Whether or not Lost Girls was really the keystone to Moore’s career it was presented as by some journalists and critics at the time, it is a useful landmark. Its publication came in 2006, the year when Moore made a conscious and very public effort to distance himself from the entire comics industry. Thanks to tension over editorial decisions at ABC and Moore’s anger about DC’s handling of the V for Vendetta movie, he had decided to wind down his involvement in the ABC range, shelving plans for new series Comet Rangers (with art by Jim Lee), Pearl of the Deep (John Totleben), The Soul (John Coulthart) and Limbo (Shane Oakley), and an anthology series called Cascade which he hoped would involve Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland and Bryan Talbot.
There was, as Moore put it, one ‘slender thread’ connecting him to DC: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Moore reiterated that he and Kevin O’Neill would not accept any further editorial interference. By mid-2006, the one-off Black Dossier was nearly ready, and it was slated for release in October that year, but the complex nature of the book saw it slipping into early 2007. Just as The Black Dossier was completed, there was to be one further delay, as O’Neill explained:
A Hollywood film producer insisted on seeing the book, long before publication, in the early part of the year it was finally published. He was putting a lot of pressure on DC, and if I understand the story correctly – I’ll try to keep names out of this – someone important at DC flew out, showed the assembled book to the guy, who was flicking through the pages going, ‘Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, you guys are going to be sued out of existence, oh my God, what are you doing, what are you thinking?’ … then, unfortunately, the same producer was at a book fair in New York, and met someone from DC and said, ‘Jeez, you’re not still publishing that thing?’
While O’Neill didn’t name names, he was clearly referring to LXG producer Don Murphy, who explains that he had asked to read The Black Dossier in case there was potential for a movie sequel:
By this point Alan was done with Hollywood … John Nee brought it to the studio and stayed while I read it. It was not really a coherent story, but very fun. It seemed clear to me that there were dozens of modern copyright violations, like with James Bond and Jeeves, that were outrageous. But remember, I’m not a lawyer, I make movies. I’m fairly good at rights, but DC and Warners have the best lawyers in town. If DC scuttled the book because I said something, that’s crazy? Who am I? On the other hand, later on O’Neill, in an interview slagging what I said, mentioned that he felt that Warners should have given them the rights to Jeeves because a sister company owned it. They played fast and loose on later editions of the League with copyrights and certainly felt entitled to other people’s creations.
Because The Black Dossier was set in the fifties, everyone involved always knew that it would contain characters who might still be trademarked or in copyright. Moore, O’Neill and their editor Scott Dunbier had been careful throughout the process of putting the book together to discuss and work through the legal issues this might entail. Nevertheless, Paul Levitz, DC publisher, recommended that The Black Dossier only be sold in the US (the given reason being that an intended pastiche of P.G. Wodehouse would fall foul of UK law). It was also decided that one of the two songs on the vinyl record, ‘Home With You’, was too close to the song it was parodying, the theme tune to Gerry Anderson’s sixties puppet series Fireball XL5, and so the record would not be included with the book.
Publicly, ever since Moore’s first falling out with DC in 1987, Levitz has never been anything other than complimentary about him in interviews, while a number of people have credited Levitz with blocking all attempts to publish a Watchmen sequel or otherwise exploit the property – in the event, the only new Watchmen material published until 2012 was in a 1987 role-playing game module created in co-operation with Moore, and a 2009 videogame that tied into the movie (Levitz vetoed the creation of any new material for the game). After Levitz stepped down as president and publisher of DC Comics in September 2009, this would quickly change.
For Moore, though, Levitz’s intervention over The Black Dossier was already a bridge too far, and he concluded that he had finally had enough. ‘At that point, we had decided we’d switch publishers. Because even if we changed things, they could always come back with one more petty alteration – it was like having a boot on our neck.’ The obvious place to take future volumes of the League was Top Shelf, publishers of Lost Girls, who were keen to pick up the series. In the UK, it would be handled by venerable underground publishers Knockabout, with whom both Moore and O’Neill had separately worked on numerous occasions in the past.
Moore explained why he was leaving mainstream comics in an eighty-page interview with journalist Bill Baker, published at the end of the year as the book Alan Moore’s Exit Interview. It was another exercise in bridge burning, during which Moore accused DC’s management of being more interested in movie deals, corporate politics and their own egos than in making comics. After more than a quarter of a century as a writer, he claimed he barely owned a single thing he had written, and, from his perspective, the business practices of comics publishers routinely involved lying, blackmail and fraud. Moore still loved the medium, but had come to believe the industry was institutionally incapable of respecting writers and artists: ‘It treats them as a resource. It treats them as fuel rods. It has no respect for them as individuals. It will work them to death in the hope of getting a few more books out of them. And then, when they’re dead, it can publish fulsome obituaries and release all their work in commemorative editions and continue to make money out of them.’
