‘When I was a teenage boy I came up with a ridiculous, poorly thought through, fatasy image of the kind of figure I might want to be when I was older. And horrifically, this seems to have come completely true down to the last detail.’

Alan Moore, The Art of Dismantling

July 2006 finally saw the publication of Lost Girls, Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s pornographic epic. What had started as a vague idea for an eight-page short story by two people who ‘barely knew each other’ ended up as a four-inch-thick, three-volume work by a couple who were engaged to be married. As Moore noted, ‘I’d recommend to anybody working on their relationship that they should try embarking on a sixteen-year elaborate pornography together. I think they’ll find it works wonders.’ Moore thought he and Gebbie were staking out territory on the extreme edge of culture and he was ready for a fight, but instead found that a work that featured – among many, many, many startling images – Wendy giving Peter Pan a handjob while her brothers look on, masturbating, had earned him academic attention and serious literary respectability. Lost Girls received enough mainstream press on both sides of the Atlantic to delight any novelist, and the coverage was unprecedented for a graphic novelist. The release of a project originally ‘meant to fill in time between Big Numbers issues’ had become a publishing event, heralded as the debut of a new major work by, as the Independent on Sunday put it, ‘the first great modern author of comics in the English language’. A Channel 4 News item went further, declaring, ‘Alan Moore isn’t just a comic writer but a spiritualist, a performance artist, even a magician, and to his many fans an anarchic visionary.’

Like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Lost Girls brought together characters from different Victorian and Edwardian novels – in this case, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz. In Lost Girls, three women meet as guests on the eve of the Great War at an isolated hotel, where they describe their sexual experiences and engage in erotic exploration with each other and various guests, in pretty much every possible permutation, depicted frankly and with utter explicitness. These are not technically ‘the characters’ from the original books, but they have processed their formative sexual experiences in terms we recognise from those stories. So, for example, the Dorothy of Lost Girls was not literally swept up in a tornado to find herself in Oz; it’s a metaphor for the new realm of experience she found herself in following her first orgasm. The three main characters represent different ages and social classes – Alice is old and upper class, Wendy middle-aged and middle class, Dorothy young and rural. It’s a simple framework for an episodic story which allows Moore and Gebbie to engage in increasingly complex exercises in literary and artistic pastiche (there are sequences in the styles of Aubrey Beardsley, Alfons Mucha and Egon Schiele), and a growing contrast between the ‘pornotopia’ of the isolated hotel and the war brewing beyond its walls.

The main significance of Lost Girls, surely, is that it is a major work by Alan Moore produced in collaboration with the woman who would become his wife. They would marry on 12 May 2007; the ceremony, at Northampton’s Guildhall, was attended by friends, family and artists including Neil Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, Todd Klein, Kevin O’Neill, Iain Sinclair, Chris Staros, Jose Villarrubia and Oscar Zarate. Moore wrote his own vows, Gebbie illustrated the invitations. On the day, Moore wore a bowler hat, Gebbie arrived in a horse-drawn carriage and guests were treated to a Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band tribute act, the Gonzo Dog-do Bar Band. The couple honeymooned in Edinburgh. In terms of Lost Girls’ place in Moore’s career, though, while it was published in 2006, it might best be thought of as a holdover from the late eighties or early nineties, the same period as From Hell, Big Numbers and The Mirror of Love, projects conceived in the years after Moore had left DC, when he was developing elaborately structured, ambitious comics for adults.

Working for mainstream US publishers had meant working within Comics Code Authority guidelines that decreed: ‘Nudity in any form is prohibited. Suggestive and salacious illustration is unacceptable.’ In practice, by the mid-eighties, comics – and not just those by Alan Moore – catered for an older audience, and no longer existed in a prelapsarian world. Even a Code-approved comic could get away with the occasional bare bottom, or a hint that characters were post-coital. In any case, Moore had soon divested himself of his CCA seals. Many of his books for DC featured a scattering of panels where a woman’s nipples were visible – still relatively tame compared with other media – and Watchmen broke the taboo of full-frontal male nudity (albeit full-frontal, fluorescent, blue post-human male nudity).

Far more controversially, and from early in his career, Moore had frequently incorporated sexual violence into his stories. Interviewed by Rolling Stone in 2012, Grant Morrison remarked: ‘I was reading some Alan Moore Marvelman for some reason today. I found one in the back there and I couldn’t believe it. I pick it up and there are fucking two rapes in it and I suddenly think how many times has somebody been raped in an Alan Moore story? And I couldn’t find a single one where someone wasn’t raped except for Tom Strong, which I believe was a pastiche. We know Alan Moore isn’t a misogynist but fuck, he’s obsessed with rape. I managed to do thirty years in comics without any rape!’ It may be colourfully put, but Morrison’s observation is not entirely unfair. Nor is he the first to make it. All of Moore’s best-known work for DC features sexual assault (or the threat of it) at crucial dramatic moments: The Killing Joke sees Batgirl abused by the Joker; V for Vendetta starts with Evey being rescued from rapists by V, who later performs a cavity search on her as part of a fake captivity; and perhaps most controversially, in Watchmen the Comedian attempts to rape Silk Spectre (although the two are reconciled and later have a child together).

In 1988, there was controversy over the violence in The Killing Joke … and not a word about The Fear, a two-part story that ran in the Code-approved Detective Comics, in which Batman tracks down Cornelius Stirk, a serial killer who kidnaps his victims from the streets, then terrifies them to death and eats their hearts. The Killing Joke inflicts its violence on a long-running character who was a strong role model for girls, whereas Stirk’s victims are created to be killed off, explaining why readers were more disturbed by the former. Even so, superhero comics intended for young readers routinely include spree killing, mutilation, armed robbery, beatings, stabbings and shootings, and depict people being drowned, burned, electrocuted or doused in acid. Moore’s work navigates fictional universes predicated on violent conflict. His inclusion of sexual violence is clearly, in part, consistent with the idea of treating the action-adventure genre ‘realistically’. No one is surprised when the Joker commits murder, but in a world with violent super-criminals, wouldn’t there be sexually violent supervillains? Moore is intentionally trying to shock his audience, and when challenged that his work has tended towards the dark and grim, he has conceded that ‘I’ve probably done more comics about the horrors of nuclear power than I’ve done about the delights of windmills.’

There are, of course, Alan Moore adventure stories that don’t involve sexual violence. But many others do, and he does not always treat the subject with high seriousness. When we meet the Invisible Man in the first volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the character is loose in a girls’ school, and the comic plays rape for laughs. Moore noted, ‘I know technically it was rape. I still thought it was funny, just because – it’s a funny idea, people floating in space with their legs wrapped around nothing, gasping in rapture.’ And for the record, there is a rape in Tom Strong, again treated lightly – in #6, the title character is drugged and raped by Nazi scientist Ingrid Weiss, who goes on to have his son, Albrecht. More recently, particularly brutal, lengthy and graphically depicted rape scenes have provided defining moments in both Century 1910 and Neonomicon.

Any analysis has to acknowledge that Moore has written about the delights of windmills, too. He has dealt with positive aspects of sex and sexuality as often as he’s depicted rape. In Swamp Thing, Moore’s only ongoing series for DC, he was able to explore the subject of sex from a number of angles, including the issue-long, joyous sex scene that is #34, ‘The Rite of Spring’. Moore reasoned, ‘if you could fill comic book after comic book every month with fights, then surely you could fill at least one comic book with a sexual act. Surely that was as interesting as a fight.’

Freeing himself from DC allowed Moore to address the topic of sex far more openly. In early interviews about Lost Girls, he was keen to stress that he was working within the traditions of the comics industry. There had been porn comics before Lost Girls, such as the Tijuana Bibles, which – as Moore had informed readers of Watchmen – usually featured famous cartoon characters like Betty Boop or Dick Tracy. During the thirties and forties, these circulated in their millions in all-male environments like barracks and barbershops. Invariably eight pages long, they were therefore known as ‘eight-pagers’. As Moore said, ‘The great appeal of showing thoroughly non-sexual figures such as Blondie, Jiggs or Popeye taking part in pornographic skits lies in the greater contrast, with the sexual content seeming dirtier when in the context of some previously spotless cultural icon. There is also the subversive pleasure that is to be had in puncturing the anodyne and sexless vision of society presented by the Sunday funnies.’ The basic premise of Lost Girls was the same: characters from children’s fiction having explicit sexual encounters. The critic Annalisa Di Liddo and Onion reviewer Noel Murray independently concluded that it’s no coincidence its chapters are eight pages long.

There was, too, a radical impulse: Melinda Gebbie had a fine pedigree in underground comix, and Moore was keen to remind people of the role the counterculture had played on both sides of the barricades during the sexual revolution: ‘Of course, both sex and sexual expression are political and always have been, but it wasn’t until the late sixties and the seventies that they were widely seen as such. Sprung up from the same sixties counterculture that had given rise to Robert Crumb came feminism to provide the artist with his fiercest critics.’

Almost from the beginning, underground comix had appropriated existing cartoon characters. When Dan O’Neill and his colleagues showed Mickey Mouse behaving like an underground comix character – dealing dope, swearing, leering and giving Minnie an STD caught from Daisy Duck (on finding out, Minnie yells ‘you dirty duckfucker’) – in their 1971 Air Pirates Funnies anthologies, it was a protest against the safe world of Disney, an assertion that free speech applied to corporate-owned characters, too. O’Neill was embroiled in an eight-year legal case for his trouble, and used the trial to express the opinion that freedom of speech should allow a cartoonist to parody cartoons. He also noted that ‘wholesome’ Disney cartoons routinely traded in ethnic and gender stereotypes. The Air Pirates case became a cause célèbre among the comics community, with Disney winning vast damages they knew they could never collect from an artist who listed the sum total of his assets as $7 and a banjo.

The British equivalent was the Oz obscenity trial, which ran for six weeks over the summer of 1971. The underground magazine was routinely full of lewd images and swear words, but the trial somehow came to centre on the inclusion of an image of Rupert the Bear with an erection. This led to memorable exchanges in court: the prosecution claimed that as Rupert was a child, the images therefore qualified as obscene images of children – a far more serious charge than doodling a cock onto a cartoon bear. The defence was led by barrister John Mortimer (author of the Rumpole novels), who called the psychologist Dr Michael Schofield to offer expert opinion that the images were not harmful and would not corrupt the intended audience, leading to the following memorable exchange under cross-examination:

BRIAN LEARY (prosecution): What sort of age would you think Rupert is, to your mind? What sort of aged bear?

SCHOFIELD: Oh, I’m very sorry. I’m not up to date with bears.

LEARY: You don’t have to be, because he doesn’t change, Rupert, does he?

JUDGE ARGYLE (interrupting): I think the question is ‘what age do you think Rupert is intended to be: a child, an adult or what?’

SCHOFIELD: It is an unreal question, you might as well ask me ‘how old is Jupiter?’

