Alan Moore, The Interviews
Hitting shelves today with a hardy thunk is Jerusalem (Norton/Liveright), Alan Moore’s 1,000-plus page modernist novel that addresses “a secular theory of the afterlife,” the metaphysics of time, and poverty and class. So heavy is it (it is almost 10 inches thick and weighs more than some laptops) that the publisher is offering it in a boxed set of three volumes to make reading it more manageable.
It is fitting then that the most recent interviews with Moore, one published by New York magazine and another by The New York Times are weighty, too.
The New York magazine interview captures the author in a good, if reflective, mood, except for his take on certain comics. Known for many pioneering comics, including The Watchmen (DC Comics), he says, “I am really in a bad mood about superheroes,” and goes on to say about film adaptations that cycle through the same material, “What are these movies doing other than entertaining us with stories and characters that were meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of 50 years ago?”
Despairing about much of the comic industry and his own role in creating some of the most iconic comics of the past few decades he says “I probably only have about 250 pages of comics left in me to write. With regard to the superhero characters, my opinion is that they were what I was given to play with when I was starting out in the industry. That’s it. It wasn’t as if I had ever expressed any particular desire to do them.”
The NYT caught Moore in a worse mood, one in which he is both evasive and self-indulgent, but did manage to illicit the news that he is currently obsessed with David Foster Wallace and particularly Infinite Jest.