The Idler

Conversations: Alan Moore

He’s the greatest comics writer ever. He’s the affable mage from Northampton, the hairy word-wizard and messiah to fan boys the world over. He’s Alan Moore and he’s having lunch with JONATHAN ROSS.

Alan Moore is the greatest comic book writer alive today. This isn’t me being deliberately cute or contentious – it’s about as close to a fact as you can get when dealing with opinions. In just about every respectable poll of the comic-loving community – like The Harvey’s or the recent Comic Buyers Guide poll – Moore comes out on top – and normally by a very long shot. I think I might even venture that he is the greatest comic book writer ever, in the history of the medium. In fact, I’ll go further. He is the greatest living comic book writer that ever was or ever will be, until this beloved and much derided medium inevitably dies out from apathy, or collapses under the weight of too many overly muscular men in tights trying to save the world.

If you don’t know much about comics – and chances are you don’t because you’re a hopeless waste of chemicals who buys FHM when your Idler pals aren’t looking – then here’s all you need to know to get started. Moore writes comics. He writes comics that successfully take the essential ingredients of whatever genre he’s working in – old style superhero, gothic horror, or science-fiction adventure – and he twists and teases them out of shape and into something utterly new and completely intoxicating. He took Swamp Thing, a so-so monster-mystery book, and made it into a dark, weird love story. He fooled around with Superman and actually made that dullest of dull bores into a fantastic riff on what a day in the life of a super-powered freak would be like, if the bad guys really did use their immense powers for evil – and not just that mischievous tomfoolery that we all knew would never lead to them ruling the world. With Watchmen he gave us a dystopian take on the whole super-hero genre. And most recently, with Tom Strong, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea, Top 10 and Tomorrow Stories he has produced – from scratch! – a whole new comic company that is so far ahead of the competition in terms of skill and craft and originality that it has caused grown men to fall to their knees in comic shops and sob like middle-aged babies with gratitude. Or maybe that’s only me.

So when Idler HQ asked me if’d like to meet the great and beardy one, I rushed at the chance like Charlie Sheen at a porn starlet. But – and this may surprise you – I felt nervous. Not a feeling I’m overly familiar with, having met and interviewed – well, almost everybody since the bird of fame and good fortune first alighted on my shoulder about 14 years back. But Moore was a different proposition. Here was someone who I didn’t want to entice pearls of wit or wisdom from, didn’t hope to hear amusing or bitchy anecdotes about his peers. Here was someone I just wanted to sit near and bask in their presence. So what follows is a sort of messy record of the meet as we ate at Momo’s Moroccan restaurant in Heddon Street – just around the corner from the very phone booth that David Bowic camps it up in on the sleeve of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.

Alan is, unsurprisingly I suppose, just like his writing. In short, he’s not what you’d expect. Tall, bearded, long-haired and dressed all in black with a long, silver-topped walking stick. A casual observer would write him off as a goth or mystic, a new age feng shui nut with a taste for herb teas and early Hawkwind, a lover of underground comicana – hardcore adult stuff that would confuse and confound the fan boys and have their parents calling the social workers out. But he’s none of those things. Well, actually he does raher like herb tea and as for his feelings about early Hawkwind I suspect that, much like you or I, he has no strong opinion one way or the other. But here he is on the need for mainstream comics as a way of introducing new ideas into a tired medium… I asked him about the style of his girlfriend Melinda Gebbie, who draws the strip “Cobweb” currently running in Tomorrow Stories.

ROSS: I love the art in “Cobweb”. It’s a really, really weird style for mainstream comic readers to see.

MOORE: This is what we wanted. The idea behind them is that mainstream comics are pretty clearly going down the toilet. You get people like Gary Groth [see the Quick Guide to Comics on page 113] and Fantagraphics who will applaud that, but I don’t think they quite realise the implications. The thing is that no comic shops can stay open selling Acme comics, From Hell or any of these books, worthy as they are. You’ve got to have The Uncanny X-Men there and you’ve got to have Spawn and all this stuff for the shops to stay open. If mainstream comics go down the tube, it pulls the rest of us along too. So it seems to me that you could invigorate mainstream comics so that you wouldn’t have to separate comics out into mainstream, independent, underground, alternative: because it’s too small to categorise like that.

ROSS: So you disagree with that phrase that we all got so tired of seeing a few years back – “comics: they’re not just for kids anymore”.