Moore has alluded to this a couple of times in stories – a flashback image in Big Numbers #2 that shows baffled parents discovering a teenager’s copy of Oz, complete with the offending image of Rupert, feels at least semi-autobiographical. And towards the end of Lost Girls, Wendy is horrified to find a book containing a story in which a pair of young children have sex with their parents – we see the illustrations. The man who gave her the book offers a defence that’s a clear allusion to the Oz trial, but he soon sort-of snatches away the get-out clause he’s just drafted:

Incest, c’est vrai, it is a crime, but this? This is the idea of incest, no? And these children: how outrageous! How old can they be? Eleven? Twelve? It is quite monstrous … except that they are fictions, as old as the page they appear on, no less, no more. Fiction and fact: only madmen and magistrates can not discriminate between them … I, of course, am real and since Helena, who I just fucked, is only thirteen, I am very guilty. Ah well, it can’t be helped.

In the early nineties, Lost Girls had been one of many forthcoming projects from Moore, who described it as ‘almost symmetrical’ with From Hell: ‘In some ways From Hell – what I hope it to be – is a painfully meticulous examination of the disease, whereas Lost Girls offers some tentative suggestions towards a possible cure.’ Unfortunately, the parallels didn’t end there, the two series also sharing a patchy publication history. Like From Hell, the opening chapters of Lost Girls appeared in Taboo in 1991–2, and Kitchen Sink published two magazine-sized volumes of the series in 1995–6. Even without a publisher, though, Moore and Gebbie continued to work on the project. Moore remained ‘sure that a major work of mine is going to be published sooner or later. I’ve been able to maintain my sangfroid concerning the various ups and downs in the publishing status of the books. I’m convinced that the work is the main thing to concentrate on, and when it’s ready to be published there’ll be a publisher there to do it.’

It would take over ten years, but Lost Girls did find its publisher. This was Chris Staros at Top Shelf, who announced in September 2002 that he was committed to publishing the book exactly to Moore and Gebbie’s specifications. Top Shelf pulled out all the stops to make the final product as lavish as possible. Lost Girls was to be a slab-like slipcased set containing three volumes, each one a hardback with its own dust jacket, on thick paper that Moore said ‘to my mind smells better than the finest Chanel, you can really bury your face in Lost Girls, and it’s such a great quality paper, it adds to the experience’. The delays in completing the book only improved the quality of the final product: ‘If we’d finished it a little earlier there would not yet have been the reproduction techniques that would have been capable of reproducing Melinda’s artwork with the kind of fidelity that we see in the Top Shelf volume.’ The original art was photographed at a specialist printer’s in London, the only place in the country they could find which was up to the technical challenge of duplicating Gebbie’s delicate pastels. The finished product would retail for $75 at a time when a standard comic book cost $2.95.

Not only did the printing and other costs represent a commitment of around $350,000 for Top Shelf – an immense financial risk under any circumstance for a small press – but Lost Girls presented a whole new set of potential problems. Due to its content, it was unclear that consignments of the book would be allowed through customs in a number of countries (as it was printed in Hong Kong, there was no guarantee it would even leave the printers’ warehouse). There are places where any depiction of underage sex, even in drawings, is banned and merely possessing a copy of a book containing them is a serious criminal offence. And in the UK there came another challenge: London’s Great Ormond Street children’s hospital, who were bequeathed the rights to Peter Pan by its creator J.M. Barrie, blocked sales in Moore and O’Neill’s home country on more straightforward copyright grounds. The initial print run of 10,000 looked extremely optimistic. When asked ‘are you worried about bankrupting Top Shelf?’ Moore’s answer didn’t rule out the possibility:

I’m incredibly proud of the way Chris is standing behind this book. Chris knew what the book was when he decided to do it, and we’ve been completely honest about what this book contains during the whole sixteen years we’ve been working upon it. Of course we don’t want anybody to be disadvantaged or bankrupted by this book. At the same time, what are our alternatives? If you’re living in a politically repressive time where you have this seemingly fundamentalist-directed agenda percolating down not only through America but through all of those countries who are fortunate enough be in the shadow of America, you’ve really got no option other than to make your statement as you see fit, or shut up.

As the publication date approached, Staros began a careful marketing campaign: ‘We really worked the press hard on this book, for several reasons. One, it’s such an expensive book to produce, it had to launch big or it would have killed us financially. Secondly, it was very important for a book this controversial to be sort of pre-approved by the public at large as a work of art, rather than come out cold and start getting detractors from the beginning … I’ve made sure the book is legitimised as a work of art. That’s why we’ve packaged it the way we have … So, there’s no confusion that it has literary merit, which in this country means it’s not obscene.’ Neil Gaiman – who, lest we forget, was the person who put Moore and Gebbie in touch in the first place – wrote a review for Publishers Weekly that, by accident or design, was perfectly on-message:

As a formal exercise in pure comics, Lost Girls is as good as anything Moore has written. (One of my favorite moments: a husband and wife trapped in a frozen, loveless, sexless relationship, conduct a stiff conversation, laced with unconscious puns and wordplay, moving into positions that cause their shadows to appear to copulate wildly, finding the physical passion that the people are denied.) In addition to being a masterclass in comics technique, Lost Girls is also an education in Edwardian smut – Gebbie and Moore pastiche the pornography of the period, taking in everything from The Oyster to the Venus and Tannhauser period work of Aubrey Beardsley. Melinda Gebbie was a strange and inspired choice as collaborator for Moore. She draws real people, with none of the exaggerated bodies usual to superhero or porno comics. Gebbie’s people, drawn for the most part in gentle crayons, have human bodies. Lost Girls is a bittersweet, beautiful, exhaustive, problematic, occasionally exhausting work.

The biggest gun in the marketing battle, though, was Alan Moore himself. Lost Girls would be published a few months after the release of the V for Vendetta movie, and there were many articles in the mainstream and comics press about his disputes with Hollywood and the comics industry. Moore was able to contrast such matters with his work on Lost Girls. As ever, he was not afraid to explain how clever he was being, and his approach to writing pornography was characteristically thoughtful as he brought his revisionist, deconstructionist techniques to bear: ‘Even porn’s most uncompromising and vociferous feminist critic, Andrea Dworkin, has conceded that benign pornography might be conceivable, even if she considered such a thing highly unlikely. Given that we don’t want “bad pornography” and can’t have “no pornography”, it’s in this mere suggestion of the possibility of “good” pornography that the one ray of light in an intractable debate resides.’

Moore wanted to create such ‘good pornography’, work with genuine artistic merit and a degree of technical accomplishment. There was a grand purpose to the endeavour, and he was keen to position Lost Girls as a political statement:

I think if you were to sever that connection between arousal and shame, you might actually come up with something liberating and socially useful. It might be healthier for us, and lead to a situation such as they enjoy in Holland, Denmark, or Spain, where they have pornography all over the place – quite hardcore pornography – but they do not have anywhere near the incidence of sex crimes. Particularly not the sex crimes against children that we suffer from in Britain, and that I believe you suffer from in the United States. It seems at least potentially that pornography might be providing an essential pressure valve in those countries, which we do not have access to here. Rather than being able to have a healthy relationship with our own sexual imagination, we’re driven into some dark corners by shame and embarrassment and guilt, and those dark corners breed all sorts of monsters. Things that cross the line between the kind of pornography Melinda and I are doing, which only occurs in the realm of the mind, to the very unpleasant things that can occur in real life.

In a long essay, ‘Bog Venus v Nazi Cock Ring’, Moore summed up, with his tongue mostly in his cheek, what he believed to be the simple choice: ‘Sexually open and progressive cultures such as ancient Greece have given the West almost all of its civilising aspects, whereas sexually repressive cultures like late Rome have given us the Dark Ages.’

This was nothing new. Moore has contrasted ‘sex’ and ‘violence’ from his earliest work. In Miracleman #13 (November 1987), an eternal cosmic war between two galactic civilisations is ended following this exchange between the leader of one side and Miraclewoman:

KINGQUEEN:	Are both cultures forever doomed, then, to an unproductive war’s dull toil?
MIRACLEWOMAN:	Excuse me … but couldn’t you have sex instead?
KINGQUEEN:	Have sex?
	…
MIRACLEWOMAN:	If two organisms or two cultures are forced into contact, it can be thanatic and destructive, or erotic and creative.

It boils down to the old hippy mantra: ‘make love, not war’. But Moore, true to character, sees it not as a suggestion, but as a description of fundamental universal forces, with history representing the Manichean struggle between them.

In Promethea #22 (November 2002), Moore describes ‘godsex’ as ‘This chaotic animal force. It’s the primal scene. It’s mom and dad doing it, humping towards the moment of conception, but it’s the conception of the universe. The universe. All the male and female energies pounding in the binary throb of being. On and off. Back and forth. In and out. Gravity. Electromagnetism. The weak nuclear force. The strong nuclear force. Earth, air, water, fire. This phosphorous angel copulation … building like music, building to a crescendo. Building to its outburst.’ It’s a coming together that creates the universe.

Indeed, Moore sees sex as the ultimate union and creative act. He’s often described it in similar, psychedelic terms as a great journey upwards. Promethea #10 (October 2000) includes the passage ‘This is heart, and soul … this is the Sun, this is the Gold in us and you are almost me and I am almost you. Oh love. Love … and we become each other … become hermaphrodite … as we climb … towards the godhead’. Snakes and Ladders (1999) reaches a transcendental climax: ‘we climb on … the he and she of us become a limitation to our pleasure, sloughs away in favour of a more erotic possibility: the limitless horny intimacy if we could become each other.’ And there’s the sex scene in Swamp Thing #34 (March 1985): ‘I am no longer certain where I end … where he begins … I feel my own hand like he feels it […] we … are … one creature … and all … that there is … is in us … Together we know the light, exploding upward in a birdcloud.’

That Swamp Thing story, ‘The Rite of Spring’, was named after the Stravinsky ballet which holds an important place in Moore’s worldview. For Moore, the original Rite of Spring represents truly revolutionary forces in its unbottling of great passion. Such energies can be channelled in one of two directions: war divides and destroys; sex unites and creates. While he has been dismissive of Freud, once telling The Onion, ‘Sigmund Freud, frankly, I’ve not got a great deal of time for, because I think he was a child-fixated cokehead, to be perfectly honest’, Moore’s model is practically identical to Freud’s theory of Eros and Thanatos. As he explains: ‘Control sex and death, and controlling populations becomes simple. Death’s easily subjugated: William Burroughs observed that anyone who can lift a frying pan owns death. Similarly, those owning the most pans, troops, tanks or warheads own the most death, and can regulate the supply accordingly. Death’s a pushover, but how do you control desire?’

