Alan Moore is DONE with Comics

Or: My Second Fisk

Okay, what the heck did I read?!

I feel like I walked through a sewer. Gross. This…oh, boy, readers. Brace yourselves, because this Fisk is going to be long and not so fun as the prior one.

Thanks to Foxfier for putting me onto this article from The Guardian, where Alan Moore was interviewed by a Mr. Sam Leith (there’s a shorter version of the interview here at Deadline which cuts snippets from the Guardian piece). In the interests of full disclosure, I have never liked Moore nor thought his work particularly brilliant. His writing isn’t something I am inclined to read. This article has gone a long way to reinforcing my opinion. Yuck.

As before, the original article is in italics. My comments are in bold. Hang on to your hats, readers!

Watchmen author Alan Moore: ‘I’m definitely done with comics’

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And may I say on behalf of all those who are not his fans: “Thank God!”

As he releases his first short story collection, the revered writer talks about magic, the problem with superhero movies and why he will never write another graphic novel.

For a second there, I thought this mention of “magic” meant “magic in stories.” Nope, that’s what I get for not reading carefully. Why did it take him this long to decide not to write more graphic novels? It appears he hasn’t liked doing it for a while. Why quit now and not earlier? Were there contracts involved?

“I’ve been enamoured of prose fiction for quite a long while,” says Alan Moore.

…And? But? So? Most writers are “enamored of prose fiction.” Stan Lee was a big reader. So were Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Writers read. It’s what they do, even when what they mostly write are scripts. (For those not in the know, comics are like movies in that unless you are both illustrator and writer, you need to write a script for the illustrator to draw. Yes, I looked into it. No, I haven’t gotten around to writing comic scripts yet.)

If you don’t read, you don’t learn, which means that your writing skills either atrophy or petrify. Reading is to writers what training is to athletes; it keeps us mentally, emotionally, and to some degree physically fit to WRITE. Why is Moore treating this like some dirty little secret? It’s not like comic book readers don’t read prose fiction, and vice versa. If the back of a jam jar was interesting, I would read THAT – and I have, when I’m utterly desperate for SOME form of brain activity to keep my mind busy.

This just feels condescending and unnecessary.

He is speaking to me from his home in Northampton for the launch of Illuminations, a short story collection – and, at the age of 68, his first.

So releasing my own short story collection – the first in a series of same – at this time of my life doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.

“But when I started my professional career, it tended to take a bit of a back seat because there were other things going on.”

Such as? This seems a rather disingenuous way to begin an interview, bub. Almost like you’re trying to distance yourself from the career that, you know, made you a big name in the first place. If you’re interested in using your platform to sell your new book, this tactic is of dubious value.

That is unless your primary interest is in marketing your new anthology to a snobby “upper crust” that you now prefer, that cannot be bothered to read any comics because your new aficionados see them as low brow and vulgar (read: popular). In which case, while this strategy may make sense at some level, it means you’re not going to sell as many copies of your anthology as you could if you included your comic book fans. It is also bad form to pick on ANY fans you have since, you know, there’s the little matter of them supporting you financially for years and GIVING YOU A CAREER IN THE FIRST PLACE.

“Other things”, for those who don’t know Moore’s work, is his gracefully understated shorthand…

It’s neither graceful, understated, nor shorthand. It is hubris and false modesty. The man’s a big name in the comic book world – big enough that I, who dislike his work, know it and recognize it. I can also guess at the contents of whatever story has his name attached to it because his fame is such that I have enough familiarity with his previously published stories to have a pretty good idea of what will be in his coming ventures. As I said, it sounds like he’s trying to distance himself from the fans and the industry that GAVE HIM HIS FAME IN THE FIRST PLACE.

But do continue, Mr. Leith. Let us see where this madness leads.

…for a 40-year career in the funny papers that made him probably the most respected comics writer on the planet.

Can we get both sides of the Lee/Kirby debate to weigh in here? I’m pretty sure that whether you think Stan was a thief and a devil who stole Kirby’s rights or not, we can all agree Moore is not THE “most respected comics writer on the planet.” He’s a big name, but far from the biggest and certainly NOT the best or most respected.

Mr. Leith skates over a number of other comic writers who are still living and who have, in fact, written prose as well as comics. Chris Claremont is the one who springs immediately to mind, having written novels as well as comics. Claremont’s name also has much more weight in ACTUAL COMICS FANDOM than Moore’s, and while I don’t agree with the man on much, he left one heck of a mark on the industry. Alan Moore is likely more easily recognized by those whose knowledge of comics is rougher than mine, and I’m not as well versed in the business as I might be.

