Άλαν Μουρ: η κορυφή των κόμικς

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/16/alan-moore-watchmen-lost-girls


Alan Moore: an extraordinary gentleman

As the world recovers from the onslaught of the Watchmen movie and its omnipresent marketing campaign, the spotlight has yet again come on to Alan Moore – its comic book creator, guru of the graphic novel and mystical man of mystery. And yet again, the spotlight has been desperately sweeping the stage only to find he hasn't turned up. He'd be easy to spot if he did – a giant of a man, always dressed in black, with formidable facial hair and large rings on every finger – but he's the archetypal reclusive writer.

Amid the chatter of debate on the merits or otherwise of Hollywood's rendition of what is generally agreed to be "the greatest comic-book story ever", Moore has maintained his usual dignified silence and stayed put in his hometown of Northampton. On the day I spoke to him, he had already turned down a profile in Time magazine and an interview with CNN, stating that he was busy preparing for a forthcoming benefit gig at the Frog and Fiddler, a local pub.

"I am aware of the immense power of absence," he says. "I'm not being completely disingenuous here. Of course I'm aware it doesn't hurt my reputation, but I'm not playing hard to get as some publicity ploy. I'm genuinely busy with stuff that is really important to me."

Nobody quite believes Moore when he says he doesn't care about the movies made of his work. For most writers of any shade, a big-budget Hollywood adaptation of their work is a form of validation, not to mention a pension fund, but Moore puts his money where his mouth is – or rather isn't. He has had his name removed from anything to do with the Watchmen movie. He's also demanded that his share of any profits from it go to Dave Gibbons, the original artist of the comic book (who has co-operated with the movie production). Assuming there are any profits, that is. Despite being expensively made and exhaustively hyped, the movie has not taken the box office by storm. It adheres to the comic with slavish reverence, transcribing whole chunks of dialogue verbatim, and using the pages as a storyboard for the expensive cinematography and production design. As a comic, Watchmen was a cultural event, "the moment comics grew up"; as a movie, it's a star-free, 18-certificate proposition with a labyrinthine plot, silly costumes and offputting levels of violence.

All of which only goes to prove Moore's long-held contention that it is impossible to make movies out of his work. "There is something about the quality of comics that makes things possible that you couldn't do in any other medium," he says, with just a hint of the exasperated schoolteacher. "Things that we did in Watchmen on paper could be frankly horrible or sensationalist or unpleasant if you were to interpret them literally through the medium of cinema. When it's just lines on paper, the reader is in control of the experience – it's a tableau vivant. And that gives it the necessary distance. It's not the same when you're being dragged through it at 24 frames per second."

Just as he distanced himself from other movies based on his works – V for Vendetta (a vigilante saga set in an Orwellian Britain), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (a superhero team of characters from Victorian literature), and From Hell (a Jack the Ripper story starring Johnny Depp), none of which achieved any significant commercial or creative success – Moore hasn't watched Watchmen. He feels, he says, "emotionally distanced" from it now, and doesn't even have a copy in the house. Nor is he attached to any of the other titles he no longer owns the rights to, which is most of them. In fact, he says he's pretty much done with comic books altogether.

Moore's career has been marked by disputes and fallings-out, largely due to issues of artistic integrity and perceived injustices. He rose to prominence in the early 1980s, when he was recruited by America's DC Comics (home of Superman and Batman), having established himself on British titles such as 2000AD and Warrior. He reinvigorated a minor DC title, Swamp Thing – a sort of sentient bog monster – with his now-familiar penchant for supernatural mysticism, psychedelic prose and adult characterisation. That led to Watchmen, and opened the floodgates for other British writers, such as Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, who largely operated in the "mature reader" territory Moore conquered. His relationship with DC deteriorated over issues such as rights and merchandising, however, and in 1999 he founded his own company, America's Best Comics (ABC), where he simultaneously wrote five titles, including League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But a few years later, ABC's parent company, Wildstorm, was acquired by his arch-enemies DC, whom he now likens to "a rich stalker-girlfriend".

