Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore Page 9

  With his foot in the door and a little more experience, Moore found it much easier to get commissioned by 2000AD, and his work – at this stage confined to more Future Shocks – was soon appearing in the comic roughly every six weeks. While he continued to write and draw his Sounds strip and Maxwell the Magic Cat, Moore’s contributions to Marvel UK and 2000AD were solely as a scriptwriter. Not only was he acutely aware that he lacked the technical flair of the regular 2000AD artists, there was also the practical matter that even half a page for weekly Sounds often took him most of the week to draw; he just was not fast enough to produce the page a day he would need if he were to work for 2000AD. He found he could describe a panel in a script far more effectively than he could ever illustrate it himself.

  Moore had a clear ambition for 2000AD: ‘At the time, I really, really wanted a regular strip. I didn’t want to do short stories. I wanted to do regular, ongoing series that would bring in regular money. But that wasn’t what I was being offered. I was being offered short four or five page stories where everything had to be done in those five pages. And, looking back, it was the best possible education that I could have had in how to construct a story.’ Moore came to relish the challenge of developing new twists and ever more elaborate story structures: ‘I did realise that in having done a couple of years of a weekly comic strip that I had, almost incidentally, learned how to tell a serialised story … I had learned something about the mechanics of telling a story on demand every week that was at least interesting enough to keep the readers entertained and to stop the editor from replacing it with something more commercial.’ Moore got into the habit of packing his pages with information and cutting out padding. He got to work with many different artists, and was fascinated to discover the ways different people interpreted his scripts and how it led to a broad range of types of creative partnership, from full and enthusiastic collaboration to an artist wilfully ignoring the script.

  It was a key shift, creatively, for Moore, and one that marked him out as a writer who was particularly enthusiastic and thoughtful. Steve Parkhouse, already established by this time as an editor, writer and artist, would go on to collaborate with Moore, most notably on The Bojeffries Saga (1983–4); he has identified Moore’s great gift as ‘the ability to write exactly what the artist wants to draw’.

  Moore found he was able to create a few running stories within the one-off format: ‘I really wanted to be doing a continuing character. If you were getting regular short story work, one way of doing that was by creating continuing characters or some other form of continuity that linked up your short stories. In 2000AD I’d done a few stories about a character called Abelard Snazz, “The Double-Decker Dome”. He was based upon an optical illusion drawing I’d seen of a man with two sets of eyes which was quite a disturbing thing, visually.’ If it went down well, he thought, then he might even get a series out of it: ‘If I can come up with a popular character and maybe link up some of these short stories so that they make a bigger narrative to show that I can handle … a longer story arc, then maybe that will work out as some future work. I suppose that was the simple mercenary thinking that was behind it.’

  Abelard Snazz was introduced in the fourth of Moore’s published 2000AD stories, ‘The Final Solution’ (#189–90, December 1980, art: Steve Dillon) and the character would eventually feature in eight issues spread over two years. Moore had created his first recurring character for 2000AD. Snazz was a genius who would ‘handle complex problems with even more complicated solutions’. In his first story he solved a planet’s crimewave by inventing robot policemen, who promptly established a police state; to solve this new problem, he created robot criminals who were a match for the policemen. To solve the further problem that so many civilians were then caught in the crossfire between ruthless robot police and robot criminals, Snazz’s masterstroke was to create a population of robot civilians, and the human population were forced to leave their planet.

