Alexander Sorondo is an American original, and we are thrilled to have him back in The Metropolitan Review. Sorondo’s singular and boundless excavations of the literary titans of our age have entranced many thousands of readers, and today he returns with a new subject: Alan Moore, creator of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and so many others. Through exhaustive reporting and research — and with great literary flair — Sorondo transports us to Moore’s realm, where magic reigns and art is as large — or much larger — than life. If you’ve enjoyed reading Sorondo in TMR and want to support our work, please pledge an annual subscription today. You will receive our inaugural print issue. And, yes, Sorondo will be there.
—The Editors
Alan Moore is 72 years old now. Since the 1980s, he’s been celebrated as the greatest writer in comics history. But he’s done with all that. Full-time novelist now. Finally. Spends his days at home just writing, reading, and smoking “frightening,” “staggering,” “saturating” amounts of weed.
“I use it to work,” as he told Alex Musson. “Always have done.”
Except these days he does it without the weekly deadlines, the phone always ringing, questions and chitchat with illustrators, coauthors, publishers, press — none of it.
Life of a novelist now. Solitude.
And he’s embarked on something new: a five-novel series called The Long London. It might not seem like a huge venture, given that Book One, The Great When (2024), reads as a fairly straightforward fantasy story, just about 300 pages, self-contained, quick-moving, irreverent.
But it marks a big change for Moore.
There’s no illustrator for this series. No coauthor. No photos to pair with the text. It’s got none of the postmodern hijinks that defined his debut, Voice of the Fire (1996), nor the cosmic 1,200-page sprawl of his follow-up, Jerusalem (2016). Those freshman and sophomore books, in their complexity, were insulated from the general readership. In order to judge them, you first needed the patience and brainpower to read them. You needed, in other words, to be a fan already.
It’s a book-length work of ambitious, conventional, commercial prose. Nothing to show except Alan Moore’s words.
For the first time in his 45-year career, Alan Moore is alone on the page.
Not a stranger, though. Friendly on the street. Keeps a low profile despite being, as his friend John Higgs puts it, “the most recognizable author in the UK.” Six-foot-four, with a beard at mid-chest, ponytail down at mid-back swishing left and white as he roams Northampton with his walking stick. Knobby wooden thing with a snakehead handle. Too short to lean on but nice for general clutching, pointing. Clutter of rings on each finger. Fewer than he wore in the ’90s. Not much silver.
Small-town boy. Been here all his life. Says the locals don’t treat him like a celebrity. “I’m just that bloke with long hair.” If someone puts you on a pedestal, Moore likes to say, you’ve not got much room to move.
If he’s out and about, for lunch or an errand, he’ll get approached maybe twice a day for a selfie, an autograph, a kind word.
“I prefer ground level.”
To say that Alan Moore got his education in Northampton is to say that this is where he read comics, went to grammar school, discovered William S. Burroughs, and then got expelled for selling acid. Also ingesting quite a lot of it. Maybe twice a week for a couple years.
“And this was when acid was acid, let me tell you.”
When he really got settled, out on his own, was about 35 years ago. His wife, Phyllis, with whom he had two daughters, and their live-in girlfriend, Deborah Delano, ran off together. Took the girls. Started over in Liverpool.
It was 1989. Moore and Dave Gibbons had just finished Watchmen (1987); Moore, having accused their publisher, DC Comics, of stealing the book’s ownership, had just quit the company where, in a span of five years, he’d written iconic stories for Batman, Superman, Swamp Thing, and other characters. He’d been married since he was 20 and now, at 35, divorced. Unemployed. Alone for the first time.
It was time for something new.
So he bought this house a few blocks over. Same layout, today, as it had then. Office upstairs. This cozy front room where he entertains. There’s a TV in the corner and books all around. He’s got occult stuff on the walls. Just this little area with a dining room behind the chair. Small kitchen over to the side of it.
Alex Musson remembers going there for the first of several interviews with Moore (though stressing, as he tells the story, that it’s been 15 years, the memory’s patchy, take it with a grain of salt). This was 2005. Musson had first seen Moore at a live event, slipped him a black-and-white Xerox of his indie magazine Mustard, inscribed with all sorts of earnestness, and then freaked, weeks later, when he got a call from Alan Moore himself saying yeah, he’d give an interview.
But it’s gotta be at Northampton.
And so he schleps over to the terraced house and Alan greets him at the door. Says he’s happy to sit for the interview but warns Musson, in advance, that he’s got an appointment in an hour. They might have to call it short. Musson says sure, no problem. They go inside, settle into the living room, Moore collapses into a big seat and they gab. On and on. Musson following Moore into the kitchen repeatedly, tape recorder in hand, while they refill on tea: “[Moore] cuts an imposing Rasputin-like figure, impressive of hair and beard, with snake walking cane and skull-ringed fingers. But his manner is extremely warm and his Northampton accent belies a massive intellect. And boy, can he talk . . . .” It’s going well, everyone’s having a nice time, but eventually the hour nears its end. Musson makes note of the time. Courteous. Probably half-rising as he says it, ready to collect his things.
But Moore — legs crossing and arms folding, twisting about and parting his brown hair aside in his nervy bridal way, back-and-forthing with cigarettes and tea — he tells Musson, Actually, like it’s just dawning on him, I don’t have to go to that appointment anymore.
Musson recounts it with a laugh: “I suspect he was seeing if we were weirdos.”
Eventually Musson goes to the bathroom. He can’t recall exactly how he got to wandering, but he happens upon a peek, up the stairs, at this little room. The door’s open and he sees it’s packed with comics. Boxes-ful. He says to Alan, You’re still reading these? Surprised to see recent runs on mainstream titles; flop-n-gloss reminders of the worst period in his life: the Watchmen debacle. Then divorce. The very public condemning of superhero comics and then, after losing all the Watchmen money with an indie publishing venture, his humbled return to the same reviled genre.
Moore looked at all these boxes of comics and shook his head. Told Musson that no, he doesn’t read this stuff.
They’ve got me on a list somewhere, he said. A bit weary, maybe. I just get sent everything.
The bathroom’s fairly new, though! Got that fitted in ’94. “Our Lady of the S-Bend.” Blacklight overhead. Friends used to visit in the ’90s, eat some psilocybin mushrooms, then come in here and shut the door and watch themselves transform in the mirror. Got a sunken bathtub, too. Vital part of the day. He explained its role in a Christmas Q&A with “The Really Very Serious Alan Moore Scholars’ Group” on Facebook: first thing after feeding the birds he’ll “run a bath with some luridly-colored Lush bath bomb foaming away in it, roll myself a jazz cigarette while [the water’s] running, go up and get into the bath, while it’s still uncomfortably hot . . . .” He washes his hair with a sea-salt shampoo, “giving me my traffic-stopping shine and volume,” before conditioning with a pale Lush-labeled thing called “Happy Happy Joy Joy.”
The bathroom is a loud and pristine blue-gold space that a visiting Guardian reporter described as “palatial,” before saying the rest of the house looks like “an occult bookshop under perpetual renovation,” cluttered as it’s been with a constant pileage of books and films and TV box sets like The Wire, an all-time favorite whose episodes he once described beat-by-beat to visitors, and FX’s What We Do in the Shadows, of which Moore says he recently watched three whole seasons in the wrong order.
Then pauses, thinks about it:
“Yep,” like he’s talking about a good kid gone wayward, “completely the wrong order.”
