Even before he broke ties with DC, Moore was saying, ‘It’s no good whining about the stupidity of the general public in not accepting comics as a valid artform when the large majority of comics simply aren’t any kind of artform whatsoever. Being honest, about 95 per cent of the titles currently on the market, while they might briefly satisfy a junkie, are nothing more than mass-produced rubbish churned out without a moment’s thought on the part of anyone involved. This is fine for making money with minimal effort, but it only works in the short term … I think that a dozen really good writers, each able to handle say three good books a month, could totally transform the industry almost overnight. Can you imagine thirty-six good comics, every month?’ He suggested looking to established authors like horror novelist Ramsey Campbell, noting that, ‘Comics writing is admittedly quite a complex skill that has to be learned gradually, but if the current batch of chimps can manage it, I’m sure some of the greater literary intellects of our time would find it to be no trouble at all.’ The way Moore would deal with ‘middle-level creators’ would be to winnow them out.
Whether or not DC continued ‘to treat their creators as chattel’ – as Moore put it – the publisher literally did own far bigger stars than any of their writers or artists. Although Miller’s Dark Knight saw a huge surge in interest in Batman, the character has been perennially popular, with DC duly doing their best to satiate demand with more and more monthly comics, paperback collections, original graphic novels and guest appearances in other titles (Moore himself had contrived to get Swamp Thing to Gotham City). DC would never have a problem selling Batman comics, whoever wrote or drew them.
Ultimately, DC could afford to lose Moore because he had already shown them the path they should take. It was evident that the ‘revisionist’ approach Moore had used on Marvelman and Swamp Thing could act as a template to work from, and while he wanted to take the medium further, DC were keen to consolidate.
They had also raided the UK, headhunting creators from 2000AD. The initiative was led by Moore’s Swamp Thing editor, Karen Berger, who said, ‘I found their sensibility and point of view to be refreshingly different, edgier and smarter … The British writers broke open comics and took the medium to a new level of maturity.’ She quickly hit paydirt, hiring writers like Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, Alan Grant, Jamie Delano, Brett Ewins, Pete Milligan and Garth Ennis. The British writers, all of whom had keenly followed Moore’s career, were now set the same task he had been given on Swamp Thing: take an obscure old character, completely reinvent it with a novelistic dollop of social conscience and adult psychology. The writers of the ‘British Invasion’ worked on titles like Black Orchid, The Sandman, Animal Man, Doom Patrol and Shade the Changing Man. Many of these writers were younger and less experienced than Moore had been – Garth Ennis was only twenty when he was first commissioned by DC. The older hands of the British comics industry, like Steve Parkhouse, Steve Moore, Pat Mills and John Wagner, typically picked up little work, although Marvel published Mills and Kevin O’Neill’s Marshall Law, a vicious satire on superheroics. But with DC and Marvel also recruiting British artists like Ian Gibson, Alan Davis, Steve Dillon and Simon Bisley – and in the mid-nineties, a new wave of creators like Warren Ellis, Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch would continue the trend – a buyer of an ‘American’ comic was likely to be reading something at least partially created in the UK.
Berger tried her best to get Moore to reconsider, but although Moore liked and respected her, he was in no mood to listen. ‘I was spitting blood and venom by the time I clawed my way out of the building. It got pretty bad over various things. Mainly about the fact that I created Watchmen, but DC owns Watchmen, they own V for Vendetta and all the work that I did, and that didn’t please me.’
Could Moore have been won over? If the ratings issue had sparked off a year earlier, before the contractual disputes had led to bad blood between him and some members of DC’s management, then perhaps both sides would have been more willing to listen to each other. By mid-1987, though, there seemed little chance of it. Moore said at the time, ‘since quitting DC, I’ve put DC completely out of my mind, more or less, and have been thinking about other things that I’d like to do’.
There was to be a period of détente between Moore and DC around the year 2000, but it was short-lived. DC meanwhile continue to publish Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Killing Joke and Swamp Thing, along with DC Universe, a collection of Moore’s shorter pieces for the company. Every single page of Alan Moore’s published work for DC remains in print.
