‘V For Vendetta’ Author Alan Moore: ‘I Am Not The Northampton Clown’

Graphic novel author Alan Moore insists that he is not the Northampton clown.

The clown first showed up on Friday the 13th, wearing a red wig and full make-up. He randomly started appearing in different locations, and police issued a warning for the surrounding areas. One female resident said the clown knocked on her door and offered to paint her windowsills.

The clown, who wishes to remain anonymous, said that he “just wanted to amuse people.” He confirmed that his outfit is inspired by Pennywise for Stephen King’s It.

“Naturally, some people would have been extremely frightened by what they saw, but I hope many are starting to see it as a bit of harmless fun,” he said.

So why did some Northampton residents think Alan Moore is the clown? Well, photographer Mitch Jenkins is collaborating with Moore on an episodic film project called The Show. Set in Northampton, the project features — surprise! — a sinister clown. Jenkins said several people sent emails asking if the clown was Moore.

“It’s not me,” the reclusive V for Vendetta writer told the Northampton Herald & Post. “Apparently there had been a certain amount of comment on the Internet suggesting probably some connection. No, it’s not me.”

Moore added, “I am getting kind of used to this. After having a comic strip I wrote 30 years ago spewing masked anarchists across the global political stage for the past couple of years. Things that I write do have a tendency to spill into reality.”

Moore said that one of the principles behind “Jimmy’s End,” an episode in The Show, is to blur boundaries and that clowns popping up in Northampton “is only to be expected.” He also said he had his own strange encounter the same day the clown sightings started.

“… There was this big white box van crawling along Broadway about five miles an hour and it had got a speaker system that was playing a tape loop of this horrible discordant metallic sort of grating or scraping noise,” he said, “a weird kind of scrap metal shriek then a burst of unintelligible speech then the same noise again and so on, crawling through the streets and I thought is this some sort of art installation?”

He added:

“Is it a misguided salesman who thinks people will understand what this noise means? Is it some kind of call to revolution? Having heard about this apparently local clown epidemic then I wonder. However the fact that we don’t have anything to do with it will not stop us from exploiting this strange chance occurrence. Me and Mitch were quite tickled by that.”

[Photo by Chris Boland/www.distantcloud.co.uk/Flickr]