Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

p5 a doddle – Daniel Whiston, ‘The Craft’, Zarjaz #3–4 (2002) [Zarjaz]. Eric L. Berlatsky, Alan Moore: Conversations (University Press of Mississippi, 2012), reprints a number of interviews: Hellfire, Zarjaz, CI65, Idler, AV01, Craft, Nevins, Mautner, Mustard

  p6 boring existences – Neil Gaiman, ‘MOORE about Comics’, Knave Vol 18, #3 (March 1986), p41 [Knave]

  p6 you’ll use everything – Steve Hanson and Christian Martius, ‘An interview with Alan Moore’, Eclectic Electric (8 March 1996). ‘The next thing’ is a reference to The Birth Caul

  p7 they were like – The Ballad of Halo Jones, Book One, p18

  p9 second-wave – Maggie Gray, ‘Transcript: Interview with Alan Moore’ (unpublished, conducted 28 November 2007 to support Gray’s PhD thesis) [Gray]

  p9 I was special – George Khoury, The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore: Indispensable Edition (TwoMorrows, 2008), pp20–1 [Works]

  p9 biographical accounts – see Victoria A. Elmwood, ‘Fictional Auto/Biography and Graphic Lives in Watchmen’, in Michael Chaney (ed.), Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels (Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography, 2011)

  p10 unavoidable political element – Bill Baker, ‘Alan Moore’s Exit Interview’, Airwave (2007 – conducted 8 May 2006), p46 [Exit]

  p10 10 Easy Ways – Vaneta Rogers, ‘10 Easy Ways to Piss Off a Comic Book Reader’, Newsarama (8 August 2011)

  p11 take out all the leaders – Margaret Killjoy and Kim Stanley Robinson, Mythmakers and Lawbreakers (AK Press, 2009), pp43–4 [Mythmakers]

  p11 all about anarchy – David Lloyd, telephone interview for this book, 25 March 2012 [Lloyd]

  p11 possibly unpopular – Norman Hull, Monsters, Maniacs and Moore (Central, 1987) [Monsters]

  p12 going to be blunted – Gray

  CHAPTER I

  p14 three generations – Paul Buhle, The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics (Abrams, 2009)

  p15 Coming Attractions – Eddie Stachelski, ‘An Interview with Alan Moore’, Fantasy Express #5 (January 1983), p7 [FE5]

  p16 load of the Ballantine – Pádraig Ó Méalóid, The Poisoned Chalice (serialised at comicsbeat.com in 2013) [Chalice]. ‘Superduperman’ was reprinted in The Mad Reader

  p17 Big brave uncles – Chain Reaction, S01E05 (BBC Radio Four, 27 January 2005; Stewart Lee interviews Alan Moore) [Chain5]

  p17 Completely infatuated – Works, pp31–2. Fantastic Four #3 is cover dated March 1962, so Moore would have been eight. Somewhat ironically, the title of the story is ‘The Menace of the Miracle Man’

  p17 written by Stan Lee – This may be the most contentious statement in this book. Jack Kirby (and his heirs) vociferously asserted that he had done the lion’s share of the work in his ‘collaborations’ with Lee. The Marvel Method is discussed further in Chapter IV, but a full discussion of the Lee/Kirby dispute is beyond the scope of this book. See, for example, Jack Kirby’s interview in TCJ (The Comics Journal) #134

  p17 actual character trait – Chain5

  p17 omnipotent losers – AM, Unearthing, in Iain Sinclair (ed.) London: City of Disappearances (Hamish Hamilton, 2006); adapted as spoken word performance piece (2010) and illustrated book (2013) [Unearthing]

  p18 loopiest thuggee – AM, ‘Blinded by the Hype’ (two-part article in The Daredevils #3/4, Marvel UK, March/April 1983) [Hype]

  p19 this chutzpah – Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs (HarperCollins, 2009)

  p19 exotic as Mars – Mindscape

  p20 small the world – In the sixties, Kinney Parking Company – a car parking company with mob connections – bought both Mad and DC as part of a swathe of acquisitions that would end up including Panavision and Warner Brothers. Following a financial scandal, the entertainment arm was spun off in 1971 as Warner Communications. As the media conglomerate grew, it acquired the intellectual property of its rivals. In 1972, DC licensed the rights to Captain Marvel, buying them outright in 1991.

