Will Eisner
Will Eisner, 1982
Born	(1917-03-06)March 6, 1917 Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Died	January 3, 2005(2005-01-03) (aged 87) Lauderdale Lakes, Florida
Nationality	American
Area(s)	Cartoonist, Publisher
Pseudonym(s)	William Erwin Maxwell[1]
Notable works	The Spirit A Contract with God
Awards	full list

William Erwin "Will" Eisner (March 6, 1917 – January 3, 2005) was an American comics writer, artist and entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the medium and is known for the cartooning studio he founded; for his highly influential series The Spirit; for his use of comics as an instructional medium; for his leading role in establishing the graphic novel as a form of literature with his book A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories.

The comics community paid tribute to Eisner by creating the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, more commonly known as "the Eisners", to recognize achievements each year in the comics medium. Eisner enthusiastically participated in the awards ceremony, congratulating each recipient. In 1987, with Carl Barks and Jack Kirby, he was one of the three inaugural inductees of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.

Early life and career[link]

Eisner was born in Brooklyn, New York City, the son of Jewish immigrants. His parents provided a modest life for their son. His mother was from Romania and served as the more practical and realistic parent, firmly believing that her son’s artistic tendencies would never amount to any kind of success in life. His father, an artist, was born in Vienna, Austria. He painted backdrops for vaudeville and the Jewish theater but was also a semi-successful entrepreneur and, at one point, a manufacturer in Manhattan's Seventh Avenue garment district. Believing his son should value creativity and art, the elder Eisners instilled in him a sense of duality, a balance between business and art.^[2][3] Eisner attended DeWitt Clinton High School. With influences that included the early 20th-century commercial artist J. C. Leyendecker,^[4] he drew for the school newspaper (The Clintonian), the literary magazine (The Magpie) and the yearbook, and did stage design, leading him to consider doing that kind of work for theater. Upon graduation, he studied under Canadian artist George Brandt Bridgman (1864–1943) for a year at the Art Students League of New York. Contacts made there led to a position as an advertising writer-cartoonist for the New York American newspaper. Eisner also drew $10-a-page illustrations for pulp magazines, including Western Sheriffs and Outlaws.

In 1936, high-school friend and fellow cartoonist Bob Kane, of future Batman fame, suggested that the 19-year-old Eisner try selling cartoons to the new comic book Wow, What A Magazine! "Comic books" at the time were tabloid-sized collections of comic strip reprints in color. In 1935, they had begun to include occasional new comic strip-like material. Wow editor Jerry Iger bought an Eisner adventure strip called Captain Scott Dalton, an H. Rider Haggard-styled hero who traveled the world after rare artifacts. Eisner subsequently wrote and drew the pirate strip "The Flame" and the secret agent strip "Harry Karry" for Wow as well.

Eisner said that on one occasion a man who Eisner described as "a Mob type straight out of Damon Runyon, complete with pinkie ring, broken nose, black shirt, and white tie, who claimed to have 'exclusive distribution rights for all Brooklyn" asked Eisner to draw Tijuana bibles for $3 a page. Eisner said that he declined the offer; he described the decision as "one of the most difficult moral decisions of my life."^[5]

Eisner & Iger[link]

Wow lasted four issues (cover-dated July–September and November 1936). After it ended, Eisner and Iger worked together producing and selling original comics material, anticipating that the well of available reprints would soon run dry, though their accounts of how their partnership was founded differ. One of the first such comic-book "packagers", their partnership was an immediate success, and the two soon had a stable of comics creators supplying work to Fox Comics, Fiction House, Quality Comics (for whom Eisner co-created such characters as Doll Man and Blackhawk), and others. Turning a profit of $1.50 a page, Eisner claimed that he "got very rich before I was 22,"^[6] later detailing that in Depression-era 1939 alone, he and Iger "had split $25,000 between us",^[7] a considerable amount for the time. Among the studio's products was a self-syndicated Sunday comic strip, Hawks of the Sea, that initially reprinted Eisner's old strip Wow, What A Magazine! feature "The Flame" and then continued it with new material.^[8] Eisner's original work even crossed the Atlantic, with Eisner drawing the new cover of the October 16, 1937 issue of Boardman Books' comic-strip reprint tabloid Okay Comics Weekly.^{[citation needed]}

In 1939, Eisner was commissioned to create Wonder Man for Victor Fox, an accountant who had previously worked at DC Comics and was becoming a comic book publisher himself. Following Fox's instructions to create a Superman-type character, and using the pen name Willis, Eisner wrote and drew the first issue of Wonder Comics. Eisner said in interviews throughout his later life that he had protested the derivative nature of the character and story, and that when subpoenaed after National Periodical Publications, the company that would evolve into DC Comics, sued Fox, alleging Wonder Man was an illegal copy of Superman, Eisner testified that this was so, undermining Fox's case;^[9] Eisner even depicts himself doing so in his semi-autobiographical graphic novel The Dreamer.^[10] However, a transcript of the proceeding, uncovered by comics historian Ken Quattro in 2010, indicates Eisner in fact supported Fox and claimed Wonder Man as an original Eisner creation.^[11]

[edit] The Spirit

In "late '39, just before Christmas time," Eisner recalled in 1979,^[12] Quality Comics publisher Everett M. "Busy" Arnold "came to me and said that the Sunday newspapers were looking for a way of getting into this comic book boom," In a 2004 interview,^[13] he elaborated on that meeting:

"Busy" invited me up for lunch one day and introduced me to Henry Martin [sales manager of The Des Moines Register and Tribune Syndicate, who] said, "The newspapers in this country, particularly the Sunday papers, are looking to compete with comics books, and they would like to get a comic-book insert into the newspapers." ... Martin asked if I could do it. ... It meant that I'd have to leave Eisner & Iger [which] was making money; we were very profitable at that time and things were going very well. A hard decision. Anyway, I agreed to do the Sunday comic book and we started discussing the deal [which] was that we'd be partners in the 'Comic Book Section,' as they called it at that time. And also, I would produce two other magazines in partnership with Arnold.

Eisner negotiated an agreement with the syndicate in which Arnold would copyright The Spirit, but, "Written down in the contract I had with 'Busy' Arnold — and this contract exists today as the basis for my copyright ownership — Arnold agreed that it was my property. They agreed that if we had a split-up in any way, the property would revert to me on that day that happened. My attorney went to 'Busy' Arnold and his family, and they all signed a release agreeing that they would not pursue the question of ownership"^[13] This would include the eventual backup features "Mr. Mystic" and "Lady Luck".

Selling his share of their firm to Iger, who would continue to package comics as the S. M. Iger Studio and as Phoenix Features through 1955, for $20,000,^[14] Eisner left to create The Spirit. "They gave me an adult audience", Eisner said in 1997, "and I wanted to write better things than superheroes. Comic books were a ghetto. I sold my part of the enterprise to my associate and then began The Spirit. They wanted an heroic character, a costumed character. They asked me if he'd have a costume. And I put a mask on him and said, 'Yes, he has a costume!'"^[15]

The Spirit, an initially eight- and later seven-page urban-crimefighter series, ran with the initial backup features "Mr. Mystic" and "Lady Luck" in a 16-page Sunday supplement (colloquially called "The Spirit Section") that was eventually distributed in 20 newspapers with a combined circulation of as many as five million copies.^[16] It premiered June 2, 1940, and continued through 1952.^[17]

[edit] World War II and Joe Dope

Premiere issue of the U.S. Army publication PS (June 1951), designed to be a "postscript" to related publications. Art by Eisner.

