Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Alan Moore, Comics, from hell, league

Children's Mobiles And Horned Whales – Five Paragraphs From Alan Moore

Laura Sneddon conducted an interview with Alan Moore for the Independent newspaper that was a little on the short side. Thankfully she's transcribed the whole hour long conversation and uploaded it to her website. And she mentioned to me that I might like to mention it on Bleeding Cool. And I did.

As well as revealing that his wife and collaborator Melinda Gebbie will be working on an adaptation of his performance CD Angel Passage about William Blake, he talked about The League, V, Halo Jones and Lost Girls. Here are five paragraphs to entice you from the much longer article.

The Future Of The League:

Oh yeah, I mean the League out of all my comics work, it's the only piece of comics work that I'm still continuing with and where it seems like it is such a good basic idea that can be put to a lot of uses and until me and Kevin get bored with it and feel that we're not giving it the same enthusiasm that we had when we started out then I don't think there's any problems at all for the League in the future. I mean, I've already got a… there's an event coming up, quite a minor story in many ways, in 2009 that once I'd written it I thought, well actually this opens up potentially catastrophic possibilities and I could see a really brilliant story that would actually tie everything in the League continuity in to a marvellous spectacular conclusion; not that it would necessarily be the last story of the League but it would bring a lot of the threads that we've had running since the first couple of volumes to a rather neat conclusion. So that's something that we're talking about after we've finished Century.

On What's Wrong With The World:

I blame a lot of culture, I found myself half way through one of my unfathomable rants the other night, you know where I suddenly sort of think, what am I actually saying? And it turned out what I was saying was that I blame most of Western culture upon the manufacturers of children's cot mobiles. Simply because I think that they have programmed a couple of generations to be entertained by something if it's moving and if it's making a noise. You know? I think that you could probably put most of Hollywood's output over the last couple of decades into that category. It's difficult to see what other appeal it's got. As long as we've got confident visual novelty, or confident novelty in general it seems that we're happy. And I think that we're missing out upon an awful lot.

On His Second Novel, Jerusalem.

And at the same time as this I've been working upon my novel Jerusalem which is at the moment on a pretty spectacular chapter where I've got a massive four dimensional hallway up above the world that is only above one area of the world geographically but it is above it in every particular moment of time. So it's this immense hallway, two miles wide, a mile high, and running down it is a naked old man with a naked 18 month old baby girl riding on his shoulders, and they're running down the length of time and they are seeing the big freeze when the Greenland ice shelf melts and the Gulf Stream stops, and then a bit further on there's a sort of a more jungly area, where presumably the warming of the planet has kind of counteracted the cooling down that would happen in these latitudes if the Gulf Stream were to stop, and you've got post-humans, genetically engineered to survive in a world with less food, and then after a few more thousand years of pounding down this corridor there's no more people any more. And then you start to get mega-fauna that have come up from the drying oceans, giant squids that are using their bodies as basically digital televisions, using the pigment cells in their skin to mimic their surroundings, and land whales that look as if they're part goat! Because I found out that apparently when whales came up on to land for the first time, the thing that they were closest to genetically was the goat. So I've got these horned whales with hooves, dragging themselves through these clearings, you know, towards the end of time.

On The V Mask

But this particular article was illustrated by a picture of a recent protest, possibly one of the anti-cuts protests, and there were a couple of people with smiling V for Vendetta masks. And yeah, I would like to think it's not just the mask it's some of the politics that are proving an inspiration, at least one of the points of inspiration. Yeah that's interesting, I mean like I have a certain amount, although I did my best when I was doing V, I wanted to… there were lots of things I wanted to say and I think that we said them very well, you know, and it's still a work which, yes I'm personally very proud of it although there's a certain amount of emotional distance purely to do with me. Just over the trail of tears that all of those books that are still owned by the big publishers have entailed for me personally. You know, sort of, damaged friendships or ended friendships, you know, and my current state of self-exile from the entire comic book industry

On The Reaction To Lost Girls

It's been quite surprising really, the reaction to Lost Girls because while we were doing it we thought that we're probably gonna be ridden out of town, tarred and feathered on a donkey over this! We'd got no idea what kind of… it took us 18 years to completely finish it, and the world that we started it in was a very different one to the one that we ended up bringing it out in. There'd been paedophile panics, there'd been a sort of resurgence of the right wing and all that that usually brings with it. So we brought it out, confident that we could justify and stand behind everything in the book but with a certain amount of trepidation because we didn't know how it would be received. And I am genuinely surprised that we really didn't have any trouble with Lost Girls that was based upon its content. There was some minor troubling copyright issues and stuff like that but they all got resolved. But other than that there were absolutely, there was no kind of response to it that was negative, which I found startling. And instead we got, I mean I was in a Cafe Nero, this was a year or something ago, and I happened to see one of the women who generally serves me when I go in for my weekly ration of Lush bath products and she was telling me that she was with her mother, who was probably closer to my age, and they'd just been and picked up a copy of Lost Girls at the local book shop and so I was standing there in Cafe Nero having this transgenerational conversation about pornography and its merits. It was a little surreal because I thought well this is great, this is fantastic, we're having a civilised conversation about sexuality that wouldn't have been possible if we hadn't brought Lost Girls out. It's sort of just simply creating something like that, it opens a kind of an arena or for talk, and for sort of, for communication. And especially on a subject that is as personal to most people as sexual fantasy. It's something which most people cannot talk about, even to their partners, and so we hope that with something like Lost Girls – beautiful, intelligent – that we might be able to give a civilised platform for people to talk about their sexual ideas. And something a bit more dignified and beautiful than the only previous existing platform which was simply pornography.

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