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Alan Moore: Difference between revisions
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[[File:Alan_Moore.jpg|link=Kubrick Stare|thumb|400px|Not actually [[Julius Beethoven Da Vinci|Rasputin]]... ''[[False Reassurance|far]]'' [[False Reassurance|harder to kill.]]]]
{{quote|''"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."''|'''
{{quote|''Alan Moore knows the score.''|'''Pop Will Eat Itself'''}}
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Moore was then encouraged by [[DC Comics]] editor Len Wein to start work on ''[[Swamp Thing]]'', Wein's classic horror comic. Originally about a scientist, Alec Holland, who had been transformed into a living plant monster after an explosion in his lab, Moore proposed a radical revision that revealed that Alec had in fact died in the explosion, and that the swamp creature had been created by plant elementals using Holland's memories as a basis for its character. Swamp Thing was not a man turned into a monster; he was never a man at all! Moore then took the Swamp Thing through a number of unusual adventures, including an entire issue [[Squick|dedicated to psychic, psychedelic sex between Swampy and his human girlfriend, Abby.]] Moore also created the character of [[John Constantine]] for the comic. Along the way, he wrote a tiny handful of [[Superman]] stories which are now considered some of the very greatest ever written for the character (one was even adapted into an episode of ''[[Justice League Unlimited]]'') and set the groundwork for a more extensive examination of Superman later in his career, through the [[Captain Ersatz|pastiche character]] [[Supreme]]. Not to mention a tiny handful of [[Green Lantern]] stories that have become integral to ''its'' history ("Mogo Doesn't Socialize" and "Tygers").
''Swamp Thing'' proved to be a massive success, and in the last years of Moore's run on the title, he was also handed another gaggle of existing characters to play with. DC had recently acquired the properties of [[Charlton Comics]] and Moore was asked to come up with a proposal for them. He came back with a dark tale that drew heavily on the mid-80s [[Cold War]] angst, in which the Charlton heroes discover that one of their number has been killed and that his death is connected to something that could lead to nuclear armageddon. DC was impressed by the pitch but was worried that Moore's pitch would render a number of the characters unusable by the end of the story. Instead, they advised him to create an entirely new series, and so ''[[Watchmen (comics)|Watchmen]]'' was born. Mature beyond anything that mainstream comics had published up to that point and with a level of complexity that rivaled the most highbrow books of the time (and continues to rival the best that many writers can come up with), ''Watchmen'' proved to be a massive sensation, and with Frank Miller's ''[[The Dark Knight Returns]]'', effectively launched the [[Dark Age]] of comics. (Moore's [[Batman]] one-shot ''[[The Killing Joke]]'' in 1988 was another big success in this
Ironically, the popularity of ''Watchmen'' was the first nail in Moore's relationship with DC; the contract that he and artist David Gibbons had signed promised them that full rights to the comic would be returned to them if the book fell out of print for more than two years. At this point in time, paperback collections of comic books were virtually unheard of and the idea that ''Watchmen'' would remain in print that long was absurd. However, the book's popularity kept it in print from 1987 through to the present day, and neither Moore nor Gibbons ever received the rights. Moore's relationship with [[Marvel Comics]] was also strained, and for similar reasons.
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* And, of course, [[Doing It for the Art]]. He ''never'' does it for anything else.
* [[Black Comedy]] and [[Kafka Komedy]]: A lot of his work from his early days at ''[[2000 AD|Two Thousand AD]]'' is overflowing with this (especially ''DR & Quinch'' and his collection of ''Tharg's Future Shocks''). These themes remain in his later works, but they are not nearly as prevalent as they are in some of his oldest stories.
* [[Humans Are Flawed]] / [[Crapsack World]]: Every major character in his stories will always be guaranteed to have some kind of obvious flaw or otherwise unlikable trait, a variant of [[Humans Are
** Along with this, [[Black and Grey Morality]] is pretty much a given.
* [[Idiosyncratic Episode Naming]]: Chapter titles in his individual works occasionally follow a common theme. For example, ''V for Vendetta'' and words that begin with the letter V, ''Watchmen'' and its [[Literary Allusion Title
* [[Alternate Company Equivalent]] and [[Expy]] characters abound in many of his works.
* [[Rape as Drama]]: Is it an Alan Moore work? Has anybody been raped yet? If the answer to the first question is yes and the answer to the second question is no, the proper response is "Wait for it."
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* ''[[Tom Strong]]'' (1999-2006)
* ''[[Promethea]]'' (1999-2005)
* ''[[The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen]]'' (
{{reflist}}
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