Alan Moore is Britain's most acclaimed comic book writer, providing the scripts for such titles as V for Vendetta (1982-1989), Halo Jones (1984-1986), Watchmen (1986-1987), Batman: The Killing Joke (1988), Miracleman (1982-1989), From Hell (1991-1998), Lost Girls (1991-2006) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1989-2019). His short film series Show Pieces (2012) culminated in the feature film The Show (2021), both directed by Mitch Jenkins, and show a fantastical underbelly to his hometown of Northampton, which also features as the location of his first short story collection, Voice of the Fire (1996), and novel Jerusalem (2016). His second short story collection, Illuminations, was published by Bloomsbury in October 2022.
Alex Fitch is the presenter of the UK's only monthly broadcast radio show on comics, ‘Panel Borders’, on Resonance 104.4 FM, the Arts Council Radio Station in London. He has been published on the topics of comics and film by the University Presses of Chicago and Mississippi, Intellect, McFarland, Strange Attractor, Cambridge Scholars, The Conversation, and The Independent. He is an associate lecturer in architecture and visual culture at the University of Brighton, where he is currently pursuing a PhD investigating ‘The Depiction of Architecture in Comic Books’.
This interview was recorded on the phone by Alex Fitch with Alan Moore in late 2011 and broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM (London) on 11th December, 2011. The interview was broadcast as part of a series of four episodes of the radio show ‘Panel Borders’, which that month was themed around comics containing characters and ideas by H.P. Lovecraft, and also featured interviews with Ed Brubaker, Ian Culbard and co–collaborators Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning.
Fitch and Moore discuss the latter’s Lovecraft-themed comics The Courtyard (2 issues, Avatar Press, 2003) and its sequel Neonomicon (4 issues, Avatar Press, 2010–2011). The Courtyard was originally published as a prose story by Moore and was adapted to comics by writer Anthony Johnson and artist Jacen Burrows; the sequel is written by Moore himself. Moore completed his Lovecraft trilogy with Providence (12 issues, Avatar Press, 2015–2017) which for its first 11 issues is a prequel to The Courtyard, and then its final issue is a sequel to Neonomicon.
In The Courtyard and Neonomicon, an FBI agent is investigating ritualistic murders committed by cult leader Johnny Carcosa, whose actions presage the return of eldritch gods and a potential, forthcoming apocalypse.
Alex Fitch: Avatar Press has just released the graphic novel collections of Neonomicon and The Courtyard, but the latter first saw print in a collection called ‘The Starry Wisdom’ in 1994…
Alan Moore: That's right. Yeah, that was, as I remember, that was Dave Mitchell from Oneiros books, had asked me to come up with something for a collection of new Lovecraft fiction that he was planning. I was feeling a bit ambitious, so I decided to take the title of Lovecraft’s poem cycle – Fungi from Yuggoth – seriously. I thought, if this is a kind of fungus, then it should be possible to take some element from each of the poems in the cycle and perhaps do something interesting with it. Just isolate some element and then see where that takes you. There are a couple of earlier pieces from the run of stories that I produced that have seen print, but it was an incredibly disparate bunch of prose pieces. I was really trying to push the Lovecraftian envelope.
I can remember a piece about Lovecraft’s father going mad in a motel that was only a couple of pages long, but it was my ambition to actually produce a couple of pages, for each one of the poems in the cycle. But, unfortunately, I got to about halfway through the process and found that I was called to do a reading in London, and the only manuscript of many of the pieces was just lost in the back of a taxi.
I couldn't recreate it, fortunately I had done The Courtyard, which was probably the longest and most self–contained of all of the pieces. So, when Avatar approached me to ask if they could do an adaptation of it, I said yes, because I mean, yes, I enjoyed the story. There’d been some nice little touches there that I've been quite pleased with. And so, yeah, I told them to go ahead with it. And then a couple of years later, when they asked if I wanted to do anything for them, I’d always thought of doing a sequel to The Courtyard with The Neonomicon piece.
But yeah, that was pretty much how it happened.
And both The Courtyard and The Neonomicon are sequels to a short story by Lovecraft called ‘The Horror at Red Hook’. Why, out of all of his stories, did you choose that one in particular that you wanted to actually do a specific sequel to, rather than just use Lovecraftian imagery?
Well, because I’d remembered that story as being quite a creepy little Lovecraft story, and it was set outside of his usual comfort zone of New England. This was, I believe, written after he married Sonia [née Green, in 1924] and gone to live in New York which he found a horrifying experience, largely because of his rampant xenophobia. And I can remember ‘The Horror of Red Hook’ as having even more than usual of the various kinds of epithets that he used to lavish upon anybody who was not a white Anglo–Saxon Protestant.
I mean, apparently during this period, he would occasionally walk in New York and see groups of Jewish people, and would go into the long anti–Semitic rants, until Sonia would quietly point out to him: ‘Yes, but Howard I’m Jewish…’ at which point he would recover himself and say: ‘Ah yes, but of course you are the exception to the rule.’
This was, to be fair to Lovecraft… at the end of his life he deeply regretted all of his earlier flirtation with anti–Semitism and racism, and he saw it for what it was. It was a young man with very little experience of the world, who for some reason had decided to pretend he was an eighteenth–century gentleman and had incorporated all of the customary prejudices of that era.
