Alan Moore’s endless (and little known) story

“I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” – Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

You’d think by now all the diamonds from Alan Moore’s oeuvre would have been dug up, polished, and preserved in one anthology or another (cough!), yet "I Can Hear the Grass Grow,” an overlooked gem from Moore's former life as a comic book creator, is all but forgotten today.

Published on the heels of Watchmen in 1988, this lost work, which Moore both wrote and illustrated,¹  was buried within the pages of the third issue of the obscure British music magazine, Heartbreak Hotel,² published by Willyprods.³ In their book, Art History for Comics, Ian Horton and Maggie Gray contextualized the series: “Heartbreak Hotel named itself a ‘lifestyle comics magazine’ and carried the tagline ‘where comics and music meet’, emphasizing the connection by describing its comics as ‘graphic sound.’ … Each of the six issues in its short-lived run was themed around a particular music genre: rock’n’roll, country, psychedelic rock, punk, surf rock and Motown, featuring strips based on songs from that genre.”⁴

Moore’s “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” was based on the hit single by the Move, a ‘60s British rock band. The song was released in March 1967 and reached number five on the UK Singles Chart in May of the same year, staying on the charts for ten weeks. A kind of Beatles/Pink Floyd hybrid, it was the band’s second of four consecutive top-5 singles. Roy Wood, the Move’s co-founder, singer, and guitarist who wrote the song, recalled that the title was inspired by the band’s photographer, Robert Davidson, who had received a letter that read, "I listen to pop music on the radio because where I live it's so bloody quiet that I can hear the grass grow."⁵

Unlike the Move’s song ("which was more pop psychedelia than acid rock, with twangy guitars and vocal harmonies”⁶), in Moore’s hands, “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” was transformed into a profound exploration of altered consciousness. Far from a mere adaptation, Moore’s “acid strip” brilliantly recreates the psychedelic experience using the comics medium. His interpretation of the song blends formalist experimentation with philosophical and existential themes; it’s equal parts political commentary and spiritual odyssey.

In many ways, "I Can Hear the Grass Grow" is a companion piece to "The Mirror of Love," which Moore wrote the same year. Both were created in the turbulent years following his split with DC Comics, and the surge of creative energy that breakup unleashed is apparent in both pieces. Both works also display a playful experimentation with time; "The Mirror of Love" leaps centuries in a single bound, while "I Can Hear the Grass Grow" melts time into a torrent of psychedelia. Both stories were also sparked by the same controversial piece of homophobic legislation that was dominating British headlines at the time. According to Horton and Gray, "The editorial of the third issue [of Heartbreak Hotel], in which 'I Can Hear the Grass Grow' appeared, opened: 'Turn on. Tune in. But whatever you do, don’t drop out. Not now. The time has come to get involved again'.⁷ The cause it was necessary to participate in was the defence of LBGT rights — Melia and Gracey-Whitman ["Willyprods"], a gay couple, were strong campaigners against homophobic legislation Section 28 and involved in AIDS activism. They organised Strip Aids UK, a 1987 benefit comic for London Lighthouse, a centre for people with AIDS, and supported Moore and his partners with the 1988 anthology AARGH! (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia) for the Organisation of Lesbian and Gay Action, self-published by his company Mad Love.”⁸ "The Mirror of Love" first appeared in AARGH!

Both the gimmick and the genius of "I Can Hear the Grass Grow" is that it is “a circular frieze,” as Moore described it, a moebius strip without beginning or end. In Heartbreak Hotel, however, the story “was printed on a vertical axis as eight sections or ‘panels’ set in two tiers across four pages.”⁹ For the few readers who even found it, it begins and ends like any other comic. Yet, with “some assembly required,” this strip established a unique connection between artist and reader, both actively participating in the creative process. While cutting, taping, and trying to line things up perfectly is hardly akin to drawing, it was still fascinating to watch the strip expand alongside its protagonists’ perceptions.

As I taped the first two “panels” together, certain details came into focus.¹⁰For example, the numbers on the characters’ sleeves are not their ages, but the last two digits of the years in the story’s timeline, which spans 33 years (from 1967-1990). In fact, the temporal dynamics of this strip are fascinating; “the work operates through visual jumps, disjunctures and fissures…” ¹¹ In the minute or so it takes to read, the Dadaist backdrop condenses three decades of political, scientific, literary, and cultural evolution into a chaotic tableau. This disassociation of time and space (and foreground from background) mirrors the protagonists’ altered states, reinforcing their feelings of disorientation and enlightenment.

By 1971, the initial hallucinogenic effects of the LSD are just beginning to take hold, as the man waves his hands enthusiastically, mesmerized by its tracer movements. These sensory phenomena occur when objects appear to leave a trail of light behind them as they move, creating the illusion of motion blurs. This effect is a hallmark of the visual distortions experienced during an acid trip (also note the swelling, fisheye distortion of the title balloons).

In the third “panel,” a dove plummets to its death, a symbolic end to the ‘60s anti-war movement. Meanwhile, as the LSD kicks into high gear, the couple’s initial euphoria has evaporated, replaced with a bewildering sense of confusion and dissonance. For example, a surreal figure with a "magnetized" head floats besides the flowerlike chart of a pulsar. Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation, and its appearance in the strip not only reflects the song’s trippy lyrics (“My head's attracted to a magnetic wave of sound / With the streams of colored circles makin' their way around”), but also the man’s profound sense of connectedness with the universe. Beyond the pulsar, the song’s “stream of circles” surrounds them, hinting that they’ve pierced the veil of reality and are standing on the precipice of a new world (note that the chain is itself unbroken, an infinite loop within an infinite loop).

