Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  In the early eighties, no British comic had the budget to create a large ‘bank’ of strips, to fund experimental work that would never see the light of day or to cultivate new talent. What editors wanted from writers were striking ideas, but what they needed were writers who could produce scripts that fitted the allotted page count and arrived in a workable state, to a deadline. No one was getting rich, everyone worked for flat page rates and in most instances everything created became the intellectual property of the publisher. There were no bonus payments, royalty payments or windfalls from merchandise or other spin-offs. A writer with one strip in every issue of 2000AD would earn about the same as a brickie.

  Paradoxically, by showing us the ‘script robots’ and telling us a little about them, the comic gave them a human face. 2000AD also ran a number of ‘making of’ features lifting the lid on the production process. Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis, writers who rose to prominence in the nineties, have both credited the same article in the 2000AD Annual 1981 describing the creation of a Judge Dredd strip with inspiring them to become comics writers. Young readers tend to have preferences for and loyalties to certain characters, but as they grow older, many become admirers of the work of particular artists and writers. And by putting credits on every strip, 2000AD had enabled readers to put names to the styles of the artists who worked on Judge Dredd or to discover, for example, that Slaine and ABC Warriors had the same writer (Pat Mills). If a reader of 2000AD then happened to pick up Doctor Who Weekly or chance upon a copy of Warrior, they would not see any familiar characters, but they would recognise a lot of the art styles and creators’ names. The British comics industry had always been a small world, but now there was a window into it.

  The life of a script robot has never been a glamorous one. Moore was a freelancer, never a salaried member of staff, and he worked in the living room of his terraced house in Northampton. He was commissioned by an editor – usually Steve MacManus at 2000AD, Bernie Jaye at Marvel UK, Dez Skinn for Warrior. A writer just starting out would send a full script on spec, but after the first few commissions would progress to pitching ideas to their editor over the phone. Editors would occasionally approach writers with story ideas for them to work up. Moore would go down to London semi-regularly ‘and just sort of meet the people at 2000AD, get together for a drink with them every few months, or you could check up on stuff or talk about your new projects that were in the planning stages’.

  When asked about his typical work day, Moore has said ‘there isn’t one’, as he is normally working on a number of projects at different stages of development and each presents its own unique challenges. From the outside, however, his routine seems to have remained basically unchanged throughout his career: long days working from home, punctuated by phone calls from editors, publishers, artists, event organisers, friends and interviewers (and in the evenings, thanks to the time difference, a fresh round of phone calls from America). During the day he makes himself sandwiches, drinks a lot of tea and smokes. In 1985 he claimed: ‘I get up at about eight or nine o’clock and lie there on the bed and read comics for two or three hours [laughter]. I’m not one of those hard, fascist people who sits down and says “Now, I will write”. [laughter]. I’m incredibly lazy. I lie around until I feel guilty about it. [laughter].’ His wife describes a far more disciplined approach, though: ‘Alan gets up at eight and works till eight. He has no answering machine, so he can work as few as four hours a day, according to how many phone calls he has to answer. Alan works in silence. He really doesn’t watch TV or listen to music much. He doesn’t write in other people’s presence.’

  Moore has echoed that: ‘I do need absolute quiet, but I don’t get it … I don’t have music on, or anything else on. I work in absolute silence. All I can hear is the sound of my own thoughts, and then the phone rings, you know?’ Earlier in his career, he ‘was listening to an awful lot of ambient music on a continuous loop while I was writing those first few John Totleben issues of Marvelman. I was listening to The Plateaux of Mirror by Brian Eno, which was one of my favorites, and Lovely Thunder by Harold Budd.’

  When he started writing professionally, Moore used a manual typewriter and three-leafed carbon paper. It was a process that did not allow errors to be erased or TippExed out, so he would overtype any mistakes with rows of Xs. When he was done, he would handwrite any minor corrections or other notes he felt were needed. The copies were often faint and difficult to read, the paper tissue-thin. Moore usually stapled the shorter scripts. The original script and one copy were posted to the editor, who would post the copy (with any amendments) to the artist. Moore kept the second copy. Even now, he does not have an internet connection and sends and receives material by fax.

  Taking to heart Brian Eno’s view that an artist should not be afraid of examining their own creativity, Moore has described his philosophy and techniques a number of times – in long interviews, in discussions with other writers and most expansively in a four-part essay, On Writing for Comics, the first chapter of which was published in the August 1985 issue of Fantasy Advertiser. Then, in the mid-eighties, Moore saw writing almost purely in terms of technique, stating, ‘all that is required is that one should think about the techniques that one is using, and should understand them and know where they are applicable’ (twenty years later he would boil this down to the distinctly Enoesque ‘think about your processes’). The implication was that he was unusual among comics writers for doing this.

