smoky intro for Alan Moore: Portraits

Detail from the portrait by Nicola Testoni

Below you can read the introduction I wrote for our Alan Moore: Portraits of an Extraordinary Gentleman book, available (ENGLISH only) in all the Amazon stores. It's a little smoky thing...

You can read more details about the book HERE.

 

I'm a kind of writer, performer, magician... and a kind of urban legend who has lived in Northampton all of his life and has clearly not seen very much of the world but has written a lot about it.
- Alan Moore, interviewed by Michaela Blackburn in front of his house in Northampton, 2020

WE ARE ALWAYS HERE

Here I am again. After twenty years.
Maybe, if you are reading this, I’d better say… here WE are again. After twenty years.
Time flies, doesn’t it?

Or we’d better say, THIS time has always been HERE, if we accept the idea of Eternalism and the block universe, two concepts that Alan Moore has embraced and shared.
So, we are always here celebrating Moore’s 70th birthday. As we are always here celebrating his 50th birthday. It’s just a matter of being at the right point in time. Sort of.
Well, these concepts are mind-blowing, aren’t they?

Trying to simplify, we are here to celebrate Alan Moore with words and pictures conjured by a variety of talented contributors. As it happened for the Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book in 2003, it all started with a simple thought: ‘It’s 2023… let’s do something for Uncle Al’s 70!’… and it ended as you know. And you know it because, right now, you are holding this book in your hands. I just tried to maintain a little control over it, avoiding exponential growth as it happened for the Portrait. (Gary, do you remember?)
Also note that at the time I am writing this, I am not completely aware of the final form of this book.
Time is a bit of a mess, at least from a human perception point of view.

However, I am sure this book is full of love and appreciation for our beloved and admired Magus from Northampton and for his creations. Obviously, it is not meant to be a comprehensive portrait. Could it ever be? It just offers an investigation of some aspects of Moore through short (maybe not always so short) essays and memories written for this occasion by his collaborators, friends, and scholars.

For the visual part, we have, well… a series of awesome, bearded portraits drawn by different artists from all over the world. These are mostly from my personal collection which has grown steadily over the years. (Yes, I know that it sounds like some sort of ‘perversion’, but the incredible amount of Moore’s portraits available on the web can demonstrate I am not alone in this, and that The Man is a real, contemporary icon. Yes, He is!)
Furthermore, we have some portraits drawn specifically for this celebration.

So… a big ‘GRAZIE’ to all the contributors – both writers and artists – who generously answered this call.
We are all here to celebrate Alan – Alan, can I call you by name? Can I? After all, I collected all those portraits of yours… – wish him ‘Happy birthday!’ and say ‘Thank you for all your stories, especially those yet to come’. We all hope you, Alan, would enjoy this little gift. We put a lot of genuine passion into it and had a lot of fun doing it, I must admit.

I also need to mention that, in these complex times we are all living in, the net profits generated by this book will be donated to Doctors Without Borders, a necessary and praiseworthy NGO.

Last but not least: very special thanks to my extraordinary friends and comics lovers Omar Martini, Gary Spencer Millidge and Angelo Secci, always ready to support me, and whose contribution and expertise were fundamental to have this project materialized from the Idea-Space into the real, tangible world.
Grazie, bros!

So… It’s party time, now.
AUGURI, Alan! A chent’annos!

smoky man,
Sardinia, August 2023

If you prefer to read the intro in Italian, I translated it for the friends at Fumettologica. 

You can find it here. 

Portrait & Portraits

Above, a great picture I was extremely pleased to see on the Web in the past days. Thanks Flavio for the tip!

It's from Jacek Żuławnik's Instagram (here the original source). Żuławnik is a Polish professional translator from English and.... a Moore-logist, of course! Grazie, Jacek! 

20 years can be a great amount of time and... a blink of an eye!

Details about ALAN MOORE: PORTRAITS book, HERE.

