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Title: A for Alan
Author: The Beat
Date: November 1, 2005
Language: en
Topics: interview, books, art, V for Vendetta
Source: Retrieved on 22nd September 2020 from https://web.archive.org/web/20060505034142/http://www.comicon.com/thebeat/2006/03/a_for_alan_pt_1_the_alan_moore.html

The Beat

A for Alan

Pt. 1: The Alan Moore interview

On November 1, 2005, I interviewed Alan Moore for GIANT Magazine.

Although the finished piece was only 300 words long, I ended up talking

to Moore for nearly an hour, and he went on at some length about his

difficulties with DC Comics and the American Entertainment Industry, in

general. A short version of the interview was published in Publisher

Weekly Comics Week on November 8, 2005. I’d always meant to get the

whole thing cleaned up and edited down, and with V FOR VENDETTA opening

this weekend, it seemed like as good a time as any.

In talking to Moore – who is just as fascinating and voluble as you’ve

heard – it becomes clear that the situation with his work at DC and in

Hollywood causes him a lot of very real pain. As you can see from the

transcript, you can disagree with some of his actions, but not with the

real passion and love of comics that motivates them.

Since this interview was conducted, V FOR VENDETTA has indeed had

Moore’s name taken off the credits. The last I heard, his demand to have

his name taken off the books he doesn’t own still stood. Perhaps a

follow up call is in order.

Despite Moore’s unhappiness, he does manage to talk about V FOR

VENDETTA, a work of which he is justly very proud. So with no further

ado, ladies and gentlemen, Alan Moore.

---

The Beat: Can you in any way encapsulate the political climate that gave

rise to V for Vendetta?

Alan Moore: At the time when I wrote it, it was of course for an English

alternative comic magazine around about 1981. Margaret Thatcher had been

in power for two or three years. She was facing the first crisis of her,

by then, very unpopular government. There were riots all over Britain in

places that hadn’t seen riots for hundreds of years. There were fascists

groups, the National Front, the British National party, who were flexing

their muscles and sort of trying to make political capital out of what

were fairly depressed and jobless times. It seemed to me that with the

kind of Reagan/Thatcher axis that existed across the Atlantic, it looked

like Western society was taking somewhat a turn for the worse. There

were ugly fascist stains starting to reassert themselves that we might

have thought had been eradicated back in the ‘30s. But they were

reasserting themselves with a different spin. They were talking less

about annihilating whichever minority they happened to find disfavor

with and talking more about free market forces and market choice and all

of these other kind of glib terms, which tended to have the same results

as an awful lot of the kind of Fascist causes back in the 1930s but with

a bit more spin put upon them The friendly face of fascism.

So V for Vendetta originally came out of the fact I’d been asked to

write a strip for David Lloyd to illustrate. We’d originally been

talking about doing a 1930’s noir strip and Dave had bolted that because

I think he’d had enough of digging out ’30’s reference. We thought maybe

we could get the same effect by rather than setting it in the near past,

to set it in the near future. So it all evolved from several different

sources, but it was playing into the fact that over here in England

we’ve got quite a good tradition of villains and sociopaths as heroes.

Like Robin Hood, Guy Fawkes and all the rest of them. And in our

fiction, in British children’s comics, there were as many sociopathic

villains who’d got their own comic strips as there were heroes. Possibly

more. The British have always had sympathy with a dashing villain.

So I decided to use this to political effect by coming up with a

projected Fascist state in the near future and setting an anarchist

against that. As far I’m concerned, the two poles of politics were not

Left Wing or Right Wing. In fact they’re just two ways of ordering an

industrial society and we’re fast moving beyond the industrial societies

of the 19^(th) and 20^(th) centuries. It seemed to me the two more

absolute extremes were anarchy and fascism. This was one of the things I

objected to in the recent film, where it seems to be, from the script

that I read, sort of recasting it as current American neo-conservatism

vs. current American liberalism. There wasn’t a mention of anarchy as

far as I could see. The fascism had been completely defanged. I mean, I

think that any references to racial purity had been excised, whereas

actually, fascists are quite big on racial purity.

The Beat: Yeah, it does seem to be a common element.