  Much of On Writing for Comics is less concerned with Moore’s own approach than with criticising the bland, lazy state of the comics industry at all levels; his main target is not editorial or corporate interference so much as his fellow writers’ acceptance of received wisdom. Even when writers and artists break away from the big companies, he says, the same patterns repeat themselves: ‘With a very few bold exceptions, most of the creator-owned material produced by the independent companies has been almost indistinguishable from the mainstream product that preceded it. It seems to me that this demonstrates that the problem is not primarily one of working conditions or incentive; the problem is creative, and it’s on a basic creative level it must be solved.’ He skewers the oft-repeated industry maxim that every successful character can be summed up in fifteen words, saying with that approach ‘however deep the pool of the character’s soul might turn out to be, it’s still only fifteen words wide’, and goes on to note that ‘unwritten laws and conventional wisdoms of this nature really are the banes of the industry’. The plots of comics are ‘madly elaborate … having no relevance at all to anything other than themselves … plot, plot, plot, plot, plot, plot, it sounds like someone wading through mud and it very often reads like it, too’. He despairs of finding ‘stories that actually have some sort of meaning in relation to the world about us, stories that reflect the nature and texture of life … stories that are useful in some way’, and claims that even the most successful writers end up endlessly repeating themselves (as he put it later, the trap for a writer is you find a ‘golden rut and plough it until you die’).

  Moore felt that the weak link was obvious: ‘primarily over the last twenty or thirty years it’s been an artist-dominated field … it is the writing that has let the medium down. And now you are starting to get the emergence of … people who do have a different sensibility regarding the writing, people who actually do – can do – stuff that has got as much power or impact as a mainstream novel or film, sometimes more so. That’s what’s made the difference. I think that is probably what’s going to transform the medium more than anything else.’

  In a later discussion of his methods, Moore would come up with a striking image when explaining that as he started to write From Hell, he read all sorts of books and articles by way of research:

  Obviously, these snippets never found their way into the finished From Hell, but they formed a part of my high-altitude mental impression of the Whitechapel events: a kind of fuzzy, low definition map, as seen through cloud where nevertheless c
ertain prominent features of the symbolic landscape could still be seen. Rivers of theory, high points of conjecture and leylines of association. This initial mapping gave me a glimpse of the whole territory in its entirety, if not in detail. I could see what features of the narrative landscape seemed the most significant and promising, even if I couldn’t provide a precise soil analysis at that point to say exactly why they seemed promising … Basically, what I’m saying is that, yes, I did have the broad shape of the whole thing in my head, with many of the details already there, before I started … the thing is, if that first high-altitude mapping is perceptive and accurate enough, whatever tiny surface details are unearthed upon closer inspection are bound to fit right into it somewhere.

  At each subsequent stage he narrows his focus until he’s establishing the minute details within individual panels. While Moore has always filled notebooks with ideas that hit him and pieces of information that he finds interesting, he initially had a ‘morbid dread of research’ (and little time to undertake it, working on a week-by-week schedule). As his work became longer and more complex, this began to change. By the end of the eighties, when he was writing Brought to Light, From Hell and Big Numbers, Moore became utterly immersed in reading up on his chosen subjects. Ten years after that, writing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, he had actively come to enjoy it.

  As we saw with his initial work on V for Vendetta, very early on in the process Moore draws up elaborate background notes about the world the story is set in, the aim being ‘to conjure a sense of environmental reality as completely and as unobtrusively as possible’. Writers should hint at the nature of the world of the story by dropping in clues in the forms of fashion, architecture, advertising and brand names. Moore has likened this to going on holiday somewhere new, where you accumulate a working knowledge of what makes a place tick without needing an omnipotent narrator to tell you.

  The next stage is to decide on the shape of a story. With many of his comics assignments, the precise number of pages was set by the editor, with little or no flexibility. So, for example, when he began working in the American industry, each issue of Swamp Thing had to be precisely twenty-three pages. With Future Shocks, the length set by an editor could vary from one page to eight. Once he had a little more control, Moore would often give himself more freedom (individual chapters of From Hell range between eight and fifty-eight pages), but he often found it a useful discipline to limit himself (every chapter of Lost Girls is eight pages long). Knowing the page count, Moore takes the simple step of writing numbers down the margin of a piece of paper, one line for each page of the final story, to set out the order of events.

  A trademark of Moore’s work is a concern for structure: ‘Back when I was starting out, I was a fetishist for structure, I think. I wanted to know where every last nut and bolt was going before I’d start the story’. This method was extremely calculated. In On Writing for Comics he made statements like ‘the important thing is that you understand the structure of the work you are creating, whatever that structure might turn out to be’ and ‘it’s quite possible to be inspired toward a story by having thought of some purely abstract technical device or panel progression or something’, or ‘a plot is the combination of environment and characters with the single element of time added to it’. Moore’s description of how a joke works was positively Spock-like: ‘the broad mechanisms that actually excite humour as a response and a reaction to certain stimuli.’

