Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  Soon afterwards, Moore and Alex Green started a band, taking a name from a Wallace Stevens poem, The Emperors of Ice Cream. Once they had an album’s worth of material – a process that apparently took around a year – they advertised for musicians in the Northampton Chronicle and Echo in October 1978. One respondent was David J. Haskins, who met Green but had to decline the opportunity to become a member as he had just joined another band. This was Bauhaus, now usually considered the earliest goth group, whose debut single ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ quickly led to a session on John Peel’s Radio One show. Moore did not meet David J until a little later, but theirs would prove to be a lasting creative partnership. The Emperors of Ice Cream, however, neither performed nor recorded. Alex Green has referred to the project as ‘the dream band that never got beyond rehearsals’.

  In the summer of 1979, another friend of Moore’s from the Arts Group days, Mr Liquorice, opened the Deadly Fun Hippodrome, an afternoon venue for local and visiting musicians. David J has said Moore was ‘partly behind’ the venture, and described it as ‘a mad anarchic surrealist cabaret … all the eccentric artists in Northampton would crawl out of the woodwork and turn up for this event … It was held in an old Edwardian pavilion in the middle of the Northampton race course.’ According to Moore, ‘over the single summer of its brief duration it built up a loyal audience of, literally, dozens’. One afternoon, there was a gap in the schedule, and Moore formed an impromptu band consisting of himself, David J, Alex Green (who by now had the stage name Max Akropolis) and Glyn Bush (aka Grant Series, from the Birmingham band De-go-Tees). They called themselves the Sinister Ducks, played for half an hour and ‘didn’t rehearse or even speak to each other’ for another two years afterwards. The spirit of the Arts Lab clearly lived on, with Moore and his mates having fun creating impromptu cabaret-style shows that were evidently more of an elaborate private joke than anything akin to a workable public performance.

  Meanwhile, Moore was still following comics. Fifteen years on from the launch of Fantastic Four, Marvel had continued to mature with their audience. DC had responded, and American superhero comics were now vehicles for complex running stories with a smattering of social conscience. Future novelists Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon – both around ten years younger than Moore – were among those inspired by the Marvel and DC comics of the seventies. In his book of essays Manhood for Amateurs, Chabon waxes lyrical about comics of his youth, and particularly Big Barda, a character from DC’s Fourth World (1970–3). This was Jack Kirby’s infectiously bizarre space-age reinterpretation of folklore archetypes that explored cosmic war between good guys called Highfather and Lightray, and evil personified by beings with names like Darkseid and Virman Vundabar. In 2007, Marvel would publish Lethem’s take on their equally weird, equally cosmic character from the seventies, Omega the Unknown (1976–7).

  Moore continued to read American superhero comics – ‘by the time I was in my middle twenties, I was still occasionally reading the odd Marvel or DC comic just to see if anything interesting was happening’ – but had all but stopped attending comics marts and conventions. He agreed with Steve Moore that fandom was becoming obsessed with the past, when it should be striving to improve the quality of storytelling in new comics, and tellingly he didn’t contribute to any fanzines. He did, however, identify the Fourth World titles as a highlight: ‘We were all really thrilled by them. I remember at the comic convention where I actually saw some early copies of Jimmy Olsen work, just how excited everybody was just to see them coming out … we were all absolutely devastated when the books seemed to finish without a proper ending.’ This interest continued throughout the seventies – Moore has noted, ‘I remember reading Frank Miller’s first stuff on Daredevil, and thinking, “Oh, this was worth buying all those crap comics for; this is something interesting, I can follow this”.’ Miller’s run on Daredevil began in May 1979, and introduced a noir sensibility to what had been a run-of-the-mill series about an acrobatic superhero.

  Two comics in particular spurred Moore on to become a comics creator, not just a reader. The first was Arcade: The Comics Revue (1975–6), edited by prominent members of the San Francisco underground scene, Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith, and designed as a showcase for the best in comics for adults. Moore discovered back issues in the London shop Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed and quickly concluded that the lavish magazine contained ‘a collection of comic material that swiftly elevated Arcade: The Comics Revue to the Olympian reaches of my Three Favourite Comics Ever In The History Of The Universe. As is usually the way when I encounter something I’m really fond of, my condition escalated rapidly from good natured boyish enthusiasm to an embarrassing display of slobbering hysteria.’ Over twenty years later, Moore would explain that he felt ‘Arcade was perhaps the last of the original wave of underground comix, as well as their finest hour … As well as showcasing new and radically different artists, Arcade also seemed somehow to encourage work from underground artists of long standing that ranked amongst the best they’d ever done.’ Arcade #4 included Stalin by Spain Rodriguez, which Moore ‘ranks as one of my favourite single comic strip pieces of all time’. He was spurred on to write an effusive fan letter to the editors and, in late September 1976, received the following reply from Bill Griffith:

