Dec 30, 2021

Regime change in Whitechapel by Iain Sinclair

Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, 2017
From the sold-out Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book, below you can read the contribution written by acclaimed Welsh writer and film-maker IAIN SINCLAIR to celebrate Alan Moore's 50th birthday in 2003. 
Moore named Sinclair as one of his favourites writers (here) in several occasions.
Regime change in Whitechapel 

Back in the dog days of the last century, before the restaurants in Brick Lane featured celebrity snaps of Prince Charles and a few dejected English cricketers on the piss and somebody in suit and tie who used to read the news (Falklands, Gulf War), a bunch of cultural subversives were gathered to enact, in their own ways, the last rites. The skeletal book-burner John Latham with his mad eyes and posthumous (slow, deadly) voice. Derek Raymond, jaunty, spry, fruity, smart, remembering what it had been like to be Robin Cook - and writing a cod-Bond novel that went so far off the rails that it froze time, a period in the Sixties, and entered all the dictionaries of slang. Poet and performance artist Brian Catling, shaven-headed, cigar-chomping, berobed, returning to scenes of vision and poverty, labours in the ullage cellar of Truman’s Brewery. Alexander Baron, solid but tentative, white raincoat like the negative of a lost life; post-war wanderings through a blasted landscape. And fellow Jewish memory-man, Emanuel Litvinoff, who once discussed alchemical epics with Elias Canetti. A few villains were also present: Tony Lambrianou, chauffeur to the rug-wrapped corpse of Jack the Hat, and the now vanished biblio-maniac Driffield. Then there was Alan Moore.
The excuse was a film for Channel 4, The Cardinal and the Corpse - which suffered from too many cardinals and not enough corpses (the dead wouldn’t lie down). Of all the faces who had to hang around, in Cheshire Street market, in the house with the peeling pink door in Princelet Street (now a regular feature in Dickens heritage romps), in the infamous Carpenters Arms (with its lost apostrophe), only one registered with the citizens, ordinary dishonest folk going about their business. ‘Are you,’ they challenged, not daring to believe it, ‘Alan Moore?’
Alan doesn’t quite believe it himself: that he is on set, grounded in the future of a definitively erased past, space-time anomalies he will activate in his serial composition, From Hell.  This grimoire, with its fearsome apparatus of actual and fantastic scholarship, is the ultimate book on the Whitechapel Murders. The endstop. Many, many others, hacks, snoops, chancers, will follow - but they won’t register. Game over. Patricia Cornwell, the latest, richest, and most absurd, brings the weight (humourless, pan-global paranoia) of the CIA, forensic SWAT teams, art dealers, foot-in-the-door men to bear on a series of terrible Victorian crimes. She is the wrong book, straddled across the razor-wire of the genre fence. It’s like Miss Marple hitting Los Angeles to solve a slasher crime, the slaying of James Ellroy’s mother. Wrong game, wrong century.
Not content with world domination, America wants to invade the only thing we have left: the past. They devoured From Hell. They liked it and they bought the company. And made it into a ‘ghetto story.’ With punch, panache, zizz: the stuff they do so well. And with a brutal disregard for history, so that the pain (which burns through those stones still) of the butchering of Marie Jeanette Kelly is demeaned - by a narrative twist, wrong girl, and a happy John Ford ending in a whitewashed cottage in the west of Ireland.
Alan Moore knows that these sentiments can be floated as recalled potentialities, a single flash-frame in a dying consciousness, before the darkness sets in. One bead of bright light before an eternity of stygian black.
Loping down Princelet Street, with a kind of nautical roll, non-metropolitan - backlit Durer hair - Alan stands out; not belonging to these alleys and rat runs, he is visible in ways the other writers are not. The space between what he writes and what he is dissolves. He acts. The rest of them are what they do, talk, words - or quiet moments, caught at a window, of wounded reverie. There is a thing that won’t leave them alone, a vulture on the shoulder. ‘The general contract,’ Derek Raymond called it. Mortality.
Mortality imprints these streets like a miasma. Alan Moore, playing at the ‘discovery’ of a magical primer, plays at being trapped forever in this house, this place. And so it is. The Vessels of Wrath sail through the sky, clouds pierced by the steeple of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church. The extraordinary, hallucinogenic structure that has haunted artists and writers (from Leon Kossoff to Peter Ackroyd) catches Alan’s eye: a stone needle in a pane of dirty glass. The church, with its balanced weight and mass, marries disparate elements: Greek, Roman, Gothic. As Moore will balance the unwieldy mass of dark history, lies, forgeries, echoes of other writers, Blakean epiphany, Crowley ritual.
There are no accidents here. Moore, on the steps of the church, is passing through, gathering what he needs. The rough walkers, the vagrants, the invisibles who challenge him, are there for the duration; no parole. Shifting facades, fresh scams; nothing changes.
                    