Eisner was drafted into the U.S. Army in "late '41, early '42"^[18] and then "had about another half-year which the government gave me to clean up my affairs before going off" to fight in World War II.^[19] He was assigned to the camp newspaper in Aberdeen, where "there was also a big training program there, so I got involved in the use of comics for training. ... I finally became a warrant officer, which involved taking a test — that way you didn't have to go through Officer Candidate School."^[18] En route to Washington, D.C., he stopped at the Hollabird Depot in Baltimore, Maryland, where a mimeographed publication titled Army Motors was put together. "Together with the people there ... I helped develop its format. I began doing cartoons — and we began fashioning a magazine that had the ability to talk to the G.I.s in their language. So I began to use comics as a teaching tool, and when I got to Washington, they assigned me to the business of teaching — or selling — preventive maintenance."^[20] Eisner then created the educational comic strip and titular character Joe Dope for Army Motors, and spent four years working in The Pentagon editing the ordnance magazine Firepower and doing "all the general illustrations — that is, cartoons" for Army Motors. He continued to work on that and its 1950 successor magazine, PS, The Preventive Maintenance Monthly.^[20]

While Eisner's later graphic novels were entirely his own work, he had a studio working under his supervision on The Spirit. In particular, letterer Abe Kanegson came up with the distinctive lettering style which Eisner himself would later imitate in his book-length works, and Kanegson would often rewrite Eisner's dialogue.^[21]

Eisner's most trusted assistant on The Spirit, however, was Jules Feiffer, later a renowned cartoonist, playwright and screenwriter in his own right. Eisner later said of their working methods "You should hear me and Jules Feiffer going at it in a room. 'No, you designed the splash page for this one, then you wrote the ending — I came up with the idea for the story, and you did it up to this point, then I did the next page and this sequence here and...' And I'll be swearing up and down that 'he' wrote the ending on that one. We never agree".^[21]

So trusted were Eisner's assistants that Eisner allowed them to "ghost" The Spirit from the time that he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942 until his return to civilian life in 1945. The primary wartime artists were the uncredited Lou Fine and Jack Cole, with future Kid Colt, Outlaw artist Jack Keller drawing backgrounds. Ghost writers included Manly Wade Wellman and William Woolfolk. The wartime ghosted stories have been reprinted in DC Comics' hardcover collections The Spirit Archives Vols. 5 to 11 (2001–2003), spanning July 1942 - December 1944.

On Eisner's return from service and resumption of his role in the studio, he created the bulk of the Spirit stories on which his reputation was solidified. The post-war years also saw him attempt to launch the comic-strip/comic-book series Baseball, John Law, Kewpies, and Nubbin the Shoeshine Boy; none succeeded, but some material was recycled into The Spirit.^{[citation needed]}

American Visuals Corporation[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

During his World War II military service, Eisner had introduced the use of comics for training personnel in the publication Army Motors, for which he created the cautionary bumbling soldier Joe Dope, who illustrated various methods of preventive maintenance of various military equipment and weapons. In 1948, while continuing to do The Spirit and seeing television and other post-war trends eat at the readership base of newspapers, he formed the American Visuals Corporation in order to produce instructional materials for the government, related agencies, and businesses. One of his longest-running jobs was PS, The Preventive Maintenance Monthly, a digest sized magazine with comic book elements that he started for the Army in 1951 and continued to work on until the 1970s with Klaus Nordling, Mike Ploog, and other artists.

Other clients of his Connecticut-based company included RCA Records, the Baltimore Colts NFL football team, and New York Telephone.

Graphic novels[link]

In the late 1970s, Eisner turned his attention to longer storytelling forms. A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (Baronet Books, October 1978) is an early example of an American graphic novel, combining thematically linked short stories into a single square-bound volume. Eisner continued with a string of graphic novels that tell the history of New York's immigrant communities, particularly Jews, including The Building, A Life Force, Dropsie Avenue and To the Heart of the Storm. He continued producing new books into his seventies and eighties, at an average rate of nearly one a year. Each of these books was done twice — once as a rough version to show editor Dave Schreiner, then as a second, finished version incorporating suggested changes.^[22]

Some of his last work was the retelling in sequential art of novels and myths, including Moby-Dick. In 2002, at the age of 85, he published Sundiata, based on the part-historical, part-mythical stories of a West African king, "The Lion of Mali". Fagin the Jew is an account of the life of Dickens' character Fagin, in which Eisner tries to get past the stereotyped portrait of Fagin in Oliver Twist. His last graphic novel, The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion , an account of the making of the anti-semitic hoax The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, was completed shortly before his death and published in 2005 .

Academic work[link]

In his later years especially, Eisner was a frequent lecturer about the craft and uses of sequential art. He taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he published Will Eisner's Gallery, a collection of work by his students^{[citation needed]} and wrote two books based on these lectures, Comics and Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, which are widely used by students of cartooning. In 2002, Eisner participated in the Will Eisner Symposium of the 2002 University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels.^[23]

Death[link]

Eisner died January 3, 2005, in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, of complications from a quadruple bypass surgery performed December 22, 2004.^[24][25] DC Comics held a memorial service in Manhattan's Lower East Side, a neighborhood Eisner often visited in his work, at the Angel Orensanz Foundation on Norfolk Street.^[26]

Eisner was survived by his wife, Ann Weingarten Eisner, and their son, John.^[27][28][29] In the introduction to the 2001 reissue of A Contract with God, Eisner revealed that the inspiration for the title story grew out of the 1970 death of his leukemia-stricken teenaged daughter, Alice, next to whom he is buried. Until then, only Eisner's closest friends were aware of his daughter's life and death.

Awards and honors[link]

Eisner has been recognized for his work with the National Cartoonists Society Comic Book Award for 1967, 1968, 1969, 1987 and 1988, as well as its Story Comic Book Award in 1979, and its highest accolade, the Reuben Award, for 1998.

He was inducted into the Academy of Comic Book Arts Hall of Fame in 1971, and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1987. The following year, the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards were established in his honor.

He received in 1975 the second Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême.

With Jack Kirby, Robert Crumb, Harvey Kurtzman, Gary Panter, and Chris Ware, Eisner was among the artists honored in the exhibition "Masters of American Comics" at the Jewish Museum in New York City, New York, from September 16, 2006 to January 28, 2007.^[30][31]

On the 94th anniversary of Eisner's birth, in 2011, Google used an image featuring the Spirit as its logo.^[32][33]

Books[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Feiffer, Jules, The Great Comic-Book Heroes, ISBN 1-56097-501-6
• Jones, Gerard, Men Of Tomorrow ISBN 0-434-01402-8
• Steranko, Jim, The Steranko History of Comics 2 (Supergraphics, 1972)

External links[link]

Biography portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Will Eisner

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (January 2011)

• Official website. WebCitation archive.
• Will Eisner at the Open Directory Project
• Tumulka, Wes, ed. Wildwood Cemetery: The Spirit Database. WebCitation archive.
• Archive of Heintjes, Tom. "Will Eisner's The Spirit", AdventureStrips.com, n.d.. Original page.
• Fitzgerald, Paul E. "Every Picture Tells A Story: His Pen and Wit Sharper Than Ever, Graphic Novelist Will Eisner Takes On Religious Intolerance", The Washington Post, June 3, 2004. WebCitation archive.
• Robinson, Tasha. "Interview: Will Eisner", The A.V. Club / The Onion, September 27, 2000. WebCitation archive.
• Will Eisner at the Comic Book DB
• Jacks, Brian. "Veterans Day Exclusive: 'The Spirit' Creator Will Eisner's Wartime Memories", MTV.com, November 11, 2000. WebCitation archive.
• Ohio State: Will Eisner Collection
• Benton, John (May 2005.). "Will Eisner: Having Something to Say". The Comics Journal (267). Archived from the original on March 19, 2011. http://www.tcj.com/will-eisner-having-something-to-say/.  Archive of material trimmed from print-magazine interview. Archive of interview excerpts originally posted online. Interview conducted September 10, 1968; originally published in Witzend #6 (Spring 1969).
• "Interview with Jerry Iger", Cubic Zirconia Reader, 1985. WebCitation archive.

