Comics in Magic Land

Magic is here!

Below, excerpt from an interview posted on PW some days ago, on the occasion of the upcoming The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic release. 

In this excerpt Moore talks about the comics contained in the book and his final comics work. With a bit of surprise revelation, too. 

Read the complete piece HERE.

Alan Moore: "Ben Wickey’s amazing ‘Great Enchanters’ pages could have come from one of those improving boys’ weekly papers like Look & Learn, while the late, great Kevin O’Neill’s scurrilous “Adventures of Alexander” is from the more working-class tradition of weekly comics like the Beano or Dandy. I should point out, though, that the Bumper Book isn’t and was never intended to be my final work in comics.

My final work in comics, completed in 2018, was the fourth and last volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Kevin O’Neill. I’d finished writing all of the Bumper Book’s comic strip material by the spring of 2014, and the whole book by 2015—it’s just taken us ten years to find all the artists and for them to complete the work to such a spectacularly high standard.

There may also be other comic book work out there, as yet unpublished, but volume four of The League was my last comic strip work, and was also, I think, a fond and comprehensive farewell to the medium. The Bumper Book, commenced around 2007, was always seen as a beautiful and accessible grimoire that happened to contain some comic strip material. It was intended purely as a statement about magic, rather than as a statement about comics."

The interview is available HERE.

A car crash of ideas

From How ‘The Great When’ by Alan Moore Got Made published on Publishers Weekly site.

A novel is more like a car crash of ideas. In this case I felt compelled to write something about London’s more spectral low-life figures, and to pick up on author Arthur Machen’s notion of a truer world concealed behind our own. I’d like the reader to know that, other than many of the characters and all of the historic detail, this book is an outrageous fantasy of things that never happened, and also that, in the riotous secret soul of London, every word of it is somehow true. - Alan Moore

You can read the complete article HERE.

Alan Moore by Phil Elliott

Art by Phil Elliott

Above, a stunning portrait and memory of Alan Moore by British illustrator, comic book artist and colorist PHIL ELLIOTT.

 

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

Dr. Manhattan by Federico Mele

Art by Federico Mele

Above, a Dr. Manhattan commission by Italian comic book artist, illustrator and storyteller FEDERICO MELE.

See more about the illustration's process HERE.

Visit the artist's Instagram page HERE.

The Book Lovers by Steve Aylett

Below, Alan Moore's words of appreciation for The Book Lovers, Steve Aylett's new book to be released this December. 

"In the whole of language there is nothing like Steve Aylett, and The Book Lovers is his most relentless assault yet on our prissy synapses. Every sentence is a nifty seizure that will slug his reader through the printed page into a better and less reasonable world, a fugue-state heaven of excruciating beauty that spends dazzling insight as though it were chocolate money. Utterly astonishing, and possibly some manner of police procedural. Read this now before it happens." ― Alan Moore, author of  Jerusalem 

For more info about the book, visit the author's site HERE.

All films are haunted

Below, a statement from Moore promoting Last Movies, Stanley Schtinter's new work.

The book seems a really interesting reading: "Last Movies remaps the century of cinema according to the final films watched by some of its cultural icons, giving an audience the opportunity to ‘see what those who see no more last saw’."

All films are haunted, both by the immortal light of the sooner-or-later dead that they curate, and by the filaments of meaning they extrude into unscripted human lives. Last Movies is an unexpectedly revealing catalogue of final interchanges between imminent ghosts and counterpart electric spectres on the screen’s far side.
Profound and riveting, Schtinter’s graveyard perspective offers up a rich and startlingly novel view of cinema, angled through cemetery gates before the closing credits.
A remarkable accomplishment.
--- Alan Moore

More info at the author's site. Buy a copy HERE.

The outrageous edifice of The Great When

Moore speaks about his new book in a short video shared by Bloomsbury on their FB page.

You can watch it HERE.

Alan Moore: For me, when writing The Great When and the subsequent books in The Long London series, the most enjoyable thing has been taking actual history and then managing to fill the cracks in that history with delirious fantasy. So that I hope that the reader will sometimes find it difficult to tell the difference between the two. 

Starting the series in 1949 seemed like a good move because at that time London was in pieces, shattered by the events of the previous five or six years by the hail of bombs and V bombs. After which I would imagine that the average Londoner’s sense of reality had been drastically overhauled psychologically and socially. The whole of the city, the whole of the country was in pieces, it was in fragments. It was trying to work out what was going on and what its identity was. It was very unstable. We had questions of whether we should adopt nuclear weapons were starting to arise. We had a rise in what we would today call serial murderers after the Second World War. 

All of these things gave the landscape a very uneasy and shifting uncertain feeling. And upon that landscape in 1949 I thought that that would make a wonderful setting on which to erect the outrageous edifice of The Great When.

Alan Moore and Harry Smith

In 2011 Moore paid homage to American countercultural giant Harry Smith.

Below, excerpts from a review of the event published on BFI site.

