Big Words From Alan Moore

The Comics Journal #138 (October 1990)
Art by Bill Sienkiewicz

ALAN MOORE:
(from an interview in The Comics Journal #138, October 1990)

Dave Sim and Gerhard. There you've got some consummate storytelling. It's always possible to learn from Dave... His sense of timing. Comics in Dave's hands comes closest to music in some respects, in that he's got such a perfect sense of comic timing. And he's also got - like I say, the thing that's very important to me - the desire to push forward and experiment and move into untested ground. What Dave has managed to do with an aardvark barbarian character that started off as a Barry Smith Conan parody, what he's managed to say in the context of that strip is staggering. I could never do that. I would feel so limited by the restrictions of the character and the world that I would never attempt to do a book as long as Cerebus, but what Dave's done is he's come up and met that challenge. It's difficult to imagine something that Dave couldn't address in Cerebus. Despite the fact that it superficially looks like a limited world, he manages to be able to talk about anything people can talk about in other books. There's not a lot of people who you can learn from in terms of storytelling, but Dave's always one of them.