Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  The stories and art were crucial, of course, but what really marked the company’s comics out was that Lee used the covers, captions, letters pages and editorial columns to vigorously and enthusiastically blow his own trumpet. The way he did so was so over the top, so hyperbolic, so reminiscent of Robert Preston’s performance as a garrulous travelling salesman in the Broadway show The Music Man, that it was clearly meant to be impossible to take seriously. So, the cover of the first Marvel Comic read by Alan Moore, Fantastic Four #3, declared itself to be

  THE GREATEST COMIC MAGAZINE IN THE WORLD!!

  And on the cover of Fantastic Four #41, readers were promised

  POSSIBLY THE MOST DARINGLY DRAMATIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE FIELD OF CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE!’

  Marvel were moreover canny enough to make sure that all these stories took place in the ‘Marvel Universe’. Spider-Man would swing past the Baxter Building, home of the Fantastic Four, note it had been damaged and speculate on the cause – a caption would helpfully inform readers which issue of Fantastic Four to pick up to find out what had happened. The wartime character Captain America was revived and put in charge of the Avengers, a team initially consisting of Iron Man, Thor and the Hulk, who already had their own monthly comics. You could just read one Marvel title … but why would you when you could read them all?

  Lee not only gave the characters nicknames – the Incredible Hulk, the Uncanny X-Men, the Amazing Spider-Man – Marvel Comics were drawn by Jack ‘King’ Kirby, ‘Sturdy’ Steve Ditko, Gene ‘The Dean’ Colan, ‘Jaunty’ Johnny Romita and the like. Together they were the Marvel Bullpen, and the way Stan Lee told it, no other room on earth buzzed with as much creative energy. Not only did the cover of Fantastic Four #10 proclaim

  THE WORLD’S GREATEST COMIC MAGAZINE! THE FANTASTIC FOUR. HOLD YOUR BREATH!! HERE IS … ‘THE RETURN OF DOCTOR DOOM!’

  but it had a couple of other special guest stars too:

  IN THIS EPIC ISSUE SURPRISE FOLLOWS SURPRISE AS YOU ACTUALLY MEET LEE AND KIRBY IN THE STORY!!!

  Stan Lee’s relentless showmanship demanded and received ferocious brand loyalty from his readers; as Alan Moore has said, ‘We were wild-eyed fanatics to rival the loopiest Thuggee cultist or member of the Manson Family. We were True Believers.’ In truth, Marvel was a tiny company and Fantastic Four had been a last-ditch gamble. Yet, as novelist Michael Chabon, another Marvel acolyte, put it, ‘Lee behaved from the start as if a vast, passionate readership awaited each issue that he and his key collaborators, Kirby and Steve Ditko, churned out. And in a fairly short period of time, this chutzpah – as in all those accounts of magical chutzpah so beloved by solitary boys like me – was rewarded. By pretending to have a vast network of fans, former fan Stanley Lieber found himself in possession of a vast network of fans.’

  For UK readers, the comics themselves were artefacts rocketed from a full-colour fantasyland. The Marvel Bullpen intended their version of New York to be ordinary, just the view as they saw it when they looked out of their window, a backdrop to be overlaid with daydreams of the incredible, amazing and fantastic. For Alan Moore, though, a boy living in an English town where the tallest buildings soared to the height of 115 feet, the Manhattan skyline that Spider-Man swung though, or the Lower East Side neighbourhood the Thing came from, or the Hell’s Kitchen patrolled by Daredevil were themselves all ‘as exotic as Mars. The idea of buildings of that scale, the idea of this modernity that seemed to pervade everything. This was a futuristic science fiction world.’

  Merely finding DC and Marvel comics in the UK required a degree of arcane knowledge, as they had no formal distribution. They arrived on freight ships which used tied-up bundles of old magazines as ballast. The bundles were meant to be thrown away, but were sold on to traders by entrepreneurial dockworkers. Seven-year-old Alan Moore had first stumbled across copies of Flash, Detective Comics and other DC titles on a stall ran by a man called Sid in Northampton’s ancient market square, and ever since he’d been back every week.