After his bath, he’s walking through the “bookshop.” Shelves creak. Occult art on the wall tilts and blinks as he passes.
Kitchen. Hit the light. Then the kettle. Time for tea.
First cup of the hundred.
“I’ve got me cup of tea made,” he tells Pádraig Ó Méalóid before an interview, settling in, “and I’m ready for ya.”
He’s picky about biscuits. Amenable to the Nice brand, “which I find admirable in its unassuming stoicism.” Doesn’t care for glam in a biscuit. Party Rings, for instance — shortbread cookies with multicolored neon glaze, squiggles of icing on top — “the upper-class call girl of the biscuit world.”
Opinions about everything, really, but you oughta be careful what you ask, because one thing that’s happened with age is he’s lost his grip on “linear time,” as he puts it. He’ll tell a story, some random thing from 30 or 40 years ago, and the telling, itself, is like brain surgery with chopsticks: effortless, fluent, eloquent, detailed, well-paced. It’s got an arc. Inflections are measured. He remembers every detail. Every bliss and triumph. Every resentment.
Just don’t ask Moore what decade it was. And be ready to step in, too. Folks’ll show up for an interview, ask a question, and if nobody stops him, he’ll just — it’s like a frog across lily pads — start with a word about the weather and then boom. We’re talking about Einstein. Fourth dimension. Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence, which Moore quite likes, though of course, if we’re just playing this out over and over, it means he shall have to endure Margaret Thatcher again. Incidentally, since you’ve brought her up, go watch the original Toho Godzilla movies in chronological order, he says, and you’ll see a subtextual narrative arc about Japan’s nuclear trauma, the way that they go from being terrorized by this giant radioactive lizard (a metaphor for the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima) toward a point, some dozen years later, where they’ve successfully harnessed its energy, via nuclear plants, and that’s when Godzilla becomes a good guy. Hey actually: he wrote a song about Godzilla being depressed. “Trampling Tokyo.” Says that, after a few installments, he could see the lizard’s “heart wasn’t in it anymore.” Good movies, though. Y’know he probably never told you about the time he got approached by Malcolm McLaren, did he? Sex Pistols manager. Yeah: Malcolm McLaren gets in touch with him, mid-1980s, says he’s got a financier, he’s ready to make a film, he just needs a script. What he’s got in mind, he says, is a modern retelling of Beauty and the Beast, except it’s set in the fashion world, and here’s what we call it: Fashion Beast. Based partly on the life of Christian Dior. Alan says, Yeah, I can write that. Especially once he’d got some books together about Dior’s actual life and thought, This is quite gothic, isn’t it? And so he starts working on the screenplay (“which [McLaren] was very approving of”) and then one day McLaren calls and says, “Can you make it a bit more like Chinatown?”
Alan says, “Um . . . yeah.”
McLaren said, “And Flashdance?”
Alan says yeah: “So it’s a kind of Christian Dior-Chinatown-Flashdance-Beauty and the Beast sorta thing?”
Science, philosophy, Godzilla, film. Eventually Moore will pause to re-light his joint. By and by he’ll ask his interviewer what time it is, and the answer lands with audible horror.
“I can’t possibly comment on the amount of hash consumption,” he tells Interview magazine. “I’ve probably got some amendment rights. Is that the Fourth?”
Protection from unlawful search and seizure.
“I’m pleading the Fourth! Whatever the Fourth is, that’s what I’m pleading.”
First time it occurred to Alan Moore that there’s a fourth dimension, and that everything that’s ever happened is still happening, simultaneously, in like some long fourth-dimensional column of time that skewers everything, he was seven years old, as he explains to Interview magazine in 2016, maybe eight.
He was looking at these old photos on the living room wall. Relatives he’d never met. The Moores of yore. Turn of the century. “Daguerreotype, I suppose.” Everybody waistcoated, wide-eyed, frowny and pensive. “I’d look at these men staring into the camera with their muttonchop whiskers and I’d wonder if they knew that they were dead.”
Then came epiphany with her hammer: First he realized that these old men, so robust in the photos, probably didn’t know that they were dead; then he realized that “somewhere in the future there was somebody looking at a photograph of me and wondering the same thing.”
The fourth-dimension concept informs the action of his latest novel, The Great When, which is a semi-fantastical historical crime novel. There’s some romance in it, some humor . . .
It’s hard to know where to shelve it. Quite in keeping with how he once described Jerusalem to Musson, back in ’05: “My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel, y’know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky.” Bloomsbury acquired the novel back in 2021. Six-book/six-figure deal. A story collection, Illuminations, got tacked onto the front as a sweetener. The series has just been optioned to Playground Entertainment for TV development, the result of a “competitive bid” that yielded probably another six figures. It is the most conventional, most streamlined, most commercial novel Alan Moore has ever published. According to BookScan, The Great When has sold, in one year, slightly more than Jerusalem has sold in a decade.
Making it also the most successful.
And the most vulnerable.
It’s a scary leap, but the money helps. One of the pillars of Moore’s public image is that he isn’t “buyable,” that he often turns down handsome paydays on principle, usually from Hollywood. The highest sum I’ve seen confirmed was high five figures, but as Moore’s biographer, Lance Parkin, points out over the phone, you can’t measure the money Moore has refused by simply looking at what’s offered and explicitly declined; what’s harder to measure, says Parkin, are the sums he could command for a lazy effort if he wanted. The sequels he could churn out for a cash grab. The publishers who’d pay him thousands of dollars for nothing more than the freedom to print his name on their book covers.
“I don’t think [money] motivates him,” said Parkin, “and . . . it’s one of the things that really confused DC [Comics], because Alan Moore could very easily phone DC and say he’s going to write Killing Joke 2,” a long-belated sequel to his and Brian Bolland’s polarizing Batman story, “and they’d give him a million dollars.”
“Not having that money,” Moore told The Mask and the Mirror in 2020, “yeah, sometimes it would’ve been easier [to’ve had it].” And then, after a deep breath, a weighty think, “Or perhaps not. I’ve got by. The people that I love have got by with me. That was all I wanted.”
But another pillar of Moore’s public image is that he’s not very good at business.
In 2009, when Watchmen was finally being adapted into a movie, the trade paperback sold about a million copies. Back then it cost $20. The publisher (DC Comics, in this case) usually collects about half of that retail price; with co-creators Gibbons and Moore still sharing an 8% royalty on paperback sales, some Sharpie-on-forearm math suggests a mid-six-figure payday for each.
Moore used the money to launch an art magazine, Dodgem Logic. It lasted eight issues — two more than expected! The magazine sported no advertisements except free ones for artists he admired. He sustained the whole thing out-of-pocket and, as he told The Believer in 2013, “I was losing a huge amount of money.” It folded after one year — just in time for a devastating tax bill to collect from that Watchmen money, of which he’d not put much aside. He spent the next couple years writing a slew of horror comics to pay it off.
Once the air was clear, and the taxman paid, Moore remained proud of Dodgem Logic. Said it failed for all the right reasons.
“Once things are back on track a bit more,” he said, “we are still hoping to reintroduce it as a print magazine.”