Despite his displeasure, Moore completed his contractual obligations with DC, even if this amounted to little more than finishing V for Vendetta, which took about another year, until the spring of 1988. Possibly the last piece he wrote for DC was the Introduction that appeared in #1 of the comic and was reused in the graphic novel. He also agreed to a UK publicity tour for the graphic novel edition of Watchmen – a week at the end of October 1987 during which he and Gibbons did two signings a day, one starting at noon, one at four, taking in Sheffield, Leeds, Nottingham, Birmingham, London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Sheffield (for the second time, but at a different shop) and Manchester. At every event there were queues out of the door, and in the case of Forbidden Planet in London, they were around the block. Technically, this didn’t involve DC, as the UK edition of the graphic novel was published by Titan Books, and Moore happily did publicity, including signings and British television interviews, for their editions of Swamp Thing and The Killing Joke, too. He also wrote an afterword for the limited edition of Watchmen in 1988, but again technically this wasn’t working for DC as it was published by Graphitti Designs.
Speaking to Comics Interview around April 1987, just as he had finished his work on Watchmen and Swamp Thing and completed a second draft of Fashion Beast, Moore welcomed the opportunity for a break: ‘I’m going to take a couple of months off and basically not have a single creative thought in my head for that entire period. I’m just going to sit and watch data on the television and vegetate and hang around with my family and sort of human, mundane stuff like that … it’s been eight years of working weekends and working approximately a ten-, sometimes eleven-hour day, and I haven’t had a holiday in that time, so this two months is going to be something quite spectacular.’ He also had the chance to reflect on what he would do next. While the headline on the cover of that issue read ‘Alan Moore bids farewell to comics – at least for now!’, the interview itself said no such thing. Moore’s thought was ‘I think, at least for the time being, I’m going to steer away from superhero work … there’s an awful lot of genres … I think I’d love to play the field a little more and just experience some of the genres that have been neglected for so long.’ He mentioned romance, shock and crime suspense, humour, war and (after prompting, in a reference to Watchmen) pirates. But his opinion was clearly to evolve. A couple of years later, he was able to say: ‘Most of the fiction that I’m doing now is an attempt to go beyond genre … comics previously have had nothing but genre. I think a lot of my reaction to genre is probably borne of the fact that I haven’t had a choice up to now. I’ve always had to work in one genre or another.’
In September 1987, Moore attended UKCAC in London. Two years before, the inaugural United Kingdom Comic Art Convention had been attended by around 500 people; now it attracted possibly ten times that number. It was held only weeks after the last issue of Watchmen had been published, and Moore found himself at the centre of something akin to Beatlemania: ‘At the last convention I was just held pressed up against a stairwell in a corridor for almost the entire convention. In two days I arrived at one panel late – that was the only panel I was on – and for the rest of the time I was just hiding in the hospitality room because I couldn’t get out the door.’ A comics industry legend has it that when Moore was at a urinal at UKCAC, he suddenly realised that the long queue behind him was of people wanting his autograph. He says of the story, ‘No, it’s charming. I may have had
one person follow me into a urinal and say “can I have an autograph?” … there certainly wasn’t a queue of people, so that’s a piece of entertaining apocrypha.’ Moore found the mass adulation unsettling and impersonal; he had experienced it before in San Diego, and that had left him with recurring nightmares about hands grabbing him. UKCAC would be the last convention he attended for over two decades.
In October 1987, Moore made his third and final visit to the US, this time accompanied by Debbie Delano, recording his visit in a one-page strip published in the magazine Heartbreak Hotel. He spent some time in New York, although he didn’t visit the DC offices, and someone at Penn Station came up to him and asked if he was Alan Moore. The main purpose of his visit was as a guest of the Christic Institute in Washington DC, a public interest law firm seeking to expose events and individuals connected to a CIA ‘secret team’ responsible for assassinations and other illegal covert activities, including the Iran-Contra affair. The Institute had invited Moore to write a comic cataloguing the history of the secret team, and this would be published in early 1989 as Brought to Light.
