Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  Again, the work for Dark Star was unpaid, but it was in a nationally distributed magazine and so appeared in newsagents around the country. In April 1981, Three Eyes McGurk and his Death-Planet Commandos would become his first piece to be published in America, when it was reprinted in Gilbert Shelton’s underground anthology, Rip-Off Comics #8.

  Very shortly after starting work for Dark Star, Moore finally secured a regular job that paid. This was Roscoe Moscow, a half-page strip for the weekly music magazine Sounds.

  Something just happened in my head one day and I did two episodes of a strip called Roscoe Moscow, which was a surreal private eye strip that owed more than a little to Art Spiegelman’s Ace Hole. What I owed to it was the idea of a self-referential private eye who talks in the third person, somebody who talks in self-conscious Chandlerese, if you like. I sent in the first two episodes of that and got a telegram back – because we weren’t on the telephone at that point – saying that they’d like me to do it as a regular strip … Sounds was a crummy British rock music weekly; it was quite low-minded in its way, but it did have an interesting array of cartoonists working for them. Savage Pencil had been their mainstay for a long time and he’d been doing half a page a week. Pete Milligan, Brendan McCarthy and Brett Ewins were working upon a punk science fiction nihilist-type rock comic strip for a number of weeks before I applied with Roscoe Moscow. Apparently, they’d run out of enthusiasm for their strip or something – I’m not sure of the entire story – but for one reason or another their strip was ending. Sounds had a gap for another comic strip and I just happened to send in Roscoe Moscow at the right time.

  The first instalment appeared in the 31 March 1979 issue of Sounds. The paper had a reported circulation of 250,000 copies a week, which if true would mean it was bought by more people than any other publication featuring Moore’s work – in either Britain or America – until he wrote for Image in the early nineties. The £35 a week Moore got for writing and drawing Roscoe Moscow was not quite enough to live on, though, and he adopted a pseudonym to hide his earnings. For the next few years, ‘Curt Vile’ would prove to be prolific and multi-talented, also writing reviews and interviews, drawing spot illustrations for Sounds, contributing to other publications, and even appearing on a single by the Mystery Guests.

  And Roscoe Moscow saw another leap in quality. While there is a nugget of truth in Moore’s assessment that he ‘was barely capable of drawing even simple objects in a way by which they might be recognised’, he never let that get in the way of an ambition to stretch the medium. In Roscoe Moscow he comes up with a number of imaginative panel designs and progressions. The main recurring joke, that the protagonist is delusional, allows Moore to contrast the first-person narration with what the reader can see, and he milks a lot of material from this. There are in-jokes in Roscoe Moscow so obscure that Moore could have expected literally only one or two other people to get them. With the benefit of hindsight and a few decades of Moore scholarship, it is fun to spot the cameo by St Pancras Panda, the blatant plug for the Bauhaus single ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ and a joint credit for a Christmas boardgame given to ‘Curt + Phyllis Vile’. In this panel, Moore both reveals his secret identity in a crossword puzzle and namechecks Steve Moore’s pseudonym.

  Moore gained a certain cachet by having his own weekly comic strip. The Back-Street Bugle were clearly proud of him, even though he had to scale back his work for them. St Pancras Panda ended in March 1979 (#25), but Moore (or rather Curt Vile) would go on to contribute another dozen or so illustrations. The Bugle even marketed the very first piece of Alan Moore-related merchandise: #26 (April 1979) had an advert for a silkscreened poster ‘tastefully printed in lurocolor’ and sold for 50p. August’s #30 also ran a short feature on Moore’s Sounds work, ‘Roscoe Moscow’s St Pancras Panda’, announcing that two more instalments of St Pancras Panda were planned and that the series might be collected into a comic book.

