http://www.blather.net/articles/amoore/alanmoore.txt HTML version: http://www.blather.net/articles/amoore/index.html Italian HTML version: http://www.ultrazine.org/ultraparole/alanmoore.htm THE ALAN MOORE INTERVIEW BY BARRY KAVANAGH, 17 OCTOBER 2000. INTRODUCTION Born in Northampton, England, in 1953, Alan Moore's comics writing was nothing short of seminal in the 1980s with Watchmen and nothing less than monumental in the 1990s with From Hell. In this interview, he talks about his comics work in great detail, as well as his non-comics writing, his CDs and his interest in the occult. Full of insights, his conversation touches upon many other social and cultural subjects which should be of interest to Blather readers. Some familiarity with Watchmen and From Hell is advised, as Barry Kavanagh's questions are based on close readings of these books. What is being said about the other works is probably understandable from the context. Nevertheless, here's a brief, helpful rundown on some of the works that are discussed: V for Vendetta, with artist David Lloyd (collected by DC Comics, 1990), originally began in 1981 in the English magazine Warrior, which was discontinued. Moore and Lloyd managed to pick it up a few years later and finished it in 1988. It tells the story of a dystopian future England, governed by fascists. A mysterious Guy Fawkes lookalike called V emerges, seemingly from nowhere, and blows up the houses of parliament. And that's just the first six pages... Watchmen, with artist Dave Gibbons (collected by Titan Books, 1987) shows how the Cold War would have been conducted if a superhuman being had existed. There are also various "masked adventurers" in the story, which completely twists and undermines superheroes and the superhero comic genre. Many philosophical issues are brilliantly addressed, including the value of human life. Batman: The Killing Joke, with artists Brian Bolland and John Higgins (DC Comics, 1988), about the relationship between Batman and the Joker, was one of the Batman stories "for mature readers" that were in high demand in the wake of Frank Miller's reinterpretation of Batman in 1986-87 (the Batman movie killed all that off). Brought to Light, with artist Bill Sienkiewicz (Titan Books, 1989), was based on the lawsuit filed by the Christic Institute against drug-smuggling, arms-dealing servants of the US government. Big Numbers, with artist Bill Sienkiewicz (Mad Love, 1990), was the ill-fated, unfinished comic about a young writer called Christine. A Small Killing, with artist Oscar Zarate (Victor Gollancz, 1991), told the story of Timothy Hole, who works in advertising in New York and is being followed by a mysterious little boy, even when he returns home to Sheffield. From Hell, with artist Eddie Campbell (Mad Love / Kitchen Sink Press, 1991-96), is a fictional account of the Jack the Ripper crimes of 1888, based on exhaustive research. The Birth Caul, with musicians Tim Perkins and David J (1995), is a spoken word performance. Moore talks about "this present moment," then takes us back through adulthood, adolescence, childhood, birth, to before birth, to earlier forms of evolution, to the periodic table, to the cosmos, to "the empty room." THE ALAN MOORE INTERVIEW BY BARRY KAVANAGH, 17 OCTOBER 2000. BK: I presume I'm calling you in Northampton Yeah, that's right, yeah. BK: Yeah, I'm calling from Dublin. Aha. BK: Is that a Northampton accent? Um... Probably, yeah... I mean, I've lived in Northampton all my life so I guess it's pretty much a complete dyed-in-the-wool Northampton accent. BK: Yeah, we've got a few different accents in Dublin. I've a South County accent, the same accent as Sinead O'Connor... Anyway, I don't know anything about Northampton. Is it a big place? Is it a city or a town? It's a town, I mean it's as big as some cities but we've got the wrong sort of cathedral, so we're not actually a city - and it's an interesting place, I mean, I wrote the book Voice of the Fire [which] was largely just about Northampton. It's very interesting, it's the largest town, like I say, it's larger than some cities - BK: What kind of population? I couldn't tell you. BK: But it's not a million or anything? No but there are some cities that are smaller than Northampton. In terms of violent crime, it's in the lead of places that are far bigger and more notorious, you know? Historically it's got some interesting kinks to it. It was one point more or less unofficially the capital of Britain. BK: Of Britain? Well, of England, certainly. During the Saxon times this would have been the capital but then after that - the royal family were born here, or died here; this was where Mary Queen of Scots was executed; I think this was where Richard III was born; it's where the War of the Roses was decided; it's where the English Civil War was decided. As far as I know it's pretty well exactly equidistant from every coast, which means that it's right in the centre of the country, so all of the internal wars in England have more or less passed through it, they just had to, you know? So there's a lot of strange history. BK: Is it very urban, or are you surrounded by hills or anything? Well I mean if you get outside of Northampton we've got some lovely countryside but you wouldn't know that from being in the town. It's very urban, I suppose in a lot of ways it's a very nondescript midlands town, in that most towns have the same shops, there's a sort of gradual homogenization where everything does become sort of like a potato print, like a wallpaper design. BK: Yeah, I've been to Leicester Yeah, in that case you probably know pretty much all you that need to know about Northampton. BK: [Laughs]. Alright, okay. I was going to start with going through all these comics you've written. But first a couple of general things about comics. What do you think of the term "graphic novel" that has come into use? It's a marketing term. I mean, it was one that I never had any sympathy with. The term "comic" does just as well for me. The term "graphic novel" was something that was thought up in the '80s by marketing people and there was a guy called Bill Spicer who used to do a brilliant fanzine back in the sixties called Graphic Story Magazine. He came up with the term "graphic story". That's got something to recommend it, you know, I can see "graphic story" if you need it to call it something but the thing that happened in the mid-'80s was that there were a couple of things out there that you could just about call a novel. You could just about call Maus a novel, you could probably just about call Watchmen a novel, in terms of density, structure, size, scale, seriousness of theme, stuff like that. The problem is that "graphic novel" just came to mean "expensive comic book" and so what you'd get is people like DC Comics or Marvel comics - because "graphic novels" were getting some attention, they'd stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel, you know? It was that that I think tended to destroy any progress that comics might have made in the mid-'80s. The companies, the marketing people, who are not terribly bright individuals, they're not terribly creative, they don't really have the hang of - well, I mean, they really haven't got the hang of the 1970s yet, so the 21st century is a long way behind them and they think in very short term measures and consequently they were more or less to blame for destroying whatever kind of momentum the comic book picked up in the '80s by immediately using it predictably to sell a load of Batman, Spiderman shit. But no, the term "graphic novel" is not one that I'm over-fond of. It's nothing that I might carry a big crusade against, it doesn't really matter much what they're called but it's not a term that I'm very comfortable with. BK: The word "novel" is kind of empty anyway, because I mean Ulysses is a novel and so is Jilly Cooper's Riders. Oh, exactly. You know, these literary terms, they've probably got more to do with... Well, genres. I'm sure the whole idea of genres in fiction was probably invented by some bored stocking clerk at W.H.Smith, fifty years ago or something like that. That everything has to be pigeonholed and packaged. I suppose, you know, "sequential art", you could call it that but then that's a bit of a mouthful, really, I mean "comics" is as good as anything. BK: Yeah, I think that's the most generic term and also it covers both episodic stuff and the single stories. Absolutely. BK: I kind of think that there's not enough stuff being produced in comics, because it's quite easy to have read loads of the quality stuff and still be left wanting. Depends how hard you're looking really. BK: Depends what they stock, I suppose. It depends what you're thinking about, having read all the quality stuff - BK: Well, I don't mean all but - You know, all the turn of the century newspaper stuff? Even some of the more obscure currently produced indie stuff? I mean, it's a big field. BK: Yeah, the older stuff is very hard to get and costs a lot of money. Well, you know, it depends. BK: In terms of new titles coming out and so on...? I think there's far too many new titles coming out... I think most of them, the creative teams, if you were to take them out and line them up against a wall and shoot them it wouldn't really make much of a ripple in the world of general culture and there'd probably be a lot of trees that would thank you for it. I mean, most of the major companies, ninety-nine per cent of what they put out is unreadable rubbish, not even children like it, it's not even aimed at children any more. The average comic fan I think these days is probably a guy about thirty? Which means that an awful lot of them are guys in their forties. And yet these are still guys who presumably are obsessed with the same characters in spandex. Nah, I'd like to see a lot less comics coming out but a lot more thought put into them. I think that one of the problems is that the industry is geared towards - it's better to put out fifty comics that don't really sell than five that do - this seems to be the philosophy in the industry. BK: That's kind of insane, that. Yeah but it's what happens. I mean, you ought to distinguish. You ought to separate the medium and the industry. The comic medium's wonderful. It still produces remarkable work, more than we've got any right to expect. I think that at the moment there's probably, well, there's as much remarkable work out there that there's ever been. You've only got to look at, say, the Chris Ware material in the Acme Comics Novelty Library. Some of the best, most breathtaking comic books that have appeared in the last decade, easily. But unfortunately the comic industry is still on a downward spiral largely because of the incompetence - I don't think there's really anything else you can describe it as - of the main players. BK: Well, certainly in shops, walking around, it seems to be the same stuff. There doesn't seem to be the amount of variety and - Well, there is variety there but probably most of the shops don't stock it. The thing is that everybody wants to stock, you know, like, somebody does a halfway decent, from what I've heard, X-Men film, I'm not going to bother to see it because I'm sure that "halfway decent" by a lot of people's standards is probably nowhere close in terms of mine - and I'm too much of a snob anyway - but the thing is, it's like with Batman films, you get a load of Batcrap - Batcrap, X-crap - BK: - Wall-to-wall - - and the thing is that because comics is not doing that great at the moment, the retailers, if they've a choice between ordering a hundred copies of some X-Men film tie-in that they know are going to sell, or, say, three copies of some little title from Fantagraphics or Topshelf or Drawn & Quartoy or one of the reputable publishers, that is a bit difficult, a bit intellectual, perhaps a bit expensive, then they're going to buy the X-Men stuff every time, so I think that if a shop in Dublin is anything like the shops over here, then I should imagine that comics is at very best a sideline, I should imagine it makes most of its money from action figures? Trading cards? BK: Yeah, there's a whole floor of that in Forbidden Planet. Yeah. So almost anything but comics, really. This is the way that it is. It could have been different. If things had gone a bit differently fifteen, twenty years ago. And if you'd got the sort of people with vision in control then who actually thought "Well, you know, this could open up comics to a whole new market," rather than leave us condemned to the same dwindling market that we've had for the last fifty years. But no, there was nobody there, there was no back-up. There was a few creators who were taking chances and who were actually for the first time making comics into something that adults could be interested in but there was no back-up. The companies concerned saw this as a short term profit, they didn't see it as anything they could build on. Like I say, these are not people who are over-endowed with imagination. BK: To talk about some of the ones you've written... Can you remember as far back as V for Vendetta? Oh sure, yeah, I was reading it the other day, in fact. My daughter's doing it at university, part of a degree course. BK: Really? Is it a text on the course? Oh yeah, that, Watchmen , a couple of other things. I mean, that's a "graphic novel" unit in her English course but my stuff turns up on a lot of different courses, you know, "postmodern literature". Not that there's anything to be that proud of, I mean they do do Spice Girls courses, so they do teach an awful lot of shit at university, so it's probably nothing that I should be congratulating myself on that much but yeah, V for Vendetta , yeah sure I remember it. BK: There's an article at the back [of the book] called "Behind the Painted Smile" and you wrote "There were resonances being struck that seemed to point to larger issues than the ones which we'd both come to accept as par for the course where comics were concerned." That would be you and David Lloyd. Was that the first time you were writing in a multi-layered style? It started to emerge out of the work, I think. With Marvelman there were some bits of cleverness creeping in there but with V for Vendetta I think that was where I started to realize that you could get some incredible effects by putting words and pictures together or leaving the words out for a while. I started to realize what you could do with comic storytelling and the kind of - yeah, the layering, the levels of meaning that you could attach to the story. I think that certainly V for Vendetta was one of the first real major breakthroughs I made in terms of my own personal style. BK: There's a great kind of running theme in it about ideas being more powerful than the physical. The character Evey says about - or she thinks about - V, "Whoever you are isn't as big as the idea of you," and shortly afterwards she thinks "Your foes assumed you sought revenge upon their flesh alone, but you did not stop there... you gored their ideology as well." So, it was like the real battle was between ideas, almost as if all the physical violence was incidental. When we started to do V, the entirety of the original idea was that we would have a dark, romantic, noirish adventurer and then we thought we'd set him in the future and then the details slowly came together and yeah, somewhere out of this we realized we were doing something about the contrast between anarchy and fascism, that there were lots of moral questions being asked and that yes, it was very much centred upon the world of ideas as being in some ways more important than the material world, which is I think a notion which has probably born fruit recently in other areas of my work, where it's still something that I'm very much involved with, that notion, that ideas are more important, if anything, than the material. BK: Did that notion occur to you while writing V or was it there - - It probably did. I mean, it's always difficult to remember where you actually came up with a thought, I mean, most of it, the thoughts only emerge in the writing. There's something weird about writing. It's not like you have the idea for what to write in your head necessarily, or you might just have the vaguest outline but none of the detail - but when you're actually writing you find that words kind of suggest themselves and that thoughts and ideas - you tend to go into some sort of trance. I mean, when I'm actually writing something , especially if it's something that is intricate, dense, heavy, I'm very much in a different state of consciousness. You notice it. It's always difficult to notice when you've shifted consciousness but it's like the mood, the atmosphere that surrounds you when you're right down there in the words, in the prose, it's a kind of trance state and I know it for a fact that when I used to do drawing as well, you'd get a similar kind of trance state, say, when you were inking, when your hand's just got to follow a pencil line but your mind perhaps hasn't got so much to do you drift into this kind of twilight state. And that's where a lot of the ideas come from. They seem to emerge from the act of writing itself. BK: Yeah, I totally agree with you about writing. I find it's like I'm coming at something from one side, as if, almost as if my own opinions are just one aspect of something larger. And then through the work you gradually begin to see the other sides and so on. Yeah. Yeah. BK: I suppose that's the only way you can be sympathetic to your characters? Well I mean I find that with the characters, V was a breakthrough in many ways. I was very pleased with the characterizations in V. There's quite a variety of characters in there and they've all got very distinctive characteristics. They've all got different ways of talking, different agendas and I think they're all credible because, well, they feel emotionally credible to me because there's none of them that I absolutely hated. Even when writing about fascists - BK: - Yeah, you would have thought in advance that you might have hated - Well, exactly. You know, like originally, when I thought "Oh, I'll make fascists the villains," it was precisely so that I could sort of do a bit of propaganda, I mean, remember at the time I think I was still - I mean, this was 1981? 1980-81? - I mean, I was still involved with Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, things like that - but it doesn't do anybody any service to actually just do a load of cartoon Nazis, you know, with funny monocles and cigars and accents. BK: 'Cause you don't get any understanding that way. Well, that's it and they're just caricatures. "Ve ask ze questions", you know? Whereas in fact fascists are people who work in factories, probably are nice to their kids, it's just that they're fascists. [Laughs]. They're just ordinary. They're the same as everybody else except for the fact that they're fascists. Like, in order to really - I mean, I've read somewhere that - I'm sure I'm not going to get this exactly right but the basic quote is something like - "Total understanding is total love." It's something [like that] or vice-versa. BK: I think I've heard that before. If you understood everybody, you'd love them. BK: Is that a quote, or - ? It's a quote from somewhere. BK: Yeah, I think I've heard that before somewhere. And I think that there is a certain truth in it, that the only that you could ever understand a Myra Hindley, a Fred West, a General Pinochet, is to in some way love them or at least suspend judgement, at least not hate, at least not draw back in revulsion from the very idea of these people. If you could in some way observe them with compassion, then you might actually learn something that was useful about them. BK: I suppose that's why art or writing or whatever is a more holistic way of investigating something. Yeah, I think so, I think with writing, in order to write almost anything - unless you're going to have a story that's just set with one character in a room and even then, I mean, almost anything you could imagine writing about, even if you've just got one character in a room, by extension there's a whole world outside it, which is having an influence upon the person in that room, so to some degree you have to kind of create a credible world in all of its detail when you're writing something, which means that you have to have at least a slender grasp upon what the real world is like and what real people are like, or at least the way that it kind of hangs together, the engineering of it, the engineering of human personalities, you've got to at least enough of a grasp of this whole holistic system, to be able to write something. I mean, probably that's not true of everything. I'm sure that you could write ninety per cent of pop songs without having any grasp of anything beyond the top ten, really. BK: Well a lot of pop relies on a kind of extremity, an expression of emotion that is not rational and usually is the point of view of one character. Also in an awful lot of pop there's a very narrow pallet of allowable emotions or perceptions. You go too far beyond that and you're wandering into the fringes, which sometimes does happen, sometimes the pop charts will throw up a splendid freak, like Laurie Anderson's "Oh Superman" or something like that but for the most part popular culture plays it safe, whether you're talking about comics or records or TV or movies. The mainstream is almost always deathly dull. The only place that you seem to find anything of any value is at the margins of any of these cultures, at the fringes of pop and of cinema and comics and books. That's where the real action's going on, not in the kind of Oscar-winning or Booker-prize winning enclave. BK: You mentioned Marvelman a minute ago, also known as Miracleman. That is completely unavailable, I've never seen an issue of that. Uh, yeah, that had a tangled story to begin with. BK: There was never any talk of collecting it or anything? Oh, it was collected, by Eclipse Comics. Eclipse Comics went bust. At that point I believe that I owned a third of Marvelman, which by that point I was so sick of all the back-and-forth on the character that I just handed that over to Neil Gaiman and just said "Look, if you want to do it, you can have my third of the ownership of the character." BK: And he did a few issues. He did a few issues but the thing is that what happened was Eclipse went bankrupt and then Todd McFarlane bought up the whole of Eclipse for some reason and at the moment, the last I heard was that Todd McFarlane and Neil Gaiman have got quite a dispute between themselves so it's just stuff that I've - you know, it's served its purpose and I've got copies of it somewhere but I can't remember exactly where. BK: But your run on Swamp Thing is now unavailable - Oh, they're making it available again now, they've just started bringing it out, the whole series in colour books from America. BK: Oh really? 'Cause I remember Titan Books had about a dozen of them. Yeah, they brought out a series of them in black and white but in America they've just started bringing them out as colour volumes and they're going to go through the whole series, apparently. BK: Right, that's good. What number did you start with? #21? Or #20? BK: And how many did you do? Up to about #65, something like that and there's probably a couple of annuals in there or forty pages or whatever. BK: I read some of it at the time but I don't have any copies or anything so I'd like to kind of discover that stuff. Yeah. It was experimental work, it was the first time that I'd got colour and twenty-four pages to play with. So I was able to kind of splash out and do a few things that I'd only been able to dream about doing with black and white material. BK: Watchmen. Like V for Vendetta, there's no objective narrator there and all the characters have very different philosophies. Well in Watchmen, in some ways you could say that it's grown out of Marvelman in that it has a very dystopic view of the superhero world. Probably, in terms of technique, it kind of grew more out of V for Vendetta. BK: Yeah, that's what I was thinking, there's that kind of "layered" thing again. There's that but Watchmen is a lot more complex than V for Vendetta. In pointlessly comparing the two works, what I've often said is that Watchmen has probably got more head and more intellect or something than V for Vendetta but V for Vendetta's got more passion. BK: Oh, right! V for Vendetta is very smart, it perhaps doesn't have the sort of multi-layered, crystalline brilliance as something like Watchmen but I think it's got more passion. I think it's got more heart, more emotion in it. That said, there both works that I'm very proud of. Watchmen was at the time about as far as I could imagine taking the mainstream superhero comic. It seemed to take it to some place that was so completely off the map. BK: Yeah, at the time I was thinking "Well, this is the end of the genre," you know? Well at the time I think I had vain thoughts, thinking "Oh well, no-one's going to be able to follow this, they'll all just have to stop producing superhero comics and do something more rewarding with their lives" but no, what happened was that it just started a whole genre of pretentious comics or miserable comics - or you could even see, you look at the Image comics of the early '90s, and you could see people who were predominantly superhero artists who hadn't got much of a grasp of writing, trying to sort of lift riffs from Watchmen, Dark Knight, you know, those mid-'80s books. It was like looking at your deformed bastard grandchildren or something like that. Yeah, I think that David Bowie once referred to himself as "The face that launched a thousand pretensions," and you can somehow kind of feel the same way [as] when I saw the actual effect of Watchmen upon comics [which] was probably a kind of deleterious effect, which is not surprizing I guess. Often the better works in any medium have the most negative effect. It's paradoxical but you get, say, something like Harvey Kurtzman's MAD comics in the mid-'50s, which to my mind if I had to pick one single comic book that was the best comic book ever it would be Kurtzman's MAD, that was the best comic book ever in my opinion but the thing is that, brilliant though it was, it doomed us to sixty years of humour comics named after some sort of mental aberration or illness. BK: Cracked? Cracked, Sick, Bug Fuck. There wasn't actually one called Bug Fuck but I always thought there should have been. And they're all going