The odds of Moore reviving Dodgem Logic seem remote now, as he’s lounging at home in the plush blue armchair, with the Zodiac symbols all over it. His wife and collaborator, Melinda Gebbie, somewhere about. Gebbie’s from California. She came to the U.K. in ’85, where she was (and would remain) one of the few women working in comics. She and Alan started in the early ’90s as they collaborated on a pornographic epic, Lost Girls, that took 16 years to complete. “I’d recommend to anybody working on their relationship,” Moore told the A.V. Club in 2006, “that they should try embarking on a sixteen-year elaborate pornography together. I think they’ll find it works wonders.” At that point, she’d been living with Moore for just over a year. Her art supplies scattered among the magical artifacts, the books on every surface. Alan’s got a shelf with some tall awkward texts from 1776. He likes to point at them, Hey, over his tea, those’re older than your country.
The wood paneled walls they share have been soaked and stained by four decades of smoke — but hey, So’s Alan. He’s got that Vonnegut laugh, like a bowling ball flying through trees. Anyone who tells you marijuana’s not addictive, Moore likes to say, simply isn’t trying. One friend, commenting on how he’s smoked enough weed to floor a football team, is equally quick to shrug it off. Says the laws of biology would not be the first ones Alan Moore has skirted. Indeed, says the friend, they never seemed to apply. Still. Not without some worry, they add that Moore is “not one to visit the doctor” and that “the lungs cannot be a pretty picture.”
He’ll be fine. Thirty years as a practicing magician, the weed’s almost a totem. As John Higgs puts it: “Gandalf has a staff, Harry Potter has a wand, Alan’s got a spliff about this big.”
Moore’s been a practicing magician since his 40th birthday, November ’93. One year later, in an interview conducted at a pub for the magazine Rapid Eye (this, incidentally, is where his streak of interviews begins to slow, as his life becomes busier, more centered), Moore mentions that he was recently performing a magical ceremony that, if you must know, involved some drugs, fine, and in the course of it, he found himself possessed by this empowering energy of love, wisdom, light; said he really did think for a minute that he was Jesus. Some kinda messiah. Then good sense kicked in. “Focus, you cunt!” Snapping himself to order: “You’re not Jesus — this energy is Jesus.”
The Christos, more specifically; it’s the energy, says Moore, that pushes you toward the service of your highest spiritual self. After a long spell of setbacks, failures, and let-downs from people he’d been working with, in 1987-93, a higher self seems to’ve been just what he was looking for. Artistic “sovereignty.” Said he knew it’d make him sound like a “twat” to go around saying he’s a magician, but that maybe that’s part of the process. A small death to the ego.
He relates this journey to the first card in the tarot, the Fool, which depicts a man stepping off a ledge with an expression of blissful ignorance about the pending plunge.
The Fool, says Moore, is the card that marks the beginning of one’s “mental odyssey.”
Poetically enough, it’s the card that marks the end as well.
But he still reads New Scientist! Talks about quantum mechanics like weather. Einstein’s a hero. Sometimes his fans or interviewers will spell magic with a “k” at the end, being deferential, but Moore doesn’t always do that himself; the way he explains it to Eddie Campbell, in Egomania magazine #2, it was the 19th-century occultist Aleister Crowley who started tacking on the “k,” because he wanted to distinguish his own brand of magic from “all the doves and colored scarves” that you’d see from stage magicians, the sort who perform at kids’ birthdays, “as if all the semen-drinking, goat-fucking, and mescaline didn’t make [Aleister’s practice] reasonably distinct already.”
Moore’s written a whole book about it. The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. Coauthored by his oldest and closest friend, his mentor, Steve Moore (no relation). The guy who, as he explained to Bill Baker in 2002, “taught me everything I know” about writing comics:
I’ve known Steve Moore since I was fourteen . . . . I wrote I think it was a Judge Dredd script . . . . Steve went through it brutally with a red pen . . . . He was saying things like, “This panel description is unclear . . . . This balloon is too long . . . . Why is this caption necessary when, if the artist is doing his job properly, the reader should be able to see everything that is happening . . . .”
Friends for 40 years, they worked on the Bumper Book for nearly 20 — in which they argue, among other things, that a vital component to one’s magical practice is keeping a dream journal, and it’s easy to imagine. Steve might’ve been the brains behind this one. He jotted his dreams each morning, first thing, and reaped the benefits of self-knowledge, a pulse-check on his imagination, the occasional premonition.
Alan’s never managed. As he said in a podcast conversation with the Bureau of Culture, “I tend to forget an awful lot of my dreams because . . . .” A quick pause, like he’s sifting for the sophisticated explanation he was just holding, then skips it. “Because I’m saturated in hashish, basically, and you don’t tend to remember your dreams.”
Sometimes when Alan went by Steve’s house up on Shooter’s Hill (same house he was born and raised in), Steve would offer him a look at the dream book. Soon as he wrote them down, Steve would forget them, and it was Alan who’d read each entry and match them to some corresponding event in the area that Steve had unwittingly forecasted: a flooded neighborhood, a new comic on the stands — purely quotidian stuff, made exceptional by the fact that he’d seen it coming.
Alan used to say of Steve Moore that chiseled at the bottom of his tombstone would be the words “No Relation.”
Only kidding, of course.
There’d be no tombstone at all.
In another interview with Pádraig Ó Méalóid, this time for Comics Beat in 2015, Alan recounts the ceremony he and a few others held for Steve “on the burial mound in Shrewsbury Lane,” spreading his ashes under a supermoon.
“I suppose that after Steve’s death I kind of hurled myself into a great deal of creative work — it’s just my way of dealing with things, you know? Or perhaps my way of not dealing with things.”
The last time they saw each other, in 2014, Alan was visiting Steve to outline the Bumper Book’s final chapter. He went home, started writing it, and a couple days later called Steve to touch base.
No answer.
After a while he asked one of his daughters to go up to Steve’s house on Shooter’s Hill and check that he’s alright. So, she went. Knocked on the door, called out to him, peeked around at the windows — nothing. From the lawn, however, she could see a second-floor window was open. Steve’s office. A blue light coming out of it.
She rang Alan. Explained the scene. Alan said, Right, better get the cops. And so the cops come around, knock knock, survey the house — they look up and spot the window. Borrow a ladder. Raise it against that open window on the second story, climb up.
He’d been dead about two days. Once authorities had rolled through, and the scene was taken care of, Alan went by and, hoping for a better sense of what happened, went around talking with neighbors about when they’d last seen him. He looked over Steve’s effects.
Amid the drafts of the novel Steve had just finished, his correspondence, and personal diary was the dream journal. Alan opened it and flipped along. As he had in the past. Handwriting. Dates.
He flipped to the end. The last dream of Steve Moore’s life.
There is a man, Steve wrote on the final page, raising a ladder against the front of my house . . .
Moore’s attitude about Hollywood wasn’t so bad at first. In fact, the way he tells it to Nick Margerrison in 2007, he was preparing a whole mental framework from which to look at film adaptations of his work from the time of From Hell (2001). Laid it out clear and calm to himself. Like Bickle in the mirror. “I don’t want to see it, but I don’t want to give any offense to the people making the film. I want to make it just clear to them that their film is their film, I don’t want to interfere with it, and I consider it as something separate to my book, and then that should all go alright.”
And it did!
“Howevah,” he continues, “that seemed to be going OK until the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film.”
Moore and co-creator Kevin O’Neill were paid $1 million for the screen rights, according to producer Don Murphy — who, in a 2009 remark to Hollywood Elsewhere, said of Moore’s righteous refusal to accept any money for the Watchmen adaptation, “He is an old man who smokes too much hash and prays to a lizard god. Don’t buy his bullshit.” Murphy’s argument is that Moore has taken some money from Hollywood, only to then scorn the whole industry and stand with pride upon the fact that, in a couple of token gestures, he refused some cash he didn’t even need; saying, basically, it’s disingenuous to make a showy refusal of five figures for Constantine after accepting $1 million for League.
