Comics Bulletin logo
Search
  • Columns
    Random
    • The Archive of The Obscure: A Business Proposal

      Eric Hoffman
      March 4, 2012
      Columns, Mission Professional
    Recent
    • The Full Run: Usagi Yojimbo – The Wanderer’s Road Part 2

      Daniel Gehen
      December 4, 2020
    • The Full Run: Usagi Yojimbo – The Wanderer’s Road Part 1

      Daniel Gehen
      October 30, 2020
    • Comictober 2020: DRACULA MOTHERF**KER

      Daniel Gehen
      October 27, 2020
    • What Looks Good
    • Comics Bulletin Soapbox
    • The Full Run
    • Leading Question
    • Top 10
    • The Long-Form
    • Jumping On
    • Comics in Color
    • Slouches Towards Comics
  • Big Two
    Random
    • The Full Run: 'Thriller' #4 by Robert Loren Fleming and Trevor Von Eeden

      Eric Hoffman
      April 18, 2013
      Columns, DC Comics, The Full Run, The Long-Form
    Recent
    • 4.5

      DCeased: Dead Planet #7 Presents a Hopeful Future (Review)

      Daniel Gehen
      January 22, 2021
    • Retro Review: Detective Comics #826 Remains a Holiday Classic

      Daniel Gehen
      December 3, 2020
    • Stan Lee

      nguyen ly
      November 7, 2020
    • DC Comics
    • Big Two Reviews
    • Marvel Comics
  • Indie
    Random
    • What Looks Good: Indies 11/11

      Eric Hoffman
      November 10, 2015
      Columns, Dark Horse, Image, Indie, What Looks Good
    Recent
    • Review: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

      Daniel Gehen
      December 14, 2020
    • The Full Run: Usagi Yojimbo – The Wanderer’s Road Part 2

      Daniel Gehen
      December 4, 2020
    • 4.5

      TMNT: The Last Ronin #1 Lives Up to the Hype (Review)

      Daniel Gehen
      October 29, 2020
    • Reviews
    • Archie Comics
    • Boom! Studios
    • Dark Horse
    • IDW
    • Image
    • Oni Press
    • Valiant
  • Reviews
    Random
    • 2.5

      Batman: Dark Detective #2

      Eric Hoffman
      May 30, 2005
      Reviews
    Recent
    • 4.5

      DCeased: Dead Planet #7 Presents a Hopeful Future (Review)

      Daniel Gehen
      January 22, 2021
    • Review: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

      Daniel Gehen
      December 14, 2020
    • Retro Review: Detective Comics #826 Remains a Holiday Classic

      Daniel Gehen
      December 3, 2020
    • Singles Going Steady
    • Slugfest
    • Manga
      • Reviews
    • Small Press
      • Reviews
      • ICYMI
      • Tiny Pages Made of Ashes
  • Interviews
    Random
    • Luna Brothers Hone Storytelling Acumen on Sword

      Eric Hoffman
      December 4, 2007
      Interviews
    Recent
    • Interview: Jon Davis-Hunt Talks SHADOWMAN

      Daniel Gehen
      June 8, 2020
    • Interview: Becky Cloonan talks DARK AGNES and Her Personal Influences

      Mike Nickells
      March 4, 2020
    • Simon Roy

      Interview: Simon Roy on His Inspirations and Collaborations on PROTECTOR

      Mike Nickells
      January 29, 2020
    • Audio Interview
    • Video Interview
  • Classic Comics
    Random
    • Classic Interview: Dick Giordano - "It was more fun to be a creator AND an editor!"

      Eric Hoffman
      July 24, 2015
      Classic Interviews, Interviews
    Recent
    • Countdown to the King: Marvel’s Godzilla

      Daniel Gehen
      May 29, 2019
    • Honoring A Legend: Fantagraphics To Resurrect Tomi Ungerer Classics

      Daniel Gehen
      February 15, 2019
    • Reliving the Craziest Decade in Comics History: An interview with Jason Sacks

      Mark Stack
      January 2, 2019
    • Classic Comics Cavalcade
    • Classic Interviews
  • News
    Random
    • Kickstarter Spotlight: Jack Katz - New Graphic Novel

      Eric Hoffman
      February 10, 2015
      Kickstarter Spotlight, News
    Recent
    • 2020 Ringo Awards Winners Announced

      Daniel Gehen
      October 26, 2020
    • BAD IDEA Announces 2021 Publishing Slate

      Daniel Gehen
      September 29, 2020
    • A Full Replay of NCSFest 2020 is now Available

      Daniel Gehen
      September 15, 2020
    • Press Release
    • Kickstarter Spotlight
  • Books
    Random
    • Review: 'Machete Squad' is a Disappointing Afghan Memoir