This is the question at the heart of Lost Girls. In the story, the main characters leave the hotel to attend a performance of The Rite of Spring. While they are carried away sexually by the pagan rhythms, the majority of the audience becomes violent and a riot ensues. In 2006 Moore was able to make a case for the contemporary relevance of the book, saying ‘This has taken us sixteen years. We didn’t know it was going to come out in 2006, in the middle of George Bush’s second administration, with the world plunged more thoroughly into war than it’s been in a couple of decades. It could just have easily come out nine years ago, when Clinton was in office, and it might’ve seemed irrelevant, and not particularly shocking in a time of [Andres Serrano’s] “Piss Christ”. And if we’d done this forty years ago, there would’ve been people asking us if we hadn’t gone a bit far by portraying homosexuality.’

The regularity with which Moore is interviewed means that when he’s asked the same question by different journalists, naturally enough he will give broadly the same answer, and tends to use similar examples or anecdotes. With the round of Lost Girls interviews, though, he gave almost word-for-word answers to MTV, the Independent, Onion, Patriot-News and other media outlets. He was clearly girding his loins for a fight, aware he needed to choose his words carefully.

Moore was ready for anything … except what actually happened. Soon, the Independent on Sunday was able to report:

In spite of worries that Lost Girls’ explicit imagery might prove controversial or even actionable in America, the book received glowing press, even in the normally conservative USA Today, and sold out there of its 10,000-copy first printing in one day. Already going into a third printing of 20,000, their distribution to Britain has been delayed because of correspondence to the publishers, Top Shelf, from Great Ormond Street Hospital – which was given the copyright to Peter Pan in J.M. Barrie’s will – possibly until January 2008, when its rights expire. This has not stopped the book hitting the Top 20 on Amazon.

The first print run sold out on the day of release, Wednesday 30 August 2006. Two weeks later, Chris Staros announced, ‘since the back orders in the Diamond system were already greater than the second printing of 10,000 we had ordered in anticipation of higher demand, we had to go ahead and order a third printing of 20,000 copies. So in a period of four days, we went through the first, second and part of the third printing.’ By 9 November, Top Shelf announced that 17,000 of the following month’s third printing were already back ordered. Lost Girls was not banned by any store or (for any length of time) by any jurisdiction, and remains available from any retailer of graphic novels, latterly in a single-volume edition. American bookstore chain Borders insisted the book be shrinkwrapped, but that was just as likely done in an effort to protect a $75 book from grubby-fingered customers as to protect the customers from the contents of the book.

Challenge after challenge fell away. Moore said, ‘We got back a wonderful letter from the Canadian Customs Authority, basically saying that, even though there were scenes that were tantamount to bestiality or incest, this could in no way be considered obscene, and even though it did appear that there were underage people taking part in some of the sex scenes, this could in no way be considered as child pornography, and that it was a work of great social and artistic benefit.’ There was no tabloid outrage. When Moore was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on 22 June 2006, the encounter started out confrontationally, but Moore soon turned the subject around from child abuse to the joys of free speech and the exchange ended up almost playful. He could hardly have had a more respectable or prestigious platform – his interview followed a discussion with Al Gore about climate change. And on New Year’s Eve 2011, he was invited back to Today to deliver the Thought for the Day homily; he chose to extol the virtues of worshipping a glove puppet, ending with: ‘Anyway, thank you very much for listening and from both me and Glycon, a very happy new year to you all.’

The coverage of Lost Girls was by no means all fawning or even positive, but the criticism it received was concerned less with its subject matter and more with its merits as a comic. For some time the work became the focus of heated back-and-forth debates in both the venerable The Comics Journal and the online academic comics forum InterText.

It also attracted broad scholarly attention. Moore and Gebbie had managed to encompass many of the hot button topics of contemporary English Literature courses – gender studies, queer theory, identity politics, Victoriana, the fin de siècle, constructions of childhood, the First World War, children’s literature, sex, rape and censorship – as well as offering rich meat for those looking simply to examine formal aspects of comics storytelling. It seemed there was much to discuss; the introduction to the collection Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore went as far as to assert ‘Lost Girls has become a sort of Rosetta Stone for understanding Moore’s career’. When Leah Moore was at university in the late nineties, both she and her father had been a little surprised to find his work on her reading lists; since then, a number of books have been published solely dedicated to his life and work, ranging from slim paperbacks to coffee-table books. There are book-long interviews with Moore, collections of old interviews, and a growing weight of academic papers. By 2010 Moore was such a focus of scholarly attention that on 28–29 May, the University of Northampton organised Magus: Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Alan Moore, an event that included papers with titles like ‘Big Numbers: Comics Beyond Referentiality and Reinvention’, ‘Chaotic Criminality: The Villains of Alan Moore’ and ‘V Versus Hollywood: A Discourse on Polemic Thievery’. Subjects ranged from Moore’s mainstream comics, through his connection to Northampton, to his performance art and magic. Efforts were made to link his work to broader literary movements, such as postmodernism and the Gothic, and there was considerable discussion of his influences and influence. There were also screenings of Moore rarities like Don’t Let Me Die in Black and White, before the conference culminated with a panel appearance by Moore and Gebbie themselves.

Whether or not Lost Girls was really the keystone to Moore’s career it was presented as by some journalists and critics at the time, it is a useful landmark. Its publication came in 2006, the year when Moore made a conscious and very public effort to distance himself from the entire comics industry. Thanks to tension over editorial decisions at ABC and Moore’s anger about DC’s handling of the V for Vendetta movie, he had decided to wind down his involvement in the ABC range, shelving plans for new series Comet Rangers (with art by Jim Lee), Pearl of the Deep (John Totleben), The Soul (John Coulthart) and Limbo (Shane Oakley), and an anthology series called Cascade which he hoped would involve Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland and Bryan Talbot.

There was, as Moore put it, one ‘slender thread’ connecting him to DC: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Moore reiterated that he and Kevin O’Neill would not accept any further editorial interference. By mid-2006, the one-off Black Dossier was nearly ready, and it was slated for release in October that year, but the complex nature of the book saw it slipping into early 2007. Just as The Black Dossier was completed, there was to be one further delay, as O’Neill explained:

A Hollywood film producer insisted on seeing the book, long before publication, in the early part of the year it was finally published. He was putting a lot of pressure on DC, and if I understand the story correctly – I’ll try to keep names out of this – someone important at DC flew out, showed the assembled book to the guy, who was flicking through the pages going, ‘Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, you guys are going to be sued out of existence, oh my God, what are you doing, what are you thinking?’ … then, unfortunately, the same producer was at a book fair in New York, and met someone from DC and said, ‘Jeez, you’re not still publishing that thing?’

While O’Neill didn’t name names, he was clearly referring to LXG producer Don Murphy, who explains that he had asked to read The Black Dossier in case there was potential for a movie sequel:

By this point Alan was done with Hollywood … John Nee brought it to the studio and stayed while I read it. It was not really a coherent story, but very fun. It seemed clear to me that there were dozens of modern copyright violations, like with James Bond and Jeeves, that were outrageous. But remember, I’m not a lawyer, I make movies. I’m fairly good at rights, but DC and Warners have the best lawyers in town. If DC scuttled the book because I said something, that’s crazy? Who am I? On the other hand, later on O’Neill, in an interview slagging what I said, mentioned that he felt that Warners should have given them the rights to Jeeves because a sister company owned it. They played fast and loose on later editions of the League with copyrights and certainly felt entitled to other people’s creations.

Because The Black Dossier was set in the fifties, everyone involved always knew that it would contain characters who might still be trademarked or in copyright. Moore, O’Neill and their editor Scott Dunbier had been careful throughout the process of putting the book together to discuss and work through the legal issues this might entail. Nevertheless, Paul Levitz, DC publisher, recommended that The Black Dossier only be sold in the US (the given reason being that an intended pastiche of P.G. Wodehouse would fall foul of UK law). It was also decided that one of the two songs on the vinyl record, ‘Home With You’, was too close to the song it was parodying, the theme tune to Gerry Anderson’s sixties puppet series Fireball XL5, and so the record would not be included with the book.

Publicly, ever since Moore’s first falling out with DC in 1987, Levitz has never been anything other than complimentary about him in interviews, while a number of people have credited Levitz with blocking all attempts to publish a Watchmen sequel or otherwise exploit the property – in the event, the only new Watchmen material published until 2012 was in a 1987 role-playing game module created in co-operation with Moore, and a 2009 videogame that tied into the movie (Levitz vetoed the creation of any new material for the game). After Levitz stepped down as president and publisher of DC Comics in September 2009, this would quickly change.

For Moore, though, Levitz’s intervention over The Black Dossier was already a bridge too far, and he concluded that he had finally had enough. ‘At that point, we had decided we’d switch publishers. Because even if we changed things, they could always come back with one more petty alteration – it was like having a boot on our neck.’ The obvious place to take future volumes of the League was Top Shelf, publishers of Lost Girls, who were keen to pick up the series. In the UK, it would be handled by venerable underground publishers Knockabout, with whom both Moore and O’Neill had separately worked on numerous occasions in the past.

Moore explained why he was leaving mainstream comics in an eighty-page interview with journalist Bill Baker, published at the end of the year as the book Alan Moore’s Exit Interview. It was another exercise in bridge burning, during which Moore accused DC’s management of being more interested in movie deals, corporate politics and their own egos than in making comics. After more than a quarter of a century as a writer, he claimed he barely owned a single thing he had written, and, from his perspective, the business practices of comics publishers routinely involved lying, blackmail and fraud. Moore still loved the medium, but had come to believe the industry was institutionally incapable of respecting writers and artists: ‘It treats them as a resource. It treats them as fuel rods. It has no respect for them as individuals. It will work them to death in the hope of getting a few more books out of them. And then, when they’re dead, it can publish fulsome obituaries and release all their work in commemorative editions and continue to make money out of them.’

Though the American comics industry has been around since the thirties and seen its share of peaks and troughs, it’s clear that it currently faces a big problem. The internet has radically altered the market for newspapers and magazines, and ultimately comics are just another form of printed periodical. Like the music industry, the comics companies were caught out by internet piracy and slow to offer a legitimate alternative. They are insulated from the worst ravages – collectors fetishise physical comics, thinking of them as investments, and there’s some basis for that belief. The first issue of The Walking Dead, for example, came out in 2003 and cost $2.95; in November 2012, a mint condition copy sold for $10,000. The direct sales distribution system essentially means comics are print-to-order and non-returnable, and so the publishers take on very little risk. But comics have relied on existing readers for too long. In the eighties, industry professionals were surprised to learn that some of their readers were old enough to go to college; nowadays they would be surprised to learn they had many readers that young. In 2012 Grant Morrison, then writing both Superman and Batman for DC, told Rolling Stone: ‘comics sales are so low … It’s just plummeting. It’s really bad from month to month. May was the first time in a long time that no comic sold over 100,000 copies, so there’s a decline … There’s a real feeling of things just going off the rails, to be honest. Superhero comics. The concept is quite a ruthless concept, and it’s moved on.’

