Backlisted - The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

The writer Alan Moore is the subject of this long-awaited episode. Joining Andy and Una is the author and dramatist Simon Guerrier, who has chosen The Ballad of Halo Jones, Moore's collaboration with illustrator Ian Gibson. It was first appeared in weekly instalments in the British comic 2000 AD, before being published in omnibus form by Titan Books in 1986. It tells the story of a bored teenage girl looking for a way out of her humdrum 30th-century existence. For reasons discussed in the show, Moore and Gibson never completed ...Halo Jones, but the saga remains a landmark of British comic books nonetheless. We also take a look at several of Moore's other projects, including (deep breath) Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Jerusalem, Top Ten, Neonomicon and Providence, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and From Hell, and explore what makes him both the most influential figure in modern comics and a British cultural icon. We also hear from the great man himself, offering words of writing wisdom as only he can. PS. Just don't refer to them as "graphic novels". * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes and exclusive writing, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to That Listed, the podcast which gives new life to old books. The title featured on today's show is The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore and Ian Gibson, first published in weekly instalments in 2000 AD comic between 1984 and 1986, and in omnibus form by Titan Books in 1986. You might be tempted to describe it as a graphic novel, but I wouldn't. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously and Inventory, an unreliable guide to my record collection. I'm Dr Una McCormack, science fiction author and associate fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge. Hello, piping in in the background, I'm Nicky Burch, the producer and editor of Backlisted. Backlisted has been running for 10 years,

and in that time we've built up a wonderful community of listeners, patrons, and guests, plus of course a library of almost 250 shows containing everything from Edith's diary to a journal of the play gear. There's one really free, easy way you can help us by supporting the podcast. Please just follow Backlisted

or whatever podcast app you choose. You can browse our back catalog. Plus it really makes the show more visible to new listeners. In other words, please, please subscribe to Backlisted. Thank you everyone. Now, before we go any further, I believe congratulations are in order because Dr Una McCormack, science fiction author, has added to her portfolio of achievements

and titles by becoming, as of yesterday, the author of a Doctor Who target novelisation. Yeah, achievement unlocked Andy. It's like a tick that one off the career goals. That was a big one. Congratulations. Thank you. We haven't introduced our guest yet, but mystery guest, in like this is your life, is there something now we could, one little phrase you could say that Una would react to?

Well, I've sort of watched Una's career with great envy for years, but I am incandescent about this. I know, aren't we all? Mystery guest, let's just claw back a little self-respect of sorts by saying, Una, your book is called Doctor Who The Robot Revolution, and that's wrong, isn't it? That's actually wrong. It should be called Doctor Who and The Robot Revolution. Who fusses about these minor things? I mean, you know, it's only the cover. I assume your editor overruled you, did he?

I don't think I even noticed. Doctor Who dash The Robot Revolution by Dr Una McCormack is available now in all good bookshops and published by Target Books and I'm never going to mention that again. Is it Doctor Who by Doctor Who? It is, oh yes, it's Doctor Who. Doctor Who indeed and I have to say the casting has been a long time coming. Right well joining us on today's show enough of that nonsense to discuss the ballad of Halo Jones and no doubt a few more of Alan Moore's other projects is our very good friend Simon Gerrier. Hello Simon. Simon Gerrier Hello, hello, it's so exciting to be here,

even if I'm still seething with envy. Simon Gerrier Yes, it was, just to clarify listeners, the mystery guest who was seething with envy was Simon Gerrier. Simon is a writer and producer. With Samira Arped, he's made programmes for BBC Radio about HG Wells, John Ruskin and Mary Whitehouse. He's just produced a two-part documentary about the writer Nigel Neal for the new deluxe box sets of the Quatermass experiment and Quatermass 2,

Hammer's first two Quatermass film adaptations. Simon's books include Sherlock Holmes, The Great War and Doctor Who, The Time Traveling Olmedak. So I should also mention Who-topia, which we did together with our mate Johnny Morris, which is a compendium of Doctor Who facts, and it's very good. Simon's currently working on a biography

of the author Terrence Dix, whose novelization of the Doctor Who serial, The Brain of Morbius, was the subject of a backlisted episode back in 2020. And he's just coming to the end of a three year stint as chair of the Books Committee for the Writers Guild of Great Britain. Simon, you've just posted a list online

of Terence Dix's complete bibliography or would be complete bibliography, but it's still a work in progress isn't it? It is yes. So the issue with Terence is his Doctor Who work is very well attested. It's everything else he did that is a bit harder to track down, but I've currently got the total to 236 books he published over a 40 year period. Yeah. Wow. I did a little number crunch on that. It averages about six and a half books a year doesn't it? Yes, yes. So I went to visit his widow and go through his paperwork and she said innocently enough how many books did my husband actually publish and it's taken me four months to get to a figure. And as you said there may yet be more it's like an antiques roadshow thing. If you have a Terence Dix book or a novel by Terence Dix that we haven't heard about. Let our experts know. We should also just say that of course

the reason why this is significant and the reason why we are so envious of Una's target novelisation is that Terrence Dix was the undisputed king of the Doctor Who novelisation and as we said back on backlisted 2020, responsible for literally thousands of children discovering literature where otherwise they may not have been hooked by it. As he used to say, they start with dicks and they end with dickens. So you are doing fine, fine work there, Simon, important stuff. Well, we're here today to talk about the ballad of Halo Jones. And this tells us the story of a bored teenage girl looking for a way out of her humdrum existence in space.

