Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  Moore continues to write The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but acknowledges that the project has evolved: ‘I don’t think either Kevin [O’Neill] or I see that in the context of comics anymore. For me, it’s one of the things I do, like the new novel, or the music I intermittently work on, or the book of magic. These are all things I do. I don’t think of them in the context of the different media that I do them in. I still do think of new things to do with the comic medium, but now they’re all pretty much sublimated into the League.’

  The early volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are among Moore’s most accessible stories. Even if you’ve not read King Solomon’s Mines or can’t immediately recall that Mina Harker is a character from Dracula, Moore spends the first couple of issues introducing his cast and efficiently defining their personalities and capabilities. The comic itself tells a linear story, with the most baroque narrative technique in the first twelve issues being a single flashback. There’s no need to understand the history of the comics industry, Northampton or the Qabalah. It’s a comic that anyone, even if they’ve never heard of Alan Moore or ever read such work before, can pick up and enjoy.

  The Black Dossier was always intended to be a little more convoluted, and Moore was concerned at the time that the way DC marketed it as a straight continuation of the series would confuse people. The third volume, Century (2009–12), shifts the premise of the series away from a crowd-pleasing steampunk literary mash-up to something more difficult to explain and which needs to be framed for its audience. It’s composed of three 80-page issues, set in 1910, 1969 and 2009, each of which is self-contained but forms part of an overarching story about an attempt by a group of occultists to create a Moonchild, an Antichrist-like being who will usher in the Apocalypse. The series has an elaborate continuity of its own, but not one you’d know even if you’d read the main comic strip: the two surviving members of the League from Volume One, Quatermain and Mina, are now immortal – a fact revealed only in a text story in the back of Volume Two – and are joined by Orlando, introduced in a sequence for The Black Dossier.

  Throughout Century, Moore is playing an ornate game about art imitating life imitating art. The occultists are not simply famous fictional practitioners of the arcane arts, they’re also stand-ins for real-life occultists, mostly members of Aleister Crowley’s Order of the Golden Dawn. Century’s ‘Oliver Haddo’, for example, is from Somerset Maugham’s 1908 novel The Magician, a character Maugham used to parody Crowley, though Moore’s Haddo perhaps tacks more closely to Crowley himself. In real life, Crowley wrote a critique of The Magician as Haddo for Vanity Fair, and accused Maugham of cobbling together his book from a variety of other people’s novels … which, of course, is what Moore is openly doing.

  There are also echoes of Moore’s own life. Mina, like her author, goes to a free concert in Hyde Park in 1969 and has an acid trip. She, Quatermain and Orlando have a fractious polyamorous relationship, and our heroes mourn that the optimism of the sixties has given way to a dreary dystopian future. The book’s touchstones are those that loom large in Moore’s own understanding of twentieth-century literature, rather than an attempt at a general survey – he finds key roles for William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, Captain Miracle (a superhero created in 1960 by Mick Anglo, who’d been responsible for Marvelman), and Iain Sinclair’s Andrew Norton. Carnacki and Norton are portrayed as affectionate parodies of their original authors. All three books are about notions of the apocalypse, about the cheapening of art in the name of entertainment and the nature of fiction. With Watchmen, the more you know about the history of superhero comics, the more you’ll get out of it. To best understand Century, you need to have some grounding in the life and beliefs of its writer. Reviewers with no sense of the subtext were clearly bewildered, and happy that the next League project, Nemo: Heart of Ice, returned to a more straightforward action-adventure narrative.

