ABOVE: Photo by Jos Villarrubia

PART ONE: 09/09/02

Having been graciously invited to his Northampton abode by the World's Greatest Comics Writer,
myself (Daniel Whiston) along with David Russell and Andy Fruish had a long and fascinating
meeting with the Enlightened One, surrounded as we were by shelves groaning under the weight of
books and comics, walls covered with mystic paraphenalia from throughout the ages, and a
constant fug of smoke.

Having introduced ourselves (and established that the Dictaphone was indeed working), an intense
two-hour introduction to Alan's methods, opinions and writing approach followed

DW: I feel quite awkward doing this cos I've never really interviewed anyone before

AM: Well I'm a doddle for interviewing cos I'm completely infatuated with the sound of me own
voiceyou just have to say a few basic words and I'll talk for the next hour or twoyou prod me if
you want me to stop or change to a different subject.

DW: The selfish motivation for me doing this is that I'm starting to try and write myself and
would be really interested to get the benefit of your experience so from that point of view I'd
be really interested in talking about the mechanics of the craft, and then maybe go on to talk
about the higher level creative aspects in a little bit.

AM: OK.

DW: So maybe we could start off with the nuts and boltswhat's your approach to plotting,
for example?

AM: My approach to most things has been in a state of flux and has been developing over the last
25 years that I've been working at this, with regard to plotting for example. When I started out with
this I was living in a state of such terror that I would get to the end of a story and not have an ending
for it, or would not have at least a satisfactory ending for it, that I would plot my stories out almost to
the finest detail. If I was plotting a 24-page Swamp Thing story I would have a kind of rough idea of
where I wanted the story to go in my head, I would have perhaps vague ideas of what would make
a good opening scene, a good closing scene, perhaps a few muddy bits in the middle. I'd then write
the numbers 1 to 24 down the side of the page and I would put down a one line description of what
was happening on that page. This kind of developed to the point of mania with Big Numbers .

LEFT: Big Numbers 1 cover

When I plotted Big Numbers I plotted the entire projected 12-issue series on one sheet of A1 paper
which was just frightening. A1 is scary it's the largest size. I divided it along the top into 12
columns and along the side into something like 48 different rows across which had got the names of
all the characters, so the whole thing became a grid where I could tell what each of the characters
was doing in each issue. It was all filled with tiny biro writing which looked like the work of a mental
patient, it was like migraine made visible, it was really scary.

I mainly did it to frighten other writers - Neil Gaiman nearly shat, the colour drained from his face
when he saw this towering work of madness. I've still got it somewhere, I just don't look at it very
often, it doesn't make me feel good, it's sort of: Where was I?

So. I used to plot meticulously, but I started to get the feeling that plot if you're doing something
that is very heavily plot-driven: if you're doing a crime story, if you're doing a whodunit or something
like that where a plot is a very very necessary thing, but some stories where there's nothing but plot,
it does sound like someone walking through a bog, you know: Plot plot plot plot plot plot plot
plot.yeah yeah, your plot made sense, but I wasn't interested in it, I was not interested in any of
these characters, your plot hung together but there was no real story. So I try not to get quite so
obsessed with plot.

With the Americas Best Comics that I've been doing along with most of the stuff I've been doing
lately of any stripe I'm much more liable to just come up with it's not even a half-arsed it's a
quarter arsed idea at best but it'll do it for the first couple of pages: Yeah, that'll be good, lets
have some three-eyed cowboys. I've got no idea what they're going to do in the story, but this
issue's all about three-eyed cowboys. I mean, you might think of a story that's got three-eyed
cowboys in it and hope it comes to some sort of resolution, but it always does.

I've been working for 25 years now and I can probably bring near enough any story to a satisfactory
resolution just because I've been doing this every day for 25 years you get more confident in your
ability to bring a story home. So you can ride bareback, and take more risks. That is something I
have a great deal of fun with. I mean, when I wrote Voice of the Fire , I knew that the last chapter
being narrated by me would have to be something that was true, and that had really happened, and
yet it would also have to tie up all of the themes and motifs of the novel, so it took me five years to
write that, and I knew that not only would the last chapter have to really happen, it would have to
really happen during the month that I was writing that chapter.
 RIGHT: Cover to VOICE OF THE FIRE

So if it happened that nothing happened that month, and nothing happened that provided me with
things like severed heads, you know, black dogs, all of the other motifs, than I would have wasted
pretty much five years, because the novel wouldn't have an ending. I mean that is really high-stakes
gambling - but the thrill, when it comes off is really something. But it always comes off.

If you've got the nerve, if you can sort of do it without flinching or worrying, then it always somehow
kind of comes off, if you just follow the process. I mean, that's probably something these days -
when I started off, I was all technique, I was obsessed with technique, and I would approach every
part of that technique meticulously, trying to think about it, how it might fit together, how it might be
changed or modified, what effect you might be able to get by sort of twisting this a degree to the left,
this a degree to the right.

These days I tend to find that I kind of improvise with a lot of confidence, and find that the material
is often much better, much fresher

DW: Maybe that's because you had a technique to start with

AM: and then you can go beyond it, I mean perhaps it's true to say that to actually get a
grounding in the techniquesonce you know how all this stuff works, then you can throw away the
rulebook, you can throw away the manual and then sort of, just do it, you know, improv

DW: To someone starting off in my position, what would you say were the elements of that
toolkit?

AM: The first thing is: think about what you are doing, think about every aspect of it. Bryan Eno was
somebody whose thinking really influenced me when I was starting out. Now he was a musician and
I was moving into comics, but his thinking was generalised enough that it applied to a whole variety
of fields. One of the things that he said was that some creative people seem to be governed by a
kind of superstitious fear about examining their own creative processes its almost like riding a
bicycle, where if they stop to think about how they're doing it, they'll fall off.

Whereas my attitude is, if you're going to be making your living out of this stuff, it's like if you're
making your living as a driver, you'd at least want to know what happens if the car grinds to a halt,
what all that stuff under the hood actually does and isactually understand your own creative
processthink about everythingthink about what you're doing.

If you're talking about comics writing, then many of the same things apply as with writing in general,
but there is a whole couple of other layers to the possibilities because you've got an image track as
well, and a kind of over grammar', as I think I once heard it described as, where you've got the
interaction, neither words nor pictures but the interaction of both of them.

DW: Scott McCloud talks about that quite a bit

AM: Yeah, Scott, he's a clever lad. I'm not sure about his new: all comics are gonna be online, I
think he's talking bollocks there

DW: I think I agree in some ways

AM: It's academiche's pushing it with this second book, there's a lot of stuff in there which isn't
actually accurate thinking, but his first book's impeccable.

DW: Maybe that comes from being more of an analyst and less of a practitionerhe hasn't
written as much as he's thought

AM: I think he's become more evangelist is the word you're looking forhe's got very very into this
idea of: everything would be better if it's on computers, without actually thinking about any of the
practicalities of it

DW: Like scrolling over the pages of a comic that's 20 metres wide

AM: You could, and I believe he has actually done a strip especially for that format that can be read
in all sorts of different ways, it sounds really cute, a really interesting experiment, I'm sure I'd love to
do that oncethe thing is, with Promethea 12 , looked at materially, it's exactly the same
technology as Action Comics 1 .it's a number of sheets of paper with like images and words
printed on them and a staple in the middle.

LEFT: Cover to Promethea # 12

However, Promethea 12 is a complete history of the universe broken down into the 22 Tarot cards,
with a commentary in verse, a frieze the whole thing is one panel, where if you duplicated it and
got two copies of it and stuck it all together, yes, it could be put up as a frieze, the ends of the frieze
join together so it runs forever, there's a flipbook worked into the sides of the pages, we've got this
joke by Aleister Crowley running all the way along the bottom, we've got perfect anagrams of the
word Promethea' 22 of them ( laughter ) that fit in perfectly with both the Tarot cards and the
era of history we are applying that Tarot card to now that is a higher technology.

To me, the basic technology is the word, I mean that's not technology, that is a fruit of technology.
The clue with technology is the logy' bit technology means writing about a body of knowledge.
The word is the mother technology, all technologies are based upon the word, the word is the
primal technology. Dealing with language, dealing with being a writer, you're gonna be dealing with
language. If it's comics, then that will involve a pictorial element, but a lot of the basic things are the
same. If you want to learn how to write, be analytical, and that probably means when you're
starting, be reductionist. It's too big a problem to grasp the whole thing at once, at least at the start
of your career. Break it down. Start thinking about the different components of a story.

What things should a story have? It should have a plot, although this doesn't have to be the most
important thing. The plot is the skeleton. Sometimes a beautiful and elegant plot is what a whole
story's about, and that's great, but sometimes a plot need only be a string of events that takes you
from point A to point B or D or whatever.

Now, there should also be what the story is about, which is not the same thing as the plot. What the
story is about - what are you trying to say? What kind of shape or impression are you hoping to
leave upon the reader? In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you
can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been
specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain.
What kind of shape, what kind of indentation, what kind of lasting scar do you want to leave upon
your reader? You design the missile accordingly. What are you trying to convey to them? It's going
to be some kind of information. Now that can be factual information, emotional information,
psychological informationit's gonna be some sort of informationit might be non-linear, it might
be more like noise than informationsort of like James Joyce, because actually it's the noise that
holds the most information.

Pure signal is like Janet and John yes, you can understand everything on the page, but there's
nothing much there worth understanding. Noise or something approaching noise is like a page
of James Joyce, a page of Ian Sinclair where there is such a density of information that it almost
becomes incoherent, but it is full of information. So, it's the ways of getting that information across
plot, the story has to be about something, it has to have a purpose, it has to have a shape. It has to
have a structure. If you're going to be really clever, you can maybe get the structure the plot and the
theme all to reflect each other in some way but that's just being clever.

Watchmen was kind of clever I was going through one of my clever periods probably emotional
insecurity, I thought: People will laugh at me cos I'm doing superhero comics. I'd better make em
really clever, then no-one will laugh. (laughter).

So we've got all this sort of thing with the metaphor of the clock face, and yes it is a kind of
clockwork-like construction a swiss watch construction where you can see all the works of it.
Different areas where the text reflects itself, different levels I was showing off.

But you'll need all of those elements. They don't all have to be tied up as fussily as that in fact, I
kind of decided after Watchmen that there was no point ever doing anything like that ever again,
because having done it once, it would have been silly to have taken it further and done something
more complex, when it's already this sort of elaborate wedding cake of a comic book - you don't
want any more icing on the top.

DW: I remember at the time you were worried that DC might do Kid Rorschach' or
something

AM: Well, it was always possible, you never know what DC might do: Blot the dog' (laughter). So
you need these things: then, what you want to do you're going to need a world for the story to
happen in. It might be the real one, it might be an imaginary one it doesn't matter, you're going to
have to make it up in either sense, because there isn't a real world here, there's not an objective
real world, at least I don't know anyone who's ever seen one. There's a lot of subjective worlds, like
in Voice of The Fire where I wrote about this area. You have to be as fantastic in your description,
in your imagining of the place as you would be writing about some alien world or some exotic
landscape like the swamps of Louisiana or whatever you have to wring the poetry out of the place
- make it real.

Whether it's real or not, make it real, give it an emotional reality, give it the reality of writing, so
when people read it it will conjure a sense of location, of place, of situation. Remember that you've
got more than one sense don't just tell them what everything looks like, tell em what it smells like,
tell em what it feels like, tell em what it tastes like. That can give a much more wraparound sense
of reality. Now, characters are the most interesting and mysterious and wonderful part of the writer's
craft in my opinion. Structure is dazzling you can feel like a real big scientist when you're doing
structure, but characters they're strange because you'll think up some facts, some fragment of a
character it might be a name, it might be a personality, it might be a face, something like that. And
once you've got that fragment, you think: What does this suggest? If this is the name, what do they
look like? You put it together like a sort of broken vase, asking: Now what goes next to this?, so
eventually

To pluck an example out of thin air, Lost Girls , the thing we've got coming out next year, me and
Melinda Gebbie. It's probably quite a good way to describe the writing process, to talk about how
that came about, on all the different levels. We decided that we wanted to do something that was
erotic. Why did we want to do that? Well, we decided that there was a need for it, that most erotica
or pornography (and the distinction seems to be largely in the income bracket of the person
buying it) most of it is shit, sadly. It's ugly on all sorts of levels aesthetically ugly, physically ugly.
Politically ugly, morallyon all sorts of levelsand there's no reason why that should be.

When you can get people beautifying violence in the cinema

RIGHT: Cover to LOST GIRLS

DW: Any subject can be beautiful

AM: Yeah, so why, with very few exceptions, has there never been any great pornographic art?
Why has there never been any great pornographic writing that has actually tried to do all the same
things that ordinary novels do

DW: I think that's people think that it should be ugly and it should be dirty

AM: Yeah, there's something wrong there we identified a problem there. So, why not do
absolutely brilliant pornography that was really horny, really clever, really beautiful, had characters
and a story and all the things a regular novel should have. So ok, we cast around for ideas as to
how we would do this, and that took a long time, because there were lots of wrong ways of doing it
that we considered and thought: no, that's wrong and that's gotta be instinct, sort of pick up an
idea and try and follow it through in your mind and see where it goes, and if it goes somewhere
you're not interested in, put it down. Pick up another one. With this idea me and Melinda had, I had
an earlier idea that I'd put to one side and shelved, that you could maybe treat Peter Pan as a kind
of coded erotic story. I think I'd been thinking about the Freudian notion of flying as a dream
metaphor for sex, and I was thinking: So, Peter Pan, he teaches Wendy how to fly, there's the
island of the lost boysI could see that that would have had a lot of sexual shadows to it, but I
never really thought of what I could do with it other than
AF: What about Hook? (laughter)

AM: Oh well, we've got very good stuff with Hook. I didn't know what to do with that other than do a
rude version of Peter Pan, where you could say: ah yes, this is going to be section and that
didn't really seem to be enough, to sexualise a children's story, but Melinda was saying that she'd
written a couple of stories she'd enjoyed that had had three women charactersthat for some
reason, she just liked to do stories about three women characters. That was just random input. But
when I kind of connected that idea up with the Peter Pan idea, I suddenly thought: alright, what if
Wendy from Peter Pan is one of the characters?, and then immediately I thought of Alice and
Dorothy. I thought, all right, that's three different female characters from three different children's
books, what if you had those women meet up at a hotel, or somewhere, and tell each other their
stories, and their stories are sexually decoded versions of the stories that they are famous for.