He later realised that’s what he'd been doing and that it was completely pointless, and he that regretted it all. But it has to be said that during a large part of Lovecraft’s career, those tendencies were pretty much at the forefront of his work. And what I wanted to do with The Courtyard was to actually attempt a modern reading Lovecraft that included all of the stuff that he had been either too prudent or too squeamish to include in his stories. ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ seemed to offer possibilities, especially because with Robert Suydam – that was the name of one of the main Cthulhu cult protagonists in the story – it seemed to me that I could probably link in with Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, which was one of his later works, and one of his better ones.
It seemed I could, perhaps, connect up a couple of the remote parts of Lovecraft’s sprawling mythology and maybe get an interesting modern story out of it. So, that was one of the reasons why I chose ‘The Horror at Red Hook’. Also, probably because Red Hook is a real location. A lot of the places in Lovecraft’s stories are places that he made up as surrogates for places in the New England landscape. I mean, Innsmouth is pretty much definitely Salem. But with Red Hook, he was talking about a real place. It seemed to me that since I wanted to try and do a realistic, modern Lovecraft story – in so much as you can ever do a realistic, modern Lovecraft story – then having a place that was actually set in a real location would probably be an asset.
Well, and also you set it in the near future, which is interesting, with Harlem underneath a dome because of something that has happened, which I don't think you ever really explain, but it has that kind of science fictional element to it. Not only is there the Lovecraftian other, but there's also this dislocation in culture that there's a group of people who are sealed off from the outside world.
Well, that was… In the original Courtyard story, there are these kind of anti–pollution, anti–radiation domes over a lot of American cities. There are also, I believe, fax booths, because this was done back in the 90s when faxes were terribly modern. But the main reason for doing it like that was because I wanted to, right from the first lines of the story, to differentiate it between a lot of the more retroactive Lovecraft pastiches that had come before, because I've read an awful lot of Lovecraft stories written by various writers.
Some of them are really good, but there are some people who seem to think it’s sufficient just to pastiche a few of Lovecraft's more obvious stylistic touches, or to refer to places and entities from his mythos.
[What] I wanted to do, was to set it in what was the near future, i.e. the very early twenty-first century – now the near past – because I wanted to say: ‘Okay, this is this is Lovecraft for the modern world. This is not set in an imagined 1920s or 1930s,’ because, I know that’s a very natural period to set Lovecraft stories because [that’s when] when most or all of his stories were written.
I like to think that some of the elements in Lovecraft are a bit more timeless than that, and that if you can realise them for modern sensibilities, then I think that they’ve still got a great deal of power and that they can still work.
So, yeah, the science fiction touches were basically a way of signalling to the reader that this is kind of new territory. In terms of Lovecraft pastiches, we're going to be trying to do something a little bit different here.
One thing that I thought was very interesting about the sequel Neonomicon is, not only is it a sequel to your print version, but it’s a sequel to the adaptation done by Anthony Johnson and Jacen Burrows, particularly the final scene where they do this thing, where each panel is replicated in the next panel as a window in the background of the shot. And that sort of playing with time and different dimensions within the comic book panel is something you very much explore in the sequel.
Yeah. Well, I thought that Anthony and Jacen did a very good job of adapting The Courtyard, I mean, that kept all of my language there and I thought that the embedded time sequence that you’re talking about… I mean, that was something that had been there in the prose, but the way that they managed to recreate that in the artwork, I thought was ingenious.
With Neonomicon, I really wanted to take some of the ideas that had been set up in The Courtyard and take them as far as they would conceivably go. And that included some of the ideas about language, some of the ideas about time and space and perception, that had been a feature of the original story. Although given that I’d written the original story of the prose place with no idea of having it converted into a comic, it’s kind of more that with Neonomicon, I was trying to come up with things that were suitable to the comics medium. Things that perhaps you couldn't have done in a prose piece. For example, the scene in the first issue where the character, Johnny Carcosa, is apparently talking to some of the assembled police SWAT team that are raiding his apartment building, and when they approach him and tried to take off his bandana, it turned out that he’s a chalk drawing on a wall.
That is something which probably you could only realise effectively in comics. I mean, yes, I probably could have written that, but it would have had nowhere near the same effect because there wouldn’t have been the deception of the reader’s eye that comics can utilise. So, I mean, generally when I’m doing things, I do tend to write them with an eye to the actual medium they’re being produced in.
So, I think, yeah, with Neonomicon it was taking some of the subject matter from The Courtyard and then just thinking ‘Now, what would be the best way to realise this, to have a 100-page comic story?’, and taking it all from there, really.
And it’s interesting that with a story called Neonomicon, you do a lot of things that are new in terms of telling comics. I mean, there’s a YouTube video that dissects the first issue of Neonomicon, and I don't know if you’ve seen it or if, indeed, the guy who made the video actually goes too far in examining the exact shape of panel borders and how they’re referencing different ways of perception? But I thought that previous to Neonomicon, you’d said that you didn't want to do any more comics other than sequels to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and so I was wondering if it was the prospect of doing something new with the format that brought you onto this other project.
Well, I mean the actual genesis of Neonomicon… there was actually a huge gap between writing Neonomicon, and Neonomicon actually appearing. It was a few years, but originally it was just when I’d severed connection with DC. And both me and Kevin O’Neill were having a pretty sticky time of it around them, and I’d found myself with a large tax bill and with a lot of the money that I’d been expecting to have to pay it hadn’t turned up through various kind of oversights and complications.
