From The Onion A.V. Club interview w/ Alan Moore. I like this little excerpt about how he likes to write comics because he can make decisions that WILL appear in the book, whereas on a film, no one person has that sort of control over the finished product. Anyway, then he has this nice little spot about how he doesn’t want to be a screenwriter:

“For one thing, that would mean moving out of Northampton, and I already can’t imagine that. I very seldom even leave this end of the living room. The other end of the living room is a foreign place where they do things differently, and where I feel a bit nervous. So that’s basically it.”

Him talking about how he doesn’t like comics celebrity or fandom or conventions and what-have-you:

I swore off public appearances and sort of… I’ve become like the Howard Hughes of the comics medium. I hang around in a darkened room, eating ice cream in a negligee, or something like that. Yes, it’s nice at first to have lots of people telling you that you’re a genius. It’s a novelty. Then you realize that they’re almost certainly wrong, that they’re all very young, hysterical, and sort of overwrought about something that was probably just a good comic story. There’s something very unhealthy about the relationship between celebrity and public that I couldn’t really subscribe to. Everybody suddenly starts treating you as if you’re on some different level, so you can’t really communicate with them. I honestly think that the only sort of possible communication is between equals. I started to feel very alienated and very strange, so I stopped going to conventions altogether, or doing public appearances. I didn’t really sign up to be a celebrity, I only signed up to be a writer. That was the part that I was interested in. It wasn’t the rest of it.

[interviewer]: Is celebrity itself the problem? Do you think it’s possible for a creator and his fans to have a relationship if it’s not…

It may well be possible. I know some people who manage it very well. But these days, everybody wants to be famous, and I think all too often, you’ll see somebody who has maybe written one good book, made one good film, produced one good record, one good comic book. And all of a sudden, everyone’s telling him that he’s a genius, and he probably thinks, “Well, yeah, yes I am. I always thought that I was sort of special, and, yeah, that’s probably because I was a genius.” He’ll launch himself out onto the billows of fame, and he’ll be washed up in the tabloid press six months later, when his bloated, heroin-sodden carcass bobs up to a beach somewhere. It’s a dangerous thing. Fame does all sorts of unpleasant things to people. It tends to, in many cases, warp them. It doesn’t necessarily make them happier. It’s nothing that I’m very interested in. I figure that, for the number of people who read my work and get something out of it, I’m already having an untoward effect upon their minds and thoughts. Which I must admit I quite enjoy, in a kind of a spooky, creepy way. But I don’t want to colonize their imagination as some sort of idol.

Man, this is a good interview. All of these interviews with him are really amazing I think. There’s a good passage about him becoming a magician, and a bunch of good stuff about religion vs. magic as being a parallel between fascism vs. anarchy. I’m gonna put together a little pastiche from that section.

…I find something a bit unnatural in the idea of being bound together in spiritual ideas with people. I’m sure that, in our natural state, we all believe something entirely different.

…I think that anarchy is, to the contrary, about taking personal responsibility for yourself. I believe that fascism is about abandoning your personal responsibility to the group or to society. You say, “In unity there is strength,” which inevitably will become, “In uniformity there is strength.” It’s better if all those sticks are the same size and length, because then they’ll make a tidier bundle, which consequently leads to the kind of fascism that we saw in the ’30s and ’40s. I mean, anarchy is about taking complete responsibility for yourself. And I would extend that into the spiritual area, with the differences between religion and magic.

…All I would be urging people to do in Promethea is to explore, in their own way, by whatever means they personally feel comfortable with, using whatever system they happen to feel comfortable with, whether that be Christianity, or paganism, or Hinduism, or anything else, to explore the kind of rich world that I think all of us have inside us. I just want to tell them that that world is there, that there are a variety of ways of exploring it. It doesn’t really matter which way you use, or which system you adopt. It’s a territory I find very rewarding, very fulfilling, very human.

Also, I just discovered that there’s an additional section from this interview which they cut for space constraints, but preserved online or something. I don’t know.