Alan Moore: Storyteller

“Alan Moore: Storyteller” by Gary Spencer Millidge is an excellent, 320 page over-sized hardback that canters through the career of the great man. Moore is one of most important creative forces in the history of comics, with his best works being towering peaks on the modern cultural landscape – his graphic novel “Watchmen” was considered by Time to be amongst the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century. Millidge’s book surveys Moore’s expansive output from the best-sellers through to his more underground experimental work and on into his modern guise as Crowleyesque magician. Unfortunately, however, the book does come across as hagiography in places – there is no informed critical analysis of Moore’s work, other than Moore’s own views, with a lot of that commentary being taken from previously published interviews. Anyone who has viewed “The Mindscape of Alan Moore” DVD will be familiar with a lot of the more startling quotations and assertions. All that said, this is a beautifully produced and illustrated tome that provides rare insight into Moore’s working methods and his philosophies. As a bibliography and catalogue of Moore’s oeuvre the book is superb. There is a massive amount of new materials including a fascinating look at Moore’s working methods, with many examples of his amazingly intricate scripts. The sections dealing with Moore’s battles with his many publishers are illuminating, as is Moore’s vicious approach to those who would make movies of his comics. Moore famously refuses to sanction any of his comics being made into movies; refusing to take payment for movies made when he didn’t hold the rights and refusing to have his name in the credits of any movie. Moore takes the view that his work was developed specifically for the comic book medium and can therefore only work as a comic, with any reinterpretation into other media being a second-rate travesty of the original work. This uncompromising belief in the power of the medium makes Moore an inspiration to all lovers of the radiant beauty of good comic books. Overall then, this is a luxurious and highly enjoyable, albeit highly uncritical book, but one that does give a fair degree of insight into the life of Northampton’s greatest living dope-smoking hippy. ( )