Alan Moore by MD Penman

Art by Mark Penman. Words by Moore.

Above, a great Alan Moore portrait drawn by UK based freelance illustrator and comic book artist Mark Penman. The image enriches the introduction that Moore wrote (above, you can read the final lines too) for Penman's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight written by John Reppion.  

 

You can order a copy HERE! Highly recommended!

Morlan The Mystic by Paul Grist

Art by Paul Grist

Above and below, Alan Moore... ehm, Morlan The Mystic from the pages of The Weird World of Jack Staff by the great Paul Grist, published in 2010 by Image Comics. 

"You can call me Al." Enjoy!

Art by Paul Grist

La Mappaterra del Mago

La Mappaterra by Pelosi & Frongia

Italian musician, actor, comic book author and scholar Francesco Pelosi is writing a series of articles focused on Moore's works: he is tracing a map and he named it la Mappaterra del Mago... The Magician's Map-Land. I am really proud to call Francesco... a friend!

Below, I translated - with a little help from another friend of mine, the extraordinary Omar Martini - a short excerpt from one of Pelosi's articles which includes the map drawn by Francesco Pelosi & Francesco “Checco” Frongia.

You can read the complete set HERE. Of course they are in Italian.

From the corner where we are now, from the special and elevated point of view of Citadel Supreme, we can finally see the whole Map-Land: it spreads beneath us but, on a closer look, also above and all around us.
At the centre there is From Hell’s black city [...]. Watching it from here, you can notice that it is wrapped in the flames of the Voice of Fire and that there is a Hole at its centre: there is the same Hole also up here, in the Citadel Supreme, because the two cities are equal and opposite, one black and rooted to the earth, the other gold and floating. However, when they are watched from above, from a place outside the Map-Land, they occupy exactly the same space - the only difference is that to access Citadel Supreme you have to go through the door/outpost called 1963.

Around the city of From Hell, there is an area of barren and even darker countryside, with an unusual circular shape. If we could look at the Map-Land from below, we would see that those dark lands are nothing more than the foundations of Providence/Neonomicon, an upside-down city, whose roofs and buildings, like rotting and incomprehensible roots, plunge directly into the ground.
The dark circle of Providence is defined by a series of streets that form the sides of two equilateral triangles, crossing themselves to outline a six-pointed star.
One of the points, the one looking at the Map-Land from above, seems to point to the sky or the West: it is the place where the city of Promethea lies. On the other hand, on the opposite point which seems to indicate the ground or the East, lies the city of Tom Strong.

From here, heading south, we find the townlet of A Small Killing […], then the Top 10 metropolis and going westwards, just before arriving at Promethea, the Lost Girls hotel. Following this path, we can see that the outermost part of the Map-Land is circular and all the towns in this area are connected to each other by roads and, in the same way, each town is connected to the centre of From Hell.
Then, moving from Promethea and heading north, we find the old and crumbling city of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the five districts of Tomorrow Stories (which include the village of Jack B. Quick, the swamp of Splash Brannigan, the film-set city of First American and U.S. Agent and the metropolis of Indigo, also known, depending on which side you access it from, as Greyshirt or The Cobweb). Finally, closing the circle to the east, we arrive at the small town of Mirror of love […] and again at Tom Strong.

However, the most interesting thing you may notice from this high angle concerns the shape of the land. The Map-Land, as it has developed until now, looks like a two-dimensional rectangle. If you look at it closely, you can see four dotted lines rising perpendicularly towards the sky from the vertex of the rectangle corners, each touching the vertex of another dotted rectangle that closes the airspace as if it were a box. The Magician's Map-Land is therefore both a two-dimensional rectangle and a 3D rectangular parallelepiped. Ultimately - and how could it be otherwise - we find ourselves inside a Block-Universe/Idea-Space.
The name of this all-encompassing place is Jerusalem. 

Francesco Pelosi

100 Comics qui ont marqué l’histoire!

Art by Laurent Lefeuvre

Above, cover for the French book 100 Comics qui ont marqué l’histoire! published by Ynnis Editions.
The book is an essay presenting a selection of 100 comics (la bande-dessinée anglo-saxonne) from 1966 up to 2022.

