Alan Moore Reveals His Optimistic Side

What makes an Alan Moore story an Alan Moore story? Often, his work offers a dark, shadowy interpretation of the larger world around us. Whether depicting the ominous rise of fascist regimes in V for Vendetta or the wavering battle to protect the planet’s fragile ecosystem in Swamp Thing, reality always seems poised on the brink of collapse in Moore’s oeuvre. And yet, the comics legend continues to hold a bright view of the future — even if it’s a future none of us seems able to imagine. “While it might very well turn out to be the correct view of the future, pessimism is stupid,” Moore tells Inverse. “It doesn't achieve anything. It doesn't make you any more prepared to react or respond when the terrible, pessimistic thing happens. And you need optimism in order to imagine a possible solution to all this, in order to imagine our way around it.”

The author of such lauded works as Watchmen, V for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and From Hell has been hard at work offering an exploration of the past century in his most recent endeavor, the Long London novel series. A sprawling fantasy that spans various genres, characters (both real and largely forgotten, as well as mythical and imaginatively fictional), and distinct historical settings, the world of Long London has been Moore’s foremost creative focus since his retirement from comics in 2022.

Set over a roving 50-year timeline, the Long London series finds Moore conjuring up his most imaginative, ambitious, laugh-out-loud humorous portrayal of England’s capital city to date. In the first book in the series, The Great When (2024), Moore transported readers back to the postwar years of London’s history, inviting them to step foot in an upside-down reality populated by sorcerers, artists, gangsters, and nettlesome creatures that read like a wicked combination of Alice in Wonderland and H.P. Lovecraft.

With the second and most recent addition to the series, I Hear a New World jumps ahead 10 years in the series’ slipstream timeline, following the novel’s main hero, Dennis Knuckleyard, as he is pulled back into the alternative version of London he’s tried so hard to leave behind. “This is the first book contract that I've ever had, and so I'm taking it seriously,” Moore said. Here’s what this legendary author revealed about his career, his worldview, and what moving from comics to novels has really been like.

It’s been about four years since you retired from the comics industry to focus on other media. How has the transition to becoming a full-time novelist been treating you so far?

That has been wonderful. I have completely forgotten the trauma of working in the comics industry. I mean, I've disowned about 95 percent of my books, including all the ones that everybody actually liked. But that means that I can concentrate everything upon what I've always loved doing most, which is simply writing.

I started out as a poet, songwriter, and cartoonist before eventually finding that I could make a living as a comic writer. But all the way through that, I've been doing other things – recording five or six pretty decent albums, doing a film and a couple of novels, things like that. So, the transition has been great. I find that I can finally focus upon what I love doing most without all of the distractions of a toxic workplace.

What drew you to London in particular as the basis for an entire novel series?

Well, I haven't actually personally seen London for some years now, becoming even more landlocked in Northampton as time progresses. But London has always, since I was a child, had a certain aura, because of its history, its tremendous presence, so I've had a long fascination with London, although with pieces like Jerusalem, I did take quite a long time off from that preoccupation with London because I thought it was time that my own territory, Northampton, sort of got a look in.

But when it came round to thinking about maybe doing a series of prose novels – I was thinking, “What do I really want to write about?” And it seemed to me that what I most wanted to write about were these obscure characters that I'd read of – most of them centered around London – that seems to have fallen through the cracks of history. Characters like the artist Austin Osman Spare, characters like the racing tipster Prince Monolulu, or the king of the bohemians, Ironfoot Jack; all of the criminal figures, the gangster Jack Spot, Peter Rachman, the Kray twins; marginal figures like the recording genius Joe Meek. And I thought, yes, I really want to talk about these people. I want to give them a second twirl upon the stage because I think that they've been forgotten and I don't think they should have been. I think that they had significance that far outweighed their financial circumstances, and so I needed a narrative that could fit those people into it and could also actually say something about London and could say something about the times that London has been through and how all of that relates to our present moment. Because as with all fantasy and science fiction authors, we might set things upon a distant planet in a far-off nebula or set them in the remote past or the future, but we're always talking about the present and the here and now.