Where Murphy’s argument seems to stand strongest is a later scenario, around 2008. Alan Moore says he refused the money he was owed for the Watchmen film, asking that it be given to co-creator Dave Gibbons instead. The gesture, however, seems to have been purely that — there was no money to be given to either creator, at least none that was contractually owed. The film rights to Watchmen had already been optioned, in 1987, by Joel Silver and Lawrence Gordon; Gordon alone held onto the rights for 20 years, periodically paying a renewal fee, until it got the green light at Warner Bros.
In other words, when Moore asked the studio to give his share of the Watchmen movie money to Dave Gibbons . . . there wasn’t any. The movie had been optioned two decades prior.
Moore would later claim, in a 2010 interview, that although he had surrendered his share of the movie money to his co-creator, he’d never gotten a thank you.
Gibbons, who’d remained mostly neutral on the topic of Moore’s fallout with DC, went on the record in his 2023 memoir:
Hurt at the public suggestion of ingratitude and being depicted as DC’s stooge, I phone Alan. I formally thank him for the Watchmen movie money although, in reality, it never existed. The option payment we’d both shared many years ago was all there was . . . . He still doesn’t believe me.
Gibbons claims that, shortly afterward, he saw Moore make the same accusations in another interview. So he called one more time and tried to explain that he (Alan) had “joined up the dots wrongly,” but to no avail; Moore tells him that “as far as he’s concerned, only his own perception has any meaning for him.”
Gibbons accepts this. He says that, according to his own perception, this would appear to be the end of their friendship.
Moore, it seems, agrees.
“I add that, nevertheless, I will always be a fan, and that our relationship gave me some of the best creative experiences of my life. We wish each other well. Just before the silence becomes too awkward, we hang up.”
But all of that goes back to the situation with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, when Moore felt he’d been accused of complicity in a crime.
A screenwriter and producer filed a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox, claiming that League was their idea, for a movie called The Cast of Characters, and that Fox had bought the rights to Moore’s graphic novel as a “smokescreen.”
Moore seethed. “This was somebody claiming that I got my ideas from other people,” he put to Margerrison, and that he was “connected with Hollywood, which is a place that I’ve always found loathsome.”
Whether anybody explicitly claimed or implied this is up for debate; point is, he was so offended by “these aspersions” that, to clear his name, Moore surrendered himself to a “hellish” deposition, via video link in some Soho basement, for the plaintiff’s U.S. lawyers.
It took 10 hours.
“If I had raped and murdered a schoolbus full of retarded children after selling them heroin,” Moore told the New York Times, “I doubt that I would have been cross-examined for 10 hours.”
After that, he put a hard rule on all his personally owned IP: No movies.
It was another experience, upon the pile, cementing his resolve to keep as few collaborators as possible.
And now, as a full-time novelist, he’s on his own, with his weed and his tea and his books on the shelf. Comfortable here in Northampton. His living room. North side of the living room. Never the south side. “They do things different there.”
He’s such a homebody, it might feed the “Angry Alan Moore” persona. Long-bearded hermit who doesn’t want to talk to anybody, always angry about the comics industry, Hollywood, this and that.
Hermits don’t take visitors, however, and Joe Brown is over here often. Moore’s personal assistant, dear friend, and invaluable right hand, with his portable “looking glass,” finding facts in a flash, helping out with general internet stuff. Moore doesn’t have a mobile phone and he’s not online. When Walt Simonson invited him over to his New York apartment in 1985, showing off his word processor and telling him he oughta get one, Moore said no. “I will probably never even buy an electric typewriter.” In the transcript of a drunken Q&A with sci-fi enthusiasts, transcribed in a 1993 issue of Comics Forum, Moore concedes the recent purchase of a fax machine: “I’ve been dragged screaming into the 1970s.”
If you send Alan an email, it’s Joe who prints it out, runs it over, drops it in the letterbox. Moore can’t answer all the reader mail that he gets, but he tries. He even went viral for it! A nine-year-old called Joshua sent him, in 2013, a handwritten letter as part of a class assignment. In the letter, Joshua tells Moore that V for Vendetta (co-created by Moore and David Lloyd) has “a brilliant story line and is very cool when [the hero] blows up Parliament.” Moore wrote back saying thanks for the kind words and that he was happy Joshua had found joy in his earlier comics, like V and Watchmen, but that he (nine-year-old Joshua) should also realize that those comics don’t belong to him anymore. “I’m afraid they’re all owned by perhaps-less-than-scrupulous big comic-book companies.” He signs off telling Joshua that his letter was a delight and that he might use some of those kind words as a blurb on his book cover someday. “Take care of yourself, Joshua. You’re obviously a young man of extraordinary good taste and intelligence.”
The exchange was circulated so widely as to appear in the Guardian.
“Could anybody believe this?” Moore riffed about it with Interview magazine. “I was actually nice to a child once.”
Three years later, after its decade-long gestation, Top Shelf publishes Moore’s opus, Jerusalem. It is black-jacketed and bricklike and spare. Solemn. Literary.
“I feel it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done,” he told Alex Musson, back in their 2005 interview. “This is the work I’ll want to be remembered for — just because it’s something I’m doing completely on my own, unlike the things I’ve done before, which have mostly been collaborations.”
The book was greeted, by the handful of critics who attempted it, with rave reviews, and they celebrated it as a thing whose joyousness belies the foreboding appearance. So dense and heavy and dark. Its back cover gilded with a single blurb, in golden serifs:
“All in all you are the best author in human history.
Please write back.”
—Joshua Chamberlain,
Naseby Church of England Primary School
Old Moore, like a ghost, shuffling about the house with his coffee mug. The big white one with the black-printed legend on the side: “Wake Up, Drink Tea, and Be An Awesome Magician.” Pithy little thing, like that bumper sticker he heard about from Steve Bissette, the artist on Swamp Thing, so this must’ve been back in 1985? Yeah, they were both in New York together. Alan had just started with DC the year before. He had won some Eagle Awards for his work in U.K. comics and then, since “Americans tend to think that every award is an Oscar,” he got a call one day from the editor at DC Comics. Moore picked up the phone.
Hey, this is Len Wein.
Moore hung up.
Thought it was a prank.
They wanted him to take a shot at salvaging Swamp Thing, a horror comic Wein himself had co-created, about a biochemist, Alec Holland, who’s working on a serum to accelerate plant growth. He’s doing this near a swamp. When someone blows up his lab, Holland rises from the swampy muck as this huge, green, muscular humanoid monster. Broody and gothic. He fights things like ghosts and the U.S. government.
As Moore tells it, he spent some time reading through back issues of Swamp Thing and then submitted a 10-page memo in which he boiled the issue down to this: Alec Holland isn’t the Swamp Thing. Alec Holland is dead. He was killed in that explosion. What happened then, when his serum and his corpse got absorbed into the Louisiana bayou, is that the surrounding plant life cohered into some humanoid shape; now, with an innocence like Frankenstein’s monster, this big vegetable is under the impression that it is Alec Holland.