Cover art by French comic book artist and illustrator Laurent Lefeuvre. On the upper side of the illustration you can identify the blue legs of Doc Manhattan and... a V mask.

Art by Laurent Lefeuvre

Pixel Moore by Turbogamma

Art by Turbogamma

Above, an essential Moore portrait by pixel artist Turbogamma.

For more info about the artist: Instagram - Twitter

Dreaming Moore and... Elvis

Some days ago, acclaimed British comic book artist and creator Liam Sharp posted the following text on his Facebook page (you can read it here):

I dreamt that Alan Moore lived on the moon, and used a space ship/throne, given to him by Elvis, in the shape of an E.P belt buckle, to fly back to earth, where he embarked on a comic odyssey from Clapham to Northampton, meeting Dave Gibbons and others along the way… - Liam Sharp

For more news about Liam Sharp: Official site

Many years ago a friend confessed to me that she dreamed that Alan Moore and Melinda were the owners of a pastry shop and while selling sweets they also provided love advice to the clients.

Dreaming is a strange land, you know!

The Queen, Thunderman and Long London

Excerpt from a great interview by Séamas O'Reilly published on his site few days ago.

You can read the complete piece HERE.

[...] This interview took place on 14th September. As it was six days after the Queen’s death, I began by offering what little consolation I could to one of Her Majesty’s most doting subjects.

As we speak, we’re all in mourning here in Walthamstow. How are you finding yourself in these sad times?

Alan Moore: I’m taking each day as it comes. Being familiar with this country for nearly 69 years now, I have been avoiding any contact with the media or the world since we got the sad news. I figure that give it another a month and it might have died down to a manageable level.

There seems to be a fear within the media that they’re going to get leapt on by a public clamour which does not really appear to exist

I notice that most of my comedian friends are apparently only commenting within a fairly exclusive site where they can avoid getting piled upon by, what have been referred to as, flag-shaggers. I’ve seen there’s been a couple of nice comments. My friend Barney Farmer had noticed that a lot of food banks had been closed for the queen’s funeral, which is of course what she would have wanted. Barney posted a picture of the Swedish Chef from the Muppets giving one of his signature kisses. These are certainly eventful times. [...]

might the passing of the Queen mark a psychic shift in how people relate to that institution? That her being replaced by a King who enjoys a slightly less worshipful reverence, might make some of the arguments against the wider institution break through?

That had occurred to me. That this might be the beginning of the end of the Royal Family, which perhaps wouldn’t be before time. It’s about how relevant the Royal Family are to our current state of affairs. I tend to consider that, with or without a monarchy, this country will probably carry on as the conservative/fascist utopia that it has been for a long while.

I’m not sure how much, at least in the 21st century, that was dependent on the Royal Family. It would be a step in the right direction though, if only that. 

[...]

So maybe you can assuage my embarrassment and talk a little about how you assembled such a big, complete world for [What We Can Know About Thunderman]?

Well, it came from a strange place, it came from something I think I have one of the characters in there expressing, which is that leaving comics is one thing — and I’d done that, which seemed like a massive relief — but stopping thinking about comics is another. Especially when you’ve been working at them for forty years, which is a fairly long career by anyone’s standards. So, I tend to find these annoying, often negative, thoughts about comics swirling up in my mind when I didn’t want them there.

And there was also an image that came with them, it was something to do with, I dunno, old copies of Superboy or something like that. Some kind of Curt Swan scene with someone walking across one of those generic midwestern landscapes that used to appear in Superboy and adventure comics. And, coming the other way, there was somebody who was one of the original Legion of Superheroes in their original, twelve-year-old-kid incarnations. And I’d got no idea what this meant but there was a sort of obsessive quality about it.

So, when I was putting together the proposal for Illuminations I thought this would be a good place to actually exorcise some of that stuff as some form of art rather than some angry mutterings in the bath.

[...]

Will there be more of these short stories, is there a drawer full of these or you can return to the unwieldy space operas?

I’m probably not going to return to the space operas anytime soon but, for the time being, what I am committed to is a quintet of books I promised, which is the Long London series. I’m about halfway through the first one, which is entitled, at least at the moment, The Great When. I’m having enormous fun with them, when I get the chance to write them, which is one of the reasons why I’m finding the publicity circuit a bit of a pressure, because I’m just aching to get back to where I left Long London.

