Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  No Dialogue.

  Moore believes his record is a ten-page description of a two-page spread in Promethea … and that was one of the few times he was forced into a rewrite. The pages depicted characters having a circular conversation while walking along a Möbius strip, but a miscommunication meant artist J.H. Williams placed the twist the wrong way round, so the original dialogue did not fit the art. Rather than have the artist redraw the pages, Moore rewrote the dialogue.

  Each issue of Watchmen had twenty-eight pages of comic strip (except the final issue, which had thirty-two). According to Dave Gibbons, the Watchmen scripts were:

  #1: 91 pages

  #2: 90 pages

  #3: 100 pages

  #4: 84 pages

  #5: 106 pages

  #6: 91 pages

  #7: 111 pages

  #8: 110 pages

  #9: 53 pages

  #10: 65 pages

  #11: 78 pages

  #12: 53 pages

  As this indicates, Moore’s scripts for succeeding instalments tend to be shorter and more functional. Eddie Campbell has suggested that, on the flipside of that, ‘Alan’s speed of production tends to trail off towards the end of a project so that the artist is receiving the pages one at a time’. This has led to suspicion, and in a couple of cases open accusation, on the part of some artists that Moore does not share, to the same degree, their long-term commitment to a series. Though, it seems fair to acknowledge that even if Moore begins each project with a ferocious burst of activity and creativity that later cools off, that is probably to be expected once a series is underway and the tone and design work are settled.

  With only a few exceptions, Moore’s basic method, from the artist’s vantage point, has looked the same throughout his career: he identifies for himself the strengths and tastes of an artist (what he thinks they will enjoy drawing), brainstorms with them a few times (often in letters, faxes and long telephone calls), phones to agree a rough outline for an issue, then goes off and types up a full script which ends up far, far longer than the artist had been expecting.

  It is a running joke among many of the artists who have worked with Moore that the first question they’ll be asked at a signing or convention is ‘What’s Alan Moore like to work with?’ – as Eddie Campbell notes, ‘I know what they really want to hear is one of those anecdotes that make him appear windswept and interesting and just a little eccentric.’ But the length of Moore’s scripts is another perennial question those artists find themselves fielding. And many have admitted feeling overwhelmed at first. Dave Gibbons quickly mastered a technique to cope: ‘What I tend to do is read the script very carefully … and then what I like to do is to mark the script up with highlighters, so that I can separate the wheat from the chaff, so that I can have the stuff that’s really essential to the job of drawing the story separated from the asides and things, and to separate the lettering out as well, so that slowly from an impenetrable mass of grey typescript we get some sort of order and some sort of graphic sense to the whole thing.’

  A few artists have not been able to clear the first hurdle of understanding the demands of the script. In 1994, Moore wrote the first issue of a series originally called Swordstone, later renamed War Child, for Rob Liefeld at Image. Set in a near-future America after the government had collapsed and been replaced by criminal organisations, it featured a fascist biker gang, the Weimar Knights, fighting the Magical Mafia. But the series never materialised, at least in part because Liefeld could not find an artist able to draw what Moore had written: ‘A couple of the artists I gave it to handed it back. The first ten pages is some of the most difficult, visually, it’s hard to crack … There’s someone standing atop a building, looking in through the window at a certain angle, while the person is sitting doing their hair looking at themselves in the mirror … and the panel descriptions, you go, how do I shoot this? I could shoot it with a camera, but like all the storyboards? It’s just very difficult.’ Most, though, say that Moore’s style, rather than being impenetrable, prescriptive, bullying or limiting, makes for a far more interesting job than a purely functional script does. Stephen Bissette says:

  They were like long, narrative letters to the cartoonist. And they were playful in a lot of ways, too. We did a two-part zombie story that was set in the antebellum South and Alan’s script for the first page of the first issue, it was a page where you’re underground and you’re looking at a body in a coffin. And in every panel description, Alan had a beetle family. He had a description to me of the beetle family, that these two beetles are on the body, and they’re arguing. Now this is nothing I was supposed to draw, it was just like a joke. And at the sixth panel, he said ‘I’ve decided to kill the beetles. They don’t have any character potential, and there’s no future for them in this comic series.’ So Alan’s scripts were fun to read! But they were also these elaborate blueprints of not just what was happening on each page and panel, but where it was going to go. Like ‘This object is here because on page 22, it’s going to come back in. So be sure to emphasise it.’ And it was unusual at that time to have scripts not just of that length and that detail, but scripts that carefully thought out.

