Primer: Alan Moore

By Keith Phipps, Noel Murray | March 7, 2008 | 5:10am

Aux Features Books

Moore 101

"I'd discovered American comic books
at age 7," Alan Moore told the website Comic Book Resources in a 2002
interview. "I later came to appreciate comics as an art form, and
realized that even with glorious exceptions like Will Eisner [and] Harvey
Kurtzman, this was a field that was still largely untouched. Its great work
still lay in the future at that point." Coming from anyone else, the statement
would sound immodest, but Moore's work backs it up. Since entering the comics business
in the late '70s, Moore has helped redefine the medium several times over. But
his work leans more toward the subversive than the radical. The lion's share of
Moore's writing can be classified neatly into genres—dystopian science
fiction, true crime, more than a few superhero stories—but written in a
way that takes the genre's conventions apart while still paying heed to them.
Moore is a maverick who realizes he needs a tradition to play against.

Most Popular

Moore's best-known, bestselling work is Watchmen, which calls upon decades
of superhero tradition, and helped kick off the trend of "grim 'n' gritty"
adventure comics by placing morally ambiguous characters in a more realistic
milieu. Released in serial form over 12 issues in 1986 and '87, Watchmen was loosely based on the
Charlton Comics' line of Golden Age superheroes (properties wholly owned by DC Comics, Watchmen's publisher), but it added
all manner of pulp archetypes and historical conundrums, from pirate tales and
murder mysteries to the Gordian Knot and the quagmire in Vietnam. Unlike the
postmodern superhero stories to
come—some by Moore himself—Watchmen doesn't take a
tongue-in-cheek approach to existing comics history. It rewrites that history
completely, imagining costumed crusaders as pathetic and pathological, less
interested in keeping the peace than in living out their self-satisfying
fantasies. But while Watchmen's characters and plot have become less radical over
time—either because they've been copied so much, or because they were
thin and derivative to begin with—the structure and sophistication of the
book's storytelling remain every bit as thrilling now as they were 20 years
ago. Dave Gibbons' insanely detailed art finds visual rhymes and thematic
connections that even Moore didn't know he'd implied, and Moore's method of
stopping the action in order to look deeper into what a character is reading,
as well as his devoting whole chapters to some heroes' convoluted backstories
(complete with frenetic time-jumps, in the case of the omni-powerful Dr.
Manhattan) has influenced a generation of geek art, right up to the current ABC
hit Lost.
The immediate impact of Watchmen was a wave of violent, ugly, and stupid superhero
comics. The long-term impact has been much more resounding.

After swearing off major comics companies over
issues of creators' rights in the late '80s, Moore spent much of the '90s doing
quirky short-term assignments and work-for-hire jobs for the many upstart
independent publishers that sprung up in the early '90s. Meanwhile, he worked
on a pair of long-term projects: Lost Girls (see below) and From
Hell,
a sprawling, copiously researched account of the Jack The Ripper slayings. As a
mystery, it's a non-starter: Moore reveals the killer early on, and his
solution is neither original nor, with its conspiratorial ties to Freemasonry
and the Royal Family, plausible. But that really isn't the point. From Hell lets Moore vivisect Late
Victorian culture, pinpointing the source of the slaying less as one man than as
the society that produced him, and tracing a pattern of cause and effect from the
architects of Atlantis up to the present day. Moore's work has always been best
served by artists ready to realize his vision down to the minutest detail, and
here, Australia-based artist Eddie Campbell uses quavery black-and-white art to
capture the church steeples, downtown billboards, and back-alley blood-spatters
with equally unsparing attention.

Moore, a lifelong resident of Northampton,
England, ended the '90s by launching the slyly named America's Best Comics, an
imprint consisting, initially at least, of comics penned entirely by Moore. All
the ABC titles have qualities to recommend them, but none has the immediate
appeal of Top 10, a police drama set in a city of superpowered beings inspired
more by Ed McBain than Justice League Of America. Loaded with references
both obvious and obscure (some buried almost subliminally in Gene Ha's penciled
art), it sends up the conventions of cop and superhero stories without letting
the humor overwhelm the emotional pull of its appealing characters. It breathed
fresh life into both genres, before ending unceremoniously after 12 issues.
Moore returned to the Top 10 world twice, with excellent results both times:
Using a pair of characters to explore the conventions of fantasy literature
with the spin-off limited series Smax, and delving into the origins of the Top 10 world with the prequel
graphic novel Top 10: The 49ers.