That being said, I wouldn’t peg Moore as being that high on the totem pole of comic book writers or their fans. A lot of them pride themselves on being able to name names going back further than the ‘80s – if you only go back that far, you automatically out yourself as someone “not in the comics club.” I know more Marvel than DC writers because I like Marvel better, but that still means I can name more big shots in the industry who have greater fame and a larger impact than Moore, something Mr. Leith here can’t do because – as far as I can tell – his only exposure to the comic graphics is the Marvel films he’s likely watched only when bored out of his mind.

Next line:

Yet he [Moore] has always had literary roots:

Why harp on this, Mr. Leith? All writers read. Screenwriters, video game writers – heck, JOURNALISTS and other poseurs purport to read. If your stock in trade is words then you READ. Unless, like that mental deficient, you seem to think that comic book writers never passed beyond picture book-level literacy.

Newsflash, Mr. Leith: comics’ writers CAN and do read beyond picture book-level. May the same be said for you?

…his best-known work, Watchmen…

I have Opinions on that. As a friend said, Watchmen is Lord of the Flies, but the protagonists are adults with super powers rather than boys stranded on a desert island. More of my Opinions on Watchmen can be found here, as well, and the search engine at the link can take you to what I think of Lord of the Flies. (News flash, not much.)

…took its title from Juvenal…

My short story in the Sol Anthology took its title from the Bible – the New Testament, specifically. What’s your point?

…and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was peopled by the canonical characters of 19th-century adventure stories.

The Sisters Grimm book series and the Once Upon a Time TV series took inspiration from fairy tales and classic works of children’s fantasy. Again, is there a point to this, Mr. Leith? I can agree that The League of Extraordinary Gentleman gave us a fairly good film with a handful of good ideas, but I don’t see the point of acting like LEG was/is new, “brave,” “daring,” or any of that twaddle. Several other writers have done similar things with other characters in the public domain – and they have done it MUCH BETTER. Why does Moore’s doing it make him so heroic and your new BFF?

Once Upon a Time in a nutshell.

So, although Moore avowedly dislikes nostalgia…

Nostalgia in excess, like chocolate and sugar, is bad. In moderation it simply IS. Why does everyone feel the need to pick on ol’ nostalgia? Let’s check the dictionary…

Per Merriam-Webster (hard back, not online): NOSTALGIA 1: the state of being homesick: HOMESICKNESS

2: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irreconcilable condition; also: something that evokes nostalgia.

Well, yes, no one should WANT to be homesick all the time. Key word there is “sick” – who LIKES being sick? Little bouts of nostalgia are normal. It is, dare I say it, human. What’s so bad about that?

Hmm. Considering the hero of Watchman was supposed to be the guy who “left humanity behind,” as the Red Skull put it, mayhap the answer to my question is more obvious than it may appear. It also strikes me that Moore doth protest too much: Is he not rather too blatantly trying to cash in on any nostalgia for his comic book career to sell this, his new book that you are being paid to hype?

But let’s read on and see what else there is to see here.

…short fiction is a sort of coming home – back to the library he joined at the age of five…

See? Nostalgia is a human trait. Nothing wrong with it.

…and, once he’d outgrown Enid Blyton and Just William, where he got his teeth into science fiction and fantasy.

Duly noted. Continue.

The young Moore tore through Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, HP Lovecraft and, especially, Mervyn Peake.

Good material to read, particularly if you want to become a writer, whether you want to work in the sci-fi and fantasy genres or not. The only names on that list I have yet to read are Bradbury and Peake, and I plan to tackle Bradbury (looks under desk) when I have the time…

The Gormenghast novels, he says, “were probably the first books where I began to understand just what you could do with writing: how he could conjure this entire complex environment and these almost fluorescent characters that stayed in your mind for ever”.

Never read Peake’s work myself, but if he got you interested in reading and then writing, he did his job and did it well. We all have books that open the door like that for us, sooner or later. I hope I’m good enough to open the door for someone, someday.

The stories in Illuminations follow where Peake and those other writers led.

*looking at Watchmen* Somehow I doubt that.

Formally and tonally varied, each is a little feat of world-building.

Everyone does that… Dooo go on.

Not Even Legend imagines a paranormal being infiltrating a meeting for enthusiasts of the paranormal. Location, Location, Location finds a conveyancing solicitor introducing the messiah to his new property (an end-of-terrace house in Bedford; original site, as it turns out, of the Garden of Eden), while the biblical apocalypse takes place, gaudily, overhead. American Light: An Appreciation plays a Pale Fire-style trick with the footnotes to an imaginary beat generation poem tracing a journey through the streets of San Francisco. The Improbably Complex High-Energy State imagines a sort-of-civilisation’s rise and fall in the first zeptosecond after the big bang. Cold Reading is a twist-in-the-tale ghost story with a flavour of WW Jacobs; while the title story – describing a lonely middle-aged man’s nostalgic return to the English seaside resort where he spent his childhood holidays, based on a similar trip Moore made to Yarmouth – has a Ray Bradbury vibe.

…

….

