Swamp Thing by Marco Santucci

Art by Marco Santucci

Above, a bulky Swamp Thing by Italian comic book artist Marco Santucci, a recent Lucca Comics pre-show commission.

 

For more info about the artist, visit his Instagram page HERE.

Moore Gutiérrez

Above, a spectacular Moore portrait by the amazing Spanish artist Manu Gutiérrez, for my personal collection. 

Gutierrez is the cover artist of Roberto Bartual's essay Occulture. Alan Moore: al otro lado del velo (Occulture. Alan Moore: Beyond the Veil) (Ediciones Marmotilla, 2024). 

Below, his dedication on the book.

Grazie mille, Manu! Glycon lives!

Peter Thiel on Watchmen

The Guardian reported that billionaire Peter Thiel has recently hosted a series of four lectures in San Francisco about...  well, the Antichrist and Armageddon.

Thiel also did several references to pop culture including One Piece and... Watchmen! 

We definitely live in interesting times.
You can read the complete article HERE.

[...] He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.  

Read the complete article HERE.

Swamp Things by Andi Watson

Art by Andi Watson

Above and below, gorgeous Swamp Things by the amazing Andi Watson.

You can get one at a bargain price! Check it HERE!

 

For more info about the artist, visit his site, here.

Art by Andi Watson

Miracleman by Mark Badger

Art by Mark Badger

CAF site is full of awesome material to discover. 

So... above, an interesting, unpublished piece by the great MARK BADGER, featuring... Marvelman/Miracleman!

I confess I have a soft spot for Badger since his... Excalibur's issues. Long time ago! 

 

For more info about the artist, visit his Instagram.

Manu Gutiérrez: Making Moore!

In the past days I contacted Spanish artist Manu Gutiérrez asking any comment about drawing Moore, and especially about his wonderful cover art for Bartual's book. 

Below you can read his feedback. Enjoy!

And... Grazie mille Manu!  

Manu Gutiérrez: Drawing Alan Moore was not a whim. It arose from a commission to illustrate Roberto Bartual's book Occulture. Alan Moore: al otro lado del velo (Occulture. Alan Moore: Beyond the Veil) (Ediciones Marmotilla, 2024).
It is an essay that discusses psychogeography, psychedelia, magic, spiritualism, and Lovecraftian themes in the work of Alan Moore.

It was quite a challenge, which I failed at conceptually because in my first sketches I tried to detach myself from Moore's iconic force, but I didn't succeed.

In the initial designs, I sought more of the occultist implication of the book and rambled on with icons from the spiritual universe. The compositions worked, but they didn't quite speak to Moore's figure. So, after quite a few attempts, I went back to the beginning and let myself be carried away by the Magician's gaze. That, combined with his characteristic beard, was too powerful to ignore its pop symbolism. And from there, I took it to my own territory of black on black and layers of textures to infinity. Finally, I added several basic occultist elements to make the meaning of Bartual's essay clear.

Dave McKean: V for Vendetta is the one!

Transcript from a short video in the great Bob Fish presents channel.

You can watch the video HERE.

Bob Fish presents channel HERE. Highly recommended! 

Dave McKean: [V for Vendetta] is the best book that Alan did.

Bob Fish: Better than Watchmen?
 

DMK: I'm not a fan of Watchmen anymore. I was. I loved it...

BF: Because of the superheroes?

DMK: Because of the superheroes. 
Whereas this one... it always seemed like a really strong personal vision, conceived with no pressures on it. It didn't have to use characters from here... 'cos Watchmen started with Charlton characters.

Whereas this is a total from scratch, "I can do anything I want and I feel passionate about this and I need to make this story". That's why I think this one survives. 

Watchmen now feels like the end of an era rather than this that feels much more like the beginning.

David Lloyd really was a terrific for this particular story. Endlessly inventive and beautifully crafted ideas. 

And I think this Alan's work will be the one that will be remembered from this particular era.

I hear a new world: cover art!

Above, the cover for I hear a new world, the second book of Long London quintet, has been revealed!!! Art, of course, by Nicolas Delort!

The book is scheduled for May 2026 release.

TGW, comics and... mass infantilisation

Transcript excerpts of an audio interview from BBC Front Row program, conduced by Samira Ahmed. The episode, on air the 15th of September, can be listened here and downloaded here. Moore segment starts around minute 28. 

The interview is mostly focused on The Great When with incursions in other territories of interest too.

Alan Moore: [about his fascination with post-war London] I think that the main reason why I wanted to write The Great When was because I'd noticed in my readings that all of my favourite London characters were essentially low-life characters who had slipped through the cracks of conventional history. People like Iron Foot Jack or Prince Monolulu or particularly Austin Osman Spare.

I thought that these people suggested a different history of London and it was that that I wanted to pick out in The Great When. 

Samira Ahmed: You know reading the prose of this book from the very first paragraph it feels like you're revelling in painting vivid pictures in words. Is it liberating not writing for comics or did comics liberate you to write this freely? 

AM: I think that comics probably certainly affected my writing. Certainly in my later books, in books like Jerusalem, I was very aware that I am known mostly as a comics writer - which is something which I am probably not that happy about and which I'm trying to rectify - but I was aware that I might be seen as a comics writer who suddenly hadn't got an artist. 

So I think that I wanted to compensate to make the pictures inside the reader's head and I've come to realise recently that probably the major influence upon all of my prose work would probably be Mervyn Peake. 

Mervyn Peake

SA: Do you know I was thinking of him? Yeah, the Titus Groan books. 

