Dec 31, 2013

Infinity Moore

Art by Gary Spencer Millidge.
Previously available for iPad on Sequential, since the 27th of December Infinity N.5 is also downloadable for free in pdf format: here.
Infinity N. 5
The rich issue's content list includes several interesting Moore-related pieces such as:

THE QUOTABLE ALAN MOORE
Moore expert smoky man selects sixty quotes for Alan’ sixtieth with stunning art by Gary Spencer Millidge who also did the cover.
 
TEN THINGS WE LEARNED FROM ALAN MOORE
Dominic Wells on the latest Moore revelations.
 
ALAN MOORE: AN EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMAN
A preview of the acclaimed revised and updated biographic.
Infinity N.5
So... go and download it HERE!!!

Dec 25, 2013

The Bojeffries are... back!

Art by Steve Parkhouse.
Next February a collected edition of The Bojeffries Saga - the comedy series which debuted in Warrior in 1983 and ran through until 1991, written by Moore and drawn by Steve Parkhouse - will be finally available thanks to the joint effort of the US and UK’s publishers Top Shelf and Knockabout.
The 96-page softcover volume will contain all the previously published stories and an all-new episode bringing The Bojeffries up to the present day. Don't miss it!
Cover of the collected edition. Art by Steve Parkhouse.
Info about the book can be read at Top Shelf website: here.
More Bojeffries here.

Dec 17, 2013

Moore’s Eclectic Emporium by Leah & Amber Moore

Photograph by David Ma, from The Quietus interview.
From pp. 261-263 of Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman, the sold-out tribute-book published by Abiogenesis Press in 2003. 
In the following you can read the amusing and brilliant contribution written for the occasion by Alan Moore's daughters Leah & Amber. 
 
Special thanks to Leah and Amber Moore for the permission to post the piece on this blog. 
 
