ANOTHER UNIVERSE - Alan Moore Interview 1/1/1997

Webdate: 11-11-97

The Writer Supreme : Talks About His Role at Extreme, Twilight, and the Future of the Industry

Alan Moore's relaunch of Extreme Studios' flagship hero, Supreme, has already won a FAN magazine award for best relaunch. If MANIA gave awards for relaunches, he'd be in the running. too. Now Moore is preparing to do the same thing on an infinitely grander scale, retrofitting the entire Extreme universe (including Glory. Prophet. the New Men and the ever-expanding Youngblood team) with a past, a present a future, and with luck, a purpose.

The New Extreme Universe Supreme Watchmen The Future of Comics The Industry DC and Marvel Other Projects

Judgment Day

MANIA:

In your own words, what is Judgment Day all about?

Alan Moore:

Well, Judgment Day is something that originated, in a sense, way back in conversations between me and Eric Stephenson. I don't remember the exact order of them but as far as I can recall, in one of them I pointed out to Eric that in the course of my work on Supreme I'm giving Supreme’s history a complete overhaul, but that entails showing flashbacks to various periods in the history of the Extreme Universe. What I said at the time was that, if Rob wanted, by the time I got this done I could pretty well have established the entire back story of the Extreme Universe overall.

I think I also said to him I’d never been able to see why anybody didn't just give me their entire universe and say, "sort it out.” Because it struck me that that would be what I'd do if I were in that position.

It would be an advantage to have a universe not thought up by a committee or by a kind of car crash of stories which is what most continuities are formed by loads of different writers write different stories over a ten year period and the conglomerate of these forms a continuity. So I felt maybe it would be interesting to see if one person were to come up with a continuity with a specific end in mind, you would get the kind of specific comic book universe that I would like to create, and I want one that is open to as many different sorts of stories as comics used to be open to.

MANIA: Sort of the universe that Marvelman created the end of that run, with smart waterfront kids tracking down spies, and monsters in the jungle, and that sort of thing.

Alan Moore: Well, a bit like that. That was a kind of high-tech, futuristic, "Yeah, what if we made that world real in real terms?"

This is a bit different. What Marvelman was, he provides the technology to make this fantastic world real. We're not bothering about that, were just going from the assumption that what they did in the comics in the '60’s was real anyway. It's just a sort of world where there happen to be talking gorillas or what have you.

So what we want to do is create a universe where, just as in the comics in the '60's, you can have Western heroes, medieval heroes, Stone Age heroes, outer space heroes, war heroes, supernatural heroes, romance comic heroes, teenage heroes ... all co-existing.

There was a diversity in comics then which I think it's something that we have been lacking lately. Everything is very focused upon the superhero. Although this is still going to be primarily a superhero continuity, I want to start building in the stuff around the edges that gives it contrast and depth.

So basically what happened was, I think, when Rob split with Image, he was given the opportunity, in fact it almost became desirable, to create a new, very well defined version of the Extreme universe. I think I connected up with conversations I had with Eric and Eric had presumably had with Rob, basically I was offered the chance to do a miniseries that would give the history of the Extreme universe and in doing so create much of it.

The process of creating this history will put a bit of a new shine upon the current continuity. I have the freedom to revise nearly all of the Extreme characters and put them into a sort of context, acting as a consultant on nearly all their books in terms of writing a synopsis of how I think a series should go and how to draw upon their past to make the characters richer, give them more depth.

MANIA: And this will be for the next few months, or for the indefinite future?

Alan Moore: Well, for the indefinite future. I’ll be basically be providing a background and a template for the characters. So many comic writers want to write DC characters, and the reason for that is because the DC characters have got all this backlog of history. Now there's no reason why characters that are coming to be in the '90's, like the Extreme characters did, can't also have that apparent history. I think Supreme has demonstrated that.

MANIA: Rather quickly and in only a few issues.

Alan Moore: Yeah, within the first run of twelve we fill in an incredible amount of back story, it's sort of a full year's continuity and it seems very credible. I want to do that for the entire Extreme universe; that doesn't mean that I shall be doing forties versions of every character, and fifties versions of every character, but I will be giving a lot more background to the characters so that it will be as if the writers working on them had that background to draw upon.

MANIA: So you will essentially be “their history”; you'll be all the writers up to 1990-something?

Alan Moore: Yeah, that's it. I'll do a synopsis of Glory which will give more detail about her background. This magic kingdom that she comes from? Nothing much has been said about it, whereas I can see some potential there for doing something that's as potentially staggering as, say, Kirby's Asgard or some of these great things from the past.

