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I freaking love me some Alan Moore books. V For Vendetta and Watchmen are the two superhero books I look to when I want to read about a hero trying his damnedest to save their worlds because he creates people first and puts them into the situations that unfold. But he does more than just write people as super heroes, he has an agenda.

When writing Watchmen Alan Moore thought that he was writing the best comic book to ever be printed, he openly admits this, and hoped that it would change the way people write super hero stories and I believe this is why he and Dave Gibbons worked so hard on the project and made sure to put everything they had into it. They weren’t looking for a movie check and didn’t expect that the characters would eventually be handled by someone else, they said This Is It and made it the best possible comic they could imagine.

In Alan Moore’s book on writing comics he talks about panel transitions, rhythm and character development but after his lesson in what comics are and how they function he says point blank to forget everything you’ve read and to develop your own tricks. He says to visit people in prison and get a sense of who they are and to study people who are in trouble and to be a good person and try and find the humanity in everybody.

And he couldn’t be more right. That is what story tellers are attempting, after all. We want to find humanity in other people and this is why Alan Moore’s comics are the best comics on Earth. Watchmen isn’t good because the mystery of who killed the Comedian is so dramatic and engulfing. Watchmen is good because it is the only time in my life that I had ever felt a connection to an openly racist, homophobic man with extreme right wing tendencies.  Alan Moore is an Anarchist and has stated that he intended Rorschach to be so dark and disturbing that people would look at super hero comics in a new light and he did. He made us care for someone who would, in other comics, have been the bad guy.

In V For Vendetta we care, not about V himself but about Evey, the woman he saves and introduces to the world. We care also about the woman who wrote the letter to V while he was imprisoned, which V passed onto Evey.

We even understood the people who had been the bad guys, the corrupt government and their quest for safety and truth and their love of order, the very thing V had wanted to destroy. Alan Moore hadn’t intended for some US film makers to come along and make an allegory out of his film to discuss their disapproval of the Bush administration. His intent was clear. He was afraid of Fascism in his own country when he heard politicians talking about putting gay men and women into concentration camps.

Lost Girls, a pornographic book he wrote with artist Melinda Gebbie (who later became his wife) is about the sexual hang ups people develop based on their introductions to the world of sex as children. He took characters from classic stories and found sex, often in the form of abuse, and how it shaped girls into women.

His other works, such as From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea, Miracle Man and such feature people in difficult situations overcoming surmountable odds and are often deep in historical accuracies. Swamp Thing features some of the most brilliant writing I have ever seen and gave warmth and humanity to a creature that would otherwise be the Scary Monster of a b horror film.

This is the face of madness and his name is Alan Moore. He dares to take people on as they are rather than see the stiff ideologies that so many of us hide behind. He doesn’t believe that people are all good or all evil, but rather that people are problematic and that they do what they think is best. He often tries to figure out why people think the way they do and that is what makes his stories far better than anything else out there.