Iain Sinclair

Dec 28, 2021

Dr. Bisley and Mr. Hyde... again!

Art by Simon Bisley
Above a fantastic and powerful Mr. Hyde by the fantastic and powerful SIMON BISLEY!
 
Some days ago, I posted another Mr. Hyde drawn by Bisley (here): below you can see the final colour version.
 
More art by the artist: HERE.

Dec 16, 2021

Earth-616

Excerpt from an article published on Marvel.com. Full article available HERE
Marvel.com: I've heard some rumors about where the number 616 may have come from. But I want you to explain, definitively, where that number came from.

David Thorpe: Well, for years, I'd [gotten] emails from fans who say, “Why did you come up with 616?” And to be honest, I gave them each a different story. But, obviously, it's got something to do with 666, the number of the beast: 666 minus 50.

A nice, round number away from the scariest one.

David Thorpe: Yeah. Alan Moore, who took over the series, he was the one who actually put it into print. Let's be fair. And both Alan and I shared a big interest in magick and the occult. And I got into chaos magick, and then I think Alan did, and so did Grant Morrison and quite a few of us, you know, in the comic scene at that time in the '80s.
Full article available HERE.

Dec 14, 2021

Mr. Hyde by Simon Bisley

Art by Simon Bisley
Above, an intense Mr. Hyde by legendary artist SIMON BISLEY
More art by the artist: HERE.
 
Bisley was indicated as the possible artist for The League of The Extraordinary Gentlemen back in the day. I admit that I'd love to see Bisley doing a special or a short story featuring The Leaguers. I know it already happened in Idea Space. Maybe...

Excerpt from Khoury's The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore (TwoMorrows, 2003), page 183.
George Khoury: [...] you were going to do this book originally with Simon Bisley?
Alan Moore:
Originally, I’d put the idea forward without an artist attached to it, to Kevin Eastman, I think. And at that point, I think Kevin Eastman had advanced me some money on the understanding that I would do a 64-page graphic novel for him at some point. And he wanted me to work with Simon Bisley. So that was the original idea, that we’d perhaps put together this League of Extraordinary Gentlemen thing.

But then I think I got a phone call from Kevin saying that he didn’t want me to do the graphic novel with Simon Bisley, he’d rather that I’d work off his advance by doing the Spirit stories for the Spirit comic that he was going to be bringing out. So I did those for that first issue of The Spirit with Dave Gibbons, which was great fun. So the other stuff never happened with Simon Bisley, and the idea was still around.

Then when I started thinking about it seriously, Kevin O’Neill was the artist that was right at the forefront of my mind. It just seemed, once I thought of Kevin, he seemed to be the perfect artist. He would allow the strip to evolve in a completely different way. Kevin’s work is meticulous, but there is an exaggerated and cartoony quality, which is part of its genius. And that kind of almost cartoony flexibility allows you a much greater emotional range in the strip. With The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, partly because of Kevin’s art, we can span comedy, horror, and pathos in a couple of pages. Often in one page, sometimes in one panel. The emotional range that Kevin’s artwork lends to the story is fantastic. It’s one of the main assets of The League. There’s some scenes in there which are going to be horrible, silly, and all sorts of other things. Quite erudite, intelligent. It’s an interesting mix that we can get away with, regarding The League.

Dec 13, 2021

Alan Moore by Sergio Vanello

Art by Sergio Vanello
Above a stunning and mesmerizing pencil portrait of Alan Moore by acclaimed Italian painter, comic book artist and illustrator SERGIO VANELLO
 

Dec 7, 2021

Silk Spectre and Nite Owl by Jesse Lonergan

Art by Jesse Lonergan.
Silk Spectre (above) and Nite Owl (below) drawn by American comic book artist and illustrator Jesse Lonergan.
 
For more info about the artist: Website - Etsy shop - Image page

Dec 1, 2021

Eddie Campbell about the Ripper

Excerpt from an Eddie Campbell interview by Chloe Maveal, published on NeoText Review site.
The complete interview is available HERE.
Eddie Campbell: Were you a fan of From Hell?

