Neil Gaiman: A portrait of the artist as a disciple of Alan Moore

Taking into account the fact that Alan Moore was the person who actually taught Neil Gaiman how to format a comics-script, and that reading Moore's Swamp Thing (1983–1987) notoriously rekindled Gaiman's interest in comics in his adulthood, this article studies and surveys the connections between Moore's fiction and Gaiman's. At first, it particularly focuses on their shared interest in the kind of integrative fiction pioneered in the 1970s by Philip Jose Farmer through his 'Wold Newton Universe' (initiated in the novel Tarzan Alive in 1972), and which is a narrative practice at the core of Gaiman's Sandman (1988–1996), 'A Study in Emerald' (2003) and others, and of Moore's Lost Girls (1991– 2006) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (started in 1999). It also tries to appraise the place of Gaiman's work on Miracleman (1990–1992) following up Moore's seminal run (1982–1989), in the rich history of Gaiman's love affair with mythology. And it ends up exploring the direct intertextual links between Gaiman's Black Orchid (1988–1989) and Moore's Swamp Thing, and between Gaiman's Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? (2009) and Moore's Whatever Happened to the Man ofTomorrow? (1986).