Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore Read online

  The movie E.T. was being hyped at the time ahead of its June 1982 release in the States. But it would not be released in the UK until December, and Moore was given the job – without having seen the film – of coming up with a similar story about a cute alien being marooned on Earth and befriending a child. The result, Skizz (1983), was an interesting strip for 2000AD because it was actually set in Thatcher’s Britain, rather than some SF analogue of it. Its main influence is, perhaps a little too clearly in places, Alan Bleasdale’s The Boys from the Blackstuff, a BBC television drama about a group of unemployed working-class men that had been running in late 1982 as Moore wrote Skizz. The main human cast of Skizz are young people about to leave school and enter a world where there are no jobs. Moore makes it a story about human dignity as much as cute aliens, but it didn’t matter. While he and artist Jim Baikie were developing their strip, E.T. became a huge cultural phenomenon and commercial success: it remained in the top two at the US box office for over six months, and was also hugely popular in the UK. When Skizz arrived in March 1983, it was completely overshadowed by what had become one of the most beloved and commercially successful movies of all time.

  Moore hated the strip, describing it in an interview in November that year as ‘the horrible E.T. rip-off that I did for 2000AD, you’ve got this cuddly little alien that everybody likes who’s having a really bad time on Earth ’cos everyone’s beating on him ’cos he’s little (that’s the plot so you needn’t read it)’. Twenty years on, he was able to see a brighter side: ‘It was great working with Jim Baikie, who is a wonderful artist. It was interesting to have an ongoing strip in 2000AD where I could explore character development and maybe press a few unusual buttons for 2000AD. But it kind of really whetted my appetite for doing something better.’

  His opportunity wasn’t long in coming. Alan Davis had suggested Moore take over as the writer on Marvel UK’s Captain Britain when Dave Thorpe, the writer Davis had been working with, quit after a series of disputes with the management. Captain Britain had begun in 1976, the particularly literal-minded result of a plan to create a ‘British Captain America’. As Bernie Jaye explains: ‘The managing director was concerned about the political content of Captain Britain and read the riot act. This was a bit of a crisis to say the least and I do remember there were hours of phone discussions. Dave, quite understandably, wasn’t willing to compromise and I couldn’t risk the whole project being sabotaged. We needed a different take on the story. Paul Neary, who I trusted, vouched for Alan Moore, and Alan Davis independently also vouched for Alan Moore. It was thought he could take the story in a more acceptable superhero direction.’

  Under Thorpe, Captain Britain stories had been odd mélanges of science fiction and folklore, and Moore admitted he picked up the assignment ‘halfway through a storyline that I’d not inaugurated nor completely understood’. But his run on Captain Britain was to continue almost uninterrupted for two years, even if the strip itself moved across three Marvel UK publications: Marvel Superheroes (July–August 1982), The Daredevils (January–November 1983) and The Mighty World of Marvel (December 1983–June 1984).

  Dez Skinn was unhappy that Moore and Davis were the creative team on both Marvelman and Captain Britain, the only two British superhero strips running at the time. Bernie Jaye at Marvel was far more relaxed: ‘I trusted Alan Moore and Alan Davis not to compromise their own work.’ And in the event, the strips were very different. While there were a few nods towards realism – for example, Captain Britain struggles to work out a method of carrying around the helmet of his superhero costume when he is in his civilian identity – Captain Britain was a story about parallel universes and Arthurian magic. Moore was now writing stories set in the Marvel Universe he’d explored so avidly as a boy, where, as he said, ‘these sort of things are willingly accepted, whereas in the Marvelman continuity they would look stupid and completely out of place’. He brought back the Special Executive from his 4D War stories in Doctor Who Monthly, and contrived to have Captain Britain fight inside London’s Forbidden Planet comic shop, but the strip is perhaps best remembered for a relentless cyborg, the Fury, who presented Captain Britain and his allies with a lethal and durable antagonist.