Alan Moore
Born	Alan Oswald Moore (1953-11-18) 18 November 1953 (age 58) Northampton, Northamptonshire, England, UK
Pen name	Curt Vile Jill de Ray Translucia Baboon
Occupation	Comics writer, novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, musician, cartoonist, magician
Nationality	British
Genres	Science fiction, fiction, non-fiction, superhero, horror
Notable work(s)	Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Batman: The Killing Joke, Voice of the Fire, Lost Girls
Spouse(s)	Phyllis Moore Melinda Gebbie
Children	Amber Moore Leah Moore
Influences William Blake, Angela Carter, William S. Burroughs,[1] Thomas Pynchon, Robert Anton Wilson, Clive Barker, Bryan Talbot, Michael Moorcock, Bertold Brecht, H. P. Lovecraft, Iain Sinclair, Will Eisner,[2] Steve Ditko,[2] Jack Kirby,[3] Edgar Allan Poe, Dave Sim
Influenced Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke, Joss Whedon,[4] Kurt Busiek, Brian Azzarello, Brian K. Vaughan, Mark Millar, Geoff Johns, Damon Lindelof,[4] Dax Riggs, Tim Burton

Alan Oswald Moore (born 18 November 1953) is an English writer primarily known for his work in comic books, a medium where he has produced a number of critically acclaimed and popular series, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell.^[5] Frequently described as the best graphic novel writer in history,^{[6](p10)[7](p7)} he has also been described as "one of the most important British writers of the last fifty years".^[8] He has occasionally used such pseudonyms as Curt Vile, Jill de Ray, and Translucia Baboon.

Moore started out writing for British underground and alternative fanzines in the late 1970s before achieving success publishing comic strips in such magazines as 2000 AD and Warrior. He was subsequently picked up by the American DC Comics, and as "the first comics writer living in Britain to do prominent work in America",^[7](p7) he worked on big name characters such as Batman (Batman: The Killing Joke) and Superman (Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?), substantially developed the minor character Swamp Thing, and penned original titles such as Watchmen. During that decade, Moore helped to bring about greater social respectability for the medium in the United States and United Kingdom,^[7](p11) and has subsequently been credited with the development of the term "graphic novel" over "comic book".^[9] In the late 1980s and early 1990s he left the comic industry mainstream and went independent for a while, working on experimental work such as the epic From Hell, pornographic Lost Girls, and the prose novel Voice of the Fire. He subsequently returned to the mainstream later in the 1990s, working for Image Comics, before developing America's Best Comics, an imprint through which he published works such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the occult-based Promethea.

Moore is a Neopagan, occultist, ceremonial magician, wizard, vegetarian and anarchist and has featured such themes in works including Promethea, From Hell and V for Vendetta, as well as performing avant-garde spoken word occult "workings" with The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, some of which have been released on CD.

Despite his own personal objection to them, his books have provided the basis for a number of Hollywood films, including From Hell (2001), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), V for Vendetta (2005) and Watchmen (2009). Moore has also been referenced in popular culture, and has been recognised as an influence on a variety of literary and television figures including Neil Gaiman,^{[10](pp16–18)} Joss Whedon,^[4] and Damon Lindelof.^[4]

Biography[link]

Early life: 1953–1977[link]

Moore was born on 18 November 1953, at St. Edmond’s Hospital in Northampton, Northamptonshire, England, to a working class family whom he believed had lived in the town for several generations.^[6](p11) He subsequently grew up in a part of Northampton known as The Boroughs, a poverty-stricken area with a lack of facilities and high levels of illiteracy, but he nonetheless "loved it. I loved the people. I loved the community and… I didn’t know that there was anything else."^{[6](pp13–16)} He lived in his house with his parents, brewery worker Ernest Moore, and printer Sylvia Doreen, along with his younger brother Mike and his maternal grandmother.^[6](p14) He "read omnivorously" from the age of five, getting books out of the local library, and subsequently attended Spring Lane Primary School.^[6](p17) At the same time, he began reading comic strips, initially British strips, such as Topper and The Beezer, but eventually also American imports such as Flash, Detective Comics, Fantastic Four, and Blackhawk.^[6](p31) He later passed his eleven plus exam, and was therefore eligible to go to Northampton Grammar School,^[11] where he first came into contact with people who were middle class and better educated, and he was shocked at how he went from being one of the top pupils at his primary school to one of the lowest in the class at secondary. Subsequently disliking school and having "no interest in academic study", he believed that there was a "covert curriculum" being taught that was designed to indoctrinate children with "punctuality, obedience and the acceptance of monotony".^{[6](pp17–18)}

In the late 1960s Moore began publishing his own poetry and essays in fanzines, eventually setting up his own fanzine, Embryo. Through Embryo, Moore became involved in a group known as the Arts Lab. The Arts Lab subsequently made significant contributions to the magazine. ^{[6](pp33–34)} He began dealing the hallucinogenic LSD at school, being expelled for doing so in 1970 – he later described himself as "one of the world's most inept LSD dealers".^[12] The headmaster of the school subsequently "got in touch with various other academic establishments that I'd applied to and told them not to accept me because I was a danger to the moral well-being of the rest of the students there, which was possibly true."^[6](p18)

Whilst continuing to live in his parents' home for a few more years, he moved through various jobs, including cleaning toilets and working in a tannery. Around 1971, he met and began a relationship with a Northampton-born girl named Phyllis, with whom he moved into "a little one-room flat in the Barrack Road area in Northampton". Soon marrying, they moved into a new council estate in the town's eastern district whilst he worked in an office for a sub-contractor of the local gas board. However, he felt that he was not being fulfilled by this job, and so decided to try to earn a living doing something more artistic.^{[6](pp34–35)}

Early career: 1978–1980[link]

Abandoning his office job, he decided to instead take up both writing and illustrating his own comics. He had already produced a couple of strips for several alternative fanzines and magazines, such as Anon E. Mouse for the local paper Anon, and St. Pancras Panda, a parody of Paddington Bear, for the Oxford-based Back Street Bugle.^{[7](pp16–17)} His first paid work was for a few drawings that were printed in NME music magazine, and not long after he succeeded in getting a series about a private detective known as Roscoe Moscow published using the pseudonym of Curt Vile (a pun on the name of composer Kurt Weill) in the weekly music magazine Sounds, earning £35 a week. Alongside this, he and Phyllis, along with their newly born daughter Leah, began claiming unemployment benefit to supplement this income.^[6](p36) Not long after this, in 1979 he also began publishing a new comic strip known as Maxwell the Magic Cat in the Northants Post, under the pseudonym of Jill de Ray (a pun on the Medieval child murderer Gilles de Rais, something he found to be a "sardonic joke"). Earning a further £10 a week from this, he decided to sign off of social security, and would continue writing Maxwell the Magic Cat until 1986.^{[6](pp36–37)} Moore has stated that he would have been happy to continue Maxwell's adventures almost indefinitely, but ended the strip after the newspaper ran a negative editorial on the place of homosexuals in the community.^[13] Meanwhile, Moore decided to focus more fully on writing comics rather than both writing and drawing them, stating that "After I'd been doing [it] for a couple of years, I realised that I would never be able to draw well enough and/or quickly enough to actually make any kind of decent living as an artist."^[14](p15)

To learn more about how to write a successful comic book script, he asked advice from his friend, comic book writer Steve Moore, whom he had known since he was fourteen.^[14](p20) Interested in writing for 2000AD, one of Britain's most prominent comic magazines, Alan Moore then submitted a script for their long running and successful series Judge Dredd. Whilst having no need for another writer on Judge Dredd, which was already being written by John Wagner, 2000AD's editor Alan Grant saw promise in Moore's work – later remarking that "this guy's a really fucking good writer"^[15] – and instead asked him to write some short stories for the publication's Future Shocks series. While the first few were rejected, Grant advised Moore on improvements, and eventually accepted the first of many. Meanwhile, Moore had also begun writing minor stories for Doctor Who Weekly, and later commented that "I really, really wanted a regular strip. I didn’t want to do short stories… But that wasn't what was being offered. I was being offered short four or five page stories where everything had to be done in those five pages. And, looking back, it was the best possible education that I could have had in how to construct a story."^{[14](pp21–22)}