  John Totleben, who worked with Moore on Swamp Thing and Miracleman, agrees: ‘He was really clear. Alan is the kind of writer who pretty much nails everything down. There’s really no guessing in terms of what has to be done in a panel from an artist’s standpoint. He has a pretty good visual sense of how to move the story along with images and what will fit and what won’t work. That’s something that some writers tend to lose sight of’.

  Moore calls the process ‘collaboration’, and it clearly involves two creative people bringing their talents to a project, but it is not always the two-way exchange of ideas that word implies. David Lloyd felt his work on V for Vendetta in the Warrior days was truly collaborative, but that changed when Moore came to finish the series for DC, mainly because of Moore’s workload:

  it was to do with the fact that the last three issues were written in one chunk. One of the best things about it when we were doing it for Warrior is that we were doing it step by step and, in fact, when we started we didn’t have any idea how it was going to end. We didn’t know how it was going to develop and in fact it developed very organically through suggestions and chats we were having. Alan would write a synopsis of the first book, we’d talk about that, I’d say what I liked and didn’t like and what we could maybe change and this that and the other. I would get scripts month by month. I’d make suggestions and sometimes we’d argue about those but mostly not. Most of the things I changed were frame breakdowns, pacing things.

  The point is it grew organically. There was a course change in the middle of V for Vendetta. An accidental change of course. Those things couldn’t happen with the work for DC … There were no real chats, no discussion about any of it. I remember him calling me after I got it and asking what did I think. It was great, of course it was, very good. But I felt sad it was a done deal, there was none of that chat. There was none of that organic … it was very like being in a band and jamming, and incredibly enjoyable. And the great thing about Warrior is that it was six to eight pages a month. Alan would not write the script for the next episode until he’d seen the last one, and he would be inspired by things that happened.

  Eddie Campbell was the artist on From Hell for ten years and ended up self-publishing the collected edition, but doesn’t seem to see it as a true collaboration:

  it’s Alan’s book, I’m just illustrating it. It comes in as always horrifying, I try to take the horror out of it, try to play this real deadpan … it kind of works, actually. They just produced a book of Alan’s scripts, in a ninety dollar hardback, I did some spot illustrations for it, but it’s really interesting to read because Alan’s one of the most interesting writers in comics. In an Alan Moore script he describes it, his prose is unbelievable. Any other writer of comics says ‘in this panel it is raining’. But Alan says ‘the rain beats out in staccato mor
se code the rhythms of a dreary Russian novel’. It’s raining. I make it rain. But Alan’s scripts do that all the time, they’re just so dense with poetic metaphor, they’re a great read, and none of it ever gets on to the page. It’s just for my benefit, to help me visualise the picture.

  Rather than ‘jamming’, a better musical analogy might be that the artist is a musician interpreting the work of a songwriter. Aware that his own drawing skills are limited – certainly compared with the professional artists he’s worked with – Moore has often stressed that an ‘artist will almost certainly have visual sensibilities fifty times more sound and reliable than your own’. His philosophy about his scripts is that ‘I give the artists the freedom to change them, because my ideas might not always be the most inspired. But my ideas will work as a basic place to start from, or to fall back upon. If they can’t think of anything better, my way of doing it will work.’ He had formed this opinion early enough to say in 1981, ‘It doesn’t really bother me unduly that such and such an artist might have decided to do a number of frames differently to the way I’ve specified in the script. As far as I’m concerned the only important consideration is whether the artist enjoyed the script and had fun translating it into pictures. If this is the case then nine times out of ten you’ll get a good story roll off the conveyor belt.’