Moore’s Eclectic Emporium 
"Purveyors of quality merchandise, novelties, home furnishings and occult paraphernalia" 
2003-2063
© Leah & Amber Moore
The young reporter’s palms are slick as he knocks on the door. The glass pane is milky with cobwebs, revealing nothing of what lurks beyond. Thuds, clatters and a rasping cough filter from inside, wheezing and muffled swearing grow louder as someone, or something approaches…
“Hang on, hang on, I’m coming…. bloody reporters. Thought they knew we don’t open ‘til noon.  Yeah come on, pull up a…heap. You want a drink? Lemmesee…we got Mango and Lychee… urggh, I think that’s off. We got bio-yogurts, tea, peppermint cordial… or Absinthe. No? Suit yourself. I was just sayin’, we don’t usually open this early… company policy. No it’s no problem, just keep it quick. No he’s not here, his Royal Grand Egyptian wossname is at home, or in town or something. Probably anointing his sacred orbs.
    Yeah, we pretty much have the place to ourselves these days, keep it ticking over.  We are ‘purveyors of quality merchandise, novelties, home furnishings and occult paraphernalia’. Humph. Not that there’s much call for it. I said to him when he retired he might need something to fall back on in his old age… didn’t bank on this though. First we were just sellin’ the stuff he couldn’t shift through normal distributors… CDs, t-shirts, action figures. We had all his spare copies of stuff he did years back. He thought it’d be great, just sign a few dusty copies of Superlative #6 and we’d be sorted. Amazing how people don’t want to buy stuff if it’s covered in tea rings and fag burns isn’t it? The action figures sold at first, but when they did that ‘Imaginary ideas from outside inner Idea Space’ range, we couldn’t give ‘em away. How collectable can abstract concepts be anyway? Even if they do have twenty-seven points of articulation, and detachable accessories…people didn’t really see the point.  Then there was the fiasco about the novel… re-issued it with pictures… lovely pictures mind… but then the publishers decided to drop the text, and just put out the drawings. They’re still selling… colouring books, stuffed toys, the whole lot. Hear there’s a cartoon series planned. We don’t mention it to him of course… not to his good ear.
    The Magick line seemed like a safe bet, you know… flog a few incense sticks to the arty student types, few tie-dye throws… but no. His Holiness the Archduke of Spook said that that wasn’t good enough; he wanted us to sell the real thing. So a couple of phone calls later and we were the only retailer stocking the patented ‘Magick Al’s Occult Odds and Ends’ series. Need a thurible in a hurry? Chalk circles keep smudging? You get the idea. Needless to say, the denizens of Towcester aren’t really big on wands, so we’re still tripping over it all. Ever stubbed your toe on a grimoire? No? Didn’t think so.
    Yep, times are tough that’s for sure. But it’s not like we’re complaining… we have a pretty good life, the two of us. Bloody pair of spinsters. All we need is matching rocking chairs. What?  Boyfriends? Pah! Not for sixty years now. Not since we opened this place. Any potential husbands were either scared off by the Grand Vizier of Grump, or just couldn’t handle the idea of running this place for eternity. Bitter? No we’re not bitter. And anyway, there’s always pay-per-view. No, we got it pretty good here, there’s three rooms upstairs, although one of them is also the storeroom, so it’s pretty cozy bedding down between the boxes. We’ve got his old bath here as well. The bathroom was too small to put any other fittings in, but if you’re used to it, the bath can pretty much be used for everything. Well, nearly everything.
We did have a little shed out back, but he wanted that turned into a grannexe for his beloved life partner when he’s gone. So we’ll have to run this place and bed bath the queen of perv in-between times. “Could you sharpen my pencil dear? Not that one, the Jonquil one…NO! THAT’S CHARTREUSE!” I can see it now. We sell some of her stuff in here too, you know. Yeah, it’s the only thing that’s still selling. What does she call ‘em? ‘Tijuana Bibles’ I think. ‘Sjust a silly name for filth as far as I can see. We sell 'em under the counter, mind. Don’t want that stuff in the window; it'd get us raided for sure. We’re apparently under surveillance by no less than six major government organizations, and that’s not including the American ones. F.B.I., C.I.A., S.W.A.L.E.C., it’s like bloody scrabble! He says they’ve been after him for years… like he’s public enemy number one. He reckons they’ve been hiding over the road from him since that thing he did for the Christic Institute. Yeah right… and who says herbal tobacco doesn’t make you paranoid? Anyway, he’s got his place covered in so many protective spells and charms and amulets, it’s amazing that the gasman can even get in. We don’t have to worry here though, anyone tries to get in and we’ll beat them to death with enochian tea strainers. What’s that? You’ve got enough now? Are you sure? We’ve got plenty of stories yet…like the one about that time when he set fire to his hair on the gas ring, or when he bounced my head off the porch roof when I was a baby…no? Well at least take this as a gift… it’s a cold cast porcelain statuette of the ninth dimension… it’d look lovely on the mantelpiece. Maybe one of our...  Hey! Come back! You forgot your coat!”
