Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore
LANCE PARKIN is a British writer best known as the author of fiction and reference books related to Doctor Who. It was in the pages of Doctor Who Weekly that he came across Alan Moore’s earliest professional writing, and he’s followed the comic maestro’s career ever since. In 2001 he wrote a pocket guide to Moore’s work, which has since been updated and reissued. In addition to contributing pieces to magazines such as TV Zone, SFX and Doctor Who Magazine, and a stint as a television storyliner, he is the co-author of a guide to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. He lives in the USA.
MAGIC WORDS
THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF
ALAN MOORE
LANCE PARKIN
Introduction
1 Beardless Youth
2 Eight yeaRS LateR …
3 Realistic Weird Warrior
4 Script Robot Alan Moore
5 Heads Up America … Here I Come!
6 That Isn’t Funny. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!
7 Watchmen II
8 I, Mage
9 Pictopia
10 Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?
References
Images
Thanks
Index
Copyright
‘My life is peculiar. It’s not the one that I was expecting. I’m enjoying it. Terrific. But a bit odd.’
Alan Moore, Magus Conference (2010)
Which one is Alan Moore?
No one ever has to ask the question when Alan Moore is in the room, and it is easy to pick him out in photographs. It is apparently mandatory for anyone writing about Moore to start off by noting that he is a giant of a man (he is in fact 6ft 2in – tall, but hardly grotesquely so), that he has a bushy beard and has taken to wearing chunky, segmented rings and carrying a snake-headed cane. He has been a gift to caricaturists, and works in an industry full of them. His physical appearance has frequently led people to believe he is a fearsome, peculiar person. Moore is fully aware it makes him stand out.
Alan Moore’s work is as distinctive as the man himself. His CV includes five-panel newspaper cartoons and a novel that is significantly longer than War and Peace; slapstick comedy and the goriest of horror; a five- or-six-page strip about Darth Vader and a three-volume slipcased work of pornography; stories about gaudy corporate-owned characters written under work-for-hire contracts; and a black-and-white self-published, creator-owned anthology magazine opposing a specific piece of Thatcher-era legislation. Moore has worked in collaborative media with over a hundred different artists, each with their own style, but when you’re reading stories written by him, even those featuring iconic characters like Superman, the Joker, Jack the Ripper, Han Solo, Dorothy Gale or Jekyll and Hyde, they’re clearly all the product of the same creative mind.
The main reason people pick up his comic books is precisely because Moore wrote them. As critic Douglas Wolk notes: ‘I still buy anything with his name on it. Even his most minor or slapdash pieces almost always inform the way I understand his major work. And the major work still sends out shockwaves, years after it’s been completed. It’s not at all correct to say that the past twenty-five years of the history of comics are the history of Alan Moore’s career, but it’s fair to say that it sometimes seems that way.’ You don’t have to read Sawdust Memories (1984), a three-page prose story in the pornographic magazine Knave, before you can understand the seminal graphic novel Watchmen (1986–7), but there are always connections and commonalities. Moore has a distinctive personal worldview and he is a constant presence in his own stories.
Much of his most prominent work was done for US publishers, has been adapted by Hollywood and is concerned with that distinctly American invention, the superhero. He grew up fascinated by superhero comics and the west coast counterculture, and he’s now married to an American underground comix artist. It’s forgiveable, then, that there are still people surprised to learn that Alan Moore was born, raised and has lived his entire life in Northampton, a town in the east Midlands of England. Moore has been a consistent champion of the place, once declaring, ‘The more I looked at Northampton, the more it seemed that Northampton actually was the centre of the universe and that everything of any importance had originated from this point.’