  Alan,

  Thanks for the entertaining letter. Seeing as it was of such a high intellectual calibre, we’ll most likely print it in our next issue … You almost found us too late. No 7 is just out and No 8 (out in 6–10 months) will be our last as a magazine. After that we go annual, in paperback form. I’m afraid we’re a bit too avant-garde for the Mafia.

  Tally ho,

  Griffy.

  In the event, though, #7 was the last.

  In 1984, Moore wrote ‘Too Avant Garde for the Mafia’, an essay for the fanzine Infinity which surveyed the seven issues of Arcade and their contributors. He concluded:

  Arcade was an almost perfect culmination of the whole idea of Underground Comix. Granted, there have been worthy individual efforts by the various Arcade contributors since then, but somehow without the same flair … Balance is what Arcade achieved, in a nutshell. It balanced Griffith’s metaphysical slapstick against Spiegelman’s thirst for self-referential comic material and ground their more explosive experiments with a solid anchor of Robert Crumb’s simple and unadorned storytelling. It pushed the medium in all sorts of new directions, the vast majority of which still remain to be properly explored almost ten years later. Anyone seriously interested in seeing what directions comics might go in the future could do a lot worse than checking out just how far they’ve been in the not too distant past.

  On the face of it, the second comic to inspire Moore could not have been more different. 2000AD was a weekly science fiction comic for boys that launched in February 1977 (and is still running today). It was published by IPC, publishers of children’s comics like Whizzer & Chips and Roy of the Rovers, and the early issues came with free gifts like a ‘space spinner’ and stickers. It had evolved, though, from Action, a comic first published the previous February, then abruptly cancelled after tabloid outrage at the violence of strips like Look Out for Lefty, about football hooligans, and Hellman of Hammer Force, whose protagonist was a Nazi tank commander. Over the next few years, 2000AD would thrill its audience with action-packed (i.e. violent) stories featuring characters like Dan Dare, Rogue Trooper, Strontium Dog, Nemesis the Warlock and Slaine – and, towering over all of them, future lawman Judge Dredd.

  Picking up an early issue because he liked Brian Bolland’s cover (see following page), Moore was pleasantly surprised by the contents. He instinctively understood what 2000AD was trying to do, and recognised that it was attracting the top British comics talent. More than that, many of the contributors were writers and artists Moore had known for years. ‘When I was getting into comics, I’d recognised Dave Gibbons and Brian Bolland’s work in 2000AD, I’d recognised those names and those styles from the underground magazines of
ten years before. Ian Gibson, he’d done some stuff in Steve Moore’s Orpheus fanzine. So a lot of these names, I recognised them from fandom, or from the underground.’ But that wasn’t what drew him to the comic. As he explained elsewhere: ‘You’d got really funny, cynical writers working on 2000AD at that time. This was mainly Pat Mills and John Wagner, who had previously spent eleven years working on the British girls’ comics. And they had grown cynical and possibly actually evil during this time.’ Wagner, continued Moore, had once written a script called The Blind Ballerina, in which the title character would find herself in increasingly dire situations:

  At the end of each episode you’d have her evil Uncle saying, ‘Yes, come with me. You’re going out on to the stage of the Albert Hall where you’re going to give your premiere performance’ and it’s the fast lane of the M1. And she’s sort of pirouetting and there’s trucks bearing down on her … hell, they were funny even in the girls’ comics. But when John got a science fiction comic to play with he could really amp up the humour. I saw this stuff and thought these people were intelligent, there’s satirical stuff, I could maybe write something that would play to this audience and would also be interesting for me to write.

  Moore understood that the creators were sneaking in political and subversive material. Broad satire, to be sure, but Judge Dredd routinely took ‘tough policing’ firmly into the realms of police brutality, if not fascism, and the strip made clear that, in large part, the endemic crime in Mega-City One was a result of social injustice. More to the point, the editors needed to fill pages every week. Finally, there was a venue for the sort of stories Alan Moore wanted to write, and they were hiring new writers.