The first book is all set in 1949 with London pretty much destroyed, in pieces, and the national psychology in a similar state. Everybody important in magic has just died. Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Arthur Machen, Harry Price, Uncle Tom Cobbley, so there’s a gaping hole in English magic and English psychology.

It’s nice to get back into London again, it’s a city that have always enjoyed fictionally. I haven’t been down there for years but to get back into that fictional territory where there are all these figures from the different periods that I’ll be setting the various books in. I suppose those figures are the reason why I wanted to write the book. There’s something in those kinds of liminal characters and their histories and how they all interwove.

I’m talking about people like Prince Monolulu, the imaginary African, who was probably the most famous black man in Britain in his time. He was a racing tipster and he was acting the exotic very skillfully to work his audience.

People like Iron Foot Jack, the King of the Bohemians, with his huge built-up shoe. Austin Osman Spare figures quite prominently, and odd figures like John Gawsworth who was Arthur Machen’s biographer and publisher. Arthur Machen’s a big off stage presence, having died a couple of years before. It’s taking off from some ideas of Arthur Machen’s, along with the way that they overlapped with other bits of London lore and legendary London figures.  

 The complete interview is available HERE.

Moore 69: a gift from Gianluigi Concas

Art by Gianluigi Concas

Let's keep celebrating today Moore's 69th birthday! So, above a spectacular portrait of The Man by Italian water-colorist and designer Gianluigi Concas. 

Again... Happy birthday, Alan! A Chent'annos!

For news about the artist, visit his Instagram page: HERE.

Moore 69: a gift from Zander Cannon

Art by Zander Cannon

Today is Moore's 69th birthday! So, above a phenomenal portrait of The Bearded Man from Northampton by the great comic book artist and creator Zander Cannon. 

 

Grazie, Zander for such a great homage! And... Happy birthday, Alan!

For news about the artist, visit his Instagram page: HERE.

Eternity for V

Page from Eternity vol.1. Art by Sergio Gerasi

Above, a page from the first volume of Eternity, a new intriguing deluxe series created by writer Alessandro Bilotta and published in Italy by Sergio Bonelli  Editore; volume one, titled La morte di un dandy (Death of a dandy), has been drawn by the great Sergio Gerasi.

The series - set in a strange, alternative Rome where futuristic technologies coexist with a sort of pervasive nostalgia for the '60ies - follows the adventures of tabloid journalist Alcide Santacroce (above, enjoying an animated party!).

You can read a review here (in Italian).

Brian Bolland 1986

Above and below, pages from IT'S ABOUT TIME: A Memoir in Pictures and Words by Brian Bolland, due Spring 2023. Shared by Bolland on his FB page. 

Don’t know whether this is of interest. Pages 27 and 28 of my memoir part 2 “Where Was I?”  I’m in 1986 here I think. Bolland

Eulogy for Kevin O'Neill

Art by Kevin O'Neill

Above excerpts from a moving eulogy that Moore wrote in memory of Kevin O'Neill. 

It was shared by Scott Dunbier on his Facebook page. 

[...] What made him unique amongst his generation of comic creators was the breadth of his influences and experience. While most of his contemporaries were modelling their styles solely upon the incoming wave of great American talent, Kevin was assimilating the angular transatlantic elegance of, say, Spiderman creator Steve Ditko, without abandoning his love for the manic cartoon grotesquery of England’s Ken Reid. The result was an astonishingly flexible ability to shift from the bold designs of the Edwardian illustrators he had a passion for, to the deranged absurdities of the British children’s fare that he’d been absorbed in since infancy.

Nobody drew like Kevin O’Neill. As a result of one of our more innocuous collaborations, Kevin received the supreme compliment of having his entire artistic style – whether he was drawing a table-leg or a baby carriage – ruled unacceptable by the American industry’s then-extant Comics Code Authority. [...]

Working with him was an honour, a pleasure, and an education. His knowledge of the culture we were mining was easily as extensive as my own, and in most instances was marvellously complementary. [...]