A book for Moore 70: Portraits

Cover art by Gary Spencer Millidge (based on a photograph by Joe Brown)

We did it, AGAIN! 20 years after the Alan Moore: Portrait, I conceived and edited a new book (in English only) to celebrate The Man and wish him a collective "Happy birthday"! 

It's a little belated birthday gift and an advance X-Mas present but... it's HERE!

ALAN MOORE:

Portraits of an Extraordinary Gentleman

A celebration of the acclaimed British writer ALAN MOORE on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

This 150-page volume contains short essays, memories and portraits by 50+ contributors including Gary Spencer Millidge (cover), Iain Sinclair (foreword), Peter Hogan (afterword), Paul Gravett, Russell Willis, John Coulthart, Koom Kankesan, Gene Ha, Zander Cannon, Hilary Barta, Jacen Burrows, Eduardo Risso, Hunt Emerson, and more (see the complete list in the image below).

100% of the net profits proceed from this book are to be donated to the NGO Doctors Without Borders. 

It's a DIY production, a labour of love, with no publisher attached, so it's available only on Amazon stores. It's the solution that we found to manage distribution and make the book available to all the readers interested, world wide. 

So check it on the following direct links or simply search it on Amazon (I suggest "Alan Moore smoky man" as keywords).

US ---- UK ---- DE ---- FR ---- ES ---- IT

 

NL ---- PL ---- SE ---- JP ---- CA ---- AU

It needed a lot of hard work and I couldn't have done it without the amazing contribution of all the artists and writers who generously answered the call. GRAZIE a tutti. I am really proud of the final result. Thank you, AGAIN! (Special thanks to Omar & Angelo for their unwavering support.) And...We all hope that Alan will like it.

 

Below, the full content list and some sample pages. Enjoy! 

Ancora Auguri, Alan. A chent'annos! :)

 

 

Moore 70: Happy birthday, Magus!

Cover art by Carlos Dearmas. Colours by Luca Paciolus.

Today is the day! Happy 70th birthday, Alan!

 

Upon request from the friends at Fumo di China (which is a long-standing Italian magazine fully focused on Comic Art), I put together a 6-page special to celebrate the great event. With a gorgeous cover art by Carlos Dearmas & colours by Luca Paciolus.

The special contains a 4-page article that I wrote titled "Parole da Moore" (Words by Moore) with Moore portraits by Gene Ha, Angelo Secci, Leomacs, Lorenzo Mò, Giacomo Putzu and Officina Infernale. Furthermore, the special includes a brief Moore profile, selected excepts from the famous Sassaki's interview and 7 opinions about Moore from his peers and friends.

All in Italian, of course. Scusate. Sorry.

Special thanks to Carlos, Luca, Gene, Angelo, Massimiliano, Lorenzo, Giacomo, Andrea and Raphael for their collaboration and permission.

The magazine (Fumo di China n. 335) will be available next week in all the Italian news-stands & comic shops (of good taste). 

Visit Fumo di China site (HERE) or their FB page (HERE) for more information.

 

Again... Auguri, Alan! A chent'annos. Have a great day!

 

(And maybe there is something moore to come...)

Alan Moore by Alessandro Aroffu

Art by Alessandro Aroffu

Above, a great Alan Moore portrait by Italian comic book artist Alessandro Aroffu. You can also recognise some familiar faces and... a Sardinian mask, too. Grazie mille, amico!

 

Alessandro loves stories, comics and... bees. 

For more info about him, visit his Instagram: HERE.

The artist as a young man by Claudio Calia

Art by Claudio Calia

Above, a portrait of The Man from Northampton directly from... the 80ies, by Italian comic book artist and graphic journalist Claudio Calia.  

Calia has published several graphic novels on social and political subjects and has contributed to many indie projects and festivals. 

 

Grazie mille, Claudio!

For more info about the artist, visit his official site: HERE.