Moore changed Swamp Thing, in other words, from a biochemically altered human into “a plant with delusions of grandeur,” “Hamlet covered in snot,” “a ghost,” as one character in the book puts it, “covered in weeds.”
It was the first of Moore’s many renderings, across several decades and stories, of a very tall, eloquent, introspective man, powerful and weird, who tries to fit in with polite society and imitate normal behavior, but fails; he then redeems himself, privately, by embracing his weirdness as a superpower.
It saved the series. The book went from selling 17,000 copies per issue to 100,000. After taking the reins in January 1984, Moore’s run on Swamp Thing was doing so well by ’85 that DC flew him out to New York City to do a convention panel.
Moore shows up at the DC offices at 666 Fifth Avenue. Eighth floor. He doesn’t yet have the sartorial flair of recent years; he tends, in the ’80s, to buy and wear suits with the sleeves hemmed up short, as per the fashion, and skinny blood-color neckties mostly covered by the witch-broom beard, walking with his lifelong slouch, shoulders high. He is roughly 54% legs. Hands forever plugged wrist-deep in either pocket (once a drug dealer . . . ). Such is the vision as he comes to the DC doorway.
Which has a porthole in it.
He steps into an empty lobby. The door wafts shut and reveals, sitting behind it, a big and sickly man in a blue suit.
It is Clark Kent. A mannequin. In his travel diary, published by Escape Magazine later that year, Moore would stay demure. “Seems a thoughtless prank to play on a jet-lagged foreigner.” He meets his Swamp Thing collaborators for the first time against the notorious wallpaper: neon yellow dots against a white background, “migraine visible.”
There’s a Tetris configuration of desks everywhere, but few offices. The restroom doors are marked by a Superman or Wonder Woman logo.
Alan is wined and dined and praised. He visits comic shops. He gets very little sleep. He meets Frank Miller at a bar and, over sandwiches and beer, Frank “tells me about his forthcoming Batman series for DC.”
Back in England, Alan’s brother-in-law picks him up at the airport and asks him what America’s like. All he can seem to recall is a bumper sticker whose legend, as he remembered in a travel diary, said “I Swerve for Hallucinations.”
The hallucinations, looking back, were the partnerships.
Forty years later, he’s home in Northampton with his comfy black slip-ons and his tall blue socks. Deep in his chair but sitting forward. Elbows on his knees. Hands wafting as he talks or thinks. Always a bit slack at the wrist, with palms upturned. Penitent. Pale tobacco fingers, nails quite long and clean. Hair’s a bit thinner now. Widow’s peak. He wears it in a ponytail. The beard is still sternum-long, but the brown’s gone to gray except he’s got a smoker’s mustache like a brown frown. Probably doesn’t help stave off the whole “Angry Alan Moore” reputation.
“The Alan Moore that exists in the world,” he tells Interview, “far as I can tell, is perpetually furious — ‘cantankerous,’ that’s what they said in the Guardian.”
Moore argues it’s all a misunderstanding. As do friends and colleagues. Granted, yes, he might’ve said some things to give the impression of someone who’s incredibly curmudgeonly, going on podcasts and saying things like, “I am incredibly curmudgeonly,” but a lot of that reputation has been foisted on him by the press — not by conspiracy, or willful distortion, but a constant scratching at scabs. As Alex Musson puts it, there are two topics that get Moore somewhat instantly and predictably worked up: the comics industry and Hollywood. And so Moore will write a book, he’ll go out to promote it, and almost invariably there’ll be a journalist along the way who wants clicks above all else, and so they ask a few courteous pro forma questions, just to set the mood, and then they ask about the same grievance they’ve been talking about for nearly 40 years at this point:
“Why’d you fall out with DC comics?”
“Because they’re a bunch of bloodsucking bastards, quite frankly,” is the kinda thing he tends to say. He’ll clarify that the comic book medium is “perfect,” it is “sublime,” whereas the comics industry is “a dysfunctional hellhole” that “hasn’t had any new ideas in 20 or 30 years,” that it’s run by “sub-human” thieves who employ the same “gangster ethics” by which DC “bought” the rights for Superman off its teen creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, for $130.
“I pretty much detest the comics industry” is the gist, most recently for what they’ve done to popular culture and democracy with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and . . . whatever it is that DC’s up to. Moore’s been saying for years that he sees a harbinger of fascism in how young adults flock to see these “franchised übermenschen” zipping across the screen, and yes, he’s also mindful of the fact that he’s basically the cause of all this.
After all, he wrote the masterpiece of gritty “realist” superhero stories with Watchmen.
But the whole point of Watchmen is it’s a satire of the superhero narrative; it says that if comic book heroes existed in the real world, it’d be a disaster. It poses the question: What would happen if Superman was real, an American citizen with the powers of a god? And the answer is persuasive: America would send that deity overseas to subjugate its enemies.
It gets worse from there.
Watchmen culminates in the (arguably natural) apocalyptic endpoint of such a narrative, showing what would happen if such godly powers — be they of strength or intelligence or wealth — were wielded by everyday people who were also vain enough to believe they were worthy of wielding it. “All you need to know,” he said, in a 2021 interview with Sophie Shevardnadze, “about capes and masks in American superhero comics can be learned by a close viewing of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation,” a movie from 1915 that (long story short) celebrates the Ku Klux Klan, in their billowy white robes and hoods, as the horseback heroes against barefoot, libidinous, powerful Black invaders.
“Heroes,” Moore says, “are dangerous.” And the superhero narrative in particular is a fascist “power fantasy,” a “white-supremacist dream of a master race,” one that now, with the explosive success of the MCU and its multimedia sprawl, has saturated the culture so completely as to have trickled into the ground water, and polluted even our political storytelling, such that — as he explained on the How To Academy podcast — “the fantastic [and] unbelievable threat” that we’ve come to expect in our shows, movies, games, comics, novels — it’ll get absorbed, as an effectively simple storytelling device, by the nightly news, and the political commentariat, so that it manifests in daily life as “the underground Democrat paedo demons that were suggested by QAnon, and the equally-unbelievable superhero savior that is working behind the scenes to rescue us all will be ‘The Donald,’ who’s even got a superhero name.”
Ask him about literally anything else, though, and you’re good.
But a lot of this is personal. Sensible, coherent, well-argued — fine; but the vehemence stems from his own experience. Particularly with Watchmen. The definitive case-closed breakdown appears in Lance Parkin’s biography, Magic Words, at the center of which he collects and cross-references different takes and documents so fluently as to make them appear as though they were in conversation, decades later. But because a few more details have popped up since then, thanks largely to the 2023 release of Dave Gibbons’ memoir, the quick overview is this:
Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore tried collaborating on two different projects with pre-existing DC characters, but editors said no, so in ’85 they started working on Watchmen, a 12-issue series of modern-day heroes, mostly retired, all of them damaged in some deep way.
A contract was drawn up and here’s how Parkin spells it out. There was a clause in the contract, fairly boilerplate, saying that ownership of the whole 12-issue run, and its characters, would revert back to the creators (Moore and Gibbons) once the book had been out of print for one year. Until then, the creators would get a fairly standard 8% cut of residuals, split between them.
Alan Moore concedes in hindsight that he “obviously did not read [the contract] very closely.”
But Gibbons did read it closely. And he had concerns. On broaching the issue, however, they seem to’ve talked themselves into the path of least resistance.
They signed.
In 1986, Watchmen takes off.
DC’s marketing department goes mad with tactics: pins, posters, teasers, cardboard standees.
