By Gary Spencer Millidge,
Published Ilex
It’s a chilled October afternoon and Pádraig Ó Méalóid and I are sitting down to contemplate the biographical work that Gary Spencer Millidge has lovingly put together. Although we recognise the photo of Alan Moore on the cover from elsewhere, we are actually somewhat impressed with the non-Photoshop cover done by Chip Kidd.
We are trying to turn a book review into more of a sociable discussion, and of course, we have pretty high expectations of the book. Ilex books are generally heavy on image and illustration and we wondered what they would allow, but the biggest hurdle with a project like this is the subject. Alan Moore is a private man, and why wouldn’t he be, but we had heard the ‘rumour’ that he had said he would never participate in a biography, so the fact that we understand that he actually was very co-operative here is of course exciting.
As we meander, we ponder how Bryan Talbot has never worked with Alan Moore on a major project, imagining, in a way, what would be really impossible to have in this book.
The endpapers are pieces from Alan Moore’s notebooks – his own personal notes – and there are many of them, and we wonder if he was enthused about this project a lot more than we expected.
Alan reportedly once said that anyone with biro and notepad can make comics, and in a way the eighties showed that anyone can create a comic. In actual fact today, self-published comics possess a totally opposite perception to self-published books – peculiar dichotomy among fans and readers and publishers, where self-published comics are often a route into the industry whereas a self-published books is seen as an admittance of rejection.
The packaging, the glossy paper, nice typography and Gary looks like he was pushing open doors when it came to getting material for the book, are immediate impressions, and then there is a smiling Alan Moore, quite obviously a family man. An issue that one can only get your head around, is the ‘perception’ and ‘reality’ of Alan Moore. He is a genuinely friendly nice guy and you need to read what he says remembering this.
There’s a lot of text in it for a book with a lot of photos. A lot more than we’ve ever seen before. Imagery from his youth, and we understand as we look at a picture of one of his home-made Christmas cards that he still draws. There’s an advert for the shop ‘Dark They Were and Golden Eyed,’ drawn when he was sixteen, and himself someone who visited the shop, and we note how a similar titled bookshop appears in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century 1969, and also called after a Ray Bradbury short story.
There is lot of good fanzine work, which makes me smile, being a fanzinista myself, and one gets to see a nice amount of time and space spent on the early work: St Pancras Panda, Anon E Mouse, and Roscoe Moscow, which appeared in Sounds and is full of parodies of real musicians – Brain One is Brian Eno, and so on.
There are Doctor Who and Star Wars stories, and even the missing page from one of those, that got missed out on the first publication.
The book is more of a Biblio-Biography, although there is much about Alan Moore the man, his family and his personal influences, it is not a crass Show-and-Tell of his personal life, and would we want that anyhow? Alan Moore is as much his work, as his work is Alan Moore, and that’s what we are here for. For sure the insights into his life are interesting, photos of previous times fun but it is the comics, and the other work, we are here for.
The chapters are cleverly done, some focus on an individual character or comic, while other then gather smaller less well-known or shorter jobs together into a chapter.
We reach Captain Britain and contemplate The Fury, an implacable nemesis, and we both love the reproduced Alan Davis Captain Britain original artwork, with pasted down lettering and pencil notes, and it’s this type of detail that impresses.
Gary uses images to not only tell the story of a career but also to look at the work, so a Marvelman colour page is next to the same page in black and white, and we both hope that if Marvelman is ever reproduced, that they re-colour it. We note that V for Vendetta had a very good re-colouring job done, in fairness to DC and that Bolland’s colours on Killing Joke were excellent as was Higgins re-colouring of The Watchmen. The Bojeffries Saga pages do not compare well – the black and white was better.
Then a beautiful fold-out gatefold script is upon us, for a V for Vendetta story never used, seven pages from Episode 5, Violence, along with Lloyd talking about why this occurred.
The book acts as a reminder of some of the lesser-known works, Skizz for instance, which is a brilliant and poignant story, with a great female lead, but which is often over looked. Moonstone, which even Pádraig hasn’t read the whole story, which appeared in Fantasy Advertiser. [In fairness to myself, only the last part was written by Alan, and I just haven’t gotten around to gathering together that earlier parts – PÓM]
Pádraig poses a tricky question – who was the second meta-human with super powers in Watchmen? I ask some questions, it’s not Ozymandias, and I am stumped, and yet his answer makes sense. Do you know? [*Answer below – but only look if you’ve read the book! PÓM]
We look at images of In Pictopia which is in many ways a lot of what Moore is about in comics, looking at the dichotomy between the world in comics and the real world. How would we manage with a continuity upgrade – what happens to the old version? In this story old characters go to a neighbourhood, a ghetto, and once we humanise the superhero world, or the world of comics, it becomes sad even though we know it to be fiction. This is a key as Alan asks what if it was real, what it must be like to always live in the perpetual now.