to have a parody of the movies in them and it won't actually be funny because they're only really going through the motions of what Harvey Kurtzman did, they're just trading on a couple of his riffs but they're not actually funny people in the way that Harvey Kurtzman was. And it's like almost anything, if a good movie comes out, it dooms you. If there's a good science fiction movie, you know that for the next ten or fifteen years, science fiction's going to go right down the drain because everybody is just going to be slavishly copying this one particular movie. BK: Yeah, it's the kind of thing that always happens. It is. It's just a thing where anything that's good or original, it's probably bad news. [Laughs]. It's going to doom you to ten or fifteen years of things that are neither good nor original. BK: The Watchmen characters, I've read that they're based on DC Universe characters but I know very little about those old superheroes Well, I mean, it's a fairly minor fact but what originally happened was that me and Dave [Gibbons] had got an idea for a kind of a superhero story which we figured needed a whole continuity of characters, not a big continuity but a whole continuity of characters, like we figured that if there were any superhero characters from old defunct comic companies lying around, that we could take a whole bunch of them wholesale and then tell this story starting with the murder of one of them, that would take these kind of familiar old-fashioned superheroes into a completely new realm. Now, at that time Dick Giordano was working for DC Comics. Now, Dick had previously been working for a company called Charlton comics. Now, while he was at Charlton he had overseen the creation of a number of characters that are still remembered with vague nostalgic affection by comic readers and comic fans. These included a lot of characters that had been created or co-created by Steve Ditko, including the Blue Beetle; the Question, who was as sort of moral extremist vigilante in the Steve Ditko mould at the time; a nuclear character called Captain Atom; there was a character called Thunderbolt, a man who had got control of the full ten-tenths of his brain capacity and was thus capable of astonishing mental and physical feats. You know, these are fairly forgettable superheroes but - BK: - Was there a guy with a hat and a mac? There was a guy with a hat and a mac, that was the Question, who was also very similar to Steve Ditko's far more right-wing character, Mister A, that was too right-wing to put in mainstream comics but which Ditko had published some strips about in independent comics at the time. Mister A was an absolute insane fascist but done absolutely straight. So we originally said that we could do the story about the Charlton characters because DC had just acquired the rights to the Charlton characters and Dick Giordano had asked if we could do anything with them. So me and Dave kind of laid out this plan for what we could do with the characters. Now, although they liked the idea of it, they had only just paid to acquire the Charlton characters, so they didn't fancy the idea of a series where at the end of it a couple of them would be dead and a couple of them would be too messed up to really work with any more, so they said "Why don't you come up with your own characters?" So we said okay and then just took the Charlton characters as a starting point and in away it was a perfect solution because Captain Atom was a nuclear superhero but he's nowhere near as interesting as Doctor Manhattan! BK: No way, I wouldn't imagine so. With Dr Manhattan we were able to bring in all this kind of quantum consciousness. BK: And the fact that he'd changed the world and so on. Yeah! We were able to do all this stuff, so yeah, it was much better the way it eventually worked out but there was a sort of a seed of the original Charlton characters but we took them further. Steve Ditko's Question/Mister A, Rorschach is a kind of logical extension of that character but I'm sure it's not one that Steve Ditko himself ever imagined, in fact I did hear that someone was interviewing Steve Ditko and asked him whether he'd seen Watchmen and this character in it called Rorschach and he said "Oh yes, I know that, he's the one who's like Mister A, except Rorschach is insane." [Laughs] I thought, well yeah, that's about what I'd expect! Well, Mister A wasn't, presumably. Yeah so it was just taking these ordinary characters and just taking them a step to the left or right, just twisting them a little bit. BK: Speaking of Rorschach, he takes off his mask to face death at the end. I only noticed that reading it again recently. Has he had some kind of psychological epiphany, or - ? I'm not sure, I'm not sure, it just seemed right. I mean, a lot of these things you just - I kind of felt that's what he'd do. I don't know, I don't know why. I couldn't logically say why the character should do that but it just felt right. At the end this is not the mask talking, it's not Rorschach, it's the actual human being that is somewhere under there. BK: Yeah, it's just amazing that it comes out because you kind of think that that person is dead, you know? But he's there. There's still this kid who had an awful time at children's homes. And that is the moment when he's going to die, that he wants it to be that personality that's at the forefront, or something. I don't know, I couldn't really explain why I did it, it just seemed like what I'd do if I was Rorschach, which is the only way that I can really justify the actions of any of the characters. BK: There are some interesting microcosms in Watchmen, like "the Black Freighter". The protagonist asks "How had I reached this appalling position with love, only love as my guide?" whereas in the main story someone's committed genocide in order to save the world. Yeah, there's even a bit where I think Adrian Veidt says at the end that he's been "Troubled by dreams lately, of swimming towards - " and then he says, "No, it doesn't matter, it's not important" and I mean it's pretty obvious that he's dreaming of swimming towards a great Black Freighter. Yeah, there's a parallel there. The pirate narrative was again something that emerged by accident - it emerged by accident in issue #3 - and yet originally it just grew out of a kind of incidental comment made by me and Dave. We were trying to work out the texture of the world and so we sort of said "Well, what sort of comics would they have? If they've got superheroes in real life, they probably wouldn't be at all interested in superhero comics" and I think Dave said "What about pirate comics?" and I said "Yeah, sounds good to me," so we dropped a few pirate comic titles into the background, including "Tales of the Black Freighter" because I'm a big Brecht fan. BK: The Threepenny Opera? Yeah, Pirate Jenny. So there was that particular point in issue #3 when I'd suddenly got all these different things going on at once and it suddenly struck me that I could have the newsvendor talking; I could have someone screwing up a radiation symbol on a fallout shelter across the street; I could have what the kid, who's sitting with his back to the electrical hydrant near the newsvendor's pitch, is reading in his comic; and I could kind of get this weird shit going on between these different levels where they're striking sparks of meaning off each other - BK: - Yeah, they're all commenting on each other. Yeah and I suddenly realized what a benefit it was having this pirate narrative embedded in the overall narrative I could refer to and use as a counterpoint. I mean yes, it eventually does end up being the story of Adrian Veidt but there's points during the pirate narrative [where] it relates to Rorschach and his capture; it relates to the self-marooning of Dr Manhattan on Mars; it can be used as a counterpoint to all these different parts of the story and after I'd done that it's kind of manifested in a lot of work since then. Not a lot of work that people have seen but a lot of work, I mean Big Numbers had got two or three microcosms involved in it.Lost Girls, which is going to be coming out next year - BK: - Finished, yeah? It's nearly finished, we've got about five chapters to do, about forty pages. But that's got a microcosm in it, in that there is a pornographic book at the hotel that the action's taking place in, which is called "the White Book" and which seems to have been drawn and written by a group of great artists and great writers, people like Beardsley, Egon Schiele, Oscar Wilde. It's a book of pastiches but that, again, can be used to counterpoint the main narrative. So yeah, that was a trick that I became quite fond of. BK: There's one thing I thought was - maybe it's just me but in that issue #3 of Watchmen, there's one panel that I thought was a microcosm for the whole work. It's the first time we see the "Gordian Knot Lock Co" guy, because the whole thing, Veidt's whole plan is basically the Gordian Knot, isn't it? Sort of, yeah. BK: To use force to evade something. Well actually, I mean the thing was when I actually named the [company], I thought we needed a locksmith, Rorschach's gone and busted these locks and we need a locksmith and I thought "What would be a good name for a locksmith? The Gordian Knot Lock Co., they'll never undo this sucker!" and it was just a kind of throwaway joke. I think we actually had that "They'll never undo this sucker" as the company slogan and then I started to realize that Veidt/Alexander fixation and of course, the story is a kind of knot. BK: Yeah but when that lockman first appears there's a bit of what Janey Slater is saying above him and she's saying "Some things, once they're busted, they can't ever be fixed," so it's kind of like Jon saying to Veidt at the end "Nothing ever ends." "Nothing ever ends," yeah. BK: And also, Seymour reaching for the diary at the end. Yeah and "It's all in your hands." BK: Well, that one panel kind of has - - Oh, I guess. Well the thing is, with Watchmen, what we tried to do was give it a truly kind of crystalline structure, where it's like this kind of jewel with hundreds and hundreds of facets and almost each of the facets is commenting on all of the other facets and you can kind of look at the jewel through any of the facets and still get a coherent reading. Yeah, basically, there are single panels there, single images, that somehow kind of tie up the whole book. BK: Yeah, I'm sure next time I read it I'll see some other things. My daughter quite enjoyed [it]. I mean, it's tailor-made for a university class, because there are so many levels and little background details and clever little connections and references in it that it's one that academics can pick over for years. BK: One thing I found really funny is near the end there's a little poster for a Tarkovsky season and the two films are Nostalgia and The Sacrifice. I think that's quite funny. Yeah, we just thought they're going to be showing Russian directors, now that it's post-reconciliation. BK: The two titles are so apt. Yeah, well Nostalgia, because we'd been using that [word] all the way through. I think when we just got to the end we thought "Right. What are they showing at this cinema where they've previously been showing '50s American disaster films?" and we thought "Alright, now they're showing Russian films." I think it was Dave who suggested Tarkovsky and said "Look, you know, there's this film, Nostalgia...and The Sacrifice." A lot of this stuff just dropped into our lap. I mean, we didn't know that there was a smiley face on Mars. We discovered halfway through that there was a crater on Mars that looked like a giant smiley face. And when we set out to do it, we didn't realize that about a month after Watchmen [would] come out, then the Tower Commission Report into Iran-Contragate would come out and use the Juvenal quote "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" as its epigram. It was a bit weird, that Watchmen period, it all got a bit spooky, there were big coincidences happening around the work and then all of a sudden the central image of it has been nicked on all these acid house t-shirts everywhere, so something that was just in me and Dave's head is now surrounding us in the culture and it felt a bit strange. BK: You then went and did Batman: the Killing Joke. Yeah, it was done while I was doing Watchmen, or just after or something, I'm not sure which but it was too close to Watchmen. I mean, Brian [Bolland] did a wonderful job on the art but I don't think it's a very good book. It's not saying anything very interesting. BK: Well, the main thing is the symbiosis between Batman and the Joker. Was that there already in Batman comics or was it something you kind of - ? - Oh, I don't know. I think that it was certainly that I made it explicit for the first time. BK: And the Joker's origin? Had he had one before that? He'd got a kind of muddy kind of origin. They'd said that he'd been the leader of a criminal gang called the Red Hood Mob and that while trying to escape from Batman he'd swum across this river of chemicals. BK: And that was about it? That was about it and this was from a story from, like, the late '50s or something and so I thought "Okay, I won't contradict that," because I kind of believe in working by the rules