The creators are treated like royalty. After three issues, they’re flown out to New York City. Gibbons meets Alan at Heathrow Airport. “Alan and I sit together on the plane for six hours,” Gibbons writes in his 2023 memoir, Confabulation. “Alan never stops talking. We sit in the taxi to Manhattan for an hour. Alan never stops talking.”
Back again to the eighth floor of 666 Fifth Ave, they’re given a hero’s welcome. A fellow writer, Howard Chaykin, tells Gibbons that “Watchmen is fucking A.” They go to conventions. They do panels. Signing tours. DC puts them up in fancy hotels. They sit for a convention panel moderated by a young energetic journalist named Neil Gaiman, to whom the series, in paperback, is partially dedicated, and who would later introduce Moore to his second wife. Gibbons, in his memoir, seems to take a morbid delight in observing that, around this time, “Alan [is here at a convention] with his then wife Phyllis, who is all over her then girlfriend Debbie Delano.” (The pair would soon run off together.) Gibbons and Moore are at a rainy New York diner, “waiting for [Alan’s] smoking supplies to be delivered.” They’re taken to an uncomfortably fancy French restaurant in London, and they escape the swank by literally running into a bar. “[Moore’s former editor] Dez Skinn walks over to Alan and asks why they can’t let bygones be bygones. Alan tells him to fuck off. It seems normal.”
Nobody had any precedent for anticipating the success of Watchmen.
Alan was getting touchier and touchier as those two years wore on, and the stress of so much attention got harder and harder to bear, such that he “woke up screaming” in his San Diego hotel room one night during Comic-Con, Wizard magazine reported, “from a dream of clutching hands,” plus he’s got this notorious habit where, as he’s nearing the end of a high-stakes project, he starts working a lot slower, some kind of performance anxiety, and maybe yes, it reached a point where Moore, in Northampton, was running so far behind schedule with the script pages that he’d have to summon a taxi and then call Dave, whose illustrations were meanwhile outpacing the scriptwriting, and tell him, On the way, so that Dave would have to stop what he was doing and go stand waiting for that taxi to drive 60-odd miles, probably a two-hour trip, and then once it pulled up in front of his house, he’d run over, yank the passenger door open, and grab not Alan Moore himself but the single page of typescript on the seat, maybe two pages, taxied over at a cost of, good lord, £125? £130 maybe? Alan back at his house meanwhile trying to thread this thing out of his wrist like some delicate narrative hair — the whole thing is a miracle. A miracle the book got done on time, a miracle of creativity, a miracle of tenacity and talent pairing.
The one miracle was soon sabotaged by another.
After Watchmen’s phenomenally successful 12-issue run, concluding in the summer of 1987, it was expected to succumb to the fate of most comics: a thing for the back-issue racks in comic book stores. Give it six months or a year and Watchmen, like any other book, would be a thing of the past. The rights would revert to the creators.
Instead, for the first time, DC collected those 12 issues into a trade paperback, published just in time for Christmas.
They called it a “graphic novel.”
It’s never been out of print since then.
The rights never went back to the creators.
Parkin’s exegesis on the Watchmen fiasco concludes with an earned ambiguity.
Moore, he says, was negligent with the contract: he didn’t just sign it, he praised it, onstage, at an ’86 convention:
Given that [Moore] has received millions of dollars [from Watchmen], that DC have fulfilled the terms of the contract to the letter, and that his work has been enjoyed by countless more people than he could ever have dreamed of, in what sense has Moore been “swindled”? The obvious answer is that he wasn’t swindled, that he’s being irrational and stubborn, and has no grounds for complaint.
And yet, he says, that’s not the whole picture. Parkin says editor Len Wein’s argument — that it’s “not [DC’s] fault the book [Watchmen] continues to sell” — is more than misleading; indeed, it displays the exact sort of gaslighting that Moore’s accusing it of.
The graphic novel, Parkin writes, is basically a new concept in the marketplace; when Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons signed a contract, agreeing to let DC keep the Watchmen rights until it’d been out of print for one full year, “there was not a single precedent” of a contemporary comic book series getting bundled into a trade paperback and sold as a single volume. “[Moore], Gibbons and DC . . . fully expected that within a year all rights would revert to the creators.”
Really, it’s just easier in Northampton. Where everybody knows him. Everybody’s friendly.
In 2016, the journalist Dominic Wells was out here reporting a piece about Moore and Jerusalem. He writes of their walk through Northampton, catching its history on a breezy gray English day, and how Moore stops them outside Doddridge Church. He points up at the second floor where it’s got a “door to nowhere.” Big heavy plank of a thing, with a hinge at the center. Inaccessible from the outside, save by ladders and wings, and if you stepped out of it from the inside, you’d just drop some dozen feet to the ground. Moore’s riffing on how mysterious it is. How they’ve got a photo of it for the book.
That’s when a homeless man across the street — a “rough-sleeper,” Wells calls him, “about 40” — sees them looking and poses the question: “What do you think that door there’s for?”
Alan perks up, spots the guy, then crosses the street so they can speak up close, partly on account of that he’s a bit deaf these days, Alan is, but also it’s just common courtesy. Talking to people “on their own level,” without airs or presumption. Talks that way with kids, publishers, collaborators — everyone. Personal credo. Even did it that one night in February ’94, when he performed a magical ceremony at his then-girlfriend Melinda Gebbie’s house and accidentally conjured the Persian math demon Asmodeus into the living room: he stayed polite.
Asmodeus got conjured by accident into a ceremony that Moore was perhaps ill-equipped to perform, just three months deep into his magical practice, but as Moore admits during his 2020 interview with Lena Korkovelou, his early approach to magic involved “an awful lot of rituals” and “psychedelic drugs” and “entities and spectacular experiences,” because “back at that time,” he was still weighing whether or not there was anything to magic and “I needed [to see] that stuff. As a rationalist.”
Moore’s friend and collaborator, musician David J. Haskins, wrote about their shared experience of magic around this time in his 2014 memoir. Haskins was having nightmares in which he was accosted by an angry ancient-seeming woman. Shaken, he went to the house of his “old friend Alan,” who “immediately identified the crone as Hecate, the Greek Goddess of the underworld.”
Moore, having identified Hecate’s treachery, raised his wand and “ushered in a night of transformative necromancy,” involving wine and tea and “viscid honeyed psilocybin mushrooms.” They used a knife to cut bits of their hair for a ceremony and, when something seemed missing, Alan “slipped a hand inside his pants and yanked out a pubic sprig” to contribute, whereupon Haskins did the same.
Reporting he’d had some friendly conversations with the demon Asmodeus, Alan drew the creature in intricate detail with colored pencils. He then carried the drawing outside into the garden, where he directed a sort of prayer at the sky, presumably at his demon acquaintance Asmodeus, saying, “I’m not asking you to pull any strings here,” alluding to his friend David J. and the midnight crone, “but please just let him off the hook.” After that, he lit the drawing on fire. As the flames chattered up from its edges, Moore marveled at the light. “These are the most beautiful colors I’ve ever seen!” Back in the house, Haskins saw some of the drawing’s gray flecks had made it inside. “The demon,” he said, “it’s trying to get back in.”
“‘Right!’ Alan exclaimed. “I know exactly what to do in that case.’ He proceeded to lick the ashes from my hands. ‘Excuse me!’ he said, ever the gent. He swallowed the ashes. Now we were safe.”
