Alan Moore: I’ve watched the first couple, and frankly, it wasn’t for me. I’m not even really commenting on it, I’m more commenting on my reaction to this stuff, which may be entirely my own, I don’t know. In Illuminations , you have a funny moment at the beginning of the story “What We Can Know About Thunderman,” where a group of comics writers are having this pained argument in a diner about the stakes of rewriting a character’s origin story and messing with the continuity. Did you actually have arguments like that? This collection being an exercise in narrative and formal flexibility, there are times in which Moore tries—and fails—to go past his limits. "American Light: An Appreciation" (2021) attempts an homage to the Beat generation of authors and poets by presenting the reader with a fictional Beat poem, complemented by biographical and exegetical annotations about its in-universe author. This isn't the first time Moore has tried his hand at such free-form poetry (I highly recommend the collection A Disease of Language, in which Eddie Campbell adapts two of Moore's spoken-word performances into comics), but previous efforts were more successful for a very simple reason: they emerged from within Moore, reflecting his personality and psyche and the circumstances in his life that he could not have shaped. Those were a reframing—a reclaiming—of the uncontrollable. "American Light", on the other hand, seeks to reverse-engineer a poetic work from a fictional persona that Moore himself controls: first deciding what he wants it to say, then creating ornamentation around that core statement. It robs the work of the spontaneity and abandon it warrants, leaving Moore with not much beyond overwrought, too-careful derivation. I'm about halfway through the first book, which is called The Great When. I'm really pleased with that. It's nothing at all like Illuminations or Jerusalem. This first one is set in 1949 so I'm trying to conjure the mindset of that period. It's got an 18-year-old protagonist who knows very little of the world and over the next three or four books, he will grow up and the time period will change. I'm anticipating that there will probably be a different style for each book

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Reviews

When we put all the short stories together there wasn't even enough for a collection and so I thought, "I should write four new stories, that should just about round it out." I used the last four stories [in the book] to do a lot of things that I figured hadn't been done in the preceding stories. I was kind of showing off a little bit. I wanted to show people that I do have a bit of range. When there were civilisations, when there were settled communities and the beginnings of urban culture, people no longer had to grow their own food or hunt. You had the emergence of all of these new classes of individuals. You had a priest caste that emerged, which took away from the spiritual component of shamanism. Then you got artists and writers often in the pay of religion, which took away shamanism’s functions as the dispenser of visions. It still left shamanism with natural philosophy however, which was the beginnings of science and medicine. I have had people in the comics industry phone up and express – and these are people who write about or draw these fantastic, invulnerable, fearless characters – and, yes, if you were invulnerable it wouldn’t be quite so difficult to be fearless, would it? But I’ve had them phone me up and sort of say ‘we don’t know how you Brit guys can sleep at night without a gun on the night table.’ To which the answer is ‘we sleep like babies because we’re not surrounded by thousands of jittery, tawed-up Americans.’ And he was saying, ‘yeah, but you could get guns over there, can’t you?’ And I was saying, ‘yeah, you could probably get anything over in anywhere, but we don’t because what would be the point?’ If you’re a criminal and you take guns out for a robbery, that’s going to massively increase your chances of being shot and killed. In fact, with the British police being so unfamiliar with guns, and a bit jittery with them, even if you’re carrying a table leg home from the pub, you’re probably going to get shot by a British police marksman. So, yeah, we don’t do it over here, so we don’t have that constant anxiety that must be at least in the atmosphere over there all the time. I grabbed this from NetGalley mainly for the author (‘Watchmen’ is almost like a master class for adult comic lovers), and partly for the concept. The first story, “A Hypothetical Lizard” mostly met my expectations. From there, it was a slide downhill. The stories were too meandering and verbose to present a submersive experience. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?

