Alan Moore

Now I am going to write about one of my favourite comic book story tellers, Alan Moore. This is a man who has written some of the best comic plots such as Watchmen, V For Vendetta, From Hell and many more, and what is good about all of his stories is that the characters in them all have a meaningful story to tell, they have a secret and conflict within all of them, they all have a purpose for the plot of the story.

Alan Moore's most popular and best piece of work without a doubt is the graphic novel Watchmen, originally each chapter was released every few weeks in DC Comics in America and was a few years after the final chapter was printed that all of them were finally brought together to make the one big book, and thank god it was as it is a must have for all comic book fans, even Time magazine have it in their top 100 most influential books of all time, the only graphic novel to make it into the top 100.

At the beginning of his career after being expelled from school for dealing LSD, Moore started off as a cartoonist in the late 1970's, where he wrote and drew underground style strips for music magazines, including NME under the pseudonym, Curt Vile. He later began a weekly strip, Maxwell the Magic Cat, for the Northants Post until 1986. Moore realised that he could not make a living as an artist so decided that his area of expertise would be in story telling and so began his first steps into becoming one of the greatest comic writers of our time, not only in comics and graphic novels but a story teller in general.

Scripts he began writing for were for Marvel UK, 2000 AD and Warrior and then wrote short story strips for Doctor Who Magazine and Star Wars Weekly before a joint run on Captain Britain with artist Alan Davies. As I have said before that Watchmen is by far his greatest piece of work, a story of what if mask heroes did arrive in the late 1930's in an alternate version of Earth, but it has too be said that this is a very, and I mean very strange and peculiar man. When he was expelled for dealing drugs he called himself"one of the world's most inept LSD dealers. During his first marriage they both had a mutual lover, who his wife left him for taking their children with them, and believes himself to be an anarchist. A quote he had once said,

"I believe that all other political states are in fact variations or outgrowths of a basic state of anarchy; after all, when you mention the idea of anarchy to most people they will tell you what a bad idea it is because the biggest gang would just take over. Which is pretty much how I see contemporary society. We live in a badly developed anarchist situation in which the biggest gang has taken over and have declared that it is not an anarchist situation- that it is a capitalist or a communist situation. But I tend to think that anarchy is the most natural form of politics for a human being to actually practice."

He has clearly stated that when Hollywood has approached him into making his stories into films that he gives them permission to make them, but wishes to have no other dealings with the film, giving him no deal with the company, therefore no profit, as he believes that the original story told in his work would be taken away and replaced with the usual glossy over coating of the film industry. His name is not on any of the films adapted from his scripts, which is a bit strange in my opinion as he could have been making a lot of money as there have been four very successful films adapted from his work. But this is part of the reason of why Alan Moore is such a great writer a you need a little bit of a crazy mind to allow your imagination and beliefs to be told through the story you are telling, it is part of how a good story is told, without it i don't think his work would have been as successful as it has been.