More unusual comic stories get mentioned, Love Doesn’t Last Forever with Rick Veitch from Epic Illustrated #34 and the backup American Flagg story which ran from #21 to #27, along with real gems such as the process he uses in his own notebooks to take a story into thumbnails, sketches that are then turned into detailed scripts.
The multi-page Big Numbers plotting out, in all its handwritten proto-spreadsheet glory, for the 408-page story which was abruptly ended too soon. It’s an example of the unusual and new which is only possible here with Alan Moore’s co-operation. There’s an inside back page of Taboo with a From Hell advert in Alan’s hand, and the reference photos that Alan took for From Hell, next to the complete comic images by Eddie Campbell, are pretty brilliant.
The Image years bring back thoughts of the old characters from 1963 meeting up with the new characters, and of course the same again occurred with Supreme. It’s nice to see Alan Moore’s own initial character sketch. How do we rate the WildC.A.T.S. stuff? Interesting, is about as far as we’ll go on that one…
Some more rarities, such as the Images from the Outbreak of Violets package done by Rian Hughes for MTV, which even Alan didn’t have a copy until Rian sent him one in recent times.
Then we are looking at images from America’s Best Comics, which was an incredible resurgence for Alan. Bring comics back to the kind of innocence they had, back from the dark places they had gone. In fairness we recognise that Moore had been influential in going down the dark alley, but when he did it, it was unique, new and different, yet it was a catalyst for lazy writers, and suddenly everyone was dark, and that surely was not the plan, a bandwagon for others to leap aboard.
Tom Strong. Proper honest to God upright superhero next to Promethea, and as Pádraig even admits, ‘I am not saying I understand Promethea, but I like it a lot, there’s just a vast amount of stuff in it.’
The LoEG section is next, and brings to mind the fun of annotating, even if it’s just for yourself. Things that everyone get, or the variety of things people spot in these works, and how it can be a lot of the fun even leading to a bit of research. While the likes of the 3D section, pushing a little at the boundaries of what is to be found on comic book shelves. The Black Dossier well worth going back to… the other eras of LoEG, we mention of Arkham and the Old Gods, and also the Seven Stars, with Mick Anglo’s Captain Universe. There is a lot more in this book than meets the eye, and we talk about the tie between the City of Disappearances pieces by Michael Moorcock, and their link to 1969.
Notes from Voice of the Fire are really nice and there is a decent amount about his audio work – a crucial part of the overall person. This is reflected by having a 19-track audio CD accompanying the book. Although we talk comics, the live performances, talks, music are very much a part of Alan Moore, and seeing him on stage live – whether reading a soliloquy on Burroughs or talking about his work with Northampton youngsters doing a fanzine – his personal presence is electric, and hearing his voice is important.
(Alan with Steve Bell at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2010, pic from Joe’s Flickr, re-used with permission in the book)
Gary Spencer Millidge has really gone into all corners, and reprints of the reviews Moore did for the Fortean Times are an example of the effort. It’s obvious that Moore is still a busy man, still firing off stuff in all directions. Yet there is an awful lot of bullshit out there about Alan Moore the man, but neither of us have seen a nasty grumpy reclusive man; we have seen a pleasant gentleman, happy to sign ANY comic he has written, very positive to fans, and very friendly. Yes, he is private, yes he has issues with the way he has been treated, but you have to ask him about this, it’s not some mantra and of course, interviewers focus on these angles, and it reads differently than it is spoken. Yet having only seen the man from fairly afar, I know the happy smiles with family is the person I recognise, with a soft distinctive deep and slow English voice, and warm bright eyes.
Overall, we are very pleased with it, it’s everything it possibly it could be, great, really detailed, lovingly crafted and very accurate. And even as a pair of Moore geeks looking for problems in that pedantic way, we find it hard to find anything, except lovely quotes, and references and a timeline of perfection. It’s a gorgeous book.
[*Spoiler ahead: It was the psychic whose brain they used to make the squid telepathic.]
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