Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  Alan Moore would reasonably have expected the twelve issues of Watchmen to be published and for that to be that; when he signed the contract, there was not a single precedent to suggest otherwise. He, Gibbons and DC all fully expected that within a few years all rights would revert to the creators. Even as the early issues of Watchmen went on sale, however, the game was changing. One catalyst was Dave Sim, creator and self-publisher of Cerebus the Aardvark (1977–2004), a series which had transformed from a pastiche of Conan and Howard the Duck comics into a literate, complex discussion of religion and politics. Sim had been publishing slim collections of old material for a number of years, but found that keeping supply matched to demand was a challenge, and his printing bills were expensive. In 1985, DC began negotiating to publish graphic novels of the Cerebus back catalogue, and offered Sim $100,000 and a 10 per cent share in the royalties and merchandise. This looked like an extraordinarily good deal for Sim, but he was unhappy at having to sign over so much control of his intellectual property. He came up with the alternative of self-publishing thick ‘phone book’ paperbacks collecting twenty-five issues at a time, which would be far easier to keep in print. Sim published a 512-page volume, High Society, in June 1986, and by cutting out every possible middleman he had earned himself $150,000 within weeks. He would become a champion of self-publishing, putting his money where his mouth was by supporting dozens of ventures.

  The corporate publishers, though, could learn the lesson of Cerebus: there was a market for collections of recent comics, and DC would soon reap the rewards. The collected Dark Knight Returns was published in October 1986 with an introduction written by Moore. As Watchmen neared completion, the idea that – as a limited edition for hardcore fans – it would have a similar afterlife in book form excited its writer. When it became clear that there was a market for a paperback collection of Watchmen, which would give the book an unusually long lifespan, Moore assumed that he and Gibbons could renegotiate terms with their friends at DC to reflect the new situation. (It has been suggested that they had already had informal conversations in that vein with people at DC, although the details of any such discussions remain unclear.) For his part, Moore evidently felt there was a gentlemen’s agreement in place that the rights would revert to the creators in any event after no more than three years. All seemed to be well.

  And at some level, Len Wein is wrong. DC did not accidentally fall into a situation where people were buying the Watchmen graphic novel. The marketing department had seen the positive publicity around the release of the individual issues of Watchmen; they had seen the success of the collected Dark Knight Returns. In their wildest dreams, no one at DC would have expected Watchmen still to be a bestseller twenty-five years down the line, but a movie version had been optioned in the autumn of 1986, and so a Watchmen book could reasonably be expected to have a shelf life of several years. They were planning the release of the graphic novel edition for over a year before it happened, setting up a special arrangement with Warner Books to distribute it. The trade paperback would stay in print, Moore and Gibbons would not be getting the rights back, and that was all in accordance with the contract. To Moore, it ‘seemed to us as if we were being punished for having done a particularly good comic book’.

  This was not, for Moore, anything to do with legal or financial pedantry. At heart, the tragedy of Moore’s realisation that DC ‘were not necessarily his friends’ is that he had genuinely believed they were.

  Up until the dispute over the Watchmen buttons, Moore had enjoyed a cordial relationship with people at the company. They had quickly developed a mutually beneficial deal where he was given great creative freedom, and where in return he produced comic books that won awards and made a lot of money. He had found people at DC open to his imaginative suggestions, and had been lucky enough to start working for the company right on the cusp of a number of changes that benefited the talent producing comics. Unlike the UK comics industry, DC had the resources to do his work justice. They had flown him to New York and San Diego, handed him copies of rare comics and given him a chance to meet his idols like Jack Kirby and Julius Schwartz, as well as his peers like Frank Miller and Walt Simonson. He had got to work with Curt Swan, artist of the Superman stories he had loved so much as a child. Senior staff at DC smiled at him, shook his hand, told him they loved his work, fought his corner. In early 1986, Moore clearly thought that he had landed in a place that delivered everything Warrior had merely promised: ‘This is the sort of thing that makes America a very attractive proposition … being trusted enough as a professional and an artist to be granted almost total license. If the financial situation was reversed and there was more money available over here, I’d still be working predominantly in America purely on the grounds of the creative opportunities they have to offer.’

  Once the disagreements over the buttons and the graphic novel had changed the tone of discussion with DC the issue of a sequel to Watchmen inevitably became the elephant in the room. It was clear that such a sequel would be hugely lucrative. Research by comics journalist Rich Johnston indicates that it was decided at an editorial retreat in late 1986 that Andy Helfer would be approached to write The Comedian in Vietnam. Barbara Randall, Watchmen editor, alerted Moore and Gibbons, who made it clear they were not happy, and the plans were dropped. Interviewed the following summer, Dave Gibbons revealed that DC had also floated the idea of prequels, including Rorschach’s Journal written by Michael Fleisher and The Comedian’s War Diary, set in Vietnam, but he was not impressed. Neither was Moore, who said: ‘I actually felt that the work we did on Watchmen was somehow special. I have got a great deal of respect for that work. I do not want to see it prostituted. This has always been my position. I don’t want to see it prostituted and made into a run of cheap books that are nothing like the original Watchmen which, anyway, wouldn’t work if it was dismantled. Those characters only work as an ensemble. A comic book about Dr Manhattan would be really obtuse and boring. A comic book about Rorschach would be really miserable.’

