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When comic book writer Alan Moore announced in the early 1990s that he was leaving superhero comics, many of Moore's most ardent fans scratched their heads in puzzlement. Was it really true--was Moore's decidedly adult, recently-completed superhero opus Watchmen not just his farewell to mainstream DC Comics corporation, but to traditional genre comics as well?
"There was a time when I thought it was appropriate to try and express certain ideas in a superhero format," explains Moore from his home in Northampton, England. "But after Watchmen, I no longer believed that the superhero comic was anyplace to express serious concerns, and I still believe that."
Moore was simply bursting with a number of ideas for new projects, none of which remotely resembled the subject matter of his '80s work on genre comics like Swamp Thing, Miracleman and V for Vendetta. Astute readers could probably tell from the breadth of talent and ambition exhibited in those books that Moore was shackled by the traditions of mainstream comics. Still, the boldness with which Moore abandoned what seemed to be his bread and butter appeared at the time to be somewhat risky commercially. And, of course, many were perplexed by Moore's decision to write From Hell, a meticulously researched series based on the Jack the Ripper murders (also called "the Whitechapel murders," after the London district in which they occurred). Hadn't that territory already--pardon the pun--been done to death?
"The original idea was really no more complex than 'Wouldn't it be interesting to do a documentary comic strip about a murder?'" says Moore. "It struck me that a murder was a specific type of human event. It's a very intense human event. There's perhaps some kind of bottom line in terms of human experience that's represented in the murder. It's about the most terrible thing we can imagine doing or having done to us. People who've gone into that territory of murder, they've crossed that line that very few of us have crossed. And that struck me as interesting.
"It took me a long while to figure out which murder I should focus on. Because the Jack the Ripper one was so obvious, it was the least obvious. It looked like it didn't have anything new to offer because itÕs been covered so many times before in film and literature and everywhere else.
"But once I realized all of the advantages of having something set in that time, in that city, with all of those walk-on players that were available (Oscar Wilde, the Elephant Man, all the rest of them), then it seemed more and more attractive.
"I realized that the web of ideas that were connected to the Ripper murders--the various Masonic philosophies, some of the more magical speculations, even the philosophical speculations of [Whitechapel figure] James Hinton--all seemed to indicate a rich and very dark web of ideas that sort of radiate out from the Whitechapel murders."
But though the Ripper murders were useful to Moore in providing a rich historical backdrop against which to place a series of events with almost cataclysmic power, they also presented some interesting problems--the most important being that the murders were never solved. For Moore, this meant that Jack the Ripper is "not confined to a human dimension. If he'd been captured, he would've been reduced, been another wretched creature, which is how most serial killers turn out to be. There's very few Hannibal Lectors, very few of these amoral murderous supermen--most serial killers seem to be damaged inadequates. But because he wasn't caught, Jack the Ripper was able to become this shapeless dark creature, that was beyond the realms of fact and was in the realms of legend."
Locating these murders in the real world--naturalizing an almost fantastic being--would, Moore felt, be a job that would rest heavily on the shoulders of whichever artist worked on the project. With that in mind, Moore handpicked Australian artist Eddie Campbell for From Hell.
"I'd known Eddie's stuff from the very beginning [of his career]," says Moore admiringly. "I think of his work as very down to earth, very 'life as it is lived.' And that was exactly what I wanted for From Hell. When you're dealing with a legend, you need somebody who can anchor that legend in something which is very credible, very believable, very 'kitchen sink,' if you like. And the assurance in [Campbell's] line, the almost classical power and confidence to it [provides that].
"I can't imagine any other artist doing the Mary Kelly [explicit murder] episode. Could you imagine that in an EC [horror] comic? It would be a joke. With a style like Eddie's, which is much more neutral [than a typically sensational horror comic art style], I think the actual effect is much creepier, much more horrifying. It doesnÕt allow the mind to slip off into a glib 'Oh, this is a horror comic' mode, because there's no overdramatization of any image, everything is done up on a flat level, whether people are shopping or having sex or talking in the pub or chopping up a prostitute. It all looks like it's happening in the same world--we've not suddenly leapt into 'horror story world' [when the murders are depicted]. That's what gives it the most extraordinary power."