To quote the blurb on the reverse of the most recent omnibus edition, Halo Jones is bored. Trapped in the hoop, a futuristic world where jobs are scarce and excitement non-existent, Halo sets out to see the galaxy any way she can and to rewrite her destiny. From drudge work on a glamorous cruise liner to serving in a brutal war zone, Halo experiences love and loss as she grows up into the woman who will change the course of history. In other words, Halo Jones is a feminist soap opera, an epic Bildem's Roman in the making, and a satire on the very consumerist society in which its readers were being raised and indeed

it was being created. And this collaboration between writer Alan Moore and illustrator Ian Gibson produced one of the most radical works of art ever to appear in a children's comic. Now, Simon, we've never met, have we? No. And would you confirm for listeners that you chose the Ballad of Halo Jones entirely independently and that no one influenced your decision? I can confirm this fact. This sounds like the start of one of those, what's the guy who's like, we've never met before, you don't know my card.

Derren Brown. Thank you, Derren Brown. What am I going to hold up? I can independently verify this as well. Okay, good. Well, it's important that we do that. It's important that we establish the independence of Simon's Choice, because anyone who listens

to Batlisted regularly or certain other bookish podcasts will be aware that I, Andy Miller, am a great admirer of Alan Moore's. And part of the challenge for me of making this show at Simon's suggestion, everyone, will be not to repeat myself on things I may have said before. So if we don't discuss watchmen much,

you can find me wanging on about watchmen elsewhere on the internet on an episode of the Secret Life of Books. As such though, I am thrilled to have the opportunity to discuss more, more, more, that's right, more, more, more with two such distinguished colleagues. From Miracle Man and V for Vendetta, through Swamp Thing, Batman the Killing Joke and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, to From Hell, Big Numbers, Lost Girls, Neonomicon and Providence, and of course Watchmen, Alan Moore has expanded the possibilities of what comic books

are capable of and in some people's minds legitimised the form, helping to elevate it from pulp to, in the case of Watchmen, Time magazine's greatest novels of the 20th century, the lone so-called graphic novel in that prestigious list. The gnostic Northampton Nostradamus is a prolific prolix producer of prose. This is like being Leonard Sachs on the good old days. There's one for the teenagers. And the magus of magnificent maximalist manuscripts. His second novel, Jerusalem, published in 2016 was over 1200 pages in length and he has published two further books since then, Illuminations, an anthology of short stories and in 2024, The Great When, the first of a projected five volume sequence. What I'm trying to say is for both Alan Moore and for me, Moore is always Moore.

Oh well done there Andy. Tricky, tricky there with the alliteration. Thank you. The Ballad of Halo Jones is one of several unfinished works in progress by Alan Moore. In a pattern that has become familiar to readers, he came into conflict with the original publisher, in this case Fleetway Publications, over which of them owned the copyright of the characters that he and Ian Gibson created for 2000 AD. Rather than seed control and royalties to Fleetway, Moore withheld his labor on Halo Jones and declined to continue until a satisfactory settlement had been reached. As we go to air, this strike has lasted 39 years and shows little sign of ever being resolved.

No pass around, Alan, don't abandon the course. So instead we have to make do with what we've got. We have the first three books or chapters of a projected nine volume saga, The Ballad of Halo Jones, that would have taken young Halo from her teenage years on the hoop through adulthood, old age, infinity, and beyond.

So what would it become of Halo Jones? And what makes this unfinished run of decades old comics so special and so influential? And what is wrong with the term graphic novel anyway? When we come back, Alan himself will explain exactly why he would prefer it if we all refer to them as comics. But first let's hear from our sponsors.

Remember in the eighties, there were tons and tons of headlines just saying, Bamsock pal pal comics have grown up And like they hadn't there were about three or four halfway decent comic books And the rest of it was still the same juvenile rubbish that had been produced for the last 40 or 50 years um What the comic boom of the 80s did was grant a license to a lot of people not to have to actually grow up by calling them graphic novels, which was a term that I hated because they're not particularly graphic and they're certainly not novel.

Usually they're 12 issues of She-Hulk stapled together. That is not a novel. What I think happened was that a lot of people who were just interested in the adventures of Green Lantern, even though they were 35 or 40, having Watchmen gave them away, saying, Oh, I'm not emotionally retarded. I am reading. This is a graphic novel that are for adults. No, it's not. It's the same comics that you've been reading for ages. I would feel happier about it if graphic novel actually meant something more than it does at the moment, which is big, expensive comic.

And that's pretty much all it means. Well, Bravo. which is big, expensive comic. And that's pretty much all it means. Well. Ha ha ha! Bravo, sir! Well, that's us told. So thanks for listening to Backlisted. Welcome back. We should begin by asking Simon, as an expert on big, expensive comics,

when and where did you first read The Battle of Halo Jones and or become aware of the work of Alan Moore? I had read comics as a kid in the 1980s. I read a comic called Eagle, which began when I was about six, I think. I read a horror comic called Scream, I read Transformers when I could prize it out of my younger brother's hands. And when I was about 12, I got into 2018 in a big, big way. They were just beginning to do sort of experimentally slightly more adult things.

