1990
In 1990 Alan Moore gave his first interview
for over two years. As this was just a couple of years before he (in his words)
"came out" as a magician I decided to trawl through it to see if there
were any hints of an impending collision with the infinite.
This interview was conducted over the phone
by Gary Groth for The Comics Journal 138.
Art
"I think that art has a place in the world, I think it's
important to the world, I think it's part of the way in which we evolve. I think
that cultures evolve as much in response to their art and their dreams and their
aspirations as they do to their fears and whatever bullying and intimidation
is being heaped on them from outside. There's very little in current human culture
that I place any value on at all, but art is one of the few things that I do
value and cherish. I think art has an immense importance to the world as it
is now and as it hopefully will be in the future."
Hints at some of the ideas in
V for Vendetta ideas which I have since heard being described
as Thelemic, a theme which I hope to be able to elaborate on another time.
Definition of Art
"I've got a very, very broad, almost functionally useless,
definition of art: just as anything which communicates creatively .. but I think
you've got to have a broad definition of art."
Moore was later to say that
magic and art are more or less analogous.
Definition of Politics
"I've got a broad definition of what's political. To me,
anything which is a system of seeing the human world is a political statement.
It doesn't have to be a traditional sort of political ststement. What happened
in Watchmen, where that did become the thing that interested me the most
about the story - just the view of the world as a web of interconnected egos
and desires and ambitions and accidents and random events - seemed to me to
be saying something that to me felt true, and felt important and that is something
which I've expanded upon in Big Numbers."
Moore would much later say that
"Magic is the ultimate politics".
Fame
"Media and fame, they're like an element as much as water
and fire are. They're 20th century elements, they're ones that we didn't have
before in this way, and the people who are thrown into that grinder are still
being thrown in without any preperation, without any understanding of what it
is they're being asked to face."