Alan Moore was born on 18 November 1953 and is an English author known primarily for his work in comic books including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Ballad of Halo Jones, Swamp Thing, Batman: The Killing Joke, and From Hell.
78 Facts About Alan Moore
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Alan Moore is widely recognised among his peers and critics as one of the best comic book writers in the English language.
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Moore has occasionally used such pseudonyms as Curt Vile, Jill de Ray, Brilburn Logue, and Translucia Baboon;, reprints of some of his work have been credited to The Original Writer when Moore requested that his name be removed.
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Alan Moore started writing for British underground and alternative fanzines in the late 1970s before achieving success publishing comic strips in such magazines as 2000 AD and Warrior.
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Alan Moore was picked up by DC Comics as "the first comics writer living in Britain to do prominent work in America", where he worked on major characters such as Batman and Superman, substantially developed the character Swamp Thing, and penned original titles such as Watchmen.
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Alan Moore subsequently returned to the mainstream later in the 1990s, working for Image Comics, before developing America's Best Comics, an imprint through which he published works such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the occult-based Promethea.
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Alan Moore is an occultist, ceremonial magician, and anarchist, and has featured such themes in works including Promethea, From Hell, and V for Vendetta, as well as performing avant-garde spoken word occult "workings" with The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, some of which have been released on CD.
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Alan Moore has been referenced in popular culture and has been recognised as an influence on a variety of literary and television figures including Neil Gaiman and Damon Lindelof.
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Alan Moore has lived a significant portion of his life in Northampton, England, and he has said in various interviews that his stories draw heavily from his experiences living there.
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Alan Moore was born on 18 November 1953, at St Edmund's Hospital in Northampton to a working-class family who he believed had lived in the town for several generations.
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Alan Moore "read omnivorously" from the age of five, getting books out of the local library, and subsequently attended Spring Lane Primary School.
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Alan Moore felt that he was not being fulfilled by this job, and so decided to try to earn a living doing something more artistic.
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Alan Moore had already produced a couple of strips for several alternative fanzines and magazines, such as Anon E Mouse for the local paper Anon, and St Pancras Panda, a parody of Paddington Bear, for the Oxford-based Back Street Bugle.
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Alan Moore's first paid work was for a few drawings that were printed in NME.
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Alan Moore wrote most of the episodes of "The Stars My Degradation" and drew all of them, which appeared in Sounds from 12 July 1980, to 19 March 1983.
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Alan Moore has stated that he would have been happy to continue Maxwell's adventures almost indefinitely but ended the strip after the newspaper ran a negative editorial on the place of homosexuals in the community.
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Interested in writing for 2000 AD, one of Britain's most prominent comic magazines, Alan Moore then submitted a script for their long-running and successful series Judge Dredd.
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From 1980 through to 1986, Alan Moore maintained his status as a freelance writer and was offered a spate of work by a variety of comic book companies in Britain, mainly Marvel UK, and the publishers of 2000 AD and Warrior.
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The story, which Alan Moore described as "continuing the tradition of Dennis the Menace, but giving him a thermonuclear capacity", revolved around two delinquent aliens, and was a science-fiction take on National Lampoon's characters OC.
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The third comic company that Alan Moore worked for in this period was Quality Communications, publishers of a new monthly magazine called Warrior.
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Alan Moore was initially given two ongoing strips in Warrior: Marvelman and V for Vendetta, both of which debuted in Warriors first issue in March 1982.
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The third series that Alan Moore produced for Warrior was The Bojeffries Saga, a comedy about a working-class English family of vampires and werewolves, drawn by Steve Parkhouse.
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Warrior closed before these stories were completed, but under new publishers both Miracleman and V for Vendetta were resumed by Alan Moore, who finished both stories by 1989.
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Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing was successful both critically and commercially, and inspired DC to recruit British writers such as Grant Morrison, Jamie Delano, Peter Milligan, and Neil Gaiman to write comics in a similar vein, often involving radical revamps of obscure characters.
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Alan Moore began producing further stories for DC Comics, including a two-part story for Vigilante, which dealt with domestic abuse.
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Alan Moore was eventually given the chance to write a story for one of DC's best-known superheroes, Superman, entitled "For the Man Who Has Everything", which was illustrated by Dave Gibbons and published in 1985.
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In 1987 Alan Moore submitted a proposal for a miniseries called Twilight of the Superheroes, the title a twist on Richard Wagner's opera Gotterdammerung.
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Alan Moore wrote the lead story in Batman Annual No 11 drawn by George Freeman.
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The works they published in Mad Love turned away from the science fiction and superhero genres that Alan Moore was used to writing, instead focusing on realism, ordinary people, and political causes.
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Meanwhile, Moore began producing work for Taboo, a small independent comic anthology edited by his former collaborator Stephen R Bissette.
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The other series that Alan Moore began for Taboo was Lost Girls, which he described as a work of intelligent "pornography".
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Meanwhile, Alan Moore set about writing a prose novel, eventually producing Voice of the Fire, which would be published in 1996.
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In 1993 Alan Moore declared himself to be a ceremonial magician.
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Alan Moore did so through Image Comics, widely known at the time for its flashy artistic style, graphic violence, and scantily clad large-breasted women, something that horrified many of his fans.
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Alan Moore's first work published by Image, an issue of the series Spawn, was followed by the creation of his own mini-series, 1963, which was "a pastiche of Jack Kirby stories drawn for Marvel in the sixties, with their rather overblown style, colourful characters and cosmic style".
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When Rob Liefeld, one of Image's co-founders, split from the publisher and formed his own company Awesome Entertainment, he hired Alan Moore to create a new universe for the characters he had brought with him from Image.
