Alan Moore

Early life

Moore was born on 18 November 1953, at St Edmund's Hospital in Northampton to a working-class family who he believed had lived in the town for several generations. He grew up in a part of Northampton known as The Boroughs, a poverty-stricken area with a lack of facilities and high levels of illiteracy, but he nonetheless "loved it. I loved the people. I loved the community and ... I didn't know that there was anything else." He lived in a house with his parents, brewery worker Ernest Moore and printer Sylvia Doreen, with his younger brother Mike, and with his maternal grandmother. He "read omnivorously" from the age of five, getting books out of the local library, and subsequently attended Spring Lane Primary School. At the same time, he began reading comic strips, initially in British comics, such as Topper and The Beezer, but eventually also American imports such as The Flash, Detective Comics, Fantastic Four and Blackhawk. He later passed his 11-plus exam and was, therefore, eligible to go to Northampton Grammar School, where he first came into contact with people who were middle class and better educated, and he was shocked at how he went from being one of the top pupils at his primary school to one of the lowest in the class at secondary. Subsequently, disliking school and having "no interest in academic study", he believed that there was a "covert curriculum" being taught that was designed to indoctrinate children with "punctuality, obedience and the acceptance of monotony".

In the late 1960s, Moore began publishing his poetry and essays in fanzines, eventually setting up his fanzine, Embryo. Through Embryo, Moore became involved in a group known as the Northampton Arts Lab. The Arts Lab subsequently made significant contributions to the magazine. He began dealing the hallucinogenic LSD at school, being expelled for doing so in 1970—he later described himself as "one of the world's most inept LSD dealers". The headmaster of the school subsequently "got in touch with various other academic establishments that I'd applied to and told them not to accept me because I was a danger to the moral well-being of the rest of the students there, which was possibly true."

LSD was an incredible experience. Not that I'm recommending it for anybody else; but for me it kind of—it hammered home to me that reality was not a fixed thing. That the reality that we saw about us every day was one reality, and a valid one—but that there were others, different perspectives where different things have meaning that were just as valid. That had a profound effect on me.

Career

Early career, as writer and artist: 1978–1983

Abandoning his office job, he decided to instead take up both writing and illustrating his own comics. He had already produced a couple of strips for several alternative fanzines and magazines, such as Anon E. Mouse for the local paper Anon, and St. Pancras Panda, a parody of Paddington Bear, for the Oxford-based Back Street Bugle. His first paid work was for a few drawings that were printed in NME. In late 1979/early 1980, he and his friend, comic-book writer Steve Moore (whom he had known since he was fourteen) co-created the violent cyborg character Axel Pressbutton for some comics in Dark Star, a British music magazine. (Steve Moore wrote the strip under the name "Pedro Henry", while Alan Moore drew them using the pseudonym of Curt Vile, a pun on the name of composer Kurt Weill.)

Not long afterward, Alan Moore succeeded in getting an underground comix-type series about a private detective known as Roscoe Moscow (who is investigating the "death of Rock N' Roll") published (under the Curt Vile name) in the weekly music magazine Sounds, earning £35 a week. Alongside this, he and Phyllis, with their newborn daughter Leah, began claiming unemployment benefit to supplement this income. After the conclusion of Roscoe Moscow, Moore started a new strip for Sounds—the serialised comic "The Stars My Degradation" (a reference to Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination), featuring Axel Pressbutton. Moore wrote most of the episodes of "The Stars My Degradation" and drew all of them, which appeared in Sounds from 12 July 1980, to 19 March 1983.

Beginning in 1979 Moore created a new comic strip known as Maxwell the Magic Cat in the Northants Post (based in Moore's hometown), under the pseudonym of Jill de Ray (a pun on the Medieval child murderer Gilles de Rais, something he found to be a "sardonic joke"). Earning a further £10 a week from this, he decided to sign off of social security and to continue writing and drawing Maxwell the Magic Cat until 1986. Moore has stated that he would have been happy to continue Maxwell's adventures almost indefinitely but ended the strip after the newspaper ran a negative editorial on the place of homosexuals in the community. Meanwhile, Moore decided to focus more fully on writing comics rather than both writing and drawing them, stating that "After I'd been doing [it] for a couple of years, I realised that I would never be able to draw well enough and/or quickly enough to actually make any kind of decent living as an artist."