  He certainly understood that there was little chance of finding the best, most recent American comics on the annual family holiday in Norfolk. Every year, Ernest and Sylvia Moore would take their sons Alan and Mike for a week at the North Denes Caravan Camp in Great Yarmouth on the east coast of England. This was around 130 miles from home, the furthest the Moores would typically venture.

  In the mid-sixties the bucket-and-spade British holiday was still in its heyday, with practically every family enjoying time at the beach at some point in July or August. One consequence of this was that seaside towns had a captive audience of millions of bored children. The British comics companies catered for them by printing Summer Specials of their titles, larger comics that often featured reprinted material or activities like colouring pages and stories involving the regular characters on holiday. Unsold stock was also retired to the seaside, ending its life fading on spinner racks and boxes in seafront shops. Moore would trawl through them hoping to uncover some unexpected treasure among the trash. It was on one such family holiday, in 1966, that he found the aforementioned collections of highlights from Mad, introducing him to ‘Superduperman’. He also came across an old hardback annual featuring the British superhero Young Marvelman, which he was less excited about, but he liked the cover and decided to buy it.

  The name Marvelman enables us to make one of those connections that demonstrate how small the world of comics often is. The Captain Marvel strip was reprinted in the UK by publisher L. Miller and Co, and one consequence of the lawsuit parodied in ‘Superduperman’ was that Miller had to find new material once Fawcett ceased publication of Captain Marvel in the US. Their solution was to create an almost identical character. Captain Marvel had been a young boy, Billy Batson, who would say the magic word ‘Shazam!’ and be hit by a bolt of magic lightning that transformed him into an adult who had super strength and could fly. Artist Mick Anglo created a ‘new’ character, Marvelman, a young boy, Mickey Moran, who would say the magic word ‘Kimota!’ and be hit by a bolt of atomic lightning (‘kimota’ is, give or take, ‘atomic’ spelled backwards) that transformed him into … an adult who had super strength and could fly. Where Captain Marvel had a young sidekick called Captain Marvel Jnr, Marvelman had the sidekick Young Marvelman. Their adventures were published for nine years from 1954 to 1963 and amassed a total of 722 issues and 19 hardback annuals.

  Even at twelve, Alan Moore knew Marvelman to be a rather cheap knock-off, but when he read the stories in the annual, he found them more charming than he had expected. His awareness of the history of the character sparked an idle thought: ‘I knew that Marvelman hadn’t been printed for about two or three years and that Marvelman had vanished … It occurred to me then “I wonder what Marvelman’s doing at the moment?” three years after his book got cancelled. The image I had in my head was of an older Mickey Moran trying to remember the magic word that would change him back to Marvelman.’ Like all good origin stories, the events of that day have been recounted numerous times over the years, and perhaps tidied up a little to make for a better tale. Moore gave the definitive account in an interview in 2010:

  I remember I was reading these two very disparate books back in the caravan, and somehow there was a kind of a cross-fertilisation – well, it wasn’t even that much of a cross-fertilisation. I read the ‘Superduperman’ story, and thought, ‘Oh, I’d really like to do a story like that, that was so funny,’ and I thought, well, you couldn’t do it about Superman, because they’ve already done it. Could you do a story like that about this British superhero, Marvelman, that I was aware of? And so I just started to think about it – I think at the time I was even planning to submit it to the school magazine, which was the only publishing outlet that was available to me back then. It never got any further than just the idea, but I can remember that I thought it would be kind of funny to have Mickey Moran grown up and become an adult, who’d forgotten his magic word. And, yeah, at the time, that was seen as a satirical, humorous situation, but the
idea just stayed in my mind, and over the next twenty or something years, fifteen years, it obviously percolated until it became my version of Marvelman.

  Throughout his career, Moore has acknowledged ‘Superduperman’ as being a huge influence on his work, and the links to ‘Superduperman’ are often pretty concrete. As he implies in that interview, Moore would eventually write his Marvelman story (1982–9), and it culminates with, essentially, the battle from ‘Superduperman’ played straight: the hero does a vast amount of damage to the city he is meant to be protecting and finally defeats his equally powerful opponent only by tricking him; in addition, one of Moore’s last pitches to DC Comics was Twilight (1986), a series that, had it been made, would have featured an epic battle between Superman and Captain Marvel.