In the fourth segment, the couple wanders through a dark forest and discovers a meadow where, now fully attuned to the cycles of the Earth, the man drops to his knees, ear to the ground, overcome with joy and revelation (he can hear the grass growing!). In the splendor of the moment, he is convinced that the universe is whispering its secrets to him, and, in this state of hyper-awareness, the normal sounds of nature's cycles become a magnificent symphony of breathing, pulsing life.

But this reverie is interrupted by the portraits of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the two-headed beast of '80s conservatism. Their sudden intrusion alarms the couple, but, still gripped by hallucinations, these world leaders appear to them with their skulls flipped open like cookie jars, filling up with rainbows (“in the evening I see rainbows”). Yet, even just a glimpse of these smirking politicians sparks their paranoia, abruptly shifting both the trajectory and tone of the strip.

By the fifth and sixth “panels,” the strip has become unwieldy, requiring a full wingspan to hold. The backgrounds have also grown more cluttered, with a flood of random pop culture symbols dredged from the depths of collective memory. Moore's iconography choices are sometimes confusing, though undoubtedly deliberate. For example, his “puzzling signs” from 1980-81 may be alluding to the “American spirit” – from the beaming white couple (representing the middle-class “American dream"), to the burning swastika (a symbol of America’s victory over the Nazis in WWII), to Charles Atlas, the bodybuilder featured in comic book ads during the ‘60s and ‘70s (an icon of American masculinity, strength, and power).

Yet, by the mid-‘80s, the myth of American exceptionalism had evaporated. While the man stubbornly tries to ignore the great tragedy unfolding behind him, the woman’s trip has dissolved into "a bummer," and an assault of self-consciousness overwhelms her. The man, still desperately clinging to his fantasy, explodes at her for “spoiling [his] trip,” but, in the background, a giant Kirby-esque orb frames the “unhip” woman as she crashes face first into the mud. Horton and Gray speculated that this “globe-shaped structure with a geometrically-patterned surface … could be [a] reference to the ‘golf ball’ radomes of the American satellite receiving stations at RAF Menwith Hill and Fylingdales which were the sites of demonstrations and peace camps in the 1980s along with locations like Greenham Common where nuclear cruise missiles were based.”¹² In a fury, he drowns his partner, oblivious to the Cold War raging behind him – Communism versus Capitalism under the All-Seeing Eye of the mighty dollar.

In the penultimate section (now wider than I am tall!) the backdrop shifts from a barren desert, filled with craggy rocks, to shadowy politicians hurling nuclear threats. This scene was based on “[John] Heartfield’s 1932 cover for A-I-Z (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung [Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper])… altered with the addition of a hand-drawn phallic missile to the figure of the fascist-funding industrialist…” ¹³The protagonist is visibly older now, with receding hair and a creased forehead. He stoops and sags, his youthful vigor has drained away. He is no longer a “tuned out” hippie basking in the glory of Mother Nature, but rather a middle-aged burnout. After glimpsing “naked existence,” he is appalled by humanity’s relentless march toward extinction. He tries in vain to hear the grass growing, but this time he is overwhelmed by the horror of a government prioritizing exorbitant military projects over the well-being of its citizens. This point is underscored by the large illustration of the satellite labeled SDI, a reference to the ‘80s Strategic Defense Initiative — a military operation (colloquially known as “Star Wars”) intended as an American missile defense system against a Russian nuclear attack. In Moore’s strip, the satellite serves as a damning symbol of political failure.

With the final “panel” taped in place, the strip is over seven feet wide! Even as a loop, it is almost too large for a six-person dining table to contain. In its last, mostly silent section, the man’s comedown is so intense, he can’t go on living. The grass is gone now, the woman is gone, everything is gone, destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. Yet even as mushroom clouds decimate the horizon (and, symbolically, the story’s timeline; the man has reached “the end of time”), one final rainbow, its spectrum replaced by radioactive isotopes, leads to a line of other planets. This acid flashback hints at the existence of alternate dimensions. Suddenly, the story resets and the man and woman are reborn, blissfully unaware, embarking on their 33-year journey anew.

So, what does it all mean?

With its historical scope, “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” traces the gradual decline of Western civilization from “the utopianism of the psychedelic 1960s to the dystopianism of the present day and immediate future. [The strip] clearly allegorizes the historical demise of the counterculture and the rise of the authoritarian New Right...”¹⁴ But is this a deeply cynical strip, portraying each generation's inexorable march toward self-destruction? Or does Moore's circular storytelling hint at humanity's constant renewal, with each new generation emerging revitalized and hopeful? Are Moore’s characters dimensional explorers, or just druggies seeking chemical escape from the atrocities of contemporary life? Does the ending’s allusion to other worlds imply that our actions are insignificant against the vastness of the universe? Or is he suggesting, as he has in other stories like “The Mirror of Love,” that time itself is not linear?

Alan Moore’s ability to probe such deeply spiritual and intellectual concepts, while using the comics medium in a wholly original way, sets this short story apart. As an adaptation, this work of "graphic sound" offers a transcendent depiction of an acid trip, elevating a simple pop song into a pioneering work of imagination. As a comic strip, it shatters the traditional boundaries of print media while pushing the form to its limits. As a work of psychedelic art, it is a masterpiece on par with Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.

Bibliography
Dunsbee, Tony. Gathered From Coincidence: A Singular history of Sixties' Pop. M-Y Books Limited, 2015.
Gracey-Whitman and Melia. Heartbreak Hotel #3. Willyprods/Small Time Ink Ltd. April/May 1988.
Horton, M. Gray, Art History for Comics: Past, Present and Potential Futures, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07353-3_11 November 17, 2022.

Special thanks to Martha Kuhlman. This essay is dedicated to Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg. #ReadMooreComix

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