Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  Swamp Thing #34 featured ‘The Rite of Spring’, the consummation of Swamp Thing’s relationship with Abby. She ingests a tuber she plucks from his body, and goes on an LSD trip where they form a perfect, orgasmic union. In the American Gothic sequence (beginning with #37, June 1985), Swamp Thing began touring America, fighting supernatural creatures who symbolised the rot Moore saw affecting the country: racism, misogyny, gun violence, corporate pollution, the nuclear industry.

  Not everything in the garden was rosy, however. Stephen Bissette would later confess: ‘I hated the intrusion of superheroes into the pages of Swamp Thing (and said so, apparently with enough vigor for Len to tell me it was his idea, a white lie told to me so I wouldn’t direct my ire at Alan, who was the real catalyst for the coming of the Justice League into Swamp Thing with #24), and even having bucked and shucked the Comics Code with SOTST #29, we were still working under mainstream comics restrictions. That forced us to be inventive with our subversion, but the necessary (to my mind, essential) evolution of horror comics required something more radical and unfettered.’

  As ever, one of the more prosaic restrictions of a monthly comic was the necessity to work to a rigid timetable. Moore could write a comics script quickly, but now he was being called on to do so quite frequently. Swamp Thing #19 was already complete and heading to the printers when he was commissioned for #20. Various other production bottlenecks meant that, for example, the script for #29 had to be written in three days, that the ‘inventory’ issue he wrote to be used as a fill-in for use in an emergency was used immediately (#32), and that Moore had to come up with a way to dress up a reprint of the first Swamp Thing story with a new framing sequence (#33).

  The biggest problem was that Swamp Thing was subject to what senior DC figure Paul Levitz once called ‘the worst contract DC has ever made’. In the early eighties, the company led the way in improving the deal for creators. Previously – and at Marvel, this was still the case for many years afterwards – the publisher could turn, say, a cover illustration into a poster or T-shirt without any further payment to the artist. That had changed under DC’s new president, Jenette Kahn (appointed in 1981), and now creators received a cut of the revenue from any exploitation of characters they created or artwork they had drawn. One exception, though, was Swamp Thing. The 1979 movie option included the right to use any or all of the characters and situations created for the series, as well as the merchandising rights. The main practical effect was that DC could not market posters or T-shirts based on Bissette and Totleben’s art, or any of the toys or badges that other DC characters enjoyed, let alone pass on a share to the creators.

  Even so, working for DC was lucrative for Moore. Only four years before, he had considered himself a success for being paid £45 a week for his writing. Now his earnings from Swamp Thing alone were equivalent to the average UK salary: DC paid $50 a page, so Moore was earning $1,150 an issue. Due to fluctuating currency rates in 1984, this would convert to anywhere between £810 and £890 a month. Perhaps the most salient exchange rate is that Moore got paid more for his first issue of Swamp Thing than for all the work he had done on Marvelman in the three years to that point.

  Moore had come to DC’s attention because of his British work, but his two best-regarded series for 2000AD started after his Swamp Thing debut.

  The first was DR & Quinch. The characters had been created by Moore and Alan Davis for a Time Twister that appeared when Moore had been about halfway through writing Skizz (#317, May 1983). That was intended as a one-off, but the reaction to it was so positive that the characters were given their own series, which proved wildly popular when it debuted in January 1984. DR & Quinch was – by Moore’s own admission – a rip-off of OC & Stiggs from National Lampoon. Two teenage delinquents, aliens with a flying hotrod, create havoc wherever they go – whether they’re chasing a girl, being drafted into the army or attempting to make a Hollywood movie. Davis was pleased, saying, ‘I’m very proud and fond of them; they’re easy to draw, they look funny no matter what they are doing, and it was fun to see what they could do and how far I could push them.’