Though the American comics industry has been around since the thirties and seen its share of peaks and troughs, it’s clear that it currently faces a big problem. The internet has radically altered the market for newspapers and magazines, and ultimately comics are just another form of printed periodical. Like the music industry, the comics companies were caught out by internet piracy and slow to offer a legitimate alternative. They are insulated from the worst ravages – collectors fetishise physical comics, thinking of them as investments, and there’s some basis for that belief. The first issue of The Walking Dead, for example, came out in 2003 and cost $2.95; in November 2012, a mint condition copy sold for $10,000. The direct sales distribution system essentially means comics are print-to-order and non-returnable, and so the publishers take on very little risk. But comics have relied on existing readers for too long. In the eighties, industry professionals were surprised to learn that some of their readers were old enough to go to college; nowadays they would be surprised to learn they had many readers that young. In 2012 Grant Morrison, then writing both Superman and Batman for DC, told Rolling Stone: ‘comics sales are so low … It’s just plummeting. It’s really bad from month to month. May was the first time in a long time that no comic sold over 100,000 copies, so there’s a decline … There’s a real feeling of things just going off the rails, to be honest. Superhero comics. The concept is quite a ruthless concept, and it’s moved on.’
Moore had been saying for years that the industry was doomed. In an interview for podcast Panel Borders, he offered the following suggestion:
The thing which I think might really save the comics industry, what we really need, is a good insurance fire. I think that if we actually burned the industry down to the ground, and we could probably lock the fire exits on all the big companies before we did that, then what we’d have would be scorched earth, which is rich in nitrates and which green shoots can blossom from. That perhaps sounds a bit apocalyptic, but I think that would be really healthy to actually bust the comics medium back down to the ignored state that it used to blissfully enjoy before people like me came along and spoiled everything.
There is a comics community, one in which most professionals started out as fans – Moore, of course, being no exception – and it’s a network with very few degrees of separation. Comics, like every other creative industry, has its fair share of feuds, splits, factions and grudges, but it’s broa
dly fraternal. So when Moore offers a critique, he inevitably provokes a reaction – from the creators, who feel personally slighted, and from the fans who champion the work of those writers and artists he is seen to be criticising. In September 2010, Moore remarked that if ‘they have got these “top-flight industry creators” that are ready to produce these prequels and sequels to Watchmen, well this is probably a radical idea, but could they not get one of the “top-flight industry creators” to come up with an idea of their own? … Just simply get some of your top-flight talent to put out a book that the wider public outside of the comics field find as interesting or as appealing as the stuff that I wrote twenty-five years ago. It shouldn’t be too big an ask, should it?’ Such comments are incendiary, and quickly spread online, but it’s a one-way process: while virtually all comics creators now have a blog and Twitter account, Moore genuinely still does not have an internet connection (although, based on comments he’s made, he clearly gets reports from friends and family).
Even when silent, his voice is heard. Every comics fan knows Alan Moore wrote V for Vendetta and Watchmen, so when the credits on the movie versions read ‘based on the graphic novel illustrated by David Lloyd’ and ‘based on the graphic novel co-created and illustrated by Dave Gibbons’, it means they start their viewing experience with a jarring reminder of his disapproval. Many fans are now in early middle age and prefer Moore’s early superhero work from their formative years to his more recent projects. They take Moore’s criticisms as personal attacks, with various degrees of denial, bargaining, anger, depression or acceptance. Fans of the V for Vendetta movie can’t comprehend why Alan Moore dismisses it.
All this has fuelled an image of Moore as reclusive and embittered, particularly, it would seem, among sections of American comics fandom. As Melinda Gebbie told the New York Times, ‘Because he looks like a wild man, people assume that he must be one. He’s frightening to people because he doesn’t seem to take the carrot, and he’s fighting to maintain an integrity that they don’t understand.’ Journalists often note their surprise on discovering that Moore is rather affable, the consensus being summed up by a profile in the Guardian: ‘You could be forgiven for thinking he’s a curmudgeonly old hermit, but in person he’s genuinely warm, considerate and utterly unpretentious.’
Most sixty year olds, presumably, have lost touch with former pals, or aren’t on the same good terms with every workmate they had in the eighties. Moore is no exception: he’s fallen out with a number of his collaborators over the years, including people he used to be friends with. He has also maintained friendships with Northampton locals since childhood, retained friends from the world of comics like Steve Moore, Neil Gaiman and Eddie Campbell for many decades, and stayed on good terms with many of his artists, going so far as to marry one of them. He has, though, also consciously cut people out of his life. On occasions he’s made it clear to publishers that he’s only willing to speak to certain individuals – latterly at DC, for example, he would only take calls from his former Swamp Thing editor Karen Berger, and his only contact at ABC was Scott Dunbier. By the mid-eighties, he had stopped communicating with Dez Skinn to the point that the Warrior editor had to send letters to him by registered post to be sure Moore had received them. Moore only wants to deal with people he trusts. Skinn’s response is: ‘Trust? Unless one’s paranoid, I’m not sure where that even factors in. I’ve never even stopped to consider whether I trusted my bosses at IPC, Marvel, Mad or anywhere. As long as they paid me, I worked for them.’
