Alan Moore: 'Why shouldn't you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?'

There is a certain degree of swagger, a sudden interruption of panache, as Alan Moore enters the rather sterile Waterstones office where he has agreed to speak to me. The jut of beard, the ringed fingers, the walking stick one feels he could use as a wand or a cudgel at any moment: he looks like Hagrid’s wayward brother or Gandalf’s louche cousin. He has a laugh that might topple buildings, though I doubt the man who reinvented the superhero comic would want such powers. He is here to promote Fashion Beast, a project that is unusual even in terms of a career that has been exceptionally idiosyncratic. Fashion Beast, an idea initiated by punk legend Malcolm McLaren, was to have been a film. It is now – 28 years later – a comic book. The story charts the relationship between a reclusive fashion designer, Celestine, an apprentice, Jonni Tare, and their favourite model, Doll. As one might expect from the author of V For Vendetta, Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lost Girls, it combines satiric wit and furious philippic, the politically radical with the sexually ambiguous. Perhaps strangest of all, Moore can barely remember writing it.

I tell Moore how delightful it is to be speaking to him about an unmade film that turned into a comic, rather than a comic of his turned into a film. Moore has been outspoken in the past about his disdain for the latter. He makes a characteristic cross between a laugh and a harrumph, and says: “It was certainly a lot more agreeable from my point of view. My main point about films is that I don’t like the adaptation process, and I particularly don’t like the modern way of comic book-film adaptations, where, essentially, the central characters are just franchises that can be worked endlessly to no apparent point. In most cases, the original comic books were far superior to the film. With this, it started out as my first-ever film script or attempt at one. I was pleased with the results and I think that Malcolm was quite pleased with the results, but through circumstances quite unconnected to either of us the film never got made. So it was kind of existing in a weird hinterland of my memory.”

“It was probably never going to be realised,” he continues, “but when my publisher said he’d managed to find a copy of the screenplay and suggested that perhaps he get the excellent writer Anthony Johnson to do the adaptation … I didn’t know whether it would work but it sounded very handy in that I wouldn’t have to do any labour at all. That was what attracted me to the project. But then when the material started to come in, it was very unusual. For one thing, the adaptation had been really smooth. And when I started to see what Facundo Percio had done with the artwork, it was a fantastic experience because I’d completely forgotten everything to do with Fashion Beast. It really was like reading something that was by somebody else, and I was quietly impressed with myself. I was pretty pleased with it,” he beams.

For a story conceived in 1985, Fashion Beast both foreshadows later Moore works and seems eerily as if it were written with foreknowledge of what would transpire in the world in the intervening years. “1985? Blimey!” he bellows, with a startled look in his eyes. “Was it that early? I hadn’t remembered it was 85, but I had accepted it was probably late 80s and I was very surprised because there is a lot of the politics that would be expanded on in other works, the sexual politics certainly. There’s also some precursors to my magical thinking; we’re talking about fashion as an almost shamanistic activity, so I was very surprised to find that I’d been thinking about all these things back then.”

Quick Guide

The five Alan Moore comics you must read

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V for Vendetta (1982 - 1989)

This dystopian graphic novel continues to be relevant even 30 years after it ended. With its warnings against fascism, white supremacy and the horrors of a police state, V for Vendetta follows one woman and a revolutionary anarchist on a campaign to challenge and change the world. 

Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow (1986)

Moore's quintessential Superman story. Though it has not aged as well as some of his work, this comic is still one of the best Man of Steel stories ever written, and one of the most memorable comics in DC's canon.

A Small Killing (1991)

This introspective, stream-of-consciousness comic follows a successful ad man who begins to have a midlife crisis after realising the moral failings of his life and work.

Tom Strong (1999 - 2006)

A love letter to the silver age of comics that nods to Buck Rogers and other classics of pulp fiction. Tom Strong embodies all of the ideals Moore holds for what a superhero should be.

The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (1999-2019)

One of Moore's best known comic series, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the ultimate in crossover works, drawing on characters from all across the literary world who are on a mission to save it. 