[...] The polymath spirit of American countercultural hero Harry Smith – filmmaker, artist, folk-song collector, psychonaut and magician – is hard to pin down, let alone summon in the sedate surroundings of the Barbican’s cinema. Yet writer Alan Moore and artist, critic and musician Edwin Pouncey pay their respects admirably tonight, in an event programmed as part of the Barbican’s Watch Me Move: The Animation Show exhibition, conjuring up a soundtrack of poetic biography and collaged noise to a screening of Smith’s No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic (1957).

 

[...] Moore’s skill as a comics writer fits him well for narrating the moving image. Seated in a conspicuously cosy leather chair (which throws a distracting shadow across the screen), he recounts a subjective version of Smith’s life story, from Portland, Oregon childhood to death at the Chelsea Hotel, in a rhythmic present-tense style. Moore’s eye for everyday, even trashy magic is keen and wry, evoking the occult power of New York City’s streets and peep shows, and journeying with abandon into Smith’s psychic and physical desires. [...]

Read the article HERE. Pics of the event HERE.

Harry Smith's movies: Heaven and Earth Magic - Early Abstractions

 

And... I'd love to read Moore's complete text on Harry Smith and/or watch the whole performance!

The last Beatnik artist

Alan Moore speaks about Savage Pencil to promote his Rated SavX book, released in 2020 by Strange Attractor.

From the most subterranean of underground cartoonists to full-blown daemonic visionary, here we see Savage Pencil’s horrid Lovecraftian metamorphosis in all its sublime and terrifying glory; all its ugly ecstasies. Hilarious, psychedelic, beautiful, deformed – give your nervous system a bracing dip into this lysergic acid-bath of a collection from the last Beatnik artist standing. Unmissable.
 -- Alan Moore

More info here, here, here (interview) and here (a book's review).

A picture from the 80ies (from left to right): Chris Long, SavX, Alan Moore

On dreams, punch-ups, occult artifacts and Steampunk

Below, excerpts from a really entertaining interview printed in 2013 on The Chap magazine, issue 70. If you can, get a copy of the magazine! Highly recommended!

 

The Chap is a British humorous men's lifestyle magazine published quarterly, founded in 1999 by Gustav Temple and Vic Darkwood. 

For more info, visit the magazine's official site (HERE) and check the Wikipedia entry (here)

The Chap: [...] What, if any, are your recurring dreams?
Alan Moore: I remember when I was about five, my mother had taken me to the cinema - this wasn't a dream, this was real - to see a film by the Dead End Kids. And this particular film had them meeting a man in a dark suit and a bowler hat, who introduced himself as Mr. Boob. When he took his bowler hat off, it revealed two horns sticking out his bald head. I assume his name was a pun on Beelzebub or something like that. I was screaming and under the seat. And for about a year, thereafter, I would have serial dreams in which I was haunted by this pair of horns in a bowler hat. [...]

When was the last time you engaged in a genuine punch-up?
Because I was an unusually tall kid, I used to attract a certain amount of bullying, but the pattern was that I would put up with it for a certain amount of time. And then I would completely lose all rational control and go berserk, and I nearly strangled two of my classmates. I was quite a strong child. And I also - this is a creepy admission - used to work out by squeezing a weighing scale until I could exert my body weight with my thumbs. So there is this young strangler in here just trying to get out. That would perhaps be a good title for an autobiography: Strangler in Paradise or something. [...]

Could you disclose to our readers some of your favourite and most interesting occult artifacts?
My most powerful, without a doubt, is the Random House Dictionary of the English language, unabridged. That is the best book anyone will ever read. To understand language is to understand what is hidden, which is to say, the occult. [...]

Have you ever experimented with any contemporary fashions? EG Steampunk, Young Fogey, GothLoli etc.
I've got nothing against any of that. Steampunks, sometimes at its more committed end, come up with some really useful ideas. I'm friends with people like Margaret Killjoy, who contributed to Dodgem Logic and also, I believe, actually invented and built a desalination unit (which turns seawater into fresh water). So that's useful. One of my favourite jokes is: "How many Steampunks does it take to change a light bulb? It takes two. One to change the light bulb and one to glue an unnecessary watch part to it." [...]

If you can, find a copy of the magazine. Highly recommended. 

I can hear the grass grow

Excerpt from an interesting analysis by Marc Sobel about I can hear the grass grow, Moore's forgotten strip (or is it a trip?) & adaptation of a song by British band The Move.

Read the complete article HERE. 

Hear the song and watch/read the strip HERE. 

 

The work has been originally published in 1988 in the third issue of  British music magazine, Heartbreak Hotel published by Willyprods. It was also reprinted in George Khoury's The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, published in 2003 by TwoMorrows.

Marc Sobel: "[...] Alan Moore’s ability to probe such deeply spiritual and intellectual concepts, while using the comics medium in a wholly original way, sets this short story apart. As an adaptation, this work of "graphic sound" offers a transcendent depiction of an acid trip, elevating a simple pop song into a pioneering work of imagination. As a comic strip, it shatters the traditional boundaries of print media while pushing the form to its limits. As a work of psychedelic art, it is a masterpiece on par with Huxley’s The Doors of Perception."

Read the complete article HERE. Hear/watch the song/strip HERE.