The Jack the Ripper story is also powerful because it allows us to look at ourselves. The second appendix of From Hell, entitled 'Dance of the Gold Catchers,' will actually be the story of the evolution of the Jack the Ripper story since the 1890s, says Moore, "featuring all of the various Ripperologists who've taken the story and read their own interpretations into it, their peculiar lives and deaths and all the rest of it.
"It's like when physicist Neils Bohr was talking about quantum physics, he says that all of our observations of the universe, whether it's the stars or the quanta, can't really ever be more than observations of ourselves. So when we're looking at Jack the Ripper, we're really looking at some sort of black mirror to our entire culture."
Moore and Campbell's particular take on the Whitechapel murders has been gratifying to its creators ("I think it's great. I'm pretty pleased with it. I'm pretty smug," chuckles Moore), won major awards and been optioned by Touchstone to be made into a major motion picture. Moore's not holding his breath waiting for a release date for a From Hell movie, though.
"I'd think that it's a pretty safe bet that there's no way that the book as it stands could be transferred to the screen unless it was in some kind of very long miniseries," says Moore. "And even so, it could not be transferred as is, because although there are superficial similarities between comics and films, the problem with a lot of my comics is that I try to play up the differences. I try to do things that can only be done in comics, which is great for comics, but not so good for trying to adapt them into films," he laughs.
"Also, we can get away with an awful lot more in comics than people can get away with on television or in the movies," adds Moore. "There's a kind of frankness that we can bring to the violence and sex that I canÕt see movies being able to do for a long time yet."
This is certainly true for the extremely frank Lost Girls, another comics series started several years ago that will near completion within the next year, and which is the subject of Moore's enthusiastic interest at the moment. Illustrated by Melinda Gebbie, Lost Girls is Moore's attempt to write a 240-page mini-epic of sophisticated adult erotica set in 1913 about three "different yet strangely familiar" women. Moore is especially excited about GebbieÕs artwork.
"There's some exquisite stuff coming up," Moore enthuses. "Melinda is somebody whose artwork is making as big a jump in quality as Lost Girls progresses as Eddie's made during From Hell."
Moore's artistic and commercial triumphs with From Hell and Lost Girls in recent years have been tempered somewhat by his inability to get his even more ambitious series, Big Numbers, successfully off the ground. A complex story involving supermarket developers, skateboarders, fractal geometry and a cast of some forty characters, Big Numbers was launched in 1990 as a 12-book, 480-page series to be written by Moore and illustrated by the innovative comics artist Bill Sienkiewicz. But only two issues were released before Sienkiewicz mysteriously quit the project. Sienkiewicz's assistant Al Columbia was then picked to complete the series, but he too dropped out.
"All projects have their ups and downs, but the others have all gone relatively smoothly compared to Big Numbers," Moore sighs. "It was intended to be like a magnum opus. I've got the whole thing plotted and five chapters are written. There's material in those chapters that I think is the best stuff that I've done.
"After I finish Lost Girls, I'm going to sit and think long and hard about Big Numbers, see if there is any possible way that I could resurrect it and could bring myself to invest another load of work into it."
Simultaneous with his work on Big Numbers, From Hell and Lost Girls, the always-prolific Moore managed to complete his first novel. Due this fall, Moore says, Voice of the Fire is "a bit of a curious one... I don't know how itÕs going to go down. "It's based in Northhampton, surprisingly enough, and it's a story that has 12 chapters. Each of these is a self-contained story, each with a first-person narrator of the period from the neolithic period, through to the present. There are no continuing characters other than the town itself. Chapters are narrated by different narrators including the last witch to be burned in England, as she burns on the pyre; John Claire, the wonderful sublime 19th century poet; Alfred Raus, the town murderer from the 1930s. The final chapter is narrated by me in the present day, tying the whole thing together. It looks like a collection of short stories but itÕs not--it's a novel that took five years to write."
Moore has also recently begun to explore other media. Although music and lyrics have occasionally appeared in his comics work (an early chapter of V for Vendetta features a song, complete with lyrics and score), this is the first time that Moore has released audio CDs. It's performance poetry with musical accompaniment by the likes of Love and Rockets' David J.
"It's an area that is new to me, but is is area which I'm very interested in. It'll probably end up being a bit like Sting doing acting but I don't care, I'm enjoying it," he laughs.
"One CD is The Birth Caul, recorded on my birthday in Newcastle this year," Moore explains. "The other is The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theater of Marvels--a very strange, occult piece of work, which is pretty well where a lot of my interests are going these days.
