As he releases his first short story collection, the revered writer talks about magic, the problem with superhero movies and why he will never write another graphic novel
I’ve been enamoured of prose fiction for quite a long while,” says Alan Moore. He is speaking to me from his home in Northampton for the launch of Illuminations, a short story collection – and, at the age of 68, his first. “But when I started my professional career, it tended to take a bit of a back seat because there were other things going on.” “Other things”, for those who don’t know Moore’s work, is his gracefully understated shorthand for a 40-year career in the funny papers that made him probably the most respected comics writer on the planet.
Yet he has always had literary roots: his best-known work, Watchmen, took its title from Juvenal, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was peopled by the canonical characters of 19th-century adventure stories. So, although Moore avowedly dislikes nostalgia, short fiction is a sort of coming home – back to the library he joined at the age of five and, once he’d outgrown Enid Blyton and Just William, where he got his teeth into science fiction and fantasy.
