Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  For all of us, life is a matter of trying to come to terms with the universe and I think that in its most benign sense, apocalypse is the moment of revelation, where we realise that all of our attempts to make sense of the universe are hopelessly off the mark and in the ruins of our theories we kind of get a glimpse, we have what drunks call a ‘moment of lucidity’ of the things that are really important … revelations can come in sorts of ways in everybody’s life.

  So is Watchmen a comedy? Well, its jokes tend towards the dark, the cruel and even the sick, but there are plenty of jokes in there. Comedies have happy endings, and Watchmen … might. The world is not destroyed, and it no longer seems inevitable that it will be. Dreiberg and Laurie, the most ‘ordinary’ characters in the story, have put aside the emotional baggage from their past and started thinking about their future together. Is Watchmen cheerful and life-affirming, then? No, not for the most part, but neither is it written in a monotone, endlessly dark and dreary. While it is ‘by the writer of V for Vendetta and The Killing Joke’, to fully understand Watchmen, it’s important to understand that it’s just as much ‘by the writer of DR & Quinch and “March of the Sinister Ducks”’.

  ‘I’m a comic book messiah for the 1990s, and having risen from my humble terraced street origins, and having survived my tenure as one of the dole queue millions, I’ve now become a successful small businessman of no mean repute, and I believe that this is the face of success in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain.’

  Alan Moore, Monsters, Maniacs and Moore

  With the dust settling from Watchmen, 1987 saw perhaps the pivotal point in Alan Moore’s creative life, as both he and the comics industry tried to figure out what would come next.

  Moore and Gibbons’ work on Watchmen finally came to an end around May 1987, over three years after they first conceived the project. They knew the series was a huge critical and sales hit before they had started on the final issues. In the event, though, finishing the book had become something of a scramble, with Moore sending individual pages of scripts over to Gibbons by taxi as he completed them and the schedule slipping by a couple of months so that the last issue had to be resolicited (that is, the original orders placed by comic book stores were cancelled and they had to order the issue again). Watchmen #12, the final number, was published on 11 July 1987. The series would be collected into a ‘graphic novel’ in December, and quickly become a bestseller.

  In the UK, style magazines and Sunday supplements were now running articles heralding the advent of comics for grown-ups. One of the first was by Neil Gaiman, in the 27 July 1986 edition of the Today newspaper, and it serves as a template for practically every subsequent mainstream article. It informed readers that comics were not just for kids any more; that the quintessentially American superhero was now being written and drawn by British talent with an outsider’s perspective on US society; and that comics like Watchmen included political commentary. It noted that Alan Moore was one of a new breed of British comics creators whose work could be found in 2000AD, referenced Frank Miller’s Dark Knight and mentioned the Forbidden Planet comic shop in central London. A longer piece by Don Watson in the Observer in November 1986, ‘Shazam! The Hero Breaks Down’, followed almost exactly the same pattern, noting, ‘Alan Moore’s fearsome appearance (over six feet tall, shoulder-length hair and beard) belies a character of gentleness and restless intelligence. Despite the fact that the title that made his name, Swamp Thing monthly, is set in the rotting opulence of the American South, he himself still resides in his native Northampton.’

  The hype was carefully nurtured by publisher Titan. Not only did Titan Books publish collected editions of both British and American material, its distribution arm supplied comics to shops, and its London comic shop, Forbidden Planet, was the largest in the UK. Titan had hired a PR man, Igor Goldkind, to find ways to market comics to a wider audience. He popularised the name ‘graphic novel’, admitting ‘I stole the term outright from Will Eisner’, but it was a strategy that persuaded bookshops to stock comics.