Intermediate Work

After a couple of years of writing short comic-book
stories for British magazines—often using pre-existing characters like
Captain Britain—Moore started developing ideas for original series. In
1982, in the cutting-edge UK anthology Warrior, Moore and artist David
Lloyd introduced V For Vendetta, a dark commentary on what they saw as the
creeping fascism of the nuclear age. Moore and Lloyd offer up two protagonists:
a philosophical terrorist wearing a mask fashioned after notorious anarchist
Guy Fawkes, and an abused young woman whom "V" takes under his wing, to teach
her (and thereby us) what needs to be done to preserve individuality and free
thought. Built around short chapters, frequent plot twists, and heavy doses of
bleak irony, V For Vendetta was a sensation in serialized form, but Moore and
Lloyd had to abandon the story when Warrior folded. They came back to
it three years later, when DC offered to let them finish the run, but the
completed book feels unbalanced. It's two-thirds a gripping yarn, followed by a
rushed, shrill third act. Still, those first two-thirds were enough to prove
that Moore had the vision to spin a complex, involving narrative over more than
eight pages.

Another densely detailed period piece, this one
illustrated by Kevin O'Neill, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen takes a concept straight
out of fan fiction and turns it into an exciting inquiry into how the heroes
and villains an era produces reveal its fears and desires. With explosions.
That premise: What if The Invisible Man, Captain Nemo, Mr. Hyde, Allen
Quatermain, and Mina Murray from Dracula teamed up to save the world? It works both
as high adventure and as a game of spot-the-reference sure to challenge the
most hardened devotee of Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction. But Moore's treatment
of the characters truly distinguishes the book. He doesn't so much redefine his
heroes as draw out who they already are. The Invisible Man becomes the
definition of amorality. Nemo's opposition to authority becomes a precursor for
the coming centuries' terrorist acts. After revealing that The League was one
of several Leagues that appeared over the centuries, Moore and O'Neill deepened
the mythology with a satisfying second volume and the frustrating The League
Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, the latter as much a sourcebook as a
proper story.

Watchmen overshadows most of Alan Moore's other superhero
work, but it was neither his first nor his last plunge into the world of capes
and tights. The tangled history of Miracleman—from its origins as
a British derivation of the 1940s Captain Marvel character to its current
status as the source of a seemingly bottomless legal quagmire—is a Primer
unto itself. Moore's run on the title stretched from its 1982 revival as a
feature in Warrior
through 16 issues. It begins with the middle-aged Micky Moran remembering he
has the ability to transform into a superhero with the use of a magic word, and
it ends with Moran's alter ego becoming a god on earth. In between, Moore
teases out the troubling implications always present in the genre. What do
these power fantasies mean, and, if left unchecked, where would they take us? Can the gulf
between humanity and superhumanity ever be closed? "His emotions are so pure,"
Moran tells his wife early in the run, "when he loves you it's gigantic. His
love is so strong and clean… When I love you it's all tangled up with who's not
doing their share of the washing up and twisted neurotic things like that." By
the end of Moore's story, the part of Moran that asks such questions is gone.

Moore was growing up in public as he wrote Miracleman. His progression and the
wildly variable art—it begins beautifully with pencils by Garry Leach and
Alan Davis, and ends with John Totleben's masterful pointillist work, but
suffers in between—makes Miracleman show its seams a bit. But should it ever
become widely available again, it should assume its proper status as one of
Moore's best work. (The A.V. Club would never endorse illegal downloads, but there
are rumors that it's digitally available online.)

After stripping superheroes down to their base
elements in the '80s with Miracleman and Watchmen, Moore began putting them back together
again in the '90s. Invited by the artists at Image to do more or less whatever
he wanted with their creations—whenever he needed a quick influx of cash
to help him finish From Hell—Moore initially responded with the muddled,
unfinished miniseries 1963, and some routine work-for-hire on Spawn and WildC.A.T.s. Then he took over Rob
Liefeld's grotesque Superman rip-off Supreme, and renewed a love
affair with the genre that Watchmen had effectively killed off. Over the course of 22 Supreme
issues, Moore strove to write superhero stories as imaginative and
light-hearted as the best of the Silver Age, while subtly acknowledging that
times had changed, and that throwback comics can never be more than a
self-conscious construct. Though Moore was mainly spitballing ideas that he'd
bring to fruition with the America's Best Comic line a few years later, and
though he never got to bring Supreme to the big battle-royal finale he'd planned, the
series' individual issues—collected in two sloppily produced trade
paperbacks by Checker—are in many ways the most purely "fun" comics Moore
has ever written, and some of the best "Superman" stories since the '60s.

