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| Sketch art by Raulo Caceres |
It's 1958 and Dennis Knuckleyard has decided to leave his adventures in the Great When in the past where they belong. For nine years, he's avoided so much as thinking about the magical version of London, until he rediscovers an unpleasant reminder of his last adventure-a key that he'd secretly brought into his own world from the other for safekeeping.
But while Dennis may believe he's done with the Great When, it's far from done with him. When Dennis gives the key to a friend, its magical properties reawaken, bringing creatures from the other world into Dennis's and sparking riots in Notting Hill. Even worse, Dennis's old crush Grace Shilling has been forced into the Great When to investigate strange happenings in both cities.
Desperate to keep Grace safe, Dennis follows her into Long London. But once inside the other city, it will not let him go away again so easily, and Dennis and Grace must fight to set things right in the Great When and their own world, or forever lose their lives-and each other.
Full of Moore's characteristically stunning world building and rollicking prose, I Hear a New World is the extraordinary second adventure in the Long London series.
Alan Moore: [...] In issue #21 - which is the first issue that I'll write - the entire issue is dedicated to the putting together of the replacement WildC.A.T.s team, and it's only after that, with issue #22, that we break into 16 pages of the original team in space and then eight pages of the new team back on Earth; but the two stories will run in parallel and will hopefully coincide in, oh, about seven or eight issues time.
The lineup of the new team is Majestic and Savant, who have both been seen before. There'll be kind of a replacement Grifter in the form of his brother Max Cash who turned up in the Jim Lee/Savage Dragon crossover.
He's a nastier character than his brother. In my script notes, I've said that he shouldn't be quite as corrupt as Harvey Keitel in The Bad Lieutenant, but he's getting there. The code name that he works under is Condition Red, and he'll be getting a new look to go with it.
Then there are two new characters that I've created for the book. One is a genetically engineered character called Tao, which stands for Tactically Augmented Organism. The other character is called Ladytron, which is in fact named after one of my favorite tracks on the first Roxy Music album.
It seems to be about a woman but you suspect that it's probably about a car, and this character sort of combines some of the best elements of both. It's a female cyborg. with a lot of serious personality problems. She's beautiful like a Cadillac.
Alan Moore: [...] The Great When is the first of five books in the Long London series which is an excavation of some of the more marginal and little known points of London's history that is all stirred up into a very very baroque fantasy. And there's been a lot of books that have actually very much played into the writing of The Great When.I mean one of them is Pariah/Genius by my very good friend Ian Sinclair; for my money one of the best writers in the English language. And in Pariah/Genius he's following the story of John Deakin, who was the photographer that Francis Bacon actually got all of those images from. And not a very likable man, but a very, very interesting man. And Ian has done this wonderful story about John Deakin. He's already dead when the book opens and the rest of the book is the thought going through the mind of this extraordinary dying man.Other books that have played into The Great When would include Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman, probably one of my favourite novels ever. The main thing about Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is it's very, very strange and quite frightening in places but it's very, very funny. And that was something that I was trying to keep in mind while writing my book that there's no reason why everything has to be straight-faced. There's no problem with having a laugh once in a while.And the third book that certainly was a huge inspiration was Brian Catling's The Vorrh. This is the first book of a trilogy. But having read this, I realised that Brian had really raised the bar for fantasy writing because fantasy, as I see it, really shouldn't be about things that you already know about. I mean, I've got a lot of room for magicians and dragons and all the rest of the fantasy paraphernalia, but I would prefer a fantasy that gives you things that you've never even imagined before. And certainly in the Vorrh trilogy, Brian does that in spades.So while I was writing my books, I was thinking of all of these authors and trying to make sure that my book was at least in the same ballpark as these greats.
Alan Moore: What we’re attempting to do with Miracleman is strip away a lot of the accumulated cliches and dross that have built up around the super-heroes, and try to get back to what we perceive as the original idea - which was probably something very closely akin to the original function of the Greek and Norse legends. When those particular legends were current, when they had just been evolved, they were contemporary: they weren't set in an exotic faraway land or faraway time, they were happening at the end of the street. What we are trying to do is reinterpret the idea of a god amongst people, which is basically what the idea oi the super-hero is, even though the original idea has been diluted.
We're trying not to go over the more conventional background of the super-hero, like... you won't find a lot of super-heroes in Miracleman. With the exception of Kid Miracleman, whom you've seen already [in the first two issues], there are not any villains planned for the immediate future of the book. I find it more interesting not to see how powerful, exaggerated characters react to each other, but how one powerful, exaggerated character - Miracleman - reacts to the human race in general.
We'll also be going into the psychology of the character, trying to get into what would feel like to actually do all this bizarre and miraculous stuff. Anytime someone jostled you in the line at cafeteria you could just throw them into orbit. I think it would probably change your view of society slightly.
