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Alan Moore Biography
Moore started out writing for British underground and alternative fanzines in the late 1970s before achieving success publishing comic strips in such magazines as 2000AD and Warrior. He was subsequently picked up by the American DC Comics, and as "the first comics writer living in Britain to do prominent work in America", In the late 1980s and early 1990s he left the comic industry mainstream and went independent for a while, working on experimental work such as the epic From Hell, pornographic Lost Girls, and the prose novel Voice of the Fire. He subsequently returned to the mainstream later in the 1990s, working for Image comics, before developing America's Best Comics, an imprint through which he published works such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the occult-based Promethea.
A countercultural figure, Moore is also known as a Neopagan, occultist, and ceremonial magician, and has featured such themes in works including Promethea and From Hell, as well as performing avant-garde spoken word occult "workings" with The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, some of which have been released on CD.
Despite his own personal objection to them, his books have provided the basis for a number of Hollywood films, including From Hell (2001), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), V for Vendetta (2005) and Watchmen (2009). Moore has also been referenced in popular culture, and has been recognised as an influence on a variety of literary and television figures including Neil Gaiman, Joss Whedon, and Damon Lindelof.
Biography
Early life: 1953–1977
Moore was born on 18 November 1953, at St. Edmond’s Hospital in Northampton, England, to a working class family who he believed had lived in the town for several generations. where he first came into contact with people who were middle class and better educated, and he was shocked at how he went from being one of the top pupils at his primary school to one of the lowest in the class at secondary. Subsequently disliking school and having "no interest in academic study", he believed that there was a "covert curriculum" being taught that was designed to indoctrinate children with "punctuality, obedience and the acceptance of monotony".
Meanwhile, in the late 1960s, he became interested in the Hippie movement, at the time believing in its ideals that everyone would be "brothers in the Age of Aquarius". The headmaster of the school subsequently "got in touch with various other academic establishments that I'd applied to and told them not to accept me because I was a danger to the moral well-being of the rest of the students there, which was possibly true."
Whilst continuing to live in his parents' home for a few more years, he moved through various jobs, including cleaning toilets and working in a tannery. Around 1971, he met and began a relationship with a Northampton-born girl named Phyllis, with whom he moved into "a little one-room flat in the Barrack Road area in Northampton". Soon marrying, they moved into a new council estate in the town's eastern district whilst he worked in an office for a sub-contractor of the local gas board. However, he felt that he was not being fulfilled by this job, and so decided to try and earn a living doing something more artistic.
Early career: 1978–1980
Abandoning his office job, he decided to instead take up both writing and illustrating his own comics. He had already produced a couple of strips for several alternative fanzines and magazines, such as Anon E. Mouse for the local paper Anon, and St. Pancras Panda, a parody of Paddington Bear, for the Oxford-based Back Street Bugle. Meanwhile, Moore decided to focus more fully on writing comics rather than both writing and drawing them, stating that "After I'd been doing [it] for a couple of years, I realised that I would never be able to draw well enough and/or quickly enough to actually make any kind of decent living as an artist."
To learn more about how to write a successful comic book script, he asked advice from his friend, comic book writer Steve Moore, whom he had known since he was fourteen. – and instead asked him to write some short stories for the publication's Future Shocks series instead. While the first few were rejected, Grant advised Moore on improvements, and eventually accepted the first of many. Meanwhile, Moore had also begun writing minor stories for Doctor Who Weekly, and later commented that "I really, really wanted a regular strip. I didn’t want to do short stories… But that wasn't what was being offered. I was being offered short four or five page stories where everything had to be done in those five pages. And, looking back, it was the best possible education that I could have had in how to construct a story."
Marvel UK, 2000AD, and Warrior: 1980–1984
From 1980 through to 1984, Moore maintained his status as a freelance writer, and was offered a spate of work by a variety of comic book companies in Britain, namely Marvel UK, and the publishers of 2000AD and Warrior. He later remarked that "I remember that what was generally happening was that everybody wanted to give me work, for fear that I would just be given other work by their rivals. So everybody was offering me things." It was an era when comic books were increasing in popularity in Britain, and according to Lance Parkin, "the British comics scene was cohering as never before, and it was clear that the audience was sticking with the title as they grew up. Comics were no longer just for very small boys: teenagers – even A-level and university students – were reading them now."