Maveal: I was! I think it’s one of Moore’s best works and I, of course, am always blown away by your artwork. It was very cool seeing it in color for the first time though. I — and I think a lot of other readers — have become so accustomed to seeing it in black and white and grey that seeing the addition of color is pretty wild.

Campbell: When I did the issues — the ten volumes — in the scene of Mary Kelly’s death, I had gone very light on the blood. When it printed in color, all the reds just disappeared! I looked at it and thought “I’ve had nosebleeds worse than this!” So I went in a added a lot more blood and red. I think it looks terrifying now.

Maveal: Hat’s off to you, seriously. The color of the blood alone is pretty harrowing. You got it to a nice, rich blue-red.

Campbell: Yeah, it was really nice. And I wanted to mention —and I had to fight for this really hard — that I had to argue to get the women put on the cover. I really had to fight for that. And they said “Nah, it’s too dark”, but I got my way in the end. I just wanted them walking in the street with the street-lamps and they said “Well can’t we have Jack the Ripper at the end of the street or something?” And I said no, just walking in the London street when they were happy and healthy and before it all went wrong.

Maveal: That’s a pretty hefty thing to fight for. That’s considerably darker than the original.

Campbell: Well when Alan [Moore] and I originally released it, we didn’t want people to know it was about Jack the Ripper. I put still life sketches on the cover back in the 1990s. Things like grapes or a melting candle and a cell phone [laughs]. The number on the dialed cell phone was the number for the publisher. It was Kitchen Sink Press and they noticed it right away. [laughs] But we wanted people to buy it thinking that it was a story about real life and the real world every. So often thing about jack the Ripper are horror stories in general. They take place in an environment that is designed to receive and produce horror. Horror…it just works at its best when it comes out of nowhere and you’re not prepared for it…

Nov 30, 2021

AlanMooreVember: Squanchmen

Art by Jeaux Janovsky
Jeaux Janovsky asks me: "Who squanches the Squanchmen, smoky?"
 
The answer is above: a fantastic mash-up with Squanchy and Rick and Morty gang! 
 
Again Jeaux... you "did it!", mate!

Nov 29, 2021

Alan Moore and... the Russians!

Moore asks: "Do I look like a character from Gogol?"
Watch all the rest HERE!
 

Nov 26, 2021

AlanMooreVember: In Pictopia!

Art by Jeaux Janovsky
Yesterday entry by the usual suspect... Jeaux Janovsky. I love it! 
"It's based off of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, in particular the Michael Madsen cop torture ear scene. But mixed with Disney's Goofy and Beavis of Beavis and Butt-Head fame. 
Quite a mash-up.
Indeed, Jeaux! Well done!

Nov 25, 2021

Alan Moore by Cristian Canfailla

Art by Cristian Canfailla
Above, a lovely and intense portrait of Moore by Italian comic book artist, illustrator and storyboard artist Cristian Canfailla. I really love it!

For more info about the artist, visit his page: HERE.

Nov 24, 2021

Pog and Swampy by Shawn McManus

Above, a recent commission by the Great Shawn McManus featuring Pog and Swamp Thing, a reference to his acclaimed Swamp Thing Vol 2 n.32 issue, a fantastic and unforgettable tribute to Walt Kelly's Pogo characters.
 
For more info and beauty, visit McManus' site: HERE.

Nov 23, 2021

AlanMooreVember: ProMargeThea

Art by Jeaux Janovsky

Again, a fantastic and funny idea (it's AlanMooreVember's entry dated 8th of November) from the explosive mind of Jeaux Janovsky
I am sure Marge and Promethea are laughing in Idea Space, a lot!
AlanMooreVember: Instagram page at @alanmoorevember;

Nov 22, 2021

Alan Moore by Navneel De

Art by Navneel De
Above, an evocative portrait of Alan Moore by Indian artist Navneel De.

Nov 19, 2021

Neil Gaiman on a lost Bojeffries story

I've dug up this in my archives (which are bigger than Idea Space, I suspect).
 
Some months ago, Neil Gaiman commented on a Facebook post by Brian Bolland about The Bojeffries, here.
Gaiman wrote: "Many years ago, Alan described a Bojeffries story to me he would be writing. It was hilarious and heartbreaking. Some years later I asked about it, and he had absolutely no memory of it. Which says something about his prodigious imagination because I wouldn't have let one that good escape."