Not only a working relationship, the connection with Kevin was one of the most important friendships of my life. As well as being one of the medium’s most individual and exciting draftsmen, he was also exceptional in being one of the very few working-class creators working in a trashy, gutter art-form that was originally intended only for the poor and supposedly illiterate, since become a gentrified middle-class district with graphic novels in the stead of studio loft-apartments. Of all my mainstream collaborators, Kevin was the only one who stood solidly beside me in our difficulties with the comic-book publishing industry, and whose commitment was always to the work, like my own, rather than to the financial inducements and bullying of the companies; the manufacturers.

He was also one of the warmest, funniest, most erudite and most courageous people that I’ve ever met. [...] I am going to miss him like I’d miss sunsets.

In the words of English music-hall legend Max Miller, ‘Take a good look, missus. You’ll never see another one.’

Alan Moore,

Northampton,

November 9th, 2022

Read also HERE and here.

Rorschach by Mike Perkins

Art by Mike Perkins

Above, a great Rorschach portrait by the excellent British comic book artist Mike Perkins.

For more info about the artist: Official site - Wikipedia 

Italian Maxwell

During the past Lucca Comics Con, Panini announced that in February 2023 they will publish Maxwell The Magic Cat, in hardcover format. Italy is the second country, after Brazil, to get a collected edition of this Moore's early work.

Kevin O'Neill Forever!

Source: Alan Moore Official FB page

Eyes Wide Open

Art by Sergio Vanello

Above, a fantastic portrait of Alan Moore by acclaimed Italian comic book artist, graphic novelist and illustrator SERGIO VANELLO. 

Vanello's most recent work is L'uomo lupo, a great graphic adaptation of The Wolf Man, George Waggner's iconic horror movie; published for the Italian market by NPE.

 

For more info about the artist visit his Instagram page: HERE.

Alan Moore by Paco Anguita

Art by Paco Anguita

Above, Alan Moore portrait by Spanish artist Paco Anguita. 

For more info about the artist: Behance - Personal site

 

Moore's quote, included in Spanish in the illustration, is from DeZ Vylenz's The Mindscape of Alan Moore documentary. In the video Moore says:

Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images to achieve changes in consciousness. 

- Alan Moore

A message to the Brazilian People

Below, a text piece published yesterday on the Alan Moore Facebook page. 

It has been confirmed as authentic by Moore's daughter Leah. 

Published here with the sole intention of sharing the message. The text is (c) Alan Moore.

Dearest Brazil,

We are fast running out of last chances to save the planet and its peoples. Our world is changing, faster than it’s ever changed before, and forcing us to adapt more quickly if we are to survive. From hunter-gatherer society to agriculture, from agriculture to industry, from industry to whatever is taking shape now – this new condition that we do not as yet have a name for – humanity has seen these kinds of monumental shift before, although not often. These transitions are not caused by political forces but by the unstoppable tidal movements of history and technology, which is a tide that we can either steer our vessels to take advantage of, or we can be washed away by. The Earth is turning, turning of necessity into a new place, and we can only turn with it or else lose the biosphere that sustains us forever. Most people, I believe, know this in their hearts and feel it in their stomachs.

And yet, over this past five or so years, we have seen across the globe a ferocious resurgence of exactly the political and economic ideas that led us into this clearly disastrous situation in the first place. The unconcealed aggression of this extreme right advance seems to me so forceful, and yet so disconnected from any reality, that it can only be born of desperation; the hysterical fear felt by those most invested in the power structures of the old world, who know the new world can, ultimately, have no place for them. Afraid for their very existence, for the existence of the worldview from which they benefit, they have crowded the world stage over this last half-decade with increasingly loud, overblown and blustering pantomime characters, for whom no course of action is too corrupt or inhuman, and no line of reasoning too blatantly absurd.

Unashamedly monstrous, these have persecuted racial and religious minorities, or their native peoples, or the poor, or women, or people of different sexualities, or all of the above. During the still-evolving pandemic they put their political posturing and their financial doctrines before the safety of their populations, presiding over hundreds of thousands of potentially unnecessary deaths; hundreds of thousands of devastated families, devastated communities. With their nations on fire, or flooded, or parched by drought, they insisted that climate change was a leftist hoax to inconvenience industry, and branded environmental or social protestors as terrorists. Adopting the fascist circus-act style of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, we have had the dangerous insurrectionary theatrics of Donald Trump in North America, and the ruinous indignities of Boris Johnson and his understudies in the (at present) United Kingdom. And, of course, Brazil has had Jair Bolsonaro. 

