“Between the Panels” is a monthly interview series focusing on comic book creators of all experience levels, seeking to examine not just what each individual creates, but how they go about creating it.
Encouraging parents, a rich diet of illustrated material, and a thriving London comics scene were three of the ingredients that set Alex Moore on the way to a career in the arts. This sequential storyteller from a young age has put their mark on work for a variety of publishers — both inside and outside the comics field.
First off, the basics…
Your specialties (artist/writer/letterer/inker/etc.): Artist
Your home base: London
Website: cargocollective.com/alexmooreillustration
Social Media
Instagram: @alexmooreillustration
Bluesky: @notanotheralex.bsky.social
Fanbase Press Contributor Kevin Sharp: Why comics? As an artist, why does this medium specifically appeal to you?
Alex Moore: Firstly, thanks so much for reaching out to include me in your interview series – really appreciate being included in your lineup! Aside from the time you need to put into making them, comics are probably the most accessible means for visual storytelling. Once you’ve got your materials together, you can tell a story of any scale from quite slice of life to the most bombastic blockbuster pretty single-handedly. That said, I’ve also had the chance to collaborate with some incredible writers and letterers and being part of a team is something I respond really well to so it’s great there’s also that option… plus, it’s been a great way to get to know some wonderful people!
There’s something about the format that really gels with my thought process. I’m an incredibly visual thinker — I would describe inside my brain like the Spider-Verse films — and reworking a script into a static, narrative structure is always a fun challenge. It almost feels more like scoring music… or punctuation if that makes sense. There’s also something utterly engrossing about the process and characters. Often, I’ll find myself getting way too invested in them and you find yourself acting out their dialogue and body language. I’m quite glad I work at home and no one gets to see this!
KS: Please tell readers about your earliest comics memories as a reader. Not necessarily the first you ever read, unless you recall, but where you would have first encountered them.
AM: I was super lucky growing up in London where comics were pretty easy to get your hands on. Kids were particularly well catered to with titles like The Beano and The Dandy — with a few IP tie-ins like Marvel superheroes and The Simpsons, though those seem to have disappeared over the years — were always a staple in newsagents and something I was always drawn to, even if I didn’t really know too much about the property itself.
I owe the biggest thanks to my dad, though. I was always scribbling away at something, and he very wisely put me on to those classic staples of Tintin and Asterix when I was super young. I’m not sure how he got onto them because while there were art books around the house, they were more things like Private Eye annuals — which were full of cartoons I would just pore over despite the political commentary going completely over my head — and collections of this serial from the ’70s called The Fosdyke Saga which was basically Dallas but with a family who built their fortune on tripe?!? He also put Forbidden Planet and Gosh Comics, our big, independent comics shop, on my radar once I was a little older.
KS: When you were old enough to identify different artists and art styles, who were your earliest favorites?
AM: Again, hats off to my parents who indulged me with a ton of picture books and trips to the local library when I was a young, so I grew up pretty well versed in visual media. I can remember being obsessed with this series of Greek myth books which had this hyper-graphic artwork — I pretty much had those out on permanent loan! I definitely gravitated more towards Hergé’s cleaner style than Uderzo. When I was a little older, 11 or so, I had a friend who was massively into comics, and I remember picking up an X-Men comic drawn by Joe Mad and some early Spawn stuff, and it was like WHAT IS THIS?!? While I never really managed to crack the Big Two, this helped turn me onto manga which is a whole other thing.
KS: At Fanbase Press, our #StoriesMatter initiative endeavors to highlight the impact that stories can have on audiences of various mediums and about the way a reader can find an important story at just the right time. What was a comic book story you read when younger that had a real impact on you?
AM: I was insufferably precious growing up and picked up Maus when I was probably far too young. That was also my first brush with autobiographical comics and… I don’t know… at that age I wouldn’t have been quite so open to watching a film on the subject. I think comics can be a lot more approachable than other media when dealing with more challenging subject matter. Which is what makes them so great for us telling personal stories and delivering extremely difficult topics in a way that’s… well, as accessible as the subject matter like that can be. On that note, I actually just attended a conference on comics and architecture that included a number of speakers from the Comics Cultural Impact Collective who are doing amazing work to raise the profile of comics in the UK — which is, lol, not great — particularly in terms of education and informing policy given what an effective tool they are in that respect.
