I was a journalist long before I was a fiction writer and corporate shill. I think I was pretty good at being a newspaperman. Even now, nearly 20 years after leaving the business, I dearly miss the art and craft of print journalism—especially conducting interviews.
During my brief career, I freelanced for Wizard, a magazine that covered the comics industry. I had the great fortune to interview creators such as Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis and Will Eisner. But my most memorable conversation was with Alan Moore, who was then—and remains—one of my favorite fiction writers.
I interviewed Moore in 1999. I was still in college. Moore had just launched his wildly imaginative America’s Best Comics imprint and was game to talk to Wizard about it. I can only imagine how starstruck and nervous I must’ve sounded during that chat, but Moore was a class act. He was generous with his time, great humored, and accommodated the small detours I took, asking him questions that weren’t precisely about his new comics.
In hindsight, I reckon it was my curiosity to go “off script” with my questions that probably evoked some of the more intriguing moments in the interview, which is posted below.
I consider this conversation with Moore to be one of the coolest gifts the universe has given me over the years. I hope you enjoy it.
“Alan Moore: The Wizard Q&A”
Wizard #95, July 1999
The more comics legend Alan Moore shuns the limelight, the wilder the rumor mill swirls around him.
The rumors say the award-winning writer’s a devil worshipper. You’ll hear he’s got a really creepy voice. He’s a reclusive egomaniac, a mad genius, some kind of humorless goth-type. The Englishman’s been banned by the State Department from traveling to the United States. And if you look at the superspooky black-and-white photograph that accompanies most of Moore’s work, you’d probably believe every word.
But here Moore sits in his Northampton, England home, lighting up a smoke and speaking humbly about his career. Relaxed and cordial, he doesn’t see himself as the writing genius others paint him to be. “The idea of being on some kind of pedestal isn’t as much fun as it looks,” he says. “The fact I don’t go to conventions and tend to eschew celebrity in any way should give you a clue how I feel about that. Okay, so some letter in a fanzine says you’re a genius. Well, for about 10 minutes, you can say, ‘Yes, I probably am a genius.’ But it didn’t take long before I realized that was absurd.”
This isn’t the Alan Moore of the rumor mill. No, the creator of the new America’s Best Comics line is all too human here, smiling and bragging about his two pierced, punky daughters (“Both of them have more metal in their bodies than the average appliance,” he says.) He recounts stories from the early ’90s, when he played in a pop band called The Emperors of Ice Cream: “We had a girlie back-ing band, and I had this wonderful, huge white zoot suit,” he laughs. “But it didn’t work out.”
So Moore didn’t hit the Billboard charts. Big deal. He’s recognized as a pioneer in comic books. Moore began impressing the American audience in 1983 with his reinvention of the modern horror comic in DC Comics’ Swamp Thing. He gave readers the politically-charged V for Vendetta. But Moore is perhaps best known for Watchmen, the 1986 series that gave readers a superhero story without the superheroics. The story rattled the industry, and catapulted Moore to critical acclaim, media attention and superfandom among readers.
In the late 1980s, Moore left DC—mainly over an ownership and royalties dispute over V for Vendetta and Watchmen—vowing to never write for the company again. But now Moore is back at DC, writing his America’s Best Comics line for the DC-owned Wildstorm Productions. He speaks freely about his current relationship with the company, and his new comics line. He also debunks some rumors, explaining why he hates being seen as a comics “god” and about being a practicing magician—not a devil worshipper.
Oh, and the rumor about Moore being banned from America? That’s between him and the State Department. After all, there are some things you just don’t ask a practicing magician…
WIZARD: Over the years, your name has become synonymous with words like “genius,” “visionary” … even “comic book god.” But come on, man. You eat like everyone else. You take a crap like everyone else—
MOORE: And I put my pants on three legs at a time like everyone else. [Laughs] I live in Northampton, where everybody is familiar enough with my untidy and bumbling physical presence to dispel any illusions of deity. Nobody here treats me special, just how I like it.
