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Alan Moore (born November 18, 1953, in Northampton, EnglandAlan Moore is a British writer most famous for his work in comics, including the acclaimed graphic novels

As a comics writer, Moore is renowned for bringing more mature, literary sensibilities to a medium often dismissed as juvenile and trivial. As well as including literary influences, adult themes and challenging subject matter, he also experiments with the form of comics, employing effects unique to the medium, and creating different ways to combine text and image. He brings a wide range of influences to his work, including authors such as William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon and Iain Sinclair, New Wave science fiction writers like Michael Moorcock and horror writers like Clive Barker, and film-editing techniques from the work of directors like Nicolas Roeg. Comics artist Bryan Talbot, whose anticipated the adult comics movement, is also undoubtedly a major influence.

Moore is also a practising magician, and claims to worship the snake-deity Glycon.

Moore spent the next several years in menial jobs before embarking on a career as a cartoonist in the late 1970s. He wrote and drew underground- under the pseudonym Curt Vile, sometimes in collaboration with his friend Steve Moore (no relation). Under the pseudonym Jill de Ray he began a weekly strip, , for the Northants Post newspaper, which continued until 1986.

Deciding he could not make a living as an artist, he concentrated on writing, providing (the first series in the comic to be based around a female character, with Ian Gibson). The last two proved amongst the most popular strips to appear in but Moore became increasingly concerned at his lack of creator's rights, and in 1986 stopped writing for story incomplete. The theme of fallings out with publishers on matters of principle would become a common one in Moore's later career.

Of his work during this period, it is the work he produced for (later retitled Miracleman for legal reasons), a radical re-imagining of a forgotten 1950s superhero drawn by Garry Leach and Alan Davis; , a dystopian pulp adventure about a flamboyant anarchist terrorist who dresses as Guy Fawkes and fights a future fascist government, illustrated in stark chiaroscuro by David Lloyd; and , a comedy about a working-class English family of vampires and werewolves, drawn by Steve Parkhouse. closed before these stories were completed, but he was able to continue them with other publishers.

Moore's British work brought him to the attention of DC Comics editor Len Wein, who hired him in 1983 to write , then a fairly formulaic monster comic, and also one of the poorest selling of DC's titles at the time. Moore, along with artists Stephen R. Bissette, Rick Veitch and John Totleben, deconstructed and rebuilt the character from the ground up, writing a series of formally experimental stories that addressed environmental and social issues alongside the horror and fantasy.

Once it was clear that Moore had revitalised and that he brought great critical acclaim, he was given new assignments by DC. These included backup Green Arrow (in , plus various Batman and Superman stories. The most acclaimed of this work was the final two part Superman story (, begun in 1986 and collected as a graphic novel in 1987, that he cemented his reputation. Imagining what the world would be like if superheroes had really existed since the 1940s, Moore and artist Dave Gibbons created a twisted Cold War mystery in which the heroes, who either work for the U.S. government or are outlawed, are variously neurotic, amoral, sexually dysfunctional, borderline fascist and merely human, and the shadow of nuclear war threatens the world. is formally ambitious, densely written, intricately constructed, non-linear and told from multiple points of view, and is a rare example of a graphic novel that in its scope and depth can be genuinely considered a novel in comics form.

is also notable for widening the rift between Moore and DC Comics which originated during Moore's tenure as writer on . DC marketed a limited edition badge set featuring characters and images from the series as well as the iconic smiley badge featured in the series. This badge set caused friction between Moore and DC - the publisher claimed that they were a "promotional item" and not merchandising, and therefore DC did not pay Moore or Gibbons any royalties from the sale of the sets.

Alongside roughly contemporaneous work such as Frank Miller's was part of a late 1980s trend towards comics with more adult sensibilities. Moore briefly became a media celebrity, and the resulting attention led to him withdrawing from fandom and no longer attending comics conventions (at one UKCAC in London he is said to have been followed into the toilet by eager autograph hunters).

, published by independent publisher Eclipse Comics. The change of name was prompted by Marvel Comics' complaints of possible trademark infringement. Despite copyright disputes with artists and allegations of non-payment against the publisher, Moore, with artists Chuck Austen, Rick Veitch and John Totleben, finished the story he wanted to tell and handed the character to writer Neil Gaiman and artist Mark Buckingham to continue. The legal ownership of the character continues to be rather murky.

