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| Art by Raphael Salimena |
"[...] You aren't born knowing you will die. Someone has to break the news. I asked my dad if it was him, but he can't remember. [...] Maybe death came to you in the form of a goldfish or a grandparent. You might have processed mortality as much as you were able, or needed to, in the time it took for the fins to disappear in the swirl of a toilet bowl. I don't have one of those moments. I can't remember a time before death existed. Death was just there, everywhere, always.Maybe it began with the five dead women. Throughout my single digits, my dad - Eddie Campbell, a comic book artist - was working on a graphic novel called From Hell, written by Alan Moore. It's about Jack the Ripper and shows the full horror of his brutality in scratchy black and white. 'Jackarippy' was such a part of our lives that my tiny sister would wear the top hat to eat breakfast, and I would stand on tiptoes to study the crime scenes that were pinned to my dad's drawing board while trying to get him to agree to something Mum had said no to. There they were, the disembowelled women, the flesh torn from their faces and thighs. Next to them, the stark autopsy photographs, their sagging breasts and bellies, the pinched rugby-ball stitching from neck to groin. I remember looking up at them and feeling not shocked, but fascinated. I wanted to know what had happened. I wanted to see more. I wished the pictures were clearer, I wished they were in colour. Their situation was so removed from anything I knew of life that it was too other to be frightening - it was as alien to me there in tropical Brisbane, Australia, as the foggy London streets where they had lived. To look at those same photographs now is an entirely different thing - I see violence, the struggle and misogyny, the lost lives - but back then, I didn't have the emotional language to process something so terrible. [...]" - Hayley Campbell
Alan Moore: [...] I do get some funny phone calls. Nicolas Cage phoned me up a few times because he likes my stuff. He seems nice enough, but the phoned me once to ask me for advice on his love life. It must be a lonely existence being a film star.He was asking me if he should choose this girl over another girl he was seeing.I just said, "I don't know." But I thing it worked out happily because he's not needed my advice since.
The complete interview is available HERE.
Ladies and Gentlemen and the Gender-progressive, it gives us enormous joy to reveal the narrator of Damned Andrew.BBC Radio 4, June 21st, 6:30pm (and the following three weeks...)Available worldwide on BBC Sounds.Written by Andrew O'Neill and Tom DeVille (@Devilligan)
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| Art by Hannah Hildebrand |
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| Swamp Thing n.60, page 12. Art by |
Veronese writes: "In the midst of writing Watchmen, Alan Moore paired with the long-time illustrator/inker of his Swamp Thing run, John Totleben, for a one-off issue just months before Moore left the book. What was created is the issue entitled "Loving the Alien," with the name stemming from the David Bowie release of a year and a half before. In my mind, this issue stands out as the most adventurous and bizarre offering of the mainstream modern comics era. It features a mix of pen and ink, spray paint, found art including zippers and watchfaces, and other sundry materials to create the individual pages of the issue, in what one could consider a harbinger of the forthcoming work of Dave McKean. The process by which it was scripted is unique as well. To begin, Totleben created 11 pages and labeled them as A through K. He then sent them off to Alan Moore so that he could craft a story around them. Moore then wrote 11 additional pages to finish the story, with Totleben then providing the art for them.An image of this piece of original art was included in the extra materials for Absolute Swamp Thing Vol. 3, along with the script for this issue and an essay from Totleben describing how it came into being. The letter designation for the page is unknown, but from the script devised by Alan Moore for this issue, it is noted to be of the initial batch of 11 sent by Totleben.I feel this is easily one of Totleben's best pages from his tenure on Swamp Thing (and maybe the most adventurous of his career) - it is a standout page from a run that Totleben calls, "one of the greatest mainstream horror comics of all time." This page itself has a certain heft to it, with a plethora of watchfaces and even a zipper sturdily attached to a piece of roughly 11x17 illustration board. Glad to have this one, it has been one of my favorites on CAF for quite some time."
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| Art by Marat Mychaels |