The notion of celebrity after a while became horrible to me. Since the end of the ’80s, I’ve kept a low profile. Before then, I’d go to conventions and was mobbed everywhere I went. Kids fainted—or had epileptic seizures—when they met me.
WIZARD: The convention experience was that bad for you?
MOORE: Yeah. I went to one of the British conventions during the Watchmen boom, and it was certainly the most highly-attended British conventions; most came because of the press Watchmen was getting. This was a great moment of triumph for comics, mind you. But all I can remember of the entire convention was sitting in a bleak hospitality room, miserable, because I couldn’t go out without attracting a mob. At one point, I was halfway up a stairwell—there was a two- or three-story drop beneath me—with 50 kids, all pressing forward. At the San Diego convention one year, I woke up screaming from a dream of clutching hands.
What do you do? I don’t want to be the celebrity, the center of attention. Sometimes I find myself quite boring, believe it or not, and I don’t want to dwell upon myself every single second of the day.
I’d rather my work maintain my only profile. It doesn’t really matter to readers whether I exist or not, now does it? It’s only the work. I don’t want them to admire my haircut. I don’t want them to admire my complexion or my trim physique. If they enjoy the story, then that’s great. The contact between me and them has successfully been completed, you know?
WIZARD: What’s your contact with DC these days? Although the company’s publishing your new line of comics, there’s no DC logo on any of them.
MOORE: That’s part of the deal [former WildStorm publisher] Jim Lee proposed [when DC acquired WildStorm last year]—that it would be possible to keep America’s Best as far removed from DC as possible. There is nothing on the book that connects it to DC. I mean yes, at the end of the day, it’s DC who’s publishing these books. And yes, I would prefer it if it were otherwise. But it’s a thing I can live with, and as long as we can keep this arm’s-length relationship, there won’t be any problems.
WIZARD: Is there any chance you’ll be writing Swamp Thing or any other DC characters again?
MOORE: I know fans would like to see that, but no. Even if my relationship with DC were different, I’m not sure I’d be interested in working on the characters anyway. They’ve seemed to change in the last 10 years, probably for the better, but they’re not really the characters I want to work with anymore. I don’t really have any nostalgic longings for them. I’m quite happy with the stuff I’m doing.
WIZARD: Let’s talk about that. What was your overall plan for America’s Best Comics when you conceived it?
MOORE: There was a band over here in the ’80s called Pop Will Eat Itself. That name was a great name, a prophetic name. Pop—whether it be popular music, culture or comics—comes to a point where it devours its own past to find something new. Comics have done that; my Supreme work [for Awesome Entertainment that paid homage to Superman] is an example. What I wanted to do was avoid that in this line. So I asked myself, “Is there another way comics could have gone?”
To answer that, you have to trace comics’ roots back to the point of which the modern superhero was born: Superman. If you go back to the stage right before then, you’ll find pulp magazines and newspaper comic strips. The 19th-century fantasy novel. Mythology. Early science fiction. These were the things the comic grew out of. I’ve tried to return to that pre-Superman territory and extrapolate a different future from there.
They’re the parallel world comic books, if you like. I’m just hoping there’s a parallel world audience out there that’s interested in reading them. [Laughs]
WIZARD: There are five ABC books debuting in the next few months. [EDITOR’S NOTE: See sidebar.] Are there plans for any other titles?
MOORE: There is a sixth book we’re thinking of doing, one for artists who can’t commit themselves to an ongoing strip, but who I would be mad not to work with. I’ve been talking to people like Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Glenn Fabry. This is all very formative right now; there’s no schedule for it yet, but it’s something we’re planning for a few months down the line. We also have more six-issue stories planned for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
WIZARD: Has it been difficult finding the time to write all this stuff?
MOORE: I enjoy doing it, frankly. I see this as kind of showing off a bit. “Hey, let’s show off and dazzle the readers.” I don’t indulge myself that often, so what the hell.
WIZARD: You’ve been dazzling readers for about 20 years now. When it comes to having a “favorite writer,” fans and comic book pros almost always drop your name. What’s your reaction to that?