Alan Moore: I read The Hobbit and thought it was a great children’s book. I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the ‘60s because that was kind of mandatory in the ‘60s. You had to read The Lord of the Rings or you’d have been, I don’t know, thrown out of the counterculture or something like that. I read them and some of my friends, whom I very much admired, said that they had been completely captivated, but it didn’t really relate to me. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just to say that I didn’t particularly respond to it. So, when I sat down to write Hypothetical Lizard, yes, it was to some degree restrained by the pre-created world that Emma Bull and Will Shetterly had put together for this anthology, but I wanted to talk about things that were as far away from Conan or The Lord of the Rings as I could possibly get. Alan Moore: I’ve been in Northampton forever. I’ve barely been out of this house for the entire pandemic. Me and Melinda [Gebbie, Moore’s wife and collaborator] have been shielding. I think pandemics are pretty much tailor-made for writers. This is how we live, not seeing our friends for months on end, living in a silent room without any communications from the outside world. We’ve been handling it all right, I think.It had death, murder, pornography, Americana, and pop culture. This definitely also had Moore’s feelings towards movies never being able to live up to the comic books they try to recreate expressed, which was cool to see.

When I did things like Marvelman [now known, for a variety of legal issues, as Miracleman] and Watchmen, they were critiques of the superhero genre. They were trying to show that any attempt to realize these figures in any kind of realistic context will always be grotesque and nightmarish. But that doesn’t seem to be the message that people took from this. They seemed to think, uh, yeah, dark, depressing superheroes are, like, cool.Returning to the severed head of magic, you might not be the best person to ask, because I know you’re famously offline, but can this new, ubiquitous digital world that we’re seeing – Web 3.0 and all that – interrupt Enlightenment assumptions about reality in favour of more magical ones? Particularly in places where certain physics, certain chemical rules won’t apply anymore? And I think that when you get that actually playing out in peoples’ political thinking, then you get something like QAnon. You get a completely invented, imaginary threat that we can only get saved from by a completely invented, imaginary hero. It’s when you’ve got the thinking that pervades third-rate superhero comics actually being allowed to govern consensus reality, the one that we all have to live in, that’s when you’re going to get things like the January the 6th Capitol Invasion, y’know? This is what the logic of superhero comics – as I was attempting to say in Watchmen, if these creatures, these superheroes were ever manifested in anything like a real world, the results would be horrifying and grotesque. That was basically the message, at least one of the main messages of Watchmen: that they don’t work in reality! Even in the fake reality that I constructed for them to work in in Watchmen, they don’t work, they mess everything up. There’s probably no better person to write a biography of “TV talking head, pop culture conceptualist, entrepreneur and bullshitter” Tony Wilson than Paul Morley, a man who formed an esoteric writing career in his Manchester orbit. Still, Morley immediately understands the pitfalls of this enterprise: he calls Wilson “beautiful, foolish, dogmatic, charming. Impossible.” This moving portrait of Manchester from the late 1970s onwards is richer, more complicated and thoughtful than mere biography; a history, of sorts, of a city long since passed into memory. This book contains nine stories from short about to novella length encompassing about 40 years of writing, but most it seems from this century. The earliest and oddest is Hypothetical Lizard, about a brothel for people of magic and two friends who work for it. This story still has that craziness in the writing that Moore has learned to control over the years, the sheer I can't believe what is coming out of my pen, oh look out I have a lot more. The longest is a piece on comics, their creators and history What We Can Know About The Thunderman, which covers a lot of different themes, and is based on real creators and real events. Plus the usual collection of ghosts, aliens, Twilight Zone- seeming stories all written with that Alan Moore uniqueness. The main problem is the argument that, originally, Palaeolithic shamanism was the one-stop theory of everything. Most of the stuff that has come to be the furniture of human culture has its origins there. The shaman would have originated writing and depicting. The shaman would have used dance as part of their ritual function. They would have also been advising the leaders of the tribes. They would have been observing the cycles of the stars and the cycles of the seasons. They would have been pulling together the observations that would lead to science, lead to agriculture. But once civilization started, magic was gradually dismembered.