of the material as it already exists but I can put a lot of spin on that. BK: You put a complete spin on that. But at the end of the day, Watchmen was something to do with power, V for Vendetta was about fascism and anarchy, The Killing Joke was just about Batman and the Joker - and Batman and the Joker are not really symbols of anything that are real, in the real world, they're just two comic book characters. BK: Then you did Brought to Light, which is very much "real". Yeah, that's something that I'm very pleased with. That was a piece of work. BK: It's very hard to get across all that history and so on. Yeah, well, tell me about it, I'd got forty or fifty years of CIA history to cover and I'd got thirty pages to do it in. BK: Are you still interested in that kind of stuff? Um, well, you know, up to a point. It was quite a revelation when I actually researched it - well, no, it wasn't a revelation entirely, having grown up in the '60s I'd been exposed to more bizarre conspiracy theories than most but this wasn't conspiracy theory, it was conspiracy fact. It was an artistic challenge putting it all together. I was very pleased with the final result. I heard a nice little story from a film director who's actually making a film based upon the memoirs of a spook who was a part of most of the ventures that we talk about in Brought to Light, including all the Miami stuff, all the stuff in Vietnam in Operation Phoenix and all that sort of stuff, this guy was a veteran of those campaigns. The director of the film gave him a copy of Brought to Light and said "Here, see what you think of this," and the guy came back in the next morning - as the director described it to me, this spook came in in a state of semi-shock. For one thing he was surprized by some of the things that we knew and had printed, little things like the Australian CIA bugging facility which no-one's supposed to know about and the hand that it had in overthrowing Gough Whitlam's Labour government. But the thing that he was most shaken by was the characterization of the Eagle. He just said "That's us. That's all of us guys. That's us!" BK: Did you think that he was made to look evil or something? No, I think that he was shaken because it was true. BK: Because you had the personality of it? Well, the thing is that these guys are sort of defiant about what they believe and then they end up killing themselves, so many of them. They're so defiant that what they're doing is right for the world; is the only realistic way of proceeding politically; and then they [kill themselves] so they must have felt pretty fucking good about themselves all the while, mustn't they? And you know, they're real, they get cancers. Alright, I know lots of people get cancers but there's a certain sort of spook, people who've done rotten fucking things for their living, they've got a lot of demons and I think that Brought to Light was the most successful satire that I've ever done. Satire in the old sense, satire in the sense of doing a grotesque and unflattering portrait of somebody that is nevertheless true, that even they can't disagree with it. BK: It must have been great when you heard that. It certainly was. I mean the Christic Institute themselves pretty much got stamped into the turf. BK: They lost their lawsuit, did they? Well, they had the lawsuit thrown out, because the judge said they hadn't got enough evidence. [Laughs]. They'd got an aerodrome full of evidence but the judge was not really working to that kind of agenda. When I went over to visit them, in I don't know '85 or '86, whenever it was, the day after I left Washington they blew up the car of the head of the Christic Institute, I think it was a guy called Father Bill Ryan, they blew up his car. About a week before I'd got there someone had blown a hole through the wall using military explosives in the middle of the night and gone through some files. Like, you know, this was real. They got stamped out of existence by CIA lawsuits. We got a letter - you see, I did it as a piece of music as well with an electronic musician called Gary Lloyd, who's almost done some stuff with Iain Banks - BK: - You mean it was spoken word with - - Spoken word with music. Gary did the music. We brought it out on a label called Codex, I think it's still available. Codex, they're a record company from Brighton, and we brought it out as a spoken word piece, the whole of Brought to Light. But I know that Gary at one point was talking to Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys and I think that Gary was hoping that maybe Jello would put it out on his label. BK: Was it Alternative Tentacles? Yeah, Alternative Tentacles. We got a very nice communication back from Jello Biafra more or less saying "Look, I think it's great but the CIA have just completely stamped the Christic Institute into the turf, destroyed them with lawsuits. If they can do that to the Christic Institute they can certainly do that to Jello Biafra," and so he reluctantly kind of declined, it was a bit too hot for him to handle. So Codex brought it out over here. I believe that Bizarre magazine made it one their CDs of the millennium, which was nice. Yeah, so you know, the information's still out there. And I mean, these days, do I still keep an eye upon what the CIA are doing in the world or the intelligence community? Not really closely. I just assume that almost any shit that happens has probably got one of these kind of half-arsed Men from UNCLE set-ups behind it. You know, one of the main things I learnt with Brought to Light was that yes, there is a conspiracy but the conspiracy is largely done by people who are corrupt and stupid. You've only got to look at the CIA plots to get rid of Castro. You're not dealing with realists here. BK: Cigars that blow up. And they were planning to stage the Second Coming in the Bay of Pigs, with a firework display and a loudspeaker taking the part of Jesus to tell the no doubt superstitious and backward Cubans that Jesus was on hand and that they should renounce Castro. BK: Jesus! They believed this was going to work. This was the same as the exploding cigars; the chemicals to make Castro's beard fall out, thus robbing him of his virility in the eyes of the Cuban people; these were all serious plans! So yeah there is a conspiracy, there's lots of conspiracies. BK: But there's also a systemic corruption where the police might take on informers and they might end up protecting criminal gangs and so on. And with double-agents and triple-agents you end up with total chaos. You do! The thing is, that's exactly it: chaos. If you've got one conspiracy going on in the world, that might be something to worry about but that conspiracy itself will have a couple of sub-conspiracies going on within it and there are probably in the end more factions than there are people. It's a chaotic situation. Nobody's in control. You're not talking about conspiracy theory, you're talking about fractal mathematics. [Laughs] When the maths gets complex enough, then it's a kind of bronco that nobody can successfully hold onto, you know? BK: In Brought to Light, just on your little biography there it says you did something called AARGH, Artists Against - - Rampant Government Homophobia. Yeah this was - what year was this? About '88? The Clause 28. BK: Oh, I remember that. Well, you would remember it then, I don't think they have got rid of it still, have they? I mean, they're still having these fucking huge debates. I thought it had just dropped out of existence completely but then I see that they're having these huge debates up in Scotland because everyone's upset because the government want to get rid of Clause 28 and they see Clause 28 as being the only fragile bulwark between their precious children and this army of homosexuals who out to corrupt them, you know? Yeah but when Thatcher brought that in, in '88, at the time I was part of - there was kind of - there was me, there was my wife and there was our girlfriend and we were all kind of living together quite openly as a different sort of relationship. It lasted for two or three years. At that time obviously we were a lot closer to the lesbian and gay scene and when we saw this legislation coming down we thought it was pretty alarming because there actually hadn't been any legislation that had specifically legislated against one particular sub-group before. This was Nazi legislation, especially when you'd got enthusiastic Conservative councillors talking about "gassing the queers" being the only ultimate solution to the problem, then it was a bit nerve-wracking. So what we decided to do was mobilize as many famous friends as I could dig up and put out a benefit book with all the money going to the organization for lesbian and gay action. BK: So it wasn't an organization in itself? It wasn't an organization in itself, no, it was just a magazine. The response was great. We had Frank Miller, Robert Crumb, Dave Gibbons, Art Spiegelman, Howard Cruse, Brian Bolland, Hunt Emerson, just everybody, Neil Gaiman, everybody chipped in and I think we made somewhere like pushing twenty grand for the organization of lesbian and gay action, who actually, we didn't even like that much, because they were sort of - BK: Were they militant themselves? Ah, they were militant, bigoted, half-arsed. When we actually met them they didn't even like the fact that - I mean it was Phyllis and Debbie who went to deal with them - the fact that Phyllis and Debbie said that they were bisexual. This, you know, "Huh! Accepting money from bisexuals!" I think one of them said "We'll be allowing men in next!" However, once we raised the seventeen, twenty thousand, whatever it was, they were very different. BK: They loved you then? Oh, they loved us then. But we kept up a kind of frosty contempt. We said "Here's your seventeen thousand but please understand that the way that you've treated us throughout all this says an awful lot about problems that you ought to look at within your own structure." [Laughs] Yeah. You know. It was a worthwhile thing. I've still got some copies of AARGH floating around upstairs somewhere. It was a nice Dave McKean cover. BK: Oh, cool. It was a cool little magazine. BK: The other thing in that biography was you did something for Malcolm McLaren, something called Fashion Beast. Was that a film? That was great. It was the only time I've - I've got no interest in writing for films at all, or getting anywhere near Hollywood or stuff like that but Malcolm McLaren got in touch with me and said that he'd got two or three film properties that he'd like to develop, would I like to meet up with him, choose one of them and see if I could come up with anything? So I met up with him, he's a charming bloke, he's really funny, really intelligent and certainly did alright by me. BK: He actually paid you then, yeah! I got all the money I was promised, even though he didn't actually use - I mean, apparently, according to his autobiography, the screenplay that I turned in was just what he wanted but by then, through circumstances beyond my control or his, the money had run out on the project at its source, so it never got made. So I got the experience of writing a screenplay, I don't know how good it was. It was probably over-clever. I remember him saying that I really ought to leave something for the director to do, because I was writing the screenplay the way I would one of my comics, where you're talking about camera angles, you're talking about composition but yeah, it was fun. I just did it mainly because I wanted to work with Malcolm McLaren. He's somebody that I've got a lot of admiration for and you know, it was a laugh. I got paid, I got to meet Malcolm McLaren and hang out with him and Lauren Hutton, who's one of the most beautiful and nice women - certainly celebrity women - that I've ever met. She's really great, I mean 'cause she used to be a supermodel. BK: Were they called "supermodels" back then, or just - No, they weren't, I mean, she was one who actually fought for rights for models. She kind of organized... and she's terrific, she's so self-effacing, she was really nice to spend an afternoon with. Stunningly beautiful and seemingly completely unaware of it, which is a rare combination. Now, her and Malcolm were a nice couple. It was worth doing it just to meet them and the fact that I got thirty thousand quid or whatever for writing the script, that wasn't bad either. BK: [Laughs] ...I've only got #1 of Big Numbers There were two that actually came out. Yeah, that was going to be a masterpiece, a magnum opus. I still think those first two issues are among some of the best comic work of that period. I mean, I got five scripts written. BK: Right, 'cause I wish I knew where it was going. Yeah, well, I mean, I've got the whole thing plotted. I've got an enormous sheet of A1 paper with the whole plot on it, almost like a graph. The idea was that we were going to produce a really good comic, publish it ourselves, we were really committed to it and it was my money that was kind of supporting the entire thing. What happened was that Bill Sienkiewicz, after promising to do it, he did a brilliant job on the first two episodes and then just seemed to stop working upon it and all the money was kind of pouring down a black hole, because we'd