  Early in his career, Alan Moore was happy to identify himself as coming from underground comix roots. In 1982, he would tell artist Bryan Talbot that collaborating with him ‘will be the first time I’ve worked with an artist whose background is as solidly rooted in the underground as my own is’. But even by 1988, he was backtracking a little, framing his Sounds work as a way to sneak into the profession ‘by entering an area of comic book work that really didn’t have an awful lot going for it and wasn’t terribly popular’. In 2004 he said he had been ‘a kind of sub-underground cartoonist’; in 2010, ‘you can look at my early work and see for yourself. I was an average, undergroundish cartoonist who was just making things up from week to week and hoping that the glaring flaws wouldn’t be too apparent.’ Whatever his feelings about the context in which he was operating, though, Moore has never been keen on the work itself. In 1984, he said he regarded it ‘in the same way that anyone who’s served their apprenticeship in public would do. For the most part, I see it as a lot of poorly executed drivel’. In the early nineties, he observed: ‘There’s a lot of repulsive bilge in there; and an awful lot of honest effort in there as well. It’s not terribly memorable work, those first strips. It didn’t teach me anything about drawing. Well, it taught me that I couldn’t draw, which was a useful thing to know before I carried on too far with it …’ He does admit that ‘there were a couple of odd little episodes in there where it was nicely drawn, nicely conceived, there was a nice little gag or a nice little concept’, but its value was largely elsewhere: ‘it kept me alive for two or three years, and it gave me a hands-on education in comic strips.’

  Moore has only ever allowed isolated examples of his underground work to be reprinted (although almost all of it can be found online), saying, ‘it will probably remain unpublished. I’m glad, it’s nice that it’s out there on the ’net. The thing is, I was doing my best at the time … I’m really glad that it’s out there, so people can see, but I’m glad that … I don’t even have to look at it!’

  Moore was still searching for more mainstream opportunities, and pitched an idea to his local free newspaper, the Northants Post. This was Nutter’s Ruin, a parody of a village soap opera. He drew a half-page strip outlining the cast and their foibles; the characters included Elsie and Eric Nutter, brutal police constable Willard Turk, aristocratic Bradley and Belinda Reighley-Stupid and (in a presumably unconscious lift from Monty Python’s ‘Mr Hilter’ sketch), ‘Mr Adolph Hilton, a kindly old Austrian gent who moved to Nutter’s Ruin just after the War’.

  The paper’s editor liked Moore’s art but wanted something for children, and suggested ‘perhaps a strip about a little cat or something?’ So Moore came up with Maxwell the Magic Cat, basing the protagonist on his own cat, Tonto. The first strip appeared in the 25 August 1979 edition of the Northants Post. The drawing was technically primitive – more like the simple linework of Anon E. Mouse than the elaborate stippling of his Sounds work – but the jokes were funnier and more elaborate. Moore soon abandoned the idea of telling a running story and came to enjoy the challenge of coming up with a new five-panel gag week after week; because his deadline was only three days before publication, he could make the strip extremely topical. Moore chose to write the strip under the pseudonym Jill De Ray. As he has always taken great delight in recounting, Gilles de Rais was a fifteenth-century demon summoner, child molester and serial killer. Emboldened by having got that past his editor, Moore occasionally steered the strip into dark or overtly political territory, with a healthy regular dose of surrealism.

  He enjoyed himself, and Maxwell the Magic Cat would continue to run until October 1986 – after the first issues of Watchmen had been published and Moore had become the most renowned writer of comics on the planet (a fact his Northants Post editors seemed blissfully unaware of). Artist Eddie Campbell’s prediction that the next generation of comics historians would reassess Maxwell and it ‘will be properly recognised as an important work’ hasn’t yet come to pass, but Campbell best explains the significance the strip holds in Moore’s canon: ‘Of
all Alan’s work, Maxwell is the most immediate representation of the man’s thoughts and idle notions … they reach us without being modified by a collaborator or the complicated requirements of the big publishing houses’.

  Moore was now earning £35 from Sounds and £10 from Maxwell the Magic Cat, more than the £42.50 he had been receiving in benefits. Honour satisfied, he signed off the dole and was now officially a full-time professional comics creator.

