Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  The Tory leader of South Staffordshire Council, Bill Brownhill, is in the centre of a political storm following his call for the mass extermination of gays. His comments followed a meeting of the council’s Health Committee at which a government film on AIDS was shown. He said, ‘I should shoot them all … those bunch of queers that legalise filth in homosexuality have a lot to answer for and I hope they are proud of what they have done. It is disgusting and diabolical. As a cure I would put 90 per cent of queers in the ruddy gas chambers. Are we going to keep letting these queers trade their filth up and down the country? We must find a way of stopping these gays going round yet we are making heroes of some of these people and some are even being knighted.’

  He was supported in these views by the leader of the local Labour group Jack Greenaway, who said, ‘Every one of us here will agree with what has been said’. The only dissenting voice was Liberal councillor John Chambers who argued that AIDS was originally a heterosexual disease originating in Africa, ‘there is little point in queer-bashing other than making ourselves feel better.’

  Moore’s response was a 76-page protest comic titled Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia! – AARGH! for short – an anthology that featured an enviable line-up of comic book creators and other artists, including Frank Miller, Robert Crumb, David Lloyd, Neil Gaiman, Kevin O’Neill, Garry Leach, Brian Bolland, Kathy Acker, Dave McKean, Bill Sienkiewicz, Posy Simmonds, Alexei Sayle, Oscar Zarate, Harvey Pekar, Bryan Talbot, Dave Sim, Dave Gibbons and Art Spiegelman. Moore’s story was ‘The Mirror of Love’, a poetic survey of homosexuality with art by Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch. It was published by Mad Love – a company set up to produce AARGH! and consisting of Alan Moore, Phyllis Moore and Debbie Delano (Moore’s lovers co-wrote the afterword). This was an energising introduction to the world of self-publishing for Moore. Either through raw subversive cunning or complete coincidence, AARGH! was published the same month – March 1988 – as The Killing Joke. Titan distributed the book for free, and Mad Love donated the profits – around £17,000 – to OLGA (the Organisation of Lesbian and Gay Action), one of the most prominent groups to oppose Clause 28.

  To Moore’s disgust Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party voted for the Bill out of fear of the right-wing press, and it passed into law on 24 May 1988. While there were never any prosecutions under what was now Section 28 of the Local Government Act, the vague wording had the desired effect: a climate was created which led schools to err on the side of caution when teaching about homosexuality, and which made local councils wary of supporting gay organisations.

  AARGH! and Brought to Light had been departures for Moore, in terms of his writing methods as much as his subject matter. He liked the intensive research he had done for Brought to Light and ‘The Mirror of Love’: ‘In the morning I’d be researching sodomy and heresy in early modern Switzerland, and in the afternoon I’d be researching heroin smuggling in Thailand during the seventies … I found that research was really enjoyable … in the case of Brought to Light, it was exhilarating … compiling all that information, making it fit and then finding a way to convey it to the readership in an interesting and entertaining way.’ While he had always been a voracious reader and collector of books, Moore had typically described his research process by means of self-deprecating jokes. He confessed his total lack of familiarity with the Louisiana bayou where Swamp Thing was set, or explained how he’d slot some nugget of information from an article in that week’s New Scientist into whatever he was writing, even though he only half understood what he’d read. Working on weekly or monthly comics, he simply hadn’t had the time to acquire an in-depth knowledge of his subject matter. This new, immersive approach to research would become Moore’s method of working on all his major projects. From now on, when he was interviewed, he would frequently go off on tangents about his opinions on philosophy, history, science, literature or current affairs, subjects he’d barely mentioned before.