During this three year period, 2000AD would accept and publish over fifty of Moore's one-off stories for their Future Shocks and Time Twisters science fiction series. Another series he produced for 2000AD was D.R. and Quinch, which was illustrated by Alan Davis. The story, which Moore described as "continuing the tradition of Dennis the Menace, but giving him a thermonuclear capacity", revolved around two delinquent aliens, and was a science-fiction take on National Lampoon's characters O.C. and Stiggs. However, the work widely considered to be the highlight of his 2000AD career, and that he himself described as "the one that worked best for me" was The Ballad of Halo Jones, the first series in the magazine to be based around a female character, which Moore did deliberately. Co-created with artist Ian Gibson, the series was set in the 50th century. It finished before all the episodes were written.
Another comic company to employ Moore was Marvel UK, who had formerly purchased a few of his one-off stories for Doctor Who Weekly and Star Wars Weekly. Aiming to get an older audience than 2000AD, their main rival, they employed Moore to write for the regular strip Captain Britain, "halfway through a storyline that he's neither inaugurated nor completely understood." He replaced the former writer Dave Thorpe, but maintained the original artist, Alan Davis, who Moore described as "an artist whose love for the medium and whose sheer exultation upon finding himself gainfully employed within it shine from every line, every new costume design, each nuance of expression."
The third comic company that Moore worked for in this period was a new monthly magazine known as Warrior, founded by Dez Skinn, a former editor of both IPC (publishers of 2000 AD) and Marvel UK, that was designed to offer writers a greater degree of freedom over their artistic creations than was allowed by pre-existing companies, and it was at Warrior that Moore "would start to reach his potential". Moore was initially given two ongoing strips in Warrior: Marvelman and V for Vendetta, both of which debuted in Warrior's first issue in March 1982. V for Vendetta was a dystopian thriller set in a future 1997 where a fascist government controlled Britain, opposed only by a lone anarchist dressed in a Guy Fawkes costume who turns to terrorism to topple the government. Illustrated by David Lloyd, Moore was influenced by his pessimistic feelings about the Thatcherite Conservative government, which he expected to create a fascist state where all ethnic and sexual minorities had been eliminated. It has been regarded as "among Moore's best work" and has maintained a cult following throughout subsequent decades.
Marvelman (later retitled Miracleman for legal reasons) was a series that originally had been published in Britain from 1954 through to 1964, based largely upon the American comic Captain Marvel. Upon resurrecting Marvelman, Moore "took a kitsch children's character and placed him within the real world of 1982". The third series that Moore produced for Warrior was The Bojeffries Saga, a comedy about a working-class English family of vampires and werewolves, drawn by Steve Parkhouse. Warrior closed before these stories were completed, but under new publishers both Miracleman and V for Vendetta were resumed by Moore, who finished both stories by 1989. Moore's biographer Lance Parkin remarked that "reading them through together throws up some interesting contrasts – in one the hero fights a fascist dictatorship based in London, in the other an Aryan superman imposes one."
Although Moore's work numbered amongst the most popular strips to appear in 2000 AD, Moore himself became increasingly concerned at the lack of creator's rights in British comics.
Meanwhile, during this same period, he – using the pseudonym of Translucia Baboon – became involved in the music scene, founding his own band, The Sinister Ducks, with David J (of goth band Bauhaus) and Alex Green, and in 1983 released a single, March of the Sinister Ducks, with sleeve art by illustrator Kevin O'Neill. In 1984, Moore and David J also released a 12-inch single featuring a recording of "This Vicious Cabaret", a song featured in V for Vendetta, which was released on the Glass Records label.
The American mainstream and DC Comics: 1983–1988
Moore's British work brought him to the attention of DC Comics editor Len Wein, who hired him in 1983 to write Swamp Thing, then a formulaic and poor-selling monster comic. Moore, along with artists Stephen R. Bissette, Rick Veitch, and John Totleben, deconstructed and reimagined the character, writing a series of formally experimental stories that addressed environmental and social issues alongside the horror and fantasy, bolstered by research into the culture of Louisiana, where the series was set. These titles laid the foundation of what became the Vertigo line.