AM: I've just been reading them to my grandchildren recently and that has reacquainted me with them and I've suddenly realised that he's drunk on language. 
He takes off on all of these ridiculous flights of fancy and they are... they're immaculate. The language is perfect, it drips like jewellery and... I was reading them again that I suddenly realised that Mervyn Peake was probably where I got my prose style from. I also realised that I probably got all of my approach to humour, as applied in The Great When, because he is quite funny in places. 
But I think I got all of my approach to humour from Galton and Simpson. I was watching The Complete Steptoe a couple of years ago and realising that so many of the tropes and the approaches of that working class humour were exactly what I was playing with in The Great When. 

SA: So in The Great When the plot revolves around a fictional book that appears in the work of Arthur Machen, a real writer from the early 20th century whose horror stories earned him a cult following particularly amongst writers like yourself and Stephen King. 
But there's this whole joke in the book about how he's gone out of fashion for being a fascist sympathiser. It feels like a very knowing joke given everything we know about how writers are assessed against their views these days. Tell me why he was a focus for the story.

AM: Well I mean the reason that Machen was the focus of the story was that he's one of my favourite London authors and I noticed that in a couple of his works he seems to be talking about a truer London, a more blazing London that exists behind the facade of the earthly London. So I thought that this would give me access to some of the ideas that I wanted to play with. 
The thing about Machen's fascism... this was during the 1930s when Machen was a very old man. Arthur Machen, amongst others, came out for Franco. This has been a bit of a problem for me, squaring that with the Arthur Machen that I've loved in all of his other fiction. I don't think that he'd necessary thought it through and I don't think it's a major factor in Machen's writing but it was one that I felt ought to be addressed. 

 

[...]

 

SA: You've spoken out about the double nature of fandom, that it can feed obsessive and toxic behaviour and I wonder... do you sometimes look at the modern world, look at the news and think it looks like an Alan Moore comic come to life? 
 

AM: If it had been an Alan Moore story come to life it would have had much better dialogue and it would have been building towards something with genuine meaning rather than absolute incoherence. No, you can blame me for an awful lot of things in the modern world. I will put my hand up and yes I do have an upsetting habit of being right in my dystopian projections for the future. 

SA: What do you think you've got right most famously? Because I have to confess I have watched the film V for Vendetta - as well as having read the comic - and I watched it during lockdown and I was struck by how it imagined a revolution after 100,000 pandemic deaths and in fact we'd had more than twice that in the UK from Covid-19 and no revolution. 

AM: Well I think that I managed perhaps in V for Vendetta where I was talking about a dystopia in the future that is all centred upon a centralised computer network. We didn't have the word hacking back then but, yeah ,I think that that's a fairly good prediction of what was actually to come. And I would also say that when in 2011 I made my apparently very upsetting statement that there was something wrong with the masses of people going to see superhero movies that this spoke to me of a kind of mass infantilisation which I thought was politically worrying and this has earned me my reputation as a crazy angry old man who is just angry with everything you know I'm angry with my bowl of Shreddies in the morning because actually that's a lot easier than actually addressing any of the points that I was making. 

SA: Some of your most acclaimed comics - Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta - have been adapted into films which you've disowned and refused to watch. The Great When is going to be adapted, isn't it? Why do you feel differently about this one? 

AM: Mainly because I actually own this one and it is not an unauthorised work being made into a film that I didn't want it to be made into. Also because I believe that The Great When might actually make quite a good film or TV series, well specifically a TV series, because this is the modern extended television series, is a new format that has arisen since I was complaining about the film adaptations. 

One of the reasons I was complaining about them was that you cannot get an extended work into the couple of hours needed for a film. Also because of the way that The Great When is written it's not a comic strip with most of those comic strips that you mentioned I was deliberately trying to do things that could only be done in the comic strip medium so I've got quite high hopes for this potentially forthcoming Great When television series. 

SA: Excellent. And you'll know that Watchmen in particular is regarded as perhaps one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, let alone a comic. 
I think Time Magazine listed it as one of the kind of 100 best novels and as someone who grew up with comics has been such a major figure in them you'll also be aware that there's great anxiety over the past decade about whether comics - particularly the big brands, Marvel, DC - have lost their way amid the culture wars especially in the US and become bogged down possibly in identity politics and I wonder what you think has happened to comics whether they still have a future. 

AM: I have disowned about nine tenths of my comics work including Watchmen, V for Vendetta simply because I'm not allowed to own them and because those works can now be made into any adulterated or ridiculous thing and I have no say in that and so I am also.. I don't really wish to be associated with comics anymore. I realise it's a bit late for that and that yes in the first line of the obituary they're going to be talking about Rorschach. 

Nobody's really interested in comics anymore, they don't sell. The only thing that people are interested in is superhero movies. I think that superheroes have grown over the entire comics medium. The comics medium is a wonderful thing, the simple thing of telling stories with a mixture of pictures and words it allows for all sorts of effects that people have barely scratched the surface of. And yet when people talk about comics these days, when people say that they're comics fans, they don't even necessarily have to have read a comic: they just went to see the last Avengers movie. 

 

I think that there are some wonderful talents working in the industry but the industry does not deserve them. Comics have never grown up properly and they insist upon treating their readership and the creators that work for them as if they were children. You know, there has never been an American billionaire who has been traumatised as a child and has decided to go out and fight crime and defend people dressed as a giant bat. 

 

Listen HERE - Download HERE 

Alan Moore by Tim Acke

Art by Tim Acke

Above, an Alan Moore caricature by Belgian artist Tim Acke.

 

For more info about the artist, visit his site HERE. 

Moore, Swamp Thing and Abby by Raulo Caceres

Sketch art by Raulo Caceres

Above, a great portrait sketch of The Man fused with Swamp Thing and Abby by Spanish artist Raulo Caceres (from Mario B.'s amazing CAF Gallery).

 

Caceres illustrated some special, limited covers for Providence (check it here).

For more about the artist, visit his web site, here.