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| Art by Gary Spencer Millidge |
- 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.” [...]
You can get a copy of the book on Amazon stores.
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