Moore: It does seem to rather be a badge they wear. Whereas, what I was

trying to do was take these two extremes of the human political spectrum

and set them against each other in a kind of little moral drama, just to

see what works and what happened. I tried to be as fair about it as

possible. I mean, yes, politically I’m an anarchist; at the same time I

didn’t want to stick to just moral blacks and whites. I wanted a number

of the fascists I portrayed to be real rounded characters. They’ve got

reasons for what they do. They’re not necessarily cartoon Nazis. Some of

them believe in what they do, some don’t believe in it but are doing it

any way for practical reasons. As for the central character of the

anarchist, V himself, he is for the first two or three episodes

cheerfully going around murdering people, and the audience is loving it.

They are really keyed into this traditional drama of a romantic

anarchist who is going around murdering all the Nazi bad guys.

At which point I decided that that wasn’t what I wanted to say. I

actually don’t think it’s right to kill people. So I made it very, very

morally ambiguous. And the central question is, is this guy right? Or is

he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a

properly anarchist solution. I didn’t want to tell people what to think,

I just wanted to tell people to think, and consider some of these

admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly

regularly throughout human history. I was very pleased with how it came

together. And it was a book that was very, very close to my heart.

The Beat: And you are still happy with it?

Moore: Well, this is a bit more complex, Heidi. A couple of weeks ago I

did ask DC Comics to take my name off the book. This was after a long,

long string of gradually worsening relationships which had been kind of

obliviously ignored by DC comics. It’s got to the point where I’ve

become very, very distanced emotionally from a lot of the work which I

don’t own. It’s a kind of feeling that sort of…if I don’t actually have

the moral right to declare myself the author of the work, does that not

mean that I should have the moral right to declare myself not the author

of the work?

V for Vendetta was about something that was very important to me. It was

a book that I was very pleased that David Lloyd and I owned. And I never

wanted to be in a position where I didn’t own it. We were misled, I

think is the probably the gentlest way of putting it, and ended up

signing V for Vendetta away more or less in perpetuity.

The Beat: So near and yet so far…[laughs]

Moore: Yeah. At that point I kind of cut off contact with DC Comics and

never wanted to work with them again.

The Beat: You’re talking about back in the ‘80s?

Moore: Right. It was when I realized that in fact Watchmen and V for

Vendetta had been taken from me. And I though, all right, fair enough. I

was fooled once, and I decided I didn’t want to work for DC Comics again

or indeed for any of the big American comic companies. And this went

fine for a number of years until DC evidentially thought it would be a

good idea to force me back into the fold, when they purchased Wildstorm.

I had already signed contract and would go back upon my word with people

I’d made promises to. So I stuck with it for six years. I was assured at

the beginning that DC wouldn’t be interfering. This turned out not to be

the case, but I stuck with it for as long as I told my collaborators

that I would be sticking with it. Which was longer than I’d wanted to,

but it took longer than I’d expected.

But I stuck it out and I did the best work that I possibly could. In the

midst of all this, this ridiculous thing with V for Vendetta film came

up. All of this nonsense could have been stopped at any point if—when I

had said, look I want my name taken off the films and all the money

distributed to the artists—if they hadn’t said, Okay, well, you’ll just

have to sign some things then to give your money to Dave Lloyd. When in

fact what they should have said was “--and we’re not going to bother

doing anything to take your name off the film.”

The Beat: Your name is on [the] League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

[film], right?

Moore: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was the reason why I decided to

take my name off all subsequent films.

The Beat: Well…[General laughter] I think anyone might have done that!

But go on…

Moore: Yeah, a lot of things which had to do with League made me decide

I really wanted nothing to do with the American film industry in any

shape or form. Which is why I asked DC if I could possibly have my name

taken off the films and the money redistributed. This went fine with the

Constantine film. This was because my name was never going to go on the

Constantine film in the first place. Because that had gone so well, I

distributed the money amongst the other artists my name hadn’t been on

the film and I was completely happy. I assumed when DC then sent me

paperwork so I could sign my money over to David Lloyd on the V for

Vendetta film this was going to go fine.

It didn’t. I had an American producer actually lying about my

involvement in the film, which made me look like a liar. When I said I’m

not taking any money from these films and I’m not interested in them, he

makes a statement that’s completely dishonest and was saying the

complete opposite. So I felt I had to at that point exercise my right to

completely sever myself from DC Comics if, assuming that they weren’t

able to just get a simple retraction, nothing humiliating, just a simple

retraction apology and clarification that would have said we regret that

due to a misunderstanding blah blah blah. That would have been all.