  In May 1980 Sounds published a letter from reader Derek Hitchcock accusing Roscoe Moscow of being homophobic. Moore replied as Curt Vile, insisting that it was the character who was prejudiced, not the writer: ‘Curt Vile likes to think of himself as a friend to all the people, irrespective of class, colour, place of worship or whatever the hell they wish to do with their private parts’; in writing this, he wanted ‘to make absolutely sure that no impressionable adolescent ran away with the idea that I was outlining my own personal philosophy’. Since, at a number of points later in his career, Moore would worry that his audience were not spotting his ‘heavy irony’, this exchange may have been one factor that led to him begin to wind down Roscoe Moscow, its last chapter appearing in the 28 June 1980 edition. He began a new strip, The Stars My Degradation, the first instalment of which was published in July 1980. Dropping all references to the music industry, this was a broad parody of science fiction and superhero stories, the sprawling space opera that 2000AD would never have let him get away with. Meanwhile, Curt Vile had written glowing reviews of the Mystery Guests and Bauhaus, and Moore struggled with other conflicts of interest: ‘Occasionally I’d supplement my income by interviewing people like Hawkwind. Unfortunately if Nik Turner made me a cup of tea while I was interviewing them. I couldn’t write anything nasty about them. So I figured journalism wasn’t for me.’

  Fortunately, there were new opportunities in mainstream comics conducive to the sort of work Moore was keen to write. Doctor Who Weekly debuted in late 1979, and was packed with articles about the popular BBC show, both the on-screen adventures of the time-travelling main character and what was going on the behind the scenes. Each issue contained two original comic strips: the first showcased adventures of the Doctor himself, the second was a shorter back-up strip featuring a parade of his old foes, like the Daleks and Cybermen. The latter had until now all been written by Steve Moore, but when from Doctor Who Weekly #35 (June 1980) he was promoted to the main strip, he tipped off Alan that they would be looking for a new writer, then passed his friend’s trial script, ‘Black Legacy’, to editor Paul Neary. It was accepted, and was published in the same issue Steve Moore took charge of the main strip. Alan was delighted to realise the artist was the same David Lloyd who, like him, had contributed to the fanzine Shadow as a teenager. ‘I felt that at the time David Lloyd’s strips as an artist were undervalued; he didn’t seem to be regarded in the same way that Dave Gibbons or even a relatively young artist like Steve Dillon would be regarded. The perception of David’s work back then seemed to be that he was a solid, meat and potato artist who you shouldn’t really expect anything spectacular from, but I saw more than that in David’s work. I saw a really powerful sense of storytelling and a starkness in his contrasts of black and white.’

  Steve Moore had established a formula for the back-up strips. Generally the protagonist would venture somewhere they had been warned not to go, where they meddled with forces they did not understand – this tended to mean unleashing an old Doctor Who monster – with a nasty twist at the end when the protagonist thought they were finally safe. Alan had watched Doctor Who off and on over the years, but had not been much of a fan since William Hartnell left in 1966 (he had been twelve at the time). With ‘Black Legacy’, he followed Steve Moore’s template perhaps a little too faithfully, but once he had proved himself, he and Lloyd followed it up with the far more unsettling ‘Business as Usual’, a fast-paced story using the Autons – old monsters made from animated plastic, who infiltrated Earth by taking the form of toys and mannequins. Both stories required a degree of discipline new to Moore, but he enjoyed the challenge: ‘Two pages isn’t a lot for the reader to be able to remember even by the next week. You’ve got to kind of establish everything and have each little two-page section come to its own dramatic conclusion. It was trickier than it looked but it was a great way of learning how to write comics … the 300-page sci-fi epic was never going to work, whereas what I was now doing was actually starting from something really small.’ Each story consisted of eight pages in total, broken into four parts, with an increasingly tense cliffhanger each week, building up to the climax. ‘I’m not saying I did a great job of it but it seemed to work, and it is just the best way of learning how to write stories: start off with something that is too small, in your opinion, to tell a good story in and then find a way to tell a good story in that space.’

