Alan Moore

Alan Moore (born November 18, 1953, in Northampton, England) is a British writer most famous for his work in comics. He is the co-creator of some of the most acclaimed comic books in history, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell.

Major works

Marvelman/Miracleman

:Main article: Miracleman

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Moore resurrected Marvelman, an obscure British comic which was a thinly disguised ripoff of the American superhero Captain Marvel. The strip, which ran from 1953 to 1963, followed the adventures of Micky Moran, a young boy who was given the power to become a full grown superhero by a recluse astro-scientist who discovered the secret "key harmonic" of the universe. The strip, which maintained a childish innocence and purity, has the distinction of being the first British superhero comic.

Related Topics:
Marvelman - Captain Marvel

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In Moore's revival, begun in 1982, the now adult "Mike" Moran is a married journalist with no memory of his former life as a superhero. Caught in the middle of a hostage situation, he remembers the key word "Kimota" and becomes Marvelman once more. But the world does not remember him, and the simple morality of his former life no longer seems to apply. Mike begins a search for the answers to his past, which involves a secret government conspiracy and technology reverse-engineered from a crashed alien spacecraft.

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After Warrior closed, Marvelman was reprinted and continued at Eclipse Comics, renamed "Miracleman" due to a trademark dispute with Marvel Comics. After disposing of the conspiracy that created him, Miracleman faced his former sidekick in a battle that devastated London, and ultimately used his god-like power to overthrow the governments of the world and institute an uneasy utopia under his rule.

Related Topics:
Eclipse Comics - Utopia

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Miracleman is an early example of post-modernism in superhero comics, and has a strong theme of loss of innocence. Another key idea is that the existence of a superhero would change the world radically, something Moore would return to in Watchmen.

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V for Vendetta

:Main article: V for Vendetta

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Moore's original strip for the British Warrior comic was designed as an homage to the spirit of the British Boys Adventure comics of the 1950s and 60s as well as referencing literary sources such as George Orwell and the libertarianism of William Blake. The title character "V" appears at first to be a modern Robin Hood figure righting wrongs in a corrupt Fascist Britain of the Future, but as the story develops becomes more sinister. Moore's writing in 'V' continually challenges the assumption of moral absolutism.

Related Topics:
George Orwell - William Blake - Robin Hood - Fascist

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Though set in the year 1997 the strip captures the feel of life in Britain in the early 1980s with economic decline and a perpetual drift to the right in national politics. In the strip Moore also innovated for comics the use of the literary device of intertextuality, with V's speech often made up of extended quotes and references that are not cited. Moore also makes extensive use in 'Vendetta' for the first time of the technique that became his motif: using secondary characters to carry forward plot development or elicit background details.

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Swamp Thing

:Main article: Swamp Thing

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Moore's first American work was Swamp Thing, a title starring a man turned into a vegetable monster by an experimental plant growth formula, which at the time was one of DC's poorest selling titles. The editor, Len Wein, had been a huge fan of Moore's work in Warrior and had decided to get Moore to take over the book from Martin Pasko.

Related Topics:
Swamp Thing - Len Wein - Martin Pasko

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Moore's first issue wrapped up Pasko's storyline and set up what would be his own very unique take on a former fan-favourite character.

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In Moore's second issue, "The Anatomy Lesson", the title character is shot and dissected by a scientist. The scientist soon concludes that Swamp Thing is a superficial imitation of a man, his lungs cannot pump air, his brain does not contain neurons. He concludes that the swamp creature is a plant which had absorbed the memories and imitated the life of a dead man; Swamp Thing was never human. The initial shock to his sense of identity led the character to embrace his identity as a plant, discovering new abilities and becoming less a "muck-encrusted mockery of a man" than a virtual vegetation deity.

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Many of Moore's stories dealt with social ills as seen through horror metaphors. Sexual discrimination, racism, violence, fear of nuclear energy, and pollution are all themes addressed in his work. The series was formally ambitious, using unusual story structures and experimenting with different ways to combine text and image for narrative effect. The slow, languorous pace of Steve Bissette's layouts, the intricate textures of John Totleben's inks, and Tatjana Wood's imaginative and atmospheric use of colour were all put to good use.

Related Topics:
Steve Bissette - John Totleben - Tatjana Wood

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The series also revitalised DC's neglected magical and supernatural characters, featuring the Spectre, the Demon, the Phantom Stranger, Deadman and others in supporting roles. At the prompting of Bissette and Totleben, who were fans of The Police and wanted to draw a character who looked like Sting (specifically his character from the film Brimstone and Treacle), Moore created his own magical character, John Constantine, who would go on to headline a title of his own, Hellblazer, that is the longest continuously published comic of DC's Vertigo imprint.

Related Topics:
Spectre - Demon - Phantom Stranger - Deadman - The Police - Sting - Brimstone and Treacle - John Constantine - Vertigo

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Moore's Swamp Thing was enormously influential in showing a larger audience that genre comics could address serious issues and take on literary pretensions. DC followed Swamp Things success by recruiting British writers like Grant Morrison, Jamie Delano, Peter Milligan and Neil Gaiman to write comics in a similar vein, often involving radical revamps of obscure characters, and thus laid the foundation of what became the Vertigo line.

Related Topics:
Grant Morrison - Jamie Delano - Peter Milligan - Neil Gaiman

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Gaiman in particular was strongly influenced by Moore's Swamp Thing work: his Black Orchid, Books of Magic and many early Sandman stories are largely derived from Moore's innovations.