  The PR effort was augmented by the publication as collections of three superb comics that had previously appeared in serial form: The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and Maus – ‘the Big Three’, as they became known. Alongside their regular references to Dark Knight, the British press would often mention Maus, Art Spiegelman’s account of the Holocaust told using cartoon mice, but they would always concentrate on Watchmen and Alan Moore. Moore’s striking figure and Watchmen’s smiley badge illustrated almost every article. By 1988, the badge was cropping up in all sorts of places: as set dressing in a Lenny Henry sitcom, on a Doctor Who companion’s bomber jacket, ubiquitously as the emblem of electronic dance group Bomb the Bass. Moore and his work were name-checked by all sorts of bands. The Chameleons sang ‘Swamp Thing’, Transvision Vamp were ‘Hanging Out with Halo Jones’. In 1989 Pop Will Eat Itself released ‘Can U Dig It?’, a list of songs, movies, TV and comics they liked, which name-checked V for Vendetta and had the repeated refrain ‘Alan Moore knows the score’.

  Moore was now skirting the boundary between being a cult figure and a celebrity. His parents were pleased for him. ‘As I started to realise some of my idle teenage ambitions, I don’t think they quite believed it at first, at least to start with. They thought it was going to end in disappointment and it would prove to be impossible … my father was very impressed when he saw me on television for the first time. He never read my work … but he understood that if you appeared on television and people were saying nice things about you, you were doing well.’ Moore was everywhere: he appeared on Radio 4’s arts show Kaleidoscope and in the very first issue of Q (October 1986). Having talked about Swamp Thing during one appearance on children’s Saturday morning show Get Fresh, he then sat on a panel with Cliff Richard, Shakin’ Stevens, Alvin Stardust and a dog from EastEnders to judge that week’s pop singles. He was interviewed on an arts programme by Muriel Gray and by Paula Yates on the 14 November 1986 edition of late night music show The Tube. ‘At that point I was the most successful comic writer that had ever been. I felt weird because with the best will in the world you can get cut off from people if you become a success; all of a sudden your time is taken up doing TV things, doing interviews – not like this one, but interviews with some magazine in Holland, another in Germany, another in France; you’re filming documentaries about your life …’

  That last point was a reference to Monsters, Maniacs and Moore (1987), a half-hour TV documentary made by Central Television as part of their long-running England Their England series, and which took the form of Moore interviewing himself. He makes the case for comics in the programme by stating that their low price means they are ‘within reach of anybody’. There’s a long discussion of the environmental themes of Swamp Thing and his work for 2000AD. He shows us around Northampton, explains the political intent of his comics, reads ‘A Cautionary Fable’ (from 2000AD #240) to his daughters Amber and Leah, and provides a detailed exegesis of ‘The March of the Sinister Ducks’. Asking himself if he has a messiah complex, he notes ‘would I have a haircut like this if I didn’t?’

  One aspect of Moore’s life that wasn’t picked up by the press was that around this time Debbie Delano, a mutual friend for many years, had moved in with Alan and Phyllis to their house on Birchfield Road. Moore says they tried a ‘sort of an experimental relationship, I suppose you’d call it. It was something we were very serious about, and it endured for two to three years, which was a mark of that seriousness.’

  As with much of Moore’s personal life, it’s a mistake to confuse his choice not to throw the relationship into the limelight by writing about it with secrecy or evasion. The three were open with friends and family about their relationship. Moore drew Phyllis and Debbie in a piece for Heartbreak Hotel (see next page).

  Public exposure brought with it a degree of anxiety for Moore, who in 1986 admitted, ‘I like the undeserved adulation, but in some ways I’d almost rather write anonymously.’ He understood t
he game he had to play, though. Much to the amusement of some of his peers, Moore bought a shiny white suit cut fashionably – for the summer of 1986 – short at the sleeves and made himself available to anyone who wanted to talk to him. As Igor Goldkind noted, Moore ‘was adopted as a kind of spokesman for adult comics – a task he fulfilled with great patience, as virtually every interested journalist buttonholed him for his views. He was soon dubbed “Britain’s First Comics Megastar”, and for once the media analysis rang true.’