British readers will understand that this is not a widely held view of a town whose chief exports – besides Moore himself – are Carlsberg lager and Barclaycard bills. His American readers may not. This raises an important distinction. Moore’s grim and gritty reinterpretations of superheroes may weigh heavily on British perceptions of him, but they absolutely dominate his reputation in America. Many of his early series imposed ‘realism’ on hokey characters like Marvelman, Swamp Thing, Batman and the Joker, reimagining their storybook worlds as unsentimental places of mid-life crisis, economic reality and brutal, often sexual, violence. Moore has been happy to play along with this image of him. When he appeared as himself on The Simpsons (in the episode ‘Husbands and Knives’, broadcast in November 2007), we learned that he was the new writer on Bart Simpson’s favourite comic, Radioactive Man, and had turned him into ‘a heroin-addicted jazz critic who’s not radioactive’. One of Moore’s characters in Supreme (1996–2000) was a comic book artist plagued by a British writer intent on telling a ‘superdog rape story’. Moore’s works for the giant American comics company DC – the major entries being Swamp Thing (1984–7), the Superman stories For the Man Who Has Everything (1985) and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? (1986), Watchmen, The Killing Joke (1988) and V for Vendetta (1982–9) – are seen as classics by comics fans and are hugely influential on today’s creators, all of them remaining in print and still selling strongly. However, a glance at those dates shows that it represents a mere five-year period in Moore’s career, thirty years ago. His work has always been broader than superhero comics for adult fanboys, and while his DC work remains important, clearly it represents a blip in his career, not the bedrock of it.
As we try to learn more about Alan Moore, it should be noted that any attempt to reconstruct his life from his stories would find little to go on. Armed with biographical information, if we delve long enough, we can unearth the odd plum: Quinch’s first name is Ernest, the same as Moore’s father; Raoul Bojeffries is big and hairy and works in a skinning yard, as Moore did after he was expelled from Northampton School for Boys; the concentration camp in V for Vendetta is at Larkhill, which Moore has said was the location of ‘one of the most truly horrendous hitchhiking holidays I’ve ever had’, but these are in-jokes, not insights.
To find anything straightforwardly autobiographical in Moore’s early work – say the first two decades of his career – it’s necessary to venture far from the well-trodden sections of his bibliography. There’s A True Story (1986), a five-page piece for the fanzine Myra which recounts how a schoolfriend died from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Honk #2 includes a short essay, ‘Brasso with Rosie’ (1987), which recounts his family background and very early childhood. And the single-page Letter from Northampton (1988), written and drawn by Moore, recounts a trip to America and includes a sly, not-quite-paradoxical, observation on meeting one of his idols, Harvey Pekar, the underground cartoonist who created American Splendor, and was the first major comics creator to use the medium for memoir.
Virtually everything Moore wrote before the age of forty was science fiction, superheroes or funny animal satire, and his main concerns involved rethinking genre conventions and storytelling techniques. His most visible work in the eighties was in mainstream adventure comics, and he understood that the editors and readers of Doctor Who Weekly or Green Lantern Corps weren’t looking for anecdotes about his life as a Midla
nds schoolboy. Moore knew as well as anyone, though, that there was a rich tradition of autobiographical comics, exemplified by Pekar. He was proud to identify himself as coming from a background of underground cartooning. What he never did, though, was create strips with the searing self-analysis and raw confessional that Pekar was famous for.
Moore didn’t avoid writing about his life only in his fiction. When, from time to time, a comic he was working on would ask for potted autobiographies from its contributors, most other writers and artists would supply fairly straightforward paragraphs. Steve Moore, for example, is a comics writer, Alan Moore’s mentor, and his oldest and dearest friend. Here is the biography he supplied for the back pages of Warrior #1 (1982):
Steve Moore is 32, lives in London and has spent most of his working life in the comic-strip industry … At present he is the associate editor of Fortean Times, the journal of strange phenomena, and has produced a booklet of articles on the Chinese yeti, Wild Man.
And here is Alan Moore’s:
A baffling hybrid between Renaissance Man and Piltdown Man … great fun to mix with socially until the tranquilisers wear off, Mr Moore believes himself to be possessed by the demon Pazuzu.