Moore began producing further stories for DC Comics, including a two-part story for Vigilante, which dealt with domestic abuse. He was eventually given the chance to write a story for one of DC's best known superheroes, Superman, entitled For the Man Who Has Everything, which was illustrated by Dave Gibbons and released in 1985. In this story, Wonder Woman, Batman, and Robin visit Superman on his birthday, only to find that he has been overcome by an alien organism and is hallucinating about his heart's desire. He followed this with another Superman story, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, which was published in 1986. Illustrated by Curt Swan, it was designed as the last Superman story in the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths DC universe.
1988 saw the publication of a Batman story written by Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland. Entitled The Killing Joke, it revolved around The Joker, who had escaped Arkham Asylum and gone on a killing spree, and Batman's effort to stop him. Despite being a key work in helping to redefine Batman as a character, along with Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, Lance Parkin believed that "the theme isn’t developed enough" and "it's a rare example of a Moore story where the art is better than the writing," something Moore himself acknowledges.
The limited series Watchmen, begun in 1986 and collected as a trade paperback in 1987, cemented Moore's reputation. Imagining what the world would be like if costumed heroes had really existed since the 1940s, Moore and artist Dave Gibbons created a Cold War mystery in which the shadow of nuclear war threatens the world. The heroes who are caught up in this escalating crisis either work for the U.S. government or are outlawed, and are motivated to heroism by their various psychological hang-ups. Watchmen is non-linear and told from multiple points of view, and includes formal experiments such as the symmetrical design of issue 5, "Fearful Symmetry", where the last page is a near mirror-image of the first, the second-last of the second, and so on, and in this manner is an early example of Moore's interest in the human perception of time and its implications for free will. It is the only comic to win the Hugo Award, in a one-time category ("Best Other Form"). Indeed, it is widely seen as Moore's best work, and has been regularly described as the greatest comic book ever written.
In 1987 Moore submitted a proposal for a miniseries called Twilight of the Superheroes, the title a twist on Richard Wagner's opera Götterdämmerung (meaning "Twilight of the Gods"). The series was set in the future of the DC Universe, where the world is ruled by superheroic dynasties, including the House of Steel (presided over by Superman and Wonder Woman) and the House of Thunder (led by the Captain Marvel family). These two houses are about to unite through a dynastic marriage, their combined power potentially threatening freedom, and several characters, including John Constantine, attempt to stop it and free humanity from the power of superheroes. The series would also have restored the DC Universe's multiple earths, which had been eliminated in the continuity-revising 1985 miniseries Crisis on Infinite Earths. The series was never commissioned, but copies of Moore's detailed notes have appeared on the Internet and in print despite the efforts of DC, who consider the proposal their property. Similar elements, such as the concept of hypertime, have since appeared in DC comics. The 1996 miniseries Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross, was also set amid a superheroic conflict in the future of the DC universe. Waid and Ross have stated that they had read the Twilight proposal before starting work on their series, but that any similarities are both minor and unintended.
Moore's relationship with DC Comics had gradually deteriorated over the issues of creator's rights and merchandising. Moore and Gibbons were not paid any royalties for a Watchmen spin-off badge set, as DC defined them as a "promotional item", and according to certain reports, he and Gibbons gained only 2% of the profits earned by DC for Watchmen. Meanwhile, a group of creators including Moore, Frank Miller, Marv Wolfman, and Howard Chaykin, fell out with DC over a proposed age-rating system similar to those used for films. After completing V for Vendetta, which DC had already begun publishing, thus enabling him to finish the final few episodes, in 1989, Moore stopped working for DC.
