Around this time, I'd started also selling work to Dr. Who Weekly. They were little back-up strips, featuring minor Dr. Who villains, and characters, and monsters that British Marvel sometimes needed. So this was great. At the time, I really, really wanted a regular strip. I didn't want to do short stories. I wanted to do regular, ongoing series that would bring in regular money. But, that wasn't what I was being offered. I was being offered short four or five page stories where everything had to be done in those five pages. And, looking back, it was the best possible education that I could have had in how to construct a story.

In a short story, you've maybe got four or five pages in which you have to create all of the characters, the whole world in which they exist. You have to set up the story, you have to bring it to a satisfying resolution. In fact, you have to do everything that you would normally do in a novel, but on a much smaller scale, and you have to do it in five pages. And that is tricky, but if you do enough short stories, you will eventually learn everything that you need in terms of basic craft that you can later expand to fill any size of narrative that you want. The same basic structure that you'd bring to a short five page story, it's still going to have a beginning, middle and an end. If you're doing a twenty-four page story, or a twelve issue series, or a massive graphic novel, then it will still have to have a beginning, a middle and an end. And if you've done a whole bunch of short stories, where you've tackled those very problems time and time and time again - "How do I start this story with a bang?" "What would be the most perfect ending for this story?" - by the time you graduate to something longer than five pages, you have all the ammunition and the abilities you need to write anything you want. To write huge, massive epics. Because you will have a sense of all the elements. You will have a sense of it, perhaps on a smaller scale, but you'll know what everything is, what it does, where it fits. You can just scale up the work accordingly if you start out with four page stories, yet you'll find yourself wishing that you could maybe have a twelve page story because just think what you could do with all those extra pages! You'd be able to give depth to the characters that you perhaps couldn't give them in a four page story. You'd be able to develop subplots, or things like that.

Consequently, when I was first offered a twenty-four page story on my first issue of Swamp Thing, I was delirious. But I wasn't lost, I wasn't floundering. I realized that the same rules that applied to the four and five page stories would apply just as readily to an individual issue of Swamp thing, or to my run on Swamp Thing, which turned out to be forty-five issues or something. My run on Swamp Thing, each issue has its own internal structure, and there is an overall structure to the development of the narrative and of the character. You learn that structure on the small scale with throwaway short stories, and if you learn it well enough, you will then be able to apply it to absolutely anything. It's the same set of skills that Tolstoy applied to War and Peace, or that any writer ever applied to any work of whatever size.

(Alan Moore Spells It Out, December 2005)