It feels like every 5 years or so I get interested in Alan Moore again, without ever actually getting around to reading any of his groundbreaking work. This might be my deepest side-foray yet: an incredibly long interview with the man that spans an entire large-format book (I read the 2002 edition, not sure what the newer one looks like).
It kept me completely enwrapped, especially the parts where he goes into fairly minute detail about how he got his foot in the industry and somehow early on made a living out of it. His thought process for various story ideas, and his opinions on the comic medium and business in general, are all very interesting. I even liked it when he gets a little preachy about the whole magic thing. But the interview is poorly edited- there's a good deal of repetition and rehashes, and all the "when did you? was it when?" "I think it was, no maybe you're right it was earlier" got a bit tiresome. Also, by these interviews being amassed in a book, one after the other, and by being the subject of all this idolizing scrutiny and all, through really not much fault of his own, Moore comes off a bit full of himself. There, I said it! Which is why the two bookends, witty put-downs by his daughters, are so nice to read.
The homages/tributes are fairly whatever, and I would have liked less of them (as well as the embarrassing Moore pin-up pictures that start every chapter) and more Moore, or at least enlarged, readable fuckin' prints of the ephemera (scripts, comics he drew, etc.), from his professional and pre-professional lifetime.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the creative process, and the business of the creative process, maybe even especially if they are cynical or uninterested in the medium and business of mainstream captain underpants comic books.