Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore Read online

  The Ballad of Halo Jones might not be a thinly veiled version of Alan Moore’s own life, but it does contain a thinly veiled expression of his personal politics. Book One, like his earlier series Skizz (1983), is concerned with the long-term unemployment that was perhaps the central concern for his teenage readers in the 1980s. Readers and critics have agreed with Moore in identifying a strong political slant as a characteristic of his work. Moore says ‘there is an unavoidable political element in life. And if art reflects life or has got any relationship to life, then surely there must be an unavoidable political element in art. I’m not saying that every piece has to be a piece of political polemic, but that all of us have a political standpoint, surely, just as we all have an emotional standpoint, and an intellectual standpoint.’ From his earliest work onwards, Moore has seen comics as a place to talk about – suitably dramatised for the stories and audience at hand – issues like child abuse, environmentalism, gay rights or nuclear power. This was, and remains, unusual in mainstream comics, and provokes a fair amount of resistance. These days, the noisiest proponents of the view that comics should avoid politics are not concerned parents, but adult comics fans who don’t want anything to interrupt their escapism. The popular comics website Newsarama once listed ‘10 Easy Ways to Piss Off a Comic Book Reader’, and at #7 was:

  COMICS THAT PREACH

  It’s the comic books that take an ‘issue’ and explore it from a character’s point of view. Some of the most respected writers in fiction wrap their plots around thinly veiled stands on socio-political views. But in comics, it has to be thickly veiled. In fact, hidden would work better for some … As Geoff Johns told Newsarama last year when we asked about the potential for environmental issues in his Aquaman run: ‘Aquaman cares about that, and it’s central to who he is. But you have to be careful not to be preachy.’

  Moore is not tacking generic ‘save the whales’ style issues onto otherwise conventional adventure stories, though. The politics are distinctly, and often idiosyncratically, his own. Another of his early works, V for Vendetta, would qualify as ‘political’ if all it did was take the broad anti-totalitarian line dictated by it being a dystopian tale in the vein of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451 and ‘“Repent Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman’, but Moore steers it into more specific territory. Its concern with the rise of the far right in the UK reflects Moore’s own activism in the late seventies and early eighties (he attended Rock Against Racism events and posted flyers for the Anti-Nazi League). Most notably, the lead character V shares Moore’s anarchist philosophy – if not his methodology. Moore’s expression of his own beliefs in an interview for the book Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers of Fiction is practically a plot summary of V for Vendetta:

  If we were to take out all the leaders tomorrow, and put them up against a wall and shoot them – and it’s a lovely thought, so let me just dwell on that a moment before I dismiss it – but if we were to do that, society would probably collapse, because the majority of people have had thousands of years of being conditioned to depend upon leadership from a source outside themselves. That has become a crutch to an awful lot of people, and if you were to simply kick it away, then those people would simply fall over and take society with them. In order for any workable and realistic state of anarchy to be achieved, you will obviously have to educate people – and educate them massively – towards a state where they could actually take responsibility for their own actions.

  While this is not a view unique to Moore, neither is it a widespread one. It is not, for example, shared by the co-creator of V for Vendetta, the artist David Lloyd: ‘That’s the irony with V, and people saying it’s all about anarchy: they’re led from the beginning by V … That whole thing is ironic to me. I wish I did believe anarchy was possible. I think people, if they don’t have someone, they just get lost. When was the last time there was something like anarchy? What’s the earliest form of society? Tribes. Who leads tribes? Somebody. They’re not just making pots and spears, someone tells them what to do.’

  Moore wants his work to be challenging. At the playful end of the spectrum, that means deconstructing genre clichés and an exploration of some of the absurd impracticalities of being a superhero or living in a science fiction world. At a narrative level, it means using a range of techniques to tell a story. Underlying this, though, Moore has always sought to create work with a deeper meaning, and at least some form of relevance.

  For Moore, comics are a way to get his ideas across to people: ‘What I’m trying to do is to take some possibly unpopular political beliefs and to make them accessible, to give ideas that are quite large and complex to children in a form they can understand. I would much rather put out my stories to children, to people who did not share my political beliefs at all because in that instance I am not preaching to the converted. Given that I’ve got, say, half a million readers a month, if only ten per cent of those or one per cent of those take notice of what I’m saying, that is still a large number of people.’ When working on comics like 2000AD and Swamp Thing, Moore knew that his editors tended to be resistant to explicitly political stories, but he felt that in the carefully moderated world of mass entertainment, the rough-and-ready comics medium was uniquely equipped to sneak in more personal positions: ‘There is always the possibility that some of your message is going to be lost, some of it’s going to be blunted, but there are strategies, there are ways around these things and if you’re smart enough then you can generally find a way to hoodwink your employers into letting you print the most incendiary filth.’

  That many comics fans bemoan Moore for bringing ‘politics’ to his work might indicate the anodyne nature of most comics, even now, when the overwhelming majority of readers are adults. It might expose a naïve understanding of the nature of art among that readership – or just a concern that superhero comics are not the subtle instruments needed for discussing complex real-world issues.