  Those reviewers would presumably be equally baffled by Jimmy’s End, a project written by Moore and located in the heart of the Boroughs and even deeper in his imaginative world. The series of five linked short films centre around the St James Working Men’s Club in Northampton, and have a seedy, unsettling feel that’s reminiscent of David Lynch’s work. Moore features in a supporting role (in gold facepaint and silver suit) as the magical – we might dare venture ‘heavenly’ – Mr Metterton, who deals cards with DNA codes on them and makes pronouncements on the nature of reality. The series is directed by Mitch Jenkins and produced by the production company Orphans of the Storm set up in 2010 by Moore and Jenkins. It’s a conscious attempt on Moore’s part to create the sort of film he would like to see instead of adaptations of his superhero work. Moore did not need to put much money where his mouth is: the budget of the first part, Act of Faith was £11,000, which he suspected was less that the coffee budget for the Watchmen movie: ‘This is it: I am horrified by the budgets of these films, almost as much as I am by the films themselves.’ In 2013, Moore and Jenkins launched a successful Kickstarter appeal, squaring a circle that allowed them to fund the project without compromising it.

  Since the beginning of 2005, though, Moore’s main creative efforts have been directed towards his second prose novel, Jerusalem. Most reports have concentrated on its size, and Moore has estimated it will be 750,000 words long when completed (the length of the book you have in your hand plus War and Peace). The Observer reported in December 2012 that Moore was ‘delighted if not a little concerned that having typed it all with single digits he has worn away the tips of his index fingers’.

  Jerusalem will be a novel that maps out territory familiar from Moore’s recent work: the history of Northampton (including Moore’s family history), an exploration of fiction and imagination, and a discussion of magic and transcendence. The book consists of three parts, and each part has a different setting. As he explains: ‘All three parts of the book have got elements of fantasy to them. The first part is about the Earthly domain of the Boroughs, and indeed the first part is called The Boroughs, and this is about eleven chapters that are all set in the material realm in Northampton, but it’s not a straightforward realistic depiction, it has elements of quite outrageous fantasy as well. The second part is called Man’s Soul and that entirely takes place on a higher plane above the Boroughs in a fourth dimensional afterlife of sorts. The third part is a … it’s very difficult to describe, it all gets a bit modernist, but in some ways it’s a summary, a conclusion.’

  That first part draws on anecdotes about local characters and an exploration of the town’s history. Real life historical figures pop up, including Victorian fairy painter Richard Dadd, Lucia Joyce, Charlie Chaplin, William Blake and John Bunyan. There’s a sequence involving a magic ritual in which Asmodeus is invoked, causing ‘screaming pandemonium’. Some names have been changed or thinly disguised – there seems to be a Vernall family with a similar history to Moore’s ancestors the Vernons. One main character, Alma Warren, is an illustrator, and appears to be a Moore analogue along the lines of Christina Gathercole in Big Numbers. She, like Moore, has a younger brother called Michael. There will be extracts, or possibly the full text of an imaginary children’s book, The Dead Dead Gang illustrated by Alma that would seem to be the route into the second setting, a fictional realm ‘brightly decorated with painted motifs’. Moore’s description of the place as being ‘constantly in flux, with details of the landscape metamorphosing and shifting like the details of a dream’ suggests this is Ideaspace, or the Immateria. Above that is the third realm, a transcendental location akin to heaven.

  The three realms are linked, containing echoes of each other. The Archangel Michael is a recurring character in the book, and manifests in all three realms. He has won a bar brawl in which golden blood was spilled, and is one of ‘four master builders … crowbars of creation’. Moore has given a public reading of Chapter 24 of the book, ‘Clouds Unfold’, which is told from the point of view of the statue of the Archangel Michael atop Northampton’s Guil
dhall. Consistent with Moore’s belief that time is a solid structure, the Archangel experiences his entire life history simultaneously (unavoidably, there are echoes of Watchmen’s Dr Manhattan). It builds to a similar climax to Snakes and Ladders, in a moment where identities and experiences, good and bad, merge to create a perfect whole.

  Moore’s first novel, Voice of the Fire, was published soon after he had declared himself to be a magician, and it received little attention, let alone acclaim. He had made a conscious decision to avoid making it a superhero or science fiction story – although that was clearly what his fanbase wanted at the time. Moore’s readers have since had twenty years to digest Moore the Magus. Jerusalem is a novel that only Alan Moore can write, both thematically and practically:

  I can take unfair advantage of my position. Only I could do this, only I could spend eight years of intense work on it, only I could actually recount what happened in that neighbourhood with those people, and only I am in a position where I could do that without worrying about getting it published. I don’t need to go with a big publisher, they don’t really have anything to offer me. It’s not a big, popular book or a beach read, I’d much rather have a small publisher who had some understanding of what I was doing.