And then he added: "It was Ginda's wedding."

Nov 18, 2021

Alan Moore 68: a gift from Richard Pace

Art by Richard Pace
Today is Moore's 68th birthday! So, above a stunning portrait of The Man by Canadian comic book artist and writer RICHARD PACE. Pace has worked for all the big comics companies, for television and games. Currently, he is drawing the controversial and successful series Second Coming published by Ahoy Comics
 
Grazie, Richard for such a great gift! And... Happy birthday, Alan!

For more info about the artist: Instagram - Twitter - Patreon - Original Art

Alan Moore 68: a gift from Claudio Calia

Art by Claudio Calia
Today is Moore's 68th birthday! So, above a great portrait of The Man by Italian comics artist, teacher and popularizer CLAUDIO CALIA. Moore is wearing his classic hammer and sickle red t-shirt and declaiming a key passage from a past interview. The mask that Moore is holding is his hand is a reference to I Baccanti (The Bacchants), Calia's new series, and of course to V's mask.

Grazie, Claudio! Happy birthday, Alan!

For more info about Calia, visit his site HERE.

Nov 14, 2021

Nov 12, 2021

'90s Moore by Catacchio and Baldazzini

Art by Onofrio Catacchio
Few weeks ago, comic book artist and friend Onofrio Catacchio send me some scans from an old publication. It's the catalogue published in 1991 by Editori del Grifo for the 16th edition of Treviso Comics convention. The book, in Italian (of course), is titled Segni Particolari and was edited by Silvano Mezzavilla, with a great cover by Lorenzo Mattotti.
 
That Treviso edition was dedicated to several authors including José Munoz and Alan Moore. The catalogue's section about Moore included an excerpt from his Writing for Comics article, selected pages from his comics and 3 portraits: one by Bill Sienkiewicz and two by Italian artists Onofrio Catacchio and Roberto Baldazzini (realized for the catalogue in 1990, I guess a bit in a rush as a... last minute contribution). Note the numbers in Catacchio's version: a clear reference to Big Numbers; at the time there were rumours about an upcoming Italian ed of the now "lost" series. 
Enjoy! (Of course, I've bought a copy of the catalogue!)

Nov 10, 2021

British politics

Tom Burke in The Show
A small excerpt from an interview published few days ago on The New European, mostly focused on The Show movie. The complete piece is available HERE
Alan Moore: Our politics over the past five years have been entirely predicated on dream and illusion and nonsense. Our fundamental reality is starting to collapse under the onslaught of all this delirium.

Nov 4, 2021

AlanMooreVember 2021

Art by Jeaux Janovsky
I am pleased to share this message from artist and friend Jeaux Janovsky:
I am taking part in a friend's AlanMooreVember which is November with an Alan Moore twist! The whole month dedicated to Alan Moore, his beard, and creations.

I've included my art for Day 3 which is Maxwell the Magic Cat! Even gave him Alan's mighty beard! Haha

Also included is the AlanMooreVember 2021 prompt list. I believe there's an AlanMooreVember Instagram page at @alanmoorevember and a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/alanmoorevember/
So, take a look! And... Grazie, Jeaux! :)

Nov 3, 2021

Travelling, Northampton and celebrity

Excerpts from an interview published on NN Journal the 1st of November
The complete interview is available HERE.
[...] “I have got a theory,” he says “that if you travel the world and go to lots of different countries you will get to know the world broadly. However, I think you will probably have a tourist experience of all of it and it will probably be a fairly shallow experience.

“By staying in one place you get to know the world deeply, you get to know how all of the stories turned out; you get to know how people grew up and what happened to them and their children; you get to see the texture of a human town as it works its way out over decades, you get to soak up its atmosphere and I would say if you get to know one human place deeply enough you will probably have a head start on understanding all of them because, humans are not that different.”

[...] “You have to understand,” he says “that I have a probably psychotic belief that I am the town of Northampton. This has been ever since I noticed that Richard the Lionheart granted the town its charter on November 18, my birthday. So I am the town of Northampton, its living embodiment.”

[...] “I really don’t like being famous,” he says. “I’m glad I can bring some attention to Northampton and I can do the work that I do, I just wish that celebrity wasn't a part of that, because there is nothing in celebrity that I want and there’s quite a lot of things in celebrity that I really don't want.