The cobwebs flap and writhe around him as he claws his way out into the afternoon drizzle, gasping in deep lungfuls of blessedly pure air. His heart races, pumping blood to his trembling limbs, feeding them the adrenaline he needs to escape. As he races away from the leering shop front, he can almost hear voices, cracked and bubbling from behind the cobwebbed door.
    A hunched figure watches him run, barely human beneath it’s mop of multicolored tangles. Wheezing in between puffs on a foul brown roll-up, it totters over to a low chair and sweeps it free of papers and dust with one flail of its palsied arm. There is a creaking and snapping as it lowers itself into the grimy chair. From up the twisting vertiginous stair comes a rumbling. Dust is shaken from the ceiling and overburdened shelves and forms another layer on the tiny gnarled figure perched beneath. The syrupy light, which falls sluggishly from the landing above, is suddenly blotted out by the shadow of someone descending the stairs. Eventually, a towering figure emerges, its knee length black hair grayed with layers of dust and spiders nests. The eyes which glint from beneath this veil of filth are red rimmed, and dreadful in their purpose. The ragged breathing which accompanies its descent causes great clouds of dust to swirl and eddy in its wake. The hunched gnome looks up at this terrifying form, its eyes like glittering currants in a gray ball of dough. “Amber! We nearly had one! A real live man!”
“Forgeddit sis, they never stay long… you know the only eligible guy that hangs around here is Azmodeus; nice enough, but I wish he’d clean up his webs when he leaves. Yes, ever since we ran out of those Watchmen re-runs we haven’t had a hope of getting out of here. Might as well accept our lot and try that two for one promotion on Kabalistic fridge magnets. Never thought the Idea Space boom would crash like it did, perhaps the whole thing of everywhere being as close as the inside of your head got a little old when peoples’ mother-in-laws kept popping in from across the ether. We could have lived without the ‘Instant Space-Time’ memos direct from dad, and that was when we still had ‘personal’ lives! All that enochian chanting in-between gave me migraines.
      I remember the days, the shop was new and it’s not like we had a choice about working here… all those cherubim fluttering round the office, gnawing through the fax lines; no wonder I got fired really. I did think he went a little far with that ‘Glyco-Gram’ to your studio. Giant snakes nesting would be enough to give anyone writers block. Always gets his way.
Not that it was all bad, it was fun for a while; combing the goat hair on the book spines, air dusting the jars of teeth. It used to have such a mysterious air to it, I thought we’d end up with some of those tall dark and handsome Men In Black guys… never the way though. Here we are, older than should be allowed and sharing a storeroom with more entities than you can shake a wand at. Remember? We tried...
Maybe he’d let us retire if we could convince those creatures he summons to do a little work before they scuttle off? Of course that would be self-serving and an abuse of power… he didn’t think that when he started balding though; he was off chanting at anyone who’d listen before the first tuft hit the floor.
I thought the move from comics to magic would do him good at first… you know? He’d worked so hard building up his own little comics empire from nothing; I thought it was time for him to rest on his laurels and reap the rewards. Never thought he’d have the idea that material gain from non-magical work would pollute his ‘Ain Soph’ whatsit, if only we could've had him sectioned before he transferred the royalties to the retirement fund for archaic deities. Damn those ungrateful entities… sitting around drinking the amber nectar while I make myself Amber-knackered selling signed coffee mugs with their tentacles all over! You’d think they’d have at least let us off with middle-aged spread or something, some perk in exchange for giving up our inheritance.”
In the corner of the room, between stacks of faded boxes, a pinprick of light appears. Glimmering and growing into a cloud of sparkles. The papers that litter every surface flap and flutter in a chill wind which gusts from the glittering portal.  A shape is forming in the centre of the swirling vortex, the muscular coils of a serpent. Atop these coils sits a hirsute head. Its heavy lidded eyes peer from between the silvery fronds of hair, which drips like Spanish moss on either side. The skin sparkles with jeweled scales, carven into deep furrows by the passage of time. A forked tongue flickers from beneath a long moustache, and the beard which sprouts from its slender serpentine chin reaches nearly to the floor. It makes a noise, what could be a greeting, were it not so drenched in sibilants. And turns to bathe the wretched pair of hags in its bloodshot and baleful glare. “Oh hullo dad…”
“I’ll put the kettle on then…”