      Eric Hoffman
      July 31, 2018
      Books
    Recent
    • Collecting Profile: Disney Frozen

      CB Staff
      November 22, 2019
    • Collecting Profile: NFL Superpro

      CB Staff
      August 31, 2019
    • “THE BEST OF WITZEND” is a Wonderful Celebration of Artistic Freedom

      Daniel Gehen
      September 15, 2018
    • Review: ‘Machete Squad’ is a Disappointing Afghan Memoir

      Jason Sacks
      July 31, 2018
    • Review: ‘Out of Nothing’ is the Antidote to Our Sick Times

      Jason Sacks
      July 23, 2018
    • Review: ‘Bizarre Romance’ Shows Rough Edges in the Early Days of a New Marriage

      Jason Sacks
      July 10, 2018
What's New
  • Collecting Profile: If I win Powerball, I will buy Amazing Fantasy 15
  • DCeased: Dead Planet #7 Presents a Hopeful Future (Review)
  • Collecting Profile: Batwoman
  • Collecting Profile: Daredevil
  • Collecting Profile: Floronic Man
  • Review of Cheetah in Wonder Woman 1984
  • RSS Feed
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • Contact Us
  • Write for us!
  • Visit Video Game Break!
Home
Reviews

Review: ‘Alan Moore: Conversations’ is a useful compendium of all things Moore

Eric Hoffman
December 27, 2013
Reviews
Review: 'Alan Moore: Conversations' is a useful compendium of all things Moore
4.5Overall Score
Reader Rating: (0 Votes)

Full disclosure: Together with Dominick Grace, I co-edited two volumes of the Conversations with Comic Artists series, of which this book is a part, Dave Sim: Conversations and Chester Brown: Conversations. A third, Seth: Conversations, is forthcoming from UPM in 2014.

There’s an interesting comment made in an early (1981) interview with celebrated comic book auteur Alan Moore: in conversation with his V for Vendetta collaborator David Lloyd, conducted just on the cusp of his taking comicdom by storm in the mid-1980s in a quartet of venerated comic books for DC, then in a post-implosion slump, Moore remarks that “the [comics] medium is possibly one of the most exciting and underdeveloped areas in the whole cultural spectrum. There’s a lot of virgin ground yet to be broken and a hell of a lot of things that haven’t been attempted.” Certainly Alan Moore broke much ground and attempted a lot of exciting things during this brief period (1983-89, to be exact) for DC, a stunning burst of creativity resulting in a body of work currently unmatched by any other living comics writer in its originality, complexity, sophistication and cultural impact. (Those Guy Fawkes masks worn by Anonymous have as much to do with V for Vendetta as they do with Guy Fawkes). In that time, Moore wrote over forty issues of the “creature-themed” horror comic Swamp Thing (complimented by the stellar artwork of Alfredo Alcala, Stephen Bissette, John Totleben and Rick Veitch), V for Vendetta, Batman: The Killing Joke (with Brian Bolland) and Watchmen (with Dave Gibbons and John Higgins), a comic that holds the peculiar honor of being named one of Time magazine’s best 100 novels since 1923 and Comics Bulletin’s most overrated comic. Also during this time, Moore would produce a handful of fondly-remembered Superman and Green Lantern stories, and, more notably, for Warrior and later Eclipse Comics, revive Marvelman (retitled Miracleman for US audiences to avoid a lawsuit from the always litigious-prone Marvel), perhaps Moore’s most thorough examination of the superhero (they are Gods, basically). Moore initially explored this idea in seed form in his re-envisioning Swamp Thing as something called an “elemental” and the portrayal of Watchmen‘s Dr. Manhattan as a quantum anomaly.

Swamp Thing painted by Steve Bissette

Indeed, with the exception of V for Vendetta, largely a scathing critique of Thatcherite Britain, each of these works are a redefinition of the concept of the superhero, a philosophical and cultural unpacking of the metaphysical implications of the genre. Paradoxically, DC, a company that publishes superhero comics, primarily, published these works, with the exception of Marvelman. This apparent contradiction, according to Eric Berlatsky, the editor of this welcome, career-spanning collection of interviews with this “iconoclastic, rebellious and free-thinking” comics genius, is emblematic of Moore’s contradictory nature. Watchmen, for example, is, Berlatsky writes:

a superhero story about the dangers of heroism, a Cold War tale that also eerily predicts the events and aftermath of 9/11, a meditation on the philosophy of time that presents the reader with two seemingly exclusive temporalities, sequential and simultaneous . . . a series . . . originally published in the United States, takes place there, and comments on its status as a Cold War superpower, but is written and drawn by two Englishmen, created for one of the “big two” corporate comics companies, whose copyrighted characters and work-for-hire contracts often allow little room for creative freedom.