  Moore was now a visible part of the London comics scene, whose writers, artists and editors would meet up under the aegis of the Society of Strip Illustration (SSI) and compare notes. Shortly after Moore joined, his Doctor Who artist David Lloyd became chairman. As Lloyd explains, ‘it started in 1977 as something of a glorified lunch club, with a lot of the really great Fleet Street cartoonists and artists. It recruited some of the guys from 2000AD and some of the other comics out there, and it was mostly a young organisation at the time … we had meetings initially at the Press Club, which was a great, posh place on Shoe Lane just off Fleet Street … if people walked in without a tie, they were frowned upon and it was kind of ridiculous to control that, particularly with comic artists. Later on we moved to various pubs, the George at the top of Fleet Street, then we moved to the Sketch Club in Chelsea … The Sketch Club is where we were at for the longest time, and it was very good, very vibrant.’ There were about forty members, all established comics creators, with two associate members who hadn’t been published by that point: Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Eddie Campbell, who at the time was based in London and self-publishing autobiographical comics, scathingly depicted the SSI – and Lloyd – as ‘an association of professionals … Status Quo is the new chairman. They meet upstairs at a pub’. Moore had been welcomed into the group and was much more warmly inclined to it, later describing the SSI as ‘at its best a kind of coffee evening, or rather where you could meet up at a bar … there were some very nice people there’. These included artists Moore would work with, such as Dave Gibbons, Alan Davis, Mark Farmer, Hunt Emerson, Garry Leach, Dave Harwood, David Lloyd and Mike Collins, as well as most of the editors who commissioned their work. Moore was now firmly in the loop.

  Alan Moore had begun his attempt to become a professional comic strip creator around the time his wife Phyllis learned they were expecting their first daughter, Leah, who’d been born in February 1978. When the Moores’ younger daughter, Amber, was born three years later, Moore was well on his way. But this is not how it felt at the time, either for Moore, for anyone in the comics industry, or for his readers. He may have begun to earn himself a steady stream of commissions, and was becoming well known in the industry, but he was ‘having to work hard to get every little breakthrough to win an inch of ground’. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that we can see this as the beginning of a sure-footed, meteoric rise.

  ‘Working for Quality Comics is great! It’s cartoon heaven.’

  Alan Moore, Fantasy Express #5 (1983)

  In its May 1981 edition, the editor of the newsletter of the Society of Strip Illustration, David Lloyd, posed a series of questions to ‘five of the most respected and reputable strip writers in British comics’: Angus Allan, Pat Mills, Steve Moore, Steve Parkhouse and Alan Moore. The other four writers were stalwarts of the British comics scene: Allan, perhaps the least well known today, had been in the business since before Moore was born, and at the time of the interview he was writing virtually all the strips in Look-In, a children’s magazine that ran comic-strip versions of ITV shows like The Tomorrow People and Worzel Gummidge – and sold twice as many copies as 2000AD. Moore was very much a newcomer (this was his earliest published interview), but Lloyd had no hesitation inviting him to the ‘round table’ discussion (they weren’t in the same room – Lloyd had posted the same questions to each writer and collated the responses): ‘He became very famous and well known very quickly. He just happened to be brilliant, and accepted as brilliant, and everyone knew he was brilliant when they met him … There was no surprise with Alan reaching that position because everyone recognised how brilliant he was.’

  Moore was twenty-seven years old, married, the father of two daughters, and the family had just moved across Northampton into a old-fashioned brick council house on Wallace Road. He was now freelancing for 2000AD and Marvel UK, but was yet to work on a regular series for either of them. It is clear from the interview that he was enjoying his job: ‘I find writing comics to be staggeringly easy … on an average day, working at
a fairly leisurely pace, I can turn out a complete five-page script. On a tough day, I can turn out a couple and still be finished by the early evening … I love my work, although having previously been employed in cleaning toilets, this is perhaps less than surprising … I think I’m adequately payed [sic]. Actually, just between you and me, I’m grossly overpaid … I can turn out a four or five-page script in a single day and get a return of somewhere between sixty and ninety quid for my efforts. On top of this I get to buy ludicrous amounts of comics each month.’