Hitchcock's gems

Excerpt from page 50 of Alan Moore's BBC Maestro Course Notes 1.0, "Part Five: A Variety Of Forms - 24. Screen Gems". Full course: HERE!

HITCHCOCK’S GEMS
Alan Moore: Reading François Truffaut’s book about Alfred Hitchcock was a revelation for me. He was explaining how Hitchcock achieved his effects in films like Psycho, shot by shot.

I remember the scene in Psycho where one of the detectives is suspicious there might be something unusual on the upper floor of the Bates Motel. The first shot is the detective looking up the stairwell, low-angled and looking up, which means that what you are looking up at is placed in a position of power, psychologically. In that instance, the audience’s tension increases because the detective is considering going upstairs but we feel the unknown power because of the way the image is set up. When the detective climbs the stairs it switches to an overhead shot, so that the audience is in the position of power but helpless to intervene. Whatever happens you are trapped looking at it from this position. This is the exact point at which the apparently crazy old lady (which we later find to be Norman Bates himself) comes running out of the landing and stabs the detective to death – while we look on, helplessly.

The angle at which you look at something will affect the psychological mood of the shot.
This is something that I’ve learned a great deal about when it came to writing for comics because it uses the same principles.

V by Yildiray Cinar

Art by Yildiray Cinar

Above, a V homage by Turkish comic book artist Yildiray Cinar.

 

For more info about the artist, visit his Twitter account, here.

Mystic Moore by Abhishek Singh

Art by Abhishek Singh

Above, a phenomenal Moore portrait by acclaimed artist Abhishek Singh.

Singh writes: "The mystic scribes like Thoth, Atri, Enki, many others, come into the visceral spirit of this much visceral Moore, a shaman of fables."

 

Abhishek Singh is an Indian creator and storyteller. Spanning fine art exhibitions, comic books, animation and VR films, his work has been exhibited in prestigious places like LACMA, Asia Society, Vermont Museum and Burning Man. His critically acclaimed Krishna: A Journey Within, published by Image in 2012, is the first graphic novel by an Indian-origin writer/artist to be published in the USA. He currently lives and creates between his studios in Brooklyn, New York and Mumbai. For more info visit his official site, HERE.

Iain Sinclair 80

Below, a small excerpt from Alan Moore 1-page contribution to IS 80, a limited-edition signed publication to mark the 80th birthday of legendary writer, film-maker, and walker Iain Sinclair.

The 192 page A4 illustrated publication features over 170 contributors, including Peter Ackroyd, Caroline Bergvall, Keggie Carew, William Gibson, Xiaolu Guo, Philip Hoare, Toby Jones, Stewart Lee, Esther Leslie, Rachel Lichtenstein, Robert Macfarlane, Jonathan Meades, Dave McKean, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore,  J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley and Marina Warner.

 

Unfortunately, the book is currently sold-out. And I sadly confess that I couldn't get a copy. Sigh. Sob. 

Special thanks to friend Omar Martini for sharing the text.

Alan Moore: [...] I met Iain and became entangled in his fascinating human narrative, demoralised to find that he was even better at being a person than he was being an unbeatable writer: generous with his invaluable time, supportive, warm, and always willing to share the astonishing arcane intelligence that flows so freely through his multitude of subterranean channels. Not only a literary example, then: if arguably the best and most bar-raising writer in the English language can be such a lovely individual, what excuse does anybody have for being otherwise?

[...] We are privileged to walk the world while he does. [...]

Alan Moore by Lorenzo Mò

Art by Lorenzo Mò

Above, a great, intense, cartoon Moore by Italian graphic novelist and illustrator LORENZO MÒ.

 

Lorenzo Mò has published two graphic novels for Eris Edizioni, Dogmadrome in 2019 and the recent Omnilith in 2023, mixing a cartoon, pop style with indie vibes. His illustrations and comics have appeared in several magazines, including LÖKzine and linus.  

For more info visit his Instagram, here.

V by Peter Kuper

Art by Peter Kuper

From the sold-out Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book, above a fantastic V by award-winning artist PETER KUPER.