  Moore was less keen: ‘DR & Quinch are probably the comic strip that I shall ask to have eradicated and destroyed upon my deathbed. What DR & Quinch are is a continuation of the Great British comic tradition of making heroes out of juvenile delinquents. If you imagine Dennis the Menace with a thermonuclear capacity, you’re probably pretty close to the idea of DR & Quinch. Maybe it’s a sign of the times, I don’t know, but certainly in this country they are probably the most popular creations I’ve come up with.’ He later clarified his position: ‘It makes violence funny, which I don’t think is right. I have to question the point where I’m actually talking about thermonuclear weapons as a source of humour …’ He admitted, however, ‘There were a lot of good things about DR & Quinch. I think Alan Davis and I both put a lot of nice work into it and some of it is amusing. But it has no lasting or redeeming social value as far as I am concerned.’

  Moore was a lot happier with another new creation for 2000AD. The Ballad of Halo Jones was a story about an ordinary young woman in a vast science fiction landscape. The artist was Ian Gibson, who had brought his fluid, cartoony style to numerous strips for 2000AD, most notably Judge Dredd and Robo-Hunter. He was keen to work with Moore and was introduced to him by 2000AD editor Steve MacManus at a party. Gibson suggested they could work on a story with a female lead, and they quickly agreed she should be ‘a totally unexceptional character, somebody who could just be the girl next door’, a celebration of the triumphs and tragedies of everyday life. Moore’s preferred technique was to meticulously build up his worlds through little details, and he found a kindred spirit in Gibson, who Moore credits with ‘providing as many of the main concepts and small touches as myself’. It was Gibson who provided the basic idea for the story of Book One: ‘I told Alan that the best way to get to know a place is to go shopping in it. And it seemed like an ideal “girl” story – without being too chauvinist, I hope. I remember saying to Alan “Imagine what it is like if going shopping is like a military expedition, requiring planning ahead of time. If there is a hostage situation in Sainsbury’s and a fire bombing of Tescos etc.” He turned my suggestion into a very fine tale!’

  Moore had finally achieved his ambition of creating a running space opera for 2000AD. Now, Halo Jones is regularly cited as a high point of the magazine’s long history. Then, it was a different story. Every week the magazine polled its readers on their favourite strips, and Halo Jones was notably unpopular during its first run (#376–385, July–September 1984). Moore accounted for this as follows:

  Naturally, given its nature, the strip wasn’t really for everyone. Some found our decision to dump the reader straight in at the deep end with a totally alien society and let them figure it out for themselves to be merely confusing and irritating. Then, of course, there were those readers who complained that very little happened in the strip. Personally, I think what they actually meant was that very little violence happened in the strip, but it was their 24p a week and they had every right to be bored if they damn well want to be. In short, for numerous reasons, not everybody liked Halo Jones Book One. But we did. And the people at 2000AD did.

  Meanwhile, another project that had been among Moore’s earliest writing ambitions was coming off the rails. Warrior #21 (August 1984) saw the last appearance of Marvelman. Artist Alan Davis has offered the most succinct reason why: ‘By the time I had given up on Marvelman it was really a bit of a snake pit of egos.’ Five years later, Moore would pass both the writing duties and his stake in the character on to Neil Gaiman with the words ‘this may well be a poisoned chalice’. Marvelman became the focus of a great deal of ill will, much – but by no means all – of the animosity being between Moore and editor Dez Skinn. As Moore explained: ‘I was not on the best of terms with Dez Skinn by the end of the Warrior experience. I didn’t trust the man, and my opinion – for what that is worth – is that there was know
ing deceit involved in the Marvelman decision.’

  The dispute over Marvelman would have subsequent implications for Moore’s work for Warrior, Marvel UK and 2000AD. Earlier in his career, he had stopped working for Doctor Who Monthly in solidarity with Steve Moore, and there’s some evidence of friction over editorial changes to work for ANoN and Sounds. The dispute with Skinn, though, was the first of several truly spectacular fallings-out Moore would have with his publishers, disputes which have tended to conform to a pattern.

  Moore’s understanding of the dynamic between himself as a writer and his editor/publisher has always been that he (and his artists) should be trusted with total creative freedom and that his publisher’s job is to deal with the commercial side of things: marketing, rights issues, legal matters, merchandising and so on. In 1983, Moore had said: ‘The major benefit of working for Warrior is that we’re all allowed to do more or less what the hell we like. Dez knows we’re all competent professionals and tends to trust in our judgement on aesthetic matters. From the response we’ve had I don’t think we’ve let him down so far. If anything I think Warrior has benefited immensely from the diversity and outlandishness of much of its content. It sets us apart and makes us different. It enables us to make artistic progressions of a sort that the major companies are too nervous to even contemplate.’

