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| Art by Claudio Calia. |
Claudio Calia is an Italian comics artist, teacher and popularizer.
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| Art by Claudio Calia. |
Sep 21, 2016
Claudio Calia and Alan Moore
Sep 19, 2016
Joker by Tanino Liberatore
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| Art by Tanino Liberatore. |
Above, painted cover by Italian superstar TANINO LIBERATORE for French USA Magazine N.36 on the occasion of The Killing Joke publication in 1988.
Liberatore's illustration was based on a sketch by Brian Bolland, finished and inked by Fershid Bharucha.
Sep 14, 2016
Mike Mignola draws The League
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| Art by Mike Mignola. |
Above an amazing drawing by Master MIKE MIGNOLA from actor Scott Adsit's art collection featuring Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Scott Adsit: "[...] I don't assign anything [...]. I just say it has to be a character that appears in the books and that it has to have red in it. That's all I say. [...]
[...] Variety is what I like. I like that I have Mike Mignola has a ballpoint, full page drawing that he did in a bar of Mr. Hyde and Nemo. Just ballpoint pen."
More details about Scott Adsit's art collection HERE.
Scott Adsit: "[...] I don't assign anything [...]. I just say it has to be a character that appears in the books and that it has to have red in it. That's all I say. [...]
[...] Variety is what I like. I like that I have Mike Mignola has a ballpoint, full page drawing that he did in a bar of Mr. Hyde and Nemo. Just ballpoint pen."
More details about Scott Adsit's art collection HERE.
Sep 9, 2016
Moore confirms his retirement from comics
Excerpt from an article published the 8th of September on The Guardian.
[...] At a press conference in London for his latest work, Jerusalem [... ] Moore said he had “about 250 pages of comics left in me”.
[...] "There are a couple of issues of an Avatar [Press] book that I am doing at the moment, part of the HP Lovecraft work I’ve been working on recently. Me and Kevin will be finishing Cinema Purgatorio and we’ve got about one more book, a final book of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to complete. After that, although I may do the odd little comics piece at some point in the future, I am pretty much done with comics.”
[...] "There are a couple of issues of an Avatar [Press] book that I am doing at the moment, part of the HP Lovecraft work I’ve been working on recently. Me and Kevin will be finishing Cinema Purgatorio and we’ve got about one more book, a final book of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to complete. After that, although I may do the odd little comics piece at some point in the future, I am pretty much done with comics.”
[...] “I think I have done enough for comics. I’ve done all that I can. I think if I were to continue to work in comics, inevitably the ideas would suffer, inevitably you’d start to see me retread old ground and I think both you and I probably deserve something better than that.”
The complete article is available here.
Aug 20, 2016
Moore & Coulthart and... the lost Crowley
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| Detail from John Coulthart's illustration for the Crowley project. The full illustration is available here. |
In the past few days I found by chance on The Orphan site a reference to an Alan Moore's unrealized project to be illustrated by artist John Coulthart focused on... Aleister Crowley.
Surprised by the discover, I contacted Coulthart to know more about it.
In the following you can read his feedback posted on this blog with the artist's permission. Thank you, John! :)
John Coulthart: The information about Alan's story that ended up on the web page was a little brief compared to the explanations I sent to Brendan via email. I've tracked down the details I wrote originally:
This is something I was working on with Alan Moore in 1996 which Alan was forced to abandon. The impetus was that Creation Books were going to be doing an anthology of stories related to Aleister Crowley. Alan was happy to give me the opportunity to illustrate it since our planned Yuggoth Cultures collaboration (also for Creation) fell apart after he left the MS in a London taxi. I forget the title of this story (I'll have to check all these details), it was an odd phrase from Crowley's The Book of the Law but Alan had seven sections planned with each section to be divided into a set number of paragraphs. I forget the number but each paragraph would contain exactly 156 words since 156 was the occult number--derived from Dr John Dee, I think--which formed the basis of the piece. Oh, I remember now...there were seven sections because that's a number of Babalon, the Scarlet Woman; Crowley called all his wives and mistresses Scarlet Women so each section would examine Crowley through the experience of a different woman. We only did the first part which concerns Crowley first wife, Rose Kelly, and their experiences in Cairo in 1904. Alan leant me his Franz von Bayros books since he wanted the art style to be in the manner of what he calls Von Bayros's "fractal pornography". The image is from a reduced photocopy of the very large ink drawing I made which to date has never been published anywhere. There are many Crowley-specific references encoded into it. The original is so large I'm not sure it would have made a good illustration, much of the detail would vanish. But I like the drawing even though it lacks the elegance of Von Bayros's style. That's always the problem with pastiche: you often capture the details but miss the essence of the artist's work.
[...]
If you need more detail about Alan's side of the story, I think the whole piece was going to be called "The ill-ordered house in the Victorious City", from Crowley's The Book of the Law. Seven is a number of Babalon, so too is the number 156. The 156th section of The Book of the Law (chapter III, para, 11) includes that phrase. Alan used the number 156 as a basis for the entire story to the extent of writing it in paragraphs of 156 words each. I forget how many paragraphs there were. This was obviously a difficult task which is one reason why the story didn't get finished. The central part of the drawing is contained by a grid of 156 squares.