[edit] Marvel UK, 2000AD, and Warrior: 1980–1984

From 1980 through to 1984, Moore maintained his status as a freelance writer, and was offered a spate of work by a variety of comic book companies in Britain, namely Marvel UK, and the publishers of 2000AD and Warrior. He later remarked that "I remember that what was generally happening was that everybody wanted to give me work, for fear that I would just be given other work by their rivals. So everybody was offering me things."^[6](p57) It was an era when comic books were increasing in popularity in Britain, and according to Lance Parkin, "the British comics scene was cohering as never before, and it was clear that the audience was sticking with the title as they grew up. Comics were no longer just for very small boys: teenagers – even A-level and university students – were reading them now."^[7](p20)

During this three year period, 2000AD would accept and publish over fifty of Moore's one-off stories for their Future Shocks and Time Twisters science fiction series.^[15] The editors at the magazine were impressed by Moore's work and decided to offer him a more permanent strip, starting with a story that they wanted to be vaguely based upon the hit film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The result, Skizz, which was illustrated by Jim Baikie, told the story of the titular alien who crashes to Earth and is cared for by a woman named Roxy, and Moore later noted that in his opinion, this work "owes far too much to Alan Bleasdale."^[16](p94) Another series he produced for 2000AD was D.R. and Quinch, which was illustrated by Alan Davis. The story, which Moore described as "continuing the tradition of Dennis the Menace, but giving him a thermonuclear capacity",^[16](p99) revolved around two delinquent aliens, and was a science-fiction take on National Lampoon's characters O.C. and Stiggs. However, the work widely considered to be the highlight of his 2000AD career,^{[16](pp100–110)} and that he himself described as "the one that worked best for me"^[6](p58) was The Ballad of Halo Jones, the first series in the magazine to be based around a female character, which Moore did deliberately.^{[16](pp99–102)} Co-created with artist Ian Gibson, the series was set in the 50th century. It finished before all the episodes were written.

Another comic company to employ Moore was Marvel UK, who had formerly purchased a few of his one-off stories for Doctor Who Weekly and Star Wars Weekly. Aiming to get an older audience than 2000AD, their main rival, they employed Moore to write for the regular strip Captain Britain, "halfway through a storyline that he's neither inaugurated nor completely understood."^[17] He replaced the former writer Dave Thorpe, but maintained the original artist, Alan Davis, who Moore described as "an artist whose love for the medium and whose sheer exultation upon finding himself gainfully employed within it shine from every line, every new costume design, each nuance of expression."^[17]

The third comic company that Moore worked for in this period was a new monthly magazine known as Warrior, founded by Dez Skinn, a former editor of both IPC (publishers of 2000 AD) and Marvel UK, that was designed to offer writers a greater degree of freedom over their artistic creations than was allowed by pre-existing companies, and it was at Warrior that Moore "would start to reach his potential".^[7](p21) Moore was initially given two ongoing strips in Warrior: Marvelman and V for Vendetta, both of which debuted in Warrior's first issue in March 1982. V for Vendetta was a dystopian thriller set in a future 1997 where a fascist government controlled Britain, opposed only by a lone anarchist dressed in a Guy Fawkes costume who turns to terrorism to topple the government. Illustrated by David Lloyd, Moore was influenced by his pessimistic feelings about the Thatcherite Conservative government, which he projected forward as a fascist state in which all ethnic and sexual minorities had been eliminated. It has been regarded as "among Moore's best work" and has maintained a cult following throughout subsequent decades.^[7](p22)

Marvelman (later retitled Miracleman for legal reasons) was a series that originally had been published in Britain from 1954 through to 1964, based largely upon the American comic Captain Marvel. Upon resurrecting Marvelman, Moore "took a kitsch children's character and placed him within the real world of 1982".^[7](p23) The work was drawn primarily by Garry Leach and Alan Davis.^[18] The third series that Moore produced for Warrior was The Bojeffries Saga, a comedy about a working-class English family of vampires and werewolves, drawn by Steve Parkhouse. Warrior closed before these stories were completed,^[19][20][21] but under new publishers both Miracleman and V for Vendetta were resumed by Moore, who finished both stories by 1989. Moore's biographer Lance Parkin remarked that "reading them through together throws up some interesting contrasts – in one the hero fights a fascist dictatorship based in London, in the other an Aryan superman imposes one."^[7](p26)

Although Moore's work numbered amongst the most popular strips to appear in 2000 AD, Moore himself became increasingly concerned at the lack of creator's rights in British comics.^{[16](pp105–106)} In 1985, he talked to fanzine Arkensword, noting that he had stopped working for all British publishers bar IPC, "purely for the reason that IPC so far have avoided lying to me, cheating me or generally treating me like shit."^[22][23] He did, however, join other creators in decrying the wholesale relinquishing of all rights, and in 1986 stopped writing for 2000 AD, leaving mooted future volumes of the Halo Jones story unstarted.^{[16](pp110–111)} Moore's outspoken opinions and principles, particularly on the subject of creator's rights and ownership, would see him burn bridges with a number of other publishers over the course of his career.^[22][23]

Meanwhile, during this same period, he – using the pseudonym of Translucia Baboon – became involved in the music scene, founding his own band, The Sinister Ducks, with David J (of goth band Bauhaus) and Alex Green, and in 1983 released a single, March of the Sinister Ducks, with sleeve art by illustrator Kevin O'Neill. In 1984, Moore and David J also released a 12-inch single featuring a recording of "This Vicious Cabaret", a song featured in V for Vendetta, which was released on the Glass Records label.^[7](p95) Moore would also write the song "Leopardman At C&A" for David J, and it would be set to music by Mick Collins for the album We Have You Surrounded by Collins' group The Dirtbombs.^[24]

The American mainstream and DC Comics: 1983–1988[link]

Moore's work in 2000 AD brought him to the attention of DC Comics editor Len Wein,^[25] who hired him in 1983 to write Swamp Thing, then a formulaic and poor-selling monster comic. Moore, along with artists Stephen R. Bissette, Rick Veitch, and John Totleben, deconstructed and reimagined the character, writing a series of formally experimental stories that addressed environmental and social issues alongside the horror and fantasy, bolstered by research into the culture of Louisiana, where the series was set.^[19][20] For Swamp Thing he revived many of DC's neglected magical and supernatural characters, including the Spectre, the Demon, the Phantom Stranger, Deadman, and others, and introduced John Constantine, an English working-class magician based visually on the British musician Sting, which later became the protagonist of the series Hellblazer, the longest continuously published comic of DC's Vertigo imprint. Moore would continue writing Swamp Thing for about three years, from issue No. 20 (January 1984) through to issue No. 64 (September 1987) with the exception of issues No. 59 and #62.^[7](p82) Moore's run on Swamp Thing was successful both critically and commercially, and inspired DC to recruit European and particularly British writers such as Grant Morrison, Jamie Delano, Peter Milligan, and Neil Gaiman to write comics in a similar vein, often involving radical revamps of obscure characters.^[19][20] These titles laid the foundation of what became the Vertigo line.

Moore began producing further stories for DC Comics, including a two-part story for Vigilante, which dealt with domestic abuse. He was eventually given the chance to write a story for one of DC's best known superheroes, Superman, entitled For the Man Who Has Everything, which was illustrated by Dave Gibbons and released in 1985. In this story, Wonder Woman, Batman, and Robin visit Superman on his birthday, only to find that he has been overcome by an alien organism and is hallucinating about his heart's desire.^[7](p37) He followed this with another Superman story, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, which was published in 1986. Illustrated by Curt Swan, it was designed as the last Superman story in the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths DC Universe.^[26]

1988 saw the publication of a Batman story written by Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland. Entitled The Killing Joke, it revolved around The Joker, who had escaped Arkham Asylum and gone on a killing spree, and Batman's effort to stop him. Despite being a key work in helping to redefine Batman as a character,^[27] along with Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, Lance Parkin believed that "the theme isn’t developed enough" and "it's a rare example of a Moore story where the art is better than the writing,"^{[7](pp38–39)} something Moore himself acknowledges.^[6](p121)