To learn more about how to write a successful comic-book script, he asked for advice from his friend Steve Moore. Interested in writing for 2000 AD, one of Britain's most prominent comic magazines, Alan Moore then submitted a script for their long-running and successful series Judge Dredd. While having no need for another writer on Judge Dredd, which was already being written by John Wagner, fellow writer Alan Grant saw promise in Moore's work—later remarking that "this guy's a really fucking good writer"—and instead asked him to write some short stories for the publication's Future Shocks series. While the first few were rejected, Grant advised Moore on improvements, and eventually accepted the first of many. Meanwhile, Moore had also begun writing minor stories for Doctor Who Weekly and later commented that "I really, really wanted a regular strip. I didn't want to do short stories ... But that wasn't what was being offered. I was being offered short four or five-page stories where everything had to be done in those five pages. And, looking back, it was the best possible education that I could have had in how to construct a story."

Marvel UK, 2000 AD and Warrior: 1980–1986

From 1980 until 1986, Moore maintained his status as a freelance writer and was offered a spate of work by a variety of comic book companies in Britain, mainly Marvel UK, and the publishers of 2000 AD and Warrior. He later remarked that "I remember that what was generally happening was that everybody wanted to give me work, for fear that I would just be given other work by their rivals. So everybody was offering me things." It was an era when comic books were increasing in popularity in Britain, and according to Lance Parkin, "the British comics scene was cohering as never before, and it was clear that the audience was sticking with the title as they grew up. Comics were no longer just for very small boys: teenagers—even A-level and university students—were reading them now."

During this period, 2000 AD accepted and published over fifty of Moore's one-off stories for their Future Shocks and Time Twisters science fiction series. The editors at the magazine were impressed by Moore's work and decided to offer him a more permanent strip, starting with a story that they wanted to be vaguely based upon the hit film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The result, Skizz, which was illustrated by Jim Baikie, told the story of the titular alien who crashes to Earth and is cared for by a teenager named Roxy, and Moore later noted that in his opinion, this work "owes far too much to Alan Bleasdale." Another series he produced for 2000 AD was D.R. and Quinch, which was illustrated by Alan Davis. The story, which Moore described as "continuing the tradition of Dennis the Menace, but giving him a thermonuclear capacity", revolved around two delinquent aliens, and was a science-fiction take on National Lampoon's characters O.C. and Stiggs. The work widely considered to be the highlight of his 2000 AD career, and that which he described as "the one that worked best for me", was The Ballad of Halo Jones. Co-created with artist Ian Gibson, the series was about a young woman in the 50th century. The series was discontinued after three books due to a dispute between Moore and Fleetway, the magazine's publishers, over the intellectual property rights of the characters Moore and Gibson had co-created.

Another comic company to employ Moore was Marvel UK, who had formerly purchased a few of his one-off stories for Doctor Who Weekly and Star Wars Weekly. Aiming to get an older audience than 2000 AD, their main rival, they employed Moore to write for the regular strip Captain Britain, "halfway through a storyline that he's neither inaugurated nor completely understood." He replaced the former writer Dave Thorpe but maintained the original artist, Alan Davis, whom Moore described as "an artist whose love for the medium and whose sheer exultation upon finding himself gainfully employed within it shine from every line, every new costume design, each nuance of expression."

The American mainstream and DC Comics: 1983–1988

Moore's work in 2000 AD brought him to the attention of DC Comics editor Len Wein, who hired him in 1983 to write The Saga of the Swamp Thing, then a formulaic and poor-selling monster comic. Moore, with artists Stephen R. Bissette, Rick Veitch and John Totleben, deconstructed and reimagined the character, writing a series of formally experimental stories that addressed environmental and social issues alongside the horror and fantasy, bolstered by research into the culture of Louisiana, where the series was set. For Swamp Thing he revived many of DC's neglected magical and supernatural characters, including the Spectre, the Demon, the Phantom Stranger, Deadman and others, and introduced John Constantine, an English working-class magician based visually on the British musician Sting; Constantine later became the protagonist of the series Hellblazer, which became Vertigo's longest-running series at 300 issues. Moore wrote Swamp Thing for almost four years, from issue No. 20 (January 1984) through to issue No. 64 (September 1987) with the exception of issues No. 59 and 62. Moore's run on Swamp Thing was successful both critically and commercially, and it inspired DC to recruit British writers such as Grant Morrison, Jamie Delano, Peter Milligan and Neil Gaiman to write comics in a similar vein, often involving radical revamps of obscure characters. These titles laid the foundation of what became the Vertigo line.