So, I was quite in need of some funds quite quickly. So, I spoke to William [Christensen, Editor–in–Chief at Avatar Comics] at Avatar to ask if there’d been any royalties owing or anything like that, and he suggested that maybe if I wanted to write a four–part series, that he’d be able to give me an advance on the money for it, which sounded like a good idea! Since I had always been interested in The Courtyard, and I'd always been kind of thinking of maybe doing a sequel. I’d already got a kind of a first scene in my mind which would have been Aldo Sax in the asylum being interrogated by a couple of fellow FBI agents. It wasn't much more than that, but I thought that might be interesting, and I thought it might be interesting to revisit that world and see how it had progressed since I left off with it in The Courtyard.
Now, after that point, I am pretty much… The League of Extraordinary Gentleman is the comic that I am committed to, and is pretty much the only comic that I'm doing. But, you know, back then in 2006 or whenever it was that I actually wrote Neonomicon, 2006 to 2007, it was the possibilities that the story seemed to offer because there were a lot of interesting things that had been touched on in The Courtyard. I was quite pleased with that as a story.
There seemed to be life in some of those ideas that, you know, that just made it a more attractive proposition than it might otherwise have been.
I guess Lovecraft died young and his entire oeuvre can be collected in sort of four or five books, and it's interesting that while he was still alive, some of his contemporaries were already doing sequels and other stories set in his mythology, which you’ve done yourself. And in fact, both Neonomicon and one of your short stories, ‘Recognition’ [in Alan Moore's Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths #2 (Avatar Press, October 2003)], are actually sequels to everything that Lovecraft did. Why do you think it is so tempting for writers like yourself to do additional work set in the Lovecraft universe? Because he seems to be a writer that inspires others, rather than inspires people to adapt his work?
Well, you’d have to say that there must be something about Lovecraft’s writing that attains a kind of creepy universality. I think that it might be that he was a writer who was genuinely about 50, 60, 70 years ahead of his time. I think that Lovecraft was very attuned to the scientific breakthroughs of his day, which were many, and also to the breakthroughs in astronomy and cosmology. I think what happened with Lovecraft was that as a very sensitive man – a kind of pit canary, almost – he was uniquely attuned to some of the psychological problems that would be afflicting humanity in the decades to come.
I mean, he was living at a time when it was just starting to sink in that we were not living in… Not only was it that the Earth goes around the Sun, but that our sun was one of about 100 billion in our galaxy, which was one of an immense number of galaxies, and we have no special position in the cosmos whatsoever. And in all likelihood, the cosmos was completely unaware of our existence and if it had been aware, would not have cared.
I think that these concepts, which are quite big and alienating, and I think they are concepts that are still to have sunk in for an awful lot of contemporary people, but I think that it was these concepts that Lovecraft was wrestling with: just this sense of cosmic horror, a horror at the insignificance of human existence in the kind of cosmos that science seemed to be presenting him with.
And the only way that he could in any way encompass these abstract cosmic anxieties was to turn them into squirmy entities to terrify his readership with. I think that in a way, he managed that successfully, even with his very personal and very specific approach to language and to short stories. He managed that so successfully that I think that he actually somehow managed to embed these vast, abstract cosmic ideas into a living crawling form, that his readers could engage with, given that people like Jorge Luis Borges and William Burroughs were very, very interested in Lovecraft. I believed that Burroughs was rereading Lovecraft when he died. And you’d have to say that from looking at Burroughs’ work, for example, that he was concerned with representing alienating, or invasive, abstract forces of alien and invading entities.
There were a lot of similarities between the two, in that they both used monsters to represent states of mind. And I think that actually, as time has moved on, as we’ve moved into a new century, I think those states are probably a lot more familiar to us now than they were in Lovecraft’s day. I would imagine that’s why he probably still has something to say.
I mean, there’s also that fantastic quote by Lovecraft, which I shall probably almost certainly mangle. But he was saying something to the effect that he thought ‘it was the greatest conceivable mercy that Mankind was not able to correlate its knowledge. But the time, that it could do, that would be coming soon, and it only remains to be seen whether man would embrace this new understanding or would flee from its light into the shadows of a new Dark Age.’
Now, given the response of both our religious fundamentalists and our political fundamentalists, the nationalists and all the rest who seem to feel assaulted by this rapidly changing world that we’re in… A lot of the values and certainties upon which they based their lives and understanding of the world are being swept away. And so at least to some people, they are doing exactly what Lovecraft feared that they would.
They are trying to escape into a new Dark Ages, where we can ignore all that has been learned by science and just pull back upon what we were taught in our religious texts.
I think that’s a very real danger, and I think that Lovecraft was ahead of the curve in predicting it.
I think it’s the fact that he was so sensitive to the stuff that was coming up, that makes him still so relevant today and still such a good source of nightmares.
Well, it occurs to me looking at your work over the years, the even before the short stories you wrote for The Starry Wisdom and elsewhere, you'd been thinking about Lovecraft because, for example, the monster at the end of Watchmen is very Lovecraftian. And my favourite part of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier [DC Comics, December 2008] is your mash up between Lovecraft and P.G. Wodehouse.