Moore and Lloyd took to DC, where it was reprinted and completed in full colour and released as a graphic novel. However Moore (along with Frank Miller and Howard Chaykin) fell out with DC over a proposed age-rating system similar to those used for films, and he stopped working for them after completing which Moore submitted to DC at some point in 1987. A superheroic pun on Richard Wagner's opera act, the "Twilight of the Gods" (Götterdämmerung), this story was to be set two decades in the future of the DC Universe and would feature an epic final conflict between good and evil, as well as between the older and younger generations of superheroes. was conceived as a standalone limited series which could optionally also be tied into ongoing titles, much like the then-recent 12-issue limited series . However, it would also undo one element of the prior series by restoring writers' access to the various multiple earths which had been eliminated during continuity intact.

The story would feature a world ruled over by superheroic houses, in which the two most powerful, the House of Steel (presided over by Superman and Wonder Woman) and the House of Thunder (consisting of the Marvel family) are about to join forces through a political marriage between the children of the two families. Such a marriage would make the combined houses an unstoppable force and a potential danger to freedom, and as such certain characters set about a complex plot to prevent the marriage and free humanity from the power of the superheroes. By the climax of the story, elements from all across the universe and from up and down the timestream would be brought in. Unusually, the series would highlight many obscure and forgotten DC characters by putting them in important roles, and the lead character would be John Constantine, whose interaction with the superheroes of the DC Universe had up until then (and indeed since) been rather minor.

With Moore's departure from DC, the series never got beyond the proposal stage, although copies of Moore's very lengthy notes have appeared on the internet and in print. DC have been quite thorough in tracking down and suppressing these copies as the story, though unpublished, is still considered the property of the company. Elements of proposal may be an attempt by DC to hide the fact that they are strip-mining unused Moore concepts. Both Mark Waid and Alex Ross, the creators of proposal before starting work on their series, but claim that any similarities are both minor and unintended.

, a history of CIA covert operations with illustrator Bill Sienkiewicz for Eclipse Comics, and an anthology, campaigning against anti-homosexual legislation, which Moore published himself through his newly-formed publishing company, Mad Love.

After prompting by cartoonist and self-publishing advocate Dave Sim, Moore then used Mad Love to publish his next project, , a proposed 12-issue series set in contemporary Britain and based on chaos theory and the mathematical ideas of Benoît Mandelbrot. Bill Sienkiewicz illustrated in an intense, painted but the workload became too much for him after only two issues. His assistant Al Columbia took over and painted a third issue, which never saw print, and the series was abandoned. Mad Love was financially wiped out.

Moore contributed two serials to the horror anthology examined the Jack the Ripper murders as a microcosm of the 1880s, and the 1880s as the root of the 20th Century. Illustrated in an appropriately sooty pen and ink and going through two more publishers before being collected as a graphic novel by Eddie Campbell Comics. , with artist Melinda Gebbie (who would eventually become Moore's second wife), is an erotic series decoding the sexual meanings in . A collected edition is due in early 2006.

He also wrote a graphic novel for Victor Gollancz Ltd, , illustrated by Oscar Zarate, about a once idealistic advertising executive haunted by his boyhood self, published in 1988 through Mad Love and reprinted in 2003 by Avatar Press.

After several years out of the mainstream, Moore worked his way back into superhero comics by writing several series for Image Comics and the companies that later broke away from it. He felt that his influence on comics had in many ways been detrimental. Instead of taking inspiration from the more innovative aspects of his work, creators who followed him had merely imitated the violence and grimness. As a reaction against the superhero genre's abandonment of its innocence, Moore and artists Stephen R. Bissette, Rick Veitch and John Totleben conceived s of the time, including the period's sexism and pro-capitalist propaganda, which, though played seriously, appeared quaint to a 90s audience. There was also a large streak of self-promotion, a satire of the bombastic Marvel editorial columns and policies of Stan Lee.

The series was to have concluded with an annual in which the heroes travel to the 1990s to meet the prototypical grim, ultra-violent Image Comics characters. The heroes would have been shocked at their descendants, even the change in art from four colors to gray shading would have been commented upon. The annual never appeared due to disputes within Image and the creative team.

Following , retooling sometimes rudimentary and derivative characters and settings into more viable series. In Moore's hands, became an inventive post-modern homage to superhero comics from the 1940s on, and the Superman comics of the Mort Weisinger era in particular.