DC told me they were really trying hard to get that, I kind of got the

idea that in fact probably they were just hoping if they stalled for

long enough it would all blow over and there wouldn’t be anything I was

able to do about it. After a few weeks it turned out they hadn’t been

trying to get any apology or retraction or at least not very hard. They

certainly weren’t able to offer one that was anything like what I’d

asked for. At this point, I said that’s it I’m not working for DC again

and also I still want my name off this film, if they don’t take my name

off this film, I will be taking my name off the books, because it means

that much to me to sever my connection with this whole painful business.

The Beat: But, Alan, isn’t that throwing out the baby with the

bathwater?

Moore: Well, I don’t own the baby anymore, Heidi! The baby is one I put

a great deal of love into, a great deal of passion and then during a

drunken night it turned out that I’d sold it to the gypsies and they had

turned out my baby into a life of prostitution. Occasionally they would

send me increasingly glossy and well-produced pictures of my child as

she now was, and they would very, very kindly send me a cut of the

earnings. This may sound melodramatic, but I’ve been writing for 25

years and I think that the passion with which I write is probably

evident—it’s not faked. I really do feel intensely passionate about

nearly everything I write. Obviously, it’s going to vary, but I try to

be passionate about everything I write. In some cases I succeed. V for

Vendetta was one of those cases. It’s that—I mean for 20 years since

then, it’s been a kind of a dull ache that the regular paychecks of our

cut of the money don’t really do an awful lot to assuage.

[Eventually] I said, look, if this would help, a simple solution would

be, alright, if they are assuming my name’s going on the film, then I

don’t want my name on the books, and I will sign off all the income from

them. If they’re thinking otherwise, if they’d just given me a small

signed piece of paper assuring me my name’s not going on this film. If

they can get me that, before I see any books coming out with my name on

them, that from my point of view DC are sort of producing dishonestly,

then that would be all right.

Months passed. This piece of paper never arrived, but a big box of V FOR

VENDETTA books did, that I specifically asked not to see, and which when

I opened them had got on the front a big red sticker saying now a major

motion picture. On the back it had kind of a half baked jingle from the

film worked into the ad copy prominently, and it had also—

I have to say, the editorial standards in the comic industry these days

are nothing that any proper editor would ever recognize as such. Most of

these people—I mean, I wanted to be a writer or an artist ever since I

was a child. I know most of the people in this industry, they wanted to

be artists or writers since they were children. I don’t know anybody who

wanted to be an editor as a child. Or don’t know anyone who honed their

editorship skills and then got a job. All I mainly know is people who

have got perhaps no marketable talent and who sort of drifted into the

industry and found themselves in editor jobs. This is perhaps a bit of a

slur on editors in general and there are some very good ones. But I

hadn’t even take the cling film of that V for Vendetta book and on the

back cover in bold type, it’s got the catchy phrase, “Have a pleasant…”

[The copy has since been corrected to say “Have a pleasant evening.”] I

mean it’s…it seems to me, I’m perhaps overstating, that nobody’s even

looked at this book at any stage during it’s production.

The Beat: Hm, I just happened to get that book myself and took off the

shrink-wrap, and now I’m looking at it. “Have a pleasant”…

Moore: Well, I think this is my basic message to the American industry

at this moment. [general laughter] “Have a pleasant.”

And so where I’m at, at the moment, it was heartbreak. When I got that

package of books I took them straight out to the garage and threw them

straight into a skid. I didn’t even want to recycle them. That night at

4 in the morning I woke up and I had black thunder rolling in my heart.

I could not sleep, I was just lying there thinking well, they’re just

going to ignore everything I say. It’s not my book. It’s their book, but

the only reason they’ve my name on that book is it sells more copies,

and it gives them a certain amount of integrity and credibility that I

don’t think they would otherwise have had.

I’m perhaps overstating my case here a bit, but I think I lent an awful

lot of literary and intellectual credibility to the American comics

business and to the comics business in general when I entered it. I

don’t feel the same way about comics any more, I really don’t. I never

loved the comic industry. I used to love the comics medium. I still do

love the comics medium in its pure platonic, essential form, but the

comics medium as it stands seems to me to have been allowed to become a

cucumber patch for producing new movie franchise.

The Beat: I know what you’re saying, but there is an awful lot of stuff

coming out that’s good.

