Moore critiques superheroes 'they cancel humanity'
Known as the most critically acclaimed, cerebral writer in the history of comics, Alan Moore is not content to rest on his laurels, entering the prose arena in earnest with new short story collection Illuminations, and the gigantic tome Jerusalem - an epic exploration of his hometown of Northampton, England. Illuminations made headlines, particularly for its mockumentary-style story, 'What We Can Know About Thunderman' - a vivid takedown of the comic industry.
Alan Moore: Well at the time, which I think was about 1984 when I wrote that story, it was the first time that I’d actually been asked to write a prose short story for publication. Since it was for a fantasy anthology, a shared world anthology, then it was obvious that, if I was going to write the story, I was going to be doing a fantasy.
Do you think that there’s a sterility to mainstream fantasy that you’re getting at in terms of your Tolkien comparison? As in, rather than celebrating this idea of magic, there’s an obfuscation of it, and in its place there’s a sort of fascist bullying. Alan Moore: Well, he’s even more hopeless than that! He doesn’t understand anything. Partly that’s his culture, partly it’s just him, and he has been thrown out by his tribe and is wandering through Neolithic Northamptonshire long before it’s got a name, and falls foul of a local cunning-man, a Hob-man, and is just enormously unlucky. He’s obviously in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, as happens quite a bit in the history of Northampton.
What Makes an Alan Moore Villain In your story 'Cold Reading,' you’ve got Ricky Sullivan, some fly-by-night conman who pretends to talk to ghosts. It feels like an indictment of that kind of personality; not only that he’s a bad guy, but that he’s betraying the very idea of storytelling itself. Alan Moore: Alfie Rouse, the Burning Car Murderer. Well, what they’ve got in common is the self-deception. Alfie Rouse in that chapter in Voice of the Fire; he is confident all the way through that the reader, the audience, the people at his trial, they’ll all be on his side, because he’s such a charming rogue.
Alan Moore Talks 'Thunderman' and the Problem with Superhero Media The centerpiece of Illuminations is 'What We Can Know About Thunderman,' and it discusses the ideas at the core of superhero stories, but also the power of myth to influence people without them necessarily knowing why. What makes those concepts go together?
A superhero continuity is just that: it’s a superhero continuity. It will probably go on for years because unless – except in the case of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where me and Kevin O’Neill actually finished a comic book that was still selling really well, that we had no other [reason to], other than the fact that we chose to finish it because that was the end of the story. But, that doesn’t really happen in superhero comics, they just run on and on forever.
I think that this perhaps would account for the habituated 50-year-old, 60-year-olds who are still reading comics even though they’re never going to get that original crack hit of their childhood, and they know it. I’ve heard enough of the general tenor of complaint, because, yeah, a lot of modern comic books are rubbish, and the industry doesn’t seem to be going anywhere good. It does seem to be in a decline.
I believe South Park actually commented on it, where they had the episode about the Memberberries, that just provoke everybody to remember when times were nicer and when there weren’t so many Mexicans.
And, yes, probably these things could’ve happened in any industry, that’s quite possible, but I think my point is that there is always something more grotesque about these things when they happen to what was formerly considered to be a cheerful children’s industry like the comic book industry.
It is perhaps that the superhero is a projection, a fantasy figure that lifts you out of that in some way. All you have to do is to find the magic power ring or something like that. I mean most of these superheroes, they just luck out, don’t they? This is another thing that is corrosive about the whole idea of superheroes; that ordinary people, ordinary people like all of us, are capable of some extraordinary things.
Alan Moore: These are all different sorts of villain, to some degree. With the creature at the end of 'What We Can Know About Thunderman,' I was wanting to go for something that was different because William Gull, the Antichrist, all those various other figures, you know that they’re evil. I mean, William Gull’s Jack the Ripper, and the Antichrist, he’s the Antichrist, he’s got eyes all over him and he’s destroying the world.
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