, Moore created the ABC (America's Best Comics) line, an entirely new group of characters to be published by Lee's company Wildstorm. Before publication, however, Lee sold Wildstorm to DC, and Moore found himself in the uncomfortable position of working for DC again. The line included:

, a team-up book featuring characters from Victorian era pulp fiction such as H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain, H. G. Wells' Invisible Man, Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Wilhelmina Murray from Bram Stoker's , a post-modern superhero story drawing on and politicizing pre-Superman characters such as Doc Savage and Tarzan and subtly implicating their moral absolutism in a program of fascism, drawn by Chris Sprouse and others;, a deadpan but hysterical police procedural set in a city where everyone, from the police and criminals to the civilians and even pets, has super-powers, costumes and secret identities, drawn by Gene Ha (finished art) and Zander Cannon (layouts). The series ended after twelve issues, but spawned two spin-offs: the miniseries , a superheroine explicitly from the realms of the imagination, which also explores Moore's ideas about consciousness, mysticism, magic, écriture féminine and the Kabbalah, drawn by J.H. Williams III;, an anthology series with a regular cast of characters such as Cobweb, First American, Greyshirt, Jack B. Quick, and Splash Brannigan.

As noted above, Moore had a long-standing dispute with DC Comics, and he was unhappy that his deal with Wildstorm unexpectedly placed him in the DC "family." Wildstorm attempted to placate him by forming an editorial "firewall" to insulate Moore from DC's corporate offices. However, various incidents continued to irritate Moore. #5 contained an authentic vintage advertisement for a "Marvel"-brand douche, which caused DC executive Paul Levitz to order the entire print run destroyed and reprinted without the advertisement.

In 2002, Marvel Comics' editor-in-chief, Joe Quesada, attempted to persuade Moore to contribute new work (Moore had already contributed to Marvel's 9). Quesada had spent a lot of time courting contributors who had previously had problems with the company. Moore was suitably impressed by Quesada's claim that the company he had once known had now changed, and that the problems (Marvel US had printed some of Moore's Marvel UK strips without his permission) he'd had previously would not happen again.

This resulted in Moore's approving a trade paperback collection of his work with Alan Davis, on the understanding that he would receive full credit for his characters. Unfortunately, Moore's credit was omitted due to a printing error, and this led him to declare that he would no longer consider working for Marvel, despite Quesada having apologised publically and ensured that later editions were corrected.

Film adaptations of Moore's work also proved controversial. With , Moore was content to allow the filmmakers to do whatever they wished and removed himself from the process entirely. "As long as I could distance myself by not seeing them," he said, he could profit from the films while leaving the original comics untouched, "assured no one would confuse the two. This was probably naïve on my part."span

Trouble arose when producer Martin Poll and screenwriter Larry Cohen filed a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox, alleging that the film s bear many similarities, most of them are elements that were added for the film and do not originate in Moore's comics. According to Moore, "they seemed to believe that the head of 20th Century Fox called me up and persuaded me to steal this screenplay, turning it into a comic book which they could then adapt back into a movie, to camouflage petty larceny." Moore testified in court hearings, a process so painful that he surmised he would have been better treated having "sodomised and murdered a busload of children after giving them heroin." Fox's settlement of the case insulted Moore, who interpreted it as an admission of guilt.

Moore's reaction was to divorce himself from the film world: he would refuse to allow film adaptations of anything to which he owned full copyright. In cases where others owned the rights, he would withdraw his name from the credits and refuse to accept payment, instead requesting that the money go to his collaborators (i.e. the artists). This was the arrangement used for the film .

The last straw came when producer Joel Silver misquoted Moore at a press conference for the upcoming film, produced by Warner Brothers (which also owns DC Comics). Silver stated that producer Larry Wachowski had talked with Moore, and that "he [Moore] was very excited about what Larry had to say."span Moore, who claims that he told Wachowski "I didn't want anything to do with films... I wasn't interested in Hollywood," demanded that DC and Warner Brothers issue a retraction and apology for Silver's "blatant lies." No retraction or apology appeared, and in response Moore announced his departure from Wildstorm will be published by Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout Comics. Moore has also stated that he wishes his name to be "Alan Smitheed" from comic work that he does not own.span for the Wildstorm imprint of DC Comics. The series is written by his daughter Leah Moore and her husband John Reppion.

