Magical 71 by Francesco Frongia

Art by Francesco Frongia

Above, a blazing, magic portrait of The Wizard of Northampton by friend FRANCESCO FRONGIA. It's also a belated birthday gift of sort: notice the number 71 as the magical spell in the illustration!

Francesco Frongia is an Italian illustrator and graphic novelist, founder of the comics collective Mammaiuto. He also draw the cover for Franceso Pelosi's Alan Moore: La Mappaterra del Mago.

For more information about Frongia visit his Instagram HERE. Grazie mille Checco! :) 

From The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, page 26:

[...] since the disc or coin is sometimes called a pantacle or pentacle, you might decide to furnish your design with a five-pointed star. In this case it’s important to remember what the symbol means, namely that when the star has one point uppermost, presiding over the four points below, this stands for the supremacy of the so-called ‘fifth element’, the element of Spirit, over the four worldly elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth. (A pentacle turned upside-down just means the opposite, with Spirit downcast and neglected, dominated by material concerns. This is not to claim that such a symbol can’t be said to be Satanic when inverted in this way, but simply that it is no more Satanic than the ordinary world about us, where material concerns predominate at the expense of soul and spirit.) [...]

It's Moore 71!

Art by Claudio Calia

Today is Moore's 71st birthday! So, above a fantastic portrait of The Man by Italian comics artist and illustrator CLAUDIO CALIA. What Alan says is a reference to a recent article (here).

 

Grazie, Claudio! Happy birthday, Alan!

For more info about Calia, visit his site HERE.

1963 Bootleg Annual

From Cosmic Lion Productions. It seems an interesting bootleg tribute project, sort of...

In 1993, Alan Moore wrote a love letter to the Marvel Age Of Comics. Steve Bissette, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, Dave Gibbons, Don Simpson, and Jim Valentino brought it to life. Called 1963, the six-issue miniseries was equal parts parody, tribute, satire, examination, and eulogy. Compared to the Spawns and Youngbloods that ran the world just then, 1963 flopped and has been a regular bargain bin fixture for over 30 years. To add insult to injury, the final annual chapter never came out, and the plotline that ran through every issue never reached the climax. 

Zip ahead three decades, where a group of creators banded together to create a tribute. The characters are undeniably fun, and the art is gorgeous. A rip-roaring good time several years in the making, we're proud to present GIANT SIZE '63!

Featuring: Ben Perkins, Ian Mcm, Milo Trent, Jerome Cabanatan, Dan Shahin, Geoffrey Krawczyk, William Hoffknecht, Ben Granoff,  Daniel Moler, Joseph Antoniello, Eli Schwab, Tony Fero, Douglas Wolk, Tony Wolf, Blake Wilde, Jim Dandy, Mike Hansen, Shane Berryhill, Max Rex, Don Simpson and more!!

Cover by Geoffrey Krawczyk!

Preorder HERE. International preorder: HERE.

Sussidiario di Magia

Panini Comics has announced that they will publish the Italian edition of The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. The book is scheduled to be released in May 2025.

 

La Magia sta arrivando!

Incantations of the present day

Art by Steve Parkhouse

Excerpts from an in-depth and quite interesting review of the Bumper Book of Magic by Joe McCulloch published the 29th of October on The Comics Journal. 

Joe McCulloch: [...] The great virtue of this book is its accessibility; I found it a concise guide to a variety of esoteric topics, organized with a good sense of intuition.5 This is creditable to not only the authors, but its predominant visual force, John Coulthart, an artist I mostly know through his extensive involvement with Manchester's Savoy Books as a designer, illustrator and cartoonist, though he has been a consistent presence in Moon and Serpent projects though his album art for A. Moore's live performance works with the musicians Tim Perkins, David J and others (The Highbury Working, Angel Passage, etc.). Here, Coulthart is credited with the Bumper Book's overall design, its cover art, large illustrations for nine different sections and many spot illustrations throughout. Sections are differentiated often by page color — white, blue, several shades of brown — while individual illustrations repeat themselves on successive pages to prompt the readers through the authors' esoteric thickets: the image of the Tree of Life repeats page after page as the Moores run down its branches, each of its 10 emanations glowing one by one by alchemical color as they are discussed; Tarot cards are displayed both as in the Tarot de Marseille and in iconographic forms devised by Coulthart himself, running along the tops of pages for quick reference. Decorative borders on most pages pulse dim to strong on a gradient; colors glow cold under glassy digital frost, which is not my favorite look, but further imposes unity on the book as if from an aloof mechanical Demiurge. [...]

