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Mar 28, 2021

An experience with a demonic creature

The whole piece is available online HERE.
Alan Moore: [...] I also had an experience with a demonic creature that told me that its name was Asmoday. Which is Asmodeus. And when I actually was allowed to see what the creature looked like, or what it was prepared to show me, it was this latticework…if you imagine a spider, and then imagine multiple images of that spider, that are kind of linked together–multiple images at different scales, that are all linked together–it’s as if this thing is moving through a different sort of time. You know Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase”? Where you can see all the different stages of the movement at once. So if you imagine that you’ve got this spider, that it was moving around, but it was coming from background to foreground, what you’d get is sort of several spiders, if you like, showing the different stages of its movement.

Now if you imagine all of those arranged into a kind of shimmering lattice that was turning itself inside out as I spoke to it, and I was talking to my partner at the time and sort of saying, This thing’s showing us it’s got an extra dimension I haven’t got, and it’s trying to tell me that it’s good at mathematics. [laughter] It’s vain. There’s something fourth-dimensional about this. This is all stuff I was actually saying at the time, while I was having the experience, which was pretty extreme.

Anyway. Over the next couple of weeks I started researching Asmodeus and found out that actually, yeah, he’s the demon of mathematics. [chuckles] Also there is a thing which apparently, traditionally he is able to offer one, and this is called the Asmodeus flight. This is where the demon will pick you up, carry you into the air, into the sky, and you can look down and you can see all of the houses as if their roofs had been removed, so you can see what’s going on inside them. Now that is not a description of being carried through the air. That’s not being moved into a higher physical space. That’s what things would look like if you’d been moved into a higher mathematical space. If you were actually in the fourth dimension, or if your perceptions were in the fourth dimension, looking down at the third dimension, you wouldn’t see places as if the roofs of the houses had been removed, you’d see around the roofs of the houses. [chuckles] In the same way that if you imagine a race of completely two-dimensional creatures living on a sheet of paper, if you draw a square and then put one of those two-dimensional creatures inside it, they are COMPLETELY enclosed, because every direction in their two dimensions is shut off to them. If you then as a three dimension creature were to reach down and pick up this two-dimensional speck because you can see through the roof, which is a dimension that he hasn’t got. So, if you’re a fourth dimensional creature looking at the third dimension, you would be able to see around the walls of a sealed room. This was interesting, because it kind of confirms the fourth dimensional aspect of Asmodeus.

I did a picture, as best I could, of what I’d seen. I did that about a month after I’d had this experience. Dave Gibbons, who’s a very down-to-earth, practical man, had come up to visit me. He’d seen the Asmodeus picture that I’ve got up on an altar kind of shrine type thing, and he phoned me up a couple of weeks later, saying that he’d just got this book called Four-Space which is a book about the fourth dimension in mathematics. This is not a mystical or occult book, this is hard maths. Very hard maths a lot of it, certainly beyond me. But at the end of the book, the guy who’s put it together gets a little bit playful and just decides to have a little bit of fun with speculation, because whereas all of the book has been hard mathematical facts, in the last chapter he lets himself be a little bit speculative and he sorta says, “Alright, if there was such a thing as fourth-dimensional life, how would this appear to us? Well my best guess is that it would appear as a kind of multiple images of itself at different scales arranged in a shimmering latticework.” And Dave said that he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, because he’d seen the Asmodeus picture, which is pretty much exactly that! [...]

Mar 22, 2021

32 Short Lucubrations by John Coulthart

Art by John Coulthart
In the following, the amazing and revealing 5-page story (click on the images and enlarge) created by the amazing British artist and designer JOHN COULTHART for the Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book (Abiogenesis Press) to celebrate Moore's 50th birthday in 2003.
 
For more info about the artist, visit his blog HERE where you can also find several entries related to Moore.
 
Posted on this blog with the author's permission. Grazie, John!

Mar 19, 2021

Mar 18, 2021

He got a literary agent

James Willis
[James] Wills recently signed the bearded comics legend Alan Moore, writer of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, among other landmark works. Moore has never had an agent, and given his famous public disagreements with filmmakers on how they have adapted his stories, perhaps he should have. At any rate, Moore has written some prose works—a collection of short stories and Long London, a series of speculative novels—which at this writing Wills is auctioning in the UK.