 

For more info about the artist: Official site - Wikipedia

ShieldMaster introduction

ShieldMaster: Blast To The Past. The Kickstarter crowdfunding will end in 7 days. 

Check it HERE.

This comic features a glorious introduction by the icon, Alan Moore. You read that right! The Alan Moore!

Not quite as good as The Watchmen!!

 

Above, cover of Flaming Carrot Comics No. 16, June 1987: 1st appearance of Mystery Men. Created by Bob Burden.

Tolkien, nostalgia, superheroes & material culture

In the past days, on the occasion of the paperback release of Illuminations, Screen Rant published a 2part in-depth interview with Alan Moore. 

You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here. It's a reading that I highly recommend!

Below, some selected excerpts.

From Part 1
Alan Moore: [...] My favorite fantasies are the ones that are unclassifiable. Things like David Lindsay’s The Voyage to Arcturus, or the late Brian Catling’s Vorrh trilogy, which was one of the most original fantasies that I’d ever read, where the authors are coming up with things that aren’t their fantasies. That are things that they have created when not restrained by the rules of naturalistic fiction, not something that Tolkien borrowed from Norse Mythology. Nothing against Tolkien, although he’s not an author that I particularly admire. [...]
I read The Hobbit and thought it was a great children’s book. I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the ‘60s because that was kind of mandatory in the ‘60s. You had to read The Lord of the Rings or you’d have been, I don’t know, thrown out of the counterculture or something like that. I read them and some of my friends, whom I very much admired, said that they had been completely captivated, but it didn’t really relate to me. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just to say that I didn’t particularly respond to it.

[...] The nostalgia is never for anything real. Even when we practice it ourselves, and yes, it’s something we all do. We say, ‘aw, wasn’t that nice, that particular television series or that particular brand of...’ There’s nothing wrong with it, to feel nostalgically affectionate for things like that, but it is technically an illness. The first people to be diagnosed with nostalgia – I believe it was somewhere in Germany – there were some people who’d arrived in a village and immediately fallen ill, and there was nothing that seemed to be done for them, until somebody said, ‘they are suffering from nostalgia. Take them back to the places where they came from, and they’ll get better immediately.’ And they did. He was talking about a physical homesickness, but I think nostalgia is a sickness, because those memories – they’re not actually real. We’ve elaborated them, we’ve gilded them, those memories of how wonderful those things are. When I’ve done pastiches of things from the past, which I’ve done quite a bit over my career, I’ve found out that you don’t have to make them as good as the things were originally. You have to make them as good as people remember those things being, which is to say you have to make them better than the original. Because we will burnish things in our memories, and that becomes dangerous when we’re burnishing fairly miserable times into some kind of trouble-free utopia, when in fact it was pretty much the exact opposite. The mythical past that has been taken from people, and that, if they just vote for this person or that person, they will somehow mystically have returned to them. [...]

[...] as I was attempting to say in Watchmen, if these creatures, these superheroes were ever manifested in anything like a real world, the results would be horrifying and grotesque. That was basically the message, at least one of the main messages of Watchmen: that they don’t work in reality! Even in the fake reality that I constructed for them to work in in Watchmen, they don’t work, they mess everything up. [...]

From Part 2

Alan Moore: [...] I am obsessed with rhythm, because it will create a rhythm in the reader’s head. And if that rhythm is smooth, then they will absorb the prose without little stumbles or things like that. It’ll be easier for them. I think that’s perhaps one of the things that – of course the use of language as well, but the rhythm I think is one of the things that gives the poetry some room to breathe.

