Alan Moore is best known for his comics Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, all of which were turned into so-so or (in his opinion) no-no big-studio movies. For me, though, he hit the heights with his 2006 essay Unearthing, a tribute to Steve Moore, who created the UK’s first comics fanzine. Here he describes his mentor’s home in Shooters Hill as part of “dreaming London”, a place where “residues of fossil night-sweat crown the tumulus”, a “life-sump for the Neolithic swill to fill, the pallid Morlock scum”.
This is Alan Moore in full-on psychogeologist mode, envisioning deep time – with its glowering, mesmerising violence – beneath the surface of everything that masquerades as the present day. It gives a V-sign to literary realism, to the twee cosiness of much modern landscape writing. This London is both hyperreal and fugitive, populated by rogues and occult reprobates, littered with the residue of pulp publishing. And the language! Steve isn’t born; rather, he unwinds from “the luminous coelenterate complexity that is his mother”.