  Campbell was one artist who was not afraid to bring his own spin to the material. In one sequence for From Hell (for Chapter Five, page 26), for example, Moore’s script had the direction ‘NOW WE REVERSE ANGLES SO THAT IN THE FOREGROUND WE CAN SEE POLLY, SITTING IN PROFILE TO US’. It used the grammar of cinema, not of comic strips. Campbell drew the scene differently: ‘My idea was to take “cutting” away and replace it with a keen observation of body language. In order to see subtle interactions between two bodies, the leanings toward, the leanings away, the slight turnings, superior straightenings, lookings down, lookings away, while not necessarily leaning the same way, lookings inwards, subtle changes in the emotional temperature, but instinctively dealing with it and not categorising it like this, etc, etc … then the two bodies need to be seen in each and all of the pictures.’ In the book From Hell Companion (2013) Campbell outlines examples of how he interpreted the scripts and notes Moore’s objections to the changes, which the writer seems to have limited to sarcastic asides in subsequent strips.

  Across the comics industry, writer/artist partnerships have broken down, sometimes very acrimoniously and spectacularly, over the directions of stories, who first came up with a particular idea, the quality of the work or perceived disparity in the commitment to a project. This tends to come with great success – Stan Lee fell out with Jack Kirby in the sixties, Chris Claremont with John Byrne when they worked together on The Uncanny X-Men in the eighties.

  Moore gets a lot of attention, and so a lot of credit. It’s all too easy to give primacy to the writer, to fall into the shorthand of describing ‘Alan Moore comics’, ‘Moore’s work’, his co-creator as ‘Alan Moore’s artist’, or to see the artists as interchangeable components. Articles about Moore frequently don’t acknowledge the artists’ existence, for instance: ‘He jolted the comics world with Watchmen and a dramatic updating of Batman in The Killing Joke. Three of his works – From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V for Vendetta – have been made into films, and he has disavowed them all. On Vendetta, he went so far as to take his name off the credits.’

  Even praise for the artists can be phrased in a way that underplays their contribution, merely crediting them with following Moore’s instructions particularly adeptly. It would be natural enough if his artists resented this, but most genuinely don’t seem to. This may be because even by the mid-eighties, artists knew what they were getting into when they agreed to work with Moore. It may be because artists recognise that working with Moore spurs them on to produce some of their best work. Perhaps it is because Moore himself takes pains to counterbalance a focus on him, saying as early as 1984: ‘It annoys me when people talk about “Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta” or “Alan Moore’s Marvelman” and I’m not going to enjoy hearing about “Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing”. I can’t claim to be an individual artist in my own right. The end result, the strip you see on the page, is the meeting between me and the artist. That’s where the creation is.’ Moore is commonly effusive about the art. So, early on in his career, he singled out John Stokes’ work on the Doctor Who strip ‘Stardeath’ (Doctor Who Monthly #47, December 1980) for praise: ‘Everything I asked for was in there, no matter how ridiculous or time-consuming, and as an additional bonus lots of little details had been squeezed into the backgrounds which contributed greatly to the old-fashioned space opera atmosphere that I’d been aiming for.’ At other times, he has been happy to give the artist credit for salvaging something from his own lacklustre writing, saying for example, ‘The Killing Joke is another thing that I’m rather embarrassed by. I mean it’s a wonderful piece of work by Brian Bolland, but for my part, I don’t think the story’s anything spectacular.’ It can’t be stressed often enough how many of the major decisions that make projects like V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, Watchmen and From Hell so successful come from the artist.