McLaren, Moore says, was pitching the film as “a mash-up of Beauty and the Beast and the life of Christian Dior. He had these other elements as well – a bit like Chinatown and a bit like Flashdance, which I was bowled over by. I think he was expecting me to bring political depth and sexual politics to the mix.

“It was Malcolm who suggested that the main characters be a boy who looks like a girl who looks like a boy and vice versa. What was strange was that, actually, in 1985 this was nobody’s vision of the fashion industry. Since then, fashion and fascism have crept closer: you’ve got John Galliano doing his promotional bits for the Third Reich, you’ve got Alexander McQueen killing himself, you’ve got Versace and that horrible, violent stalker coming for him. Since it was written, almost all of it has come true apart from the nuclear winter, but I think we’re working on that. The actual society that the story happens in is much more like the society we have now than culture was in 1985.”

McLaren was described as a “couturier situationniste”, and I wondered what Moore felt about the movement. A few moments of trading slogans commenced (“It is forbidden to forbid”, “Be rational: demand the impossible”, “A mental disease has swept the planet: banalisation”), and Moore was in full flow. “I’m a lot of things,” he says. “I’ve got a great deal of sympathy with the situationist position. Situationism is one of the roots of psychogeography.

“I like Jacques Derrida, I think he’s funny. I like my philosophy with a few jokes and puns. I know that that offends other philosophers; they think he’s not taking things seriously, but he comes up with some marvellous puns. Why shouldn’t you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind? The situationists – I like their style, I like their attitude, I like the ‘below the street the beach’; I like that it was basically a more intellectual take and a more artistic take on anarchist principles. Malcolm was a situationist: the last time I was talking to him, he was trying to make music with some people out of Game Boy chips. It sounded like it might be rubbish, but I liked the spirit he brought to everything. He was fiery, he was subversive and I think he meant it.”

One underestimates Moore at one’s peril: yes, he may have written Swamp Thing, but he did so while reading continental philosophy. Fashion Beast is about oedipal influences – who can inhabit and subvert the master’s voice? Several writers have acknowledged Moore as a key influence: Neil Gaiman told me Moore made a whole generation possible. Fashion Beast is about apprentices and masters, pupils and teachers. So how does he feel about this? “I don’t generally read very much at all. I’ve got no problem with people taking certain inspirations or perhaps being interested in one of my ideas, but it’s important they make it their own voice, not my voice or an echo of my voice. If being influenced by my work is part of a process leading them to develop their own proper voices, then I’m glad. I believe China Miéville gets a lot of respect; I’ve not read his stuff, but I’ve heard he’s done that. Grant Morrison has actually self-confessedly made a tactic of not only basing some of his narratives on my style or my work but also trying to make himself more famous by slagging me off at every opportunity. I have nothing to do with him.”

When I mention that Geoff Johns has done a whole series of Green Lantern based on his story “Tygers”, he gets tetchy. “Now, see,” he says, “I haven’t read any superhero comics since I finished with Watchmen. I hate superheroes. I think they’re abominations. They don’t mean what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it excellently. These days, superhero comics think the audience is certainly not nine to 13, it’s nothing to do with them. It’s an audience largely of 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-year old men, usually men. Someone came up with the term graphic novel. These readers latched on to it; they were simply interested in a way that could validate their continued love of Green Lantern or Spider-Man without appearing in some way emotionally subnormal. This is a significant rump of the superhero-addicted, mainstream-addicted audience. I don’t think the superhero stands for anything good. I think it’s a rather alarming sign if we’ve got audiences of adults going to see the Avengers movie and delighting in concepts and characters meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s.”

Having seen comics turned into movies, and film-scripts turned into comics, Moore is most concerned with Jerusalem, his fiction.

“I am currently on the last official chapter, which I am doing somewhat in the style of Dos Passos. It should be finished by the end of the year or close to it. I don’t know if anyone else will like it at all,” he muses. I say that I can’t wait, and that it strikes me that the style he and the likes of Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock pioneered has become central to literary culture. He sighs, shaking the walls: “Oh God, have we? Oh no, we’re the mainstream!”