Alan Moore
Alan Moore (born 18 November 1953) is an English author known primarily for his work in comic books including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Ballad of Halo Jones, Swamp Thing, Batman: The Killing Joke, and From Hell.[1] He is widely recognised among his peers and critics as one of the best comic book writers in the English language.[2][3] Moore has occasionally used such pseudonyms as Curt Vile, Jill de Ray, Brilburn Logue, and Translucia Baboon; also, reprints of some of his work have been credited to The Original Writer when Moore requested that his name be removed.[4]
For other people named Alan Moore, see Alan Moore (disambiguation).
Alan Moore
18 November 1953
Northampton, England
- Curt Vile
- Jill de Ray
- Translucia Baboon
- Brilburn Logue
- The Original Writer
Comics writer, novelist,
short story writer, musician, cartoonist, magician, occultist
Science fiction, fiction,
non-fiction, superhero, horror
- Phyllis Moore
- Melinda Gebbie (m. 2007)
- Amber Moore
- Leah Moore
Moore started writing for British underground and alternative fanzines in the late 1970s before achieving success publishing comic strips in such magazines as 2000 AD and Warrior. He was subsequently picked up by DC Comics as "the first comics writer living in Britain to do prominent work in America",[3]: 7 where he worked on major characters such as Batman (Batman: The Killing Joke) and Superman ("Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?"), substantially developed the character Swamp Thing, and penned original titles such as Watchmen. During that decade, Moore helped to bring about greater social respectability for comics in the United States and United Kingdom.[3]: 11 He prefers the term "comic" to "graphic novel".[5] In the late 1980s and early 1990s he left the comic industry mainstream and went independent for a while, working on experimental work such as the epic From Hell and the prose novel Voice of the Fire. He subsequently returned to the mainstream later in the 1990s, working for Image Comics, before developing America's Best Comics, an imprint through which he published works such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the occult-based Promethea. In 2016, he published Jerusalem: a 1,266-page experimental novel set in his hometown of Northampton, UK.
Moore is an occultist, ceremonial magician,[6] and anarchist,[7] and has featured such themes in works including Promethea, From Hell, and V for Vendetta, as well as performing avant-garde spoken word occult "workings" with The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, some of which have been released on CD.
Despite his objections, Moore's works have provided the basis for several Hollywood films, including From Hell (2001), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), V for Vendetta (2005), and Watchmen (2009). Moore has also been referenced in popular culture and has been recognised as an influence on a variety of literary and television figures including Neil Gaiman[8] and Damon Lindelof.[9] He has lived a significant portion of his life in Northampton, England, and he has said in various interviews that his stories draw heavily from his experiences living there.
Career[edit]
Early career, as writer and artist: 1978–1983[edit]
Abandoning his office job, he decided to instead take up both writing and illustrating his own comics. He had already produced a couple of strips for several alternative fanzines and magazines, such as Anon E. Mouse for the local paper Anon, and St. Pancras Panda, a parody of Paddington Bear, for the Oxford-based Back Street Bugle.[3]: 16–17 His first paid work was for a few drawings that were printed in NME. In late 1979/early 1980, he and his friend, comic-book writer Steve Moore (whom he had known since he was fourteen)[17]: 20 co-created the violent cyborg character Axel Pressbutton for some comics in Dark Star, a British music magazine. (Steve Moore wrote the strip under the name "Pedro Henry", while Alan Moore drew them using the pseudonym of Curt Vile, a pun on the name of composer Kurt Weill.)
Not long afterward, Alan Moore succeeded in getting an underground comix-type series about a private detective known as Roscoe Moscow (who is investigating the "death of Rock N' Roll") published (under the Curt Vile name) in the weekly music magazine Sounds,[18] earning £35 a week. Alongside this, he and Phyllis, with their newborn daughter Leah, began claiming unemployment benefit to supplement this income.[2]: 36 After the conclusion of Roscoe Moscow, Moore started a new strip for Sounds – the serialized comic "The Stars My Degradation" (a reference to Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination), featuring Axel Pressbutton. Alan Moore wrote most of the episodes of "The Stars My Degradation" and drew all of them, which appeared in Sounds from 12 July 1980, to 19 March 1983.