Moore had been saying for years that the industry was doomed. In an interview for podcast Panel Borders, he offered the following suggestion:

The thing which I think might really save the comics industry, what we really need, is a good insurance fire. I think that if we actually burned the industry down to the ground, and we could probably lock the fire exits on all the big companies before we did that, then what we’d have would be scorched earth, which is rich in nitrates and which green shoots can blossom from. That perhaps sounds a bit apocalyptic, but I think that would be really healthy to actually bust the comics medium back down to the ignored state that it used to blissfully enjoy before people like me came along and spoiled everything.

There is a comics community, one in which most professionals started out as fans – Moore, of course, being no exception – and it’s a network with very few degrees of separation. Comics, like every other creative industry, has its fair share of feuds, splits, factions and grudges, but it’s broadly fraternal. So when Moore offers a critique, he inevitably provokes a reaction – from the creators, who feel personally slighted, and from the fans who champion the work of those writers and artists he is seen to be criticising. In September 2010, Moore remarked that if ‘they have got these “top-flight industry creators” that are ready to produce these prequels and sequels to Watchmen, well this is probably a radical idea, but could they not get one of the “top-flight industry creators” to come up with an idea of their own? … Just simply get some of your top-flight talent to put out a book that the wider public outside of the comics field find as interesting or as appealing as the stuff that I wrote twenty-five years ago. It shouldn’t be too big an ask, should it?’ Such comments are incendiary, and quickly spread online, but it’s a one-way process: while virtually all comics creators now have a blog and Twitter account, Moore genuinely still does not have an internet connection (although, based on comments he’s made, he clearly gets reports from friends and family).

Even when silent, his voice is heard. Every comics fan knows Alan Moore wrote V for Vendetta and Watchmen, so when the credits on the movie versions read ‘based on the graphic novel illustrated by David Lloyd’ and ‘based on the graphic novel co-created and illustrated by Dave Gibbons’, it means they start their viewing experience with a jarring reminder of his disapproval. Many fans are now in early middle age and prefer Moore’s early superhero work from their formative years to his more recent projects. They take Moore’s criticisms as personal attacks, with various degrees of denial, bargaining, anger, depression or acceptance. Fans of the V for Vendetta movie can’t comprehend why Alan Moore dismisses it.

All this has fuelled an image of Moore as reclusive and embittered, particularly, it would seem, among sections of American comics fandom. As Melinda Gebbie told the New York Times, ‘Because he looks like a wild man, people assume that he must be one. He’s frightening to people because he doesn’t seem to take the carrot, and he’s fighting to maintain an integrity that they don’t understand.’ Journalists often note their surprise on discovering that Moore is rather affable, the consensus being summed up by a profile in the Guardian: ‘You could be forgiven for thinking he’s a curmudgeonly old hermit, but in person he’s genuinely warm, considerate and utterly unpretentious.’

Most sixty year olds, presumably, have lost touch with former pals, or aren’t on the same good terms with every workmate they had in the eighties. Moore is no exception: he’s fallen out with a number of his collaborators over the years, including people he used to be friends with. He has also maintained friendships with Northampton locals since childhood, retained friends from the world of comics like Steve Moore, Neil Gaiman and Eddie Campbell for many decades, and stayed on good terms with many of his artists, going so far as to marry one of them. He has, though, also consciously cut people out of his life. On occasions he’s made it clear to publishers that he’s only willing to speak to certain individuals – latterly at DC, for example, he would only take calls from his former Swamp Thing editor Karen Berger, and his only contact at ABC was Scott Dunbier. By the mid-eighties, he had stopped communicating with Dez Skinn to the point that the Warrior editor had to send letters to him by registered post to be sure Moore had received them. Moore only wants to deal with people he trusts. Skinn’s response is: ‘Trust? Unless one’s paranoid, I’m not sure where that even factors in. I’ve never even stopped to consider whether I trusted my bosses at IPC, Marvel, Mad or anywhere. As long as they paid me, I worked for them.’

This goes beyond purely professional relationships; Moore has applied the same sort of all-or-nothing approach to his friendships. He and Stephen Bissette started out on very good terms, working together as writer and artist on Swamp Thing. When Bissette began self-publishing Taboo, Moore provided From Hell and Lost Girls, as well as other material; Eddie Campbell, clearly a little frustrated with the venue, says ‘I always knew that From Hell was going nowhere as long as it was imprisoned in Taboo but Alan stuck loyally by his original agreement with Steve.’ Bissette visited Moore in Northampton, staying at his house. Moore took an interest in Bissette’s creator-owned dinosaur comic Tyrant. They worked together on 1963 for Image, enjoying at least the initial process, and both earning a lot of money.

But things were to change abruptly. Bissette told The Onion that Moore had fallen out with him over an interview in The Comics Journal #185 (March 1996): ‘I sent copies to anyone I mentioned by name, of the transcript of the interview with a cover letter, saying “If anything upsets you, I will take it out. If there’s anything I got wrong, I will change it. Please read this, go over it, and let me know.” Alan, I never heard from. But when Neil [Gaiman] saw him, Alan … Actually, Neil called me before he left England, and I called Alan that night, and it was the last sentence he ever said to me. He said “Right, Steve? I’ll keep this short. Don’t call me, don’t write me, as far as I’m concerned, it’s over, mate.” Click. That was it. All done. I don’t know what offended him …’

Moore’s recollection is that although ‘the conversation wasn’t a long one, it was slightly longer than Steve Bissette reports. I asked him why he had never raised any of these problems and complaints about my behaviour with me. When he did raise them, he decided rather than raise them to my face, to raise them in a comics fanzine. He didn’t really reply to that. Also, that hadn’t happened … he was talking about how working for Todd McFarlane had completely changed my head and I’d lost interest in 1963, when as far as I remember I was still trying to write that last issue when Steve Bissette and Rick [Veitch] said they didn’t want to do it any more – the project. I could understand their frustrations at dealing with Image, where every couple of weeks it seemed to be another part of the Image partnership wanted to handle the book and it was just hopeless.’

The final issue of 1963, the 1963 Annual, was due to feature a few pages of art each from most of the Image partners, but there was no editorial team to coordinate or sort out the paperwork. Bissette picked up many of these duties, feeling that those involved – including Moore – were prioritising other projects at Image. But the straw that broke the camel’s back for Moore would seem to be when he read Bissette saying:

I really didn’t think, when push came to shove, that Alan would abandon us so readily. We built the bridge with him to Image, but I suppose we were just his porters in the eyes of the Image ‘aristocracy’. Alan became ‘Affable Al.’ It took me a little time to recover from that. It surprised me that money would be that motivating a factor. But, you have to understand how long Alan had been scraping. At the same time, his life was moving in another direction, away from the exclusive focus on comics, into really amazing creative avenues elsewhere.

Moore says, ‘When he called up I went through all this with him, I explained to him what had happened, that when I got this package, after The Comics Journal was already on the stands, I got halfway through it and I was in tears. My daughter took it out of my hands and put it in the trash bin … up until that moment, I had thought he was one of my closest friends. And, yeah, that was very, very upsetting.’ The relationship between Moore and Bissette had changed over the years. It meant ‘a phone call to Alan that used to be a friendly, peer-level co-creator chat was turning into more and more business. And Alan hates doing business. And it was becoming more and more of an intrusion in his life.’

A dozen years later, it appears, a similar rift opened with Dave Gibbons. Gibbons was enthusiastic about the Watchmen movie, Moore wasn’t. Each knew and respected the other’s view. Gibbons had been party to all the discussions and disputes in the mid-eighties and so, while the rest of us can only speculate, he understood the reasons Moore had fallen out with DC. He, like Moore, was keen to ensure that DC didn’t water down the original book. His attitude to Watchmen spin-offs was only a hair more generous than Moore’s: ‘As far as I’m concerned, what Alan and I did was the Watchmen graphic novel and a couple of illustrations that came out at the same time. Everything else – the movie, the game, the prequels – are really not canon. They’re subsidiary. They’re not really Watchmen. They’re just something different.’ In 2011, he did provide a quote for the Before Watchmen launch, but it sounded so lukewarm many commentators were surprised DC used it: ‘The original series of Watchmen is the complete story that Alan Moore and I wanted to tell. However, I appreciate DC’s reasons for this initiative and the wish of the artists and writers involved to pay tribute to our work. May these new additions have the success they desire.’ Gibbons remained on good terms with the publisher overall, though, and has continued to work for them.

As DC geared up for the release of the movie of Watchmen, they wanted to market a one-off Black Freighter comic that took the panels of the pirate comic-within-a-comic interspersed throughout Watchmen and wove them together into a complete comic book. Moore said that he didn’t like the idea, but as long as his name wasn’t on it he didn’t mind if Gibbons approved. When Gibbons remarked, ‘DC said that they expected you to be quietly compliant’, Moore’s hackles were raised; he had become convinced that the publisher had begun using his friends against him.

Steve Moore had not worked for DC for two years, and felt he had been blacklisted. He was surprised, then, to be offered the chance to write the tie-in novel for the Watchmen movie (he had previously novelised V for Vendetta). He was nursing his dying brother at the time, and the book would represent useful income. But shortly after Alan had refused to put his name to the Black Freighter comic, Steve received a letter from Warner Books saying they had decided not to publish a novelisation. Alan Moore believed he saw a connection: ‘At that moment I suddenly understood what they had meant by “We expect Alan to be quietly compliant”. Of course it’s all deniable. That is the marvel of these people, they always have complete deniability, but I know what I think and what I think is that they, knowing that Steve had got a terminally ill brother decided that this would be the thing that would put pressure upon me so that I could not refuse.’ News website Comics Alliance reported this under the headline ‘Alan Moore Goes Beyond Paranoid in His Latest Crazy Old Man Rant’.

Certainly there were more innocent – and perhaps more plausible – explanations. When anyone except Alan Moore wrote ABC comics, Steve Moore included, orders dropped dramatically. And a number of sources have stated that the Watchmen novelisation was cancelled at the request of director Zack Snyder, specifically because he assumed publishing it would offend the comic’s author. For Moore, however, ‘the only perceptions that were important in this were mine. This was what I perceived had happened … short of an explanation of what “We expect Alan to be quietly compliant” meant, which I’ve never received, that still is the only scenario that makes any sense to me. So I said to Dave Gibbons, “For the sake of our friendship, Dave, I think it would be better if you and I did not discuss Watchmen ever again.” Obviously, it was something that both of us felt a little upset about, but it was the only way that I could stop Dave from ever being used to pass on creepy little messages to me, with or without his knowledge.’

