Alan Moore interview

In The Daily Telegraph, Susanna Clarke talks to comic-book writer Alan Moore about his career and his sexually explicit new work, Lost Girls.

'Frankly,' says Moore, 'creating a piece of pornography that men will respond to isn't rocket science. Charlie Brooker wrote in The Guardian that men get aroused simply by glancing at a crude charcoal sketch of a single boob scrawled on the side of a shed. Quite wretched, and probably true. Most visual pornography is lit as if for brain surgery – the most repulsive strip-lighting imaginable. Every pore, every hair visible. Not in any way sensual. But thanks to Melinda [Gebbie]'s artwork, there was almost no conceivable scene that, if it were approached with enough layers of soft, beautiful colour, could be said to be obscene.'