How Alan Moore’s new novel builds on his iconic comics

Alan Moore is best-known for writing the most acclaimed comic books of all time, but in recent years he has made a real pivot to prose. Following the publication of his massive, years-in-the-writing novel Jerusalem in 2016, Moore published his first book of short stories in 2022 and just published another novel. The Great When is the first installment in his first book series, The Long London Quintet. 

Fans of Moore’s writing for comics like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which initially assembled all the most famous characters in Victorian literature before growing over the years to encompass basically every character ever written) and From Hell (with its phantasmagoric approach to the history of London) will find a lot to like in The Great When. Set in London in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the book stars a hilariously dunderheaded protagonist named Dennis Knuckleyard, who unexpectedly finds a portal to the titular “Great When” — a higher dimension where London is represented through arcane symbols rather than real-life landmarks.

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In populating this higher dimension, Moore eschews the familiar icons of League in favor of his own archetypes like Harry Lud (the personification of urban crime, a massive being who wears “crowbars for cufflinks, and his tiepin is the head of a decapitated rat) and Charming Peter (a.k.a. The London Cat, a great skinless feline who likes to turn people inside-out and embodies all the mischief and malevolence of cats).

Entertainment Weekly recently caught up with Moore to discuss how his newest novel grew out of his comics work.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: The titular Great When, this “Other London” that exists in the book, is described as an inspiration for artists like Austin Spare and William Blake. Is that how you yourself conceive of artistic inspiration? Have you “seen” something like the Great When? 

ALAN MOORE: I conceive of what we call reality as having two major components, at least for us sentient human beings. There is the physical world, where we do physical things like hitting our shin on a door edge, but we equally exist in the world of the mind. It's just that it’s a world that science can't really talk about because science is based upon repeatable physical experiments, as it should be. But the world of the imagination, if you think about it for even a moment, it's pretty obvious that everything around us — the rooms that we are sitting in, the devices we're speaking on, the language that we're talking in, the clothes that we're wearing, the political situations that we're in — these have all come from the human imagination, and that ethereal and immaterial world is actually more enduring than our physical one. If, for example, all of the chairs in the world were suddenly too vanished overnight that wouldn't matter a great deal. As long as we still had the idea of a chair, then we could make more.

It's when we lose our knowledge that the big disasters happen. That's when we get a dark age, when our knowledge has suddenly dropped out of existence, where we've burned all the libraries. It suggests that this immaterial, flimsy, untouchable world of imagination is in some ways more substantial than this one, and in some ways is the foundation upon which this one is standing, that we have unpacked our imaginations and we are living in them. This is the story of human civilization, but that realm, even though it cannot be touched or talked about by science, seems to me to be vastly important. Now, obviously, I don't suppose that it has giant wooden men or talking cats or any of that stuff, but this is a fantasy that is trying to symbolize something that is really going on. I was just talking about when Margaret Thatcher came into office, and it was my feeling that the very worst thing that she did was to destroy the symbols that had underpinned British social life for so long. She destroyed them, and the physical world followed in the wake of that. If you destroy the ideals that are supporting something, the physical thing itself will eventually wane and die.

That's the way that I'm using the Great When. Of course, it's a great thing to write about because if you're talking about the history of London, a wonderful image or a startling fact is never very far away.

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Your descriptions of the Great When remind me of the Blazing World in your comic League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. There’s a similar use of stylistic techniques: Italic fonts in The Great When, 3D glasses for the Blazing World sections of League. How have you refined your approach to depicting a higher reality? 

Well, it's using them for different things. In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it was part of our attempt to take away the dividing lines between everybody's stories and just assume that every book that you've ever read, every movie that you've ever seen, these all happened on the same world and that all of these characters probably knew each other. And so over the books of the League, we had the Blazing World, which I think had been invented by the Duchess of Newcastle in 1666, as a kind of refuge for fictional characters in our vast world.

And it did, I suppose, stand for something, but it was more of a plot element in an evolving comic book story than the major symbolic center of those books. As for how I approached it, you're quite right. The 3D glasses in League were meant to slightly jolt readers out of their normal frame of reference, to make it feel like they were in some extraordinary alien world. It’s the same thing with the italics in The Great When, and also the shift to the present tense which makes it more immediate. Italics, for some reason, make things more intense. They're leaning forward, they look like they're in a hurry to get somewhere. It was to make people feel that they were suddenly in a different state of being and that perhaps not one that they were necessarily comfortable with.

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One of the things that I don't like in a lot of modern fantasy or even historical fantasy is whenever the children go through the back of the wardrobe into Narnia, and it's really no big deal. If any of us were to even fleetingly contact a world with different physical laws, we would be in therapy for the rest of our lives. It would be a shattering experience, and so that's what I've tried to get across in The Great When, where the characters' reactions when they go into or out of the other dimension generally includes vomiting, weeping, and fainting.

Related: Kevin O'Neill, British comic artist and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen co-creator, dies at 69

The imagery in The Great When is so arresting and vivid. Did working with great artists over the years, like Kevin O’Neill in League, influence your descriptive writing? 

Yes, I've certainly learned from some of the creators that I've worked with, but you have to remember that I had described those pictures for the artist. I've got the visual imagination, but I just didn't have the artistic chops to realize it as beautifully as I saw it in my head when I made the shift from cartooning to writing comics. My descriptive passages that were intended only for the artist are famously long-winded, and sometimes go on for pages for a single panel. Generally speaking, one page of comics would be about three pages of my script, because I was trying to describe everything that I could imagine in a particular scene.

So working in straight prose fiction, it's always been using the same sensibility and using the same descriptive of abilities, but just shifting the register up so that you are not just writing practical descriptions for an artist. You are actually writing literary descriptions that are meant to entertain and hypnotize the reader.

But it's basically the same process I have. I became very conscious around the time when I was writing Jerusalem, that yes, alright, I'm well-known for being a comics writer, and people have come to expect illustrated narratives from me. So in my prose, I want to really make up for that. If anything, I was being more keen upon generous descriptions to try and compensate for not having an artist like Kevin O'Neill or Melinda Gebbie or any of the other great artists that I've worked with.

And since I happen to be lucky enough to be married to Melinda, she has been very, very useful coming up with colors. If I want to talk about blue, and I've already used ‘blue violet’ and ‘indigo’ and ‘sapphire,’ she'll say, what about ‘lapis’? Oh, that's a lovely word. So that has been very handy.

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