So there are ways we can beef up these existing character. We've got the whole rich pageant of comics history that we can choose from, basically. I think that is one of the benefits of the 1990's, that we can look back over the entire landscape and there is nothing to stop us [from] choosing any style, mood, even values. We don't have to be imprisoned, really, by our moment in history. I think we've reached a point where we've got the freedom to take what's best of what's done before and to try and make it into something that works in a contemporary sense. So that’s the plan.

MANIA: How did the idea get started?

Alan Moore: Rob had got the idea, and he was pretty solid on the title of Judgment Day, which he'd come up with, and at first I was a bit reluctant because I said to Eric Stephenson that this sounded to me like the end of the world, the apocalypse, another universal crisis and I said," You can see in the words, I'm bored already." And we must agree, the apocalypse is boring, let's face in I tried to think of something else that the term Judgment Day might apply to and so this was what gave me the idea of this court case.

MANIA: The idea that no one can sit in judgment on superbeings but other superbeings?

Alan Moore: That's right. So we're going to have, and as far as I know it might be the first, a superhero murder case. If you think of Murder One, except everybody's a superhero....

We're going to have three issues. There's going to be this murder trial and in the course of it evidence will come out that ties this murder into an event that goes right back to the beginnings of the Extreme universe. Ifs going to be a long trial; this is going to make the O.J. Simpson trial look pretty tiny in comparison because it goes right back to before there was life on earth.

In the course of the trial there will be certain events which will change the nature of the future of that universe; there will be big changes for Youngblood, for example. For most of the characters, all of them, there will be things that come up at the trial, quite naturally, that will change that future, in much the same way as finding out a lot about the past will change the future. That's basically the plan for the three issues.

The New Extreme Universe

MANIA: Okay, can you tell me specifically what sorts of changes are happening? We already know that Supreme, by virtue of his calling this trial and moderating it, is coming out of this sort of semi-seclusion he's been in throughout most of his life.

Alan Moore: Yes, Supreme is going to become more central. That's been hinted at in my run on Supreme so far. There's also, I think in issue #47 or 48 of Supreme, which I have seen some of the artwork for, we start to reintroduce some of the vanished characters from the '60’s. In fact by the end of Supreme #49 we've already reintroduced a whole ’60's back-continuity of characters.

MANIA: The Allied Supermen of America?

Alan Moore: Well, we've got them, but then again most of those existed previously, but those of the '60's characters like Space Hunter, The Fisherman and Skipper. There was Black Baron, Uncle Agent, Mark Time the dome engineer, there were the Conquerors of the Uncanny, and of course who could forget the Storm Birds, the fighting aviators of that period. There was Janet Planet, the Spice Puppet.

There's all sorts of them but they all sort of come out of retirement all by the end of Supreme #49. So we've already got quite a lot of characters but what I’ll be doing is filling in the western characters like Kid Thunder and the barbarian characters like Bran the Berserk and medieval characters like the Winter Knight and things like this. We'll be filling in a whole history that will stretch all the way back to the Stone Age.

Supreme will be moving into more of a central position. Youngblood, I don't want to tell you too much but ... and this is note criticism toward Youngblood, this is just my take on Youngblood...when I looked at the recent issues it seemed to me that it was a bit sprawling and amorphous, that you've got hundreds of superheroes in this team that didn't really seem to have atones or an identity. So I started looking back at classic super-team books and yeah, there's your Justice League and there's your Marvel period, your Fantastic Four and stuff like that. There's also the kind of 70's classics or early 80's classics where you've got your very early Chris Claremont, John Byrne X-Men stuff. Didn't like all of it, but them was some very good stuff in them. The same with the Teen Titans with Mary Wolfman and George Perez. Again, not all of it was to my taste, but I could are what they were trying to do there's some very impressive riffs.

MANIA: What, in your opinion, were the sorts of things they did well?

Alan Moore: It was the way they were fun, modern and up to the minute for that period. They seemed to take a delight in playing in the established DC continuity, or in the established Marvel continuity if we're talking about the X-Men, that they'd be bringing up these old characters or new versions of characters ... there was that element that I liked about the books. Lots of guest stars, a mandatory science-fiction plot line that would take them to an alien world for couple of issues. It's difficult to pin it down much more than that. Do you know what I mean?

MANIA: Actually, I do know what you mean. I was a big fan of both those titles. They would do something hyper-realistic with runaways who are addicted to drugs, and then they were sending them off to the planet] Tamaran or whatever.

