In an infamously self-referential field, comic author, Alan Moore stands aloof. Having revolutionised mainstream comics with 1985's labyrinthine, metaphor-laden and, in passages, breathtakingly stark Watchman series, Moore promptly turned his back on the limelight to furrow in the margins. A deepening fascination with English mythology and contemporary occult orders yielded a string of esoteric tracts, hyper-dense treatises which pushed the oeuvre to visceral extremes and drew comparisons with Tolstoy and Dickens. Permanently bedecked in flapping black vestments, his hulking features obscured by a ferocious thatch of facial hair, Moore bears an unsettling resemblance to a home counties Rasputin. It is a carefully cultivated image. While other comic writers collaborate over pizza or chew the fat at fan conventions, Moore broods enigmatically in his secluded Northampton pile. To the coterie of profoundly conservative New York publishing houses dominating the industry, he may as well be relaying his dispatches from the outer rings of Saturn. Born in 1953, Moore exploded onto the scene in the early 1980s, when DC comics - home to Superman and Batman - hired him to overhaul Swamp Thing, an ailing curiosity which, lurching uneasily between horror and farce, was haemorrhaging readers at a distressing rate. Moore reworked the Swamp Thing into a subtext laden post-modern satire. Controversy swiftly embroiled the title, culminating in uproar when DC refused to censor a plot line featuring (admittedly subtly framed) allusions towards incest and sodomy. The kids, predictably, loved it to bits. Swamp Thing's circulation climbed from 17,000 to 100,000, convincing DC to give Moore his head. He embarked on a 12-part stand-alone collaboration with artist Dave Gibbons (best-known for his eviscerating ink-work on Frank Millar's revisionist Batman saga The Dark Night Returns). Dour and brutalised, Watchmen posited a grim cold war America "protected" by a grotesque, occasionally psychotic, troupe of costumed "heroes" turned rapists, racists and CIA stooges. Moore's multifaceted, literary reference-strewn, plot and vitriolic deployment of irony, radicalised comic writing, spawning, to its author's enduring chagrin, a generation of calculatingly morose rip-offs culminating in Tim Burton's neo-gothic 1989 Batman movie. A row over money and marketing rights saw Moore and Gibbons sever their ties with DC. Weary of his burgeoning celebrity, Moore retreated into a 15-year, self-imposed exile during which he scripted From Hell, a cathartic account of the Jack the Ripper murders. A big screen adaptation, filmed in Prague and starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham, arrives in cinemas in August. Exhibiting a previously unhinted at lightness of touch, Moore recently dipped a hesitant toe in the mainstream with the rollicking League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a rambunctious Victorian fantasy in which fictional heroes such as Captain Nemo, H.G. Well's The Invisible Man, and Allan Quartermain, the daring adventurer of King Solomon's Mines, join forces to battle evil. Disenchanted with obscurity, Moore today talks enthusiastically of returning to subvert the genre from within. Keep an eye on the shelves. Comics just got a whole lot more interesting.
More on Moore at www.salon.com/people/feature/ 2000/10/18/moore/index.html