Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  The Watchmen movie does include a couple of nods to Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, but only in the set design, not the style of direction or editing. A ‘faithful’ adaptation of Watchmen would resemble the eighties arthouse cinema of Roeg or Greenaway, not the sort of popcorn action movie that the most successful superhero movies have been – and it’s hard to imagine such a film making more for the studio than Snyder’s version.

  Although Moore has distanced himself from them, the movie adaptations of his work have inevitably affected his reputation. Movies have multi-million-dollar international advertising campaigns designed to raise awareness of the title and the iconography, they are routinely reviewed in newspapers and magazines, they enjoy an afterlife on DVD and casual viewers will bump into them when they are shown on television. The least successful movie will reach more people than even the most successful comic. That said, none of the movies based on Moore’s work was a blockbuster. They were all number one at the US box office in their week of release, except The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which opened the same weekend as the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie at #2. LXG went on to be the most lucrative of the four adaptations. V for Vendetta is the only one of the movies that can be argued to have had a lasting cultural impact.

  Nevertheless, the films have served both to introduce Alan Moore’s work to a wider audience and to reframe it for the existing comics readership. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the movie industry’s appropriation of his work, generally against his wishes, has tended to empower Moore. While the internet harbours a broad spectrum of critical opinion on every subject, it’s hard to find many people who think any of the movie versions outshine the originals – the comparison has only reinforced the critical consensus that books like Watchmen, From Hell and V for Vendetta are ‘classics’. Moore had previously been seen as the master of taking existing concepts and reinterpreting them, to the point that one critic had suggested ‘Moore’s fiction is like yoghurt – he needs a bit of a starter to get his own batch going.’ The movies have increased the profile of Alan Moore’s own creations.

  One demonstrable fact is that the Hollywood versions have led new readers to the comics that they’re based on. The best example was probably the earliest movie, From Hell. The comic was dogged with production and distribution problems. It took three and a half years for the story to reach the first murder, and ten years passed between the publication of the prologue and that of the epilogue. The issues put out by Kitchen Sink, the last of From Hell’s four original publishers, had print runs of only around 4,000 copies. Kitchen Sink went bankrupt in 1999, making it impossible to order back issues from the publisher. From Hell was expensive and difficult to collect, and a relatively obscure part of Moore’s body of work. Even the movie production team couldn’t find enough issues to go around and had to make photocopies. The first collection of From Hell in November 1999, self-published by Eddie Campbell, received fewer than 6,000 orders, and so was ‘made on the cheapest possible materials’. However, pre-publicity for the movie sparked interest from bookstores in the US and UK. By the time From Hell opened in theatres, the book had sold 110,000 copies and within a few years that total had doubled. From Hell was a book waiting to be rediscovered, but it was the catalyst of the movie that elevated it into the top flight of Moore’s oeuvre.

  The same pattern was repeated with every movie: anticipation sent people to the source material, and although sales settled down after the movie’s release, they remained steady at a higher level than before. This applied even when Watchmen was adapted, despite the fact that the book had already sold in the millions and was Moore’s most acclaimed and discussed work. DC boasted that they had printed a million copies of the graphic novel to keep up with the demand generated by the trailer that went out in front of The Dark Knight.

  Moore’s public denunciation of the movies – and rejection of the money – handed mainstream journalists a simple narrative about a maverick concerned only with his art raging against the corporate machine. It has led to the incongruity of dozens of newspaper stories and magazine profiles about how he is reclusive and not interested in celebrity. The articles find the idea of Moore the Magus irresistible, and tend to have titles like ‘The Wonderful Wizard of … Northampton’ and ‘Could it be Magic?’ One clear benefit to Moore is that such coverage has tended to contrast his more difficult, personal current work – such as Lost Girls, Unearthing or Jerusalem – with the slick Hollywood product based on his old comics, giving that new work a great deal more attention from British broadsheet newspapers than any DC superhero comic would get.

