that's not a bad thing

Alan Moore with daughter and editor Leah. Photograph: Mitch Jenkins/Leah Moore.

Excerpt from the interview included in the Electricomics booklet.

Alan Moore: We may end up creating something that isn't technically a comic at all but that's not a bad thing. We'll just have to give a name to whatever it is that we've actually formed. Yeah, this has got an awful lot of possibilities, with things that you can do. I suppose what I'm thinking is when I do something as sophisticated, or more sophisticated, in this medium that I can do with comics, as they stand at the moment, then I will be finally convinced.

The Electricomics booklet can be ordered here.

Electricomics website: here.

Alan Moore by Eddie Campbell

Art by Eddie Campbell.

Above, a magic portrait of Alan Moore by From Hell's artist Eddie Campbell. It's an ex-libris produced for the French edition of The Birth Caul. More details here.

Eddie Campbell's blog: here.

Alan Moore by Joseph Viglioglia

Art by Joseph Viglioglia.

Above, an intense portrait of Alan Moore by Italian professional comic book artist Joseph Viglioglia (also known as Joseph Vig or Eon).

For more info about Viglioglia visit his site: here.

V by Marco Foderà

Art by Marco Foderà.

Above, an explosive sketch of V by Italian professional comic book artist Marco Foderà.

Where does he get his ideas? by Batton Lash

Art by Batton Lash.

Below you can read the 2 page story written and drawn by well-known comic book creator BATTON LASH for Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book (2003, Abiogenesis Press, page 152-153). Batton Lash is currently contributing a new strip to a former collaborator of Moore's, David Lloyd, for his Aces Weekly project. 

Where does he get his ideas? is published on this blog with the author's permission.

For more info about Batton Lash visit his site here.

Where does he get his ideas? by Batton Lash.

Alan Moore's early days

Hypernaut © and ™ Stephen R. Bissette.

Excerpt from an interview by Lance Parkin.

Alan Moore: [...] It wasn’t until I was about twenty-four that I came up with Plan B.

Lance Parkin: And that was to write and draw an epic space opera, possibly one you could sell to 2000AD. You’ve said you had elaborate plans, but after a year you only had a couple of pages completed. I don’t think you’ve ever gone into detail.
Alan Moore: It was all in my head. I think it was called Sun Dodgers, but whether I lettered that up, I doubt it. They were a group of superheroes in space, with a science fiction explanation for each of these characters. They were a motley crew in a spaceship, probably going back the kind of strips Wally Wood was doing in witzend and The Misfits. That was certainly the model Steve Moore was building on with Abslom Daak. I was thinking along the same lines. I can remember somebody looked a bit like a futuristic samurai.

Lance Parkin: Like Warpsmith?
Alan Moore: I suppose so. A coincidence. It was Garry Leach who came up with that look, I gave him a free hand, I wasn’t adverse to it. There was also a humanoid robot thing with a big steel ball for a head, which probably later surfaced as the Hypernaut in 1963. There was a half-human, half-canine creature who ended up as Wardog in the Special Executive. I only got a couple of pages done. The ideas I had … actually, thinking back, there was a character whose name was Five, and I don’t think I ever got around to drawing him, but my vague idea was that he was a mental patient of undefined but unusual abilities who had been kept in a particular room, room five, that might have been an element which fed into V for Vendetta. I don’t think there was anything else that ended up in anything.

The complete interview can be read here.

Lance Parkin is the author of Alan Moore: Magic Words biography.

Adam Hines and From Hell

From Hell cover.

Excerpt from an interview with Duncan The Wonder Dog's creator Adam Hines conducted by Marco Apostoli, originally published in Italian on Fumettologica site.

Adam Hines: From Hell by Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell [is] my favorite “graphic novel” I’ve yet read. I could put another three or four more Alan Moore stories and another two or three Eddie Campbell books on here, but this, to me, is my favorite work by both of them, and what I consider their best. Still chilling.

The complete interview, in Italian, can be read here.

Special thanks to Marco Apostoli for the support.

Chris Weston talks about Moore

A sketch of Allan Quatermain drawn by Chris Weston at Bristol Con 2003.

The following contribution written by amazing comics artist Chris Weston was originally published in Ultrazine's Alan Moore Special in 2002.