Well, yeah, I mean, there’s been quite a few… I haven't really thought about the connection between Lovecraft and Watchmen, but I guess it was a squidgy alien. So, you know, yeah, I guess that there may have been some influence there, but particularly, in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, there’s been quite a few references to Lovecraft, I mean, I think in the first volume, in the text story ‘Allan and the Sundered Veil’, there were quite a few references to gigantic Lovecraftian entities. And then they turned up in the P.G. Wodehouse parody in The Black Dossier. Also, I think, Nyarlathotep, makes an appearance during the 3D giant party in the Blazing World sequence that ends the book.
So, as part of the fictional landscape, it would be kind of strange to be doing a book like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that delights in picking amongst the features of the fictional world, it would be kind of strange to overlook Lovecraft. He definitely has to be in there somewhere, you know, and I’ve been interested in his work since I was about 12.
I’d heard the name and I’d seen a paperback down at one of the book shops in town. It was a Boxing Day – around that time of year – and I was with my parents at a local club, and I was literally bored to tears. I was completely miserable. There was nothing to do. And eventually, just in desperation, I think my mum gave me half a crown and told me to go down to the newsagents down the road and see if I could find myself something to read.
And I brought back a copy of At the Mountains of Madness, which had got the most inappropriate cover that I had ever seen on any Lovecraft book. It was a kind of a big, badly constructed waxwork head, wearing an eyepatch! I've really got no idea what that had do with Lovecraft or Cthulhu or anything, but I remember that that particular edition has got ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’ [and] I probably read that one first because it was the shortest. I thought I’d have a go at that one before I got on to something like ‘The Mountains of Madness’, and it's also one of the punchiest of Lovecraft’s stories. It’s got a killer last line that at least when I was 12 or 13, or whenever it was, it was an ending to a story that completely blew me away, as did the rest of the stories when I got around to reading them.
There was obviously a really unusual imagination at work. It was a flavour that I’d never tasted before! I think at the end of that particular volume, there was ‘The Dream–Quest of Unknown Kadath’, and there was also, I think, his essay about supernatural horror in literature, which pretty much shaped my reading tastes – just that essay – for the next 20 or 30 years!
I went on to discover that people like Arthur Machen, William Howard Hodgson, and all the rest of the writers that I was introduced to by that essay. So, yeah. Lovecraft has always been there, but I’d never really had the opportunity before to actually write a purely Lovecraftian story. So that was why I gave it my best shot with Neonomicon, and which I’m very pleased with. I wasn’t sure for a while because, like I said, there was a huge gap between actually writing the work and publishing it. During that time, you can be beset by a lot of doubts. And obviously with the work like Neonomicon, which is quite intense and quite extreme, I did think, ‘Is it possible that I've gone too far? Have I created something that is just plainly nasty?’, which I wouldn’t have wanted to do.
So, I went back and read it just on the screen of my word processor, and I thought, ‘No, actually, I’m glad that I went as far as I did’, because I think morally, that is its saving grace. I thought that if I’m going to approach Lovecraft, then all of the things that Lovecraft considers unnameable, I’m going to name them.
I mean, a lot of Lovecraft’s stories are talking about hideous forbidden rites or rituals that somehow result in hybrid beings, you know? This is obviously talking about sex. With whom it is not necessarily… given at least one of the partners in this act is some kind of slithering horror from beyond, it would seem that is not necessarily consensual sex that we’re talking about, in which case we’re talking about rape.
And I’ve got quite strong feelings about the way that comics have handled rape in the past. There were the kind of lusty, ‘it’s not really rape is it?’ kind of erotic adventures of Conan where it didn’t seem that the sex was consensual. Although generally the lusty tavern wench would melt into Conan’s arms, after she’d put up a token resistance. This is sending out entirely the wrong signals. It’s making rape a kind of ornament of an adventure story which it should never be.
I decided with Neonomicon, that if we were going to investigate this, then it would be unflinchingly, and there would be no evasions. There would be none of the… there would be a full presentation of the horror of that situation. I mean, yes, alright, it’s with a big, hideous monster, but on the other hand, isn’t it always? So, you know, I was pleased with the way that me and Jacen handled that sequence. I mean, considering that it went on for a couple of excruciating issues, then I suppose I’d have to be, you know?
But it seemed to me that people these days when they're talking about… they seem to have, if anything, an increased thirst for horror. It was quite a minor genre, back when I was young, it wasn’t like science fiction, it was one of those things that only a certain type of person, generally a very young one, would read.
These days, everybody seems to be a real fan of horror in the cinema or on television and I am suspicious of the use of the word. I don’t think that it’s horror that they're looking for. I think it’s kind of titillation of one sort or another, generally. And so what I wanted to do was a story which was not at all titillating. Even though it had a huge amount of sexual content. I mean, as Melinda [Gebbie, Moore’s wife] said when I showed it to her to ask what she thought about it as a woman, and she thought she liked it. And she said: ‘Well, nobody could be aroused by this unless they were mentally ill.’ And yes, I was pleased to hear that. It meant I’d presented it exactly as I wanted to.
So, yeah, you know, it was a piece of work that I was pleased with, and it was interesting to see some of the comments that greeted it, you know? I think there was a certain amount of debate. I mean, I'm probably immune to a lot of it because I’ve not got an internet connection, and I’ve not seen the YouTube piece that you mentioned.