Like Supreme, a lot of Alan Moore's projects in the
'90s went unfinished or unrealized, as he struggled to make the transition from
genre writer to serious writer, while independent comics publishers and
unreliable artists folded all around him. But in 1991, Moore completed an
entire graphic novella that has gone practically unnoticed. A Small
Killing,
illustrated by Argentinean painter Oscar Zarate, jumps around the consciousness
of a rising young advertising executive as he prepares to start pitching a soft
drink to the Soviets. He flashes back to his childhood in the low-rent suburbs,
and tries to puzzle out the reasons behind his intuition that someone's trying
to kill him. The secret isn't that hard to figure out, but A Small Killing isn't the kind of story
that relies on surprise. It's more a poignant depiction of how the ghosts of
our choices linger, as well as a demonstration that Moore is capable of writing
a sophisticated non-adventure book that doesn't descend to pretentious incomprehensibility. A Small Killing
is his most underrated work.

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Advanced Studies

Moore's interest in fringe science and the occult
has grown more intense through the years. By the mid-'90s, he was publicly
professing to worship the Roman snake god Glycon (though his attraction to the
deity seems largely tied to the probability that the original Glycon cult was defrauding
the devout). Promethea began as the ABC line's take on Wonder Woman, and
became a clearinghouse for Moore's thoughts on Alesteir Crowley, tarot, and the
Kabbalah, before circling not quite all the way back again in its final
apocalyptic issues. Reading it can feel a lot like being buttonholed by a
genial, disturbingly persuasive madman with fully considered ideas about the
mystic forces that secretly guide the world. The gorgeous art by J.H. Williams,
who guides Promethea from a slightly dystopian city to the afterlife and all points
beyond, stays in lockstep with Moore's ideas, no matter how outré they become.

DC's Swamp Thing was on the verge of
cancellation when Alan Moore assumed writing duties in 1984. It became his
breakthrough into American comics, one accomplished by turning the title on its
head. Swamp Thing's origin was pretty simple: Alec Holland, a scientist working
on a secret project in the Louisiana swamps, has been turned into a horrific
vegetable monster thanks to an explosion intended to kill him. With his second
issue, Moore used a story called "The Anatomy Lesson" to unravel that origin,
revealing that Holland had died in the explosion, leaving behind a vegetable
creature who only thought he was Holland. Instead of a man who had turned
into a plant, he was a plant laboring under the illusion that he'd once been a
man. From that inversion, Moore spun horror stories with a mystical bent,
sending Swamp Thing off to explore the afterlife, the dark side of America (in
a long storyline that introduced acerbic magician John Constantine, soon to
star in his own series), and, less successfully, outer space. Stephen Bissette
and John Totleben supplied the lion's share of the art for a run that, by the
time it concluded, had helped redefine what could and couldn't be done with
comics, and built a mythical system out of the fringe elements of the DC
Universe. That's what makes it simultaneously brilliant and a little forbidding
to comics newcomers, who may not immediately get the references to Adam
Strange, Deadman, and other venerable-but-obscure characters. The poetic
storytelling that balances creepiness with tenderness—the latter courtesy
of Swamp Thing's odd romance with an understanding woman named Abby—makes
the problem easy to overlook.

Soon after Moore launched From Hell in Steve Bissette's
short-lived (but glorious) horror anthology Taboo, he added the erotic
juvenile fiction deconstruction Lost Girls to the Taboo roster. When Taboo folded, Moore and artist
Melinda Gebbie (who became Moore's romantic partner as well) decided to
complete the whole story before publishing it, and 15 years later, they
convinced independent publisher Top Shelf to release Lost Girls as a three-volume
hardbound box set, retailing for $75. The book sold more than 30,000 copies,
which is a testament to Moore's reputation, because while Lost Girls is one of his most
straightforward stories—divided, like V For Vendetta and so many other Moore
works, into digestible chunks—the subject matter couldn't be more
repellent. Attempting to demystify pornography and pull apart the
psychological underpinning of children's stories, Moore and Gebbie have The
Wizard Of Oz's
Dorothy, Peter Pan's
Wendy, and Alice In Wonderland's Alice enjoying a sexy country vacation on the
eve of World War I. The material set in 1913 is explicit but fairly benign,
while the retellings of each woman's personal history are at times
stomach-turningly shocking, including graphic depictions of well-loved
children's book characters—some of them children
themselves—engaging in sexual activity. Lost Girls is a bold work that dares
to ask whether fantasy alone can be harmful, and while it isn't always
successful as a statement of principles, it's as emotionally affecting a book
as the comics medium has ever produced.

