Alan Moore
18 November: Alan Moore is born in 1953 in Northampton, England. His parents, a brewery worker and a printer, live in a pverty-ridden section of Northampton, The Boroughs.
While in primary school, AM begins reading comic strips, initially in British comics, such as Topper and The Beezer, but eventually also American imports such as The Flash, Detective Comics, Fantastic Four, and Blackhawk.
AM attends Northampton Grammar School (high school), where he first meets people who are middle class and better educated. He is schocked at how he went from being one of the top pupils at his primary school to one of the lowest in the class at secondary.
AM begins publishing his poetry and essays in fanzines, eventually setting up his own, called Embryo. Through this venture he becomes involved in a group known as the Northampton Arts Lab.
AM begins taking lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, recreationally. He later said of this,
"LSD was an incredible experience. Not that I'm recommending it for anybody else; but for me it kind of – it hammered home to me that reality was not a fixed thing. That the reality that we saw about us every day was one reality, and a valid one – but that there were others, different perspectives where different things have meaning that were just as valid. That had a profound effect on me."
AM is expelled from school for selling LSD to his fellow students.
AM meets and eventually marries Phyllis Dixon, with whom he moves into "a little one-room flat in the Barrack Road area in Northampton". They then move into into a new council estate in the town's eastern district while he works in an office for a sub-contractor of the local gas board. But AM is unfulfilled in his job, so decides to try to earn a living doing something more artistic.
AM and and Steve Moore (whom he had known since he was fourteen) create the violent cyborg character Axel Pressbutton for some comics in Dark Star, a British music magazine. Steve Moore writes the strip under the name "Pedro Henry," while AM illustrates them using the pseudonym "Curt Vile," a pun on the name of composer Kurt Weill.
AM finds a great deal of work as a freelance writer hired by several comic book companies in Britain. During this time comic books are gaining popularity in Britain. They are no longer just for very small boys; teenagers and university students are reading multiple titles.
Moore is voted Best Writer by the Society of Strip Illustration.
Quality Communications (the publisher of a monthly magazine, Warrior) gives AM two ongoing strips in Warrior: Marvelman and V for Vendetta. The latter was a manifestation of AM's pessimism about Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, which he projected forward as a fascist state in which all ethnic and sexual minorities were eliminated.
Under the pseudonym Translucia Baboon, AM becomes involved in popular music, and forms his own band, The Sinister Ducks.
Moore is again voted Best Writer by the Society of Strip Illustration.
AM is hired by DC Comics to take over the writing for The Saga of the Swamp Thing, which was then a formulaic and poor-selling monster comic. AM reimagines the character and writes a series of formally experimental stories that address environmental and social issues alongside the horror and fantasy. He revives many of DC's neglected magical and supernatural characters, including the Spectre, the Demon, the Phantom Stranger, Deadman, and others, and introduces John Constantine, an English working-class magician based visually on Sting, then the bass player and lead singer for The Police.
Moore's run on Swamp Thing (from 1983 to 1987) is so successful both critically and commercially that DC recruits other British writers like Grant Morrison, Jamie Delano, Peter Milligan, and Neil Gaiman to write comics in a similar vein, often involving radical revamps of obscure characters.
The Sinister Ducks release their first single, "March of the Sinister Ducks."
AM begins the Watchmen series. This work cements his reputation as one of the formost voices in comics. The 12-issue run imagines what the world would be like if costumed heroes had really existed since the 1940s. AM and artist Dave Gibbons create a Cold War mystery in which the shadow of nuclear war threatens the world. The heroes who are caught up in this escalating crisis either work for the US government or are outlawed, and are motivated to heroism by their various psychological idiosyncracies. Watchmen is non-linear, told from multiple points of view, and includes highly sophisticated self-references, ironies, and formal experiments.