It's interesting…
…but, it sounded like there was a certain amount of debate, and I think that generally people got what we were trying to say.
A podcast of this interview can be downloaded or streamed at https://panelborders.wordpress.com/2011/12/11
Alex Fitch is the presenter of the UK's only monthly broadcast radio show on comics, ‘Panel Borders’, on Resonance 104.4 FM, the Arts Council Radio Station in London. He has been published on the topics of comics and film by the University Presses of Chicago and Mississippi, Intellect, McFarland, Strange Attractor, Cambridge Scholars, The Conversation, and The Independent. He is an associate lecturer in architecture and visual culture at the University of Brighton, where he is currently pursuing a PhD investigating ‘The Depiction of Architecture in Comic Books’.
This interview was recorded on the phone by Alex Fitch with Alan Moore in late 2011 and broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM (London) on 11th December, 2011. The interview was broadcast as part of a series of four episodes of the radio show ‘Panel Borders’, which that month was themed around comics containing characters and ideas by H.P. Lovecraft, and also featured interviews with Ed Brubaker, Ian Culbard and co–collaborators Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning.
Fitch and Moore discuss the latter’s Lovecraft-themed comics The Courtyard (2 issues, Avatar Press, 2003) and its sequel Neonomicon (4 issues, Avatar Press, 2010–2011). The Courtyard was originally published as a prose story by Moore and was adapted to comics by writer Anthony Johnson and artist Jacen Burrows; the sequel is written by Moore himself. Moore completed his Lovecraft trilogy with Providence (12 issues, Avatar Press, 2015–2017) which for its first 11 issues is a prequel to The Courtyard, and then its final issue is a sequel to Neonomicon.
In The Courtyard and Neonomicon, an FBI agent is investigating ritualistic murders committed by cult leader Johnny Carcosa, whose actions presage the return of eldritch gods and a potential, forthcoming apocalypse.
Alex Fitch: Avatar Press has just released the graphic novel collections of Neonomicon and The Courtyard, but the latter first saw print in a collection called ‘The Starry Wisdom’ in 1994…
Alan Moore: That's right. Yeah, that was, as I remember, that was Dave Mitchell from Oneiros books, had asked me to come up with something for a collection of new Lovecraft fiction that he was planning. I was feeling a bit ambitious, so I decided to take the title of Lovecraft’s poem cycle – Fungi from Yuggoth – seriously. I thought, if this is a kind of fungus, then it should be possible to take some element from each of the poems in the cycle and perhaps do something interesting with it. Just isolate some element and then see where that takes you. There are a couple of earlier pieces from the run of stories that I produced that have seen print, but it was an incredibly disparate bunch of prose pieces. I was really trying to push the Lovecraftian envelope.
I can remember a piece about Lovecraft’s father going mad in a motel that was only a couple of pages long, but it was my ambition to actually produce a couple of pages, for each one of the poems in the cycle. But, unfortunately, I got to about halfway through the process and found that I was called to do a reading in London, and the only manuscript of many of the pieces was just lost in the back of a taxi.
I couldn't recreate it, fortunately I had done The Courtyard, which was probably the longest and most self–contained of all of the pieces. So, when Avatar approached me to ask if they could do an adaptation of it, I said yes, because I mean, yes, I enjoyed the story. There’d been some nice little touches there that I've been quite pleased with. And so, yeah, I told them to go ahead with it. And then a couple of years later, when they asked if I wanted to do anything for them, I’d always thought of doing a sequel to The Courtyard with The Neonomicon piece.
But yeah, that was pretty much how it happened.
And both The Courtyard and The Neonomicon are sequels to a short story by Lovecraft called ‘The Horror at Red Hook’. Why, out of all of his stories, did you choose that one in particular that you wanted to actually do a specific sequel to, rather than just use Lovecraftian imagery?
Well, because I’d remembered that story as being quite a creepy little Lovecraft story, and it was set outside of his usual comfort zone of New England. This was, I believe, written after he married Sonia [née Green, in 1924] and gone to live in New York which he found a horrifying experience, largely because of his rampant xenophobia. And I can remember ‘The Horror of Red Hook’ as having even more than usual of the various kinds of epithets that he used to lavish upon anybody who was not a white Anglo–Saxon Protestant.
I mean, apparently during this period, he would occasionally walk in New York and see groups of Jewish people, and would go into the long anti–Semitic rants, until Sonia would quietly point out to him: ‘Yes, but Howard I’m Jewish…’ at which point he would recover himself and say: ‘Ah yes, but of course you are the exception to the rule.’
This was, to be fair to Lovecraft… at the end of his life he deeply regretted all of his earlier flirtation with anti–Semitism and racism, and he saw it for what it was. It was a young man with very little experience of the world, who for some reason had decided to pretend he was an eighteenth–century gentleman and had incorporated all of the customary prejudices of that era.
He later realised that’s what he'd been doing and that it was completely pointless, and he that regretted it all. But it has to be said that during a large part of Lovecraft’s career, those tendencies were pretty much at the forefront of his work. And what I wanted to do with The Courtyard was to actually attempt a modern reading Lovecraft that included all of the stuff that he had been either too prudent or too squeamish to include in his stories. ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ seemed to offer possibilities, especially because with Robert Suydam – that was the name of one of the main Cthulhu cult protagonists in the story – it seemed to me that I could probably link in with Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, which was one of his later works, and one of his better ones.