The limited series Watchmen, begun in 1986 and collected as a trade paperback in 1987, cemented Moore's reputation. Imagining what the world would be like if costumed heroes had really existed since the 1940s, Moore and artist Dave Gibbons created a Cold War mystery in which the shadow of nuclear war threatens the world. The heroes who are caught up in this escalating crisis either work for the U.S. government or are outlawed, and are motivated to heroism by their various psychological hang-ups. Watchmen is non-linear and told from multiple points of view, and includes formal experiments such as the symmetrical design of issue 5, "Fearful Symmetry", where the last page is a near mirror-image of the first, the second-last of the second, and so on, and in this manner is an early example of Moore's interest in the human perception of time and its implications for free will. It is the only comic to win the Hugo Award, in a one-time category ("Best Other Form").^[28] It is widely seen as Moore's best work, and has been regularly described as the greatest comic book ever written.^{[7](pp39–40)} Alongside roughly contemporary works such as Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez's Love and Rockets, Watchmen was part of a late 1980s trend in American comics towards more adult sensibilities.^[29] Moore briefly became a media celebrity, and the resulting attention led to him withdrawing from fandom and no longer attending comics conventions (at one UKCAC in London he is said to have been followed into the toilet by eager autograph hunters).^[30]

In 1987 Moore submitted a proposal for a miniseries called Twilight of the Superheroes, the title a twist on Richard Wagner's opera Götterdämmerung (meaning "Twilight of the Gods"). The series was set in the future of the DC Universe, where the world is ruled by superheroic dynasties, including the House of Steel (presided over by Superman and Wonder Woman) and the House of Thunder (led by the Captain Marvel family). These two houses are about to unite through a dynastic marriage, their combined power potentially threatening freedom, and several characters, including John Constantine, attempt to stop it and free humanity from the power of superheroes. The series would also have restored the DC Universe's multiple earths, which had been eliminated in the continuity-revising 1985 miniseries Crisis on Infinite Earths. The series was never commissioned, but copies of Moore's detailed notes have appeared on the Internet and in print despite the efforts of DC, who consider the proposal their property.^{[7](pp43–44)} Similar elements, such as the concept of hypertime, have since appeared in DC comics. The 1996 miniseries Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross, was also set amid a superheroic conflict in the future of the DC universe. Waid and Ross have stated that they had read the Twilight proposal before starting work on their series, but that any similarities are both minor and unintended.^[21]

Moore's relationship with DC Comics had gradually deteriorated over the issues of creator's rights and merchandising. Moore and Gibbons were not paid any royalties for a Watchmen spin-off badge set, as DC defined them as a "promotional item",^[31] and according to certain reports, he and Gibbons gained only 2% of the profits earned by DC for Watchmen.^[7](p44) Meanwhile, a group of creators including Moore, Frank Miller, Marv Wolfman, and Howard Chaykin, fell out with DC over a proposed age-rating system similar to those used for films.^{[7](pp44–45)} After completing V for Vendetta, which DC had already begun publishing, thus enabling him to finish the final few episodes, in 1989, Moore stopped working for DC.

Independent period and Mad Love: 1988–1993[link]

Abandoning DC Comics and the mainstream, Moore, along with his wife Phyllis and their mutual lover Deborah Delano, set up their own comics publishing company, which they named Mad Love. The works that they published in Mad Love turned away from the science fiction and superhero genres that Moore was used to writing, instead focusing on realism, ordinary people, and political causes. Mad Love's first publication, AARGH (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia), was an anthology of work by a number of writers (including Moore) that challenged the Thatcher government's recently introduced Clause 28, a law designed to prevent councils and schools "promoting homosexuality". Sales from the book went towards the Organisation of Lesbian and Gay Action, and Moore was "very pleased with" it, stating that "we hadn't prevented this bill from becoming law, but we had joined in the general uproar against it, which prevented it from ever becoming as viciously effective as its designers might have hoped."^{[6](p149)[32]} Moore followed this with a second political work, Shadowplay: The Secret Team, a comic illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz for Eclipse Comics and commissioned by the Christic Institute, which was included as a part of the anthology Brought to Light, a description of the CIA's covert drug smuggling and arms dealing.^[7](p47)

After prompting by cartoonist and self-publishing advocate Dave Sim,^[11] Moore then used Mad Love to publish his next project, Big Numbers, a proposed 12-issue series set in "a hardly-disguised version of Moore's native Northampton" known as Hampton, and deals with the effects of big business on ordinary people and also with ideas of chaos theory.^[7](p48) Illustration of the comic was begun by Bill Sienkiewicz, who left the series after only two issues in 1990, and despite plans that his assistant, Al Columbia, would replace him, it never occurred and the series remained unfinished.^{[7](pp48–49)[33]} Following this, in 1991 the company Victor Gollancz Ltd published Moore's A Small Killing, a full length story illustrated by Oscar Zarate, about a once idealistic advertising executive haunted by his boyhood self. According to Lance Parkin, A Small Killing is "quite possibly Moore's most underrated work."^[7](p49) Soon after this, Mad Love itself was disbanded as Phyllis and Deborah ended their relationship with Moore, taking with them much of the money that he had earned from his work in the 1980s.^[7](p25)

Meanwhile, Moore also began producing work for Taboo, a small independent comic anthology edited by his former collaborator Stephen R. Bissette. The first of these was From Hell, a fictionalised account of the Jack the Ripper murders of the 1880s. Inspired by Douglas Adams' novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency,^[34] Moore reasoned that to solve a crime holistically, one would need to solve the entire society it occurred in, and depicts the murders as a consequence of the politics and economics of the time. Just about every notable figure of the period is connected with the events in some way, including "Elephant Man" Joseph Merrick, Oscar Wilde, Native American writer Black Elk, William Morris, artist Walter Sickert, and Aleister Crowley, who makes a brief appearance as a young boy. Illustrated in a sooty pen and ink style by Eddie Campbell, From Hell took nearly ten years to complete, outlasting Taboo and going through two more publishers before being collected as a trade paperback by Eddie Campbell Comics. It was widely praised, with comics author Warren Ellis calling it "my all-time favourite graphic novel".^[35]

The other series that Moore began for Taboo was Lost Girls, which he described as a work of intelligent "pornography".^[36] Illustrated by Melinda Gebbie, whom Moore subsequently entered into a relationship with, it was set in 1913, where Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Wendy from Peter Pan – who are each of a different age and class – all meet in a European hotel and regale each other with tales of their sexual encounters.^{[7](pp49–50)} With the work, Moore wanted to attempt something innovative in comics, and believed that creating comics pornography was a way of achieving this. He remarked that "I had a lot of different ideas as to how it might be possible to do an up-front sexual comic strip and to do it in a way that would remove a lot of what I saw were the problems with pornography in general. That it's mostly ugly, it's mostly boring, it's not inventive – it has no standards."^{[6](pp154–155)} Like From Hell, Lost Girls outlasted Taboo, and a few subsequent instalments were published erratically until the work was finished and a complete edition published in 2006.

Meanwhile, Moore also set about writing a prose novel, eventually producing Voice of the Fire, which would be published in 1996. Unconventional in tone, the novel was a set of short stories about linked events in his hometown of Northampton through the centuries, from the Bronze Age to the present day, which combined to tell a larger story.^[7](p92)

Return to the mainstream and Image Comics: 1993–1998[link]

In 1993 Moore declared himself to be a ceremonial magician. The same year marked a move by Moore back to the mainstream comics industry and back to writing superhero comics. He did so through the Image Comics, widely known at the time for its flashy artistic style, graphic violence, and scantily-clad large-breasted women, something that horrified many of his fans.^[7](p55) His first work published by Image, an issue of the series Spawn, was soon followed by the creation of his own mini-series, 1963, which was "a pastiche of Jack Kirby stories drawn for Marvel in the sixties, with their rather overblown style, colourful characters and cosmic style."^[7](p56) According to Moore, "after I'd done the 1963 stuff I'd become aware of how much the comic audience had changed while I'd been away [since 1988]. That all of a sudden it seemed that the bulk of the audience really wanted things that had almost no story, just lots of big, full-page pin-up sort of pieces of artwork. And I was genuinely interested to see if I could write a decent story for that market."^[6](p173)