  Most comics plotting at the time, according to Moore, was hackneyed, a straightforward chronological recounting of events. He outlined three simple strategies to make a story more interesting: starting in the middle; framing the main story in another; telling the story from a specific viewpoint or viewpoints. A great many of Moore’s stories, both the shorter and longer pieces, are what he calls ‘elliptical’: the end of the story echoes the beginning. This takes many forms. At the end of V for Vendetta, Evey puts on V’s mask and recruits a follower, just as V took her under his wing in the first instalment. From Hell has a framing sequence set years after the main events of the story. The first and last panels of The Killing Joke are identical pictures of raindrops falling into a puddle. Book One of Marvelman ends as it started, with the image of a truck on a motorway and the same caption.

  Before the eighties, comics were traditionally ephemeral, designed to be read once and thrown away, or to be swapped with another. Alan Moore, though, was keen to write stories that actively demanded you take a second look. As critic Iain Thomson has said, Watchmen ‘can only be read by being re-read’, since some of the details and connections can’t possibly be made out on first reading. In Watchmen, re-reading is structured into the narrative itself. The last issue ends with a character poised to pick up Rorschach’s diary and read the opening captions of the first issue.

  The eighties saw a 180-degree shift in attitude. Since then, comics fans have routinely referred to the comics they own as their ‘collection’, and have been encouraged to see each comic as a piece of mass-produced fine art. They have agreed strict criteria for the grading of the physical condition of a comic, so that a Fine back issue can cost many times less than a Near Mint because the cover has a slight tear or fold, or the staples are a little loose. In this climate, ever the iconoclast, Moore designed Promethea #12 (February 2001) so that the art flows from one page to the next, the whole issue consisting of one long panel; it can only really be appreciated if you prise the staples off and lay out the separated pages (the Deluxe Edition of the Promethea graphic novel reprints it as one fold-up page which, when unfurled, is sixteen feet long). The final twist is that the last page flows into the first – so anyone who has laid out the comic to form one panel can then join up the ends to create a loop. Even more ambitious, the final issue of Promethea could be read as a comic book and then taken apart and reassembled as a double-sided poster: ‘I’d originally had the idea for that 32nd issue of Promethea about a year before in the midst of a full-on psychedelic magical ritual … the final issue will somehow fold out into this double-sided psychedelic poster but you’ll still somehow be able to read it as a comic and this’ll be great and people will carry me around in a gold sedan and shower me with confetti wherever I go. And then, of course, I straightened up and realised that I’d got no idea how to do this, so I sat down with Steve Moore, who is often a great help at times like this when I’ve bragged about something that I’m going to do and then I have to actually sit down and do it.’

  Moore’s emphasis on formal structure perhaps peaked in 1988, when he drew up a giant grid for all twelve issues of the series Big Numbers on a piece of A1 paper (594 x 841mm), outlining the entire sequence of events and the role each of the nearly four dozen characters would play in each issue. He has confessed that ‘one of the main reasons I did it was to frighten other writers. Just for the look on Neil Gaiman’s face, you know.’ He now claims to have a more relaxed approach to planning his work, and says he was ‘riding bareback’ on the titles he wrote for America’s Best Comics (which were published 1999–2005) in order to keep things ‘fresh and lively’.

  Once he has the structure, Moore works on getting from one scene to the next. ‘The movement between one scene and another is one of the most tricky and intriguing elements of the whole writing process … The transitions between scenes are the weak points in the spell that you are attempting to cast over [readers]. One way or another, as a writer, you’ll have to come up with your own repertoire of tricks and devices.’

  It is fair to say that Moore would come to over-employ one trick: overlapping dialogue so that a new scene starts with the last line of dialogue from the previous scene. As Grant Morrison has noted:

  This self-reflected cross-referral of image and text reached fever pitch as Watchmen unfolded: a drawing of Dr Manhattan telekinetically looping a tie around his neck for a rare clothed appearance in a TV interview had his estranged lover Laurie Jupiter … ask in voiceover ‘how did everything get so tangled up?’, while a sce
ne in which she crushed a mugger’s balls in her grip was cross-cut with another character’s words to Doctor Manhattan: ‘Am I starting to make you feel uncomfortable?’ … this relentless self-awareness gave Watchmen a dense and tangible clarity.

  Those examples, though, are meant to be deliberately jarring. Elsewhere, Moore employed the technique to more subtle ends, switching scenes with an echo of a panel composition, or even just the use of the same colour, providing a smoother segue.

  And once we get to the layout of individual pages, Moore’s advice is straightforward: ‘The simplest and most mechanical way to understand comic book pacing is to work out how long a reader will spend looking at a panel.’ The creators of a comic can control that reading speed by altering the levels of information in each panel – the more detailed the art or the more dialogue it contains, generally, the longer it takes to read. Many comic creators fail to recognise, for example, that a fast-moving fight scene will be slowed down if the antagonists are making lengthy speeches to each other. The example of Watchmen (along with Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns) would prove highly influential on the superhero genre, and nowhere was this more obvious than the influence the series had on the way fight scenes were portrayed. Very soon after Watchmen was published, superhero comics had all but abandoned the lengthy monologues and parades of thought balloons that had previously cluttered fight scenes. It was a quick fix, one that creators and editors could easily implement.