They were watching that their readership, that the age of their readership was going up and I got into that in a big way. And then boys from school told me that it had been better before and started lending me other stuff and I think the first thing that I was lent was Viva Vendetta which was a comic published by DC since being a film and stuff which was where I would have learned Alan Moore. I may have read some of his stuff before that but that was the one that really grabbed me. And then I was going to sort of bring in buy sales and church fates and second-hand shops and buying up old comics from the older boys who'd outgrown them and I began to piece together Halo Jones and realized it was something very special. And then in 1991

And then in 1991, the collected edition of the whole lot came out and just adored it. And I think, unlike what Alan Moore says about Watchmen and Andy says on the Secret Life of Books podcast, I think Halo Jones is a novel. I think that's the kind of whole point of it. Alan, come in. Yeah, here today. it's Alan Moore. So okay I think I just want to clarify, much as we all enjoy Alan fulminating against the term graphic novel, it is the term graphic novel that he objects to, not so much the idea that there is no such thing as a graphic novel. What he means is for personal and I suspect financial reasons,

he objects to the, as he says, omnibus editions of popular comics receiving some bogus legitimization by being called this new thing, the graphic novel. I think we would all agree that many of his works, even if he prefers to call them comics, would qualify as graphic novels, and that indeed there are graphic novels,

Mouse, Persepolis, you know. It's almost as though having invented the term in the 1980s, subsequent generations began to create a art to fulfil the name. But I agree with you, Simon. I think Halo Jones is the first three books of a long novel. What do you think, Una? It's hard, isn't it? Because these are all coming out of a particular mass market production context. And so I can see the argument that this is a term created to sell something to, like Simon was saying, an audience that is getting older and is perhaps feeling a little bit uncomfortable about still reading comics. But I'd give anything to read all of these nine books to see where this

story would go. And you've got to wonder the extent to which in his mind the end of Halo's story was quite clear. There's clearly propulsion and purpose in this story and that's part of what novel does. Can I also just say a quick word for listeners who may not be familiar with it? 2000 AD is a British weekly comic that is something of an institution, I guess, at this point, isn't it? It's been around nearly 50 years and it was first dreamt up in the mid-1970s, supposedly because there was a sense that there was a wave of science fiction product coming, including Star Wars, certainly Doctor Who was very big on TV at the time, where it was divined by publishers IPC, Pat Mills I think was involved in the early,

in the founding of 2000 AD, that a science fiction comic, and this is very specific for boys, would do rather well. And indeed it did. I can remember the first, I'm old enough to remember the first issue of 2000 AD coming out in the 1970s. Una, I think it's really important and useful at this point if you could counterpoint Simon's experience and mine from the previous generations with your personal experience of comics, because this is going to feed into this whole discussion. Yeah. 2000 AD was something I did not read. I did not get hold of, partly, I think, because I didn't have older siblings who read comics,

but partly, and it's really interesting what Simon said, that it was the older boys passing it down. I was at a flipping girls school, right? Okay. Yeah. We were reading ballet shoes. Oh, we were reading ballet shoes, but also what we were reading, we were reading things, comics that were specifically designed for us, which were things like Bunty, Chinty, Misty, and they were the ones that I was reading. Much more than those, you could get these little kind of omnibus editions that were selling a bit later in the 80s. So, 2018 never came up on my radar and I didn't read Halo Jones until the boy gave it to me to read. So there we go, all the best literature.

But I would have eaten this up at 12.30. So it's interesting you say that because one of the big influences on Halo Jones was that those girls' comics were dying off. And they were all published by the same company IPC and Debbie and Bunty and Misty and Jincy and Jackie and all of those things were all quietly being taken off the shelves and they were all written and drawn by the same people and You can buy them on by the way eBay does really I bought some recently little a5 Bunty you can still available now andion have been doing collections of things as well. But Halo Jones was in part because there was an awareness of an influx of girl readers into 2008. I don't know what

kind of proportion that was, but significant enough that the people working on the comic were kind of, this is something that we should address and cater for. Yeah. Well, now what's interesting though, Simon, there is Una looked up who were the production team on Misty were, and even Misty, the most famous, alongside Buncey, the most famous, along with Side Buncey, the most famous of the girls' comics that IPC produced, its editorial staff had a massive three women on it. Otherwise it was all written by men. And 2000 AD was all written by men.

And even when they get to their feminist statement of Halo Jones, it's delivered almost entirely by men. It is, we can't deny the reality of the world in which these things were produced. That's true of lots of this kind of stuff. I mean, Dr Who, we talked about Dr Who books earlier, was massively dominated by men. You get, you know, women editors for 18 months and then they'd be fired and somebody else would be brought in. None of the novelizations were done by women until,

Una probably knows better than I, but. Until Dr. Una was just published, she's literally the first woman ever to have produced a target novelization. I don't think that's true. Jenny Colgan for one. Sorry, Jenny. But it's in the last 10, 15 years of books that have been published since the 17th of January 1974. So it's, you know, and there are hundreds of them. And to be fair, hundreds of them are written by one man. hundreds of them are written by one man. So Simon, to return then to Halo Jones, when you as a precocious young boy, you were reading scavenged copies of 2000 AD and whatever you could get your hands on. Did you have any

issues with reading about a female protagonist as opposed to a male one? No. I knew it was different. That was the big thing. That it was... It's not just that it's a comic about a female character, which I had read. I'd read Wonder Woman comics, I'd read Spider Woman and whatever else Marvel was putting out. Twelve copies of She-Hulk. Yeah, 12 copies of She-Hulk stapled together. I would have been all over that.

But this was something very different. And it's the female character, but it's also the way it's told. It's also the fact that it's clearly written that you have to go back and read it again. I think one of the big things that really got me hooked on 2008 was they did a story called The Dead Man, which began in issue 650, I think.