Much of Alan Moore’s writing from the early nineties onwards has been more personal. Even here, though, it is never a straightforward account of the events of his life. His most overtly autobiographical work to date is the performance piece The Birth Caul (1995), which starts with the death of his mother. It soon moves to family, then local, history, before looping back to become a (reversed) account of Moore’s childhood, ending with his conception. The Birth Caul was created with musicians David J and Tim Perkins, and in places, autobiographical details come from his collaborators – so, for example, each of them contributed a (real) name to the list of three girls the narrator secretly fancied as a boy. The Birth Caul mostly avoids the use of ‘I’ in the narration, preferring ‘we’, which, as writer Marc Singer puts it, makes the experience more of a ‘communal narrative’.
There’s a similar technique at work in the last chapter of Moore’s novel Voice of the Fire (1996); told in the present tense, it describes from Moore’s point of view the events of the evening on which he was writing the chapter. Yet it is more of a guided tour of the area he lives in than autobiography per se:
you’ll perhaps notice the extent of my unease regarding personal literary appearances: the words ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘mine’ are used nowhere in the final chapter. I think I was originally adopting that device as a way of appearing in my own story without really appearing in it, but as it turned out I quite liked it for the way it left a kind of empty conceptual space at the middle of the narrative for the reader to inhabit and provide their own ‘I’. I supposed that really it’s just my particular great vanity to try and conceal my great vanity, please don’t be taken in by it for an instant.
So if it is not through his work, how do we know anything about Alan Moore’s life?
Moore is often portrayed as some kind of recluse. A major BBC interview began by saying he was ‘keeping a low profile’ and stated he ‘dislikes giving interviews’. Nothing could be further from the truth. Soon after he started his professional career, Moore had become a vocal, visible presence in the comics industry. He has given hundreds of interviews over the years, first to fanzines, then to professional magazines, promotional videos, national and local newspapers, radio and television, and latterly to websites. As he said to one interviewer, ‘I’m a doddle for interviewing ’cos I’m completely infatuated with the sound of me own voice … you just have to say a few basic words and I’ll talk for the next hour or two … you prod me if you want me to stop or change to a different subject.’ Some interviews with Moore have been long enough to fill a book or whole episode of a radio or TV show. Many concentrate on the development of a particular project – usually his current work – or his creative techniques, career or interest in magic. Very few do more than touch on his biography, but when asked, he will answer, to the point that some early incidents have become familiar anecdotes.
Over the years, then, Alan Moore has spent hundreds of thousands of words going into his background and personal history. He has chosen to tell us his life story, although not – generally – in his art. Moore has suggested in the past that he’s avoided autobiographical work simply because he felt his life wasn’t very interesting: ‘All I do is sit in a room and write – it must be one of the most boring existences in the world.’
Moore’s work, like that of any artist, does not exist separately from his experience. He has fictionalised events from his life, and has admitted to becoming more comfortable with doing so as he gets older. When once asked ‘How much of your own experience do you encompass in your work?’ he answered,
Eventually you’ll use everything. You usually put them in some kind of code unless you’re doing a straightforward biography. There’s things I did like A Small Killing [1991]. The central event in that was a boy burying some bugs in a bottle. I did that when I was eight or nine and it haunted me. In Big Numbers [1990] the writer was me, not exactly, but there was enough experience. I borrowed voraciously from my friends’ lives, sometimes that can feel a bit dodgy. These people, they’re your friends and they’ll pour out details of their lives and part of your brain is this cold vampiric thing writing it all down to use later. I can’t help it, I’m a writer. I’m getting closer and closer to actually writing about myself. The next thing I do will have a significant autobiographical slant to it. As I get older I’m less worried about revealing myself and looking a prat. It gets to a point where you feel comfortable about being a prat when you do that.
But far more typical of Moore’s early work are stories that look for all the world as if they’re autobiographical, or which take the form of fictional biography, but which on closer examination simply don’t map onto what we know of their author’s life.