  It also allows him to publicise issues local to Northampton – protesting the closure of St James’s Library or the council’s decision to sell off an ancient Egyptian statue. Moore gives an example of the ‘loud voice’ he now enjoys:

  After a visit to the museum by some fundamentalist Christians, the evolution display had been completely covered up by the cowardly county council. So Norman [Adams, a local activist] phoned me up on the Saturday night and said: ‘Look, this has just come up. I’m gonna be organising a small protest group outside the museum tomorrow at one o’clock. Any chance of you coming down and saying a few words?’ I said sure, because that’s something I do feel strongly about. Anyway when I got down there, because Norman had announced that I would be coming, the council had been out overnight and had removed the cover. Not that it did a lot of good, because by the time it happened, it got reported that I’d spoken at this thing, and it got on the midweek news. I had Radio 4 programmes driving up to Northampton to interview me about it. So that’s the way that I can be most useful. I have been given this kind of unasked for clout, in terms of people who know my work. It’s not something that I’ve ever sought, but it is there, and if it’s needed in some way to help stem the tide of idiocy, then I can do that.

  It also gives him a way to counter DC’s marketing efforts that’s so effective that it almost looks like symmetrical warfare. Moore was able, for example, to appear in newspapers in both the UK and US to criticise the publication of Before Watchmen, a 2012 spin-off series he didn’t write and Gibbons didn’t draw, and which Moore did not want DC to make. The prevalent story became one of Moore’s disappointment and the poor standing of writers and artists in the comics industry. Moore is unsympathetic to DC’s plight: ‘It’s so unfair when you think about it, isn’t it, that you’ve got a barely educated thug from the English Midlands picking upon this huge multinational corporation. You know, I ought to be ashamed of myself.’

  ‘When I was a teenage boy I came up with a ridiculous, poorly thought through, fatasy image of the kind of figure I might want to be when I was older. And horrifically, this seems to have come completely true down to the last detail.’

  Alan Moore, The Art of Dismantling

  July 2006 finally saw the publication of Lost Girls, Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s pornographic epic. What had started as a vague idea for an eight-page short story by two people who ‘barely knew each other’ ended up as a four-inch-thick, three-volume work by a couple who were engaged to be married. As Moore noted, ‘I’d recommend to anybody working on their relationship that they should try embarking on a sixteen-year elaborate pornography together. I think they’ll find it works wonders.’ Moore thought he and Gebbie were staking out territory on the extreme edge of culture and he was ready for a fight, but instead found that a work that featured – among many, many, many startling images – Wendy giving Peter Pan a handjob while her brothers look on, masturbating, had earned him academic attention and serious literary respectability. Lost Girls received enough mainstream press on both sides of the Atlantic to delight any novelist, and the coverage was unprecedented for a graphic novelist. The release of a project originally ‘meant to fill in time between Big Numbers issues’ had become a publishing event, heralded as the debut of a new major work by, as the Independent on Sunday put it, ‘the first great modern author of comics in the English language’. A Channel 4 N
ews item went further, declaring, ‘Alan Moore isn’t just a comic writer but a spiritualist, a performance artist, even a magician, and to his many fans an anarchic visionary.’

  Like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Lost Girls brought together characters from different Victorian and Edwardian novels – in this case, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz. In Lost Girls, three women meet as guests on the eve of the Great War at an isolated hotel, where they describe their sexual experiences and engage in erotic exploration with each other and various guests, in pretty much every possible permutation, depicted frankly and with utter explicitness. These are not technically ‘the characters’ from the original books, but they have processed their formative sexual experiences in terms we recognise from those stories. So, for example, the Dorothy of Lost Girls was not literally swept up in a tornado to find herself in Oz; it’s a metaphor for the new realm of experience she found herself in following her first orgasm. The three main characters represent different ages and social classes – Alice is old and upper class, Wendy middle-aged and middle class, Dorothy young and rural. It’s a simple framework for an episodic story which allows Moore and Gebbie to engage in increasingly complex exercises in literary and artistic pastiche (there are sequences in the styles of Aubrey Beardsley, Alfons Mucha and Egon Schiele), and a growing contrast between the ‘pornotopia’ of the isolated hotel and the war brewing beyond its walls.