"Much as I love the medium, I despise the industry," he says. "I've always despised it to a certain degree but after this last few years and all this nonsense with the films, I believe it to be a completely poisonous place that isn't really going anywhere. I did once feel I was part of a movement that wanted to change comics into something was valuable to culture, but I don't really feel that kinship in the way I used to."

The Watchmen movie was the final straw. From his point of view, which he explains in great detail, various executives at DC (which is owned by Time Warner, co-producers of the Watchmen movie) tried to manipulate him and attempted to sneak out Watchmen-related products behind his back, using artist Dave Gibbons as a "messenger", and even exploiting the fact of his best friend's brother's terminal illness to exert pressure on him. "At that point, I decided I didn't want anybody at DC to ever contact me again. That was what made me curse this wretched film and everything connected with it."

Moore can at least be assured that his most recent comic book epic will not be made into a movie. Lost Girls is a 320-page, three-volume work of pornography, illustrated by Melinda Gebbie, a veteran of the San Francisco underground and also his wife. In its own way, Lost Girls is as pioneering as Watchmen, albeit more difficult to read on public transport without getting strange glances.

"Most pornography is simply horrible, and not just from a woman's perspective," Moore says. "We felt we could reclaim and redefine what pornography was, and we deliberately chose to use that word. We didn't want to hide behind 'erotica' – because it's not etymologically accurate for one thing, and I'm very fussy about that kind of stuff, and there's a class element to it. Pornos graphos – drawings or writings of wantons – that will do."

Again, Lost Girls demonstrates what comics can do that movies can't – or at least shouldn't. The story centres on three fictional women – Lewis Carroll's Alice, Peter Pan's Wendy and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, whose sexual exploits at an Austrian hotel it details with a mix of Carry On-style humour and De Sadean exhaustiveness. Wendy gets it on with the Lost Boys, Dorothy gets it on with the Tin Man, everyone gets it on with everyone, in fact. There are polysexual orgies, incest, bestiality, semi-pubescent sex – polite softcore it is not. But in a country that's still only comfortable acknowledging bad literary sex, the shamelessness is utterly refreshing, even – dare anyone ever admit it – arousing. As always with Moore, he's done his homework, (including Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Carter and feminist critiques of pornography), and Lost Girls takes in the history of sexual literature, the impact of modernism, war, sexual repression and the ethics of the imagination. And even if Gebbie's illustrations leave very little to that imagination, they're dreamy and sensual rather than cold and anatomical. "There is a moral agenda in it. Put simply, it's 'make love, not war' but it goes a bit further than that. I think if we had a better relationship with our sexual imaginations, there would be a lot less sex crime – and a lot less directed at children."

Moore isn't entirely done with comics – there's a new trio of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stories coming soon – but he's keeping busy elsewhere. A practising magician (the occult kind, not the Paul Daniels variety), he's been working on the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic – a history of the subject presented as a children's annual, with none of "that creepy gothic shit" that hangs around modern-day views of the subject. There's also a 750,000-word novel, which he expects to complete in a couple of years' time. Entitled Jerusalem, it follows on from his 1996 novel Voice of the Fire, a collection of short stories set in Northampton over 6,000 years. "I'm trying to tell the story of the neighbourhood I grew up in – much smaller than the area I covered in my first book, which was paradoxically a lot slimmer. Whether my third novel is going to be a couple of million pages long and will be set just in this end of the living room I don't know. It's a possibility."

In entirely appropriate defiance of physical laws, Moore's world seems to be expanding and contracting simultaneously. As his career has progressed, he has homed in ever closer on his immediate landscape, while roving further across history, literature and human consciousness – usually right out to the edges. In the process, his work has become ever more inimitable and unclassifiable: a rich blend of fantasy, psychogeography, folklore, occult mysticism, baroque prose, down-to-earth humour, social critique and literary criticism. He surely merits his own adjective. Moorean? Mooreish?

"To me, all creativity is magic," he says. "Ideas start out in the empty void of your head – and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself. That's the reward. That's better than money."

The single-volume hardcover edition of Lost Girls will be published in May. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume III, Book One is out in April, both from Top Shelf productions.