Joss Whedon

ALAN MOORE ON FANBOY RADIO - A RECAP

Possibly the brightest highlight of the five-year old comic book radio talk show, master comic creator Alan Moore makes a landmark appearance on Fanboy Radio. For those Newsarama readers interested in a text commentary of the break-free hour, producer/host of FbR, Scott Hinze provides the following:

First off, yes - I was very nervous. My list of questions for the comic-god was chiseled and polished over as soon as I knew we had him for a live hour. The only time I felt this level of insecurity on the radio was speaking with Joe Quesada for the first time in 2001 when the show was brand new. This truly has ushered in a new era for Fanboy Radio and I hope both listeners old and new will enjoy the changes and evolution that will come. Stick around after this wrap-up of the hour for some Newsarama exclusive announcements.

Alan begins with discussing his agenda in comics and how it affected the medium. He did humbly accept the praise for making the comics more sophisticated and said that it was a combination of trying to push comics in a particular direction as well as his own personal style. He started with the origin of his writing which was set in the British fan scene which started around 1967. “Everybody over here was a proto-hippy, everyone involved in the comic scene. And everyone accepted that the thing to do with comics was to progress them, to see if you could push them into generally grown-up territory, generally artistic territory. And I think a lot of the people who were around at those first couple of British comic conventions are the people that have sense gone on to be people like Dave Gibbons and Brian Bolland, various people without whom the shape of the comics over the last 20 - 25 years would be completely different.”

When asked if he thought people pushed his direction too far, Alan brings up Watchmen. “I think that what both me and Dave hoped was that what people would take from Watchmen would be the interesting things we done with storytelling... the stylistic things. If people would take the more progressive attitude of Watchmen and try to apply it to their own ideas, there could be fantastic things emerging. What we tended to see was a lot of people only taking a lot of things from Watchmen that were obvious and only on the surface... It tended to make comics more pretentious and more dark... I hoped for more from comics.” Neil Gaiman’s name is dropped as someone who was pointed influenced by his work but went off on his own direction soon after. “You should always have confidence in your own ideas... there’s nothing wrong with being influenced by people - of course, we’re all influenced by people. But if you’re going to be influenced by people, try to be influenced by hundreds of people, rather than just one. Because if your influencesd by a huge amount of people, no one influence is going to be over-riding and you’re probably going to have a much better chance of actually coming up with something with your own style where you can actually say what you want to say in your own voice - rather than with somebody else’s voice that was popular 25 years ago.”

In explaining “Why Comics?” asked from a question from an Australian listener, Alan shares a few words about his novel, Jerusalem, and how it has made him crave comic book work. “The amount of information that you can get in to the comic medium is astonishing. The way that you can get that information to lodge in your reader’s mind by using imaginary to underline the words, is also astonishing. A further project that I’ve just started last weekend - it’s something we’ve been brewing for a long time - but we finally signed the contract for me and Steve Moore to write the The Moon & Serpent: Bumper Book of Magi’... it’s going to be my no-nonsense, one-stop grim-moir (which will take a few years, 320 pages, we’ve got it pretty well planned out) which depicts the lives of the great enchanters.”

Alan fields a call regarding his goals in comics and a listener’s message board post about the possible pressure of his reputation. “I really can’t afford to be thinking about my position in comics when I have to think about the work at hand. So this is why I live in North Hampton and why I make very few public appearances and very few of them are comic related... it keeps me balanced and I remain the same thing that I’ve ever been - a man with a notepad and a ball-point pen.”

Fanboy Radio surely received this honor because of Alan’s desire to promote his latest book, Lost Girls, which is a work of pornography. On what makes the Lost Girls, lost, Alan explains, “Sex deranges all of us upon our first contact with it... When we enter sex, there is a kind of trade-off there that we’re not necessarily aware of when we do so... you’re never going to be a child again... That’s not to say that it’s a bad experience - of course, it’s a necessary one. But you will change. There will be something of the person that you where that is lost... So what we have in Lost Girls, is these three women, that have something that is part of themselves which is somehow missing, that for various reason have shut away. And in the course of Lost Girls, it’s about their reintegration, if you like, with the missing parts of themselves, with the girls that were inside these women that were lost.”

Answering a callers question about his retirement, Alan speaks about his thoughts on deadlines, “If you’re not getting the scripts to [artist] they can’t do their work - and that was the only part of the equation I was ever concerned about. This probably sounds terrible, but was I never interested in making the deadlines for the sake of publishers or even the readers because most of the readers... they’re not going to be that bothered. People aren’t going to be looking at League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volumes in five years time and think, ‘This looks really great, it’s a pity Kevin O’Neil couldn’t finish drawing it three months earlier.’ Because that will be completely irrelevant!”

A caller brings up Alan’s artwork which leads to an explanation, of the lax attitude toward drugs and pro-sex culture. Scott exclaims, “You’re our John Lennon!” after Alan instructs listeners to ‘make love not war’ in reference to the moral of Lost Girls. Alan replies, “What do you mean ‘our,’ Yankee??”

Later, Alan gets to the topic burning the minds of millions of fanboys - “I could not work with any of the major comic companies and I have no interest in recycling their characters any more,” but later states regarding a collected Marvelman publication, “If all of this ungodly mess [with Marvelman] gets sorted out, and if it ends up, as it should - as the rights to Marvelman returning to Mick Anglo free and clear - then who knows what possibilities there might be in the future? If the book ever does come out, it would have to be free of any of these rather shady complications that have hung over the character for the past twenty years. So, you know, its [An Absolute Marvelman] is something I’d like to see. Will it ever happen? That’s something that’s out of my control. But keep your fingers crossed and maybe one day.”

Right after speaking about Watchmen’s rank on Time Magazine’s listing of the greatest novels of all time, and the Canadian customs recent approval of Lost Girls, Alan gives details about his upcoming appearance on The Simpsons. The episode involves new competition to The Android’s Dungeon that brings in hip comic creators like "my hip self, the hip Art Spiegelman and Dan Clowes to their new shop. If Trey Parker and Matt Stone are listening... your South Park DVD distribution here in the UK is shameful! Should they offer to let me on their show, I’d do it. I dunno - if George Clooney can play a gay dog... If there is some other sexually-confused animal, I’d be a natural for it in many ways.”

The hour wraps with a few books (both comic and non-comic) that Alan is currently reading, a quick answer about influences from Melinda Gebbie and I gush uncontrollably (sorry about that - but... wouldn’t you?).

There you have it. The product of five years of work in a live, unedited hour, free for your enjoyment. Well, that’s part of the product as November is a month-long celebration of five years of FbR - we’ll be speaking with Paul Levitz & Dan Buckley tomorrow afternoon, Joss Whedon LIVE this Sunday, Mike Mignola LIVE on 11/29... and a pair of exclusive announcements for Newsarama - New York Times Best-Selling author, R.A. Salvator LIVE on 12/3 and late December will mark the return of David Hopkins’ Indie Show!

As always, thanks for listening.