  Moore tirelessly heralded the coming of the adult comic. He knew, though, that his main role in the revolution would be to write some of the ‘graphic novels’ everyone was hearing so much about. His fans were interested in a follow-up to Watchmen. After the success of The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller had been commissioned to write Batman: Year One, a ‘grittier’ origin story, and it was a huge hit. From the time Watchmen started publication, Moore and Gibbons had said they weren’t interested in a continuation of their story, but they were open to the idea of exploring other aspects of that world. Moore commented: ‘We might do a series called Minutemen, detailing the superheroes of the 1940s. We’ve also thought of maybe doing a series called Tales of the Black Freighter, which would be this pirate comic-book series that we’ve mentioned running in that alternate world. But, no, there will not be another series of Watchmen.’ Gibbons confirmed this: ‘Obviously, Alan and I could make ourselves a fortune on Watchmen 2 next year. I just can’t think of any reason to do it other than the obvious monetary ones. Minutemen appeals because it’s a different era and a different story.’

  They both stuck to this line in interview after interview, although Moore occasionally alluded to an important caveat (my emphasis): ‘The only possible spin-off we’re thinking of is – maybe in four or five years time, ownership position permitting – we might do a Minutemen book. There would be no sequel.’

  As Watchmen reached its conclusion, Moore’s fans were not short of further reading. Though he vetoed a couple of reprint projects – he didn’t think his Sounds work was of high enough quality, and continued to block reprints of his Marvel UK material – almost all of his early British work was repackaged and reprinted for both the US and UK markets. The best of his Future Shocks and Time Twisters were branded by name in the collections Alan Moore’s Shocking Futures and Alan Moore’s Twisted Times; Moore wrote introductions for them (possibly because although he wasn’t due payment from the reprints themselves, the writer of the Introduction was on a 1 per cent royalty), and contributed a page to a strip in 2000AD #500 – his last work for the title. A four-volume set of all the Maxwell the Magic Cat strips was published, a fact that embarrassed Moore so much he donated his fee to Greenpeace. Eclipse were publishing Miracleman, and by this point it was all new material. Moore was a frequent contributor to small press comics in Britain and America, providing a vast range of pieces encompassing everything from a dramatised account of real soldiers’ experience of war to an illustration of Godzilla. DC were due to publish V for Vendetta, with Moore and David Lloyd completing the story that had been abruptly halted by the cancellation of Warrior. The long-gestating Batman/Joker graphic novel, The Killing Joke, would soon be released, and Moore was interested in writing a Mr Monster/Swamp Thing crossover.

  Astute readers could spot, though, that all was not well between Alan Moore and DC. There were no longer any shorter pieces or guest writing from Moore in DC comics. Previously prolific, he had finished work on his last issue of Swamp Thing around the same time he completed the script for the twelfth and final issue of Watchmen. The script for The Killing Joke had been written in 1985. Two-thirds of V for Vendetta was to consist of reprints from Warrior. Even if it wasn’t going to be a sequel to Watchmen, where was Moore’s new major project, and why weren’t DC publishing it?

  The answer was that there had been a major falling out between Alan Moore and DC Comics. Early in 1987, Moore had declared publicly that he would never work for the company again.

  Moore had begun writing Watchmen on extremely good terms with DC. Watchmen #1 was published in May 1986, but a full year earlier, as the first issues were being assembled, those at DC understood it was something special and had proudly shown it off to people visiting the offices, including the author Michael Crichton. Artistically, Moore and Gibbons were given a virtually free hand and DC’s resources allowed innovations with such matters as the format of the comic and the graphic design. The writer and artist trusted each other, DC trusted them. They were not working within the constraints of an existing ‘line’, and this removed whole layers of corporate oversight and editorial concern. Gibbons has said that while the series was being developed, there was no time pressure on them. Watchmen’s editor was kept busy, though. Barbara Randall, who assumed the role midway through the series, says ‘There was a hell of a lot to do: music rights, production issues (you wouldn’t believe how many hours it took to create a “paper clip” in those days before personal computers, scanners, and Photoshop!), long calls with Alan walking through the content of the back matter, mostly just congratulatory calls to Dave because his work was excellent.’