Moore was engineering a situation whereby even indirect communication with DC was cut off. From Hell and LXG producer Don Murphy saw a pattern: ‘There are some people who aren’t happy if they aren’t complaining. It suits them to be able to blame other people, blame companies and blame the world because that means they don’t have to look in the mirrors and be responsible.’ He cited the example of the ‘twisted logic’ with which Moore had attacked Dave Gibbons, and said the same applied to ‘Steve Bissette, the lovely Karen Berger, Scott Dunbier who ate his crap for years, Marvel, DC, me and many many others. He’s an unhappy person, and that’s a real shame because he is talented as hell.’ Independently, Dez Skinn had reached much the same conclusion: ‘One internet wag said: “Someday the world will run out of bridges, because Alan Moore will have burnt them all.” It would be a terrible waste of talent were that to happen, but unlike say the more politically savvy Neil Gaiman, he does seem to be running out of artists and publishers. Even his audience is far smaller than in the old days.’

Are Murphy and Skinn right? Moore’s most recent comics work has come from Top Shelf and Avatar, established publishers, but small fry. Avatar, the larger of the two, averages something like a 0.8 per cent share of the retail market, while DC and Marvel each have about a third. That said, Top Shelf were able to place Nemo: Heart of Ice at the top of the graphic novel charts in a busy month that also saw new Batman, Walking Dead and Adventure Time titles and a Doctor Who/Star Trek crossover, all of which did well. Watchmen, The Killing Joke and V for Vendetta are perennial sellers, but his new work does better still: Moore’s only new release in 2011, Century 1969, ranked third in the annual charts, after two Walking Dead collections, and the following year’s Century 2009 was the only graphic novel in the top ten that wasn’t a Batman or Walking Dead title. Moore can still shift more comics than most.

People in the comics industry sometimes have a skewed view of where the ‘mainstream’ is. The best-selling comic in August 2006, the month Lost Girls was released, was Justice League of America #1, a relaunch of a title teaming up DC’s most popular superheroes, written by thriller novelist Brad Meltzer. It sold 212,178 copies. This was an exceptional number (number two on the chart, Marvel’s New Avengers #12, sold 153,970). Nevertheless, at $75 a copy, the dollar sales of the first two print runs of Lost Girls added up to $1.5 million, while Justice League #1 made $846,590. Even in terms of unit sales, Lost Girls outdid the last regular comic books Moore had written for DC the previous year, Promethea #32 (15,833 copies) and Tom Strong #36 (12,193 copies). And it was Lost Girls – and its creators – that got the critical attention. Moore had produced exactly the sort of comic he had been hoping to create as far back as Warrior: daring, personal and utterly uncompromised, with high production values – a showcase of storytelling techniques that couldn’t work in any other medium, and which raked in acclaim while being profitable for all concerned. The fact that there was no chance whatsoever that anyone would ever option the movie rights wasn’t a drawback, it was the icing on the cake.

So whatever happened to Alan Moore?

For most of his career, Moore has been physically distinctive, but it would be a serious mistake to think that he was any kind of outsider. He’s best thought of as encapsulating what was going on around him in the comics industry. He wasn’t the only person writing more worldly British comics in the post-2000AD era; or dark superhero comics that appealed to sixth-form boys in the mid-eighties; or who came a cropper self-publishing in the nineties as the market crashed; or who became a demigod to sections of the fanboy population which inherited the Earth in the internet age. Even being a comic book creator who saw movie studios run off with his creations made him part of a crowd; he wasn’t being singled out. Moore wrote landmark comic books that were hugely influential, but if he had stuck to his office job processing invoices for Pipeline Constructors Ltd, Frank Miller would still have written Daredevil and The Dark Knight, Art Spiegelman would still have written Maus, DC would have revamped their line. Karen Berger may not have had the impetus to seek out British writers, but there was a whole cohort of creators at 2000AD who would have built careers for themselves. Batman would still be a major character if The Killing Joke hadn’t been written (though it’s possible the Joker wouldn’t be quite so popular). And for all that Watchmen is an important, beautifully crafted book, and extremely influential, there would still be graphic novels if it had never existed, just as there would still be movies if Citizen Kane had never been made.

There are many other ‘name’ comic book writers besides Alan Moore. A list limited to British writers often mentioned in the same breath would include people like Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and Warren Ellis. All have creative autonomy, distinctive voices and enough of a following that they can switch publishers, even media, and take a large chunk of their fanbase with them. There are movie versions of their comics, they’ve made efforts to write more than superhero stories, they have done experimental work, they have a satirical streak. Ten years ago, it would have been easy to say Moore was in the same category as these creators, albeit one who came to prominence a couple of years earlier, and whose disputes with his editors were noisier.

Now, though, Moore really is sui generis. His contemporaries have embraced what wealth and status they can. They’ll be flattered if a senior editor at Marvel or DC headhunts them for a high-profile superhero project. They’ll take transatlantic flights to meet movie producers or attend Comic-Con. There is nothing wrong with this – most freelance writers would envy them such opportunities. What marks Moore out is his wilful rejection of playing that game. He stays in Northampton and self-publishes a magazine with articles about bus lanes and how to make trifle. Without an agent or an attempt to find a publisher, he’s spent seven years (so far) writing a novel that, when finished, will be about the same length as the Old and New Testaments put together, and which he’s admitted may not be readable, conceding that ‘certainly the last chapter, the Lucia Joyce chapter, nobody is going to get through that, it’s brilliant but it’s completely unfathomable’.

Has Moore been forced into the position in which he finds himself? Not by others. He and DC may have had their differences, yet, according to Moore, the publisher offered him ‘probably a couple of million dollars’ to work on Before Watchmen. Recently Marvel bought the rights to Marvelman, and it’s hard to imagine they would do anything but bite Moore’s arm off if he wanted to return to the character. But there’s little either company can offer him, and he evidently has no interest in Hollywood. He works only with people he wants to work with. He carefully reads his contracts with Top Shelf and Avatar, but admits ‘I still don’t get a lawyer to look at things, because that seems to me mistrustful. Yes, I know that sounds stupid, given that it’s obviously an industry I mistrust, but I do really prefer to be working with people on the assumption everyone’s being honest with each other. I’d rather not work with people than be in a continual state of mistrust.’

So is his situation the result of a quirk of personality? At the end of 2012, Moore recounted a little family history to the Observer:

He hates being coerced, whatever the financial incentive, and it may well be something in the blood. His great-grandfather Ginger, the hard-drinking cartoonist, was at the turn of the twentieth century offered the chance to become the director of a glass company in town, Moore claims. He was told: ‘You’ll make millions! The only condition is that you stay out of the pub for two weeks.’ The answer, inevitably, was no; and Vernon spent the rest of his life walking past the mansion of the man who took the job. ‘But I’m immensely proud of that. Turning something down because it wasn’t what you wanted to do. This stuff … it’s probably in the genes.’

Moore sees the rejection of money as virtuous: ‘You can’t buy that kind of empowerment. To just know that as far as you are aware, you have not got a price; that there is not an amount of money large enough to make you compromise even a tiny bit of principle that, as it turned out, would make no practical difference anyway. I’d advise everyone to do it, otherwise you’re going to end up mastered by money and that’s not a thing you want ruling your life.’

It’s easy to talk about not selling your soul to the corporations if you don’t have to worry about money. Moore’s first professional sale was an illustration of Elvis Costello, who sang of John Lennon (in ‘The Other Side of Summer’), ‘Was it a millionaire who said “imagine no possessions”?’ It’s an awkward fact that Moore has been financially secure, and able to work on long-term or uncommercial projects, thanks in large part to the income he’s had over the years from his DC work like Watchmen. Lennon lived in an apartment overlooking Central Park with a refrigerated wardrobe for his fur coats; Alan Moore does not. ‘I’ve got enough money to be comfortable. I live comfortably, I can pay the bills at the end of every month.’ It’s true that he has chosen not to be rich by turning down ‘millions’, but he’s not sitting on a miser’s hoard. When he finds himself with a surplus of cash, Moore has used it to donate Christmas hampers to poor residents of the Boroughs, and he sponsors the Northampton Kings basketball team, made up of kids from the same deprived area of the town.

Alan Moore is in a position now to do what he wants. So the question becomes whether what he wants to do is worthwhile, and – perhaps easier to judge – whether he’s succeeding in the terms that he’s laid out for himself.

When America’s Best Comics started out, Moore was prolific, imaginative and versatile; it’s a range that includes some of his most baroque formal work, but also some of his most enjoyable action-adventure romps. But it failed in at least one of the terms Moore set for it. In April 2000, he told Tripwire, ‘What I’d really like in an ideal world would be for me to be able to continue doing ABC for another few years and establish it as a thriving, vital comic line.’ After falling out with DC, however, Moore chose to end the ongoing story in an event that saw all the other ABC characters team up but fail to prevent Promethea from ushering in the Apocalypse. DC have since shown little enthusiasm for continuing the line without him, and have cancelled a couple of follow-up titles by the series’ co-creators mid-series. They have kept all Moore’s material in print, but taken the ABC branding off later reprints, so The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Promethea have joined V for Vendetta under the Vertigo banner. ABC feels a little like ancient history.

So if Moore is not a comics writer now, what is he? Any answer to that has to tackle the issue of Moore the magician. Even if ‘magic’ is thought of simply as an oblique strategy Moore uses to improve his creative output, the problem remains that his concept of magic is broad enough to allow him to claim kinship with any creative person he chooses to: ‘If you start looking beyond the confines of self-declared magicians, then it becomes increasingly difficult to find an artist who wasn’t in some way inspired either by an occult organisation or an occult school of thought or by some personal vision.’

In practice, he has identified a fairly narrow artistic, mainly literary, magical tradition. In an introduction to a comics adaptation of William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland, Moore praises the novel for ‘the aura and charisma that surround it, evident before the book is even opened. The mad whirlpool of fantastic imagery and wildly, apocalyptic notions it contains.’ He declares it to be part of ‘a buried treasure seam of literature which might immeasurably enrich our current largely moribund cultural landscape, if only it were not buried, had not been ruthlessly buried alive in the first instance’, and goes on to name Poe, Lovecraft and Stoker as belonging to this tradition, as well as the less well-known Hodgson, Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, Arthur Machen, M.P. Shiel, Algernon Blackwood and David Lindsay, and more recent exponents Angela Carter, M. John Harrison, Jack Trevor Story, Mervyn Peake and Maurice Richardson. Elsewhere, he’s described Robert Anton Wilson, Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock in similar terms, and talked of ‘Dee, Machen, Blake, Dunsany, Hodgson, Bunyan, the Duchess of Newcastle. Stenographers of the apocalypse’.

Academics have also attempted to locate Moore within an existing tradition. Annalisa Di Liddo concludes her study of Moore’s work, Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel, by placing him alongside Angela Carter (Di Liddo wrote her thesis on Carter), Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, with honourable mentions for Michael Moorcock and Kathy Acker, all of whom have ‘a significantly shared artistic terrain, the main focus of which ultimately is reflection on the idea of identity: hence the recovery of tradition through new codes and modalities of representation; the focus on gender, ethnic and class trouble; the consideration of otherness and its contribution to the evolution of the UK; and the examination and reassessment of the locations of Englishness’.

