Alan Moore on New Jack

Alan Moore gave an interview about Jack Kirby to the Jack Kirby Collector, which can be found here. I'm reprinting part of it below (obviously, if anyone has a problem with me reprinting this here, let me know and I'll remove it).


THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: How powerful an influence was Jack Kirby for you?
ALAN MOORE: Well, I'll have to go all the way back to my very early childhood for that. I first discovered comics when I was about seven; this would have been around 1959 or 1960. When I said "comics" I meant American comics; I had read the homegrown British fare before that, but when I first came across the Superman and Batman comics of the time, the first couple of appearances of the Flash, things like that, these were a revelation. I became completely addicted to American comics, or specifically to the DC Comics that were available at the time. I can remember that I'd seen this peculiar-looking comic that I knew wasn't DC hanging around on the newsstand and it looked too alien. I didn't want to risk spending money upon it when it wasn't stuff that I was already familiar with. And then I can recall on one day, I think I was ill in bed—I'd been seven or eight at the time—and my mother said that'd she get me a comic to cheer me up while I was confined to the bed. I knew that the only comic that I could think of that I hadn't actually bought was a Blackhawk comic that I'd seen around. So I was trying to convince her to sort of pick up this Blackhawk comic, kind of explaining to her what it was and that it was a bunch of people in blue uniforms. Much to my initial disappointment she brought back Fantastic Four #3, which I read. It did something to me. It was the artwork mainly. It was a kind of texture and style that I've just never seen before. The DC artists at the time, I didn't really know their names, but their style was the one I was accustomed to: Very clean, very wholesome looking, and here was something with craggy shadows with almost a kind of rundown look to a lot of it. It was immediate; literally, from that moment I became a devoted fan of the Fantastic Four and the other Marvel books when they came out—particularly those by Kirby. I mean, it was Kirby's work that I followed more than anybody else as I was growing up. Just the work in Thor and "Tales of Asgard," the Fantastic Four during that long classic stretch in the middle, and then when Kirby went over to DC and the Fourth World books. This was around the time that I was approaching my psychedelic teenage years and the subject matter of these books seems to be changing along with me. I absorbed actively every line he drew in those years, or at least the ones that I was able to lay my hands on. There's something about the dynamism of Kirby's storytelling. You never even think of it as an influence. It's something that you grew up with, kind of understanding that this is just the way that comics were done. So I'd say yeah, that I would account for the influence of Jack Kirby upon my own work. It's almost like a default setting for my own storytelling. It's sort of like if you can tell a story the way Kirby would have, then at least that's proper comics; you're doing your job okay.

TJKC: What exactly made those classic Marvel stories so revolutionary? Was it that the storytelling was more mature than DC?
ALAN: An extra dimension had been added to both the storytelling and the art. In a sense the DC characters at the time were archetypes to a certain degree. Archetype means they are one-dimensional. Stan Lee and his collaborators in terms of the story overlaid a second dimension of character. He gave them a few human problems. These weren't three-dimensional characters but they were of a dimension more than what we'd been used to, and something about the art kind of corresponded with that. With Kirby there was a level of attention to detail and texture and intensity about the art that seemed to give another dimension to the super-hero—to the comic book—than what was used at the time. It just seemed to be much more visceral, much more real. The Human Torch finding the Sub-Mariner in a bowery slum; that kind of had a visceral reality to it that was much more engaging.

TJKC: It seems that everyone at the beginning finds Kirby's artwork a bit awkward. Did it take you a while to get used to it?
ALAN: Well for a while, probably seven or eight pages, but yes there was that kind of shock of something unfamiliar. But then again, in my life that's generally been a sign; something I'm almost repulsed by to start with will be something I'll be enduringly fascinated by later. Some of the underground artists, the first time I saw their work, genuinely repulsed me, but later I became addicted to them and the same is true to a different degree with Kirby. Yeah, looking at his art for the first time there is that shock of something that is unfamiliar, and at first the shock might feel unpleasant, but pretty soon it's a strong acquired taste and you have to have more of that.

TJKC: Do you think your style of comics writing is a natural progression to what Lee and Kirby did in the Sixties?
ALAN: I guess it must be to a degree. That's some of the early stuff that I saw, so like I said, that's almost a kind of default setting.

TJKC: But namely with your super-hero work....
ALAN: Yeah, but there again that was the only kind of comic I'd seen at the time: Super-hero comics, really. Even war and western comics were super-hero comics in drag, so basically that is almost a default storytelling style. Lee and Kirby: It's just basic. It's something that's omnipresent—you don't even think about it. You don't even notice it. It's there like air is there.

TJKC: How would you describe Kirby's use of mythology and other genres in his work?
ALAN: It was great. He obviously got a real feel for these archetype figures. I remember "Tales of Asgard" being some of his best work, and the way he blended together myth and science-fiction in Thor was terrific. I thought he got exactly the right degree of relevance for the original material and exactly the right degree of irrelevance, where he was prepared to sort of change it and do new things with it; that kind of made the myths live in a sense.

TJKC: One of the most amazing things about Kirby is the more you see his work, you start to notice the great versatility he had jumping from genre to genre.
ALAN: Sure, it's stunning. You look at his westerns, Boys' Ranch, the romance stuff; that's the sort of thing which I've always tried to emulate. I've always liked to think that I could have as much breadth and versatility in my work as Kirby did—obviously in a different way because I'm a writer and he was an artist/writer. Yeah, I've always admired that in him. I think more people should. If you're going to take something from Kirby, don't take just his style; take his sense of adventure, take his willingness to explore other forms and take a few chances.

TJKC: Could you tell me a little about the "New Jack City" story in Supreme?
ALAN: The basic story was that some sort of mysterious citadel seems to have appeared overnight somewhere in some high, inaccessible Tibetan mountain valley or whatever. So Supreme goes to investigate and what he finds is this bewildering landscape which is in fact a great number of different landscapes sort of fused together. There's bits of it that look like a 1930s Depression era bowery slum, where he meets a kid gang and a costumed hero that the kid gang are obviously accomplices of. They have some battle with a suitably super-villain type. I believe we have a huge Atlas monster rising from the depths. Supreme wanders down a tunnel to find himself coming out into a trench of a battlefield where there are lots of grizzled multi-ethnic soldiers: An obvious Irish one, an obvious Jewish one, an obvious Black guy, all very much like the Sgt. Fury line-up and a whole slew of patriotic heroes. This carries on until Supreme actually meets the supreme creator of this world, who kind of turns out to be Jack Kirby. This is very difficult to explain because it took a whole story to tell the story, but it's basically that this gigantic floating head changes from this kind of Kirby photo montage—the head is changing, it always looks like Jack Kirby drawn or both. This gigantic entity explains to him that he used to be a flesh and blood artist but now he is entirely in the realm of ideas, which is much better because flesh and blood has its limitations because he can only do four or five pages a day tops, where now he exists purely in the world of ideas. The ideas can just flow out uninterrupted. He talks about the very concept of a space where ideas are real, which is the kind of place to some degree all comic creators work in all their lives, but Jack Kirby maybe more than most. So it's kind of an idea that being free of a physical body, this artist is then able to explore endless worlds of imagination and ideas.