I don't know why I can remember that of all the things. That is, carry on being terrified, Simon. That's impressive. It's the spreadsheet in my head, basically. Yeah, okay, good. Yeah. And The Dead Man is about this very badly burnt man out in a sort of radioactive wasteland, who's lost his memory. And as he stumbles around, he finds this village, it's kind of a Wild West thing going on, but it's in the future. And people are wary of him and what's his past, because he's, he can clearly fight, and he's clearly very skillful, and he's a bit ruthless. And they're all like, who is he? And then, in the penultimate part of this comic strip,

they reveal in the big cliffhanger moment, that this guy is Judge Dredd, who is the main character in 2008. Basically, and it's like there's a Judge Dredd story already running every week. And this one feels like a backup strip, but turns out to be the lead into the big new epic story of Judge Dredd and it's such a fantastic twist, not least because what you immediately need to do is go back and read the whole of the Deadman again to spot all the clues they've put in that he's Judge Dredd. Because once you know that, it's really obvious from page one that that's who he is and they put in loads of little things about, so Judge Dredd at one point has his eyes replaced with robot eyes and the dead man has these weird things where people are going, your eyes are strange and all of that. And I think Halo Jones is exactly like that. It's a comic that's been

written specifically so that you go back once you get to the end and go look at all of this stuff. Look at all the stuff that's been said on the very first page that you don't get the context of until you've read book three and that's why I think it's a novel rather than a series of comics. And that would be true indeed I think of many of Moore's other publications. We'll talk about some of them later on but they do benefit from a second structured reading which would indicate they do have novelistic qualities. Now look reading from the Ballad of Halo Jones is going to be something of a challenge. We've all got little bits to read they're all slightly different from one another but Simon I think the

bit you want to read actually demonstrates rather well exactly what you've just been talking about. So I'll just explain what this is. So the first run of 10 episodes of Halo Jones went out and it confused some younger readers. There was definitely a response to this because it was full of slang that had been made up for the comic strip and it doesn't work like a normal 2018 comic strip which is all violence and men hitting things and then book two begins with a prologue which is set thousands of years in the future where a university lecturer basically brings us up to speed on what we've missed. I'll take two panels from this because it's difficult because it's a

comic strip but I think it really tells you kind of what Anna Moore is doing. So the lecturer says over the centuries a lot of nonsense and distortion has built up around Halo Jones. It's said that she was a war criminal who aided in the slaughter of millions. But you see I've spent 15 years researching this woman and do you know what I found out? It's this. She wasn't anyone special. She wasn't that brave or that clever or that strong. She was just somebody who felt cramped by the confines of her life. She was just somebody who had to get out. And she did.

I struggle to not use cliches here, but it's very cinematic, right? Flashbacks, flash forwards. So it is making the most of the potential of the comic form by integrating the visual and the literary. In other words, it is drawing on both novels and other forms of storytelling and cinema. We have a clip here that Simon suggested, which is a quite short one, which I'm just going to preface by saying we also have several other clips of Alan Moore coming up in this program, which honestly, we could stop now and just play you nothing but clips of Alan Moore. One of his wizarding skills

is how to tell a good yarn, either on the page or off. But here he is on an episode of the second series of BBC Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage and he has been asked about the science in science fiction. The thing is, with science fiction you have to remember the fiction bit. I mean, like, I'd keep up to date with the latest scientific theories to see if there were any particularly mad ones that I could possibly sort of turn into a money-making series but at the end of the day the science in science fiction is mostly rubbish I remember that I think in Halo Jones I'd got a planet of such mass that time was actually being bent as a function of gravity that sort of I thought maybe that could work it's absolutely correct is it yeah

and if you wrote that before 1915, you're a genius. So Una, let's pick that up. The science in science fiction. You write science fiction. What proportion is science and what's proportion is fiction? Oh, it's all fiction. Most of the science I write is absolute rubbish. I mean, you could analogously use things like, well, I said joking in Doctor Who, I said a space hyperlink because I didn't want to say magic door. Yeah. So a lot of this kind of edges into fantasy, but you use what we in the Star Trek trade called Technobubble to cover a multitude of sins. It's something that's acting as a device that's enabling you to estrange the reader and operate in a space that is defamiliar for them and foregrounding or hyperrealizing what's really important

about your story. Wow, that was amazing. My head's just fallen off. Simon, so science fiction, it's often said that although it's set in the future, it is actually about the era in which it was written. So if we apply that principle to Halo Jones, what things from the 1980s do you see in it? Oh, where to start? I think you can see it's, it's one of the things is you kind of said, look, it's very visual and it's very like cinema but actually I think it is is it's pure comic it's a story that you can't tell in another medium. Because it's about the juxtaposition of the text with the images and the opening spread.

Is all very is of the hoop this this habitat that's out in the water by Manhattan, with a whole load of things superimposed over it, which is the noise of the news going on at the time. There's a sort of computer generated newscaster giving you traffic updates and bringing you bits of the news, and basically there's a traffic jam and stuff. So that's, that feels very like, you know, what somebody from North Hampton would think New York was like at the time. But one of the things that then happens is that Halo Jones and her roommates go on a shopping trip. And that made me, you know, reading it again, I was thinking, oh, this is, is it Dawn of the Dead that's set in the shopping mall? That would have been out by this point.

Yeah, okay. There's stuff in book three that's about how they justify, because she's a soldier by this point, and there's a thing about how she justifies the terrible things that the soldiers have done. There's one point where their unit kills an enemy soldier who turns out to be a child and how they self-justify that becomes a thing. And that's the Belgrano but it's also Vietnam. There's characters called Slabs who are clearly visually based on Sylvester Stallone in First Blood but also taking into his consideration his kind of role as a boxer in Rocky. I think there's a kind of some of that kind of mashup is going on there. It's about the way that you know the

very 80s idea of female empowerment which you could see in other things you could see in television at the time. So it's all of these things all at the same time. Well, I was just about to say, as someone who was there at that time, so much of the material produced for children from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s takes as its theme mass unemployment and Halo Jones is no exception. It evokes that period for me so, so powerfully. In fact, so much of 2000 AD was a kind of post-punk, ruined Britain. First of all, pre-Thatcherite, and then Thatcherite, reflection of the changes in society.