  Alan Moore was twenty-four the year 2000AD launched. He’d switched employers from Kelly Brothers to Pipeline Constructors Ltd – another office job processing paperwork for a company that supplied and fitted pipes for the Gas Board – while he and Phyllis had moved to a brand new council house in Blackthorn. In the autumn of 1977, Phyllis Moore was pregnant. This represented a decision point for Alan: ‘I was married and we had our first child on the way. I always had a vague idea that it would be nice at some point in the future to actually make my living out of doing something that I enjoyed rather than something I despised which was, like, everything other than comics. So, I figured that my wife was pregnant, if I didn’t give up the job and make a stab at some kind of artistic career before the baby was born that, I know the limits of my courage, I wouldn’t have been up for doing it after I’ve got these big, imploring eyes staring up at me. So, I quit.’

  With the benefit payments Alan and Phyllis Moore received amounting to £42.50 a week, ‘the bare minimum they needed to live on’, Moore determined that he would measure his success by his ability to earn more through his writing. So he buckled down to the task of becoming a professional comics writer, embarking on a space opera with the projected title Sun Dodgers which he thought he could write and draw for 2000AD, ‘an epic that I could’ve easily filled 300 pages with. A massive story that made Lord of the Rings look like a five-minute read’.

  It was all in my head … there was a group of superheroes in space, with a science fiction explanation for each of these characters. They were a motley crew in a spaceship, probably going back the kind of strips Wally Wood was doing in witzend and The Misfits … I can remember somebody looked a bit like a futuristic samurai. A humanoid robot thing with a big steel ball for a head, which probably surfaced later as the Hypernaut in 1963. There was a half-human, half-canine creature who ended up as Wardog in the Special Executive. Thinking back, there was a character whose name was Five, and my vague idea was that he was a mental patient of undefined but unusual abilities who had been kept in a particular room, room five, that might have been an element which fed into V for Vendetta.

  Moore got very little of this down on paper. ‘I think about six months later I’d got one page half pencilled, some inks. I just thought, “Why am I doing this?” I realised it was because I was never going to finish it.’

  He sought practical advice from Steve Moore, who by this point was making a living selling comic scripts, and who gently explained that 2000AD wouldn’t just give a new writer a regular series. Writers and artists were expected to start their careers with one-off, self-contained pieces that were typically two to five pages long. Most British comics had slots for stories of this type, not because they allowed editors to test new talent so much as because they allowed for a far more flexible schedule than a roster of regular titles. In 2000AD these shorter pieces were published in the series Future Shocks and Time Twisters. Future star writers like Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and Pete Milligan would all start at 2000AD by writing Future Shocks; it was how most writers and artists got their break for the magazine. The original idea, and name, for Future Shocks is usually credited to Steve Moore himself, and he certainly wrote the first story to appear under that banner (‘King of the World’ in #25, 13 August 1977), although such stories had a venerable heritage dating back at least as far as the EC Horror and SF comics of the fifties. Wherever they appeared, the strips tended to be fairly generic tales with a very limited repertoire of twist endings – most concluded with the protagonist dying because he wasn’t careful what he wished for, or his greed had led him to walk into a trap, or he didn’t realise his world was merely a simulation, or he was rude to someone who was secretly some kind of monster.

  Abandoning his space opera, Alan wrote instead a thirty-panel Judge Dredd script, ‘Something Nasty in Mega-City One!!’, complete with design sketches. Steve Moore gave him advice about formatting the script and warned of common mistakes: a writer shouldn’t have overlong dialogue; captions aren’t needed to convey information shown in that panel’s picture; one panel can’t (usually) convey a sequence of events or even motion, much of the skill is in deciding which exact moment will appear in every panel. The Dredd script was rejected by 2000AD assistant editor Alan Grant, but he encouraged Moore to submit further ideas.