Moore spoke in 1988 about the challenges facing the mainstream comics industry: ‘If you would have asked me five years ago to describe my audience, I would have started by placing it between thirteen and eighteen years of age. Now I’d place it between thirteen and thirty-five or forty. It has expanded a great deal. If we’re going to keep that audience we’re going to have to be conscious of their interests, which aren’t going to be the same as our captive audience. It’s true that this new audience will occasionally enjoy a novel take on the superhero, but it won’t want a steady diet of that.’
With perfect comic timing, his long-gestating Joker story, one of the very first projects Moore had discussed with DC, was published in March 1988. The Killing Joke epitomised everything that Moore had just walked away from. It was perhaps the quintessential ‘dark’ eighties comic, a better example even than Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns, because it shares all the violence and pessimism of those books with virtually none of the satire or urge to subvert or deconstruct. It is a glossy, corporate product that features graphic scenes of the fun-loving former Batgirl being crippled and sexually assaulted. We see her father Commissioner Gordon stripped, degraded and forced to look at photographs of his daughter suffering. A pregnant woman is killed. It’s morally empty, with a narrative that doesn’t stand up to any form of logical or emotional scrutiny. The Killing Joke isn’t some piece of pulp that accidentally transcends its humble origins to achieve a sort of kitschy grandeur, nor is it a raw yarn that manages to somehow tap into something primal and visceral. Its nihilism is calculated, carefully choreographed.
It is beautiful.
In 1988, most comics were still printed on greyish, flimsy newsprint paper where the colours bled and faded into each other, while every three or four pages there would be an advert. The Killing Joke had perfectly white paper, sharp colours, precision-engineered edges, no ads. It was like holding the Platonic ideal of a comic book. Brian Bolland’s art makes every page look gorgeous: the scene where Batman roughs up a prisoner, the people punched in the face, shot through the head and doused in acid, the prostitutes, the potholes and litter, every set of mad, staring dead eyes. It is so seductive, the climactic fight scene so cathartic. Every panel is memorable and much-imitated, but they flow together to tell the story. It is an episode of the Adam West Batman TV show directed by David Lynch – every bit as misconceived and compellingly unpleasant as that implies. Even at the time, Moore expressed his unhappiness with it, saying just before it came out: ‘I think people have almost got themselves hyped up into believing that this is the next Watchmen and they’ll be understandably disappointed.’
The Killing Joke was a huge success. Having been ordered in vast quantities, it sold out and was almost instantly reprinted, and reached its fifth printing by the end of 1990. Although not everyone was keen – Cefn Ridout’s review in Speakeasy described it as ‘a grave disappointment, this is Alan Moore at his most self-conscious and heavy-handed’ – most comics fans lapped it up. It was massively influential on subsequent Batman projects, including Tim Burton’s 1989 movie version, which adopted its forties retro look. It still sells strongly every month, with sales spikes whenever a new Batman movie is released.
DC had always published non-superhero books, usually in other action-adventure genres like westerns, war comics, horror or science fiction. In the late eighties the company understood it now had a keen, older audience and put in an extra effort to try new formats and subject matter. But the audience didn’t bite. While ‘grim and gritty’ superhero stories like The Killing Joke and Batman: Year One have remained in print for a generation and been reissued in ever more luxurious editions, DC’s Piranha Press imprint, which from 1987 to 1994 produced eclectic, creator-led graphic novels with titles like Epicurus the Sage, Gregory and The Elvis Mandible, has all but been forgotten. Its successor, Paradox Press, produced books like Road to Perdition and A History of Violence that have been adapted for cinema, but were ignored by the comics-reading audience before then. As one commentator notes: ‘Although intended to be the last word on comic book superheroes, ironically Watchmen breathed new life into the genre, establishing the cynical comic book hero as a staple of superhero fiction, and leading to a succession of mostly inferior imitations that continue to this day.’ Comic book readers were far more interested in seeing existing superheroes being given ‘the Watchmen treatment’ than in anything Piranha or Paradox had to offer. DC are in the business of selling comics, and had to follow the market.