Those are the areas that we're going to get into: what it feels for the person himself being a god amongst creatures that must look to him like animals.
What it feels like for the humans suddenly being confronted with something that's a million times better than they are. [...]
[Talking about the inflated prices on the premiere issue of MM]
Miracleman #1 is a comic book, a throwaway comic book, that should be bought for 75 cents and briefly enjoyed. The thing I like about comics is that they are a democratic art-form - often with very good art - that is in the price range of anybody who has 75 cents. He can just go down to the corner news agent and buy a comic. That is one of the things that attract me about comics.
When you start getting to the point where something with a cover price of 75 cents changes hands for 10 dollars, I certainly don't want anything to do with it. I find it a bit distressing, I certainly wouldn't pay that much. Quite frankly, I would advise other people not to, although obviously, what they do is up to theme. It seems like a wholly false, manufactured, and artificial situation to me.
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| Art by André Toma |
Alan Moore: It's fair to say that some of the ideas of this very urban approach to the supernatural eventually found their way into other books, as well as in the character of John Constantine-but you have to remember that I created Constantine as an occult wide boy. A spiff. There was something of the used car salesman mixed in with the occultist there, as well as that tricky, untrustworthy kind of intelligence which I found appealing in the character. The central character of Nightjar, on the other hand, was an intelligent woman who sought vengeance and wanted to take back what she thought was rightfully hers. And the series itself was an honest attempt to portray the occult, not as something performed mainly in spandex costumes, but as something which happens on ordinary streets with ordinary people in ordinary clothes.
The premise of the story was that underneath our ordinary, everyday world, there exists this other magical reality where occultists-with seemingly ordinary, everyday lives-vie for power. And the occultists who practice this magic all have odd names connected to birds. That's why the strip was going to be called 'Nightjar'-after the central character's magical name and a bird of prey that comes out at night.
Nightjar was going to be Mirrigan Demdyke. The name 'Demdyke' came from Bryan's suggestion, because this was the name of one of the Pendle Witches who were hung for witchcraft up north in Bryan's part of the country [England]. And Mirrigan was the daughter of Harold Demdyke, a powerful, but obscure occultist who'd been living in absolute anonymity. As the king of all the magicians, which in the story was referred to as 'Emperor of All The Birds,' Harold had taken the ultimate zen step by obtaining power beyond power, while living the life of a common man. And on the very first pages of the series, you'd see that he's killed, and his murderers-the new magical aristocracy-have dissolved his line of hierarchy.
[...] This would then bring her into conflict with a number of sinister occultists, which would've given the reader all of that great 'Doctor Strange,' good versus evil stuff against this gritty, Bryan Talbot-Northern England background.
[...] Do I think the story will ever see print? Probably not. Nightjar was a lot of fun to work on at the time, but over the years, it's lost its magic. Both Bryan and I are too busy with projects of our own now, which was why the story never materialized in the first place [laughter]! But still, the basic story is an idea I've been kicking around in my head ever since then. There's some fragments of it starting to emerge in a proposal that I'm working up for Lenny Henry, who's recently been working with Neil Gaiman on a television series over here. I suggested something to Lenny that would have combined the world of the occult with the urban grimness of a crime drama. I thought that could make for an interesting, explosive combination. There's not much that relates it to Nightjar, but there's still some of the atmosphere of it. So yeah, I'm still looking for a way to put the story to use.
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| Art by M. Kaluta |
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| From Supreme n.56. Art by Chris Sprouse. |
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| From Supreme n.49. Art by Mark Pajarillo. |
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| From Supreme n.52A. Art by Jim Mooney. |
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| From Supreme n.53. Art by Chris Sprouse. |
Alan Moore: I guess that I was influenced the most stylistically by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner. […] Those two are right up there at the top. Those are the two main gods in my comic book writers' Pantheon. The stuff I grew up with was the Julie Schwartz era of DC Comics and the Stan Lee, Kirby/Ditko stuff at Marvel and all the other stuff during the 60s.[…] I think the main thing that gave me the idea that I could write stories for comics that would interest me was the work that was appearing from Pat Mills and John Wagner in 2000 AD. When it was in its early heyday, you had people like Brian Bolland doing Judge Dredd. Most of the better stories, with a couple of exceptions, seemed to be written either by John Wagner or Pat Mills, or under one of their many aliases. And there was something in them that said that these stories were being written by grown-up people who had a high degree of intelligence and had a high level irony and humor, which attracted me, and I began to think that maybe there was some possible slot for me within the more fruitful kind of ground that comics seemed to be turning into.[…] The waters of that particular question have become more murky recently, but if there is some clear feature that separates British comic book writing from American, especially at that time, it might well be the sense of irony, the kind of cynicism that really only comes from being in an empire that is well into its decline. America is headed towards its decline.Give it another few years, and you'll have that deep-seeded pessimism of the soul. It's sort of a post-empire state that brings this strange, wry melancholia to some of the British work. It has something to do with how the history of a place defines the consciousness of its inhabitants.