Dr Manhattan's dilemma

Moore’s dislike of work-for-hire contracts, writes Berlatsky, came relatively late in his career. A younger Moore, after spending several years writing science fiction (Future Shock, Skizz), “feminist space opera” (The Ballad of Halo Jones), and sci-fi and horror humor strips (D.R. and Quinch and The Bojeffries Saga, respectively) for a number of UK magazines, became disappointed by the lack of financial success for his creator-owned work. For example, when writing V for Vendetta for the British magazine Warrior, Moore owned the rights, yet received little in the way of remuneration; as a result, he was willing to sell the property to DC in exchange for greater economic reward. That position would change not long after Vendetta‘s publication when Moore, disgusted by DC’s questionable business practices (in particular for a proposed rating system and failure to compensate Moore and Gibbons for contractually obligated percentages on Watchmen merchandise; the company claimed they were “promotional” items), left the company, a departure that apparently paralleled his decision to stop writing superhero comics altogether. This later turned out not to be the case when, following a nearly decade-long foray into non-superhero comics, beginning with the Jack the Ripper story From Hell (with Eddie Campbell) and the pornographic Lost Girls (with Melinda Gebbie) (both serialized in Bissette’s groundbreaking anthology Taboo), and his collaborations with artist Bill Sienkiewicz (the graphic novel Brought to Light and the abandoned Big Numbers), a graphic novel with Oscar Zarate (A Small Killing) and a novel (Voice of the Fire), Moore returned to writing superhero comics in the late 90s. These works included Supreme for Image, followed by his own Wildstorm imprint, America’s Best Comics, which included the superhero-themed Tom Strong and Promethea.

During the decade of the 1990s, Moore continued to produce additional superhero work (an issue of Spawn here, a  WildC.A.T.S. mini-series there), yet none of it was really on par with the watershed comics he produced for DC and Eclipse during the previous decade. His Silver Age paeans Supreme and 1963 (collaborations with Chris Sprouse, Rick Veitch and Bissette, among others) are notable for their whimsy and knowing, tongue-in-cheek satires of the Mort Weisinger and Stan Lee eras of DC and Marvel, comics Moore cut his teeth reading, yet these are comparatively lightweight efforts. Arguably, From Hell stands as Moore’s consummate achievement from this period, a work that, with Watchmen, manages to interweave most of Moore’s various interests: in particular, the simultaneity of time, and the power of the human imagination.  Moreover, their villains, in From Hell the Royal Family’s physician, in Watchmen the world’s smartest man, are self-deceiving and delusional megalomaniacs who believe they are capable of saving humankind, yet in attempting to do so only lay waste innocent lives and transform the world for the worse. In that sense, they are the harbingers of our own accursed age of tyrants, warlords, jihadists and martyrs.

From Hell

The interviews collected here display Moore’s wide-ranging and seemingly incongruent interests: from comic books to quantum physics, from psychogeography to “Idea Space,” from music to magic (Moore now claims to be a practicing magician who worships the snake god Glycon, who was in fact a Roman hand puppet). Yet, as Berlatsky notes, these various interests are on display even in Moore’s earliest work, with themes of magic explored in the pages of Swamp Thing, with its preference for DC’s stable of occult characters, including the Spectre, Doctor Fate, the Phantom Stranger and the Demon. Moreover, Masonic occultism figures prominently in From Hell and, perhaps most significantly, the melding of all these various themes – superhero, occult, quantum physics – is explored in considerable length in Promethea, an extended foray into the meaning of time and existence, to the extent that its final volume might be more accurately entitled Moore’s Metaphysics. Recent years have seem Moore concentrate on his spoken word efforts, which deal with similar ideas concerning history, magic, geography and science, and in his more “literary” pursuits, such as his ongoing (since 1999) collaboration with Kevin O’Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Conclusion of Promethea

The ten interviews included in this book span the years 1981 to 2009. The first, conducted by V for Vendetta artist David Lloyd, finds Moore near the start of his career and is, according to Berlatsky, Moore’s first published interview. The 1983 interview with Garry Leach provides some interesting background to the genesis of their work for Warrior and a critique of Marvel Comics, particularly X-Men impresario Chris Claremont, whom Moore would soon supplant as the medium’s most celebrated writer. A 1984 interview finds Moore at the start of his tenure on Swamp Thing, and provides an interesting and insightful career interview up to that point. The 1988 interview, originally published in David Kraft’s Comics Interview, focuses on Watchmen and is among the most penetrating and in-depth interviews here. An example: “I suppose the central question of Watchmen is the question Dr. Manhattan asks of himself on Mars, which is, ‘Who makes the world?’ What I was trying to say in Watchmen is that we all make the world. It isn’t the heroes and villains, the Dr. Manhattans and the Richard Nixons exclusively. It can just as easily be a pudgy, acne-ridden, mentally subnormal kid working for a right-wing newspaper.” (My guess is that Zack Snyder failed to read this particular interview.)