Watchmen is the only comic to win the Hugo Award, in a one-time category ("Best Other Form"). It is widely seen as Moore's best work, and has been regularly described as the greatest comic book ever written. Other roughly contemporary works such as Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez's Love and Rockets, Watchmen is part of a late 1980s trend in American comics towards more adult sensibilities.
Moore wins multiple Eagle Awards for his work on Watchmen and Swamp Thing. (These are a series of awards for comic book titles and creators, awarded by fans voting for work produced during the previous year.) In the US categories he wins "Favorite Writer," "Favorite Comic Book," "Favorite Supporting Character," and Favorite New Title." In the UK categories he wins "Favorite Writer," "Favorite Character," "Favorite Continuing Story," and "Character Worthy of Their Own Title" (in this last category his works held all top three spots).
Watchmen wins the Comics Buyers Guide Fan Award for Favorite Comic Book Story.
AM writes another classic, Batman: The Killing Joke. The work becomes famous for its origin story of the Joker as a tragic character, a family man and failed comedian who suffered "one bad day" that finally drove him insane. Many critics consider the graphic novel to be the definitive Joker story and one of the best Batman stories ever published.
Batman: The Killing Joke wins the Comics Buyers Guide Fan Award for Favorite Comic Book Story.
Moore wins the Harvey Award for Best Writer for Watchmen.
AM's relationship with DC Comics had become problematic in the mid-1980s, as he was at loggerheads with the publisher about the issues of creator's rights and merchandising. Reports abound that AM and Dave Gibbons received only 2% of the profits earned by DC for Watchmen. After completing V for Vendetta, which DC had already begun publishing, AM leaves DC.
In a 2006 interview with The New York Times, AM later claimed that fine print in the contracts regarding Watchmen and V for Vendetta, which stipulated that the ownership rights would revert to Moore and the artists after the stories had gone out of publication, had tricked him into believing he would eventually retain ownership, only to discover that DC had no intention of ceasing publication of the stories, effectively preventing the ownership from ever returning to him.
Moore sets up his own publishing company, Mad Love. Following the model of the Hernandez brothers, he publishes comics that focus on realism and the everyday lives of ordinary people. He also publishes material with a specific political bent, against the rampant conservatism of the day.
He also begins work for a small independent comic anthology. The first series he produces is From Hell, a fictionalized account of the Jack the Ripper murders of the 1880s. Moore depicts the murders as a consequence of the politics and economics of the time. His next series is Lost Girls, which he calls a work of "intelligent pornography." This series is set in 1913, where Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and Wendy from Peter Pan—who are all of different ages and from different classes—meet in a European hotel and tells the tales of their various sexual encounters.
With Lost Girls, Moore wanted to attempt something innovative in comics, and believed that creating comics pornography was a way of achieving this. He later said that,
"I had a lot of different ideas as to how it might be possible to do an up-front sexual comic strip and to do it in a way that would remove a lot of what I saw were the problems with pornography in general. That it's mostly ugly, it's mostly boring, it's not inventive – it has no standards."
Moore returns to the mainstream comics industry, and begins writing superheor comics again. He writes for Image Comics, an imprint widely known at the time for its flashy artistic style, graphic violence, and barely-dressed large-breasted women. His alignment with Image upsets many of his fans. His first work published by Image, an issue of the series Spawn, was soon followed by the creation of his own mini-series, 1963. Moore later explained his unique position:
"After I'd done the 1963 stuff I'd become aware of how much the comic audience had changed while I'd been away. That all of a sudden it seemed that the bulk of the audience really wanted things that had almost no story, just lots of big, full-page pin-up sort of pieces of artwork. And I was genuinely interested to see if I could write a decent story for that market.
Moore declares himself to be a Ceremonial Magician, or practitioner of Ceremonial Magic. This covers a encompasses a wide variety of rituals of magic, but all are insistent on ceremony and and a number of magical objects and accessories to aid the practitioner. The height of its popularity was in the late Victorian period (William Butler Yeats was a believer), when it was popularized by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It draws on such schools of philosophical and occult thought as Hermetic Qabalah, Enochian magic, Thelema, and the magic of various grimoires. Ceremonial magic is part of Hermeticism and Western esotericism.
