MORE MOORE

Last month the trailer for Zach Snyder's movie adaptation of Watchmen premiered with The Dark Knight. Since then, sales of the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons have skyrocketed, with publisher DC Comics ordering up a 300,000 print run. Not bad for a comic book that came out 22 years ago.

Via a link from Neil Gaiman, here's a reprint of a 2002 interview with writer Moore. Despite the occasional typo, this is one of the most in-depth conversations with Moore I've ever seen. The Manchester Northampton comics master cultivates the image of a wild-haired, wide-eyed, magic-practicing outcast -- and he is indeed that -- but here he's also revealed as an erudite, insightful and very generous writer.

Writing will consume your life, because so much of writing happens in your head – you don't need to be ‘at work', you don't even need to be awake. You're not gonna get a respite from writing when your head hits the pillow, you're not gonna get a respite from writing when you go on a holiday caravan to Great Yarmouth, or anywhere – the moon – you can't get away from it, it's in your head. And if it's working properly, it's probably obsessive. If you've got a story on the boil, and if you're a writer you probably will have, you're probably thinking about problems with that story, good things about it that you wanna enhance and make even better, and you're probably thinking that all the time. You might be thinking that when you're having sex. You might be thinking that when you're eating dinner, you might be thinking that on public transport. This is something that will take over your life. Surrender. Surrender to it right from word one. Don't fight. It's bigger then you are, it's more important than you are, just do what it says. Even if that seems to be completely ruining your life, do what it says. Even if it tells you to do something stupid – if it tells you to jump off a cliff, do it.

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... Watchmen was about a number of things. It started off as a silly-ass superhero story. We wanted to do a superhero story where we saw what would happen if you'd got a group of superheroes existing in a credible, real world, and what if these were credible, real characters emotionally-speaking, or at least as credible as we can make them. I suppose that was the basic premise – we thought we might get a darker than usual, grittier than usual superhero story out of it. We had got to round about the third issue when all of a sudden we started to realise that there was something growing out of the storytelling that we hadn't really anticipated. There was something happening within the structure of the story – slightly interesting sparks, coming to life ...

Comments

[vrtualme]

for a few years there, when i was really into my poetry, i'd have a journal with me 24/7. i was always writing. every fragment of a thought went down on paper. my friends thought i was crazy, but some great stuff came from that.