  When Jerusalem appears, it will receive the level of attention that a major work by Alan Moore can now expect. After exploring his magical beliefs in comics, music, painting and performance art, Moore might have discovered that, ironically, it’s unadorned prose that best gets across the worldview he has been developing and articulating all his life. It’s unlikely to be his last major work, and it’s foolish to judge a novel before it’s even finished, but it clearly has the potential to be one of the larger landmarks in the terrain of his oeuvre … and at least a little baffling to the uninitiated:

  This is exactly the novel I wanted to write. I am really proud of it, I think it’s sensational. That is, of course, just my own opinion. I am aware that conventional criticism will probably say that it’s about ten times too long, that it’s difficult in places, that some of the passages are deliberately alienating … it’s going to be a very forbidding book in terms of its sheer size and because it’s about the underclass. There is no better way of ensuring that you don’t get a readership of your book than making it about underclass people … The only ambition I have for Jerusalem is for it to exist. I’m under no illusions that anybody is going to say this is the greatest book of the centuy. No, no, it’s probably far too difficult for that. It’s just an accurate expression of part of my life and part of my being that also includes lots of other subjects that have become part of that.

  The endings of many of Moore’s stories are neatly symmetrical. They loop back to the beginning, the threat of the apocalypse looms large, and as the narrative draws to a close, it’s not always clear whether the protagonists are heroes or villains, whether they won or lost.

  As above, so below.

  On the face of it, Alan Moore has ended up almost exactly where he was before he sold his first professional drawing. He lives with his wife in Northampton, keenly aware of his roots in the town and of the modern world’s encroachment in ways that promise great progress but often deliver upheaval, particularly to the poorest residents. He has sprawling writing projects underway, and rails against right-wing politicians and Northampton Council. Instead of tiny children, he has tiny grandchildren. (His eldest daughter, Leah, is now a successful comics writer in her own right.)

  Many things have changed, of course. A young and hungry writer who sought out every opportunity and exploited it to the full has grown into someone defined more by who he won’t work with. The man who thought he had landed his dream job when Dez Skinn was paying him £10 a page to write Marvelman now chooses not to make phone calls to New York or Hollywood that could earn him millions. Moore has a devoted audience, those who will lap up everything he releases and queue round the block to see him at an event. Again, there are two edges to that. Is a three-LP/three-CD reading of a short story about Steve Moore’s life that comes with a dot matrix transcript and art prints and costs £50 the work of a man who’s decoupled himself from the shackles of mere commerce to produce uncompromised art, or one who knows his fanbase will show up for anything and is just taking the piss?

  Comics fans have a nostalgic streak. Moore’s deconstruction of the superhero genre in the eighties is now as fondly remembered – and longer ago – than Lee and Kirby’s revolution at Marvel was then. But Moore outgrew his personal warmth for superheroes. He has the advantage of a childhood that resists romanticisation. Where his nostalgic streak kicks in, his Rosebud, would seem to be the Arts Lab. Throughout his career, Alan Moore has clearly hankered for another place where he and his mates just get on and make art. Warrior, DC, Mad Love, ABC … Moore seems to have started out seeing each one as an Arts Lab with a marketing arm. He agrees that ‘Arts Labs thinking has been an underlying factor in a lot of my subsequent work, it is how I do tend to organise projects: let’s have fun, let’s experiment… I’m basically still at the Arts Lab, it’s just an incredibly enabled Arts Lab with whatever contributors I want. With the Arts Lab all of my needs to express myself, all my urges, had an outlet.’ With Moon and Serpent – and Top Shelf, Knockabout, Avatar, the revived Mad Love and Orphans of the Storm – Moore has finally found a way to do his own thing, enjoy doing it and pay the bills.