[...] I’d like maybe a return to some of the older forms of culture, because, just because they have been apparently superseded, that doesn’t mean that they’re banished, or that there’s no point to them anymore. When the camera was invented, all of the painters in Europe didn’t immediately go out and burn their easels and brushes. There is still painting, even if we have a more high-tech way of producing images. And it’s the same with stories and with culture in general, that, yes, the whole world, we are told, is destined to be run completely online. I wasn’t consulted. An awful lot of the people that I know weren’t consulted, obviously, and that really doesn’t work for me. If it works for other people? Fine, although I’m not sure that it does. Given the immense amounts of political instability that have been occasioned by online interference, firms like Cambridge Analytica, and all of these other movers and shakers who have been targeting different voter groups and stuff like that. Who were responsible, it was found out by the electoral commission over here, for completely throwing the results of the EU Referendum in 2016, and who weren’t a million miles away from the people organizing Donald Trump’s campaign a few months later that same year. This online world has got a lot of problems with it, but one of those is that it’s made people think that other forms of expression are kind of old-fashioned.

I’d like to see a return to physical culture. I’d like to see a return to music papers and physical fanzines. I’d like to see – I mean, the hippy culture that I grew out of and the culture that Beat culture turned into was entirely – the actual texture of it, the fabric of it, was hundreds and hundreds of cheaply produced poetry fanzines. Little poetry magazines, which I spent quite a great deal of money on buying in the moment. Things that were originally 50 cents that had got brilliant poems in, by poets who went on to become really famous or really accomplished. These artifacts have got so much of that era in them, and offer so many possibilities. When I was producing things like my crappy school poetry magazine, Embryo, and the Arts Lab magazines, we were doing them all upon a big duplicator where you had to type them onto wax stencil, then put the stencil physically on the drum of the duplicator machine, turn a big handle that would propel single sheets of paper through the drum, which would come out printed on one side. So, it took quite a while to print and staple even 200 copies of a twenty-page poetry magazine, but that physical culture, it was important. And at that time, we would’ve killed to have the possibilities that desktop publishing offers. What kind of Arts Lab could we have made if we’d have had the technology that is around today? What kind of magazines could we have published? What would our music have been like if we’d got that facility for it?

And yet, now that that technology and that capability is within everybody’s grasp, when anybody could produce a magazine much, much better looking, much better presented than anything we did in the Arts Lab on their desktop computer, nobody’s doing it. There aren’t poetry magazines. There probably are, but nowhere near the number that there were. There aren’t fanzines. There aren’t any places where people can try out their work and get themselves published. So, I would say, that an ideal situation for me was, if we took, in some areas, a couple of steps back. Or at least, if part of the culture took a couple of steps back.

[...] So, yeah, a return to some sort of material culture, even if that’s augmented by the technology of present day and the future. I can’t help but feel that a physical culture would be something that I think would be a lot more sustainable. It would probably allow a lot more people the opportunity to see what they could do as an artist, as a writer, as a musician or whatever. I think it would probably be a bit more democratic, and perhaps a bit more enjoyable, but that may be just me.

You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here.

Doppelgänger Moore by Officina Infernale

Art by Officina Infernale

Above, a strongly intense Moore by Italian artist Officina Infernale.

Officinale Infernale is active in the comics field since the 90s, both self-publishing his personal works and collaborating with the most important Italian comics publishers. His most recent work is Glitch, a cyber-punk thriller published by Feltrinelli Comics.

The comics medium is sublime

Excerpts from an interview published on Newsarama. The complete piece is available HERE.

Moore is talking about his 'What We Can Know About Thunderman' story from Illuminations.
Alan Moore: [...] The comics medium is perfect. It is sublime. The comics industry is a dysfunctional hellhole. [...] The medium can do anything. Its potential is still almost completely untapped. So it was attempting to express my love of the medium, some of the wonderful people who worked in it, and to also express my horror at the fact that this this little offshoot, the superhero genre, has become a monoculture that's in danger of taking down at least a considerable part of the comics medium with it when superhero movies finally aren't interesting. When that happens, my worry is that a lot of the comic shops won't be able to continue and a lot of interesting independent comics would perhaps not have outlets.

Mischievous Bitz

Excerpt from Smash Hits, January 7 - 20, 1982, "Bitz" section, page 10.

