The very peculiar world of Alan Moore

[struggle4progress]

22/06/2011
Comic book icon talks mysticism, snake gods and Hollywood

Alan Moore – anarchist, occultist, “mumbling reclusive”, practising magician and the most important comic book writer of the last three decades – is explaining how he found himself in the peculiar position of guest directing last week’s Cheltenham Science Festival. With matching greying flowing hair and beard, fingers generally crowded with scorpion rings and ideas every bit as wild as his appearance, he cuts a surprising figure among the rationalist likes of Prof Robert Winston, Prof Brian Cox and Roger Highfield, the editor of New Scientist.

“It certainly seems a little incongruous to me,” he allows, speaking from between the stacks of rare books that crowd his terrace house in Northampton and make it “almost unliveable”. The writer behind Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell fell in with the science crowd as a result of his appearances at Robin Ince’s ‘School for Gifted Children’ shows in London. Self-depreciatingly, he describes the events as “a bunch of really talented comedians, and scientists and musicians… and then me” but he is delighted to have been accepted by the rigorously rationalist audience. Especially given his decision on his 40th birthday to become an Aleister Crowley-style practising magician and simultaneously start worshipping the second century snake god Glycon.

“I find myself in the possibly unique position of being a kind of snake-worshipping occultist that rationalists for some obscure reason feel comfortable about,” chuckles the 57-year-old serial nonconformist ...

Later finding himself expelled from ... grammar school for selling LSD, Moore found himself unable to get any work at all, aside from at the local tannery – where light relief came in the form of throwing hacked off sheep’s testicles at each other. “That did make me realise that actually, I was kind of fucked. And if I was ever going to have any other life outside of the tanning yards down Bedford Road then I was going to have to do it all myself,” he says. “It forced me to consider my own resources and that is what pushed me into the life that I now enjoy" ...

http://www.bigissuescotland.com/features/view/548