  Generally speaking, Moore’s editors are initially very impressed by his enthusiasm and the level of thought that has gone into his scripts, and tend to leave him alone. Inevitably, though, at some point, an editor will suggest some change to a script that Moore disagrees with. When asked about Warrior in 1986, Moore told interviewer Neil Gaiman that the promised ‘creative freedom was only gotten after a lot of arguments with the editor’ and Skinn had said, even in happier times, in the pages of Warrior itself: ‘Alan and I have such arguments you wouldn’t believe. He cares about his characters with a passion that’s quite unbelievable. It can make an editor’s life hell! … But the alternative, of not caring, merely hacking the scripts for unknown artists, and never looking at the end product is far more frightening to me.’

  There had been a number of specific disputes. In On Writing for Comics, Moore related: ‘I have had at least one editor within the field tell me that there was no point in risking the alienation of even one reader, the solution being to soften the dialogue of the sentence in question until it had no teeth left with which to maul even the most sensitive member of the audience … there is such a thing as being offensively inoffensive.’ The editor in question was Skinn. Comics journalist Pádraig Ó Méalóid asked them both about the incident. Skinn’s side of the story is: ‘For Alan, I think things got tarnished when I suggested we edit out such words as “chocolate” (about [black character] Evelyn Cream), “virgin” (in the context of a twelve-year-old boy) and “period” (about Liz missing hers) – all from the same Marvelman script (#7, I’ve just checked specifics). We’d lost W.H. Smith only a few weeks earlier because somebody’s mum had complained about the “adult nature” of the Zirk strip in #3 … I couldn’t afford a trade backlash against us.’

  Moore elaborated on the consequences:

  Warrior was aimed at a fairly intelligent readership, we hadn’t had any complaints, and I tended to think that this was a hangover from Dez Skinn’s days at Marvel, and he mentioned lots of things – ‘Why offend even one reader?’ – to which I responded, ‘Because the alternative is to gear your entire product to the most squeamish and prudish member of the audience’. I said that I’m not happy going along with that. Eventually, the argument got down to, well, if I’d just change one of them, and it didn’t matter which one it was. At which point I said, so, basically, they’re all alright to go in, but you want me to change one of them? And Dez Skinn had said, yes, and that it was a matter of him not losing face, at which point I said, no, that’s an even more ridiculous reason … Probably the breaking point came in a meeting in the New Cross offices. We were arguing over some other issue, at which point I had reminded Dez [about this]. At which point he said, ‘That never happened, Alan.’ This was calling me a liar about something we both knew was true in front of, I suppose, Garry Leach and Steve Moore. At this point I was halfway across the office, and Steve Moore and Garry Leach were saying, ‘Leave him, Alan, he’s not worth it,’ and at that point I ceased my work for Warrior.’

  Note that the original dispute was over the script for Warrior #7, which would have been a couple of months before its publication in November 1982. Yet Moore’s last Marvelman appeared in #21 (August 1984) and the last V for Vendetta was written for #27 (unpublished at the time, it was scheduled for publication in March 1985), so the fisticuffs took place at least two years after the initial incident. A year after that, Moore would contrast Skinn’s squeamishness over the word ‘period’ with Karen Berger’s willingness to run a Swamp Thing story ‘entirely about menstruation without the slightest qualm’.

  The corollary of Moore’s position is that if an editor starts interfering with his storytelling, Moore feels authorised to start finding fault with their business skills. Moore was not the only person disillusioned with the way Warrior was being run by the time it had entered its third year of publication. As was normal, after a peak at launch, sales of the magazine had levelled out and eventually started to drop. The prospect of sharing profits had evaporated, with Warrior racking up losses of around £20,000. When many of the creators started prioritising better-paid work elsewhere, it triggered a vicious circle that cut the frequency of Warrior’s publication to bimonthly, and so halved its already fairly meagre income. Many of the later strips were little better than filler material, with reprints and new strips written by Skinn himself, while he continued to pay flat page rates to all his creators. Alan Davis has indicated that there was frustration among some of the Warrior writers and artists: ‘There was a situation where the most successful strip was carrying the book and the other strips weren’t earning their way … it started to be an issue that various creators thought they deserved more because their work was receiving more attention than other people’s work. And so it just got pretty nasty.’ Davis had his own reason to be upset:

