Celebrating 2000AD 46th birthday

Art by Chris Weston

Few days ago, the extraordinary British artist CHRIS WESTON posted the above, fantastic illustration on his Facebook page. He added: "Happy 46th Birthday to the comic that changed my life and  paid a good chunk of my mortgage! Cheers, 2000 AD!" The first issue dated 26 February 1977.

You can recognize some familiar faces: Halo Jones and Waldo "D.R." Dobbs.

Alan Moore by Catriel Tallarico

Art by Catriel Tallarico

Above, a mesmerising pencil portrait (with a touch of digital) of Alan Moore by Argentinian artist Catriel Tallarico.

For more info and news about the artist: Blog - Instagram - Gallery  

Note: This is the 1000th post on this blog! Let me celebrate a bit! Grazie a tutti!

The story behind Top 10

Excerpts from an interview conducted by David Harper with Top 10's artists Gene Ha and Zander Cannon. You can read it HERE. 

[...] I sat down with both Ha and Cannon to discuss the story behind Top 10 from their perspective, and how the two worked with Moore to craft this remarkable series.

[...] “By the end of the first issue and a little after the beginning of the second, it became totally clear to us that Zander’s insanely good and fast at layouts, storytelling, reading the script, interpreting it, and figuring out nuances I wouldn’t see,” Ha shared. “And for consistency of style, anatomy, perspective, backgrounds, and stuff like that, I can do things that Zander can’t do.”

[...] “Zander was able to figure out the storytelling build of Alan Moore, and then figure out a Zander Cannon way of telling the story more efficiently sometimes.”
“The nice thing about (Top 10) was it wasn’t this spare, tense drama. It was just a fire hose of junk out on the page,” Cannon added. “If you had to course correct a little bit to fix a problem or whatever, it was no big deal.
“It was part of the vibe.”

[...] “His scripts are very detailed. He obviously has that vision in his head of the camera as a character moving in and out of conversations,” Cannon said. “And he was attempting something that was so complex. In this case it was…I wouldn’t say new to comics, but the idea was that we were specifically trying to emulate something that is done in film and doing it in comics.”

[...] “I’d say that two thirds of the background characters in the first issue were in Alan’s script, and by the end, one third were,” Ha said. “The trick is that he would sometimes just give a theme for characters in the story or in a scene, but then he wouldn’t list any examples.”

[...] If there’s one issue that Top 10 is famous for, it’s #8. [...] The incredible thing about this issue is it at least in part only happened because Alan Moore got sick shortly before pages were due to the artists. [...]

“What happened is, Alan had gotten the flu or something like it, and he was too sick to write the whole script or to figure out the plot of that issue,” Ha noted. “So, he wrote two pages to slow us down long enough so he could recover from the flu and then figure out what the story was.”

“(The second page) is just a one point perspective down shot of this entire city that took Gene an absolute age to draw. And that was on purpose because Alan had the flu and he was like, ‘I have to give Gene and Zander something to get them off my back,’” Cannon shared. “So, he wrote these two pages that were intentionally a huge pain in the ass to draw. That was why the story ended up focusing on (Peregrine).”

“I think the reason the story is so tight is that it starts and ends on her and her crisis of faith. That’s a great example of just playing the cards you’re dealt, being able to pivot, and then making a meaningful story out of it. Which I thought was remarkable.”

“He left himself little bits and pieces that he could play with later, but he didn’t know what he was going to do with it,” Ha added.

“And then, it turned out to be the greatest issue of Top 10 ever.”[...]

Alan Moore's cane

Few weeks ago DC co-bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran finally revealed their plans for the new DC movies included one focused on The Authority. In his newsletter - Orbital Operations for 5 February 2023, titled Big Sound Authority - Warren Ellis commented the news:

THE AUTHORITY was a comics series I created with and for the artist Bryan Hitch, with colourist Laura DePuy (now Laura Martin) in the late 1990s at DC Wildstorm. It was actually just Wildstorm when we started - I remember Jim Lee and Scott Dunbier gathering us all to dinner in London to explain that Wildstorm was being bought by DC, that doughty pair having just returned from Northampton to explain it all to Alan Moore.

