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Alan Moore is a very big fish in a little pond. He’s a legend in the sphere of graphic novels, who defined and redefined comic stories through his work on Superman, Swamp Thing, and Watchmen. He pushed past what people expected of comic books, and the authority of the Comics Code to inject more literary thought into his work. Moore is a fiercely independent writer intent on crafting meaning where none exists, who moved through an industry satisfied with the illusion of change with characters no one can really claim. For a man who’s defined, and redefined the kind of stories comics tell, he has startlingly little patience for the industry around him and has tried to leave it multiple times. Today, on his 71st birthday, let’s take a look at why that is.
Alan Moore's History
Born November 18th, 1953, Alan Moore was not a writer. Though he’d been interested in it, he couldn’t gather the nerve to try writing professionally when he was younger. He described his first jobs after school as looking “great on the dust jacked of your first novel, but were shit to actually live through!” He rose up the ranks to become a toilet cleaner, and then worked several tedious office jobs. It was the approaching arrival of his first child that prompted him to finally try writing because if “[he’d] waited until after the baby was born [he’d] never have had the nerve.”
Moore’s first foray into comics came from working as a cartoonist and penning Maxwell the Magic Cat for this local newspaper. But had his first breakout success in 1982 at a monthly magazine called Warrior. In its first issue he wrote the first issues of Marvelman, later renamed Miracleman for legal reasons, and V for Vendetta. The two not only garnered immense critical acclaim for their stories, but also show two sides of the same idea. In Marvelman, a white man with godlike abilities tries to better humanity on his own, essentially imposing his will on the world. In V for Vendetta, the lone anarchist in a Guy Fawkes costume is the only opposition to a fascist government in Britain that holds absolute power and has wiped out all ethnic and sexual minorities. The duality of these premises, combined with their ideas of misinformation and explorations of what it means to be a hero, have left many regarding them as some of Moore’s best works. It was around this time in the mid-1980s that Moore first became aware of the startling lack of creator’s rights in the comic industry, which require writers to completely relinquish their claim to any characters or stories they write.
Despite his misgivings with the comic industry, Moore was eventually hired by DC to write the Saga of the Swamp Thing in 1983. He revamped it from a formulaic monster comic into a more nuanced exploration of environmentalism, social issues, and a resurrection of DC’s long forgotten supernatural characters. His success on Swamp Thing led to more work with DC. This included Watchmen in 1986, which many consider to be Moore’s magnum opus, but also an equally acclaimed Superman story, Whatever happened to the Man of Tomorrow? The imaginary story depicts the last days of the original Superman. As his villains plot a sinister scheme to kill him, Superman is stretched to his limit, his identity is revealed, and he makes the ultimate sacrifice to save the day. The story is widely considered to be one of the best Superman stories ever told, and exactly how you end a long running series full of characters, plot threads, and more ideas than you can shake a stick at. It’s a triumph of storytelling in serial comics.
Moore’s time at DC did not last. He was tricked into signing away his rights to V For Vendetta and Watchmen to DC in near perpetuity, as the rights will only revert to him when the books leave print, which they haven’t since they were first published nearly 40 years ago. That, along with DC’s propensity for milking as much money as they could while legally giving Moore and his collaborators as little as possible, was the last straw. He struck out for independence in the comic industry, along with others frustrated with DC’s restrictions on more adult material.
But DC would continue to hunt after Alan Moore. A few years after he pursued self publishing Moore found a new home in Wildstorm Comics. As he began making commitments to stories, DC purchased Wildstorm, and Moore’s contract with it. Moore was understandably frustrated, but had already signed a contract, and didn’t want to break his promises with his collaborators. He was assured DC wouldn’t meddle in his work, and even after they did, he stuck with Wildstorm for 6 years.
The film adaptation of his original comic, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, was an embarrassment to him. When the 2006 V for Vendetta movie was made, Moore asked for his name to be stricken from it. Not only was this not done, but the movie’s producer claimed Moore had been involved in production, which made Moore look like a liar. When Moore asked DC hire ups to have the statement retracted, or for the producer to issue an apology, they assured him they were working hard on it, only for Moore to learn they’d actually done nothing. This, along with DC’s refusal to even honor his request to not be sent a movie promotion edition of V for Vendetta, was again last straw, and Moore again left DC.
After cutting ties, Moore continued League of Extraordinary Gentlemen at Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout Comics, where he could be sure of his creative ownership and independence. While working on that series, he also appeared at live music events collaborating with musicians, wrote a book length essay on the history of pornography, and made appearances in the Simpsons and tried starting his own magazine called Dodgem Logic. After the release of the final volume of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in 2019, Moore retired from writing comics. “I haven't written one for getting on for five years. I will always love and adore the comics medium but the comics industry and all of the stuff attached to it just became unbearable.”
Alan Moore's Writing style
Moore’s hallmark in comic writing is to wipe the slate clean, ignore what came before, and tell his own story without being bogged down by continuity. This was done most notably with The Saga of the Swamp Thing in the 80s, as Moore ignored the work of the previous writer, and the idea that Swamp Thing had once been human. He transformed the horror adjacent comic into one about identity, and arguably still horror, as the Swamp Thing learns he’s not a human turned into a plant, but a plant that thought it was human. Moore’s run on Swamp Thing is also notable for being the first comic to completely abandon the Comic’s Code Authority, setting a trend that would push the comics industry past the outlandish days of the Silver Age of Comics and into more serious storytelling.
