Written by When talking about the greatest comic book writers of our time, you can’t go too far without encountering the immense talent of Alan Moore, author of some of the most innovative and memorable comic book creations of the last thirty years or so.
Alan Moore was born in Northampton, UK in 1953 into a poverty stricken family in a poor area of the town. As a child he was a keen reader of books and comics. The comics he read were both British and American and Moore remembers reading the Fantastic Four and Detective Comics alongside kids comics such as Topper and Beezer.
In his late teens he became involved in a project called the Arts Lab which supplied material for Moore’s own magazine named Embryo. It was also around this time he became “the world’s most inept LSD dealer“, leading to his expulsion from the grammer school he was attending.
Maxwell the Magic Cat
In his early 20s, bored with the job he had working for the local gas supplier, he began to use his illustrative talents to produce work for alternative fanzines and similar magazines. Music magazines NME and Sounds were the first to pay him for his work and it was his Roscoe Moscow strip for Sounds which he produced under the name ‘Curt Vile’ for the first time. He used ‘Gilles de Ray’ when producing Maxwell the Magic Cat for the local newspaper.
Roscoe Moscow
Alan Moore continued in this vein until the mid-1980s when he came to the realisation that he could not write and draw his own comics and make a decent amount of money. He decided to concentrate on writing and took advice from a friend and fellow writer Steve Moore. Following Moore’s advice, he began to submit stories for 2000AD’s flagship character Judge Dredd. None were accepted, largely because 2000AD did not need any but the editor Alan Grant recognised the quality of his work (“this guy’s a really fucking good writer“) and asked him to submit stories for the Future Shocks series. Some were rejected but soon they were regularly appearing in 2000AD. Moore’s career was on it’s way.
Part Two follows…..