It seemed I could, perhaps, connect up a couple of the remote parts of Lovecraft’s sprawling mythology and maybe get an interesting modern story out of it. So, that was one of the reasons why I chose ‘The Horror at Red Hook’. Also, probably because Red Hook is a real location. A lot of the places in Lovecraft’s stories are places that he made up as surrogates for places in the New England landscape. I mean, Innsmouth is pretty much definitely Salem. But with Red Hook, he was talking about a real place. It seemed to me that since I wanted to try and do a realistic, modern Lovecraft story – in so much as you can ever do a realistic, modern Lovecraft story – then having a place that was actually set in a real location would probably be an asset.
Well, and also you set it in the near future, which is interesting, with Harlem underneath a dome because of something that has happened, which I don't think you ever really explain, but it has that kind of science fictional element to it. Not only is there the Lovecraftian other, but there's also this dislocation in culture that there's a group of people who are sealed off from the outside world.
Well, that was… In the original Courtyard story, there are these kind of anti–pollution, anti–radiation domes over a lot of American cities. There are also, I believe, fax booths, because this was done back in the 90s when faxes were terribly modern. But the main reason for doing it like that was because I wanted to, right from the first lines of the story, to differentiate it between a lot of the more retroactive Lovecraft pastiches that had come before, because I've read an awful lot of Lovecraft stories written by various writers.
Some of them are really good, but there are some people who seem to think it’s sufficient just to pastiche a few of Lovecraft's more obvious stylistic touches, or to refer to places and entities from his mythos.
[What] I wanted to do, was to set it in what was the near future, i.e. the very early twenty-first century – now the near past – because I wanted to say: ‘Okay, this is this is Lovecraft for the modern world. This is not set in an imagined 1920s or 1930s,’ because, I know that’s a very natural period to set Lovecraft stories because [that’s when] when most or all of his stories were written.
I like to think that some of the elements in Lovecraft are a bit more timeless than that, and that if you can realise them for modern sensibilities, then I think that they’ve still got a great deal of power and that they can still work.
So, yeah, the science fiction touches were basically a way of signalling to the reader that this is kind of new territory. In terms of Lovecraft pastiches, we're going to be trying to do something a little bit different here.
One thing that I thought was very interesting about the sequel Neonomicon is, not only is it a sequel to your print version, but it’s a sequel to the adaptation done by Anthony Johnson and Jacen Burrows, particularly the final scene where they do this thing, where each panel is replicated in the next panel as a window in the background of the shot. And that sort of playing with time and different dimensions within the comic book panel is something you very much explore in the sequel.
Yeah. Well, I thought that Anthony and Jacen did a very good job of adapting The Courtyard, I mean, that kept all of my language there and I thought that the embedded time sequence that you’re talking about… I mean, that was something that had been there in the prose, but the way that they managed to recreate that in the artwork, I thought was ingenious.
With Neonomicon, I really wanted to take some of the ideas that had been set up in The Courtyard and take them as far as they would conceivably go. And that included some of the ideas about language, some of the ideas about time and space and perception, that had been a feature of the original story. Although given that I’d written the original story of the prose place with no idea of having it converted into a comic, it’s kind of more that with Neonomicon, I was trying to come up with things that were suitable to the comics medium. Things that perhaps you couldn't have done in a prose piece. For example, the scene in the first issue where the character, Johnny Carcosa, is apparently talking to some of the assembled police SWAT team that are raiding his apartment building, and when they approach him and tried to take off his bandana, it turned out that he’s a chalk drawing on a wall.
That is something which probably you could only realise effectively in comics. I mean, yes, I probably could have written that, but it would have had nowhere near the same effect because there wouldn’t have been the deception of the reader’s eye that comics can utilise. So, I mean, generally when I’m doing things, I do tend to write them with an eye to the actual medium they’re being produced in.
So, I think, yeah, with Neonomicon it was taking some of the subject matter from The Courtyard and then just thinking ‘Now, what would be the best way to realise this, to have a 100-page comic story?’, and taking it all from there, really.
And it’s interesting that with a story called Neonomicon, you do a lot of things that are new in terms of telling comics. I mean, there’s a YouTube video that dissects the first issue of Neonomicon, and I don't know if you’ve seen it or if, indeed, the guy who made the video actually goes too far in examining the exact shape of panel borders and how they’re referencing different ways of perception? But I thought that previous to Neonomicon, you’d said that you didn't want to do any more comics other than sequels to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and so I was wondering if it was the prospect of doing something new with the format that brought you onto this other project.
Well, I mean the actual genesis of Neonomicon… there was actually a huge gap between writing Neonomicon, and Neonomicon actually appearing. It was a few years, but originally it was just when I’d severed connection with DC. And both me and Kevin O’Neill were having a pretty sticky time of it around them, and I’d found myself with a large tax bill and with a lot of the money that I’d been expecting to have to pay it hadn’t turned up through various kind of oversights and complications.