  In retrospect, however, Moore’s most important work for Marvel UK was the cheap filler material he came up with. Marvel UK was a shoestring operation, and while they published a few original strips like Captain Britain, most of the pages of their magazines were black-and-white reprints of American titles. Bernie Jaye recalls ‘I was always relieved when he said yes. I was happy that he was able to sustain such a prolific output. I don’t think he ever turned down any request.’ There are issues of The Daredevils – the anthology comic in which Marvel UK reprinted Frank Miller’s much-acclaimed recent Daredevil strips – where Moore seems determined to appear on every page. He wrote short stories, but he also wrote volumes of non-fiction: articles about the history and social context of comics, their relationship with pop music, their problems with the depiction of women. By 1983 specialist comic shops had started to appear in most British cities, places like Forbidden Planet in London, Odyssey 7 in Manchester and the Sheffield Space Centre. There you could find full-colour imported American comics – the true aficionado did not need to pick up reprints. The text articles, though, were clearly designed with the hardcore fan in mind. Bernie Jaye says: ‘Daredevils was a conscious attempt to include the fans. I think I had been to a few comic conventions by then, I loved being around artists and writers, they were obviously the lifeblood of the medium and I was keen to do my bit to provide creative opportunities. It was a breath of fresh air in the midst of all the reprints. I enjoyed the interaction and engagement.’

  In this spirit, Moore instigated and wrote a fanzine review column for The Daredevils. Fans were now more savvy about the creators of their favourite comics, and the advent of cheap photocopying had given them a way to publish their thoughts: soon, Moore reported that he had been inundated with fanzines to review. While this was hardly a great seat of power, it allowed him to reach out to the network of British comics fans and positioned him as an authority and arbiter of taste. Moore clearly enjoyed reading the fanzines he was reviewing, and he attended the comic marts at which the creators of fanzines hawked their wares. It is doubtful he was enacting some Machiavellian scheme to win the hearts and minds of the people who voted in the Eagle Awards – more likely his hidden agenda in volunteering to write the review column was simply to get some freebies – but Moore was so physically distinctive that it was difficult not to notice and remember him. He proved loquacious and entertaining on panels and in interviews, wrote letters to fanzines, mingled with their editors, happily contributed ideas and articles. He quickly came to realise he was becoming well known: ‘I used to go down to the comic marts that they’d have at Westminster Hall. And we’d all gather in the Westminster Arms just down the road. This would be comic fans, comic professionals, there was no differentiation. And you’d have a couple of people saying, “I saw that story you did in 2000AD, I thought that was really good.” And you’d say thanks and you’d perhaps buy each other a drink and then stand and chat. I noticed after a few of these that I was getting four or five people coming up and saying that they liked my work. Then I was noticing that I was getting about twenty people. Now this is tiny. But I started to think, “Hmmm. If this trajectory continues the way it’s going, it’s going to be a lot more people, isn’t it? And so I might end up being famous.’

  Alan Moore’s success was not down to being tall and having a bushy beard, of course. Ultimately, there is a simple explanation: he was very good at writing comics. If you only read one of the magazines Moore was writing for in 1982–3, you would start to spot his name cropping up over and over again. If you read more than one, you’d see the same man in a variety of different roles: writing dark, adult stories in one place, silly throwaway gag strips in another, fanzine reviews and articles about feminism in another. Moore managed – and this is what distinguis
hed him from all his peers – to consolidate a diverse portfolio into one solid body of work with a distinctive voice. While writers like Steve Moore and John Wagner were happy to stay relatively anonymous, even pseudonymous (Steve Moore’s most acclaimed series was probably Laser Eraser & Pressbutton, which was only ever credited to ‘Pedro Henry’; Wagner used half a dozen pseudonyms, the most prolific being ‘T.B. Grover’ and ‘John Howard’), Alan Moore instead ended up creating the character ‘Alan Moore’, someone with an instantly recognisable appearance who was enthusiastic, affable, if a bit loud and weird, and always willing to share his opinion.

  Was this all part of a three-front strategy with a clear endgame? While Moore is not a ruthless man or a cunning businessman, he clearly does not like coming second. He has always understood himself to be a better writer than most of his contemporaries. In an interview barely four years into his professional career, he was quite comfortable saying: ‘I know quite a bit about writing comics. It’s a problem I’ve been applying my admittedly limited intelligence to for the past five years, and it’d be pretty remarkable if I didn’t. Without wanting to sound egotistical, I reckon there are maybe a dozen people in the Western world who know as much or more than I do about writing comics. This says more about the paucity of the medium that it does about my personal talents, but the point still stands.’