  As another example that there’s always a connection to be made, the first American comic Moore wrote was Swamp Thing, and the colourist on that book was Tatjana Wood, the first wife of Wally Wood, the man who drew ‘Superduperman’

  p20 722 issues – see Kimota and Chalice for detailed histories of Marvelman

  p20 older Mickey Moran – Kurt Amacker, ‘Alan Moore Reflects on Marvelman’, Mania (September 2009) [Mania09]. See also George Khoury, Kimota! The Miracleman Companion (TwoMorrows, 2001) [Kimota]. There’s also an account in ‘Miracleman: It’s a Miracle’ in Speakeasy #52 (1985) [Speakeasy52]

  p21 tidied up – AM always says he saw his story as a ‘Kurtzman’ style piece, but in some places that means a parody (e.g. Speakeasy52), in others something more poignant (e.g. Works, p77, ‘a Kurtzman-type comic, but done seriously and for dramatic effect rather than for comic effect’, and see the ‘twist a dial’ quote in the main text). There are big discrepancies between AM’s various accounts of his age when this happened. AM was born November 1953, so would be twelve in summer 1966. In interviews, he has said: ‘I was about twelve or thirteen … in about 1966’ (Speakeasy52); ‘It was 1968, and I was 15 years old’ (essay in Miracleman #2 (1985), where there’s no mention of ‘Superduperman’); ‘I’d probably been about eleven … around the same time I picked up one of the Ballantine reprints of Mad’ (Kimota p11); ‘I also picked up a copy of one of the Ballantine paperbacks of Harvey Kurtzman’s brilliant Mad. It was the one that had “Superduperman”. Since I picked up these two things on the same day – and bearing in mind that I was twelve’ (Mania09); ‘I was only thirteen or something at the time, or possibly even younger, twelve or thirteen, and it might well have had Don Lawrence art, but I wouldn’t have known about that at the time. The main thing was, it was just this purely chance conjunction of events, really, that they were selling a Young Marvelman annual that I hadn’t seen before, so I picked that up, and they’d also got a load of the Ballantine Mad reprints’ (Chalice). The balance of evidence is for 1966, when AM was twelve. It’s only in later interviews where AM states that he bought the Mad reprints on exactly the same day, so this is possibly a conflation for the sake of a better story

  p21 Percolated – Chalice

  p21 Turn the dial – Kimota, pp11–2

  p22 same house – Don’t Let Me Die in Black and White (Phrontisterion Films, 1993) [B&W]

  p22 employed as a foetus – AM, ‘Brasso with Rosie’ in the Knockabout Trial Special (Knockabout, 1984) [Brasso]

  p22 £18 – Works, p15

  p22 Ginger Vernon – David Sim, ‘Dialogue From Hell’, Cerebus 217–20 (1997) [Cerebus]

  p23 Victorian matriarch – The Comics Journal #138, p58 [TCJ138]

  p23 five or ten miles – Works, p13

  p23 upbringing – B&W

  p23 morality – Sridhar Pappu, ‘We Need Another Hero’, Salon (18 October 2000) [Salon00]: ‘“I got my morals more from Superman than I ever did from my teachers and peers,” he says. “Because Superman wasn’t real – he was incorruptible. You were seeing morals in their pure form. You don’t see Superman secretly going out behind the back and lying and killing, which, of course, most real-life heroes tend to be doing.”’

  p23 insidiously and invisibly – Jeremy Seabrook, The Unprivileged (Longmans, 1967), pp36–7 [Unprivileged]

  p23 Counter-Juju – Brasso

  p23 rigidly fixed pattern – Unprivileged, pp157–9

  p23 Far Cotton and Jimmy’s End – Seabrook email correspondence for this book, 16 June 2012 [Seabrook]

  p24 shoe people – Seabrook

  p24 sons of immigrants – It’s no coincidence that so many of the early comic book creators – including Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, creators of Superman, were Jewish, as well as Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman – were Jewish. Danny Fingeroth’s book Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics and the Creation of the Superhero (2008) spells it out: American Jews routinely had secret identities – Bob Kane, creator of Batman, had been born Bob Kahn, Stan Lee had been born Stanley Lieb
er, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, co-creators of Captain America, had been born Jacob Kurtzberg and Hymie Simon

  p25 Kirby self-caricature – Mark Evanier, Kirby – King of Comics (Abrams, 2008), p22

  p25 recognised my uncle – TCJ134

  p25 very happy childhood – TCJ138, p59

  p25 grim as it sounds – Works, p48

  p25 sad about the working class – Alex Musson and Andrew O’Neill, ‘The Mustard Interview’, Mustard 2.4 (March 2009, which edits together interviews from 2005 and 2009 and is reprinted in Conversations) [Mustard]

  p25 encouraging him – Bill Baker, ‘Alan Moore Spells It Out’, Airwave (2005), p17 [Spells]

  p26 The Magic Island – There are a number of books called The Magic Island. The one AM borrowed is most likely to be Ethel Talbot’s 1930 children’s book, which was reissued in 1955, when AM was two

  p26 knew where the library was – TCJ138, p59

  p26 Omega Comics – Gary Spencer Millidge, Alan Moore: Storyteller (Ilex Press, 2011), p26 [Storyteller]