  None of his new interests comfortably fitted the superhero genre, and he ‘no longer felt the superhero form was really the best way to tell important meaningful stories … if I wanted to do a story on the environment, I think it would be better without the swamp monster in it, if I wanted to do a story about politics, it would be better not to have a bunch of superheroes in it.’ But he found himself still writing superheroes, under contract to finish his Warrior series, V for Vendetta and Marvelman. Returning to them, he faced the problem that not only he, but the superhero genre and the world too had moved on. He felt that Britain had lurched so far to the right politically in the five years or so since he had started writing V that the present was beginning to resemble the dystopian future he’d imagined, and the Introduction to the collected V for Vendetta (written in 1988) indicates his level of alarm:

  My youngest daughter is seven and the tabloid press are circulating the idea of concentration camps for persons with AIDS. The new riot police wear black visors, as do their horses, and their vans have rotating video cameras mounted on top. The government has expressed a desire to eradicate homosexuality, even as an abstract concept, and one can only speculate as to which minority will be the next legislated against. I’m thinking of taking my family and getting out of this country soon, sometime over the next couple of years. It’s cold and it’s mean spirited and I don’t like it here anymore. Goodnight England.

  He was unhappy with his superhuman lead character now – ‘I’d rather do it without the strong guy who kills in the centre role’ – and changed the ending because he felt it was unrealistic: ‘Originally, I had intended to have V instigate an anarchist utopia at the end of the third book.’ Instead, the story ends with the fascist regime in tatters and Evey taking on V’s role after the man himself is killed.

  Continuing Marvelman presented a different challenge. Thanks in no small part to Moore himself, the idea of treating superheroes ‘realistically’ was no longer, as it had been in 1982, a shocking departure from the norm. Now it was pretty much what the audience expected. Moore quickly wrapped up the small-scale story he had been telling and launched into a new phase, Olympus, which saw Marvelman gaining a pantheon of superhuman allies and travelling into space, though at heart Marvelman retained its mission of treating superheroes realistically. Indeed the central action sequence of the final act is a virtual re-run of the fight between Superman and General Zod in the movie Superman II, except that when cars are thrown and buildings collapse, tens of thousands of bystanders are killed and the city is left ruined.

  Marvelman #16 (December 1989) ends with the title character taking over the world, using his great powers to instigate the utopia V couldn’t. In a handful of pages, in single panels deliberately reminiscent of Superman’s super-feats in the comic books of Moore’s youth, Marvelman and his friends restructure the world economy into smaller units, depose Margaret Thatcher, teleport all weapons of mass destruction and nuclear power plants into the sun, lay soil in the deserts to feed the world, repair the ozone layer and stop global warming, legalise all drugs (ending most crime), release and rehabilitate the criminally insane and abolish money. Superheroes had always been power fantasies, and this was clearly Moore’s dream of ‘if I ruled the world’ … but the tone is one of regret, not triumph. It’s made clear that these are imposed terms. The human beings we see haven’t striven for this, it’s left them bewildered and angry. It’s the dictatorial rule of elite super-fascists, however benevolent the outcome. By this point Margaret Thatcher was Moore’s arch-nemesis as surely as Lex Luthor was Superman’s, but when Marvelman gets rid of her, even here, Moore sounds a note of regret: ‘The way she hung onto the minister beside her, voice too choked to speak, her eyes so dazed walking away, she looked so old so suddenly. I could not hate her.’

  Moore was not looking to make every comic overtly about a specific political issue; there was something else at work here: ‘I’m much more interested in exploring our own world rather than creating new alien worlds and such. There are so many areas of our own
landscape that seem like the first outpost of Mars there is no need to create fantastic worlds.’ Even while he had been writing Watchmen, Moore had become fascinated by the non-superhero characters. Many of the scenes in the book are set within a few blocks’ radius of a New York intersection, and over the course of twelve issues, Moore and Gibbons had built up a recurring cast of New York natives. On casual reading, it’s very easy to miss, but – mostly as ‘sight dramatics’ in the background as the main characters go by – they are seen arguing, making up, and living out all sorts of relationships with each other. Ultimately, we see virtually every single one of them lying dead in the streets, killed by Ozymandias.

