You’ve said in the past that an artist’s job is to give audiences what they need, not what they want. Which is only a bit more than he touches on in this interview, conducted over the phone from his home in Northampton. His new book, Jerusalem, written over ten years, is a nearly 1,300-page attempt to encompass theories of space-time, hallucinogenic children’s adventure, thinly fictionalized personal biography, the surprisingly epic history of the downtrodden Northampton neighborhood in which he grew up, and, well, just about everything else. Having forever altered the realm of superheroes, Moore is now attempting to do the same with the novel. And so he’s spent the last two decades mostly off in his own wild margins, exploring fantastical Victorian-influenced erotica ( Lost Girls), occult-informed fictionalizations of the Jack the Ripper story (the truly mind-blowing From Hell), and, among a great many other things, smoking a lot of hash. Now 62 years old, Moore is on the very short list of people responsible for why mainstream audiences - and corporations - treat superheroes as very serious stuff.ĭespite his status as a comic-book genius, Moore has disavowed some of the genre work - along with its Hollywood adaptations - that made him famous because of what he sees as the shady business practices and shallow creativity of corporate comic-book publishers and the studios behind the characters’ onscreen incarnations. In emotionally and intellectually complex masterpieces of genre deconstruction like his work on Watchmen, Batman: The Killing Joke, and Swamp Thing, the lifelong resident of Northampton, England, showed how all of these crime-fighters running around in capes and masks could transcend simple entertainment and instead function as some of our most culturally potent myths. With his legendary run of comic-book writing in the 1980s, writer Alan Moore changed the way we think about superheroes.

Graphic novel by alan moore