Leah & Amber Moore 2003

Dec 15, 2013

Swamp Thing page sold for $10,125.25

The 11th of December the original art from page 10 of The Saga of The Swamp Thing N. 20 (the very first issue written by Alan Moore) has been sold on eBay for $10,125.25.

Art by Dan Day and John Totleben with the main character shown in every panel on the page.

This original page was part of artist P. Craig Russell's personal comic art collection.

Dec 14, 2013

Mad Joker

"My warm-up doodle of the Joker turned into this exploration sheet. Was too much fun LOL! Special thanks to Alan Moore and Brian Bolland for creating the ultimate Joker story in 'The Killing Joke'. I remember as a kid, crying at the end." [Joe Madureira]

Posted the 12th of December 2013 on Facebook official Joe Madureira fan page

Dec 12, 2013

1963 advertising

 
A couple of ads promoting 1963 in... 1993, from the pages of Shadowhawk.

Dec 11, 2013

Magus by Melinda Gebbie

Art by Melinda Gebbie.
Above, a gorgeous painted portrait of the Magus by MELINDA GEBBIE.

Visit Melinda Gebbie site: HERE.

Dec 9, 2013

The Italian Dodgem Logic edition

In October, Italian publisher 001 Edizioni published a volume titled The Best of Dodgem Logic, a selected collection of articles, essays, comics and illustrations from Alan Moore's Dodgem Logic magazine. 
The book is printed as a 192-page color softcover with French flaps, 21 cm (wide) x 29,7 cm (tall) (portrait). Cover price is € 34,95
In the following you can see some preview pages.

For my part, I co-edited the book and translated some pieces. It was a very challenging but rewarding experience.
 
Preview pages from The best of Dodgem Logic (001 Edizioni).

Nov 30, 2013

Watchmen in Matt Madden's history of American comics

Above, excerpt from A history of American comic books in six panels by Matt Madden.

panel 4: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen (this panel is copied pretty directly from a Vietnam flashback in the book)

The complete strip can be read here.

Nov 27, 2013

Gaiman talks about Moore, Morrison, himself and... pop music!

Moore, Gaiman, Morrison... through the years!

Neil Gaiman: One of the things I had in common with Alan Moore and a whole generation of comics writers around us — certainly Grant Morrison — was a love and respect for what had gone before but also a healthy interest in seeing where we could go with it. It was a combination of those the two impulses. We were in a period then in mainstream American comics that things had gotten a bit hidebound. Comics read very much like a mixture of what had come before. And I think at the time you had this wonderful little transatlantic thing that happened, this mini-British Invasion. Looking back on it, the analogy of what happened to pop music in the 1960s was probably pretty accurate. Alan Moore got to be the Beatles and, along with Grant Morrison, I was Gerry and the Pacemakers. 

GB: Well, don’t sell yourself short. What about the Kinks or the Stones?
NG: Right, maybe the Kinks or the Stones. But maybe I was Herman’s Hermits.

GB: I’ve got it: the Animals. Then you can have a spooky Eric Burdon, “House of the Rising Sun” kind of thing going on.
NG: The Animals, yes. That would be cool. But yeah, the idea that you had Brits listening to this [American] stuff and fell in love with it and for all the right reasons, and then realized they could do something new with it, something with different cultural impulses. The British Invasion did that in music, and in a way, we did it in comics.

The complete interview can be read here.

Nov 25, 2013

Moore says: "Oh no, we're the mainstream!"

Alan Moore photo by Chris Boland. Used under Creative Commons license.
Excerpt from an interview by Stuart Kelly published on The Guardian.

Moore is most concerned with Jerusalem, his fiction.

"I am currently on the last official chapter, which I am doing somewhat in the style of Dos Passos. It should be finished by the end of the year or close to it. I don't know if anyone else will like it at all," he muses. I say that I can't wait, and that it strikes me that the style he and the likes of Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock pioneered has become central to literary culture. He sighs, shaking the walls: "Oh God, have we? Oh no, we're the mainstream!"

The complete piece can be read here.

For more info about photographer Chris Boland, visit his site here.

Nov 18, 2013

He says... 60!

Photo by Diamond Geyser. Used under Creative Common licence.
Best wishes for a very happy 60th birthday!!!

Nov 15, 2013

Moore the Musician and Dr. Manhattan by A. Boni

Art by Alessandro Boni.
Above you can admire a Moore's portrait as a musician drawn by Italian artist ALESSANDRO BONI, originally realized for the Italian book Canta Canta in 2002 and included at page 234 in Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman tribute volume (Abiogenesis Press, 2003).

Boni also drew a Dr. Manhattan illustration (see below), expressively realized for the Alan Moore: Portrait (page 282)

Illustrations posted on this blog with the author's permission.
Art by Alessandro Boni.