  In an article for Warrior published five years later, Steve Moore described his own rise, ‘the long way … joined Odhams Press as an office boy, way back in 1967 … then worked my way up through sub-editor. Started on Pow! and Smash! … ended up at IPC’. The new generation of British comics writers – people like himself, Alan Grant, Steve Parkhouse and Pat Mills – had all started out as junior editors on the staff of comics companies in the late sixties, spending a decade learning their craft and the trade, mainly by reading lots of scripts, networking and seeing the commissioning process from the editor’s point of view. Steve Moore noted that ‘the other way is how Alan Moore came into the business … by bombarding people with scripts from outside’. Moore says: ‘I don’t think Steve was saying that through gritted teeth, so much as noting he’d never actually seen it done that way before.’ He has described his method of breaking into the comics industry as ‘a matter of going round the back, poisoning the dogs and going over the fence’.

  Moore was not looking to write only for 2000AD. He cast his net anywhere he found that published comic strips – places like newspapers, underground zines and the music press. And his persistence started to pay off. He was contacted by Dick Foreman, editor of The Back-Street Bugle, a fortnightly, Oxford-based alternative paper, who’d been told about Moore by a couple of Arts Lab alumni who’d moved to the town, Ant and Jackie Knight. Moore was offered a full-page strip, and came up with St Pancras Panda. This series is usually described as a pastiche of the children’s character Paddington Bear, but in fact it is basically a pretext for Moore to be increasingly mean to a sweet little panda. The tone is set in the first part, where our hero is rounded up along with Winnie the Pooh, the Dandy’s Biffo the Bear and Dougal from The Magic Roundabout and consigned to a furrier’s. ‘I was still drawing benefits and I still hadn’t really got around to submitting anything professionally, but working on the strip I did for The Back-Street Bugle, St Pancras Panda, I was able to meet deadlines, I was able to find how much time I ne
eded to get the strip looking the way I wanted … So that was quite an important magazine, and it was uncovering dirty doings at the local council, it was covering local rock gigs, local alternative activities, very entertaining, very informative.’

  St Pancras Panda looks sumptuous compared with Anon E. Mouse, although Moore put this down to a simple trick, rather than any improvement in his ability to draw: ‘I used to cover each picture in tiny stippled dots. For some reason editors love stippling. They buy your work every time. I think, personally, that this is because they feel sorry for you’. He used ten to fifteen small panels per instalment, packing each panel with detail, including Kurtzman-style sight gags. St Pancras Panda made its debut in The Back-Street Bugle #6. This was published only a few days after the Moores’ first daughter, Leah, was born on 4 February 1978, an event Moore would mark with an illustration for the Bugle.

  Moore’s first professional work came in late 1978, when he submitted illustrations to Neil Spencer at the New Musical Express (NME). Spencer had been an associate of the Northampton Arts Lab and paid Moore £40 each for pictures of Elvis Costello (published 21 October 1978) and Malcolm McLaren (11 November 1978).

  This did not lead to regular work for NME; a third illustration depicting Siouxsie and the Banshees was rejected (Moore then submitted it to the Back-Street Bugle, and there’s a note in #24 saying they hadn’t got room to run it). Having the NME on his CV, though, Moore was able to get his foot in the door in other parts of the music press.

  Dark Star was a British magazine that had started in 1975 by covering west coast music, but had come to embrace British bands like The Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen, and was – a little anachronistically by the end of the seventies – rooted in the underground magazine aesthetic: reporting on Moore’s success, The Back-Street Bugle described it as ‘a magazine for ageing hippies’. Moore was commissioned to write and draw a series called The Avenging Hunchback, a broad parody of Superman (‘our saga begins upon the planet Krapton, a gigantic boil on the bum of the galaxy’), the first episode of which appeared in #19 (March 1979). When the second instalment was lost – the editor’s car having been stolen with the original artwork inside – Moore could not face redrawing it and instead was allowed to produce a series of one-off stories. The first was Kultural Krime Comix (#20, April 1979) – a strip he also starred in, appearing in ‘the vast Alan Moore Studios’ alongside a crowd of his creations, such as Anon E. Mouse and St Pancras Panda, lamenting the loss of the second Avenging Hunchback chapter. He then teamed up with Steve Moore for Talcum Powder (#21) and the more substantial Three-Eyes McGurk and his Death-Planet Commandos (#22–25), the latter a four-part strip drawn by Alan, written and inked by Steve. It included the first appearance of the character Axel Pressbutton, a psychotic cyborg who would end up in his The Stars My Degradation (1980–3) and Steve Moore’s Laser Eraser and Pressbutton (1982–6). Moore had designed a bald character with one eye bigger than the other, Lex Loopy, to be the villain of The Avenging Hunchback, but instead used the design for Pressbutton.