In his first collection of short fictions, Illuminations: StoriesOut now from Bloomsbury Publishing, legendary comic book writer Alan Moore offers nine stories ranging from his first short prose to the 2021 short story, “What We May Know About Thunderman,” a scathing dissection of the American comic book industry. drawn.

TP spoke via Zoom with Moore – considered one of the greatest comic book writers of all time – about his retirement from comics and why, the influence of comic book writing on his prose and his deep apprehensions about the superhero genre and his regrets about its role in its current popularity.

Weekly editors: What led to your first attempt at short prose fiction in 1987?

Alan Moore: I started as a teenager in what was called the psychedelic left in England in the 60s and 70s. poetry, I would do illustrations. That’s where I come from, basically doing all kinds of things. The fact that I focused on comics for largely economic reasons was just that it was the most practical thing to do. And I was very, very good at it. But I’ve always, throughout my career as a comic book writer, done all kinds of other art projects, I’ve written things in all kinds of media, it’s just that they haven’t not tend to be seen as widely an audience. So in 1985, it was more a question of, I would like to let people see what I can do when I don’t necessarily have images illuminating the stories. I thought I’m pretty good with prose. And so, basically, when I was given the opportunity to write a short story for the Liavek’s Shared World Anthology, I thought, yeah, it might be nice to let people know that I can do something other than just comics. And I was very satisfied with the result.

Was there anything about writing comics that was helpful in moving into short prose fiction?

Well, I think if you take a multidisciplinary approach to your writing, you’ll find that whatever field you work in will greatly help all other fields – there are approaches and understandings that are transferable. And this is especially the case with comics. Throughout my comic book career, I’ve done probably the most detailed scripts in the industry. My scripts were huge, unwieldy things that gave the artists directions for everything from character expressions, to lighting, to people’s positions, to camera angles – everything, so that was very helpful when it came to short prose writing. Because I’ve often thought that my prose writing should read like someone who’s used to having an artist, and trying to compensate for that, I tend to be very rich, in my descriptions, because I try to do the same thing for the reader as I would in my instructions to the artist; I try to conjure up the scene in my head and transfer it, in the case of comics, to the artist, or in the case of strike fiction, purely directly to the reader. So yes, it helped a lot.

In 2020, you said that when you “entered the comics industry, the big attraction was that it was a vulgar medium, created to entertain working-class people, especially children”. What attracted you to the industry in the first place?

Exactly that. I mean, I come from a working class background. And I had noticed that the entertainment that is generally given to working class people is loaded with an expectation perhaps of stupidity, or an inability to understand things. Working-class people tend to be treated almost like children by the wider culture. And the opportunity that I saw in comics was a medium, which was cheap, accessible, very fast, through which ideas that I thought might be useful to a large mass of people could be communicated to them. Interesting new ideas could be communicated to them very quickly, at very little cost, and would be within everyone’s reach.

But that has changed.

I think, perhaps largely through my own efforts, around the 1980s the comic field gentrified. I think graphic novels are the equivalent of loft studios. I think it’s now a medium that’s largely there to entertain the standard middle-class audience, people who don’t necessarily need these ideas as much as the people they were originally intended for. That was what drew me to comics. And that’s one of the many factors that actually separated me from comics, where I don’t think comics serve that function anymore.

What explains the gap between your retirement from comics in 2018 and writing the 2021 story “What We May Know About Thunderman” when, as you indicate in the acknowledgments of this book, the story “exploded like a thrown boil”?

Comics are a wonderful medium. I think it’s a lousy industry, but a wonderful environment. But overall, I didn’t want anything to do with comics anymore. However, that said, and having it internalized are two different things. I found that having worked in comics for almost 40 years, he tends to leave his psychological scars. It’s easy to say, I’m not going to work in comics anymore, and I don’t want anything to do with comics anymore. It’s easy. But to stop thinking about comics, usually in a negative light, in my own situation is more difficult. I discovered that the comic book industry haunted me.

There will be things that you will find your mind about, even if you don’t want to. So I think “What We Can Know About Thunderman” was an attempt at exorcism. I’ve been thinking for a long time, yeah, you want to write something about your experiences in the comics industry, but I’m not sure how you could do that. And I had struggled with that. And then all of a sudden, the title came to mind. And I saw a different way of approaching that, a way that could actually be, albeit awful, quite funny. And I started writing it, and it just seems to flow, I didn’t realize I had so much bottled poison inside of me.

And after kicking off the boil in 2021, has writing this story had a therapeutic effect on you?

Immense therapeutic value! I’m not haunted by old comics anymore like I used to be – I can go days or weeks without thinking about them. It was extremely helpful. Of course, I just unloaded all my nightmarish problems on the general public. So I apologize. But I feel much better.

Was the timing of ‘Thunderman’ writing in 2021 tied to the rise of Trumpism?

Well, yes, because I realized a long time ago that if I was going to talk about comics, as I see them, it would involve talking about a lot of other things. Around 2011 or 2012, I was interviewed by someone who asked my opinion on the phenomenon of the modern superhero movie. And I said I found that extremely disturbing. Because the idea that hundreds of millions of adults were lining up to see characters and situations created to entertain 12-year-old boys 50 years before, I found socially disturbing, because it seemed to speak to me of some sort of retreat into infantilism.

We live in a world of unbearable complexity that I think many people find overwhelming, in which they have no idea how they can even begin to engage. And I think at times like that, historically, you’ll find people looking for a more simplistic world that they can bail out of. And I was struck by the fact that what we are potentially looking at is the rise of populist fascism. When people are under pressure and they don’t feel like they can handle it, then a simpler narrative seems like something a lot of people will be looking for, whether it’s the simple narrative of all your problems. by the Jewish banking conspiracy in Germany in the 1930s, or if it’s the simpler narrative, say, of the QAnon conspiracy theorists, or if it’s the simpler narrative of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where the problems are all caused by an unlikely threat or villain or monster, and the solution will be an equally unlikely and implausible superhero. I noted, for example, that in the year Trump was elected and many Britons seemed to be voting to leave the European Union, six of the twelve best-selling films were superhero movies.

Maybe it’s just me imposing my personal biases on the world situation, but I don’t think so. I think in general, in our trash culture, we are very often able to see the various tensions and stresses that are present in our society at large. And so yeah, I think the superhero has become almost a white supremacist, kind of a symbol of the kind of simplistic thinking that we’re still trying to apply to an incredibly complex world. And that doesn’t seem to work for us. I felt that comics, and in particular the superhero movie industry, had a lot to answer for in this regard. So yeah, Thunderman was a very useful vehicle to be able to tie those ideas together.