So that sounded like it was going somewhere, it wasn't there yet, but it was going somewhere. So
then I started to look at the dates those stories were written, and try and work out the relative ages
of the three women, and what period they could have met, and what ages they would all have been.
And I kind of worked it out that round about 1913, 1914 Alice would have been about 60, Dorothy
would probably be about 20, 19, something like that, Wendy would probably be middle-aged sort of
30, 35, something like that.

AF: Middle aged?!?!? (laughter)

AM: Later youth. She'd probably be in later youth. Certainly not nearly dead. And I suddenly
thought: ok, they can meet in this hotel in 1913, and then I thought: 1913, that was when the war
was kicking off, and there was that Stravinsky performance in Paris of Rite of Spring when there
were all the riots, and I thought:

Wouldn't it be interesting if this whole story was going on against a backdropif we had this story
happening in a beautiful place, this sort of art nouveau hotel, where everything is perfect and lovely,
it's erotic, everyone's fucking, you know it's a pornotopia. And then as a counterpoint, in the
background we have the riots at the Stravinsky concert which to a certain degree show the
emotional pitch Europe was at at that timethen we'll sort of take that on, we'll show the
assassination of Franz Ferdinandwe'll show everything sort of careening towards war, and pretty
much the destruction of European culture, or at least a massive blow to it. All the pretty things get
burned.

And I was thinking: There's something epic about this, there's something really stark about
sexuality and war, because most of the people who get sent to die in wars are young men who've
got a lot of energy and would probably rather, in a better world, be putting that energy into
copulation rather than going over there and blowing some other young man's guts out.
It's a perversion, war is a perversion of sex. Also, you only have to look at things like the language
of war, any of these excitable young American pilots coming back from bombing Libya, and they're
saying: Yeah, we shot our missiles right up their back door. Homoerotic. They will also, just before
they attack somewhere, generally launch a sort of propaganda campaign saying the enemy is a
homosexualthey have to make him into a woman. The Ayatollah Khomeini: Oh yeah, he likes
little boys, that's what we were saying just before we bombed the shit out of Iran, or were going to,
or that Colonel Gadaffi: He dresses up as a woman, this was the CIA rumour put around just
before we bombed Tripolithere's a lot of connections between war and eroticism, so it struck me
that there was a story here where, yes, we could do our original thing of bringing weight and
importance to pornography, and there seemed to be a plot there, the three women tell their stories
and the First World War happens, and you put those two in juxtaposition against each other.

So all right, then we had to come up with the characters. Now, you might say that the characters
were already there, but the characters were already there as little girls whereas we wanted them as
women. So we looked at Lewis Carroll's Alice: what sort of 60-year old woman would she be? She's
obviously the most intellectual of the three girls she's also the oddest, she's the most eccentric

DW: Did you see Dreamchild?

AM: Yeah I did, it was a nice take, but then Dennis Potter was a good writerso what we came up
with was this aristocratic lesbian with a laudanum habit, with a very active imagination, who's kind of
lostsomething happened to her as a childshe kind of went through the looking glass and never
came back. There's a sort of glass screen probably something to do with the opium between her
and herself. And we did the same thing with Wendy. Wendy's very middle class, very maternal, very
prim, almost insufferable, priggish, you knowso she'd have got married to a man who was older
than her, somebody who worked in the shipping industry and is really boring, who doesn't represent
any kind of sexual threat at all because she had something happen to her, and her response was to
shy away from sex and to see it as something shadowy.

(Phone rings and then there is a tea break).

AM: We were talking about character, and there comes a point, when you've done all these things,
when you've tried to imagine about the character, then you try to imagine a little scene with him or
her, and you try and imagine how they move, you try and imagine what their body language is. One
of the things I used to do was to actually act things out in front of a mirror, to actually try and get the
body language right and see what it felt like to be that person. I can do all that in my head now so I
don't bother, but when you're starting out it's not a bad idea.

They might be just made out of words and

paper, but their effect in the world can be
massive

DR: Is acting something you used to do when you were younger?

AM: You couldn't really call it acting, I used to appear in sketches with the Northampton Arts Lab,
which was a sort of experimental kind of arts collective that used to be around back in the 60s, they
were very popular. Being a method actor, there's tips you can pick upboth you and an actor are
going to have to create a character that is believableyou're going to have to know the way they
talk, the sound of their voice, even if the reader will never be able to hear that because it's in word
balloons or whatever, you wanna know what the sound of their voice is like, you want to know what
their phraseology is like. Try and write a few words, see if you get a voice that sounds kind of
natural. When you've got all these things, you find there comes a point with the character
probably sooner rather than later where (this is a clich, that all writers spout) where the
character comes to life. And that's not quite it, that doesn't quite describe the phenomena, although
that's partly it its where the characters first start doing things that surprise you its sort of when

DW: Sorry to interrupt, I've only just started writing myself but I've experienced that myself
on a couple of occasions, and it's rather odd

AM: It's the sort of thing that leads you to become a magician at the age of 40, (laughter) because
you can't come up with any rational explanation for it because it's like the comic writer Alvin
Schwartz, who used to write Superman in the 50s for DC I think he wrote the Superman
newspaper strip in the 50s? he also wrote a book called A Very Unlikely Prophet , which is
completely mad, but is really interesting, because what he says is, you sit round with the other
writers, tossing around ideas for Superman stories, and somebody would come up with an idea:
what if Superman does this, this and this? and unanimously, the rest of the group would say:
Superman wouldn't do that and he said that this had happened so many times that he'd thought:
Hang on, Superman isn't real, what do we mean Superman wouldn't do that?'. He started to come
to the conclusion that there did exist somewhere some sort of Platonic space, where there was

DW: Ideational space?

AM: Idea space is what I'd call it.

DW: My background is political philosophy, where I've heard a lot of that talked about
totally different discipline, but say aspects of globalisation

AM: Something like Carl Popper with his World Three', or something like that? A space in which
concepts exist?

DW: I think so, but it wasn't quite as philosophical as that, more of a Marxist school of
thinking, in that the important things about globalisation are not what actually happens in
the economy I mean that's important, but the actual essence of it is nothing to do with
that

AM: It's the immaterial structures and things like that that are the important things?

DW: And extensions of those into the world are what we observe, but that isn't what's
causing it

AM: Of course, Marxism is an example of what Carl Popper would have called a World Three'
structure, in that it's got immense power as an idea, but you couldn't actually hold up anything in the
world and say: this is Marxism. You couldn't even hold up Kapital and say: this is Marxism. It's a
bookanyway, what he was saying was that there seemed to be some level or he and the writers
seemed to be behaving as if there was some level, some platonic level, on which these archetypal
sort of idea-forms actually existed, where there was a Superman, or some sort of proto-Superman,
some sort of er-Superman, who sort of, if a writer came up with a bad idea and he didn't like it, he'd
just say: no, I wouldn't do that.

Now, that is kind of stupid, but it's kind of true. I've worked on Superman, just using that character. If
you're a conscientious writer, you can't help but feel the weight of myth and history that is
connectedits like if you were writing Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes is a massive figure in
people's minds. More massive than a lot of real historical characters these figures have real
weight. They might be just made out of words and paper, but their effect in the world can be
massive, if they've got the right kind of mass, the right kind of gravity and momentum.

So yes, there does come this point when characters start talking to you. They'll start telling you what
they want to do, you'll know what they would say and what they wouldn't say. I mean when I started
writing Watchmen , I'd got no idea that Rorschach was gonna be dead by the end of it, it was just by
about issue three I started to know the character and I thought: he's got a death wishhe's so
self-destructive, he's clearlyhe wants out. There's no way that he's gonna live through this, he
wouldn't be able to live with any sort of moral compromises, so he'll have to die. But it was the
character himself who told me that, after two or three issues. I'd got no idea when I started it.

LEFT: Detail of Rorschach from Watchmen , art by Dave Gibbons

So OK, you'll have to go through all of these areas - characterisation they're all big you could
probably fill a massive book with your thoughts on all of them sooner or later you get down past
like I say this is reductionist thinking you'll break it down into areas like characterisation, plot,
ambience, place, location (location location)all these thingssooner or later you're going to get
down into the molecules, the molecules and the atoms. This is down to words. An awful lot of my
writing why it reads well is because I've read it before I wrote it. I have read it to make sure that
there are no clunky syllables, so that there's a nice sort of bumdabumdabumdabum there's a nice
sort of rhythm, there's no sudden three-syllable words where there should have been a two-syllable
word, on which the mental voice of the reader will trip. Rhythms that was something I learned from
performance, with the Arts Lab if you're talking in the right rhythm, people don't even give a shit
what you're saying. The rhythm alone will get everybody hypnotised. And that's true of written work.
Not so much of written work you have to rely upon the reader reading it in the right way and
getting the right rhythm but you can write so that you can at least guide the reader towards certain
rhythms.

If I ever write a book on writing it will probably be called Real Men Don't Use Thesauri , because no,
don't touch em, I think they're cheating. What's wrong with having an enormous vocabulary?
What's wrong with thinking: oh, there should be a word that means this or that, could it be this,
could it bemaking up a word and checking in the dictionary and seeing if there is such a word
and if it meant what you thought it did. That's better, and alright you can waste an hour trying to get
the exact right word that's got the right kind of sound, the right flavour, the right colourthat fits just
perfectly.

DR: Associations as well are important

AM: Yeah, because a word sometimes will have completely illogical associations just because they
sound like another word

AF: There's a sort of synasthesia going on there

AM: There's an awful lot of synasthesia, I mean one of the greatest writers, a lot of the greatest
writers, one of my favourites, Vladimir Nabakoff, he was a synasthetic...to him, the letter O' was
white, the word Moscow' was green flecked with goldolive green, flecked with gold. I can see
that. And it's a good thing to try and develop. Synasthesia is a great literary tool. You'll be able to
come up with perfect metaphors that are really striking and strange, because they maybe jump from
one sense to another try describing a smell in musical terms.

Actually, it can be quite easy. Also, it's how we tend to do things anyway. They've just proven that
you know when Jilly Gordon gets on a roll on The Food Program and she's talking about: ..it's a
kind of buttery, composty, tractory I'm getting peat, I'm getting burning tyres. Now they've done
tests - those people who describe the flavour and bouquet of wine, they're not describing the flavour
or the bouquet at all they are synasthetically describing the colour. They're taking visual cues.
They did things where they'd put an odourless and tasteless colour agent into white wine to make it
look like red wine, and then they'd note the kind of language the wine-tasters were using. When it
was white wine they were using: buttery, new-mown hayyou know, yellow, basically, was
what they were saying, whereas when it was red wine they were saying: its wonderfully fruity,
blackcurrantytalking about red things. It's synasthesia. It's how a lot of our sensesI think
synasthesia is probably a lot more common than the sensory aberration that it's made out to be,
and there's probably a key there, somewhere, to how we sense everything. Synasthesia. There's
something there.

But yeah, it's when you get down to the words themselves. I mean I've got some books here that
are incredibly valuable. I've got Bibles that are older than America, I've got signed books by Alistair
Crowley, I've got some incredible shitthese are all Golden Door magic wands, that's Austin
Osmond's Fair Original, these are Dr Dee's tables... the thing I'd grab if there was a fire is
my Random House Dictionary , which is an etymological dictionary which tells you where the words
come from so you actually know what you're talking about. If you use a word like fascism' you can
actually have a look and see: now where does that word come from, what does it actually mean?.
That'll save you a lot of embarrassment. It's also got a great Encyclopaedia functionit's a
biographical dictionary, it's got all famous names and obscure names and dates...it's fantastic. And
that is my best Grimoire if you like, my best magic book, because it's got all the words in the English
language and where they come from and what they mean.

If you're gonna be a writer, you'll cover all this territory, from the broadest categories down to, like I
say, the sub-atomic detail of words and syllables

AF: And when they get down to quarks and things as well they talk about them in weird
terms like strangeness' and

AM: Charm'. I think that quark' as a matter of fact is from James Joyce, a word from James
Joyce

DR: Finnegan's Wake

AM: What's the actual quote? A quark I've forgotten. Or it might even have some associations
with Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark . Yeah, you know, this is literally magical territory.
Eventually, to learn all this technique you can amass an incredible vocabulary, which willyou'll get
cleverer. The moreas far as I understand it, consciousness is predicated upon language.
Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got
language, you can't be conscious. You need words for things. You need words before you know
what they are, before you can store any information. You need concepts, which are verbal. You
need a concept of I' to start with, and then all the rest. So much of this stuff is made up of
language, so much of our reality, our consciousness, everything, is made up of language, that you
can study it in so much of its fine details, you can learn all about the techniques.

And remember when you're learning the techniques, remember what you're actually doing don't
kid yourself. If you think there's a huge amount of difference between you and Paul Joseph
Goebbels, you're kidding yourself. Any form of art is propaganda. It is propaganda for a state of
mind rather than a nation-state but it is propaganda nonetheless, and it's best if you accept that and
understand what you're doing and be honest about it: you are trying to change the mind of your
target audience. You are trying to change their perceptions, you are trying to stop them from seeing
things how they see things and start them seeing things the way you see things. The ethics of that
we could debate all night (laughter) but basically, the thing is, I can, so I will. I'm aware of how
words can change people/s minds, can change the way people think. So are all of the advertisers,
so are all of the politicians, so are all of the people who run our lives. They're not pulling any
punches I would say that it is beholden unto any writer to equally not pull any punches, on the
other side. If you believe something, if you believe something is right or something is wrong then
yeah, try and convince other people. Spread the idea around like a designer virus. Make it so that
other people will repeat it. This is partly what you're doing. And you'll probably have to consider all
these aspects of writing

DR: It's like some of Richard Dawkins' ideas about memes.

