Alan Moore by Vida Poppell

Art by Vida Poppell

Above, an interesting caricature of Moore by British artist Vida Poppell that I found out on DeviantArt.

 

For more info about the artist: DeviantArt - ArtStation

TCJ Dave Gibbons

Art by Dave Gibbons from Watchmen n.1

Below, excerpts from an interview with Dave Gibbons published the 15th of January on The Comics Journal site. You can read the complete piece HERE.

DAVE GIBBONS: [...] For instance, my classic collaboration with Alan Moore doing Watchmen and the other things we did - I felt a great connection in that he was an artist. He was a writer who could draw quite good comics. And I was an artist who could write quite good comics. So we were close together in the middle. [...]

Talking about Watchmen's contract: [...] So there was no question of anybody putting pressure on us. It's not even me putting pressure on Alan to sign anything he didn't want. We've all signed bits of paper that we really wish afterwards we hadn't signed. It doesn't necessarily mean that there's any evil intent in it. But what I would say with Alan-- and I think these things go hand in hand. I've become reasonably well-known and famous because of Watchmen. But Alan's talents, and I think Frank Miller's talents, are on a different level than so many of us. What comes along with that degree of talent is a degree of difficulty as well, that people want things from you. That people are continually trying to get you to do things for them. And I think that that can quite often taint things. [...]

[...] Well, clearly Watchmen was the Everest of my experience, really. And I'm perfectly at ease with that. It's been good for me in all kinds of ways, not only in whatever money we've made from it, or whatever fame we've had, but it's opened doors to other things. And I've had adventures that I otherwise wouldn't have had. So I'm long since resigned to the obituary reading “Dave 'Watchmen' Gibbons, dead at the age of 105,” you know, blah, blah, blah. I just feel happy that I've had the life that I wanted when I was 10 years old. There's so many people [who] aspire to do things. Perhaps [that’s] because I had a relatively easy thing to aspire to. I mean, I didn't want to get a Nobel Prize or a Pulitzer or anything like that. I just wanted to sit and draw comics. And that was literally what I wanted to do, just to find enjoyment sitting, drawing, coming up with ideas for comics. So I don't care what they call me or-- you know, “Dave Gibbons: the comic fan who never grew up,” or something like that, I guess would be a fairly accurate thing. But I think I'm going to have to settle for Watchmen.

The complete interview is available HERE.

Moore Iluminace by Mikulas Podprocky

Art by Mikulas Podprocky

Above, a great portrait of our Writer from Northampton by Czech artist Mikulas Podprocky.

The image has been used as cover for the Czech edition of Illuminations (Iluminace) published by Argo even if the final printed image seems a bit different, as filtered to feel more "material". I confess I prefer the original one.

More info about the artist at Podprocky Artstation page, here.

Iluminace published by Argo

Alan Moore Portraits - Excerpts Part 2

Art by Flavio Pessanha (detail)

Below, opening lines from the text contributions contained in the Alan Moore: Portraits book, Part 2 (Part 1: here). The 150-page book is available on Amazon stores.

 

• From AMERICA'S BEST COMICS WERE ACTUALLY AMERICA'S BEST COMICS by Duy Tano (page 83)

I was 17 years old in 1999, and I was this close to quitting comics. I’d been buying them regularly for almost a decade at that point, but with increasing prices and, frankly, an overall lack of what I saw as quality books (I may have just not been looking in the right places), I was really starting to feel like I was outgrowing the hobby. I’d discovered Alan Moore a few months before, via a friend who had lent me Watchmen, and the bar had been raised for what I considered good comics.
And just when I was about to throw in the towel, Wizard Magazine came out with an article about Alan Moore’s new America’s Best Comics line, and I immediately put that towel back in the closet where it belonged. [...]

• From TREASURE HUNTING IN THE NINETIES - Moore's lost gems: 1995-1998 by Mike Shea (page 95)

For many, Alan Moore’s comics career can be summed up in the broad strokes of working in British comics on V for Vendetta, Halo Jones and Marvelman; going to DC to make Swamp Thing and Watchmen; spurning mainstream comics for serious-minded indies Big Numbers and From Hell; a return to mainstream with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and America's Best Comics imprint; and finishing with his H.P. Lovecraft works Neonomicon and Providence.
But for those willing to dive into his lesser known and not as easily obtained works, there is buried treasure waiting to be discovered throughout his legendary career. For me, it’s his period from 1995 to 1998 that yields a rich vein of gold worth being brought up to the light not only because it’s so well done, but because it was unexpected. [...]