MOORE: It’s very nice, very flattering! It’s nice to know I’m any help at all to my fellow creators—they can rest assured that they’ve been a help to me. As far as the fans still loving my work, I’m very grateful for it. I sort of wish… [pauses] that they had more choice.
WIZARD: What do you mean by that?
MOORE: [Pauses] Remember, you’re talking to Alan “Big in the ’80s” Moore. Watchmen was more than 10 years ago. I don’t want to sound rude or patronizing in any way, but I just wish there had been… [pauses again]. I would have liked to have thought in the ’80s that by now, there would have been some stuff that would have come and made [Watchmen] long forgotten. That would have been perhaps worse for me, but would have been better for the industry. But I’m not sure there’s been work that’s reached as far, or attempted as much.
And that’s not to decry any of the work that’s been along since, because there’s been some very fine work. I don’t know. I’m probably on very shaky ground and I’m probably being very insulting to a lot of people’s work. But anyway, that’s my only regret. But it’s very flattering that people still think very highly of my work.
WIZARD: So what the hell do you do when you’re not writing comics?
MOORE: Oooh. That’s a good question. I’ve spent the last five years—and I’ve made no secret about this—being intensely committed to the study of magic and the occult.
Most of my life, I didn’t have much sympathy for the occult. If you go into a lot of occult shops, you’ll find people with yawning emotional gaps in their lives who try to cram them full with some outlandish belief system. But I started to look at people who I could not dismiss. People like Dr. John Dee, a man who invented the concept of the British Empire, wrote the definitive boom on navigation and was Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer. A brilliant man in numerous respects. But he spent the last half of his life transcribing this strange stuff which he believed to be the “language of angels.”
WIZARD: That’s where everyone says, “That’s when he went crazy.”
MOORE: Right. But I found it harder to dismiss. I thought it wasn’t fair that this man was a genius apart from this stuff. I thought I should look at it a bit more closely. So on my 40th birthday, I decided that rather than have a mid-life crisis, I’d do something a bit more mad. I decided to explore the ideas behind magic. To me, magic has an awful lot to do with creativity, and creativity has an awful lot to do with magic.
So if I wanted to find out more about creativity, I’d have to take that last step over the boundary of the rational.
WIZARD: What did you do?
MOORE: I read lots of books. Studied. Tried to think my way into it. Then, doing a ritual with a friend of mind back in January ’94, something happened, something difficult to describe in detail. There was some kind of influx of something, something… [pauses]. It happened to both of us at the same time. Bear in mind, I know this is completely mad. It can’t possibly be so. But at the time, if felt like something like a god—some extraordinary intelligence or consciousness—was rushing through both of us.
I was completely stunned. I spent the next few days thinking, “Dare I tell anybody about this?” But I decided to go for it. People were a little worried at first, but they were also very curious because I was speaking with conviction. Now, some of them practice with me. [Laughs] Here’s the subtext to my magical experience: I’m going mad, and I’m taking as many people with me as I can.
WIZARD: [Laughs] So, what do you practice?
MOORE: Qabalah is one. It’s part of the Western occult tradition. It includes all of the religious systems: Greek, Egyptian, Norse, Christian, it’s all there. It’s seen as a map of the universe on one level, but it’s also seen as a map of you, the individual. I might do a ritual that involves the god Mercury. You can have a dialogue with that energy, that cluster of ideas we label with the name Mercury.
WIZARD: You’ve had a conversation with the god Mercury.
MOORE: Maybe. During the experience, you believe you are actually talking to a god. Who’s to say if you are, or if you’re not? I’ve tried to keep an open mind about it. I tell myself, “One one level, this is a hallucination. This is an element of my own personality, some subconscious element of myself.” On the other hand, I also have to allow that this might be something completely beyond my personality, a higher entity. I mean, if it barks like a god and smells like a god, it’s probably a god. [Laughs]
WIZARD: [Laughs] At least you have a sense of humor about it.