His work has won him several awards, including a 1985 Jack Kirby Award for Best Single Issue for #2 with John Totleben and Steve Bissette, the 1985, 1986 and 1987 Jack Kirby Awards for Best Continuing Series for with Totleben and Bissette, the 1985 and 1986 Jack Kirby Awards for Best Writer for Swamp Thing, the 1987 Jack Kirby Award for Best Writer for with Gibbons, the Comics' Buyer's Guide Award for Favorite Writer in 1996, 2000, and 2001.

He received the Harvey Award for Best Writer for 1988 (for Watchmen), for 1995 and 1996 (for ).

In addition, he received nominations for the 1985 Jack Kirby Award for Best Single Issue for #1 and #2 with Dave Gibbons, and the Comics' Buyer's Guide Award for Favorite Writer in 1997, 1998, and 1999.

, a popular British comic from the 1950s which was a thinly disguised ripoff of the American superhero Captain Marvel. The strip, which ran from 1954 to 1963, followed the adventures of Micky Moran, a young boy who was given the power to become a full grown superhero by a recluse astro-scientist who discovered the secret "key harmonic" of the universe. The strip, which maintained a childish innocence and purity, has the distinction of being the first British superhero comic. The new version would retcon and revise utterly the earlier children's comic. After was reprinted and continued at Eclipse Comics, renamed "Miracleman" due to a trademark dispute with Marvel Comics.

is an early example of post-modernism in superhero comics, and has a strong theme of loss of innocence. Another key idea is that the existence of a superhero would change the world radically, something Moore would return to in

Moore's original strip for the British Warrior comic was designed as an homage to the spirit of the British Boys Adventure comics of the 1950s and 60s as well as referencing literary sources such as George Orwell and the libertarianism of William Blake. The title character "V" appears at first to be a modern Robin Hood figure righting wrongs in a corrupt fascist Britain of the future, but as the story develops becomes more complex, a trickster version of a Bakuninesque revolutionary. It becomes clear that V differs from standard comic heroes in that his purpose is to empower "ordinary" people rather than do things for them. In bringing down the government, his intention is not to replace it with another of his choosing but to clear the stage for people to rule themselves. Moore's writing in 'V' continually challenges the legitimacy of those who would wield power over others: the party members are shown to be morally and politically corrupt.

Though set in the year 1997, the strip captures the feel of life in Britain in the early 1980s, with economic decline and a perpetual drift to the right in national politics. It was among the first comics to use the literary device of intertextuality, with V's speech often made up of extended quotes and references that are not cited. 'Vendetta' marks Moore's first use of the technique that has become his motif: using secondary characters to carry forward plot development or elicit background details. 'V' remains a shadowy figure who never removes his Guy Fawkes mask.

, a title starring a man turned into a vegetable monster by an experimental plant growth formula, which at the time was one of DC's poorest selling titles. The editor, Len Wein, had been a huge fan of Moore's work in and had decided to hire Moore to take over the book from Martin Pasko. Moore's first issue wrapped up Pasko's storyline and set up what would be his own unique take on a former fan-favourite character.

In Moore's second issue, "The Anatomy Lesson", the title character is shot and dissected by scientist Jason Woodrue. Woodrue, who was also the villain Floronic Man, soon concludes that Swamp Thing is a superficial imitation of a man, his lungs cannot pump air, his brain does not contain neurons. He concludes that the swamp creature is a plant which had absorbed the memories and imitated the life of a dead man; Swamp Thing was never human. The initial shock to his sense of identity led the character to embrace his identity as a plant, discovering new abilities and becoming less a "muck-encrusted mockery of a man" than a virtual vegetation deity.

Many of Moore's stories dealt with social ills as seen through horror metaphors. Sexual discrimination, racism, violence, fear of nuclear energy, and pollution are all themes addressed in his work. The series was formally ambitious, using unusual story structures and experimenting with different ways to combine text and image for narrative effect. The slow, languorous pace of Steve Bissette's layouts, the intricate textures of John Totleben's inks, and Tatjana Wood's imaginative and atmospheric use of colour were all put to good use.