But also alongside, what I remember from the 80s as well is the arrival of things like MTV and the glamorization of kind of American consumerist culture. And the hoop is sort of operating in that world, isn't it? It's simultaneously the people who are getting left behind and disenfranchised by those processes of globalization, but also the glamour and the glitz and the attractiveness of it. I think that shopping mall story is genius. I think it's the true innovation in Halo Jones. Alan Moore has sat down and gone, I'm telling a story about girls. What do girls do? They go shopping. And then rolls with that, completely subverts it. Because the point about the hoop is that it's in decay,

isn't it? They're having to use their wits to reach places, to make connections before the places become unsafe, or they can't travel any further. So a shopping trip isn't getting the bus from Northampton to Kettering. It's a major military operation in the making. And that's what makes this all so clever, I think.

And I think there's a big thing is about the lack of escape for the people who were in this system. So in book one, Halo's roommate, Ludy, is in a band and it looks like the band is going somewhere. And then that doesn't happen for reasons. But also when Halo escapes the hoop and goes into space, there's a whole, the prologue to book three is about her being unable to escape the call of the army.

And whatever she does, that's the only option she's got. Yeah, yeah. And I find those kinds of things really interesting. Not least because, I mean, one of the reasons Alan Moore got into writing comics professionally, his ambition, he said, was to make more money from comics than he was getting from the doll. And so the comics at this period, this is the period where he's doing it, he's begun working for DC in the States doing a thing called swamp thing, which is similarly rich and dense and playing with what you can do. And he's working on other bits and pieces. But this this stuff became his escape. And I think there are parallels in what he's writing and the kind of economics of it and the way the system continually plays, you know, the way the system keeps you where you are. You were

talking about his issues about payment and reciprocal rights and copyrights and things. I think all of that is in this at some level. Hasn't he also become the father of daughters at this point? Yeah. So I think that part of what Halo Jones is doing in the face of what superhero comics do is say, not only could a working class person be the protagonist and the agent of a story, but a working class girl can be the agent of this story. And part of that, and why I think this is feminist, even though I don't necessarily think it's addressed to girls, is that it's saying that to its young boy audience. It's saying you can read this and you can look at a girl and see her as a worthy protagonist of a story. And that's an incredibly feminist thing to say, I think, to boys. I would also like to add that you're seeing here,

played out, a couple of what become almost cliches about when we think about Alan Moore's career. The first is this is happening everyone in a comic. We are talking about this in the most high-falutin terms and it's not inappropriate to do so, but let's not forget this is happening in a weekly comic that you walk into WH Smith's if you're lucky and buy. It's not in a comic shop, it's in every newsagents in the country when we had newsagents. It's also on mass produced pulpy paper. I remember people referring to the paper, you know, compared to the rather slick production of Eagle when it came out in 1982, 2000 AD and a lot of these comics were, I remember people in school referring to it as toilet paper,

that that's the kind of quality it was on. The quality of the art was not great in terms of what you could print. So it had to be fairly blocky and thick line. The kind of detail of Ian Gibson's artwork comes out in later publications, but in those original comics it's fairly, you know, rough. Just the mechanics of how these things were printed. It's not the elegant book that it later became. came. The other tropes that I see of Alan's career here already in Halo Jones are A, unfinished projects, that becomes a big thing. B, falling out with his publishers overpayment, that becomes a

big thing. And more seriously in a sense, both those elements feed into this. His work is produced in opposition. And when one says in opposition to what, Alan would say in the classic phrase, what have you got? Yeah, he's a rock star. He exists. He will return to this in the second half of the show. He is, if you want to understand where Alan Moore is coming from, it is an old-fashioned idea of the counterculture, which he has managed to keep alive for 50, 60 years. Lessons learned in the 50s and 60s carried forward into the present day. I had listened to a really interesting interview with

him where he was asked about the counterculture and He said, well, fundamentally, the clue is in the name. It's anything that's against the prevailing culture. Most people are not part of the counterculture by definition, but those who are make more noise than those who aren't. That for me, it doesn't matter if it's a government or a magazine publisher or you know a film company, Alan looks at it, he makes up his mind and he does the opposite. That as you said Nikki, it's rockstar stuff but it's counterculture rockstar stuff. It's Hawkwind and it's punk rock. Yeah. And it's coming from one other place, Nikki, and that place is Northampton. And when we come back from the

break, Alan himself will explain how Northampton is the cradle of all culture. See you in a minute. it. takes on a whole new meaning. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca slash yamex. Okay, welcome back. Now, as I was saying before the break, we're just gonna hear Alan Moore himself is now gonna address us for, this is quite a long clip by Batlist is standards.

It's a couple of minutes, but I promise you it's worth it. If you want to press pause, go and, I don't know, pour yourself a drink or make a cup of tea, get a biscuit or something, and just sit back and listen to this. I'm not even going to tell Nikki when to end this. She can decide after about two and a half minutes. After about two and a half minutes. Okay. Yeah. All right. yeah. But she can fade him down or just because I think Alan strikes me as one of those people, you point a microphone at him and let him go. So without further ado, here yourself writing in a genre. Now I'd advise that if you're starting off writing in genre,, but find something that you're genuinely excited about before you go plunging into this extremely fertile undergrowth.

