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| Art by Maurizio Lacavalla |
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| Art by Lambuja |
[...] the first of his five Long London novels, The Great When set in 1949 in an alternative London. The subsequent books will be set in 1959, 1969, 1979, and then jumping to 1999. And now, we have learned the name of the second of that novel, I Hear A New World.
The second book is titled after the album by Joe Meek, I Hear A New World, recorded in 1959 but released in 1960, subtitled "an outer space music fantasy". One of the most influential record producers and sound engineers, Joe Meek, was the first to conceive of the recording studio itself as an instrument and one of the first producers to be recognised as an artist in his own right. Working with many artists, he may be best known for the Tornado's track Telstar in 1962, written and produced by Meek, the first record by a British rock group to reach number one in the USA. But he is also famed for taking a shotgun owned by musician Heinz Burt, killing his landlady, Violet Shenton, and then shooting himself in 1967. Those last moments of Joe Meek's life also featured in Alan Moore's spoken word performance art piece The Highbury Working, A Beat Séance, created by The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels collaborative team of Moore, David J, and Tim Perkins and performed on the 20th of November 1997 at the performance club Absorption at The Garage in Highbury, with dancer Paule van Wijngaarden. The words to the track No 1 With A Bullet can be read here. Perkins used samples from I Hear a New World for the soundtrack.
Ben Wickey: After three years of keeping this under my hat, I am so excited to finally share some of the work I did on Alan Moore and Steve Moore's MOON AND SERPENT BUMPER BOOK OF MAGIC, which was just released today! Between 2021 and 2022, I illustrated 50 biographic comic book pages known as OLD MOORES' LIVES OF THE GREAT ENCHANTERS for this incredible tome. [...] Massive thanks to [...] Alan Moore for choosing an unknown weirdo like me to embark on one of the most thrilling, fun, and deeply fulfilling projects of my life. [...]
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| Art by Ben Wickey |
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| Magic is here! |
Alan Moore: "Ben Wickey’s amazing ‘Great Enchanters’ pages could have come from one of those improving boys’ weekly papers like Look & Learn, while the late, great Kevin O’Neill’s scurrilous “Adventures of Alexander” is from the more working-class tradition of weekly comics like the Beano or Dandy. I should point out, though, that the Bumper Book isn’t and was never intended to be my final work in comics.
My final work in comics, completed in 2018, was the fourth and last volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Kevin O’Neill. I’d finished writing all of the Bumper Book’s comic strip material by the spring of 2014, and the whole book by 2015—it’s just taken us ten years to find all the artists and for them to complete the work to such a spectacularly high standard.
There may also be other comic book work out there, as yet unpublished, but volume four of The League was my last comic strip work, and was also, I think, a fond and comprehensive farewell to the medium. The Bumper Book, commenced around 2007, was always seen as a beautiful and accessible grimoire that happened to contain some comic strip material. It was intended purely as a statement about magic, rather than as a statement about comics."
A novel is more like a car crash of ideas. In this case I felt compelled to write something about London’s more spectral low-life figures, and to pick up on author Arthur Machen’s notion of a truer world concealed behind our own. I’d like the reader to know that, other than many of the characters and all of the historic detail, this book is an outrageous fantasy of things that never happened, and also that, in the riotous secret soul of London, every word of it is somehow true. - Alan MooreYou can read the complete article HERE.
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| Art by Phil Elliott |
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| Art by Federico Mele |
