Alan Moore on Magic, Storytelling, Fascism, and His New Not-Quite-a-Comic

You've spent much of your career embroidering the mythology of superheroes in a medium that wondrously combines words and pictures, while also taking a serious and scholarly interest in ritual magic. Do you see those interests as related? If so, how?

My association with superheroes, after starting my career with a few years of humor and science fiction, is largely born of working in the American comics field of the early 1980s, where such characters seemed mandatory; of having a useful prior knowledge of American superhero comics from the age of around five or six to the age of around sixteen; and of it turning out that, arguably, I wrote that genre with more force and purpose than anyone else. In actuality, I have no special affinity for superheroes and, indeed, over the last fifteen or so years, have come to see them as a kind of spandex blight afflicting our culture, our societies, and even our politics. So, no, I don't think there's any meaningful connection between Dr. Strange and Dr. Dee.