Moore began producing further stories for DC Comics, including a two-part story for Vigilante which dealt with domestic abuse. He was eventually given the chance to write a story for one of DC's best-known superheroes, Superman, entitled "For the Man Who Has Everything", which was illustrated by Dave Gibbons and published in 1985. In this story, Wonder Woman, Batman and Robin visit Superman on his birthday, only to find that he has been overcome by an alien organism and is hallucinating about his heart's desire. He followed this with another Superman story, "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?", which was published in 1986. Illustrated by Curt Swan, it was designed as the last Superman story in the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths DC Universe.

The limited series Watchmen, begun in 1986 and collected as a trade paperback in 1987, cemented Moore's reputation. Imagining what the world would be like if costumed heroes had really existed since the 1940s, Moore and artist Dave Gibbons created a Cold War mystery in which the shadow of nuclear war threatens the world. The heroes who are caught up in this escalating crisis either work for the US government or are outlawed, and are motivated to heroism by their various psychological hang-ups. Watchmen is non-linear and told from multiple points of view, and includes highly sophisticated self-references, ironies and formal experiments such as the symmetrical design of issue 5, "Fearful Symmetry", where the last page is a near mirror-image of the first, the second last of the second, and so on, and in this manner is an early example of Moore's interest in the human perception of time and its implications for free will. It was the first comic to win the Hugo Award, in a one-time category ("Best Other Form"). It is widely seen as Moore's best work, and has been regularly described as the greatest comic book ever written. Alongside roughly contemporary works such as Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez's Love and Rockets, Watchmen was part of a late 1980s trend in American comics towards more adult sensibilities. Comics historian Les Daniels noted that Watchmen "called into question the basic assumptions on which the superhero genre is formulated". DC Comics writer and executive Paul Levitz observed in 2010 that "As with The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen set off a chain reaction of rethinking the nature of superheroes and heroism itself, and pushed the genre darker for more than a decade. The series won acclaim ... and would continue to be regarded as one of the most important literary works the field ever produced." Moore briefly became a media celebrity, and the resulting attention led to him withdrawing from fandom and no longer attending comics conventions (at one UKCAC in London he is said to have been followed into the toilet by eager autograph hunters).

Independent period and Mad Love: 1988–1993

Abandoning DC Comics and the mainstream, Moore, with his wife Phyllis and their mutual lover Deborah Delano, set up their own comics publishing company, which they named Mad Love. The works they published in Mad Love turned away from the science fiction and superhero genres that Moore was used to writing, instead focusing on realism, ordinary people and political causes. Mad Love's first publication, AARGH, was an anthology of work by a number of writers (including Moore) that challenged the Thatcher government's recently introduced Clause 28, a law designed to prevent councils and schools "promoting homosexuality". Sales from the book went towards the Organisation of Lesbian and Gay Action, and Moore was "very pleased with" it, stating that "we hadn't prevented this bill from becoming law, but we had joined in the general uproar against it, which prevented it from ever becoming as viciously effective as its designers might have hoped." Moore followed this with a second political work, Shadowplay: The Secret Team, a comic illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz for Eclipse Comics and commissioned by the Christic Institute, which was included as a part of the anthology Brought to Light, a description of the CIA's covert drug smuggling and arms dealing. In 1998 Brought to Light was adapted by Moore in collaboration with composer Gary Lloyd as a narrative and music work which was released on CD.