The Essentials

1.From
Hell

2.Watchmen

3.Top
10

4.Promethea

5.V
For Vendetta

Essential Stories

1. "Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?"

Alan Moore only had three cracks at Superman, but
he made all three count: first with the rich Superman's-greatest-wish story
"For The Man Who Has Everything," then with the surreal Swamp Thing team-up
"The Jungle Line," and finally with "Whatever Happened To The Man Of
Tomorrow?," a two-issue farewell to Superman designed to clear the decks before
the series rebooted in 1986. Set free to come up with a logical endpoint to 46
years of Superman lore, Moore made the bad guys badder, brought back nearly
every Superman character and concept for one last hurrah, and found a way to
spread wanton destruction throughout the DC universe, while still ending with a
reassuring wink. Though it's far less dense than Watchmen, the same approach
pertains: What if the people who created superhero comics cared as much as the
people who read them?

2. "Greyshirt: How Things Work Out":

Appearing in Tomorrow Stories, ABC's uneven but often
brilliant anthology series, "How Things Work Out" uses Greyshirt, Moore and
Rick Veitch's homage to Will Eisner's masked gumshoe The Spirit, as the anchor
for a storytelling experiment with a powerful payoff. Set in a four-story
apartment building, with each story of the building capturing a different decade,
it follows a father and son's dashed dreams to their tragic conclusion.

3. "Reversible Man"

A lot of Moore's early stories for British
magazines are tossed-off goofs, heavy on punchlines and gleeful oddity. But
"The Reversible Man" is a powerful exception. Like a lot of that early work, it
explores a single idea—in this case, it's that old fantasy-fiction
chestnut, "What would it be like to live your life backward, from death to
birth?"—but rather than going for laughs, Moore finds the sweetness in
the concept, observing how irritation with spouses turns to fervent affection,
and how work gets "progressively easier… and I had to give less and less money
to the firm every Friday night." In four short pages, Moore packs in dozens of
touching observations on the pains and pleasures of everyday life, before
ending on a moment of existential horror.

4. "Swamp Thing: Pog"

Moore never let his affection for classic comics
creations stop him from using them to heartbreaking ends. Originally published
in Swamp Thing #32,
"Pog" recasts Walt Kelly's Pogo characters as visitors from another planet who
drop by Swamp Thing's Louisiana turf in search of a more hospitable
environment. Instead, they find the same problems they left behind, discovering
that a world overrun with humanity has little use for funny animals, no matter
how whimsical their speech or sharp their social commentary. (Moore has never
let his own complicity in the darkening tone of modern comics get in the way of
mourning what's been lost. See also the brief, brutal one-off story
"Pictopia.")

5. The Killing Joke

While Watchmen had a lot to do with the
darkening of superhero comics in the decade to come, Moore's 48-page, Brian
Bolland-illustrated Batman story The Killing Joke—along with Frank
Miller's badass Batman revival The Dark Knight Returns—showed future
writers and artists how to add a coat of grime to preexisting characters. Even
Moore has regretted the influence of The Killing Joke, a nasty re-telling of the
Joker's origin story that spills over into the sexualized torture of Batgirl.
But while its chin-stroking "are good and evil really the same?" theme isn't
all that profound—and its punk nihilism loses its cool once readers get
past their sophomore year of college—The Killing Joke is undeniably upsetting,
and it carries Moore's obsession with rhyming images to a mind-bending extreme.
Even now, adolescent comic-book fans can read The Killing Joke for the first time and
think, "This
is how superhero comics are supposed to be," while middle-aged comics fans read
it and think, "This is the moment where the genre went wrong." Either way, The
Killing Joke
remains an impressive achievement.