TRANSPORT OF DELIGHT
They're really a caution these pop groups, aren't they? The latest artistic wheeze from David Jay, bassist with ever so serious Bauhaus, is to play a gig on an ordinary double decker bus as it plies its regular route around his home-town of Northampton. He plans to pull it off with his spare-time outfit The Sinister Ducks who also feature Sounds cartoonist Curt Vile.
The whole point, he says, is that there will be no advance warning to Press, public or passenger transport authority.
The lads will just wait at a request stop with their instruments, battery amps and so on, go upstairs and set up whether the audience is a full house of choking smokers, three men and a dog or just the conductor.
When his associate outlined the scheme, Bauhaus singer Peter Murphy observed: "You are mischievous, Dave. It's a nice idea, but don't you think as an event it's really rather obscure?"

Occupy the world of comics!

Above, excerpts from Buster Brown At The barricades: Foment in the funnies and comics as counter-culture, a long essay written by Alan Moore to support the Occupy movement and serialised in the three issues of Occupy Comics, published in 2013 by Black Mask.

Alan Moore: [...] The present generation, those who mostly (although by no means exclusively) make up a large part of the modern protest movements, are the first who've grown up since the comic book upheavals of the 1980s and therefore the first who've grown up in a world where comics were a natural and accepted feature of the cultural landscape. This is perhaps evidenced by their gleeful appropriation of comic book iconography and highly-visible cartoon theatrics. It would seem that there has never been a generation for whom comics as a tool or an effective weapon are more eminently suited, nor a time of social crisis better able to lend comics a true sense of urgency and purpose. Times like these are arguably exactly those which comics were created to engage with.

So, by all means, occupy the world of comics. Occupy the doorsteps and the lobbies of the industry if you've a mind to...certainly the comic industry is as deserving of such treatment as is any other greedy and unscrupulous business concern...although it might be thought that mainstream comics are best left to manage their own imminent destruction, this being the one task which they've demonstrated a real attitude for over the last seven decades. A more positive and useful protest might be to support the families of the true titans of the medium, the cheated giants like Jerry Siegel or Joe Shuster or Jack Kirby or the scores of others that have never received fair remuneration or redress, in their courageous efforts to confront these massive corporate entities with their immense resources and battalions of lawyers. [...]

An even more effective long-term strategy would surely be to occupy the medium itself. The many glories of comic strips past have never been so instantly accessible to the would-be comic creator, giving him or her the means to steep themselves, to educate themselves, in an astonishing array of concepts and techniques, from Little Nemo through to Jimmy Corrigan. Thus armed, with nothing more than a blank page and some variety of drawing implement, dissenting voices can refine and broadcast their ideas more widely and compellingly, while at the same time possibly making their protest into an enduring work of art that can enrich the medium and the broader culture in which it exists. Today's technology has made self-publishing more easily achievable, and in addition there are an increasing range of small and honourable publishers with a more flexible approach to new material, allowing access to new formats and fresh concepts which perhaps have a potential to transform the medium.

[...] If you care about what you are saying, if you seek a more effective way of saying it, then pick up that brush, pencil, pen, that mouse or even that discarded cardboard box out in the alleyway and pour your heart, your mind, your self into as many little panels as it takes to make your statement. You may find it opens up modes of expression and dissent that you have previously not considered or imagined.

You may even find you've got yourself an occupation.

Alan Moore
Northampton,
May-June 2012

Black Lives Matter

Excerpt from an interview published on The Telegraph site the 13th of September. Also available on MSN.com site, here.

Is it true that he refuses all money he is entitled to from the film companies, asking for it to be divvied up among the film’s writers and other creatives? “I no longer wish it to even be shared with them. I don’t really feel, with the recent films, that they have stood by what I assumed were their original principles. So I asked for DC Comics to send all of the money from any future TV series or films to Black Lives Matter.”

Read the complete interview HERE.

