On avant-garde writing and Gilbert Sorrentino

Excerpt from page 60 of Alan Moore's BBC Maestro Course Notes 1.0, related to the 30th episode of the series, Lost In The Funhouse. Full course: HERE!

Alan Moore: [...] I recommend Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, an ingeniously hilarious avant-garde novel about someone writing a dreadful avant-garde novel.

There are some wonderful touches in it. All of the characters in the novel get together in between scenes to discuss how the novel is going and previous books they featured in. [...]

One chapter was the writer’s attempt at pornography and is one of the funniest pornographies that you will ever read. It was based on the style of Victorian pornographies with their very overblown language. You would have this sexual situation where the writer keeps describing the colour of the underwear being torn off the female participants. The writing gets so overwrought that some of the underwear is being ripped off numerous times and seems to be changing colours.

Another book of Gilbert Sorrentino you might want to look at is Aberration of Starlight, which is not funny so much as incredibly moving. It tells the story of a woman and her young son at a boarding house, and the arrival of a travelling salesman who might be a good romantic match for the young single mother. Each chapter is composed of three or four different parts, perhaps a letter that the character has written but not posted, a fantasy the character has had, and so on. You start to get an idea of how all of these people are misunderstanding each other. [...]

Stream the full course HERE!

Alan Moore by Butch Curry

Art by Butch Curry

Above, oil painting portrait of Alan Moore by artist Butch Curry.

More info about the artist HERE and HERE.

Das Pastoras and... Watchmen!

Art by Das Pastoras

Above the extraordinary, eye-popping poster by Spanish Master of Comic Art and Illustration DAS PASTORAS for the upcoming Banda á Feira, a new comics festival that will take place in Vigo the 5th and 6th of June.

The poster features several comics character... included a gorgeous version of Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach, Nite Owl and The Comedian plus... a giant squid! Well, it's El Mercado del Calvario so...

More info here and here. In Spanish.

Alan Moore by JR Gibson

Art by JR Gibson

Above, a powerful portrait of The Writer from Northampton by British illustrator and designer JR Gibson. 

 

For more info about the artist, check his Twitter - Instagram - Artstation

Ian Gibson on Moore and Halo Jones

Excerpt from an interview with artist Ian Gibson, co-creator of Halo Jones, about his long career in comics, published on Tripwire Magazine and conducted by contributing writer Paul N Neal.

The complete interview is available HERE.

Paul N Neal: [...] how did Halo Jones first originate? Did you have much story input into it?

Ian Gibson: After a signing session at Forbidden Planet, Steve MacManus came up to me and said: “You’ve just done a long stint on Dredd and an even longer stint on Robohunter. Is there anything you’d like to do next?” [...] I told Steve: “I want to work with Alan on a girl’s story.” So, he introduced me to the hairy one and I told Alan: “I want a story without thought bubbles or explanatory captions, as I never see signposts proclaiming ‘Little did he know’ or shit like that. I wanted the story to be experienced by the reader the way we go through our daily lives – we figure it out as we go. Alan said fine and he went away, coming back six months later saying: ‘We have a winner! Girls, Rockets and Monsters!” Sadly, I had to put him right on a few things, but I’m sure you’ll ask what those were.

Paul:  Ian, you dangled a carrot there. What were the things you managed to correct Alan Moore on?

Ian: His first plotline had Halo out in space on some asteroid discovering a mysterious ship. I asked him what her motivation was, and he said “Escape”. So, I said “Well then, we have to show what she’s escaping from, and the best way to show what a world is like is to go shopping in it. If Tesco has been firebombed, Sainsburys has a hostage situation etc, then you have to plan your shopping expedition like a military campaign.” Then he suggested the story was set on a floating island called the hoop which was powered by Manhattan. I said, “Don’t be silly. If this is an island out in the ocean it would be used as a wave/energy producer that supplies Manhattan. Not the other way around.” I sent him sketches of how the Hoop would look and the fact that it would need to open to allow mega waves to pass through without it busting apart, which he managed to incorporate into the story. It was just simple stuff like that. 

Paul: Would it be fair to say your career has been marked by working mostly with the incredible John Wagner and Alan Moore? I’m told their scripts vary in detail and style a lot. Is that true and can you compare them at all? As an artist, which of the two approaches do you find more rewarding?

Ian: My preference has always been John. He’s a great writer with a wonderful sense of humour. He doesn’t waste pages of picture descriptions that he knows I’m going to ignore, whereas Alan runs off at the typewriter.

The complete interview is available HERE.

Alan Moore by Daniela Hyde

Art by Daniela Hyde

Above, a mystical Moore portrait by Italian illustrator Daniela Hyde.

She writes: "Alan Moore" (2021) - Ink on watercolour paper and digital colouring. Personal project.
In the image composition I wanted to include the caduceus, a symbol of wisdom and immortality linked to the god Mercury in Greek mythology. This element is also present in Moore's comic series Promethea.
Furthermore, the similarity with the iconographic representations of the main divinity in Norse and Germanic mythology Odin (god of wisdom and poetic inspiration, as well as god of war) is something I did wilfully.
Gold and purple - the colours I used - recall the mysticism which characterizes and pervades Moore's works."

For more info about the artist: Facebook - Behance

Lovecraft, misprision and hypernovel

Excerpt from page 58-59 of Alan Moore's BBC Maestro Course Notes 1.0, related to the 29th episode of the series, Approaches To The Future. Full course: HERE!

Alan Moore: [...] I recently came across ‘misprision’, an academic term that – if I’ve got it right – means a wilful misunderstanding where you know that a certain idea is not correct but you use it anyway because it opens up creative possibilities. When I was preparing my H. P. Lovecraft opus, Providence, I was reading an awful lot of Lovecraft criticism including the so-called ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ that had been an invention of later writers and that Lovecraft himself would not have recognised. 

