The great Alan Moore (Watchmen, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta etc.) recently sat down for a chat with our good friend John Higgs (Stranger Than We Can Imagine) at the 2016 Brighton festival. In a wide-ranging discussion (and subsequent Q&A session with the crowd), Alan and John covered topics including virtual reality mysticism, creating a new counterculture, Alan’s upcoming ‘epic novel’ Jerusalem, reinventing magick, and the eternal nature of time.
Fans of the bearded one’s comics might be dismayed by one particular reply Alan gave, in response to John asking what he is wanting to do now that Jerusalem is finally done (it’s been a work-in-progress for around a decade):
Well one of the things I’d like to do is, I really do want to finish up with comics. I’ve got a lot of other things [I’d like to do]…I came up through the Arts Lab, where we did everything, that was why the Arts Lab was fun. I did some comic strips in the Arts Lab, but I did a lot more performances and poems, and pieces of prose. I’ve always liked doing just about everything…but the comics thing, that paid off unexpectedly well.
…at this point, I thing that probably I’ll be finishing off Cinema Purgatorio…and there’s another series that I’ve got about 48 pages on to do, and then me and [illustrator Kevin O’Neill] want to do a final book of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that will just tie up all of the loose threads, even the ones that you didn’t know were loose threads from all of the previous books. I reckon that’s about another 250 pages of comics. Then, I should just like to do whatever takes my fancy.
…You have to understand one of the things that’s put me off of comics – and this is probably an admission of kind of immaturity on my behalf – but comics are like really acceptable now. Everybody really likes comics. They’re a good thing to have on your coffee table…I really liked comics when everybody hated them. I thought this is a brilliant medium that is being overlooked, it could be used for some fantastic things. And now, here we are…
…These days, I would rather do things that nobody wants…. That’s what art is about – it’s not about what people want, it’s about what I want.
Be sure to actually watch the video though (embedded below) – the transcript takes the fun and humour out of the discussion, making the above words perhaps sound grumpy or negative, when Alan says he explicitly doesn’t want to give that impression (“I’m perhaps a lot less angry than you might suspect…[though] if you hear me talking about corporations I can see where you might get that impression”). Instead, as always, AM is a fantastic raconteur, so worth grabbing your favourite brew and sitting down to listen to him chat with John.
