Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  Signing Moore to Image was a significant coup, but McFarlane had not been the only partner to approach him. The first had been Jim Valentino, who’d promised him a miniseries, with only one proviso: it had to be about superheroes. Moore had begun planning out a storyline encompassing superheroes (a Captain Marvel archetype called Thunderman) and horror (Golem, an ‘urban Swamp Thing’), as well as a ‘Lynch meets Leone’ western with a cast of characters all implicated in a murder. Moore had always liked David Lynch’s movies, but was particularly enamoured of the television series Twin Peaks (1990–2). His proposed series included the character Major Arcana, a mystic serving in the US military like Twin Peaks’ Major Briggs. Collaborating with his Swamp Thing artists Rick Veitch and Stephen Bissette, he whittled these ideas down until he had 1963, an arch parody of the Marvel comics from the sixties he had loved so much as a boy, with characters like Mystery Incorporated and Horus standing in for the Fantastic Four and Thor. The pastiche was so complete it saw Moore adopting an ‘Affable Al’ persona in captions, editorials and interviews akin to that of ‘Smiling Stan Lee’ back in the day. Recruiting Moore was a triumph on Valentino’s part, says Bissette:

  the other Image partners wanted a piece of that action, which would also trump Jim Valentino’s initial coup. There was apparently more than just a healthy collegiate rivalry involved. Some of it seemed pretty cutthroat from where we sat … Todd McFarlane trumped everyone by inviting Alan to write for Spawn, which led to the whole four-issue Moore/Gaiman/Sim/Miller arc on Spawn. His first issue and miniseries with Alan was already coming out before 1963 #1 hit the stands in April 1993, making it appear Todd had landed Alan.

  According to Bissette, ‘Rick Veitch and I found ourselves caught in the crossfire between the Image partners’ pissing contests. We didn’t grasp what was going on at the time – we thought everyone was eager to work together, we didn’t realise the Image partners were in competition with one another …’

  In the event, 1963 was not what the audience were expecting from an Image comic – or for that matter from an Alan Moore comic – and reviews were decidedly mixed. In post-Watchmen, post-Dark Knight comics, superheroes were troubled figures who enforced justice by throwing rusty hooks into the bad guys. Moore’s appeal to a more innocent, colourful era was either poorly framed or poorly timed – the problem may simply have been that the new audience Image was carving out just wasn’t au fait with the old Marvel comics, and so was ill-equipped to get the jokes. Moore was building up to a finale in the 1963 Annual which would have pitted the 1963 characters against the ‘grim and gritty’ stars of the Image range, like Spawn and Youngblood, but in the event, disputes and delays between the Image partners meant the Annual was never published – leaving the series as a set-up without its punchline.

  The first issue of 1963 sold around 660,000 copies, more than six times the sales of Watchmen, and represented the biggest payday of artist Stephen Bissette’s career. Despite that, it was seen as something of a flop at Image, a company used to million-sellers. Frustrations over the Annual led to considerable rancour between the creators, and as a result 1963 is one of very few Alan Moore projects that has never been collected as a graphic novel.

  Moore stuck around though. Over the next couple of years, he went on to write more Spawn spin-offs, as well as one-offs for two other Image books, Shadowhawk and The Maxx. Spawn had enough momentum now that McFarlane could license a movie, an animated series and computer games. In 1994, he founded Todd McFarlane Toys, a company that launched with a line of Spawn action figures but which soon exploded into an operation that brought out wave after wave of toys based on horror movie icons, basketball and baseball players.

  Moore was, by any reckoning, a terrible fit for the crassly commercial, art and merchandising-led Image books. For three or four years he had been loudly declaring that he was done with superheroes and, now comics had a vast new audience of adult readers, he was primarily interested in exploring the outer limits of the medium’s potential in ‘serious’ work like Big Numbers:

  Yet, here, he was writing comics like Violator v Badrock:

  One reason – obvious to everyone at the time – that Moore had chosen to work for Image was financial. An interview in comics news magazine Overstreet’s Fan framed it perhaps over-bluntly, and Moore responded in kind: ‘Contrary to what some may believe, Alan’s continuing work with Image is not just for the money … “the money that comes from WildC.A.T.S. or Supreme, that’s very handy. It’s useful to have a source of income that enables me to carry on doing the projects that are dearest to my heart like From Hell, Lost Girls, the CDs that I’m doing; the more obscure and marginal projects, which is where my real interests lie.”’