Moore: There is some fantastic stuff but it is marginalized. The only

things I ever get asked about are generally related to superhero films,

and even some of the other stuff in the medium at the moment. I don’t

know, it’s probably just my tastes. But one end of it seems adolescent

in its brutality and in its inexperienced adolescent approach to

violence and sex. And at the other end, at the more supposedly

intellectual end I see an awful lot of angst, and adolescent

breast-beating. This is not a complete blanket condemnation by any

means, there’s people like Joe Sacco, other people who do wonderful work

that is not mainly concerned with them, and their fears of mortality or

whatever it is. Or feelings of emptiness. This is not really what I

wanted for the comics medium. That’s fair enough. There’s no reason why

it should be the kind of medium that I wanted. But at the same time—I

don’t know. I think that my, kind of, contempt for the way that the

major companies have handled things since their inception, they’ve only

ever changed when there’ve been absolutely forced to at gunpoint.

Otherwise the industry for all of the great claims it makes for itself

these days—we’re kind of post modern, we’re hip, you know, we’re sort of

a major star accessory—the industry still seems to be based upon a

gangster ethic that was around when it was founded. It’s been modified

slightly to sort of super times. But it’s nothing I’m happy with.

The way that I’ve left it is, all right DC can take my name off V for

Vendetta and stop paying me the money. And if that doesn’t happen, take

my name off all of the books and stop paying me the money. So no telling

where this one could run to. I mean, believe me, I would be completely

happy if my name came off everything I do not own.

The Beat: I know I’m not going to change your mind, but let me play

devil’s advocate. I certainly understand you reviling and castigating

the sheer idiocy of things like the League film, but at the same time,

the people who do understand what you’re trying to get at are not going

to be dissuaded just by the fact that Joel Silver has made V a liberal!

Moore: I know that. This started out with me being really upset with the

way that the American film industry seemed to be treating me, not just

on League but on V, but then it started to spread to the point where

it’s more the American Entertainment Industry that I’ve got a grudge

against. When I originally allowed myself to work for DC again because

I’d sign contracts with ABC, I said to Scott and Jim Lee, you know this

is probably going to be very explosive, you might end up regretting

this. I will do what I’ve said I’m going to do I’ll work and produce

these books to the best of my ability. And if DC leaves me alone we

shouldn’t have any problems, but be advised I am doing this against my

will and I know that I am very volatile, especially with regard to this

particular issue. But I was assured it was okay to go ahead. But I had

warned everybody.

Now this stuff has brought up the whole original [reason why] I didn’t

want to work with DC in the first place. But it’s brought it up more

painfully and it’s made it completely clear that actually I don’t think

DC Comics gives a shit about the comics industry or the comics medium

except as an adjunct to Hollywood. I really don’t.

The Beat: But do you honestly think Paul Levitz or Scott Dunbier or Jim

Lee have any influence whatsoever on Joel Silver?

Moore: The thing is, Paul Levitz, Scott Dunbier and Jim Lee, I’ve got no

axe to grind against them at all. Paul Levitz may not have any influence

upon Joel Silver, but wouldn’t it have been better for Paul Levitz to

think about that before his company cheated me out of the ownership of

my work and then peddled it to another part of their parent company?

This wouldn’t have arisen if they hadn’t done this initial unfair act

and despite the fact they’ve been given several opportunities to put it

straight and logical reasons to do so when in fact it would have made

them more money. Can you imagine how nicely this could have gone? It

could have gone swimmingly.

Pt. 2: the further adventures of Alan Moore

Continuing my conversation with Alan Moore from November 1, 2005. A few

of the questions and answers reflect events that were current at this

time – notably the Tokyopop matter, and should be read with that in

mind. In part one of this interview, Moore talked about his unhappiness

with the comics industry. In this part, he finishes up on that topic,

and talks about his novel and answers the question: Is V a hero?

THE BEAT: You still have a good relationship with Chris Staros and Top

Shelf, right?

MOORE: Absolutely, and various big works that are impending, Lost Girls

and The Black Dossier [League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 3 will

be published through Top Shelf in 2007. THE BLACK DOSSIER, a LOEG book

will be out from Wildstorm later this year], things I still own and am

completely committed to.

THE BEAT: You own Lost Girls 100% and From Hell 100%, right?

MOORE: Absolutely, and A Small Killing and a painfully small number of

other books. These are the books I’m completely happy about. These are

the ones I can look at with pride and not with a pang of, yeah, but I

don’t own it. By asking DC to take my name off V for Vendetta and stop

giving me the money for V for Vendetta, all I’m asking for is for them

to treat me in the same way they’ve been completely happy to treat

hundreds of much greater comics creators than I over the decades. I’m

asking them to say to me the same thing they said to Gardner Fox and

Jack Kirby and to all those other guys, just say to me you are not going

to see a penny for any kind of future reproductions of your work and

we’re not going to put your name on them.

