Alan Moore: an extraordinary gentleman
Novelist, magician and 'guru of the graphic novel' Alan Moore talks to Steve Rose about Watchmen, the dark side of Hollywood and the morality of pornography

Steve Rose in guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 March 2009

'Demonstrates what comics can do that movies can't': Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's pornographic comic book epic Lost Girls. Photograph: Top Shelf Productions

As the world recovers from the onslaught of the Watchmen movie and its omnipresent marketing campaign, the spotlight has yet again come on to Alan Moore – its comic book creator, guru of the graphic novel and mystical man of mystery. And yet again, the spotlight has been desperately sweeping the stage only to find he hasn't turned up. He'd be easy to spot if he did – a giant of a man, always dressed in black, with formidable facial hair and large rings on every finger – but he's the archetypal reclusive writer.

Amid the chatter of debate on the merits or otherwise of Hollywood's rendition of what is generally agreed to be "the greatest comic-book story ever", Moore has maintained his usual dignified silence and stayed put in his hometown of Northampton. On the day I spoke to him, he had already turned down a profile in Time magazine and an interview with CNN, stating that he was busy preparing for a forthcoming benefit gig at the Frog and Fiddler, a local pub.
"I am aware of the immense power of absence," he says. "I'm not being completely disingenuous here. Of course I'm aware it doesn't hurt my reputation, but I'm not playing hard to get as some publicity ploy. I'm genuinely busy with stuff that is really important to me."

A long and interesting piece in The Guardian, link here to read the full piece.

The following paragraph on Lost Girls (which I have read but not reviewed) interested me:

Again, Lost Girls demonstrates what comics can do that movies can't – or at least shouldn't. The story centres on three fictional women – Lewis Carroll's Alice, Peter Pan's Wendy and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, whose sexual exploits at an Austrian hotel it details with a mix of Carry On-style humour and De Sadean exhaustiveness. Wendy gets it on with the Lost Boys, Dorothy gets it on with the Tin Man, everyone gets it on with everyone, in fact. There are polysexual orgies, incest, bestiality, semi-pubescent sex – polite softcore it is not. But in a country that's still only comfortable acknowledging bad literary sex, the shamelessness is utterly refreshing, even – dare anyone ever admit it – arousing.
As always with Moore, he's done his homework, (including Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Carter and feminist critiques of pornography), and Lost Girls takes in the history of sexual literature, the impact of modernism, war, sexual repression and the ethics of the imagination.
And even if Gebbie's illustrations leave very little to that imagination, they're dreamy and sensual rather than cold and anatomical. "There is a moral agenda in it. Put simply, it's 'make love, not war' but it goes a bit further than that. I think if we had a better relationship with our sexual imaginations, there would be a lot less sex crime – and a lot less directed at children."