Nov 14, 2013

Marvel CCO talks about Miracleman

Mike Deodato Jr.'s modern interpretation of Miracleman. In black and white.

Marvel's announcement at NYCC and the subsequent solicitations copy referred to the series and character as Miracleman -- the name adopted in America in the '80s. Why keep with this title on this project? Are you guys viewing Neil's Miracleman series of stories different from Marvelman as a character you may use somewhere else?
Joe Quesada: The answer is really simple. After much thought and internal discussion, we felt that between the two, "Miracleman" was the coolest name for the project. I wish I had a more scientific answer for you, but that's kind of how it went down. A bunch of us sat around at the editorial meeting and talked about it. We all remember it fondly as "Miracleman" and just felt that the name was by far better than Marvelman. That's not to say that the name Marvelman isn't in play for something else down the line someday, but when asked to choose between the two, well…

[...] "Miracleman" was one of my all-time favorite comic runs, and when I became Marvel's Editor-in-Chief in 2000, it was one of those things that we looked into possibly acquiring. But, for many reasons, it wasn't something that was going to pan out at that time. So to have the character in our stable at this juncture is really a dream come true. The tough thing about Miracleman is that unless you were reading the actual books around the time that they were published, it's so hard to put into context just how influential they really were. But there have been so many legendary modern comic runs -- and even modern super hero and action adventure movies -- that owe a debt to those Miracleman comics as they were directly influence by the level of realism and tone that were presented for the first time in those stories. I urge fans who are unfamiliar with the material that when they read it for the first time, think about the time period in which it was written and how utterly revolutionary it was.

Read the complete interview HERE.

Nov 12, 2013

Moore biography comic to celebrate his 60th birthday

SEQUENTIAL Releases Free Alan Moore Biography Comic to Celebrate His 60th Birthday
London, November 11th, 2013

SEQUENTIAL, the digital graphic novel app, has today released a free biography comic of the legendary Alan Moore, to celebrate the writer's 60th birthday this November 18th.

Alan Moore: An Extraordinary Gentleman is free to download and is available exclusively via SEQUENTIAL for iPad. It has been created by comics writer and aficionado GARY SPENCER MILLIDGE, author of Alan Moore: Storyteller and the critically acclaimed comic book series Strangehaven.

The comic strip was originally created in 2003 for a tribute book compiled to celebrate Alan Moore’s 50th birthday, using images from Moore's own comics to illustrate his journey, literally and metaphorically. A decade later, Gary Spencer Millidge has revised, updated and expanded the original comic, upgraded images, and re-sequenced panels, to produce a reasonably accurate, albeit highly condensed, slightly simplified, moderately sensationalised and intentionally melodramatic reflection of one of comics’ greatest creators and personalities.
Alan Moore: An Extraordinary Gentleman is now presented in full colour for the very first time, exclusively on SEQUENTIAL, and completely free to download.
The book sits alongside other SEQUENTIAL releases including a free collection of Neil Gaiman's 'lost' comics from the 1980s (with money from each free download donated to the charity Malaria No More UK), works by Moore including From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century and titles by comics legends Gilbert Shelton, Bryan Talbot, Alison Bechdel, Eddie Campbell, David Lloyd and many more.

SEQUENTIAL is available worldwide to download for free from the App Store: here.
About SEQUENTIAL
SEQUENTIAL is a graphic novel storefront app for iPad, launched by digital publishers Panel Nine in May 2013. They work with the best publishers of graphic novels across the world, including Jonathan Cape, Knockabout, Myriad Editions, and Blank Slate Books, as well as a range of indie and small press publishers.
They make quality graphic novels available digitally via their 'gold standard' platform and aim to expand the market for graphic novels for adults with a superhero-free, carefully curated selection of material. Twitter: SEQUENTIAL_app

Extra info about the project can be found at Millidge's blog: here.