For anyone who wants something a little more lighthearted than that, I have an anthology of short stories available for purchase here* on Amazon. (Yes, that’s an affiliate link – I’m not Alan Moore. After all I need to eat.) Also, who taught Mr. Leith to write? In addition, who hit “publish” for his article? The titles of each story get mixed up with the description. If they were italicized or at least put in quotations, they would be easier to grasp at first reading than they are here. Ploughing through this mish-mash is just headache-inducing.

The longest piece by far is What We Can Know About Thunderman, which you could read as Moore’s farewell to the comics industry…

Okay, here we go…

…more of a “good riddance” than “ae fond kiss”. In his afterword he describes that story as having “exploded like a lanced boil”, and it’s a scabrous mickey take of an industry full of crooks, perverts, weirdos and arrested adolescents.

That seems to be a problem with a lot of institutions, businesses, and franchises these days. Used to be you didn’t have as many traipsing around various industries as you do now. Not that ALL of them could be kept OUT of everything ALL THE TIME (looking at you, William Moulton Marston, among others), but the general trend was not what it is at present.

Oddly, that description feels like it perfectly encapsulates Moore’s and Leith’s own mindsets.

One long and memorable scene finds its protagonists going through the flat of a revered industry figure after his death and finding his apartment literally waist-deep in pornographic magazines – and worse.

Yeeaaah…. Pretty sure that’s what Moore’s mind actually looks like, judging by the rest of this article. I will mourn for whomsoever may be required to sort through and clean out HIS personal effects when he passes…as eventually we all do.

Yet it also contains a rapturous evocation, with the pulse of memory in it, of a child’s encounter with the magical carousel of comic books in a 1950s five-and-dime: “the flimsy miracles that […] filled the boy’s fixed, dilated gaze”.

How did that quote go again? “Nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so.” You can start out innocent as the first dawn of time and still turn into an ugly old perv – which, according to this article and the attendant pictures, Moore certainly seems to have become.

Moore himself grew up on the drabber DC Thomson titles such as Beano and Dandy (“The Eagle was for middle-class children, and we didn’t really have it around the house”):  

I am left to guess that these are English comics, since they are class denoted and don’t ring any bells for me; here in America, as in all things, the comic genre is for everyone.

“It was very easy for me to be seduced by my first glimpse of American comics, which would have been on a market stall in town run by a gentleman called Sid, who very much resembled a late-period Will Eisner. That was where I got my first breathless visions of all of these … these colour comics that were about fantastic characters.”

Well, America ended its WWII rationing system in 1946-47, well ahead of England, which maintained its World War II rationing programs until the mid-1950’s, so our comics were probably brighter and more vibrant because of that. To say nothing whatsoever of the artistic talent we had at various comic publishers: There was, of course, Jack “King” Kirby and Steve Ditko, as well as Don Heck and John Romita, Sr. Stan Lee didn’t do as much drawing as writing, and his position as head of the company in the seventies meant he didn’t get to do much of that as the years passed, either.

These are comic book artists I can name, by the way. There were and are MANY others, but I can’t keep track of them all as well as other fans can. George Perez, God rest his soul, passed away just this year due to cancer. He illustrated Jim Starlin and Steve Englehart’s runs on the Avengers, among other comics at Marvel (and, if I remember correctly, DC as well). We had an embarrassingly rich array of artists at work in the industry for decades, and while I can’t recall where I read it now, an art teacher some time back used Jack Kirby’s drawings in his classes, counting him one of the three best artists of all time.

Yes, really. A comic book artist was, by an art teacher, put on the same level as ALL the artists of the past. He really was that good, so I am far from surprised his and the others’ art would arrest Mr. Moore’s attention.

[Moore]’s own career in comics – The Ballad of Halo Jones, Swamp Thing, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell are just the highlights…

I think it says something that I know just four of those titles, and I always confuse the name Swamp Thing with Marvel’s eldritch hero Man-Thing (sorry, Man-Thing) because of the use of “thing” in their names. Also, there ought to be a comma after “Gentleman” to help keep the titles separated – it’s known as the Oxford comma, by the way. The titles should all be italicized, too, to denote that they are TITLES, not descriptions.

Grammar, Leith, ever hear of it? Your people INVENTED this language and its rules, the least you could do is WRITE USING BOTH.

…is too well documented, and too long past, to bear much rehashing here.

Hold the phone. If it is too long past and too well documented, WHY are you even bringing it up? Alan Moore is a household name – even I know who he is, though I wish I didn’t. What the HECK is with this fawning, glowing phraseology? (Oh, yeah, a paycheck. DUH.)

Furthermore, if you want to sell a new story, then that means you HAVE to bring up your past works. Despite yours and Moore’s best efforts, all you have done so far is remind us over and over again that he spent most of his career in comics. If you’re trying to help him distance himself from the medium, you are doing a TERRIBLE job of it.