MOORE: “Comics have grown up.” Me and Frank Miller have got a lot for answer for, it has to be said. When I did Watchmen, I thought, great, people are going to feel compelled to look at the clever storytelling involved and they’re feel compelled to match me or better me in coming up with ways for telling stories. But instead, it seems what most people saw was the violence, the grimness, the layer of atheist pessimistic politics that was glossed over it. That’s what got regurgitated and recycled with the Vertigo books.

ROSS: It’s still happening.

MOORE: Well, one of the main things I’ve got against Vertigo, and there’s some great books that Vertigo do… but the thing I find a bit of problem is that their atmosphere, their ethos or whatever, seems to be based on the bad mood that I was in about 18 years ago. It’s not even their bad mood. I was in a bit of a strop, you know, about politics in general, because of the Thatcher years.

ROSS: It was a bad time, yeah.

MOORE: And that might have coloured my outlook somewhat, but I don’t see why it should colour everybody else’s in exactly the same way.

ROSS: I’d have thought you’d have got it out of your system with that thing you did with Bill Sienkiewicz – Brought To Light.

MOORE: I did, yeah.

ROSS: I always thought that looked very cathartic.

MOORE: I thought that was one of my best works. I’m glad you remember it, Jonathan.

You really have to get hold of a copy of Brought To Light – the best and most unsettling piece of Chomsky-like political truth telling I’ve ever seen, and one of those books which hits you – SMACK – between the eyes with the potential that the medium has.

But here’s another thing about Alan Moore that I really want to share with you. He’s a genius. He really is a fucking Grade A once-in-a-lifetime inspirational talking-in-tongues genius. And of course being a genius means that his ideas and his approach and his methods have been stolen and appropriated and homaged by just about every lesser talent who trails in his wake. It also means that there’s a legion of Moore devotees like myself who pore over every panel of every book he’s worked on – and of course he has his fair share of unofficial web sites on our glorious internet… which comes in handy when you’re trying to ensure you catch every last reference that Moore crams into his work.

ROSS: So what about the Alan Moore mythology that exists out there? I went on the internet and had a look at a couple of the Alan Moore sites – it is a strange place to go unchaperoned. There’s a few guys out there who take quite a scholarly approach to your work, and almost see it as their job to be librarians or collaters of it all…

MOORE: There’s one bloke who analyses The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – and it’s just one bloke… I thought it must be a team of literary fellas.

ROSS: And he picks up all your references… I get the feeling from your books that not only have you read a lot, but there’s a continuing quest for knowledge.

MOORE: I’ve always been absorbing information in one form or another. I got chucked out of school when I was 17 which is more or less when my education started.

ROSS: You were expelled?

MOORE: Yeah. The way that school seemed to me was that there was an overt curriculum – reading, writing and arithmetic – and a covert curriculum, which was more or less punctuality, obedience and the acceptence of monotony… In a lot of cases it seemed that school was like aversion therapy. It wasn’t there to teach you knowledge, it was there to put you off learning. You’d associate learning or reading with work and you’d associate work with drudgery. This is why most people are happy to just sit down in front of the televsion at night. “I’m not actually doing any work, therefore I must be having a perfect time.”

ROSS: …being entertained, it’s a passive thing.

MOORE: Yeah. Now, I was shunted out of school when I was 17. The headmaster, he took against me, I’d like to think that it was a class thing… He wrote to all the various colleges around and said, don’t take this kid because he’s a corrupting influence on all the others…

ROSS: Bastard!

MOORE: Well, I was 17 and I was a pretty hellish 17 year old. But, I was only 17… he wrote to all the employers telling them not to give me a job. That was mental, but I was forced back on to my own resources and started to read voraciously and learn and filled my head with various stuff and it’s all back there in a soup and I’m putting more stuff in there all the time. I read very quick. I sort of suck ‘em in…it’s just gone in to the general silage vat in there and it will ferment and maybe it’ll evolve into something in twelve years time.

ROSS: When you’re writing are you always aware of your references, or are you sometimes surprised to see when you re-read that there was a reference there?

MOORE: Sometimes I can be very surprised. I remember there was one Abelard Snazz story which I wrote and never reprinted because after I’d written it I suddenly realised that it was a complete rip-off of an RA Laperty story. You read all these anthologies with hundreds of stories in them and sometimes if you forget where one came from you think, “that’s a good idea, it must be mine.”