AM: Yeah memes, interesting idea. You're probably going to have to consider all of these ideas
and eventually you're gonna come up against: the mystery. I mean because there is an essential
mystery in writing. It's like you were saying (to DW) about the first time that characters you've
created start doing things other than what you'd intended them to. Why do they do that? What do
you actually mean when you say that? These and other things will start to impinge upon you. You
will start to notice that, you'll maybe write some stories and you won't know where they came from
they were powerful, they were heartfelt, but they didn't seem to come from anywhere. And then a
year later, the events will happen that make perfect sense of those stories if the stories had been
written after the events rather than before them. You get enough things like that and you start to
in my case anyway you start to - technique, craft, these things have their limitations.

DW: A couple of questions come to mind I had one initially but another one just popped in.
A couple of creative people, one a musician, the other a writer Steven King and Shane
MacGowan have both made very similar comments about the fact that they discover what
they do rather than create it from within themselves, necessarily. I think Stephen King's
talked about writing as archaeology, finding things together and dusting them down, Shane
MacGowan's talked about: songs are floating in the air, and it's my duty to grab them
before some cunt like Paul Simon does.

AM: Ha-ha, good point Shane. R.A. Lafferty, when I asked him: Where do you get ideas from?,
and he said: Ideas are like pumpkins, they just float through the air, and hit people on the head.
It's a similar idea. I've noticed and this is an experiment that perhaps a lot of other writers could
try: start writing upon a subject upon which you don't know very much, or about which you have no
opinions. Start writing. You will find that you've not got something perfectly planned in your head
and you're writing it down, you'll find that the words are forming practically at your fingertips on the
keys of the typewriter, the ideas are forming, ideas that you never had before. Juxtapositions are
occurring to you. Your mind goes into a very different state. If you actually notice this you can
write certain different types of prose, which can leave your mind in a state every bit as altered, as
say psychedelic drugs.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe
directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only
universe is perception. All of our perceptions are made up of words. You alter the words, you alter
the perception, you alter the universe. And if you actually look back you come, as I did, to a point
where craft no longer really cuts it, where you want something more than craft. Yes, you know
skilful ways of persuading people to your argument or things like that, but that's not good enough.
That is when you come up against a point like I did. Where I started to look at the archaic notions of
writing. Not writing theory as it is now let's look at what writing used to be. And of course, if you
start looking at it, after a while it's obvious that writing must have had its origins in magic, in that
anyone who'd got command of written language, would have had supernatural powers.
Text-messaging or The Sun , these are perfect
Orwellian ways of limiting the vocabulary and thus
limiting the consciousness
AF: So in those early times, anyone who had that bigger grasp of language which was in its
early stages looked like they were doing something incredible which is why these days

AM: They were doing something incredible

AF: Yes they were, they were, but we look back

AM: The thing is, imagine, the person who first came up with the idea of representative marks, to
actually make that huge jump of saying: Right, there's a hut - we haven't got a word for it yet, but
hut'. That'll be hut', that's what we'll call it - hut'. So that sound means that thing over there, and if I
draw this little thing, these lines on the wall ah the hut'. In some way they represent, they stand
for it. That is a massive leap of consciousness, from which the whole of the rest of human
consciousness springs from that point. That is what distinguishes us from the animals, written
language. There's not much else we do that they can't, but written language does seem to be a very
important point. So you imagine someone who'd got written language you could pass you
thoughts at a distance, you could remember things, you could fix time you could remember that:
Hang on, I did this yesterday and that the day before and that the day before. You could
suddenly start to build a consciousness for yourself, because you'd have words. So yeah, you'd be
big time magic.

Now, you see this carried on into the bardic tradition of the Welsh bards, things like that. Now, as I
understand it, the bards were feared. They were respected, but more than that they were feared. If
you were just some magician, if you'd pissed off some witch, then what's she gonna do, she's
gonna put a curse on you, and what's gonna happen? Your hens are gonna lay funny, your milk's
gonna go sour, maybe one of your kids is gonna get a hare-lip or something like that no big deal.
You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you. And if he
was a skilful bard, he puts a satire on you, it destroys you in the eyes of your community, it shows
you up as ridiculous, lame, pathetic, worthless, in the eyes of your community, in the eyes of your
family, in the eyes of your children, in the eyes of yourself, and if it's a particularly good bard, and
he's written a particularly good satire, then three hundred years after, you're dead, people are still
gonna be laughing, at what a twat you were.

(break in tape)

AM: I'll give a brief recap in case we feel we missed anything. Magic and language are practically
the same thing, they would at least have been regarded as such in our distant past. I think it is
wisest and safest to treat them as if they are the same thing. This stuff that you are dealing with
words, language, writing this is dangerous, it is magical, treat it as if it was radioactive. Don't
doubt that for a moment. As far as I know, the last figures I heard quoted, nine out of every ten
writers will have mental problems at some point during their life. Sixty percent of that ninety percent
which I think works out at roughly fifty percent of all writers will have their lives altered and
affected seriously affected by those mental problems. I think what that translates to is - nine out
of ten crack up, five out of ten go mad. It's like, miners get black lung, writers go bonkers. This is a
real occupational hazard. There's plenty of ways to go bonkers, some of them a lot quieter, some
more insidious than others drink, heroin, there's lots of other sorts of things but this is
dangerous - we're dealing with the unreal. You're dealing right on the borderline of fact and fiction,
which is where our entire world happens. We're living in a world of fact and we've got out heads full
of fiction, the characters that we've invented for ourselves we're all writers, we all invent
characters for ourselves, roles in this little play that we're running in our head that we call our lives.
With a writer, you're dealing with the actual stuff of existence, you're playing the God game. All the
things that you will have to consider before you write a story are exactly the things God had to
consider before he created the universe plot, characters (laughter) and what's it mean, what's it
about, what's the theme heremotifs. A lot of them suns, they'll do, we'll put them everywhere
hey, snakes! These are easy(laughter).

So you're dealing with dangerous stuff, you're in dangerous territory. It canyou can start to forget,
for examplethere's a great thing in a Jack Trevor Storey book, and he's a brilliant writer, Jack
Trevor Storey, he was, just before he died. There's one bit where he's talking to this woman, and
she's telling him about events that have happened, and she says: Wait a minute, did that happen,
or did that happen in my story? And she suddenly starts to look terrified, and he's a writer himself
so he knows what to do: he walks up, slaps her round the face and says: What's your name? And
she sort of, so he slaps her again and says: What's your name? and she gives him a name, and
he says: Right, what's just happened to you is that you have for the first time confused your real life
with your fiction. Don't worry about this this is going to happen quite a lot. It's just important that
you remember that you're a real person, this is your name, that other stuff was stuff that you wrote.
Keep the line there.

But it's difficult to do, especially if you start messing around and writing self-referential things, like
writing a novel about your home town in which you are the final character

AF: Alan World.

AM: Alan World well actually, that was a complete mistake, well not a mistake

AF: Well it shows! (laughter)

AM: It was, I just looked through the phone book all the names from Big Numbers I got from the
phone book, and I found A. World and I thought: that's good, and I thought: Alan. I could have
thought: Andrew, but I didn't, that's just the breaks.

So, it's a difficult job. It's a dangerous job. You're probably not gonna make any money out of it.
Most writers don't. You go down to W.H.Smiths or Waterstone's, most of those writers on the
shelves, that is not their only job. Yeah alright, Stephen King and Catherine Cookson, Jeffrey
Archer, well other than convict and embezzler, most of them have got another source of income. It's
difficult, it's dangerous, it's not necessarily good for your mindI mean the rewards of it are
fantastic, I wouldn't do anything else. To me it is the ultimate job and yes, it has made me more
intelligent, because it's like George Orwell: if you want to make people less intelligent, limit their
vocabulary, limit their language, give them a sort of Newspeak' that's like

AF: Text-messaging.

AM: Text-messaging or The Sun , these are perfect Orwellian ways of limiting the vocabulary and
thus limiting the consciousness. So the corollary of that holds true as well. If you want to expand
people's consciousness, give them better language, wider language, new words. Learn to love
words, learn to delight over a new word that you've found. I mean, looking through News Scientist
the Amigdale'.

DR: Oh yes, the part of the brain to do with fear isn't it?

AM: Emotion, all emotion is put through this tiny little bit called the Amigdale'. Or perhaps the
Amidgda-luh', I'm not exactly sure how it's pronounced but it's great either way. A phrase I read
once in a book the annalidden ancestor and I thought: Annaliden, what's that?, and I looked
it up in a book and I couldn't find a word Annaliden', and for about two years I thought: I didn't
dream that, that must be real, the annalidden ancestor'. Eventually I realised it's a word that's been
kind of coined, based upon annalid', which is a type of worm. So, the annalidden ancestor' is kind
of like Pichia, one of those flatworms in the Burgess Shale that have got the rudiments of a spine,
and thus is an ancestor to anything that's got a spine. Yeah, words, they're lovely.

AF: Simulacra', I like.

AM: I'm probably a bit dyslexic, I always pronounce it sim-ul-ac-ra.

DR: Do you ever pick up the dictionary and start leafing through it?

AM: Oh yeah, sometimes I sort of: Look up how many words do begin with N'? There's not many, I
could probably get through that in half an hour. But you find words like Xanthic which means
yellowish it's lovely. You've gotta love language, love writing right from the molecular level of
words, or even letters: the letter A' originally had wings.

DW: Aerosmith's logo's gone back to that.

AM: Yeah, well, they've always been ahead of the curve (laughter) or a long way behind it. And the
letter C' was the other way round, and was supposed to represent the crescent moon. Language
itself is such a fantastic phenomenon with it's own fantastic history, you can get involved in writing
to whatever depth you want, but the thing is that really you have to kind of remember the best way
to do it, with all this that I've said about the dangers of madness, treat writing the way that you
would treat a god. If you believed in such things, if you were going to devote yourself to a particular
god, then that's the best way to treat it. Treat it as if it's not just some abstract idea of a god, treat it
as if it was a real god that will maybe, if you do right by the god, will maybe grant all your wishes,
will maybe lavish nothing but success and wonder upon you and, if you don't do right by the god,
will begin to fuck with you in ways you cannot even begin to imagine. Treat it like that, and you
won't go far wrong. In effect, that's what you're doing.

Writing will consume your life, because so much of writing happens in your head you don't need
to be at work', you don't even need to be awake. You're not gonna get a respite from writing when
your head hits the pillow, you're not gonna get a respite from writing when you go on a holiday
caravan to Great Yarmouth, or anywhere the moon you can't get away from it, it's in your head.
And if it's working properly, it's probably obsessive. If you've got a story on the boil, and if you're a
writer you probably will have, you're probably thinking about problems with that story, good things
about it that you wanna enhance and make even better, and you're probably thinking that all the
time. You might be thinking that when you're having sex. You might be thinking that when you're
eating dinner, you might be thinking that on public transport. This is something that will take over
your life. Surrender. Surrender to it right from word one. Don't fight. It's bigger then you are, it's
more important than you are, just do what it says. Even if that seems to be completely ruining your
life, do what it says. Even if it tells you to do something stupid if it tells you to jump off a cliff, do
it. (laughter).

This is my experience. I mean, when I was 25, I'd got a baby on the way, or my wife had at least,
we were living up Blackthorn, it was really shitty, but I had got a job. I was working down the gas
board, and it was a regular job. It wasn't a great job, but with a baby on the wayat which point,
writing told me to quit my job, with a baby on the way

AF: That must have been a tough decision at the time

AM: But really, it wasn't, I hadn't really got much of a choice by that point, because I was kind of
aware what the alternative would be, and I couldn't stand that, that frightened me, that frightened
me more than dooming my wife and baby, which frightened me considerablyit would have just
doomed me to something different, if I'd stayed with that gas board job. So yeah, if it said jump off a
cliff, do it. It knows what it's talking about, it's more intelligent than you are. It knows more about you
than you do. Treat it like that, treat it like a god, and you probably won't go far wrong. And always
try to do your best for the deity that you swore yourself to, and it might reward you. You shouldn't go
into it expecting it to reward you, you just do this for the glory of writing itself. You want to do this for
Thoth and for Hermes you wanna write something that is just that good, just for the glory of
writing. And like I say, that's a completely irrational attitude, but I think at the end of the day, that's
the best one. That's got me through 25 years.

What was your second question? (laughter)

DW: I feel a bit anally-retentivewe've talked about writing a lot, but what about in terms of
writing for comics, about writing in collaboration with another creative person, rather than
by yourself?

AM: (Gets up and walks away to desk to fetch something and comes back with it). Now this is
something that won't come over on the tape, but you can perhaps reconstruct for your audience.

DW: Using glove-puppets

AM: Or give them a brief verbal descriptionnow somewhere in here (Alan has fetched a
battered blue hardback notebook of lined A4 paper; falling apart at the seams, it looks like a family
heirloom, Grandfather's old schoolbook brought down from the attic. He opens it out on the living
room floor, and Alan and Dan crouch over it, Alan pointing things out to Dan).

DW: At this point Mr Moore reveals his Grimoire

(The book has tiny sketched-out panels (stick figures basically), laid out quite precisely to form a
rough outline of a page from a Promethea script (the scene has two characters in conversation
walking down a beach, with a boat on shore in the foreground in some panels). Each panel has a
line drawn from it to handwritten dialogue that is accompanied by two reference numbers one for
the page no. and one for the panel no.)

AM: Horrible, tatty book, but what this has got in it is lots of crappy little drawings that are
indecipherable to anybody else but me, but which are basically all I need for anything re writing
comics. They will give me a breakdownthey'll just be sort of these pages these are bits of
Promethea I will break down the page area into a number of panels. Now, I've got a simple,
mathematical mindless formula that I follow that is I mean if you look at these little bits of dialogue
that go in each of the panels you'll see that they have little numbers written after each of the lines
and what this is is the number of words.

Now, this is basically something that I took from Mort Weisinger, who was the harshest and most
brutal

DW: DC editor?

AM: - of the DC editors during the 60s.

DW: Bit of a tyrant from what I hear.

AM: Oh Christ, he was a monster, I remember Julie Schwarz telling me who was a lovely man
he told me about Mort Weisinger's funeral and this was probably just an old Jewish joke that he'd
adapted for Mort Weisinger but he said that apparently during Jewish funerals there's a part
where people can stand up and spontaneously will say a few words about the departed personal
tributes, things like that. So it's Mort Weisinger's funeral, and it gets to this bit in the funeral and
there's absolute dead silence, and the silence just goes on and on and on and nobody gets up and
says anything and eventually this guy at the back of the synagogue gets up and says: His brother
was worse! (laughter).