Where does genre come from? Well, actually, it kind of comes, as with most of the important things in this world, from Northampton. Genre has grown out of the Gothic movement. The Gothic movement has grown out of the graveyard poetry movement. The graveyard poetry movement has grown out of the writings of the miserable but very eloquent Northampton divine James Hervey. He wrote such incredibly morbid but beautiful pieces of writing about funeral processions with the seraments blowing on the breeze, which, I mean, Jesus Christ, they were really depressing but beautifully worded.

And he became the best writer in John Wesley's Holy Club, as it was called. He was then thrown out for hanging around with evangelicals. But his writing was so extraordinary and pervasive, he could write so beautifully about how only God was eternal and that all of the flesh would eventually decay and fall away. This was lovely. And then you've got the first graveyard poets who thought, oh, this is fantastic stuff. I wonder if you could write this sort of stuff as poetry. And so they wrote the graveyard poems, the things like Grey's Elegy in a Country Churchyard,

where they were talking about the things that you find in graveyards, the skulls, the bats, the tombstones, and how these are all symbols of how the flesh and the material world will all fall away and there will only be the eternal, immortal glory of God. Now, some people read these graveyard poems and they thought, yeah, actually, I'm not all that fussed about this God business, but now the bats and the skulls, that is fantastic. I feel like we should do a little scene setting for people. You've got a load of candles,

and when he's basically in some kind of abandoned church, isn't he? It's phenomenal. He's just sitting there extemporizing this stuff. I would like to congratulate my colleague Nikki Birch of the BBC for being part of an organisation that's produced a whole series of clips on a service called BBC Maestro of a creative writing course run by Alan Moore. Seriously, we ought to just stop our chat now and play that through the rest of it through into this show. And double our license fee payments right now. Yeah, I know, but it's so incredible. I mean, Una, you were saying as a creative writing teacher yourself that you would award full marks to your fellow creative writing teacher, Alan Moore. I would indeed. Well done, Alan, I say. So I think there's hope for the world in which

films of Alan Moore sitting in an abandoned church telling you about how to write exist and are funded by the license fee. It's absolutely great. His advice is spot on. There's one little video he does about point of view, and I'm just, I'm nodding along, it's just messages that I tell people constantly about points of view and about the drip feed of information that point of view enables. He's completely on the mark. But yeah, all genre comes from Northampton. I mean, now we know. Now we know. Simon, how does Alan Moore do this then, right? He is widely acknowledged as one of the most important figures in the history of the graphic novel, who says publicly there's no such thing as a graphic novel. He has an important figure from the counterculture who is employed by the state broadcaster as a greatest living treasure

to tell you how to write. How does he do it? How does he manage to be a wizard, which he literally is everybody, is a wizard, and at the same time, you know, up there with the, he would hate this. I apologize if you ever listen to this, Alan Moore, greatest living Englishman, I hate that phrase. He would hate that himself, I'm sure. How does he do it?

How does he manage to be an anarchist and at the same time so beloved of so many people? I think genre is a really good way into this because if you've got somebody like David Rudkin who wrote plays for the, you know, back in the 70s like Pender's Fenn and Artemis 81 and stuff, these weird, weird, weird, weird things. And the response of most people watching them is, what the hell is this? When you're a kid, you just read, you read something mad and you go, this is great. You know, it's weird and it's dense and I don't really understand it. The idea you're supposed to understand it

doesn't really factor in because you're just soaking it up. So the fact that he was writing comics for kids actually gives him license to put in this weird, densely rich, densely resonant stuff for a mass audience. And kind of by the time it's come out, he's moved on to the next thing. And you leave these, this readership trying to puzzle out what it is and what it signifies and what it means. I don't know about the rest of you, but that is the stuff that lodged itself straight into my head as a kid.

That's the stuff that I lapped up. This weird, because it seemed like I was reading stuff that was far older than I should. I had the same thing as a kid watching the Muppet Show, where I knew the Muppet Show was full of jokes and references that were a bit too grown up for me, but I had no idea what they were. I just knew that the adults were laughing at something that I hadn't got to yet. So I felt I was being brought into something very excited and that's the effect I got from reading Alan Moore comics. That's the effect I got from all of these things. I always think this is really true about when you're young,

right, and it's true with music as well, Simon. As a child growing up near Croydon in Surrey, I knew neither what a Chevy nor a Levy was, but it didn't stop me enjoying American Pie by Don McLean. This idea that you constantly need to provide people kids, particularly with things they recognise, I think it's sad when we lose the ability to just accept the reality of the situation we're presented with. Before we hear another clip from Alan about writers, in fact, about what writers are. How do you feel Moore has influenced your various works, your own writing and how you read perhaps, how has Moore influenced you?

I think a number of things. I think his range has always, don't apologize for what you work in, but also that it should be good, whatever you're working in, that it should demand and reward repeated readings. I think about that kind of, you know, the value that he provides. provides. I don't know about Una, but I'm now of an age where I meet people in their mid-20s, 30s, who read stuff I wrote when they were children. There's a responsibility with that. I'm now aware of decades too late. But I'm glad that the stupid jokes that I put in to make myself laugh or daft ideas that I put in just because writing is very lonely and you're just entertaining yourself. But I'm glad those pay off because people remember. He was one of a number of people whose stuff I read at a formative age who kind of made

me look at the world as a, you know, I wanted to read more as a result of that and explore more and delve into odd stuff and try and make sense of things. That clip we played earlier of him getting the physics right, I think what he does, you know, Una said that science fiction is a lot of kind of fantasy, but with techno babble, I don't think that's true. I think you create a logical framework. I think science fiction is much more like a detective story. And in a detective story, as a writer, you seed clues and the reader tries to pick up on those clues as to who the murderer is. In science fiction, you do that,

but the clues are to how this world works. So it's a kind of mechanical thing going on as well as what is the plot. It's also how does all of this work. And Halo Jones is a really formative one for me on that of going, oh, there's all of this stuff that just seems to be noise at the beginning. And by the end, you realize, no, this is all pipe work for how this universe works. Can I give you a counterpoint to that? I've written several times about Douglas Adams.

