Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  The obvious solution would be simply to change Marvelman’s name. There were two options. The first was what DC had done with Captain Marvel for many years: comics starring Captain Marvel were named Shazam!, after his magic word. The comic in which Marvelman appeared could simply be named Kimota!, after his magic word. Alternatively the name of the character could change: as Marvelman has an MM insignia on his costume, the name would have to begin with an M (while speech balloons could easily be edited, correcting art would be far more complicated, and trademarks would also be affected).

  Moore had in fact jokingly referred to changing the name to ‘Miracleman’ as far back as the original pitch to Warrior. He and Davis had shown (and quickly killed off) Miracleman, a character who looked just like Marvelman, in a Captain Britain episode featuring superheroes from a parallel universe. In early 1984, however, Moore told Comics Interview ‘I’m not prepared to change the name’, and had already told Skinn and Davis the same thing. Skinn was furious: ‘With Marvelman, we’d all poured our souls into making it work. For Garry Leach, Alan Davis and me, this was where we’d get some financial return for our efforts. We really didn’t care what America wanted to call it. So long as they’d print it and pay us that rare beastie in comics called a royalty. But Alan felt it would somehow destroy the property if the name was changed. That he couldn’t continue writing it as anything other than Marvelman. Great, he’d already made it to big payer DC, on Swamp Thing. Everybody else was still waiting for the call and could use the money. I seem to remember it took almost a year to get him to see sense.’

  It’s a characteristic aspect of the pattern of his disputes with publishers that once Alan Moore starts losing patience with them, he adopts a point of principle that seems, to the other side, at best eccentric or self-defeating. This principle is usually straightforward and the logic behind it coherent, but it can come out of the blue. While there’s invariably a noble philosophical cause at stake, it is also clearly a tactic which has the effect of forcing the publisher into bending over backwards to keep him happy.

  Skinn had many other Warrior properties to offer. Giordano and DC’s publisher Jenette Kahn were keen on Zirk and Pressbutton; across town, Archie Goodwin at Marvel’s ‘adult’ line Epic also reportedly wanted to publish Pressbutton. Skinn, though, had a sticking point of his own: he wanted a publisher to commit to reprinting every strip from Warrior. He envisaged a range of titles, ideally co-branded with Quality Communications, and had prepared dummy issues using photocopies of Warrior pages and reusing painted cover art: ‘I wouldn’t let them cherry-pick! DC loved Zirk and Pressbutton I remember … But we’d had a very democratic way with Warrior, everybody was an equal, so I felt it unfair to dump any strip in favour of getting a deal with some of the others. I was going the movies-on-TV route, where to get Jaws you’d have to agree to take a few of Universal’s other maybe less sellable movies as part of a bundle. We hadn’t known who’d be our Judge Dredd/Tank Girl when we started, but the magazine wouldn’t have worked without everybody pulling together so I certainly wasn’t about to dump anybody now we could see who the front-runners were. Instead, I put the shorter-run strips or the less flavour-of-the-month ones into US anthologies, with titles like Challenger and Weird Heroes. Only Marvelman and Pressbutton had their own titles.’ This was not something either Marvel or DC were interested in. Skinn returned to the UK empty-handed, and began preparing pitches to smaller American publishers.

  Marvelman now ground to a halt. Moore told Skinn he would not be writing any more Marvelman scripts for the time being. This was no problem in itself – he had already delivered scripts for several future issues – but now Alan Davis joined in, withholding his artwork because he hadn’t been paid for his last batch. Skinn was prompted to explore at least one other avenue: a young Scottish writer named Grant Morrison had submitted a spec Kid Marvelman script, and Skinn sounded him out about becoming the regular Marvelman writer. Many years later, Morrison would recall:

  I didn’t want to do it without Moore’s permission, and I wrote to him and said, ‘They’ve asked me to do this, but obviously I really respect your work, and I wouldn’t want to mess anything up, but I don’t want anyone else to do it, and mess it up.’ And he sent me back this really weird letter, and I remember the opening of it, it said, ‘I don’t want this to sound like the softly hissed tones of a mafia hitman, but back off.’ And the letter was all, but you can’t do this, you know, we’re much more popular than you, and if you do this, your career will be over, and it was really quite threatening …