  Moore’s most substantial debt to ‘Superduperman’, though, has nothing to do with specific characters or plot points. It relies on his own formulation of how the story fits into the history of comics, and the philosophy it encapsulates: ‘The way that Harvey Kurtzman used to make his superhero parodies so funny was to take a superhero and then apply sort of real world logic to a kind of inherently absurd superhero situation … It struck me that if you just turn the dial to the same degree in the other direction by applying real life logic to a superhero, you could make something that was very funny, but you could also, with a turn of the screw, make something that was quite startling, sort of dramatic and powerful.’ Moore has identified a desire to mimic the density of information in each panel of ‘Superduperman’ and its cynical take on heroism as the seed of Watchmen, but the idea he credits to Kurtzman of applying ‘real world logic’ is at the core of almost all of his early stories.

  The family holiday over, the Moores returned home to their three-bedroom terraced council house at 17 St Andrew’s Road, in the Boroughs area of Northampton, opposite a large railway station (then Northampton Castle, later renamed Northampton). Alan lived with his parents Ernest, a labourer at a brewery, and Sylvia, who worked at a printer’s, his maternal grandmother, Clara Mallard, and younger brother Mike. The family had lived in the same house for thirty or forty years. Just before Alan was born, it had also accommodated uncle Les, aunt Queenie and their baby Jim (who slept in the wardrobe drawer), as well as another aunt, Hilda, her husband Ted and their children, John and Eileen. Life in such a crowded house had been tense although, as Moore noted at the time, he ‘was employed as a foetus and was thus spared the worst effects’.

  The Boroughs – now Spring Boroughs – area of Northampton remains one of the most deprived areas of the United Kingdom. The town’s main industry had for centuries been boot and shoe manufacturing. The houses were a hundred years old, with outside toilets and no running hot water, although the Moores’ house was considered luxurious compared with many in the neighbourhood because the council had installed electric lighting. Ernest Moore earned around £780 a year, when the national average was about £1,330, and once told Alan that £15 a week wasn’t enough, and he hoped one day his son might earn £18. This was not abject poverty – the family may have used tin baths filled with water heated in a copper boiler, but that wasn’t so uncommon at the time, and they never went hungry. The Moores had a television when Alan was growing up, and every week he was given a little pocket money.

  Alan was born in St Edmund’s Hospital on 18 November 1953, blind in his left eye. At first he had red hair, a family trait (there were people alive in 1953 who remembered his great-grandfather, Mad Ginger Vernon). He was baptised into the Church of England at the local church, St Peter’s, and with both his parents at work, he was raised by his grandmother, ‘a working class, Victorian matriarch. She was a deeply religious woman who never said very much but then didn’t need to because everybody obeyed her implicitly’. Moore doubts she ‘ever travelled more than five or ten miles from the place she was born’. (While his grandmother was devout, Moore did not have a religious upbringing, and has claimed he learned the basics of morality from reading Superman.)

  In 1967, Jeremy Seabrook wrote The Unprivileged, the first book in a long career charting poverty throughout the world. It was an oral history of the working class of Northampton. The portrait he painted was of a community only a few generations away from agricultural peasantry, locked into old rituals of speech, family behaviour, deference to their social superiors and plain superstition: ‘The real fear in which their superstitions held them – and at least fifty common phenomena were considered certain forerunners of death – was a grim and joyless feature of their lives … Their irrational beliefs were like an hereditary poison, which, if it no longer manifests itself in blains and pustules on the surface of the skin, nonetheless continues its toxic effects insidiously and invisibly.’ This is echoed in Moore’s description of his grandmother, who had a ‘nightmarish array of sinister and unfathomable superstitions … she managed through sheer force of will to involve the entire household in her system of Juju and Counter-Juju. Knives crossed upon the dinner table, as an instance, heralded the forthcoming destruction of the house and its immediate neighbourhood by a rogue comet. To avert this peril, the catastrophically crossed cutlery had to be struck forcibly by yet a third knife.’ Seabrook concluded that attitudes like this left people insular and ill-equipped to deal with a world that was changing rapidly, that they were ‘exposed to an overwhelming sense of loss, seeing the certainties of a lifetime take on a bewildering and terrifying relativity … the life of the streets had a devitalising effect and did not allow of any departure from a rigidly fixed pattern of behaviour and relationships.’