  We learn, too, that his 2000AD editor, Steve McManus, had set him the challenge of telling a story without wordy captions; Moore clearly relished the task, but felt the artist had ruined the final product. The artist in question was Walter Howarth, drawing ‘Southern Comfort’ for the 2000AD Sci-Fi Special (July 1980). This early in his career, Moore would have been keen to rack up as many credits as possible, but significantly the strip went out under the pseudonym ‘R.E. Wright’. Moore cited the forthcoming ‘Bax the Burner’ (2000AD Annual 1982, published August 1981), as a particular favourite, praising the artist Steve Dillon, and noting: ‘I was pleased inasmuch as the story was the only one in which I’ve hung the plot around a strong emotional content and not had the whole thing come off as being incredibly trite and sentimental.’

  Moore was ambitious – ‘one day I’d like to have a crack at writing novels, short stories, TV and film scripts, stage plays, kiddie porn and all the rest of that stuff’ – but ‘at this point I can’t see comics as ever becoming anything less than my principal area of concern’. That ambition was not solely personal. His love of comics shines through, and for the first time – but by no means the last – he set down why: ‘To me the medium is possibly one of the most exciting and underdeveloped areas in the whole cultural spectrum. There’s a lot of virgin ground yet to be broken and a hell of a lot of things that haven’t been attempted. If I wasn’t infatuated with the medium I wouldn’t be working in it.’

  This was not what most people working in the British comics industry saw. Twenty or so years later, fellow round-table contributor Steve Parkhouse would say:

  IPC Juveniles were simply regurgitating ideas that were fifty years old. Recycling was the name of the game. Editorial staff were paid next to nothing, installed in draughty old buildings with creaking office furniture and expected to co-exist with the rats, the debris and the general malaise of Farringdon Street and its depressing environs. It was a cottage industry inhabited by middle-aged men in cardigans who smoked pipes. You could see them in the works canteen, spooning down vast quantities of jam roly-poly and custard while discussing the latest developments in model aircraft design.

  Pat Mills was perhaps the highest-profile participant in the SSI round table. By any standards he was an energetic and innovative figure, someone who’d fought against the staid, complacent comics industry. Mills had written the acclaimed Charley’s War, a long-running series in the comic Battle, which followed an underage working-class lad into the trenches of the Somme without flinching from depictions of either brutality or the political context. It was he who had launched first the controversial, violent war comic Action, as well as 2000AD and its fellow SF title Starlord. For each of these comics, he had created, co-created, developed or written early scripts for virtually all the running characters (including Judge Dredd). At the time of the interview, Mills was working on the experimental, satirical, not to mention downright strange Nemesis the Warlock, a regular series for 2000AD with artist Kevin O’Neill. When asked the question ‘What ambitions do you have for strips as a whole?’, though, Mills’ reply was curt and practical: ‘Albums, rights – the usual thing. But I don’t see it happening. Publishers in this country like things the way they are and I don’t see anyone or anything altering their outlook.’

  Moore was far more expansive. At the beginning of the eighties, he described the battlefield on which he would be fighting for the next decade, one he reasoned would involve changing the attitudes of publishers, editors, creators, readers and even society as a whole. It practically amounted to a manifesto:

  There’s such a lot of things I’d like to see happen to comics over the next few years that it’s difficult knowing where to start.

  I’d like to see less dependence upon the existing big comic companies. I’d like to see artists and writers working off their own bat to open up space for comic strips in magazines which might not have considered them before.

  Secondly, I hope that kids’ comics in the eighties will realise what decade they’re in and stop turning out stuff with an intellectual and moral level rooted somewhere in the early fifties. Stories concerning the daring escapades of plucky Nobby Eichmann, Killer Commando decimating the buck-toothed Japs with his cheeky cockney humour and his chattering stengun don’t have a lot of immediate relevance to kids whose only exposure to war is the horribly grey mess that we’ve got in Northern Ireland. I’d like to see an erosion of the barrier between ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ comics. I’d like to see the sweaty, bull-necked masculine stereotype and the whimpering girly counterpart pushed one inch at a time through a Kenwood Chef.