  For Moore, this is a version of events that ‘as far as I know has no bearing upon reality at all’. He remembers Morrison’s script and that ‘Dez had rather sprung it on me out of the blue, and it didn’t fit in with the rather elaborate storyline that I was creating … I can only imagine that Dez Skinn told Grant Morrison what I’d said. As far as I remember, and this would be quite a serious aberration if I’d forgotten something like this, but I am almost 100 per cent certain that I never wrote any kind of letter to Grant Morrison, let alone a threatening one. Of course, if you were able to produce this, I would be willing to think again.’ In a 2001 interview, Skinn implied he had been the one to pass the news to Morrison – ‘Alan’s reply was, “Nobody else writes Marvelman.” And I said to Grant, “I’m sorry, he’s jealously hanging on to this one”’ – but he says now ‘I do remember the situation. I never saw or asked to see the letter Grant got, though … I enthusiastically sent Grant’s wonderful little cameo story up to Alan Moore, ill-aware of his growing possessive paranoia (for want of better terminology). But I quickly became aware of (and surprised by) how jealously he was guarding his position.’

  Whatever the rancour in the air, Skinn clearly bore Alan Davis no ill will, assigning him a three-part Pressbutton story. For his part, Davis made it clear he wanted nothing more to do with Marvelman, and returned his stake to Garry Leach.

  Alan Moore wasn’t only losing patience with Dez Skinn and Warrior in the summer of 1984, he had also severed ties with Marvel UK. Two reasons were stated: first that the company’s accounts department had become slow to send out cheques; second that his favourite editor, Bernie Jaye, had left the company. He also decided to end DR & Quinch, ‘a Frankenstein monster that got out of hand. I was going to do a one-shot story … It went on beyond the point where I would rather have finished it off.’ The net effect was that he had abruptly stopped working with Alan Davis on all three strips they’d been collaborating on at the start of the year. Their last regular DR & Quinch appeared in #367, in May 1984; their last instalment of Captain Britain appeared in June; their last Marvelman was published in August. For the moment at least, however, they remained friends. Davis continued to draw Captain Britain and DR & Quinch, with Moore’s recommended successor, Jamie Delano, his old pal from the Arts Group days, writing the scripts for both.

  While Moore claimed he had left Warrior and Marvel UK on principle, Davis notes that he ‘clearly quit both Captain Britain and Marvelman at virtually the same time but claims external, unconnected reasons for both. Isn’t it simpler to accept that with Swamp Thing and new offers from DC – which were far better paid – the volume of work increased to a point where choices had to be made? I know I, amongst many other creators, was hoping for a call from DC.’ Moore continued to work in British comics – not just on Maxwell the Magic Cat, but for 2000AD and a variety of smaller publications – but whatever was motivating his choices, his American breakthrough had clearly changed things. Barely a year before, he had been happy to let Dez Skinn try pitching to US publishers; now he was in direct contact with senior management at DC. They were keen for him to take on more projects with them, and offered lavish production values and generous deadlines. It wasn’t just the promise of jam tomorrow: DC were publishing Swamp Thing every month without fail. He was now a star name at DC Comics, with Dave Gibbons only half joking when he referred to him as DC’s ‘golden boy’.

  Moore’s second projec
t for DC was a short Green Lantern Corps story, drawn by Gibbons (Green Lantern #188, May 1985), but characteristically, he had plenty of plans for the future. He worked with Kevin O’Neill on developing Bizarro World and The Spectre, and at least considered reviving the Demon (who had made a couple of appearances in Swamp Thing). By December 1983, he had pitched a Lois Lane series and expressed interest in the Metal Men. He and Gibbons also talked about revamping science fiction series Tommy Tomorrow, although they seemed motivated solely by their amusement that the lead character wore shorts. Meanwhile Moore wrote one-off strips for Green Lantern, The Omega Men, Green Arrow and Vigilante. And DC signed up Moore and Brian Bolland to produce a Batman/Judge Dredd crossover series: as Bolland explained in October 1984, ‘the whole premise would have been that Judge Dredd is an organ of the law whereas Batman represents justice, and the story revolved around the conflict between these two, and the misunderstandings that would arise from the two completely different ways of looking at how society is run.’ The project fell through, Bolland claimed, when IPC could not be convinced ‘that Batman was a viable character’. By the beginning of 1985, Moore and Bolland had moved on to start work on a story that pitted Batman against the Joker.