"Alan got out of the cab with a walking stick in his hand, and I swear to god it looked like a cudgel he'd brought to beat us to death with."

Alan Moore, to me later: "Ah, yes.  I affect a cane these days."

(Note: this is the correct English formulation of a sentence that might otherwise read, "I carry a cane as a personal affectation.") - Warren Ellis

 You can subscribe to Orbital Operations HERE.

Lost Ant Man

On his newsletter, Tom Brevoort posted again the script that Moore wrote for his contribution to Heroes, a benefit book published by Marvel in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks in 2001. We talked about it here. But this time he added something more:

I did later make an attempt to convince Alan to write FANTASTIC FOUR, unsuccessfully—he did have an interest in doing ANT-MAN, though I was never quite certain whether we could sell it in sufficient quantities to make it worth pursuing, and it never came together in any event. But I bet his Ant-Man would have been mind-blowing. - Tom Brevoort

You can read Brevoort's newsletter HERE.

Thunderman: Paul Hostetler did it!

Art by Paul Hostetler

American artist Paul Hostetler did it! He created a 1-page comics by using Moore's script included in "What we can know about Thunderman", a short (well not so short...) story from his Illuminations book.

 

All the details are HERE, at Hostetler's site.

And if you happen to be Mr. Alan Moore, reading this, and thinking, "My career in comics cannot end on such a note," we would be happy to have you and your verbose, asiatic, quaquaversal scripts back in the medium. - Hostetler

For more info about the artist: his official website - Instagram - Twitter

Who is…? Miracleman

Who is…? Miracleman Infinity Comic n.1 has debuted on the Marvel Unlimited app February 8, 2023, written by Ram V with art by Leonard Kirk and colors by Edgar Delgado.
Is it simply a recap (in vertical scrolling comic format) of Miracleman's classic adventures or... are they planning something? You can read more HERE.

Who is…? Miracleman Infinity Comic n. 1 is available to read on Marvel Unlimited: here. 

Comic Book Punks

Comic Book Punks. By Karl Stock. Length: 352 pages. 

To be published by Rebellion. Release date: November 21, 2023.

About the book

The influence of the comic book has never been greater, from movies to streaming and beyond, but the journey comics took from little-regarded kids' magazines to literary prize-winning books and global franchises turned on a highly unusual group of writers and artists. Few would have expected a small gathering of British comic book fans and creators in the early 'seventies to be a global cultural pivot-point, but this was the start of a disparate movement of punks, dropouts and disaffected youths who reinvented a medium and became the imaginative heart of a global success story.

Based on years of interviews with a generation of leading writers, artists and editors, Karl Stock reveals the true story of the wild times, passion and determination that helped, hindered and saw the reinvention of comics.

Stock brilliantly tells the story of the triumphs and disasters that rewrote the rulebook on what comics could be and who they should be for.

About The Author
Karl Stock has written Tharg's Future Shocks for 2000AD, Dredd prose fiction for the Judge Dredd Megazine and strips including Sniper Elite and Death Wish for Rebellion titles such as Battle, The Vigilant and Cor! & Buster, as well as interviews and features about comics for the Judge Dredd Megazine, Tripwire, Comic Heroes and more. He is the co-author of the 40th anniversary edition of Thrill-Power Overload, 2000AD's official history, and lives in Scotland.

Source: Simon & Schuster site. 

Miracleman by Ian Churchill

Art by Ian Churchill

Above, a picture posted by British artist Ian Churchill on his FB page, the 1st of February.

Churchill writes: "I re-read my old copies of Miracleman over Christmas to refresh my memory before reading the long awaited new stories by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham. Marvel have never asked me to do a Miracleman variant cover (and I'm a big Miracleman fan!)- So, I decided to draw one for fun over the festive period."

For more about the artist, visit his site HERE.

Swampy by Rick Veitch

 

Art by Rick Veitch

Above, a fantastic Swampy by Master Rick Veitch! Great thing!

Kimota! vs. Shazam!

Art by Kerry Callen

Above and below, two fabulous commission pieces by MAD contributor and freelance illustrator Kerry Callen.

 

For more info and news about the artist: Blog - Twitter - Instagram

Art by Kerry Callen