Comics Writer and Snake-God Magician
Expelled acid dealer turned writer of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, who broke with DC over who owns a story, worships a hoax god and never left Northampton.
Comics Writer, Novelist & Performer
Thrown out of school at seventeen for selling LSD, Alan Moore stayed in Northampton and wrote, for other people to draw, the comics that showed the mainstream what the form could do: Swamp Thing, Watchmen with Dave Gibbons, V for Vendetta with David Lloyd, From Hell with Eddie Campbell. Then he fell out with DC over who owns a story, announced on his fortieth birthday that he was a magician, took a Roman snake god for his deity, made a pornographic book with the artist he later married, and spent about a decade on a novel about the streets he grew up in.
Moore was born in Northampton on 18 November 1953, the son of Ernest, a brewery worker, and Sylvia, a printer, and grew up in the Boroughs, a poor quarter of the town, in a house shared with his grandmother. “I had joined the library by the age of five and I naturally gravitated towards mythology, fairy stories, Arthurian romances and the legends of the Greeks and Romans,” he told BBC Inside Out in 2008. He passed the eleven-plus into the grammar school, sank towards the bottom of the class, and decided that school ran a “covert curriculum” of “punctuality, obedience and the acceptance of monotony.” By the late 1960s he was writing poetry for fanzines, running his own, Embryo, and drifting into the Northampton Arts Lab.
Then came the acid. “At the age of 17 I became one of the world’s most inept LSD dealers,” he told the BBC. “The problem with being an LSD dealer, if you’re sampling your own product, is your view of reality will probably become horribly distorted.” He was expelled in 1970, and by his own account the headmaster wrote to the colleges he had applied to, calling him “a danger to the moral well-being of the rest of the students there, which was possibly true.” Moore has said the drug “hammered home to me that reality was not a fixed thing”, adding that he was not recommending it to anybody else.
What followed was dead-end work: cleaning toilets in a Northampton hotel, a tannery, an office job for a gas-board subcontractor. In late 1973 he met Phyllis Dixon; they married and moved to a council estate on the east side of town. Wanting to make a living from something artistic, he drew strips for the music paper Sounds as “Curt Vile” and, from 1979, Maxwell the Magic Cat for the local paper as “Jill de Ray”, at £10 a week, enough to stop claiming social security. He then concluded that he was “nowhere near good enough or fast enough to succeed as a cartoonist”, and decided to write for other people to draw.
He sent 2000 AD a Judge Dredd script. John Wagner already had Dredd, but the writer Alan Grant saw promise and steered Moore to Future Shocks, complete twist stories a few pages long; the magazine printed more than fifty of his one-offs. Each had to set up a world and turn it inside out almost at once, which is good training for a writer who would later fold a whole series around a single reveal. Longer serials followed: Skizz with Jim Baikie, D.R. and Quinch with Alan Davis, Captain Britain for Marvel UK, again with Davis, and The Ballad of Halo Jones with Ian Gibson (1984–1986), the life of an ordinary young woman in the fiftieth century and, Moore said, “the one that worked best for me”. Halo Jones stopped after three books when Moore and the publisher Fleetway fell out over who owned the characters he and Gibson had made. In 1985 he told the fanzine Arkensword that he had stopped working for every British publisher except IPC, because IPC had so far avoided “lying to me, cheating me or generally treating me like shit.” In 1986 he left 2000 AD.
The first issue of Dez Skinn’s anthology Warrior, in March 1982, carried two Moore serials. Marvelman revived Mick Anglo’s 1950s British substitute for Captain Marvel, which Skinn believed was in the public domain. In Moore’s version, drawn by Garry Leach and Alan Davis, a middle-aged freelance reporter, Michael Moran, remembers his magic word and becomes a god again, and the story asks what such a being would actually mean for the people around him. The character’s ownership became one of comics’ great tangles. Marvel objected to the name, so the American reprints from Eclipse in 1985 were called Miracleman, and only in 2009 did it emerge that Anglo had kept the rights all along; Marvel then licensed them from him.