After prompting by cartoonist and self-publishing advocate Dave Sim, Moore then used Mad Love to publish his next project, Big Numbers, a proposed twelve-issue series set in "a hardly disguised version of Moore's native Northampton" known as Hampton, and deals with the effects of big business on ordinary people and with ideas of chaos theory. Illustration of the comic was begun by Bill Sienkiewicz, who left the series after only two issues in 1990, and despite plans that his assistant, Al Columbia, would replace him, it never occurred and the series remained unfinished. Following this, in 1991 the company Victor Gollancz Ltd published Moore's A Small Killing, a full-length story illustrated by Oscar Zárate, about a once idealistic advertising executive haunted by his boyhood self. According to Lance Parkin, A Small Killing is "quite possibly Moore's most underrated work". Soon after this, Mad Love itself was disbanded as Phyllis and Deborah ended their relationship with Moore, taking with them much of the money that he had earned from his work in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, Moore began producing work for Taboo, a small independent comic anthology edited by his former collaborator Stephen R. Bissette. The first of these was From Hell, a fictionalised account of the Jack the Ripper murders of the 1880s. Inspired by Douglas Adams' novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Moore reasoned that to solve a crime holistically, one would need to solve the entire society it occurred in, and depicts the murders as a consequence of the politics and economics of the time. Just about every notable figure of the period is connected with the events in some way, including "Elephant Man" Joseph Merrick, Oscar Wilde, Native American writer Black Elk, William Morris, artist Walter Sickert and Aleister Crowley, who makes a brief appearance as a young boy. Illustrated in a sooty pen-and-ink style by Eddie Campbell, From Hell took nearly ten years to complete, outlasting Taboo and going through two more publishers before being collected as a trade paperback by Eddie Campbell Comics. It was widely praised, with comics author Warren Ellis citing it as his "all-time favourite graphic novel".

Return to the mainstream and Image Comics: 1993–1998

In 1993 Moore declared himself to be a ceremonial magician. The same year marked a move by Moore back to the mainstream comics industry and back to writing superhero comics. He did so through Image Comics, widely known at the time for its flashy artistic style, graphic violence and scantily clad large-breasted women, something that horrified many of his fans. His first work published by Image, an issue of the series Spawn, was soon followed by the creation of his own miniseries, 1963, which was "a pastiche of Jack Kirby stories drawn for Marvel in the sixties, with their rather overblown style, colourful characters and cosmic style". According to Moore, "after I'd done the 1963 stuff I'd become aware of how much the comic audience had changed while I'd been away [since 1988]. That all of a sudden it seemed that the bulk of the audience really wanted things that had almost no story, just lots of big, full-page pin-up sort of pieces of artwork. And I was genuinely interested to see if I could write a decent story for that market."

He subsequently set about writing what he saw as "better than average stories for 13-to-15-year olds", including three miniseries based upon the Spawn series: Violator, Violator/Badrock and Spawn: Blood Feud. In 1995, he was also given control of a regular monthly comic, Jim Lee's WildC.A.T.S., starting with issue No. 21, which he continued to write for fourteen issues. The series followed two groups of superheroes, one of which is on a spaceship headed back to its home planet, and one of which remains on Earth. Moore's biographer Lance Parkin was critical of the run, feeling that it was one of Moore's worst, and that "you feel Moore should be better than this. It's not special." Moore himself, who remarked that he took on the series—his only regular monthly comic series since Swamp Thing—largely because he liked Jim Lee, admitted that he was not entirely happy with the work, believing that he had catered too much to his conceptions of what the fans wanted rather than being innovative.

Next he took over Rob Liefeld's Supreme, about a character with many similarities with DC Comics' Superman. Instead of emphasising increased realism as he had done with earlier superhero comics he had taken over, Moore did the opposite and began basing the series on the Silver Age Superman comics of the 1960s, introducing a female superhero Suprema, a super-dog Radar and a Kryptonite-like material known as Supremium, in doing so harking back to the original "mythic" figure of the American superhero. Under Moore, Supreme proved a critical and commercial success, announcing that he was back in the mainstream after several years of self-imposed exile.

America's Best Comics: 1999–2008

Image partner Jim Lee offered to provide Moore with his own imprint, which would be under Lee's company WildStorm Productions. Moore named this imprint America's Best Comics, lining up a series of artists and writers to assist him in this venture. Lee soon sold WildStorm—including America's Best Comics—to DC Comics, and "Moore found himself back with a company he'd vowed to never work with again". Lee and editor Scott Dunbier flew to England personally to reassure Moore that he would not be affected by the sale, and would not have to deal with DC directly. Moore decided that there were too many people involved to back out from the project, and so ABC was launched in early 1999.