He subsequently set about writing what he saw as "better than average stories for 13- to 15-year olds", including three mini-series based upon the Spawn series: Violator, Violator/Badrock, and Spawn: Blood Feud.^[7](p56) In 1995, he was also given control of a regular monthly comic, Jim Lee's WildC.A.T.S., starting from issue #21, which he would continue to write for fourteen issues. The series followed two groups of superheroes, one of whom are on a spaceship heading back to their home planet, and the others who are instead remaining on Earth. Moore's biographer Lance Parkin remarked critically of the series, feeling that it was one of Moore's worst, and that "you feel Moore should be better than this. It's not special."^[7](p56) Moore himself, who remarked that he took on the series – his only regular monthly comic series since Swamp Thing – largely because he liked Jim Lee, admitted that he was not entirely happy with the work, believing that he had catered too much to his conceptions of what the fans wanted rather than being innovative.^[6](p174)

Next he took over Rob Liefeld's Supreme, about a character with many similarities with DC Comics’ Superman. Instead of emphasising increased realism as he had done with earlier superhero comics he had taken over, Moore did the opposite, and began basing the series on the Silver Age Superman comics of the 1960s, introducing a female superhero Suprema, a super-dog Radar, and a Kryptonite-like material known as Supremium, in doing so harking back to the original "mythic" figure of the American superhero. Under Moore, Supreme would prove to be a critical and commercial success, announcing that he was back in the mainstream after several years of self-imposed exile.^{[7](pp59–60)}

When Rob Liefeld, one of Image's co-founders, split from the publisher and formed his own company Awesome Entertainment, he hired Moore to create a new universe for the characters he had brought with him from Image. Moore's "solution was breathtaking and cocky – he created a long and distinguished history for these new characters, retro-fitting a fake silver and gold age for them." Moore began writing comics for many of these characters, such as Glory and Youngblood, as well as a three-part mini-series known as Judgement Day to provide a basis for the Awesome Universe.^{[7](pp60–61)} However Moore was not satisfied with Liefeld, saying "I just got fed up with the unreliability of information that I get from him, that I didn't trust him. I didn't think that he was respecting the work and I found it hard to respect him. And also by then I was probably feeling that with the exception of Jim Lee, Jim Valentino – people like that – that a couple of the Image partners were seeming, to my eyes, to be less than gentlemen. They were seeming to be not necessarily the people I wanted to deal with."^[6](p175)

America's Best Comics: 1999–2008[link]

Image partner Jim Lee offered to provide Moore with his own imprint, which would be under Lee's company WildStorm Productions. Moore named this imprint America's Best Comics, lining up a series of artists and writers to assist him in this venture. However, Lee soon sold WildStorm – including America's Best Comics – to DC Comics, and "Moore found himself back with a company he'd vowed to never work with again". Lee and editor Scott Dunbier flew to England personally to reassure Moore that he would not be affected by the sale, and would not have to deal with DC directly.^[37] Moore decided that there were too many people involved to back out from the project, and so ABC was launched in early 1999.^[7](p62)

The first series published by ABC was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which featured a variety of characters from Victorian adventure novels, such as H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain, H. G. Wells' Invisible Man, Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Wilhelmina Murray from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Illustrated by Kevin O'Neill, the first volume of the series pitted the League against Professor Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes books; the second, against the Martians from The War of the Worlds. A third volume entitled The Black Dossier was set in the 1950s. The series was well received, and Moore was pleased that an American audience was enjoying something he considered "perversely English", and that it was inspiring some readers to get interested in Victorian literature.^[6](p183)

Another of Moore's ABC works was Tom Strong, a post-modern superhero series, featured a hero inspired by characters pre-dating Superman, such as Doc Savage and Tarzan. The character's drug-induced longevity allowed Moore to include flashbacks to Strong's adventures throughout the 20th century, written and drawn in period styles, as a comment on the history of comics and pulp fiction. The primary artist was Chris Sprouse. Tom Strong bore many similarities to Moore's earlier work on Supreme, but according to Lance Parkin, was "more subtle", and was "ABC's most accessible comic."^{[7](pp64–65)}

Moore's Top 10, a deadpan police procedural comedy set in a city called Neopolis where everyone, including the police, criminals, and civilians has super-powers, costumes, and secret identities, was drawn by Gene Ha and Zander Cannon.^{[7](pp65–66,71)} The series ended after twelve issues, but has spawned four spin-offs: a miniseries Smax, which was set in a fantasy realm and drawn by Cannon; Top 10: The Forty-Niners, a prequel to the main Top Ten series drawn by Ha;^[7](p68) and two sequel miniseries, Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct, which was written by Paul Di Filippo and drawn by Jerry Ordway, and Top 10: Season Two, written by Cannon and drawn by Ha.

Moore's series Promethea, which told the story of a teenage girl, Sophie Bangs, who is possessed by an ancient pagan goddess, the titular Promethea, explored many occult themes, particularly the Qabalah and the concept of magic, with Moore stating that "I wanted to be able to do an occult comic that didn't portray the occult as a dark, scary place, because that's not my experience of it… [Promethea was] more psychedelic… more sophisticated, more experimental, more ecstatic and exuberant."^[6](p188) Drawn by J.H. Williams III, it has been described as "a personal statement" from Moore, being one of his most personal works, and that it encompasses "a belief system, a personal cosmology".^[7](p68)

ABC Comics was also used to publish an anthology series, Tomorrow Stories, which featured a regular cast of characters such as Cobweb, First American, Greyshirt, Jack B. Quick, and Splash Brannigan. Tomorrow Stories was notable for being an anthology series, a medium that had largely died out in American comics at the time.^[7](p66)

However, despite the assurances that DC Comics would not interfere with Moore and his work, they subsequently did so, angering him. Specifically, in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen #5, an authentic vintage advertisement for a "Marvel"-brand douche caused DC executive Paul Levitz to order the entire print run destroyed and reprinted with the advertisement amended to "Amaze", to avoid friction with DC's competitor Marvel Comics.^[38] A Cobweb story Moore wrote for Tomorrow Stories No. 8 featuring references to L. Ron Hubbard, American occultist Jack Parsons, and the "Babalon Working", was blocked by DC Comics due to the subject matter.^[39] Ironically, it was later revealed that they had already published a version of the same event in their Paradox Press volume The Big Book of Conspiracies.

In 2003, a documentary about him was made by Shadowsnake Films, titled The Mindscape of Alan Moore, which was later released on DVD.^[40]

Return to independence: 2009–present[link]

With many of the stories he had planned for America's Best Comics brought to an end, and with his increasing dissatisfaction with how DC Comics were interfering with his work, he decided to once more pull out of the comics mainstream. Speaking to Bill Baker in 2005, he remarked that "I love the comics medium. I pretty much detest the comics industry. Give it another 15 months, I'll probably be pulling out of mainstream, commercial comics."^[14](p65) The only ABC title continued by Moore was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; after cutting ties with DC he launched the new League saga, Volume III: Century, in a co-publishing partnership of Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout Comics, the first part released in 2009, the second in 2011 and the third planned for 2012.

In 2006, the complete edition of Lost Girls was published, as a slipcased set of three hardcover volumes. The same year Moore published an eight-page article tracing out the history of pornography in which he argued that a society's vibrancy and success are related to its permissiveness in sexual matters. Decrying that the consumption of contemporary ubiquitous pornography was still widely considered shameful, he called for a new and more artistic pornography that could be openly discussed and would have a beneficial impact on society.^[41][42] He expanded on this for a 2009 book-length essay entitled 25,000 years of Erotic Freedom, which was described by a reviewer as "a tremendously witty history lecture – a sort of Horrible Histories for grownups."^[43]

In 2007 Moore appeared in animated form in an episode of The Simpsons – a show he is a fan of^[44] – entitled "Husbands and Knives", which aired on his fifty-fourth birthday.