  p26 smothering black dirt – AM, The Birth Caul (1995 – originally a performance piece, it has been issued on CD and adapted for comics by Eddie Campbell) [Caul]

  p26 miniature god – Works, p17

  p27 Call me naïve – Mindscape

  p27 unacknowledged curriculum – Seabrook

  p27 proper little gentlemen – Unprivileged, p144

  p28 enthusiasm for sports – In an uncredited interview with Leftlion (7 August 2012) [Leftlion], AM stated ‘I have no interest in sports at all … competitive sports are one of the few things in culture that don’t seem to derive from Shamans. Most of the art and most of the actual consciousness in society – is almost certainly derived from Shamanic roots. With sport, I can only assume that it was when the hunters wanted to show off’

  p28 impersonal and cold – TCJ138, p61

  p28 twenty-seventh in the class – ‘27th’ in Works, p17, ‘25th’ in Mindscape

  p28 genuine intellectual light – Works, p17

  p28 sulky children – Mindscape

  p29 Stan Lee achieved – Hype

  p29 so we applauded – Exit, p43

  p30 ruining my existence – AM, Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness lecture (October Gallery, London, 26 October 2010)

  p30 bewildered – Pádraig Ó Méalóid, ‘Lunar Man’, Forbidden Planet International website (11 November 2011)

  p30 sixty or seventy – Alex Fitch, ‘Panel Borders: Alan Moore interview Pt 3’, Resonance FM (2008)

  p30 undeniably a performer – Portrait, p83

  p30 Obama – Jon Swaine, ‘Barack Obama: The 50 facts you might not know’, Daily Telegraph (7 November 2008)

  p31 absolutely formative – Gray

  p32 proto-hippies – Exit, p43

  p32 Cyclops – Works, p46

  p33 hell of a long time – Paul Duncan, Alan Moore interview pt 1 in Arkensword #10 (April 1984) [Arkensword10]

  p33 Firebowels – Reprinted in Works, Storyteller.

  p33 eleven-word letter – Reprinted in Works, it reads: ‘Aspect was incredible. I’m overwhelmed. I have whelms all over me’

  p33 Androgyne – Gray

  p33 breast-beating things – Works, p33

  p33 friend’s motorbike – TCJ138, p61

  p34 funny wonder – Moore, PC

  p34 motherfuckers – Embryo #2 (circa December 1970 – the editorial advertises the poetry reading on 16 December and wishes readers Merry Christmas)

  p35 art department – Works, p32

  p35 growing his hair – Compare Storyteller, p39; Works, pp32, 35

  p37 great clearances – Seabrook

  p37 bothersome people – Works, p14

  p37 two weeks after the death of his grandmother – Caul. Tom Lamont, ‘Alan Moore: Why I Turned My Back on Hollywood’, Observer (15 December 2012) [Observer12] dates this to 1969, when AM was sixteen. In a telephone interview for this book (July 2013 [Moore, PC]), Moore confirmed he misspoke on that occasion and was seventeen

  p37 various reasons – TCJ138, p60

  p37 woolly hat – Uncredited, ‘Alan Moore interview’, Ptolemaic Terrascope #8, 1991 [Ptolemaic] Moore, PC

  p37 most inept – Nic Rigby, ‘Comic Legend Keeps True to His Roots’, BBC News website (21 March 2008)

  p38 drugs squad – Observer12

  p38 hearsay – Moore, PC

  p38 upset and disappointed – Works, pp18–9

  p38 being my parents – Monsters

  p38 ideological reasons – Works, p19

  p38 purple pills – Works, p19

  p38 an incredible experience – Works, pp19–20

  p39 rather harsh – Mindscape

  p39 I was a monster – Works, p21

  p39 £6 a week – Salon00

  p39 antimatter – Mindscape

  p39 scary dog – Moore, PC

  p40 caustic dye – Caul

  p40 there two months – Storyteller

  p40 downward progression – TCJ138, p64. AM makes the same joke in Mindscape

  CHAPTER II

  p41 miserable jobs – TCJ138, p63

  p42 supernatural powers – Gray

  p42 I was living for – Works, p34

  p43 chief occupation – Chris Welch, Melody Maker, September 1969

  p43 Dave Thompson – email to author. See Thompson’s Your Pretty Face is Going To Hell (Backbeat, 2009)

  p44 soup of sensations – Gray. In TCJ138, p61, AM notes, laughingly, ‘the Northampton Arts Lab, for four or five years, just basically decided that we didn’t want any government support. Then somebody decided to try to get some just in case they were going to offer any. We wrote them a 50-page summary of our activities over the past five years and they offered us five pounds’