  Johnston quotes Mike Gold, a senior editor at DC at the time, as saying: ‘there most certainly was a lot of conversation around the joint about sequels. Many people – certainly Barbara, but others as well – thought that a follow-up was aesthetically contradictory. Of course, that’s why we were editors and not in the marketing department. And many people – including all of those in the former group – knew Alan would rebel against the idea. Any of us who had ever worked with him, including me, knew that with complete certainty. After he reacted adversely and loudly to some marketing/promotion stunt, you’d have to be on the Bizarro World to think he wouldn’t scream to the heavens had DC done anything Watchmen-like without him, and certainly he was not going to play along.’ While investigating the early brainstorming session for the Watchmen spin-offs, Johnston found that ‘another, very well placed DC source who wishes to remain nameless confirms much of Barbara’s account, but differs in the motivation for those on the retreat, the spinoffs being positioned as a response to the fight that Alan Moore had had with Bruce Bristow over Watchmen merchandise being labelled “promotional” and thereby not paying out royalties.’

  There is a common thread here: Moore had fought with the marketing department over merchandising royalties; it was marketing that came up with the idea of a collected Watchmen that would remain in print; it was now the marketing department that was the driving force behind Watchmen sequels. Now it is possible, perhaps even likely, that management at DC were caught out when Moore pushed to get money from the sale of buttons. They may have been surprised when he asked for the contract to be amended if Watchmen was going to remain in print. However, they definitely knew that he would object to the idea of Watchmen prequels. Moore was already in ‘a bad mood’ with DC by the end of 1986, ‘which never helps’, but it’s clear that this was not some form of unilateral antagonism on his part. There were those at DC already working on contingency plans if there was a future dispute with him. That dispute did not
take long to materialise.

  At the Mid-Ohio Comic Con, held over the Thanksgiving Weekend at the end of November 1986, Frank Miller got wind that DC was about to impose a new ratings system that would divide their books into Universal, Mature and Adult categories, with detailed guidelines as to what could and couldn’t appear in each category. Miller spread the word to the other freelancers at the convention, and also telephoned Moore. Moore then called Rich Veitch, who remembers, ‘when Alan heard about it, he hit the ceiling … HARD! I still remember the phone call I got from him and boy, was he pissed! REALLY pissed!! He took the whole thing as a personal affront.’

  With so many comics creators coming from a countercultural background, it is no surprise that they were suspicious of even the abstract concept of censorship, but they had a specific historical reason for being especially sensitive. This felt like a beginning of a return to the fifties, Seduction of the Innocent, Senate hearings and the creation of the Comics Code Authority. For the ever self-mythologising comics world, the darkest of days appeared to be returning.

  There had been those, including Moore himself, who had understood that in Reagan’s America, the forces of social conservatism and ‘family values’ would, sooner or later, turn their baleful eye on the comics industry. Yet, when it came, the pressure was so light it was barely detectable. A Christian cable show (no one could say quite which one) had declared modern comics like X-Men to be ‘pornographic’. Around the same time, one comic shop owner, Buddy Saunders of Lone Star Comics, had written a letter to his distributor, Diamond, saying he was worried that none of the solicitation information he was given when he ordered stock for his store told him whether a book was suitable for children or not (he singled out Moore’s Miracleman #9, an issue with graphic images of childbirth, as one of particular concern).

  Diamond were the largest comics distributor in the US. Their founder and CEO, Steve Geppi, wrote to DC and Marvel echoing Saunders’ concern: ‘We are not censors. We no more want someone deciding for us than you do. We cannot, however, stand by and watch the marketplace become a dumping ground for every sort of graphic fantasy that someone wants to live out. We have an industry to protect; we have leases to abide by; we have a community image to maintain.’ Within weeks of that statement, DC announced their ratings system.

  The freelancers quickly reached the consensus that this was unacceptable. Moore and Miller took a particularly hard line on the whole concept of censorship; Moore said, ‘My feelings on censorship are that it is wrong, full stop. It is a thing which I utterly oppose. I believe there is nothing in this world that is unsayable. It is not information which is dangerous; it is the lack of information which is dangerous.’ Interviewed by Gary Groth for The Comics Journal, a magazine that was giving comprehensive coverage of the controversy, Moore spelled out the absolutist line he took on the issue, saying he would not even take steps to block children from accessing hardcore pornography. ‘I would think that in reality there would be a certain sort of common sense element creeping in. I would try to handle it in as non-authoritarian a fashion as possible.’