One psychologist, Dirk Mosig, suggested that all of Lovecraft’s stories were intended as episodes of some gigantic hypernovel, that he was creating a new form of the novel that comprised these 30 or 40 fragmentary stories. 

While H. P. Lovecraft had not meant anything like that, with the concept of ‘misprision’ in my mind, I thought, ‘But what if he had?’ 

And so I began building that hypernovel and so came the plot structure for Providence. [...]

Stream the full course HERE!

Movies, books and... Raymond Chandler

Excerpt from a great 1998 interview by writer Matthew De Abaitua. 

The complete piece is available HERE.

Matthew De Abaitua: Prospective TV and film projects are always so up in the air.
Alan Moore: It’s barely even up in the air, it’s in some vapourous netherdimension from which it may coalesce into something as sturdy as a soap bubble: the From Hell film is going to go into production in April, May, June – I understand Sean Connery has been signed for it, Hughes brothers to direct, it sounds like it might happen. But I’ve seen two of my books, V for Vendetta and Watchmen go through various stages of Hollywood optimism. But I’ve not been that interested. I mean, it was nice to meet Terry Gilliam, the first thing he said to me over lunch was “Well, how would you turn Watchmen into a film?” and I said, “Well to be honest Terry, I wouldn’t.” So we went on to talk about other things and just had a great lunch. But Big Numbers could work, it was always more like a TV series than a comic book anyway. All the visual elements, the backgrounds were photo-referenced, it might have been a lot easier if we had just filmed it to begin with. But Hollywood, television and film is not my prime area of interest. Because I would never have any control, working in those areas. It’s nice to get the money from a Hollywood project, but whatever they do with it, it would be their piece of work, and not mine. Someone said to Raymond Chandler, ‘how do you feel about Hollywood ruining all your books’ and he took them into his study, pointed to the shelves containing ‘Farewell My Lovely’ and all the rest of them and said, ‘there they are, they’re alright, they’re not ruined.’

Read the complete interview, HERE.

Alan Moore by Diego Mora G.

Art by Diego Mora G.

Above, an interesting purple portrait of the Bearded One by Chilean artist Diego Mora G.

 

More about the artist HERE.

Illuminations contents

Above and below, pictures from a proof copy shared on Instagram by Kenny Chan, here.

The contents list reveals the title of the 9 short stories included in:

• Hypotethical Lizard
• Not Even Legend
• Location, Location, Location
• Cold Reading
• The Improbably Complex High-Energy State
• Illuminations
• What We Can Know About Thunderman
• American Light: An Appreciation
• And, at the Last, Just to Be Done with Silence 

The book, published by Bloomsbury, will be available in hardback, eBook and audiobook on 11 October 2022. 

You can get some hints about the stories HERE and HERE.

Alan Moore by Clément Dengremont

Art by Clément Dengremont

Above, a colourful portrait of Alan Moore by French illustrator Clément Dengremont. 

 

For more info about the artist: Twitter - Instagram - Behance

The Sound of Silence

Alan Moore reveals you the secrets of writing: HERE!

Excerpt from page 52-53 of Alan Moore's BBC Maestro Course Notes 1.0, related to the 25th episode of the series, Words, Music & Performance. Full course: HERE!

Alan Moore: [...] the life of a writer can be a very solitary thing. Unlike some writers, I cannot go and sit in a coffee shop to create. I need complete silence and no interruptions, which leads to a condition of pretty much permanent isolation. In fact, when lockdown started, I thought that if the virus was created in a lab, it would have been by a writer. Lockdown is normal for writers like me.

Never seeing your friends, never going out, hearing from people over the phone intermittently, being in a room on your own in complete silence – this is our existence.

[...] I used to enjoy listening to music when I was a cartoonist but that’s a different thing entirely. Cartooning can be done by some sort of vestigial brain that you have in your wrists. I used to listen to the John Peel show and it wouldn’t affect my cartooning at all. Once you start writing, that all changes.

I realised that I couldn’t listen to anything with lyrics because it would interfere with the words that I was trying to write. I moved on to purely instrumental pieces but was halfway through an album by John McLaughlin when the music was interfering with the rhythms that I was trying to write in. Listening to ambient music lasted a couple of months before I realised that was affecting the atmospheres I was creating. Some of my comic strips from that period feature huge captions focused on the way things sound, all because I was listening to a lot of Brian Eno and Harold Budd.

Eventually I gave in to the silence.

Stream the full course HERE!

On The Tale of One Bad Rat

Below, a blurb for the collected edition of Bryan Talbot's excellent The Tale of One Bad Rat. From 2010 edition. Dark Horse Books.

"... an ingenious, intertextual narrative that interweaves the charming, whimsical, and above all, the English vision of Beatrix Potter with a vision of England as it has become; the soft juxtaposed with the savage; Peter Rabbit lost in Cardboard City. Thoroughly excellent."

Alan Moore - Author of Watchmen

Saint Moore and Mr. R by Theo Szczepanski

Art by Theo Szczepanski

Above, a small but excellent sketch card by the extraordinary Brazilian comic book artist, illustrator and graphic novelist Theo Szczepanski featuring our beloved Bearded Author as... The Saint of Comics. 

Bonus... Mr. Rorschach, below! Grazie, Theo!

Szczepanski, who is currently living in Italy, has just released his last graphic novel, La Grande Crociata (The Great Crusade), a phenomenal story mixing legendary historical events with a bit of Lovecraft and weird fantasy. Preview HERE! The book is currently available in Italian but I am sure International editions will follow soon, I bet!

For more info about the artist: Instagram - Bio 

Art by Theo Szczepanski