  Perhaps this is why, even though Alan Moore has a reputation for being difficult to work with, his ‘creative differences’ tend to be with the management at his publishers or with rival writers. Moore has written for well over a hundred artists and – as far as we know – very few of those relationships have broken down while a project is running. That’s not to say that he’s never had a dispute with a co-creator. An entire chapter of V for Vendetta went unpublished because David Lloyd felt it wasn’t up to standard. Stephen Bissette did not want superheroes in Swamp Thing. But those disputes always seem to have been relatively amicable. Moore has fallen out with a number of his artists – including Bissette – but it’s always been over business issues, and long after the project has concluded.

  In a career so far spanning around thirty-five years, Moore has publicly blamed his artist for problems with a project precisely three times. The first, as he noted in his 1981 Society of Strip Illustration interview, was Walter Howarth’s work on the Future Shock story ‘Southern Comfort’. The second was Bill Sienkiewicz on Big Numbers (1990), a major work set in a town closely resembling Northampton (and self-published by Moore), which ground to a halt after just two issues. Sienkiewicz and Moore had previously worked together on Brought to Light (1988), an extremely dense and visually complex project. Moore had contributed the introduction to the Bill Sienkiewicz Sketchbook, saying ‘What I have come to appreciate more fully is the breadth of his talent … Bill has worried at the work in question until he finds that part of it that seems most central in the light of his individual vision.’ The artist had a great deal of trouble, though, with Moore’s scripts for Big Numbers. Moore’s side of the story is: ‘I still don’t know what the problem was but he couldn’t do the work. Now why that should be I don’t know. The two issues he did were beautiful – they’re amongst the best work he’s ever done. Bill liked the idea of Big Numbers and respected the cutting-edge aspect of its publication … the problem seemed to be having to draw all these miserable terraced streets and Northampton people just drove him mad, or at least it was boring for him.’

  Sienkiewicz has explained that he was relying on photo reference, and was finding it hard to wrangle his cast: ‘Big Numbers started to become a money pit. Too much time and effort was involved in getting the reference, leaving very little time to create the artwork. Time. The ultimate tool. The ultimate foe. But with Big Numbers one of the demands – prerequisites – I’d placed upon myself was to work almost exclusively from the model as possible. I was going for as great a degree of illustrative photographic verisimilitude as I could muster. Dammit, I was going to adhere to the accurate reference no matter what. It was, in retrospect, a vain attempt to control everything – everything – completely, as things swirled and collided in mid-air all around. This was my Stanley Kubrick peri
od. Of course, the more I tried to control everything, the more real life kicked my ass.’ The final straw came when his model for Christine, the main character, got married to a soldier and relocated to Germany. In this case Moore remained generous in his praise for the quality of Sienkiewicz’s work; his problem was solely with the quantity.

  Moore spoke about the third time an artist disappointed him when interviewer Alex Fitch noted that ‘the only occasion I can think of where the art was fairly lacklustre was some of Rob Liefeld’s drawings for Judgment Day’ (a 1997 series that was a gigantic crossover between series in Liefeld’s Awesome Studios stable). Moore answered, with a very long chuckle:

  Rob Liefeld. There’s a name to conjure with. I can remember when I was working for Awesome Comics – and I suppose really that the name of the comic company should have given me a couple of tips going in the door really as to what I was in for – I can remember that Rob Liefeld asked me through an intermediary what I actually thought of his artwork … I was trying to be as honest as possible, and I said ‘Well, there’s obviously something about it that appeals to the readers, but for me it looks lazy and there are never any backgrounds, all of the characters look the same, it looks like there’s been no involvement between the artist and the script that he’s working from at all. There are no backgrounds in any panels, there’s just a series of characters posing or gritting their teeth and looking resolute.’ And I think his response to that was ‘(sigh) Well, who cares about windows?’. Which I suppose pretty much defines his approach to comic book storytelling.

  Perhaps it is significant that Liefeld was Moore’s publisher as well as his artist, and that, as Moore was self-publishing Big Numbers, in that instance Moore was Sienkiewicz’s publisher. This was not purely a writer and an artist disagreeing on creative choices, there was another relationship in play.