  Nonetheless, he would often find himself batting away the allegation that he had become a pen for hire: ‘I have never done anything purely for the money. If I couldn’t find a way to enjoy the project, then I wouldn’t do it.’ In some of his justifications he sounded uncharacteristically as if he was wriggling to find a loophole in his previous statements: ‘The biggest element for me was the world of imagination that comics opened up! … It was the wonderful concepts, not the superhero’s muscles, which gave me the biggest charge’; ‘I have no desire to be hip in comics. I have no desire to really be part of the comics industry. I have a great interest in the medium … I’m trying to create an interesting realm of the imagination for teenage, adolescent, or even younger boys. And that seems valid.’ But there were other reasons, perfectly consistent with the various stances he had taken: ‘all of a sudden it seemed the bulk of the audience really wanted things that had almost no story, just lots of big, full-page pin-up sort of pieces of artwork. And I was genuinely interested to see if I could write a decent story for that market that kind of followed those general directives’; ‘Although my aesthetics are different from theirs, I admire what the people at Image are doing. They’ve shaken up the industry in a very brutal way and probably shaken it up for the better’; ‘All I really knew about Image was that they’re the opposite of DC and Marvel and that sounded pretty good to me, you know?’

  The problem Moore faced was that the Image work was his only new material to see the light of day in this period. He would state in interviews, ‘I’ve nearly finished A Small Killing, after that the next book I finish in about a year’s time will be either From Hell or Lost Girls, and then I will finish Big Numbers’, but only a trickle of this work actually appeared. In 1992, Comic Collector not only called an interview with Moore ‘Out of the Wilderness’, it began: ‘Five years ago, Alan Moore was the most lauded and feted star in the comics firmament. Times change and times move on apace and in 1992 newer advocates to the comics’ cause might be forgiven for asking “Alan who?”’ The dream of a world of sophisticated graphic novels for adults was over, leaving work like Big Numbers that was meant to be the vanguard of the revolution high and dry. As Grant Morrison (who’d ‘managed to write three issues of Spawn in 1993 as the result of a misunderstanding’) later put it, ‘when [Moore] returned to the superheroes he’d made such a show of leaving behind it was clear that he needed money … it was easy to tell that he’d rather be somewhere else, stretching his wings, but even the stentorian Moore had capitulated to the Image juggernaut.’

  No one blinks when a successful actor chooses to balance prestigious work for the theatre or in arthouse films with a lucrative appearance as the villain or mentor in a summer blockbuster. While there were undoubtedly people who smirked at Moore for ‘lowering himself’ to work for Image, he was receiving a large amount of money and a high profile for relatively little work, and had struck a deal that granted him far more rights than working for Marvel or DC ever had. If Moore had surrendered, he’d done so on remarkably good terms.

  Moore’s bank balance received another significant boost when, in 1994, he sold the movie rights to From Hell. He remained a proud Northampton resident, but around this time he and Melinda Gebbie bought at auction a three-acre farm in Wales, and beg
an the long process of renovating the ruined farmhouse. But Moore hadn’t abandoned his principles to make a buck. In 1996, even Marvel found Image an irresistible force, subcontracting some of their biggest titles – Fantastic Four, Thor, Iron Man, Captain America and The Avengers – to Image’s Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld and relaunching the titles under the banner ‘Heroes Reborn’. Lee offered Moore the chance to write Fantastic Four, but Moore turned down what would have been another huge payday, still unwilling to work (even indirectly) for Marvel. Indeed, despite Morrison’s assertion, the problem might actually have been that Moore was enjoying himself a little too much at Image: ‘1963 has been a great deal of fun. It’s given me a great burst of energy that has been very refreshing in the midst of more demanding projects. It’s a bit like customarily working in a symphony orchestra, but playing in a bubblegum band on weekends.’ Moore’s work for Image certainly represented his most blatant attempt to write ‘something commercial’ and ‘fit in’ since his very earliest days as a freelance comics writer. His private life was about to become far less conventional.

