Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Alan Moore, Comics, grant morrison

Fanboy Rampage: Grant Morrison Vs Alan Moore, Round Eight

I recently wrote an article for Bleeding Cool Magazine #2, entitled Comic Book Feuds, looking at some of the more prominent comic industry feuds of late, and they included Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.

I may have to do some last minute editing however, as Laura Sneddon has compiled for The Beat, a fisking of a recent article by Pádraig Ó Méalóid that detailed Alan Moore's case against Grant Morrison, by Grant Morrison himself.

Thankfully they mostly line up with what I'd written, with some extra details that will no doubt make it into a reworked version. And it's terribly handy, if only for legal reasons, gto have this kind of thing on the record.

Here are a few choice cuts from Grant;

So I'll repeat until maybe one day it sticks; I was already a professional writer/artist in the late '70s, doing work-for-hire at DC Thomson alongside "creator-owned" sci-fi and superhero comics. This was at the same time as people like Bryan Talbot, Peter Milligan, Brendan McCarthy, and Brett Ewins, making us some of the earliest exemplars of the British new wave. If Alan Moore had never come along, if he'd given up halfway through his ground-breaking turn on "St. Pancras Panda", we would all still have written and drawn our comics. We published our own fanzines, and small press outlets were popping up everywhere. "2000 AD" was at a peak. Marvel UK was in a period of expansion and innovation. I'd already submitted art and story samples several times to both DC and Marvel, along with a pitch for a crossover entitled "Second Coming" to DC's New Talent Programme in 1982. I was on the files and I didn't stop angling for work. DC would have found all of us, with or without Alan Moore, who seems curiously unable or unwilling to acknowledge that he was part of a spontaneous movement not its driving force or sole font of creativity.

Far more significantly, much of the material that fed into early Vertigo was originated by the creators and by Editor Art Young for the proposed Touchmark imprint of creator-owned adult comics he'd been assigned to put together under the aegis of Disney, of all things. Coincidentally gay-themed series like Peter Milligan's "Enigma" and my own "Sebastian 0″ – which actually grew out of a pitch for a revamp of IPC's "Janus Stark" character – were commissioned by Art for publication at Touchmark, not by Karen Berger. When Touchmark experienced a failure to launch, Art was re-hired by DC and brought his portfolio of projects to Vertigo. At no point was Alan Moore involved in any of this.

Allow me to demonstrate how easy it is to play this dangerous game:

I'll start by pointing out how various interviews in which I talked about my practice of Chaos Magic during the 1980s and early '90s clearly played into Alan Moore's decision to declare himself a magician in 1993. Next, with censorious authority, I'll point to my own "Doom Patrol" #53 and claim it gave him the idea for his "1963″ project at Image, released a year later. I'll suggest that Moore's take on "Supreme" was a lot more like my take on "Animal Man" than "Zenith" was like "Marvelman" or "Captain Britain" – The Supremacy in "Supreme" is a fairly blatant copy of the Comic Book Limbo concept I introduced in "Animal Man" seven years earlier and the Moore book's wider meta-fictional concerns also covered territory well-trodden by "Animal Man". "LOEG: Century" with its apocalypse/moonchild plot occurring over three time periods cannot help but recall the apocalypse/moonchild plotline running over three time periods in "The Invisibles" fifteen years previously – with Orlando playing the Lord Fanny role, if you fancy. I could go on and on here, with "convincing" examples, but you get the idea. I'll wind up with some condescending comment about how I figured he'd grow out of the rip-off magic and metafiction nonsense then wryly conclude that there's not much chance of that now he's nudging 60.

The above is at least as plausible as Alan Moore's outlandish attempts to claim that my entire career rests on two stories he wrote 30 years ago.

There's plenty more when this came from. Expect another round in a few months when someone asks Moore about some of the more pertinent points raised…

Fanboy Rampage was a blog by Graeme McMillan dedicated to the funniest, most ludicrous and most inappropriate comic book back-and-forths online. McMillan has moved on now, becoming a proper journalist for the likes of Newsarama and Spinoff but he gave permission to Bleeding Cool to revive his great creation. Feel free to contribute your own spots of online excess…

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