Chris Weston: So what have I got to say about Alan Moore? Not much. Never worked with him; never met him; haven't even read an interview by him. Let's face it, I'm the wrong person to be writing about him, really. He looks like a big hippy bastard and I'm told he smokes too much dope, apparently. I don't know anything else about his private life. Nothing. And I wouldn't have it any other way! "There shouldn't be artists, only their works." Orson Welles once said. I couldn't agree more. In this new millennium, Celebrity is no longer just a Cult; it's a bloody Craze! It's poisoned every single popular art-form I can think of, including comics. I don't need to tell you about all the so-called "big-name" writers who put so much time and effort into promoting themselves, they actually forget to sit down and write some decent stories.
Worse than that, there's even gossip columns devoted to the activities of comics creators... that has got to be the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard.

I don't know if Alan Moore has his own website, and I couldn't give a toss if he did. All I know is I've never heard of one, so I'm going to assume he spends all his valuable time on his craft: writing comics. Funny ones like "D.R. and Quinch". Ground-breaking ones like "Watchmen". Moving ones like "Halo Jones". Traditional ones like "Tom Strong". Shit, I'm not going to reel off his whole back catalogue; we all know his work and its brilliance. But nothing about the man, please!

I will let you know which Alan Moore book is my own personal favourite, though: it's gotta be "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"! The single most charming publication in the whole history of comics!

Zander Cannon and Moore's cartooning Tetris

Zander Cannon's cover art for Smax tp.

In the following, you can read an intense post published by artist Zander Cannon on his Facebook page the 18th of November 2014.

Today is Alan Moore's 61st birthday.

I worked with Alan on Top Ten and Smax the Barbarian in the late '90s and early '00s for America's Best Comics, an imprint of Wildstorm, which was then itself an imprint of DC Comics. I've never met the man in person (and it has been postulated that he no longer has human form, but rather exists as a blue smoke which gives a vague sense of unease), but spoke with him frequently on the phone. Sometimes it was for a legitimate storytelling reason, but as often as not it was because I knew that all things must eventually pass, and there would come a day when I had no reason to speak to one of my greatest heroes on the phone.

I learned more from my time working from Alan Moore's scripts than at virtually any point in my career. Gene Ha and I had adjacent studios while working on Top Ten and we passed our pages back and forth, talking about the background characters, ideas for design, and taking guesses where the story was going (we had no idea). The scripts, beyond being legendarily dense, long, specific, and chatty, were an education in comics storytelling right there on the page. His style of comics does not work for every artist, but it absolutely hits the bullseye on HIS style. It creates intricate, layered, humorous, on-point comics that are both dense and dynamic, treating every panel like a well-constructed sentence and every page like a well-constructed paragraph. Consequently, drawing from his scripts was as much an exercise in efficiently cramming elements into a panel as it was a process of storytelling. I used to tell people it was like 'cartooning Tetris'.

It's come into vogue lately to criticize the once-uncriticizable Moore for being a crank, or for protesting the unsanctioned or unethical use of his or others' work to make a billion dollars for massive corporations, or for simply being unwilling to 'go along to get along'. Now, I don't like to have my parade rained on any more than anyone else, but for Moore to harsh our collective buzz about the Watchmen or V for Vendetta movies by speaking out against the way he's been treated, and the similar ways that others have been or are being treated, is completely fair, and completely warranted. And frankly, reducing it down to "well, that's just the deal he made", shows a crucial lack of awareness of how comics companies ran in (in this case) the late '70s to mid-'80s. Furthermore, for a prominent person who has financially thrived in that system to nevertheless make the case for fair treatment is very important for those of us who have yet to knock one out of the park.

Alan is a gentleman, a remarkable artist, and in my experience, a kind and generous soul. I thank him for providing me a boost in my career, the Platonic ideal of a great comic book script, and hundreds of thousands of pages of wonderful comics. Not to mention some really enjoyable phone calls. [Zander Cannon]

Wot have Oi done...

Art by John Cullen.

Above, a short comics by artist John Cullen featuring a perplexed Alan Moore regarding the V mask popularity. 

Visit John Cullen's site here.

Brian K. Vaughan's hero

A page from Swamp Thing Vol.3 N.2 (Vertigo, 2000) by B.K. Vaughan, R. Petersen and J. Rubinstein.

Excerpt from an interview with acclaimed writer Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The last man, Ex Machina, Saga) conducted by Adriano Ercolani and Evil Monkey during the last Lucca Comics & Games convention. 