At the totally other end of the spectrum, I remember reading a short in a Mike Mignola anthology called The Magician and the Snake. The story, a collaboration between Mignola and his seven-year-old daughter, is incredibly simple but it had me in absolute bits. Well, clearly it wasn’t just me just being a massive sap as it won an Eisner!
This mmmmmight be slightly off topic, but I would like to give a shout-out to Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido’s Blacksad. I fell off comics in my mid-teens, but I stumbled across the first volume of this in a bookshop and was hooked; the artwork is truly next level and completely blew my mind, from the incredible expressiveness and design of the characters to the perfect marriage between sequential and comic book art. Utterly aspirational stuff!
KS: Let’s switch over to you as a creator. You mentioned earlier you were always scribbling away at something… Did you ever dabble in sequential storytelling?
AM: God, there’s probably half a rain forest’s worth of smudgy penciled comics out there. Sequential storytelling was something I started playing with from a very young age — it was a way to unload all the overblown Star Wars/The Hobbit knock-offs my brain would cook up, or fan fiction for whatever video game or cartoon had taken grip. Truly an endless source of entertainment.
KS: Among all that, was there a certain piece you completed that felt like an especially big deal to be proud of?
AM: As I mentioned, these were all very overcooked narratives that tended to get wildly out of control and kid me was definitely not capable of landing that plane! That said, 14-year-old me did manage to finish a 40+ chapter Silent Hill fan fiction. The length can be attributed in part to me doing my best Stephen King impression at the time, so uh… that was quite the purple piece of prose.
KS: What better time in life to get the purple prose out of your system! Your bio mentions you got an illustration BA. Tell us about that decision for your education path. Did you have family support for the idea, or was there any conversation about choosing something “safe” to study?
AM: Being an illustrator or comic book artist was always just something I believed I could do which, looking back, was pretty brass of me! I was extremely lucky to grow up with parents who encouraged me to be creative, and I think due to a certain amount of class privilege, the conversation of whether or not this was a financially wise move never really happened — which, in retrospect, was wild. That said, I didn’t have any illusions about going full-time straight from graduation and very much imagined that I’d be working in retail till I keeled over in order to fund pursuing a career in the arts.
KS: Was there a career vision or strategy for after you graduated?
AM: I think it was just to do anything? This 100% led to me taking some terrible jobs that paid peanuts seeking what I saw at the time as professional validation… but it also resulted in me saying yes to some rather intimidating-sounding clients that were probably way over my head. One of my first gigs out of uni was boarding ads with a creative agency who made trailers for some pretty big video games which wound up with me getting shipped to France! I think at this point between freelancing, working part time in retail, and part time as a TA on the BA course I’d studied, I was moving too fast to have any notion of a vision or strategy!
KS: So, what was the path that got you your first paid comics job?
AM: I’m not sure I can remember what my first paying gig was exactly. In case it hasn’t been made explicitly clear, I am just… chaos incarnate. But I think it may have happened while I was graduating from uni? The illustration course I did at Middlesex was great in terms of running live projects that gave students the chance to work with clients while still having support and guidance of the tutors. It was very clear I liked making comics. Pretty much any project I had free rein on would veer into sequentials, so when it came to developing a graphic novel anthology with the Bishop’s Stortford Museum based on this huge archive of WW1 police records they found behind a knocked-down wall, I was picked to take part.
Around the same time, I helped start a collective with some of the other people on the course; the idea was that if there were a bunch of us working together, we could club together to cut down printing and exhibition costs (plus, it meant there would be a creative network in place once we left uni!). One of our earlier projects was a 100-page anthology of sea stories. Things like that were really great for helping to build a portfolio, and I soon discovered the small-press scene on 2012-2022’s Twitter (RIP) which offered plenty of opportunities to get involved with more anthologies. I owe a huge thanks to those projects as they’ve given me the chance to try out lots of different genres and subject matters while also getting to collaborate with some really awesome folk and getting to know the people in the comics scene.