So, I was quite in need of some funds quite quickly. So, I spoke to William [Christensen, Editor–in–Chief at Avatar Comics] at Avatar to ask if there’d been any royalties owing or anything like that, and he suggested that maybe if I wanted to write a four–part series, that he’d be able to give me an advance on the money for it, which sounded like a good idea! Since I had always been interested in The Courtyard, and I'd always been kind of thinking of maybe doing a sequel. I’d already got a kind of a first scene in my mind which would have been Aldo Sax in the asylum being interrogated by a couple of fellow FBI agents. It wasn't much more than that, but I thought that might be interesting, and I thought it might be interesting to revisit that world and see how it had progressed since I left off with it in The Courtyard.
Now, after that point, I am pretty much… The League of Extraordinary Gentleman is the comic that I am committed to, and is pretty much the only comic that I'm doing. But, you know, back then in 2006 or whenever it was that I actually wrote Neonomicon, 2006 to 2007, it was the possibilities that the story seemed to offer because there were a lot of interesting things that had been touched on in The Courtyard. I was quite pleased with that as a story.
There seemed to be life in some of those ideas that, you know, that just made it a more attractive proposition than it might otherwise have been.
I guess Lovecraft died young and his entire oeuvre can be collected in sort of four or five books, and it's interesting that while he was still alive, some of his contemporaries were already doing sequels and other stories set in his mythology, which you’ve done yourself. And in fact, both Neonomicon and one of your short stories, ‘Recognition’ [in Alan Moore's Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths #2 (Avatar Press, October 2003)], are actually sequels to everything that Lovecraft did. Why do you think it is so tempting for writers like yourself to do additional work set in the Lovecraft universe? Because he seems to be a writer that inspires others, rather than inspires people to adapt his work?
Well, you’d have to say that there must be something about Lovecraft’s writing that attains a kind of creepy universality. I think that it might be that he was a writer who was genuinely about 50, 60, 70 years ahead of his time. I think that Lovecraft was very attuned to the scientific breakthroughs of his day, which were many, and also to the breakthroughs in astronomy and cosmology. I think what happened with Lovecraft was that as a very sensitive man – a kind of pit canary, almost – he was uniquely attuned to some of the psychological problems that would be afflicting humanity in the decades to come.
I mean, he was living at a time when it was just starting to sink in that we were not living in… Not only was it that the Earth goes around the Sun, but that our sun was one of about 100 billion in our galaxy, which was one of an immense number of galaxies, and we have no special position in the cosmos whatsoever. And in all likelihood, the cosmos was completely unaware of our existence and if it had been aware, would not have cared.
I think that these concepts, which are quite big and alienating, and I think they are concepts that are still to have sunk in for an awful lot of contemporary people, but I think that it was these concepts that Lovecraft was wrestling with: just this sense of cosmic horror, a horror at the insignificance of human existence in the kind of cosmos that science seemed to be presenting him with.
And the only way that he could in any way encompass these abstract cosmic anxieties was to turn them into squirmy entities to terrify his readership with. I think that in a way, he managed that successfully, even with his very personal and very specific approach to language and to short stories. He managed that so successfully that I think that he actually somehow managed to embed these vast, abstract cosmic ideas into a living crawling form, that his readers could engage with, given that people like Jorge Luis Borges and William Burroughs were very, very interested in Lovecraft. I believed that Burroughs was rereading Lovecraft when he died. And you’d have to say that from looking at Burroughs’ work, for example, that he was concerned with representing alienating, or invasive, abstract forces of alien and invading entities.
There were a lot of similarities between the two, in that they both used monsters to represent states of mind. And I think that actually, as time has moved on, as we’ve moved into a new century, I think those states are probably a lot more familiar to us now than they were in Lovecraft’s day. I would imagine that’s why he probably still has something to say.
I mean, there’s also that fantastic quote by Lovecraft, which I shall probably almost certainly mangle. But he was saying something to the effect that he thought ‘it was the greatest conceivable mercy that Mankind was not able to correlate its knowledge. But the time, that it could do, that would be coming soon, and it only remains to be seen whether man would embrace this new understanding or would flee from its light into the shadows of a new Dark Age.’
Now, given the response of both our religious fundamentalists and our political fundamentalists, the nationalists and all the rest who seem to feel assaulted by this rapidly changing world that we’re in… A lot of the values and certainties upon which they based their lives and understanding of the world are being swept away. And so at least to some people, they are doing exactly what Lovecraft feared that they would.
They are trying to escape into a new Dark Ages, where we can ignore all that has been learned by science and just pull back upon what we were taught in our religious texts.
I think that’s a very real danger, and I think that Lovecraft was ahead of the curve in predicting it.
I think it’s the fact that he was so sensitive to the stuff that was coming up, that makes him still so relevant today and still such a good source of nightmares.
Well, it occurs to me looking at your work over the years, the even before the short stories you wrote for The Starry Wisdom and elsewhere, you'd been thinking about Lovecraft because, for example, the monster at the end of Watchmen is very Lovecraftian. And my favourite part of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier [DC Comics, December 2008] is your mash up between Lovecraft and P.G. Wodehouse.