Independent period and Mad Love: 1988–1993
Abandoning DC Comics and the mainstream, Moore, along with his wife Phyllis and their mutual lover Deborah Delano, set up their own comics publishing company, which they named Mad Love. The works that they published in Mad Love turned away from the science fiction and superhero genres that Moore was used to writing, instead focusing on realism, ordinary people, and political causes. Mad Love's first publication, AARGH (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia), was an anthology of work by a number of writers (including Moore) that challenged the Thatcher government's recently introduced Clause 28, a law designed to prevent councils and schools "promoting homosexuality". Sales from the book went towards the Organisation of Lesbian and Gay Action, and Moore was "very pleased with" it, stating that "we hadn't prevented this bill from becoming law, but we had joined in the general uproar against it, which prevented it from ever becoming as viciously effective as its designers might have hoped." Moore followed this with a second political work, Shadowplay: The Secret Team, a comic illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz for Eclipse Comics and commissioned by the Christic Institute, which was included as a part of the anthology Brought to Light, a description of the CIA's covert drug smuggling and arms dealing.
After prompting by cartoonist and self-publishing advocate Dave Sim, Following this, in 1991 the company Victor Gollancz Ltd published Moore's A Small Killing, a full length story illustrated by Oscar Zarate, about a once idealistic advertising executive haunted by his boyhood self. According to Lance Parkin, A Small Killing is "quite possibly Moore's most underrated work." Soon after this, Mad Love itself was disbanded as Phyllis and Deborah ended their relationship with Moore, taking with them much of the money that he had earned from his work in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, Moore also began producing work for Taboo, a small independent comic anthology edited by his former collaborator Stephen R. Bissette. The first of these was From Hell, a fictionalised account of the Jack the Ripper murders of the 1880s. Inspired by Douglas Adams' novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Moore reasoned that to solve a crime holistically, one would need to solve the entire society it occurred in, and depicts the murders as a consequence of the politics and economics of the time. Just about every notable figure of the period is connected with the events in some way, including "Elephant Man" Joseph Merrick, Oscar Wilde, Native American writer Black Elk, William Morris, artist Walter Sickert, and Aleister Crowley, who makes a brief appearance as a young boy. Illustrated in a sooty pen and ink style by Eddie Campbell, From Hell took nearly ten years to complete, outlasting Taboo and going through two more publishers before being collected as a trade paperback by Eddie Campbell Comics. It was widely praised, with comics author Warren Ellis calling it "my all-time favorite graphic novel".
The other series that Moore began for Taboo was Lost Girls, which he described as a work of intelligent "pornography". Illustrated by Melinda Gebbie, whom Moore subsequently entered into a relationship with, it was set in 1913, where Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Wendy from Peter Pan – who are each of a different age and class – all meet in a European hotel and regale each other with tales of their sexual encounters. With the work, Moore wanted to attempt something innovative in comics, and believed that creating comics pornography was a way of achieving this. He remarked that "I had a lot of different ideas as to how it might be possible to do an up-front sexual comic strip and to do it in a way that would remove a lot of what I saw were the problems with pornography in general. That it's mostly ugly, it's mostly boring, it's not inventive – it has no standards." Like From Hell, Lost Girls outlasted Taboo, and a few subsequent installments were published erratically until the work was finished and a complete edition published in 2006.
Meanwhile, Moore also set about writing a prose novel, eventually producing Voice of the Fire, which would be published in 1996. Unconventional in tone, the novel was a set of short stories about linked events in his hometown of Northampton through the centuries, from the Bronze Age to the present day, which combined to tell a larger story.
Return to the mainstream and Image Comics: 1993–1998
In 1993 Moore declared himself to be a ceremonial magician. The same year marked a move by Moore back to the mainstream comics industry and back to writing superhero comics. He did so through the Image Comics, widely known at the time for its flashy artistic style, graphic violence, and scantily-clad large-breasted women, something that horrified many of his fans. His first work published by Image, an issue of the series Spawn, was soon followed by the creation of his own mini-series, 1963, which was "a pastiche of Jack Kirby stories drawn for Marvel in the sixties, with their rather overblown style, colourful characters and cosmic style." According to Moore, "after I'd done the 1963 stuff I'd become aware of how much the comic audience had changed while I'd been away [since 1988]. That all of a sudden it seemed that the bulk of the audience really wanted things that had almost no story, just lots of big, full-page pin-up sort of pieces of artwork. And I was genuinely interested to see if I could write a decent story for that market."
