Why
Dave Gibbons will be watching the Watchmen
Alan Moore is an anarchist and a practising magician who is acknowledged as
Britain’s finest author of comics. He is also a recluse given to tantrums.
Not content with disowning Hollywood’s newly released version of his classic
story Watchmen, he has refused to take a penny.
The 55-year-old author helped to make comics the new rock’n’roll in 1986 with
his 12-part series Watchmen, a richly detailed “graphic novel” that
introduced the revolutionary notion of morally ambiguous superheroes who
come out of retirement in an America where the costumed characters are real.
Once feted as the Orson Welles of comic books, mobbed by fans and courted by
directors, he has retreated to his den.
Moore, a 6ft figure of straggling hair and a chest-length beard, sporting
scary rings and a walking stick carved in the shape of a snake, has his
reasons. These have nothing to do with the “travesties” Hollywood made of
his books V for Vendetta (his response to Thatcherism), From Hell (a Jack
the Ripper tale that starred Johnny Depp) and The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen (featuring a multi-hero team from Victorian fiction). Moore struck
his credits from those movies too.
His point is that the books were never designed to be films. “This is what
I’ve been trying to explain to these stupid bastards for the past 20 years,”
he said recently. “They were designed to exploit all the things that comic
books can do and no other medium can.”
Besides, he cannot stop studios making movies of his early work as the rights
are held by DC Comics, with which he has an acrimonious history. When Terry
Gilliam once asked him how he would make a film of Watchmen, Moore’s advice
was blunt: “Don’t.” Gilliam was one of many directors who fell by the
wayside during 20 years of abortive efforts to bring the film to the screen.
To those who argue that such movies can draw new readers into comic book
culture, Moore’s response is equally dismissive. People said the same about
the Batman films, he pointed out. “What happened was, some people went to a
Forbidden Planet store and bought Batman toys. Maybe some of them bought a
Batman comic. And then they found that the comic was nothing like as
exciting as the film.”
A failed cartoonist who realised long ago that “I was nowhere near good enough
or fast enough to succeed”, Moore leaves the drawing to others, notably Dave
Gibbons for Watchmen. His author’s role is to craft scripts with minutely
detailed instructions “so there’s no chance for misunderstanding”.
Malcolm McLaren, the punk entrepreneur, once told him during their
collaboration on a screenplay: “You know, Alan, you really should leave
something for the director to do.” To which accusation Moore protests that
his greatest skill is cooperating with artists and readily deferring to
them.
He has a theory that there is an inverse relationship between imagination and
money in the movie world: the more bucks and technology, the less original
the film. His favourite films, such as Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête,
were made on a shoestring.
Although this sounds dour and Moore cuts an intimidating figure, acquaintances
attest to an affable, even avuncular man – “a great big harmless hippie”. He
is said to be deaf in one ear and partially blind. Magic, he claims, is now
a central part of his life. An adherent of The Moon and Serpent Grand
Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, which performs “occult workings”, he reveres
Glycon, the snake god, and is writing a black magic handbook.
“I think a boy’s got to have a hobby,” he reflected. “And with magic you get
some really good toys. And it’s really good for interior decor.” He was
referring to his three-bedroom mid-terrace house in Northampton, converted
into a part-Byzantine temple of the gods featuring a circular stained-glass
window in the bath-room – “I’ll never be able to sell it.”
He shares the house with his second wife, Melinda Gebbie, a Californian comic
book artist with whom he collaborated on his pornographic tale Lost Girls.
The work, for which he predicted he would be “burnt at the stake”, explores
the sexual experiences of three grown-up heroines of children’s literature –
Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Wendy from
Peter Pan – who meet in 1913. Publication in Britain was delayed because of
a legal dispute with Great Ormond Street hospital, which owns the rights to
Peter Pan.
Moore’s first marriage ended when an experiment in polygamy went wrong. He had
married Phyllis at the age of 20 and they had two daughters. By the late
1980s he was in a ménage à trois with Phyllis and their mutual lover, Debbie
Delano. “We decided we wanted to experiment with a different way of living,”
he said. “We did this very openly; we didn’t hide it.” However, the
relationship was not sustainable. “It ended explosively, as you might
expect.” The two women went off together.
Moore was born on November 18, 1953, in the Boroughs, the oldest and most
impoverished area of Northampton. The son of a brewer father and a printer
mother, he loved comics as a child, learning to copy the drawings, but also
gravitated towards the fairy stories, mythology and Arthurian romances that
he found in the local library.
He passed the 11-plus but felt out of place among the middle-class children at
Northampton grammar school and embraced the 1960s counterculture. The
headmaster, he complained, “had it in for me”. With good reason: Moore was
inspired by Timothy Leary, the American writer who coined the phrase “Turn
on, tune in, drop out”, but realised he could emulate his hero in only one
respect: as an LSD dealer. Moore’s efforts to turn on members of the school
rugby team led him to drop out – he was expelled at 17.
The headmaster wrote to colleges and universities, warning that Moore posed a
risk to their pupils, which he felt was a bit harsh: “I wasn’t really making
any profit out of it.” The problem with being an acid dealer, he conceded,
was that sampling the product gave him a distorted sense of reality.
The net effect was to limit his employment to menial jobs. He started in the
skinning division of the Cooperative Society. “We’d go to work at 7.30 in
the morning, drag these blood-sodden sheepskins out of vats of cold water
and urine, chop off extraneous testicles or hooves and throw them at each
other in this concentration camp gaiety we’d established to cope with the
grimness of our surroundings.”
From there he “climbed the social ladder” to became a lavatory cleaner for a
hotel. In his spare time he submitted comic strips to underground magazines.
Two years later he was bringing in £45 a week – £35 for a regular half-page
in Sounds, a music weekly, under the pseudonym Curt Vile, and £10 from
Maxwell the Magic Cat, which ran in the local paper.
After some “grindingly tedious” office jobs, it was while working as a clerk
for the gas board that he made the jump to writing and was taken on by 2000
AD, a leading British comic. On the strength of winning a string of Eagle
awards with 2000 AD’s rival Warrior, he was hired by DC Comics, the
publisher of Superman and Batman, where he transformed Swamp Thing into a
successful series that sold more than 100,000 copies an issue. Moore is
credited with introducing adult themes and a literary approach that
reflected his interest in William Blake and William Burroughs. But when DC
Comics decided to paste “adults only” warnings on some of his works, he had
one of his “Bette Davis-style tantrums” and severed his relationship with
the publisher.
Moore also had troubles with DC over the 8% of the series’ earnings he was paid.
At first it seemed a lot, paying for his house, his car and much else
besides, before he calculated that the publisher was pocketing 92% for
“getting it to the printer on time”.
He moved to the Wildstorm imprint to produce the popular America’s Best Comics
range. The characters include Tom Strong, a hero possessed of superhuman
strength who resolves problems through common sense, the magic-infused
Promethea and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
He is now said to be writing his second “proper” novel. His debut attempt,
Voice of the Fire, was handicapped by the fact that the first chapter was
written in an invented neolithic language. The latest is set in Northampton,
which was the model for an ambitious 12-part project that foundered after
two issues when the artists went missing. Moore wondered: “When two artists
run screaming into the night, you ask yourself: is it me?”
His birthplace continues to fascinate him: “In Northampton we started
persecuting the Jews before everybody else and stopped burning witches after
everyone else. That gives you some idea of the character of the place.”
There is a heroic quality about his resistance to Hollywood’s siren calls and
his refusal to compromise. But Moore’s integrity is important to him:
“Speaking as a former high school drug dealer, reputation is everything.”