Suffice to say he [Moore] helped transform the medium, showing a formal command and ambition that few contemporaries matched…

Look up Frank Miller and then tell me that. As for why Moore (and, to a degree, Miller’s) “formal command and ambition” wasn’t “matched” by his contemporaries, maybe said contemporaries didn’t match it because they knew it wouldn’t sell well outside of a certain niche? Ask Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Waid, Mark Millar, Joe Quesada, and most recently Chuck Wendig how well all THEIR attempts to imitate Moore worked out. Here, I’ll help you: One More Day (fans hate it), the Ultimate Marvel Universe (cancelled because it didn’t have enough sales to justify continuing, if I recall correctly, and it looked A LOT like a Marvel attempt to ape Watchmen to me), Avengers: Disassembled (fans were IRATE at that event), Dark Avengers, Ragnarok (stupid does not even BEGIN to describe that proposed arc), House of M, the manhandling of Civil War (comic, not the movie), and practically anything written for Marvel in the last ten years….

Basically, Marvel’s biggest comic busts of the 21st century are busts precisely BECAUSE they imitated Moore – and got creamed for it. They’ve tried to course correct since, but that’s just made things worse as they take the Disney Star Wars sequel route of fluffing and fouling up everything in an attempt to please all the people who DON’T CARE about the material in the first place. Moore fills a niche – he is not, and never will, be mainstream. Also, you cannot MAKE him mainstream, Mr. Leith.

Been there, done that, Mr. L. I’ve seen Marvel try this, and have far too many T-shirts for it. Not. Interested.

The One More Day story summarized. Thank you for nothing, Joe Quesada.

…but struggled – just as Superman’s creators Siegel and Shuster had before him – with the rights over his own creations.

The pitfalls of work-for-hire and writing in a shared universe, unfortunately.

His [Moore’s] fallings out with DC Comics (among others) are the stuff of industry folklore.

Jack “King” Kirby is on line one and he is NOT HAPPY with you, you ignorant, petulant boob. Perusing your article, I would have to think you believe comics only got big in the 1980s. There is an entire HISTORY you are glossing over here and, as far as I can tell, you are doing so because you DON’T CARE or can’t be bothered to do a minimum of research on anything written before Watchmen debuted.

As another character might say, up your nose with a rubber hose, pal.

“I’m definitely done with comics,” he [Moore] says.

Deo gratias!

“I haven’t written one for getting on for five years. I will always love and adore the comics medium but the comics industry and all of the stuff attached to it just became unbearable.”

Thank God, you finally said something I can’t disagree with. Outside of manga and French comics, the industry isn’t something I would want to touch with a ten-foot pole. We’ve got some good up-and-comers OUTSIDE the industry who might be in a position to build around, over, and under the current mess, but if you want to write comics, do yourself a favor: Stay as far away from the Big Two and lesser industry giants as possible. They’re getting mighty weak-kneed, and when giants fall, the earth shakes. You don’t want the metaphorical roofs of DC and Marvel falling on your head, so stay away from them for the present. When the dust clears, then we might be able to pick up the pieces, salvage the characters, and put some interesting stories together. But right now, consider this a gigantic DANGER: DO NOT ENTER sign to warn you away from potentially killing your career.

And he [Moore] now looks with dismay on the way the superhero genre in which he once worked has eaten the culture.

Okay, there are two things wrong with this. First, the superhero genre hasn’t eaten anything, no more than the Western genre did back in the sixties. Second, people went to superhero films because they are literally starving for good entertainment.

Westerns would still be big business now (if not quite as big as they were in the sixties) if certain kill-joys intent on making them anything other than morality tales hadn’t gotten their hands on them. As a now-deceased acquaintance of mine (salute to Kitteh-Dragon) pointed out, audiences were enthralled by Westerns in the sixties because they had good triumphing over evil. They had “heroic, manly” leads and strong, actually feminine heroines whom the audience could – and usually did – aspire to imitate.

In other words, they presented humanity honestly, and they inspired their audiences to be better people (and note, for the record, most of them weren’t doing badly to begin with). This is something Watchmen emphatically DOES NOT DO. (You can take a pig, dress it up, put lip gloss on it, and call the result perfected universal government. You may even entitle it World Peace, but it is still the pig you started with. Such a thing based on such a lie is neither peace nor is it going to last, Moore.) When the Western was corrupted by writers who had NO IDEA what real heroism, real masculinity, and real femininity even WERE, they stopped being morality tales. The new writers didn’t want to overcome evil but to embrace it. So they made weak, cowardly men and vile women the protagonists, because this was the only type of person they KNEW from looking in their bathroom mirrors.

Audiences did not dwell in that tawdry, lifeless space, so once these writers wrecked Westerns, the viewing public moved on to a different genre that hadn’t yet been corrupted. My friend said it was “doctor shows” to which people retreated once the Western was no longer a viable escape. I have no reason to doubt her.

