The man who invented the future

Alan Moore, who reinvented the comic book as the cutting-edge literary medium of our day, talks about beheading, the diabolical power of the media, the Bush dynasty and the fall of Tony Blair.

By Scott Thill

Jul 22, 2004 | "What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything."

-- Don DeLillo, "White Noise"

"The whole thing is a movie," says Alan Moore. The comic-book visionary behind such epoch-changing works as "Watchmen," "V for Vendetta" and "From Hell" is actually talking about the war in Iraq. But the statement could sum up his view of the ceaseless complexities of 21st century life, where reality TV and celebrity culture have usurped individuality, and the human body has become not much beyond more information needing to be assimilated.

Every once in a while we are horrified by a beheading (albeit one seen only on videotape) and human culture remembers that it is not much more than a vulnerable collection of flesh, bone and nerve endings. "This is what wars are; it's not Hollywood," Moore cautions. But ultimately we return to the womblike safety of our media universe with its push-button wars and Internet porn, where sex and death are hidden behind splashy corporate graphics.

The funny thing is that Alan Moore hates to talk about film and television, because, as he explains later in our interview, both "have a lot to answer for." He's not talking about how they've distilled his densely researched, intricate tales of socio-historical interrogation, like "From Hell" and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," into narrowcasted popcorn movies. Instead, he means the way they've had such an impact on human consciousness that many people were only able to articulate the horrific reality of 9/11 by comparing it to a disaster film.

Moore clearly believes that the same mechanism has foisted a deadly, unwanted and unnecessary war upon the world. "Television and movies have short-circuited reality," he asserts. "I don't think a lot of people are entirely clear on what is real and what is on the screen."

Moore, now 50, has a peculiar perspective on this problem of "misrecognition" between fiction and reality -- because so many of his works have seemingly anticipated or prefigured so much of what has come to pass. "V for Vendetta," Moore's dystopian early-1980s narrative about a future fascist Britain under siege by a notorious terrorist who was subjected to unbearable torture, echoes much of our current dilemma in the so-called war on terrorism, all the way down to the criminalization of homosexuality, the panoptic PATRIOT Act-like surveillance state and a homogeneous media that glosses over real news in favor of sensationalism.

Similarly, "Watchmen," Moore's groundbreaking serial that blew the comics genre wide open, unmasked our presumed comic-book heroes as nothing but a set of neuroses and psychoses in action, figures who look the other way (some in protest) as one of their own unleashes a devastating act of terror that kills half of New York's population -- ironically enough, in order to save the world from nuclear annihilation. It is the same kind of warped cost-benefit analysis that, some would argue, led to 9/11 and its resultant wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and who knows where else.

Then there is "From Hell," a labyrinthine masterpiece of historical research, detective work and social commentary worthy of Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" or William Burroughs' "Naked Lunch." Moore's calculated tale of turn-of-the-century England -- as seen through the eyes of its prostitutes, public servants and aristocrats -- achieves its apotheosis in the birth of the serial killer, which Moore considers one of the 20th century's key innovations.

There's so much information to absorb in "From Hell" that it's almost impossible to gather it in at one sitting. In one 38-page chapter alone, Moore's Jack the Ripper takes his driver on a city-wide tour of London's points of diabolical interest, connecting the bastions of secret societies, mythical and true lineages, transcendent architectures, phallic topographies and other landmarks into a pentagram shape. This allegorical voyage, which Moore says he made himself, relying on both recent and ancient maps of London, so terrifies Jack's driver that he vomits, sick with the realization that he is connected to his culture, his history and his employer in ways he never could have conceived.

The lesson there, as Moore explains it, is that to understand the world one lives in, one has to give "coherence to ... complexity, to say that it is possible to think about politics, history, mythology, architecture, murder and the rest of it all at the same time to see how it connects." And Moore's work is nothing if not complex. His explorations of the ways humanity deludes and condemns itself have done more to overcome the anti-comics prejudice of the American and European literary establishment than anything else in the comics genre. And he imparts a whole lot more information than Fox News or CNN.

In other words, Moore is not simply one of the finest writers in comic book history. He's one of the world's finest writers, period. He's capable of illuminating postmodern culture's disorienting information overload as well as any accepted literary genius, whether it's Melville, Pynchon or Joyce.

Next Page: "The thing with writing stories about the rise of fascism -- if you wait long enough, you'll be proved right"

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