  The Unprivileged was a study of Seabrook’s own upbringing. He was born just a few streets away from the Moores’ house, fourteen years before Alan. He recalls:

  As far as working-class Northampton of that time is concerned, it was definitely separated by districts – Far Cotton and Jimmy’s End were different from the Boroughs, which were, in any case, in the process of being demolished in the late fifties, early sixties. The boot and shoe industry was also being eclipsed – it was one of the earliest occupations that were victims of de-industrialisation. The most remarkable thing was the sameness of people’s lives – the almost regimented coming and going to work, the predictability of life – the pub, factory, maybe chapel, the pictures, the young people walking up and down Abington Street, the slightly louche places like Becket’s Park (clandestinely gay) and around the Criterion and Mitre (prostitution). The arrival of the bus from the American base in the market square on Saturday night was a weekly event.

  In the mid-sixties, Seabrook was teaching at the local grammar school, where he was Alan Moore’s first-form French teacher the year before he wrote The Unprivileged. He doesn’t recall Moore specifically, but when he describes the prevailing character of the area, he uses at least some of the same words that have been used to describe Moore over the years: ‘The shoe people were generally narrow, suspicious, mean, self-reliant, pig-headed, but generally honourable and as good as their word.’

  Moore could not have known as a boy that many of the early comic book writers and artists had grown up in an even more deprived place than fifties Northampton – the Depression-era New York slums. It would be some years before comics fans turned their attention to the history of the ‘Golden Age’ of the 1940s, and it’s perhaps only in the twenty-first century that studies of the period have gone beyond the anecdotal. But Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), Gerard Jones’ book Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (2005) and Michael Schumacher’s biography of Will Eisner, A Dreamer’s Life in Comics (2010) paint a consistent picture of the genesis of the industry and of the superhero genre, revealing a pattern of the young sons of immigrants exploited by companies formed and run using highly dubious business practices … often by other young sons of immigrants.

  Much later, some of the Golden Age creators would write overtly autobiographical works, like Eisner’s A Contract With God (1978) and L
ife, In Pictures (2008). Although it was not always so obvious, their superhero work in the 1940s often drew from personal experience as well. Many comics were power fantasies about confronting bullies – from a crook on the corner to Hitler himself. Comics historian Mark Evanier, a friend and former assistant to artist Jack Kirby, has described Fantastic Four member The Thing as ‘an obvious Kirby self-caricature’. The Thing is a gruff and pugnacious brawler who was a member of the Yancy Street Gang as a kid. Jack Kirby had been a member of the Suffolk Street Gang, and had frequently fought running battles on the streets and rooftops of the Lower East Side in turf wars with the Norfolk Street Gang:

  I had to draw the things I knew. In one fight scene, I recognised my uncle. I’d subconsciously drawn my uncle, and I didn’t know it until I took the page home. So I was drawing reality, and if you look through all my drawings, you’ll see reality.

  Like all artists, the creators of comic books draw on what they know. The life stories of comic book writers and artists are often far darker, stranger and more troubled than those of their creations. There’s no contradiction here. Who is going to have the strongest urge to enjoy creating escapist fiction? Someone with a life they want to escape from.

  Moore, however, has corrected interviewers seeking to portray his early life as particularly squalid, saying on one occasion ‘this is not a tale of extraordinary poverty by any means … I had a very happy childhood’ and explaining ‘I never really thought much about material luxury. That was kind of where I was starting from. My family never had anything. It was never as grim as it sounds because it was normal, in [the] context of what I was used to.’ This doesn’t mean he waxes lyrical about his background, either. While he remains committed to his roots, and sees much of value – far more than Seabrook does – in the culture found in the terraced streets of Northampton, now and then, there are, Moore concedes, ‘things I personally find very sad about the working class. You know, a lot of them are a bunch of racists, a bunch of idiots. They’re in these awful social traps that they can’t get out of. They blunder through life.’