Originally published in Italian on Fumettologica site.

Is there any other author that you feel close to you or you are inspired by?
Brian K. Vaughan: In comics...Alan Moore is my hero. Bur I will never be able to write in his style.

Well, you have been compared to him many times!
Brian K. Vaughan: Unfairly! Maybe they said: "This guy sucks compared to Alan Moore!"

The complete interview, in Italian, can be read here.
Special thanks to Adriano Ercolani for the support.

Electricomics badges

From Electricomics' online shop.

A set of all seven Electricomics badges, featuring:

The logos of all four of the forthcoming stories - Big Nemo, Sway, Red Horse and Cabaret Amygdala,
The Electricomics Logo itself,
Electricosmos- the logo of the open publishing platform.

All logos were designed by the Mighty Todd Klein.
As well as the logos, there is also the lovely muse of Electricomics from Colleen Doran's cover, coloured by Jose Villarrubia.

Buy here.

Moore 61

Art by Michael Netzer.

Happy b-day, Magus!

Above, an amazing portrait of Alan Moore drawn by Michael Netzer.

Alan Moore on Gilbert Shelton

Art by Gilbert Shelton.

Gilbert Shelton is as near as comics have come to producing a natural comedic genius of the same stature as a Chaplin or a Tati. With the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers he created a hilarious and unlikely sibling trio as timeless as in their appeal as the Marx brothers, able to somehow endure well beyond their natural era while keeping all of its ridiculous idiosyncrasies intact. Recognition.. for Shelton’s mastery of slapstick, his practiced comic storytelling and timing, his remarkable skill as a draughtsman .. is long overdue. He is truly one of the greatest and most sublimely funny talents that the comic medium has to offer, and his work will undoubtedly delight and convulse people of  future generations, for whom the black-light poster glow and Nepalese temple-ball fug of the sixties will no longer be even a distant memory. Timeless brilliance. [Alan Moore]

Source: Knockabout site.

Electricomics booklet

Art: Colleen Doran, colours: José Villarrubia; logo: Todd Klein.

Above the cover for the Electricomics limited edition booklet produced for Thought Bubble 2014: art by Colleen Doran, colours by José Villarrubia, logo by Todd Klein. It's a clear homage to the works of Czech Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha.

The booklet will have some of the beautiful art we have coming in for the project, some of the lovely shots taken by Mitch Jenkins over the course of project so far, a stunning cover by Colleen Doran, a completely new three page comic by our digital comics guru Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, and an interview with the man behind the curtain himself, Alan Moore.

Mr Moore has kindly said he will pre-sign all of them [...].

More details at Electricomics website here.

About making films

Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins.

Excerpt from The Leeds International Film Festival Q & A event. Transcript by Hannah Means Shannon for Bleeding Cool.

Alan, we know you’ve been unhappy with previous film adaptations of your work. What inspired you to get into making films first hand?

Alan Moore: I did read a review that said I was the “human avatar of Grumpy Cat”. You’re all laughing because you know what grumpy cat is. I don’t. My feelings about the adaptation films, if you can call them that is that I don’t like adaptations generally. There’s always going to be a couple of things that go against that premise, but there are no exceptions in the films that have been made of my work. I have nothing against the film medium—it’s a great medium. But actually I don’t see much film these days.

When things switched over to digital, for some obscure reason, I stuck with analog, so it’s now a dead TV in the corner of the room. But I do have an affinity for cheap cinema. If you’ve got money, then you don’t need imagination, and if you’ve got imagination, then you don’t need money. The main thing that differs from comics is that you can be kind of sociopathic in comics. All the people you are putting in these terrible situations are made out of paper. The first time that was put to the test was when we made Act of Faith. Mitch asked me along to the shooting, and I said I’d rather not because I’d met Siobhan Hewlett and I thought “She’s a nice woman and I don’t want to see her choking in a wardrobe”. By the time we got to His Heavy Heart, with Darell D’Silva in physical pain, I was cold-hearted.

Read the complete piece here.

Miracleman: Onofrio Catacchio inks Kevin Nowlan

Art by: Kevin Nowlan (pencils) and Onofrio Catacchio (inks)

In 2010 I commissioned a Miracleman sketch to Kevin Nowlan (you can see it here). 

Some months ago I sent a good scan of Nowlan's pencils to Italian well-known comics artist, and friend, Onofrio Catacchio. And I asked him if he could be interested in inking the piece. He generously replied "sure, just give me some time". 

