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Alan Moore On The Comics He's Reading, The State Of Jerusalem And The End Of The Killing Joke

Published Fri, 30 Oct 2015 13:30:46 -0500

"I'm pretty much incapable of listing my favourite films or books, as my answers to the rest of this series of questions demonstrate resoundingly, so asking me what I think was my most spiritual experience is pretty much doomed to elicit an answer that is even vaguer and more equivocal."

Alan Moore has answered 75 questions given to him by GoodBook readers as part of their HorrorWeek celebrations. And he answered them all – mostly. Consider this Prime Magus' Question Time.

Here a few clips that might if immediate interest to the Bleeding Cool audience, but there is plenty more to discover as well. First the comics he is reading now,

Garth Ennis's always-powerful War Stories along with anything else that the man happens to put out; Si Spurrier's excellent and reinvigorated Crossed + 100 and his forthcoming Cry Havoc from Image; Kieron Gillen's spectacular Mercury Heat, Phonogram,The Wicked + The Divine and, whenever he gets his lazy arse into gear, the next run of the exemplary Über; and, as mentioned earlier, the incredible Brian Vaughn's concept-crammed Saga.

Kieron? Get your arse into gear. He also described Uber as

a meticulous and carefully worked-out piece of extended parallel history that makes most other examples of the sub-genre seem frankly lazy.

As for graphic novels,

As far as the 'graphic novelists' of the past go, one of the only people ever to produce work that was inarguably deserving of that term would be the unsurpassable Lynd Ward, author and artist of such sophisticated wordless narratives as God's Man and Madman's Drum amongst others. Anyone interested in the form should investigate Ward, a great American original whose work still has a great deal to teach us all these decades later.

On the continued popularity of the character of Constantine

are you referring to the American film and, I believe, television series featuring an American character that is nothing at all to do with the character that I created and simply has a name that is spelled the same, but which the makers of the show apparently don't know how to pronounce properly?

And the current state of the massive manuscript that is Jerusalem,

For the past year I've been working with Donna Bond, the very capable editor that I dragged in to oversee the enormous manuscript after the death of my original chosen editor, Steve Moore. Donna has been making suggested changes and edits over the thirty-five chapters…bless her, she even made some useful points about the frankly unreadable Lucia Joyce chapter…and I can report that I finished integrating the edits on the last chapter just six days ago on October 22nd. This almost-complete draft is with the publishers, and I believe some of the foreign editions have already begun the lengthy work of translation. It has also been passed over to my two trusted macro-managers (to see if there are any big structural or plot flaws in a work of this scale and with this number of characters), the author and prison writer Ali Fruish, and author and counter-cultural historian John Higgs. Meanwhile, I am shortly to recommence my drawing work on the front cover – which I began before I commenced work on writing the actual book, and then put away because it struck me as a stupid way to go about things – and I'm hoping that the whole thing will be out next year.

On the ending of The Killing Joke

And David, for the record, my intention at the end of that book was to have the two characters simply experiencing a brief moment of lucidity in their ongoing very weird and probably fatal relationship with each other, reaching a moment where they both perceive the hell that they are in, and can only laugh at their preposterous situation. A similar chuckle is shared by the doomed couple at the end of the remarkable Jim Thompson's original novel, The Getaway.

On V For Vendetta and Anonymous,

on the subject of V for Vendetta I have few thoughts at all, whereas I retain a great deal of admiration for much of the work done by Occupy and Anonymous. From my position, if I have had one of my ideas stolen from me and turned into yet another cash-generator for some abhuman corporation, then if it has at least escaped into the wild sufficiently to be of some symbolic use to today's protest movements, that makes me feel a lot better about having written it in the first place. It makes me feel that the work may have had some use beyond its purely commercial agendas, a use more in keeping with my intentions back in 1981when I was first putting the ideas for that work together.

Discover over 70 more answers right here.

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