I’ve been enamoured of prose fiction for quite a long while,” says Alan Moore. He is speaking to me from his home in Northampton for the launch of Illuminations, a short story collection – and, at the age of 68, his first. “But when I started my professional career, it tended to take a bit of a back seat because there were other things going on.” “Other things”, for those who don’t know Moore’s work, is his gracefully understated shorthand for a 40-year career in the funny papers that made him probably the most respected comics writer on the planet.
Yet he has always had literary roots: his best-known work, Watchmen, took its title from Juvenal, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was peopled by the canonical characters of 19th-century adventure stories. So, although Moore avowedly dislikes nostalgia, short fiction is a sort of coming home – back to the library he joined at the age of five and, once he’d outgrown Enid Blyton and Just William, where he got his teeth into science fiction and fantasy.
