In one of those buy-one-more-thing-from-Amazon-to-get-free-shipping purchases, I bought “The Extraordinary Work of Alan Moore: Indispensable Edition.”
It’s part biography, part fan tribute, part Q&A. (That’s a lot of parts). Moore is the author behind the graphic novels “Watchmen,” “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” “V for Vendetta,” and many other works.
His stories of growing up in Northampton, England, are remarkable and worth the cover price all by themselves.
This book brings to mind a short work that Moore put together some time back, “Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics,” which is one of my favorite books on writing, and on storytelling in general.
He really knows how to boil down the process, and does a great job of describing how to look for ways to use subtle symbolism and parallels to help the reader connect the strands of a story.
If you’re interested in the blow-by-blow of Moore’s battles over the removal of his name on movie projects (such as the recent “Watchmen”), look no further than “The Extraordinary Work of Alan Moore.” To say that he has an independent streak is an extreme understatement.