  Moore understood the paradox: he needed to be a script robot, but one who stood out from the crowd. One of the articles in The Daredevils that brought him particular attention was ‘Stan Lee: Blinded by the Hype, An Affectionate Character Assassination’ (#3–4, March/April 1983). While it wasn’t hard to find Marvel employees who had some choice things to say about their publisher and company figurehead, the pages of Marvel’s comics themselves had always treated Lee with reverence. Moore was happy to call Lee a ‘flawed genius’ and characterise his recent editorials as ‘geriatric gibberings’ (Lee had just turned sixty). The main problem he diagnosed was that what had once been bold had been repeated and diluted so many times it was now simply formulaic, and more depressingly it had become the only game in town:

  All the other companies of the mid-sixties … Charlton, ACG, Tower and so on … opted not to follow Marvel’s lead and subsequently went bust, leaving the comic field populated solely by pale ghosts of Lee’s former glories. Even the independent publishers that have recently sprung up seem largely unable to do anything more radical than tinker feebly with Lee’s basic formulas. Captain Victory is little more than The Eternals playing at the wrong speed and Ditko’s Missing Man would not have looked out of place as a sub-plot in Doctor Strange. Oddly enough, it is imitating the superficial stylistics of Mr Lee’s ‘Marvel Renaissance’, most of these imitators seem unable to recognise the single most important quality that he brought to the comic medium.

  Stan Lee, in his heyday, did something wildly and radically different. And as far as I’m concerned, his vacant throne will remain empty until we come up with someone who has the guts and imagination to do the same.

  Any offers?

  Moore identified what he saw as the problem, though it’s unclear whether he had a candidate in mind. Unlikely as it seems in retrospect, is he making a case for Warrior’s iconoclastic approach to the subjects comics could tackle and the rights creators enjoyed there? Probably not: Moore seems to be talking solely about American superhero comics. There is, though, the possibility he was proposing himself as the solution.

  Moore has claimed he did not see working in British comics as a stepping stone to the more lucrative, full-colour shores of the United States. He said, twenty years later, ‘I wasn’t thinking about America at all. I was thinking, “this is great, I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do. I’m doing a regular series for British comics. In fact, I’m doing four regular series for British comics”.’ This was clearly true in 1981 when he was interviewed just before starting on Warrior. But things had changed by the time he wrote ‘Blinded by the Hype’. That article appeared in March 1983. In January that year, he had told Fantasy Express, ‘On the American front, there are loads of characters I’d like to write … Superman, Martian Manhunter, Challengers of the Unknown and so on. But the two main features I’d really like to deal with are Tales of the Bizarro World and Herbie.’

  This wasn’t a pipe dream. American publishers had begun to look at British writers. In 1983, Brendan McCarthy and Pete Milligan (working with artist Brett Ewins) became the first British-based writers to be commissioned by an American comics company, when they contributed stories to Pacific Comics’ Vanguard Illustrated anthology series. British writers were meeting American editors at conventions and pitching projects. Moore himself had written to DC, volunteering to take over as writer of the struggling series Thriller. And a number of artists were finding work across the Atlantic. One of the first was Brian Bolland, a stalwart of Judge Dredd in 2000AD. In late August 1979, Bolland was at Seacon, a convention held in Brighton. Len Wein, an editor at DC, was in attendance, actively looking to recruit artists from 2000AD. Bolland was commissioned to draw a few covers for DC Comics, and persisted in his attempts to gain more substantial commissions: ‘I had been appearing at DC every summer for four consecutive years. The first time I went, Paul Levitz – not knowing who the hell I was – gave me the standard tour of the premises and away. The next year, one or two people knew me through liking Judge Dredd, and the third year I was taken out, wined and dined and I met all sorts of people.’ Wein commissioned Bolland to draw an ambitious and prestigious miniseries, Camelot 3000. The story, by American writer Mike W. Barr, would not have been out of place in Warrior – King Arthur returns at England’s time of greatest need: the year 3000AD, with the solar system under attack from Morgana Le Fey.