During the last Lucca Comics & Games convention I received the amazing final piece: you can admire it above!

Special thanks to Onofrio for his generosity and fantastic art skills.

You can visit Onofrio Catacchio website here.

Tom Strong by Mike Wieringo

Art by Mike Weiringo.

Above a great Tom Strong sketch by the amazing Mike Weiringo.We miss you, Ringo!

Bone and... Alan Moore

Art by Jeff Smith.

Above, from Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book (2003, Abiogenesis Press, page 55), a gorgeous illustration by internationally acclaimed artist JEFF SMITH featuring his famous Bone cousins.

Visit Jeff Smith's site here.

Angri Alan

Art by Tiziano Angri.

Above, an amazingly powerful portrait of Alan Moore drawn by Italian comics artist and illustrator Tiziano Angri for my personal collection.

More info about Tiziano Angri here and here.

Dr. Manhattan and the Metabaron by Juan Giménez

Above, an awesome illustration by Internationally acclaimed artist Juan Giménez featuring Dr. Manhattan and Othon the Metabaron. It is a commission realized for collector Gerard Nadal.

Moore talks about his... influence upon comics

Photo by José Villarrubia.

Excerpt from an interview conducted by Alan David Doane in 2004. 

The complete interview is available here.

You’re seen by many as a key figure in the history of comics and I’m wondering if you’d talk a little bit about what ways that you saw your career intersecting with, and affecting the course, of the comics industry in the time that you spent in it.
Alan Moore: Well, my original intention was simply to try and scrape a very modest living as a kind of sub-underground cartoonist. I found within a couple of years that I was never going to be able to draw well enough, to my own satisfaction or quickly enough, to be able to carry out a career as an artist. At this point, I decided to maybe try writing, because I thought that I was perhaps I was better at that than I would be at actually drawing the pictures that go with it. So, I launched on a career as a writer and, from the very beginning, I had a couple of simple precepts, if you like…I decided that I was never going to write a story that I, personally, wasn’t interested in. I figured that this would be a helpful dividing line to prevent me from sliding into hack-work, which is always a danger in an industry where the deadlines come fast and furious. So, I kind of developed a method by which I would take…even on promising material, and then make it into something that was fun for me, that was either amusing or intellectually stimulating or, you know, that my use of language or storytelling or something like that…there some element in the story that would provide me with sufficient motivation to do a good job on it.

And by simply following that agenda, I found myself fairly rapidly in demand over here and then I was, swiftly thereafter, head-hunted by DC Comics and asked to write Swamp Thing and I simply carried on doing the same thing that I’d been doing, in that I would try to make whatever I was given interesting from my own point of view, because my feeling is that if I’m not interested in the work, then I can’t expect the reader to be. That just seems to be obvious, that there’s something about the writer’s enthusiasm that communicates to the reader. I think that readers know if a particular piece of writing is being a joyless slog for the writer because that becomes obvious.

So, in order to make these things interesting to me, I found that I was having to radicalize them. I expected this to probably cause more trouble than it did to start with, but I found that the readers were responding to it and so I found that encouraging. So I carried on doing it only moreso and I got a lot of support from Karen Berger and the other people at DC at that time and they seemed to like the fact that the book was gaining in sales figures every month; it seemed to indicate that we were doing something right. So, I was encouraged to push it as far as I wanted and that’s, luckily, the sort of situation that I’ve enjoyed in comics ever since. I think people trust me to know that I’m probably going somewhere that’s at least interesting, you know, it might be a bit mad or disturbing or something like that, but it’ll probably be somewhere interesting. And, if I’m just left to my own devices, I probably won’t scare the horses too much and I’ll probably bring in a good end result.

And, as for how that’s affected comics, I really don’t know. Sometimes, on my darker days, I tend to feel that most of my influence upon comics has been negative, that perhaps people who read the early Swamp Thing or Watchmen or a lot of the work that I was doing in the ’80s, that what they took from it wasn’t its urge to experiment or its urge to stretch the limits of the form and the medium. It seems that perhaps what a lot of them took from it was the violence, a certain kind of intellectual posture…a few other things, and it seemed to condemn comics to a lot of very depressing and grim post-Watchmen comic books. Maybe that’s too bleak, like I say, it depends from day to day, it depends what sort of mood I’m in and you’ve caught me on a tired day today, so, I’m perhaps being a bit pessimistic there.