  Alan Moore himself has described the real world of Northampton as ‘monochrome’, echoing the imagery in both Big Numbers (1990), a comic set in Northampton which used only tiny splashes of colour, and in a (black-and-white) documentary about his birthplace that he made in 1993, Don’t Let Me Die in Black and White. His home town is centrally important to him, then, but there is another place he has lived all his life, a polymorphous, radiant domain where people can fly, encounter beings who are beyond human, and find themselves walking in dramatic landscapes of golden skies, giant statues and symbols made concrete – a place he’s called ‘a bright land without time’.

  Moore’s imaginative life has consistently been at least as rich and meaningful to him as his ‘real’ one. His inner life is a land he’s been exploring over recent years in increasingly ambitious expeditions, and he now sees art as a way not just to process his imaginative experience, but also to change the mundane world. He calls this ‘magic’, and his work has become – may always have been – something best understood not as literal autobiography but as extracts of the autobiography of his imagination.

  ‘This really sounds Dickensian, I never thought about this before.’

  Alan Moore, The Comics Journal #138 (1990)

  Chapter Five of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel From Hell (1989–98) opens by presenting us with the ‘striking juxtaposition’ that Adolf Hitler was conceived just as the Jack the Ripper murders began in London. Using the same technique, it’s a resonant chronological coincidence that simple arithmetic places Alan Moore’s conception around February or March 1953, the very time that Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood produced the parody comic strip ‘Superduperman’ for Mad magazine.

  Human beings tend not to have the same neat ‘secret origins’ that superheroes do. Few of us have our lives transformed by a single event that galvanises us and leads us to destiny. That said, the summer’s day when a young Alan Moore first read a British reprint of ‘Superduperman’ was hugely formative, and an idea he had that day would end up defining
his early career, transforming the superhero genre and providing a successful template for revitalising a long-running series that spread from comics to television and cinema. If we understand what it was about this eight-page comic strip that engaged Moore, what he understood about its contents and what his response to it represents, we’ll be closer to understanding Moore himself.

  ‘Superduperman’ originally appeared in Mad #4, published by EC Comics in April/May 1953, and was hugely popular. It was one of the first times the magazine had run a sustained spoof of a specific pop culture phenomenon, a format for which Mad would become famous. As the name suggests, ‘Superduperman’ is a parody of the Superman comic, and at one level it now looks a little hackneyed. Some of the targets are obvious, such as the spoof of Clark Kent’s penchant for changing into costume in a phone booth, while the substitution of the names ‘Clark Bent’ and ‘Lois Pain’ for Clark Kent and Lois Lane, or ‘Captain Marbles’ for Captain Marvel, is not something most adults would find terribly witty. There is far more going on in the strip than that, though. Clark Bent’s fawning devotion to Lois and his compulsive desire to sniff her perfume is far from innocent, while echoing the creepiness of the relationship of the ‘real’ Lois and Clark. By changing the ‘camera angle’ slightly, the fight between Superduperman and Captain Marbles involves everything a similar sequence in the original comics would, while portraying its ‘heroes’ as vain, stupid and violent.

  Crucially, some of the jokes in ‘Superduperman’ depend on knowledge of behind-the-scenes drama. Any comics fan back then worth their salt knew that the ‘real’ Superman and Captain Marvel could never meet, because they were owned by different companies. DC published Superman, Fawcett published Captain Marvel. The two superheroes had met in court, though, with DC accusing Fawcett of plagiarism. Shortly before ‘Superduperman’ was released DC had prevailed and Captain Marvel, once the best-selling comic on the market, was forced to cease publication. The confrontation between Superduperman and Captain Marbles was, then, as much a commentary on that court battle as on the conventions of the superhero fight scene.

  It matters, too, who wrote and drew ‘Superduperman’; it’s a parody that works because the creators clearly love and understand what they are mocking. The artist, Wally Wood, was one of the stars of the comics industry, and had already worked for three of the biggest names in the business: Timely, Will Eisner’s studio and EC. Harvey Kurtzman was another comics legend, the first editor of Mad, who’d go on to the Playboy strip Little Annie Fanny and was the founding father of a style of comedy now familiar from TV series like Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons and The Daily Show. As actor Harry Shearer put it, ‘Harvey Kurtzman taught two, maybe three generations of post-war American kids, mainly boys, what to laugh at: politics, popular culture, authority figures.’

  At heart, what ‘Superduperman’ plays on is that anyone reading a superhero comic is exposed to two parallel narratives. The first is the colourful, escapist adventure on the pages of the magazine. The stories in superhero comics are sprawling, interconnected sagas that often seem circular in nature. The same never-ending battles are fought across decades by different individuals who are startlingly similar to those who came before. The same moves are made, the same betrayals occur, old ideas are spliced together to make new ones. The elaborate soap opera cast lists, continuity and traditions that are often baffling and off-putting to outsiders are utterly immersive for the fans. It is always possible to dig down a little deeper, make another connection, spot one more influence, coincidence or unintended consequence. Whole books have been written about the convoluted history of just one comic book character.