In 2010 Moore began what he described as "the 21st century's first underground magazine". Titled Dodgem Logic, the bi-monthly publication consists of work by a number of Northampton-based authors and artists, as well as original contributions from Moore.^[45][46]

In January 2011, the fourth and final issue of Moore's Neonomicon was released by Avatar Press.^[47] This horror mini-series is set in the H. P. Lovecraft universe, and like its prequel The Courtyard, is illustrated by Jacen Burrows.

Recently Moore has appeared live at music events collaborating with a number of different musicians, with a forthcoming appearance with Stephen O'Malley confirmed for the ATP 'I'll Be Your Mirror' music festival in London.

A planned future project is an occult textbook known as The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, written with Steve Moore. It will be published by Top Shelf in "the future".^[48] He is also currently working on a second novel, Jerusalem, which will again be set in Northampton.^[49][50]

Both Alan Moore and David Lloyd have joined the Occupy Comics Kickstarter project. Moore is said to contribute a long-form prose piece, possibly illustrated.^[51]

Work[link]

Themes[link]

In a number of his comics, where he was taking over from earlier writers, including Marvelman, Swamp Thing, and Supreme, he used the "familiar tactic of wiping out what had gone before, giving the hero amnesia and revealing that everything we'd learned to that point was a lie."^[7](p58) In this manner he was largely able to start afresh with the character and their series and was not constrained by earlier canon.

As a comics writer, Moore applies literary sensibilities to the mainstream of the medium as well as including challenging subject matter and adult themes. He brings a wide range of influences to his work, such as William S. Burroughs,^[1] Thomas Pynchon, Robert Anton Wilson and Iain Sinclair,^[52] New Wave science fiction writers like Michael Moorcock and horror writers like Clive Barker.^[53] Influences within comics include Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman,^[54] Jack Kirby^[3] and Bryan Talbot.^[55][56][57]

Recognition and awards[link]

Moore's work in the comic book medium has been widely recognised by his peers and by critics. George Khoury asserted that "to call this free spirit the best writer in the history of comic books is an understatement"^[6](p10) whilst interviewer Steve Rose referred to him as "the Orson Welles of comics" who is "the undisputed high priest of the medium, whose every word is seized upon like a message from the ether" by comic book fans.^[58] Douglas Wolk observed: "Moore has undisputably made it into the Hall of Fame: he's one of the pillars of English language comics, alongside Jack Kirby and Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman and not many others. He's also the grand exception in that hall, since the other pillars are artists – and more often than not, writer/artists. Moore is a writer almost exclusively, though his hyper detailed scripts always play to the strengths of the artists he works with. That makes him the chief monkey wrench in comics author theory. The main reason that almost nobody's willing to say that a single cartoonist is categorically superior to a writer/artist team is that such a rule would run smack into Moore's bibliography. In fact, a handful of cartoonists who almost always write the stories they draw have made exceptions for Moore – Jaime Hernandez, Mark Beyer and most memorably Eddie Campbell."^[59](p229)

Moore signing an autograph, 2006.

Moore has won numerous Jack Kirby Awards during his career, including for Best Single Issue for Swamp Thing Annual No. 2 in 1985 with John Totleben and Steve Bissette, for Best Continuing Series for Swamp Thing in 1985, 1986 and 1987 with Totleben and Bissette, Best Writer for Swamp Thing in 1985 and 1986 and for Watchmen in 1987, and with Dave Gibbons for Best Finite Series and Best Writer/Artist (Single or Team) for Watchmen in 1987.^[60]

Moore has won multiple Eagle Awards, including virtually a "clean sweep" in 1986 for his work on Watchmen and Swamp Thing. Moore not only won "favourite writer in both the US and UK categories", but had his work win for favourite comic book, supporting character, and new title in the US; and character, continuing story and "character worthy of own title" in the UK (in which last category his works held all top three spots).^[61]

Moore has been nominated for the Comics Buyer's Guide Fan Awards several times, winning for Favorite Writer in 1985, 1986, 1987, 1999, and 2000. Also, he won the CBG Fan Award for Favorite Comic Book Story (Watchmen) in 1987 and Favorite Original Graphic Novel or Album (Batman: The Killing Joke with Brian Bolland) in 1988.^[62]

He received the Harvey Award for Best Writer for 1988 (for Watchmen),^[63] for 1995 and 1996 (for From Hell),^[64][65] for 1999 (for his body of work, including From Hell and Supreme),^[66] for 2000 (for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen),^[67] and for 2001 and 2003 (for Promethea).^[68][69]

He has received the Eisner Award for Best Writer nine times since 1988, and among his numerous international prizes are the German Max & Moritz Prize for an exceptional oeuvre (2008) and the British National Comics Award for Best Comics Writer Ever (in 2001 and 2002). Hij also won French awards like the Angoulême International Comics Festival Prize for Best Album for Watchmen in 1989 and V for Vendetta in 1990, and the Prix de la critique for From Hell in 2001, the Swedish Urhunden Prize in 1992 for Watchmen and several Spanish Haxtur Awards, in 1988 for Watchmen and 1989 for Swamp Thing No. 5 (both for Best Writer).

Moore was also lauded outside the world of comics. In 1988, Moore and artist Dave Gibbons won a Hugo Award in the category Other Forms for Watchmen. The category was created for that year only, via a rarely-used provision that allows the Committee of the Worldcon to create any temporary Additional Category it feels appropriate (no subsequent committee has repeated this category).^[70]

In 1988 he received a World Fantasy Award for Best Novella for A Hypothetical Lizard, which Avatar Press published in 2004 as a comics adaption by Antony Johnston. Moore also won two International Horror Guild Awards in the category Graphic Story/Illustrated Narrative (in 1995 with Eddie Campbell for From Hell and in 2003 with Kevin O'Neill for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen)^[71] and in 2000 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen landed a Bram Stoker Award in the category Best Illustrated Narrative.

In 2005, Watchmen was the only comic book to make it onto Time Magazine's "All-Time 100 Novels" list.^[72]

Film adaptations[link]

Due to the success of his comics, a number of filmmakers have expressed a desire to make film adaptations over the years. However, Moore himself has consistently opposed such ventures, stating that "I wanted to give comics a special place when I was writing things like Watchmen. I wanted to show off just what the possibilities of the comic book medium were, and films are completely different."^[73] Expressing similar sentiments, he also remarked that "If we only see comics in relation to movies then the best that they will ever be is films that do not move. I found it, in the mid 80s, preferable to concentrate on those things that only comics could achieve. The way in which a tremendous amount of information could be included visually in every panel, the juxtapositions between what a character was saying, and what the image that the reader was looking at would be. So in a sense… most of my work from the 80s onwards was designed to be un-filmable."^[40]

The first film to be based upon Moore's work was From Hell in 2001, which was directed by the Hughes Brothers. The film made a number of radical differences from the original comic, altering the main character from an older, conservative detective to a young character played by Johnny Depp. This was followed in 2003 with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a film that departed radically from the books, changing the ending from a mob war over the skies of London to the infiltration of a secret base in Tibet. For these two works, Moore was content to allow the filmmakers to do whatever they wished and removed himself from the process entirely. "As long as I could distance myself by not seeing them," he said, he could profit from the films while leaving the original comics untouched, "assured no one would confuse the two. This was probably naïve on my part."^[74] His attitude changed after producer Martin Poll and screenwriter Larry Cohen filed a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox, alleging that the film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen plagiarised an unproduced script they had written entitled Cast of Characters. Although the two scripts bear many similarities, most of them are elements that were added for the film and do not originate in Moore's comics. According to Moore, "They seemed to believe that the head of 20th Century Fox called me up and persuaded me to steal this screenplay, turning it into a comic book they could then adapt back into a movie, to camouflage petty larceny." Moore testified in a deposition, a process he found so unpleasant that he surmised he would have been better treated had he "molested and murdered a busload of retarded children after giving them heroin". Fox's settlement of the case insulted Moore, who interpreted it as an admission of guilt.^[74] In 2012, Moore claimed that he had sold the rights to these two works simply for the money; he did not expect the films ever to be made. He was simply "getting money for old rope". To date, Moore has seen neither film.^[75]