So that was why I decided, after coming across the wonderful short story “N” by Arthur Machen where he talks about his concept that the London that he could see and that we can see, the physical London, is merely a kind of a shabby curtain that is drawn across a blazing reality. And I thought that that was an idea that I could expand. “N” by Arthur Machen is largely talking about Stoke Newington, but I thought why not talk about the blazing reality hidden behind the entirety of London. And so this is how the Great When came into being.

As someone who’s lived their entire life in Northampton, it’s safe to assume you don’t have that personal connection to London as you had with the setting of Jerusalem. Was there any difficulty approaching that exploration of London from an outsider’s perspective, especially given the fact that you said it’s been years since you visited the city?

I don't think there was any difference in the difficulty between either of those places because the way that I tend to work – yes, if I can actually go out and physically investigate a place, that always adds something to the telling. But with London, I've found that, for example, in my work From Hell about the Jack the Ripper murders, which also took an incredible amount of time to actually complete (about 10 years), you can practice what I suppose would be called a kind of remote viewing where, by immersing yourself in the facts of the place, by having a map handy so that, in your imagination, you can actually walk down these lines and see what streets run off from them, you can find out about the history of those places, you can fix it in time as well as space. I've found that you can often create a more compelling and realistic picture than people who actually live in these places because your focus is stronger.

As an example, when I first started writing for American comics, when I was working on Swamp Thing, I think that I was the first person who'd ever asked which swamp he was the thing of and was told basically that nobody knew. It might be the Florida Everglades, it might be in Louisiana. I decided on Louisiana because I thought that it had got a better musical tradition and seemed more interesting to me, but once I'd done that, I simply found out about the history of the place. I found out what vegetation was like, about the Spanish moss and the water. I found out what kind of bird life the swamps had. I found out everything. And then we were getting letters saying, “How long has Alan Moore lived in America? How long has Alan Moore lived in Louisiana?” No, I was sitting here in Northampton and imagined it all.

I think that for everybody perhaps it's a natural tendency to disregard the place where you actually are. And when you visit places, a lot of people, they're caught up in the experience of being in a new place, but they don't actually find out anymore about the place that they're visiting. They can cross it off on their list of places that they’ve visited, but they don't actually understand the place as well as somebody who is sitting hundreds of thousands of miles away who is really examining the minutia of the place.

So I've found both of them relatively easy, but that's just because this is a practice. This is a technique that I have developed over several decades.

You’re known for being incredibly prolific in your creative output. Along with the Long London series, are there any projects you've been working on that you're particularly excited about?

Basically, I am concentrating entirely upon these Long London novels. I'm doing a couple of little other things that don't really involve me. I think that I will perhaps be doing a print version of the [BBC] Maestro series, which will be very different because I'm going to have to revise most of it.

Largely, I am just focusing upon getting [Long London finished]. This is the first book contract that I've ever had, and so I'm taking it seriously. And I am not taking on work that might detract from getting these books finished. So at the moment I'm doing 500 words a day, which seems to be about right for me, because they're very well chosen words so they take a little time to put in place. But I'm right at the end of [the third book in the series] Blow Away Dandelion, in August 1969 precisely. The Troubles are just beginning, with all sorts of things happening in 1969 in August.

So yeah, I'm very excited about what I'm doing at the moment, and I'm kind of looking forward to, apprehensively, the next book, which is called In England's Dreaming, which will be set in the 1970s, so it will perhaps be a bit more punk-inflected. And then there's the big finale, which is set in the 1990s after a 20-year gap. For reasons that will become apparent, there isn't Dennis' adventures in the 1980s. We just pick him up again in 1999. So, that's what I've got in front of me, and I'm enjoying it. I think it's coming on rather well. I've just written some very, very good sequences. I'm having immense fun with them and I just hope that perhaps the readers might do too.

Moore’s newest novel, I Hear a New World, arrives on May 26, 2026, everywhere books are sold.