Illuminations: Stories

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And on top of that, Lovecraft had a cosmological perspective in that he was an avid follower of science magazines. He had kept up with Einstein and appeared to understand Einstein. He did his best. But this led to more fear. Because he actually understood how tiny and insignificant we were in this boundless universe and that the universe was governed, not by God—because Lovecraft was an atheist—but by these blind chaotic forces of physics that did not know that we were here. That didn’t care about us. They weren’t good. They weren’t evil. They would just annihilate us without ever knowing that we’d existed. And these forces became Lovecraft’s pantheon of unpronounceable elder gods. He was kind of giving a shape and a name, even if it was a particularly tentacled shape, to the blind forces of physics that he thought governed human existence. After this overlong comedy of comics we get an analysis of an imagined beatnik poem. While it is clever it... well, I think it is easy to write a clever piece, if you do it with analysis in mind. Also, I didn't really see the point of the whole thing. A critique of literary critics perhaps? If you’re interested in my bullshit theory as to why this should be, then for my money it probably has something to do with the character’s ontology, ontology being the study of what can be said to exist, as opposed to epistemology, which is the study of what we can know. The only Thunderman that can be said to exist is the perfect and ideal one, who is made of nothing more than lines of paper or acetate, and Essler shorts are the purest and most glorious expressions of this: the true imaginal essence of this fictional character in a moving, speaking, unbounded form. It’s when you materialise Thunderman as a flesh-and-blood human being with pubic hair and a rental agreement that you start to run into trouble. When I did things like Marvelman [now known, for a variety of legal issues, as Miracleman] and Watchmen, they were critiques of the superhero genre. They were trying to show that any attempt to realize these figures in any kind of realistic context will always be grotesque and nightmarish. But that doesn’t seem to be the message that people took from this. They seemed to think, uh, yeah, dark, depressing superheroes are, like, cool. You talk about Thunderman as being sort of a disappointing father figure. How much of this would you say this is part of the American sense of having to “level the playing field?”

This book contains nine stories from short about to novella length encompassing about 40 years of writing, but most it seems from this century. The earliest and oddest is Hypothetical Lizard, about a brothel for people of magic and two friends who work for it. This story still has that craziness in the writing that Moore has learned to control over the years, the sheer I can't believe what is coming out of my pen, oh look out I have a lot more. The longest is a piece on comics, their creators and history What We Can Know About The Thunderman, which covers a lot of different themes, and is based on real creators and real events. Plus the usual collection of ghosts, aliens, Twilight Zone- seeming stories all written with that Alan Moore uniqueness. A lot of my English-based work is centred on Northampton. But yes, I do find an awful lot of haunted resonance in the English landscape. I’d say that it’s a fourth dimensional aspect of the place. If Einstein’s right and we exist in a universe that has at least four dimensions, one of which we perceive as the passage of time, then you have to look at places with the time element. If you're trying to get the scale of a place, you have to consider that fourth dimension as well. And the scale of England geographically is not that great. We’re a relatively small island, sort of bobbing somewhere off Europe. But the actual scale of England, Britain, considered in terms of the history, is kind of enormous. Take Northampton: we had mammoth hunters here, we had Romans, we were the centre of the country in terms of how the Saxons saw things. We had the Normans, but we fell out of favour because of Hereward the Wake, a local terrorist who used to be one of the great English legendary heroes when I was growing up. You’ve got him, the Nene Hag in Jerusalem, the real Thunderman, William Gull in From Hell. "Mad God"-like figures who end up wreaking havoc while pursuing a grand sense of control.So, how do we be human? If we've got everything we want, how do we be human? You can’t, can you? How is there any feeling in anything that humans do in the face of these demigods? They cancel humanity. That’s basically my objection to them. That is a very true statement. We need to move beyond capitalism. We need to move urgently beyond growth and our obsession with growth, because that is a fantasy and it always has been. We do not live in a world of infinite resources, so infinite growth is clearly not possible. It’s becoming very urgent. We don't have to be ruled by GDP. There are other ways that progress can be measured: the wellbeing of a country, for example. Moore’s ability to take common, reality-based fears and turn them into something disconcerting is one of my favorite talents of his. For real though, what’s scarier than something that could happen? Ghosts, aliens, and unknowns? Something about these subjects gets me a little more on the edge of my seat than the definite non-realities of zombies, vampires, etc. And, boy, does he craft them well. For example, say, the vampire genre of horror fantasy. Yes, you’ve stepped outside reality, and you’re now in a reality that allows vampires, which, if anything, has more laws and rules and boundaries than conventional reality. I mean, the vampires, they can’t cross running water, a stake through the heart, holy water, the daylight… there’s nothing fantastical about these things anymore. It becomes a simple matter of logistics. ‘Oh, we’ve got a vampire in town, how do we get rid of him?’‘Well, why don’t we stalk him during the hours of daylight, and then when we catch him, we’ll put a stake through his heart.’ It’ll be a variation of that.