[...] the authors draw a distinction between "high" magic, "the urge towards greater understanding, transcendent experience and the ecstatic enhancement of consciousness," and "low magic ... the attempt to bring about desired changes in material reality that are to the magician's personal advantage." In advocating for high magic, the Moores urge the practice of magic for magic's sake, whereby personal, creative, intellectual boons present themselves as if guided by magic itself, "the practitioner left marveling at an abundance of results that he or she had neither asked for nor expected." Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, to add an inappropriate note of my own. The "Great Enchanters" of the comics in this Bumper Book are often buffeted by politics, but they are not usually individuated as activists; rather, magic itself is treated as an expression of anarchy – the promotion of unmediated self-governance vs. the compulsory obedience of doctrinal religion. That magical orders have tended to regiment into elitist fraternities and doom cults does not dim magic as "a subjective practice of the individual, a means by which a single self may come to its own understanding of and make it its own peace with the wonderful and terrible phenomenon that is existence." Importantly, the work of "material" security is a condition precedent to magic practice, because “if we do not have our material circumstances under our control it will be difficult, if not impossible, to progress spiritually.” [...]

[...] A. Moore has said that this book is “intended purely as a statement about magic, rather than as a statement about comics.” But if art is magic, and comics are art, then this is also a book about comics, one that positions the drawn image, the picture story, as fundamental to social beings. This romance feels like a way of raising the art far above the mess of its mercantile circumstances, the shell which too often defines it, the mess from which he fled, a comics that is not just cruel tricks to cop money from suckers, comics preserved in the sky with wizards to voyage far on the silver foam of dreams.

Read the complete article HERE.

(Quasi) Leggere Long London

Omar Martini is writing a series of articles exploring and investigating the many references, links and worlds of The Great When, the first book in Moore's Long London pentalogy. 

The articles are published on the Italian magazine (Quasi) on a weekly basis. 

Till now, we had 6 articles, with more to come. 

You can read them all HERE. In Italian, of course. Enjoy!

Fandom has toxified the world

Magic art by Caio Oliveira

Below, excerpt from an article by Alan Moore published on The Guardian the 26th of October. 

Read the complete piece HERE.

[...] I believe that fandom is a wonderful and vital organ of contemporary culture, without which that culture ultimately stagnates, atrophies and dies. At the same time, I’m sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement.

[...] An enthusiasm that is fertile and productive can enrich life and society, just as displacing personal frustrations into venomous tirades about your boyhood hobby can devalue them. Quite liking something is OK. You don’t need the machete or the megaphone.

Candidly, for my part, readers would have always been more than sufficient.

Alan Moore

The complete article can be read HERE.

309 Moore Magic by Massimo Giacon

Art by Massimo Giacon

Above, a fantastic portrait of Moore by the great Massimo Giacon for his 366 project.

 

Read more HERE. 

Alan Moore by Maurizio Lacavalla

Art by Maurizio Lacavalla

Above, an intense and powerful portrait of The Man by Italian artist Maurizio Lacavalla.

 

Lacavalla has a strong, unique style resulting in a mesmerizing black and white art. 

His last graphic novel is an oneiric biography of H.P. Lovecraft (HPL - Una vita di Lovecraft), in collaboration with writer Marco Taddei, published this month in Italy by Edizioni BD. 

Highly recommended (waiting for International editions to come!).

 

For more info about Lacavalla, visit his Instagram, HERE.

O Grande Durante

Art by Lambuja

Above, cover for the Brazilian edition of The Great When, published by Editora Aleph. 

 

As you can see they commissioned a brand new cover to... Brazilian digital artist ‎ Pedro Henrique Ferreira popularly known as Lambuja.

 

For more info about Lambuja: Official site - Instagram - Behance page

Art by Lambuja

 

I Hear A New World

[...] the first of his five Long London novels, The Great When set in 1949 in an alternative London. The subsequent books will be set in 1959, 1969, 1979, and then jumping to 1999. And now, we have learned the name of the second of that novel, I Hear A New World.

The second book is titled after the album by Joe Meek, I Hear A New World, recorded in 1959 but released in 1960, subtitled "an outer space music fantasy". One of the most influential record producers and sound engineers, Joe Meek, was the first to conceive of the recording studio itself as an instrument and one of the first producers to be recognised as an artist in his own right. Working with many artists, he may be best known for the Tornado's track Telstar in 1962, written and produced by Meek, the first record by a British rock group to reach number one in the USA. But he is also famed for taking a shotgun owned by musician Heinz Burt, killing his landlady, Violet Shenton, and then shooting himself in 1967. Those last moments of Joe Meek's life also featured in Alan Moore's spoken word performance art piece The Highbury Working, A Beat Séance, created by The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels collaborative team of Moore, David J, and Tim Perkins and performed on the 20th of November 1997 at the performance club Absorption at The Garage in Highbury, with dancer Paule van Wijngaarden. The words to the track No 1 With A Bullet can be read here. Perkins used samples from I Hear a New World for the soundtrack.

Source: BleedingCool