Kurtzman, Eisner and American comics

Excerpts from an article titled "The British and Scottish and Irish Invasion" published in Overstreet's FAN n.20, released in February 1997.  

Alan Moore: I guess that I was influenced the most stylistically by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner. […] Those two are right up there at the top. Those are the two main gods in my comic book writers' Pantheon. The stuff I grew up with was the Julie Schwartz era of DC Comics and the Stan Lee, Kirby/Ditko stuff at Marvel and all the other stuff during the 60s. 

[…] I think the main thing that gave me the idea that I could write stories for comics that would interest me was the work that was appearing from Pat Mills and John Wagner in 2000 AD. When it was in its early heyday, you had people like Brian Bolland doing Judge Dredd. Most of the better stories, with a couple of exceptions, seemed to be written either by John Wagner or Pat Mills, or under one of their many aliases. And there was something in them that said that these stories were being written by grown-up people who had a high degree of intelligence and had a high level irony and humor, which attracted me, and I began to think that maybe there was some possible slot for me within the more fruitful kind of ground that comics seemed to be turning into. 

[…] The waters of that particular question have become more murky recently, but if there is some clear feature that separates British comic book writing from American, especially at that time, it might well be the sense of irony, the kind of cynicism that really only comes from being in an empire that is well into its decline. America is headed towards its decline.

Give it another few years, and you'll have that deep-seeded pessimism of the soul. It's sort of a post-empire state that brings this strange, wry melancholia to some of the British work. It has something to do with how the history of a place defines the consciousness of its inhabitants.

[…] In the town that I live in, there are buildings that are a thousand years old. In America it's a completely different dynamic. The difference between Britain and America was once described to me as, in Britain, a hundred miles is a long way, and in America, a hundred years is a long time. When you've been marinating in your own black juices for a couple thousand years, there's a different tone, a different flavor to things.

[…] The opportunities that were presented when I was offered Swamp Thing were really stunning. In Britain, the most that you could hope for was a black and white strip with five pages a week, something like that. Whereas in America, you had the opportunity to write things that seemed of incredibly sprawling length. You could do a story in 24 pages and it would be printed in color! I remember putting some really serious thought into how to revise the story structures I'd been doing because they'd been devised to break down into 5 or 6 page episodes.

[…] I grew up reading American comics. We had very many great British comics at the time, but American comics were something different. They showed me a world that was already fantasy before the superheroes turned up. New York City was a science fiction landscape to me before you even had Superman leaping over the tall buildings. It's a thing where, when I was offered the chance to work at dc, all of the sudden there was the chance to tap back into these comic reading experiences which had been very formative for me.

[…] When I entered the field, certainly in this country, there was no job less glamorous than comic book writer. That wasn't what I got into the field for, though. It was purely because I wanted to write comics. It was only in the kind of explosion that followed that, when it got slightly tarnished for me because it became about other things than writing comics. It became about having a certain position in the industry or reputation, image, things like that. It these things that made me take a more reclusive position in the industry. In fact, the industry itself, I have no interest in. I suppose that might be the sort of position of an embittered, cranky, old guy, but…

Howard Chaykin on Moore and... Kurtzman

Page from American Flagg! n. 21. Pencils by Larry Stroman, inks by Don Lomax.

Simply put, Alan Moore is the best writer American comic books have had since Harvey Kurtzman—and since, in my opinion, Harvey was the best writer comics have ever seen, that’s high praise. --- Howard Chaykin

Above, Chaykin's contribution to the sold-out Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman (2003, Abiogenesis Press), page 77.

In 1985, Moore wrote The Kansas saga, a sequence of short stories that appeared in appendix to Chaykin's acclaimed American Flagg! series (issues n. 21-27).

I love Howard Chaykin!

Vital stats on Alan Moore 1999

Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore at Cheltenham Science Festival in 2011.

From Wizard Wildstorm special, 1999, "Vital stats on Alan Moore" box at page 54.

OCCUPATION: Comic book writer
BORN: Nov. 18, 1953 in Northampton, England
BASE OF OPERATION: Northampton, England

Frame from Insignificance.

FAVORITE MOVIE: "Insignificance", directed by Nicholas Roeg. "It's based on some tenuous real-life connections between famous people: Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio and Joseph McCarthy. Apparently, Monroe once said the person she'd most want to sleep was Einstein. Of course, DiMaggio was married to Monroe. McCarthy apparently had a sexual fixation with Monroe, and he also investigated Einstein at one point. These are the real-life connections. What the director did was imagine that they all meet one night at a hotel. There are all these coincidences that bring them all together. It's wonderful."
FAVORITE AUTHOR: Iain Sinclair [*]. "He's probably my biggest influence at the moment, and has been for a couple of years. There is stuff he can do in writing that I've never seen anybody attempt before."

Harvey Kurtzman's cover for Mad N. 1, 1952.

FAVORITE COMIC: Mad Comics. "Nothing has been able to touch that in terms of originality, experiment, sheer quality and the cleverness of the writing and the drawing."
MOTTO HE LIVES BY: "Keep in the dry place, and stay away from children."
HIS TAKE ON PEOPLE SEEING HIM AS A COMIC BOOK LEGEND: "I'm not one. People like to build up these big, imaginary pantomime figures in their heads. I say, 'Why not?' It's fun for them. It just doesn't have much to do with me."

[*] In the actual box the name is misspelled as "Ian Sinclaire".