Beginning in 1979 Moore created a new comic strip known as Maxwell the Magic Cat in the Northants Post (based in Moore's hometown), under the pseudonym of Jill de Ray (a pun on the Medieval child murderer Gilles de Rais, something he found to be a "sardonic joke"). Earning a further £10 a week from this, he decided to sign off of social security and to continue writing and drawing Maxwell the Magic Cat until 1986.[2]: 36–37 Moore has stated that he would have been happy to continue Maxwell's adventures almost indefinitely but ended the strip after the newspaper ran a negative editorial on the place of homosexuals in the community.[19] Meanwhile, Moore decided to focus more fully on writing comics rather than both writing and drawing them,[20] stating that "After I'd been doing [it] for a couple of years, I realised that I would never be able to draw well enough and/or quickly enough to actually make any kind of decent living as an artist."[17]: 15
To learn more about how to write a successful comic-book script, he asked for advice from his friend Steve Moore. Interested in writing for 2000 AD, one of Britain's most prominent comic magazines, Alan Moore then submitted a script for their long-running and successful series Judge Dredd. While having no need for another writer on Judge Dredd, which was already being written by John Wagner, fellow writer Alan Grant saw promise in Moore's work – later remarking that "this guy's a really fucking good writer"[21] – and instead asked him to write some short stories for the publication's Future Shocks series. While the first few were rejected, Grant advised Moore on improvements, and eventually accepted the first of many. Meanwhile, Moore had also begun writing minor stories for Doctor Who Weekly and later commented that "I really, really wanted a regular strip. I didn't want to do short stories ... But that wasn't what 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."[17]: 21–22
Marvel UK, 2000 AD, and Warrior: 1980–1986[edit]
From 1980 through to 1986, Moore maintained his status as a freelance writer and was offered a spate of work by a variety of comic book companies in Britain, mainly Marvel UK, and the publishers of 2000 AD and Warrior. He later remarked that "I remember that what was generally happening was that everybody wanted to give me work, for fear that I would just be given other work by their rivals. So everybody was offering me things."[2]: 57 It was an era when comic books were increasing in popularity in Britain, and according to Lance Parkin, "the British comics scene was cohering as never before, and it was clear that the audience was sticking with the title as they grew up. Comics were no longer just for very small boys: teenagers – even A-level and university students – were reading them now."[3]: 20
During this period, 2000 AD would accept and publish over fifty of Moore's one-off stories for their Future Shocks and Time Twisters science fiction series.[21][22] The editors at the magazine were impressed by Moore's work and decided to offer him a more permanent strip, starting with a story that they wanted to be vaguely based upon the hit film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The result, Skizz, which was illustrated by Jim Baikie, told the story of the titular alien who crashes to Earth and is cared for by a teenager named Roxy, and Moore later noted that in his opinion, this work "owes far too much to Alan Bleasdale."[23]: 94 Another series he produced for 2000 AD was D.R. and Quinch, which was illustrated by Alan Davis. The story, which Moore described as "continuing the tradition of Dennis the Menace, but giving him a thermonuclear capacity",[23]: 99 revolved around two delinquent aliens, and was a science-fiction take on National Lampoon's characters O.C. and Stiggs. The work widely considered to be the highlight of his 2000 AD career,[23]: 100–110 and that which he described as "the one that worked best for me",[2]: 58 was The Ballad of Halo Jones.[23]: 99–102 Co-created with artist Ian Gibson, the series was about a young woman in the 50th century. The series was discontinued after three books due to a dispute between Moore and Fleetway, the magazine's publishers, over the intellectual property rights of the characters Moore and Gibson had co-created.
Another comic company to employ Moore was Marvel UK, who had formerly purchased a few of his one-off stories for Doctor Who Weekly and Star Wars Weekly. Aiming to get an older audience than 2000 AD, their main rival, they employed Moore to write for the regular strip Captain Britain, "halfway through a storyline that he's neither inaugurated nor completely understood."[24] He replaced the former writer Dave Thorpe but maintained the original artist, Alan Davis, whom Moore described as "an artist whose love for the medium and whose sheer exultation upon finding himself gainfully employed within it shine from every line, every new costume design, each nuance of expression."[24]
Work[edit]
Themes[edit]
In a number of his comics, where he was taking over from earlier writers, including Marvelman, Swamp Thing, and Supreme, he used the "familiar tactic of wiping out what had gone before, giving the hero amnesia and revealing that everything we'd learned to that point was a lie."[3]: 58 In this manner he was largely able to start afresh with the character and its series and was not constrained by earlier canon. While commenting on the artistic restrictiveness of serialised comic books, artist Joe Rubinstein gave the example that a comics creator would be limited in what he could do with Spider-Man, and added, "unless you're Alan Moore, who would probably kill him and bring him back as a real spider or something".[87]
As a comics writer, Moore applies literary sensibilities to the mainstream of the medium as well as including challenging subject matter and adult themes. He brings a wide range of influences to his work, such as William S. Burroughs,[88] William Blake,[89] Thomas Pynchon,[90] and Iain Sinclair,[91] New Wave science fiction writers like Michael Moorcock, and horror writers such as Clive Barker.[92] Influences within comics include Will Eisner,[93] Steve Ditko,[94] Harvey Kurtzman,[95] Jack Kirby,[96] and Bryan Talbot.[97][98][99]
Recognition and awards[edit]
Moore's work in the comic book medium has been widely recognised by his peers and by critics. Comics historian George Khoury asserted that "to call this free spirit the best writer in the history of comic books is an understatement"[2]: 10 while interviewer Steve Rose referred to him as "the Orson Welles of comics" who is "the undisputed high priest of the medium, whose every word is seized upon like a message from the ether" by comic book fans.[100] Douglas Wolk observed: "Moore has undisputably made it into the Hall of Fame: he's one of the pillars of English language comics, alongside Jack Kirby and Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman and not many others. He's also the grand exception in that hall, since the other pillars are artists – and more often than not, writer/artists. Moore is a writer almost exclusively, though his hyper detailed scripts always play to the strengths of the artists he works with. That makes him the chief monkey wrench in comics author theory. The main reason that almost nobody's willing to say that a single cartoonist is categorically superior to a writer/artist team is that such a rule would run smack into Moore's bibliography. In fact, a handful of cartoonists who almost always write the stories they draw have made exceptions for Moore – Jaime Hernandez, Mark Beyer and most memorably Eddie Campbell."[101]: 229
Moore was voted Best Writer by the Society of Strip Illustration in both 1982 and 1983.[102]