  Moore continued to be given other plum jobs at DC, who were undertaking a relaunch of their entire range to make it more appealing to modern readers. In 1986, Julius Schwartz commissioned him to write Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, a send-off for the ‘original’ Superman before the character was given a major revamp; there are rumours Moore had to turn down the offer to become one of the writers for the revamped version because he was too busy with Watchmen. He wrote a number of one-off strips, and while writing Watchmen, he’d continued to pitch ideas to DC. Moore and Gibbons discussed the idea of working together on a lighthearted version of Captain Marvel after Watchmen, as an antidote to all the darkness. One of Moore’s last pitches to DC would be Twilight (also referred to as Twilight of the Superheroes), a vast series set in the future of the DC Universe, with the same end-of-days feeling as The Dark Knight Returns, but applied to the entire pantheon of superheroes. It had big roles for characters Moore had created, such as John Constantine and Sodom Yat, but also for Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and so on. The pitch document is undated but internal evidence suggests it was written in late 1986. Moore thinks, ‘Twilight was the Watchmen II sort of proposal … It was just this big crossover … I guess that they were very pleased by the success of Watchmen and … I think we could have done more or less whatever we wanted.’ By the beginning of 1987, though, Moore was ‘starting to realise DC weren’t necessarily my friends’.

  DC’s business model was based around long-running ongoing monthly comics featuring superheroes created decades before – Superman, Batman and Robin, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Green Lantern, the Teen Titans and many more. By 1987, the oldest titles, Action Comics and Detective Comics (featuring Superman and Batman respectively), were both heading towards their 600th issue. There had been legal disputes over the creation and ownership of many of these characters, but DC treated them all, from the household names to the most obscure one-off supporting character, as corporate property, licensing merchandise as well as producing their own.

  Watchmen was unusual in being a creator-led limited series that used original characters, but these were not entirely uncharted waters for DC. Mike W. Barr and Brian Bolland had co-created Camelot 3000 (1982), Frank Miller had created Ronin (1983). By the time Moore started working for DC, creators were beginning to enjoy a few more rights. Contracts changed so that writers and artists received payments if their characters were reused. Swamp Thing #37 had seen the debut of John Constantine, a working-class magician who proved instantly popular and was eventually given his own monthly title, Hellblazer, which inspired a 2005 feature film starring Keanu Reeves. If Constantine had been introduced just a year earlier, they would have received nothing; now, with every appearance, the creators split a small payment. Writers and artists also became eligible for at least some form of royalty payment for strong sales and reprints. Artists
were paid royalties if their work was sold as a poster. Original art was returned to the artists, who could sell it on directly to fans, or in batches to comic shops.

  Watchmen was commissioned in the knowledge that there was now a distinct demographic of older comic fans, keen for less childish stories and willing to pay a premium for them, and that the best way to produce such comics was to let creators have more creative freedom and a financial stake in the success of the project. Moore’s Swamp Thing contract had been a simple work-for-hire arrangement that came into force when he cashed his cheque; the Watchmen contract was a far more substantial, complicated legal document.

  Watchmen told a complex and intertwined story where small events that initially seem unconnected converge towards a surprise apocalyptic finale that sees a demigod withdrawing from the mortal realm. As above, so below. Moore and Gibbons’ series became the flashpoint for behind-the-scenes disputes that had been brewing within the industry for a number of years. Although no one seems to have put it in these terms at the time, Watchmen can be seen as the moment when comics stopped being magazines (ephemeral, editor-driven, deadline orientated, ongoing) and became novels (enduring, authored, carefully composed, complete). It was a change that caught out publisher and creators alike – and one that provoked a fierce rearguard action from the former. It’s entirely fitting that the dispute culminated in an argument about what happened when a comic was literally turned into a novel.

  The first crack in the relationship between DC and Alan Moore appeared soon after Watchmen went on sale, in the summer of 1986, and it was one that all parties involved considered to be trivial. The Watchmen deal gave Moore and Gibbons a cut of merchandising revenue, but there was one loophole: DC were allowed to distribute ‘promotional’ items without paying the creators. It was a standard clause, understood to cover small things commonly given away in comic book stores or at conventions: buttons (badges, as they would be called in the UK) or flyers that folded out to become posters. For Watchmen replicas of the smiley button depicted in issue #1 were given away in great quantities, but some comic shops began charging for them, believing DC had set a recommended price of $1. Even when money was charged for the buttons, however, the DC marketing department classified them as ‘self-liquidating promotional items’, rather than merchandise. Moore and Gibbons received no money.