Why I Love Alan Moore

I realize that many of you out there reading Threshold have never read, and likely will never read, anything written by Alan Moore.
While I'm of the opinion that you are sadly missing out, I understand that issues of personal taste as well as prejudices against the form ("Comic books are for kids/are stupid and infantile/are not a valid medium for artistic expression," etc.) will prevent you from ever reading things like Watchmen or From Hell or Promethea, or any of the assorted wonderful works of art that Moore has produced in his extensive and prolific career.
This makes it nearly impossible for me to explain just why I love Alan Moore and all his works with a slavish fanboy devotion that borders on worshipfullness.
(And of course this entry is built on the assumption that you might actually wonder or care about the why of it)
So how do I go about providing an explanation?
I think this rather lengthy exchange (which is only an excerpt from a much larger correspondence which can be found here) between Dave Sim (who I will be writing a fairly in-depth entry about somewhere along the line. Short preview of the entry: Sim is a misogynistic nutjob) and Moore.
The verbose response that Moore provides to the (also verbose) question that Sim asks is quintessentially Alan Moore, full of erudition, philosophical questions, and the bearded one's characteristic sense of humor.
And yes, I know, as I've already pointed out, it's long, so those of you with short attention spans can feel free to skim or skip or do whatever it is that you do (if nothing else, at least read the last paragraph), and those of you who are just plain not interested (Duddy, I'm looking at you) can call it a miss. As for the rest of you (which at this point is probably just Scott, who already knows why I love Alan Moore), enjoy.

Dave Sim: One of the reasons I wanted to do this "chat" with you is — I know you don‘t read The Comics Journal faithfully anymore and I can’t say as I blame you (I often find myself wondering why I still read it) — there ‘s this Robert Cwildik fellow who went on a bit of a strange rant in the Journal about why the comic-book medium is unsuited to do large, complex works. Just as I was preparing myself to devour From Hell in its entirety he was on the Journal’s letters page saying that Cerebus is a "serious work but it isn’t realistic." Well, that’s water off a duck’s back but as I was reading From Hell — particularly that marvel-filled final volume — the thought came to me, "You, know, I’d bet that Cwildik fellow wouldn’t think this is realistic, either. "Interesting that what’s water off a duck‘s back to Dave Sim author was a knife in the ribs to Dave Sim fanboy. I was quite indignant on your behalf And I realised as I analysed the difference in viewpoints that the crux of the thing was; "What is and isn’t reality?" Personally, I find that work which functions on the level of mere "this is what happened, this is what they said, this is what it looked like" to be unsatisfying — or, at least, less satisfying. So, I thought maybe an informal dialogue between two thoughtful chaps who tend to perceive reality in terms of "wheels-within-larger-wheels-within-still-larger-wheels-within-wheels-so-large-you-could-vomit-contemplating-them" might serve as a counterpoint — an invigorating tonic — to alleviate the symptoms produced by the Journal’s cold-porridge diet of "a wheel is a circular frame of hard material, solid or spoked, that is capable of turning on an axis" (Gary Groth presumed to be the axis, of course). Or maybe we can just dispense with the ‘opposing viewpoint in this initial exchange and get right into the interesting and really interesting things you and Eddie accomplished in From Hell.