  Now he devised a story that brought a similar, intricate cast of ordinary people to the foreground. This was the series Moore himself considered to be ‘the follow-up to Watchmen’, and it started life with the title The Mandelbrot Set. Moore announced he was writing it in an interview published in May 1988, and that it was to be a twelve-issue series drawn by artist Bill Sienkiewicz, who was well known to comics fans for his work on X-Men spin-off The New Mutants and Elektra: Assassin, a series written by Frank Miller published hot on the heels of The Dark Knight Returns. This new series was going to feature ‘shopping malls, mathematics, history and skateboards … the whole book is going to be about nothing more exciting than the building and accomplishment of the shopping mall’. At this point, Moore had a 21-page synopsis, and by the end of August he had drawn up an infamous poster-sized grid that plotted out every aspect of the series.

  Moore had enjoyed the experience of self-publishing AARGH! and was pleased to demonstrate that comics could be put to serious purpose. A number of comics professionals, including Cerebus the Aardvark creator Dave Sim, a contributor to AARGH!, had spent the past few years trying to persuade other high-profile creators that self-publishing would allow them total creative and financial autonomy; now Moore, Phyllis and Deborah found themselves in charge of a small but successful and effective publishing company.

  Even before AARGH! was released, Moore had decided that The Mandelbrot Set would be published by Mad Love. He invested his proceeds from Watchmen as start-up capital, while Phyllis and Debbie were responsible for the business, legal and marketing sides. Moore would have artistic control over every aspect of his book, ‘from the ground up with no preconceptions’. In practical terms this meant a long planning and development phase, with even the physical size and binding of the book up for consideration. Nevertheless, Moore was soon speaking confidently about The Mandelbrot Set as his magnum opus: ‘It’s a way in which I can get what I want to say out to the public in an unaltered form, without compromising it to meet the demands of a marketplace or the demands of individual publishers. That’s something that increases the purity of my message.’

  Then, around 1989, Moore’s marriage ended. For Alan, Phyllis and Deborah, living together had been an experimental relationship, and often an emotionally turbulent one. The two women left together, moving to Liverpool and taking Leah and Amber with them. The family home was sold, and Moore bought a new house about 150 yards down the road; he admitted fifteen years later, perhaps unsurprisingly, that this ‘was not the best time in my short life’. He named his new house, in one of the most landlocked towns in the country, Sea View and set about renovating the interior so that it resembled a Moorish palace. Friends and family soon reported that he’d managed to clutter up the house as though he had been living there for many years.

  Mad Love continued, with Phyllis and Deborah still in their marketing and administrative roles, sending out press releases and answering correspondence. The Mandelbrot Set was renamed Big Numbers, and two issues of the series came out in April and August 1990, before it ran into problems that had little or nothing to do with the breakdown of Moore’s home life. The original plans for Mad Love had been ambitious, with Moore intending it to be the future home of his more personal projects, but in the event, the company only ever produced AARGH! and two issues of Big Numbers. Twenty years on, Moore would publish a magazine, Dodgem Logic, under the Mad Love imprint, but for a long time Mad Love was to exist in name only.

  While contributing short pieces to small press comics and anthologies, Moore spent the remainder of 1988 and 1989 on a number of other projects that he hoped would demonstrate the potential of the comics medium and stretch him artistically. As he plotted out his more substantial work, he clearly started from a blank piece of paper, showing no interest in resurrecting, for example, the ideas from the Fantagraphics incarnation of Dodgem Logic, and declining Bryan Talbot’s suggestion that they try to develop Nightjar, the series they had pitched to Warrior.

  Moore did consider inviting Talbot to be the artist on a new project: a documentary comic about a murder and the subsequent investigation and consequences. 1988 was the 100th anniversary of the Jack the Ripper murders and, after initial reluctance, Moore realised this was a subject worth tackling, deciding on the title From Hell (after the address given in one of the letters sent to the authorities and allegedly written by the killer). Talbot’s work on Luther Arkwright and a memorable steampunk sequence in Nemesis the Warlock demonstrated that he would be at home among Victoriana, while Moore also considered that the horrific nature of the murders might suit his Swamp Thing and Miracleman artist John Totleben. Once From Hell found a home in Stephen Bissette’s new horror anthology Taboo, though, Moore settled on Eddie Campbell as the artist. Campbell, for his part, felt at first that his background, which was mostly in autobiographical comics, meant he would have been better suited for Big Numbers, but Moore and Bissette persuaded him that he was right for the story precisely because he wouldn’t interpret it as a horror comic, with Bissette saying ‘it was essential that the artist not be seduced by the violence inherent in the tale’. Campbell received the script for the Prologue and first chapter in December 1988.