Wills says: “You might think I’m paying homage or cosplaying Alan with this [motioning to his hair and beard]. I’ve represented his daughter Leah Moore for many years and I’ve never done the hard sell with Alan, because I knew that he was going to do what he wanted to do—and he said he didn’t believe in agents. Which is a shame, because maybe some things would have been different, but I’m glad to represent him now. But with these stories and series of novels, he just knew that he had something special.
More info HERE.

Mar 16, 2021

Alan Moore... with a touch of blue by Danijel Žeželj

Art by Danijel Žeželj
Above, a spellbinding portrait of The Bearded One by internationally acclaimed graphic novelist, animator, illustrator and performer Danijel Žeželj
 
The original is "A4 format, black ink, white and blue acrylic on paper.
Grazie, Danijel, for such an amazing illustration!
 
For more info about the artist, visit his site HERE.

Mar 14, 2021

Moore and Veitch's lost SUPERVERSE project


Art by Rick Veitch
Some time ago, I wrote about a lost Moore and Veitch's project... 
In the past days more details and character sketches have been revealed by Veitch himself on his Facebook page: they clarify a bit the situation but, at the same time, "invalidate" part of the previous info I had. In any case, it's something that will remain unrealized. But... who knows?
Rick Veitch: "[...] It was a giant project called "Superverse" that included knock-offs of every superhero ever made. Sort of like "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" but with long underwear guys.  
[It was] probably 8 or 9 years ago. [...] post ABC and integrated with THE SHOW, the film Alan and Mitch Jenkins were trying to finance. Alan's idea was to create products that would be in the movie but also exist in the real world.
[...] There was no written outline. Everything done over the phone so I've forgotten many of the story details. There were a bunch of character sketches though.
[...] It was a many worlds story. With a very young brother and sister split up and living in different universes as Thunderman and Thundergirl each unaware of the other until...

Mar 11, 2021

Voice of the Fire: 25th Anniversary Edition

Art by John Coulthart.
Alan Moore's first prose novel, Voice of the Fire, is getting a 25th anniversary edition. It will be out in May, co-published by Top Shelf Productions in the United States and Knockabout in Britain, with a stunning new cover by John Coulthart (see above and below).
John Coulthart: [...] I liked the original cover but felt it made the novel seem too much like something by Henry Treece or Alan Garner, with no indication of more recent history. A stained-glass window seemed like a good solution to the problem of how to bring together so many disparate elements into a single design. Stained-glass windows are often things from the distant past still visible in the present day, and they have the additional convenience of being a single container for many small pictorial details.
My design doesn’t attempt to illustrate all the characters or events from the novel but shows the more salient moments together with smaller details, some of which (the noose, for example) appear in multiple chapters.
[Read more here.]
More info HERE too.

Mar 9, 2021

The Ballad of Halo Jones audio adaptation

"Featuring Sheila Atim as Halo Jones, alongside Ellie Kendrick, Kemah Bob, Michael Fenton Stevens and Yaz Zadeh, with an exciting accomplished cast, existing fans of Halo and newcomers alike will be transported to The Hoop and beyond in an immersive listening experience like no other."
More info about the character HERE.

Mar 4, 2021

Alan Moore by Stefano Zattera

Art by Stefano Zattera
Above, an intense pencil portrait of Alan Moore by Italian comic book artist, illustrator and painter STEFANO ZATTERA.

For more info about the artist visit his site HERE.

Mar 3, 2021

Alex Ross says "not replacable"

Art by Alex Ross
In the past days, legendary artist ALEX ROSS posted the above image on his Instagram page: it features the Watchmen characters with Alan Moore behind them and the text "not replacable".

Mar 1, 2021

Alan Moore by Gilbert Hernandez

Art by Gilbert "Beto" Hernandez
Above, a burning-eyed Alan Moore by legendary Love and Rockets co-creator GILBERT HERNANDEZ. Published in Comics Interview n. 65, 1988.