I mean, I’d like to think that if I’ve shown anything, it’s that comics are the medium of almost inexhaustible possibilities, that there have been…there are great comics yet to be written. There are things to be done with this medium that have not been done, that people maybe haven’t even dreamed about trying. And, if I’ve had any benign influence upon comics, I would hope that it would be along those lines; that anything is possible if you approach the material in the right way. You can do some extraordinary things with a mixture of words and pictures. It’s just a matter of being diligent enough and perceptive enough and working hard enough, continually honing your talent until it’s sharp enough to do the job that you require. I hope that if I had any sort of benign legacy at all, that that would be it, but I don’t know, I think that my legacy, some days, like I say, I think that my legacy is more likely to be a lot of humourless snarling, sarcastic psychopaths, but that’s just on my black days, pay me no mind.

[the complete interview is available here]

Constantine by Camuncoli and Palmiotti

Art by G. Camuncoli (pencils) and J. Palmiotti (inks)

Above, an amazing illustration featuring our beloved classic John Constantine by Giuseppe Camuncoli (pencils) and Jimmy Palmiotti (inks) from the sold-out Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book (2003, Abiogenesis Press), page 253.

You can find Camuncoli's entry on The Comic Book Database here.

Visit Palmiotti's blog here.

Alan Moore talks about Crossed +100

Art by Gabriel Andrade.

Excerpt from an interview published on BleedingCool site (here) 

How did you come up with the “future” of Crossed and extrapolate what things would be like 100 years after the outbreak?
Alan Moore:  To start with, it would make a huge impact if all human industry were to stop dead in 2008. I’ve tried to think all this through. I’ve tried to come up with an estimate of around 7 billion people on the planet, and I followed Garth’s estimate in one of his “Fatal Englishman” stories, where he outlined the numbers that had been infected and the numbers that had survived, and extrapolated that across the planet. There would be a massive depopulation and a lot people would just be killed. The majority of survivors would be infected and there would be just tiny groups of uninfected human beings, however, given time, those trends would start to reverse.

The main thing is that the Crossed are extraordinarily stupid. And do not have any survival instincts. Humans do have survival instincts, and those who have survived might have done so because they’ve gotten to a place of relative safety, somewhere that can be defended, somewhere that was isolated enough not to be a problem. They would have presumably gotten better at surviving if they’ve managed to survive. The Crossed, on the other hand, would start dying off in extraordinary numbers. Mind you, there are extraordinary numbers of them, so that wouldn’t be as much of a consolation for the human survivors for a considerable time. But the first bad winter would kill an awful lot of the Crossed who hadn’t already died from starvation, stupidity, or their own colleagues.
[...]
 

the problem with the Crossed, they can’t really have children. They are not going to survive. We allowed that there might be a tiny, tiny percentage that might select for not killing their own children. That you might get small, isolated outposts of inbred Crossed, that this was a possibility. But the others would be dying off in extraordinary numbers. And we worked out that certain tipping points would come.

There’d be a time when the population of humans was starting to expand, the population of Crossed was receding dramatically, and also that a lot of the Crossed children that somehow managed to survive—if it happened in 2008—are going to be by 2060 relatively old Crossed. And they are not going to have been looking after themselves. So they are going to be easier to deal with, they are going to be less numerous, and I can see that from around that time, that you are going to start to get humans being able to have relatively defended settlements and would possibly start concerted efforts to “clean” various cities of what remaining Crossed there were.

Now there are still not many remaining people, and they are scattered in settlements across the world. But this was the basic premise. Vegetation would have altered. Most cities, as far as I understand it, would have been colonized by Buddleia, within 4 or 5 years. That would colonize most of our urban centers, and that brings in the butterflies, and most of the insects, which brings in the birds, which brings in other predators. And with the species that had escaped from botanical gardens and zoos, a lot of our western cities would be pretty tropical.

The complete interview can be read here.

More detail about the series: here.

Art by Gabriel Andrade.

Moore's Crossed +100

The 15th of September Bleeding Cool announced a new miniseries written by Moore to be published by Avatar Press. The first issue will be on the shelves in Dicember.

Moore will play in the horrorific universe of Crossed, created by Garth Ennis, with art provided by Brazilian artist Gabriel Andrade. 