  Moore’s as ‘famous’, however that’s measured and whatever it’s worth, as any living British writer who isn’t J.K. Rowling. He has a continuing cultural impact. His – as he puts it – ‘toxic influence’ is reflected in many of today’s comics, television shows and movies. Will his work endure? It has already, beyond any reasonable expectation – the year of his sixtieth birthday saw new editions of Watchmen and Halo Jones and Unearthing and … many others, even his Empire Strikes Back Monthly back-up strips. Will future generations sing his praises? It’s notoriously difficult to predict. Moore’s body of work is large and varied. It’s of its time, while speaking to archetypes. It’s accessible and usually fun to read, and there’s much about the man and his art to discuss. With those qualities, there’s every chance he’ll make the same transition that, say, Philip K. Dick has from pop culture to the literary canon. Judging by university syllabuses, V for Vendetta may already have done so.

  Although Moore disdains the cult of celebrity, his work now exposes far more of himself: his family history, his thoughts on sex, his deepest personal beliefs. This hasn’t made it easier to decide whether Moore is cannily playing the game or has disqualified himself from it. Yes, when he says, ‘The other end of the living room is a bit of a foreign country where they do things differently and have different stamps and passports and currency. I’m not interested in travelling. I’m all over the world in my head, I’m everywhere. I’m not very often where I actually am, so I don’t really have to move,’ it sounds like he’s succumbed to a kind of insularity usually seen as harmful – even fatal – to a writer. But his imaginative horizons are wider than they’ve ever been. When he was starting out, Moore’s literary interests were confined to the world of comics, with a few forays into other strains of fantasy fiction. Once a writer who soaked up various pieces of pop culture and reflected them back at the world, his curiosity now extends – albeit somewhat haphazardly, it feels, at times – over the realms of science, history and philosophy. Yes, much of his work today is now inflected by his magic, but the fact is that you don’t have to welcome Glycon into your heart as your personal saviour to accept that ‘consciousness’, ‘creativity’, ‘history’, ‘sex’, ‘language’ and ‘how our environment affects us’ are weightier topics for an artist to engage with than ‘what sort of person would put on a bright cape to fight crime?’

  There would seem to be two possible interpretations of Moore’s recent work. The first is that he has cut himself off from most of his former friends, and hurt only himself by adopting stubborn, naïve points of principle instead of making sensible business decisions; th
at he’s not listening to the right people, and has become bitter to the point of paranoia. That both he and – crucially – his work are now increasingly insular and opaque. That he has, in short, lost it.

  The alternative is that the comics industry is in a death spiral, that it’s become the worst of all worlds: soulless corporate product that barely breaks even. The industry needs Alan Moore more than he needs it and should have listened to him when it had the chance. He’s escaped to fashion for himself a unique position where he enjoys critical acclaim and commercial success by combining experimental storytelling in multiple media not only with a bold political flavour but also with a complex personal cosmology. Moore’s a writer who loves posing questions but keeping his endings ambiguous, leaving the conclusion in the hands of his readers.

  So … which one is Alan Moore?

  ‘I’m a lot stranger than what I’ve just said, I’m just giving you the quick, commercial, acceptable outline. I’ve still got me secrets.’

  Alan Moore, interviewed for Mania, 2007

  INTRODUCTION

  p2 still buy – Douglas Wolk, Reading Comics (Da Capo, 2008), p229 [Wolk]

  p2 centre of the universe – DeZ Vylenz, The Mindscape of Alan Moore (Shadowsnake, 2005) [Mindscape]

  p3 horrendous hitchhiking – AM, ‘Behind the Painted Smile’, Warrior #17 (March 1984) [Painted]

  p5 fancied – bauhausgigguide.info/gig.php?gid=1671

  p5 communal narrative – smoky man and Gary Spencer Millidge (eds), Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman (Abiogenesis, 2003), p41 [Portrait]

  p5 extent of my unease – Eddie Campbell, ‘Alan Moore interviewed’, Egomania #2 (2002) [Egomania]. Reprinted in A Disease of Language (Knockabout, 2005)

  p5 keeping a low profile – Culture Show, BBC2 (9 March 2006)