be called Snakes And Ladders, which I performed at Red Lion Square last year. Ironically, it’ll be appearing as a comic, drawn by Eddie Campbell, like The Birth Caul, before the CD comes out. It’s more overtly magical than The Birth Caul. It’s about Arthur Machen and about Holborn, where we did the reading. We talk about the history of the earth, the universe, mankind, Oliver Cromwell, the Pre Raphaelites and a lot of different threads that end up making a sort of sense.”

For Moore, he feels ambivalent about the passing of the twentieth century but obviously feels that it was a century like no other before it:

“What a fucking century that was! Look at all of the art, the horror, the war, the music and the philosophy! You had Hitler, Stalin and Van Gogh all in the same century. When I was at the farm in Wales over last New Year, once I had taken a lot of magic mushroom admittedly, I started thinking that perhaps civilisation started here in Wales. It definitely started where the glaciers receded and that would have been Northern Europe. So, if you’re in the right mood, you could construe that the hill where the farm is might have been where everything started. We may be under the same stars, looking at the same landscape as we were ten thousand years ago.”

Getting back down to earth for a moment, we return to the subject of comics. The scheduling for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has been sporadic, to say the least, but Moore still seems as full of vigour for it as he did before it started. He provides me with a few choice snippets about the content of the next series:

“I’ve just started writing the second volume. Obviously as some of the characters are still in copyright, I can’t confirm for definite all of the characters that we are using but in the part that I’ve written already, we see Gulliver Jones of Mars meeting another prominent Martian hero. They are planning to combine their forces with those of the Sauns, from Out of The Silent Planet, by CS Lewis, to drive The Tripods, from HG Wells’ War of The Worlds, off Mars. The Martian race that Jones encounters were called The Hithers and they live in a city that was built in the ruins of a pre-existing settlement, thousands of years old. So I remembered that Michael Moorcock, under the pen name of EP Bradbury, wrote Mars stories which were set in the 1960s. This would move it out of the time period that we’re dealing with but, having said that, the main character doesn’t just travel in space but also in time. So I got someone to contact Michael Moorcock and ask him if it’d be alright. He said that he’d be honoured, which is too kind because Moorcock is a brilliant writer. Much of the first issue probably won’t take place on Earth at all.”

Moore sees the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a creative playground where the possibilities are endless:

“We could carry this on forever. I had a really perverse idea the other day, and I’ll probably never get around to doing it, but it would be funny to have one series set in the 1950s where you have Sal Paradise from Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and his crazy wired-up driver friend, Dean Moriarty, who of course is the great grandson of James Moriarty, or I could say that he is. Then there’d be Doctor Sax, a Kerouac character based on William Burroughs and The Shadow but who owes a lot to Fu Manchu. You could set it in Interzone with the Burroughs centipede people appearing all over the place. You could even have a couple of members of the Victorian League still around. Having said that, we might be completely sick of it by the second volume.”

Moore reveals to me that he feels quite optimistic about the twenty-first century:

“I feel good about this next century. I feel that we’re going somewhere in our minds and our minds are evolving into something. I think that imagination and the world of the imagination are at a premium in these coming times. People’s lives have become increasingly virtual and less material. The technological side is only a material echo of something that’s going on anyway. I don’t know when but probably in the first twenty years of this century, we’ll reach a point of information saturation.”

Moore disagrees that the problem with comics is tied in with the fact that they could be perceived as a twentieth century creation:

“Surely everything, except for something that they’re going to come up with in the next week, is tied into the twentieth century. Films are, and so is mass produced music. Video games and computers are a bit nineties, aren’t they? I think that the comic book industry is as good as the people who are working in it.”

Whether you agree with what Moore has to say or not, about magic, comics and society, it’s very hard not to get caught up and you’re always guaranteed a diverting conversation. Moore may look a little unapproachable but he’s one of modern comics’ characters.

On the way back to the station, we bump into a woman who Moore knew as one of his aunts, even though she wasn’t a blood relative. He chatted to her for a little bit and then we headed down towards the station. The absurdity of this six foot man with a huge beard, some scary rings on his fingers and carrying a ceremonial staff sharing small talk with a very ordinary middle aged woman didn’t fail to strike me. But it proved that Moore had more than one facet to his personality and whatever he writes in the future, it’s guaranteed to be of note.

JM

Alan moore flashback www.tripwiremagazine.co.uk