This makes for a long list, but the artists on it have many shared characteristics and literary interests. More relevantly, an examination of their lives and work allows us to triangulate a sense of what Moore now aspires towards.

In 2002, Moore wrote an introduction for an edition of one of his favourite books, Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (1876–1945), a phantasmagorical allegory about a man transported to an alien world. He ‘demands that David Lindsay be considered not as a mere fascinating one-off, as a brilliant maverick, but as one worthy and deserving of that shamanistic mantle; of the British visionary and apocalyptic legacy’. Again, he seeks to place an apparently outlying author firmly within an existing tradition. After mentioning Henry Treece and Nicholas Moore, he invokes ‘the Britannic honour roll of seers and suckers and transported ranters, in that noble foam-flecked crew with Bunyan, Moorcock, Bulwer-Lytton, Machen, Lord Dunsany, Robert Aickman, Iain Sinclair, M. John Harrison, Hope Mirrlees and William Hope Hodgson, and there is David Lindsay, one that almost got away’. He goes on to describe the qualities that he feels make Lindsay’s book noteworthy:

There is more to this than run-amok fantasy trilogies turning the marvellous into the irritatingly ubiquitous, that carpet every bookchain. There is more to this than fiction. These are crystal-gazings, reconnaissance missions, unmanned camera-drones to map the dreamtime from high-altitude, to overlook the Overworld. This is Revelation as a cottage industry, a local craft tradition. Burning, screaming angels at the bring-and-buy … In A Voyage to Arcturus it is not difficult to glimpse the heavily-masked blueprint for an idiosyncratic, beautifully deranged utopia. Civilisation suddenly illuminated by an understanding of its own enslavement in the Empire of the Senses. Men and women made free from the limits and restrictions of their psyches, their identities, able to grow new spiritual appendages or apertures to counteract the vagaries of their existence, of Crystalman’s treacherous and endlessly refracting mirror-maze dominion … There are other tentative utopian suggestions in the text, occasions when one might conclude that Lindsay is attempting to float his own scientific theories in the guise of fantasy.

Needless to say, Moore is describing himself as efficiently as he is Lindsay. Moore often stresses his kinship with the lives led by the authors on his list, not just the contents of their books. Most (although not all) were writers of genre stories rather than great literary works, but to Moore that’s a strength. Comparing himself to H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), he’s said, ‘We’re both pulp writers trying to express our vision of the truth … you tend to work faster as a pulp writer and you’re absolved of literary obligations and pretentions. Your vision is purer’.

In recent years, he has produced a number of projects based on Lovecraftian themes. The first was a prose story, ‘The Courtyard’, set in the present day (and later adapted for comics by Antony Johnston). Moore decided to write a sequel, Neonomicon. Freely admitting that he took the job because he needed the money, thanks to a combination of late royalty payments and an unexpected tax bill, he was nevertheless keen to create a work that depicted the horrors Lovecraft only alluded to in his stories, ‘to actually put back some of the objectionable elements that Lovecraft himself censored, or that people since Lovecraft, who have been writing pastiches, have decided to leave out. Like the racism, the anti-Semitism, the sexism, the sexual phobias which are kind of apparent in all of Lovecraft’s slimy phallic or vaginal monsters’. The result is suitably nasty, although the metatextual criticism of Lovecraft’s prejudices is overshadowed by a brutal, explicit rape scene that takes up almost a whole issue. Moore, who had once said ‘there isn’t a Too Far. And if there is, it’s absolutely the place to be seen’, now admitted to an interviewer, ‘Looking back, yes, maybe I have gone too far – but it’s still a good story.’ In late 2012 it was announced that Moore would be writing a longer series, Providence, based around the life of Lovecraft himself.

He has also become a prominent advocate for the artist Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956), writing an introduction to the brochure for an exhibition commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Spare’s death, and appearing on The Culture Show in 2010 to argue that ‘not only was he an incredible artist, he was also in my opinion possibly the greatest English magician of the twentieth century’. While Spare during his lifetime enjoyed a strong reputation as a portrait painter and for his nudes, he also produced works of occult significance, often inspired by dreams or produced using automatic drawing techniques. Moore – who has a nude by Spare hanging in his front room – praises him because ‘He kind of completely eschewed the gallery art scene and his middle-class upbringing and just said “I am going to move to Brixton amongst prostitutes and crooks, because I trust them and I am never going to exhibit other than in the back rooms of pubs.” And he excommunicated the whole of the human race and even he said later perhaps that was going a bit too far. You have got to admire the man, wonderful artist, brilliant magician.’ This, of course, mirrors Moore’s own resistance to moving out of the working-class areas of Northampton.

Moore sees the ‘magical’ writers on his list as having a political purpose, or at least a practical, positive effect on society:

I find myself very attracted to the Apocalypse school of poets, who are completely forgotten these days, and in fact nobody can understand why they were called Apocalypse poets when all they talked about was nature: little birds sitting in trees, and flowers … The big totem of Apocalypse poets was Dylan Thomas. [The movement] would have included people like Henry Treece and a lot of other forgotten names. But what they were, what they meant by ‘apocalypse’, was simply revelation. And that other thing in the world is kind of pregnant with revelation if you’re somebody who comes equipped with the right kind of eyes and the right kind of phrasebook, if you like, for decoding … At the moment, I feel that hopefully in some of the pieces that I’m doing, I might be providing attitudes, mental tools, ways of looking at things, that could actually be of use in these otherwise turbulent times. That’s the plan.

Virtually everything Moore has produced in recent years has at least an echo of his belief that the world is on the verge of a transition to a new state. He has clarified when he feels the apocalypse will occur: ‘The time that I’d heard, and this is both from conventional sources and from imaginary friends when I was in my more extreme magical states, (that’s not to say there’s any validity to them at all, just feelings that I got), is that there is probably some sort of event looming between 2012 and 2017.’ And in Snakes and Ladders, he described what it would feel like: ‘As species or as individual, we approach the moment when the lights go on, the point of comprehension and of revelation. Of Apocalypse. The sum of human information doubles ever faster, every fifteen months and counting. The reaction at the core of us tips over into critical. Our crisis is approaching, though it may be in the late-Victorian pornographic sense. Pulse racing, human history convulses, nearing orgasm.’

Moore’s work has often dealt with apocalyptic themes. When, in 2005, the magazine The End is Nigh drew up an ‘Alan Moore Apocalography – the complete apocalyptic works’, they found thirty-two stories that qualified. When Promethea ushers in the Apocalypse, in Moore’s most positive depiction of what he envisions might be coming, the happening represents a welcome shift. As Promethea explains: ‘Don’t be frightened. Our lives are all a story we’ve been telling to ourselves. Whiling away the long afraid night of our human ignorance. But now we are grown. Now the night is over. Now there is light.’ Moore is, however, keen to stress that he thinks ‘there is great change likely to occur, but whether that’s for the better or not, I really don’t know’. Elsewhere, he’s suggested the human race may not survive this apocalypse.

But for all this talk of global transformation, the artists Moore identifies with often have a strong sense of place. Likewise, much of his recent work has been about his home town of Northampton. In practical terms, this means he has come full circle, back to the sort of community activism he was involved with when he began his career working for ANoN and The Back-Street Bugle. Consistent with that, he resurrected the Mad Love imprint to produce a magazine called Dodgem Logic, using the same title as the fanzine he had not been ‘together enough’ to compile in 1975. Debuting in December 2009, Dodgem Logic looked like an old school underground fanzine, albeit one with exceptionally high production values. Its contents included an essay from Moore about the underground press that began by quoting journalist H.L. Mencken’s assertion that ‘freedom of the press is limited to those who own one’, as well as cheap recipes, a how-to guide on guerilla gardening, illustrations by Kevin O’Neill and comedian Josie Long, and articles about feminism by Melinda Gebbie, Northampton’s notable rock concerts by Gary Ingham and Twitter by comedy writer Graham Linehan. The issue came with a CD of tracks by Northampton musicians.

It was a print magazine in the internet age, a deliberate decision: ‘I see a chasm opening between the information-rich and information-poor and, possibly because of my own background, age and prejudices, I believe that something funny, lovely and informative that is available to everyone without the need for a device or internet connection is the option which, to me, makes most sense both emotionally and ethically.’ Moore was internet-savvy enough to spot that by assembling an eclectic selection of items he found personally interesting, he had basically invented ‘a new form of blog that avoids the internet altogether’. Wired were impressed, declaring that ‘Dodgem Logic’s spirit of triumphant creative individualism celebrates Moore’s individualist philosophy, delivering a perfectly timed message for a world filled with failing states and superpowers.’

It was a tough sell, though, and while Moore hoped other people might create local offshoots of the magazine, replacing the Northampton content with material from their own towns, these failed to materialise. Moore planned to fund six issues, until it got on its feet; the magazine lasted only a little longer, eight issues, until spring 2011. Moore announced in the editorial for #8 that he had had ‘some of the best fun that I can remember having in my career’, but ‘our initial strategy of paying contributors, high production values, no stinking capitalist advertising and an affordably low cost cover price (basically “let’s do everything backwards and see what happens”) seems not to have worked’.

Dodgem Logic #5 spoofed a Vanity Fair cover by featuring a picture of Spring Boroughs resident Phil, ‘a bad lad and a bad dad’, holding an albino ferret in one hand and a hatchet in the other, and captions enticing us to read about ‘Brian, Dougie, Frankie, Claire, Rosalind, Marion, Warren, Charlie and George’. Does this demonstrate a witty satire on the priorities of celebrity culture, or does it indicate that Moore’s concerns are now meaningless to anyone who doesn’t live within sight of the National Lift Tower? How are we to take a statement like: ‘I’ve travelled very little, I have never lived anywhere else other than Northampton. Consequently, this is my microcosm. The entire of the human world seems to me to boil down to these streets, to this history, these anecdotes.’ Moore doesn’t have a passport; he’s left the UK only a handful of times. He has said of his second novel, Jerusalem, ‘My earlier book Voice of the Fire was set within Northampton/Northamptonshire, but this book is a lot less cosmopolitan and far reaching’. Even acknowledging that such remarks are meant lightly, there’s a sense of agoraphobia within them, rather than empowerment.

One of the main characters in Halo Jones, Rodice, always panics at the thought of going outside. But perhaps we see a clearer echo of Moore in the character Brinna, a rich old lady who lives with Halo and Rodice. In 1986, Moore said: ‘Brinna is someone who is too rich to need to live in the Hoop but who is emotionally trapped there by her basic nostalgie de la boue, which roughly translates as “nostalgia for the mud”. It’s like when rich people go and live in Greenwich Village because they like the atmosphere and liveliness that poverty often brings with it. In her way, Brinna is as helpless to escape the Hoop as anyone else is, despite her money, and it is this which eventually kills her.’ Is Moore’s nostalgia for the mud of Northampton an indication he’s ‘helpless’? Moore clearly doesn’t think so, and this sequence from Big Numbers #1 (1990) is evidence it was his position when the world was his oyster.

