SOURCE: "Hot Comic Books," in Rolling Stone, Issue 578, May 17, 1990, pp. 57, 60, 62, 64, 65.

[In the following essay, Gilmore remarks on the early development of the graphic novel genre and surveys the work of several writers.]

"Batman doesn't exist," British comic writer Alan Moore is saying. "There aren't any characters like that in the real world, and the real world is what we should be writing about."

It is late on a blustery winter evening, and Moore is seated in the living room of his row house in the small town of Northampton, England, showing some of the finished pages from Big Numbers—his new twelve-part opus about small-town community, millennial convulsion and fractal mathematics. Tall, gracious and voluble, Moore is probably the most respected and visionary talent in comics today.

A fervent believer that comics can prove as sophisticated as any narrative medium around, Moore is convinced that for the art...