Demanding the question “How many big-ass snake statues can a million dollars buy?” Alan Moore has apparently signed a six-figure deal for a new set of novels. Per The Guardian, Moore has signed on to pen a new five-book series—or as we’re damn sure he’d insist, a pentalogy—of novels for Bloomsbury, as well as a new short story collection, Illuminations.
Moore is, of course, best known for his work as a writer of comics and graphic novels, as well as a writer of criticism of adaptations of his specific comics and graphic novels. (We kid, but Moore’s complicated relationship with the people who currently own, and frequently profit off of or append to, his work, is just kind of part of the legend at this point.) He previously wrote and published a novel, the sprawling 1,266-page Jerusalem, back in 2016, a long-form discussion of British history and (in practical terms) a real talking-point in the annals of how damn big you can make a book and still get it onto a shelf.
Moore’s new project, Long London, will duck those structural concerns by arriving in 5 installments, although the basic premise—a blending of British history with extensive mythic qualities and magical realism—will sound pretty familiar to fans of the writer’s previous work. The series is set to launch in 2024, after Illuminations lands on shelves (hopefully without shattering them) in 2022. Moore, meanwhile asserts that his creative energy is still as vital and powerful as the beard from which it springs, stating in a press release that he’s still “bursting with fiction, bursting with prose” even after walking away from the graphic novel game a few years back.