Nov 10, 2013

Moore portrait by Bruno Olivieri

Illustration by Bruno Olivieri.
From page 287 of Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book (Abiogenesis Press, 2003).

Above, you can admire a great portrait of the Bearded Bard of Northampton drawn by Italian cartoonist BRUNO OLIVIERI.

Illustration posted on this blog with the author's permission.

Nov 7, 2013

Win a copy of MAGIC WORDS, Moore's biography

Today Aurum Press officially releases Magic Words: The extraordinary life of Alan Moore, an instant classic biography of the British writer by Lance Parkin.

Thanks to Aurum you can win a copy of the book.

The rules are simple.
1. Write an email with subject: "Magic Words"

2. Include in the mail text ***just*** the answer to the following question:
"What are the names of Alan Moore's daughters?"

3. Send the mail to ultrazine (at) tiscali.it ***within*** the 17th of November (23:59, CET).

The 18th of November (which is Moore's birthday), the winner will be drawn within the ones that correctly answered to the above question and then he/she will receive a confirmation email (asking for a shipping address).

So... let's play!

UPDATE (18/11/2013): We have a winner and... he is from Brazil! :)

Nov 4, 2013

Moore music remastered

Etiquette of Violence: Expanded Edition remastered versions of Moore classic songs Old Gangsters Never Die and March Of Sinister Ducks.

Nov 2, 2013

Watchmen Artifact Edition

Announced at NYCC: in 2014, IDW will publish Watchmen: Artificat Edition, a special case in their acclaimed Artist's Edition line.

Scott Dunbier said: "Watchmen" (like I need to tell anyone) is something very special in comics -- no other series has even come close to receiving the praise that has been heaped upon it, and deservedly so. When Dave first approached me about doing a book like this I knew it could not be a traditional Artist's Edition -- too many of the originals had been scattered to the four corners of the globe, we could not do complete stories. But the work is just too damn good to not do a book like this! So I decided to try something a little different -- it looks like an Artist's Edition, it feels like an Artist's Edition, it's the same quality of reproduction as an Artist's Edition, but it's just a little bit different. It will collect individual pages and covers, and be called an Artifact Edition. So it's not an Artist's Edition, per se, but you still get to see all that beautiful Dave Gibbons "Watchmen" art in its rawest form.

Oct 27, 2013

The Roses are coming soon!

Cover by Kevin O'Neill for Nemo: The Roses of Berlin.
The new episode in The League saga, titled Nemo: The Roses Of Berlin, will be published by Top Shelf Comix & Knockabout in April 2014.

From The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen! Sixteen years ago, notorious science-brigand Janni Nemo journeyed into the frozen reaches of Antarctica to resolve her father's weighty legacy in a storm of madness and loss, barely escaping with her Nautilus and her life. Now it is 1941, and with her daughter strategically married into the family of aerial warlord Jean Robur, Janni's raiders have only limited contact with the military might of the clownish German-Tomanian dictator Adenoid Hynkel. But when the pirate queen learns that her loved ones are held hostage in the nightmarish Berlin, she has no choice save to intervene directly, travelling with her ageing lover Broad Arrow Jack into the belly of the beastly metropolis. Within that alienated city await monsters, criminals, and legends, including the remaining vestiges of Germany's notorious 'Twilight Heroes', a dark Teutonic counterpart to Mina Murray's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And waiting at the far end of this gauntlet of alarming adversaries there is something much, much worse. Continuing in the thrilling tradition of Heart of Ice, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill rampage through twentieth-century culture in a blazing new adventure, set in a city of totalitarian shadows and mechanical nightmares. Cultures clash and lives are lost in the explosive collision of four unforgettable women, lost in the black and bloody alleyways where thrive The Roses of Berlin.

Oct 26, 2013

Alan Moore: THE biography

On 18 November this year, Alan Moore turns sixty. In anticipation of that landmark birthday, expert and aficionado Lance Parkin goes in search of this extraordinary gentleman, and reveals a writer quite unlike any other working today.