MOORE: You have to. Most of this is a lot less dramatic than you’d suppose. It’s reading a bunch of books, and every three months or so, doing a working. We’ll do a proper ritual working, something peculiar will happen, and then we’ll get our strength back in a few months and do it again.
WIZARD: That dispels the image that some readers have of you—that you’re some kind of unapproachable “goth genius.” I bet they get it from that black-and-white photo of you. You look dangerous.
MOORE: [Chuckles] Ah, the photo. That’s all [photographer] Mitch Jenkins. He always goes for the dark, scary look. I don’t know. To me, my life is completely normal. I have no desire to have a dark allure. I have my hair like this because, frankly, I think it looks gorgeous. [Laughs] Those rolling, natural highlights, you know.
But I’m sure that looks dangerous to some people. And from experience, I know that if they met me in some foggy circumstance, they’d find me a bit alarming.
WIZARD: You have a great “Alan Moore looks like the bogeyman” story, don’t you?
MOORE: [Laughs] I remember walking though a park here in Northampton—a park notorious for its muggings and the like—during a foggy night. I heard some guys coming, probably from the pub or something, and I knew our paths would intersect. They were loud and boisterous. We finally crossed paths in the fog, and they stopped dead in their tracks. I kept walking. Finally one of them gave this nervous laugh.
WIZARD: Did he say anything?
MOORE: Yeah. He said, [in a fearful voice] “I didn’t know what it was.”
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SIDEBAR 1: Vital Stats
Name: Alan Moore
Occupation: Comic book writer
Born: November 18, 1953 in Northampton, England
Base of Operations: Northampton, England
Career Highlights: Has won more than 20 awards since he landed on the comics scene in 1980. Became a superstar with his American comic debut on Saga of the Swamp Thing in 1983 and a bona fide legend with Watchmen in 1986, which many believe to be the best comic series ever done. Keeping a lower profile in the ’90s, Moore recently launched his new comics line, America’s Best Comics, from DC/Wildstorm.
Best “Stranger Than Fiction” Moment: “I was eating sandwiches at a restaurant in London; this was right after I created [Swamp Thing’s] John Constantine. I looked up, and walking by was a man who looked just like Constantine: the cigarette, the trench coat, everything. He looked at me, winked, nodded and turned the corner. It was a chilly moment. I could have followed him … but I decided to leave the café instead.”
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SIDEBAR 2: ABC’s 1,2,3
When Alan Moore conceived his America’s Best Comics line, he wanted “pre-Superman” heroes inspired by 19th-century literature, pulp magazines and mythology. Here, Moore introduces us to ABC’s major players:
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Set in 1898, this book stars characters of 19th-century fiction—folks like Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, Captain Nemo, Allan Quartermain—who all exist in the same world and team up to stop an international conspiracy.
Tom Strong
Inspired by pulp icons like Doc Strange, Tom Strong is a hero who’s battled evil since the beginning of the century. A bizarre supporting cast (including a talking moneky and a steam-powered butler) assists him through his exploits. “This stuff is fun. It’s all shipwrecks and beautiful women and jungle kingdoms,” Moore says.
Top 10
Neopolis is a super city … literally. “Everyone in this book—the cabbies, the winos—are superheroes,” Moore says. This May-shipping book’s about Precinct 10, a police force created to take care of Neopolis’ supercrime. Inspired by shows like “NYPD Blue,” Moore’s going to have several storylines going on at once here.
Promethea
Debuting in June, Promethea stars a warrior from the realm Immateria. “Promethea is hard to describe without blowing the first few issues,” Moore explains. “She’s an embodiment of the human imagination. Promethea’s a fiction who’s somehow crossed over into our world. I want to babble her origin away, but that would spoil the readers’ enjoyment.”
Tomorrow Stories
July’s anthology features stories starring new heroes. The Spirit-like Greyshirt fights crime in the natural gas-powered Indigo City. Boy inventor Jack B. Quick spends his time building miniature solar systems and elevators to the moon. The bored, rich girl Cobweb fights crime for fun, and says Moore, “wears a transparent costume.”
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