  Alan Moore’s personal situation had changed beyond recognition. He had become famous enough to be a ‘cultural icon’. After years when Mad Love – and presumably the breakdown of his marriage – had absorbed much of his DC income, Image had stabilised his finances. His daughters had moved to Liverpool with his exes Phyllis and Debbie, but they remained on good terms. Moore had also moved, albeit to another house in Northampton, with Melinda Gebbie living nearby and had delighted his parents by buying them a large greenhouse with some of his Watchmen money. (The Chinese whispers of comics fandom transformed this into a ‘large, green house’, evidence of Moore’s fabulous wealth.)

  Ironically, Moore was also literally playing – or at least singing – in a bubblegum band at the weekends. He had met guitarist Curtis E. Johnson, who set Moore’s lyric ‘Fires I Wish I’d Seen’ to music, and they recruited Chris Barber of Bauhaus (bass) to record it at the Lodge studios in Northampton under the name the Satanic Nurses. The three were then joined by Peter Brownjohn (drums) and Tim Perkins (viola) as The Emperors of Ice Cream, the name Moore had wanted to call his band in the mid-seventies. Moore wrote over a dozen more songs for the group. As Johnson remembers:

  We did about three gigs with that line-up and at each gig our girlfriends were all sitting at a table near the stage, I thought they should have as much fun as we are having and so the ‘Lyons Maids’ were born, comprising Ros Hill – who accompanied ‘Murders on the Rue Morgue’ with some wonderful contemporary dance – Sarah Parker and Melinda Gebbie. It was very visual, the entire backcloth was white nylon and various early cartoons were projected onto it – Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend, Little Nemo, Gertie the Dinosaur. During the song ‘London’, huge ultraviolet lights flooded the stage and the ultra-white suit Alan was wearing [handmade by Hill and Gebbie] and the backdrop lit up in ultraviolet whilst the Lyons Maids threw ultraviolet gris-gris in the air.

  We did about eight or ten gigs. Alan did the posters for all of them. At one, the backdrop and the side fills were hand-drawn comics of a future cityscape by Dick Foreman, Alan Smith and several other talented comic artists. The gigs were noisy, good fun affairs. We did covers of ‘White Light’ and ‘Children of the Revolution’, there was also a pastiche of ‘Aquarius’ from Hair, sung to the same tune in a Mad magazine opera style that began ‘when the goons come crashing down your doors, or drag you off in unmarked cars’. My favourite gig was the UFO Fair in Abington Park. We played the Rocking Horse (the back room of the Racehorse pub in Northampton), we played Chequers in Wellingborough which is also a pub, we played a couple of outdoor local festivals and we had a fantastic time.

  Moore took obvious pleasure crafting lyrics that often feel a little reminiscent of his old Future Shocks: simple, funny, high-concept narratives such as ‘Trampling Tokyo’ (sung by a mournful Godzilla, who’s ‘tired of Trampling Tokyo … Bored to death / When my every breath / Sets the boulevard on fire’) and ‘Me and Dorothy Parker’ (in which the narrator and the noted wit go on a Bonnie and Clyde-style crime spree: ‘We went out with both lips blazing, and a pen in either hand’). Little of this material was released at the time, but fifteen of Moore’s lyrics from various projects, including The Emperors of Ice Cream, were published in Negative Burn between 1994 and 1996, illustrated by a number of comics artists. Moore drew the posters for all the gigs, with Johnson remembering that ‘the one for Easter 93 was my fave. It featured the Pillsbury Dough Boy on a cross and the heading said “rejoice for he has risen”.’