• From A NOT-SO-DIVINE PROVIDENCE - Alan Moore’s exploration of Lovecraft’s mythos and legacy by Andrea Tosti (page 107)

Providence represents the third phase of British writer Alan Moore's exploration and reinvention of the incoherent mythological universe American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft created in the 1920s. Each of these three stages fits into a precise path whose intimate consistency is perceptible only retrospectively. [...]

• From HATE AND LOVE, 24 FRAMES A SECOND by Craig Fischer (page 119)

In addition to his blunt refusal to see the Hollywood film versions of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) and V for Vendetta (2005), Moore is also on record as defining cinema in general as a lesser medium than language and writing. In many texts—From Hell (1989-1998), Promethea (1999-2005), Snakes and Ladders (1999/2001), others—Moore defines language as the primary technology, a system capacious and powerful enough to grant us consciousness, and film can’t compete with Moore’s conception of Language-as-Prime-Mover. [...]

• From WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT, ALAN? by Koom Kankesan (page 131)

Seventy! Alan Moore is turning seventy. While I’m sure other contributors to this collection of essays may assay a joke about Alan’s age vis a vis his belief in eternalism, there is something about the number and passage that evokes loss, a sense of life running away from us. We so identify our favourite writers with their works. And those works seem to endure in an enshrined perseverance/preservation of time, so it’s always surprising to see photos of one’s favourite creators through the decades, caught in seemingly meaningless moments such as sharing a drink with friends, strolling down the street with their family, or buying something at a store. But of course, these moments, these humdrum details, are just as essential as the book signings and the talks and the political announcements and everything else which squarely frame the writer’s persona. Writers are not simply brains or minds living in jars of electrified jelly, with that jar being the work they produce. [...]

• From ABC AND ME by Peter Hogan (page 143)

The first time I had a long conversation with Alan Moore was at the height of what we might call Watchmenmania, in 1987 or 1988, when I went up to Northampton to interview him about it for various magazines. We got on well – I’m only six months younger than him, so we share a lot of common reference points and interests – and by the time I’d interviewed him a couple more times over the next five years or so, we’d become friends. [...]

Part 1: HERE

 

You can get a copy of the book on Amazon stores.

Alan Moore by Rafael Michel

Art by Rafael Michel

Above and below, a detailed Moore portrait by Brazilian artist Rafael Michel.

More info about Michel at his Instagram: HERE. 

Art by Rafael Michel

Alan Moore Portraits - Excerpts Part 1

Art by Gary Spencer Millidge

Below, opening lines from the text contributions contained in the Alan Moore: Portraits book, Part 1. The 150-page book is available on Amazon stores.

• From MAN’S LIFE IS THIS MEAT by Iain Sinclair (page 11)

With the dubious benediction of old age, a decade more than my allotted biblical span, tired eyes fail but the picture sharpens. Our future is not ‘used up’ as Marlene Dietrich lays on Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, but invigorated, ripe with inventions from a misused past. Potential is now absolute. Veterans hanging around beyond their mortal permissions have an enhanced sense of the world: we are on the cusp of being absorbed into its tacky substance. Disnatured, we leak through former inhibitions, invisible boundaries. We are everywhere. At once. Our own grandfathers. Our children.

Alan Moore, from my side of the grass, is a young man: permanently so. I mean in his boundless energy, his productivity, his continued interest in the obligatory madness of things. And his preternatural ability to ingest the information he needs and to formulate a great synthesis in popular form. [...]

• From FANDOM, FANZINES, AND THE SMALL PRESS: A LOOK BACK by Russell Willis (page 19)

“I really love fanzines… I’d much rather do work for a fanzine and not get paid than do work for a slimy media parasite … and not get paid. I think the difference lies in the purity of intentions behind the editorial policy. Fanzine eds whatever their individual quirks, are putting in a lot of work purely out of love for the medium and desire to help and understand it.” –– Alan Moore

When Alan wrote the above to me in 1984 (I was 16) I had no knowledge of his involvement in fanzines or fandom. I had collected older fanzines that were before my time (and often before my ability to read), such as BEM, Comic Media News International and the pre-Martin Lock Fantasy Advertiser but hadn’t come across his name. I assumed Alan hadn’t been involved. I was wrong. He was there, of course, further back than I was able to go, right at the very beginning… [...]