The first series published by ABC was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which featured a variety of characters from Victorian adventure novels, such as H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain, H. G. Wells' Invisible Man, Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Wilhelmina Murray from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Illustrated by Kevin O'Neill, the first volume of the series pitted the League against Professor Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes books; the second, against the Martians from The War of the Worlds. A third volume entitled The Black Dossier was set in the 1950s. The series was well received, and Moore was pleased that an American audience was enjoying something he considered "perversely English", and that it was inspiring some readers to get interested in Victorian literature.

Another of Moore's ABC works was Tom Strong, a post-modern superhero series, featured a hero inspired by characters pre-dating Superman, such as Doc Savage and Tarzan. The character's drug-induced longevity allowed Moore to include flashbacks to Strong's adventures throughout the 20th century, written and drawn in period styles, as a comment on the history of comics and pulp fiction. The primary artist was Chris Sprouse. Tom Strong bore many similarities to Moore's earlier work on Supreme, but according to Lance Parkin, was "more subtle", and was "ABC's most accessible comic".

Moore's Top 10, a deadpan police procedural drama set in a city called Neopolis where everyone, including the police, criminals and civilians has super-powers, costumes and secret identities, was drawn by Gene Ha and Zander Cannon. The series ended after twelve issues but has spawned four spin-offs: a miniseries Smax, which was set in a fantasy realm and drawn by Cannon; Top 10: The Forty-Niners, a prequel to the main Top Ten series drawn by Ha; and two sequel miniseries, Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct, which was written by Paul Di Filippo and drawn by Jerry Ordway, and Top 10: Season Two, written by Cannon and drawn by Ha.

Return to independents: 2009–present

With many of the stories he had planned for America's Best Comics brought to an end, and with his increasing dissatisfaction with how DC Comics were interfering with his work, he decided to once more pull out of the comics mainstream. In 2005, he remarked that "I love the comics medium. I pretty much detest the comics industry. Give it another 15 months, I'll probably be pulling out of mainstream, commercial comics." The only ABC title continued by Moore was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; after cutting ties with DC he launched the new League saga, Volume III: Century, in a co-publishing partnership of Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout Comics, the first part, titled "1910" released in 2009, the second, titled "1969", released in 2011, and the third, titled "2009", released in 2012. He continues to work with Kevin O'Neill on their League of Extraordinary Gentlemen spin-off, Nemo, with three graphic novels published, "Heart of Ice", "The Roses of Berlin" and "River of Ghosts".

In 2006, the complete edition of Lost Girls was published, as a slipcased set of three hardcover volumes. The same year Moore published an eight-page article tracing out the history of pornography in which he argued that a society's vibrancy and success are related to its permissiveness in sexual matters. Decrying that the consumption of contemporary ubiquitous pornography was still widely considered shameful, he called for a new and more artistic pornography that could be openly discussed and would have a beneficial impact on society. He expanded on this for a 2009 book-length essay entitled 25,000 years of Erotic Freedom, which was described by a reviewer as "a tremendously witty history lecture—a sort of Horrible Histories for grownups."

In 2007, Moore appeared in animated form in an episode of The Simpsons—a show of which he is a fan—entitled "Husbands and Knives", which aired on his fifty-fourth birthday.

Since 2009, Moore has been a panellist on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Infinite Monkey Cage, which is hosted by physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince.

In 2010, Moore began what he described as "the 21st century's first underground magazine". Titled Dodgem Logic, the bi-monthly publication consisted of work by a number of Northampton and Midlands-based authors and artists, as well as original contributions from Moore. Despite Dodgem Logic's content not being particularly regional or parochial, its advertising sales remained mainly Midland's based, limiting its financial stability, and making it unusually dependent upon sales revenues. It ran for eight issues and folded in April 2011.

Work

Themes

In a number of his comics, where he was taking over from earlier writers, including Marvelman, Swamp Thing and Supreme, he used the "familiar tactic of wiping out what had gone before, giving the hero amnesia and revealing that everything we'd learned to that point was a lie." In this manner he was largely able to start afresh with the character and its series and was not constrained by earlier canon. While commenting on the artistic restrictiveness of serialised comic books, artist Joe Rubinstein gave the example that a comics creator would be limited in what he could do with Spider-Man, and added, "unless you're Alan Moore, who would probably kill him and bring him back as a real spider or something".

