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The Mindscape of Alan Moore
Bart Simpson: Alan Moore! You wrote my favorite issues of Radioactive Man!
Alan Moore: Oh really? So you like that I made your favorite superhero a heroin-addicted jazz critic who's not radioactive? -“The Simpsons
“The only place that you seem to find anything of any value is at the margins of any of these cultures, at the fringes of pop and of cinema and comics and books. That's where the real action's going on, not in the kind of Oscar-winning or Booker-prize winning enclave.” – Alan Moore
Since Elvis Presley first swiveled his hips, middle class white teenagers have been raiding African-American culture and that is understandable. Black people are cool. But since the mid-1990s, with the invention of the internet, something strange has been happening. Perfectly normal human beings, dare I say it, even hot chicks, are claiming to be, or have been nerds, dorks, geeks, dweebs. Hotties like Sharon Stone, Nicole Kidman, Carmen Diaz, Denise Richards, Gisele Bundchen, Juliana Margulies, Zooey Deschanel, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Winonna Ryder all have tried to claim the mantle. A blind date I went on a few years ago, the really hot girl proclaimed, “I am a huge nerd. I love Star Wars.” Okay, a really hot chick cannot and never has been a geek. If someone wants to sleep with you, you are out of the club. At one point in their lives everyone feels gangly, ugly, and socially inept. That does not make you a nerd. It makes you human. Liking “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” “Farscape,” Spider-Man or any of the other tent poles of loser culture does not make you one either. Being a nerd is about social isolation and stigma and taking enjoyment in aspects of our culture that the cool kids might only have a surface knowledge. It is time I start taking back the title for my people.
There are all kinds of nerds, computer geeks, movie dorks, sci-fi dweebs, science losers, political wonks, book readers, and one of their patron saints is Alan Moore. If you recognize the name and can picture the British gentleman in your mind, you have no need to question whether you are a friend of Bill’s (Gates). His celebrity is such that, at the last geek convention he went to, he fled the place after several fans followed him into the restroom and pestered him at a time when most people least want to be pestered. Yet, if he walked across the street to get a Coke, the cashier probably would not have the foggiest clue of who the long haired, bearded freak was and that probably applies to 99.999 percent of the rest of America.
That is a shame because Alan Moore might be the greatest writer, not just comic book writer, but writer alive today. He not only transformed a children’s genre into something that adults could proudly read, but the depth and insight found in anyone of his capes-and-cowls sagas rivals anything found in the pages of any book in the New York Times best sellers’ list. His graphic novel Watchmen, of which the film version is due out in a few weeks, is considered by many to be the Magnus Opium of the medium. Entire books have been devoted to going through any of his given works panel by panel, page by page, to show the complexity and detail that goes into what he is trying to communicate. Three of his other graphic novels, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, and V for Vendetta have also been put on the big screen, although none have the depth of the source material which draws on the works of Thomas Pynchon, Michael Moorcock, Will Eisner, Clive Barker, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Kirby, William S. Burroughs, and Robert Anton Wilson.
So who is Alan Moore and more importantly why should I want to watch a documentary about him? He might be one of the strangest men to ever garner mainstream success and try to shun it at the same time. While his works show a depth and knowledge that most graduate students in an English department would envy, he never even made it through high school, being expelled for dealing LSD. Engaged in an unconventional relationship with his first wife and another woman, he set up his first publishing company which ended when the two women decided they only want to cohabitate together and took with them his two daughters. He is a vegetarian, anarchist who practices the black arts and worships a snake-like deity called Glycon. While renowned for work with mainstream companies such as Marvel and DC and with characters such as Swamp Thing, Batman, Superman, and Constantine, his relationships with both have ended in utter disaster, with Moore vowing he would never work for either again. Almost every time Hollywood has expressed an interest in one of his works, Moore has sued, expressed dismay, or signed away any financial reimbursement to be given to the artist who drew the original project. Any exploration of Moore’s thought process is going to involve psychedelics, sex, darkness, spirituality, and just plain strangeness.
So what, is Moore genuine? In his non-superhero work, he mixes fact and fiction, ideas and fantasy to communicate themes never touched in comedies before. In From Hell, he tackled Jack the Ripper and speculated that the British Royal family might have been behind the slayings. With V for Vendetta, he took his concern about the rise of conservative political figures like Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher, projected them to their logical ends, and presented a big brother-like story involving a futuristic Guy Fawkes who seeks to use the symbols of the English empire against itself. Taking the characters of Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz, Wendy Darling from Peter Pan, and Alice straight out of her adventures in Wonderland and having them meet as adults at a hotel and spin together erotic stories from their pasts. He teams up the 19th century British action/adventure literary heroes (The Invisible Man, Dr Jekyll/Mister Hyde, Captain Nemo, Allen Quaatermain, and the character of Nina from Dracula), into a Victorian era X-Men-like team in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but this team has problems the X-Men could never dream of having. In most of his superhero work, he takes seriously these questions. What if these super human like creatures really existed. Would their morality be the same as ours? Would they stand by and allow our greed, corruption, and baser natures to dominant our politics and interaction between nations or would they interfere. What kind of chaos would a real life Superman (Moore calls him, Supreme) cause?
Alan Moore does in his writing what geeks/nerds do when it comes to their field of interest. There is a joy in taking a subject matter that most people have merely a shallow interest in and taking it seriously. Hours are spent exploring the ins and outs of the focus of their love. They find others have similar such interests and surround themselves with them, so they can discuss and share their insights, not only about points of curiosity, but about the wider meaning of life. It is why, at the end of the day, nerds when they get older, are always more interesting than the cool kids in school.
Verdict: A Great Documentary