Moore is attempting to make a point that wherever we live is important. For him it’s Northampton, for us it should be where we live: ‘They’re all wonderful. And rather than berating them or complaining about them, we should actually appreciate the things that are mythical and powerful about them.’

Meanwhile, without any intervention on his part, Moore was having a very visible impact on the face of political activism around the world:

From New York, to London, to Sydney, to Cologne, to Bucharest, there has been a wave of protests against politicians, banks and financial institutions. Anybody watching coverage of the demonstrations may have been struck by a repeated motif – a strangely stylised mask of Guy Fawkes with a moustache and pointy beard.

With CCTV cameras and police videotaping of demonstrations now routine, protestors began wearing V for Vendetta masks to render themselves anonymous. Fittingly, it was members of a group called Anonymous, a collective of computer hackers, who were the first to adopt the V masks, outside offices of the Church of Scientology in March 2008. Moore admitted to Entertainment Weekly, ‘that pleased me. That gave me a warm little glow,’ and he told Laura Sneddon of the Independent: ‘Obviously I couldn’t say that I am universally behind everything that they might do in the future, you know? But sort of so far at least I’ve got a huge amount of admiration for the stuff that Anonymous and LulzSec and people like that have been doing. They are, they seem to be, genuinely frightening authority in general because they’re very hard to root out or track down and they seem to be very efficient in digging up information that we are entitled to know.’

The use of the mask became more widespread in 2011, during the ‘Occupy’ protests against governments, banks and corporations implicated in the global banking crisis. The BBC reported that 100,000 masks were being sold a year, and by November 2012, the United Arab Emirates had banned them from being worn during National Day celebrations, while security forces confiscated stocks from shops. Many journalists have noted that the anti-corporate demonstrators are channelling money to one of the world’s largest entertainment corporations, Warners, who own the rights to the masks – it’s reported less often that the creators, including Dez Skinn, are also entitled to their cut (in David Lloyd’s case, a reported £50,000 a year).

Reporting on the V mask’s ‘inescapable presence at the anti-capitalist protests around the world’, Britain’s Channel 4 News sent Moore to the Occupy demonstration outside St Paul’s Cathedral, from where he declared, ‘It’s a bit surprising when some of your characters who you thought you’d made up suddenly seem to escape into ordinary reality … I’m amazed, I’m very impressed and I’m rather touched. The people here are amazing. I think that this is probably the best-organised and most forward-thinking protest that I’ve ever had experience of.’ He later told the Observer that the mask

turns protests into performances. The mask is very operatic; it creates a sense of romance and drama. I mean, protesting, protest marches, they can be very demanding, very gruelling. They can be quite dismal. They’re things that have to be done, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re tremendously enjoyable – whereas actually, they should be … I think it’s appropriate that this generation of protesters have made their rebellion into something the public at large can engage with more readily than with half-hearted chants, with that traditional, downtrodden sort of British protest. These people look like they’re having a good time. And that sends out a tremendous message.

‘If there’s one quality in Alan Moore that I envy more than any other,’ Eddie Campbell said in 1986, ‘it is simply his understanding of the temper of our times.’ Is it possible for Moore to be in tune with a generation of protesters who organise via social media, when the nearest he has ever got to a hashtag is the sticker on a large tin he keeps half-hidden in his kitchen? When protestors wear the V mask, are they proclaiming their sympathy for Moore’s political positions?

There’s some evidence that representatives of Anonymous are familiar with the philosophy behind V for Vendetta. The nature of the group is anarchic: they don’t have ‘an official spokesman’ or leadership, and they’ve issued videos highly reminiscent of V’s video address to the nation. This is not, however, always the case with the street protests. Many journalists covering the Occupy protests asked protestors why they wore the V masks; the BBC quoted one as saying, ‘It’s a visual thing, it sets us apart from the hippies and the socialists and gives us our own identity. We’re about bypassing governments and starting from the bottom.’ And the net effect of the Occupy movement, a coalition of various political positions, was perhaps closer to the movie’s rather vague protest against Bush-era policies than the comic’s specific alternative of anarchism; the Channel 4 reporter noted that Moore maintained a diplomatic silence when protestors he talked to mentioned the movie. While the V of the comic is rebelling against an oppressive government, the book stresses the roles of individuals, rather than any mass protest. V’s technique is one of targeting individuals for assassination or political indoctrination. There’s not even a near equivalent in the book to the movie’s scenes of a crowd of protesters all wearing V masks. At least one anarchist was moved to circulate a pamphlet exhorting people to seek out the original (see below).

Perhaps as a similar corrective, Moore has contributed articles and interviews to Occupy publications such as Occupy Comics (2013), offering general advice and historical context. He suggests that psychogeography might help root the protests, as it is

derived at least in part from Situationist conceptions of the city, is a means by which a territory can be understood and owned, an occupation in the intellectual sense. Those able to extract the deepest information from a place are those most able to assert some measure of control on that environment, or at least on the way it is perceived. At the same time, by mining seams of buried or excluded information, it is possible to reinvest a site with the significance and meaning which contemporary town planning and commercial vested interests have removed from it.

When pushed, Moore can easily justify it in more accessible terms: ‘Illuminate your little patch of ground, the people that you know, the things that you want to commemorate. Light them up with your art, with your music, with your writing, with whatever it is that you do. Do that, and little by little it might gradually get to be, if not a better world, then a better understood world.’

Moore’s most affectionate work in this vein takes as its subject his friend and mentor Steve Moore. Unearthing was originally a prose piece commissioned by Iain Sinclair for the psychogeographical anthology London: City of Disappearances. Lex Records produced a lavish boxset containing Moore’s reading of the piece (2010), and three years later an illustrated book was issued. The release of the box set led to some glowing coverage in the mainstream press. The writing is unmistakably Alan’s, but the story is charming in a way that’s rare for his work. Steve Moore himself ‘thought the piece would disappear as one of Alan’s “minor works”. Obviously it didn’t happen like that!’

Much of Moore’s recent output seems to be a conscious summation of his life and art to this point. The most explicit example has to be the long-promised Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, co-written with Steve Moore and illustrated by artists such as Kevin O’Neill, Melinda Gebbie, John Coulthart and José Villarrubia. It’s a ‘how-to’ guide for the Moores’ brand of magic, but also a playful history of the occult that Alan and Steve Moore have painstakingly researched, and have been working on in its current form since at least 2007 (it started life as a magazine called Atziluth three or four years earlier). Steve Moore has linked the projects: ‘Alan and I tend to see all this as an ongoing process, somehow. Somnium [and] the non-fiction Selene book [both by Steve Moore], Unearthing, Alan’s forthcoming novel Jerusalem, The Bumper Book Of Magic … they all seem to be part of some sort of vague, barely defined Moon and Serpent project to provide an alternative view to simple materialistic reality.’

Moore continues to write The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but acknowledges that the project has evolved: ‘I don’t think either Kevin [O’Neill] or I see that in the context of comics anymore. For me, it’s one of the things I do, like the new novel, or the music I intermittently work on, or the book of magic. These are all things I do. I don’t think of them in the context of the different media that I do them in. I still do think of new things to do with the comic medium, but now they’re all pretty much sublimated into the League.’

The early volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are among Moore’s most accessible stories. Even if you’ve not read King Solomon’s Mines or can’t immediately recall that Mina Harker is a character from Dracula, Moore spends the first couple of issues introducing his cast and efficiently defining their personalities and capabilities. The comic itself tells a linear story, with the most baroque narrative technique in the first twelve issues being a single flashback. There’s no need to understand the history of the comics industry, Northampton or the Qabalah. It’s a comic that anyone, even if they’ve never heard of Alan Moore or ever read such work before, can pick up and enjoy.

The Black Dossier was always intended to be a little more convoluted, and Moore was concerned at the time that the way DC marketed it as a straight continuation of the series would confuse people. The third volume, Century (2009–12), shifts the premise of the series away from a crowd-pleasing steampunk literary mash-up to something more difficult to explain and which needs to be framed for its audience. It’s composed of three 80-page issues, set in 1910, 1969 and 2009, each of which is self-contained but forms part of an overarching story about an attempt by a group of occultists to create a Moonchild, an Antichrist-like being who will usher in the Apocalypse. The series has an elaborate continuity of its own, but not one you’d know even if you’d read the main comic strip: the two surviving members of the League from Volume One, Quatermain and Mina, are now immortal – a fact revealed only in a text story in the back of Volume Two – and are joined by Orlando, introduced in a sequence for The Black Dossier.

Throughout Century, Moore is playing an ornate game about art imitating life imitating art. The occultists are not simply famous fictional practitioners of the arcane arts, they’re also stand-ins for real-life occultists, mostly members of Aleister Crowley’s Order of the Golden Dawn. Century’s ‘Oliver Haddo’, for example, is from Somerset Maugham’s 1908 novel The Magician, a character Maugham used to parody Crowley, though Moore’s Haddo perhaps tacks more closely to Crowley himself. In real life, Crowley wrote a critique of The Magician as Haddo for Vanity Fair, and accused Maugham of cobbling together his book from a variety of other people’s novels … which, of course, is what Moore is openly doing.

There are also echoes of Moore’s own life. Mina, like her author, goes to a free concert in Hyde Park in 1969 and has an acid trip. She, Quatermain and Orlando have a fractious polyamorous relationship, and our heroes mourn that the optimism of the sixties has given way to a dreary dystopian future. The book’s touchstones are those that loom large in Moore’s own understanding of twentieth-century literature, rather than an attempt at a general survey – he finds key roles for William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, Captain Miracle (a superhero created in 1960 by Mick Anglo, who’d been responsible for Marvelman), and Iain Sinclair’s Andrew Norton. Carnacki and Norton are portrayed as affectionate parodies of their original authors. All three books are about notions of the apocalypse, about the cheapening of art in the name of entertainment and the nature of fiction. With Watchmen, the more you know about the history of superhero comics, the more you’ll get out of it. To best understand Century, you need to have some grounding in the life and beliefs of its writer. Reviewers with no sense of the subtext were clearly bewildered, and happy that the next League project, Nemo: Heart of Ice, returned to a more straightforward action-adventure narrative.