Why should I be singled out? They have extended this kind of freedom to

all of their fellow countrymen who worked for them. Is it became I’m

English? All I’m asking for is the same treatment they’ve given all

these other fine, wonderful artists and writers. It’s not the editors or

publishers who have done anything to make the American comics medium

what it is, other than in the sense it’s a mess. You know as well as I

do, these dear old men, dear dead men in a lot of cases, wonderful

men—well, they probably had the same number of pricks as any other

occupation has got.

THE BEAT: A Robert Kanigher here or there…

MOORE: Even he had interesting eyebrows. A lot of them that I met were

sweet talented people who had got a genuine love for this medium and in

nearly every case it seems that love was cynically exploited [by an

industry] whose main concern at the end of the day was their corporate

masters or the movies

THE BEAT: Let me take you back to when V for Vendetta began appearing at

DC…85 or 86. At Warrior you did own V for Vendetta and when you went to

DC what was going through your head?

MOORE: What happened, at DC, they’d been asking if we’d do the Charlton

characters and then they said, we don’t want you to use the Charlton

characters, can you come up with your own. I said yeah we can and we

were assured, if you come up with characters of your own, you’ll be able

to own them under this new different deal that forward progressive DC

comics is doing now, and I believed this. I was completely convinced by

this. They seemed to be nice people who were treating me well and were

offering what seemed to be a wonderful deal. So we signed the stuff on

Watchmen and started work on it. At this point, they were asking, well

what about V for Vendetta. I’d been shying away from anybody who wanted

to own the work, but because I thought this was some new deal, that I’d

been told about, I actually said to Dave Lloyd “I trust these people

now, Dave.” [laughs] I can hear myself saying it now. I trust these

people, they won’t take this away from us. As soon as they stop

publishing it, it will be ours. And this was a time that no comic book

had remained in print for more than 18 months,

THE BEAT: So you just didn’t know at that point.

MOORE: Nobody knew. As Neil Gaiman pointed out to them later when he was

saying, look it’s a horrible situation you’re in with Alan. You know as

well as he did that back when he signed that contract, nobody could have

predicted that these books would remain in print for that long.

THE BEAT: Right now there’s this whole thing going on with Tokyopop

publishing a lot of original manga by very young creators. Tokyopop is

splitting the copyright with them and a lot of us old timers are saying

well, that’s not the best thing and the creators are saying, we know

what we’re doing, they will never betray us. It’s obvious that some day,

there could be heartache. Now, you were a little bit older, back then.

MOORE: I was in my late twenties. Not much older.

THE BEAT: You were a little bit beyond where they are, but still, did

you have any idea then [where this could go from] talking to your peers?

MOORE: Well, I was a very aware young man at that point. I’d been

reading the fanzines, I knew that Jack Kirby had been screwed. I knew

that Marvel comics had screwed everybody and DC had screwed everybody

since their inception. However, at the time when I was getting into the

industry they were talking the language of progress, but sort of a mile

a minute. There’s new, dynamic currents running in DC, and you know, all

right I was 28, I was an anarchist. I was very politically cynical, but

I was also working in a medium I loved. Perhaps I was too ready to

believe what I was told. That might be true. Perhaps if I’d really

searched my stomach I would have thought these people are almost

certainly lying. But that would have meant dismissing out of hand a lot

of people who, up until that point, appeared to be my friends. And

hadn’t done anything.

THE BEAT: Probably most of them meant well. I’m sure Karen Berger meant

well. And she did in fact did get creator copyrights soon after. You

were almost there.

MOORE: Soon after I’d gone. This is what Neil was bringing up the point

for, Is this really fair? Alan does all the spade work, and ends up in

this invidious position, and doesn’t benefit from any of it.

THE BEAT: You’re still getting publishing money from Watchmen—

MOORE: For the moment.

THE BEAT: If you were to sit back and say, okay, whatever, go with god,

you would still be making money off these books and V for Vendetta.

