Alan Moore interview: ‘I’m giving all my screen royalties to Black Lives Matter’

Jake Kerridge

As the mind behind Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell and V for Vendetta, he has been called the Shakespeare of the comic book.

The 69-year-old Moore – a hirsute figure whose aesthetic might best be described as WFH Gandalf – insists that he has formally retired from writing comics now, despite the challenges that prose fiction brings.

Graphic novels

“Now they’re called ‘graphic novels’, which sounds sophisticated and you can charge a lot more for them. What appealed to me most about comics is no more, and these innocent and inventive and imaginative superhero characters from the Forties, Fifties, Sixties are being recycled to a modern audience as if they were adult fare.”

Comics are out of reach of children

Centrepiece of Illuminations, a collection of short stories, is a long story on the theme of the decline of the comic book industry. His objection is to “the gentrification of comics that happened post-Watchmen: that neighbourhood has been lifted out of the reach of its original inhabitants” – i.e. children.

Fallout of his work

“I didn’t mean my experiments with comics to be immediately taken up as something that the whole industry should do. When I was doing things like Watchmen, I was not saying that dark psychopathic characters are really cool, but that does seem to be the message that the industry took for the next 20 years.”

Roots

The son of a brewery worker, he was brought up in The Boroughs, “the most impoverished area of Northampton”. Moore says that his “values system was formed in The Boroughs”: “although it was destitute there was an astonishing sense of community – nobody would rob anyone else because nobody else had anything. There was a kind of commonality.”

Frank Miller

He has always espoused liberal values in his comics, and deprecates the work of the American Frank Miller of Sin City fame – his only rival for the title of King of the Comic Book – as “a pretty sub-fascist vision even from the days of The Dark Knight [Miller’s take on Batman]. It’s the idea of one man, perhaps on horseback, who can sort out this mess – that’s a bit too Birth of a Nation.”

Fascist hymn

Ironically, a “fascist hymn” that Moore wrote for V for Vendetta has become an anthem for users of the neo-Nazi internet forum Stormfront. “The person who posted it said: ‘after reading his beautiful words, I can’t help but think he must secretly be one of us inside.’ So yes, apparently I’m very big with the Nazis.”

Insists his work is unfilmable

Moore has no control over whether his comics are adapted for film or television, but has long refused to have his name attached to any film – and if you look at the long list of clunkers derived from his work (it’s hard to remember that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was Sean Connery’s last film without tearing up) you realise how right he has been to insist that his work is unfilmable.

BLM

Is it true that he refuses all money he is entitled to from the film companies, asking for it to be divvied up among the film’s writers and other creatives? “I no longer wish it to even be shared with them. I don’t really feel, with the recent films, that they have stood by what I assumed were their original principles. So I asked for DC Comics to send all of the money from any future TV series or films to Black Lives Matter.”

Reclusive

“I’ve become used to a more virtual world. And I’ve kind of forgone public appearances, partly because I’m a bit old and doddery – and, as I get older, as you can see I get more unsightly – but also I was finding at comic conventions I’d talk to people and they were looking at me like they were having some sort of religious experience rather than an ordinary conversation. So I’ve sort of retired into what I probably originally thought a writer’s life was like, where you sit at home and write books.”

Fantasy novels

He’s now working on a series of fantasy novels set in mid-20th-century Britain. “Fantasy these days seems to have been boiled down to a kind of JRR Tolkein, George RR Martin world of warriors and dragons and, for some reason, dwarves. The fantasy books that inspire me are things like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, which is actually about the real world in some ways, the changing nature of British society.

“Fantasy has no restrictions whatsoever, so it’s a bit lame to be constantly hitting the same note on the piano. Let’s have fantastic visions that nobody has ever seen before – and lay off people of restricted height for a change.”