Once this happened, the doctor shows had to be corrupted, because the writers couldn’t accept that they weren’t as good as the heroes in THOSE stories, either. Other genres followed suit, including Science Fiction and Fantasy. The parasites moved to each new host in turn, chasing the audience that got up and left once they realized they were being fed poison rather than an actual meal.

That’s one of the factors that brought superhero films to prominence – THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE WORTH WATCHING. Yes, you had occasional blockbuster successes like The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The B-movie circuit, where Pacific Rim found its home, was also pretty reliable and stable. Disney and animated features were available as well, and every now and then, Hollywood would cough up something worth watching because they had to make money to survive.

But the best thing audiences could find to satiate their hunger for “heroic, manly men” and actually feminine heroines that remained consistently reliable were movies BASED ON COMIC BOOKS. While I have plenty of fan gripes about the X-Men films and the Batman movies, I would rather turn THEM on than watch The Shape of Water or Avatar. The latter two films are gloriously artistic, particularly in their use of CGI, but the superhero films have actual SUBSTANCE to them. They have stories with good triumphing over evil as manly men fight for the feminine women they love (even if they can’t have them, right, Wolverine?).

Superhero movies haven’t eaten the culture. Nihilists, perverts, and relativists have drained all the vitality from the culture, so the only escape for audiences trying to get away from it all was superhero movies, at least until the end of the MCU (Avengers: Endgame). And of course, we can’t have nice things, now can we? Superheroes have to go – along with authentic Disney movies and other animated features – because they’re the last big, recognizable avenue of escape from Current Era Drudgery for those of us they consider the “unwashed masses.”

That is what you, Moore, and Mr. Leith are so delicately brushing over in this pervert geek fest you’re having here.

“Hundreds of thousands of adults [are] lining up to see characters and situations that had been created to entertain the 12-year-old boys – and it was always boys – of 50 years ago.

I’m not even going to dignify that “it was ALWAYS boys” comment with a response. What, you think women can’t like stuff written by men for men, or by men for boys? Moore the shame’s on you. You treat us like we’re caricatures, not PEOPLE. Again, up your nose with a fire hose.

As for the fifty years ago comment – if you offer a starving man a bag of popcorn from a brand that has been extant for almost a century, what do you think he is going to do? Pass it up for a steak you can drive him to eat an hour away? The man is going to fall on that bag of popcorn like it’s the only thing edible he’s seen in weeks, precisely because it IS the only edible thing he has seen in weeks. Damn the nutritious value, he’s HUNGRY.

Audiences are STARVING for good stories, Mr. Moore. You and your ilk have not only failed to provide them these stories, you have cut off the audiences’ routes to finding those tales. Thus, they are all STARVING. If the only thing they can find to “eat” are the popcorn superhero flicks, GUESS WHAT THEY’RE GOING TO WATCH?!?

I didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare.

Your idea of adult fare seems to be centered entirely on sex, drugs, more sex, deafening atonal noise, even more sex, politics, and – oh, look, MORE sex. I am not at all sure your idea of adult fare is adult at all. Adults have to think of far more things than sex, particularly if they respect it enough to realize the entire POINT of great sex is for two loving human beings to produce more human beings for them to cherish. In which case, they now have to work to keep those young, defenseless human beings alive so that THEY can reach adulthood.

You have two daughters. You should not need to have me point this out to you.

I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s…

Yeah, probably.

…to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional…

That’s a half-truth, and you know it. Just because it didn’t go the way you say and/or thought you wanted it to, that does NOT mean you were “doing your thing” with no intention of setting a tone for others to follow. See above paragraphs about destroying a genre to chase the audience until they can’t run anymore and can be consumed, to say nothing of your infatuation with gratuitous sex. You knew damn well what you were doing, don’t sugarcoat it now.

…when things like Watchmen were first appearing. There were an awful lot of headlines saying ‘Comics Have Grown Up’.

Which just goes to prove my earlier points. Any time they tell you an avenue of escape has “grown up,” what they really mean is: “It’s OURS now, and you HAVE to listen to us, because there is nowhere else for you to run.”

It’s abuse. Like Screwtape in Lewis’ letters, they want to eat you alive. They’re zombies, knowing or not, and they want to feast on your brain. They NEED to subsume your will, to feed off your agony. Otherwise, they have to face the fact that they are cowards without the courage God gave leeches.

I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up.

They shouldn’t. They don’t need to. Do children’s picture books need to “grow up”? There is nothing more “grown up” than childishness. With thanks to Stratford Caldecott and G.K. Chesterton:

            “…stand up and keep your childishness:

            Read all the pedants’ screeds and strictures;

            But don’t believe in anything

            That can’t be told in coloured pictures.”

If you can’t tell it to a child, maybe you shouldn’t tell it to an adult.

There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to.

Too bad they had to multiply.

But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they’d ever been.

God willing, may they become so again!

It wasn’t comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way.”

See previous comment to the effect of: “You can keep a majority of the perverts out most of the time, but not ALL the perverts out ALL the time and everywhere.” Moulton got in, and there have always been people who will find porn where there is none, or perverts who will slip through the cracks. These days the Internet has a rule about how such people apply porn to things that DON’T have it in them at all. It’s either Rule Number 34 or Rule Number 38, I think. People will be people – and since they won’t all be YOUR type of people, you can’t stand that, so you have to find a way to herd them toward YOU.

That comment says more about YOUR emotional state and “arrested adolescence,” Mr. Moore, than it does about the audience for comics in general. And I would not be the least bit surprised to find that you know that, too.

He thinks that’s not just infantile but dangerous.

Well, he would know, wouldn’t he? He made his name writing perverted (in every sense of the word) comics for a market that wanted to be titillated...

“I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see Batman movies.

Can you name me something that was as heroic and manly, that reaffirmed that right and wrong exist and good will win out, that was also worth watching at the time? That told a consistent story every year and was worth watching even if it wasn’t perfect, high art, or the greatest thing since sliced bread? No? Then quit being such a snob.

Because that kind of infantilisation – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.”

SCREEEEECH!!! CRASH! BANG! WALLOP! Tinkle…

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Are you serious? Are you – of course you’re serious. You’re so serious you had your sense of humor surgically removed. Do you honestly think ANYONE with an iota of contact with the real world is going to believe movies based on American superheroes – which became popular WHEN AMERICA WAS FIGHTING FASCISM IN WORLD WAR II – are now fascist?!

Mr. Moore, in the words of Gandalf the White, you missed your calling. You should have joined the circus, not the comic book industry. You would have left a far bigger mark on the former than the latter. To the hard back Merriam-Webster we go once again! (With a side note to please check out Professor Ornery Dragon’s piece on defining terms here. Also, John C. Wright’s excellent piece here.)

Ahem. FASCISM 1: often capitalized: a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economical and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

2: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.

You and your ilk scream “fascism” if someone so much as brushes past you while trying to turn so they don’t bump into you, because they were raised to believe doing such things was rude. Outside of Captain America: Civil War, name me ONE SUPERHERO MOVIE in the last twenty years that had the superhero supporting and not fighting against “a political philosophy, movement, or regime” that boiled down to “centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economical and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.” Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Oh, yeah, you can’t. Even Civil War doesn’t count because the entire thrust of the story is that Tony Stark and Team Iron were led astray by the fascists who want to control the Avengers, and Team Cap is fighting to STOP SAID FASCISTS and save their friends.

Go home, Moore. You’re drunk on stupid.

He points out that when Trump was elected in 2016, and “when we ourselves took a bit of a strange detour in our politics”, many of the biggest films were superhero movies.

Correlation does not equal causation. Moreover, you are an Englishman and STILL live in Britain. Why do you care about the politics of a nation that told your country to pound sand two hundred years ago? A nation that said, “Buzz off, get lost, and no, we don’t want you back”? Most people on this side of the Atlantic couldn’t care less about your government. Not our circus, not our problem. Why are you (and the rest of England) so obsessed with OUR domestic politics?

See, if he had stuck to British politics here, that would be one thing. Instead, he jumps on American politics which have NOTHING TO DO with those in his country. I can’t name the current Prime Minister in England because, let’s see… Oh, there it is: Not my country, not my problem. Until such time as England and/or the rest of the world decides to MAKE it my problem, it’s Moore’s and the rest of England’s issue.

Kindly remember that the U.S. told Britain to shove off and leave us alone two and a half centuries back, Mr. Moore. We like being a separate, better country. Get over it – and yourself.

Superman, the creation of working-class Jewish kids, was originally “very much a New Deal American” – but he got co-opted, just as “the early spiky, anarchic Mickey Mouse was very quickly modified into a suburbanite who wears short-sleeve shirts and has two nephews”.

I’ll let Uncle Walt answer that one on Mickey Mouse, since I’m fairly sure this “transition” occurred WHILE HE WAS STILL ALIVE. Mr. Disney was so protective of Mickey Mouse that I aspire to be that defensive of my own characters. As for Superman, while I am not well-versed in the argument Siegel and Shuster had with DC over him, the fact is that ol’ Supes is no longer a propaganda piece. By now, as Professor Geek has noted elsewhere, he has become an icon of the culture.

That means that he at once stays the same, being an archetype who DOES NOT CHANGE in personality and morals, yet remains different. The biggest difference is that he is no longer capable of being used as a propaganda piece. If you try to make him one (and they ARE trying – oh, are they trying!) you run the risk of completely destroying him. An icon can be broken, but it CANNOT be used for propaganda. Why?

Propaganda speaks to the moment, the passing age. It’s a fad – the latest thing, the newest piece of frippery. Archetypes, like icons, speak to eternity because their purpose is to get us there safely and happily. Superman – and Mickey Mouse – are no longer cute cartoons or propaganda for the masses.

They are icons. They speak to what America was, is, and still wants to be. Which is precisely why you, Moore, and those currently running DC hate them and want them destroyed.

Up. Your. Nose. Inhale the fire hydrant, please.

Moore is at least cautiously cheered that another of his creations, the Guy Fawkes mask drawn by David Lloyd for V for Vendetta, has been adopted as a symbol of resistance: “I can’t endorse everything that people who take that mask as an icon might do in the future, of course. But I’m heartened to see that it has been adopted by protest movements so widely across the world. Because we do need protest movements now, probably more than we’ve ever done before.”

It’s not like you could stop people from using it in whatever way they wanted, anyway. Not bothering to try is a smart move.

His caution towards the cultural turn we’ve taken extends to the digital realm.

Okay. And?

He shuns new tech to the extent that we speak down a landline, so I can’t see the lavishly bearded face from which his gentle Northampton burr issues.

Judging by his photos, I’d say that’s a relief. And what’s wrong with landlines?

“When the internet first became a thing,” he says, “I made the decision that this doesn’t sound like anything that I need. I had a feeling that there might be another shoe to drop – and regarding this technology, as it turned out, there was an Imelda Marcos wardrobe full of shoes to drop. I felt that if society was going to morph into a massive social experiment, then it might be a good idea if there was somebody outside the petri dish.”

Okay. Fine. Plenty of people feel that way. Several have moved into ghost towns out west here in the United States. They live just like the pioneers of old – no AC, no electricity, no central heating, and no running water. To each their own, and such is life.

But I don’t understand why you feel the need to brag about this? Lots of people do it. Lots of people regulate their time and tech consumption. A lot of other people don’t. What makes Moore, who decided to have no Internet and a landline, better than those who have a landline, a cellphone for emergencies, and Internet access? Moore is not braver than them – certainly not braver nor more eccentric than those who go to live in old ghost towns. He made a slightly odd decision not to use the Internet. Bully for him.

What the heck does that have to do with anything at all?

He makes do, instead, with an internet-savvy assistant: “He can bring me pornography, cute pictures of cats and abusive messages from people.”

So…you have your internet go-fer fetch porn for you? And yet you are complaining about perverts in the comic book industry? Have you ever even READ the definition of “hypocrisy”? I think you might find your photo there, Mr. Moore.

Moore not only shuns the internet but, which will seem still more eccentric to some, makes no bones about being a practising magician…

I think that goes beyond eccentricity and into, “Do I really need to know this?” territory. I just write what I believe. For the most part, I don’t make a super big production out of it.

That doesn’t make me eccentric, it makes me polite. I believe what I believe, and you can disagree or agree as you like. No skin off my back. Why do readers of the Guardian need this, “Oooo, he’s a magician, too!” thrown in their faces here?

…which he dates with peculiar precision to November 1993. Drunk in a bikers’ pub in Northampton on his 40th birthday, he announced “quite forcefully” he was going to be a magician. “The next morning when I woke up I thought: ‘Oh dear, I’m going to have to do that now, aren’t I?’

Um, no. No, you don’t. If you can remember this then you probably were not actually drunk. What’s with this “have to” business anyway? You said you were DRUNK! I am annoyed that you think that because you declared you would do this while “drunk,” you “had” to do it. What if no one at the bar who heard you CARED about this declaration, or remembered it the next morning?

By the sounds of it, you used this drunken proclamation as a Freudian excuse to make yourself do something. Still – “have to”?

I didn’t know what it meant to become a magician.

A lot of people these days really don’t. They make it up as they go along. That’s part of the problem: Start messing with things willy-nilly, and you could walk straight into a VERY bad situation. For other reasons to find it worrisome, try this transcript of an Eastern Orthodox podcast here.

Again, we are WAY past eccentric here and in TMI land. Why does anyone need to know this? It’s not interesting – it’s pathetic.

But I thought there was a certain power in having made the declaration.”

Well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it? If all you want is power, and you think there is power in simply declaring things, then modern interpretations of “magic” will appeal to you a lot more than they will to the rest of us. And you say superhero fans are trapped in power fantasies!

His [Moore’s] magical experiments came to chime with a worldview evident throughout his work.

In the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay: “I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”

Human perception (as cognitive science affirms) is partial: we see the world as it’s adaptively useful to see it, not as it truly is.

Science tells us we see the world upside down in our first days of life, and our brains correct for this so that we see our surroundings right side up from childhood onward. We also LEARN to see things adaptively – that is, the farmer learns to see things as a farmer, the businessman as a businessman, the soldier as a soldier, and so on and so forth. Your statement, Mr. Leith, leaves a heck of a lot to be desired in terms of clarity – to say nothing whatsoever of reason.

Magic, for Moore, is of a piece with his art and politics, and he says the three would have been coterminous in shamanic prehistory: “All of the culture around us that I can see looks to me very much like the dismembered body of magic.”

I can’t argue on the dismembered culture bit. If Western culture is not being chopped into pieces, there are those who are definitely doing their best to strangle it in a thousand dark offices and back alleys the world over. But the “dismembered body of magic” is a stretch and a half, to be sure. Magic didn’t make the West; not in Ancient Greece and Rome, not in Ancient Israel, and not even in Ancient Egypt. Mr. Moore has been too way deep into his cups to come up with this statement.

Since the origins of civilisation, he [Moore] says, we’ve striven to understand the world better by breaking it down into manageable bits.

That’s pretty much how you build things; you have to cut down a tree to make a fire, or to build a house. You have to cut stone to build a house – caves are rarely snug and warm year-round, particularly if they are formed by or have water running nearby. Even if you FIND a cave that would work, everything wears away, so you need to MAINTAIN it. This means you need to break various materials down to make the materials you need to maintain your residence. We won’t even in go into yurts, teepees, and tents, which all require either cured animal skins or textiles made from plants to be made to shelter one from the elements.

This statement really isn’t doing Mr. Moore any extra favors, readers. It certainly does not incline this one to want to read his latest terrible waste of paper.

“That process of fragmentation and analysis and reduction has probably gone as far as it can, in that we have fragmented societies, we have fragmented philosophies. Individually, we have fragmented psychologies […] We could do worse as a species than to try and put that dismembered corpse back together.”

Can’t put anything back together until you know how and/or why it was taken apart. We definitely DO need to put the culture of the West back together, but considering how much we differ on everything else, it goes without saying Mr. Moore and I disagree on who, what, where, when, how, and why things have fallen apart and need to be fixed. The methods we each pursue follow from that – and they do not intersect.

One of his early-00s comics, Promethea, was an effort to communicate that worldview. “I’ve disowned it now [another casualty of his falling out with DC], but it was, and is, a very good work. I think it does give a taste or a sense of the magical experience – at least some of the issues, just in the neural connectivity that some bits of Promethea suggest. I think they can put you into a slightly altered state. Which, I think, all art should do.

Not interested. At all. Besides, I have a TBR pile a mile long, anyway.

I’m probably a pretty much unreconstructed member of the psychedelic left from 1970, where the agenda was just: let’s drop LSD in the reservoirs and thus enlighten everybody.

Wait, WHAT?! Okay, now I’m REALLY not interested in anything you’ve written!

Luckily, before I could implement that, I did grow the fuck up and realise [it] would be a terrible idea.

Thank God for that glimmer of enlightenment!

But nevertheless the idea of enlightening people as a way of changing society probably remained my strongest directive.”

I think by now we’ve established that’s not likely to lead where you want it to lead. The majority of the population are NOT perverts and NOT interested in your works. Watchmen is not and never has matched a multitude of superhero comics in popularity FOR A REASON. You’re writing to a niche that is not and never has been mainstream.

Some will say I ought not to cast stones at glass houses. I will remind those people that the single best-selling author of the 20th century happened to be a Catholic. J.R.R. Tolkien’s work is mainstream because, guess what, HE WAS NOT A PERVERT. He also wrote a GREAT story. Ergo, Catholic writers who follow Tolkien’s example have more mass-appeal to the majority of audiences so long as they ARE NOT perverts.

He’s now serving that directive with a renewed enthusiasm. “I’m really enjoying just writing prose fiction,” he says. “Because, in some ways, to me, that seems the purest medium. You’ve got 26 characters, and a peppering of punctuation. With that, you can describe the entire conceivable universe.”

As Iron Man said in Marvel’s The Avengers: “Well, you’re not wrong.” It’s more than a little fun to open doors to entirely new worlds with nothing but words. Not for everyone, of course, but those of us who get hooked generally enjoy it a lot. Scripts and comics have their place, and I will say nothing bad about either medium.

But prose was not the first form of stories, either. We still have cave paintings and oral folktales; the first tales were told in colored pictures and whispered by the fireside. They were acted out at some point, too. Writing, as that podcast which I linked mentions, was akin to creating a stone monument. If it was written, it was IMPORTANT and it had REALLY HAPPENED.

How easily we forget these facts, though. How easily indeed…

Whew! Well. THAT was a tough read. Bleh. I DO feel less like I crawled through a sewer and more like I got something off my chest, however. Small mercies, readers!

I hope you enjoyed my second Fisk. I would stay to say more, but I have matters to attend to – such as my next publication! Keep your eyes peeled, as more is coming. It’s just a matter of making it all fit together.

See you later!