Alan Moore
Conversations
Publication Year: 2011
British comics writer Alan Moore (b. 1953) has a reputation for equal parts brilliance and eccentricity. Living hermit-like in the same Midlands town for his entire life, he supposedly refuses contact with the outside world while creating his strange, dense comics, fiction, and performance art. While Moore did declare himself a wizard on his fortieth birthday and claims to have communed with extradimensional beings, reticence and seclusion have never been among his eccentricities. On the contrary, for long stretches of his career Moore seemed to be willing to chat with all comers: fanzines, industry magazines, other artists, newspapers, magazines, and personal websites. Well over one hundred interviews in the past thirty years serve as testimony to Moore's willingness to be engaged in productive conversation.
Alan Moore: Conversations includes ten substantial interviews, beginning with Moore's first published conversation, conducted by V for Vendetta cocreator David Lloyd in 1981. The remainder cover nearly all of his major works, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, Marvelman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea, From Hell, Lost Girls, and the unfinished Big Numbers.
While Moore's personal life and fraught business relations are discussed occasionally, the interviews chosen are principally devoted to Moore's creative practices and techniques, along with his shifting social, political, and philosophical beliefs. As such, Alan Moore: Conversations should add to any reader's enjoyment and understanding of Moore's work.
Published by: University Press of Mississippi
Cover
Contents
Introduction
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pp. vii-xix
Alan Moore’s privileged position in the history of comics is certain. It is also complex and contradictory. He is, perhaps, still best known for Watchmen (1986–87), though his prodigious output since has reduced that epoch-making series to just one of his many accomplishments in the field...
Chronology
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pp. xxi-xxvi
From the Writer’s Viewpoint
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pp. 3-7
Until recently I had little real contact with the writers of scripts I was commissioned to work from. I’d hazard a guess that most of us on the illustration side of the business have little contact with writers and, consequently, we’re still largely unaware of their views and feelings in regard to their craft...
Garry Leach and Alan Moore
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pp. 8-25
Well, you come up with your plot ideas first. Say we talk about Warrior and a series like V for Vendetta—what I did first was to sit down and work out the entire world, all the stuff that I’m never going to use in the strip, that you never need to know, but I’ve got to know it. You’ve got to have the whole world...
Alan Moore
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pp. 26-43
Since the 1979 publication of Alan Moore’s first strip in a nationally distributed paper—the hilarious Roscoe Moscow, which he wrote and drew under the pseudonym “Curt Vile”—he has become not only one of the most respected comics scripters in Britain, but also the most prolific—working for...
Alan Moore
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pp. 44-60
It’s the supreme and perfect irony, really. The fact that Watchmen was set in a parallel world aside, we were of course writing about our world in the 1980s. We found that in order to avoid treading on people’s toes in terms of their prejudices, it is easier to sidestep certain emotional reactions...
Alan Moore Interview
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pp. 61-94
Pretty much. I’ve been in most of the restaurants of Northampton. I tend to do them on a circuit. I’ll eat at one of them for a couple of months and then get bored with it and go on to the next one. I’m less than electrifying today. I’ve been doing a lot of work this week and have not been getting to bed...
Moore in The Onion Edits
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pp. 95-107
British writer Alan Moore was a comics fan from a very young age—“If you were working-class, you had comics. It was like rickets,” he says—and by the time he was in his twenties, he was making a living writing comics and comic strips. After winning awards for his V for Vendetta series, a grim story about...
The Craft: An Interview with Alan Moore
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pp. 108-135
Having been graciously invited to his Northampton abode by the World’s Greatest Comics Writer, myself (Daniel Whiston), along with David Russell and Andy Fruish had a long and fascinating meeting with the Enlightened One, surrounded as we were by shelves groaning under the weight of books...
Alan Moore Interview
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pp. 136-152
Jess Nevins is the author of a series of books that annotate Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In addition to the annotations, the books normally include several essays by Nevins about historical or thematic elements of the League and their nineteenth-century milieu and an interview...
Moore: “We Wanted to Do Something Which Solved a Lot of the Abiding Problems That Pornography Has.”
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pp. 153-181
Well, that is quite an obvious question. It’s got a lengthy answer. I suppose that it originally started with me having done a number of mainstream comic books in which I felt that if the character was going to be completely rounded, even if that was a character like Swamp Thing, then there should be...
The Mustard Interview: Alan Moore
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pp. 182-206
Alan Moore sinks into a chair behind the coffee table in his home, an unassuming terraced house in Northampton. Bookshelves, tables, and parts of the floor overflow with impressive looking volumes and occult paraphernalia. Comparatively, the kitchen—into which we follow him, tape recorder in hand...
Index
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pp. 207-222
E-ISBN-13: 9781617031601
E-ISBN-10: 1617031607
Print-ISBN-13: 9781617031588
Print-ISBN-10: 1617031585
Publication Year: 2011
Series Title: Conversations with Comic Artists