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Alan Moore named this imprint America's Best Comics, lining up a series of artists and writers to assist him in this venture.
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Alan Moore decided that there were too many people involved to back out from the project, and so ABC was launched in early 1999.
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The series was well received, and Alan Moore was pleased that an American audience was enjoying something he considered "perversely English", and that it was inspiring some readers to get interested in Victorian literature.
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The character's drug-induced longevity allowed Alan Moore to include flashbacks to Strong's adventures throughout the 20th century, written and drawn in period styles, as a comment on the history of comics and pulp fiction.
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In 2003, a documentary about him was made by Shadowsnake Films, titled The Mindscape of Alan Moore, which was later released on DVD.
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Since 2009, Alan Moore has been a panellist on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Infinite Monkey Cage, which is hosted by physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince.
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In 2010, Alan Moore began what he described as "the 21st century's first underground magazine".
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Alan Moore has appeared live at music events collaborating with a number of different musicians, including a 2011 appearance with Stephen O'Malley at the All Tomorrow's Parties 'I'll Be Your Mirror' music festival in London.
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In 2014, Alan Moore announced that he was leading a research and development project to "create an app enabling digital comics to be made by anyone".
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Alan Moore wrote the story Big Nemo, a dystopian sequel to Winsor McCay's Little Nemo.
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In 2016, Alan Moore confirmed that after authoring a final League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book, he planned on retiring from regularly writing comic books.
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In 2018, Alan Moore contributed to the comic anthology 24 Panels.
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Alan Moore brings a wide range of influences to his work, such as William S Burroughs, William Blake, Thomas Pynchon, and Iain Sinclair, New Wave science fiction writers like Michael Moorcock, and horror writers such as Clive Barker.
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Alan Moore is a writer almost exclusively, though his hyper detailed scripts always play to the strengths of the artists he works with.
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Alan Moore was voted Best Writer by the Society of Strip Illustration in both 1982 and 1983.
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Alan Moore received an Inkpot Award at the San Diego Comic-Con International in 1985.
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Alan Moore has won multiple Eagle Awards, including virtually a "clean sweep" in 1986 for his work on Watchmen and Swamp Thing.
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Alan Moore has been nominated for the Comics Buyer's Guide Fan Awards several times, winning for Favorite Writer in 1985,1986,1987,1999, and 2000.
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Alan Moore won the CBG Fan Award for Favorite Comic Book Story in 1987 and Favorite Original Graphic Novel or Album in 1988.
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Alan Moore was given the "Best Comics Writer Ever" National Comics Award in 2001,2002, and 2003.
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Alan Moore received the Harvey Award for Best Writer for 1988, for 1995 and 1996, for 1999, for 2000, and for 2001 and 2003.
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Alan Moore received a Bram Stoker Award in the category Best Illustrated Narrative for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in 2000, then again in 2012 for Neonomicon as Best Graphic Novel.
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The first film to be based upon Alan Moore's work was From Hell in 2001, which was directed by the Hughes brothers.
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Alan Moore's attitude changed after producer Martin Poll and screenwriter Larry Cohen filed a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox, alleging that the film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen plagiarised an unproduced script they had written entitled Cast of Characters.
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Fox's settlement of the case insulted Alan Moore, who interpreted it as an admission of guilt.
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In 2012, Alan Moore claimed that he had sold the rights to these two works simply for the money; he did not expect the films ever to be made.
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Alan Moore said in an interview in 2012 that he had seen neither film.
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Alan Moore publicly criticised details of the script before the film's release, pointing to apparent laziness in the writing.
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Alan Moore announced that he would not allow his name to be used in any future film adaptations of works he does not own, nor would he accept any money from such adaptations.
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Alan Moore estimated it to be 'at least a few million dollars' and said:.
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Alan Moore has taken to wearing a number of large rings on his hands, leading him to be described as a "cross between Hagrid and Danny from Withnail and I" who could be easily mistaken for "the village eccentric".
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The couple had a mutual lover, Deborah, although the relationship between the three ended in the early 1990s as Phyllis and Deborah left Alan Moore, taking his daughters with them.
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In 1993, on his fortieth birthday, Alan Moore openly declared his dedication to being a ceremonial magician, something he saw as "a logical end step to my career as a writer".
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Alan Moore took as his primary deity the ancient Roman snake god Glycon, who was the centre of a cult founded by a prophet known as Alexander of Abonoteichus, and according to Alexander's critic Lucian, the god itself was merely a puppet, something Alan Moore accepts, considering him to be a "complete hoax", but dismisses as irrelevant.
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Alan Moore is a member of Northampton Arts Lab and takes walks with the novelist Alistair Fruish.
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Alan Moore is a friend of writer Neil Gaiman, whom he once called Neil "Scary Trousers" Gaiman due to his reaction as he described the script of From Hell.
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Alan Moore politically identifies as an anarchist, and outlined his interpretation of anarchist philosophy, and its application to fiction writing in an interview with Margaret Killjoy, collected in the 2009 book, Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:.
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In December 2011, Alan Moore responded to Frank Miller's attack on the Occupy movement, calling his more recent work misogynistic, homophobic and misguided.
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Alan Moore described Occupy as "ordinary people reclaiming rights which should always have been theirs" and added:.
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Alan Moore is a member of The Arts Emergency Service, a British charity working with 16- to 19-year-olds in further education from diverse backgrounds.
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In November 2019, Alan Moore again expressed guarded support for Labour, even going so far as to say that he would be voting for the first time in over forty years.
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Alan Moore complimented Frank Miller's realistic use of minimal dialogue in fight scenes, which "move very fast, flowing from image to image with the speed of a real-life conflict, unimpeded by the reader having to stop to read a lot of accompanying text".