ROSS: That must be a hazard that faces anyone who likes the genre they work for and likes similar media.

MOORE: Its like when I first met Gilbert Hernandez, I said, “so you really like Gabriel Garcia Marquez?” And he said, “never read it” and I said, “you haven’t read One Hundred Years of Solitude?” and he said, “no” and then later he read it, and was completely knocked out by the similarities.

ROSS: Yeah, isn’t that strange?

MOORE: Everybody thinks that Promethea is based upon this character invented by this lesbian author, Helen Cixous, who did write a book about this female emerging from the imagination, a heroine whose name is Promethea. But I didn’t realise till the painter and performer Jos?� Villarubia got in touch with me and he said he’d been looking on the map and he’d found all these different disparate references to characters named Promethea, most notably this one that Helen Cixous had written about which even sounds like the same character. And the other day he sent me a book of Tom Strong. It’s from 1903, it’s Tom Strong Saves the Day. Apparently it was published by the Boy Scout Organisation in America, they did a series of books about this muscular boy scout called Tom Strong.

ROSS: This Promethea idea, of course I wasn’t aware of the author you mentioned, but I assumed there was almost a DC back reference there. With Captain Marvel [see quick comic guide on page 113] you have the super hero half, the powerful half residing in the imagination world, and also the changing and coming into our world…

MOORE: Captain Marvel is quite a magical character, it’s all mythical stuff. One of the writers, Bill Parker, was a classics student. In the recent Promethea we’ve got the sacred plant that is Moly. They reckon that Moly is a mythical plant that Hermes gave to Odysseus to help him against Circe And this is why it’s connected to magic, but no one knows if there ever was such a plant, or whether it’s mythological, but I reckon it’s the flower of the mandrake.

ROSS: Do you remember Uncle Marvel?

MOORE: Uncle Marvel… he doesn’t have any powers, he’s just pretending…

ROSS: Yeah, that’s right… he’s the comic relief.

MOORE: He just sort of hangs onto Captain Marvel’s cloak when he’s flying, so he can appear to be flying himself…

ROSS: What a fabulous creation… [both laugh]

MOORE: You could have more fun with comics in those days. Without going back to Vertigo, this is one of my objections to it, is that there’s no fun…

ROSS: What I hate about a lot of modern comics is that they are relentlessly dark, and they never step outside this template. Whereas even in Watchmen, for example, I’ll give you an example of something which I remember finding genuinely inspirational and educational. One issue, you tell a story as if it appeared in an old pirate comic book. It loops back into the history of comics… which I only found existed after reading that. At the time you opened the eyes of this young fan boy to what comics had been once, and maybe could be again.

MOORE: Swamp Thing is probably more of a template for the Vertigo books than Watchmen was, but with Swamp Thing, you’ve got all these stories which are really horrible, really grim and really depressing… but then you’ll have these little stories like the Swamp Sex Issue, a love poem more or less.

ROSS: Yeah, some of them were quite light.

MOORE: In a way it’s crueler, if you give people a love poem they’ll numb out and switch off… it keeps the horror fresh if you…

ROSS: …give a little taste of sorbet in between the death and desolation.

MOORE: You feel the pain much greater…

ROSS: It’s making me want to go back and re-read Watchmen. Beautifully done, sir!

Here’s the deal worth knowing about Watchmen, Moore’s seminal, ground-breaking and oh-so influential treatment of the super-powers thing. Initially the characters who are shown in all their dark, dysfunctional glory were to be a bunch of superheros from one of the lesser comic companies – Charlton. These characters had been bought by DC, home of Superman and Batman. Moore wanted to take those characters and spin them off into a sort of hyper real what-if tale in which they were forced to be sort of real. DC said no. So Moore, along with Dave Gibbons, created a set of characters who might as well have been those Charlton warhorses…

ROSS: Cos they originally were going to be the Charlton characters, it was going to be The Question, and the Blue Beetle? The Peacemaker? Those guys…

MOORE: Captain Atom.

ROSS: Oh yeah, Captain Atom was great. Those early Ditko [seminal artist; see page 113] Captain Atoms were just fabulous, aren’t they?

MOORE: Ditko was great…

ROSS: Is Ditko really as nuts as they say? I mean obviously when you read Mister A and all his weird stuff you get, he seems an uncompromising sort of character… Have you met him, yeah?

