An Interview with Alan Moore

Tim Mucci

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE!  Click here to listen to Tim Mucci interview Alan Moore about print media, why a hero is more dangerous than a villain, and the groundbreaking graphic novel, The Watchmen.

(This is an excerpt--check out Issue 7 in print for the full interview.)

 Alan Moore casts a long shadow. Encompassed within that shadow is almost the entirety of modern comics. He was one of the first mainstream writers to develop comic stories with an eye toward the literary. He deconstructed the simple four-color world that had gone before and filled it with nuance, beauty, anguish, and shadow. He has created some of the most critically acclaimed works to come out of the comics medium—including the Hugo and Eisner Award–winning Watchmen and the Eisner Award–winning From Hell. But Moore has been steadily moving away from mainstream entertainment; his days of penning stories about Swamp Thing and Superman are long over. He has written a novel, Voice of the Fire, with another on the way. He performs one-off spoken word with The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, is in the process of fusing the world of literature with the world of comics in his ongoing series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and is a practicing magician whose chosen deity is an ancient Greco-Roman snake god that goes by the name of Glycon.

Thank you for talking with me today.

Well, I’ve got a cup of tea steaming beside me—I’m ready to rock when you are.

Slice magazine is a literary journal that’s devoted to promoting new dialogue by publishing well-known authors and artists alongside up-and-coming voices in the arts. You’ve recently tossed your hat into the magazine publishing arena after twenty-odd years in the comic book-industry, correct? 

Getting closer to thirty years now, but yes, you’re absolutely right. I was overtaken by an impulse around about September last year to actually try to reestablish the underground magazines that had been so much an influence and a consolation to me in my adolescence and in my formative years. It was a decision made partly because of circumstances. I’d been working with a group of young ex-offenders, a kind of hip hop posse down in the terribly deprived neighborhood that I actually was born in.

And that’s in Northampton?

That’s in Northampton. It’s a neighborhood called the Boroughs, or more recently they’ve referred to it as Spring Boroughs. It’s the oldest part of Northampton, and I believe is in the top 2 percentile of deprivation for the entire country. Now I’d been talking idly, as I normally do, about how much better things were in the 1960s—the Arts Lab, underground magazines, poetry magazines, fanzines—which was met partly with blank stares of incomprehension by the younger people I was talking to, but with a certain degree of interest, and they were thinking maybe they could bring out a news magazine for the area that would be circulated in the schools. I said that I’d contribute to it and help in any way that I could, and we brought out a very nice little magazine called OVR2U. We were very pleased with it, and it went down very well with the kids of the neighborhood.

We were pulling together the second issue and I was talking with Lucy, the woman who was running the project, and we agreed that in order to help, it would be better if we could actually talk about the real problems that are affecting the neighborhood. I was putting together an article with a few facts about the neighborhood. I submitted this article, and perhaps unsurprisingly, since the magazine and the support organization were both partly council funded, we were told that we couldn’t publish this because it was critical of the town authorities.

I was talking to Lucy and I said, “Well, look, I’ve got a little bit of extra money thanks to the increased sales on the Watchmen book in the wake of the regrettable film, so why don’t we publish an independent, underground magazine?” I picked up the name Dodgem Logic from an aborted fanzine that I’d tried to get off the ground in 1975, and we decided that we were going to pretty much ignore most of the conventional wisdom about bringing out a magazine.

We’ve tried to take a chaotic approach to the design, in the same way that the original underground magazines of the 1960s and very early ’70s did. We’ve put little free gifts in every issue. It’s going very well. We’re trying to get this to run more smoothly, but that’s one of the problems about having taken a fairly anarchic approach to the magazine from its inceptions. I mean, much as I’ve got a great deal of fondness for anarchy, one of the things it doesn’t do is make the trains run on time.

We’re starting to have proofreading, we’ve remembered to put an indicia in, and we’re getting all these little refinements that you would have thought I would have known better than to omit in the first place. I think the main thing is we’re putting some stuff back into that area and trying to encourage other people to do things for deprived areas in their town, because every town’s got one. We’re very proud of what we’re doing, whatever the future holds. The chances for it continuing are looking pretty good at the moment, and the neighborhood is a brighter place because of it.

You define Dodgem Logic as an underground magazine. I’ve always thought of underground as being synonymous with independent, but it seems like there’s also a countercultural connotation in there as well. 

In the first issue I did a sort of lengthy article about the actual history of the underground press. With the invention of the printing press, you’ve got leaflets and pamphlets whereby anybody could express themselves. I think that the term underground paper actually derives from the resistance fighters in France, or elsewhere in occupied Europe during the Second World War, who would publish newspapers that were contrary to the occupying Nazi regime, and they were genuinely underground papers.

In the ’60s and ’70s you started to get this connection with the counterculture that existed at the time. And you’re right, that is mostly where my idea of underground publishing originates from. But at the same time, I recognize that there really isn’t a counterculture, if there ever really was. There are a lot of really interesting disparate voices, but looking back upon the 1960s it seems to me that underground publishing was a glue that held the different elements of what we called the counterculture together.

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