  The main significance of Lost Girls, surely, is that it is a major work by Alan Moore produced in collaboration with the woman who would become his wife. They would marry on 12 May 2007; the ceremony, at Northampton’s Guildhall, was attended by friends, family and artists including Neil Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, Todd Klein, Kevin O’Neill, Iain Sinclair, Chris Staros, Jose Villarrubia and Oscar Zarate. Moore wrote his own vows, Gebbie illustrated the invitations. On the day, Moore wore a bowler hat, Gebbie arrived in a horse-drawn carriage and guests were treated to a Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band tribute act, the Gonzo Dog-do Bar Band. The couple honeymooned in Edinburgh. In terms of Lost Girls’ place in Moore’s career, though, while it was published in 2006, it might best be thought of as a holdover from the late eighties or early nineties, the same period as From Hell, Big Numbers and The Mirror of Love, projects conceived in the years after Moore had left DC, when he was developing elaborately structured, ambitious comics for adults.

  Working for mainstream US publishers had meant working within Comics Code Authority guidelines that decreed: ‘Nudity in any form is prohibited. Suggestive and salacious illustration is unacceptable.’ In practice, by the mid-eighties, comics – and not just those by Alan Moore – catered for an older audience, and no longer existed in a prelapsarian world. Even a Code-approved comic could get away with the occasional bare bottom, or a hint that characters were post-coital. In any case, Moore had soon divested himself of his CCA seals. Many of his books for DC featured a scattering of panels where a woman’s nipples were visible – still relatively tame compared with other media – and Watchmen broke the taboo of full-frontal male nudity (albeit full-frontal, fluorescent, blue post-human male nudity).

  Far more controversially, and from early in his career, Moore had frequently incorporated sexual violence into his stories. Interviewed by Rolling Stone in 2012, Grant Morrison remarked: ‘I was reading some Alan Moore Marvelman for some reason today. I found one in the back there and I couldn’t believe it. I pick it up and there are fucking two rapes in it and I suddenly think how many times has somebody been raped in an Alan Moore story? And I couldn’t find a single one where someone wasn’t raped except for Tom Strong, which I believe was a pastiche. We know Alan Moore isn’t a misogynist but fuck, he’s obsessed with rape. I managed to do thirty years in comics without any rape!’ It may be colourfully put, but Morrison’s observation is not entirely unfair. Nor is he the first to make it. All of Moore’s best-known work for DC features sexual assault (or the threat of it) at crucial dramatic moments: The Killing Joke sees Batgirl abused by the Joker; V for Vendetta starts with Evey being rescued from rapists by V, who later performs a cavity search on her as part of a fake captivity; and perhaps most controversially, in Watchmen the Comedian attempts to rape Silk Spectre (although the two are reconciled and later have a child together).

  In 1988, there was controversy over the violence in The Killing Joke … and not a word about The Fear, a two-part story that ran in the Code-approved Detective Comics, in which Batman tracks down Cornelius Stirk, a serial killer who kidnaps his victims from the streets, then terrifies them to death and eats their hearts. The Killing Joke inflicts its violence on a long-running character who was a strong role model for girls, whereas Stirk’s victims are created to be killed off, explaining why readers were more disturbed by the former. Even so, superhero comics intended for young readers routinely include spree killing, mutilation, armed robbery, beatings, stabbings and shootings, and depict people being drowned, burned, electrocuted or doused in acid. Moore’s work navigates fictional universes predicated on violent conflict. His inclusion of sexual violence is clearly, in part, consistent with the idea of treating the action-adventure genre ‘realistically’. No one is surprised when the Joker commits murder, but in a world with violent super-criminals, wouldn’t there be sexually violent supervillains? Moore is intentionally trying to shock his audience, and when challenged that his work has tended towards the dark and grim, he has conceded that ‘I’ve probably done more comics about the horrors of nuclear power than I’ve done about the delights of windmills.’