Although we in the Global North obviously contribute much more than our fair share of horrifying political figures to the world’s situation, I don’t know anybody with an ounce of conscience and compassion who isn’t appalled by what Bolsonaro, riding into office on Trump’s bow-wave, has done to your huge and beautiful country, along with what he continues to do to our relatively small and somehow-still-beautiful planet. We’ve watched despairingly while, singing from the same hymn-book as his North American inspiration, Bolsonaro has railed against Brazil’s indigenous people, its homosexuals and the rights of its women to safe abortions, fuelling an uncontrolled bonfire of hatred as a distraction from his social and economic agendas, while simultaneously flooding your culture with guns. We’ve seen him attempt to swagger his way through the pandemic by spouting his anti-vaccination idiocy, and we’ve seen Brazil’s increasing acreage of hastily-prepared graveyards; those pigeonhole grids in grey soil with here and there dead flowers or painted markers as a drip of colour.

We’ve also looked on while he responded to the prospect of new international environmental laws by simply speeding up his suicidal destruction of the rainforest, choking our communal atmosphere with burning jungle, displacing or dispatching people who had lived in these regions for generations, and seemingly colluding with or turning a blind eye to the murder of journalists investigating this brutal ethnic cleansing. A respected British science magazine that I subscribe to, New Scientist, has recently described Brazil’s imminent elections as a potentially crucial point of no return in our species’ life-or-death battle with the climate catastrophe we ourselves have engineered. Simply put, Jair Bolsonaro can continue, profitably, to please the corporate interests that support him, or our grandchildren can eat and breathe. It’s one or the other.

As an anarchist, there are very few political leaders that I could completely tolerate, much less endorse, but from all that I have heard or read about him, Luiz da Silva, Lula, seems to be one such rare individual. His policies appear to be fair, humane and practical, and, as I understand it, he has promised to reverse many of Bolsonaro’s most disastrous decisions. Repairing the damage of these last five years would surely not be easy or without cost, and da Silva would be inheriting a badly disfigured political landscape. At the very least, however, from this distance he at least has the look of a candidate who acknowledges that mankind is going through one of its infrequent seismic transformations, and realises that we must change how we live, if we are to live at all. He seems a politician committed to the future, with its hard work and its just and wonderful possibilities, rather than the flailing and destructive death-throes of an unsustainable past.

Brazil’s forthcoming election is, I’m told, balanced on something of a knife edge and, as discussed above, the whole world is riding on it. If you have ever enjoyed any of my work, or have felt any sympathy with its humanitarian leanings, then please go out and vote for a future that is fit for human beings, for a world that is more than the golden latrine of its corporations and their puppets.

Let’s put the iniquities of the last five, or perhaps the last five hundred years, behind us.

With love, and trust, 

Your friend,

Alan Moore   x 

The world is rudderless

Designed by Simon Sherry. You can buy it HERE.

Moore's quote is from DeZ Vylenz's The Mindscape of Alan Moore documentary (an amazing and fundamental video). Even if the text on the t-shirt is slightly different.

The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. 

The truth of the world is that it is chaotic.

The truth is that it is not The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Aliens or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control.

The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.

The world is rudderless.

- Alan Moore

Chameleon Boy, tv series, theism

Photo by Josh Hight

Excerpts from a fantastic interview published on GQ few days ago. By M.H. Miller with amazing photos by Josh Hight. The complete interview is available HERE.

Alan Moore: [...] I suppose the comics were a very big thing in my life until the age of about 14, 15. I had absorbed an awful lot of completely pointless and unnecessary lore about superheroes, all of these excessive, insane, meaningless details of continuity. I have a very sticky memory. Not so much these days, but back in my pomp, I remembered everything. It was very embarrassing when, at a comics convention that I attended after becoming a professional, they had a trivia quiz that they persuaded me to take part in. And, horrifyingly, I knew the secret identity of Chameleon Boy [a minor member of DC’s Legion of Superheroes]. That was when I realized that, no, you gotta back away from this. It’s sort of an illness.

