Alan Moore

Alan Moore (born Northampton, England, 1953) is a British comics writer and one of the most influential figures in English-language comics. He began publishing in the late 1970s in British magazines such as 2000 AD and Warrior. Over the following decades he helped persuade readers and critics to take comics seriously as a literary form, producing work that mixes popular adventure with political, historical and philosophical concerns.

He was born into a working-class family and grew up in The Boroughs, a poor district of Northampton. As a child he read both British and American comics. He was expelled from school in 1970, and for several years he moved between very different jobs while writing and drawing on the side. His first published work appeared in fanzines and music papers, where he drew strips under the pen name Curt Vile. He later wrote short stories for 2000 AD, such as those in its Future Shocks series, and became known for Marvelman and V for Vendetta, a story of an anarchist who confronts a fascist British state, drawn by David Lloyd. In 1985 he left IPC, the publisher of 2000 AD, in protest over the treatment of creators' rights.

In 1983 he joined DC Comics, where he reshaped Swamp Thing and introduced John Constantine. His superhero work, including Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? and The Killing Joke, looks at heroism with a critical eye. His most celebrated work from this period is Watchmen, drawn by Dave Gibbons, set in an alternative Cold War and built on a non-linear structure and a complex view of power and morality. It is the only one-volume comic to have won a Hugo Award.

From the mid-1990s he worked mostly with independent publishers. In this period he wrote From Hell, a fictional account of the Jack the Ripper murders, and the novel Voice of the Fire, as well as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Promethea, which is centred on the occult. He describes himself as an anarchist and has long been interested in magic, which has shaped both his writing and his public activity. In 2016 he announced his withdrawal from the comics industry.

His legacy can be seen in the graphic novel as it is understood today and in the generation of British writers who came to DC in the 1980s. Several of his works have been adapted for film, though he has kept a critical distance from those adaptations.