still got overheads but we couldn't actually get a comic out, because the artist wouldn't - and we kept saying "Look, Bill, if you don't want to do this work, just tell us and we'll think about something else, get a replacement in or something but just tell us so that we're not just having all of our money pouring down a drain" and Bill still didn't get up the nerve to tell us that he didn't want to do it for another few months, by which time our situation was desperate. When Kevin Eastman, of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fame, he stepped in with his brave but doomed publishing venture Tundra and he was trying to produce Big Numbers. We tried to get Al Columbia, who'd been Bill Sienkiewicz's assistant, to continue with the strip. Now, I heard that Al did an issue of it but then, depending on which story to believe, either he destroyed the artwork or took it away or I don't know what happened but it meant that we'd had two artists sort of back out on the project. BK: So, it's permanently unfinished, do you think? I don't see any way that I can resurrect it as a comic strip. I mean, what do I do? Do I actually sort of say "Yeah, we've got a great new artist, are we going to start from #1 again but this time, no, buy it, because this time we really will get to issue #12." I mean, I wouldn't buy that if I heard it from somebody who'd kind of failed twice to do what he said he was going to do. So the only possible future for Big Numbers is that Alex Usborne, he's with a firm called Picture Palace Productions, that did The Acid House Trilogy, they did Irvine Welsh - BK: - They turned that into a film - BK: - Yeah, there was a little short trilogy of films called The Acid House Trilogy, a couple of which were very good and that was done by Picture Palace Productions. Now, Alex has been working with me. We have got a pretty fully worked out episode-by-episode sort of presentation - BK: Television? - For Big Numbers the television series. This would be a kind of big twelve-part drama like Our Friends in the North or something like that. BK: Would it be moved to the present day? Probably. BK: It seems to be set in the late '80s. Yeah, I'm not sure, it could be done in the late '80s or it could be done in the present day, it wouldn't really matter much. But again, it's the idea of selling. I mean, I think fractals and shopping is a great idea but as a pitch to hot young Channel 4 presenters who are just mainly thinking "Let's do Queer as Folk again and see if we can shock some more retired colonels from the home counties and get viewing figures off the back of it," so your guess is as good as mine whether it'll ever eventually surface but I know that Alex is still keen to do it if there's a way that it can be done. BK: A Small Killing. Yeah, one of my favourites, A Small Killing. BK: Actually, when I read that the first time, back in '91, I didn't like it, because the main character [who is] not perceiving the obvious, I must have found it annoying. Well, the main character is an arsehole. BK: Yeah but I liked it the second time. So, that was actually last week. It's kind of mysterious in a way, because - - It's a grower - BK: - Timothy, he seems to have gone against his innate nature but his innate nature's obviously not to sell soft drinks to the Russians but it didn't seem to be the ideals of his youth either. That was a kind of thing that just purely grew out of being approached by Oscar Zarate, who's since turned into one of my best friends, I mean, I love Oscar, Oscar's great. He's one of the warmest, wisest people that I know. But he kind of came to me and said "Look, you know, we ought to do something together," and I said "Yeah, okay," you know, I'd liked what he'd done with Alexei Sayle and him and Alexei have worked on various books. So we kind of came up with the story between us, it would sort of grow out of conversations. Oscar had got a very definite idea of what sort of book he wanted to do and he'd got this image of somebody haunted by a little boy, or somebody being followed by a little boy, and I think that was the image that he'd got in his head, he didn't know any more about it than that. And he kind of threw it to me and I kind of said "Well, what if the little boy was him?" BK: You can tell that, even from the front cover. Yeah. Yeah, that's it, I wish that we'd probably masked that a bit more. But yeah, I think that it's a very good work, I'm very pleased with it and yeah, at the time, I think people found it dull, because they'd just read Watchmen or whatever, or The Killing Joke and there's a kind of "Well, when's something going to happen?" It's just about this self-obsessed advertising guy. Whereas actually, I'm glad that you found after a break of ten years that it's - I think that actually it's probably a more contemporary - I know it was set in the '80s but actually at the time that wasn't a view of the '80s that was very widely held. It's more one that people have come to in retrospect. BK: I think there's a lot more people like Timothy now. Just in their thinking, attitude to work and life and so on. Well I mean that was a type that was emerging then but perhaps hadn't emerged clearly enough for people to really know what we were talking about. So, yeah, that's another one, that's one of the ones that got away, A Small Killing, it's one of my personal favourites. But yeah, who knows? I've spoken with Oscar about maybe finding another publisher, getting it published again. BK: Is it out of print? Believe so. I've done such a lot of shit [sic] that I tend to sort of lose track of it, most of it, you know, I can't even remember a lot of it, you know? Yeah it'd be nice if we could get that one out again because I mean I think just in terms of Oscar's artwork it's a thing of beauty and a joy forever. BK: Yeah, there's lots of - I love the way there's completely different shades throughout the book, you know, there's pinks and oranges at the beginning, then near the end it gets very dark green. It's just lovely, the way it's painted. And it goes through all these different phases... That's it, I agree, he's got one of the most wonderful approaches to colour of any artist I've ever worked with, with the possible exception of Melinda Gebbie. BK: Right, does she - ? Was that the artist you did Lost - - Lost Girls. BK: Yeah. No, I've never seen an issue of that. Well, there were two issues that came out before it - You know, that was Kevin Eastman, and Dennis Kitchen had took over from Kevin Eastman, it was when they both went out of business and Lost Girls, two issues had come out but it was left without a home. Very expensive strip to produce, because it's in full colour. But now Topshelf have picked it up and that should be coming out towards the end of next year. BK: Well, I look forward to that. That should be pretty good. BK: Okay, the next one is From Hell, with the evil Victoria in it. Mm-hmm. BK: What did you think of the most recent Princess of Wales dying on the same date as Polly Nichols, the first Ripper victim? Was it August 31st? BK: Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, I hadn't noticed really. It's quite interesting because I'd kind of connected the Princess of Wales into that whole diabolic pentagram thing, just because, there was all that stuff when they were originally getting married at Westminster Abbey but at the last minute they changed it to St Paul's, which is of course a temple of the moon goddess Diana... and yeah, I think that the main mystical significance of the death of Princess Diana is that it's probably not a great idea to go roaring round Paris at eighty mile an hour when your driver's coked out of his head. BK: [Laughs] I just thought it was curious. It's interesting. Which means also that that's the same date that John Bunyan died, I believe, because I think that Bunhill Fields, that the grave, is it Bunyan or is it Defoe? BK: Are you talking about the one beside William Blake's grave? It's right beside William Blake's grave, Bunyan or Defoe, they died on - yeah it was Bunyan. BK: Yeah, I remember the little picture in From Hell [chapter 4] when they're at Blake's grave and you see Bunyan's grave in the background. And it's got the same date on it. BK: Yeah, another interesting thing was that Elizabeth Stride, was it her family that went down on a ship called the Princess Alice? Well, she said they did. BK: And then Alice is the - - The name of the little daughter. I had to research all of this. It seems that perhaps she'd claimed that her family had been lost in the disaster where the Princess Alice hit a steamer called the Bywater Castle and no, I think that her husband had died by completely different means. She was maybe hoping for compensation. BK: Right. Yeah, it's a strange little thing. Yeah, in that throughout the whole case there's all these kind of odd little connections, little coincidences, the same names, you know, it's a strange eerie little kind of area of information. BK: One little thing I thought was odd was the passer-by seeing Liz Stride being flung to the ground. Yeah. That was an eyewitness account. He saw a man struggling with a woman. The man seemed to shout something at him that sounded something like "Lipski", which may have been a reference to the witness' own Jewishness. Lipski was the name of a Jewish guy who'd been, I think, hung for murder a couple of years before and may have become a general term of abuse for Jews. Yeah that's - somebody saw - and this did happen in the yard where there was this packing-case maker called Walter Hindley and it was directly below the window of the socialist club where William Morris used to regularly do readings. I tried to put the mosaic together as thoroughly as possible and just get every piece of information that I'd got in there. BK: The two Mary Kellys, like the two Lee Harvey Oswalds, can't be dismissed out of hand. It's a bit of a weird one, you know, that Katherine Eddowes gives her name as Mary Ann Kelly and she leaves the police station having given this false name and gets killed. BK: Oh, I was talking about the other two Mary Kellys. The witness seeing her the next day. Ah! Yeah, now that's another odd one. Two witnesses who both said that they saw her the next morning. BK: That gave you a direction, really, for the end of the story, didn't it? It did. I mean, I wanted to leave it covered up. Because obviously, the simple truth of it is, how could anybody have identified what was in 13 Miller's Court? You know, I've seen the photographs, it's difficult to actually tell which way up she is for a while, let alone who she is. There is no positive evidence. They didn't have fingerprinting or DNA fingerprinting or anything like that back then. All they'd got was the word of a boyfriend in a state of shock. He said "Yeah, that's Mary." BK: There's no face, so - She had no face. Bits of her were cut down to the bone. She had no stomach. I mean, it was, it was sort of, um - So. Who knows? And by that time I just wanted to give the poor woman a happy ending, I wanted to somehow - without actually going against what was possible, I wanted to sort of give her a way out, just - and actually that, that final scene, with the ghost of gull, descending to the hilltop in Ireland where there's this woman that he's never seen before and there are four little girls, that's one of the most powerful scenes in the book to me. There's something spine-tingling in the bit where she tells him to get back to Hell where he comes from. There's just something in that which I - I find really in - you know, it's moving. BK: It's kind of your anger as a writer then, isn't it, as well? Yeah. BK: Having to deal with this, for so many years writing about this serial killer. Yeah. It's what, ten years. Ten years wading through the material, the literature, not just Jack the Ripper but all of these fuckers. All these miserable little apologies for human beings. They're not supermen. They're not supermen at all. They're not Hannibal Lecter. You know, they're Peter Sutcliffe, they're a bloke with a dodgy perm. And some horrible screw-up in his relationship with his mother or something. They're little blokes. BK: That's what the FBI study showed, anyway, didn't it? And I read all of Robert Ressler's, you know, books like Sexual Homicide, which is probably the best of the books on serial killers. But I've got all of them, all these awful Colin Wilson compendiums of murder, I've got about thirty books on Jack the Ripper, I mean Fortean Times kept sending me Jack the Ripper books after I'd begged them to stop. The last two that they sent me were Jack the Ripper - a Psychic Investigation, where some woman had decided that she was going to psychically investigate the Ripper crimes; and the other one was someone writing a book about what would have happened to Jack the Ripper if we'd have had modern policing methods in the 1880s. It's a bit puzzling, because they'd got things like Fred Abberline picking up the phone to ask if the DNA report had come through yet and you think "Well, why bother to go through all that trouble, why not just say that they caught him on the security camera after the first murder and that was it?! BK: If you're going to import that stuff to the 1880s you might as well import nuclear weapons and