He subsequently set about writing what he saw as "better than average stories for 13 to 15-years olds", including three mini-series based upon the Spawn series: Violator, Violator/Badrock, and Spawn: Blood Feud. In 1995, he was also given control of a regular monthly comic, Jim Lee's WildC.A.T.S., starting from issue #21, which he would continue to write for fourteen issues. The series followed two groups of superheroes, one of whom are on a spaceship heading back to their home planet, and the others who are instead remaining on Earth. Moore's biographer Lance Parkin remarked critically of the series, feeling that it was one of Moore's worst, and that "you feel Moore should be better than this. It's not special." Moore himself, who remarked that he took on the series – his only regular monthly comic series since Swamp Thing – largely because he liked Jim Lee, admitted that he was not entirely happy with the work, believing that he had catered too much to his conceptions of what the fans wanted rather than being innovative.
Next he took over Rob Liefeld's Supreme, about a character with many similarities with DC Comics’ Superman. Instead of emphasising increased realism as he had done with earlier superhero comics he had taken over, Moore did the opposite, and began basing the series on the Silver Age Superman comics of the 1960s, introducing a female superhero Suprema, a super-dog Radar, and a Kryptonite-like material known as Supremium, in doing so harking back to the original "mythic" figure of the American superhero. Under Moore, Supreme would prove to be a critical and commercial success, announcing that he was back in the mainstream after several years of self-imposed exile.
When Rob Liefeld, one of Image's co-founders, split from the publisher and formed his own company Awesome Entertainment, he hired Moore to create a new universe for the characters he had brought with him from Image. Moore's "solution was breathtaking and cocky – he created a long and distinguished history for these new characters, retro-fitting a fake silver and gold age for them." Moore began writing comics for many of these characters, such as Glory and Youngblood, as well as a three-part mini-series known as Judgement Day to provide a basis for the Awesome Universe. However Moore was not satisfied with Liefeld, saying "I just got fed up with the unreliability of information that I get from him, that I didn't trust him. I didn't think that he was respecting the work and I found it hard to respect him. And also by then I was probably feeling that with the exception of Jim Lee, Jim Valentino – people like that – that a couple of the Image partners were seeming, to my eyes, to be less than gentlemen. They were seeming to be not necessarily the people I wanted to deal with."
America's Best Comics: 1999–2008
Image partner Jim Lee offered to provide Moore with his own imprint, which would be under Lee's company WildStorm Productions. Moore named this imprint America's Best Comics, lining up a series of artists and writers to assist him in this venture. However, Lee soon sold WildStorm – including America's Best Comics – to DC Comics, and "Moore found himself back with a company he'd vowed to never work with again". Lee and editor Scott Dunbier flew to England personally to reassure Moore that he would not be affected by the sale, and would not have to deal with DC directly. Moore decided that there were too many people involved to back out from the project, and so ABC was launched in early 1999.
The first series that begun publication through ABC was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which featured a variety of characters from Victorian adventure novels such as H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain, H. G. Wells' Invisible Man, Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Wilhelmina Murray from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Illustrated by Kevin O'Neill, the first volume of the series pitted the League against Professor Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes books; the second, against the Martians from The War of the Worlds. A third volume entitled The Black Dossier was set in the 1950s. The series was well received, and Moore was pleased that an American audience was enjoying something he considered "perversely English", and that it was inspiring some readers to get interested in Victorian literature.
Another of Moore's ABC works was Tom Strong, a post-modern superhero series that in equal parts parodies and pays tribute to the superhero genre, featured a hero inspired by characters pre-dating Superman, such as Doc Savage and Tarzan. The character's drug-induced longevity allowed Moore to include flashbacks to Strong's adventures throughout the 20th century, written and drawn in period styles, as a comment on the history of comics and pulp fiction. The primary artist was Chris Sprouse. Tom Strong bore many similarities to Moore's earlier work on Supreme, but according to Lance Parkin, was "more subtle", and was "ABC's most accessible comic."