  There are, of course, Alan Moore adventure stories that don’t involve sexual violence. But many others do, and he does not always treat the subject with high seriousness. When we meet the Invisible Man in the first volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the character is loose in a girls’ school, and the comic plays rape for laughs. Moore noted, ‘I know technically it was rape. I still thought it was funny, just because – it’s a funny idea, people floating in space with their legs wrapped around nothing, gasping in rapture.’ And for the record, there is a rape in Tom Strong, again treated lightly – in #6, the title character is drugged and raped by Nazi scientist Ingrid Weiss, who goes on to have his son, Albrecht. More recently, particularly brutal, lengthy and graphically depicted rape scenes have provided defining moments in both Century 1910 and Neonomicon.

  Any analysis has to acknowledge that Moore has written about the delights of windmills, too. He has dealt with positive aspects of sex and sexuality as often as he’s depicted rape. In Swamp Thing, Moore’s only ongoing series for DC, he was able to explore the subject of sex from a number of angles, including the issue-long, joyous sex scene that is #34, ‘The Rite of Spring’. Moore reasoned, ‘if you could fill comic book after comic book every month with fights, then surely you could fill at least one comic book with a sexual act. Surely that was as interesting as a fight.’

  Freeing himself from DC allowed Moore to address the topic of sex far more openly. In early interviews about Lost Girls, he was keen to stress that he was working within the traditions of the comics industry. There had been porn comics before Lost Girls, such as the Tijuana Bibles, which – as Moore had informed readers of Watchmen – usually featured famous cartoon characters like Betty Boop or Dick Tracy. During the thirties and forties, these circulated in their millions in all-male environments like barracks and barbershops. Invariably eight pages long, they were therefore known as ‘eight-pagers’. As Moore said, ‘The great appeal of showing thoroughly non-sexual figures such as Blondie, Jiggs or Popeye taking part in pornographic skits lies in the greater contrast, with the sexual content seeming dirtier when in the context of some previously spotless cultural icon. There is also the subversive pleasure that is to be had in puncturing the anodyne and sexless vision of society presented by the Sunday funnies.’ The basic premise of Lost Girls was the same: characters from children’s fiction having explicit sexual encounters. The critic Annalisa Di Liddo and Onion reviewer Noel Murray independently concluded
that it’s no coincidence its chapters are eight pages long.

  There was, too, a radical impulse: Melinda Gebbie had a fine pedigree in underground comix, and Moore was keen to remind people of the role the counterculture had played on both sides of the barricades during the sexual revolution: ‘Of course, both sex and sexual expression are political and always have been, but it wasn’t until the late sixties and the seventies that they were widely seen as such. Sprung up from the same sixties counterculture that had given rise to Robert Crumb came feminism to provide the artist with his fiercest critics.’

  Almost from the beginning, underground comix had appropriated existing cartoon characters. When Dan O’Neill and his colleagues showed Mickey Mouse behaving like an underground comix character – dealing dope, swearing, leering and giving Minnie an STD caught from Daisy Duck (on finding out, Minnie yells ‘you dirty duckfucker’) – in their 1971 Air Pirates Funnies anthologies, it was a protest against the safe world of Disney, an assertion that free speech applied to corporate-owned characters, too. O’Neill was embroiled in an eight-year legal case for his trouble, and used the trial to express the opinion that freedom of speech should allow a cartoonist to parody cartoons. He also noted that ‘wholesome’ Disney cartoons routinely traded in ethnic and gender stereotypes. The Air Pirates case became a cause célèbre among the comics community, with Disney winning vast damages they knew they could never collect from an artist who listed the sum total of his assets as $7 and a banjo.