'The basic stance that we were taking in Lost Girls is that the sexual imagination cannot be policed, you cannot shut areas of it off and I think that if you do, it actually becomes dangerous. I think that if you shut off parts of people's sexual imagination then that part becomes a dark space in which they can fester and become something generally appalling.'
What we wanted to say with Lost Girls was there's a big difference between pornography and art. Art makes us feel less alone. It makes us think: somebody else has thought this, somebody else has had these feelings. Pornography does the exact opposite: it's an isolating thing. Everybody thinks, ''I bet it's only me who has had these thoughts. I bet there's never been anybody as low as me in the entire history of the world." We wanted to say, "Look, it's OK. It's OK for you to have these thoughts.
[...]
The first step into magic is the human imagination. The world of the mind and the world of matter are both real, but in different ways. In fact, if one is more important than the other, it's probably the world of the imagination, where the world of human artefacts, well, all of it, actually originates. The basic paradigm of science tends to rule out consciousness, imagination, because they're not repeatable in empirical laboratory conditions. So it struck me that perhaps through magic there might be a different way to interact with the mind. This might in fact have been what magicians were talking about all along.
[...]
The 'tarot stuff' is the issue entitled 'The Magic Theatre', a history of the universe from pre-Big Bang to the present day told through the major arcana (the picture cards) of the tarot. Moore did it in rhyming verse. He gave each page a title and all 21 titles were anagrams of 'Promethea' ('Pa Theorem'; 'Ape Mother'; 'Me Atop Her'; 'Heart Poem'; 'Meet Harpo' etc). Gags and puns abound, and at the bottom of each page a long, rambling joke is told in segments, which will, we are told, if properly understood, explain magic. 'The Magic Theatre' is a virtuoso demonstration of what an Alan Moore comic can do that novels and films can't get near – provide multiple strands of simultaneous narrative and visual information that wind around each other in dizzying fashion, echoing and commenting on each other.
'It was one of the best things we've ever done. I was dead pleased with that. I was smug for months…' (Gebbie is quick to attest to the smugness.) 'We were haemorrhaging readers, but the ones who stayed behind had presumably sustained such neurological damage that they were no longer capable of cancelling their subscription – a hardcore readership who stayed with us right to the end and really appreciated it and really enjoyed it.
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