Issue Icons
Alan Moore
By Ian SattlerPhoto By Jose Villarrubia
Comic books have been fighting for respect across the landscape of American popular culture for decades. Many people see comics as kids’ stuff or the ramblings of nerds—regardless of the fact that Superman and Spider-Man are recognized around the globe as icons, or that few other forms of entertainment so seamlessly fuse art and literature together. Comics have evolved over the years from true pulp to a truly sophisticated medium that allows for highly evolved storytelling and endless entertainment. Every kind of story can be told with poignancy in comics, from the deeply personal autobiography to the epic adventures of supermen. Not just for kids, comics produce masterworks as deserving of accolades as any movie, novel or song.
Comics have arrived at this level of achievement by building on the work of visionary creators. In the way that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and the other godfathers of modern American comic books ushered in a new generation during the ‘60s that continues to influence the industry today, the same can be said for the work of Alan Moore during the ‘80s. His work on titles such as V for Vendetta, Miracleman, Swamp Thing, and especially Watchmen, redefined every aspect of the trade and offered readers a bold new way of seeing things. Moore had an effect similar to the Sex Pistols or Nirvana, in that he created a legacy of influence on those who would expand on his efforts and those who would simply plagiarize them.
A true innovator, Moore continued to lead the pack through the ‘90s with the creation of his America’s Best Comics (ABC) imprint, which included the breathtaking League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series with Kevin O’Neill and his deeply complex tour de force, From Hell.
Moore says that he is near the end of creating comics with any regularity, but with Lost Girls he is promising to go out on what may be his most controversial and daring project to date. A colloboration with illustrator Melinda Gebbie, published by Top Shelf Productions, Lost Girls is a rediscovery of the power of ecstatic writing and art following the sexual awakenings of Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz, and Wendy Darling from Peter Pan. Lost Girls was the topic of conversation when we caught up with Moore.
Since this is the Icons Issue, what do you have to say about using icons or subverting icons in your work?
I suppose, with regard to Lost Girls, all iconic characters solve an awful lot of the problems that we were having in actually coming up with some form of progressive, artistically worthwhile erotica or pornography, which we were rather drawing a blank on up until that point. But as soon as we hit upon the idea of this combination of Alice and Dorothy and Wendy, we started to feel all sorts of advantages that those characters opened up for us. I mean, for one thing, because they are iconic characters that all of us grew up with, there is kind of an immediate identification on the reader’s part because you’re connecting the reader’s childhood to something that is very intimate and dear to them.
All of us know those characters, so the task of the erotica artist is not so much to build a character completely from scratch but to interpret an existing character in such a way that will be faithful to the original character. And yet, we’ll extend it in some way, because if you endlessly reiterate all icons without actually using them for anything, they pretty soon lose their gloss.
I think that the measure of the iconic figure is the number of angles from which it can be considered and the number of applications to which it can be put. Like with Lost Girls, once we thought of those three characters we immediately understood. What those characters have in common is that in all three books you’ve got a young woman who is plunged by a series of circumstances into a completely other world, in which everybody behaves differently, where the normal rules of logic no longer apply, and where things are whimsical or comical or exciting or scary all the time.
And it struck us that that is a really good metaphor for how most people tend to experience their first entry into the world of sex and sexuality. It is very disorienting; it feels as if everything that you’ve known before that point is probably wrong, and you are suddenly in a world that seems to be governed by the same rules that Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen would lie down—so it made those characters absolutely ideal. And also, we found that the more we got into it, the more poignant those characters became. What we were doing was taking those original characters that we’ve got the greatest respect for and trying to project an adult voice for them.
Now, in any fiction that involves children, there is the implied assumption that, unless something terrible happens, those children are probably going to grow up, as everybody does. Part of that process of growing up will probably involve some kind of sexual experience, and they will probably be different people after that experience. It’s kind of poignant thinking about these beloved children’s characters growing up into the same kind of sordid adulthood as the rest of us. But at the same time, again, that’s something that we can all identify with.
In a sense, we were all at one point beloved children’s characters, and we all grew up, and we became something different. And I think that the kind of arc of passage of the three protagonists in Lost Girls probably fit very neatly with most people’s actual experience.
After Lost Girls, what is your next big thing, or can you say?
Oh yeah, in terms of comics work, the only thing that I will be continuing with will be The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. That’s not to say that there won’t be more of the other things down the line, but at the moment me and Kevin are going to be continuing with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with one massive publication that is still to come out from ABC and then future volumes will be coming out probably from a combination of Top Shelf in America and Knockabout Comics over in the UK. Now, that’s pretty much it for comics.
The big thing that I’m involved in at the moment —I’ve been involved in it for the last 15 months or so and will probably be involved in it for the next two years—is a second novel. It’s called Jerusalem. It’s very difficult to describe exactly what it’s about, but one of the big issues that is discussed in it is what happens to us when we die. The goal is to conclusively and inarguably answer the big question of life after death. Lord knows what my final revelations might be, but that’s one of the things that the book is concerned with.