You can’t separate them from each other. Artistically, it’s painful because of the immense amount of work—and I hope, vision—that I put into those early works. I was trying as best I could to remake the comics industry and to a certain, lesser extent, the comics medium, into the thing that I wanted it to be. I was introducing the ideas that I thought might be beneficial to the medium and take it into new areas. Artistically, to have those works taken away from me and perhaps largely misunderstood? The centerpiece of Illuminations is 'What We Can Know About Thunderman,' and it discusses the ideas at the core of superhero stories, but also the power of myth to influence people without them necessarily knowing why. What makes those concepts go together?

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To conclude, we have one masterpiecewhich takes about 10 % of the book total. I'm not sure it is worth the price of admission. Do you think that there’s a sterility to mainstream fantasy that you’re getting at in terms of your Tolkien comparison? As in, rather than celebrating this idea of magic, there’s an obfuscation of it, and in its place there’s a sort of fascist bullying. So as Worsley whimpered in his sleep, up there over his head, over the bedroom ceiling and the roof tiles and the TV aerial, up near the moon, was where the Russian space-dog sat above the sky in judgement. It looked down on the United States and had its head on one side like they sometimes do, with eyes of caramel regret, and very likely nobody would ever know what it was thinking, because everything that it was thinking was in Russian, and in Dog.

When you’re talking about the foundation of myths, and that’s sort of an undercurrent of a lot of Illuminations, I can’t help but think of Voice of the Fire, particularly 'Hob's Hog.' For readers who don’t know what 'Hob’s Hog' is, it’s a pastiche of a traditional hero’s tale. He tries to get the girl, he tries to kill the wizard, and it doesn’t quite work.Alan Moore: That was an awful lot of fun. Originally, I was just thinking about entropy, as you do, and I was thinking that, of course, if the universe is going to end in a state of complete disorganization and freezing darkness, where all of the energy has been spread out over the entire expanding universe and everything is a couple of degrees above absolute zero – then, if that’s the case, if that’s inevitably waiting for us in the future, does not that imply that everything must have started in an incredibly complex high-energy state? And that is a kind of a thing in physics, people sort of say, ‘well, all right, we know it couldn’t have all been completely organized, but that is the implication of entropy.’ So I thought, ‘well, why don’t I just go investigate that idea?’ I found out that it’s a literary technique, misprision, which as I understand it, is where it’s a deliberate misunderstanding where, yeah, you know that the universe didn’t start like that… but what if it did? Some of the most grotesque scenes I've embellished and in some of them I've flat out lied, but I think that it captures the character of the comics industry and a lot of the most physically appalling things in there are very close to actual reality.

Things shift, however, with the title story—one of four written specially for the volume—an oblique and indeed simply bleak look at childhood nostalgia, working class holidays, aging, and death that comes off as a holiday camp remix of one of Moore’s final comic works, Cinema Purgatorio. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? When I saw the television industry awards that the Watchmen television show had apparently won, I thought, “Oh, god, perhaps a large part of the public, this is what they think Watchmen was?” They think that it was a dark, gritty, dystopian superhero franchise that was something to do with white supremacism. Did they not understand Watchmen? Watchmen was nearly 40 years ago and was relatively simple in comparison with a lot of my later work. What are the chances that they broadly understood anything since? This tends to make me feel less than fond of those works. They mean a bit less in my heart.Alan Moore: It’s almost all superhero comics, it’s not any specific, particular title. It’s just what I see as the corrosive effects of these people, these characters, these inventions. For one thing, they are a huge excuse. They can sort out everything straight away. They are empowered, they can do anything. Mostly what they do is get involved in fights. You have to think that for a lot of the audience, it is the idea of being invulnerable in some way, and to have an advantage over other people. I mean that is the root of what superheroes have become. I don’t think that it was always that. I think in the particular case of Superman, you’ve got a character that was invented by two working-class teenagers from Cleveland in the middle of the Depression, who created a character that was an empowerment of a disempowered working-class community. You're retired from comics and you've talked about your bad experiences with the industry before. So why return to the subject now? Is this an exorcism? It’s probably more complicated than that, but, yes, I’m an atheist. No, there wasn’t some guy in the clouds who created everything. However, the pagan idea of gods, and the way they were regarded in the classical world, that interests me. The idea that these gods were essences of whatever their particular field of endeavor was, that Hermes is the essence of language and intelligence and also theft. I can accept gods on that level, that they are pure ideas that may have become, through their complexity, self-aware, or which have become so complex that we perceive them as being self-aware, whether they are or not. So it’s perhaps a heavily qualified theism, not quite atheism.