This goes beyond purely professional relationships; Moore has applied the same sort of all-or-nothing approach to his friendships. He and Stephen Bissette started out on very good terms, working together as writer and artist on Swamp Thing. When Bissette began self-publishing Taboo, Moore provided From Hell and Lost Girls, as well as other material; Eddie Campbell, clearly a little frustrated with the venue, says ‘I always knew that From Hell was going nowhere as long as it was imprisoned in Taboo but Alan stuck loyally by his original agreement with Steve.’ Bissette visited Moore in Northampton, staying at his house. Moore took an interest in Bissette’s creator-owned dinosaur comic Tyrant. They worked together on 1963 for Image, enjoying at least the initial process, and both earning a lot of money.
But things were to change abruptly. Bissette told The Onion that Moore had fallen out with him over an interview in The Comics Journal #185 (March 1996): ‘I sent copies to anyone I mentioned by name, of the transcript of the interview with a cover letter, saying “If anything upsets you, I will take it out. If there’s anything I got wrong, I will change it. Please read this, go over it, and let me know.” Alan, I never heard from. But when Neil [Gaiman] saw him, Alan … Actually, Neil called me before he left England, and I called Alan that night, and it was the last sentence he ever said to me. He said “Right, Steve? I’ll keep this short. Don’t call me, don’t write me, as far as I’m concerned, it’s over, mate.” Click. That was it. All done. I don’t know what offended him …’
Moore’s recollection is that although ‘the conversation wasn’t a long one, it was slightly longer than Steve Bissette reports. I asked him why he had never raised any of these problems and complaints about my behaviour with me. When he did raise them, he decided rather than raise them to my face, to raise them in a comics fanzine. He didn’t really reply to that. Also, that hadn’t happened … he was talking about how working for Todd McFarlane had completely changed my head and I’d lost interest in 1963, when as far as I remember I was still trying to write that last issue when Steve Bissette and Rick [Veitch] said they didn’t want to do it any more – the project. I could understand their frustrations at dealing with Image, where every couple of weeks it seemed to be another part of the Image partnership wanted to handle the book and it was just hopeless.’
The final issue of 1963, the 1963 Annual, was due to feature a few pages of art each from most of the Image partners, but there was no editorial team to coordinate or sort out the paperwork. Bissette picked up many of these duties, feeling that those involved – including Moore – were prioritising other projects at Image. But the straw that broke the camel’s back for Moore would seem to be when he read Bissette saying:
I really didn’t think, when push came to shove, that Alan would abandon us so readily. We built the bridge with him to Image, but I suppose we were just his porters in the eyes of the Image ‘aristocracy’. Alan became ‘Affable Al.’ It took me a little time to recover from that. It surprised me that money would be that motivating a factor. But, you have to understand how long Alan had been scraping. At the same time, his life was moving in another direction, away from the exclusive focus on comics, into really amazing creative avenues elsewhere.
Moore says, ‘When he called up I went through all this with him, I explained to him what had happened, that when I got this package, after The Comics Journal was already on the stands, I got halfway through it and I was in tears. My daughter took it out of my hands and put it in the trash bin … up until that moment, I had thought he was one of my closest friends. And, yeah, that was very, very upsetting.’ The relationship between Moore and Bissette had changed over the years. It meant ‘a phone call to Alan that used to be a friendly, peer-level co-creator chat was turning into more and more business. And Alan hates doing business. And it was becoming more and more of an intrusion in his life.’
A dozen years later, it appears, a similar rift opened with Dave Gibbons. Gibbons was enthusiastic about the Watchmen movie, Moore wasn’t. Each knew and respected the other’s view. Gibbons had been party to all the discussions and disputes in the mid-eighties and so, while the rest of us can only speculate, he understood the reasons Moore had fallen out with DC. He, like Moore, was keen to ensure that DC didn’t water down the original book. His attitude to Watchmen spin-offs was only a hair more generous than Moore’s: ‘As far as I’m concerned, what Alan and I did was the Watchmen graphic novel and a couple of illustrations that came out at the same time. Everything else �
� the movie, the game, the prequels – are really not canon. They’re subsidiary. They’re not really Watchmen. They’re just something different.’ In 2011, he did provide a quote for the Before Watchmen launch, but it sounded so lukewarm many commentators were surprised DC used it: ‘The original series of Watchmen is the complete story that Alan Moore and I wanted to tell. However, I appreciate DC’s reasons for this initiative and the wish of the artists and writers involved to pay tribute to our work. May these new additions have the success they desire.’ Gibbons remained on good terms with the publisher overall, though, and has continued to work for them.
Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore Page 43