But that night at Gebbie’s place, in ’94, was Moore’s first encounter with Asmodeus. They’re performing a ritual, him and Melinda and two friends, and something goes wrong. The vibes are blackened. Everyone is upset but can’t say why.
Alan in particular.
Feeling defeated, he calls it a night. Trots up the stairs with (unbeknownst to him) Asmodeus in tow, tethered to his shirt like a kite and crowing at him from the fourth dimension, telling him he’s a shit magician, doesn’t know anything. Alan, meanwhile, is hearing this stuff as if they were his own thoughts, until finally he’s upstairs, and collapses back on Melinda’s four-poster bed, hair and beard tossed about like a snow angel, and realizes . . . he doesn’t actually talk like this. He’s not so negative.
That’s when he figures he might be in the presence of a separate entity.
One thing leads to another and soon enough he and the demon are in dialogue. “I thought it best,” Moore would later say, “to be respectful of it” and to “talk to it the way I talk to anybody: on its own level, basically.”
And so he asks the demon its name.
Demon says, You’ll have to guess.
Alan, deciding to start with the letter B, says, Is it you, Belial? (“I was just picking names that I’d heard that related to demons.”)
At his mention of Belial’s name, he told Margerrison in ’07, an image is airdropped into his mind’s eye:
a gigantic toad, quite beautiful in its way, made entirely out of diamonds; which, on its brow, had a ring of seven eyes. And it had a very aloof expression on its face. And I thought, “Yeah, this is probably Belial, but this is not who I’m talking to.” The whole vibe was different.
So he says OK (“Still on the letter B”), Is it you, Beelzebub? Whereupon he gets another mugshot, this time showing:
an infinite wall made of pink-gray hog’s flesh, with white bristles jutting from it at intervals . . .and the wall was studded all over . . . with these glaring hate-filled eyes . . . all glaring at me in absolute bestial hatred. And I said to myself, “Right, this is not what I’m talking to either. Perhaps I’m on the wrong track with the letter B.”
Eventually he guesses: Is it you, Asmodeus? And the demon answers. Yes.
They end up talking for about an hour that night and, in the end, Moore comes round to not only liking the guy, describing him as good-humored and “gentlemanly,” but feeling like he’d really learned something.
“If only about my own mind.”
Because, as he’s quick to point out, maybe the whole thing was a hallucination. Happened entirely in his head.
If so, his subconscious must’ve had a good reason for serving it up to him.
This is not to equate that conversation to the one he had with a homeless guy outside Doddridge Church, about the “door to nowhere,” but to illustrate what he means by speaking to people “on their level,” without presumption or pretense. So, he’s out doing the Jerusalem walking tour with Dominic Wells (reporting for his blog, London, Hollywood). He hears this “rough-sleeper” ask him, “What do you think that door there’s for?” And his response is to just walk right over to the guy and say, “I think it’s got supernatural origins.”
The homeless guy sits with that. Then he says, “I don’t believe in ghosts.” And then he says, “I’m an alcoholic.” But he’s making progress. He says he’s gotten himself down to just “a couple” drinks a day. Anyway. He says he was sitting out here the other night (implication seems to be that he’d had his couple drinks already) when suddenly it starts to rain. So he gets himself some cover. Over there. And that’s when he sees this woman out in the street. All by herself. Walking through the downpour like nothing. He goes to ask her what she’s doing, out in the rain like that — but she’s gone. Vanished.
“I believe it,” says Moore. “This area is full of ghosts, and actually, being a bit pissed helps to see them. All the pubs around here had at least two or three [ghosts] when I was a kid. So, the pubs have all been pulled down, where else have they got to go? Out in the rain with you, eh?”
They chat a bit longer, friendly, until Moore, in farewell, stuffs a 20-pound note in the guy’s hand. Tells him enjoy the weekend.
Disarmed by the kindness, wanting to pay it back somehow, the guy says, “I enjoyed Watchmen.” Clarifies, “You and . . . Gibbon?”
The way Wells recounts it, that’s when Alan shows an edge. “Dave Gibbons.” A gentle correction, but his accent’s coming out barbed and thick. “Oi hope Oi never see that fucker for as long as Oi live.”
Nat Segnit, on assignment from the New Yorker (his editors wanted something about “an English eccentric”), visited Northampton to spend a day with Moore on the occasion of Jerusalem’s release; he was surprised, as his train rolled in, to find that Moore had come out to pick him up at the station — “like my dad if I was visiting from college.”
They’d met a couple weeks prior at the Odditorium, a series of cultural events in Brighton where Moore’d been interviewed onstage by John Higgs. “He was smoking a massive reefer,” Segnit recalls, “as he would tend to do.” So they’d already been acquainted by now and just got right into talking about the book, its themes, Moore’s ideas about death, the fourth dimension, eternalism. All while walking the streets of Northampton. Pausing now and then to examine the sites.
At one point, visiting a stretch of road where Moore and his brother had played as children, they happened upon excavators in the process of tearing it all up.
Moore, with his joint and his long gray beard and his serpent-headed walking stick, stood there watching it happen, another burn mark sizzling through the map of his past.
He began to cry.
On September 16, 2002, the late comics journalist Bill Baker asked Alan Moore for an interview. It was a long shot. Skim the front of any comic shop and you’d see he was busier than ever, writing runs on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea, Tom Strong, Top 10, and Tomorrow Stories.
He was floored when Moore agreed.
So, Baker showed up at the terrace house, went inside, had a seat, and started with his questions.
“I hoped that he might be able to spare forty-five minutes, or perhaps an hour, to talk about his working methods.”
Moore talked for five hours. In large part about how difficult it’s been to get anything done, what with so many people wanting to talk to him, the phone always ringing . . .
Baker asks him about his productivity, what a normal working day looks like, and Moore says that, to the degree he even has a regimen, it looks like this: 8:30 a.m., he wakes up. Has a bath. Gets to his desk about 10:30 a.m. The hardest part isn’t the writing, per se, but getting himself to the desk where, once he’s really going, he can do a page or more per hour. (This is also, however, a period of what seemed, later, like lamentable over-writing, a three-to-one ratio of script pages to comic pages.) Today was slow. “Four pages, four hours.”
He always does the first draft in longhand. “Notepad and a Biro.” Crude little panels all over the sheet, “smaller than a postage stamp,” with a stick-figure tableau that only Alan can read.
Then type it up, print it out, fax it in.
Tries to get some reading in, as well. “I’m very promiscuous and fickle.” In ’02, with a quick twist and squint at the shelves, he could tell you he was reading lots of Americans. Cormac McCarthy (“excellent American writer”), Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (“very good book”), and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (“marvelous structural stuff he’s doing there”). After that, he’ll end up “on the phone til about 10, and then I’m going to be hungry and I’m going to want food. And then I shall eat the food.”
Bed by 12:30 a.m.
Repeat.
In 2002, while saturated in deadline comics writing, Moore is reading big, ambitious, cerebral novels.
In 2003, he would turn 50 and start making notes for his own.
We were talking about 2016, though.
Alan’s out and about with Nat Segnit for the New Yorker, and after a long walk, they’re getting a bite at his beloved PizzaExpress Northampton. They’re talking over a voice recorder while Alan is enjoying his favorite thing on the menu: billiard-size dough balls dipped in garlic butter. This is where Segnit starts telling Moore — after some lengthy exchanges concerning Einstein, math, literature — about a big American novel he might enjoy. It’s roughly the size of Jerusalem. Grapples with similar themes.