That great conclusion to Watchmen

A 1998 interview, more conversational in tone as it is reproduced from the “unedited transcript,” delves into Moore’s view on film adaptations, and his views have grown considerably less patient since this interview was conducted (one assumes the result of having actually seen the results). Film adaptations of Moore’s work range from the merely adequate (V for Vendetta), to the laughable (Watchmen, From Hell), to the atrocious (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). (Moore surely has the dubious honor of having so many stellar works transformed into cinematic train wrecks. Hollywood’s Moore is, to this author, quite literally zero for four.) This interview is exceptional also for the range of its subject matter; Moore touches on everything from Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenic field theory and its relationship to Moore’s Idea Space, the Qabbalah, secret societies, psychogeography, anarchy, occultism, madness and magic.

A 2001 feature from The Onion A.V. Club is a relatively brief interview focusing on From Hell, taking place around the time of the release of the film adaptation. (The interview holds the peculiar distinction of being more interesting than the feature film.) A 2002 interview focuses on Moore’s work for America’s Best Comics. Jess Nevins’ 2004 interview, originally published in Nevins’ book of annotations for Moore League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, naturally focuses on that work, while the 2006 interview discusses Moore and Gebbie’s pornographic Lost Girls, specifically Moore’s view of pornography as, like comics, a legitimate literary genre long viewed as lacking cultural legitimacy as a result of its association with exploitative subgenres. The volume concludes with an appropriately career-spanning 2009 interview, focusing mostly on LOEG but also touching on other projects, such as Moore’s long-delayed novel Jerusalem, which promises to explore in even greater detail themes familiar to most of Moore’s work.

Alan Moore's Lost Girls

Altogether, Alan Moore: Conversations is a useful compendium of all things Moore, a handy resource for a more thorough understanding of Moore’s idiosyncratic and expansive interests, recommended for both the hard-core Moore fans and initiates alike.

 

Eric Hoffman

Share On:
Tweet
Review: ‘A1 Annual #1’ is the Perfect Christmas Gift that You Didn’t Know You Wanted
Tiny Pages Made of Ashes 12/27/13: His Back Pages

About The Author

Eric Hoffman
Publisher Emeritus

Jason Sacks has been obsessed with pop culture for longer than he'd like to remember. Jason has been writing for Comics Bulletin for nearly a decade, producing over a million words of content about comics, films and other media. He has also been published in a number of publications, including the late, lamented Amazing Heroes, The Flash Companion and The American Comic Book Chronicles: the 1970s and 1980s. Find him on Facebook and Twitter. Jason is the Owner and Publisher of Comics Bulletin.

Related Posts

  • Classic Comics Cavalcade: The Complete Peanuts 1983-1984

    Eric Hoffman
    December 26, 2014
  • Harvey Pekar and American Splendor: A Comics Bulletin discussion, Part Two

    Eric Hoffman, Jason Sacks
    June 27, 2014

Latest Reviews

  • 4.5

    DCeased: Dead Planet #7 Presents a Hopeful Future (Review)

    Daniel Gehen
    January 22, 2021
  • Review: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

    Daniel Gehen
    December 14, 2020
  • Retro Review: Detective Comics #826 Remains a Holiday Classic

    Daniel Gehen
    December 3, 2020
  • 4.5

    TMNT: The Last Ronin #1 Lives Up to the Hype (Review)

    Daniel Gehen
    October 29, 2020
  • 4.5

    Micro Review: Commanders in Crisis #1

    Jason Jeffords Jr.
    October 12, 2020
  • 3.0

    Review: GHOST WRITER Fights the Spectre of Unevenness

    Daniel Gehen
    September 3, 2020
  • 3.5

    Review: Strange Skies Over East Berlin

    Yavi Mohan
    August 11, 2020
  • DRAWING BLOOD: A Hyper-Stylized, Fictional Autobiography

    Ben Bishop, Brittany Peer, David Avallone, Drawing Blood, Kevin Eastman, Tomi Varga
    August 9, 2020
  • 3.0

    Alien: The Original Script #1 – This One’s For The Fans

    Jason Jeffords Jr.
    August 7, 2020
  • Singles Going Steady: Why? Lettering!

    Daniel Gehen
    July 28, 2020
RSSTwitterFacebookgoogleplusinstagramtumblr

Comics Bulletin is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for website owners to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com, audible.com, and any other website that may be affiliated with Amazon Service LLC Associates Program. As an Amazon Associate, Comics Bulletin earns from qualifying purchases.

All content on this site (c) 2018 The Respective Copyright Holders