MOORE: Yeah, I would be and I would also still be subscribing to a

“Culture.” I’m very, very proud of the books I don’t own. But I don’t

want to be associated with them any more because of the fact I don’t own

them any more, and I don’t think it’s fair I don’t think it’s any way to

run a business. But I don’t think that would be very honest. It wouldn’t

feel honest to me, and I’m basically at the end of the day, I’m the only

person I’m concerned about. That is selfish I know, but at the end of

the day, it’s whether I’m waking up at four in the morning in a boiling

rage or not, and there is practically no amount of money that can

compensate for that. I want to have the work I’ve done. [Such as the

novel I’m writing.] This is a book about a subject that is, it’s not

next to my heart, it is my heart. It’s right from the very core of me

and what I’m all about. I’m loving it. It’s the best thing I’ve ever

written. I don’t care whether it sells or not. At the end of it I will

own this. Just like a proper grown up author working in a proper grownup

industry,

THE BEAT: Do you know who’s going to publish it?

MOORE: No, I haven’t got a publisher yet. I’m not taking an advance for

it. I’m waiting until I’ve got it finished because I don’t actually want

to send a synopsis and a chapter to an editor.

THE BEAT: Well, with your stature as a writer—

MOORE: I’m not going to have any problems.

THE BEAT: Yeah. You could probably, if you had an agent which I’m sure

you—

MOORE: Haven’t.

THE BEAT: Yeah, and probably don’t much like the idea of. But I’m sure

you could get New York publishing houses in a bidding war over it.

MOORE: Well, yeah, when I’ve got it finished and I know how good it is

rather than merely suspect, I’ll see what I want to do with it. At the

moment I’m thinking quite seriously of not going to a big publisher but

going to someone like Top Shelf that I absolutely trust. Which

commercially might be a terrible idea, but morally might be a good one.

The kind of idea I should have been going for 25 years ago.

THE BEAT: At some point, you know, there’s got to be away – well, what

am I saying. I wish there were a way to make the system work for you

MOORE: Yeah it would be nice, wouldn’t it. Although having kind of dealt

with the system for the past 25 years, even when I didn’t want to, I

have to say I can’t see any point at which it will change. I’m not

expecting DC Comics to be shamed by my asking to have my name taken off

the work. I don’t think anyone’s going to be shamed.

THE BEAT: Let me ask you one more question on my original list about V

for Vendetta. It’s fascinating that people growing up under our

generation grew up under the threat of nuclear winter, now people are

growing up under the threat of Islamic Jihad.

MOORE: Well, they think they’re growing up under the threat of Islamic

Jihad. They’re in fact growing up under the threat of nuclear winter.

Just like we were.

THE BEAT: If you have a last laugh on Joel Silver it’s that he’s made

this movie and depending on what the news is the day before it opens, he

might or night not be able to open it.

MOORE: I’ve got to say to say we are having a lot of strangely costumed

bombers blowing up landmarks in London at the moment and we’re not that

happy about it. I would have thought a film coming out of it, perhaps

the timing could be better. But we shall see.

THE BEAT: Do you think you were being prescient?

MOORE: I wouldn’t like to claim I was being prescient but that said, it

is pretty clear that I have a direct line to God and I know every moment

of the future before it happens. [laughter] I mean, as a case in point,

I was saying back in 1981 or whenever it was, I was setting this in the

absurdly far future period of 1997, where Britain would be run by a

computer centralized right wing government. And to show what they were a

really nasty right wing government, the easiest and quickest shorthand

was to put monitor cameras on every street corner. In 1997, in England,

I believe it first began in the town of King’s Lynn, they had monitor

camera saturation, where you could track somebody from one end of the

town to the other without them ever going off camera. And when this was

successful they shipped it into every town in the British Isles. So,

yes, there are monitor cameras everywhere. I can only presume that

someone like our former home secretary David Blunkett [a blind British

politician] must have somehow got hold of a Braille edition of V for

Vendetta and thought oh, that’s a good idea. But there again, these are

not remarkably prescient ideas. It’s fairly obvious. It’s what I would

do if I were going to start a fascist political state so I assume it’s

what anyone would do. It’s like terrorism – you were talking about

people being more frightened of dying in a jihad. No offense, but that

is perhaps more of an American perception than a global one. You have to

remember that over here, there were teenagers being taken out of cellar

bars in separate carrier bags all through the ‘70s and ‘80s because of

the war in Northern Ireland. Which in that case, the IRA were largely

being supported by donations from America. That was why I was a bit

worried when George Bush said he was going to attack people who

supported terrorism, I thought oh my god, Chicago is going to be

declared a rogue state and they’re going to hunt down Teddy Kennedy and

people like that.

