Reclusive 'V' creator transformed a genre

Few comic-book legends tower as high as Alan Moore. The reclusive creator of "V for Vendetta" transformed a genre usually regarded as children's reading matter into deep, dense meditations on philosophy, society, mysticism and literature. His publications might be studded with scholarly footnotes and references, or designed to be taken apart and reassembled as a giant poster that tells the story.

No mere geek god, Moore has attracted mainstream acclaim for his groundbreaking work. Last year Time magazine named "Watchmen," his densely plotted meditation on power and heroism, one of the 80 best English-language novels since 1923 -- the only graphic novel in the company of such classics as "The Sound and the Fury,"The Sun Also Rises" and "The Catcher in the Rye."

His characters' challenges are deeper than Peter Parker's worries over getting a date or finishing his term paper on time. One "Watchmen" character "worries whether the whole issue of being a costumed superhero is a way of dealing with his failings and problems of a sexual nature," said Lance Smith, comic manager at DreamHaven Books in Minneapolis.

"Early on he made his career by adding depth to two-dimensional characters," Smith said. "You can read it as a straightforward comic book, but read it again and you notice more things. He took Marvel Man, a Shazam prototype, and deepened it into a more interesting character with complexities about what happens when you take a normal person and give them a super power."

Then Hollywood took that third dimension away again.

"V for Vendetta" is the fourth time Moore's idiosyncratic work has been swept up in the tuna nets of Hollywood's appetite for all things comic book. But it has not been easy to process into tuna fish.

The film versions of "From Hell," his exactingly detailed take on Jack the Ripper; "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," a team-up of Victorian heroes and monsters, and most recently his exorcist fantasy "Constantine" left the writer's fans fuming, the studios in the red, and Moore, as he told Publishers Weekly, "waking up at four in the morning in a boiling rage."

He has pre-emptively taken his name off "V for Vendetta," is openly feuding with the producer, Joel Silver and has declined to accept any money from the film. (The property was sold without Moore's approval by DC Comics, which owned the rights.)

Meanwhile, "Watchmen" -- the only comic to have won the prestigious Hugo award, science fiction's Pulitzer -- has been "in development," as they say in Hollywood, since at least 1989. Terry Gilliam, who calls it "the 'War and Peace' of comic books," was only the first of a number of directors attached to the project. It's currently in the hands of Paul Greengrass ("The Bourne Supremacy").

'Hell' to Hollywood

Michael Drivas, owner of Big Brain Comics, a store in Minneapolis, said filmmakers seem to be attracted to Moore's novel twists on familiar themes, yet determined to simplify them beyond recognition.

"'From Hell' was a perfectly reasonable Hollywood movie of Jack the Ripper, but there was nothing of the Alan Moore story in there," Drivas said. "It's a deeply textured, deeply researched piece of fiction. It's as much about the fact that Jack the Ripper was the first media-created bogeyman, and why our society is fascinated by those stories, as it is about the murders."

"It wasn't a whodunit," said cartoonist Zander Cannon. "You knew who the murderer was after 10 pages and it was a 500-page book. And it very much exists only on the page because it's all about maps and what he calls the psycho-geography of London. The physical plane of the page and the physical plane of the map work together because your eye moves around the page in a way that would be very hard to get across in a movie."

Cannon, a founder of the Minneapolis illustration studio Big Time Attic, got to know Moore well while they collaborated on the comic series "Top Ten" and "Smax" from 1999 to 2003.

"Everything that Alan does is a genre story in a way -- a horror story, a superhero story, an action story," Cannon said. "I think people see that, but they don't see the special thing he brings to it. They just get an action director and action actors and make an action movie.

"If he had been doing novels that were this successful for this long, they'd probably take more care with making movies out of his products. But it's only comics, you know?"

BY COLIN COVERT • ccovert@startribune.com

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