Alan Moore (born 18 November 1953) is an england-cool author known primarily for his work in comic books including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Ballad of Halo Jones, Swamp Thing, Batman: The Killing Joke, and From Hell. He is widely recognised among his peers and critics as one of the best comic book writers in the English language. Moore has occasionally used such pseudonyms as Curt Vile, Jill de Ray, Brilburn Logue, and Translucia Baboon; also, reprints of some of his work have been credited to The Original Writer when Moore requested that his name be removed.

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 DC Comics as “the first comics writer living in Britain to do prominent work in America”, where 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.  He prefers the term “comic” to “graphic novel”. 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 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. In 2016, he published Jerusalem: a 1,266-page experimental novel set in his hometown of Northampton, UK.

Moore is an occultist, ceremonial magician, and anarchist, 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 objections, Moore’s works have provided the basis for several 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. He has lived a significant portion of his life in Northampton, England, and he has said in various interviews that his stories draw heavily from his experiences living there.

Early life to Success with Warrior

Moore was born on 18 November 1953, at St Edmund’s Hospital in Northampton to a working-class family who he believed had lived in the town for several generations. 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.”

He lived in a house with his parents, brewery worker Ernest Moore and printer Sylvia Doreen, with his younger brother Mike, and with his maternal grandmother. He “read omnivorously” from the age of five, getting books out of the local library, and subsequently attended Spring Lane Primary School.

At the same time, he began 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.

In the late 1960s, Moore began publishing his poetry and essays in fanzines, eventually setting up his fanzine, Embryo. Through Embryo, Moore became involved in a group known as the Northampton Arts Lab. The Arts Lab subsequently made significant contributions to the magazine

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.

His first paid work was for a few drawings that were printed in NME. In late 1979/early 1980, he and his friend, comic-book writer Steve Moore co-created the violent cyborg character Axel Pressbutton for some comics in Dark Star, a British music magazine. Not long afterward, Alan Moore succeeded in getting an underground comix-type series about a private detective known as Roscoe Moscow published in the weekly music magazine Sounds, earning £35 a week.

Beginning in 1979 Moore created a new comic strip known as Maxwell the Magic Cat in the Northants Post under the pseudonym of Jill de Ray. 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

Interested in writing for 2000 AD, one of Britain’s most prominent comic magazines, Alan Moore then submitted a script for their long-running and successful series Judge Dredd. While having no need for another writer on Judge Dredd, which was already being written by John Wagner, fellow writer Alan Grant saw promise in Moore’s work – later remarking that “this guy’s a really fucking good writer” – and instead asked him to write some short stories for the publication’s Future Shocks series. Meanwhile, Moore had also begun writing minor stories for Doctor Who Weekly.

From 1980 through to 1986, Moore maintained his status as a freelance writer and was offered a spate of work by a variety of comic book companies in Britain, mainly Marvel UK, and the publishers of 2000 AD and Warrior. During this period, 2000 AD accepted and published over fifty of Moore’s one-off stories for their Future Shocks and Time Twisters science fiction series.

Moore was given two ongoing strips in Warrior: Marvelman and V for Vendetta, both of which debuted in Warrior’s first issue in March 1982. V for Vendetta was a dystopian thriller set in a future 1997 where a fascist government controlled Britain, opposed only by a lone anarchist dressed in a Guy Fawkes costume who turns to terrorism to topple the government. Illustrated by David Lloyd, Moore was influenced by his pessimistic feelings about the Thatcherite Conservative government, which he projected forward as a fascist state in which all ethnic and sexual minorities had been eliminated. Marvelman (later retitled Miracleman for legal reasons) was a series that originally had been published in Britain from 1954 through to 1963, based largely upon the American comic Captain Marvel. Upon resurrecting Marvelman, Moore “took a kitsch children’s character and placed him within the real world of 1982”.

Warrior closed before these stories were completed, but under new publishers both Miracleman and V for Vendetta were resumed by Moore, who finished both stories by 1989.

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