"[...] Moore has created an entirely new world and a hundred years of “missing” history to explore the future of the Crossed outbreak, what will happen to the Crossed themselves over such a long period of time, and what fate awaits humanity after losing the basic elements of modern civilization. 

[...] Crossed: +100 features characters in a specific enclave of survivors, many of whom have never actually seen an infected Crossed individual and are seeking to build a future for themselves upon the ruins of the past. The natural world has returned to human cities in force, and humans are resorting to reclaiming basic technological advancements. Central to the narrative is Future Taylor, a female archivist intrigued by science fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries, and her struggling team of reclamation workers. When they encounter a small group of Crossed, they are troubled by the implications of proliferation from the violent and infected beings, and set out to uncover the mystery of why Crossed seem to be increasing and behaving unusually in the region. Is there really any hope for rebuilding human culture, or will the Crossed epidemic finally stamp out human evolution through the last of the straggling survivors?

Alan Moore explains the appeal of the series to him as a writer:

What kind of human future would there be at all? Would humans all be gone? Once I started thinking about this, and I checked all this with Garth, and he thought that it was logical, it seems pretty sound. So, that’s been part of the thrill of it. I think people think of Crossed as a horror story, and I can see why. It is extremely horrible. But actually I’ve always had my problems with genre, and I am coming to the conclusion that genre has really only ever been a convenience.
Now, looking at Crossed, I was actually thinking that this, for my purposes, is a horror story, but it’s also a science fiction story. I was thinking that Crossed is actually a science fiction story that has got a really, really high horror quotient. So that was the way that I started approaching it. I was treated Crossed as a “What if?” story, which is the premise of most science fiction.

Not only has Alan Moore full-scripted this contained arc of Crossed, but he has also designed every single cover of the series personally, in multiple formats. [...]

[...] more information on a special “sampler” publication that will precede the series’ arrival in shops and include exclusive artwork, notes from Alan Moore, and a first look at the series."

The complete article can be read on BleedingCool site, here.

Jerusalem is... finished!

From the official Facebook page for Alan Moore (here), administrated by Moore's daughter Leah Moore. The annoucement is dated the 9th of September.

The book will be published by Knockabout who co-publish all of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen books;  Knockabout is also managing the foreign publishing rights.

Alan Moore portrait by Francesco Frongia

Art by Francesco Frongia.

Above, an intense portrait of Alan Moore (with a bit of V embedded in) drawn by Italian comics artist Francesco Frongia (founder of the comics collective Mammaiuto) for my collection. 

For more information about Francesco Frongia visit his blog (here).

Lovecraft's entities and... psychogeography

The new annotated H.P. Lovecraft. Introduction by Alan Moore.

Excerpt from All About Alienation: Alan Moore On Lovecraft And Providence, an interview by Nick Talbot published in August on The Quietus website. 

"He was doing his writing where he loved the New England landscape around him, he loved its history, he loved the way it looked, he loved everything about it. In that sense he was a very provincial person. He found his stay in New York unendurably horrific. But at the same time he was keeping up with the science of the day. And he understood the implications of that science; he understood the implications of relativity; he understood the implications of the quantum physicists; perhaps only dimly, but he understood how this decentralised our view of ourselves; it was no longer a view of the universe where we had some kind of special importance. It was this vast, unimaginably vast expanse of randomly scattered stars, in which we are the tiniest speck, in a remote corner of a relatively unimportant galaxy; one amongst hundreds of thousands, and it was that alienation that he was trying to embody in his Nyarlathoteps and his Yog-Sothoths. 

[...] the anthropocentric view of the world – he saw that that was all gone. And I think tellingly he said that his entities should not be seen as evil. He said things like 'good' 'evil' 'love' 'hate' – these are all human concepts that mean nothing to the vast infinities. But as a person he loved the world around him. And he found great meaning in it and great warmth. As an intellect he understood that that area around him was just part of a gigantic chaotic meaningless random universe. And I think that in his stories of transcoding horrors manifesting in New England settings he was trying to bridge the gap between the personal, intimate human world as we know it and the vast, inhuman cosmos as we know it. Yet that's not psychogeography but its not a million miles away from it." [Alan Moore]

Moore's characters by Kresimir Biuk

Art by Kresimir Biuk.

Above, an illustration by Croatian artist Kresimir Biuk published in Alan Moore: Ritratto di uno Straordinario Gentleman (2003, Black Velvet Editrice, page 56), the Italian edition of the Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book.