  Even with his Image commitments, Moore had time to work on his ‘more demanding’ writing projects. According to a progress report he issued in the November 1993 issue of Wizard (the best-selling comics news magazine, rather than the trade journal of his future vocation), he’d just finished Chapter Eight of From Hell and the first book of Lost Girls. It would be a ‘long time’ before Voice of the Fire was completed, but he had it all mapped out. As for Big Numbers, Moore asserted: ‘It is the most advanced comic work I’ve ever done in terms of the storytelling. I’m committed to it – I’ve never left a project unfinished yet, although I can’t draw it myself. If I thought I could I would go for it …’ The interview was conducted just before Moore’s fortieth birthday, and there’s no trace of an interest in magic in it. He describes Voice of the Fire in conventional genre terms – ‘it’s not quite fantasy, but there are certain fantastical elements in it’ – and volunteers to the interviewer that what ‘excites me as an artist’ is ‘the sense that you can make a difference in comics’.

  The announcement that Moore had become a magician took even those who knew him best by surprise. Yet by his own account it had been brewing for at least a couple of years.

  In a long interview for The Comics Journal conducted by Gary Groth in 1990, Moore had taken the opportunity to talk about politics and philosophy at some length. Confessing, ‘I’ve got a very, very broad, almost functionally useless, definition of art: just as anything which communicates creatively … but I think you’ve got to have a broad definition …’ he had concluded, ‘there is only one organism that is human society or human existence. We’ve divided it up in our reductionist way into different areas of spirituality, sexuality politics, religion, all of these things, but essentially, we’re talking about one thing, one organism.’ While that sounds a little New Agey, he had little time for mysticism as commonly practised, but understood the impulse: ‘New Age mysticism seems to me to be quite dippy and stupid a lot of the time … there are numbers of people out there who in however a muddled and woolly a way are looking for something of substance in their lives.’

  Moore was working on the script for Big Numbers #4 at the time. One theme of that book was that people’s lives are controlled by numbers, from everyday things like phone numbers and timetables, via demographics and high finance, right through to the mathematical structures that govern reality. Immersing himself in research, he read books like James Gleick’s Chaos, Rudy Rucker’s Mind Tools and The Fourth Dimension and How to Get There, and Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach and Metamagical Themas. The early nineties saw a vogue for fractals and chaos theory, and both fascinated Moore, as well they might: his work had always relied on pattern, symmetries, echoes, interwoven narratives, entangled events that only appeared to be random. Now he found that much of his work already conformed to the concepts described in the books he was reading, such as the emergence of deep complexity from very simple processes and the huge, unforeseeable consequences of tiny events. Fractal mathematics, Moore felt, dictated that ‘there is order in the world, but it also says that that order does not care about us … we can’t regulate chaos, we can’t impose our will upon the world in the way that we’ve been previously trying to … it’s simply not true that the world is there for man to impose his will on’. He felt that society could be described using this new maths, that we were approaching ‘a boiling point and what comes after the boiling point wil
l be radically different to whatever came before’.

  Moore was also working on From Hell, and finding the research equally immersive. He and his artist, Eddie Campbell, would frequently uncover some odd coincidence: ‘There were an awful lot of surprises. They were strange little things that probably wouldn’t mean anything to anybody who hadn’t been obsessively absorbed in all this stuff for the past eight years.’ He noted that one Ripper murder had been carried out close to both Brady Street and to an establishment called Hindley’s – resonant names because Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were notorious serial killers from the 1960s. ‘Like I say, if those first initial impressions are accurate enough, then everything that you subsequently discover will fit in, in some way. It’s quite an eerie process, but it’s one that I’ve found on numerous occasions and in From Hell, that was very definitely true. So there were no real surprises.’ The last sentence of that quote contradicts his opening comment, but not irrevocably. As Moore said, he was immersed in the material, engaging his imagination and looking for patterns. As he had learned with Watchmen, the deeper his research, the more odd pre-existing connections and facts he found to support his instincts. It wasn’t, in other words, a surprise that he found surprises. ‘I was constantly unnerved and amazed by the amount of confirming “evidence” that turned up to support my “theory”, precisely because I knew it wasn’t a theory: it was a fiction. This is a much more strange and wonderful phenomenon than simply being able to say, “I was right all along! William Gull was Jack the Ripper!”.’

  While writing Chapter Four of From Hell in early 1991, Moore had found himself putting in the mouth of a man of science, William Gull, words about the divine: