The Grand Return of Comics Legend Alan Moore

Alan Moore, who is perhaps the greatest comic book writer to ever live, does not give many interviews. “No offense, but I am unused to publicizing my own work,” he told me from his home in Northampton, in England’s East Midlands, during one of two Zoom interviews in September, around the time of Queen Elizabeth II’s death. He was dressed, both times, in a red sweater, and occasionally dragged on an enormous rolled cigarette that smoked up the screen. Behind the couch he was sitting on were reproductions of the Enochian Tables, texts from a 16th century form of magic founded by the occultist John Dee. “Whereby,” Moore said, “he was convinced that he was capable of speaking to a range of entities that he had to describe as angels, because describing them as anything else would have probably got him burned.”

When Moore made his debut in the American comics industry in the early ’80s, taking over the little-read Swamp Thing for DC Comics, he instantly made the medium more literary and expressive, injecting it with postmodern techniques that offered a self-awareness and seriousness that previously didn’t exist in the realm of superheroes. Over the following years, he created some of the most enduring works to ever grace the comics form: Miracleman, which took an obscure British knock-off of DC’s Captain Marvel from the 1950s, and transposed him, convincingly, onto Thatcher’s England; Watchmen, a nightmarish parable that imagines how a group of masked vigilantes would actually function in the real world (not very well, it turns out); V for Vendetta, about London after a nuclear war has plunged the government into outright fascism, and the anarchist revolution that emerges as a result (a series that, among other things, popularized the Guy Fawkes mask as a contemporary symbol of dissent); From Hell, a meticulously researched account of Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel murders; and the late-period masterpieces Neonomicon and Providence, which posit that the Cthulhu Mythos, the universe in which H.P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction was set, was not altogether fictional.

Moore will likely always be best remembered for these works, but he has since abandoned comics. Long before superhero stories became the bread and butter of Hollywood, studio executives were exploiting Moore’s writing. The 2001 film of From Hell, starring Johnny Depp, was especially derided, but Moore purists would argue all adaptations of his work—including the critically acclaimed, Emmy-winning Watchmen limited series from HBO, which diverges rather boldly from its source material—are at best reductive misinterpretations and at worst offensively awful. Not only has Moore had nothing to do with these adaptations—he famously hasn’t watched any of them. It’s no wonder, then, that Moore has been a tireless advocate for creators’ rights. After failing to maintain ownership of the characters and stories he created for mainstream comics publishers (predominantly DC) he’s disowned much of his most beloved material.

But he remains a prolific author. His 2016 novel Jerusalem, largely set in Northampton’s Boroughs neighborhood, where Moore was born and raised and where he’s spent the majority of his life, is over 1,200 pages of shifting perspectives, styles, and timeframes. It is both a kind of cosmic autobiography and, taking inspiration from William Burroughs, an attempt by Moore to write his way around death. A collection of stories, Illuminations, was released this month, and includes the novel-length “What We Can Know About Thunderman,” a vicious satire of the comics industry, dedicated to Kevin O’Neill, Moore’s collaborator on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, another classic comic with a disastrous adaptation (Sean Connery, its star, never acted in a feature film again).

The times Moore has talked to the press, he has been outspoken, railing against the absurdities of superhero fandom and the rapaciousness of the comics industry. “When I first protested having my intellectual properties stolen,” Moore says, “the reaction from a lot of the fans was, ‘He’s a crazy, angry guy.’ He’s just inexplicably angry about absolutely everything. He wakes up in the morning, angry with his pillow. He eats his breakfast cereal while being angry with it. He’s angry about everything, so, therefore, nothing that he seems to be upset about is of any consequence. This is just an angry person. Alan Moore says, ‘Get off my lawn.’”

Talking to him, I was pleasantly surprised to find this to be far from the truth. Moore was personable, open, and intensely reasonable, even when talking about esoteric things like graven images—representations of gods as objects of worship. During our conversations he had an almost mystical sense of calm. And he certainly looked wizard-like, with a shock of long silver hair pulled back tightly behind his shoulders, and a Merlin-style beard extending down to his mid-torso.

GQ: Were you in Northampton during the whole pandemic?

Alan Moore: I’ve been in Northampton forever. I’ve barely been out of this house for the entire pandemic. Me and Melinda [Gebbie, Moore’s wife and collaborator] have been shielding. I think pandemics are pretty much tailor-made for writers. This is how we live, not seeing our friends for months on end, living in a silent room without any communications from the outside world. We’ve been handling it all right, I think.

What has kept you in Northampton for most of your life?

Northampton has always been a hotbed of trouble. As far as I understand it, Northamptonshire was the point of origin for Hereward the Wake, who is a figure that I grew up reading about. He was a figure just as big as King Arthur or Robin Hood in English mythology, with the exception that, of those three characters, Hereward actually existed. He was an anti-Norman terrorist, a kind of Fenland bin Laden, who lived out in the marshes. He’d ride into Norman settlements, including Northampton, burn everything to the ground with his trademark cry of “awake, awake!” and then ride off into the treacherous bog lands so that anyone who followed him would almost certainly drown. Hereward was a massive pain in the ass for the Norman royalty.

And, over the succeeding centuries, Northampton has always been at the center of all the trouble. I don’t think that Princess Diana [who grew up in Northampton’s Althorp parish] did Northamptonshire any favors in the eyes of the British establishment. It’s difficult to find anybody famous who comes from Northamptonshire who wasn’t an incredible troublemaker, which probably gave me a predisposition towards those kind of sentiments.

And also, you have to remember that I’m slightly delusional. Northampton first got its charter [in the 11th century] under Richard the Lionheart on November the 18th, which is actually my birthday. Je suis Northampton. I feel an immense kinship with the town, and with its inflammatory spirit. It’s probably little wonder that I turned out the way I did.

“All of that material that is owned by the various comic companies, I have personally disowned. It’s just too painful.”

At what point did you start reading comics?

I think that in the Boroughs, illiteracy was still a stigma. There were a lot of people who couldn’t read or write. My mother probably only read one or two books in the course of her life, but she could read. She didn’t enjoy reading. Except for the novelization of The Sound of Music, which she’d been to see eight times. She’d taken me with her on three of those occasions. Probably child abuse, you know.

She was not a well-read woman. But she loved words. She loved long and difficult words because there was a sense that these are words that are actually only meant for better-off people, and we had stolen them. You could just see the delight in her face when she would say, “Oh, Alan. Why do you have to be so obstreperous?”

I had British children’s comics, which I was reading, I now realize, during their golden age. British comics were about America, which was a land as exotic to me as Narnia. They were just something that all working-class homes had. We had a local market called Sid’s Market Stall. It sold magazines—men’s magazines, ones with sweating GIs being whipped by Nazi women wearing swastika armbands in their underwear, which made me think the American experience of the war seemed to have been very different from what my dad told me about. They’d have those hanging on bulldog clips beyond the reach of children. And then they’d have this array of American comics that had been brought over as ballast. By the age of eight I had graduated to Mad Magazine, so I knew who John F. Kennedy was, and Adlai Stevenson. Nikita Khrushchev. I found out an awful lot about America.

There are worse ways to learn about America.

There probably are. I suppose the comics were a very big thing in my life until the age of about 14, 15. I had absorbed an awful lot of completely pointless and unnecessary lore about superheroes, all of these excessive, insane, meaningless details of continuity. I have a very sticky memory. Not so much these days, but back in my pomp, I remembered everything. It was very embarrassing when, at a comics convention that I attended after becoming a professional, they had a trivia quiz that they persuaded me to take part in. And, horrifyingly, I knew the secret identity of Chameleon Boy [a minor member of DC’s Legion of Superheroes]. That was when I realized that, no, you gotta back away from this. It’s sort of an illness.

In Illuminations, you have a funny moment at the beginning of the story “What We Can Know About Thunderman,” where a group of comics writers are having this pained argument in a diner about the stakes of rewriting a character’s origin story and messing with the continuity. Did you actually have arguments like that?

“What We Can Know About Thunderman,” I think that is probably my concluding statement on the comics industry. A lot of it is delirious invention, but an awful lot of it is pretty much what happened. I’ve exaggerated much less than you’d think.

The comics industry was quite a shock. I think I was suffering from the illusion that: I’m really good and if they put me on a book, it will start to increase in sales, quite rapidly. I assume that they are at least decent enough business people to understand that they will be making much more profit out of me and my work if they treat me fairly than if they surrender to their basic impulses and steal all of my shit. And that of course turned out to be a hopeless romantic fantasy. Almost as soon as I was in the door, I was on my way out again. That period of comics that most people remember me for was actually, what, a five-year period? Between 1982 and 1987. Something like that. And 35 years ago. All of that stuff, all of that material that is owned by the various comic companies, I have personally disowned. It’s just too painful.

Is it painful artistically or are you just frustrated by the business side of things?

You can’t separate them from each other. Artistically, it’s painful because of the immense amount of work—and I hope, vision—that I put into those early works. I was trying as best I could to remake the comics industry and to a certain, lesser extent, the comics medium, into the thing that I wanted it to be. I was introducing the ideas that I thought might be beneficial to the medium and take it into new areas. Artistically, to have those works taken away from me and perhaps largely misunderstood?

It seemed to me that what people were taking away from works like Watchmen or V For Vendetta wasn’t the storytelling techniques, which to me seemed to be the most important part of it. It was instead this greater leeway with violence and with sexual references. Tits and innards.

When I did things like Marvelman [now known, for a variety of legal issues, as Miracleman] and Watchmen, they were critiques of the superhero genre. They were trying to show that any attempt to realize these figures in any kind of realistic context will always be grotesque and nightmarish. But that doesn’t seem to be the message that people took from this. They seemed to think, uh, yeah, dark, depressing superheroes are, like, cool.

The creation of Rorschach [a masked vigilante who is one of Watchmen’s main characters]—I was thinking, well, everybody will understand that this is satirical. I’m making this guy a mumbling psychopath who clearly smells, who lives on cold baked beans, who has no friends because of his abhorrent personality. I hadn’t realized that so many people in the audience would find such a figure admirable. I was told—this was probably 5 or 10 years ago—that apparently Watchmen has quite a following amongst the right wing in America. In fact, do you know the far-right website, Stormfront?

Sure. [Editor’s note: Stormfront is a neo-Nazi internet forum that the Souther Poverty Law Center has described as “the first major hate site on the internet.”]

They did a reproduction of the fascist hymn that I wrote for V for Vendetta. And they said that, “Yeah, this person is supposed to be the exact opposite of us politically, but having read these beautiful words, I think that he must secretly be one of us, inside.” I think I understand fascism, and I know what kind of hymns people like that would probably like. But if this stuff can be so fundamentally misunderstood, it does make you wonder what the point of doing it was.

“It seemed to me that what people were taking away from works like Watchmen or V For Vendetta wasn’t the storytelling techniques, which to me seemed to be the most important part of it. It was instead this greater leeway with violence and with sexual references. Tits and innards.”

I assume you still haven’t seen any of the adaptations of your work.

I would be the last person to want to sit through any adaptations of my work. From what I’ve heard of them, it would be enormously punishing. It would be torturous, and for no very good reason. There was an incident—probably a concluding incident, for me. I received a bulky parcel, through Federal Express, that arrived here in my sedate little living room. It turned out to contain a powder blue barbecue apron with a hydrogen symbol on the front.

And a frank letter from the showrunner of the Watchmen television adaptation, which I hadn’t heard was a thing at that point. But the letter, I think it opened with, “Dear Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen.” That wasn’t the best opener. It went on through a lot of, what seemed to me to be, neurotic rambling. “Can you at least tell us how to pronounce ‘Ozymandias’?” [Another of the vigilante characters in Watchmen.] I got back with a very abrupt and probably hostile reply telling him that I’d thought that Warner Brothers were aware that they, nor any of their employees, shouldn’t contact me again for any reason. I explained that I had disowned the work in question, and partly that was because the film industry and the comics industry seemed to have created things that had nothing to do with my work, but which would be associated with it in the public mind. I said, “Look, this is embarrassing to me. I don’t want anything to do with you or your show. Please don’t bother me again.”

When I saw the television industry awards that the Watchmen television show had apparently won, I thought, “Oh, god, perhaps a large part of the public, this is what they think Watchmen was?” They think that it was a dark, gritty, dystopian superhero franchise that was something to do with white supremacism. Did they not understand Watchmen? Watchmen was nearly 40 years ago and was relatively simple in comparison with a lot of my later work. What are the chances that they broadly understood anything since? This tends to make me feel less than fond of those works. They mean a bit less in my heart.

Was doing something like Neonomicon or Providence in any way a reaction to some of the things you’re talking about? A reaction against superheroes?

With the “Lovecraft” books, that was strange. They grew almost like a culture in a Petri dish. I was trying to divorce Lovecraft and his ideas from the archaic setting that they usually present it in. Lovecraft was kind of anti-modern and certain stories weren’t really designed for the modern world. Certainly not this modern world. [Editor’s note: Lovecraft, who set many of his stories in imaginary towns across New England, is known for both his influential contributions to the horror and fantasy genres and the racism that taints his work.] Neonomicon was probably one of the nastiest things that I’ve ever done.

I think it’s the most disturbing.

Thank you. Because that was what I wanted. Let’s do something that is not just a horror comic. Let’s do something that is genuinely horrific. Not “This is a cool horror story,” but, “I’m horrified.” With Providence, I made the central character gay and Jewish, just to problematize the relationship with Lovecraft, who was notoriously antisemitic and possibly a conflicted homophobe.

Do you identify with Lovecraft at all?

It’s a bit difficult to identify with Lovecraft. I can appreciate Lovecraft, despite his racism, his antisemitism, his—not misogyny, but his perhaps discomfort with women. I can see that in some ways he was not the outsider that he’s often depicted as. I think that Lovecraft is, in some ways, an ultimate insider. He was exactly a man of his times. He was almost a barometer of American dread.

And on top of that, Lovecraft had a cosmological perspective in that he was an avid follower of science magazines. He had kept up with Einstein and appeared to understand Einstein. He did his best. But this led to more fear. Because he actually understood how tiny and insignificant we were in this boundless universe and that the universe was governed, not by God—because Lovecraft was an atheist—but by these blind chaotic forces of physics that did not know that we were here. That didn’t care about us. They weren’t good. They weren’t evil. They would just annihilate us without ever knowing that we’d existed. And these forces became Lovecraft’s pantheon of unpronounceable elder gods. He was kind of giving a shape and a name, even if it was a particularly tentacled shape, to the blind forces of physics that he thought governed human existence.

A lot of your work deals in some way with the afterlife, with what happens to a person when they die. Would you call yourself an atheist, or is it more complicated than that?

It’s probably more complicated than that, but, yes, I’m an atheist. No, there wasn’t some guy in the clouds who created everything. However, the pagan idea of gods, and the way they were regarded in the classical world, that interests me. The idea that these gods were essences of whatever their particular field of endeavor was, that Hermes is the essence of language and intelligence and also theft. I can accept gods on that level, that they are pure ideas that may have become, through their complexity, self-aware, or which have become so complex that we perceive them as being self-aware, whether they are or not. So it’s perhaps a heavily qualified theism, not quite atheism.

As for what happens when we die, in my book Jerusalem, I wanted to give everybody an alternative way to think about life and death. It was something that I had deduced myself after absorbing Einstein, who had said this is, at least, a four-dimensional universe, with the three dimensions that we’re familiar with and a further dimension, which is not time, but, if I’m understanding it correctly, time is the way that human beings perceive the fourth dimension. That we are actually in what Einstein referred to as a block universe. This means that the universe of space-time is a colossal solid that is eternal and is unchanging. I think this is the view of conventional physics. There’s of course people who would contest that view, but that’s normal in physics, and Einstein’s theory has so far stood up to the most rigorous testing. In the decades since his death, nobody has disproved it.

So, if we are in a block universe that is eternal and unchanging, that means that everything within that universe is also eternal and unchanging. It means that we are not really moving through our lives. Time isn’t there. Instead, our consciousness is moving through a solid medium of space-time. The best way to imagine this is as a reel of film. Each of those little images on the reel of film are fixed and unchanging. There is no movement in them. However, when we apply the beam of a projector to them, or the beam of consciousness in the analogy that I’m making, then Charlie Chaplin does his funny walk and saves the girl and defeats the baddie. You’ve got action. You’ve got morality. You’ve got narrative. You’ve got events. From static images.

And if that is the case, if we are in an unchanging and eternal solid, then that means we’re in it forever, and that all of the past is still there and is still happening, back in the past. And the future is already happening. That we are already dead. We are not yet born. That this is the nature of time, and that if everything in the past is still there, that includes our lives and the lives of everybody else, and every moment of consciousness within those lives. So it seems to me that, basically, we are living in an eternal recurrence, that when your consciousness reaches its concluding point at your death, it has nowhere to go but back to the beginning of that reel of film. And it will always seem like the first time, even though it doesn’t really make sense to talk about a first time. That seems to me to offer a rational way around the concept of death. I think I’ve made a pretty good stab at it.

In the British children’s comics that we started out talking about, there always used to be a free gift. They would always have a bag of sherbet or some sort of paper noise maker or something like that. I’ve always liked free gifts. So with Jerusalem, I thought, “I want to give everybody the best free gift ever.” You know? A get out of jail card for death. At least to the best of my ability that’s what I think I did there.

I feel like the timing of this interview kind of makes this next question unavoidable: What do you think of the British monarchy?

Well, that’s opening a huge can of intestinal worms, there. We had our monarchy imposed on us by force in the 11th century, and I can bear a grudge for at least, you know, a thousand years or so. The royal family are something that flutters across the newspapers or the television screens at intervals, generally when there’s some horrifying scandal that has erupted. Otherwise, they’re like an old building. It’s a part of the English landscape, but nobody thinks about it very much. For some reason, there was a huge amount of sympathy for the Queen. She’d been around since most of us were born. Her coronation was the same year that I was born. I think a lot of Americans think that we are all besotted with the Queen, the royal family, which for most ordinary people is simply not true.

When was the first time you visited America?

I’ve visited America twice. I didn’t find myself very comfortable. Possibly I don’t feel comfortable anywhere. I always used to warn people against making the mistake of trying to map a country that you’re unfamiliar with onto a country that you are familiar with, because that is something we all tend to do, and it generally leads to tremendous errors. I myself fell prey to that because when I went over to America the first time, I was thinking, “Okay, so the Republicans, they’re probably more like the conservatives, which means that the Democrats are probably more like the Labor Party.” So, Republicans right-wing, Democrats left-wing. That was the construction I had in my head. This was despite the fact that an awful lot of the Americans that I spoke to considered themselves to be left-wing. They sounded, to my ears, and to the ears of some of my English friends, to be essentially center-right. Since 2016, specifically, it has struck me that probably the Democrats are more the conservatives, and the Republicans would seem to be closer to actual fascists. I think there’s a worrying fascist undercurrent in America. I myself have stopped traveling. I’ve not been out of the country since 1989, something like that.

Oh, really?

I don’t have a passport anymore. Everything is here, as far as I’m concerned.

Do you have a first memory of Northampton, growing up?

We had a little terraced house down opposite the railway station in this immensely old and rundown area called the Boroughs. It had originally been the whole of the town. But the town had expanded over the centuries, and the Boroughs had more or less been left to decay. By the time you get around to the First World War, the Boroughs is the receptacle for the poorest people in the town. It is shunned by respectable people. It was the loveliest community that you could imagine. It was undoubtedly a shabby neighborhood, but it was drenched in history. You’d think that it might be more celebrated, but like I say, Northampton has been on somebody’s shit list since the 11th century.

Because of the soot from the railway yards, which covered everything, we used to get a very beautiful flower called rosebay willow herb that would thrive upon dirt and soot. A beautiful little flower, sort of pinkish silver. And because we were looking directly west, every night, the sun would set behind the rail yards, and we would get beams of light through our front room window. And we had a tiny stained-glass window dividing the front room from the living room. Sometimes, around about tea time, around about sunset on a summer’s evening, you’d get a beautiful little splash of color over the dusty radio wireless that was set on a little shelf halfway up the wall. It doesn’t sound like much, but a little splash of transcendent color in these very dark, very cramped little houses. That is perhaps one of my earliest memories.

I’ve moved out of the Boroughs. I now live a couple of miles away from it, probably. Maybe half an hour’s walk. It actually made me. It was full of extraordinary characters that didn’t exist anywhere else. My paternal grandmother was what was called a deathmonger. In poor neighborhoods, where people couldn’t afford either midwives or undertakers, you would have a working-class woman—always a woman—who would attend to both for probably sixpence or a shilling. One that I heard of, Mrs. Gibbs, had two aprons. There was a black apron that she wore if she was going to attend to the laying-out of a recently-deceased person. Her other apron had beautiful bees and butterflies embroidered around its hem; this was the apron she wore for births. I’m sure that they must’ve had such people in other neighborhoods, but deathmonger is, I think, terminology unique to Northampton. Knowing Northampton, I imagine they called them deathmongers because calling them by their old name would’ve perhaps gotten them burned. Like, they were witches. Wise women, herbalists, all of that. People who attended to medical situations, like a birth or a death. Fantastic, mythical characters. I’ve taken an enormous amount of inspiration from them.

You’ve long been associated with magic and the occult. Can you talk to me about how that is part of your life?

I’ve made magic a central part of my ordinary life. It’s how I see things. It’s how I view the world. It’s the language that I frame reality in and it has an immense influence upon all of my thinking, and all of my actions. I still have a very healthy philosophical relationship with my second-century Roman snake-puppet, Glycon, who I have come to believe is probably a lot more significant than I originally assumed him to be.

How is that?

I decided, when I was drunk on my 40th birthday, that I was going to become a magician. Then, when I sobered up the next day, I realized that I was going to have to go through with that, no matter how ridiculous it made me look. The first person that I sought advice from was my friend and mentor of many years, Steve Moore, who taught me how to write comics, whom I’d known since I was 14 or 15, and who was my greatest friend. He was already involved in a strange metaphysical relationship with the Greek moon goddess, Selene. His relationship with that goddess was probably the biggest romantic relationship of his life. And that isn’t necessarily a tragic thing. Because it was a real relationship. Having experienced it at close hand, it was as good a relationship as many physical, real-world relationships that I’ve witnessed.

Steve was my first port of call. I said, “All right, now I’ve decided that I’m a magician, what do I do? How do you do magic? How do you become a magician?” And he said, “The first thing to do is to either choose a god, or let a god choose you, and then use that god, that imaginary being as a guide to the imaginary territory that you’re going to be entering into.” It was sometime after that where Steve happened to show me a book of Roman antiquities, which included, on the front cover, the statue of Glycon. Glycon was the last-created Roman god. And I thought that this was the most beautiful creature that I’d ever seen. There was something absurd about it, and there was also something of incredible majesty and beauty. This snake with long blond hair. I’m still not sure whether I chose the god or whether the god chose me.

Steve said once you’ve got your god, it’s not a bad idea to do a graven image. That was what he’d done with Selene. Since Steve’s death, we’ve got his graven image of Selene.

Oh, yeah?

Upstairs, in the bedroom.

M.H. Miller is a features director at T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.