On Mary Shelley, Iain Sinclair, Moorcock and more...

Below, excepts from a great interview published in 2004 on Salon.com. 

It's titled The man who invented the future and conducted by Scott Scott Thill. 

I highly recommend it! There is also an extremely interesting section focused on the political situation of the time.

Scott Thill: [...] my contention in this article is that it's pretty much undisputed that you're the heavyweight champion of comics, but that you should also be considered among the world's literary greats, up there with Pynchon and DeLillo, because of what you do with language and narrative.
Alan Moore: Well, thank you. That is praise indeed. I'm a huge Thomas Pynchon fan. But, I don't know, it's nothing that I'm really that bothered about. Over here, the literary establishment is still running, as back in the days of Jane Austen, on the novel of manners, which she more or less invented. And, of course, they're about the social intricacies of the middle class, who were also the only people at the time who could read or afford to buy the books. They were also the people who made up the book critics. And I think that, around this time, critics were so delighted by this new form of literature mirroring their own social interactions that they decided that not only was this true literature, but this was the only thing really that could be considered true literature. So all genre fiction, anything that really wasn't a novel of manners in one form or another, was excluded from that definition.

Do you still find that to be the case?
I recently saw a program about the history of the novel on TV over here -- it was a short series and it was ridiculous. I predicted before the thing was actually shown that there would be nobody representing any form of genre fiction whatsoever -- and I was, for the most part, right. They managed to get through the 18th and 19th centuries without a mention of, say, the gothic novel. Fair enough, perhaps the gothic novels weren't as extraordinary as literature, but they also didn't mention Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," which is an incredibly important book for all sorts of reasons. But I guess it has become what they would term genre fiction, so it is amongst the literary damned. My only mistake was that I said I didn't think there would be a mention of H.G. Wells, but my girlfriend told me they did mention "The History of Mr. Polly," which is one of the few works by Wells that I have not been able to get through. To completely ignore "The War of the Worlds," "The Time Machine," "The Invisible Man" and all his other work shows you the way that the literary critical establishment tends to regard even people in so-called lower literary genres. So if you are working in comics, which is considered a whole lower medium, well, let's just say that I'm not anticipating being given the Booker Prize anytime soon -- and I'm immensely glad of that.

You're not too worried about mainstream appreciation.
 

No, I think that the real life in any culture happens on the margins. I'd agree with what the brilliant, divine, wonderful Angela Carter said about Booker Prize-winners; I believe she referred to them as shortlist victims, which I think pretty well sums it up. The most interesting writers are the ones that are seldom going to get anywhere within shouting distance of a literary prize because they are considered too vulgar. Take Michael Moorcock, for example, who wrote the wonderful "Mother London," one of the most astonishing London novels ever written -- and there have been a great many astonishing London novels. "Mother London" is a tour de force; it is the best thing he's ever written, but there is no chance of Moorcock ever being given literary respectability because he has dabbled in ignored, disregarded and, some would argue, frankly juvenile comics or fantasy.

Are there other authors you feel are devalued because of the nature of their work?
 

Sure, people like Iain Sinclair, who is I think perhaps one of the best writers of the English language who is currently alive and working. His books are not an easy read. They're very dense with a lot of information on a single page. Culture today predisposes us to receive our information predigested and prepackaged, and most, as a rule, tend to shy away from anything which hasn't been simplified to the level where anyone could understand it. That is not the job of an artist or a creator, yet all too often in the mainstream you'll find that is what people are doing in order to remain popular. They know their audience, and they know if they push the right buttons in the right order that they can create another bestseller or whatever. I'm very content with this kind of strange, underground ghetto that I've been shunted into. It's a wonderful place and you meet a much nicer class of people. [...]

You can read the complete interview HERE.

Interests in Art

Excerpt from an interview, dated 2016, by Séamas O'Reilly. A shortened version was published in the Irish Times. The complete interview is available HERE. I strongly recommend to read it!

Alan Moore: [...] To describe my interests in art when I was a kid, it would mostly fall under the genre of “things that didn’t happen”. So that would include science fiction, fantasy, myths and legends, superheroes, horror. Once I discovered horror, I began to seek it out ravenously and, from the age of about 7 or 8, I was reading at least mild horror and ghost stories as well as a few of the pre-code horror comic book stories that would show up in the old black and white English reprints. And when I was around ten, eleven, twelve, my tastes started to zero into things that I’d heard about — Dracula, which was a fantastic book and still a very modern read. Frankenstein I did less well with, I was too young for it. [...]