The 7 November Aurum Press will release MAGIC WORDS: THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF ALAN MOORE, a 400+ pages literary biography of the Bard of Northampton written by Lance Parkin.

In the following you can read a brief interview I did with Parkin (conducted via email a couple of weeks ago).
How did you start writing another book - a biography (!) - about Alan Moore? And how hard was the process?
Parkin:
I really wanted to write something hefty about Alan Moore, a proper book, a literary biography that tells the story of his life and art. I wanted to go into depth, to push at things, not just to recount the facts or rely on interviews with Moore himself.

As you say, I’d previously written The Pocket Essential Alan Moore. That first came out in 2002, it was revised for a reprint in 2009. It’s a good little book, it’s available as an ebook for anyone who’d like a copy, but it’s 15,000 words. It’s more like an introduction to Moore. Magic Words is 165,000. The shortest chapter is longer than the whole Pocket Essential! I had three years to write it, so I just had the time to puzzle over things, redraft, get obsessed with tracking down one little factoid. In a way, having 165,000 words is far easier than trying to condense it to 15,000. You don’t have to simplify, you can go into as much detail as is needed, instead of going ‘they argued’ you can spell out every step of who said what.

The hard part was pushing myself to make sure that this wasn’t just a recounting of facts, that I was bringing my own personality to it, some literary flourishes of my own. Anyone with the internet can assemble a pile of information about Alan Moore using Google. So what can I bring, why am I the person to write this, what can I see that other people haven’t? It’s like any writing, you need to hit your subject at an angle.  
After you completed the book, what did you learn that you didn't know about the Man and his career? Any anecdote to share or to anticipate?
I learned a lot. There’s some great stuff in there about the Arts Labs, these weird little of-their-time hippie get togethers where people read poetry and played music to each other. I didn’t realise just how formative that time had been for Moore, but once you know about them, everything about him makes a lot more sense. There are places where I was quite surprised people haven’t really dug too deep. I was able to find out a little more about the genesis of V for Vendetta, for example: the role Evey played in the original plans, nuts and bolts stuff like how much Moore got paid per page for writing it.

There are other places where I had to navigate some very complex material. ‘Why Alan Moore falls out with DC’ is this giant knotted ball of events, but once you start pinning exact dates on things, it becomes this sequence of little events that cascade.

Oh, and there’s just some material in there that even avid Moore fans probably haven’t seen. A plot summary of Another Suburban Romance. A quick description of Sun Dodgers, a space opera he worked on in the seventies. The ‘He Is Risen’ poster Moore drew for an Emperors of Ice Cream gig.

Was Moore involved in any phase? I read a really nice "quote" of sort he wrote...
I sent him a letter, via a rather convoluted route, at the beginning of the process saying I was doing it, and got a very polite and thoughtful note back saying he didn’t want to be involved. He asked me not to hassle his family, but to take full advantage of it being an unauthorised biography. And so that’s what I did. I spent three years writing a book without Alan Moore looking over my shoulder, and tried to write as full and honest a book as I could. As with every human being, Alan Moore has done things that can be criticised or which look unreasonable. There have been disputes, and when there’s a dispute, there are two sides to a story, so I sought out the other side.

Skip to three years later. I delivered my book, and once we were happy with it, out of courtesy, we sent a copy of the manuscript to Alan Moore on a Friday, with some trepidation, and on Monday morning he phoned my editor, said he liked the book and that he’d like to discuss it with me. I had two long phone calls, the first was just picking through the book and correcting or adding little factual stuff – the name of the caravan park he went to as a child, that kind of thing. The second, I got to interview him properly and to ask about some of the gaps. I’ll be putting the interview up on my blog around the time the book comes out.