The series also revitalised DC's neglected magical and supernatural characters, featuring the Spectre, the Demon, the Phantom Stranger, Deadman and others in supporting roles. At the prompting of Bissette and Totleben, who were fans of The Police and wanted to draw a character who looked like Sting (specifically his character from the film Brimstone and Treacle), Moore created his own magical character, John Constantine, who would go on to headline a title of his own, was enormously influential in showing a larger audience that genre comics could address serious issues and take on literary pretensions. DC followed s success by recruiting British writers like Grant Morrison, Jamie Delano, Peter Milligan and Neil Gaiman to write comics in a similar vein, often involving radical revamps of obscure characters, and thus laid the foundation of what became the Vertigo line.

Gaiman in particular was strongly influenced by Moore's "The cast of Watchmen, clockwise from top: Dr. Manhattan, the Comedian, Ozymandias, Nite Owl, Rorschach, Captain Metropolis, the Silk Spectre. Art by Dave Gibbons" , clockwise from top: Dr. Manhattan, the Comedian, Ozymandias, Nite Owl, Rorschach, Captain Metropolis, the Silk Spectre. Art by Dave Gibbons , is about superheroes who have been affected by real world politics. McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War have unhinged the current superhero generation.

deconstructed the superhero, looking at the moral, psychological, and sexual implications of their activities. His most far reaching work to date, addressed such issues as free will, the nature of time, human psychology, global politics, and moral relativism.

is the only comic to be granted an honorary Hugo award. Moore said it was his final statement on superheroes, and, upon completing his commitment of would revert to Moore and artist Dave Gibbons if it is ever taken out of print; paradoxically, it has been , Liefeld's violent, inconsistently-written Superman knockoff. Moore agreed on the condition that he could throw out everything previously done with the character, as he felt the comic was not very good, and turned the series into a post-modern homage to the innocence and imagination of Mort Weisinger's Superman.

Beginning with issue #41, Moore began developing a new approach to comic storytelling and the Superhero. is a complex comic, containing layers upon layers of metafiction, each issue containing further comment on the nature of comics history, storytelling, and the Superman mythos.

Supreme's secret identity is Ethan Crane, a mild-mannered artist for Dazzle Comics. When not saving the world as the archetypical superhero, he illustrates the adventures of Omniman, an ultra-violent Supreme-like character going under a relaunch with a change of writers. In the first issue, Supreme discovers he is living in the most recent "revision," as reality is an ever-changing story and there have been many versions of himself who came before. Retired Supremes live in the "Supremacy", an afterlife for characters whose stories have come to an end.

Supreme learns that his memories are "backstory" gradually being filled in until his real memories are indistinguishable from the filled-in, never-happened ones of the past. Flashback Supreme sequences are told in the comic of the era, reflecting different periods of comics history.

Moore's run on Supreme has been collected in two trade paperback volumes, "Story Of The Year" and "The Return".

, but this time the intricacy is not of form but of message. It was partly inspired by Douglas Adams' novel ; to solve a crime holistically, one would need to solve the entire society it occurred in. Moore's take on the Jack the Ripper murders is not a "whodunit": he spells out his (fictional) culprit and the reasons for his actions very early on. , slightly modified, as its starting point (see Jack the Ripper royal conspiracy theories): the killer is Sir William Withey Gull, the royal surgeon, silencing all those who knew about Prince Albert Victor's illegitimate child. But as Gull remarks, "Averting Royal embarrassment is but the fraction of my work that's visible above the waterline."

The murders are an occult ritual, a complex sacrifice using Victorian London itself as an altar. The symbolism of London's landmarks is explored in a chapter, in which Gull explains his motives to his uncomprehending coachman. Women had power over men once, Gull believes, and the irrational, Dionysian unconscious mind once dominated the rational, Apollonian conscious mind. Gull is reason's lunatic, carrying out an act of magic to enforce the rational, masculine hegemony. Following the murder of Marie Kelly, Gull claims to have "delivered" the twentieth century, a mysterious statement perhaps clarified by the conception of Adolf Hitler, depicted at the beginning of Chapter 5, which must have taken place in the month of the murders.

On a more prosaic level, Moore indicts the inequalities of Victorian society, contrasting Gull and the wealthy circles he moves in with the hand-to-mouth existence of the women he targets, the moral disgust shown at the peccadilloes of the poor with the depths the rich are prepared to sink to to protect the appearance of propriety, the imaginary anti-Semitic conspiracy theories which divert the police's investigations with the real conspiracy that controls them. Just about every notable figure of the period is connected with the events in some way, from Joseph Merrick, the "Elephant Man", to Oscar Wilde, from the Native American writer Black Elk to William Morris, the artist Walter Sickert to Aleister Crowley, who makes a brief appearance as a young boy in short trousers, sucking on a candy cane, and lecturing the police about magic.