But anyway, Mort Weisinger, because he was the toughest of the editors, I thought: Alright, I'll take
his standard as the strictest. What he said was: if you've got 6 panels on a page, then the
maximum number of words that you should have in each panel, is 35. No more. That's the
maximum. 35 words per panel. Also, if a balloon has more than 20 or 25 words in it, it's gonna look
too big. 25 words is the absolute maximum for balloon size. Right, once you've taken on board
those two simple rules, laying out comics pages it gives you somewhere to start you sort of
know: OK, so 6 panels, 35 words a panel, that means about 210 words per page maximum.

DW: And if you've got one panel you'd have 210

AM:and if you've got 2 panels you'd have 105 each. If you've got 9 panels it's about 23-24 words
that'll be about the right balance of words and pictures. So that is why I obsessively count all the
words, to make sure that I'm not gonna overwhelm the pictures, that I'm not gonna make oh, I've
seen some terrible comic writing where the balloons are huge, cover the entire of the background

DW: Doesn't that tend to often happen when you've got what's called the American plot style
of scripting which is where the writer basically gives a very broad breakdown

AM: I've never really got on with that, I can't see that just looks sloppy to me. I mean, I remember
once Archie Goodwin, who I greatly respected, saying it does allow for serendipity. Yeah, I can see
that, but I should imagine that as a reward that is probably outweighed by the fact that all the
characters, the artist has to give them neutral expressions because he doesn't know what they're
gonna be saying, or thinking, in those panels, so he has to make them look kind of neutral, a bit
constipated, and everything gets sort of blanded out. Whereas, I can control this I can make sure
that everything works, at least in my little crappy drawings, I can make sure there's not too many
words for any panel

DW: So this number refers to the page and the panel within the page?

AM: Er yeah, well this is a spread so it's 18 and 19 5, 18 and 19

DW: Oh right, with the staple line in the middle?

AM: Yeah, that's it it's a nice way to get to grips with a page. As to how you lay the page out, in
your suggestions to the artist, that will depend. How much room have you got? What's the pacing
like? One thing to remember in comics and this is an interesting axiom space equals time. To
convey time in a Page from FROM HELL -
 it's spatial. I remember, when I was doing From Hell I think it's the epilogue? no, the prologue,
the prologue, where I've got the prologue with just the two old guys on the beach, and I'd been
doing that in just little panels because I thought, that's good, keeps it intimate, these little panels just
one of them says this, the other one says that, the next one just sits down and takes a breather
and then I thought; Alright, I'll have one of them say: Its getting cold, shall we be getting back?'.
And then I thought: Right, they're right down by the tide line there, and actually it would take them
quite a long while to walk back up the beach, and I don't just wanna suddenly jump to them on the
seafront, and I don't wanna caption saying: Meanwhile, shortly later'. So I thought alright, I'll just
put a big wide panel taking up the whole tier big picture of the beach at night and there's these
two little men, walking up the beach and the width of the panel will convey, it took a long while to do
this. Alright, it will take the reader 3 seconds 2 seconds to actually look at the picture and take it
in there's no words in it but it will convey time.

DW: There's some scenes in Dark Knight where Frank Miller really chops it up, in terms of
one scene

AM: - where you splinter the action, that is, all of a sudden it's all happening, it's happening in slow
motion, you see something that would take 2 seconds, and you do it in 10 panels

DW: - a drop of water falling while something happens

AM: Yeah, yeah, that's it. I think most of what Frank based his stuff upon on which any aspiring
comic writer would do very well to go back to is Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman they're the best.
Of their period. They came up with a lot of the devices, a lot of the ideas, that Frank and people
elaborated upon you look through Eisner and you can come up with so many brilliant ideas that
he just throws away. Or probably even better, look back at the early American newspaper strips of
the turn of the century.

DW: Dragon Lady and stuff like that?

AM: No no, before that Steve Canyon was sort of 40s, Terry and the Pirates , that was all sort of
40s. You go back to 1902, you look at Windsor Mackay

DW: Little Nemo in Slumberland

AM: Little Nemo in Slumberland , Dreams and Rarebit Themes , you look at Frank King, Gasoline
Alley , a sort of deceptively mundane strip, but then you got the Sunday colour supplements which
were pieces of art that would stagger you if you came across them in the latest issue of Raw or
something like that. So forward-thinking, so brilliant I mean there was a thing that I did in Big
Numbers 2 which was a thing that I did just for the pleasure of 2 or 3 or the discomfort of - 2 or 3
other comic writers who'd be able to see what I'd done. And what this was was that I'd looked at
some of the early Frank King Gasoline Alley pages where, for the sale of variety, he'd used the
whole page as one big image. You're looking down upon this warren of alleys, and he breaks this
down into panels and in each of the panels there is basically a one-off sight-gag, or a one-off verbal
gag, that are all happening at the same moment, in this alley. And I thought: That's charming,
there's something lovely about that, wouldn't it be great if you could have a moving element, that
was moving between the panels. But I thought: Yeah, I can see his problem here, as soon as you
get to the right-hand side of the top row, then the action's gotta suddenly go to the middle left-hand
side

DW: I guess you could spiral couldn't you?

AM: Well, there are different possibilities yeah but with a spiral you're gonna end up in the middle,
rather than the bottom left-hand corner which is where you wanna end up so when I did Big
Numbers 2 I came up with this brilliant idea of how you could have a family arguing around a
breakfast table, and you could have everyone moving logically in different directions panel 1,
the Mum is, I think she's, now hang on a minute I think she's taking a dish off the table, panel 2
she's scraping it into a peddle-bin which is just next to the sink, where she's washing it up, and then
panel 4 she's putting it in the dish-rack and she's starting to come down the right-hand side of the
kitchen into panel 8.

Incidentally, this was one of my first installments in

Comics Techniques and Tricks!

ABOVE: Art from Big Numbers 2

Meanwhile you've got her husband sitting at the table there's the children at the table as well
they're having this conversation, it all works perfectly and he gets pissed off with her and storms
out down into panel 9, and then walks out of the door into panel 12, where he storms out of the
kitchen leaving his wife to come down through panels 4, 8 and 12, leaving the family looking after
him it's a brilliant little whirlpool of a scene.

It was all inspired by Frank King, I thought: If only I could do what he'd done, but make it a bit
cleverer and have moving elements in. I've done the same in Lost Girls , I've got a couple where
that problem of having to have the zig-zag line, that's fine if you've got sort of a down view of a path
that winds like that or a staircase that will double back on itself, so that that will do the right thing.
Yeah, you can do it, but there's other variations.

DW: Do you think you could do that in any other medium?

AM: No. Which says that comics is a very versatile medium that's got possibilities that people have
not even begun to touch.

DW: Underlying that, what do you think it says about the technique

AM: Why does it work? Why do comics work? Well, you'd have to get into mad theory, but if you
want more mad theory, I'd say that the reason comics work and work they do I mean, when I
was researching Brought to Life I found out that the Pentagon had done tests to see what was the
means by which information could be most easily taken in and could be most easily retained
they'd tried straight text, they'd tried text with photographs, they'd tried illustrations with captions,
photographs with captions, and they'd tried comics. Comics were best.

Now, why should that be? Why are comics so brilliant at fixing ideas in people's minds, getting them
across? I would say it's because the verbal parts of our brains what used to be called left-brain'
activities before we found out that they're actually kind of all over the place you might say that the
currency' if you like for what used to be called our left brain you might say that that was the
word. Now, our pre-verbal minds what used to be called the right brain' you might say that the
currency for that side of the brain the pre-verbal part would be the image. Now, comics might
therefore be one of the only forms of art that calls upon you to actually have a kind of integrated
experience. Because some people who have trouble reading comics and there are a lot of people
well they'll say: Do you look at the pictures first or do you read the words?, whereas if you read
comics you know that you kinda do both at once. You're taking in the picture peripherally while
you're reading the words, and your eyes will sort of zig around and you kind of absorb them both
at once. And I think-

DW: That synasthesic thing is the same kind of thing

AM: It's utilising both lobes of the brain, if you like, or what used to be called both lobes of the brain.
And it might be that because it's the only controlalright, films have an image track and they have
a sound track, but, big problems: you can't synchronise. With a film, you're being dragged through
the experience at 24 frames a second that's a given. Even in the most complex films you couldn't
the reader even if you've got someone saying this line of dialogue just as something happens in
the background or something that makes a really ironic connection, then it's gonna flash by. People
aren't gonna see it: if its in a Dave Gibbons-drawn comics page where they can sit and look at and
absorb it at their own pace, then you can get layer upon layer of meaning and reference

DW: Partly because it's self-paced.

AM: Yeah, because the reader is in complete control of the experience. It is a medium which not
only combines the verbal and visual parts of our minds, but one where we are in complete control of
the experience and where because it is so reader-friendly you wanna check out this panel there to
see if there's any connection you can just flick back. You don't have to rewind the video and then
pause it, you just flick back. Easy. And so it enables the comic book writer, the inventive writer, to
utilize all those advantages and come up with really clever structures that would be lost in a film, but
when they're frozen on the page where everyone can see how clever you are for all time, it works
perfectly.

[The interview then abruptly ended with Dan and Dave madly scrambling into Andy's car in an
(ultimately-successful) attempt to make the last train back to London. However, Alan graciously
invited us back for a second visit as we were still in full flow.]

AUTHORS NOTE:

This interview is copyright me, Daniel Whiston, 2005; any errors are entirely my fault (having
spoken to Alan after the interview was first published, he mentioned a few terms/references that I
had transcribed incorrectly - but I never established what they were. He planned to revise the
mistakes, but so far hasn't had time to); this interview previously appeared in Zarjaz.

PART TWO: 29/10/02

Having already met Alan in September, David Russell and I returned to the Moore-cave in October
for a second fix. Once again Alan welcomed us with by now customary cups of tea into his inner
sanctum. We cracked open the Dictaphone, and got down to business

AM: What questions can I answer about The Craft for you?

DW: Last time we talked about the toolbox': if you're gonna be reductionist about it, plot

AM: Different areas of creative importance.

DW: What I thought might be interesting to talk about this time was a more type of
reportage' perspective: when you sit down to write a comic, is there an experience that is
common to those different projects, those different pieces, those different works, that seems
to come out over time? How does one start? I mean, this is a nave question, but do you
start with a fragment of dialogue, or an idea, or-

AM: Well, a story can start with anything. It can start with a fragment of dialogue, it can start with a
sudden idea for a character, it can start with a purely intellectual musing upon some subject or other
the thing that unites all of these things is the endless frozen tundra of an empty page. This is the
theme whether you're talking about writing a performance piece, a comic, a novel, whatever.

DW: I think we're talking about something from nothing.

AM: Yeah, this is the essential mystery of creation whether you're talking about an individual act of
creation such as writing a poem, a story or a comic or whether you're talking about the creation of
the universe. It's all something from nothing. You could say the same thing about thoughts entering
our heads. Ideas. There's that white page somewhere there at the beginning of the process,
whether you're talking in cosmological terms where the white page is the quantum vacuum. If you're
a novelist then it is literally a white page.

Now, what you have to do is limit yourself. You cannot work in a complete conceptual void. Which is
what the white page is. You have to start putting restrictions upon yourself. Now, if you're working
commercially then you're lucky, in a way, because some of those restrictions will be pre-imposed. If
you're asked to write a half-page story for a comic anthology 2000AD then you know certain
things about the story, there are certain parameters. You know it's gonna be something in the kind
of science fiction/fantasy area, so the genre is already imposed. You know it's gonna be, say, 5
pages long, which means that's probably 30 panels, tops, maybe a few more, a few less, but that's
roundabout what you're looking at. These are all kinds of structural considerations which give you
somewhere to start. They kind of mess up the white page, interestingly. Now you can then, I find,
often achieve interesting results byonce you've got your initial start conditions, once you've got
your basic shape you know it's a five-page comic strip about science fiction or a five- panel
comic strip about a cat a one-hour performance piece about William Blake you've got your
purely external parameters imposed then, what is productive very often is to immediately come up
with a bunch more shackles with which to bind yourself.

Start imposing ridiculous little rules, just perhaps on a whim, or because you think they might help.
You don't have to be too logical about this, although logic can help. I mean, as an example, when I
was starting to write V for Vendetta , David Lloyd, the artist on the strip-

DW: At this point, if we pause the tape, can you tell us who V really is?

AM: Erm no, I'm afraid. ( laughter ). If I knew, I would. ButV's exactly what he looks like: he's an
idea, with a mask and a hat and a cloak. He's much more symbol than reality. When we were doing
that, Dave Lloyd, at the outset, said that he'd got a feeling that comics would be better without
sound effects and without thought-balloons. He made a very cogent case for this, he said that in
real life, or in cinema, we don't have the luxury of knowing what people are thinking, we can't see a
little cloud above peoples heads, we don't have access to their inner life. Now in literature we do,
but I could see his point. I could see that there was something about thought-balloons which
distanced the story from immediate reality.

DW: Maybe in a sense literature makes you God, you can know everything, or often books
are written as though you know absolutely everything that's going on unless they're a
mystery, whereas other mediums are more observatory

AM: I'd got rid of the sound-effects, I'd got rid of the thought-balloons and I started to think well
probably I could do with getting rid of the captions as well. I didn't completely banish captions until
From Hell , which was very very restricting, and that's one of the reasons From Hell was so long.

DW: Do you think that had an impact on the density of the footnotes?

AM: It probably did well that was mainly due to the nature of From Hell , in that it was a kind of
historical reconstruction, so the footnotes seemed necessary to me. But it certainly added to the
length, because when you're not using things like captions or thought-balloons for exposition, yes
that'll give you greater verisimilitude, greater reality in the story that you're telling. People won't have
so many barriers that are placed between them and complete identification with and immersion in
the story. At the same time, it will take you two or three pages to do what you could have done in a
few panels if you'd been using captions.

"The entire universe - for one thing -

only exists in your perceptions ..."