Well, yeah, I mean, there’s been quite a few… I haven't really thought about the connection between Lovecraft and Watchmen, but I guess it was a squidgy alien. So, you know, yeah, I guess that there may have been some influence there, but particularly, in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, there’s been quite a few references to Lovecraft, I mean, I think in the first volume, in the text story ‘Allan and the Sundered Veil’, there were quite a few references to gigantic Lovecraftian entities. And then they turned up in the P.G. Wodehouse parody in The Black Dossier. Also, I think, Nyarlathotep, makes an appearance during the 3D giant party in the Blazing World sequence that ends the book.
So, as part of the fictional landscape, it would be kind of strange to be doing a book like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that delights in picking amongst the features of the fictional world, it would be kind of strange to overlook Lovecraft. He definitely has to be in there somewhere, you know, and I’ve been interested in his work since I was about 12.
I’d heard the name and I’d seen a paperback down at one of the book shops in town. It was a Boxing Day – around that time of year – and I was with my parents at a local club, and I was literally bored to tears. I was completely miserable. There was nothing to do. And eventually, just in desperation, I think my mum gave me half a crown and told me to go down to the newsagents down the road and see if I could find myself something to read.
And I brought back a copy of At the Mountains of Madness, which had got the most inappropriate cover that I had ever seen on any Lovecraft book. It was a kind of a big, badly constructed waxwork head, wearing an eyepatch! I've really got no idea what that had do with Lovecraft or Cthulhu or anything, but I remember that that particular edition has got ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’ [and] I probably read that one first because it was the shortest. I thought I’d have a go at that one before I got on to something like ‘The Mountains of Madness’, and it's also one of the punchiest of Lovecraft’s stories. It’s got a killer last line that at least when I was 12 or 13, or whenever it was, it was an ending to a story that completely blew me away, as did the rest of the stories when I got around to reading them.
There was obviously a really unusual imagination at work. It was a flavour that I’d never tasted before! I think at the end of that particular volume, there was ‘The Dream–Quest of Unknown Kadath’, and there was also, I think, his essay about supernatural horror in literature, which pretty much shaped my reading tastes – just that essay – for the next 20 or 30 years!
I went on to discover that people like Arthur Machen, William Howard Hodgson, and all the rest of the writers that I was introduced to by that essay. So, yeah. Lovecraft has always been there, but I’d never really had the opportunity before to actually write a purely Lovecraftian story. So that was why I gave it my best shot with Neonomicon, and which I’m very pleased with. I wasn’t sure for a while because, like I said, there was a huge gap between actually writing the work and publishing it. During that time, you can be beset by a lot of doubts. And obviously with the work like Neonomicon, which is quite intense and quite extreme, I did think, ‘Is it possible that I've gone too far? Have I created something that is just plainly nasty?’, which I wouldn’t have wanted to do.
So, I went back and read it just on the screen of my word processor, and I thought, ‘No, actually, I’m glad that I went as far as I did’, because I think morally, that is its saving grace. I thought that if I’m going to approach Lovecraft, then all of the things that Lovecraft considers unnameable, I’m going to name them.
I mean, a lot of Lovecraft’s stories are talking about hideous forbidden rites or rituals that somehow result in hybrid beings, you know? This is obviously talking about sex. With whom it is not necessarily… given at least one of the partners in this act is some kind of slithering horror from beyond, it would seem that is not necessarily consensual sex that we’re talking about, in which case we’re talking about rape.
And I’ve got quite strong feelings about the way that comics have handled rape in the past. There were the kind of lusty, ‘it’s not really rape is it?’ kind of erotic adventures of Conan where it didn’t seem that the sex was consensual. Although generally the lusty tavern wench would melt into Conan’s arms, after she’d put up a token resistance. This is sending out entirely the wrong signals. It’s making rape a kind of ornament of an adventure story which it should never be.
I decided with Neonomicon, that if we were going to investigate this, then it would be unflinchingly, and there would be no evasions. There would be none of the… there would be a full presentation of the horror of that situation. I mean, yes, alright, it’s with a big, hideous monster, but on the other hand, isn’t it always? So, you know, I was pleased with the way that me and Jacen handled that sequence. I mean, considering that it went on for a couple of excruciating issues, then I suppose I’d have to be, you know?
But it seemed to me that people these days when they're talking about… they seem to have, if anything, an increased thirst for horror. It was quite a minor genre, back when I was young, it wasn’t like science fiction, it was one of those things that only a certain type of person, generally a very young one, would read.
These days, everybody seems to be a real fan of horror in the cinema or on television and I am suspicious of the use of the word. I don’t think that it’s horror that they're looking for. I think it’s kind of titillation of one sort or another, generally. And so what I wanted to do was a story which was not at all titillating. Even though it had a huge amount of sexual content. I mean, as Melinda [Gebbie, Moore’s wife] said when I showed it to her to ask what she thought about it as a woman, and she thought she liked it. And she said: ‘Well, nobody could be aroused by this unless they were mentally ill.’ And yes, I was pleased to hear that. It meant I’d presented it exactly as I wanted to.
So, yeah, you know, it was a piece of work that I was pleased with, and it was interesting to see some of the comments that greeted it, you know? I think there was a certain amount of debate. I mean, I'm probably immune to a lot of it because I’ve not got an internet connection, and I’ve not seen the YouTube piece that you mentioned.
It's interesting…
…but, it sounded like there was a certain amount of debate, and I think that generally people got what we were trying to say.
A podcast of this interview can be downloaded or streamed at https://panelborders.wordpress.com/2011/12/11