Alan Moore by Fred Hembeck

Art by Fred Hembeck

Above, Moore portrait by American cartoonist and comic book artist Fred Hembeck drawn with, of course... curlicues at his knees!

 

Currently on eBay. Auction ends this Saturday. Check it HERE.  

Unfortunately "International mailings have been suspended for the time being."

Promethea by Bill Sienkiewicz

Art by Bill Sienkiewicz

Above, a Promethea commission by Master Bill Sienkiewicz for Duy Tano of The Comics Cube fame. Great One!

John Constantine by Matt Seneca

Art by Matt Seneca

Above, a fascinating portrait of John Constantine by American cartoonist and comics scholar MATT SENECA. 

Published on his Instagram page: "HELLBLAZER! One of my top 3 comic book characters with Cyclops and Valentina. Reading all 300 issues of John Constantine’s chain smoking occult adventures a couple years ago was a high like no other- Hellblazer comics scratch an itch that, for me, never goes away."

 

About the artist: Instagram - Twitter - Tumblr - The Comics Journal - Big Cartel - Profile

Swampy by Dan McDaid

Art by Dan McDaid

Above, a great sketch of our beloved swamp monster by British comic book writer and artist Dan McDaid. It's a sort of companion piece to the Moore portrait he did (check HERE).

 
For more info about the artist: Wikipedia - Instagram - Twitter - BigCartel

I strongly recommend McDaid's sci-fi epic Dega: check here and here!

 

Grazie mille, Dan!

On Alejandro Jodorowsky

Jodorowsky photographed by Grant Delin

From Kickstarter, to support Jodorowsky's film Endless Poetry.

Alejandro Jodorowsky, if I may presume to have correctly understood his intentions, is an authentic creator who has always understood that magic is greatly reduced without art, but that art is precisely nothing without magic. His inspirational work has always provided a dazzling example of genuine vision coupled with the enormous human strength necessary to realise that vision in this sometimes difficult world of material form and materialist agendas. His example is a blazing beacon to anyone aspiring to work in the medium of cinema; a searing admonishment to remain true to their own unique voice, and eye, and mind; true to the golden information that is pouring through them.

I could list his films with their enduring images, their haunting atmospheres that linger in the heart long after the concluding credits, but if I am honest it was Jodorowsky’s luminous account of his encounter with surrealist goddess Leonora Carrington that most impressed me with the exalted humanity and compassion of the man, and with the heartfelt lucidity of his style, as clear as rain. Anything, any radiant morsel from this artist and magician’s table, is a thing to be treasured in our culture forever, and to contribute in any way to the realising of yet another fugue-state masterpiece could only be the most tremendous honour. -- Alan Moore

Bissette: Swamp Thing, Roeg and... a perfect synthesis

Excerpts from a long, interesting interview with Stephen R. Bissette conducted by Jason Bergman for The Comics Journal.  You can read the complete piece HERE.

Stephen R. Bissette:[...] I alone couldn't have done what we did on Swamp Thing. None of us who were part of that unique team could have done it alone (although Rick Veitch came damned close to doing so, didn’t he, when he was writing and penciling his run on the title?). We, meaning Alan Moore, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, and everybody else that was part of that - Len Wein our first editor, Karen Berger our second editor; John Costanza lettered the book, Tatjana Wood was our colorist. That kind of chemistry yields work that, when it's really humming, is better than the work any of us could do individually. Having experienced that myself, I really believe that.

I went into Swamp Thing having experienced that kind of synergy with one of my oldest friends in the comic book field, Rick Veitch. Rick and I really did some work together that we're both still proud of.

[...]

Len Wein called us and said, "You're going to be working with a new writer and it's somebody you've never heard of." And I said, "Who is it?" He said, "Alan Moore." I said, "Alan Moore! We love his work." Len thought I was bullshiting him. I said, "No, no, no. We've been reading Warrior since the first issue." We had been buying the UK black & white comic magazine Warrior from Heroes World, ironically enough - Ivan Snyder’s Heroes World New Jersey comic shop, the same mini-distributor Marvel later went exclusive with. The Heroes World comic shop in New Jersey carried Warrior, and we'd been reading "V for Vendetta" and "Marvelman" right from the first issue. We knew what Alan had been doing and we were psyched.

And this is what you can't explain, Jason. This is pre-internet. This is before we could have afforded a phone call to each other. We all wrote letters to each other, John Totleben, me, Alan Moore. All three of us. Our letters crossed in the mail. Alan wanted to do with the character exactly what John and I wanted to do with the character. What we wanted to do with the character, John had been pitching to Len via Tom Yeates, and Len had said, "No, no, no, no. Too radical." The whole idea of Swamp Thing not being a man inside, that he was this plant. That's what John said that the character should be, should run with.

Len had turned it down as an idea. For some reason, now that Alan was onboard, Len was open to it. Does that mean Len had let go of the character he had co-created to the point where he could do that, or because Alan so excited him as a writer that Len would trust him? I don't know, but we all wanted to do the same thing.

Furthermore-- Rick Veitch could talk to you about this. From the time Rick and I met, one of the things Rick said always captivated him is, I remember every movie I've seen. And this is pre-video era, so you would see a movie once or twice and you would try to remember it frame-by-frame, if you were crazy like me, because you might never see that film again in your life. And I was trying to make that kind of kinetic imagery and storytelling happen in my comics work, the aspects of cinema that I knew would and could work in comics, but I didn't have the writing skill to do it.

The filmmaker by name, and I've named him before in interviews, was Nicolas Roeg, co-director of Performance, director of Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth. It turned out that Alan Moore loved Nicolas Roeg's work. In our first couple of letters, we found we were on the same page, that Roeg was a common reference point: something we could work from to forge a different way of doing comics.

If you go back and read "The Anatomy Lesson"—that first story that the team of us worked on together (all of us, because as I’ve repeatedly stated, Rick helped me on the pencils), so it was the four of us—it's structured like a Nicolas Roeg film, right? Nicolas Roeg approached storytelling like a mosaic, and you can move the tiles around. I always like to describe it as when Roeg’s approach to cinema is really working, you can tell the story from both ends to the middle—to the heart of the story—and you make the fireworks detonate in the reader's head. That's what Alan could do. He could already do it. Alan was scripting everything Rick Veitch and I had been talking about doing for years. We wish we could do this. Here's this script from this guy in England none of us have met, “The Anatomy Lesson”, and he aced it. And he fucking did it in what, 22 pages.

So right from that point, we all knew we're onto something, like, this is working. Alan would get fired up seeing my pencils. And what was happening, Jason, because there was no internet, is, we were moving all this stuff through the mail. I would photocopy in triplicate every pencil page I sent out to DC, and I would send a package to John Totleben and a package to Alan Moore and keep a set for myself. And Alan was seeing the pencils within a week to 10 days of when Len Wein and then Karen Berger had them. That was back when the US-to-UK/UK-to-US mail was functional and dependable.

Alan would get excited by what I was doing with the pencils, and then we would all see what John had done with the inks, and it would set fireworks off, and we were all pushing each other to go further. For a time, it was just a perfect synthesis.

You can read the complete piece HERE.