  One of Bolland’s friends was the artist Dave Gibbons. Their careers had developed in close parallel. Both had been part of the early British comics fandom, then worked on underground comix; they had worked together on Power Man, a superhero comic sold in Nigeria. Gibbons had become even more of a presence in 2000AD than Bolland, with strips like Dan Dare, Harlem Heroes, Ro-Busters and Rogue Trooper appearing virtually every week in the comic’s first two years. By 1983, Gibbons was perhaps best known for his work on Marvel UK’s Doctor Who Weekly. He had been hired for the job in 1979 by Dez Skinn and worked there from the title’s launch in 1979 until 1982, drawing the main strip for sixty-five of the first sixty-nine issues. DC originally thought Gibbons would be ideal for their Star Trek comic, although Gibbons ‘only heard later this was DC’s plan … I would certainly have turned it down, who wants to draw half a dozen likenesses every time you show the bridge of the Enterprise?’ He was set to work instead on Flash and Green Lantern back-up strips, quickly impressing his editors enough to become lead artist on Green Lantern.

  The name of the game at DC was to revamp existing characters, not to create new ones. After long discussions with Gibbons, Moore typed up pitch documents for at least two such series. Martian Manhunter was set in the McCarthyite fifties and got as far as Gibbons making sketches, while Challengers of the Unknown would be a way of telling ‘an essential and definitive DC Story’. Set in the present day and making extensive use of flashbacks, it would be an exploration of how Superman’s arrival on Earth represented a huge divergence from our history. In particular, it would make ‘the Soviet Union feel very insecure. This might have some interesting long-term political repercussions’. (The idea of an all-powerful American superhero impacting the course of the Cold War was to be a central plot point in Moore and Gibbons’ series Watchmen.) In the event, before either series was formally pitched to DC, Gibbons was told the characters had already been promised to other creators.

  More fortuitously, in early 1983, DC editor Len Wein was searching for a new artist for horror title Swamp Thing, and invited Gibbons to submit sample pages. Neither Wein nor Gibbons liked the results, and agreed Gibbons’ clean linework did not suit the swamp creature. But Wein was a 2000AD reader, and was familiar with Moore’s work.
He later called Gibbons asking for Moore’s phone number.

  So, it wasn’t completely out of the blue when, on an evening in May 1983, as Alan Moore sat down to dinner with Phyllis, Leah and Amber, he received a phone call from Len Wein at DC Comics in New York, asking him if he would like to work for them …

  ‘There’s nowhere to go in this country… no space. Not like in America, that’s what it’s really like to be on the road. THE road is in America.’

  Kid, Another Suburban Romance

  Swamp Thing inhabits a murky backwater of the DC universe, on his own far from the soaring towers of Superman’s Metropolis or Batman’s Gotham City. This was also the status of the comic book The Saga of the Swamp Thing in DC’s 1983 line-up. The character had been created in 1971 by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson for a one-off appearance in House of Secrets #92 (1971), which had led to a short-lived Swamp Thing comic (twenty-four issues from 1972 to 1976). The movie rights were optioned in 1979 and the resultant movie, directed by Wes Craven, was released in March 1982, whereupon DC revived the comic to cash in. Alan Moore was contacted a little over a year later, and as he later summarised, ‘I was given this book called Swamp Thing which was really the pits of the industry. At the time it was just on the verge of cancellation, selling 17,000 copies and you can’t do comics beneath that level.’

  Swamp Thing’s protagonist was Alec Holland, a scientist who had been caught in an explosion and stumbled out of his laboratory engulfed in flame, then fallen into the neighbouring swamp and sunk into the murky waters, where his flesh transformed into vegetation. Swamp Thing stories concerned Holland’s attempts to restore his body to human form while protecting people from other monsters and supernatural creatures. Moore knew, ‘It was a dopey premise. The whole thing that the book hinged upon was there was this tragic individual who is basically like Hamlet covered in snot. He just walks around feeling sorry for himself. That’s understandable, I mean I would too, but everybody knows that his quest to regain his lost humanity, that’s never going to happen. Because as soon as he does that, the book finishes.’