Alan Moore: Yeah, that's it. And they were flexible. Sometimes they'd get bogged down in subplots and that eventually was what probably brought about the end of both series. But when they were fun, they were fun.

So what I'd like to do, without being silly or inconsequential, is to have Youngblood have some very major changes in the course of this trial. What we'll have at the end of it is a much smaller team and I think a much more dynamic one, hopefully, and one in which ... I wouldn't like to say how many of the current Youngblood members will still be in the team. Maybe none of them, who knows. I've got some plans.

The New Men need a role. We've already got a kind of Teen Titans/X-Men type of young superhero team [Youngblood] and then with the Allies, which we'll be reforming after the trial, then we'll have our grand old men, Justice League/Avengers type group. I see there's a possibility for a kind of group that doesn't go out and fight crime, doesn't protect the world but they're explorers, adventurers.

MANIA: Like the best of the Fantastic Four.

Alan Moore: Yes, the best of the Fantastic Four and the immediate Kirby book that preceded the Fantastic Four, which was Challengers of the Unknown. There's a lot of similarities between the Fantastic Four and The Challengers of the Unknown. If you imagined somewhere between the two, then that gives a hint of what might be happening to the New Men.

Their character Maximage, yeah, I've got some ideas for her that would probably, again, try to bring out the best of mystic characters in long cloaks over the years, including all the usual suspects, all the usual candidates, and trying to boil down some essence.

That is a lot of the work for been doing on Supreme and that is probably what's fueling my thoughts on Judgment Day. To try and extract an essence from these various types of comics. To sort of boil down some essence and instill that in these characters.

On one level [Supreme] is Superman and there is no point in denying that. At the same time its not just Superman; there's a lot of ideas in Supreme that never appeared in Superman that take you to different areas. To some degree I've tried to make an archetypal big-guy superhero in a cape, who stands up as well as Captain Marvel and all the others. To some degree that's what I want to do with all the characters. I want to make them archetypal, I want to give them that archetypal power that the best superheroes have.

MANIA: So Youngblood will be the young world-hopping superteam.

Alan Moore: Yes, that's what I want. I want to sort of get at what it was that made those books work in the first place. Then distill some of it and jack Youngblood full of it, that's the idea. Now, how well this will all works still remains to be seen but this is the plan, anyway.

MANIA: Well, we've already seen the few issues of Supreme and it seems that the way that you re communicating the essence of Supreme is by an accretion of thousands of details, which is kind of an interesting way to do it you boil it down to an essence, but you communicate that essence by building it up by slow degrees.

Alan Moore: And they are telling details, there are things that.. you'll mention a name in conversation, but I know what comic readers are like, they pick up on it, they'll notice and remember it That's a great way to get lots of information to comic readers: you just mention it casually in dialogue, mention a name of a character that they've never heard of before, and there's ways of doing this. In the space of four issues we've fleshed out an awful lot of Supreme's world. And it already seems like it’s been there for years, and I think over the next few issues as we meet the "Professor Night-Supreme team," and all the rest of it. By the end of the twelve issues of Supreme it's going to feel like the characters have been here for 45 or 50 years.

Supreme

MANIA: What are the sorts of things that you want to go into in Supreme that em different from the Earth-1 Superman that you've beautifully closed off in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow and so forth?

Alan Moore: What I want to do, is to do a really supreme being. I see this as not being a retro book, not in the way 1963 was. There's a lot of similarities. Rich Veitch being one of the most striking ones.

I’m putting these flashbacks, these 8 page stories, 12 page stories, into the twelve issues of Supreme in order to create that illusion of a previously existing continuity. By the time I get to Supreme #52, in the ones that follow 52 I don't think there's going to be any flashback sequences. It’s going to be entirely a modern day Image superhero comic that will have all of that back history to call on. Now that means I would be able to do any story that I want, it's the blend of the old and the modern. That's the interesting thing to me and I think Jim Lee just said some similar things: it's not the retro stuff, it's how the retro stuff is played up against the contemporary stuff. What we're trying to do is create something that has the energy, the undoubted energy of the modern Image superhero stuff. There is a sort of hyperkinetic energy that kids do respond to in [the Image style].

MANIA: Not just kids.

Alan Moore: Not just kids; there is a hyperkinetic energy that has something to do with Image's success, a large pan of it. 2 or 3 panels a page, the steroid characters, everything taken to extremes.