Moore's Top 10, a deadpan police procedural comedy set in a city called Neopolis where everyone, including the police, criminals, and civilians has super-powers, costumes, and secret identities, was drawn by Gene Ha and Zander Cannon. The series ended after twelve issues, but has spawned four spin-offs: a miniseries Smax, which was set in a fantasy realm and drawn by Cannon; Top 10: The Forty-Niners, a prequel to the main Top Ten series drawn by Ha; and two sequel miniseries, Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct, which was written by Paul Di Filippo and drawn by Jerry Ordway, and Top 10: Season Two, written by Cannon and drawn by Ha.
Moore's series Promethea, which told the story of a teenage girl, Sophie Bangs, who is possessed by an ancient pagan goddess, the titular Promethea, explored many occult themes, particularly the Qabalah and the concept of magic, with Moore stating that "I wanted to be able to do an occult comic that didn't portray the occult as a dark, scary place, because that's not my experience of it… [Promethea was] more psychedelic… more sophisticated, more experimental, more ecstatic and exuberant." Drawn by J.H. Williams III, it has been described as "a personal statement" from Moore, being one of his most personal works, and that it encompasses "a belief system, a personal cosmology".
ABC Comics was also used to publish an anthology series, Tomorrow Stories, which featured a regular cast of characters such as Cobweb, First American, Greyshirt, Jack B. Quick, and Splash Brannigan. Tomorrow Stories was notable for being an anthology series, a medium that had largely died out in American comics at the time.
However, despite the assurances that DC Comics would not interfere with Moore and his work, they subsequently did so, angering him. Specifically, in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen #5, an authentic vintage advertisement for a "Marvel"-brand douche caused DC executive Paul Levitz to order the entire print run destroyed and reprinted with the advertisement amended to "Amaze", to avoid friction with DC's competitor Marvel Comics. A Cobweb story Moore wrote for Tomorrow Stories #8 featuring references to L. Ron Hubbard, American occultist Jack Parsons, and the "Babalon Working", was blocked by DC Comics due to the subject matter. Ironically, it was later revealed that they had already published a version of the same event in their Paradox Press volume The Big Book of Conspiracies.
In 2003, a documentary about him was made by Shadowsnake Films, titled The Mindscape of Alan Moore, which was later released on DVD.
Return to independence: 2009–present
With many of the stories he had planned for America's Best Comics brought to an end, and with his increasing dissatisfaction with how DC Comics were interfering with his work, he decided to once more pull out of the comics mainstream. Speaking to Bill Baker in 2005, he remarked that "I love the comics medium. I pretty much detest the comics industry. Give it another 15 months, I'll probably be pulling out of mainstream, commercial comics." However, Moore continued The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Volume III: Century, a three volume work published by Knockabout Comics, the first released in 2009, with the second planned for 2011 and the third for 2012.
In 2006, the finished edition of Lost Girls was published, as a slipcased set of three hardcover volumes. The same year he published an eight-page article tracing out the history of pornography in which he argued that a society's vibrancy and success are related to its permissiveness in sexual matters. Decrying that the consumption of contemporary ubiquitous pornography is still widely considered shameful, he called for a new and more artistic pornography that could be openly discussed and would have a beneficial impact on society. He expanded on this for a 2009 book-length essay entitled 25,000 years of Erotic Freedom, which was described by a reviewer as "a tremendously witty history lecture – a sort of Horrible Histories for grownups."
In 2007, Moore married Melinda Gebbie after a lengthy romance. The same year he also appeared in animated form in an episode of The Simpsons – a show he is a fan of – entitled "Husbands and Knives", which aired on his fifty-fourth birthday.
In 2010 Moore began what he described as "the 21st century's first underground magazine". Titled Dodgem Logic, the bi-monthly publication consists of work by a number of Northampton-based authors and artists, as well as original contributions from Moore.
In January 2011, the fourth and final issue of Moore's Neonomicon was released by Avatar Press. This horror mini-series is set in the H. P. Lovecraft universe, and like its prequel The Courtyard, is illustrated by Jacen Burrows.
A planned project is an occult textbook known as The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, written with Steve Moore. It will be published by Top Shelf in "the future". He is also currently working on a second novel, Jerusalem, which will again be set in Northampton.