Serious literary story telling with an eye for themes and messages are another of Moore’s trademarks. Its one of the reasons he detests his work on the 1986 comic, The Killing Joke. Even beyond his decision to cripple Barbara Gordon for the benefit of Batman’s story, a decision DC editor Len Weid reportedly okayed by saying “cripple the bitch,” intead of reining in, Moore just doesn’t think its an interesting story. The only thing it explores are the similarities between Batman and the Joker, two pieces of intellectual property with no bearing on reality. Thus, the story has nothing to say about reality.
Moore’s habit of starting fresh even extends to some of his more original work like Watchmen, Alan Moore’s masterpiece. The story was originally meant to be told using the characters of Charlston Comics, who had recently been acquired by DC. But rather than wiping their continuity clean, he wiped the world clean and created distinct stand ins for the Charlston Comics superheroes that he could do with as he pleased. Rorschach, a conspiracy theorist detective in a trench coat without powers or a face, is The Question ratcheted up to 11. Dr. Manhatton, a man who becomes living atomic power, is Captain Atom, a man of living atomic power. The list goes on and is indicative of Moore’s personal style, which would continue into his later series League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which is based on public domain characters and pastiches of popular literary characters.
Like the best comic writers, Moore also knows how to use the medium of the comic itself to tell his story. For other writers this means using panel size to tell you how important the panel is or having a character’s attack break a panel’s border to emphasize their strength. In Watchmen, the opposite approach is taken. Much of its story happens in a flat 9 panel grid that dispassionately shows our characters’ actions. Their attacks are never emphasized because fights aren’t sexy. They’re brutal, and the comic won’t glorify that violence. None of our characters’ actions are important enough to be given a bigger panel. While there are exceptions to this 9 panel system, like combining the top three panels to give a wider shot, it never breaks the intent of the system. The exceptions exist more for the practicality of storytelling and the realities of drawing comics in the 1980s, than for any thematic reason, and don’t intrude on the rest of the dispassionate grid as a result. It’s so deliberate that Moore must have worked closely with artist Dave Gibbons for the comic to achieve this effect.
The stark contrast with conventional paneling in comics puts Watchmen’s heroes in stark contrast with conventional heroes. Crisis on Infinite Earth, for example, layers numerous panels of the Flash’s death over the antagonist’s rampage, showing us his quick decline while giving more attention to his heroic sacrifice and final words than the antagonist’s actions behind him. He’s a hero, and his death deserves the presentation of one. In comparison, Moore depicts Rorschach’s death in Watchmen as just a death. It’s quick. One panel there’s a red light, the next panel he’s a red smear. The next, he’s forgotten. He’s a hero only in the sense he put on a costume and usually targeted bad people. In every other way he’s a conspiracy theorist and a murderer who failed at every turn to be a hero and carries none of the heroic values the Flash did. He isn’t someone to emulate, so the comic deliberately refrains from glorifying his actions and death.
Moore’s deliberate use of dispassionate comic paneling to show us that Watchmen’s characters aren’t heroes puts the comic at odds with Zack Snyder’s film adaptation of Watchmen. Although the film nearly recreates the comic shot for shot, it misses this subtext. The film loves its fight scenes. It uses slow motion to make the heroes look sexy as they beat the snot out of people. And Rorschach’s quick, meaningless death is transformed into a drawn out act of martyrdom when his body explodes into a perfect Rorschach blot in the snow that fills the entire screen, giving him the importance Moore refused to and implying he stood for more than himself. If nothing else, Snyder’s adaptation makes Moore’s style and themes more apparent through comparison, revealing how the story’s medium and presentation affect its message.
Alan Moore's Advice: Read Terrible Books
We’ve all heard that to write well you should read well. When learning to write we turn to the carefully curated classics and look with awe at our favorite contemporary authors. We strive to be like them, so we read them to learn how they wrote. But Alan Moore has an addendum to add. “I would urge you to not only read good books – read terrible books as well.”
This might sound insane, but Moore has a methodology to his madness. When you read the classics, or your favorite author, you’re looking at the peak of the mountain, staring directly up and telling yourself you need to match that. And that doesn’t make sense. When you start mountain climbing, you don’t begin with Everest. You look around and find a mountain that’s more like a steep hill. And once you climb that, you realize you can do so much more. Terrible books are an author’s steep hill. It sounds horrible, but sometimes a book is just bad. Realizing they got published, and you can do better, is liberating. It gives you somewhere to start, something to beat, and a realistic goal to achieve. You can read something, analyze why it was bad, and learn from its mistakes. Figure out why something ruined the story for you and learn to avoid doing that. By doing that, you’re less likely to copy someone else, and will develop your own writing style. “That will probably be a lot more helpful to your career as a writer.”
Stepping into Fiction Once Moore
Alan Moore can’t help himself. He may hold no love for the comics industry, but he loves writing, and stories don’t have to be comics. In 2021 he announced he’d signed a deal with Bloomsbury to publish his collection of short stories, Illuminations, and a five volume fantasy series called Long London. Despite coming out of retirement, this is in some ways a new Alan Moore who’s finally found the home he was looking for. You might say he’s wiped the slate clean and started fresh.
Discussion Questions:
1. One of Alan Moore’s most prominent frustrations with the comics industry is how they require creatives to relinquish their rights to the work they create. What can you do to hold onto your rights to your work?
2. The dispassionate paneling of Watchmen is an example of using your medium to convey your themes. How could you use the ordinary aspects of a novel, like the table of contents or the page numbering, in unconventional ways to enhance your story?
3. Alan Moore’s retirement from comics didn’t signal a retirement from creative works. What are the challenges of moving to a new creative medium?
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