  Moore also said he would like to ‘try my hand at doing an erotic comic and that possibly I might do one based on Peter Pan’, but at this stage it had been little more than ‘a vague, half-assed notion … I’d been thinking about the flying sequences in the work, and how from a Freudian perspective at least they could be seen as a symbol of sexual expression.’ In 1989 he was invited to contribute an eight-page strip to an erotic anthology ‘that I think was called Lost Horizons of Shangri-La’. The publishers had also invited a London-based American underground artist, Melinda Gebbie, to contribute – Moore had been aware of Gebbie’s work for many years, and mentioned her in a 1983 article – but she could get no further than deciding that her story should involve three women. Their mutual friend Neil Gaiman gave Gebbie Moore’s number and suggested they collaborate on the strip.

  Melinda Gebbie hails from the opposite of Northampton: Sausilito, California, ‘just down from Hurricane Gulch, where the Golden Gate Bridge crosses a rainbow-painted tunnel and breaks through into golden sunlight from pearly fog on the other side of the bay’. She was avidly copying images from Archie Comics and Mad by the age of twelve, followed Mad editor Harvey Kurtzmann’s Little Annie Fanny, and became a prominent member of the underground comix scene in San Francisco in the early seventies. As Moore said, ‘She made an eloquent and good-humoured response to the actually rather jokey and harmless “misogyny” found in the work of male contemporaries like [Robert] Crumb and [S. Clay] Wilson.’ (As well as eviscerating Wilson’s work, Gebbie had dated him.) She had also seen one of her strips banned by British customs, and later moved to London, where she worked in animation.

  Moore and Gebbie had met at conventions and had last seen each other a couple of years before at a meal for the contributors to a benefit comic, Strip AIDS. By combining their two vague ideas, they came up with a story for their collaboration: ‘It was a fairly logical step from thinking if Wendy from Peter Pan was one of these three proposed women, who would the other two be? It was a fairly short step from that to thinking of Alice and Dorothy, and once we’d got those three names in place the idea just snowballed massively from tha
t point very quickly. I think that probably within another week, or two weeks at the very most, I’d got the entire story roughly planned out and I knew that we weren’t talking about an eight-page inclusion in an anthology.’

  Moore’s marriage had ended around a year ago, and Gebbie spent a couple of weekends at his house. Then, once Lost Girls was underway, she moved to Northampton, although they agreed it would be better if they didn’t live together: ‘I had to be able to keep that particular reverie that I needed, so, if we had been living together, I don’t think that it would have worked like that … we got together several times a week and we were very close, but of the work, we lived apart, and I think that was a very important and functional thing: that was part of the reason why I think it was successful.’ Like From Hell, Lost Girls would also find a home in Taboo. Both have clear origins in a time when Moore was still thinking in terms of ‘working in other genres’, splicing two genres together: From Hell is a crime story, marinated in horror; Lost Girls is an erotic comic that plays with children’s literature.

  The first major post-DC work Moore completed was less easy to pigeonhole. A Small Killing had art by Oscar Zarate, an artist originally from Argentina who now lived in London. The two men had met when they contributed to Strip AIDS, and Zarate had gone on to contribute to AARGH!. He had made it clear he would like to work with Moore, and offered the image of a man being followed by a small boy. This reminded Moore of a dream in which a man was stalked by his younger self. The book was commissioned by Gollancz and published in the UK in September 1991. Moore has said, ‘I still think A Small Killing was one of the best things I’ve ever done.’