Moore explains why nostalgia is literally an illness and how authoritarianism has always weaponised it

Transmission 337: Interview with Alan Moore

Featured image: Mitch Jenkins

It is often said that it is necessary to leave past creations behind to truly grow, and few artists embody this philosophy more radically than Alan Moore. While the mainstream world remains fixated on the seismic impact of his superheroes stories, the “Magus of Northampton” has long since moved on. Today, Moore views those seminal works as relics of a past era, artifacts from a superhero genre he has decisively outgrown. While From Hell (visualized by Eddie Campbell—read our interview here), Lost Girls (illustrated by Melinda Gebbie), and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (featuring the intricate lines of Kevin O’Neill) are among his classic novels that reshaped the medium of the graphic novel, his literary journey has always sought even wider horizons. He is also the author of the hauntingly experimental Voice of the Fire and the monumental Jerusalem, works that explore the deep, psychogeographic roots of his native Britain. Alan Moore has spent a lifetime insisting that stories matter—perhaps more than we are comfortable admitting. A writer, magician, and cultural critic, Moore has remained steadfastly independent in both practice and belief, often pushing against the industries that celebrate him. His work treats narrative not as entertainment alone but as a technology of thought, capable of unsettling identity, and even reality itself: linguistics, local history, and the architecture of the mind can have a true impact in humanity. Widely regarded as the most significant writer in the history of the graphic medium, he has since transcended those borders to become a cartographer of the human psyche, a historian of the unseen, and a self-described ceremonial magician.Alan Moore is accurately a deconstructor of myths, his work casts shadows. He is a writer who opted out of the corporate machinery to pursue a more singular, sovereign form of art. 

To understand the Moore of today, one must look beyond the DC Comics era and into the deep waters of the English visionary tradition. His current creative pulse beats in sync with the radical mysticism of William Blake, the “sigilised” occultism of Austin Osman Spare, and the boundary-pushing phantasmagoria of Michael Moorcock and Clive Barker. By tracing these lineages, we find a creator who has traded the grids of the comic book page for a more fluid, magical, and literary landscape. This evolution reached its zenith in 2024 with two monumental releases. On one hand, the long-awaited The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic—a definitive, kaleidoscopic grimoire that bridges the gap between art and the occult, crafted over several decades. On the other, his latest foray into “Total Fiction” with The Great When, the first chapter of his Long London series. Here, Moore explores a historical, post-war London where the boundaries between the mundane and the mythical dissolve. Exploring the linguistic roots of magic, nudging into unfamiliar territory, or fourth-dimensional streets of London, he remains one of the most vital and uncompromising cultural critics. To read his work is to be reminded that imagination is not neutral—and that art, when taken seriously, can be a powerful thing. This trajectory continues with the imminent release of the second volume, I Hear a New World, where Moore weaves the sonic experiments and the social unrest of 1950s Notting Hill into his expanding ‘Long London’ mythos.

Maxwell the Magic Cat is one of your early comic strip works. Can you tell us more about what motivated you to explore these themes? Was it during those years that you began to understand—or at least catch a glimpse of—magic?

I’m afraid not. Maxwell the Magic Cat was a comic-strip title conceived in desperation when I was attempting to come up with an idea suitable for the children’s page of a local newspaper that I was seeking employment from at the time. It didn’t actually have anything to do with magic, and in fact was rather callous and cynical, being swiftly moved from the children’s page to some more adult section of the newspaper in question. Magic as a subject was something that I had no more than a normal English child’s exposure to, through fairy stories, legends, films, comics and so on. Once I began writing stories for a living, often fantasy stories, I would sometimes look up some obscure occult detail to lend weight or texture to a narrative, but even being quite knowledgeable about magic or the occult as an interesting subject for research is a very different thing from a personal involvement and engagement with the magical itself. This doesn’t occur until one seriously commits to becoming a magician and commences an intelligent program of investigation and experiment, or at least it didn’t with me, and I think the part about serious commitment might be true for everyone.

You’ve described magic as a form of language. Has your understanding of magic evolved since you first publicly identified as a magician? Has practicing magic changed how you write?