Those reviewers would presumably be equally baffled by Jimmy’s End, a project written by Moore and located in the heart of the Boroughs and even deeper in his imaginative world. The series of five linked short films centre around the St James Working Men’s Club in Northampton, and have a seedy, unsettling feel that’s reminiscent of David Lynch’s work. Moore features in a supporting role (in gold facepaint and silver suit) as the magical – we might dare venture ‘heavenly’ – Mr Metterton, who deals cards with DNA codes on them and makes pronouncements on the nature of reality. The series is directed by Mitch Jenkins and produced by the production company Orphans of the Storm set up in 2010 by Moore and Jenkins. It’s a conscious attempt on Moore’s part to create the sort of film he would like to see instead of adaptations of his superhero work. Moore did not need to put much money where his mouth is: the budget of the first part, Act of Faith was £11,000, which he suspected was less that the coffee budget for the Watchmen movie: ‘This is it: I am horrified by the budgets of these films, almost as much as I am by the films themselves.’ In 2013, Moore and Jenkins launched a successful Kickstarter appeal, squaring a circle that allowed them to fund the project without compromising it.

Since the beginning of 2005, though, Moore’s main creative efforts have been directed towards his second prose novel, Jerusalem. Most reports have concentrated on its size, and Moore has estimated it will be 750,000 words long when completed (the length of the book you have in your hand plus War and Peace). The Observer reported in December 2012 that Moore was ‘delighted if not a little concerned that having typed it all with single digits he has worn away the tips of his index fingers’.

Jerusalem will be a novel that maps out territory familiar from Moore’s recent work: the history of Northampton (including Moore’s family history), an exploration of fiction and imagination, and a discussion of magic and transcendence. The book consists of three parts, and each part has a different setting. As he explains: ‘All three parts of the book have got elements of fantasy to them. The first part is about the Earthly domain of the Boroughs, and indeed the first part is called The Boroughs, and this is about eleven chapters that are all set in the material realm in Northampton, but it’s not a straightforward realistic depiction, it has elements of quite outrageous fantasy as well. The second part is called Man’s Soul and that entirely takes place on a higher plane above the Boroughs in a fourth dimensional afterlife of sorts. The third part is a … it’s very difficult to describe, it all gets a bit modernist, but in some ways it’s a summary, a conclusion.’

That first part draws on anecdotes about local characters and an exploration of the town’s history. Real life historical figures pop up, including Victorian fairy painter Richard Dadd, Lucia Joyce, Charlie Chaplin, William Blake and John Bunyan. There’s a sequence involving a magic ritual in which Asmodeus is invoked, causing ‘screaming pandemonium’. Some names have been changed or thinly disguised – there seems to be a Vernall family with a similar history to Moore’s ancestors the Vernons. One main character, Alma Warren, is an illustrator, and appears to be a Moore analogue along the lines of Christina Gathercole in Big Numbers. She, like Moore, has a younger brother called Michael. There will be extracts, or possibly the full text of an imaginary children’s book, The Dead Dead Gang illustrated by Alma that would seem to be the route into the second setting, a fictional realm ‘brightly decorated with painted motifs’. Moore’s description of the place as being ‘constantly in flux, with details of the landscape metamorphosing and shifting like the details of a dream’ suggests this is Ideaspace, or the Immateria. Above that is the third realm, a transcendental location akin to heaven.

The three realms are linked, containing echoes of each other. The Archangel Michael is a recurring character in the book, and manifests in all three realms. He has won a bar brawl in which golden blood was spilled, and is one of ‘four master builders … crowbars of creation’. Moore has given a public reading of Chapter 24 of the book, ‘Clouds Unfold’, which is told from the point of view of the statue of the Archangel Michael atop Northampton’s Guildhall. Consistent with Moore’s belief that time is a solid structure, the Archangel experiences his entire life history simultaneously (unavoidably, there are echoes of Watchmen’s Dr Manhattan). It builds to a similar climax to Snakes and Ladders, in a moment where identities and experiences, good and bad, merge to create a perfect whole.

Moore’s first novel, Voice of the Fire, was published soon after he had declared himself to be a magician, and it received little attention, let alone acclaim. He had made a conscious decision to avoid making it a superhero or science fiction story – although that was clearly what his fanbase wanted at the time. Moore’s readers have since had twenty years to digest Moore the Magus. Jerusalem is a novel that only Alan Moore can write, both thematically and practically:

I can take unfair advantage of my position. Only I could do this, only I could spend eight years of intense work on it, only I could actually recount what happened in that neighbourhood with those people, and only I am in a position where I could do that without worrying about getting it published. I don’t need to go with a big publisher, they don’t really have anything to offer me. It’s not a big, popular book or a beach read, I’d much rather have a small publisher who had some understanding of what I was doing.

When Jerusalem appears, it will receive the level of attention that a major work by Alan Moore can now expect. After exploring his magical beliefs in comics, music, painting and performance art, Moore might have discovered that, ironically, it’s unadorned prose that best gets across the worldview he has been developing and articulating all his life. It’s unlikely to be his last major work, and it’s foolish to judge a novel before it’s even finished, but it clearly has the potential to be one of the larger landmarks in the terrain of his oeuvre … and at least a little baffling to the uninitiated:

This is exactly the novel I wanted to write. I am really proud of it, I think it’s sensational. That is, of course, just my own opinion. I am aware that conventional criticism will probably say that it’s about ten times too long, that it’s difficult in places, that some of the passages are deliberately alienating … it’s going to be a very forbidding book in terms of its sheer size and because it’s about the underclass. There is no better way of ensuring that you don’t get a readership of your book than making it about underclass people … The only ambition I have for Jerusalem is for it to exist. I’m under no illusions that anybody is going to say this is the greatest book of the centuy. No, no, it’s probably far too difficult for that. It’s just an accurate expression of part of my life and part of my being that also includes lots of other subjects that have become part of that.

The endings of many of Moore’s stories are neatly symmetrical. They loop back to the beginning, the threat of the apocalypse looms large, and as the narrative draws to a close, it’s not always clear whether the protagonists are heroes or villains, whether they won or lost.

As above, so below.

On the face of it, Alan Moore has ended up almost exactly where he was before he sold his first professional drawing. He lives with his wife in Northampton, keenly aware of his roots in the town and of the modern world’s encroachment in ways that promise great progress but often deliver upheaval, particularly to the poorest residents. He has sprawling writing projects underway, and rails against right-wing politicians and Northampton Council. Instead of tiny children, he has tiny grandchildren. (His eldest daughter, Leah, is now a successful comics writer in her own right.)

Many things have changed, of course. A young and hungry writer who sought out every opportunity and exploited it to the full has grown into someone defined more by who he won’t work with. The man who thought he had landed his dream job when Dez Skinn was paying him £10 a page to write Marvelman now chooses not to make phone calls to New York or Hollywood that could earn him millions. Moore has a devoted audience, those who will lap up everything he releases and queue round the block to see him at an event. Again, there are two edges to that. Is a three-LP/three-CD reading of a short story about Steve Moore’s life that comes with a dot matrix transcript and art prints and costs £50 the work of a man who’s decoupled himself from the shackles of mere commerce to produce uncompromised art, or one who knows his fanbase will show up for anything and is just taking the piss?

Comics fans have a nostalgic streak. Moore’s deconstruction of the superhero genre in the eighties is now as fondly remembered – and longer ago – than Lee and Kirby’s revolution at Marvel was then. But Moore outgrew his personal warmth for superheroes. He has the advantage of a childhood that resists romanticisation. Where his nostalgic streak kicks in, his Rosebud, would seem to be the Arts Lab. Throughout his career, Alan Moore has clearly hankered for another place where he and his mates just get on and make art. Warrior, DC, Mad Love, ABC … Moore seems to have started out seeing each one as an Arts Lab with a marketing arm. He agrees that ‘Arts Labs thinking has been an underlying factor in a lot of my subsequent work, it is how I do tend to organise projects: let’s have fun, let’s experiment… I’m basically still at the Arts Lab, it’s just an incredibly enabled Arts Lab with whatever contributors I want. With the Arts Lab all of my needs to express myself, all my urges, had an outlet.’ With Moon and Serpent – and Top Shelf, Knockabout, Avatar, the revived Mad Love and Orphans of the Storm – Moore has finally found a way to do his own thing, enjoy doing it and pay the bills.

Moore’s as ‘famous’, however that’s measured and whatever it’s worth, as any living British writer who isn’t J.K. Rowling. He has a continuing cultural impact. His – as he puts it – ‘toxic influence’ is reflected in many of today’s comics, television shows and movies. Will his work endure? It has already, beyond any reasonable expectation – the year of his sixtieth birthday saw new editions of Watchmen and Halo Jones and Unearthing and … many others, even his Empire Strikes Back Monthly back-up strips. Will future generations sing his praises? It’s notoriously difficult to predict. Moore’s body of work is large and varied. It’s of its time, while speaking to archetypes. It’s accessible and usually fun to read, and there’s much about the man and his art to discuss. With those qualities, there’s every chance he’ll make the same transition that, say, Philip K. Dick has from pop culture to the literary canon. Judging by university syllabuses, V for Vendetta may already have done so.

Although Moore disdains the cult of celebrity, his work now exposes far more of himself: his family history, his thoughts on sex, his deepest personal beliefs. This hasn’t made it easier to decide whether Moore is cannily playing the game or has disqualified himself from it. Yes, when he says, ‘The other end of the living room is a bit of a foreign country where they do things differently and have different stamps and passports and currency. I’m not interested in travelling. I’m all over the world in my head, I’m everywhere. I’m not very often where I actually am, so I don’t really have to move,’ it sounds like he’s succumbed to a kind of insularity usually seen as harmful – even fatal – to a writer. But his imaginative horizons are wider than they’ve ever been. When he was starting out, Moore’s literary interests were confined to the world of comics, with a few forays into other strains of fantasy fiction. Once a writer who soaked up various pieces of pop culture and reflected them back at the world, his curiosity now extends – albeit somewhat haphazardly, it feels, at times – over the realms of science, history and philosophy. Yes, much of his work today is now inflected by his magic, but the fact is that you don’t have to welcome Glycon into your heart as your personal saviour to accept that ‘consciousness’, ‘creativity’, ‘history’, ‘sex’, ‘language’ and ‘how our environment affects us’ are weightier topics for an artist to engage with than ‘what sort of person would put on a bright cape to fight crime?’

There would seem to be two possible interpretations of Moore’s recent work. The first is that he has cut himself off from most of his former friends, and hurt only himself by adopting stubborn, naïve points of principle instead of making sensible business decisions; that he’s not listening to the right people, and has become bitter to the point of paranoia. That both he and – crucially – his work are now increasingly insular and opaque. That he has, in short, lost it.

The alternative is that the comics industry is in a death spiral, that it’s become the worst of all worlds: soulless corporate product that barely breaks even. The industry needs Alan Moore more than he needs it and should have listened to him when it had the chance. He’s escaped to fashion for himself a unique position where he enjoys critical acclaim and commercial success by combining experimental storytelling in multiple media not only with a bold political flavour but also with a complex personal cosmology. Moore’s a writer who loves posing questions but keeping his endings ambiguous, leaving the conclusion in the hands of his readers.

So … which one is Alan Moore?