• From THE FOUR-DIMENSIONAL ARCHITECT - Two locations on the Map-Land of the Wizard by Francesco Pelosi (page 35)

From Hell: The House that Jack Built
I don't know when Alan Moore came in contact with Rudy Rucker’s The Fourth Dimension, but when writing From Hell, the ten-year work on Jack the Ripper’s murders co-created with Eddie Campbell, he was well aware of it. [...]

• From FLAME ON! - More Moore memories by Paul Gravett (page 49)

The early 1980s were a creative ferment for British comics and through this formative period and early professional comics career, Alan Moore was caught up in the thick of it. Xerography helped more people to self-publish fanzines about comics as well as small press comics themselves. Often in modest print runs, with finishing, stapling, perhaps cover-colouring, of necessity usually done by hand. From starting the Fast Fiction table to sell self-published titles at the bimonthly Comic Marts at the Central Hall, Westminster (right across the square from the Houses of Parliament), the next step was to pick out some of most interesting and distinctive voices among them and put them into a bigger, bolder anthology. It was my partner Peter Stanbury who came up with the title and used his handwriting of it as our logo. Escape would feature quite a range of written contributions by Alan over its nineteen-issue run between 1983 and 1989. [...]

• From A CHANGE IN THE AIR by Joel Meadows (page 55)

The year was 1986 and I was only thirteen years old. Earlier that year I had been blown away by Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, a comic with an approach to Batman unlike any I had seen before. In May of that year, I went into my local comic shop in London to grab Watchmen n.1, a series which had been advertised in other DC books before it was published. I wasn’t a 2000AD reader as a kid so my exposure to Moore had been limited up to this point. I had seen him and Gibbons create Green Lantern stories for DC’s book of the same name which were fun but I wasn’t prepared for Watchmen. [...]

• From THIS IS INFORMATION by José Alaniz (page 61)

Scarcely four months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Dark Horse put out a collection, 9-11: Artists Respond. The gashes were still fresh, the dead still being counted (or pieced together), the toxic reek still wafting over Manhattan. That’s the context for Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s contribution, the six-page comics essay “This is Information.”

The piece is somber, respectful of the moment and the victims. Still, upon first reading it in January, 2002, I was struck by how different it was in tone from all the other works in the collection, indeed from virtually all discourses about 9-11 which we had been steeped in up ‘til then. [...]

• From SHAMAN OF IMAGINATION - Random thoughts on the magic side of Moore by Adriano Ercolani (page 71)

In 1993, to celebrate his 40th birthday, Alan Moore declared himself a ceremonial magician.

In an interview published in Entertainment Weekly, he says: “I was turning 40 and thinking, Oh dear, I'm probably going to have one of those midlife crisis things which always just bore the hell out of everybody. So it would probably be better if, rather than just having a midlife crisis, I just went completely screaming mad and declared myself to be a magician. That would, at least, be more colourful. So, I announced, on the night of my 40th birthday party — probably after more beers than I should have had — that, 'from this point on, I'm going to become a magician’. And then the next morning you have to think, Oh, what have I said now? Are we going to have to go through with this? So I had to go about finding out what a magician was and what they did.” [...] 

Part 2: HERE

You can get a copy of the book on Amazon stores.

Neil Gaiman and Bruce Dickinson on Watchmen

Cover art by Iain Clarke (after Gibbons)

Below, two little excerpts by Neil Gaiman and Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden lead singer) from Journey Planet n. 77.

Journey Planet: Do you have any opinion on Watchmen's place in comics' history?
Neil Gaiman: For me, it was a revelation. I had imagined comics that literate and smart but they didn't exist. I loved the process of reading one issue and then rereading it all. For me Watchmen exists in black and white. That's how I read them, in photocopy form.

Journey Planet: What sort of impression on you did [Watchmen] leave?
Bruce Dickinson: Watchmen for me is the gold standard of comics. It can stand repeated readings and still have secrets to reveal. It's something to aspire to in my opinion.

Journey Planet is an acclaimed sci-fi and comics fanzine. Its 77th issue, released at the end of December, is fully focused on Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins' Watchmen. 

Editors: James Bacon, Michael Carroll, Chris Garcia, Helena Nash and Pádraig Ó Méalóid.

The 96-page project, free to download right HERE, presents analysis and contributions on Watchmen from different angles including short interviews with Neil Gaiman, Bryan Talbot, Antony Johnston, Bruce Dickinson and Peter Hogan; longer interviews with Paul Levitz and John Higgins; Todd Klein on Dave Gibbons’ iconic lettering and... much more!

 

You can get the complete package HERE. Highly recommended!