MOORE: No, I haven’t, nobody gets to meet Ditko… I have great admiration for the guy…

ROSS: We could tie this in, he could be the other great comic creator recluse. ‘Cos I don’t know anyone who never does anything, never goes to conventions, never answers calls…

MOORE: Someone was interviewing Ditko, and they said have you seen Watchmen at all? And he said, “well yeah I’ve seen the book,” because there’s this character in it called Rorshach and he said, “oh yeah, Rorshach, he’s like Mr. A except he’s insane.” [Both laugh]

ROSS: Fantastic… He still works doesn’t he, he still draws? He must be pretty elderly?

MOORE: The saddest story I heard: it was either the 30th anniversary year or the 25th, one of the big Spiderman anniversaries I think, and Steve Ditko was staying in the YMCA…

ROSS: No…

MOORE: You know, practically living out of a box.

ROSS: Were you a Kirby fan [Jack Kirby, another seminal artist; see page 113]? Presumably you were when you were younger.

MOORE: Everybody was….

ROSS: He created the template really, the look, the feel …?.

MOORE: Given the fact that Marvel values were predominantly his… I think he was the creator and the architect of the Marvel values more than Stan Lee was…

ROSS: Yeah, I think even Lee might admit that now, wouldn’t he ? Obviously he brought a lot to it, we can’t take it away from him…

MOORE: Yeah, I mean I don’t know whether it’s The Sopranos but recently I’ve found myself really getting hooked on the mafiosi…

ROSS: I haven’t watched The Sopranos yet, I’m embarrassed to say, because I missed the beginning of it, and I didn’t want to come in half way through so I’ve now got them ready to watch, and everyone raves about them…

MOORE: It’s Shakespeare, it really is. I mean I’m very, very hard on most television work, and most film work, but The Sopranos is like Shakespeare. The characters are so wonderful, the writing is terrific. I envy you.

ROSS: Well, I’ve got them all on DVD ready to go… Well, that’s something I want to ask you about as well, the commercial aspects of what you’re doing. I get worried, as a fan, because you come up with something which I love, like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen say, and I’ll love it, and on the other hand I’ll probably buy multiple copies of them, because I’m desperately keen to keep it going.

MOORE: Well, the current state of the industry is that everybody seems to think it’s the end of the world. Comics are getting cancelled around about the 15,000 mark, you know, the top-selling book in the industry will do just about 100,000, you know, this is the end of the world… No, this is not the end of the world, this is 1982, when Daredevil was down to 15,000, and they thought, well we can’t make it any worse, let’s try the kid who says he wants to write and draw it, and like with Swamp Thing down to 17,000, let’s give it to him…

ROSS: So that’s why they gave it to you?

MOORE: Yeah, because they were on the verge of cancellation. Same with Daredevil, that’s why they gave it to Frank [Miller], it was down to 15,000…

ROSS: Unbelievable…

MOORE: The top-selling book in the industry was The X Men which was selling around 120,000 when television came along in the Sixties. That’s when the comics figures start to drop.

So as the meal rolls on and we move from vegetarian main course – he out of principle. me the desire to impress – the talk turns to Moore the man. A few years back chances were that if you wanted to hear him speak you could find him at the bigger conventions.

ROSS: You don’t smoke, do you?

MOORE: I’m quite happy at the moment. I’m trying to stop the drink.

ROSS: Yeah…

MOORE: I decided that, it was really because I was bored with drink and I wasn’t having any fun with it anymore and I felt the same thing about smoking…

ROSS: Are you sociable in Northampton? Do you go out much? Or do you pretty much stay at home?

MOORE: If you asked that lady on the radio [I had mentioned on Radio Two that Northampton was home to the country's foremost comic book writer, much to the bemusement of the lady who had phoned in from there to win a Ricky Martin CD], “What about Alan Moore?”, she’d say, “Oh yeah, that bloke with the walking stick and the beard, oh yeah, lovely chap, got a note from him the other day, know him very well…”

ROSS: Is it not misanthropic anyway, the desire not to mix….?

MOORE: Possibly it is, as you may have noticed is partly, I’m partly deaf…So you’ll have to excuse me…

ROSS: What, in both ears?

MOORE: No, only that one, and I’m practically blind in that eye and practically deaf in that ear so it balances out… One of the reasons I stopped drinking is because I don’t like pubs, and background noise and it gets a bit diffficult…

ROSS: They get very noisy…

MOORE: …and also I think that during the Eighties, the conventions, that put the wind up me a bit.