In 2005, a film adaptation of Moore's V for Vendetta was released, produced by the Wachowski Brothers and directed by James McTeigue. Producer Joel Silver said at a press conference for the Warner Bros.' V for Vendetta that fellow producer Larry Wachowski had talked with Moore, and that "[Moore] was very excited about what Larry had to say."^[76] Moore disputed this, reporting that he told Wachowski "I didn't want anything to do with films... I wasn't interested in Hollywood," and demanded that DC Comics force Warner Bros to issue a public retraction and apology for Silver's "blatant lies". Although Silver called Moore directly to apologise, no public retraction appeared. Moore was quoted as saying that the comic book had been "specifically about things like fascism and anarchy. Those words, 'fascism' and 'anarchy,' occur nowhere in the film. It's been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country."^[77] This conflict between Moore and DC Comics was the subject of an article in The New York Times^[31] on 12 March 2006, five days before the USA release. In the New York Times article, Silver stated that about 20 years prior to the film's release, he met with Moore and Dave Gibbons when Silver acquired the film rights to V For Vendetta and Watchmen. Silver stated, "Alan was odd, but he was enthusiastic and encouraging us to do this. I had foolishly thought that he would continue feeling that way today, not realising that he wouldn't." Moore did not deny this meeting or Silver's characterisation of Moore at that meeting, nor did Moore state that he advised Silver of his change of opinion in those approximately 20 years. The New York Times article also interviewed David Lloyd about Moore's reaction to the film's production, stating, "Mr. Lloyd, the illustrator of V for Vendetta, also found it difficult to sympathise with Mr. Moore's protests. When he and Mr. Moore sold their film rights to the comic book, Mr. Lloyd said: "We didn't do it innocently. Neither myself nor Alan thought we were signing it over to a board of trustees who would look after it like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls."^[31]

Moore has subsequently stated that he wishes his name to be removed from all comic work that he does not own, including Watchmen and V for Vendetta, much as unhappy film directors often choose to have their names removed and be credited as "Alan Smithee". He also announced that he would not allow his name to be used in any future film adaptations of works he does not own, nor would he accept any money from such adaptations.^[78] This request was respected by the producers of the subsequent adaptations of his work Constantine (2005) (based on a character created by Moore) and Watchmen (2009), and his name was removed from the V for Vendetta credits.^[79][80]

Personal life[link]

Since his teenage years Moore has had long hair, and since early adulthood has also worn a beard. He has taken to wearing a number of large rings on his hands, leading him to be described as a "cross between Hagrid and Danny from Withnail And I "who could be easily mistaken for "the village eccentric".^[58] Born and raised in Northampton, he continues to live in the town, and used its history as a basis for his novel Voice of the Fire. His "unassuming terraced" Northampton home was described by an interviewer in 2001 as "something like an occult bookshop under permanent renovation, with records, videos, magical artefacts and comic-book figurines strewn among shelves of mystical tomes and piles of paper. The bathroom, with blue-and-gold décor and a generous sunken tub, is palatial; the rest of the house has possibly never seen a vacuum cleaner. This is clearly a man who spends little time on the material plane."^[58] He likes to live in his hometown, feeling that it affords him a level of obscurity that he enjoys, remarking that "I never signed up to be a celebrity."^[40]

With his first wife Phyllis, whom he married in the early 1970s, he has two daughters, Leah and Amber. The couple also had a mutual lover, Deborah, although the relationship between the three ended in the early 1990s as Phyllis and Deborah left Moore, taking his daughters with them.^{[6](pp158–159)[81]} On 12 May 2007, he married Melinda Gebbie, with whom he has worked on several comics, most notably Lost Girls.^[82]

Religion and magic[link]

In 1993, on his fortieth birthday, Moore openly declared his dedication to being a ceremonial magician, something he saw as "a logical end step to my career as a writer".^[40] According to a 2001 interview, his inspiration for doing this came when he was writing From Hell in the early 1990s, a book containing much Freemasonic and occult symbolism: "One word balloon in From Hell completely hijacked my life… A character says something like, 'The one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind'. After I wrote that, I realised I'd accidentally made a true statement, and now I'd have to rearrange my entire life around it. The only thing that seemed to really be appropriate was to become a magician."^[58] Moore associates magic very much with writing; "I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness… Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman."^[40]

Connecting his esoteric beliefs with his career in writing, he conceptualised a hypothetical area known as the "Idea Space", describing it as "...a space in which mental events can be said to occur, an idea space which is perhaps universal. Our individual consciousnesses have access to this vast universal space, just as we have individual houses, but the street outside the front door belongs to everybody. It's almost as if ideas are pre-existing forms within this space… The landmasses that might exist in this mind space would be composed entirely of ideas, of concepts, that instead of continents and islands you might have large belief systems, philosophies, Marxism might be one, Judeo-Christian religions might make up another." He subsequently believed that to navigate this space, magical systems like the tarot and the Qabalah would have to be used.^[40]

Taking up the study of the Qabalah and the writings of the notorious early 20th century occultist Aleister Crowley, Moore accepted ideas from Crowley's religion, Thelema, about True Will being connected to the will of the pantheistic universe.^[40] In some of his earlier magical rituals, he utilised mind altering psychedelic drugs but later gave this up, believing that they were unnecessary, and stated, "It's frightening. You call out the names in this strange incomprehensible language, and you're looking into the glass and there appears to be this little man talking to you. It just works."^[58]

Moore took as his primary deity the ancient Roman snake god Glycon, who was the centre of a cult founded by a prophet known as Alexander of Abonoteichus, and according to Alexander's critic Lucian, the god itself was merely a puppet, something Moore accepts, considering him to be a "complete hoax",^[83][84] but dismisses as irrelevant. According to Pagan Studies scholar Ethan Doyle-White, "The very fact that Glycon was probably one big hoax was enough to convince Moore to devote himself to the scaly lord, for, as Moore maintains, the imagination is just as real as reality."^[8]

Anarchism[link]

Moore politically identifies as an anarchist,^[22] and outlined his interpretation of anarchist philosophy, and its application to fiction writing in an interview with Margaret Killjoy, collected in the 2009 book, Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:

I believe that all other political states are in fact variations or outgrowths of a basic state of anarchy; after all, when you mention the idea of anarchy to most people they will tell you what a bad idea it is because the biggest gang would just take over. Which is pretty much how I see contemporary society. We live in a badly developed anarchist situation in which the biggest gang has taken over and have declared that it is not an anarchist situation – that it is a capitalist or a communist situation. But I tend to think that anarchy is the most natural form of politics for a human being to actually practice.^[85]

In December 2011 Moore responded to Frank Miller's attack on the Occupy movement, calling his more recent work misogynistic, homophobic and misguided. Worldwide, Occupy protesters have adopted the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta.^[86][87] The mask has also been adopted by Anonymous, Wikileaks, Egyptian revolutionaries [1], and anti-globalization demonstrators.^[88] Moore described Occupy as "ordinary people reclaiming rights which should always have been theirs"^[89] and added:

I can't think of any reason why as a population we should be expected to stand by and see a gross reduction in the living standards of ourselves and our kids, possibly for generations, when the people who have got us into this have been rewarded for it – they've certainly not been punished in any way because they're too big to fail. I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who's too big to fail. As an anarchist, I believe that power should be given to the people whose lives this is actually affecting.^[89]

On conspiracy theories[link]

Doing research into conspiracy theories for his work on Brought to Light, he came to develop his own opinions on the subject of a global conspiracy, stating that "Yes, there is a conspiracy, indeed there are a great number of conspiracies, all tripping each other up… the main thing that I learned about conspiracy theories is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in the conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control, the truth is far more frightening; no-one is in control, the world is rudderless."^[40]

Selected bibliography[link]

See also[link]

	Anarchism portal
	Biography portal
	Comics portal
	England portal
	Occult portal
	Speculative fiction portal
	Superhero fiction portal

• List of comic creators
• List of Comics Journal interview subjects
• List of English writers
• List of Eisner Award winners
• List of Harvey Award winners
• List of occultists
• List of postmodern authors
• List of science fiction authors

Notes[link]