Alan Moore wrote some of the most inventive and influential comics that the medium has ever seen. His run on Swamp Thing in the 1980s transformed the character by infusing ecological and spiritual matter. He mined the sooty depths of Englishness in two epic works: V for Vendetta and From Hell. And, perhaps most famously, he overthrew the superhero status quo with Watchmen, a series that comics creators have been trying (and, as we’ll get to, failing) to replicate for 40 years.

He also wrote:

“If your ambition is to be a writer, a creator, then know that creativity is an ongoing and progressive phenomenon and that stasis and stagnation is sure death to it.”

The first comics I ever bought were not written by Moore (that honour belongs to Gerard Way’s Umbrella Academy). But, when I decided in the twilight of my teenage years that I wanted to read comics earnestly, I started with V for Vendetta, Watchmen and a handful of Batman titles. Moore’s writing was smart, sometimes imposingly so. His interests were esoteric and he wove them together seemingly without effort. His stories weren’t the episodic 32-page adventures of the other things I was reading – he wrote stories that could only belong in the comics medium but he battled the assumptions of that medium at every turn.

When it comes to comics creators, he is in the pantheon, atop a plinth, next to an obelisk etched with words like “revolutionary,” “unprecedented” and “visionary” (all words, incidentally, from the back of my copy of Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume 1). I owe my love of comics in no small part to Alan Moore and, as I read his work for the first time all those years ago, I sensed that he must love them too.

Oh boy.

How to write comics the Alan Moore way

I checked From Hell out of the library recently and found that, while the illustrations had been updated to include colour, the credits had been stripped of any mention of Alan Moore, the writer. Hardly the most horrifying thing between those pages but upsetting nonetheless. The man means what he says:

“Some of my comic book work – a handful of titles – I remain immensely proud of. But the rest of it, I don’t have copies of it in the house and I’ll never be looking at it again. Which was painful, but it was a necessary amputation.”

Still, it’s no fun watching someone you admire speak negatively about their work.

It’s not beyond my understanding why he would speak negatively of the comics business. Here is a creator who, 40 years ago, really was doing things nobody else could, for no better reason than he loved the medium and wanted to show others that they could do things nobody else could, too. Unfortunately, nobody got the message and, instead, we had countless others trying to do things only Alan Moore could. Nice for the ego, maybe, but poison for the spirit.

I should clarify that Moore has said countless times that he finds the comics medium to be sublime, even the best. It is, for the most part, the comics business and the role he played in that business that he takes issue with. I want to understand why he would take his name off his work but that’s probably not something I can do here or now. (I guess, the way he sees it, the message has been misheard and the damage has been done. But the way I see it is we still have the work, it’s still great and it’s not the fault of good creators that bad creators are prone to mindlessly copy.)

All I can do here is try to receive the message he’s trying to send to a new generation.

In the opening paragraph of his essay Writing for Comics, Moore writes:

“I don’t want to produce anything that smacks even remotely of ‘How to Write Comics the Alan Moore Way.’ Teaching a generation of emergent artists or writers how to copy the generation that came before was a stupid idea when Marvel introduced their “How to Draw…” book and it would be equally irresponsible of me to instruct up-and-coming writers on how to write sickly extravagant captions like ‘Dawn transformed the sky into an abattoir’ or whatever.”

At the risk of missing his point entirely, I do believe there’s something to learn from Moore’s position.

It's lonely at the top

Earlier this year, I read Zoe Thorogood’s brilliant auto-bio-graphic-novel, It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth. At the centre of Centre is a personal plummet juxtaposed with Thorogood’s professional ascent – off the back of her debut, she’s been handed some major projects, brought home some prestigious awards and, in an echo of that Swamp Thing back cover, been hailed by critics as the future of comics.

Well, the critics certainly haven’t learned.

It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth deals with much of what Alan Moore has been talking about for 40 years – the pressure of success, the assumptions of comics, the amputations that can be essential for growth. Thorogood explores these topics with irreverence and inventiveness, just as Moore might have done. But It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth, like all great comics and all great art, is really something nobody else but Thorogood could do. It was absolutely energising. I recommend it to everyone (that includes you).

I also think Laura Pérez is doing fantastic and original work in the medium. But maybe all this is better left for another time.

What I’m trying to tell you is that I don’t think the comics landscape is better without Alan Moore. But I understand the crushing disappointment he surely feels that so many young writers wanted to be just like him. What Moore was trying to tell us, he spells out in Writing for Comics:

“To change comics, we must change the way we think about their creation.”

In changing the way we think about their creation, we need to change the way we think about their creators.

Legends like Alan Moore don’t come along very often. But when emerging or established creators put them on that plinth next to that obelisk in that pantheon, it’s not long before the creators themselves stop looking for new ways to do things. The legend is a legend because they figured it out, we think. Moore knows that’s not true, so he did one last thing nobody else could do. He took his name off his work in the hope that we’d stop worshipping at his altar.

Reflecting on all this for the last couple of weeks, then finally sitting down to put thoughts into words, has made me sad. I’m very grateful for Alan Moore. But, for all of this I’m a little closer to understanding him.