KS: Is there something you now understand about working in comics that you maybe didn’t fully grasp when looking in from the outside?
AM: I think the importance of building a network with your peers. This was something that I really began feeling at university; the course expected you to be in 5 days a week and each student had their own designated desk space which is practically unheard of on most courses in the UK, especially these days. Part of the reason for starting the collective was the fact that was about to go away and freelancing can be a very solitary existence. I’ve always tried to make an effort to cheerlead friends’ and peers’ projects, because making comics is hard enough without the battle of marketing them. It also just keeps you enthused about the scene; I’ve also recently had the chance to take this offline and started going to exhibitions and book launches with some really awesome people in the community, and I cannot express how incredibly enthusing that is.
That said, it’s also really good to have people out there who you can talk to about things like rates and contracts. Starting out, there’s the temptation to sign the first contract that comes your way, but, unfortunately, there are some less-than-great actors out there in the industry. Equally, the more we talk about fees and the like, the more we can make sure we’re being paid our worth.
KS: Yes or no: listening to music or other background noise while you work?
AM: Oh my god, 100%. You can tell how stressed I am by how aggressive the dance-electro remix I have on loop is. One of the reasons I cannot work in a studio is that I would be absolutely murdered for listening to the same song all day. Otherwise, and if I’m doing something where I don’t need to conceptualize things so much like inking or final colors, I try and stay up with current affairs with news/politics podcasts and tech commentary since we seem to be increasingly at the mercy of “the bros.” If you want an indication of where I stand on all that, Paris Marx’s Tech Won’t Save Us really does it for me. I also really enjoy conversations about process, so another regular listen is Tape Notes, where musicians and producers break down several tracks on an album and it. is. fascinating.
KS: What’s a hobby of yours totally unrelated to art? Something you study, collect, practice…
AM: What with the heady combo of not being the fastest drawer, biting off more than I can chew, and some real workaholic tendencies, I am not very good at having free time, so I try and make sure the time I do have is spent catching up with friends I work from home and live alone… which I love, but I also definitely go funny ‘round the edges if I go more than a week without human contact. That said, I probably would have more time to spare I hadn’t developed a horrible addiction to running over lockdown and will happily spend up to two hours a day going for one of those or at the gym. It absolutely keeps me sane though and I’ve discovered I can listen to audiobooks while out for a big, long run, so a big resolution for this year is to get back into to book-books. Joining a local book club has also helped!
KS: In a hypothetical Comic Book Hall of Fame, you get to induct a single series or graphic novel that you feel represents the best of the medium. What gets your plaque?
AM: Oh man. I’m sure it’s come many times before in this series, but The Many Deaths of Laila Starr is a phenomenal read — there’s just so much to think about with that one, and I’m still thinking about this incredible meditation on life and death years later. The artwork and coloring is immaculate, and it’s really exciting to see V and Andrade diving back into Hindu mythology — something we don’t seem to see explored as often in western storytelling as other pantheons — for Rare Flavors.
KS: Finally, please let readers know what you have out now and upcoming in ‘25.
AM: At the moment, the only things from me in the wild are several anthology short. The most recent one of those is a short with longtime collaborator Ollie Gerlach for Dave Cook’s blockbuster collection, Killtopia: Nanojams. We’re also teaming up for a short in Limit Break Comics’ Wish Upon a Star which should be out later this year.
I might also have some news soon about Death Drop; Drag Assassins, a queer neo-noir book I’m working on with David Hazan after we parted ways with the previous publisher. Also in the watch this space-space is The Count of Monté Cristo High, a YA retelling of Dumas’ classic tale of revenge with Rex Ogle for Penguin Random House and Castles and Cholos with Samuel Teer. That’s a coming-of-age story with lots of big feelings and D20s which I can’t wait to start thumbnailing.
I’m also hoping this year is the year I finally do something with The Fine Art of Destruction, my 400-page MA project, a graphic novel set in London’s art scene featuring some very messy adults that’s about 70% done but… err. My plate’s a little full. We shall see…
In the meantime, you can find me every other week doing artwork for the live-play DnD podcast, Dungeons and Daddies. I’ve been doing cover art for them for 5 years now, but now we’re doing art for each episode and it’s a blast.