Top 10 posse by Gene Ha

Art by Gene Ha

Above, a stunning Top 10 commission created by the amazing GENE HA during the recente Baltimore Comic-Con. Pure gold, with a nice Jeff Smith's Bone homage too! Well done!

Alan Moore by Lee Moyer

Art by Lee Moyer

Above, an ingenious portrait of Moore, full of references to his works, by illustrator and designer Lee Moyer. The illustration has been used for an article published on Aeon.co in 2014.

 

For more info about the artist: Official site - Instagram - WordPress

Moore from the shadows

Art by Daniele Serra

DANIELE SERRA did it again! Above, you can admire an awesome watercolour portrait of our Bearded Man by acclaimed Italian award-winning illustrator and comic book artist DANIELE SERRA. Mille grazie, Daniele!

For more info about Daniele Serra visit his website: here.

It's time for... The Great When

In the past weeks, details have been revealed regarding The Great When, the planned name for Alan Moore's first of a series of five fantasy novels, collectively known as Long London. The book in scheduled for September 2024 release.

Dennis Knuckleyard is a hapless eighteen-year-old who works and lives in a second-hand bookstore in 1949 London. Aspiring writer though he is, his life feels quite uneventful. But one day his boss and landlord, Coffin Ada, sends him to retrieve some rare books from a strange and paranoid dealer. When he retrieves the books, he discovers that one of them, A London Walk by Rev. Thomas Hampole, does not exist: It is a fictitious book that appears in a real novel by another author. If both Hampole and the book are made up, how did it come to be physically in Dennis's hands? Coffin Ada tells him they come from the other London, the Great When, a version of the city that is beyond time, in which every aspect of its history from its origin to its demise is somehow made manifest. There epochs blend and realities and unrealities blur and concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous and terrible beings. And Coffin Ada tells Dennis, if he does not return the book to this other London, he will be killed.

So begins Dennis' adventure in Long London. To return the otherworldly book, he must dive deep into the city's occult underbelly, meeting an eccentric cast of sorcerers and gangsters, including Grace Shilling, a sex worker who agrees to help Dennis with the caveat that she will stab him if he makes any advances; Prince Monolulu, an infamous horse race tipster who claims to be an Abyssinian Prince; and Jack Spot, a ruthless mob boss looking to cement his status on top of the city's underworld. But upon entering The Great When, Dennis finds himself at the center of an explosive series of events, one that may have altered and endangered both Londons for good.

Mystical, magnificently written, and hilarious, The Great When is Moore's most imaginative work yet. It is the unforgettable introduction to the brilliant, staggering, consciousness-altering world of Long London.

More info here and here.

Stylish Moore by Giacomo Putzu

Art by Giacomo Putzu

Above, a terrific digital portrait of The Man by uber-talented Italian painter, illustrator and street artist Giacomo Putzu. I really love Giacomo's art!

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

Supremes by Officina Infernale

Art by Officina Infernale

Above, a stunning commission piece by Officinale Infernale, nom de plume of Italian multi-faced artist Andrea Mozzato. The illustration - with a strong 90s vibe - features Grim Eighties Supreme and Squeak The Supremouse from the acclaimed Alan Moore's Supreme run (check here and here for some extra details; last link is in Italian).

It's a gorgeous piece, isn't it?

Officinale Infernale is active in the comics field since the 90s, both self-publishing his personal works and collaborating with the most important Italian comics publishers. He is the founder of Murder Skateboarding brand. His most recent work is Glitch, a dystopian, cyber-punk thriller, published by Feltrinelli Comics. Mozzato is one of the most original and powerful voices in the Italian comics scene.

 

More info here, here and here - Tumblr

Art by Officina Infernale

Italian Illuminations

Italian publisher Fanucci Editore has announced the upcoming publication of Illuminations. The release date is set for the 27th of October 2023. The book is already available for pre-order. 

For more info check the publisher's site and Facebook page.