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Alan Moore:
New Moore's Almanac
Tuesday November 18th 2003 was Alan Moore’s 50th birthday. For some time, Alan announced that this date would mark his retirement from writing mainstream comics, but it was not to be, at least not yet. His freedom has been postponed because he still has to wrap up all of his America’s Best Comics commitments. And you’ll have noticed he refers only to leaving ‘mainstream’ comics. That leaves him plenty of scope for more independent and personal works still to come, like Lost Girls (due in Summer 2006) and his second novel Jerusalem. Meantime, his Golden Jubilee year brought a plethora of projects, old and new, into print.
So yes, I did drink a toast of fine Belgian beer to Alan, because on that Tuesday, by pure coincidence, I was meeting the organisers of the first large-scale art-gallery retrospective of the comics of Alan Moore - les Dessins du Magicien. As the curator, I was in Charleroi, a city near Brussels, which not only hosts one of Belgium’s best comics festivals but is also home to publishers Dupuis, a giant in Franco-Belgian bande dessinée. It is quite natural for a European city like this to embrace comics and its prestigious exhibition venue, the Palais des Beaux Arts, dedicated one of its main galleries, some 5,000 square feet, to this Moore celebration.
There have been some Moore exhibits in the past; I helped stage one back in the Nineties for Italy’s TrevisoComics festival. Then in 2002, as part of their festival, I visited an impressive display of originals by many of Moore’s cohorts in the basement gallery at Portugal’s National Comics Centre or CNBDI in Amadora. Co-curators Pedro Mota and writer-artist Rick Veitch rounded up some 150 mouth-watering pieces for ‘Argumentos’. Their smart bi-lingual catalogue (ISBN 972-8284-27-6) is valuable for Mota’s insightful overview and a postface by Veitch, though I would have liked a few reproductions of the original art or scripts shown, a bit of a missed opportunity.
Given the chance to look back over more than two decades, it’s hard to exaggerate the visionary force Alan has exerted on the medium. This comes across in the respect, affection and humour which fill the pages of two essential anthologies which appeared in 2003. George Khoury compiled The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, interweaving an extensive interview with rarities like unused scripts and short but revealing strips about the writer from the likes of Gibbons, Bolland and Gaiman and Buckingham. Moore’s captions on his childhood photos alone are worth the price of admission. The other tome, co-edited and published by Gary Spencer Millidge of Strangehaven fame, tops 350 pages and 145 international contributors with all profits to Alzheimer’s charities. Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman is a feast, from Gary’s concise 12-page ‘biographic’ of Moore’s life to meaty texts and varied illos and comics. Very tall and hairy, dressed in black, Moore may never be seen again at a festival, but he has become an iconic comics character in his own right.
In addition to his ongoing ABC series, relics and out-of-print gems are being resurrected. The haunting masterpiece A Small Killing returns from Avatar with improved colour overseen by collaborator Oscar Zarate. Avatar’s Yuggoth Cultures presents, some twenty years later, the first and only episode of Nightjar, intended for Dez Skinn’s Warrior but never completed or published. Co-creator Bryan Talbot found his unfinished art and Alan’s script and set about completing them. It provides a tantalising glimpse of what might have been Alan’s first modern horror series. Once he found his ‘ideal horror vehicle’ in Swamp Thing, however, as Bryan explains, Alan "felt that he’d moved on and was capable of better work, and he was right. He just carried on getting better."
While we await the complete Miracleman volume, and a reissue please of The Bojeffries Saga, at least Checker Books has packaged Supreme, an homage to Weisinger’s Superman, into two volumes. Sadly the repro shot from the printed pages is fuzzy, so I’m keeping the comic books. Another gatherum, Across The Universe, groups Moore’s stray interpretations of DC heroes and villains and proves how he could unlock magic in the least likely material. He has had his fallings out, with DC and others, including their absurd ban on a Cobweb tale. Luckily, this has appeared, thinly disguised, in the latest bumper Top Shelf. Their other Moore books are a ravishing re-imagining by José Villarrubia of The Mirror Of Love and a new edition of his novel, Voice Of The Fire.
A man of principle, Moore has left mainstream comics before, but now for the first time he can do it on his own terms. As he put it to me, "When things start getting too successful, it’s time to tear them down and start all over again." Like a destroyer of worlds, like the goddess Shiva, he is charting the XYZ of his ABC universe. And, as always in his continuous creative cycle, the ‘death’ card Alan is playing will also signify renewal and rebirth.
The original version of this article appeared in 2003 in the pages of Comics International, the UK’s leading magazine about comics.