microwave ovens. Why not? The thing is, that there's just absolutely nothing else to say about the Jack the Ripper murders. BK: Have you put away all these books now? No, I never put away any books, I more or less live in the small spaces between piles of books. No, they're never far away. I can still see most of them from where I'm sitting here. Some of them, I could probably do with just going through and throwing the lot of them out. There's a couple I'd keep. But my kind of book collection is the sort that doesn't look good if you get raided. The sort of thing where in the write-up in the paper it'll say "He had many books upon serial murders, Nazis and the occult!" [Laughs] BK: [Laughs] You don't want to be on the receiving end of a witch hunt. Well, absolutely. Yeah, From Hell, I'm very proud of it. It's a big, black, monumental work. Victorian. BK: There's a couple of things in the background. There's one bit, I think it's chapter 4, where Gull is talking about child sacrifice as a usurpation of a female symbol and then later on - - Is he? Let me think. Child sacrifice. BK: Chapter 4. That would be when he's with - - He's with Netley, going around London. I'm trying to remember. I remember there is something about when he's saying about sacrificing children is a way of kind of negating female power. BK: I found the page, here [page 24]. He says "Goddesses were replaced by Gods. Next came child sacrifice, killing that first, most awesome female symbol, which is motherhood, their magic and their power." This is not necessarily true but this is what Gull, in my opinion, could have believed. BK: Because then later you have - they're talking about Ratcliffe Highway, the Marr family murders and he says [a] child [was] killed [and asks was this] a "ritual act, to shape society," i.e. [the] creation of the police force. I'm just kind of interested in this infanticide taboo as - Well, it just struck me that - there are probably lots of reasons for child sacrifice - I believe that a lot of sacrifices were done with the best interest of the victim in mind, they were to make people sacred. At the same time, it struck me that sacrificing children would be a way of kind of negating female power. BK: I kind of think it's a very deep taboo, it provokes extreme reactions in society. Well, look at Myra Hindley. I mean, she's never going to get out. BK: Yeah. The recent thing in Britain, Sarah Payne. After that there were vigilante mobs. [Laughs] Private Eye did a cartoon about some guy being chased by a mob and the guy shouting "But I'm a paediatrician!" and they reported that within ten days of that cartoon being published, purely by coincidence, somewhere down on the South Coast of Britain, a mob of, one presumes, completely illiterate subnormal News of the World readers, actually drove a woman paediatrician from her home and spray-painted the prefix "paedo" upon her doors and walls and stuff like that. Yeah, it's not just about child murder, it's also about child sex. And you've only got to really look at British culture. Why do we get so upset about that? I mean, surely, can it be a coincidence that, say, in the Sun newspaper, the ideal of female beauty would seem to be the body - the overdeveloped body - of a nubile woman and, what, the face of a twelve-year-old? Paedophilia is completely ingrained within our culture. In places where they have pornography, Sweden, Denmark, places like that, where they have open pornography, you don't get kids being raped, murdered and thrown in the canal. It's something we can keep a pressure-cooker lid on over here and we can talk about deploring this shit but I think a lot of time I'd want to know exactly what the home lives of some of these mob members were like. BK: Yeah, it seemed to be after the Sarah Payne killing, it seemed to be "Let's get the paedophiles," so they automatically made the connection themselves, or so-called connection between - - Whereas I mean obviously, yeah, children are in danger from paedophiles and strangers, that's true. They're in much more danger from their own families, statistically speaking. BK: Yeah, and from mobs... Actually, the Halifax Slasher case [1938] was preceded by the murder of an eight-year-old girl in Bradford, so that helps kind of raise the consciousness of random attacks and so on. They all contribute to the hysterias. The Halifax Slasher was an interesting one, though, because there was nobody there. That was just complete hysteria. It was like the Ripper hysteria but there was no actual figure at the centre of it. Just this mysterious absence. BK: Well, also the Great Witch Hunts, one of the major things that so-called witches were accused of was killing children. Yeah, and Jews. In a lot of the Pogroms. I mean, what is it, the Blood Libel? They call it the Blood Libel. I know in Northampton in I think the 1300s we had accused Jews of sacrificing Christian babies at arcane kabbalistic rituals. Basically, we probably owed them some money and didn't want to pay it back and so it was a good excuse to take out all the Jews and stone them to death. BK: There's a whole - infanticide is just one - there's a whole network of these taboos that seem to provoke - - They're buttons that you can press in people... The whole British notion of childhood is screwed anyway because we only invented childhood in the late 19th Century, when most of the little bastards were dying of croup on doorsteps. BK: I thought it was earlier, I thought it was maybe mid-18th Century, or was that just children of the rich? Probably children of the rich. I know that by the late 19th Century or mid-19th Century the children of the poor were getting married at the age of twelve. They were setting up home on their own, I mean you were kicked out of the nest at the age of about ten because your parents certainly couldn't - you know, you were expected to work from the moment that you could first sell matches or whatever. BK: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, is that a more lighthearted thing, then? Yeah. BK: I haven't seen it at all. Oh well, the collected book's coming out sometime in the next month or two. BK: Is that a by-product of your researches into Victorian - ? - Not really, I was just sort of thinking I'd like to do some stuff in the mainstream, because if you do stuff out on the margins it actually makes no difference whatsoever to the broad sweep of comic book culture. Like, Maus is never going to make any impact at all upon mainstream comics, because it was done outside the mainstream, it was in the margins. I just thought I'd like to do some cool stuff in the mainstream that is still progressive and forward-looking enough to actually be valid and worthwhile material but do it in the mainstream so that it can have an impact and hopefully can in some small measure go towards regenerating the currently dismal medium. So, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it was just I'd been thinking about superheroes, superhero groups and I was thinking well, it'd be nice to actually kind of run the tape back to a point before all of the superhero clichés started to come into being. Take it back before Action Comics #1 and the invention of Superman. And if you do that, then you've got the pulp adventure stuff from the '30s and there is the fantastic literature of the late 19th Century, which was a big source of inspiration for an awful lot of comic book characters. The Hulk, for example, is just Jekyll and Hyde. All the invisible characters in comics do owe an awful lot to Wells' Invisible Man, so I just thought perhaps if I could assemble a group of interesting characters. Round about the second issue, I suddenly thought "Hey, what if I did this so that any character that's mentioned by name had got to be a real character from fiction?" I thought "That could be funny." BK: A "real" character from fiction? Well, a genuine character from fiction, someone that has existed in other people's work. And I think that it was when, possibly in the first issue, where I suddenly got to a bit where I realized that I'd got Emile Zola's Nana being killed on the Rue Morgue by Mister Hyde, I thought, well, "This is great! This is going somewhere!" And then when I started to bring in characters from Victorian pornography, like the Pearl, in the second issue. It sort of built up from there. We've even got walk-ons by presumably the Victorian ancestors of characters from Eastenders in issue #6. It's a lot of fun. BK: Well, I look forward to reading it. Yeah, the full collection should be out within a month, within a few weeks. BK: Are there any comics by your contemporaries that you're particularly fond of? I mean, would you have a fondness for Sandman, or whatever? Sandman, there were some very good issues of Sandman that Neil [Gaiman] did that I thought were absolutely brilliant. There's lots of people who do really good stuff. I don't know... I like Chris Ware's stuff. The Hernandez brothers still do good stuff. Neil's not really in comics any more. Frank's very good at what he does, Frank Miller. BK: Sin City. But he kind of - I don't know, this is purely a matter of taste, it's not a dismissal of Frank's work or anything - Frank tends to stick to kind of one area. BK: Hard boiled. Hard boiled, even if it's taking place - like his recent 300 series, which took place in Sparta, it's still kind of hard boiled! It's hard boiled Spartans. Frank's very good at what he does, I just sometimes would like to see him do a story that wasn't about guys being tough. That's not a criticism of Frank, he's very good at what he does and obviously his tastes are different to mine. BK: You'd have a wide taste? Well, my tastes tend to be fairly eclectic. I like to see people show a bit of range. One of the things I'm proudest of in myself is my range. I can do a lot of different shit, I can do almost anything and I can do it fairly well. BK: I haven't read [the prose book] Voice of the Fire - - Very few people have - BK: - Although Mark Pilkington from Fortean Times, he says it's fantastic, so I'd like to pick it up. Well, if you should find a copy somewhere, then good luck getting through the first chapter. The first chapter, I actually tried my best to write it in an approximation of what I thought Neolithic thought-patterns might be like. So I've done it all in this completely boiled-down English, where I think there's a vocabulary of about four hundred words in the first story, I mean it's sixty pages long, it's very long and very dense but I think I only use about four hundred words and when you think that the average vocabulary of the average Sun reader is about ten thousand words, it's... it was an experiment. BK: Sounds kind of exciting, though. Well, it's almost unreadable. [Laughs]. I loved it but people have pointed out to me since that if I was going to be doing my first novel and the first chapter of my first novel, then perhaps it might not have been a bad idea to do it in English but ah, what the hell. BK: I do have a tape of [the spoken word performance] The Birth Caul, though. Oh really? Ah, well that's something I'm very proud of. The Birth Caul and the other couple of CDs. These have all sprung out of my recent preoccupation with magic. BK: First of all, though, about The Birth Caul, a lot of the earlier part of it you're talking about Northampton, I presume, but you seem to depict it in a very bleak way. Well, I don't know. I think that what I'm doing in - in a way, yes, I'm talking, somewhere, in some places I'm talking about a specific history, i.e. mine. But more often I'm trying to universalize it. What I really want is for people to listen to it and think "Yeah, I know that, I know that feeling, I know that place, I know that time." BK: Yeah, I thought the further back you went - but maybe it's because of my age [27] or something - the further back you went the more I could, you know, I felt something with that piece. The very first part of it is actually all about Newcastle, where we performed it. It's talking about Newcastle where we actually did the performance in the Victorian Court up there. BK: That was you, David J and - - Well, David J did the music, along with Tim Perkins but Dave wasn't there at that actual performance. BK: Was that the same David J who was in Bauhaus? Bassist from Bauhaus and Love & Rockets, yeah, yeah, Northampton boy and I've been friends with David for years. I think I was one of the first journalists to ever interview Bauhaus. BK: There's great stuff about childhood there [in The Birth Caul]. Well, this all came out, we did a ritual one night and we were mainly asking "What should our next performance be?" and what came out was all this incredibly rich stuff about childhood. So it was a matter of building up into what eventually became The Birth Caul. BK: And then, near the end you have - when you're going back before the actual birth and sense of identity, you've this great line "Being named we are no longer part of everything." It reminds me of Taoism - What was your original face before you were born? That's just the words that came to me. It does cover some of that same territory. Did you see Eddie Campbell did a comic strip adaptation of The Birth Caul? BK: No, I didn't know that at all. Yeah, Eddie Campbell, he's done a - probably