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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…