Another point: the Rose Kelly sequence is a nasty one--Crowley assaults his wife then forces her to look at the rotting corpse of their daughter. Although Alan only wrote this one section he said the subsequent sections would treat the women better, for their sake, not for Crowley's. The intention was to turn the spotlight from Crowley onto the women who gave him so much yet received little thanks in return. Rose Kelly ended up in an asylum.
I still have a fax or photocopy of the text somewhere, I think, although it's Alan's copyright, of course, so I can't do anything with it.
Check also The Orphan page.
This is something I was working on with Alan Moore in 1996 which Alan was forced to abandon. The impetus was that Creation Books were going to be doing an anthology of stories related to Aleister Crowley. Alan was happy to give me the opportunity to illustrate it since our planned Yuggoth Cultures collaboration (also for Creation) fell apart after he left the MS in a London taxi. I forget the title of this story (I'll have to check all these details), it was an odd phrase from Crowley's The Book of the Law but Alan had seven sections planned with each section to be divided into a set number of paragraphs. I forget the number but each paragraph would contain exactly 156 words since 156 was the occult number--derived from Dr John Dee, I think--which formed the basis of the piece. Oh, I remember now...there were seven sections because that's a number of Babalon, the Scarlet Woman; Crowley called all his wives and mistresses Scarlet Women so each section would examine Crowley through the experience of a different woman. We only did the first part which concerns Crowley first wife, Rose Kelly, and their experiences in Cairo in 1904. Alan leant me his Franz von Bayros books since he wanted the art style to be in the manner of what he calls Von Bayros's "fractal pornography". The image is from a reduced photocopy of the very large ink drawing I made which to date has never been published anywhere. There are many Crowley-specific references encoded into it. The original is so large I'm not sure it would have made a good illustration, much of the detail would vanish. But I like the drawing even though it lacks the elegance of Von Bayros's style. That's always the problem with pastiche: you often capture the details but miss the essence of the artist's work.
[...]
If you need more detail about Alan's side of the story, I think the whole piece was going to be called "The ill-ordered house in the Victorious City", from Crowley's The Book of the Law. Seven is a number of Babalon, so too is the number 156. The 156th section of The Book of the Law (chapter III, para, 11) includes that phrase. Alan used the number 156 as a basis for the entire story to the extent of writing it in paragraphs of 156 words each. I forget how many paragraphs there were. This was obviously a difficult task which is one reason why the story didn't get finished. The central part of the drawing is contained by a grid of 156 squares.
Another point: the Rose Kelly sequence is a nasty one--Crowley assaults his wife then forces her to look at the rotting corpse of their daughter. Although Alan only wrote this one section he said the subsequent sections would treat the women better, for their sake, not for Crowley's. The intention was to turn the spotlight from Crowley onto the women who gave him so much yet received little thanks in return. Rose Kelly ended up in an asylum.
I still have a fax or photocopy of the text somewhere, I think, although it's Alan's copyright, of course, so I can't do anything with it.
Check also The Orphan page.
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| Rose Kelly and Aleister Crowley. |
Aug 13, 2016
Eroi e Mostri by Carmine Di Giandomenico
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| Art by Carmine Di Giandomenico. |
Above, amazing cover by Italian comics artist Carmine Di Giandomenico for the Italian edition of Jess Nevins' Heroes & Monsters: The unoffical companion to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Italian edition published by Magic Press in 2005; original edition released by MonkeyBrain Books in 2003.
Aug 11, 2016
John Coulthart and... waiting for The Soul
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| Alan Moore portrait by John Coulthart. |
Eroom Nala: Are there any future collaborations with Alan you can tell us about? For example a quote from an old Previews magazine "John Coulthart, who will be doing a decadent, partly computer-generated occult strip called "The Soul." The Soul is an occult investigatress who operates in or around 1910 – but it's a very strange 1910, a very beautiful, Art Nouveau world." Can you tell us any more about The Soul? Do you know when and by whom it will be published when it is finished?
John Coulthart: There's not much to tell at the moment since the whole idea remains at a very early stage of development. There are several distinct spheres of influence that it should bring together: early 20th century occultism of the kind seen in many of the "psychic detective" stories of the '20s and '30s, lush and exotic post-Decadence Art Nouveau and the cosmic horror of the early pulp magazines, especially Weird Tales.
John Coulthart: There's not much to tell at the moment since the whole idea remains at a very early stage of development. There are several distinct spheres of influence that it should bring together: early 20th century occultism of the kind seen in many of the "psychic detective" stories of the '20s and '30s, lush and exotic post-Decadence Art Nouveau and the cosmic horror of the early pulp magazines, especially Weird Tales.
The complete interview is available here.
The Soul could be included in The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic book (coming soon from Top Shelf Productions).
Aug 9, 2016
Watchmen by Pino Rinaldi
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| Art by Pino Rinaldi. |
Above, a fantastic Watchmen illustration drawn by Italian comics artist PINO RINALDI.
The image has been used as cover for Lost in Symmetry, an Italian essay volume about Moore & Gibbons' masterpiece.
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