still be available in some places - but he self-published it, The Birth Caul and it's just done as a comic strip. It's totally his interpretation, he took the CD, worked out the words from just listening to the CD and then produced this forty page comic strip of it and in fact he's currently working upon another one of the performances we did, at Red Lion Square in Holborn [London] and he's turning that into a comic strip at the moment. BK: That's great. The whole idea, though, that the "named" is a lesser concept than the "nameless", that's something I'd very much agree with, I mean, Taoism is the one philosophy I would agree with. Sure, I've got a great deal of respect for Taoism. My own tastes tend a bit more to the -[Laughs] - sinister and elaborate flourishes of the Western Occult Tradition. BK: Which would have entities and - - Yeah. BK: Now, there's another bit, further on then, near the end, where there's this - I'll read out the sentence: "Somewhere now above in giant chambers full of thunder and unthinkable emotions, god and goddess fuck and there amidst the sweat and stench of the taboo is light, uncanny and profound." Right, "light", that reminds me of Austin Osman Spare. Oh, now you're talking. BK: Because, you know, past incarnations, going back from man to animals to birds to vegetables et cetera. The atavisms. BK: And he said "The lower we probe into these strata, the earlier will be the forms of life we arrive at: the last is the Almighty Simplicity." That would be the "light", I take it. Mm-hmm. I mean, I hadn't been referring to Spare when I wrote that. BK: But there's a definite parallel [with the end of The Birth Caul] But I'm sure there is. I hadn't really noticed it until you pointed it out but yeah, I'm a major Spare fan, I've got a really nice double-sided pastel drawing by Spare, framed up on the wall, looking at me as we speak and I've got nearly a complete set of The Golden Hind and Form. BK: Even just the more available stuff is still limited edition. Oh yeah. I've got all that as well but Spare's one of the people that I actually seek out and I'm willing to part with a lot of money to get. BK: To get originals, yeah? Yeah. Very interesting man. Very powerful magician. I sometimes debate, who was the - I mean, it's like, who's strongest, the Hulk or Thor? Who's king occultist? Is it Crowley or is it Spare? Is it Bill or is it Ben? And, it's difficult, because yeah, Crowley was probably a superior theorist, or in terms of the amount of magical information that Crowley left and the way that he synthesized different systems. On the other hand, Austin Spare could make it rain! And Austin Spare could draw the places where he'd been so that you could be in absolutely no doubt that he had been there. No, I've got a great deal of respect for Spare. BK: The one thing that confused me in that sentence of yours that I read out was the word "taboo", even at that point in the cosmology. Well, I was thinking of it in terms of your parents fucking. That is the primal theme. It is taboo. The god and goddess, that's your mum and dad, that's everybody's mum and dad. Somewhere there is this moment of conception, it's up above you somewhere, you're down there in it, you're at some moment of fusion but up above, there is this male thing and this female thing, totally incomprehensible to you, that are coupling and somewhere in there, there is you happening. BK: Yeah, I get it now. Something like that. But yeah, there's parallels to the Spare stuff, certainly. BK: Those CDs you've done. Are they all spoken word with music, or - ? I know you write songs because I've seen in a shop The Alan Moore Songbook Yeah, well, most of those songs actually emerged from when I was with a band, about six or seven years ago, eight years ago, called the Emperors of Ice Cream. [That's when] I'd written most of those songs, then a couple of them I'd written back when I was seventeen. The band was good, we had some good fun, we did some good songs but it probably would have just been just a pop band at the end of it and there's plenty of good pop bands. But the band all broke up, with the usual "musical differences", i.e. we couldn't stand each other. But no, me and Tim Perkins, who was also in the Emperors, we stuck together and just after that I got into magic. The first thing that we did was this big performance in '94 at Bride Lane off Fleet Street [London] Subversion in the Streets of Shame. It was Paul Smith from Blast First records had got Iain Sinclair to put together a three day event of, I suppose, subterraneans, really. I was reading; there was Stewart Home; Robin Cook [aka] the crime writer Derek Raymond, that was his last reading before he died, he came and did a reading about death, very ill. BK: Some of his stuff is very metaphysical. Oh, he was a great bloke, Cookie. He was a rotter, he was a perfect old Etonian rotter. Great guy to have a drink with. Yeah, and then Kathy Acker turned up unexpectedly halfway through the performance and did the best reading I'd ever seen her do. Dear, sweet, lovely Kathy Acker. She'd got kind of Mary-Jane shoes on. And socks. I don't know whether it was some kind of paedo- thing that she was going through but she looked kind of - I mean, like, you know, she was in her fifties, nearly fifty but she look so sweet and cool and cute and she did this brilliant reading. So we finished off the Saturday night with this hour-long magical extravaganza. That came out, it was Cleopatra records, in the States, they brought out the CD that's just called The Moon and Serpent - Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels. BK: Right, I saw the cover [in an advert] on the back of Cerebus [#221] with that ghost photograph. That's pretty spooky. Yeah, Melinda took that at rehearsals. And yeah, you know, beats the hell out of me. BK: I remember you sent that into Fortean Times [#79]. "What's this?" I've shown it to professional photographers, they can't work out how it's happened. Nobody can. Yeah, that was quite interesting. [Laughs] Yeah, then, the next thing we did was The Birth Caul and then we did a thing at Highbury [London], which is the one that's just coming out in a couple of week's time. Steve Severin from [Siouxsie and] the Banshees, he's got his own record label now, Re: records and The Highbury Working is going to be coming out and we're very proud of that. That is - BK: - That's a great title... It's still spoken word, with music, but with The Highbury Working we did something really different. Say, with The Birth Caul, the words and the music are still integrated, obviously there's bits where I'm saying something, then something happens in the music and their obviously connected, which is not bad when you consider that The Birth Caul is actually a live recording and that I was reading to prearranged tapes, so I had to kind of time every word that I said for that hour. You see, with The Birth Caul, the music and the words are integrated but the music still tends mainly towards the ambient. It's more like kind of patterns of sound or fields of sound or drones or whatever, whereas with The Highbury Working, as opposed to The Birth Caul, what we're doing is more like dance music - one track on it is very much like drum 'n' bass - and the integration between the words and the music is a lot cleverer. It's a lot more dancey. It's probably the most accessible piece we've done. Like I've said, there's always been a dance element in my mysticism. Yeah, so, you know, I'm looking forward to this and John's done a really great cover and a really great package for the CD. It's a little Sergeant Pepper, that we've got here. BK: Incidentally, does The Alan Moore Songbook sell? Oh, I don't know. They never sent me any copies of it. Well no, they did, they did send me some copies of it but this is just people who sort of said "Look, we're desperate for something of yours, what have you got?" and I say "Nothing," and they say "Well, don't you write songs?" and I say "Well, I can send you a bunch of lyrics if you want and then you can hand them out to artists." And so that's what they did. They just handed it out to artists. The artists illustrated the songs. I hadn't really got anything to do with the process. I've no idea whether it sold or not, you know, I didn't know they were bringing out a collection. I thought it was just a little occasional piece in an anthology. BK: I saw you on a TV programme called XXXTripping, where you were talking about magic. Now, it was all very fast cuts but you seemed to be saying that on one hand magic was ideas and secondly, spirits and entities was a second interpretation. I mean, [are] these all the one thing? I'd say that, entities are a kind of compound idea, at least as far as I see them. And I do see them occasionally but they seem to me to be some sort of compound idea form. But it might be an idea - and this is just a mad, hippie, did-too-much-acid-in-the-'60s kind of theory but - if you could get an idea that was complex enough, self-referential enough, could it become aware? They say that awareness is an emergent property of complexity. Could that be true on a purely immaterial level, about ideas? If you had a complex enough idea form, could it become aware? Could you have things that were ideas but were alive? I mean, I've certainly encountered things that seem to be ideas but act as if they're alive. I'm not saying that they are, I'm not saying that they're not just some projection of me, that's also quite possible, I wouldn't want to rule that out but they pretend not to be. [Laughs] They appear to be something else. That is the way that my magic tends to go. When I first became initiated into magic, which was by an event, a spontaneous event, rather than in any organization, that was the way that my thoughts seemed to be going on the subject: that actually, awareness is a space, mind can be looked at as a space and that space may be inhabited. There might be entities that are indigenous to that space. Flora and fauna of the mental realm, which I think is more than enough to explain all the demons, angels and chimera and UFO grey aliens and elves, leprechauns, pixies of all of our human culture. BK: How far back does your interest in Aleister Crowley go? You quoted him in V for Vendetta Yeah. I found out that, apparently, the first date that I give in Watchmen, the 12th of October, is Crowley's birthday. I didn't know that at the time. My real interest in Crowley, i.e. in actually reading his books, thoroughly - and yes, I've got a signed Crowley as well - that only goes back to '94 when I became seriously interested in magic but obviously, I'd known about Crowley ever since I was twelve, when I had my spate of reading Dennis Wheatley occult paperbacks and being told that Aleister Crowley was the wickedest man in the world. There are references to Crowley in V for Vendetta, there's references to Faust, the magical motto of John Faust [in chapter five]. BK: There's little things that reminded me of Crowley. The "two faces of anarchy" in V for Vendetta, the destroyer followed by the creator. Crowley [or Frieda Harris] wrote something in his [or their] instructions for the [Thoth] tarot, in reference to one of the cards [2 of Wands: Dominion], "destruction... is the first step in the creative process," which is something I wholeheartedly agree with. Obviously, if you're going to be doing something new, then to a degree you're destroying - [Laughs] - whatever preceded it. BK: Yeah, also you could read Alexander the Great as a destroyer and a creator. I kind of saw all that connecting, going through your books. Well probably, they were more intuitive. Like, when I worked Crowley into From Hell as a small boy, I had some guy from the Californian branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis talking to me and he was sort of saying "Oh, I thought that was really good, the way you have Crowley sucking the candy cane, because that's obviously a reference to the sign of silence," and I thought "Yeah! I guess it is!" because I just hadn't thought of that. BK: It's more like I knew you were interested in Crowley so I went back and reading your older stuff, I just found it there, these ideas. So, I didn't expect - - I tell you, I've had lot of these ideas longer than I think I've had. BK: Yeah, that's what I mean. Like, I'd have sworn that my interest in Jack the Ripper started in 1988 but then when my mum died and we went through her house, we found a big suitcase in which there was a load of old books and comics and things that I'd had when I was a kid, including two or three centrefolds from The Sunday Mirror, which were dealing with Jack the Ripper and I'd obviously clipped them for some reason. I didn't remember doing it but obviously I'd had an interest in Jack the Ripper from the age of about twelve or thirteen. So I guess that these kind of themes, these ideas, they probably run all the way through our lives like a kind of developing music, that the basic kind of chord patterns are there right from the beginning, probably, but they just become more elaborate, or more penetrating or more deeper. BK: You "get around" to them, probably. BK: Yeah. BK: You work through something else and then it's time to pick up a loose end...? Something like that. BK: Have you read