  There was a political dimension to this reaction. Both Moore and Miller were writing comics that explicitly satirised right-wing extremism, and neither was happy with the idea of caving in to the religious right. Miller said, ‘these are evil, evil people and I believe that as a force in our country they should be fought tooth and claw wherever they appear.’ But the speed with which DC gave in became in an issue in itself, shocking Moore in particular: ‘I will never accept that one can oppose a social evil by cowering guiltily and hoping to avoid its notice. I believe a ratings system, or indeed any kind of censorship, to be akin to shooting oneself in the foot in the fond hope that this will make people feel too sorry for you to shoot you in the head … If any person or publisher seeks to negotiate a surrender or truce with the book burners, they are at liberty to do so, but not on my behalf. Not without telling me first.’

  There were worries about the practicalities, about what it would mean for their existing projects. Moore was happy to accept that some comics were for children, but felt many characters fell within a grey area – Batman was one such. He had the immediate concern that his Joker v Batman story The Killing Joke, in progress at the time, would be altered without his consent or labelled in such a way as to harm its sales. There was a difference, he felt, between taking on a project knowing the rules and finding that the rules had changed halfway through.

  A couple of years earlier, Moore had said: ‘I have nothing against a rating code that would provide a description of the contents … “For Mature Readers” or “Full of Tits and Innards” or something like that. In fact I can see that an idea like that would have a lot of practical appeal in the current rating debate going on in the States. But that’s description, and not censorship.’ Which would seem to be all DC were proposing. The crucial distinction, Moore felt, was that rather than reading a completed work and labelling it appropriately, DC were planning to alter the nature of the work to make it conform to a rating category. Fittingly, a key question was who would watch the watchmen – who would decide what comics went into which category, who would decide what was acceptable? And there was a related sticking point: none of the creators (nor, it turned out, many of the editors) had been consulted. DC staff had drawn up the guidelines and presented them as a fait accompli. After months of petty disputes with DC management, Moore now simply didn’t accept the company’s ability to make those judgement calls on his work.

  There was an obvious tension in the current situation, where the general public assumed superhero comics were for very small children but publishers had started targeting comics at people of college age. The previous year, DC had run a campaign with the tagline ‘DC Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Any More’. As a number of people (including Moore) pointed out, though, book publishers marketed some novels to adults and others to children and people did not need warning labels to tell them apart. It would be hard to look at the cover of Care Bears, then the cover of Watchmen and conclude they were intended for the same audience. For one thing, to see Watchmen you had to be in a specialist comic shop.

  Clearly, though, the content of some comics was becoming more ‘adult’. On the whole, comics shop owners are very knowledgeable about the products they sell and very careful (and in many US states legally obliged) not to sell unsuitable material to children. With comic shop owners like Buddy Saunders having to order comics after reading no more than a short paragraph on an order form and deciding how many they were likely to sell, and most comics being supplied on a non-returnable basis, if a shop wasn’t legally permitted to sell a comic, it was stuck with those copies. Saunders conceded that there were some titles, like Swamp Thing, that he knew were not suitable for his youngest customers, but argued that it was impossible to make that call with new titles, or when DC relaunched characters like Blackhawk and Green Arrow and made their adventures violent and sexually explicit.

  Moore and Miller now circulated a petition that signalled their alarm, taking out a full-page advert in The Comic Buyer’s Guide in February 1987. When the writer/editor Marv Wolfman was among twenty-four DC freelancers to sign it, the company removed him from editorial duties for speaking against the ratings system. Senior management at DC were clearly caught out, and began arranging a series of meetings and phone calls aimed at placating creators.

  But, for Moore, things had already come to a head. Late in 1986, he and Dave Gibbons had met DC president and publisher Jenette Kahn in London to discuss plans for a Watchmen movie over lunch with producer Joel Silver.

  This was right at the end of our relationship, when things were looking very, very dodgy, and this was a meeting with Joel Silver and Jenette Kahn. As I remember it, we were in some hotel lobby. We met Jenette Kahn first. Joel Silver would be joining us. And in the time we were waiting for him to arrive, Jenette Kahn said that they were talking about doing prequels to Watchmen including Andy Helfer writing one, I think, somebo
dy else was doing the Comedian in Vietnam. And then she said ‘but of course we wouldn’t do this if you were still working for us’. And I just went silent while I processed that. I think Dave Gibbons said, ‘Well, I’ve been assured that you won’t be doing that anyway,’ and she seemed to accept that. But I was thinking, ‘you just threatened me, I know what that was, I don’t know if you can do it or not, but you just threatened me and this is not how I want to conduct business relationships’… we left as soon as the meeting was concluded, and, yeah, that was one of things that made me sever contact with DC shortly thereafter. That was on the negative scale that was starting to add up.

  Telling Moore they could go ahead with sequels without him was a change in position, but it is by no means evident that Kahn intended it as a threat. Even so, that was Moore’s interpretation: ‘I really, really, really don’t respond well to being threatened. I couldn’t tolerate anyone threatening me on the street; I couldn’t tolerate anyone threatening me in any other situation in my life. I can’t tolerate anyone threatening me about my art and my career and stuff that’s as important to me as that. That was the emotional breaking point.’