My understanding of magic has evolved massively over the thirty-three years since I commenced my study and practice. For one thing, I have come to understand that magic and the arts, particularly writing, are to all intents and purposes synonymous. Thus, while magic is the way in which I see the world and therefore affects every area of my life, nowhere is this more true than in my writing. Indeed, these days, writing is pretty much my only form of magical expression. My guess is that this, writing being the most powerful instrument of magic, has been true for most self-identified magicians – and what other kind is there? – since the dawn of human consciousness.

If comics had never become so popular, and/or if they had evolved without the dominance of superheroes, what forms do you think the medium might have explored more deeply? What do you think the medium would look like today?

While the comics medium is an astonishing art-form, the full potential of which has been barely scratched, I fear that my personal experiences in the comics industry during a not especially enjoyable career, have led to me disowning all of the work that I do not own – around 95% of it – and not wishing to be associated with comics any longer. I don’t have copies of those books around the house, I don’t wish to discuss them, sign them, see them or, if I can manage it, even think about them or about that strip-mined and brutalised field ever again. With regard to your question, what first attracted me to the comics field was that it was ignored by culture and regarded as a trash medium suitable only for children or the working classes. It was cheaply mass produced, with tens or hundreds of thousands of copies distributed each month or week, and it seemed to me that in the right hands, comics could become a field where useful, powerful, potentially liberating ideas, represented in an attractive and engaging form, could be transmitted to young or poor people throughout society, quickly and captivatingly, to the people in society who most need those ideas.

So, that was what I’d hoped the comics industry might become, rather than, predominately, a medium that has priced itself beyond the reach of children or the poor, and which seems to be, even in its more worthy examples, a field that is generating product largely by, for and about middle-class people. Nothing against middle-class people, of course. It’s simply that the comic strip form was originally conceived as by, for and about the working classes, who were its audience and, for my money, its very best creators. That is the comics field I’d like to see, brimming with new ideas and available to everyone, but, realistically, I don’t imagine that is ever going to happen, so I’ve chosen to put my remaining energies elsewhere.

You’ve described magic as “the science and art of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will.” At what point does writing fiction become indistinguishable from casting a spell?

Well, my definition of magic has evolved since then, in order to be more inclusive and to take some of the emphasis off of the will. After all, sometimes no human will is involved. Sometimes magic just does things. The definition that Steve Moore and myself eventually settled on is that magic is ‘any purposeful engagement with the phenomena and possibilities of consciousness’, since we wanted to include the arts and the sciences – both of which emerged from shamanism or alchemy – in our definition of the magical. So, from that perspective, there is no artistic process that isn’t magical in that it’s an attempt to magically conjure an idea, something that is invisible and intangible, into material form, whether that be a drawing, or a poem, or a novel, or a piece of banging pop music. So a piece of fiction is, from birth, indistinguishable from a spell, at least if that is its intention. And if you’re doing it right, of course.

Do you believe language describes reality, or do you think it generates it?

I think that it’s both, a bit like M.C. Escher’s two hands that are drawing one another. I agree with Wittgenstein in his contention that nothing truly exists of a thing, person or event other than the words we use to describe them, and I would also agree with Count Korzybski, the Einstein of semantics, that the entirety of human experience is composed entirely of language. If you like, I see myself as a piece of language that is somehow generating other pieces of language.

In Watchmen, you dismantle the nostalgia for the Golden Age of superheroes and show that behind the masked vigilante often lies trauma, paranoia, and authoritarian fantasies. Yet many readers continue to see Rorschach as a moral hero. Does this reveal a limit of narrative deconstruction… or does it reveal something more disturbing about contemporary culture’s need to still believe in heroes? Is nostalgia a narrative tool, a cultural disease, or both?