One of the things that occurred that I feel about Douglas Adams is not that he used comedy to explore high scientific concepts, but that he used high to explore high scientific concepts, but that he used high scientific concepts to produce comedy. In other words, it's not just the ideas that are important, it's the language. The technical language is something that he bends in a way to make it seem funny.

As he refers to Woodhouse, pure word music. His fuel is science, but the end product is playing it like an instrument. I think, I mean, Douglas Edwards was another hugely important writer in this formative period of my life. I think what he shares with Alamore is that these are mad, big, sprawling ideas. And he communicates them in a way that as a 12-year-old, I was like, I'm all over this.

I want to know more. That ability to communicate, that ability to make this stuff engrossing is extra, you know, the older I get, the more extraordinary I find that. And the more I'm in awe of it. I think with Adams as well, a lot of it is in service to a worldview, isn't it? There's a coherent worldview throughout this, which plays through the choice of episodes, or the choice of language, or the choice of nonsensical juxtaposition. And most of all, I think this is really important when you're 10. It's really funny. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, okay. True with Halo Jones, you know, the gags in Halo Jones still land. They're still good. The ideas land, but the gags land as well. Okay. So we're talking about writers changing people's lives. We're going to listen to a clip now of Alan Moore, after which everyone listening to this show will want to be a writer. It is the most insanely brilliant motivational speech. This is again from the Creative Writing Program that BBC Maestro are running. So this is Alan Moore telling us why we do what we do. If I am going to tell you how to be a writer,

that will probably entail telling you what writing is, and that means telling you where writing comes from. And as far as I understand it, writing evolved from Paleolithic shamanism. And when we look at the development of writing and magic, we begin to see that they're actually the same thing. That all of the artistic effects from painting, but especially to writing, all of these effects are things that were regarded as magical powers in the ancient world, as supernatural powers. Books and writing are capable of changing the entire world, of modifying human consciousness. You are modifying the consciousness of the reader, and therefore you are modifying the reality of the reader and therefore you are modifying

the reality of the reader. Writing will modify the reality and the consciousness of the entire species and also inevitably will mean modifying the consciousness of the writer themselves. You should never think of yourself as purely an entertainer for hire, who is lucky to have the work. You should try to remember the tradition that you are becoming part of. You should try to remember that a writer can change the world with their writing. Think of the books that have completely changed human history and see yourself in that light. Because if you are a writer, then the substances that you are handling, the things that you are juggling, you are

having an effect upon human history and the entirety of the human future. And that's the spirit that I want to bring to every Target novelisation that I am commissioned to write. I don't understand, Nikki, why you aren't giving me and Una pep talks like that for our products. What kind of a producer are you? That's what I want to hear. I want to hear this thing. I love that thing, incidentally, Nikki, where he says, hear this thing. I love that thing incidentally, Nikki, where he says, don't let yourself think, sorry, I won't dive in, but don't let yourself think that you're just an entertainer for hire. Wow, says the entertainer for hire Alan Moore. The more I watch these videos on Maestro, I think it's one of his great performances. And he's a performance artist as well, isn't he? Yeah. So I think this is what,

and particularly given the context that this was commissioned by the BBC to put out on YouTube. I just think it, the whole package is genius. Absolutely genius. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so- I love it. Whoever the commissioning exec was, I'm proud of. Bravo. Chapeau. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so whoever the commissioning exec was,

Bravo. our chapeau. Yeah. So let me ask you about other Alan Moore works. I'm aware the clock is slightly against us. And I do want to talk to talk about other things other than than Halo Jones. I know we've done that anyway. But Simon Moore's other work. Do you have any it's so the body of work at this point is so vast, we could easily, you could choose from 30, 40 different things to recommend, substantial things. Do you have anything after Halo Jones that of Alan Moore's work you particularly like or would like to draw people's attention to?

that of Alan Moore's work you particularly like or would like to draw people's attention to? I absolutely adored Vika Vendetta which is about, it's a kind of punk superhero, he's a Guy Fawkes character who takes on the fascist Britain and was turned into a film and stuff, and that just absolutely captivated me as a whatever I was 12 year old. Talk about changing the world as well. The mask that V wears in Beef of Vendetta has of course gone on to become literally iconic in terms of the anonymous movement, right? I was working at the House of Lords going into the Palace of Westminster and turned up one day and there were loads of people wearing V masks standing outside Parliament. I was like, who? I think I might be the buddy. But Simon, don't you think that is, this is a classic Moore thing. That is quite disturbing at the same time. I mean, I love V for Vendetta, but the questions it asks, like the questions in

Watchmen, actually don't have simple answers. He's not saying, well, we need to live this way or we need to live that way, right? They are very nuanced and sophisticated ways of processing social and political theory. Yes, yeah, and I find that I still pick over them. I still pick over what, you know, I read that book more than 30 years ago and it still ticks away in the back of my head. Part of the thrill of it is that there are all of these dense texts that you kind of need to wade through

and sort of push your way into the undergrowth and kind of explore. So what I would recommend as a kind of entry level one, this is something that I used to buy for people who would tell me they didn't like comics or especially didn't like superhero comics, which I've never been particularly keen on. He wrote a series called Top Ten, which is sort of Hill Street Blues police procedural, but in a futuristic city where everybody has superpowers and their pets have superpowers. And as a result, their superpowers are the

least interesting things about them. It's the fact that the invisible man and the woman who can set off nuclear explosions at will are going through a messy divorce and their neighbours have got involved. It's all of that sort of stuff and it is very funny, very sort of visually and texturally rich. There's a lot of references to stuff and there's a lot of jokes and it's just really fun. So that's where I think people should start their voyage into Moorland. V for Vendetta and top 10, excellent recommendations. Dr McCormack, I believe you have an anecdote to tell us about meeting Alan Moore.