Demerits

Even the most brilliant writer in comicdom takes
some wrong turns. In Moore's case, the mistakes have either been the result of
his taking a job strictly for money, or trying something that stretches the
comics form a little too much. In the mid-'90s, with From Hell still uncompleted and his
other art-comics on hiatus, Moore cashed some checks from Image and Awesome
Comics, and worked on their superhero properties. Some of those comics, like Supreme, Youngblood, and Glory, are slight but highly
entertaining, while others are jumbled and indifferent. Moore spent a year
writing the adventures of the interstellar super-team WildC.A.T.s, but while he tries to
riff on class conflict and the distinctions between human and artificial
intelligence, his plots are overly convoluted, and he doesn't seem especially
interested in reining them in. Meanwhile, in the spin-off miniseries Voodoo, Moore crafts a bayou
mystery around a telepathic WildC.A.T.s heroine/stripper, but his interjections
of local color are blaringly awkward, and the mystery story fairly bland.

On the flip side, Moore has also been involved
with some work that exposes his weakness for the willfully obscure.
Periodically, he's allowed artists to adapt his prose stories and performance-art
pieces into comics, and the results have been generally dire. The book A
Disease Of Language collects two Moore lectures on magic, history, and human
consciousness, illustrated by From Hell's Eddie Campbell. Both "The Birth Caul"
and "Snakes And Ladders" are beautifully drawn and sporadically insightful, but
they suffer from Moore's persistent belief that incomprehensibility is a
prerequisite to mystic understanding.

Miscellany

Perhaps the biggest "what might've been" in
Moore's bibliography is Big Numbers, a self-published, serialized graphic
novel that he and artist Bill Sienkiewicz completed two issues of in 1990,
before Sienkiewicz crumpled under the workload and Moore's publishing imprint
Mad Love collapsed financially. In retrospect, maybe it was all for the best. Big
Numbers
was insanely ambitious, attempting to connect up the patterns in a handful of
strangers' lives via fractal geometry, while also pushing comics design forward
with a purposeful mix of black-and-white and color, collage and paint. But on
the page, Moore's "everyday people" seem a little shallow, and his "big
picture" pretty unfocused. A lot of the major ideas in Big Numbers were being explored
simultaneously in From Hell, and once Moore turned his attention more fully
to the latter, he was able to write a stealthier masterpiece, without the
pressure of expectation that weighed down Big Numbers.

Continuing the "unfinished" trend, in 1993 Moore
crafted an elaborate homage to the boisterous early days of Marvel Comics with
the miniseries 1963, a six-part riff on Stan Lee's hyperbolic prose
and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko's dynamic art, featuring characters based on
Spider-Man, Nick Fury, The Fantastic Four, Thor, Doctor Strange and the like.
The whole endeavor was supposed to culminate in an 80-page "annual" that would
contrast the imaginative simplicity of early Marvel with the simplistic
imagination of the early '90s, but 1963's publisher Image got wrapped up in
internal turmoil, and the story never got its contextual epilogue. All that
remains are six issues of overly rigid pastiche, lacking the spirit of later
Moore superhero works like Supreme and Tom Strong.

And speaking of Tom Strong, while it hardly counts
as "unfinished" (since Moore masterminded 36 issues and a wealth of spin-offs),
it may be the one property in the America's Best Comics line that never hit its
full stride. After a stellar debut issue that introduced the Doc Savage-like
superhero and his extended family of do-gooders, Tom Strong rarely recreated the same
mix of wonder, wit, and wisdom. The book quickly became another Supreme-like romp through the
Silver Age, full of incomplete thoughts and only mildly amusing structural
experiments. Increasingly, Moore gave the Tom Strong stories over to guest
writers and co-writers, and the concept lost cohesion. One recurring trait in
Moore's career has been that intense focus and follow-through results in
greatness, while dabbling produces something, well, less than legendary.

Twilight Of The Superheroes is only slightly less
frustrating than Big Numbers or 1963, if only because, instead of dead-ending, it
never got started. Intended as a Ragnarok for the DC Universe, it imagines a
future in which the House Of Steel (ruled by Superman) and the House Of Thunder
(ruled by Captain Marvel) have helped steer the Earth toward its apocalypse.
Moore broke with DC before it could be realized, but not before leaving behind
a detailed
proposal filled with twists and turns that suggest the mind-blowing
comic that might have been.