  When I was first asked to pencil Marvelman I never regarded myself as Garry’s long-term replacement – I was only asked to pencil two issues for Garry to ink. I believed I was simply doing some donkey work to help Garry make up time on deadlines … When it was finally made clear that Garry was going to quit Marvelman, to work on Warpsmith, I said I would only agree to continue drawing Marvelman if I was given an equal percentage of the trademark and character copyright Dez, Garry and Alan claimed to own. Each gave me a percentage that made me an equal quarter partner. Remember, Warrior was paying £40 per pencilled and inked page as opposed to £80–£95 from Marvel UK or 2000AD, so working for Warrior was a gamble to secure an equitable, or enhanced, payscale through royalties.

  The issue of who owns what rights to Marvelman has been highly contentious for a long time. We can say with confidence that at this point Moore and Leach understood that they had equal shares and that either Dez Skinn or Quality Communications also had a share (there are differing accounts of the size of Quality’s share). To recognise his contribution, Davis was cut into the deal, ending up with the same share as Moore and Leach, with Quality Communications also retaining a share.

  Moore had clearly lost his enthusiasm for Warrior. He was no longer pitching new series, writing one-off strips or contributing articles. He stuck with V for Vendetta simply because he had always seen that story as being finite, and as it was two-thirds complete, he felt an obligation to his readers and artist David Lloyd to finish. Lloyd in contrast was more than happy to keep working: ‘Other artists had to go off and do other things to make more money. I was very happy to keep doing it because Dez was still paying me money. And I was doing other work … I don’t know if Alan felt as much loyalty to it as I did, though he probably did. He was doing other things, but it was very important to me. That was fantastic, a great chara
cter, I had sympathy for the character. Nothing was more important to us … it was ours. And we could do what we liked with it … We could talk about things we couldn’t talk about anywhere else, because we had that control. I’m not saying I’d have kept doing it if I hadn’t been paid … but we would have still done it.’

  Nor did Alan Davis have any complaints about Skinn at this point. ‘Various people had warned me off about working with Dez, because he had a bit of a reputation at the time. Again I don’t know how he warranted that because Dez never ever did anything to me.’ Everyone knew that Warrior, never awash with cash, was in trouble, and tensions were clearly fraying. Davis felt ‘there was no heroic melodrama or valiant struggle for creators’ rights, just practical business decisions muddied by ego and legacy building. Dez had invested heavily in Warrior and was struggling to keep it alive.’

  The last, great hope for a lifeline was the prospect of Warrior material being licensed to the lucrative American market. Skinn had been actively pursuing this since early 1983, and initially ‘everybody was cool to let me go with my gut instinct, it had got us this far, so it made more sense than a dozen or more writers and artists all pitching individually. Outside of the expense for them to all fly to the States, not many of them were really that used to negotiating US contracts or pitching and bartering!’ At the 1984 San Diego Comic Convention, over the weekend of 28 June to 1 July 1984, he talked to representatives of the ‘Big Two’ US publishers, Marvel and DC, and was invited to pitch to both companies in New York. The flagship strip of Warrior, Marvelman, was in the paradoxical position of being precisely what the American comic publishers were looking for – a critically acclaimed, adult superhero book, by a writer who was a rising star – but which was also unpublishable by either DC or Marvel because its name contained the word ‘marvel’. Skinn says Jim Shooter, editor-in-chief at Marvel, ‘definitely didn’t want Marvelman, for a quite logical reason. Despite the name, which would make it sound like a figurehead for the company, what we were doing with the character didn’t really represent where Marvel overall was heading. Dick [Giordano] laughed at the thought of publishing Marvelman. They’d had a bad enough time with Captain Marvel! Of course this wasn’t much of a surprise. We realised that Marvelman would be a major stumbling block for anybody.’