  Moore’s Swamp Thing editor, Karen Berger, was delighted with his work and encouraged him to take risks, backing him up when he did so. Or, as Moore rather pointedly put it, speaking at a 1985 convention: ‘Karen’s great. She’s really nice … She reads the stories, and she supports us. I think one of the problems we have in Britain is that editors feel they’ve got to edit. It’s like policemen who don’t get promoted until they’ve made a certain number of arrests … They want to deliberately change something just so that they can say, “Yeah, I edited this”.’

  While DC were not able to publish Marvelman, they were interested in other stories from Moore that applied real-world logic to superheroes. The DC Universe was a playground full of interesting characters, but permanent change was not possible – a writer couldn’t blow up New York or have a nuclear war, or even age the characters. So Moore began drawing up plans for a superhero story set in its own self-contained world. Originally, he used the Archie Comics superheroes the Mighty Crusaders, but when he was told that DC had bought the characters previously owned by defunct publishers Charlton, he decided they would be ideal for his story, and started referring to it as The Charlton Project. The heyday of the Charlton heroes had been a period in the late sixties when characters like the Peacemaker, the Question and Blue Beetle had appeared in a coordinated line of superhero titles created by writers and artists like Steve Ditko, Jim Aparo, Denny O’Neill and Dick Giordano. Part of the appeal for Moore was precisely that the characters were so generic. He drew up a proposal for a six-part limited series, Who Killed The Peacemaker?, a story in which the Question investigates the murder of one of his colleagues, only to uncover a conspiracy to destroy New York with a faked alien attack.

  Dick Giordano received the unsolicited proposal in early 1984. His first instinct had been to encourage Moore to take the characters further into ‘adult’ territory, but he balked when he saw just how far Moore wanted to go. Dave Gibbons had successfully lobbied to become the artist on the project at a comics convention in Chicago (and, while there, also persuaded long-time Superman editor Julius Schwartz to commission a Superman Annual from himself and Moore). A few years later, Gibbons produced a mock-up cover of Comics Cavalcade Weekly, featuring the Charlton superheroes as a prototype for a weekly anthology comic:

  This had been what DC had in mind for the Charlton characters – an integration into the DC Universe’s superhero community (note the presence of Superman). Giordano telephoned Moore and persuaded him, after some initial reluctance, that he should rework the story with original characters. The Charlton characters were given to other creators, and over the next few years books like Blue Beetle, The Question and Captain Atom showed up. Moore and Gibbons were surprised how much creative freedom using new characters gave them, but the biggest consequence was that they were offered a contract that classified their series as ‘creator-owned’, meaning they would own the rights and would be given a share of the merchandising and other licensing deals. This progressive approach appealed to Moore, as it represented exactly the same ideal that Warrior had aspired to: a free hand for the creators, a savvy business operation getting the finished product out to readers, and everyone sharing the rewards. Moore and Gibbons spent many months discussing the project, writing notes and making sketches. After one Westminster Comic Mart, they finalised the look of their new characters.

  Warrior had acted as a talent showcase – as did 2000AD – but American editors proved to be far more interested in the creators than their creations, and could bypass the middleman, getting in touch directly with the writers and artists who interested them. Moore was only the most prominent British comics writer who was now working for American publishers. In the wake of his success, DC in particular would send senior editors to London to headhunt creators. Tellingly, in Warrior #26 Dez Skinn characterised this mass recruitment as an ‘American attack on UK talent’. Just two years after the launch of Warrior, it was Alan Moore, another fan-turned-pro, one who’d barely had a professional credit in mainstream comics when Skinn commissioned him, who was reaping the rewards. Moore’s take on the situation is ‘I think it was that Dez Skinn … wanted to be Stan Lee. He wanted to be the person who got all the credit, whose name was on the whole package – Dez Sez, back in Hulk Weekly – and that’s how he saw himself … I think that the fact that Warrior was mainly attracting attention for the artists and the writers, and specifically for me, that might have been the root of the problem – I’m only guessing.’

