Alan Moore: Part 1

Basic Overview of ‘Writing for Comics’ and his Maestro course

If you're a fan of Alan Moore or not, a lot can be learned from his lessons that he has put out into the ether.

His first attempt at describing his art, Alan Moore's Writing for Comics, deeply describes his process for his creations. It provides more practical applications for influencing your process. He touches on everything from thinking about comics to structure to plot and script.

Quotes from “Writing for Comics”...

“Ideas seem to germinate at a point of cross-fertilization between one’s artistic influences and one’s own experience.”

“Pacing should be geared toward the scene at hand.”

His 33 lesson Maestro course, although still provides ample applications to one’s process, is more philosophical. He breaks down why he chooses the path of his process, sprinkled with quite a bit of humour.

“Before writing we had awareness, empathy, grunts and gestures, but before we could write down the language, we could not retain any information or develop our human consciousness. And thus, the people who had discovered the wonderful ability of writing would have had supernatural powers in the eyes of the people surrounding them. They would have been able to send their thoughts, at a distance, to somebody else. They would be able to capture moments, and record events, which would lead to the understanding of cause and effect. These things would lead to science and art and almost every field of human endeavour. All arising from this stone-age magic.”

“Storytelling, and writing, is not one discipline. It’s thirty or forty separate subjects all in one horrifying collision. You will have to learn about character, stories and landscapes, how to present place and period, how to inspire your imagination and then order it into a coherent plot.”

Alan Moore is an extremely unique and interesting person. Is his work dense? Very much so. But even if one learns from just parts of his lessons, the work itself will become better.

Alan Moore's Writing for Comics is available through Avatar Press.

BBC Maestro allows you to purchase his individual Maestro course and keep it (as long as you retain your log in information), instead of having to sustain a subscription.