The Comedian by Patrick Goddard

Art by Patrick Goddard

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

 

For more info about the artist: his Twitter -  Albion British Comics Database Wiki  

Art by Patrick Goddard

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.

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.  

The complete performance is available HERE. 

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. 

The complete performance is available HERE.

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.

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.

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! :)

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.

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

 

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!

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: 

Instagram - Blog - Facebook - Gallery

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.

 

For more info about the artist: Website - Instagram