  Nevertheless, Skinn did find a US publisher interested in republishing the whole Quality Communications range: Pacific Comics. ‘It was the whole lot or nothing,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want any of the gang left out. So Pacific became the only game in town. Obviously until I had a deal in place there was nothing to tell the creators.’ Pacific were a small company, but they published Jack Kirby’s new series Captain Victory and – to great critical acclaim – Dave Stevens’ The Rocketeer, and were known for their high production values and commitment to creators’ rights. Skinn helped prepare mock-ups of issues. Proceeding as though it was a done deal, in the late summer of 1984 Pacific sent an order form to shops advertising eight comics that they planned to release in September. One of these was Challenger:

  This was clearly premature. Moore and Lloyd knew Skinn had been negotiating with Pacific, but both were very hazy on the details, and nothing had been signed. Lloyd admits, ‘There was no clear agreement or we’d have run it … It was a very foggy area for me … Dez did all that. He was effectively agenting it.’ It also proved academic – at the end of August 1984, employees at Pacific were told that the company was winding down, and the following month they declared bankruptcy.

  Shortly after that, Moore went to the United States for the first time – at DC’s expense – to attend the Creation Convention. A limousine whisked him from JFK airport to DC’s Fifth Avenue offices. He was greeted by Paul Levitz, then the vice-president of the company, with words that confused Moore: ‘“So, Alan Moore. You are my greatest mistake”. Sort of ambiguous to say the least. I just figured it was a kind of neurotic, American business thing that I didn’t quite understand.’ Moore met Karen Berger, John Totleben and Steve Bissette on the first day, and a number of other esteemed comic book creators (including Marv Wolfman, Walt and Louise Simonson – Walt showed Moore his new gadget, a ‘word processor’ – Rick Veitch, Howard Chaykin, Len Wein, Frank Miller and Lynne Varley) over the remainder of his visit. He participated in a Swamp Thing panel at the convention, then met Julius Schwartz, the legendary editor of the Superman books he had loved as a child, now seventy and still very much in charge of the character. Moore ‘knew his name before Elvis Presley’s … being a megalo-star of some stature myself, I obviously feel awed by very few people, and Julius Schwartz h
appens to be one of them … we hit it off immediately’. They discussed the Superman Annual Moore would be writing, and when Moore flicked through Schwartz’s scrapbook of souvenirs and mementoes he was astonished to catch sight of a letter from H.P. Lovecraft, and to learn that Schwartz had been Lovecraft’s literary agent.

  Moore, Bissette and Totleben met Dick Giordano to talk about their plans for further issues of Swamp Thing, and Moore recorded a fairly lengthy video interview DC planned to use to promote the series. He then went to stay with Bissette in Vermont, stopping on the way to meet Gary Groth, publisher of Fantagraphics, and editor of The Comics Journal. After a couple of idyllic days in the tranquillity of Vermont, he returned to New York, where he visited Marvel (‘I don’t seem to have an awful lot to say to Marvel and they don’t seem to have much to say to me’) before returning to Northampton, via Heathrow.

  It was around this time that Moore indicated to Dez Skinn that he wanted to take V for Vendetta to DC. Skinn considered what DC were offering ‘a far poorer deal’, but he also had a different objection: ‘I know I was baffled and shocked because it was a sudden move away from our all-for-one/one-for-all approach, but I can’t put a time frame on it. V had definitely been in the dummy US titles which Garry Leach and I had put together so it was a late-on change he suddenly dropped on us … Alan Moore really was starting to be his own worst enemy. Instead of going along with the rest of us and selling a single publishing right on V for Vendetta to Pacific (ultimately Eclipse) he went with a lower page rate and sold the whole caboodle, rights and all, to DC. Outside of them being his new best buddy at the time (Marvel UK, 2000AD and my own little show having served their purpose as his springboard to America) I never could understand what made him do something so insane.’