I was able to incorporate that interview into the biography, but it’s exactly the book I wrote, with a couple of clarifications from Alan Moore. He didn’t go through it with a red pen and cross out things he didn’t like. So I’m in this odd position that I wrote an unauthorised biography whose subject likes the book. He wrote a fantastic endorsement of the book. 
Which are your expectations about the volume? Are you planning any event, any tour or something like that, for promoting it?
This is not the first or last book people will write about Alan Moore. Magic Words is a literary biography, it looks at his work and his career. I hope people read it, obviously, that it inspires them to look at some of Moore’s more obscure work and to look at his bestseller stuff in a new way. I’d like it to be a good account of some of the more tangled bits of his life. I can guarantee that even the most fervent Moore fans in the world will learn things they didn’t know before. As a basic hope, though, I think Alan Moore’s an interesting person and so I hope this account of his life captures as much of that as possible.

I’m doing a lot of interviews, I’ve written a couple of articles for people. This is the first book where I’ve really done the social media thing in a systematic way. I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise to all my Facebook friends, who’ve been a little bombarded! But that’s so important now – good reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, get lots of pre-orders in, generate some buzz with something as simple as ‘look at all those Likes’.

Back in the day, Moore pioneered a lot of this. It’s odd to say that, but he worked the convention circuit, did endless interviews and appearances.

My publishers have pulled out all the stops, it’s fantastic. They sent me to Comic Con in New York in mid-October for a signing (that was the first time the book was on sale anywhere, they airfreighted in copies), they’re arranging a signing and Q&A for the book launch in London in late November. That’s going to be quite a lavish event for Moore’s fans, I think, there’s going to be more there than just me and a pen.

Considering your knowledge about the subject, which is the thing you would like to see from Moore in the upcoming future?
I’m looking forward to Jerusalem, his vast prose novel. If he did requests, I would love him to do something immense and substantial about William Blake. A graphic novel that did something very clever with Blake’s original artwork, and that complex personal mythology. Moore’s talked about Blake a fair bit, and he did a performance piece, Angel Passage that touched on Blake, but I’d want something with a sort of From Hell density and size to it.
Italian version of  this interview: here.

Another interview with Parkin can be read here.
A review of the book: here.

Oct 20, 2013

The Original Writer aka Alan Moore

Miracleman N. 1: variant cover by Skottie Young.

MIRACLEMAN #1 & 2
THE ORIGINAL WRITER & MICK ANGLO (W)
GARRY LEACH, ALAN DAVIS, PAUL NEARY, STEVE DILLON & MICK ANGLO (A)
ISSUE #1 – COVER BY JOE QUESADA
Variant COVER BY JOHN CASSADAY
Variant COVER BY MARK BUCKINGHAM
Variant COVER BY JEROME OPENA
Variant COVER BY LEINIL FRANCIS YU
Sketch VARIANT BY JOE QUESADA
YOUNG VARIANT BY SKOTTIE YOUNG
CLASSIC VARIANT BY GARRY LEACH
ISSUE #2 – COVER BY ALAN DAVIS
Variant COVER BY ARTHUR ADAMS
Variant COVER BY MIKE PERKINS
Variant COVER BY MIKE MCKONE
Sketch VARIANT BY ALAN DAVIS• KIMOTA! With one magic word, a long-forgotten legend lives again!
• Freelance reporter Michael Moran always knew he was meant for something more -- now, a strange series of events leads him to reclaim his destiny!
• Relive the ground-breaking eighties adventures that captured lightning in a bottle -- or experience them for the first time -- in these digitally restored, fully relettered editions!
• Issue 1 includes material originally presented in WARRIOR #1 and MIRACLEMAN #1, plus the MARVELMAN PRIMER. Issue #2 includes material originally presented in WARRIOR #1-5, plus bonus material.
ISSUE #1 – 64 PGS./Parental Advisory…$5.99
ISSUE #2 – 48 PGS./Parental Advisory…$4.99

Oct 17, 2013

Paper Moore

By Sally Grossart
"Paper doll" versions of Alan Moore by Sally Grossart, related to a Mustard magazine issue.

Alan Moore version 1: dressed as he appeared in Mustard magazine. Pdf: here.
Alan Moore version 2: dressed in his wedding finery. Pdf: here.