Alan Moore: Well at the time, which I think was about 1984 when I wrote that story, it was the first time that I’d actually been asked to write a prose short story for publication. Since it was for a fantasy anthology, a shared world anthology, then it was obvious that, if I was going to write the story, I was going to be doing a fantasy. Fantasy of that nature is something which I’ve very seldom engaged with, possibly because I am very specific in what I want from a fantasy, and generally that isn’t the tropes or clichés that seemed to abound in the fantasy books of that period and which still to some extent I’m sure today.

Yet Illuminations isn't a claim to perfection from a literary titan whose every word is thunderous and wondrous, but an exercise - and a mostly successful one. It serves as a reminder of Moore's oft-overlooked grounding; like the worlds he builds, he exists simultaneously in the sweeping cosmic gestures and in the minuscule and intimate. When he falters, it's often due to either his excessive need for control or his often-uninterrogated social premises; when he succeeds, it's almost impossible to deny that he is among the finest craftsmen most of us can name. Illuminations is his way of saying "I am large, I contain multitudes" - and for worse or (more often) for better, he proves himself right. Most superheroes can be reduced to just a color combination and a chest emblem. I had a strange image that was like something from an old Superboy comic, and I had no idea what it meant. It was an image of a normally dressed person walking in from the left of a kind of an archetypal 1960s comic book panel with a sort of a bland Midwest landscape and, on the other side, a fantastically-costumed superhero, and they're just walking towards each other as if to shake hands. That became the seed for the final scene. It was a really interesting experience writing that story. The writing is always excellent, words that you don't expect to fit suddenly appearing in dialogue that sounds so apt and perfect it is a wonder that no one ever thought about it before. Bits of magic and magik, a hint of the supernatural, and the sadness of being all too human. Some stories seem too short, but that is probably the selfish reader in me. A few the story about Jesus, and the simple story of a cryptid club, with a strange observer hit me and made me think about alot of things other than the story, And that is a good thing. The long story about comics, might be a little too inside baseball for some people, a lot of history and lore is mentioned in it, about real people and real events, but still even a little Wikipedia should clear that up. A strong collection of stories, that flit and flirt with a lot of different themes and ideas.Alternate chapters explore fictionalised versions of key moments in the history of the comics industry, such as one scene in which publisher Jim Laws (Moore’s stand-in for EC Comics editor and publisher William Maxwell Gaines) testifies at the 1954 Senate subcommittee hearings into juvenile delinquency. Another scene, set in 1960, suggests that “Satanic” Sam Blatz (Moore’s satirical version of Stan Lee) received covert instructions from the CIA to mobilise superhero comics in service of pro-American, pro-corporate cold war propaganda. She was not a well-read woman. But she loved words. She loved long and difficult words because there was a sense that these are words that are actually only meant for better-off people, and we had stolen them. You could just see the delight in her face when she would say, “Oh, Alan. Why do you have to be so obstreperous?” Let's ask the obvious question... 'What We Can Know About Thunderman' is a satire of the comics industry. How much of it is true? When I did things like Marvelman [now known, for a variety of legal issues, as Miracleman] and Watchmen, they were critiques of the superhero genre. They were trying to show that any attempt to realize these figures in any kind of realistic context will always be grotesque and nightmarish. But that doesn’t seem to be the message that people took from this. They seemed to think, uh, yeah, dark, depressing superheroes are, like, cool.

