Posted in: Comics, Current News | Tagged: Alan Moore, birthday

Happy Seventy-First Birthday, Alan Moore

Alan Moore is seventy-one years old. We wish the Great Wizard of Northampton a very happy birthday, as the answer to The Great When is... today!

He's rarely online, and even if he was, he probably wouldn't read this, but nevertheless, we wish a very happy seventy-first birthday to Alan Moore, who had both a novel and a graphic novel published last month, to great acclaim. Those who just wish he would write a Fantastic Four comic should read this from his daughter Leah from five years ago. Those who think he is some curmudgeonly hermit shouting at clouds just may not be in tune with his sense of humour, or might want to ask journalists why they keep asking him about superheroes. The rest of us will raise a glass to one of the greatest writers alive, and for the comic book medium, we should be eternally grateful he chose to spend forty or so years of it writing really, really good comic books.

There are the famous ones, everything from Watchmen to V For Vendetta, Top Ten to League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Swamp Thing to Marvelman, From Hell to Tom Strong, Top Ten to Big Numbers, 1963 to Supreme, The Ballad Of Halo Jones to DR And Quinch, Lost Gods to Crossed +100, WildCATS to Youngblood, Captain Britain to Violator, Promethea to Killing Joke to Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow. But here are ten of my favourite less well-known comic book works from Alan Moore. Yes, yes, I am celebrating Alan Moore's seventieth birthday with a listicle; I do not care.

1. The Bojeffries Saga with Steve Parkhouse, originally published by Quality Comics in Warrior Magazine alongside Marvelman and V For Vendetta, is often the ignored runt of the litter, but over the years, it has become my favourite. A Northampton-set terraced housing take on The Addams Family or The Munsters, it may be the most peculiarly British comic Alan Moore has ever written. Long before the Moore-influenced Buffy did it, and everyone else followed, we had a full-blown musical episode, The Terrace Symphony, which remains as glorious now as it was then.
2. Cinema Purgatorio with Kevin O'Neill, published by Bleeding Cool's own publisher Avatar Press is a furious, scabrous retelling of the story and troped and pitfalls of Hollywood, epitomised by having the hideous origins of Warner Bros retold by the Marx Bros. And all told with format of a woman attending a cinema in hell run by Adolf Hitler, having to deal with what is both on and off the screen.
3. How Things Work Out with Rick Veitch for Tomorrow Stories' Grayshirt published by ABC/Wildstorm. This may be the perfect comic book. Inspired and in image to Will Eisner, it tells a story of a New York tenement building across four floors and four panels, each set in a different decade, letting the narrative play out horizontally across all the pages in the same time period or vertically spanning the decades with the same characters. At its heart, it is a story about abuse, corruption and tenacity; in practice, it is an expression of one of Alan's favourite themes: the power of history to compel us.
4. Mirror Of Love with Rick Veitch, published by Mad Love. More recently recreated by Jose Villarubia, the original published in Alan Moore's self-published book AARGH – Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia was the most self-expressed "woke" book of Alan Moore's career, collecting work from fellow creators and aimed at the British government's extreme anti-gay policies under Margaret Thatcher. And in doing so created a queer history that, at the time, was extremely rare, through original research. And in doing so, finding poetry in pugilism. It si not often you can say that comic books changed minds, but this literally did.
5. Brought To Light with Bill Sienkiewicz, published by Eclipse. A savage history of the USA and the international operation of its secret services, as told by the bedraggled and soaked American Eagle propping up the bar. Possibly the angriest Alan Moore has ever been on the page.
6. Maxwell The Magic Cat, jokes, jokes, jokes, really funny ones too, with Alan Moore drawing this strip as well, including his first forays into meta-storytelling that would inform much of his work, including…
7. The Courtyard/Neonomicon/Providence with Antony Johnston and Jacen Burrows, published by Avatar Press. An adapted short story into comics, kicked off two major works from Moore, taking on the legacy and weight of the work of HP Lovecraft, with a  pulp fiction tale that leads to a rewriting of the continuity of the universe, creating a League Of Extraordinary Lovecraft, and turning recognised bigoted flaws into compelling narrative twists.
8. Twilight Of The Superheroes, with no artist and no publisher. A pitch to DC Comics for a comic book event to follow Crisis On Infinite Earths, it was bought by the publisher, but Alan Moore withdrew from working from DC Comics, and so that was that. Long before the likes of Kingdom Come or Earth X, Twlght envisioned a future DC Universe where the superheroes had taken all the power, and with John Constantine fighting across time to save the world from this destiny. His grasp on story structure in this pitch is as solid as his marketing plans for the event comic, and uniquely, whether or not other comics chose to tie in with it would be equally read as significant by readers. And a heartbreaking twist for John Constantine that would have been as important as Newcastle if published.
9. The Alan Moore Songbook with various artists, published in Negative Burn by Caliber Press. Alan Moore has written many songs, some recorded, most not, and this series adapted them visually, my favourite possibly being Trampling Tokyo with Arthur Adams and Positively Bridge Street with Phil Hester.
10. Dodgem Logic is a self-published magazine that revisits Northampton Arts' fanzine days and encourages others to follow suit. It features multimedia, many guest writers and artists, and Alan Moore returning to drawing his own work with full stipple effect all manner of comics that mainstream would simply be unable to publish. The magazine is politically psychedelic.

And that's even before you get to the audio and performance works, from Unearthing to Highbury Working, and his short films and feature film, The Show, available on Amazon and Freevee. He has given us all so much, the least we could say is… happy birthday!

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