[…] In the town that I live in, there are buildings that are a thousand years old. In America it's a completely different dynamic. The difference between Britain and America was once described to me as, in Britain, a hundred miles is a long way, and in America, a hundred years is a long time. When you've been marinating in your own black juices for a couple thousand years, there's a different tone, a different flavor to things.[…] The opportunities that were presented when I was offered Swamp Thing were really stunning. In Britain, the most that you could hope for was a black and white strip with five pages a week, something like that. Whereas in America, you had the opportunity to write things that seemed of incredibly sprawling length. You could do a story in 24 pages and it would be printed in color! I remember putting some really serious thought into how to revise the story structures I'd been doing because they'd been devised to break down into 5 or 6 page episodes.[…] I grew up reading American comics. We had very many great British comics at the time, but American comics were something different. They showed me a world that was already fantasy before the superheroes turned up. New York City was a science fiction landscape to me before you even had Superman leaping over the tall buildings. It's a thing where, when I was offered the chance to work at dc, all of the sudden there was the chance to tap back into these comic reading experiences which had been very formative for me.[…] When I entered the field, certainly in this country, there was no job less glamorous than comic book writer. That wasn't what I got into the field for, though. It was purely because I wanted to write comics. It was only in the kind of explosion that followed that, when it got slightly tarnished for me because it became about other things than writing comics. It became about having a certain position in the industry or reputation, image, things like that. It these things that made me take a more reclusive position in the industry. In fact, the industry itself, I have no interest in. I suppose that might be the sort of position of an embittered, cranky, old guy, but…
Zach Rabiroff: All your novels to date have been concerned to a great extent with a sense of place—with Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem, it was Northampton, which allowed you to draw on personal experience. And now in The Great When you’re dealing with London.Alan Moore: I like to think that wherever I’m writing about, and in whatever form, I have always tried to pay attention to place, whether in my comic work or other work. I was quite pleased to get a lot of letters from American readers asking how long I’d lived in Louisiana [after using it as a setting in Swamp Thing]. That was touching. But no, actually it was just all research, and then imagining myself into the place. And of course with things like From Hell, it was immersing myself in London.
[...] The majority of comics—when I started working in them—were set in America. So it felt quite radical to set some stories in London. When I did Voice of the Fire, that seemed to me to be quite audacious in that it was setting a whole novel in Northampton, which is largely a place that nobody cares about, and that doesn’t even get a mention on the local weather maps. And the same with Jerusalem, where I did it much more intensely. But that doesn’t mean that I exhausted London. The nature of a place like that means that you probably never could exhaust it. It’s infinitely deep with stories. [...]
I was actually going to ask whether you consider writing— artistic creation—itself an act of magic.
It is. I believe that all art and creation is an act of magic, consciously or unconsciously. But I believe that writing, specifically, is the closest to actual magic. If you look at the magic gods of most cultures, they are also gods of language. Hermes is the god of magic, but he's also the god of communication. The Egyptian magic god is also the scribe god, which tends to suggest that there is something, a rather intimate connection, between writing and magic.
[...] with writing, just writing straight prose, which is all I'm doing now, I think that that has got to be the most elegant form of art. You can do so much with so little. All you've got are 26 characters peppered with punctuation.
You’re summoning reality into being with an incantation, so to speak.
You can create the whole universe from those 26 letters, any conceivable universe. And that is the immense power of writing. In writing Long London, I'm actually building that space. This is something that I learned that you can do. I probably learned it from Mervyn Peake, when I first read the Gormenghast books, and I thought, this is incredible—actually creating an architectural space in my mind. Even at this late age, I remember Gormenghast a lot better than I remember places that I've actually been. Better than places in the real world.
Magic has got to be the art of causing changes in people's consciousness, including that of the practitioner. And anything that you can do with magic, you can do with writing. [...] You can be anything as a writer. [...]
We can never know another human being; that is the sorry fact of our existence. We can never know anything outside of our own skulls. And so, to a degree, everybody around us, the people that we love the most, are fictions that we have made up. We are fictions that we have made up. I can almost remember making me up when I was about 13 or 14. I can almost remember thinking that this childhood personality I have is going to be no use at all; if I want to have a girlfriend, I better write a new one. [...]
I wish I was made of writing, because then I wouldn't be in such a stage of physical collapse, and I would still be as gorgeous looking as I was 40 years ago instead of just almost as gorgeous looking as I was 40 years ago. If I was made of writing, I would be in perfect condition forever. And also, our fictional characters are going to meet and interact with a lot more people than we are, and for a lot longer time. Our fictions have a great deal of importance, I believe, not just as entertainment, but because they provide part of the infrastructure and armature of our world.