Still around ten or eleven. Also for about a year when I was say, eleven or twelve, I had a brief infatuation with the works of Dennis Wheatley. As Iain Sinclair has said, and I’d agree, that is about the only age when you can take Wheatley seriously. That’s the age before you notice all the creepy right-wing stuff, but that was part of my reading. Around about the same age as I was getting tired of Dennis Wheatley, I discovered Lovecraft, I forget exactly how, but I had seen books by him and I think that I’d read somewhere a brief description of his work that made him sound fascinating. I can remember picking up the Panther paperback edition, with the ugliest cover that I’ve ever seen, of At The Mountains Of Madness and the first book I read, I flipped through until I’d found the shortest one, which was The Statement of Randolph Carter which absolutely stunned me. I went on to read the whole rest of the book which I think included Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature essay, a brilliant guidebook to all of these authors I’d never heard of before; Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith — all of them, the whole bunch. It was a history of great supernatural and weird writing and that gave me a reading list that would take me through the next couple of years until an enthusiasm for the sword and sorcery of Michael Moorcock. That led to me picking up a copy of New Worlds when I was about 14, assuming it was going to be the adventures of Elric of Melniboné, and opening up instead to, I think, the first chapter of A Cure For Cancer with Jerry Cornelius, who at that time had black skin, black teeth, white hair and was a woman for at least part of the narrative.

The same issue had a brilliant essay by JG Ballard and I was instantly hooked on a new drug. That was my introduction to Modernism, which is what Mike Moorcock was trying to do with New Worlds. He liked Modernist writing but realised that there weren’t really any vehicles around for it, and he looked upon the science fiction genre as a potentially useful vehicle that didn’t seem to be serving any real purpose.

So, in the pages of New Worlds, along with JG Ballard, M. John Harrison, John Sladek, Hillary Bailey and all those people, he kind of reinvented what science fiction could do. He reinvented science fiction as a movement for Modernism. So, probably my relationship with horror, specifically, would have faltered in that time and it only picked up again with the new generation of horror paperbacks that were emerging in the 70s, where you’d got the magnificent Thomas Tyron, first with The Other and then with Harvest Hope. Big, thick horror paperbacks. Then, in the wake of that there was of course the book of The Exorcist, which was enjoyable. [...]

I haven’t read it for a long time but I remember it being better than the film. Then after that there was the emergence of Stephen King, perhaps inspired by these new big, thick horror books that had over the previous couple of years, and I was interested in King’s work at the time, for a few books there.

[...] I enjoyed them at the time. I noticed that it in a lot of it, it seemed to me, there was something missing in the endings and there was a possibility of formula creeping in there. But, there again, he’s done some remarkable works that have avoided that, so the thing is, Stephen King kind of kicked off a wave of horror writers trying to ride along his popularity and they were generally much, much worse. Obviously, there are huge exceptions, I mean Ramsey Campbell is one of the finest horror writers in the world. Full stop. Again, my tastes in the seventies, I actually was thinking a lot of the time, some of the Modernist literature that I was getting in Picador books seems more genuinely frightening. I think there’s more horror in Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman.
 

[...] Yes, and it’s timeless because it’s brilliant, original writing, which will be as good, and the ideas as strange, whenever you happen to read them. In many ways, culture still hasn’t caught up with O’Brien. I’d be looking at his stuff, and thinking that yes The Third Policeman is really funny, but it’s also a really frightening supernatural horror. Many people that I know find it difficult to read because they get to the bit where one of the constables is showing the infinite regress of tiny little dressing tables that are inside the drawer of a bigger dressing table. They’ll get to that point and feel vertiginous and a bit sick. I can completely understand that. It’s actually mind-warping stuff. But at the same time, I was reading other books during the seventies. Sadegh Hedayet’s The Blind Owl, which is absolutely terrifying. It’s this recursive fable that keeps going round and round and round. It’s completely different to the Third Policeman and yet you get that same chewing touch of infinity that really gets you in the bone marrow.

So, it was thinking about things like this that made me think that surely it would be best with horror stories to put other elements in, other than just horror. Try and make the horror do something different. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that using it to talk about something else is probably the only serious use of genre but a detective story that is just a detective story is not really something I’m interested in.

The complete interview is available HERE.

Moore on artists, books, music, movies and TV shows

Excerpt from an interview published on Inside The Rift the 8th of January 2018. 

Full interview available HERE.

Prox: Are there any artists, books, movies/TV shows or music you’d like to recommend to the readers?