  p44 I first started writing – TCJ138, pp62–3

  p45 playing an instrument – John Doran, ‘Hipster Priest’, Stool Pigeon (Summer 2010)

  p45 decent performer – Moore, PC

  p45 Principal Edwards – Tony Palmer, Observer (8 February 1970); AM quote Works, p34

  p45 Ashby – TCJ138, pp62–3

  p46 Dutch customs – Works, p35

  p46 Tom Hall – Moore, PC

  p46 general disillusionment – Editorial, Myrmidon (1973), credited to ‘Gary, Diane, and Dominic’

  p46 eighteen months – TCJ138, p63. All material from the Arts Group is dated 1973

  p46 we’re helped by – Myrmidon editorial, which states there are ‘around twenty’ members and that about sixty people attended their first poetry meeting. The magazine lists thirteen group members: Carl [Bush], Fitz, Chris Barber (Music); Gary [Dudbridge], Diane [Thornton], Dominic [Allard], Jamie [Andrew James, aka Jamie Delano] (Words); Clive [Green], Paul [Bliss], Phil [Laughton], Dave and Pete [Billingham?] (Props, advertising, organising, looning etc); Sue. It lists five occasional members Alan [Moore] and George [Woodcock] (words and music), Richard Ashby (light and sounds), Pete Spencer and Herb [Bob Matcham] (Music). The gig report names Jerry Sears and Nick Tomkins as performers. In addition to many of those people, the three magazines published by the Arts Group also list Ian Bailey, Andrew Boddington, Glyn Bush, Shirley Casey, Carol Clark, Ian Fleming, Barbara Lovelady, Mu MacRobert, Norman Pridmore and Nina Steane as contributors

  p47 Pilgrim Zone Two – both appear in Storyteller, dated to 1973

  p47 Lester the Geek – Myrmidon editorial; neither piece has ever been published

  p48 The Doll – Painted; AM says he was ‘22’

  p48 Old Gangsters – in 1983 the song was released as the B-side to the single ‘March of the Sinister Ducks’. The sleeve included a fold-out comics adaptation of the song (art: Lloyd Thatcher), and this was revised and reprinted in Paul Gravett (ed.), The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics (Running, 2008), as well as Works. One line, ‘don’t let me die in black-and-white’, would become the title of the 1993 documentary about Northampton featuring Moore. A second comics version of the song followed in 2003 when the songs from Another Suburban Romance were ada
pted by Avatar

  p48 pinnacle – Moore, PC

  p48 long friendships – TCJ138, p63

  p48 Hitler lookalike – AM, ‘The True Story of the Rise and Fall of the Sinister Ducks’, Critters #23 (April 1988) [Critters]

  p49 tone of the times – TCJ138, p63

  p49 cultural and political wings – Gray (who goes on to argue against seeing the split as being so clear-cut)

  p49 featuring trade unions – ANoN #2, reprinted in Works, p21

  p49 inflammatory – Gray

  p51 Eno – Chain6

  p51 surrealist drama – press release at avatarpress.com/anothersuburbanromance/

  p52 Peyton Place – uncredited, Interview with Alex Green, ApolloX (1995) [ApolloX]

  p52 Another Suburban Romance – AM recorded the song in 1992 with The Emperors of Ice Cream, which is on the Storyteller CD

  p52 Cutting himself shaving – Lugosi died of a heart attack

  p53 album’s worth – Antony Johnston’s ‘The Musical Mystery Moore’, in Avatar’s Alan Moore’s Magic Words (2002), puts the band’s output at ‘half a dozen songs’, although Alex Green says it was ‘a dozen’ (ApolloX). The original band never recorded or publicly performed. AM formed a new incarnation of The Emperors of Ice Cream in the early nineties (see p403), with the later band performing a few songs originally written for the original. ‘Another Suburban Romance’ was definitely from the seventies, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and ‘Positively Bridge Street’ also seem to be

  p53 Moore did not meet – ApolloX: David J ‘did not in fact, meet Alan until years later’, but the two both attended the Deadly Fun Hippodrome, so presumably met there

  p53 Dream band – Works, p235

  p53 Summer of 1979 – Ben Brownton of the Shapes thinks it was ‘circa 1978’ (trakmarx.com/2005_02/15_bybus.htm) but this would have been before AM met David J, so AM’s ‘around 1979’ (Critters) would seem more accurate. The ultra-comprehensive Bauhaus Concert Guide lists it as 1979: bauhausgigguide.info/artist.php?bid=8

  p53 literally, dozens – Critters. Not to be left out, AM would use a pseudonym, Translucia Baboon, for the early eighties relaunch of The Sinister Ducks

  p54 Barda – Chabon, p185

  p54 if anything interesting – Gray

  p54 becoming obsessed – FE5