Alan Moore Born (1953-11-18) 18 November 1953 (age61) Northampton, England Pen name Curt Vile, Jill de Ray, Translucia Baboon, The Original Writer Occupation Comics writer, novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, musician, cartoonist, magician Nationality English Genre Science fiction, fiction, non-fiction, superhero, horror Notable works Batman: The Killing Joke From Hell The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Lost Girls Marvelman Swamp Thing V for Vendetta Voice of the Fire Watchmen Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? For the Man Who Has Everything Spouse Children

Alan Moore (born 18 November 1953) is an English writer primarily known for his work in comic books including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell.[1] Frequently described as the best graphic novel writer in history,[2][3] he has been called "one of the most important British writers of the last fifty years".[4] He has occasionally used such pseudonyms as Curt Vile, Jill de Ray, Translucia Baboon and The Original Writer.

Moore started writing for British underground and alternative fanzines in the late 1970s before achieving success publishing comic strips in such magazines as 2000 AD and Warrior. He was subsequently picked up by the American DC Comics, and as "the first comics writer living in Britain to do prominent work in America",[3](p7) he worked on major characters such as Batman (Batman: The Killing Joke) and Superman ("Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?"), substantially developed the character Swamp Thing, and penned original titles such as Watchmen. During that decade, Moore helped to bring about greater social respectability for comics in the United States and United Kingdom.[3](p11) He prefers the term "comic" to "graphic novel."[5] In the late 1980s and early 1990s he left the comic industry mainstream and went independent for a while, working on experimental work such as the epic From Hell, the pornographic Lost Girls, and the prose novel Voice of the Fire. He subsequently returned to the mainstream later in the 1990s, working for Image Comics, before developing America's Best Comics, an imprint through which he published works such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the occult-based Promethea.

Moore is an occultist, ceremonial magician,[6] and anarchist,[7] and has featured such themes in works including Promethea, From Hell, and V for Vendetta, as well as performing avant-garde spoken word occult "workings" with The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, some of which have been released on CD.

Despite his own personal objections, his books have provided the basis for a number of Hollywood films, including From Hell (2001), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), V for Vendetta (2005), and Watchmen (2009). Moore has also been referenced in popular culture, and has been recognised as an influence on a variety of literary and television figures including Neil Gaiman,[8]Joss Whedon, and Damon Lindelof.[9][10]

Moore was born on 18 November 1953,[11] at St. Edmond's Hospital in Northampton to a working-class family whom he believed had lived in the town for several generations.[2](p11) He grew up in a part of Northampton known as The Boroughs, a poverty-stricken area with a lack of facilities and high levels of illiteracy, but he nonetheless "loved it. I loved the people. I loved the community and... I didn't know that there was anything else."[2](pp1316) He lived in his house with his parents, brewery worker Ernest Moore, and printer Sylvia Doreen, along with his younger brother Mike and his maternal grandmother.[2](p14) He "read omnivorously" from the age of five, getting books out of the local library, and subsequently attended Spring Lane Primary School.[2](p17) At the same time, he began reading comic strips, initially British strips, such as Topper and The Beezer, but eventually also American imports such as The Flash, Detective Comics, Fantastic Four, and Blackhawk.[2](p31) He later passed his eleven plus exam, and was therefore eligible to go to Northampton Grammar School,[12] where he first came into contact with people who were middle class and better educated, and he was shocked 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. Subsequently disliking school and having "no interest in academic study", he believed that there was a "covert curriculum" being taught that was designed to indoctrinate children with "punctuality, obedience and the acceptance of monotony".[2](pp1718)

"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."

In the late 1960s Moore began publishing his own poetry and essays in fanzines, eventually setting up his own fanzine, Embryo. Through Embryo, Moore became involved in a group known as the Arts Lab. The Arts Lab subsequently made significant contributions to the magazine.[2](pp3334) He began dealing the hallucinogenic LSD at school, being expelled for doing so in 1970 he later described himself as "one of the world's most inept LSD dealers".[13] The headmaster of the school subsequently "got in touch with various other academic establishments that I'd applied to and told them not to accept me because I was a danger to the moral well-being of the rest of the students there, which was possibly true."[2](p18)

Whilst continuing to live in his parents' home for a few more years, he moved through various jobs, including cleaning toilets and working in a tannery. Around 1971, he met and began a relationship with a Northampton-born girl named Phyllis, with whom he moved into "a little one-room flat in the Barrack Road area in Northampton". Soon marrying, they moved into a new council estate in the town's eastern district while he worked in an office for a sub-contractor of the local gas board. Moore felt that he was not being fulfilled by this job, and so decided to try to earn a living doing something more artistic.[2](pp3435)

Abandoning his office job, he decided to instead take up both writing and illustrating his own comics. He had already produced a couple of strips for several alternative fanzines and magazines, such as Anon E. Mouse for the local paper Anon, and St. Pancras Panda, a parody of Paddington Bear, for the Oxford-based Back Street Bugle.[3](pp1617) His first paid work was for a few drawings that were printed in NME music magazine, and not long after he succeeded in getting a series about a private detective known as Roscoe Moscow published using the pseudonym of Curt Vile (a pun on the name of composer Kurt Weill) in the weekly music magazine Sounds, earning 35 a week. Alongside this, he and Phyllis, along with their newborn daughter Leah, began claiming unemployment benefit to supplement this income.[2](p36) Not long after this, in 1979 he also began publishing a new comic strip known as Maxwell the Magic Cat in the Northants Post, under the pseudonym of Jill de Ray (a pun on the Medieval child-murderer Gilles de Rais, something he found to be a "sardonic joke"). Earning a further 10 a week from this, he decided to sign off of social security, and would continue writing Maxwell the Magic Cat until 1986.[2](pp3637) Moore has stated that he would have been happy to continue Maxwell's adventures almost indefinitely, but ended the strip after the newspaper ran a negative editorial on the place of homosexuals in the community.[14] Meanwhile, Moore decided to focus more fully on writing comics rather than both writing and drawing them,[15] stating that "After I'd been doing [it] for a couple of years, I realised that I would never be able to draw well enough and/or quickly enough to actually make any kind of decent living as an artist."[16](p15)

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