In the disowned work you refer to, I think it mostly reveals a limit to the audience for super-heroic adventure stories. Nostalgia isn’t really a narrative tool, but more something that one uses narrative tools to dismantle. It’s probably a reliable commercial tool, however, in that as the world becomes more complex and overwhelming, more and more people seem to be retreating from their responsibility to help create a tolerable present by seeking refuge in an imagined idyllic past or in their own childhoods, when they felt safe and happy and as if they understood things. Nostalgia is, and always has been since the word was first coined, an illness. It literally means ‘homesickness’, but in effect refers to all of our yearnings for a world that, with our serial view of time, we feel we have inevitably and irrecoverably lost. And as for the relationship between authoritarianism and our disappointed longing for the way we imagine things used to be, in my short story Illuminations, I have the central character speculating over whether fascism has always been weaponised nostalgia,

You have often expressed a rather frank view of Western culture. Looking at the present day, do you think Watchmen and V for Vendetta (illustrated by David Lloyd—read our interview with him here) were more prophetic or more diagnostic? Are these pieces also a psychological test for the readers?

Both of those disowned titles, as with much of my work, were intended as diagnostic in their function. The fact that they inadvertently ended up as prophetic is, I think, more down to a failure of the imagination by civilisation as a whole than to any Nostradamus-like abilities of my own. As for any of my works beings in some way psychological ‘tests’ of my readers, why would I want to do that, and how would I ever know the results? Admittedly, with both the works you mention, some of their subsequent American adaptations, prequels, sequels etc. have gone some way to convincing me that a majority of my comic work has probably never been understood by perhaps a majority of its mainstream superhero-fan audience. This is not their fault or mine, it’s just a misunderstanding that it has taken me too many decades to become aware of or rectify.

Do you think art can still change the collective consciousness, or is its role now only to record its decline? Is there any political ideology that you believe art should actively serve, or does art betray itself the moment it accepts a master?

Of course art can still change the collective consciousness. That is art’s only true function, and it is the thing that art, humanity’s most glorious technology, has been steadily improving and developing itself to do, almost since our inception as a species. And, speaking as an anarchist, then for me there is at least one political ideology that art can serve without needing to accept a master or leader. Other people, of course, may have their own ideas.

Many important messages in art, comics, and film have highlighted a kind of “cognitive distortion” effect in the audience—a sort of “lost in translation” moment. Do you think that narrative ambiguity has become more of a niche taste today than it was in the past? Is it possible that your deconstruction accidentally strengthened the very genre it was intended to critique?

To be honest, I’ve never really thought about the audience’s reaction too much, as it’s something I have no say in or control over. The only audience I’ve ever been attempting to please is, perhaps selfishly, myself. And if you’re referring to the superhero genre again, I‘m surprised to hear that it’s been strengthened, as from the sales figures I hear, I’d assumed that the genre was on its last spandex-clad legs, but what do I know? As suggested above, the whole field and that sub-genre in particular aren’t things that I keep up with or have an interest in anymore.

The quintet series is intended to trace a “secret history” of London across the latter half of the 20th century, weaving together his deep research into London’s history with the high-concept, visionary world-building he’s known for.

Have you ever abandoned an idea because it was not the right time, forgotten about it, but felt over the years that something important was missed—only to use your “magician powers” to rebirth it with its own powerful uniqueness? Are ideas living entities with their own agency, as you’ve suggested?

I’ve often been unable to use an idea until finding a place for it years or decades later, but see that as just an ordinary part of the writing process. As for ideas, I think that given how they move from mind to mind, propagating themselves and evolving themselves over years, decades, centuries, it seems reasonable to think of them as alive. I sometimes suspect that some of the bigger, older and more complex ideas might even be sentient.

When you look back at your younger self, what is the one thing you believed with absolute certainty that the Alan Moore of today would find most hilariously or tragically wrong? What’s your next project?

Probably my belief that I could perhaps change the comic field for the better, or at least make it a place where I could bear to work, which I now find both comically naïve and a bit depressing, though not what I’d call tragic. As for my next project, it’s the same as my current project: I’m currently nearing the end of the third book in my Long London quintet, this being titled Blow Away, Dandelion and set in the late 1960s, whereas the next book, In England’s Dreaming, will set in the late 1970s. The final book, And No River of Fire, will be set in 1999, on the eve of the current millennium. I have genuinely no idea what I’ll be doing after that point, so we’ll all just have to wait and see.

Photos courtesy of Alan Moore

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.