"I'm going through another one of my bizarre periods. I think working on From Hell has done something to me," he laughs. "I've started to get a lot more interested in the occult, and yeah, the CDs are gonna reflect that."
Moore is also looking ahead to reuniting with Dave Gibbons, his partner on the landmark Watchmen project, for a proposed CD-ROM project based on all-new material.
"The CD-ROMs out there now are impressive in their own sort of way," says Moore. "Myst [for example] is good, but the imagery has a kind of airbrushed blandness to it. The Residents' CD-ROM is brilliant--they strike me as artists who are heading in the right direction.
"But what impresses me more is the stuff that's not being done. There's not been any real attempt to make use of the hallucinatory possibilities of computer art. You think: 'What would Magritte have done, or Escher have done--what would an artist have done rather than designers or illustrators? What would people with some real soul and passion have done?'
"To me, the CD-ROM, or 'virtual reality,' is just a gross physical representation of something we've had all along. A book is virtual reality, music is virtual reality. It's just that with electronic virtual reality you're more immediately wrapped up in it--you donÕt have to use your imagination so much.
"It strikes me that the only thing you can't do to someone who is in your virtual reality is to touch them. So therefore, most people have the illusion that they are completely safe in a virtual reality-- without stopping to think that most of the things that affect us most in life are not physical events. Most of them are events that occur within our heads, because of our experiences. Therefore, I think that with the right way of thinking about these things you could make a CD-ROM experience that could be quite genuinely moving, genuinely powerful, genuinely affecting.
"We want to do something as far above most CD-ROM experiences as Watchmen was above most superhero comics. Whether we'll achieve that, I don't know, but that's what we're aiming for."
And then, in a mock-spooky voice, Moore confides, "And I wouldn't be surprised if what we do is very spooky."
Finally, Moore has more comics work on the horizon, including a collaboration with hot young British artist Simon Bisely. "I'm thinking of doing a rip-roaring Victorian adventure strip with him," says Moore. "That would be the complete opposite of From Hell. It would be Victorian sensationalism rather than something [dark]."
Moore has also returned, in a backdoor sort of way, to writing superhero comics. A series of comics written by Moore and drawn by various artists parodying the '60s Marvel superhero comics were released under the 1963 moniker during 1993-94, and Moore is considering continuing the series in some form in the future.
"I had a real real laugh with the 1963 comics," says Moore. "It was good fun doing all the vicious Marvel parodies. They did really well, and most people seemed to like them, and they had a certain charm. I really liked the way that they smelled when you opened them, printed on newsprint--that was an enormous sensation.
"But also, I got halfway through writing one story and I thought, 'Well hang on, this is not just good as a retro-parody comic--this is a good comic. There is something really good about this wonderful simplicity.'
"[The 1963 characters] are not the original iconic characters that they were based upon, but they've got some of that feel, that aura, to them now. It might be interesting to take them and put a different spin on them now and again."
Moore is also writing comics for the Wildstorm studio of superhero artists, including work on Todd MacFarlaneÕs ever-popular Spawn title.
"What I'm trying to do there is better-than-average stories for 13- to 15-year-olds," says Moore, drawing a distinction between this work and his 1980s work in the superhero genre that was marked by more mature aspirations. "I'm trying to make them a bit funnier, a bit more stylish, put a couple of storytelling quirks in there. It's simple, mindless adventure stuff, which I believe is what that audience wants. And it's sometimes fun to write--you can have a few laughs along the way."
"But there's nothing being expressed that is of any real importance to me, unlike with From Hell or Lost Girls or any of the other things."
Ultimately, Moore's artistic ambition is to create something of consequence, regardless of the medium he is working in.
"The thing that strikes me about the end of this millennium, this fin de siecle is how boring and awful it is," Moore complains. "If you compare it to the 1890s, you see that they had Oscar Wilde--we have Martin Amis. They had the pre-Raphaelites--we have David HockneyÕs paintings of his pet dachshunds.
"This is sad. This is not just the end a century, this is the end of a millennium. YouÕd hope for something grander," he laughs.
"I want to do some work that has got gravity to it. From Hell, Lost Girls--I want these things to have beauty and gravity and a kind of classical grandness and scope to them.
"I want to do work that lives up to its moment."