  By the age of twelve, Alan Moore was already au fait with the tricks used to lure him back month after month:

  my favourite part of the whole comic would usually be the Coming Attractions section at the bottom of the last page. They had all these demented announcements like ‘Superman marries Streaky the Supercat! Not a dream! Not a hoax! Not a Red Kryptonite delusion! Not an Imaginary Tale!’ After a while I figured out that whichever disclaimer they omitted, that was the punch line to the story. Like in the example above, since they hadn’t specifically said ‘not a robot!’ you knew damn well that on the last page of the story either Superman or Streaky, or both, would open up a plate in their chest to reveal lots of little cog wheels and SP-11 batteries.

  As above, so below. Like those who consumed ‘Superduperman’, even young readers quickly become aware of comics’ second narrative, as sprawling and convoluted as anything on the page: the real-life history of the industry and the people working in it. Characters like Superman, Batman, Captain America and Captain Marvel have been around since the thirties and forties. Creative teams have come and gone, bringing different styles of artwork and storytelling choices. Mastery of this second narrative, knowing what was going on behind the scenes, is an essential part of becoming a comics fan. It is not enough to know about Superman or Spider-Man, a fan must also know about Siegel and Shuster, Lee and Ditko. Creators like Jack Kirby and Will Eisner are, to a comic fan, as ‘legendary’ as any superhero.

  Alan Moore’s description of the shopping trip where he first encountered ‘Superduperman’ is instructive. As he fished through the racks, he found ‘they’d also got a load of the Ballantine Mad reprints, which included I think The Bedside Mad, and Inside Mad, which were reprinting from the Mad comics, rather than from the Mad magazines. And one of these that I picked up, possibly Inside Mad, had got Kurtzman and Wood’s Superduperman.’ At twelve, Moore was already a connoisseur, able to assess a comic’s pedigree and make minute distinctions based on only a few clues. With a limited amount of pocket money, he chose his purchases carefully, and the publisher, writer and artist of the comic were at least as important to him as which characters it starred, or whether the cover or story hook were enticing. And Moore was not unique, he was part of an emerging phenomenon, one that publishers had started to cater for: slightly older, more informed comic book fans.

  On both sides of the Atlantic, since the birth of the industry in the thirties, virtually all the men and women making comic books had toiled in obscurity and anonymity. Comics were cheap and ephemeral, and anyone older than a small child reading them was assumed to be illiterate. Most writers and artists were happy to sign over all the rights to their work in return for a fairly meagre, but regular, cheque. There were exceptions: Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit, signed every strip and aggressively marketed himself and his studio. But more typical was Patricia Highsmith, who before she wrote Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley, had written comics for a number of publishers (including Fawcett), but meticulously avoided referring to the fact, even in private diaries that detailed her affairs and psychiatric problems. Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, and Mickey Spillane also worked anonymously in comics early in their writing careers. People who worked in comics didn’t boast about it.

  It’s fair to say Stan Lee changed that.

  Stanley Lieber had done his share of toiling. He had started working at Timely Comics in 1939 as a sixteen-year-old office boy who filled the inkwells for the artists. He wrote his first Captain America story two years later under the pseudonym ‘Stan Lee’, as he hoped to use his real name for more respectable writing. Twenty years later, he was editor-in-chief for the same company, which had changed its name to Atlas Comics in the early fifties and had just done so again, to Marvel Comics. The company was a small one and rarely innovated, but kept a close eye on trends in the market. It had spent the previous few years producing westerns, romance and comics about astronauts.

  In the late fifties and early sixties DC, one of the major comics publishers, found success modernising its superhero line, revamping characters like the Flash, Green Lantern and Hawkman, created for the previous generation of children, by giving them new costumes and more modern stories with a science fiction flavour. In 1961, Lee followed the trend, and set about creating a new superhero team for Marvel. Lee and artis
t Jack Kirby agreed that DC’s heroes were so upright it made them a little boring. Alan Moore concurs: ‘The DC comics were always a lot more true blue. Very enjoyable, but they were big, brave uncles and aunties who probably insisted on a high standard of, y’know, mental and physical hygiene.’ So Lee and Kirby created a group that was literally a bickering family – the Fantastic Four. Moore’s experience was typical of the enthusiasm Marvel generated among its readership. In early 1962, at the age of eight, he had asked his mother to pick up a copy of DC war comic Blackhawk: ‘I told her it’s got a lot of people in it who all wore the same blue uniform. And she went out and came back with, much to my disappointment, Fantastic Four #3 … but of course I soon became completely infatuated … From that point I began to live and breathe comics, live and breathe American culture.’

  The Fantastic Four were hugely popular, and were soon joined by Spider-Man, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Daredevil, the X-Men and many more, all of them written by Stan Lee. As Moore put it, the difference between Marvel’s superheroes and those of their rivals was simple: they ‘went from one-dimensional characters whose only characteristic was they dressed up in costumes and did good, whereas Stan Lee had this huge breakthrough of two-dimensional characters. So, they dress up in costumes and do good, but they’ve got a bad heart. Or a bad leg. I actually did think for a long while that having a bad leg was an actual character trait.’ As he later put it, Marvel’s success was down to ‘Stan Lee’s crowd-pleasing formula of omnipotent losers’.