Moore was now extremely disenchanted with the comic book industry, or at least with DC and Marvel, the dominant players. Having read the magazine articles proclaiming adult comics to be the next big thing and Alan Moore to be the figurehead of the movement, though, mainstream book publishers were suddenly very interested in ‘graphic novels’, and Moore was in contact with both Penguin and Gollancz around this time. Editor Faith Brooker at Gollancz commissioned from him a prose novel which had the working titles Memory of Fire and The Buried Fires, and would eventually be published as Voice of the Fire (1996). And both companies would go on to publish comics work from him in 1991: his short strip ‘The Bowing Machine’ appeared in Penguin’s anthology RAW and Gollancz’s VG Graphics imprint published his graphic novel A Small Killing. Moore’s initial plan was simple enough: ‘For my part, I might as well work with book companies and be treated as a proper author, so my ambition really is to write graphic novels for book companies, which will be going out to the book shops, with me owning the rights to my own creations, the company having the right to print the material once. This is a bit more reasonable and civilised. So that’s my strategy: comics for book companies rather than comics for comic book companies.’ Exposure to the world of book publishers had reaffirmed Moore’s instincts about the comics industry.
As late as 1986, Moore had expressed surprise that good novelists who found it hard to make a living from their writing weren’t flocking to comics; he said he would ‘like to see a concerted campaign to demonstrate to “proper” authors that there are artistic and creative opportunities in comics that are even greater than the financial opportunities to be had’. But a couple of years later, he had come to understand why novelists weren’t jumping at the chance to do work-for-hire at DC and Marvel: ‘I’ve been content to work under those conditions for years – because those are the conditions that prevail and you have to go with them to get into the industry. I’ve now broken through to the real world of publishing and I can now see what it is I’ve been swimming through for the past five or six years. It certainly isn’t lavender water.’
Moore was ready to move on artistically, and had a degree of financial security, saying in interviews that ‘I’m not rich by any means, but I have a healthy bank balance’ and telling Eddie Campbell ‘it’s nice not to have to worry’. He was able to turn down work that simply didn’t interest him, like scripts for a Ro
bocop sequel and the twenty-fifth anniversary story of Doctor Who.
His first major post-Watchmen work to appear was as editor and organiser of a response to Clause 28 of the 1988 Local Government Bill, which had been pushed by ‘family values’ Conservative backbenchers and actively supported by the Thatcher government. Their concern was, in the words of Conservative MP Jill Knight (now Baroness Knight of Collingtree), that ‘it is wicked to tell children of five and six years old how to commit a homosexual act and encourage them to do so … it is malicious to approach young mentally handicapped girls with the idea that homosexuality is a good way to proceed.’
Moore saw this not just as some abstract issue, but as a direct assault on how he had chosen to live his life:
At the time … there was me, there was my wife and there was our girlfriend and we were all kind of living together quite openly as a different sort of relationship. It lasted for two or three years. At that time obviously we were a lot closer to the lesbian and gay scene and when we saw this legislation coming down we thought it was pretty alarming because there actually hadn’t been any legislation that had specifically legislated against one particular sub-group before. This was Nazi legislation, especially when you’d got enthusiastic Conservative councillors talking about gassing the queers’ being the only ultimate solution to the problem … So what we decided to do was mobilise as many famous friends as I could dig up and put out a benefit book with all the money going to the organisation for lesbian and gay action.
Clause 28 was part of a long battle between the Conservatives and local authorities, many of whom were controlled by the left wing of the Labour Party. In support of the Conservatives’ long-held belief that taxpayers’ money was being used to push left-wing propaganda, the relevant clause stated that local authorities should not ‘intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality’. This is clearly not a provision for anything remotely like gas chambers, but lest we think Moore was being melodramatic, a few local politicians had openly called for just that:
Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore Page 29