You say that in the short story 'Illuminations' too: that there’s a relationship between nostalgia and fascism. This collection being an exercise in narrative and formal flexibility, there are times in which Moore tries—and fails—to go past his limits. "American Light: An Appreciation" (2021) attempts an homage to the Beat generation of authors and poets by presenting the reader with a fictional Beat poem, complemented by biographical and exegetical annotations about its in-universe author. This isn't the first time Moore has tried his hand at such free-form poetry (I highly recommend the collection A Disease of Language, in which Eddie Campbell adapts two of Moore's spoken-word performances into comics), but previous efforts were more successful for a very simple reason: they emerged from within Moore, reflecting his personality and psyche and the circumstances in his life that he could not have shaped. Those were a reframing—a reclaiming—of the uncontrollable. "American Light", on the other hand, seeks to reverse-engineer a poetic work from a fictional persona that Moore himself controls: first deciding what he wants it to say, then creating ornamentation around that core statement. It robs the work of the spontaneity and abandon it warrants, leaving Moore with not much beyond overwrought, too-careful derivation. In one chapter, Moore puts Thunderman editor Julius Metzenberger (i.e., Superman editor Mort Weisinger) on the psychoanalysts’ couch, there to discover his own unconscious motivations in caring so much for the superheroic property he manages. The themes disclosed are boilerplate—Superman as refracted image of Jewish peril and immigration—but we can easily scrutinize Moore with the same lens. Isn’t the real reason for his outsized loathing of his former profession (and colleagues) likely to be not a high-minded qualm about fascism but rather class-based shame for an early publishing career whose initially lowly status mirrored his own early obscurity? Speaking as someone who traveled roughly the same cultural path, I find it an undignified, bathetic display.And, over the succeeding centuries, Northampton has always been at the center of all the trouble. I don’t think that Princess Diana [who grew up in Northampton’s Althorp parish] did Northamptonshire any favors in the eyes of the British establishment. It’s difficult to find anybody famous who comes from Northamptonshire who wasn’t an incredible troublemaker, which probably gave me a predisposition towards those kind of sentiments. My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Bloomsbury USA for an advanced copy of this collection of short stories and one novella by the incomparable Alan Moore. I mean, 'Thunder Man' was an odd story. I'd been trying to write something like that for a couple of years, and I'd even made a start on a story, but I threw it all out because it hadn't got any real life to it. I realised that this was because I was setting it in England, where I had my first experiences of the comics industry. But I kind of realised that no, England is not where the comics industry is really happening. You've got to go to the source. Alan Moore: It’s almost all superhero comics, it’s not any specific, particular title. It’s just what I see as the corrosive effects of these people, these characters, these inventions. For one thing, they are a huge excuse. They can sort out everything straight away. They are empowered, they can do anything. Mostly what they do is get involved in fights. You have to think that for a lot of the audience, it is the idea of being invulnerable in some way, and to have an advantage over other people. I mean that is the root of what superheroes have become. I don’t think that it was always that. I think in the particular case of Superman, you’ve got a character that was invented by two working-class teenagers from Cleveland in the middle of the Depression, who created a character that was an empowerment of a disempowered working-class community. Alan Moore: Alfie Rouse, the Burning Car Murderer. Well, what they’ve got in common is the self-deception. Alfie Rouse in that chapter in Voice of the Fire; he is confident all the way through that the reader, the audience, the people at his trial, they’ll all be on his side, because he’s such a charming rogue. I believe that was the idea of himself that Alfie Rouse took to the gallows in Bedford: right up until the last minute, he didn’t believe it was going to happen because he was such a charming guy.

Like saying Romeo and Juliet warns against immoderate eros or Fight Club censures masculinity, this clever argument only persuades if the best way to read a work of art is to discard its dominant affect as so much tinsel and regard its overt rhetorical self-justification as its sole legitimate meaning. But as I hope I have shown exhaustively in my past writings on Moore, his greatest graphic novels in and out of the superhero genre can hardly get their narratives started without Moore’s investiture of generative man-gods, fascist perverts, and misogynist murderers with visionary authority, no matter what bien-pensant self-congratulation he blathers to the credulous readers of the Guardian . In the course of pursuing an only superficial anti-fascist polemic, Moore’s superheroes are more fascist than anything you’d have found in the same period in the average Marvel or DC Comic. Díaz, Junot (October 10, 2022). "The Genre-Shattering Fictions of Alan Moore". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Is fantasy becoming more of an imperative now, particularly, as we’re in a time of crisis – both economic and ecological. People are becoming desperate. We’ve got a cost of living crisis that’s engulfed the entire country in Victorian levels of poverty. Might this prompt a new ascendancy of magical thinking? Not that magic is an easy material fix to fill up your smart metre or something like that. But as a way of deciphering the world, particularly when the world is quite grim. A novel has a completely different character. You have to think, "Well, I'm probably going to be writing this for years." It's more of an edifice. But short stories have got a real energy to them, because you're not investing years of your time. The following review will be posted on GateCrashers a week before release date. Link will be updated upon publication:I couldn't. The first story - 'Hypothetical Lizard' about an abusive relationship was a masterpiece. Wonderfully imagined and beautifully told. The following stories were mostly OK - fun, well-written, but not as good. Overall, I feel I would have enjoyed this better if I had any idea who these people were supposed to represent or knew more about the comic book industry itself, but it was still a fun, easy read.

When you’re talking about the foundation of myths, and that’s sort of an undercurrent of a lot of Illuminations, I can’t help but think of Voice of the Fire, particularly 'Hob's Hog.' For readers who don’t know what 'Hob’s Hog' is, it’s a pastiche of a traditional hero’s tale. He tries to get the girl, he tries to kill the wizard, and it doesn’t quite work. He reminded me of your character from Voice of the Fire’s 'I Travel In Suspenders,' who’s like the most terrifying guy ever. It definitely does show range. You have everything from a ghost story to a satirical novella about the comics industry, and 'The Improbably Complex High Energy State', which starts off as hard SF before becoming almost a romantic comedy. Not something people maybe expect from Alan Moore...Also, his ability to develop a character and his/her traits within minutes of reading is so good and probably the reason I refuse to like stories with characters reminiscent of cardboard. I’ve been spoiled as a Moore Whore, thus I have standards… You’re a practising magician and I know you believe that magic is deeply enmeshed with the act of writing and poetry and art-making generally. Do you think the English language is more fertile ground for magical tendencies? Do you think that there’s a sterility to mainstream fantasy that you’re getting at in terms of your Tolkien comparison? As in, rather than celebrating this idea of magic, there’s an obfuscation of it, and in its place there’s a sort of fascist bullying. There seems to be a criticism of the fantasy genre in the first story in Illuminations, 'Hypothetical Lizard,' and the way that there always seems to be an undercurrent of sexual dominance in it. Was that intentional?