DR: Surely it can be better, like in the first version of Blade Runner where they've got the
voice over

AM: Oh, well that was always rubbishI mean it was using a comic-book technique and not very
well because it didn't actually add that much information to the scenes, except to the impenetrably
dim members of the audience

DR: And as you were saying any ambiguity destroyed the verisimilitude

AM: Yeah, I don't like voiceovers in films anyway. Much as I'm a big fan of the Coen brothers, the
cowboy narrator in The Big Lebowski was to my mind one of the major flaws of the film it was a
distancing device. Devices like that make it much more obvious to the reader that they are reading
a story. If you don't have those obvious devices, then the reader can get completely sucked in. I
suppose at its purest with comics you're talking about wordless comics or comics with very few
words where people are drawn into the situation purely visually.

But you can come up with other stylistic limitations that will be to the benefit generally of the
story. When I was writing Voice of the Fire , the last chapter, for some reason because it was me
narrating it I suddenly got very shy about using the word I'. I think I got a bit self-conscious, I
thought I hate it when I read pieces by people and it's: I, I, I, me, my, and I thought I don't want this
to come over like that - although I am the narrator I want to be kind of invisible, I want to be an
anonymous voice. So it's a first-person narrative without the first person. I don't use the word(s) I,
me, my anywhere and it's quite an interesting exercise, it does something to the prose, it leaves a
kind of vacuum at the centre of the narrative that the reader can then inhabit. They can become the
I' of the story because there's no I, me, Alan Moore there's no occupying entity in the story, so
there's just a nice space left. But that was a sort of limitation that was self-imposed.
With the first story of Voice of the Fire I decided to alter the entire language to an approximation of
the kind of language I imagined a Neolithic tribesman speaking in. Obviously it's in English, but I
decided that based on my knowledge of Aboriginal languages, most of them seemed only to have a
present tense, they don't have a past or future tense, they see the past and future as being
somehow subsumed within the present. That's interesting. That's a different mindset to the modern
mindset. And I also decided that they'd probably have a very very limited vocabulary. I tried I think
the vocabulary of the average Sun reader is something like 10,000 words. And I think that the
vocabulary of the first story of Voice of the Fire - is around 500? It's very stripped-down. Which
made it very difficult to read, almost incomprehensible to some people there are some people
who never got to read the rest of the book because they couldn't get past the impenetrable bramble
hedge of that first chapter. But it was what I wanted to do, it got the effect that I was after.

So. You impose these preconditions upon the work. Then, when you've got a bit of an idea of what
you're going to do, attend to its internal structure. You know what the limits of the perimeter fence
are. You know that it's an hour of performance, or five pages of comics, or whatever. Then break it
down. It's a novel, break it down into chapters, if it's a comic script, break it down into pages, if it's a
performance piece like one of the Blake pieces, break it down into movements. Try and understand
how the different pieces you've broken it down into fit together, what their purposes are, their
functions. An easy textbook way of doing this is the kind of standard Hollywood three-act drama,
your beginning, your middle and your end where you've got plot points placed a third of the way
through, two-thirds of the way through and then, the big climax, right at the end. And yeah, you can
see that you watch most Hollywood films, say they're about two hours long, then about 40
minutes in, something decisive will happen, and then about 80 minutes in, something that
completely turns the story around and that you never expected will happen, and at the end of the
film you'll have the climax, the payoff, where everything will be resolved. Unless it's Mulholland
Drive and he's David Lynch and he doesn't have to follow making fucking sense.

So what you're doing is, you start out with this white tundra, and then you erect fine and finer, more
and more detailed levels of structure. And there's a certain amount of intuition in that, which is
something which is not really quantifiable, but which comes with practice. You'll start to develop a
personal aesthetic as to the kind of shape of the stories that you wanna do. You'll start to realise
that - doing something this way you can get results, but it's manipulative. It's trying to jerk people's
emotions around. And that that doesn't feel right. So you'll kind of modify the way you approach
emotional scenes you'll perhaps decide that there's greater power in keeping more in reserve, in
soft-peddling, in leaving a lot unsaid. Let it sort of detonate in the readers mind a few moments
later. There's benefits to all these approaches. And they will all shape the thousands of creative
decisions that you're gonna make, probably in the course of even a short work. And then, you know,
it's sort of, er

DW: Sorry to interrupt, but it sounds like you're saying to someone who's not a very
practiced creative person that it's something to do with clarifying and developing an
emotional position on your work, how you interact with those worlds you conjure up, in a
way that feels right

AM: Well, emotional position is part of it, but as an individual you are not your emotions, neither are
you your intellect. These are things that you have . They're not things that you are . Therefore you
have to start to become aware of the different requirements that human beings have, the different
areas that they like to be satisfied in.

DW: That's what I meant by becoming aware

AM: Yes. Which means becoming aware of yourself. I mean, as a writer you're gonna have to
understand pretty much the whole universe. But the best place to start is by understanding the inner
universe. The entire universe for one thing only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're
gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's
being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality. So. To understand the
universe there's worse advice than that which was carved above the shrine of the Delphi oracle.
Where it just said: Know thyself. Understand yourself. Know thyself is a magical goal, but like I say
to me there is very little difference between magic and creative art in any sense the laws of one
apply perfectly well to the other.

Now, coming to understand yourself again, reductionism is a useful tool. In Kabbalah, you've got
the lowest spheres of the Kabbalah (at this point Alan turns around and is explaining a diagram
hung on the wall of the room) this sphere the lowest sphere for those who are listening to the tape
and can't see what I'm doing the lowest sphere of the Kabbalah relates purely to the physical
realm that is the realm of the body and the physical world surrounding the body. We all have a
body but we are not whatever the materialists would have us believe we are not our body. The
next sphere up is the Lunar Sphere which is related to dreams, fantasy, romance, the imagination
and we all have an imagination, and we all have dreams, but we are not our dreams. They're a very
important part of our makeup just as our body is, but they are not the sum total of us. This bit over
on the left, the bottom of the left hand side of the tree is the Sphere of Mercury, that is the sphere of
intellect. We all have intellect and thus our intellect has demands, just as our imaginations do, just
as our bodies do.

The opposing sphere on the other side of the tree is the Sphere of Venus. This is to do with
emotions and feelings, which we all have. The most important sphere on a human level is the Solar
Sphere, which is the column three tiers up. That represents the soul, or the higher self' if you prefer
that sort of taxonomy, the guardian angel, the self, as in know thy self', I mean the Delphi Oracle, it
was an oracle to Apollo who, as the Sun God, goes there (points). What you have to do is develop
each of those areas within yourself. Well, another way of looking at it, again using magical
terminology, is that in magic it's said that that you shouldn't really commence magic until you've got
your four magical weapons and I'd say yeah, that applies to art as well, it applies to writing.

ABOVE: Art from Promethea 17 , by J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray and Jeromy Cox

The four magical weapons are the wand, the sword, the cup and the coin. The coin represents the
earthly, material things the body. Yeah, you've got to be materially grounded, you've got to
understand the material world. You've got to understand the urges of the flesh. You've got to
understand how all of this works on a hard, practical, earthly level. You need your coin.

The sword represents intellect and discrimination, both of which are faculties you need. You need to
be able to tell a good idea from a bad idea. Discrimination is the most powerful tool. To have the
intellectual discrimination to be able to say: This idea doesn't work because of this, this and this,
this idea could work if we did this, this and this. That's really very useful. Don't leave home without
your sword your intellect.

The wand is the will. This is the drive whatever that is in each individual. It is something above
intellect, it's above emotion, it is the soul, the will, the highest self, the thing that drives high art.
High art is nothing to do with the lower personality. It's not to do with fight and flight, fighting and
fucking, eating, surviving it's got something higher behind it. That's what wands are.

If you have all three of these things but don't have the cup, which is compassion, then no. Yeah,
you'll be incredibly clever, you'll be incredibly motivated and you'll be incredibly materially solid, but
without the compassion that the cup represents, you'll also be a monster.

So you'll need all four of these things, and that is true whether you're a human being, a magician or
a writer. You need to have these things balanced. Well, for me, I like to think that the people
reading my stories are going to find them satisfying upon a material level, they're going to work as
stories about real people in a real world. That is the plot, I suppose. Does the story work on a
material level could these things actually happen in a material universe? So yeah, attending to
material things, or the world of coins, or whatever, that's the plot level, if you like.

The level of swords, of intellect, what I wanna know is, ok, if the plot works that's not enough. I
mean, anybody can think of a plot. A story. But to make it really work as a story, its gotta have,
obviously, does it work intellectually? Is this stuff interesting to a reasonably developed intellect?
And yeah, that's important. Not just: Does it satisfy the plot demands of the lowest level of
audience comprehension, but is it going to tickle their intellect, is it gonna give them new thoughts?
If it's just clever thenah shit, you could end up like Will Self, or next thing you know you'll be doing
restaurant reviews, smoking smack in the toilet of John Major's planeI dunno, this is my personal
choice again, but I find some authors like Martin Amis or like Will Self, I find them overly impressed
by their own cleverness, and I sometimes find it a very brittle sort of cleverness that doesn't actually
have a great deal of heart behind it.

It's important to satisfy your readers emotionally that doesn't mean that you have to pile of the
violins, tug the heartstrings, have Little Nell dying on every page, that's not the way to do it, that's
manipulative and mawkish that's reactive emotion, its not a true feeling.

I mean, as human beings we tend to have feelings that come from inside ourselves, and then there
are reactive emotions someone says: Boo!, we get scared, somebody says: I love you, we say:
Aaahh. These are reactions. They might have nothing to do with our true feelings. Someone says:
Grrrr, we get angry. You know. Pfah! So you need to connect with whatever your real feelings
about things are. If you say you love your girlfriend, if you say you love your kids, what the fuck do
you mean, exactly? What do you mean by that word, if you bandy it around? And that'll take some
thinking about, that'll last for about ten or fifteen years. But these are things which are universal,
they need to be explored. You know, Edmund Hilary: Because it's there.

These are the big issues of human existence. And you need to have all these elements of your
personality balanced, and you also need to have all of these elements apparent in your writing, if
you want it to come across as a balanced thing, you need it to make plot sense on a material level,
you need it to be an interesting intellectual structure with interesting intellectual ideas to satisfy
people's intellect, you need it to have emotional resonance and depth to give it humanity and
warmth, and a kind of a beating heart, rather than to be a cold piece of artifice. Which I suppose,
that's probably down to characterisation, you want to put characterisation at that particular point in
this writing Kabbalah. The emotional level that's probably down to the characterisation.

And, it needs to be about something. There needs to be some theme. Theme that would be the
solar centre, that would be the soul you know, the book's gotta have a heart. That is its emotional
content, whether it does resonate, emotionally, so it's gotta have a soul. The soul is the theme, it's
what it's about. Is it about something that's big, or important enough? Amongst my own work, The
Killing Joke where Batman versus The Joker. Yeah, there's loads of emotion layered on there. It's
quite clever. The plot works, on a material level. But it's not about anything, it's not about anything
of human importance, it's about Batman and The Joker and you're never gonna meet anybody like
Batman and The Joker. It's of no use to you as a human being. It's one of the works there's some
very good things about it, but it's lacking something, and it's lacking soul. It's not got the thematic
drive that say Watchmen has, which I was doing at the same time. That was my big mistake. I was
doing Dark Knight I was doing The Killing Joke at the same time as I was doing Watchmen .

It was about its own structure. It was about a

certain way of viewing reality

The approach that I was bringing to bear upon Watchmen - which had a much more important and
universal human theme running through it I brought back to bear upon a Batman-Joker story, and
there was nothing there to support that kind of weight. So yes, purpose, theme, something that the
whole work whether it's a short, 5-page story or whether it's a 500-page epic: something that this
is about.

DW: So what was Watchmen about?

ABOVE/BELOW: Details from Watchmen , art by Dave Gibbons

AM: Well, Watchmen was about a number of things. It started off as a silly-ass
superhero story. We wanted to do a superhero story where we saw what would happen if you'd got
a group of superheroes existing in a credible, real world, and what if these were credible, real
characters emotionally-speaking, or at least as credible as we can make them. I suppose that was
the basic premise we thought we might get a darker than usual, grittier than usual superhero story
out of it.

We had got to round about the third issue when all of a sudden we started to realise that there was
something growing out of the storytelling that we hadn't really anticipated. There was something
happening within the structure of the story slightly interesting sparks, coming to life I remember
the actual page very clearly, it was the first page of the third issue? Where as the opening scene I
wanted a bit of vox pop you know, what's going on with the man on the street, so we'd got a
scene with the news vendor sitting there at his little shack, there's a little boy sitting against the
electric hydrant, reading a comic, across the street there's people putting up a fallout shelter notice
I thought: People putting up fallout shelter notices, that's kind of ominous, that sets a tone. We
started off with a close-up, I decided to pull back from a tight close-up of the radiation symbol on the
fallout shelter sign. In the first drawing I did of the close-up of black and yellow, I thought: Actually,
that kind of looks a little bit like a very stylised picture of a black ship, so maybe if I wrote a caption
from the pirate comic that the little boy is reading, that would reinforce the reader's identification
with this black and yellow shape, as being a black ship seen against a yellow skyand then I'll also
have some balloon from the off-panel news-vendor that will have some resonance with the content
of this pirate caption, which is mainly about war. Piracy. Death.

So I had the newsvendor making a comment about the possibility of a forthcoming nuclear war, and
as we continued to pull back, we continued with the imagery the pirate captions, the dialogue of
the news vendor all of these things are starting to strike sparks off of each other, we noticed. And
yes, Watchmen came to be about power. About power and about the idea of the superman
manifest within society. Dr. Manhattan is pretty openly I mean his name is related to the
Manhattan Project, he's pretty obviously a walking bomb. There's more to him than that, but he is
one level of human power. The other characters who are all dealing with this world in their own
different ways the way that Watchmen fitted together, it was about power, but it's about a lot of
things. What I eventually came to the conclusion of about Watchmen was that the most important
thing in it, was its structure. And I think, at the end, that Watchmen's structure was what it was
about. It was about its own structure. It was about a certain way of viewing reality. It was about a
kind of perception which I think was perhaps not as prominent in 1985 as it is now, and as I think it
will be in the near future. It's not a linear perception of things that we do increasingly have in the 21
st century.

DW: There's a quote from Dr. Manhattan that seems to capture that perfectly: Time is a
multi-faceted construct that human beings insist on viewing one surface at a time.