The image is contained only in the Italian edition.

Kresimir Biuk's blog: here.

Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore: The Scorpio Boys

Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore at Moore's wedding. Photo by José Villarrubia.

Hereunder you can read the poetry written by worldwide acclaimed writer NEIL GAIMAN as contribution to Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman, a book published in 2003 to celebrate Moore's 50th birthday.

Posted on this blog with the author's permission. 

THE SCORPIO BOYS IN THE CITY OF LUX SING THEIR STRANGE SONGS
for Alan Moore
© Neil Gaiman

The Scorpio Boys in the city of Lux sing their strange songs
and smear the windows of your car with cheap rags,piss on your doorstep.
It's lucky to see them. If you see them you won't die today.

There's an old man. He's all that stands between us and the End of the World.
The End of the World knocks on his door once or twice a week,
they have cake and tea and a chat, and crumpets in the winter, and a battle of wits.
So far the old man is winning, the world only ends every now and again.
We don't remember it ending. We're from this go around.

Oh, they stare, the Scorpio Boys, it's an act of magic of course
if you believe in them at all. If you see them you'll be lucky. So damn lucky.

Beaten up and left for dead by the Piltdown Men
singing *we are we are the Piltdown men we are we are*
they stumble down the roads of the cities of twilight
breaking bottles and puking in gutters,
someone finds you and picks you up and carries you home.
Maybe it was us. You never know.

A cigarette traces a shape in the air,
Something made out of light and smoke, so you know it's magical
someone says it's lucky and who knows what will happen?
Stranger things happen in cities. Even small cities.

Take Lux, for example: a city that isn't even there,
Like all cities it is a magical description,
a way of making impossible things happen at a distance,

like a poem or a whisper or a saucer filled with ink --
you can stare into it, or dip your pen.
Either way it will take you to invisible places,
open a door in your hearts to us,
sharp-nosed and shabby genteel, with ink-spots and cinder-burns on our clothes.

When there are enough of us, we will become a city.

Doing it because we believe in it. Because the stories need to be described.
And come to us for their faces.


© Neil Gaiman

Alan Moore and the gods

Glycon depicted on ancient Roman coin.

Excerpt from an interview conducted by Matthew De Abaitua in 1998. 

The complete interview can be read here.

Alan Moore: In my own experience – and this is where we get into the complete madness here – I have only met about four gods, a couple of other classes of entity as well. I’m quite prepared to admit this might have been a hallucination. On most of the instances I was on hallucinogenic drugs. That’s the logical explanation – that it was purely an hallucinatory experience. I can only talk about my subjective experience however, and the fact that having had some experience of hallucinations over the last twenty-five years or so, I’d have to say that it seemed to me to be a different class of hallucination. It seemed to me to be outside of me. It seemed to be real. It is a terrifying experience, and a wonderful one, all at once – it is everything you’d imagine it to be. As a result of this, there is one particular entity that I feel a particular affinity with. There is late Roman snake god, called Glycon, he was an invention of the False Prophet Alexander. Which is a lousy name to go into business under. He had an image problem. He could have done with a spin doctor there.

Anyway, the False Prophet Alexander is a Moon and Serpent hero, a saint if you like. He was running what seemed to be a travelling Selene medicine show, he would do a performance of the mysteries of the goddess Soi. The only reference to him is in the works of Lucien, who calls him a complete charlatan and fraud. At some point, Alexander the False Prophet said he was going to preside over the second coming of the god Asclepius, the serpent god of medicine. He said this is going to happen at noon tomorrow, in the marketplace. So everyone said ‘sounds good’ and they all went down there. After a little while, they said “come on, False Prophet Alexander, where is the second coming of Asclepius?” At which point, The False Prophet Alexander bent down, reached into a puddle at his feet, pulled up an egg, split it with his thumbnail, and there was a tiny snake inside, and said “Behold, the new Asclepius”, took it home with him, where over a week it apparently grew to a prodigious size until it was taller than a man, and had the head and features of a man. It had long blonde hair, ears, eyelids, a nose. At this point he started to exhibit it in his temple, providing religious meeting with this incarnate god. At which point Lucian said, it was obvious, I could have done that. Lucian is another James Randi, you know, I could have done that, he got the snake’s head under his arm, speaking tube over his shoulder, child’s play. And he’s probably right, that’s probably how he did it. If I’m going to adopt a god, I’d rather know starting out that it was a glove puppet. To me it’s a real god, there’s nothing that precludes a glove puppet from being a real god. How else would you explain the cult of Sooty? But a god is the idea of a god. The idea of a god is a god. The idea of Glycon is Glycon, if I can enhance that idea with an anaconda and a speaking tube, fair enough. I am unlikely to start believing that this glove puppet created the universe. It’s a fiction, all gods are fiction. It’s just that I happen to think that fiction’s real. Or that it has its own reality, that is just as valid as ours. I happen to believe that most of the important things in the material world start out as fiction. That everything around us was once fiction – before there was the table there was the idea of a table, and the idea of a table before tables was fiction. This is the most important world, the world of fictional things. That’s the world where all this starts. So I had an experience which seems to be an experience of this made-up, Basil-Brush type entity. It was devastating.

