Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: Alan Moore

Alan Moore Interviewed By Pádraig Ó Méalóid

Published Thu, 17 Mar 2011 16:02:05 -0500

Pádraig Ó Méalóid, long time friend of the site, has just posted a full interview with Alan Moore on his site. Naturally you'll want to read the whole thing bit here are a few select highlights from the man.

On Superfolks;

I can't even remember when I read it. It would probably have been before I wrote Marvelman, and it would have had the same kind of influence upon me as the much earlier – probably a bit early for Grant Morrison to have spotted it – Brian Patten's poem, 'Where Are You Now, Batman?', which was in the 1960s Penguin Mersey Poets collection [sic, The Mersey Sound], and that, which had an elegiac tone to it, which was talking about these former heroes in straitened circumstances, looking back to better days in the past, that had an influence.

On the end and future of Dodgem Logic:

What's happening with Dodgem Logic at the moment is that with issue eight, which will be the next one to come out – a little bit later than normal, we're sending it to print the middle of next month – issue eight will be the last issue for a while. This is because Dodgem Logic has been entirely funded with my money, and we have not yet managed to break even.

What we're doing now is, after issue eight has come out – which is looking like a very lovely issue, it has to be said. We've got a ten-page piece of new writing from Michael Moorcock, 'A Child's Christmas in the Blitz', which we'll be running, and lots of other lovely stuff as well. What we're doing after that is we will be putting original content up on the website, which we're redesigning to make it more user-friendly, 'cause it was very pretty before, but not necessarily easy for people to use.

It was right at the south-west corner of the Boroughs, the top of Gold Street, and Ann Timson was the woman who ran out of nowhere like some sort of comic book avenger and set about five smash and grab robbers, who were on scooters, and who had sledgehammers. And she just laid about them with her handbag, and all of them tried to flee. One of them fell off of his bicycle, at which point Ann went over and started laying into him with her handbag again. I'd like to think that, just by giving Ann a bit of sustenance over the Christmas period, that we sort of contributed to her extraordinary act of valour.

we're talking about doing a Dodgem Logic benefit, which would be a number of comedians and Dodgem Logic-related bands at some big venue, I don't know, some two thousand seater, or something like that, where I'd be performing, and Robin [Ince] and Stewart [Lee] and Josie [Long] would probably be along for the ride, and people like Al Murray has apparently expressed an interest…

On his film, Jimmy's End

Jimmy's End. We are, we should by the end of the week have the funding for that sorted out. Don't want to say too much, because I don't want to announce anything regarding who or what that might be, but it's people that I find interesting, and we're not talking to anybody from Hollywood.

Well, at the moment we're just talking about a short ten minute film. There are possibilities beyond that, but we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. The ten minute film Jimmy's End is the cornerstone for everything that follows, so we want to just treat that as entirely a thing in itself. Then when people have seen that, they will be able to judge whether they would be interested in the other possible film, television series, or whatever, that we've got to follow that up.

It's set in Northampton, but then everything that I do tends to be set in Northampton, I mean, if I could feasibly have done it, I would probably have set League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Watchmen in Northampton…

On Halo Jones

Well, I'd got the idea that she'd go through fabulous adventures, the next adventure would have probably been when she was a female space pirate with Sally Quasar, who was somebody that I'd mentioned, and I would have been basically going through all the decades of her life, with her getting older in each one, because I liked the idea, at the time, of having a strip in 2000AD with a seventy or eighty year old woman as the title character. And also because – it's probably true in my work that – I mean, I wrote Marvelman when I was in my, what, twenties?

It would have ended up with Halo Jones upon some planet that is right at the absolute edge of the universe where, beyond that, beyond some sort of spectacular lightshow, there is no space, no time, and it would have ended up with Halo Jones – all the rest of the people on this planetoid because, actually, time is not passing; you could stay there forever, potentially – and what would have happened is that Halo Jones, after spending some time with the rest of the immortals, would have tottered across the landing field, got into her spacecraft, and flown into the psychedelic lightshow, to finally get out. And that would have been the ending. So, you've saved me a lot of writing, and you a lot of unnecessary worrying.

On his novel Jerusalem;

Jerusalem is back on track. I have resumed it, I have done chapter 27, 28. Chapter twenty seven is called 'Burning Gold' – another [William] Blake reference, obviously – and it gives the life story of one of the characters in Jerusalem, but also gives a history of currency and economy, which goes all the way back to the historical fact that there were gold coins being made in Northampton from 600, which is the earliest that they were being made anywhere in the country… And I'm also talking about all of the things that led up to the great economic collapse of 2008.

The Steps of All Saints', chapter 29, is in the style of a Samuel Beckett play, so I'm having fun with that. It's a Samuel Beckett play that actually has Samuel Beckett as a character, relating to the fact that Samuel Beckett, he got mentioned in Wisden's Almanac for his cricket games against Northampton. The night that he visited Northampton, the rest of his cricket mates went out drinking and whoring, because both of those things were – Northampton was quite famous for them. Beckett went out on a church crawl.