  Alan’s last contribution to Doctor Who was what he has informally called the 4D War Cycle, stories set in the early years of the Doctor’s people, the Time Lords. This was an ambitious space opera spanning generations, with the Time Lords under attack from the Order of the Black Sun, a mysterious organisation from the future who are retaliating for some offence the Time Lords are yet to commit. The Doctor Who TV series had left the origins of the Time Lords a virtually blank slate, and Moore filled it with new characters. The stories are a short, sharp blending of high-concept science fiction and the superhero team book.

  We’ve got the Order of the Black Sun, who are pretty clearly the Green Lantern Corps but with a different costumier. A gothic costumier. I liked the idea of the Gallifreyans established as a very, very powerful intergalactic force and it’s also not just intergalactic, it’s throughout the aeons, because they’ve mastered time travel. So that would make them very, very powerful in any possible universe full of different races. And so I thought you’re going to need somebody that is as big and powerful as the Gallifreyans if this is going to be a fair fight. So I started to think of something a bit like the Green Lantern Corps from DC’s Green Lantern comics. At that point there was no chance of me ever working for America, so it just seemed that this might be my only chance to do something that’s a bit like those American superheroes that I remember from my boyhood. So I brought in this intergalactic confederacy of different alien races who are all united under this banner of the Black Sun. And yes, I could have carried that on. I forget where I was going to take it. I presume that the battle would get bigger. Perhaps I’d get longer stories to tell it in.’

  Moore had planned to write more stories in the 4D War Cycle, and believes he was next in line to write the main strip. Instead, he quit Doctor Who Monthly over a point of principle. One of Steve Moore’s strips had introduced Abslom Daak, Dalek Killer, a psychotic character ‘specifically created as a Pressbutton-style balance to the somewhat lightweight Doctor Who’: rather than offer the Daleks a jelly baby, Daak would slice them in half with his chainsword. Having first appeared in Doctor Who Weekly #17 (February 1980) and proved popular, Daak returned semi-regularly, and there was talk of a spin-off title. But when Steve Moore learned this was to be written by Alan McKenzie, he stopped working for Doctor Who Monthly and, as he says, ‘Alan Moore quit writing for the magazine too, in a wonderful gesture of support that was remarkable for someone at that early a stage in their career’. Alan’s last story was ‘Black Sun Rising’ in Doctor Who Monthly #57 (December 1981), although neither he nor Steve left Marvel UK altogether, and both picked up similar work in Empire Strikes Back Monthly.

  Alan Moore had continued to send ideas to 2000AD’s editor, and ‘Alan [Grant] would write letters explaining why they were turned down. Eventually, he wrote a letter saying, “Look, if you just changed this, this and this, I think this one might be acceptable,” and on the second or third attempt, I got the form letter back which had lots of robots giving the thumbs up, which means you’ve been accepted.’

  This story, ‘Killer in the Cab’ (#170, July 1980), was however beaten into print by Moore’s second commission,
which appeared earlier the same month in the 2000AD Sci-Fi Special 1980. ‘Holiday in Hell’ was a five-page story with art by Dave Harwood. The story is almost a textbook iteration of the Future Shocks formula. First, the science fiction high concept: Earth of the future is ‘a world without war, without crime, without bloodshed’, but people book holidays on Mars to let off steam by attacking ‘victimatics’, perfect robot duplicates of people who ‘show terror … pain … suffering’ as they are chopped up or shot. Then we see a ‘normal’ young couple, George and Gabrielle, enjoy themselves on Mars by brutally attacking victimatics before returning to Earth. Except there’s a twist: the real Gabrielle has been replaced by a duplicate who kills George and reveals ‘we victimatics need to take a holiday every now and again, too!’ and that half the tourists who’ve returned to Earth are actually killer robots. And so the rampage begins.