Alan Moore: Conversations

Garry Leach and Alan Moore

8 Garry Leach and Alan Moore DAVID ROACH, ANDREW JONES, SIMON JOWETT, AND GREG HILL / 1983 Hellfire 1 (1983): 15–20. Reprinted by permission of David Roach. This interview was conducted at the 1983 Cymrucon by David Roach, Andrew Jones, Simon Jowett and Greg Hill. It is printed with the full permission of Alan and Garry—so sue them, not us! The eagle-eyed amongst you may notice a cameo appearance by Dez Skinn. Hellfire: How do you go about producing a comic story? Alan Moore: 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 in your head so that you can get the texture of it. So I started working out this world from the premise that Margaret Thatcher was going to lose the 1982 elections. Then I worked out that Michael Foot gets in. You know, science fiction! [Laughter] Well he gets rid of the cruise missiles in this country. In 1988, World War III breaks out and a lot of the world gets badly screwed up, but because Britain’s no longer a nuclear target, it doesn’t actually get hit by any bombs. However, the weather is altered forever due to all these calories of heat which are poured into the upper atmosphere, resulting in the Thames Barrier breaking and a lot of England being under water, and then in 1992, after a couple of years of riots, chaos, hunger, dysentery, plague, and all that, the Right Wing groups—who are the only ones with any real organization—get together and take over. So once I’ve worked out the politics of the situation, how the government works and all the details like that, I can start thinking about the actual david roach, andrew jones, simon jowett, greg hill / 1983 9 plotlines for individual episodes, making sure that the plot hangs together nicely with a good beginning, middle, and end, not necessarily in that order, as long as they’re in there somewhere. Then I break it down into as many panels as is required. For a six-page V story, that’ll probably be about forty-two panels, because Dave Lloyd gets a lot of panels onto a page; whereas if I’m doing Marvelman, where you’ve got panels with people knocking down walls and stuff like that, then it’s about five or six panels a page. It’s like a film where you’ve got to take out the forty-two best frames which tell the story. Then you’ve got to go though all the panels and get the dialogue worked out, which is incredibly difficult! What you’ve got to do to get dialogue right is to eavesdrop on public transport . For example, Harold Pinter, his stuff sounds incredibly strange because it’s so much like real life. I remember sitting upstairs on a bus with two families sitting behind me, and one person is saying, “Now do you know, I like a bit of salad.” And another one says, “That’s funny, I like salad, now my wife—you can’t stand salad, can you?” And she says, “Well . . . I like tomato.” And he says, “Oh, I like tomato. Now, it’s funny, I know you can’t stand tomato.” And another one says, “Oh, but my wife likes tomato. Now cucumber, that’s a different thing altogether. Now I like cucumber.” “Oh really, I’m not so partial to cucumber . . .” [Laughter] Well this went on for about half an hour. This is how real human beings talk. You know what I mean. It’s HORRIBLE! I’m depressed for weeks afterwards , but fortunately not everybody talks like that. Garry Leach: Some people talk like you! Alan: Yeah, some people talk like me, but you’ve got to try and catch this sort of speech pattern, and everyone’s got a different one. You’ve got to listen to people and store it all up in your head so that you can make dialogue sound natural. That’s really important, because I think that in comics writing, much of the dialogue is incredibly stilted. I mean...