Book One of The Ballad of Halo Jones (1984), first published in British science fiction comic 2000AD quite early in Moore’s career, is a case in point. It’s tempting to see it as a futuristic makeover of Moore’s experience of living in an area of Northampton that, for generations, has housed some of the poorest families in the country. The story is set in the fiftieth century on the Hoop, a giant doughnut-shaped structure floating in the Atlantic, built to house the unemployed, or ‘Increased Leisure Citizens’, as they’ve been designated. A spoof advert declares:
If you’re one of the jobless of New York State Municipality, then the Hoop is for you! Tethered conveniently just off the Manhattan Peninsula, it provides a floating haven for its many residents – Increased Leisure Citizens who dwell in the picturesque Blister Homes … The Hoop: Manhattan Island’s Land of Leisure where the wageless pass their time in happy serenity! The Hoop: it runs rings round the Poverty Reduction schemes of other Municipalities.
We quickly see the reality of the situation: the inhabitants of the Hoop are left to fend for themselves in a brutal world where characters panic at the prospect of leaving their homes to buy groceries. The conceit of the story is that the inhabitants take every hardship and bizarre science fiction detail of their lives utterly for granted. When asked what mice are, Halo replies, ‘Well, they were like rats only they were littler and couldn’t talk,’ The inhabitants mask the realities of their existence in euphemistic slang, they distract themselves by watching soap operas set in the twentieth century like John Cage: Atonal Avenger. Within the narrative, it takes an historian writing many centuries later to spell out the reality: ‘The Hoop was a massive dead end in which to dump America’s unemployed. Called a “poverty reduction programme”, it didn’t reduce poverty … it just meant that people no longer had to look at the poor. If you lost your job you were moved to the Hoop, where you lived on a state-provided credit card system called MAM until you found employment. Except that there wasn’t any employment.’
The Hooplife spiel is only a little exaggerated from the rhetoric used by the Nort
hampton Development Corporation to lure Londoners to Moore’s home town in publications such as Come to Northampton! (1972) and Expanding Northampton: The Next Five Years (1971). As comics scholar Maggie Gray notes, Halo Jones was a conscious effort to recreate some of the work of feminist comics:
key to the second-wave feminist assertion that the ‘personal is political’, was the practice of consciousness-raising pioneered by radical feminists in New York. Consciousness-raising groups allowed participants to discuss their everyday oppression as a means to critically reconstitute the totality of women’s social experience, promote collective solidarity and plan action. This emphasis on subjective experience was reflected in the autobiographical tone of feminist comix, and intimated in The Ballad of Halo Jones through first-person narration and Halo’s diaries and letters.
The trouble is … Halo Jones is not autobiographical. Compare Moore’s description of himself at Halo’s age with his description of Halo:
[ALAN] I’d always felt I was special and important … I didn’t realise what a bad situation I was in. I was just convinced that I must get my revenge upon society, no matter what.
[HALO] She wasn’t anyone special, she wasn’t that brave or that clever or that strong. She was just somebody who felt cramped by the confines of her life. She was just somebody who had to get out.
Alan Moore was a lanky, long-haired teen from a large family, who bunked off school to ride motorbikes and smoke joints. Halo Jones is rootless, tiny, female, quiet, never shows any inclination to be artistic; she can’t wait to get away from the Hoop and never looks back, and as an act of rebellion she cuts off her hair. It’s tempting to think Moore carefully crafted Halo Jones to be the anti-Moore.
We see this too in his other work. Watchmen takes the form of a succession of different biographical accounts. The back of each issue includes extracts from artefacts like Hollis Mason’s autobiography, interviews with Silk Spectre and Ozymandias, and Rorschach’s psychological reports. The main narrative is supplemented with captions containing diary entries, first-person narration, recalled memories and other autobiographical forms. Watchmen is nothing but biography and autobiography … just not that of its author.