Alan Moore: I hardly ever watch movies or television, but I very much enjoy the work of Andrew Kötting (Swandown, By Ourselves), Ben Wheatley (Free Fire, High-Rise, A Field in England), and the increasingly rare outings of Chris Petit (Radio On, The Falconer). On TV I really liked the two seasons of Utopia, am always delighted when Stewart Lee gets a new series of his Comedy Vehicle, and continue to be very impressed by the writing of Vince Gilligan on Better Call Saul. The contemporary art world I know almost nothing of, but Jimmy Cauty’s dioramas of urban collapse and a coup d’état Police force are sobering and wonderful in equal measure. Books make up the greater part of my relatively few leisure activities: I would heartily recommend Iain Sinclair’s The Last London, and I’m eagerly anticipating both the follow-up to Michael Moorcock’s Whispering Swarm – one of the best things he’s ever done – and the final volume of Brian Catling’s hallucinatory Vorrh trilogy. I’ve also recently enjoyed a beautiful and compelling account of rearing a goshawk, Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, which turned up in the mail from an unknown benefactor, and am currently engrossed in Jane Jacobs’ masterful contrarian view of urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Oh, and anybody out there who has not yet absorbed Jarett Kobek’s i hate the internet should do so immediately if they hope to ever understand our current ridiculous historical predicament.

Musically, I remain an ardent admirer of Brian Eno – his version of the Velvet Underground’s I’m Set Free on The Ship is tremendous – although I’ve also rather taken to the Sleaford Mods. And you should watch out for a young rapper/performance poet operating under the handle of Testament. I had the good fortune to be sharing a bill with him some months ago, and his reinterpretation of William Blake’s poem London was nothing short of transporting.

[Full interview available HERE.]

Michael Moorcock on Watchmen

Page from Watchmen. Art by Dave Gibbons.

At the end of 2006 - in the occasion of its 20th anniversary - I edited an Italian Watchmen tribute book which was basically a collection of 12 brand new essays by well known comics experts analyzing Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons masterpiece. 

The volume was published by Lavieri, a small Italian publisher, with all net profits donated to AIMA, the Italian Alzheimer organization. 

Legendary writer Michael Moorcock wrote the introduction. 