ROSS: There was a period when Watchmen was huge, and you were like God. The Great God of Comics. I remember you coming out and people went nuts. It was like a rock star, or deity, it was that sort of insane level of adulation…

MOORE: Yeah.

ROSS: That must have been strange for you anyway, but what did fans want from you, what was the exchange between you?

MOORE: Um, I don’t know… I mean I’m a very untidy person, I can’t be bothered shaving most mornings. However, this does seem to give a certain messianic gloss…

He stares at me in a Manson sort of way. Charles, not Marilyn of course.

ROSS: Especially if you do that with your eyes, Alan…

MOORE: Yes!

ROSS: No, I like it, keep it going, it’s good…

MOORE: All this is innocently done, but they conspire…

ROSS: This is where the mythology comes in, I guess, because people like me who don’t know you, but know and love your work, we will always try and store theories and our own ideas about you… I always thought your hair was like that because you didn’t want to waste time… the trimming and the vanity.

MOORE: Well yeah, I can’t be arsed with all that…

ROSS: …and as you get older, because what are you? 47?

MOORE: Yeah…

ROSS: Is the ageing process also making you aware of the limited time you’ve got left? Is that in any way a factor?

MOORE: No, not really. I came to terms with death early. I had a period of three weeks when I was ten and by the end of that, I’d pretty well understood that everybody dies.

ROSS: Did someone die?

MOORE: Umm, I can’t remember. No, I think it was just the idea that I might,

ROSS: That’s pretty young for that to come to you…

MOORE: …you know that there would be parties that I wouldn’t get invited to, there’ll be great things happening and sunny days that I won’t see, and how can that be?

ROSS: It’s a fucker, isn’t it?

MOORE: It’s like, with the magic. I don’t have religious faith, almost the opposite of religion. Religion means you believe the same thing as a bunch of other people believe, and that seems unnatural to me, we have such different minds.

ROSS: When you say magic here we’re talking about theatrical magic or are we talking about magick with a K?

MOORE: Well, we’re talking about traditions of magic, which would include John Dee, and would include the Victorian artist Austin Osman Spare. Would also include Crowley, although even saying his name kind of probably sets off a load of other associations…

ROSS: It brings baggage with it.

MOORE: Yeah, well there are so many of these little shit hot satanists who sort of go round and they’re mainly middle-class people, who want to surround themselves with the glamour of evil so they’ll go on about about how William Burroughs is a great writer because he shot his wife and how Charlie Manson has to be really deep…

ROSS: So what’s your feeling about afterlife? I mean you’re putting your energies out there in your work, so you’re living on anyway. You’re guaranteed a hundred years or so after you’ve gone anyway, Alan, if people keep printing.

MOORE: Well, that’s posterity which I’m not that bothered about….

ROSS: But in a way you’re still touching people.

MOORE: But that would be true if they remembered my name or not…

ROSS: If we hadn’t met today I would be interacting with you in the same way when you were dead as I had when you were alive…

MOORE: With the afterlife, my feelings are that you’ll probably have a better life if you assume that there is only one.

ROSS: Yeah…

MOORE: It’s probably better to live as if death is a few steps away…

ROSS: It’s not only imminent, but it’s unavoidable, and that’s all there is…

MOORE: But as to what happens after death: in the kind of magic that I’ve done, which is very sort of practical, hands on, kind of magic, there is obviously some truth to it. Most scientists suggest that there’s an awful lot more to the universe than our theory of it. Spirits and the world beyond the body will forever be beyond the provenance of science, but I would point out, that amongst things that are beyond the provenance of science, it’s thought that in terms of science that the presence of the mind is a real problem. The biologists are hoping that they will be able to prove that this consciousness that we all have inside our heads is some sort of by product of biological processes and that will make them very very happy because consciousness on its own is intangible. We can’t reproduce it in a laboratory, you can’t even prove scientifically that any one of us is aware.

ROSS: You can’t explain why any of us have it, why you need it scientifically…

MOORE: Let alone the things it produces, like mathematics, where does that come from? Even scientists don’t know this stuff, but the biologists, they think, yeah, we’ll prove that consciousness is explained by biology and that will be cool because biology is a hard science based on chemistry, that’s what makes all the glands and enzymes squirt. And that’s cool because chemistry is an even harder science, and the reason that chemistry is true is because it’s based on physics, it’s the way things work, and physics is true because that’s all based upon quantum physics. Unfortunately quantum physics says that the mind affects what’s happening on a quantum level, so you can’t get rid of mind, it’s still there.