As a comics writer, Moore applies literary sensibilities to the mainstream of the medium as well as including challenging subject matter and adult themes. He brings a wide range of influences to his work, such as William S. Burroughs, William Blake, Thomas Pynchon and Iain Sinclair, New Wave science fiction writers like Michael Moorcock, and horror writers such as Clive Barker. Influences within comics include Will Eisner, Steve Ditko, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Kirby and Bryan Talbot.

Recognition and awards

Moore's work in the comic book medium has been widely recognised by his peers and by critics. Comics historian George Khoury asserted that "to call this free spirit the best writer in the history of comic books is an understatement" while interviewer Steve Rose referred to him as "the Orson Welles of comics" who is "the undisputed high priest of the medium, whose every word is seized upon like a message from the ether" by comic book fans. Douglas Wolk observed: "Moore has undisputably made it into the Hall of Fame: he's one of the pillars of English-language comics, alongside Jack Kirby and Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman and not many others. He's also the grand exception in that hall, since the other pillars are artists—and more often than not, writer/artists. Moore is a writer almost exclusively, though his hyper detailed scripts always play to the strengths of the artists he works with. That makes him the chief monkey wrench in comics author theory. The main reason that almost nobody's willing to say that a single cartoonist is categorically superior to a writer/artist team is that such a rule would run smack into Moore's bibliography. In fact, a handful of cartoonists who almost always write the stories they draw have made exceptions for Moore—Jaime Hernández, Mark Beyer and most memorably Eddie Campbell."

Moore was voted Best Writer by the Society of Strip Illustration in both 1982 and 1983.

Moore won numerous Jack Kirby Awards, including for Best Single Issue for Swamp Thing Annual No. 2 in 1985 with John Totleben and Steve Bissette, for Best Continuing Series for Swamp Thing in 1985, 1986 and 1987 with Totleben and Bissette, Best Writer for Swamp Thing in 1985 and 1986 and for Watchmen in 1987, and with Dave Gibbons for Best Finite Series and Best Writer/Artist (Single or Team) for Watchmen in 1987.

He received an Inkpot Award at San Diego Comic-Con in 1985.

Moore has won multiple Eagle Awards, including virtually a "clean sweep" in 1986 for his work on Watchmen and Swamp Thing. Moore not only won "favourite writer in both the US and UK categories", but had his work win for favourite comic book, supporting character and new title in the US; and character, continuing story and "character worthy of own title" in the UK (in which last category his works held all top three spots).

Eisner Awards

Best Writer

1988 Watchmen (DC)

1989 Batman: The Killing Joke (DC Comics)

1995 From Hell (Kitchen Sink)

1996 From Hell (Kitchen Sink)

1997 From Hell (Kitchen Sink); Supreme (Maximum Press)

2000 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea, Tom Strong, Tomorrow Stories, Top 10 (America's Best Comics (ABC))

2001 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea, Tom Strong, Tomorrow Stories, Top 10 (ABC)

2004 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea, Smax, Tom Strong, Tom Strong's Terrific Tales (ABC)

2006 Promethea, Top 10: The Forty-Niners (ABC)

Best Writer/Artist

1988 With Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (DC)

Best Single Issue/Single Story

2000 Tom Strong #1: "How Tom Strong Got Started", with Chris Sprouse and Al Gordon (ABC)

2001 Promethea #10: "Sex, Stars, and Serpents", with J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray (ABC)

Best Serialized Story

1993 From Hell with Eddie Campbell in Taboo (SpiderBaby Graphix/Tundra)

Best Continuing Series

Film adaptations

Due to the success of his comics, a number of filmmakers have expressed a desire to make film adaptations over the years. Moore himself has consistently opposed such ventures, stating that "I wanted to give comics a special place when I was writing things like Watchmen. I wanted to show off just what the possibilities of the comic book medium were, and films are completely different." Expressing similar sentiments, he also remarked that:

If we only see comics in relation to movies then the best that they will ever be is films that do not move. I found it, in the mid 80s, preferable to concentrate on those things that only comics could achieve. The way in which a tremendous amount of information could be included visually in every panel, the juxtapositions between what a character was saying and what the image that the reader was looking at would be. So in a sense ... most of my work from the 80s onwards was designed to be un-filmable.