The other serial was V for Vendetta, drawn by David Lloyd. In a Britain of the late 1990s, after a nuclear war, the fascist Norsefire party runs a police state and has already exterminated its opponents in concentration camps; an anarchist terrorist called V, wearing a Guy Fawkes mask (Lloyd’s idea), blows up its landmarks and takes in a desperate sixteen-year-old, Evey Hammond. Moore set it against Margaret Thatcher’s Britain and made V’s acts “very, very morally ambiguous”: he said he “didn’t want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think.” Warrior closed in 1985 with the story unfinished. DC reprinted it in colour, by Steve Whitaker and Siobhan Dodds, and Moore and Lloyd finished it in ten issues in 1988–1989. In 2008 the mask became the face of Anonymous’s protests against Scientology.
The DC editor Len Wein had read the 2000 AD work, and in 1983 he hired Moore to write The Saga of the Swamp Thing, a formulaic, poorly selling monster comic. Moore’s run began with issue 20 (January 1984). In issue 21, “The Anatomy Lesson”, the villain Floronic Man dissects the creature and finds that its organs are vegetable imitations: Swamp Thing was never the scientist Alec Holland, only a plant that had absorbed his memories and believed it was him. With Stephen R. Bissette and John Totleben, and later Rick Veitch, Moore took the book into Louisiana, ecology, body horror and sex; in “Rites of Spring” (issue 34) Swamp Thing and Abby share a hallucinogenic experience and make love. When the Comics Code Authority refused issue 29 its seal, DC simply stopped submitting the series, the first mainstream comic to drop the Code. He introduced John Constantine, a working-class English magician drawn to look like Sting, and wrote the book until issue 64 (September 1987).
Short commissions came with the success. “For the Man Who Has Everything” (Superman Annual 11, 1985), drawn by Dave Gibbons, finds Superman held captive in his Fortress by the villain Mongul, through a parasitic plant, the Black Mercy, that makes him dream of an idyllic life on Krypton; “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” (1986), drawn by Curt Swan, the house Superman artist of the 1950s to the 1970s, was written as Superman’s final adventure. Both are short and complete, the easiest door into Moore’s work for anyone wary of a twelve-issue commitment.
Watchmen (twelve issues, September 1986 to October 1987) began as a proposal to use superheroes DC had bought from Charlton Comics; the managing editor Dick Giordano persuaded Moore to invent equivalents instead. Gibbons designed the characters and drew every page on a nine-panel grid, which he liked for its “authority”; Moore came to see the fixed grid as giving him exact control of pacing. Because every page beats at the same rate, a repeated image, or a panel that echoes one from issues earlier, can carry meaning by itself. John Higgins coloured it in flat secondary colours. DC could not sell advertising for the back pages, so the editor Len Wein used them for Moore’s prose: chapters of a fictional memoir, reports, letters and magazine articles written by people inside the story. Inside the story, too, a boy at a news-stand reads a pirate comic, Tales of the Black Freighter, which Moore has said effectively tells the story of Adrian Veidt.
Issue 5, “Fearful Symmetry”, takes its title from Blake’s “The Tyger” and its structure from a mirror. Gibbons laid the whole issue out symmetrically: the panel arrangement of the last page reverses the first, the penultimate page reverses the second, and so on inward to the centre spread, where pages 14 and 15 reflect each other as an attacker kills Veidt’s assistant and goes for Veidt, beneath the gold V of his company’s logo. The critic Sasha Fraze has pointed out that Rorschach’s mask stays symmetrical until the moment he is kicked, when its blots slide off balance. The series won a Hugo in 1988, in a category used only once.