There is always something good about that and at the same time there's also weaknesses in that. Some writers find it very difficult, even if they have six panels a page, to tell a story in 24 pages. There's not many writers who can tell a story in 24 pages if they've only got 2 or 3 panels a page. So there's been story problems with the Image stuff; the an has looked incredible and all these wonderful new coloring techniques, but the story values have slipped.

What I'd like to do is to try and infuse this new 90's model type super hero with all of the imaginative power of the superheroes of the previous 50 years. To give it that sort of humor and grace and see if we can come up with some sort of composite that's viable for the next century.

MANIA: Tall order.

Alan Moore: Yeah, but Or worth a go. What else would I he doing?

MANIA: Actually, you have sort of been away from superheroes for a while. Was it the prospect of rebuilding the universe from the ground up that brought you back?

Alan Moore: No, I have been doing a little bit for a couple of the Image guys. I've been doing stuff for Wildstorm, did some stuff for Titan and some 1963 stuff. This was stuff that I could still have a lot of fun with. It's fun, lively, it makes a break from the more serious work. It's nice to be able to punctuate the more serious work with something that is like play time. Working with superheroes, "what can we do with him now?", was a big part of the appeal.

Although with Supreme, when the character was offered to me and I started thinking about it, I realized that this would be an opportunity to actually create the kind of character that I thought should be created. To some degree Judgment Day is just an expansion of the opportunity. Gives me the chance to create the entire universe in six days and on the seventh I shall rest.

MANIA: So you don't consider Watchmen and Miracleman to be your last word on the subject?

Alan Moore: There's never really a final word, is there? There are all different types of superhero stories. Watchmen: I can't imagine how much further you could go in that particular direction. Actually, for the dark, grimly realistic, structurally complex superhero stray, that probably is as far as it goes.

MANIA: Whereas Supreme appears to be going in the exact opposite direction, possibly farther than other people have gone.

Alan Moore: Trying to do some very complex things with some very simple elements. Like in Supreme #44. Ostensibly it’s a recounting of the history of the 1940's super group the Allied Supermen of America and it tells about their last case which was New Years Eve, December 31, 1949. These three specters turn up at this feast, who are basically the three EC horror hosts, who take these groups of superheroes into the world of the future.

There is a world very much like the EC science-fiction, post-atomic, post-nuclear holocaust world. Then there's a world very much like the Shock SuspenStories suburbia, where you have got women planning to murder their husbands, kids taking heroin, the mayor is a member of the KKK. The third world is the world of the Mad parody, where Supreme becomes Supremelvin and ifs like Superduperman. It’s a good read, understated.

Supreme is flashing back to this story while he's meeting up with other members of the superhero group in the 90's. It's a nice little story and very simple, but what it's doing is quite complex. It’s making a comment upon why superhero groups all vanished at the end of the 1940's, which was basically because they were no longer really relevant to the world of the 50's. EC comics were.

The Justice Society wasn't relevant in the 1950's whereas Shock SuspenStories and Mad comics were. It’s pretty strange; Superduperman is a parody of Superman. In this issue of Supreme, who is a pastiche of Superman, we've got this pastiche of the parody. Sort of a parody of the parody in this Supremelvin stuff because it has a lot of the EC riffs.

So we're talking about comics history, and commenting upon various comic styles gone by, and telling the story of Supreme, and filling in part of his life story. There's a lot of complexity there even though what you've got on the surface is a fairly light, readable, entertaining, modern comic. The complexity of Watchmen was all on the surface. Just looking at the average page of it would take you a half hour and give you a headache, just because it was obviously a complex work. With Supreme it looks like simple work, but it's heading in the opposite direction and seeing what treasures are to be found there.

Watchmen

MANIA: Watchmen, ten years on. What are your thoughts about what you've created there?

Alan Moore: I think that I'm very pleased with Watchmen as a piece of work. Technically, structurally ... yeah, I would still stand on that. I'm very, very pleased with it.

MANIA: Was there anything you were most pleased about?

Alan Moore: The structure and some of the storytelling techniques that happened in Watchmen, which I don't think ever happened before anywhere. Some of the things with Dr. Manhattan, there were storytelling concepts and things that we were doing with the "comic within the comic," the interplay of captions and images. There's technical stuff in there that is what I am most proud of And if I were to boil it down to a single image, a single issue, I'm still most pleased with the fourth one.

MANIA: Which is told semi-in-reverse.

Alan Moore: Sort of, it's a different view of time. It gives the whole comic a different structure which I still think is pretty marvelous, looking back. I don't know quite what we did on that one but it was right. I still have an incredible amount of affection for Watchmen. It's always going to be a very important part of my work.

