Alan Moore is the big beardy guy who gets pointed at when I’m asked, ‘Hey, who singlehandedly transformed superhero comics into dark, gritty and occasionally poetic narratives back in the 1980s?’ Moore’s re-envisioning of the genre brought superheroes’ flaws to the fore and in his hands we understood that pity, not awe, was the appropriate attitude towards these brightly costumed, invulnerable, absurd beings. In recent years, Moore has turned away from comics and focused on writing fiction and films. His first two novels, Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem, were psycho- geographic investigations of his beloved home town, Northampton, or ‘the belly button of England’ as he describes it.

Illuminations, his first collection of short stories, features tales from as far back as 1987, plus a handful of stories written during the pandemic. With most of these pieces we are in familiar Moore territory, that is to say gods and monsters at Marks and Spencer’s: slices of everyday life into which something mythic falls, pretty much always to everyone’s dismay.

But it is ‘What We Can Know About Thunderman’, the story lurking at the heart of this collection, that is its strongest, strangest, longest inhabitant: a rambling, hallucinogenic, disturbingly funny satire of the superhero comics industry from its cheap pulp mid-century origins to the multi-zillion-dollar glitz-and-glamour of its current cinematic incarnations. The writers and editors behind those original tatty paper tales of truth, justice and the American Way are presented in ‘Thunderman’ as damaged boy-men infantilised by endless fantasies of power and porn. Because it’s a Moore story, their comics get co-opted and backed by a shadowy government department keen on the superheroes’ mythic potential to manipulate mass opinion. And then, as with every tale of mystery and imagination in this collection, there’s a final reveal which makes your stomach lurch.

Alan’s back, astonishing us all over again.

Bernard Caleo is from Readings Carlton.