Throughout the remainder of the decade Moore produces a number of works for Image, including Violator, Violator/Badrock, Spawn: Blood Feud, WildC.A.T.S., and Supreme.
Moore wins the Harvey Award for Best Writer for From Hell.
For a second time, Moore wins the Harvey Award for Best Writer for From Hell.
Image partner Jim Lee offers Moore his own imprint, which would be under Lee's company, WildStorm Productions. Moore names this imprint America's Best Comics, and lines up a series of artists and writers to assist him in this venture. But Lee soon sells WildStorm—including America's Best Comics—to DC Comics. So Moore finds himself back with a company he'd vowed to never work with again. But Lee and DC editor Scott Dunbier fly to England to personally reassure Moore that he will not be affected by the sale, and will not have to deal with DC directly. Deciding that there are too man people involved to back out of the project, Moore launches ABC.
The first series published by ABC is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, featuring a number of characters from Victorian adventure novels, such as H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain, H. G. Wells' Invisible Man, Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Wilhelmina Murray from Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Moore produces other series for ABC, including Tom Strong, Top 10, Promethea, and Tomorrow Stories.
Moore wins the Harvey Award for Best Writer for the fourth time, this time for his entire corpus.
Moore wins the Harvey Award for Best Writer for the fifth time, for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Moore wins the Harvey Award for Best Writer for the sixth time, for Promethea.
Despite their earlier promise to AM not to interfere with him and his work, DC nevertheless makes unilateral editorial decisions about Moore's work that further estranges him from the company. DC destroys an entire print run of one issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen because they are afraid it will cause tension between them and their rival, Marvel Publishing. One story that Moore wrote for Tomorrow Stories is blocked entirely because it referred to references to L. Ron Hubbard, American occultist Jack Parsons, and the "Babalon Working" (a series of magic ceremonies or rituals performed from January to March 1946 by Parsons and Hubbard).
Moore is given the "Best Comics Writer Ever" National Comics Award.
For the second year in a row, Moore is given the "Best Comics Writer Ever" National Comics Award.
Moore wins the Harvey Award for Best Writer for the seventh time, for Promethea.
In an unprecedented occurence, Moore is given the "Best Comics Writer Ever" National Comics Award for the third year in a row.
AM leaves DC again. He continues his The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lost Girls projects with other publishers.
Watchmen is the only graphic novel to make it on to Time Magazine's "The 100 Best Novels from 1923 to the Present" list.
Moore appears in animated form in an episode of The Simpsons – a show of which he is a fan – entitled "Husbands and Knives," which airs on his 54th birthday.
Moore begins publishing a series of comics set in the H. P. Lovecraft universe. In 2003 Avatar Press had published Alan Moore's Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths, a compilation of unpublished scripts and strips and comic adaptations of previously published poems by Moore themed around or based upon Lovecraft's work. Avatar Press releases Moore's four-issue horror mini-series, Neonomicon, throughout 2010 and 2011.
Moore leads a research and development project to "create an app enabling digital comics to be made by anyone." Electricomics, an open source app for reading and creating interactive comics, is released. The Guardian names it one of the best iPhone/iPad apps of 2015. Pipedream Comics names it the Digital Comics App of the Year.
Moore creates a twelve-part series, Providence on Lovecraft and the Sources of the Cthulhu Mythos, which is a prequel to Neonomicon.
Moore announces he is retiring from writing comics.
Moore confirms his reasons for retiring, saying,
"I'm definitely done with comics, I haven't written one for getting on for five years. I will always love and adore the comics medium but the comics industry and all of the stuff attached to it just became unbearable."
Moore leaves the field with 24 individual Eisner Awards, which are regarded by many as the most prestigious, significant awards in the comics industry, the equivalent to the Academy Awards.