THE BEAT: There were as many Al Qaeda ties in Brooklyn as there were in

Baghdad,

MOORE: I should imagine there are probably a lot more Al Qaeda ties in

Brooklyn than there were in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein because he was

a secular leader who didn’t have any connections with Islamic

Fundamentalist. The thing is, another thing I understand about the sprit

of this movie is that it’s not really made clear that all the black and

brown and gay and Jewish people have been put in concentration camps and

vanished. I believe the only suggestion is that he could be Islamic.

Which was of course nothing that I’d ever thought. And also, they’re

making way too much of this Guy Fawkes thing. Guy Fawkes was not a

freedom fighter, he was a religious fanatic.

THE BEAT: He was more analogous to a suicide bomber?

MOORE: A bit of it. I was just saying to Melinda [Gebbie, Moore’s fiancé

and collaborator] today, the Gunpowder plot, thinking about it, was

really stupid. They’d just gone practically 60, 50 years of the reign of

Elizabeth I who was a staunchly anti-Catholic monarch. She’d been dead 2

years. James was on the throne and he was a Catholic nutcase. This was

the point at which Guy Fawkes and his plucky band decided on their

perhaps ill-judged scheme. They were shot through with agent

provocateurs. The guy who informed on them was actually one of my

townsmen. The Gunpowder plot was actually plotted in Northampton. We’re

good at that sort of thing.

THE BEAT: There’s a long heritage of anarchy there?

MOORE: Oh absolutely. The reason why Northampton is the biggest town in

Europe and the reason no one has ever heard of it, is we really royally

pissed off the monarchy back in the 1200s, and the British monarchy have

got quite a long memory. You’d be surprised. The thing is that to me I

was just using Guy Fawkes as a symbol, without really any references to

the historical Guy Fawkes. It was the bonfire night Guy Fawkes I was

referencing, with the at the time easily available Guy Fawkes masks.

Although, weirdly, say we started doing V for Vendetta in 1980,

something like that. Up until that point every November you’d be able to

buy fireworks and you’d be able to buy Guy Fawkes masks in the shops.

When we decided to use Guy Fawkes as the model for V for Vendetta, Dave

Lloyd said, great I’ll just go out around the shops and buy a Guy Fawkes

masks to base it on. He came back and said to his astonishment, there

weren’t any Guy Fawkes masks to be had. And there have been none since.

THE BEAT: Really?

MOORE: You tend to get left over Frankenstein masks from Halloween.

Nothing that refers to Guy Fawkes. It’s also no longer referred to as

Guy Fawkes Night. It’s like there’s been a cultural shift and any

references to somebody who wanted to blow up the houses of Parliament

have been carefully clipped out. So let’s hope we at least reawaken some

traditions.

THE BEAT: Do you think V is a hero?

MOORE: No, we called the first chapter “The Villain” where we introduce

him. I don’t want to say he’s the hero any more than I really want to

say he’s the villain. He’s a force. It’s funny with fascism or anarchy,

yes, they are the two poles of politics but neither of them are

actually, strictly speaking, a political system. Fascism is a kind of

weird mystical system and anarchy is an attempt to move beyond the need

to be politic, the need to manipulate large masses of people. So I tend

to think V is pretty much an allegorical force, an idea given human

form. And, obviously I have a lot of sympathy with some of his basic

ideas. But I think that killing people is wrong.

THE BEAT: Some of the things he does to Evey are dubious.

MOORE: Well…that was the bit where, I could get behind what he does to

Evey – this is probably telling far too much about me – I could get

behind that far more than I could get behind killing people. Because it

seemed to me that even though, yes, he was actually torturing Evey, this

was in his own mad way, an attempt to heal her. An attempt to push her

to a point where she has to wake up to herself as an individual with its

own will and own wants and destiny that is not just part of the

carpeting of the world, but is a person, is a fully human being. And

yes, he does use rather extreme methods. I suppose what I was doing was

if I were to actually go-around and imprison all the people that I

wanted to mentally and spiritually set free, and subject them to torture

for a couple of months, I’d probably get locked up, wouldn’t I? Nobody

would understand that one. Whereas, if I put it in a comic then I can to

some degree take the reader vicariously through the same experiences and

give them the same revelations without risking a jail sentence which is

one of the delights of fiction.