The first film to be based upon Moore's work was From Hell in 2001, which was directed by the Hughes brothers. The film included a number of radical differences from the original comic, altering the main character from an older, conservative detective to a young character played by Johnny Depp. This was followed in 2003 with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a film that also departed radically from the books, changing the ending from a mob war over the skies of London to the infiltration of a secret base in Tibet. For these two works, Moore was content to allow the filmmakers to do whatever they wished and removed himself from the process entirely. "As long as I could distance myself by not seeing them," he said, he could profit from the films while leaving the original comics untouched, "assured no one would confuse the two. This was probably naïve on my part."

His attitude changed after producer Martin Poll and screenwriter Larry Cohen filed a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox, alleging that the film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen plagiarised an unproduced script they had written entitled Cast of Characters. According to Moore, "They seemed to believe that the head of 20th Century Fox called me up and persuaded me to steal this screenplay, turning it into a comic book they could then adapt back into a movie, to camouflage petty larceny." Moore testified in a deposition and found the process to be extremely unpleasant. Fox's settlement of the case insulted Moore, who interpreted it as an admission of guilt. In 2012, Moore claimed that he had sold the rights to these two works simply for the money; he did not expect the films ever to be made. He was simply "getting money for old rope". Moore said in an interview in 2012 that he had seen neither film.

Personal life

Since his teenage years Moore has had long hair, and since early adulthood has also had a beard. He has taken to wearing a number of large rings on his hands, leading him to be described as a "cross between Hagrid and Danny from Withnail and I" who could be easily mistaken for "the village eccentric". Born and raised in Northampton, he continues to live in the town, and used its history as a basis for his novels Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem.

With his first wife Phyllis, whom he married in the early 1970s, he has two daughters, Leah and Amber. The couple also had a mutual lover, Deborah, although the relationship between the three ended in the early 1990s as Phyllis and Deborah left Moore, taking his daughters with them. On 12 May 2007, he married Melinda Gebbie, with whom he has worked on several comics, most notably Lost Girls.

His "unassuming terraced" Northampton home was described by an interviewer in 2001 as "something like an occult bookshop under permanent renovation, with records, videos, magical artefacts and comic-book figurines strewn among shelves of mystical tomes and piles of paper. The bathroom, with blue-and-gold décor and a generous sunken tub, is palatial; the rest of the house has possibly never seen a vacuum cleaner. This is clearly a man who spends little time on the material plane." He likes to live in his home town, feeling that it affords him a level of obscurity that he enjoys, remarking that "I never signed up to be a celebrity." He has spoken in praise of the town's former Radical MP, Charles Bradlaugh at his annual commemoration. He is also a vegetarian.

As of September 2023, Moore was said to be living "a quiet life in Northampton, England."

Religion and magic

In 1993, on his fortieth birthday, Moore openly declared his dedication to being a ceremonial magician, something he saw as "a logical end step to my career as a writer". According to a 2001 interview, his inspiration for doing this came when he was writing From Hell in the early 1990s, a book containing much Freemasonic and occult symbolism: "One word balloon in From Hell completely hijacked my life ... A character says something like, 'The one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind'. After I wrote that, I realised I'd accidentally made a true statement, and now I'd have to rearrange my entire life around it. The only thing that seemed to really be appropriate was to become a magician." Moore associates magic very much with writing; "I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness ... Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman."

Monotheism is, to me, a great simplification. I mean the Qabalah has a great multiplicity of gods, but at the very top of the Qabalic Tree of Life, you have this one sphere that is absolute God, the Monad, something which is indivisible. All of the other gods, and indeed everything else in the universe, is a kind of emanation of that God. Now, that's fine, but it's when you suggest that there is only that one God, at this kind of unreachable height above humanity, and there is nothing in between, you're limiting and simplifying the thing. I tend to think of paganism as a kind of alphabet, as a language, it's like all of the gods are letters in that language. They express nuances, shades of meaning or certain subtleties of ideas, whereas monotheism tends to just be one vowel and it's just something like 'oooooooo'. It's a monkey sound.