Moore and Gibbons had refused work-for-hire terms on Watchmen. Their contract, like Moore and Lloyd’s for V for Vendetta, said the rights would come back to the creators once DC stopped publishing the work. “We thought once the series was done, the book would go out of print and the rights would revert back,” Gibbons told Publishers Weekly in 2008. “We didn’t think the book would stay in print for 20 years.” The collected Watchmen has never gone out of print. Moore’s verdict, as he told the New York Times in 2006: “I said, ‘Fair enough. You have managed to successfully swindle me, and so I will never work for you again.’” DC’s side, from its president Paul Levitz in the same article: reversion clauses were routine in comics contracts, DC had honoured all its obligations, and “I don’t think Alan was dissatisfied at the time. I think he was dissatisfied several years later.” DC’s account of the break is that Moore objected to its plan to label adult comics “Suggested for Mature Readers”; there was also a quarrel over royalties on a Watchmen badge set that DC counted as promotional. By 1989 Moore had stopped writing for DC.
He went independent with his wife Phyllis and their mutual lover Deborah Delano, who together ran a small press called Mad Love. Its first book, AARGH, attacked the Thatcher government’s Clause 28 and sent its money to the Organisation of Lesbian and Gay Action; Shadowplay, drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz for the Christic Institute, laid out the CIA’s covert drug smuggling and arms dealing. Big Numbers was planned as twelve issues using fractal mathematics to describe big business arriving in Hampton, a thinly disguised Northampton; Sienkiewicz left after two issues in 1990 and it was never finished. A Small Killing (1991), drawn by Oscar Zárate, is a self-contained graphic novel about an advertising executive stalked by his boyhood self. Then Phyllis and Deborah left him, taking much of the money he had earned in the 1980s, and Mad Love folded.
From Hell, drawn by Eddie Campbell, ran from 1989 in Stephen Bissette’s anthology Taboo, then in its own volumes from Tundra and Kitchen Sink, and was collected by Campbell’s own imprint in 1999 at 572 pages. Moore took Stephen Knight’s theory that the Ripper was the royal surgeon Sir William Gull, covering up a royal baby for the Freemasons, a theory since disproved many times, and used it as a frame, telling What DVD in 2002 that he “really didn’t want to put a toe into the inviting pool of ‘the truth’, because Truth is a well-documented pathological liar. Self-proclaimed fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest.” The method was “holistic”: the murders seen as events inside a whole system of class, architecture, Masonry and the London of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches. An appendix, The Dance of the Gull-Catchers, followed in 1998.
Campbell was chosen for his detachment. Moore explained it with the old British boys’ comic Action, whose shark strip Hookjaw was taken over by an artist from girls’ comics: a severed arm on a beach, drawn in an unremarkable middle-distance shot with nobody reacting much, was “ten times more horrible” than the gory close-up. People who called Campbell’s pen scratchy, Moore said, missed that it puts sex, buying a candle at the corner shop and a ritual disembowelling in “the same absolutely credible world.” For Marie Kelly, the last victim, Moore said he “was going to have to go into that room in Miller’s Court with the reader, and stay there as long as the Ripper did”, because the usual Ripper treatments “verged on the pornographic.” He has called the scene a “ghastly nativity”: in the book, Gull says he has delivered the twentieth century.
In November 1993, Moore says, “after my fortieth birthday … I drunkenly announced that I had decided to become a practicing magician, and then had to live up to this inebriated boast or look really stupid.” In an earlier account to the Guardian he traced it to a word balloon in From Hell, a line about gods existing inarguably in the human mind, which he realised he believed. His teacher and working partner was his friend Steve Moore, no relation: their first ritual together was on Shooters Hill in south-east London on 6 January 1994, and in another, investigating the kabbalistic sphere of Hod, Alan took psilocybin while Steve stayed sober and wrote down what he reported. Psilocybin, he said in 2025, is “a very useful tool” for magic. For a god he took Glycon, the snake deity of a second-century cult which the satirist Lucian exposed as a fraud worked with a puppet; Moore accepts that, calls Glycon a hoax and does not think it matters, and keeps an altar to him at home.