  I’d like to see, and this is purely whimsy, a return to old-fashioned little studio set ups like Eisner/Iger had in the thirties and forties. This would give the artists and writers a greater autonomy, since they’d be selling stuff to the company as a sort of package deal. It would give them a stronger [sic] the merchandising royalties. And I should imagine that some editors might be quite pleased to save time in commissioning one complete job rather than hassling round trying to commission two or three separate people.

  I’d like to see an adult comic that didn’t predominantly feature huge tits, spilled intestines or the sort of brain-damaged, acid-casualty gibbering that Heavy Metal is so fond of.

  In retrospect, it is striking how Moore’s frame of reference is purely the British comics scene. The ‘big comic companies’ he referred to were the UK’s IPC and DC Thomson, not American giants DC and Marvel. Will Eisner was invoked as a legendary creator from before Moore was born, not as the man who had just written and drawn Contract With God, the comic that was the first to have been described as a ‘graphic novel’. It does not even seem to have occurred to Moore that he might work for the American industry.

  But Moore did have one more ambition: ‘My greatest personal hope is that someone will revive Marvelman and I’ll get to write it. KIMOTA!’ Of all the things he said in the interview, it was this throwaway line which would change the course of Moore’s career, and ultimately the direction of the British and American comics industries.

  Alan Moore had just said the magic word.

  Moore’s account of what happened next is that ‘Dez Skinn got in touch with me and said by a remarkable coincidence, he had been planning to revive Marvelman, and would I be interested in writing it?’ In reality, as ever, things were a little more complicated.

  Dez Skinn was a key figure of British comics at the time, and certainly the most colourful. Only two years older than Moore, during the course of the seventies he had progressed from writing comics fanzines like Eureka and Derinn Comic Collector to working at IPC and Warner Publishing (where he devised the successful House of Hammer), and launching Starburst magazine. Having sold Starburst to Marvel UK he had become an editor there, revamping and launching numerous titles like Conan and Hulk Comic as well as Doctor Who Weekly. Along the way he had worked with just about every writer and artist on the British comics scene. Ever ambitious, Skinn had come to understand both that the audience for comics was getting a little older, and that many of the younger generation of creators were frustrated with how hidebound the industry was.

  Bernadette (Bernie) Jaye remembers Skinn as ‘a blond-haired guy who was on a high, brimming with abundant energy and enthusiasm’. Jaye was a sociology student who had shown up at Marvel UK just to take a look around an art studio, but Skinn hired her on the spot as a freelance colourist before employing her fulltime. Soon to become an
editor herself, in which capacity she was eventually to work with Moore, she remembers: ‘It was an incredible atmosphere. Working at Marvel was fun in the main. Most of the staff were aged twenty-something. We were often in the office late into the night meeting ridiculous deadlines or in the local pub … I hadn’t met any “creators” before and I certainly hadn’t met people with a passion for a medium that dated back to their childhood. To have viable status in this arena you needed to have a comics collection, an obsession for the historic details and to have contributed to fanzines. I hadn’t had any of these experiences, couldn’t contribute on any of these levels and as a female I had missed out on all sorts of rites of passage. I never swapped comics in the playground, hunted down comics on my bicycle, made my own comics or had my mother throw some of my comics collection away. What I could do was be supportive of the creators. I had appreciated the freelance work I received from Dez and could offer this opportunity now to others even though it was on a small scale.’

  Most Marvel UK titles relied on reprints of American material. Skinn envisioned a comic that would be an anthology of half a dozen all-new strips, ranging across various genres, such as SF, sword-and-sorcery and superheroes. It was to be a showcase for British talent, and a launchpad for new characters. He planned to call it Warrior. Skinn has said he would have edited the comic for Marvel, but couldn’t get his bosses interested in a showcase for the emerging generation of writers and artists. As Jaye explains, ‘I don’t think providing work for creators was ever fully supported by the management. They didn’t have any history with comics and there was always the feeling it was tolerated rather than enjoyed and promoted. I always felt we were getting by on the blind side.’