“If there is a power gradient in any communication then it's not going to be a real communication. If people put you on a pedestal and look up to you, then you can't communicate with them. They can only worship and I’m not interested in being worshipped. You’d have to be ill wouldn't you.”

Oct 25, 2021

The Comedian by Patrick Goddard

Art by Patrick Goddard
Above an inspired portrait of The Comedian by British artist Patrick Goddard. Below, preliminary art.
 

Oct 21, 2021

The Question vs Rorschach by Jeaux Janovsky

Art by Jeaux Janovsky
It's DitkoBer 2021 this year: the entire month of October is dedicated to Steve Ditko's creations and characters! 
Above, a great meeting of The Question with... Rorschach. Art by  by cartoonist Jeaux Janovsky.
 
More info about the artist here and here.

Oct 20, 2021

John Martin, JMW Turner and... Antenociticus

Excerpt from a spoken word performance piece, entitled Simultaneous conjugation of four spirits in a room, with music by Stephen O'Malley performed live at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle on 13th March 2010.

For the opening of the exhibition Turner versus Martin at the Laing Art Gallery, AV Festival 10 asked Moore and musician Stephen O'Malley (Sunn O))), KTL, Gravetemple) to create something together. Alan Moore wrote and performed a new text in the gallery responding to the energy of the two paintings: John Martin's The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1852) and JMW Turner's Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812) from the Tate Collection. 
Stephen O'Malley created a new accompanying ambient soundscape, sonically melting in the radiance of the paintings.  

JMW Turner's Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps
Alan Moore: [...] This is as far north as the Romans ever got, with their Mediterranean tans, thin tunics and short skirts, freezing their arses off at Wallsend, Segedunum, thus commencing a tradition. The precarious margin of their territory scares them, alien and elemental, liminal and filled with unknown hazard, too close to the Arctic for their skimpily dressed gods to follow and watch over them. They need a local hand to mediate between them and a savage landscape, and, at the wall's other end in Benwell, Condericum, they erect their temple to a borrowed native deity, Antenociticus, god of the antler-fringed brow and therefore a horned one, a Cernunnos. [...] Called the greatest and the best, Antenociticus is clearly on a par with Jupiter, the wielder of the lightning whose dominion extended turned to all things, to the storm, an' avalanche, an' hunted boar, god of a hostile universe that lay beyond their world's Hyperborean rim, upon whose whim survival rested. Beautifully fashioned in the Celtic style, his psychopathic pin-prick eyes are merciless, omnipotent, mad with divinity, a Pagan gaze that promises the end of cities, a condition that seems far away back in the tumult of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when modern industry still gurgles in its infancy, in its gun-metal cot, or at least, further than it seems today. [...]
Though painted forty years apart by men of widely different temperament and age and style, both Turner's Hannibal and Martin's Sodom and Gomorrah possess many similarities, and have the stamp of catastrophic times upon them. Turner's piece is executed during 1812, while John Martin is hanging his first painting, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, in the Royal Academy. Just a year previously Napoleon has tried to invade Italy across the Alps, Hannibal style, defeated by the stark realities of weather and terrain. Turner conceives a warning, a reminder of the shattering and gigantic forces of the Earth that wait to wipe away our kingdoms, our republics, our delirious ambitions, a tribunal that brooks no appeal. He steals a murderous Yorkshire sky from over Farnley Hall in Otley, revels in the drama of the Northern Lights. John Martin's levelling of the Cities of the Plain, painted in 1852 with Martin in his early sixties, has the same regional atmospherics, has the furnace glow of his Newcastle youth deployed to similar ends. It shares with Turner's painting an enormity of scale and moment, tiny Bruegel figures only there to illustrate the vastness of destruction that surrounds them, the futility and insignificance of human grandeurs faced with natural disaster, faced with carpet bombing from the angels. Both works have the same intention, a critique of overreaching national arrogance couched in a language that is classical or biblical. Most strikingly they share a composition: rocky terrain in the lower foreground, rising on the right, where miniaturist figures cower, Lot and his daughters, Hannibal's doomed soldiers. Over all this in the upper background's whirl and spectacle, Martin and Turner both depict the same annihilating vortex, one with flame and one with smoke. Some say the world will end in fire, some in ice, but both functions in the debate agree that it will end. Rome's wall, Napoleon's, Gomorrah, the industry warmed world that we inhabit, straining at the end of their respective tethers, facing the same whirlpool of demise. This is a terror of the world's edge. It's the vertigo of an accelerated culture. Out beyond the lights of every city, every town and every century, this is the abyss that abides. These lethal vortices are each ellipses, one that sears and one that freezes. At the Roman garrisons hunching against the rain in Westgate Road beside Hadrian's Wall, these are the terminal configurations of civilisation's margins, other forces outside that must be appeased. In 2010 at this unique convergence, hanging side by side together the twin maelstroms of extinction can't help but suggest an optical arrangement. These storm sockets, cauled with hail and magma and eradication. We stand at the precipice of ourselves and look down into the gaze that has not blinked or wavered since before we were, and would not notice if we were no longer. At these snowblind precincts of our empire, at this limit of our possibilities, we stare into the cold eyes of Antenociticus.
John Martin's The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah

Extra info here

Oct 18, 2021

Wizard Moore by Glenn Fabry

Art by Glenn Fabry
Above, a magical portrait of Wizard Moore by internationally acclaimed British artist GLENN FABRY. The illustration was intended to be printed on t-shirts

More info about Glenn Fabry: HERE.

Oct 12, 2021

On heroes and heroism

Excerpt from a video interview (with transcript available too) published few days ago on RT.com site, HERE
What about heroes? I mean, I know your take on superheroes, you think that people are cowards, make superheroes to cover up their own complexes. But what about heroism without the prefix ‘super’? Do you think it exists in the world? And if yes, then what is it?  
Alan Moore: Of course it is. And it is an everyday heroism to choose to do the right thing, rather than not to do the right thing. These are moments of heroism, and they're basically what hold the culture, the species together. Without them, we'd be nowhere. So they are vitally important. Yes, I’m all for heroes – and I have my own heroes. I idolise William Blake, I don't think that there was probably a better human being in the entire British history.
The complete interview is available on RT.com site, HERE.

Oct 11, 2021

Supreme Self-gift!

Art by Rick Veitch. Lettering by Todd Klein.
Sometimes you know yourself better than... any other person. At least this is 100% true for me when you are talking about... comics! 
So, after some years and several attempts, I finally bought a page of SUPREME art directly from... supreme Master RICK VEITCH. Needless to say, it's a masterpiece and a real supreme treasure in my small collection! Grazie, Rick, for such a gem!
 
Well, it's a gorgeous page from Supreme with Professor Night (and Twilight the Girl Marvel) 8-page short story, titled "The secret origin of The Professor Night/Supreme Team!" published in Supreme Vol.3, issue n. 52B (Awesome Entertainment), in 1997. 
Lettering by the legendary... Todd Klein, of course!
Art by Rick Veitch. Lettering by Todd Klein.
Isn't it gorgeous? And could you feel those EC vibes?
Awesome Supreme page! Art by Rick Veitch. Lettering by Todd Klein.
Below you can see the printed page (with colours by Donald Skinner).
 
I hope you love it as much as I love it! :)

Oct 9, 2021

on Neil Gaiman and Sandman

Neil Gaiman moderating the Watchmen panel at UKCAC in 1986.
Excerpt from Some Moore - Part Two, an interview by Steve Darnall published in Hero Illustrated n. 8, February 1994.
MOORE: Neil is one of the only people who's working at Vertigo- with a couple of other exceptions-who succeeds. Neil is not writing like me anymore. He used to when he was starting out, and I think he'd be the first to admit that. It was very flattering. Everyone's got to start somewhere, and we all start out aping someone to a degree, but Neil, I think, has done more to move away from the sort of territory that I've created, and to establish something that is uniquely his own. The flavor in Neil's stories is very different to mine, and it's not unrelenting horror. Neil is somebody who understands the benefit of putting in a lovely little story like that "Midsummer Night's Dream" story [Sandman 19]. He uses interesting storytelling techniques, he's constantly trying to think of new ways to do things and there's a sense of genuine enjoyment in Neil's stories that I don't always feel in some of the other ones. You get the impression that Neil's enjoyed writing this story, he enjoyed researching all these little odd bits of obscure historical facts and putting them into his Sandman mosaic.
I read, for the first time, the whole run of Neil's Sandman about a month ago, because I've got a strange, pathological aversion to picking up DC comics [laughter]. I don't know what it is; I just see that bullet in the top left-hand corner and I start to go all clammy, my stomach contracts, I just cannot bring myself to shell out money...