[...] I would be the last person to want to sit through any adaptations of my work. From what I’ve heard of them, it would be enormously punishing. It would be torturous, and for no very good reason. There was an incident—probably a concluding incident, for me. I received a bulky parcel, through Federal Express, that arrived here in my sedate little living room. It turned out to contain a powder blue barbecue apron with a hydrogen symbol on the front.
And a frank letter from the showrunner of the Watchmen television adaptation, which I hadn’t heard was a thing at that point. But the letter, I think it opened with, “Dear Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen.” That wasn’t the best opener. It went on through a lot of, what seemed to me to be, neurotic rambling. “Can you at least tell us how to pronounce ‘Ozymandias’?” [Another of the vigilante characters in Watchmen.] I got back with a very abrupt and probably hostile reply telling him that I’d thought that Warner Brothers were aware that they, nor any of their employees, shouldn’t contact me again for any reason. I explained that I had disowned the work in question, and partly that was because the film industry and the comics industry seemed to have created things that had nothing to do with my work, but which would be associated with it in the public mind. I said, “Look, this is embarrassing to me. I don’t want anything to do with you or your show. Please don’t bother me again.”

[...] I’m an atheist. No, there wasn’t some guy in the clouds who created everything. However, the pagan idea of gods, and the way they were regarded in the classical world, that interests me. The idea that these gods were essences of whatever their particular field of endeavor was, that Hermes is the essence of language and intelligence and also theft. I can accept gods on that level, that they are pure ideas that may have become, through their complexity, self-aware, or which have become so complex that we perceive them as being self-aware, whether they are or not. So it’s perhaps a heavily qualified theism, not quite atheism. [...]

Read the interview HERE

Alan Moore by George Vega

Art by George Vega

Above, a British Alan Moore portrait by artist George Vega, drawn for Kayfabetober 2022. 

For more info about the artist: Instagram - Etsy

Green Knight Moore

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Alan Moore penned an introduction for the upcoming hardcover edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by John Reppion and MD Penman. 

You can order a copy HERE! Highly recommended! 

Excerpt from an interview published on downthetubes.net:

John Reppion: Yes, we have a truly lovely introduction from Alan. He absolutely loved the zine edition when he read it back in November last year, and had nothing but lovely things to say about it, except for the fact that it was a bit too small… and he lost his copy really quickly. So again, another vote for a larger edition. When we started putting the new edition together, I asked if he’d be interested in doing a little intro, and he was really into it. The intro ended up being about twice as long as we were expecting, but we’re certainly not complaining about that. It’s a wonderful addition to the book. A great way to open it. And, of course, it’s always nice when Alan Moore says nice things about your comic.
[...] 

Has Alan contextualised the material at all or simply talked about why he likes it?
John: Both, really. He’s not a man to do things by half. He really understood what we were trying to do with the book, and we were both delighted with how he’s articulated that in the intro. Full disclosure: Alan is also my father-in-law and every week he reads to his grandkids over the phone. That’s mine and Leah’s kids, and his other daughter, Amber’s son, my nephew. So, Alan is revisiting a few books he hasn’t read in a few decades and some of that has also informed the into. The way Victorian sensibilities about knightliness informed some children’s literature well into the 20th and 21st centuries.

Order a copy HERE!

Moore The Merrier

Excerpt from a 2-page interview (titled "Moore The Merrier") contained in Big Issue North n.1454, 17-23 OCTOBER 2022. Interview conducted by Dan Whitehead.

Buy a copy HERE!

[...] “I started out doing comedy stuff,” he explains in his unmistakable Midlands baritone rumble. Indeed, his first published work was as a cartoonist in the 1970s for music magazine

Sounds, for which he supplied the anarchic comic strip Roscoe Moscow under the wonderfully punk nom de plume Curt Vile.

“After the early stages of my career in America, I think that people tended to see me as that guy who does the dark gritty dystopian material and that I was some kind of grim, dark gritty guy. Even in the most horrific things that I’ve done, there’s generally a joke or two in there somewhere. I like humour. Nobody wants to be a dark British dystopian guy forever, you know? it’s not a good look.”

His playfully dry humour is definitely to the fore in several of the stories in Illuminations. [...]

Order your copy HERE!

Pog for Hero initiative

Art by Shawn McManus

Above, a wonderful Pog and Swamp Thing illustration created by Master Shawn McManus for an upcoming Hero Initiative auction.