ROSS: Once you’ve gone down to that level…

MOORE: Exactly, it’s still there

ROSS: They can’t really explain it away.

MOORE: And so, I tend to feel, I don’t know, I don’t think that the thing that calls itself Alan Moore will survive death, I think it would be kind of horrible if it did, because this is the personality that works for here, this is the personality that I’ve developed to get by in this place, and the idea of that hanging on forever…

ROSS: It’s a bit spooky…

MOORE: The personality, the intellect, the emotions, the dreams, the body: this is all the lower personality. I think that the bit of us that lives on is the highest part of us. I think that yeah, there is a soul, but I think there’s only one and that we’re all part of it, we’re all tributaries of the same ocean, and that maybe when that tributary dries up there’s still the ocean. You’ve lost your own individual identity but then that’s just a passing vanity anyway.

ROSS: Yeah.

MOORE: But I don’t know, Jonathan. That’s just a guess, you know…

ROSS: Of course, but that’s what faith is to a certain extent anyway, isn’t it?

MOORE: Yeah, I prefer not to have faith in ideas, so I’m more of a agnostic. I’ll believe something if I’ve seen it with my own eyes…

ROSS: So in a way these experiences you’ve had, or people you’ve been with, have skewered you in this direction.

MOORE: Yeah, and I’ve tried to interpret them and that’s led me to come to different conclusions. It’s an ongoing thing.

ROSS: Let me tap back into some more Alan Moore mythology. Are you married? Or are you living with Melinda?

MOORE: I was married when I was about twenty, and me and me wife split up in about 1989. I met Melinda a year later. Me and Melinda don’t live together because she’s an artist and I’m a writer, both of which are far too mental. But we see each other a lot. I met up wth her mainly because I wanted to do an erotic, a pornographic comic book, and the idea of doing it with guys…

ROSS: Ha ha.

MOORE: That’s the most obvious thing, because I very seldom work with women, I think Melinda was the first woman I’d ever worked with…

ROSS: There aren’t that many in comics, are there?

MOORE: No…. and certainly there aren’t many who can draw as well as Melinda can, so that gives it a completely different vibe. If it had been two guys doing it you would inevitably have a kind of locker room feel….

We spoke about a lot of other things, and comic books and creators too obscure to inflict on you. I dropped Alan off at the station and went home to re-read every one of his books that I could dig out. Reading back through the transcript of our meeting I realised that I could have asked him a thousand better questions – could have probed and got to grips with the inner man, could have eased out his hopes and dreams, lingered on his regrets. But fuck! It was Alan Moore! You’re lucky I managed even one semi-coherent sentence. Now if only the Idler can get me an audience with Elvis I’ll die happy tomorrow.

Ross’s quick Guide to Comics

Steve Ditko
Along with Jack Kirby the best artist working at Marvel during those halcyon days of the early Sixties. He worked mainly on fantasy and science fiction stories until the legendary Amazing Fantasy number 15, when he and Stan Lee introduced the Amazing Spiderman to the world. He went on to draw the first – and best – 37 issues of Spidey’s own book, then created various equally inspired characters at DC comics before headng to Charlton. More recently he has produced weird polemical black and white strips that put forward his uncomplicated slightly creepy Ayn Rand-inspired philosophy of life.

Jack Kirby
Jack “King” Kirby is probably the greatest and most influential artist/creator to have worked in American comics. He co-created Captain America, The Boy Commandos, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, The New Gods, Mister Miracle, Kamandi The Last Boy On Earth and The Demon who appeared briefly in Alan Moore’s legendary Swamp Thing run. He also pioneered the romance comic, the crime comic, and even comic books based on dreams. My son Harvey Kirby Ross is named after him. I think I am going to cry now.

Captain Marvel
The tremendous early superhero strip that was sort of goofy and sweet natured and followed the exploits of newsboy Billy Batson who, upon uttering the word Shazam, turned into Captain Marvel. The good Captain battled many nefarious foes, but was finally killed off by the lawyers at DC comics who issued a suit claiming he was a rip-off of Superman. He was of course a far better creation. Ironically, DC later bought the character and tried to revive him in the Seventies.

Gary Groth
Gary publishes the Comic Journal, an interesting if self-important and overly critical view of the comic biz.