If you meet Alan Moore on the street, you might mistake him for a hobo. It’s hard to believe that this scruffy, bearded man is a comics legend, creator of Constantine, Watchmen, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He’s also a recluse who practices magic and worships the Roman snake god Glycon. What is more in this messiah of the comic book world – genius or arrogance? Let’s find out.
At the beginning of his career, the future maestro not only composed short stories, but also drew them himself. Alan Moore’s first characters were animals – politically active mouse Anon I. Mouse, panda St. Sacras and ironic cat Maxwell.
But Alan soon realized his skills as an artist were lacking and focused on subjects. He wrote a story for the 2000AD anthology about Judge Dredd, a major British comic book hero. It wasn’t accepted, but the young author was noticed. After stretching himself with 4-5 page short stories on Doctor Who and dystopian sketches of the future in the Future Shocks series of strips, Moore soon began receiving more serious job offers, including from 2000AD’s main competitors, Marvel UK and the publishers of the Warrior anthology. It was at Warrior that the monthly series Marvelman (later renamed Miracleman) and “V for Vendetta” began to appear, turning Moore from promising newcomer to star.
Moore’s fame spread across the ocean. DC Comics invited him to write the script for the poorly selling Swamp Thing series. As he had done with Miracleman before, Moore started the series from scratch, setting up an event in the critter’s life that turned his world upside down. The stories were so compelling that the series not only didn’t lose old readers (of which there weren’t many), but gained new fans.
In the Swamp Thing comics, occult detective John Constantine made his first appearance. Although outwardly he resembled the singer Sting, in fact it was Moore himself – a cynical and distrustful Englishman, a native of the working class. The character was beloved by readers and was soon given a long-running solo series.
Skillfully juggling the ideas of other authors, Moore turned other people’s universes into his own. The logical continuation was the publication of comics about their own worlds in the DC imprint – Vertigo. That’s how the dystopia “V for Vendetta” found new life, and that’s how “Watchmen” was born.
“Vendetta” came about as a reflection on what a Cold War world could come to with reactionaries in power – Reagan in the US and Thatcher in Britain. In the story, after a nuclear war in England, a fascist party usurps power. It seeks to unite society with a single idea and purge minorities, who are sent to concentration camps. A former prisoner of one of them, wearing a smiling Guy Fawkes mask, becomes an anarchy incarnate: he blows up government buildings, hunts the party leadership and successfully opposes the system.
In 2006, when the comic was adapted, the mask of the main character became a symbol of revolutions and the Anonumous movement. It is recognized even by those who have not seen the comic book or the film. Moore approves of this as a counterbalance to what he believes the authorities have learned from the comic book.
Following Vendetta, Moore began work on the most detailed superhero epic ever – Guardians. Unlike Miracleman, where superheroes appear as Nietzschean superhumans, the characters of “Guardians” are as real as possible. They are trying to find their place in a society living in constant fear of nuclear apocalypse.
The story begins with the shocking murder of a superhero and spirals downward, plunging the reader deeper and deeper into the conspiracy and constantly reminding them of the end of the world. The comic was groundbreaking in everything from the character development to the appendices to each installment. The recurring question “Who guards against the guardians?” (variant – “Who guards the keepers?”) addresses readers, urging them to think: why do they admire masked vigilantes who put themselves above the law? Who gave the heroes the right to do so? Do they make the world a better place? The characters’ opinions varied, leaving readers to decide for themselves.
In 1987, Alan proposed an even bolder scenario: “Twilight of the Superheroes”, the finale of the entire DC universe. According to Moore’s plan, in the future the world is ruled by superhero clans – the House of Steel (the union of Superman and Wonder Woman), the House of Thunder (the family of Captain Marvel) and others. The dynastic alliance of the strongest houses carries a threat to the balance, and the wedding is tried to prevent the weaker heroes – Constantine and Batman. DC didn’t give the okay to develop this exciting idea, as it suggested the ultimate dystopia and the end of most of the lucrative series. Then Moore realized that he was not on his way with corporations, stamping comics and movies about the same heroes year after year.
Having ruined relations with DC, in the 1990s Alan decided to quit and with superheroes, and with the work for large publishers. He kept coming back to the former, but he was stubborn about the latter. Moore decided to see if he could come up with the stories that the brutal “big guns and metal” era of comics demanded. He wrote stories for several issues of Spidey and Supreme, and had the distinct pleasure of working on the Tom Strong series, a cross between the Tarzan novels and the Superman comics of the 1960s.
Alan Moore touched upon the theme of changing eras in “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”. The series brings together the heroes of Stoker, Haggard, Verne, Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells. Moore grew up on books by these authors, and he is pleased that the comic book has made many people want to read them. Another great series Moore published at the turn of the millennium is Top Ten, a story full of references about a police station in a city where everyone has superpowers.
Moore’s fascination with the occult and magic is reflected in the comic strip Prometheus, where the ancient goddess of imagination finds a new avatar in the form of student Sophie. The colorful psychedelic design of the comic made it look like a grimoire. And lately, Moore has been busy reimagining Howard Lovecraft’s legacy. Alan has rid the world of Cthulhu of the racist overtones that characterized the early 20th century, and introduced the theme of sex. The three sequential stories The Courtyard, Neonomicon, and Providence take place in different times and feature different characters, but all are mysterious, shocking, and creepy in their own way.
Moore’s comics have always attracted the attention of Hollywood. Five of them have been screened: “From Hell”, ‘Constantine’ (twice), ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’, ‘V for Vendetta’, ‘Watchmen’. But none of the screen adaptations Moore does not recognize, does not allow his name to be mentioned in the credits and does not even receive royalties. And as a magician, he even cursed them. Why? Crazy whim, recklessness?
The fact is that Alan refuses to see his life’s work as “raw material” for movies. Moore considers comics an independent form of art, not always combined with the movie. And looking at the film adaptations, one can agree with him. “From Hell” and ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ take from the comics only a few plot lines, changing and discarding the rest, and as movies are simply weak. Both “Constantine” and at all free fantasy, taking from the original only characters. The screenwriters of “V for Vendetta”, then the Wachowski brothers, treated the source material more carefully, but they also changed key elements of the comic book. Thus, the movie never mentions fascism and anarchy.