The complete interview is available here.

Rob Williams and... The Fury

The Daredevils N. 11

From the sold-out Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book (2003, Abiogenesis Press), page 151. 

In the following you can read the contribution written by British comic book writer ROB WILLIAMS.

For more info about him and his works, visit his site: here.

Allow me to introduce you to The Fury

© Rob Williams

1983. I was 12-years-old. I liked comics. I liked bright, fun comics about super heroes who hit each other a lot. Justice League, Avengers, that type of thing. I liked Roy Of The Rovers, Whizzer And Chips and the Victor Book For Boys. I LIKED comics. Understand?

And then I got hold of a copy of Daredevils #1, and suddenly I loved comics.

Daredevils was a British black and white comic which, as well as reprinting classic Spider Man stories, also contained Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Alan Moore and Alan Davis’ Captain Britain.

Now, I wasn’t sophisticated enough at the time to work out why these stories were better than anything else I had read up to that point – I just knew that they were. In the same way that I vaguely knew at the time that I had funny feelings about Erin Grey and her tight jump suits in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

I knew that I liked Alan Davis’ artwork a lot. I also knew then that the Fury scared the life out of me. It still does.

Back to the future - 2003, where I’m 31, and women do not, sadly, all wear Erin Gray jump suits. Now I write comics, where I just used to just read them.

As a writer you’re always looking for a character’s high concept – to clarify for the readers what their motivations are. 20 years on, you can’t get much more high concept than The Fury.

It kills super-heroes.

It is immensely strong, utterly ruthless, with the “logic of a computer. Intuition of a dog.” It never stops. It keeps coming. “It runs like a retarded child” (Moore made us imagine how horribly it moves – how many comic writers do that?). It has a purity to it. It cares about nothing. Is distracted by nothing. It murders. It is the stuff of nightmares.

Reading the trade paperback of Captain Britain now The Fury still makes me feel like wetting myself with fear as poor Linda McQuillan did back then. It kills super-heroes? Yes. But it also made super-heroes better than they’ve ever been.

© Rob Williams

Watchmen in Time's 100 best novels

"A work of ruthless psychological realism."

From the list compiled by Time critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo in 2005.

 

The complete list can be read here. It only includes works written in English and published between 1923 (when Time was first published) and 2005 (when the list was compiled).

Nemo news

Art by Kevin O'Neill.

Topshelf site reports details about the final book in Nemo trilogy scheduled to be released in Spring 2015, co-published by Top Shelf and Knockabout:

"In a world where all the fictions ever written coalesce into a rich mosaic, it’s 1975. Janni Dakkar, pirate queen of Lincoln Island and head of the fabled Nemo family, is eighty years old and beginning to display a tenuous grasp on reality. Pursuing shadows from her past—or her imagination—she embarks on what may be a final voyage down the vastness of the Amazon, a last attempt to put to rest the blood-drenched spectres of old.

With allies and adversaries old and new, we accompany an ageing predator on her obsessive trek into the cultural landscape of a strange new continent, from the ruined city of Yu-Atlanchi to the fabulous plateau of Maple White Land. As the dark threads in her narrative are drawn into an inescapable web, Captain Nemo leads her hearse-black Nautilus in a desperate raid on horrors believed dead for decades."[from Top Shelf site]

In the meantime, Gosh! is releasing a new exclusive screen print, limited to 250 copies and signed by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, featuring Janni Nemo and chief baddies from the book. More details here. 

Previously they produced this and this. 

Nemo exclusive screen print. Art by Kevin O'Neill.