Almost none of this made it into the film adaptation, which merely dramatised Knight's theory as a "whodunnit", with the addition of a psychic, opium-addicted police detective, who bears some superficial similarities to Sherlock Holmes. The finished film thus has many points of comparison with the 1979 Bob Clark-directed , which featured Holmes catching the Ripper in a dramatisation of the Knight theory.

Moore has always been at pains to point out that is fiction, and that he used Knight's theory for its artistic potential rather than its accuracy, yet he included an "author's statement" in the serialised publication of the epilogue which consisted of a blown-up panel from the prologue, depicting the psychic Robert Lees confessing that although his visions were accurate, they were fraudulent: "I made it all up, and it all came true anyway. That's the funny part."

, a set of short stories about linked events in his home-town of Northampton through the centuries, from the Bronze Age to the present day.

run; however, Moore has been disappointed by the adaptations and refused to accept any money for any future film adaptations of his work, donating it instead to the artists with whom he created the respective characters. Nonetheless, a film of is due for release in March 2006, written by the Wachowski brothers and starring Natalie Portman. Again, Moore requested that his name not be associated with the film, after seeing the and calling it "imbecilic". After a press release falsely reported that Moore supported the film, Moore cut all of his ties with DC Comics, removing the last project he had with the company,

Alan Moore has also made brief forays into music. Notably, with ex-Bauhaus musician David Jay and Max Akropolis, he formed a band known as The Sinister Ducks and released a single, "March of the Sinister Ducks", under the pseudonym Translucia Baboon. Moore and Jay also released a 12-inch single featuring a recording of "Vicious Cabaret", from . He has also performed with the Northampton band Emperors of Ice Cream.

Moore is a practising magician, having become a gnostic in the mid-1990s, and part of a performance art group, the Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels. Several of their pieces have been released on CD, and two, (2002), Marvel Comics; reprinted from various Marvel UK Publications ca. 1983-1984; with Alan Davis progs 317, 350-359, 363-367 (1983-1984); collected in several editions by Titan Books; with Alan Davis #5-7 (1991-1992), SpiderBaby Graphics; 2 issues (1995-1996) Kitchen Sink Press; with Melinda Gebbie #1-16 (1985-1989), Eclipse Comics; collected in 3 volumes; with Garry Leach, Alan Davis, John Totleben and others, 4 volumes (1986-1987), Acme Press; reprints weekly strip from Northants Post, originally published 1979-1986Awesome Entertainment; with Joe Bennett, Rick Veitch, Keith Giffen, Dan Jurgens, Stephen Platt, Chris Sprouse and others #1-6 (1999-2000), Awesome Entertainment; with Chris Sprouse, Rick Veitch and others, Supreme work collected in 2 volumes by Checker Books. #20-58, 59-61, 63-64, Annual #2 (1983-1987), DC Comics; with Stephen R. Bissette, Rick Veitch and others; collected in 6 volumes as: #1-26 (1982-1985), Quality Communications; 10 issues (1988-1989) DC Comics; collected edition (1995), DC Comics; with David Lloyd, 1996, Victor Gollancz; 1997, Orion Books; republished 2003, Top Shelf Productions. This new editon features a dust jacket designed by Chip Kidd, and introduction by Neil Gaiman and thirteen color plates by José Villarrubia., 2 issues (2003), Avatar Press; story by Moore, adapted for comics by Antony Johnston with artwork by Jacen Burrows. Collected into softcover and hardcover editions by Avatar Press (2004). with annotations by NGChristakos, Moore's original short story (from which the series was adapted), new pinups (2002), Avatar Press; song lyrics, poems and other writings by Moore, adapted for comics by various artists, with a cover by Juan José Ryp "Alan Moore Asks for an Alan Smithee", 9 November 2005, The Comics Reporter, accessed 7 January 2006Young, Robert (2004) "Zero Sum Masterpiece: The Division of Big Numbers" in The Comics Interpreter #3 Vol. 2-- The definitive behind the scenes story of the demise of Moore's magnum opus.