Moore can be heard chewing, nodding, gulping — then leaning in. Brow audibly furrowed like a cursive question. He repeats the author’s name for confirmation.
Says he shall have to take a look at that.
“I’ve become completely infatuated with David Foster Wallace.”
This is six months later. Alan Moore is being interviewed onstage at Liverpool’s “Super Weird Happening” festival and someone asks what he’s reading.
The answer is David Foster Wallace. All of it.
After their meal at PizzaExpress, Segnit went back to London, bought a copy of Wallace’s 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest (1996), and sent it to Moore. “I think we spoke on the phone about a week later,” Segnit recalled in an email, “by which time [Alan] had read [the novel] in its entirety, and loved it.”
“I am in love,” Moore continued, from that Liverpool stage. “I am completely besotted.” He speaks to its brilliance and even, with some affection, Wallace’s irritating shtick with endnotes. “Every ten lines,” he groans, “there’ll be a little numba.” Heaving 1,000 pages forward, to the back of the book, Moore realized, as the notes became more trivial and playful, that the author was “deliberately doing this to annoy me, [and] I really, really appreciate that.”
After all, Moore did something similar with his debut novel, Voice of the Fire (also a ’96 release). It’s a series of interwoven stories set in Northampton, progressing from ancient times to modern, each written with strict adherence to its narrator’s voice. Notorious among those voices is the one that opens the book: a paleolithic cave man, who says things like, “One while I is with gleaning in of I, which after is no gleaning follow, where-by all is quiet in I.”
When comedian Stewart Lee asked why he’d filled the opening pages with “incomprehensible gobbledygook,” Moore’s reasoning seemed clear:
“To keep cunts out of my book.”
He later regretted that explanation and clarified, in a live appearance with Lee, produced by the Guardian in 2016: “I’ve since found out about the concept of literary difficulty, which is where you deliberately sacrifice [or] alienate [some of] your audience, but where the ones who remain will be forced to engage with the book upon a much deeper and more satisfying level.”
“But yeah,” summing up, “basically to keep out cunts.”
But who are the cunts, exactly?
As Moore told students at Northampton College in 2013, “the real writer,” in his estimation, “is somebody who, as soon as he or she has identified a technique that they are using [successfully], they abandon it . . . . They do something completely different.”
Moore’s comic scripts were famous within the comic book industry not just for their details and flourish, but for their voice. Here’s a snippet from the first page of his Watchmen script, written entirely in capital letters:
ALRIGHT. I’M PSYCHED UP. I’VE GOT BLOOD UP TO MY ELBOWS, VEINS IN MY TEETH, AND MY HELMET AND KNEEPADS SECURELY FASHIONED. LET’S GET OUT THERE AND MAKE TROUBLE . . . . IN THIS FIRST PANEL WE ARE LOOKING STRAIGHT DOWN AT A DRAIN OPENING IN A PERFECTLY ORDINARY GUTTER . . . . [He describes the image for nearly thirty unbroken lines. Then, the paragraph continues.] THAT’S BASICALLY THE WHOLE OPENING IMAGE, UNLESS YOU WANT TO STICK A CANDY WRAPPER THAT’S ABOUT TO FLOAT DOWN THE DRAIN, IN WHICH CASE . . .
Notice how that reads like an in-house note directly to the illustrator. One of Moore’s inviolable commandments for collaboration, recounted to Emile Rafael in 2014, is that each person should have “absolute sovereignty” over the area of their expertise: the writer shalt not haggle with the artist, nor vice versa.
It highlights a strange detail in Moore’s reputation. He is widely celebrated as one of our greatest living writers; however, if he is using hundreds of words to describe each panel, before handing it off to an artist who will interpret and translate those many hundreds of words into an image, it’s safe to guess that a vanishingly small percentage of Moore’s written work has been seen by readers. His reputation, as a “writer,” was a technical distinction.
When Alan Moore released his debut novel, in 1996, he was perhaps the most critically acclaimed author on earth whose words were not published on their own.
Readers knew his storytelling style, but not his authorial voice.
And in Voice of the Fire, he still hadn’t done it.
That novel — a tapestry of monologues, performed with strict loyalty to the narrators’ respective speaking styles — is less “experimental,” as Moore called it, than simply guarded. Its concept allows the author to refute any critique by saying that it isn’t his writing that’s on the page, but the voice of the narrator; his own authorial sensibility looms over the book as a cosmic puppeteer. He is all of the voices and none of them.
He sounds pretentious, saying he made the first chapter particularly difficult to “keep cunts out of [his] book,” but in light of his recent achievements, in Jerusalem and (more powerfully) The Great When, it’s clear that the pretension is a defense mechanism.
Moore argued, in the early 1990s, that comic readers tend “to assume that people who don’t read comics have better taste than ourselves,” by which he means readers of novels, of literature; and yet, he points out, the New York Times best seller list isn’t exactly filled with highbrow material.
The medium, in other words, is no indicator of literary merit.
But then he makes a flashy exit from the comics industry and takes just a $15,000 advance for a novel. He’s never written one before.
And so he warmed himself, in that lonesome effort, with a cast of voices for company; his own voice, as character and author, narrates the final chapter — explaining, for those who’ve made it, what he was trying to do all along. Sounding a bit sorry he didn’t achieve it.
But now he has.
On the other side of his second novel, Jerusalem, which is basically a second (more successful) attempt at the same concept from Voice of the Fire, what characterizes Moore’s prose is its confidence. There’s nothing to prove anymore; no need to “keep out cunts,” because they don’t exist to him anymore, readers who might taunt him as talentless.
He knows he’s good now; confident enough to do something ambitious, with The Long London, but understated. The fire of voices winnowing down to a single flame. Focused. Brighter than it was in that earlier busyness.
It reads a bit like Moore himself. Alone in his multitudes. Lighting up one more joint, upstairs with the laptop, the good work of lonesome days piling up. He’s happy with it. Where once his days were dotted with phone calls, voices on the other end of Steve Moore, or the late Kevin O’Neill, or Dave Gibbons when they were speaking, they’re characterized now by the work performed alone, in haunted Northampton quiet. He pulls on his joint, sips from his tea. Home among the dark art and the books and the totems. In the bedroom he’s got a dollhouse and, inside it, a figurine crafted to look like Steve. He talks to it often. When their Bumper Book came out in 2024, he took it to the dollhouse and showed him. It’s important, he says, to keep the old dialogues going. Otherwise everything fades. The pubs and the old homes are all pulled down, your childhood streets get razed.
He’ll not have his ghosts out walking in the rain.
Alexander Sorondo lives in Miami. He’s the author of the Substack newsletter, big reader bad grades, and his debut novel, Cubafruit, was released this year.
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Yeah, yeah—Frank Sinatra had a cold, but did he SUMMON A DEMON?
Of all the pieces I've read on Alan Moore, this is the one that best captures his possibly unique mixture of pretension and self-deprecation, handling both aspects with appropriate seriousness (not buying too much into the hocus pocus, and not over-emphasising the bathos).
I didn't know he read DFW so late. His affection for Thomas Pynchon goes back decades (V reads 'V.' in the comic) and TP doubtless influenced the density of much of his work. I would have assumed he had kept tabs on Pynchon's descendents, but it seems as though his taste is shaped more by personal recommendations than, say, literary journals (or, God forbid, the internet).