ALAN MOORE WATCHMEN
by Michael Moorcock

This has to be said – I’m not much of a comics reader. I was a pretty successful comics writer in my early years and before I was 21 turned out hundreds of scripts, mostly for Fleetway Publications, but even then I tended to prefer to write features. I shared the attitudes of most of my colleagues writing for comics in the late 1950s and early 60s, that you couldn’t do much that was particularly sophisticated or ambitious with the form, beyond telling a tight story, as the best newspaper strips did, and to claim anything else was just downright pretentious. In 1968 I even presented a feature in my magazine New Worlds which deplored what I saw as a fad for comics and comic heroes, like Barbarella and Batman,, amongst intellectuals, especially French intellectuals. I saw it as a general lowering of standards, a failure of artistic ambition, even though I had long spoken up for what I saw as the virtues of the best popular arts. But all that was before the advent of Alan Moore.
I first met him, a bright, intelligent young man, at a publisher’s party sometime in the 1970s. He was then the only person there who was hairier than me. By then, I admit, I’d had a stab at a more ambitious Jerry Cornelius strip in the underground newspaper IT and was already beginning to doubt my earlier prejudices. Learning that he worked in comics, I was impressed that someone so evidently intelligent should choose a form I still tended to associate with simplistic narratives and ideas. There was something about him which, had I seen more of him, I might have recognised as a genuine visionary mind, but it wouldn’t be until the early 90s before we met again and by then I’d seen all the proof I needed.. I’m not one of those, however, who could claim that I had spotted the originality and intelligence of Moore from the start, though I had, in fact, read and liked some of his work without really taking his name in. I missed a lot of pleasure, for instance, by reacting negatively to the general tone of 2000AD when I saw the first copies. I’ve never really cared for Judge Dredd and I hated what they did to Frank Hampson’s. Dan Dare. There is still a tone about many British or British-created comics I don’t much care for. I find the writing laddish, the violence too sensational, the context of the stories spuriously portentous, the plots and targets too predictable. Much of these irritations, of course, are mindlessly corrupted imitations of Moore’s innovations. But there is also work I very much admire. I have always liked Bryan Talbot a great deal, especially in his non-generic work like The Tale of One Bad Rabbit. I like Warren Ellis, Walter Simonson, Howard Chaykin. And, of course, I remain a huge admirer of Savoy’s ReverbStorm, Meng and Ecker and their other astonishingly powerful, genuinely original work, inspired by the dark genius of David Britton who admires almost no one else in comics but Alan Moore.
Maybe Britton’s respect had something to do with it. Maybe I believed that if my friend Iain Sinclair, the English psychogeographer and novelist, admired him, then he must be interesting. I can’t even tell you exactly when I began to seek out his work. I’m still not familiar, for instance, with his Swamp Thing stories. I didn’t buy Watchmen as they came out. As I say, I was impressed by him before we appeared together in Sinclair’s movie The Cardinal and the Corpse in the early 90s. And I know that for me he is the only person writing comics whose work I now automatically buy and look forward to reading. I can never get enough of Moore’s work. It was Moore who brought me back to comics, who made me raise my own ambitions in the work I did in the 90s and in my Elric comics. All this culminated in the huge pleasure of being invited by him to write a two part Tom Strong adventure. He had shown me that it was possible to address a sophisticated audience which he had almost singlehandedly created.
Earlier this year, we appeared together on stage at the Vanbrugh Theatre, London, to a packed house which I know Alan had a lot to do with. Some wag called it ‘the Battle of the Beards’ and looking at the pictures of the event I can see how we might be considered the ZZ Top of the printed page. He is still marginally hairier than me. And he is a gentleman to his bones.. He is one of the few contemporary creative people I think of as a fellow spirit. I’d been asked who, of all the novelists and critics in England, I wanted to discuss my new book with and I immediately suggested him. To my great pleasure he accepted and I think we both enjoyed the conversation which ensued. We have a great deal in common, including an impatience with narrative conventions, an urgent desire to communicate a lot of ideas, a quest to find ways of concentrating as many narratives as possible and keep them coherent and tackle ideas we think are important. We are both largely autodidacts who have had the experienced of being expelled from schools which bored us.
In the course of that evening, I mentioned, amongst the many topics I covered with this most profoundly educated and intelligent man, how I had learned the value of my early training in comics, where you have at least three consecutive methods of story-telling which allow you to offer the reader several different narratives at once, with ‘continuity’, picture and dialogue all of which, in certain hands, can become, panel by panel, episode by episode, much, much more than the sum of their parts. I didn’t add that, before Alan Moore, even the best of the daily newspaper strips, by Caniff, Jordan, Hogarth, Starr and the rest, had never really seemed to achieve their fullest potential. I didn’t need to add this, I think, because our audience knew it already. I suspect, though, that his particular genius didn’t become fully apparent until V For Vendetta and Watchmen, when he began to use his talents to tell sophisticated moral parables far and away more stimulating and interesting than most of the fiction being produced then or now.
Plenty has been written about Moore’s narrative innovations and they have been widely imitated. However, few of his imitators, it seems to me, ever fully understood the nature of Moore’s technical solutions which derived not from a desire for novelty but a desire to tell a more complex story, to get across his ideas. As a result, we have witnessed him creating method after method to distance himself from those he has influenced, who have, in my opinion, largely devalued his techniques, taking the surface of what he did and turning it into narrative clichés no longer responding to the demands of what, in Moore’s case, is a complex and often profound meditation on the fundamental issues of our times. Yet he remains always a fine, old-fashioned story teller. He keeps you turning the pages. Only when you come back to something like Watchmen do you realise just how original Moore was and is. Meanwhile, though I am sure his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is already being imitated somewhere, only Moore has understood that his use of existing fictitious characters is neither homage nor playful ‘postmodernism’. Each character brings their own multi-layered narrative, considerable thematic resonances, so that in combination with his own creations he is able to carry an enormous amount of additional themes on what is not evidently an especially dense framework. It was in Watchmen that, in my opinion, he first began to refine this skill, which sets him apart not only from his imitators and other contemporaries, but from the majority of modern novelists who have, in my opinion, largely failed to address the problems Moore has already solved. He is both ahead of his time and engaging with his times, but unlike his great master William Blake, he has learned how to address a large contemporary audience and hold its attention. He has brought the experience of working in popular forms to his work, enabling him to do even more than some of his peers, like William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard or Iain Sinclair.
This originality has in more recent times led him to produce non-graphic narratives like The Voice of the Fire, which brings to the novel the same talent and originality. I sure he will achieve even more in the novel he is currently working on, Jerusalem. Judging from Fire, the new novel will be as astonishing and absorbing as everything else he has done, displaying even greater sophistication than he showed in Watchmen. Indeed, in whatever form he chooses to work, there is no doubt that Alan Moore will show himself, as he has always done, a consummate modern visionary. I can’t wait to see what he will do next. Meanwhile, we have the pleasure of rereading Watchmen and rediscovering how Moore shares this quality with the very best artists – no matter how many times we return to his work, he always rewards us in fresh and unexpected ways.

Michael Moorcock,
May 2006

This article is copyright Michael Moorcock. Originally posted here.