Oh, it's just a very brief one. In Northampton? Yes, it was in Northampton. It absolutely was. Where else? Because I assumed that he kind of manifests whenever anybody goes to Northampton, wherever you are, Alan Moore will briefly appear and sort of talk to you. So I was at a little science fiction convention and I didn't know anyone. I knew a couple of people and the couple of people that I knew were at the bar and I was getting a drink and they were having a conversation about what was the most important technological innovation in mankind.

They were going all the, you know, the railway, this, this, this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's easy. It's the tampons. Well, yeah, this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Easy, it's the tampons. Well, yeah, it's the pill, I know that. But because I knew my audience, I kind of said, they kind of said to me, he said, oh, hi, you know, you know, we were just talking about this, what do you think?

And I said, oh, well, and I nicked this from my other half, we'd been having a conversation just the day before. I said, oh, I think it's probably agriculture. And then this, this kind of, this other guy that was there with this long beard and long hair kind of went yeah yeah I think that's probably right and then I kind of drifted off in about two minutes later I went oh my god I think that was Alan Moore. Alan Moore agreed with me about agriculture. Was agriculture invented in Northampton? Absolutely, along with... It was agro-counterculture. Oh, Nicky Burch! So that's my Alan Moore

anecdotes. So listen, I think we do don't we? What a shame! We've got to stop talking about Alan Moore and Halo Jones now. Oh well never mind. That's where we must leave things for the next 39 years. Thank you to Simon for choosing the ballad of Halo Jones, sending us back in time on a mission to change the future. And many thanks also to our producer Nicky Burch for operating The Crush today, the bubble where our voices are preserved for what feels like eternity. If you want show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the previous 243 episodes, please, please visit our website at backlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed on

this or any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop. And remember guys, check your spigots. And of course, do subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Remember, if you subscribe at the lock listener level, you'll get two extra exclusive podcasts every month, installments of Andy's new great project, Inventory. Yeah, which is changing the species as we speak. It is brilliant. It's writing about his record collection. I really recommend it. And the chance to join a community of wonderful, dedicated listeners and readers like ourselves.

But before we go, Simon, is there anything you'd like to add about Halo Jones, Alan Moore, Ori and Gibson that we didn't get to in the show? I think one of my favourite Halo Jones things is that after these three books came out, he did one more page for issue 500 of 2000AD, which is basically a page in which Halo Jones says the editors of 2000 AD don't know how to treat a lady. And it's one of those beautiful kind of it's it's a in a perfect Alan Moore way. It is both utterly belligerent and rather charming at once. And I think it's, it's of all the things of writers complaining about their editors, it's one of my favourites.

Amazing. Oh, well, thank you, Simon. Thanks for being here. Now, before we go, I'm going to hand over to my colleague, Dr Una, to tell you about something you might want to help out with. Oh, yeah. Thanks very much, Andy. So since I have joined the backlisted podcast and have been working my way through things like the oeuvre of Elizabeth Taylor, my older brother, Niall, has been walking from

Land's End to John O'Groats, yeah? So he's been doing that for the past 33, 34 days. Yesterday, he reached Scotland and, yeah, he's got to Scotland. Well done. On a heat wave as well, it must have been a struggle. He's a bit of a legend. So he's doing this for a really good cause. It's for an obstetrician and a couple of years ago he walked the length of New Zealand to build a clinic, eye clinic in a remote part of Tanzania. And this walk is to raise funds to equip that clinic

with the stuff they need to do eye surgery, simple eye surgery for cataracts. So please, please, please, hopefully we can put his Just Giving page in the show notes for this. Go and take a look. He's also got a YouTube channel where he's giving you a daily sort of 10 minute update,

which is packed with the most atrocious puns known to mankind. And a series of catchphrases that I can promise you after 50 years of this will lodge into your brain and you will find them coming out in, you know, all kinds of moments. He's, he's an absolute mensch and, you know, one of these quiet heroes. So please take a look and well done, Niall. Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah. We'll put a link in the show notes and wherever we can so you can see what he's up to and maybe donate.

You know, I have to ask you, did he walk through Northampton? Yeah. In a way, we are all walking through Northampton, aren't we? It's a Northampton of the mind, everybody. Okay. Listen, thanks very much, everybody. I would like to thank all three of my friends and colleagues here today for this wonderful chat about the brilliant Alan Moore. You know, I love him. That's the thing.

I hope he never hears this, but I love him, that's the thing. I hope he never hears this, but I love him. He has been an inspiration to me and I think to Una and I think to Simon, you know, professional and personal lives. So thank you Alan Ball for the pleasure you have given us and the inspiration and we'll see you next time. Actually another one that I'm really excited about, but I can't tell you what it is yet. Oh, okay, it's great. Thanks very much everybody.

Thanks for listening to Bat Listed. Thanks Simon. See you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. you