Hero Initiative is auctioning off the McManus piece and other great original art at the Baltimore Comic Con Saturday, October 29 at a live auction. But it's also possible to place proxy bids in advance via e-mail. 

More details and more original art HERE. Be generous, if you can!

Kayfabetober2022: Alan Moore is in!

Art by Christopher Flork

Above and below, a smoky selection of Moore portraits created for the current Kayfabetober event launched by Cartoonist Kayfabe. You can find them all on their Facebook page following tags #kayfabetober2022 and #kayfabetober. Enjoy!

Art by Chuk Baldock

Art by Pablo Arias

Art by Simon Wyatt

The Quietus Moore: on fantasy, capitalism and VR

Excerpts from a really informative interview published on The Quietus few days ago.

The complete interview is available HERE. 

Alan Moore:[ ...] I have to admit, I was never a fan of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, I never watched Game of Thrones. I think a lot of fantasy is kind of – perhaps lazy is too strong a word but something in that region. It falls back on standard tropes. Whereas fantasy should always be unique and new. For me, a wonderful fantasy would be Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, which hasn’t got a dragon or a wizard or a dwarf. It’s just about this crumbling castle and its ritual-bound inhabitants. Or Brian Catling’s Vorrh trilogy. Which is a completely original idea: this neglected garden of Eden that has overgrown space and time. The problem with fantasy at the moment is that most of it is purely escapist. It isn’t fantasy that’s going to tell you about the real world. It’s not using its symbols to illuminate, but give you access to another world that doesn’t have the problems and responsibilities of this one. I mean, take the Metaverse, which is a massive data harvesting project, apparently. I think people are trying to bail out of this universe into – I dunno – the Marvel Cinematic Universe...

[...]

We need to move beyond capitalism. We need to move urgently beyond growth and our obsession with growth, because that is a fantasy and it always has been. We do not live in a world of infinite resources, so infinite growth is clearly not possible. It’s becoming very urgent. We don't have to be ruled by GDP. There are other ways that progress can be measured: the wellbeing of a country, for example.

A lot of this would entail the introduction of a universal basic income scheme. Which again is very possible. There are places where they’ve tried it out. It seems to be a very workable thing. And we know that the money’s there. The thing is that amongst conservative thinkers, it is unthinkable that people should get something for nothing, even though that is what their entire careers are often based upon.

We need something drastic very soon. A lot of this stuff, it’s not going to work unless there’s some top-down adjustments. Big initiatives like the Green New Deal, which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was pushing in America. I don’t think the Green New Deal actually dares to talk about the possibility of a life after capitalism. But at least it sounded like people started to address the issues. We need to show people what a world beyond growth might look like.

[...]

The idea of a VR future is, at the moment, quite a frightening and disturbing one. And we’re going to be in the hands of big tech companies who simply want all of your data so that they can sell it. But that is not to say that there won’t be possibilities in the idea of virtual reality. Technology is pretty much neutral, it depends on how we use it.

I experienced a little bit of VR and it is a very compelling experience where your body is not obeying your instructions. I have tried to step off a VR cliff, knowing that there was solid floor there, and I’ve been unable to do it. I’ve tried doing it with my eyes closed. Now, that didn’t work either, because my brain was telling me, ‘no, we don’t step off a cliff, even with eyes closed’. That's worrying, but it does indicate the depth of effect of this technology. And it occurred to me that you could recreate a transcendent experience which is very rarely visited upon people by making that available through something like virtual reality.

The first time I heard about virtual reality, I said somewhat cynically, ‘Oh, yeah, like there’s another kind…’ because we already have a virtual reality, it’s just that our headset is our head. We don’t experience reality directly, it’s compiled somewhere on the loom of our consciousness from the sensory expressions that we receive. And we do that moment by moment. So it’s not that big a leap between reality as we experience it and virtual reality. Would it be possible to recreate a mystical experience using VR? It would take a great deal of artistry. [...]

Complete interview HERE. 

Top 10 by Zander Cannon

Art by Zander Cannon

Above, a majestic Top 10 commission by series co-creator Zander Cannon. See details below.

From left to right, you can recognize officers Smax, Toybox, Dust Devil, Girl One, Jack Phantom and King Peacock.

For news about the artist, visit his Instagram page: HERE.

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Art by Zander Cannon