ABOVE/BELOW: Details from Watchmen , art by Dave Gibbons

AM: Yeah, that's itI mean, when Isaac Newton came up with the theory of gravity,
nobody understood it. Nobody understood the theory of gravity. Then, given enough time, quite a
few people did, and now, pretty much everybody understands the theory of gravity. Einstein, when
he came out with his theory of relativity, there were probably five people in the world who had the
first idea what he was talking about. Now, not everybody in the world understands Einstein, but
there are thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people probably, who've at least heard of
the theory of relativity and have some vague idea of what it entails. What I'm saying is, it takes us a
while to catch up with

DW:the guys at the front

AM:yeah, the guys at the front, who are actually shaping our view of reality. At the moment,
quantum physics suggests all sorts of interesting possibilities for looking at reality. We're nowhere
near catching up with that yet, however, we catch up quicker than we did in the past because things
are generally speeding up. Our technology acts as a kind of engine that speeds up our perceptions.
There's probably been more breakthroughs probably in the last 18 months than there have been in
the whole of world history. And it gets faster.

But I think with Watchmen the way that we were structuring reality, it wasn't from the perspective of
one person, it wasn't from an omniscient Godlike perspective, it was multiple viewpoints. All of the
different characters in Watchmen have got a completely different view of the world. Dr. Manhattan
has this kind of dispassionate quantum view, Rorschach has got this fierce, morally-driven kind of
psychotic view that issomething you could imagine people believing. Certain people. I might even
believe some of those things myself on a particularly bad morning. The Comedian has got a
particular view of the world, Nite-Owl he's got a largely romantic view of the world. All of these
none of them are presented as being more true than the others. We're not sort of saying: And yes,
Dr. Manhattan's view of the world is the right one. Or yes, Ozymandias' view of the world is the
right one.

DR: What about Nils Bohr's Greater and Lesser truths'?

AM: Yeah, he was a good one, Nils Bohr The Copenhagen Interpretation' .

DW: It's a good play.

AM: Is there a play of it?

DW: Copenhagen' Michael Frayn.

AM: Ah right, I wasn't aware of that, I was just talking about the actual Copenhagen interpretation of
Nils Bohr when he first made it. I didn't know they'd made a play of it.

DW: The play uses the metaphor the structure of the uncertainty principle in terms of the
impossibility of knowing about a conversation between Nils Bohr and a German colleague of
his about interpreting history

AM: Well, if I interpreted the Copenhagen Interpretation correctly I think that at root it seemed to say
that all of our observations be they of remote astronomical events or of the hidden quanta - can
only be, in the end result, observations of our own thought processes. I think I said in Voice of the
Fire that he came up with that in the Copenhagen brewery the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen,
where I presume they had parties and things well, it's a haunting notion that, and hard to write off
as the product of a special brew too many.

But these are viewpoints that we're going to have to take on board. The same thing's true of fractal
maths. When I did the abortive Big Numbers I could think of new possibilities for viewing human
society - human groupings a healthier way. I could see possibilities in fractal maths a new way
of looking at how humans interact. And these are things I think it is important vital that we try
and assimilate, these new options that we're provided with, new ways to live, new ways to think.
We obviously have, as a species, a number of problems at this current time. The only way I can see
for us to get round them is thinking our way round them I can't see us spending our way round
them, we're not going to be able to bomb our way around them. I could be wrong, maybe we can
spend and bomb our way around them, but I would say on balance that if we're gonna get round
them at all, we're gonna have to think our way around them, and that is gonna need new forms of
thinking. I don't know what they are, but I'd just say let's try some of the options, and see if anything
interesting comes up. So, Watchmen started off as a grim superhero story, and ended up as a
multi-layered metaphor for the effects of power upon society. But at the end of the day I think
what Watchmen was about was its own structure, it was about the way in which Watchmen viewed
reality, it was suggesting new ways in which to view reality.

The Dr. Manhattan sequence where he views time as a kind of solid with past and
future present in any moment that was very interesting to write, that was very liberating to write.
You've got I myself having to adopt that viewpoint, and realising what a lot of poetry it brought to
normal human existence. One of the benefits of fiction, especially of fantasy fiction, is that is does
enable us to put on these extravagant clothes. It enables us to do thought experiments. It enables
us to imagine ourselves to extremes and to perhaps understand ourselves a little better by running
through: What is this? What would I think if this happened? What would I do if this happened?.
Running through these little scenarios, I think that can be useful. It might even be the point of art full
stop. I mean, it's gotta be for something, right?

DW: When you were talking about Dr. Manhattan viewing time as a solid object, the reader
sees it that way too, and maybe as you say it is a way of letting us see something that we
couldn't see with our eyes by looking out the window

AM: Like I say, maybe when we've caught up with quantum theory, maybe when we've caught up
with Stephen Hawking, maybe when we've caught up with some of the shit I read about in New
Scientist every week, when we've assimilated that to the extent that we understand apples falling
from trees, who's to say that our perception of time wouldn't change? I mean, if I understand
Stephen Hawking, unless I've misread A Brief History of Time (laughter), the whole of spacetime, if
it came into existence in the Big Bang, that was the whole of time, not just the whole of space that
came into being and it all came into being inextricably linked together, then that means space time
is a kind of giant football more like a rugby ball, Big Bang at one end, Big Crunch at the other
and all the moments in-between are all co-existing in this one big hyper moment of space-time.
Now, I can accept that, intellectually, but to really know it, in the same way as apples fall from trees,
to have it as an observable realitysometimes I can almost get there. I've got a pretty good
memory, and I've had odd premonitions from time to time the same way everybody does, never
about anything significant, enough to strike a little eerie chord, and I came to think that time was
happening all at once, and it's only our conscious perceptions that arrange it all into a linear
sequence.

And there by exploring the consciousness of the fictional Dr. Manhattan I can suggest to the reader
what such a consciousness might be like. And Swamp Thing , where I was actually trying to think
my way into: What would a mass vegetable consciousness be like? What would the concerns of a
vegetable consciousness be? What would its emotional range be?. All these things are useful or
potentially useful tools for getting people to understand natural phenomena from the inside, in the
way that no other tool short of fantasy really can allow people to be put into those spaces and those
mindsets.

DW: Going back to what you were saying about the underlying theme of Watchmen being its
own structure, the name suggests that now I come to think of it: Watch-men, men of
clockwork, men of structure

AM: Also, there are actual bits in it which are actually referring to ways of reading Watchmen , I
mean, Dr. Manhattan's perceptions, they are a key to the actual structure of Watchmen .
In Watchmen I mean just like that football structure of space-time, a book has the future of its
characters, when it's closed, a few small inches away from the present of its characters all the
moments within that story are contained within the two covers, so we tried to
make Watchmen structured so that images recur all the way through, linking the present with the
past and the future, giving foreshadowings of things that have yet to come, giving echoes of things
that have already happened. So, yeah, Dr. Manhattan's perceptions are one key to
reading Watchmen . Adrian Veidt with his multiple television screens, which is another key to
reading Watchmen . Adrian Veidt is watching six channels at once and so, at various points
in Watchmen , are the readers. It's multi-channel viewing. You're watching a pirate story, you're
watching a conversation on a street corner, you're listening to symbolic dialogue, you're seeing little
symbols moving around. Both of those are ways of reading Watchmen that are encoded within the
text of Watchmen itself.

DW: You started off by counter pointing that with The Killing Joke which you thought maybe
didn't work as well

AM: Cos Watchmen has got a theme, a soul, a central reason for being. The Killing Joke was a
Batman story. With the best will in the world, we'd designed the characters in Watchmen to kind of
or at least the way they developed they were capable of carrying the weight of the narrative. They
were interesting characters in their own right, people wanted to find out what was going to happen
to Rorschach or to Dan and Laurie or whatever so it didn't become oppressive, the structure, the
mechanics of the storytelling, the clockworkthe ticking of the clockwork didn't drown out the story.
Whereas Batman and The Joker, they were designed in the late 1930's, early 1940's
Left: Cover to The Killing Joke, art by Brian Bolland

DW: But what was it that you thought you were getting right with The Killing Joke that
looking back you weren't? How do you differentiate those two experiences? What was it you
think you did wrong with The Killing Joke?

AM: Like I said a few moments ago, the problem with The Killing Joke was that I was writing it at the
same time as I was writing Watchmen and there was leakage between one narrative and another. I
was bringing to bear the mindset of Watchmen upon characters and situations that were too slight
to bear them. What I should have done, if I hadn't been so immersed in writing Watchmen well
what I probably should have done is passed on writing Batman until I'd finished writing Watchmen
what I probably should have done is to have thought longer about the Batman story and tried to
come up with a story that just because The Killing Joke doesn't work doesn't mean that Batman's
a bad character, I'm sure there are perfectly good stories you could tell about Batman. The Killing
Joke just wasn't one of them. What I should have done is to have thought more deeply about
Batman as a character, what could be said honestly and effectively using that character, and then
proceeded from there. But, on the other hand, a useful mistake. Because it irked me, I felt bad
about The Killing Joke for a while. Not very satisfied with it.

And so I had to sit down and think: Why? Why does this book not satisfy me? Brian's art's lovely,
you know it's better than most of the post-modern Batman books

DW: Arkham Asylum

AM: Well I wasn't gonna mention any namesbut yeah, I didn't really like Arkham Asylum .

DW: That's interesting, because that didn't seem to work as much as anything I've readand
I'm not sure why.

AM: Not to slag anyone off, but at the time, I met Dave McKean after Arkham Asylum came out,
always a difficult time, the book's come out, by someone you know and get on with, and you don't
happen to like it, then, you have to choose between honesty and diplomacy, and I remember saying
to Dave McKean that I hadn't liked Arkham Asylum , I thought his art had been beautiful, lovely, but
it was the story that the art was in service to

DW: Perhaps it wasn't really a story

AM: Well it wasn't much of a story, the story didn't really resonate for me on any level, and the fact
that it had got Dave's beautiful sumptuous artwork appended to it, I said to Dave that it was like
putting an exquisite golden frame and I said your art is an exquisite golden frame, it is, it's
exquisite it's like putting that exquisite golden frame around a dog turd. I said it's not gonna make
the dog turd look any better. In fact the dog turd can make the exquisite golden frame look a bit
an attempt to polish a turd. It's like, the artwork, if it's not in service to something which has depth, it
can be the most gorgeous stuff in the world, and the more gorgeous it is, the sillier it will look.
Because you'll be thinking: Someone expended all this effort and created all this beauty on this
story. It's like the gap between the story and the art is vast.

DW: That brings me to something I'd like to ask, which is, it's a collaborative medium, unless
you're a writer-artist. How do you see the relationship between writer and artist? I mean,
some writer-artists have stated that they see no place for a writer who isn't also an artist in
the medium for example Dan Jurgens

AM: I don't think I know who he ishe wrote The Death of Superman ? Yeah, yeah (smiles) a
valid opinion

DW: But that's not what I want to talk about at any length
AM:Got plenty of artists that can't writenot mentioning Dan Jurgens in any way of course

DW: Bit more of an auteur really

AM: An auteur. Yes, I think he probably is

DW: How you do you see the relationship of writing for an artist, which is not the most
common writing experience?

AM: It's a good question, and I'd say that of all my talents, working in the comics industry, my talent
for collaboration is my most prized and probably my most highly-defined and adapted-

DW: That's interesting, because many people would see you as a writer rather than-

AM: One of the things that I learned very early on was I'm very perceptive when it comes to
comics artists I pride myself on I can look at an artist's work, and not only see why it's good, I
can also see things that that artist could do that not even the artist knows that they could do I can
see possibilities, you know, a quality in someone's art, if you could bring it out, marry it to the right
story, let them run riot with this particular thing that they do. So what I do, when I, writing a story
OK, back when I used to write for 2000AD and I didn't know who would be drawing it a lot of the
time, then you have to write an artist-proof script. You put in all the details you can think of and you
try and make it as entertaining and as exciting for the artist as possible, so that even if they're not
inspired at all, maybe once they've read your story they'll want to give it just that extra little bit of
effort.

Now if you're writing for an artist where you do know who they are, it all becomes a lot easier. You
think in terms of pleasing the artist first. It's like I could give examples from any of the works I've
done errr Lost Girls . With that, me and Melinda we both knew that we wanted to do an erotic
piece of serious fiction. When we were casting around for how to do it I mean I was looking at
Melinda's work, it was the first time that I'd seen her colour work, and I suddenly thought: This
colour work, this soft crayon work, it's beautiful, it looks like children's illustrations so therefore it
looks fake. Her erotic work is really wild. If you were to do the erotic stuff in this beautiful textured
and layered coloured crayon, that would be really subversive, you could get away with anything, no
matter how grotesque or disgusting it might sound, that enough layered coloured crayon, prismatic
coloured crayon, and it's gonna look like an illustration from The Butterfly Ball or something like that,
it's gonna look like a children's favourite.

So, also by that time I'd realised that Melinda was quite good at, and seemed to enjoy, pastiching
other artists' styles she could do a pretty good Egon Schiele, a pretty good Beardsley, a pretty
good Mucker, so all right, maybe I could work that into the book in some way, something that would
give her the opportunity to do those things I know that she'd like. These things have all shaped, the
content and the storytelling of Lost Girls .

With Promethea , Jim Williams told me, early on, he really likes symmetry in a spread layout, he
really likes working with spreads. So, the unit for most of my comics is the page, the unit
for Promethea is the spread, I compose each in two-page bursts, and work out: Is there anything
interesting visually we can do with this spread? So, in all instancesit's a bit like circus horses.
The reason the circus horses dancing to the music works so well is that that's not what's really
going on. The band are playing along with the horses. The band are playing along with the random
capering of the horses, and it appears like a beautifully synchronised piece of dance. That's
something like what happens when I'm working with an artist. I am looking at this capricious,
prancing, wonderful style, whether that's Oscar Zarate's or Kevin O'Neill's or whatever, and I'm
thinking: What sort of music can I put to this capering, this dancing, that'll make sense of it and will
bring out its best qualities?
Because if the artist is enjoying it they're going to pour all their energy and enthusiasm into it, which
is gonna give the work a life you could never have achieved on your own. So yeah, collaboration is
vital and it's done by understanding the person you're working with. So, develop your perceptions
and sublimate your work to the artist. It's like dancing or sex or both of those are decent
metaphors. You don't lead when your partner's leading. You sort of have to kind of get into a
rhythm, pull back, let the other person do the solo, then maybe they pull back and let you do a bit of
a solowhen you get into the right sort of tempo then a good story will generally be the result.

