Alan Moore’s Psychogeographical Unearthing

After having explored science fiction’s outer limits, comics great Alan Moore gleefully dug into a fellow writer’s earthly origins story.

In his new multimedia box set, Unearthing, Moore explores the magical mind of fellow British comic book writer Steve Moore (no relation) through the geography of his subject’s hometown district, Shooter’s Hill in London.

“We all grow out of the environment and times which we are born into,” Alan Moore said by phone from his home in Northampton, England, ahead of Monday’s release of Unearthing. “They have an influence upon us. I’m not sure the position of remote astrological constellations has any influence on us, although I’m open to opinions on that. But the place and time from which we emerge shapes all of us.”

Thanks to dense tomes like Watchmen, From Hell, Lost Girls and others you should have read by now, Alan Moore has become a comics supernova well-known for words that deeply explore our own cosmological and Earth-based labyrinths. To tell the story of his frequent collaborator Steve Moore, Unearthing contains photography by Mitch Jenkins and musical atmospherics from Doseone, Fog, Mike Patton and Mogwai’s Stuart Brathwaite that back up the Watchmen writer’s spoken-word performance.

Alan Moore spoke with Wired.com at length about Unearthing, psychogeography, Second Life, the latest news in the long-running Watchmen rights controversy and his new dirty-minded H.P. Lovecraft comic Neonomicon (out this month from Avatar Press), all in an engaging conversation conducted in what the influential writer calls his “regionally accented midland slur.”

This article appeared at WIRED