Related Topics:
Black Orchid - Books of Magic - Sandman

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Watchmen

:Main article: Watchmen

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Moore's most popular comic work, Watchmen , is about superheroes who have been affected by real world politics. McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War have unhinged the current superhero generation.

Related Topics:
Watchmen - McCarthyism - Vietnam War - Cold War

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Watchmen deconstructed the superhero, looking at the moral, psychological, and sexual implications of their activities. His most far reaching work to date, Watchmen addressed such issues as free will, the nature of time, human psychology, global politics, and moral relativism.

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Watchmen incorporated cinema style transitions and voice overs. It avoided the then typically-used comic book thought bubble.

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Watchmen is the only comic to be granted an honorary Hugo award. Moore said it was his final statement on superheroes, and, upon completing his commitment of Miracleman, retired from mainstream comics.

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Supreme

:Main article: Supreme

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Moore was asked by publisher Rob Liefeld to write further adventures of Supreme, Liefeld's violent, inconsistently-written Superman knockoff. Moore agreed on the condition that he could throw out everything previously done with the character, as he felt the comic was not very good, and turned the series into a post-modern homage to the innocence and imagination of Mort Weisinger's Superman.

Related Topics:
Rob Liefeld - Mort Weisinger

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Beginning with issue 41, Moore began developing a new approach to comic storytelling and the Superhero. Supreme is a complex comic, containing layers upon layers of metafiction, each issue containing further comment on the nature of comics history, storytelling, and the Superman mythos.

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Supreme's secret identity is Ethan Crane, a mild-mannered artist for Dazzle Comics. When not saving the world as the archetypical superhero, he illustrates the adventures of Omniman, an ultra-violent Supreme-like character going under a relaunch with a change of writers. In the first issue, Supreme discovers he is living in the most recent "revision," as reality is an ever-changing story and there have been many versions of himself who came before. Retired Supremes live in the "Supremacy", an afterlife for characters whose stories have come to an end.

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Supreme learns that his memories are "backstory" gradually being filled in until his real memories are indistinguishable from the filled-in, never-happened ones of the past. Flashback Supreme sequences are told in the comic style of the era, reflecting different periods of comics history.

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From Hell

:Main article: From Hell

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From Hell is, in a different way, as intricately constructed as Watchmen, but this time the intricacy is not of form but of message. It was partly inspired by the title of Douglas Adams' novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. To solve a crime holistically, one would need to solve the entire society it occurred in. Moore's take on the Jack the Ripper murders is not a "whodunit": he spells out his (fictional) culprit and the reasons for his actions very early on. From Hell takes Stephen Knight's largely discredited Final Solution, slightly modified, as its starting point (see Jack the Ripper royal conspiracy theories): the killer is Sir William Withey Gull, the royal surgeon, silencing all those who knew about Prince Albert Victor's illegitimate child; but as Gull remarks, "Averting Royal embarrassment is but the fraction of my work that's visible above the waterline."

Related Topics:
Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Holistically - Jack the Ripper - Whodunit - Stephen Knight - Jack the Ripper royal conspiracy theories - William Withey Gull - Prince Albert Victor

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The murders are an occult ritual, a complex sacrifice using Victorian London itself as an altar. The symbolism of London's landmarks is explored in a tour de force chapter, in which Gull explains his motives to his uncomprehending coachman. Women had power over men once, Gull believes, and the irrational, Dionysian unconscious mind once dominated the rational, Apollonian conscious mind. Gull is reason's lunatic, carrying out an act of magic to enforce the rational, masculine hegemony. Following the murder of Marie Kelly, Gull claims to have "delivered" the twentieth century, a mysterious statement perhaps clarified by the conception of Adolf Hitler, depicted at the beginning of Chapter 5, which must have taken place in the month of the murders.

Related Topics:
London - Dionysian - Apollonian - Adolf Hitler

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On a more prosaic level, Moore indicts the inequalities of Victorian society, contrasting Gull and the wealthy circles he moves in with the hand-to-mouth existence of the women he targets, the moral disgust shown at the peccadilloes of the poor with the depths the rich are prepared to sink to to protect the appearance of propriety, the imaginary anti-semitic conspiracy theories which divert the police's investigations with the real conspiracy that controls them. Just about every notable figure of the period is connected with the events in some way, from Joseph Merrick, the "Elephant Man", to Oscar Wilde, from the Native American writer Black Elk to William Morris, the artist Walter Sickert to Aleister Crowley, who makes a brief appearance as a young boy in short trousers, sucking on a candy cane, and lecturing the police about magic.

Related Topics:
Anti-semitic - Joseph Merrick - Oscar Wilde - Native American - Black Elk - William Morris - Walter Sickert - Aleister Crowley

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Almost none of this made it into the film adaptation, which merely dramatised Knight's theory as a "whodunnit", with the addition of a psychic, opium-addicted police detective, who bears some superficial similarities to Sherlock Holmes. The finished film thus has many points of comparison with the 1979 Bob Clark-directed Murder by Decree, which featured Holmes catching the Ripper in a dramatisation of the Knight theory.

Related Topics:
Opium - Bob Clark - Murder by Decree

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Moore has always been at pains to point out that From Hell is fiction, and that he used Knight's theory for its artistic potential rather than its accuracy; yet he included an "author's statement" in the serialised publication of the epilogue which consisted of a blown-up panel from the prologue, depicting the psychic Robert Lees confessing that although his visions were accurate, they were fraudulent: "I made it all up, and it all came true anyway. That's the funny part."

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