Comic Brilliance

Universe

Pages: 320

$45

We live in the Age of Alan Moore. Our entire cultural universe bears the invisible fingerprints of the legendary British comic book writer. Moore is mostly known to the general public through the blockbusters that Hollywood has made out of his works,though of course his influence runs far deeper than that. Critics often point to Moore’s 1986 graphic novel Watchmen (with artist Dave Gibbons) as the time when “comics finally grew up”. Not only did Moore profoundly influence comics,but he also triggered the Brit Wave,a spectacular infusion of talent including Neil Gaiman,Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison.

Comic book fans are lucky that they live in a world where the prime innovators are still contemporary. Film enthusiasts will have to hark to the time of Sergei Eisenstein and D.W. Griffith when the first principles of that art form were being laid. But comics today is a living field with a huge explosion of talent,and towering over them like Zeus on the unapproachable slopes of Olympus is Moore.

So Gary Spencer Millidge’s Alan Moore: Storyteller has come out at the right time. It is important to point out that this book is not a biography. It is billed as a “handbook” to Moore’s career. It is more a compendium,a guided visual tour of the universe of his imagination.

The book constructs Moore’s evolution like archaeological strata — it lays bare the innumerable influences on his worldview. Millidge writes,“Moore is a subversive,maverick genius who identified the essential elements of the genre he is working in and tears them apart,before rebuilding them according to his own rules.”

Profusely illustrated,Storyteller is a credit to any coffee-table on which it cares to repose. Millidge,a industry veteran,has clearly pulled out all the stops: among other things,there is a full colour reproduction of Moore’s baptismal certificate,school photos,early poems in school magazine and so on. The book reveals that Moore was born blind in his left eye,the result of a congenital defect. It also comes with a CD of Moore’s spoken word performances where his gravelly Northamptonshire accent sounds like,well,Zeus.

The most interesting part for me was finding out that Moore started out as artist-writer. For nearly seven years,he drew and wrote a strip called Maxwell the Magic Cat which was supposed to be an antidote for Garfield!

The real treat for comic fans is the rare window to Moore’s working. Pre-production sketches and the back-and-forth correspondence between writer and artist show how the character design evolved.

Fans will drool over the pullout reproducing three pages from the original,typewritten script of V for Vendetta. You also get to see the evolution of Moore’s style. As one of the many writers for the magazine 2000 AD in the early 1980s,Moore would not know which artist would finally illustrate his script. This led to his now signature,ultra-descriptive style,a quest for what he called an “artist-proof” script. As he explains,“You have to put in all the details you can think of and you try and make it as entertaining and as exciting for the artist as possible,so that even if they’re not inspired at all,maybe once they’ve read your story they’ll want to give it just that extra little bit of effort.”

Moore,who was born in a working-class neighbourhood in Northampton in 1953,was expelled from the grammar school at the age of 17 for dealing LSD. The headmaster made sure to write to other schools and potential employers,“warning” them about Moore. After a series of menial jobs,Moore decided to gamble; he quit his job and focused on trying to get his stories into the comic magazines that were flourishing in Britain at the time.

Moore is staggeringly erudite,one of the last of the self-taught polymaths. His employment career varied from drug dealer to sheep-skinner. You don’t see that kind of background anymore,with most authors freshly minted from writing-workshops. He also cuts an imposing figure. Millidge describes him: “serpent-headed walking cane in hand,six-foot-two,clad in faded black,Rasputin hair and with an impressive beard showing streaks of gray,on occasion sporting ostentatious jointed fighter-rings or a wide-brimmed hat.”

Millidge also has a chapter on Hollywood’s disastrous treatment of Moore’s comics,with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen being the worst offender. As Moore mischievously explains: “The League film cost 100 million because Sean Connery wanted 17 million of that — and a bigger explosion than the one he’d had in his last film. It’s in his contract that he has to have a bigger explosion with every film he’s in. In The Rock he’d blown up an island,and he was demanding in The League that he blow up … Venice. It would have been the Moon in his next movie.”

For all the exhaustive research,Storyteller doesn’t really tell you (neither does it try) what makes Moore tick. That story is yet to be written.

As Moore says,“My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres. My experience of life is that it is a horrifying,romantic,tragic science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know,with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky.”