DW: One of the very crude distinctions between different schools of comics scriptwriting is
to label one the plot-driven approach-

AM: The Marvel school.

DW: Do you think it's accurate and if so what it says about writing and about the medium -
that the more you do write full-script and the more closely you design the comic from a
writing/ideas/concepts point of view, the less visible the collaboration is the more
seamless the collaboration is - between writer and artist, but also the more there is of the
reader fully immersing themselves in the story, and not being aware of Oh, I'm reading a
comic, not having a huge explanatory text box saying: Meanwhile, on the other side of
town

AM: Exactly. I'd say that one of the greatest compliments I've ever had for my work was when Terry
Hillier, reading the first few episodes of From Hell , commented to Eddie Campbell that: It reads
like the work of one person. Perfect. That's what I'm aiming for with everybody. I want it to read so
naturally that it will be just the work of one person. But, the Marvel-style approach, this started with
Smilin' Stan Lee, Stan The man' Lee, and I've gotta say, and this is only my opinion having seen
Jack Kirby's pencils, I think that the process went something like this:

Stan Lee comes up with an idea: Right, next issue of The Fantastic Four , like, what if there's some
really big powerful threat from space, sort of or according to some people, what if in the next
issue, the FF the Fantastic Four fight God. And Jack Kirby goes away, and he thinks:
GalactusGalactus eats planetsand he's got this heraldand it's this silver guy on a surfboard
and he goes before himand this guy's so frightening that solar systems will switch off their suns
so that he doesn't notice them, they'll black out their entire galaxies so that he'll pass them by, and
yeah, The Watcher, he intervenes and fills the Earth's sky with illusions to keep this creature away,
but it doesn't work. And you've got Kirby, he'd pencil five pages a dayhe just wasn't human.
He'd just sit there pencilling five pages a day, six pages a day, nine pages a day, and in every panel
so he'd be breaking it down into stories, he'd be breaking it down into a continuity of images, he'd
be inventing the characters, he'd be writing the dialogue suggestions very crude, very quick, but
sometimes quite detailed. Then this would go to Stan Lee, who would look at the story that Jack
Kirby had written , would dialogue it in his own unique way he would put in a lot of thees', thous',
face front true believers', footnotes, and then it would go out as Fantastic Four created by Stan
Lee and Jack Kirby', but it was only one of them who had a share of the action on the characters,
and that wasthe smiling one. And that's probably why he was smiling, come to think about it.

And the Marvel method I've heard people Archie Goodwin, who was a lovely man, a great comic
writer and somebody I respected a great deal I once said to him: I can't see any advantage in the
Marvel method. And he said: Well, sometimes it allows for serendipity. That may be true. But I
would say that it would be so infrequent and I mean looking at the vast output of Marvel comics
during the last thirty years of the twentieth century those moments of serendipity were pretty few
and far between. I'd say that the disadvantages of the method outweigh whatever slender
advantages there might be. It's lazy. I've gotta say, it's lazy. And it leads to homogenous product
because think about it - I mean, if the artist has no real idea what anyone's gonna be saying in a
particular panel, then how can he put a particular emotion on their faces while they're saying it? So
you have to go for this kind of the emotional range of Marvel characters is generally mouth open
mouth closed'. Whereas with me, if I spec a page
DW: Maybe that's why they wear masks

AM: Well, that could be it. It's not helped by the fact that all the main Marvel characters all look like
the same person with different hair colours. So do the female characters. It's a process of
homogenisation, so it should be resisted. To me I mean, I have worked close to Marvel style,
when we were doing the 1963 pastiches. But even then it wouldn't be me saying to Rick Veitch or
Steve Bissette: Yeah, and he fights a cockroach kind of guy in this issue, now go away and draw
me the story. (laughter). I was doing exactly the same things as I always do I was breaking it
down into tiny little pictures the only difference was that I was phoning through the descriptions to
Rick and Steve over the phone: Yeah alright, first page, five panels, in the first panel this happens
and this happens, do you understand?, and Rick would say: Yeah yeah, I've got that, that looks
great. Right, second panel overhead shot, we're looking down. Then they'd draw the pencils,
send them to me and I'd dialogue them, and I'd have a vague idea of the type of dialogue that
would be appropriate even when I was drawing the pictures, so it was a more streamlined it was
closer to the Marvel method but actually it was just a more streamlined version of my normal
method. So yeah, I really think that if a comic's gonna have a writer then the writer should write. I
think that most of the writers I admire in comics, they put the work in. Neil Gaiman, his scripts are
about halfway between mine and in terms of length and detail he's about halfway between me
and average comics scriptwriters. For average comics scriptwriters a page of comics is probably
gonna be a page of manuscript, whereas for me it's at the very minimum a page of comics is two
pages of manuscript, sometimes three. On one of those Prometheas , two pages of comic took me
three pages to write for Jim Williamsbut I think it's worth it, and I think that the results show.
There's things I've done in comics that would not have been possible I mean that Promethea 12 ,
tying in Tarot cards and all the rest of it, there's no way that could have been done other than with a
very detailed full script.

It's like putting that exquisite golden frame

around a dog turd

DW: What does that say about comics it's almost paradoxical - that they're most
successful in their own terms when the person who the average man in the street would
think was in the driving seat the artist is in fact written for to a larger extent?

AM: Well, I think it says that comics are I mean, alright, some of the best creators in comics have
been writer-artists. The majority of comics artists some of the best ones, Harvey Kurtzman, artist-
writer, Will Eisner, artist-writer, Frank Miller well, Dark Knight one was good, not so sure
about Dark Knight two, but yeah when Frank was cooking, he was a good artist-writer. Art
Spiegelman, who I believe has been very vocal about at least in the past how the mainstream
industry, mainstream comics could produce nothing of worth, because it was not the work of one
individual, it was a conveyor-belt process, and thus soulless. I've got a great deal of respect for Art
Spiegelman as an intellect, but I think he's wrong on that one.

I mean, it depends how you use the collaboration process, I'm sure it can be soulless, I'm sure it
can be a conveyor belt, but conveyor belt does not begin to describe the collaboration between me,
Dave Gibbons and John Higgins on Watchmen , it doesn't really describe the collaboration between
me, John Williams, Mick Gray, Jeremy Higgins and Todd Klein on Promethea . These are
everybody's putting in ideas, and I'm working trying to think of new colouring effects for Jeremy to
try out, I'm trying to think of what to do with the lettering this issue, anything new that I can come up
with to bedevil Todd this issue, make him work for his money. There's nothing soulless about the
way that I approach collaboration the exact opposite, I try to involve everybody so we've got
everybody's energies pouring wholeheartedly into the book, because it is what they most want to
do. And then you've got all of those energies in one harness, harnessed to one project, and you can
take the story to lengths you would not have imagined possible.

DR: So would you typically hook up with an artist before you begin work on a story?

AM: Well, generally if possible. Sometimes I'll have the idea for the story like with From Hell I had
the idea for the story and thought: What artist would be perfect for this? And I thought about it and
I realised with From Hell you needed an artist who was able to take a very low-key approach to
something, because I didn't want it to be a horror story in the comic book sense, I wanted it to have
a much more profound horror to it, and that needed somebody who could conjure up a much more
believable, mundane everyday reality, and who'd got pretty subtle, low-key sensibilities. Eddie was
perfect.

ABOVE: Detail from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol 2, Issue 5, art by Kev O'Neill

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen , when I was musing about: Who would be the perfect artist for
this?. Once the image of Kevin O'Neill's art came into my mind I knew that that would be exactly
right. The kind of cartoonish, English caricature quality in Kevin's work would really give a lot of
bounce and energy to the script it would dispel the heaviness of the Victorian setting, it would
just Kevin's sense of design would bring such a lot to the script. These were things where I came up
with the idea first as opposed to Watchmen , where me and Dave sat down with the idea of doing
something together and let it evolve from there, but with League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen or From Hell , the idea was there first and then I kind of picked those artists, because
they seemed - according to my instincts, my intuitions, to be the perfect ones for the job.

Collaborations all have a different nature, they all work in different ways, because any two
individuals are gonna have a different chemistry between them. You have to be sensitive to the
person that you're working with and they have to be sensitive to you, to a certain degree. And you
try to work as one organism, as best as possible, and it is possible.
Some of the things that I put my readers through
are pretty extreme

DW: What are the pitfalls to collaboration?

AM: Well, don't get an attitude. Don't suddenly decide that the way to make your mark upon the
industry is to stamp your presence over every story indelibly. I mean, I've seen some terrible
examples within the industry of an artist and writer at war-

DW: Was it Warren Ellis?

AM: I was thinking more about some of the American books I'd seen, where you had an artist with a
certain amount of fan popularity, you had a writer with a certain amount of fan popularity, and you
can see instances where the writer had decided that the artist was getting too much attention and
that he wasn't getting enough, so the writer had covered as much of the artist's work as possible
with huge word balloons (laughter) , and then the artist will start getting revengeand it's not a
collaboration, it's a war. I don't know whether I mean I speak to Warren, and he always seems a
polite, well-mannered young man when I speak to him, maybe he's trying to sound a bit-

DW: I think what he was talking about something quite specific where he'd written
something and the artist hadn't liked it and decided to draw something else

AM: I've never had that happen. Yeah, but the thing is is that I've seen some of Warren's scripts.
Warren's scripts aren't very long. I mean I've seenAvatar Comics brought out something
called Bad World that Warren had doneI mean if you look at Warren's scripts, there's not a lot on
dialogue, they're not dialogue-heavy, shall we say. In this Bad World thing they actually reprinted
the scripts to all three issues in the back section of the third issue. These were the full scripts. It was
one panel per page and there was a little caption no, one panel per spread I think with a terse
little caption talking about it. And OK, if that's how Warren likes to work, that's fine, but if he does
have trouble with artists suddenly deciding that they're gonna be a bit creative with the last quarter
of a comic or somethingI mean, I've never had that problem. It might be that if you're gonna be
very very loose with your instructions to the artists, perhaps you've not got quite as much room to
complain if they take that as you giving them a long reign.

I mean, I always in my scripts will give instructions saying: Look, despite the fact that there's all this
previous detail, if you've got a better way of doing this panel, then as long as you basically
understand the effect I was going for here and can think of a better way to achieve it, then please
do, I'm counting on you, if you've got a better idea than me to throw it in, because that'll make the
story better. Not many people take me up on it, but some do. Jim Williams'll change things
because he'll suddenly see that actually these five panels could be arranged more interestingly and
still have the same story power, if he did it like this. And I try to give them complete leeway, so
they've got as much support as they need if they haven't really got an idea of how to do the page,
but it's not a burden. They've also got as much freedom as they want, which I think is the best way
to work with people generally, let alone create with collaborators. Give people the support that they
need and the freedom that they want. Then you won't go far wrong.

It'll probably mean more work for you, but the end result is that your collaborators will feel that
they're collaborating with you if they feel you've done a good job for them, they're gonna want to
do a good job for you. It becomes a very benign competitiveness that you can get into sometimes
with comics, where you're trying to show off to each other. When the artist has read your script,
liked it and then done an art job that has gone beyond your script, then a kind of benign and lovely
gauntlet's been thrown down, and it's a kind of impetus to make your next script really knock the
artist out, and then they match that, and so on. It's a good way of amping up the creative energy on
a project.

DW: But you have to adequately specify what you require of your collaborator.

AM: Be clear. You can't be too clear. Whether in your actual script or your actual storytelling. If
you're gonna have ambiguity in there, make sure you know why you're having ambiguity in there.
Make sure you're not just saying it has ambiguity because you haven't actually figured out what it's
about. There are plenty of reasons for using ambiguity, but one of them is laziness. Make sure that
you're being as clear as you can be. I can't see any point in some artists seem to produce
something not very pleasant to read, and then they'll say it was meant to be challenging. Now, I like
the work that I read to challenge me, I like it to expand my horizons. But that is the equivalent to a
challenging debate, which I'm sure most of us would welcome. But if the artist or writer is trying to
challenge me in the manner of an obnoxious street drunk, then that's a different sort of challenge
and it's not something I particularly picked up the book for. If I'd wanted that, I'd have hung out in
the taxi rank downtown on a Friday night at chucking out time.

Why were you trying to challenge your audience? What have they ever done to you? I prefer
seduction, hypnosis, I don't want to scream at my audience and demand that they understand my
gemlike pearls of wisdom. I once said that a good way to describe my approach to writing is that in
the story, in the telling of it, the dialogue, the characters, I introduce myself to the reader, I talk to
them interestingly, fascinatingly, calmingly, I get them to sort of follow me up the alleyways of the
narrative until they are so far within it that they probably can't find their way out, and then you can
do whatever you want to them.

Some of the things that I put my readers through are pretty extreme I mean the Mary Kelly
sequence in From Hell , it was very gruelling to write, it was very gruelling to draw, and I know that it
was very gruelling to read for some people. Some people had to put the book down, it's an intense
little scene. I couldn't have got the readers to look at that without the preceding 400 pages, or
whatever it was. I had to get them to trust me. And I don't think I betrayed that trust. I had to get
them to go with me into a horrible place-

DW: Well it was a story about Jack the Ripper

AM: On the other hand, there are a lot of ways I could have done that scene and the lead-up to it
that would have made it merely unpleasant. I mean, as it is, there is something terrible about it,
which is good. If it had been merely unpleasant a bloke cutting up a woman than that would
have let down the whole book and probably not done an awful lot for my reputation as a writer. I
knew that if I was gonna have a scene that stark, that intense, then I needed to do an awful lot of
groundwork, treading very carefully every step of the way until you finally throw open the doors and
take the reader into that room, and say: Right, this is the heart of the story.