The 1990s bills were paid with superhero work, WildC.A.T.s for Jim Lee and, for Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld, Spawn and Supreme, which the critic Douglas Wolk called “lightweight at best, pretentious codswallop at worst”, while the real effort went into From Hell. From 1999 Jim Lee’s WildStorm gave him his own line, America’s Best Comics: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Kevin O’Neill, Promethea with J. H. Williams III and Mick Gray, Tom Strong and Top 10. DC had bought WildStorm in 1998. “We did the deal on the assumption that Alan would be gone the day it was signed,” Levitz said; Moore stayed for the sake of his artists. Promethea 32 is what he calls perhaps his clearest practical example of magic at work: one 32-page comic that also unfolds into two psychedelic posters, the story told in a fine gold line that turns into ornament from across a room. He solved it, he says, because he took the instruction to be from the gods, so it could not be impossible.
Lost Girls, made with the American underground cartoonist Melinda Gebbie over sixteen years, puts Alice, Wendy from Peter Pan and Dorothy from Oz in an Austrian hotel in 1913–1914, as grown women who trade the sexual histories of their childhoods and adolescence while the First World War arrives; those histories include coercion, abuse and incest, drawn explicitly. Gebbie built the pages from his thumbnail sketches and he wrote the dialogue after. “I refuse to call it erotica, because that just sounds like pornography for people who’ve got more money,” Moore said. Top Shelf published it in 2006; many American retailers would not stock it, Canadian customs first seized it, and Great Ormond Street Hospital, which held the Peter Pan copyright, delayed the British edition until the copyright lapsed, so it appeared there on 1 January 2008. Moore and Gebbie married on 12 May 2007.
The films finished his relationship with the industry. Fox’s From Hell (2001) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) were made without him; a plagiarism suit over League forced him to give ten hours of testimony by video link, and he took the out-of-court settlement badly. After that he refused credits on adaptations of work he did not control and gave his share of the option money to the artists. In March 2005 the producer Joel Silver told a press conference that Moore was “very excited” about the Wachowskis’ V for Vendetta script; Moore called it “a flat lie”, demanded a retraction, and when none came quit DC and WildStorm again and had his name removed from the film, released in March 2006. David Lloyd backed the film and was saddened: “Alan and I were like Laurel and Hardy when we worked on that. We clicked.” Moore’s name also stayed off the 2009 Watchmen film and the 2019 HBO series, and some reprints of his comics carry the credit “The Original Writer”. In 2012 he put the money he had turned down at “at least a few million dollars”; in 2023 he said he had asked DC to send all future screen money to Black Lives Matter.
The prose took him back to Northampton. Voice of the Fire (1996) is a chain of linked stories set in and around the town from the Bronze Age onward, each in a different voice. Jerusalem (2016), on which he began serious work around 2005, is what he calls “a sprawling modernist novel” meant “to examine my family, my childhood neighbourhood and my social class through the lens of Eternalism”: the belief, reached after his first ritual with Steve Moore in 1994, that all moments of time exist at once and a life, at its end, returns to its beginning. Halfway through the book he found that the position already had a name, Eternalism, “and that one of its main exponents was myself.” The Boroughs, the district he grew up in, are its ground.
Steve Moore died in 2014, of a heart attack at his desk after finishing the corrections to his book Selene. Alan has told how neighbours said they saw Steve outside his house, waving, two days after the police and physical evidence put his death; he keeps an open mind about what that was. The two men’s Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, written together, was published in 2024.
The comics stopped. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ended with its fourth volume, The Tempest (2018–2019), and Moore now describes himself as having “disowned” most of his comic-strip work and as “trying to disassociate myself from the comics field.” The writing did not stop: the story collection Illuminations (2022), then Long London, a fantasy sequence set between post-war London and a secret magical one, beginning with The Great When (1 October 2024) and continuing with I Hear a New World (2026). He still lives in Northampton.
G. K. ChestertonBoth remake metaphysical argument as extravagant popular narrative.
James GleickFormal systems, recurrence and deep time connect their otherwise different work.
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