One the other hand, what Watchmen actually accomplished in the industry, I'm not an sure. I remember that David Bowie once described himself as "the face that launched a thousand pretensions." I think maybe me and Dave Gibbons had something of a similar rote in the comic industry. To some degree Watchmen did sort of open the floodgates for a wave of comics that tended to be a bit more violent, a bit more grim, a bit more pretentious and yet didn't really seem to do anything, accomplish anything.

It's probably just me, my own personal taste but there seems to be a wave of comics post-Watchmen that were grim and miserable but didn't even have the redeeming features of doing anything that was truly new. To some degree that is the downside to Watchmen. It probably plunged the comic industry into a massive grimness of over 10 years, along with Dark Knight and all the usual suspects.

The Future of Comics

MANIA: Do you think that the Dark Age, if you will, is starting to end now with other various relaunches?

Alan Moore: I'll do my bit. I’m atoning. I don't really keep up with much of the rest of the comics industry, I'm afraid I'm a bit out of touch with most of it. But as far as Supreme, we’re trying to see if there's a way to make superheroes viable, make them work.

I think that's what were really talking about here. Them's got to be a way for superheroes to work. You can only go so far with violence, when you show something that's more violent than what you'd shown before. That issue of Miracleman that we did [#15, in which London is horribly demolished in a battle between a sadistic Kid Miracleman and his mentor, Miracleman] was pretty violent. Why go to these extremes?

It seems to me the only thing that was ever really interesting about comics when I was a kid was the sense of wonder that was involved in it. The genuine imagination that had gone into them. You got people like Mort Weisinger, who takes a lot of stick and probably a lot of it is deserved.I'm sure he probably wasn't the nicest person to work with, but that world that he and the people under him created with the Superman of the 60's, it was a very personal one for him.

Rick Veitch was telling me about a recent biography that he's read, or a book on the comic industry, that says that most of that stuff, the Bottle City of Kandor, the Phantom Zone, all of these classic 60's elements have got a lot to do with the elements that play a large part in Mort Weisinger's mental breakdown. That's how much of his imagination he was investing into it, and that was what fueled the magic of those comics for me when I was a kid.

There were people who poured so much of their imagination into these things, these wonderful little throw-away ideas. When I first got into Superman, reading the comics was almost secondary. The thing was that once I got that Superman mythology in my head I could wonder around inside my head. I'm sure a lot of comic readers do that, especially the younger ones. You're thinking, what would happen if you could travel in time, and do this. What would happen if you did have a fortress at the top of the world where you could have everything you wanted all in one place. If you did have a whole city inside a bottle.

These are all mental spaces that a kid can inhabit and wander around in, and they were vital mental spaces for me when I was growing up. It was the world of imagination that comics opened. It wasn't the power fantasies, not the thought of "If I were the Hulk I could beat up anybody who was picking on me," although I'm sure that thought occurred to me, like it would with anybody. That wasn't the main impulse, it was purely that the dog in a cape and a city in a bottle was a wonderful thing. Being able to fly backwards in time was a wonderful thing. Costumes that came out of rings… these were a few of my favorite things.

That's was what got me into comics, that sense of wonder. Later I developed an equal sense of wonder of how people actually write and draw the stories. But the thing that drew me intially was the sense of richness of the imagination. A playfulness, the mind at play. You can see in the early Flash stories, Fantastic Four, Superman, all of these. In all the different creators you can see people playing with ideas. They were having fun doing it. So were their readers. If I were to boil down to one agenda, that would be my agenda for the Extreme universe as a whole.

MANIA: To restore a sense of Wonder.

Alan Moore: Yes, if that is possible.

MANIA: Well, you are obviously having a ball with it. It does come through in every page.

Alan Moore: It has to. If I'm not having a ball with it the readers will know that.

MANIA: And you have never tested this experimentally, I would guess.

Alan Moore: I’ve never written anything that I wasn't having fun with; some things I have more fun with than others, burl find that if I am not having fun with it, I can't really write it. I've got to have some sort of fun.

One of the old Chinese brush artists was once quoted saying that if he drew a line that he was not excited by, then how could he expect anyone looking at the page to be excited by it? You have to be in the mood and that will come across almost by some sort of osmosis or something. The mood that

you're in when you're writing the story will somehow transmit to the reader and if you're bored with the stuff you're writing it will be a boring story. But if sitting here chuckling over something, thinking "that was cool" about some detail or panel that I put into Supreme, theres a fair chance that the readers will chuckle and think "that was cool." At least that Is my theory.