I think about the collaboration a lot, I also think about my relationship with the audience. These are
the people I don't know, the people I can only vaguely imagine. But art, writing, surely one thing that
all of this is is an attempt to communicate something. So why would you choose to communicate
that which you wish to communicate less clearly, less powerfully? If you've got something to
communicate, then you would want, I would think, to communicate it as clearly, as powerfully and
as affectingly as possible. So in any communication there are two factors, there is the transmitter
and the receiver. And you wanna make sure that the receiver receives the message that you were
sending out with clarity, but at the same time you don't want it to beinsultingly simple.
I'd say to anyone aspiring to be a writer: write
what you like. Write what you have genuine
enthusiasm for

(We then returned to a discussion of signal to noise' in writing again, covering the same ground as
was gone over previously, before moving on to fresh topics).

You could end up as a writer's writer, and that would be a terrible fate. What that means is you'd be
a writer where all the other writers would say: God, I wish I was as brilliant as him, and I'm glad I'm
not as penniless as him. I've known a few borderline Kathy Acker was nearly a writer's writer,
other writers would say: Jesus, how does she do this stuff, these sentences are fucking
fantasticthe way they sort of self-destruct. But she was not easy and she was not popular. Iain
Sinclair, I think yeah, let's go out on a limb the finest writer currently working in the English
language Downriver , one of his best books, took him five years to write and he got 2000 quid for
it, how many it sold I don't know, but probably not a lot. Most writers, even the very best ones,
especially the very best ones, don't often make a living from it. You go into any branch of
Waterstone's and 90% of those books on the shelves, unless you're talking about Catherine
Cookson, Stephen King, Jeffrey Archer the giants' as I like to think of them unless you're talking
about them you're talking about someone who is a teacher, or a social worker, or works in a
bookshop, or works as a lorry driver, you're doing something to pay the rent and then working into
the small hours while the wife and kids are asleep. There's levels, there's levels to being a writer,
and I think the thing to decide is the level you're happiest at. If you're happy writing pulp adventure
stories then for God's sake write pulp adventure stories, and if there comes a point when you're no
longer happy writing pulp adventure stories, try something else.

Don't think that you have to write just because literary critics decided some time in the 19 th
century that Jane Austen's comedy of manners was the only form of literature that could really be
considered literature. Basically it's because her novels were about the habits of the class that could
afford to buy books. They were about the habits of the class of people who were criticising the
books. They were flattering. It was holding a mirror up to a particular strata of society which
included the critics and they said: Yes, our ways, our vanities, our funny little intrigues, this is the
stuff of legend, the only stuff of legend. For God's sake don't write anything in genre. Don't write
detective stories, because they're low and vulgar. Even if you are Raymond Chandler, even if you
are an extraordinarily beautiful and gifted writer. If you're writing detective stories, forget it. Ghost
and horror stories, well we'll just about allow Poe, but no, on second thoughts, and certainly don't
even consider people like Lovecraft, who couldn't write . Who had a clumsy prose style'.
Apparently. Clark Ashton Smith. Gaudy. Forget about him. Arthur Knacken. You're not gonna find
these people anywhere in Melvyn Smith's list of 100 novels you simply must read. You're not gonna
find any genre. You're mainly gonna find novels of manners. You're not gonna find any science
fiction, even if it's H.G. Wells or Olaf Stapleton, because science fiction is a lower art form than the
novel of manners.

I'd say to anyone aspiring to be a writer: write what you like. Write what you have genuine
enthusiasm for. Don't write to get a Booker prize. Angela Carter, God bless her, always used to
refer to that sort of person' as shortlist victims', and it's true. Michael Moorcock is never going to
get a Booker Prize, but he's a better writer than 100% of writers who have won the Booker Prize
over the last 20 years. But he's vulgar, he used to write comics, he used to write science-fantasy
trilogies. In three weekends. On speed. He used to write the Talisman adventure libraries, he used
to write Sexton Blake , along with Jack Trevor Story, another writer who will never be included in the
canon of great British writers. Jack Trevor Story, one of our very best writers ever.

DR: Maybe in a hundred years

AM: Nah, sadly not, he'll have been completely forgottenhe'll have been forgotten three times
over by then. Yeah, the re-forgotten as Iain Sinclair calls them. People like Gerald Kersh, people
like Jack Trevor Story, John Lodwick, people who are fine writers. Their books aren't in print
anymore, nobodies concerned. I mean, Jack Trevor Story, I'm a big collector, I've got nearly all of
them, which is difficult in this day and age. I've got all of the Horace Spurgeon Fenton trilogy, The
Wind in the Snotty Gobble Tree . Marvellous. The Snotty Gobble Tree is the Yew tree, so called
because of its sticky white poisonous berries. The Yew tree grows particularly well in graveyards, it
thrives upon a human loam. So in a lot of cemeteries you get the Yew tree growing, or a Snotty
Gobble Tree'. So the title, The Wind in the Snotty Gobble Tree , it's funny, but it's also kind of
poignantit's talking about human life. Human life is just the wind in the Snotty Gobble Tree. The
wind in the graveyard. He was very funny, Jack Trevor Story, very sad, poignant. There was
someone who, after he died, suggested the Jack Trevor Story prize for literature, where the prize
would be something like 200 and the only condition would be say 500 to 1000 and the only
condition would be that after two weeks the recipient would have nothing to show for it. Which was
pretty much the pattern of Jack Trevor Story's life. Whenever he got any payment, two weeks later
he would have nothing to show for it.

But these are my heroes, these are the people I am particularly fond of, perversely fond of, people
like David Lindsey, who wrote A Voyage to Arcturus , one of the most mystifying and brilliant British
fantasy novels anywhere. Completely forgotten. Less forgotten, but still ignored, William Hope
Hodgson, who wrote House on the Borderland , The Night Land , various other booksa visionary
genius. But forgotten. There are all of these people, who because they were too cheerily vulgar, too
proletarian, something like that, because they weren't well behaved enough , in literary terms.
Because they seemed possessed, or intoxicated, or vulgar or rude, they weren't allowed in past the
doormen, into the literary banquet going on. That was only for your Iris Murdochs, to your people
who were on the list. There were a lot of people who didn't have the right kind of shoes on to get in.
And those are the people I treasure the most, because they are the voices that are most in danger
of being lost.

DW: I feel somewhat base bringing it back to comics yet again, but that might be an
interesting point. At least within the English-language tradition, comics have been
dominated by genre fiction, particularly the superhero genre which could be seen as even
more vulgar' than the ones you mentioned before. Without denigrating those genres, do you
think because of this, comics writers have to smuggle in' other themes?

AM: The beauty of a genre is in transcending it. It's like I was saying about putting limitations on
yourself when we were talking right at the beginning.

DW: The blank page.

AM: The blank page. The genre is the straightjacket and you can do some nice Houdini tricks if you
put on a restrictive enough genre. And you don't have to look very far to see some brilliant
examples of that. The detective story genre in the hands of Mickey Spillane is dull dire not very
interesting. But you get someone like Raymond Chandler who suddenly brings in this weary moral
element, and genuine compassion and human insight, and he transcends the detective genre, and
makes it something it wasn't before.

DW: And it's very hard to think of how that emotional range could have been expressed
better in another

AM: Well absolutely, it's difficult to see how it could have been expressed better in Pride and
Prejudice , or a novel of manners, because he used the extremity of the detective situation the
isolation, the moral loneliness as a counterpoint to this bleak image of a corrupt San Francisco he
was painting. I think with my own work, with things like Watchmen , if they succeed it is because
they transcend the superhero genre. They take it somewhere where it had not previously been. I'm
not saying that every work I've ever done in superheroes has transcended the genre, but that is one
of the main pleasures of genre. It's putting on a straitjacket and then making a big spectacular
display of springing out of the straitjacket with no concealed lock picks or anything like that
underwater - with a hopeless genre. The more hopeless the genre the better, really, because
people are gonna be more surprised if you do something good with it-

DW: Which puts comics writers in a privileged position in some ways

AM: Well, if they are up to that particular act of aesthetic ju-jitsu, if they can actually turn the weight
of negative expectation that is being hurled against them, by some crafty kind of ju-jitsu move, if
they can turn that round and make that weight work for them.so it depends very much upon the
writer and how they are viewing the kind of creative milieu they are working in. But yeah, for me I'm
always quick to try and find the advantages in any situation, which can often be the apparent
disadvantages. There's ways you can look at the disadvantages of a situation and see that they can
be used as a kind of lever to spin the project in a completely different direction. If this is a problem,
then how am I gonna get around that problem?

Pornography. Obviously there's a problem in how are you gonna do pornography that people are
gonna respect and people are gonna like? I've read most of the feminist critiques of pornography,
some of them I can dismiss fairly easily Andrea Dworkin - some of them less easily. Some of them
I don't wanna dismiss. I think they're perfectly valid. So, how do you produce a piece of red-hot
pornography that answers these critiques? That avoids the pitfalls like that? These are all big
problems, but the work you get out at the end can be all the better for the kinds of travails you've
had to go through to get there.

So, have you got a last question, or anything like that?

DW: It's never good to end a conversation on a negative note, but if there's anything more
you could recall that's a classic mistake, something you learned not to do early on, because
you've spoken a lot about the positives

AM: OK, a negativea negativewhat shouldn't you doyou shouldn'tyou shouldn't come up
with things that you shouldn't do. I'd say what you should do is probably make all the fucking
mistakes that you are capable of. Don't make too many mistakes where it matters, but don't be
afraid to try anything. Don't be afraid of failure, don't be afraid of trying. And if you do fail, nobody
likes to fail so you probably won't either, but if you do fail that'll probably just give you the incentive
not to not try that thing again, but you'll have some idea of how next time, you could perhaps do it,
and succeed. Some of my stories have been failures. In the American Gothic run on Swamp Thing ,
where I was trying to tie stock horror icons in with horrific aspects of contemporary society. I'd got
the treatment of women tied in with the werewolf story, and I tried to do a story that tied in zombie
imagery with a comment on racism and it didn't really work. A valiant attempt, some lovely bits of
writing in it, but I should have thought it through more, I ended up not quite saying what I'd wanted
to say, it was muddy, ambiguous a failure. And like I say, I don't like failure, so I had to try and
analyse what I'd done wrong and work out ways that I could avoid making it again.

So, don't be afraid of failing once or twice because that can be a big learning experience. If you
don't fail once or twice, you're probably not reaching far enough, you're not taking enough risks.
You should also remember here's some other bits of good advice: if you notice something that
you do, that probably means that you do it too much. Stop it. Do something else. If you notice
something that is becoming a staple part of your style, abandon it, otherwise it will become a rut,
and it'll be a crutch that you lean on, an easy little thing, and all of your books will be exactly like the
last one. I'm sure we could all think of a lot of authors perhaps quite popular ones who write the
same book over and over again sometimes very entertainingly but they're not moving anywhere.
I'd say keep moving if you stay still, you die. As a writer. You might die very lucratively, but
creatively you're not gonna be cutting it.
Also, if you're sure you can do something, that's probably because you've done it before. If you're
sure you can do something there's probably no need, no point in bothering to do it. This is perhaps
not advice for people when they're starting out. When you start out, you want the security of
knowing you can accomplish these things. But if you get on, there'll come a point when you realise
if you're sure you can do something, then there's no point in doing it because it's too safe. Best
thing is trying to find a decent-looking cliff edge and throwing yourself over it. Think: What would be
really impossible to do or nearly impossible to do? What am I not sure I could do?.

(We again returned to a conversation about Voice of the Fire , covering some familiar topics before
moving on to conclude with an observation about coming to trust the process of writing itself).

so it was leaving an insane amount of stuff to chance. I knew in that last chapter I knew I had to
have turning up within my field of vision within Northampton spectral black dogs, I had to have a
severed head, a real, human, severed head turning up somewhere in Northampton, because these
were motifs running through the entire narrative. Since all the other stories had taken place in
November, this was right that I had to write about things that happened to me during the November
when I was writing this last chapter. And I think on the last night of November I'd taken a bunch of
mushrooms, I'd done a ritual, I was basically asking the gods: For fuck's sake, help me find a way
out of this novel, before I go mad. Give me an ending.

And that was the night I came downstairs and saw on the telly the details of this murder case that
had been held at the County Court behind Sceptre Church at Campbell Square there, and it was
the details of a murder trial that had happened previously but had just come to trial in November. In
Corby an old man had had a home invasion, someone had broken into his house and he'd been
murdered. The detail that hadn't come to light at the time was that his head wasn't there, at the
crime scene. It was found, later, by a black dog, under a hedge, whichperfect. I mean I'm sorry for
the guy and all that but I mean I'd got stuff in the 11 th century chapter about how the head of St
Edmund was found being guarded by a big black dog, so to have this conjunction of black dogs and
heads and it was the first decapitation I could remember happening in Northampton during my
lifetime. They're not that common, so the fact that it should happen right when I needed it to happen
to finish my novelyeah, you've gotta trust when you get to a certain point, the best advice I can
give to any writer is: trust the process. The process by which you write is a mysterious thing that is
separate to you it is a magical thing, it is a mysterious thing that doesn't really follow conventional
laws of physics or logic. It guides you, it tells you to do certain things, sometimes irrational things. If
you trust your instincts, if you trust your feelings, if it feels right, then trust the process, even if it
looks hopeless. If something in your instinct tells you that this is possible, and if you just do these
things you can get to that point, then trust it.

You have to kind of surrender yourself to the art, which is bigger than you are and more important
than you are. If you can surrender yourself utterly which takes some nerve then there won't be
very much you can't do. In my experience, there's a certain amount of surrender involved, in
forgetting what your career plans are or what your literary plan is, sort of: I'm going to have written
the great British novel by the time I'm. Whatever. Forget all that. Trust the process. If the process
says you really really should write a 200-page work on dogshit, then don't worry, if it feels right,
don't worry if it make senses or not, it will be a great book about dogshit, it'll sell a million copies, it
willeven if it sounds unlikely but that's what the process tells you, go with it. It's bigger than you
are, and it knows better than you do. At least in my experience.

(We then went on to talk about Alan's 80's silver suit, comics fandom and all sorts. But that was that
for The Craft.)

AUTHORS NOTE:

This interview is copyright Daniel Whiston, 2004; any errors are entirely my fault (having spoken to
Alan after the interview was first published, he mentioned a few terms/references that I had
transcribed incorrectly - but I never established what they were. He planned to revise the mistakes,
but so far hasn't had time to); this interview previously appeared in Zarjaz.