DARNALL: You're back in the jungle in 'Nam...

MOORE: That's it, that's it. I can hear the 'copters going overhead. Neil, understanding this sort of pathological condition of mine, saved me the problem of going into a shop and buying them by sending me a great big bunch of them. I read them all through and I thought they were great. Reading them, I thought, "God, this must have been what it was like for Neil reading my Swamp Things." I never actually got the experience of reading Swamp Thing, because I'd written it, so I knew what the ending was [laughs]. Not that I want to compare the two, but I think I got the same feeling looking at Sandman that I hope people got out of reading Swamp Thing.

DARNALL: Neil said he chose to do "The Doll's House" and risk interrupting the previous tone of the book, because he knew if he didn't he ran the risk of becoming another X-Men. Looking back, that decision actually changed the entire direction of the book, because from there he could spring off and do "Midsummer Night's Dream" or "Dream of a Thousand Cats."

MOORE: "The Doll's House" is one of those watershed things, which Neil probably didn't realize at the time. But, sometimes you do stories because you have to and they put a spin on the series that you hadn't expected. They open up all sorts of new possibilities. I agree, and I think it's important that writers be given the freedom to develop according to their own instincts. Of course, that doesn't always work out; some people's things are not as good as others', but...it would have been so easy to crush Neil as a talent before he developed by giving him edicts and telling him, 'Do it like this, do it like that.' I mean, nobody at DC would've ever said, 'Hey, we think it'd be a really good idea if you did a sort of light fantasy story about Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream." Nobody would've done that because those don't sell, according to the conventional sort of wisdom of the marketing department. Of course, it did sell. When people think of Sandman, these are the stories they remember, the little oddities.

Oct 8, 2021

Thunderbolt and Ozymandias by Mike Collins

Art by MIKE COLLINS
From the sold-out Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book, above a great illustration by British well-known comic book artist and writer MIKE COLLINS
He wrote: "Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt, the revived Charlton hero I wrote and drew for DC in the early 90s—and his Watchmen universe counterpart, Ozymandias."
 
For more info about the artist: Official site - Twitter
 

Oct 7, 2021

Alan Moore on Jay Stephens' Jetcat

Jetcat is Saturday morning forever, a timely reminder of what comics are there for, and how good they can actually be. --- Alan Moore
Check Jetcat & Friends' Kickstarter HERE... now!

Oct 6, 2021

The Magus and his Tarot cards by Carlos Dearmas

Art by Carlos Dearmas
Above a stunning portrait of Alan Moore by phenomenal Argentinian illustrator and comic book artist CARLOS DEARMAS
Moore is showing in his hands some special Tarot cards: 
Tarot XI – LA FORCE, featuring Silk Spectre and Bubastis (from Watchmen)
Tarot VIIII – L’HERMITE, featuring Swamp Thing
Tarot XIIII, featuring V (from V for Vendetta)
Tarot VIII – LA JUSTICE, featuring Promethea
Tarot XVII – LE TOILLE, featuring Marvelman
LE MAT, featuring The Joker

It's really an amazing piece of art! Grazie mille, Carlos.
 
For more info about the artist

Oct 5, 2021

Alan Moore by Joe Granski

Art by Joe Granski
Above, an intense portrait of Moore by American painter Joe Granski (16" x 20", oil on canvas).
I am not sure about the "realism" of that... bat pin-badge, actually.
 

Sep 27, 2021

Sparks of Illuminations

New details about Illuminations, Moore's short story collection (around 500 pages!) which now has been rescheduled for October 2022 release (previously it was September):
In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work and features many never-before-published pieces, Alan Moore presents a series of wildly different and equally unforgettable characters who discover--and in some cases even make and unmake--the various unchartered parts of existence.

In A Hypothetical Lizard, two concubines in a brothel for sorcerers fall in love with tragic ramifications. In Not Even Legend, a paranormal study group is infiltrated by one of the otherworldly beings they seek to investigate. In Illuminations, a nostalgic older man decides to visit a seaside resort from his youth and finds the past all too close at hand. And in the monumental novella What We Can Know About Thunderman
, which charts the surreal and Kafkaesque history of the comics industry over the last seventy-five years through several sometimes-naive and sometimes-maniacal people rising and falling on its career ladders, Moore reveals the dark, beating heart of the superhero business. [source]
Also Waterstones is offering a signed edition: HERE.