Alan Moore: Well, first off, I suppose I should briefly preface this by pointing out that my reasons for not following the Journal very closely of late are probably different to your own and aren’t necessarily born of any disenchantment with the magazine itself, per se. Despite its occasional forays into pointless sniping, manufactured slanging matches, and all the rest, it probably remains the most incisive magazine related to the comics field that is currently available. The lapse in my reading of the Journal and indeed all other publications in the same area come entirely from my own current sense of distance from the comics industry. Despite my abiding love of the medium, it is not my only interest or indeed even my major interest at the moment. Consequently, at a time when there are very few comics that I actually see or read, comics commentary tends to disappear from my reading list altogether. No criticism of anyone other than myself should be inferred from this.
Given the above, it probably comes as no surprise that I haven’t seen the article you speak of, but if your summary of its viewpoint is accurate, I don’t imagine I’d have had many thoughts about it one way or the other. I’m sure that these are someone’s genuine opinions, but opinion is surely a devalued currency at this juncture of the twentieth century, simply by virtue of the vast amount of it there is flooding the market. To assert that comics as a medium doesn’t lend itself to longer works seems pretty meaning-less, even if we ignore Our Cancer Year, Maus, Stuck Rubber Baby, and all the rest and assume that it’s true: that comics as a medium does not readily allow works of any great length, even if this were true, the proper response could only be "So what?" The commercial practicalities of the movie industry more or less guarantee that films above two hours long will be comparatively rare. This doesn’t seem to have proven a great restriction to the field of cinema. In painting, the simple laws of physics and human architecture more or less determine that a canvas, even, at its largest, will be not bigger than the average domestic wall. Really, it isn’t so much length as what you do with it. I’ve been telling myself this since puberty and have come to see that it contains great wisdom.
As regards the increasingly quaint notion of "Realism," a concept dependent upon the broader notion of "Reality," then I’m afraid that I’m equally at a loss. Traditional notions of realism in art, which are anyway in constant revision, would seem to be left floundering in the wake of Einstein and the quantum physicists that followed after him. The physicist Niels Bohr, while conducting particle experiments using the vats at the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen, famously remarked to the effect that all of our observations of the cosmos or the quanta can only be seen, in the last analysis, as observations of ourselves, of the processes of our own consciousness. This became known as "The Copenhagen Interpretation," and while I might quibble over the man’s choice of beers, I’m not inclined to argue with his basic theory.
The simple fact of things is that we can never directly perceive any such phenomenon as this putative "reality": all we can ever perceive is our own perceptions, with these perceptions assembled into a constantly updated mosaic of apprehensions (or misapprehensions) that we call reality. If, for example, we take a dramatic human event such as a murder, then what is the reality of the situation? Is it the forensic evidence and nothing more? Well, yeah, maybe. If we’re meat and nothing more, then I guess you could argue that forensics are the only reality in such a situation. If, on the other hand, there is more to us than meat and ballistics, then other considerations must surely be taken into account. What were the thoughts and feelings of the victim? Of the murderer? Of those who witnessed or were connected to the crime? Aren’t these a part, perhaps the major part of the reality of the event, even though they are subjective impressions? What of abstracts such as the murder’s sociological implications? What of its mythic or poetic meaning in the broader scheme of things?
These are all surely equally valid facets of reality. I suggest that if reality were genuinely a simple matter of forensics, ballistics, and gross physical mechanics, we’d all have things a fucking sight easier. The distressing or glorious truth is rather that our fantasies are real things. They exist, albeit in an immaterial realm beyond the reach of science or empirical investigation. They influence our behaviour and thus influence the material world, for better or worse. In effect, fantasy is a. massive component of reality and cannot really be discussed as a separate entity in itself.
Mervyn Peake’s sublime Gormenghast trilogy, sniffily excluded from the accepted canon of worthwhile English literature for reasons probably not dissimilar to those that you attribute to the Journal piece, is a portrait of the ritual-bound emotional dream life of England in the forties and fifties, a haunting and meaningful snapshot that could not have been formulated as anything but fantasy. If we are to exclude anything beyond the chain-link fence of traditional realism from that which we accept as serious and worthwhile art, then in one sublime stroke we shall have utterly gutted the entirety of world culture. Goodbye Swift, Rabelais, and all art or literature based upon a classical or mythological theme. Goodbye Pynchon, Burroughs, Blake. Wilde has to go, or at least Dorian Gray. Hawthorne for The Marble Faun. Henry James for The Turn of the Screw. As for M.R. James, W.H. Hodgson, Wells, Verne, Eddie Poe, and other similar genre-bound losers, they haven’t a hope. While we’re setting fire to the curtains, let’s not forget the utter lack of human, emotional, or conversational realism in most eighteenth-century literature, and torch that as well. Then we can presumably all wander up the same irrefutable real and gritty cul-de-sac as Hemingway and fellate our father’s Webley with as much verisimilitude as we can muster.
The idea that Art should, only ever be a mirror to reality has always seemed ass-backwards to me, given that Art is always and everywhere well-groomed and impeccably turned out, whereas Reality wears a pair of two-year-old Adidas trainers and a Toy Story T-shirt. As far as I’m concerned, it’s rather the job of reality to try and reflect Art. The purpose of Art is not to mirror reality, but to shape it by the imprints and aspirations that it leaves in the human mind. Anyway, enough about Art and Reality. Let’s talk about me.