Connecting his esoteric beliefs with his career in writing, he conceptualised a hypothetical area known as the "Idea Space", describing it as "... a space in which mental events can be said to occur, an idea space which is perhaps universal. Our individual consciousnesses have access to this vast universal space, just as we have individual houses, but the street outside the front door belongs to everybody. It's almost as if ideas are pre-existing forms within this space ... The landmasses that might exist in this mind space would be composed entirely of ideas, of concepts, that instead of continents and islands you might have large belief systems, philosophies, Marxism might be one, Judeo-Christian religions might make up another." He subsequently believed that to navigate this space, magical systems like the tarot and the Qabalah would have to be used.

Friends and hobbies

Moore is a member of Northampton Arts Lab and takes walks with the novelist Alistair Fruish.

Political views

Moore politically identifies as an anarchist, and outlined his interpretation of anarchist philosophy, and its application to fiction writing in an interview with Margaret Killjoy, collected in the 2009 book, Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:

I believe that all other political states are in fact variations or outgrowths of a basic state of anarchy; after all, when you mention the idea of anarchy to most people they will tell you what a bad idea it is because the biggest gang would just take over. Which is pretty much how I see contemporary society. We live in a badly developed anarchist situation in which the biggest gang has taken over and have declared that it is not an anarchist situation – that it is a capitalist or a communist situation. But I tend to think that anarchy is the most natural form of politics for a human being to actually practice.

In December 2011, Moore responded to Frank Miller's attack on the Occupy movement, calling his more recent work misogynistic, homophobic and misguided. Worldwide, Occupy protesters adopted the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta. The mask has also been adopted by Anonymous, Egyptian revolutionaries, and anti-globalisation demonstrators. Moore described Occupy as "ordinary people reclaiming rights which should always have been theirs", and added:

I can't think of any reason why as a population we should be expected to stand by and see a gross reduction in the living standards of ourselves and our kids, possibly for generations, when the people who have got us into this have been rewarded for it – they've certainly not been punished in any way because they're too big to fail. I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who's too big to fail. As an anarchist, I believe that power should be given to the people whose lives this is actually affecting.

Moore is a member of The Arts Emergency Service, a British charity working with 16- to 19-year-olds in further education from diverse backgrounds.

In August 2016, Moore endorsed Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election. In the 2017 UK general election, Moore expressed guarded support for the Labour Party, mainly due to the left-wing socialist Corbyn being elected leader, although he does not vote as a matter of political principle. In November 2019, Moore again expressed guarded support for Labour, saying that he was voting for the first time in over forty years. He wrote: "Although my vote is principally against the Tories rather than for Labour, I'd observe that Labour's current manifesto is the most encouraging set of proposals that I've ever seen from any major British party. Though these are immensely complicated times and we are all uncertain as to which course we should take, I'd say the one that steers us furthest from the glaringly apparent iceberg is the safest bet."

On conspiracy theories

Doing research into conspiracy theories for his work on Brought to Light, Moore came to develop his own view about why people accept conspiracy theories, stating:

Yes, there is a conspiracy, indeed there are a great number of conspiracies, all tripping each other up ... the main thing that I learned about conspiracy theories is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in the conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control, the truth is far more frightening; no-one is in control, the world is rudderless.

On comic book writing and style

Despite his advocacy for creator-owned comics, Moore has expressed dissatisfaction with the output of independent comic companies, stating in a 1985 essay that, "With a very few bold exceptions, most of the creator-owned material produced by the independent companies has been indistinguishable from the mainstream product that preceded it." Moore has also criticised his own overuse of "a basic elliptical plot structure, where elements at the beginning of the story mirror events which are to happen at the end ... acting as bookends to give the story that takes place in between a sense of neatness and unity." He has also faulted his own excessive use of overlapping or coincidental dialogue in scene transitions.

Moore explained his preference for comic book writing over other mediums: "In comics, I have complete control, other than the input of my artists... every full stop and comma that I put down on that script is going to end up in the finished comic." Moore complimented Frank Miller's realistic use of minimal dialogue in fight scenes, which "move very fast, flowing from image to image with the speed of a real-life conflict, unimpeded by the reader having to stop to read a lot of accompanying text".