the John Symonds biography of Crowley? The Great Beast. BK: Um, yeah and then it was updated as King of the Shadow Realm. Uh-huh. Well, I read The Great Beast, I mean, you know, it's a good biography, if you accept the fact that John Symonds clearly does not like Aleister Crowley. It's kind of biased. There's a new one that's just come out which I've just started, which seems to be a bit more balanced. I've forgotten who it's by but it's one that's just come out in the last month or so. BK: I heard that Lawrence Sutin, who wrote Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick is doing one. I'm not sure about that but - BK: - It might be just a rumour - - That sounds interesting. Yeah, Crowley's an interesting guy. I think that one of the problems with Crowley is the people who are interested in him, that you'll get a lot of these little fucking middle class Satanists who are just trying to shock their mum and dad. They've heard that Aleister Crowley was "the wickedest man in the world" and so they say "Oh yeah, well I'm really into Crowley and I'm really into the philosophy of Charles Manson and I really like William Burroughs." They don't like William Burroughs because he was a brilliant writer, they like him because he shot his wife and did a lot of junk. It's this kind of "Look at me, I'm being bad." BK: Yeah, I see it as very American as well, there's so much Christianity [there] that they just take these symbols and you know, one creates the other, the extreme of Christianity creates this kind of satanic thing. Oh sure, It's like Anton Szandor La Vey, you know? Melinda Gebbie, who's my girlfriend as well as a collaborator, she's from San Francisco. She went over there and was meeting up with a lot of her old friends, a lot of the American underground artists, I mean 'cause she used to be one of them, and she was also hanging out with Carla La Vey, who she says is a very nice woman - BK: - That's the daughter, is it? Yeah but who has had to grow up being Satan's daughter and she [Melinda] said that she actually saw La Vey's house and you know, it's a rubber Satan show. It's carnival Satanism, it's just anti-Christianity. That's what I don't like about - I mean, in the pure philosophy of Christianity, I find there's a lot to recommend it, the same as there is in an awful lot of different schools of thought - but the actual religion Christianity is obviously something that is completely soul-destroying. It's just a big a mistake to try and become the mirror image of it, "Oh you're good, so we'll be bad." Because to some degree Satanism is purely a kind of disease of Christianity. You've got to really be Christian to believe in Satan. BK: There's a Taoist principle where opposites create each other. Yes, of course they do. I think that is absolutely spot-on. You couldn't really argue with that. Yeah, opposites create each other, black creates white. All these dualities, that you can't really have a single thought enter the world without its shadow following behind it immediately. No, I agree completely. BK: What are your thoughts on Crowley the man? I think that he was a brilliant scholar. I think that it's difficult to make a judgement of Crowley, mainly because he himself did almost everything he could to obscure his - I mean, he played up to all the rumours and the notoriety and for a while I think he thought "Oh well, all publicity is good publicity." It didn't actually work out like that. BK: He had a very painful end. Well, it depends. I tell you, I've got a great little picture. Well, it's only in a catalogue, it's a reproduction. I went down to that Crowley exhibition that they had a couple of years ago in London. They'd got a load of his paintings. And they'd also got paintings by Frieda Harris. And they'd got, yeah, a couple of originals from the Thoth deck, which were nice to look at, quite interesting to see. They'd also got this little pencil drawing called A.C. Dying by Frieda Harris. A little pencil drawing of this frail, skeletal guy with a wispy beard, sunk in the pillows of his bed, eaten away, consumed by his illness and he's got one finger, just touching his bottom lip. And when you hear of the alleged Crowley's last words, "I am perplexed," then - yeah, I was coming out of the exhibition with Steve Moore and talking to him, he's a friend of mine, a fellow comic writer, a fellow occultist and he was one of the editors of Fortean Times for a long while. BK: He edits Fortean Studies. Yeah, he edits Fortean Studies, well he's recently packed that it but he's back into comic writing now but Steve's one of my oldest friends, no relation but I've known him since I was fourteen. But we were coming out of the thing and we were talking about this vulnerable, fragile little pencil sketch of Crowley and Steve said "You know, it's very much like the actual pictorial of the 'I am perplexed,' you know, the finger to the lip, wondering, questioning," and I thought "Yeah but on the other hand it kind of looks like the sign of silence," and it's quite ambiguous. Is it "I am perplexed?" which would be a terrible thing, to be the last words of a man like that, you know, a terrible, damning thing for Crowley. Or is it a magus, making the sign of silence? There's something about the ambiguity that I really liked and that I really found emblematic of what I think of Crowley. If I wanted to morally judge him, I'd say that he was probably a bit selfish, probably a bit thoughtless about other people sometimes. BK: Like Ninette Shumway? Like his women in general, although sometimes I think that the women caused him as much pain as he caused them. Probably a little bit silly, probably a little bit selfish, certainly not evil. BK: No, I would never have thought that. No, the "evil" was all kind of theatrical, it was all playing up to the Sunday newspapers and stuff like that, which probably wasn't a good idea, it certainly wasn't as good an idea as he thought at the time. BK: His magic is definitely something he couldn't escape from. When he tried to write novels, Moonchild, Diary of a Drug Fiend, they're just full of it, full of all this - - I think that they were intended to actually be magical works. I think that the big problem with - BK: - I think they're awful as novels. They're not that good. I tell you, the main problem is that they actually read very much like Dennis Wheatley but with the sides reversed. It's very much like "Alright, we're still in a Dennis Wheatley novel but now all the Satanists are the good guys." [Laughs] No, I mean, there are some bits of his writing that are brilliant. Some of his writings, it's doggerel, some of it is very beautiful. I admire the prose style of The Book of the Law, that's about all I admire about it. I'm sure that there probably is great wisdom there and I'm pretty certain he did channel it from somewhere but I don't think it was from the genuine Angel of the Aeon! It was probably something pretty fucking big and scary but no, no, I could never accept [it], it's too mad and cruel, it's too heartless, it's too inhuman, I'm not interested in that. If that's what godhood's all about then I'll settle with what I've got. BK: Austin Osman Spare. I once wrote an article about what I called "trance artists", like Rosaleen Norton and him. I don't think it was a great article. One of the reasons is I didn't mention drugs. He was in Crowley's Argentum Astrum. They were using mescaline, weren't they, to trigger - ? - Yeah. Was it ana luini mescaline or peyote, that was what they always called that ana lu - I could never remember the medical name for it that they were always using but yeah, they were using drugs. Magic, as far as I can understand, since the dawn of time has been largely been predicated upon drug use. BK: Yeah, that is how to trigger the visions and so on. Well, the shamans were using - BK: - You could starve yourself, that's another way of doing it. Anything that is going to - I mean, I presume that certain acts of violence, certain sexual acts, starving yourself, scourging yourself, there are a lot of ways that you can get into a funny state. Drums, dancing, but drugs, drugs are probably pretty reliable if they don't actually kill you and they've certainly been around for an awful long time. The earliest form of magic would probably have been shamanism and would probably have been based aro}nd some kind of psychedelic mushroom. And you can see a connection between magic and drugs running throughout history from that point and certainly with Spare and Crowley. Crowley, at least, was famous for his drug use. BK: In a way, it's irrelevant what [drugs] I mentioned or not [in that article] because the interesting thing about looking at different people seeing different things in trance states is some of the recurring archetypes. Winged creatures and serpent-like beings and so on. Well, I've done some bits of artwork purely for my own consumption of some of the things that I've seen during magical rituals. Interesting. I've got a picture of a demon that I saw and that I drew, which actually, yeah, it's kind of interesting because I was reading a book about the fourth dimension, this mathematical book about the fourth dimension, where the mathematician concerned gets a bit frisky at one point and decides to be a bit playful and describe what a fourth dimensional being might actually look like and he says that his best guess is that it'd look like a shimmering lattice-work of multiple copies of itself at different scales, which is pretty well an exact description of this demon picture that I put together out of multiple photocopies of an original drawing at different scales and arranged them into this lattice-work, to suggest the creature that I'd seen, which also has a lot of other connections with the fourth dimension. Now, this is mad complex stuff that probably wouldn't mean anything to anybody unless they'd seen the picture, encountered the demon. BK: The tape counter just went "666" when you said that. Did it? In fact I had somebody - [Laughs] - Well, I was in Sainsbury's the other day and there was this young, spotty youth on the counter and I went up to buy a couple of packets of cigarettes or something like that and he rang up 666 and then just sort of went "Oah!" and looked at me when the numbers 666 came up. BK: Easily scared? Easily scared, you know. BK: Would you agree with Jung, then, that the archetypes are the basis of religion and mysticism, regardless of the culture or society? I think that the archetypes are in some ways what I'm talking about when I say "living ideas". BK: You don't think they're socio-cultural, or - ? Um, well, I think they could be a bit of both. There's the initial living idea form that can suddenly emerge unannounced in any human mind but how that is dressed might well be socio-cultural. You can get very similar ideas that are dressed up in a huge variety of different cultural forms. I think that to some degree, these entities, which I do believe are kind of independent of us at least in some ways, although yeah, they could also be part of us. I think they're kind of inside us and outside us at the same time, that yes they're part of us, yes they're something separate to us. In a way they are reflective. They gather their form or their specific attributes, they somehow - they're what we make them, they're what we dress them as, to a degree. I don't know, there is something very reflective about these creatures. For example, this demon that I at least believed I'd encountered. When I first encountered it, I was scared shitless and it was scary, very scary. Then later, after I'd got it to a kind of safe enough distance so that I could talk to it without being threatened by it, we had a conversation and it was charming. It was not scary at all. If it had been a human being, I'd have wanted to go for a drink with it. It was sardonic, funny, intelligent. And I kind of thing that it depends upon what you expect to see. I think that if you greet these things with fear, then they'll be fearsome. BK: Yeah, I mean a "demon" implies some kind of morality... I started to realize, talking to it, that - [Laughs] - that in a way, a demon is that which has been demonized. On a spiritual level you're talking about blacks, or gays, or the working class, or any group that has been demonized. Demons have had it too. They're some sort of spiritual entity. I don't think they're good or bad, any more than we are. BK: It's funny you should say that, because The Devil Rides Out was on [TV] the other night and the demon is this black guy and the only other black character in the whole film is a background Satanist. Well, Dennis Wheatley was a bit funny about that sort of stuff... anybody with a colour other than white in the Dennis Wheatley books, they're generally dead by the end of the book and they're generally villains. BK: The film remained true to that, anyway. Absolutely. I mean, I still remember it as being a lot of fun, when I saw it when I was twelve or whenever. BK: Yeah, it's great, with Christopher Lee grabbing the guy who's becoming a Satanist, saying "You damn fool!" [Laughs] Yeah, and Charles Gray as the evil Satanist, I mean, he looked like he was having fun, you know? With thanks to Steve Moore and Alan O'Boyle. Text copyright Barry Kavanagh and Alan Moore.