Rorschach by Bruce Timm

Above, a cool Rorschach sketch by the legendary BRUCE TIMM.

It was included in a set of 11 sketches by Timm recently sold on ebay! 

Magical 71 by Francesco Frongia

Art by Francesco Frongia

Above, a blazing, magic portrait of The Wizard of Northampton by friend FRANCESCO FRONGIA. It's also a belated birthday gift of sort: notice the number 71 as the magical spell in the illustration!

Francesco Frongia is an Italian illustrator and graphic novelist, founder of the comics collective Mammaiuto. He also draw the cover for Franceso Pelosi's Alan Moore: La Mappaterra del Mago.

For more information about Frongia visit his Instagram HERE. Grazie mille Checco! :) 

From The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, page 26:

[...] since the disc or coin is sometimes called a pantacle or pentacle, you might decide to furnish your design with a five-pointed star. In this case it’s important to remember what the symbol means, namely that when the star has one point uppermost, presiding over the four points below, this stands for the supremacy of the so-called ‘fifth element’, the element of Spirit, over the four worldly elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth. (A pentacle turned upside-down just means the opposite, with Spirit downcast and neglected, dominated by material concerns. This is not to claim that such a symbol can’t be said to be Satanic when inverted in this way, but simply that it is no more Satanic than the ordinary world about us, where material concerns predominate at the expense of soul and spirit.) [...]

It's Moore 71!

Art by Claudio Calia

Today is Moore's 71st birthday! So, above a fantastic portrait of The Man by Italian comics artist and illustrator CLAUDIO CALIA. What Alan says is a reference to a recent article (here).

 

Grazie, Claudio! Happy birthday, Alan!

For more info about Calia, visit his site HERE.

1963 Bootleg Annual

From Cosmic Lion Productions. It seems an interesting bootleg tribute project, sort of...

In 1993, Alan Moore wrote a love letter to the Marvel Age Of Comics. Steve Bissette, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, Dave Gibbons, Don Simpson, and Jim Valentino brought it to life. Called 1963, the six-issue miniseries was equal parts parody, tribute, satire, examination, and eulogy. Compared to the Spawns and Youngbloods that ran the world just then, 1963 flopped and has been a regular bargain bin fixture for over 30 years. To add insult to injury, the final annual chapter never came out, and the plotline that ran through every issue never reached the climax. 

Zip ahead three decades, where a group of creators banded together to create a tribute. The characters are undeniably fun, and the art is gorgeous. A rip-roaring good time several years in the making, we're proud to present GIANT SIZE '63!

Featuring: Ben Perkins, Ian Mcm, Milo Trent, Jerome Cabanatan, Dan Shahin, Geoffrey Krawczyk, William Hoffknecht, Ben Granoff,  Daniel Moler, Joseph Antoniello, Eli Schwab, Tony Fero, Douglas Wolk, Tony Wolf, Blake Wilde, Jim Dandy, Mike Hansen, Shane Berryhill, Max Rex, Don Simpson and more!!

Cover by Geoffrey Krawczyk!

Preorder HERE. International preorder: HERE.

Sussidiario di Magia

Panini Comics has announced that they will publish the Italian edition of The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. The book is scheduled to be released in May 2025.

 

La Magia sta arrivando!

Incantations of the present day

Art by Steve Parkhouse

Excerpts from an in-depth and quite interesting review of the Bumper Book of Magic by Joe McCulloch published the 29th of October on The Comics Journal. 

Joe McCulloch: [...] The great virtue of this book is its accessibility; I found it a concise guide to a variety of esoteric topics, organized with a good sense of intuition.5 This is creditable to not only the authors, but its predominant visual force, John Coulthart, an artist I mostly know through his extensive involvement with Manchester's Savoy Books as a designer, illustrator and cartoonist, though he has been a consistent presence in Moon and Serpent projects though his album art for A. Moore's live performance works with the musicians Tim Perkins, David J and others (The Highbury Working, Angel Passage, etc.). Here, Coulthart is credited with the Bumper Book's overall design, its cover art, large illustrations for nine different sections and many spot illustrations throughout. Sections are differentiated often by page color — white, blue, several shades of brown — while individual illustrations repeat themselves on successive pages to prompt the readers through the authors' esoteric thickets: the image of the Tree of Life repeats page after page as the Moores run down its branches, each of its 10 emanations glowing one by one by alchemical color as they are discussed; Tarot cards are displayed both as in the Tarot de Marseille and in iconographic forms devised by Coulthart himself, running along the tops of pages for quick reference. Decorative borders on most pages pulse dim to strong on a gradient; colors glow cold under glassy digital frost, which is not my favorite look, but further imposes unity on the book as if from an aloof mechanical Demiurge. [...]

[...] the authors draw a distinction between "high" magic, "the urge towards greater understanding, transcendent experience and the ecstatic enhancement of consciousness," and "low magic ... the attempt to bring about desired changes in material reality that are to the magician's personal advantage." In advocating for high magic, the Moores urge the practice of magic for magic's sake, whereby personal, creative, intellectual boons present themselves as if guided by magic itself, "the practitioner left marveling at an abundance of results that he or she had neither asked for nor expected." Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, to add an inappropriate note of my own. The "Great Enchanters" of the comics in this Bumper Book are often buffeted by politics, but they are not usually individuated as activists; rather, magic itself is treated as an expression of anarchy – the promotion of unmediated self-governance vs. the compulsory obedience of doctrinal religion. That magical orders have tended to regiment into elitist fraternities and doom cults does not dim magic as "a subjective practice of the individual, a means by which a single self may come to its own understanding of and make it its own peace with the wonderful and terrible phenomenon that is existence." Importantly, the work of "material" security is a condition precedent to magic practice, because “if we do not have our material circumstances under our control it will be difficult, if not impossible, to progress spiritually.” [...]

[...] A. Moore has said that this book is “intended purely as a statement about magic, rather than as a statement about comics.” But if art is magic, and comics are art, then this is also a book about comics, one that positions the drawn image, the picture story, as fundamental to social beings. This romance feels like a way of raising the art far above the mess of its mercantile circumstances, the shell which too often defines it, the mess from which he fled, a comics that is not just cruel tricks to cop money from suckers, comics preserved in the sky with wizards to voyage far on the silver foam of dreams.

Read the complete article HERE.

(Quasi) Leggere Long London

Omar Martini is writing a series of articles exploring and investigating the many references, links and worlds of The Great When, the first book in Moore's Long London pentalogy. 

The articles are published on the Italian magazine (Quasi) on a weekly basis. 

Till now, we had 6 articles, with more to come. 

You can read them all HERE. In Italian, of course. Enjoy!

Fandom has toxified the world

Magic art by Caio Oliveira

Below, excerpt from an article by Alan Moore published on The Guardian the 26th of October. 

Read the complete piece HERE.

[...] I believe that fandom is a wonderful and vital organ of contemporary culture, without which that culture ultimately stagnates, atrophies and dies. At the same time, I’m sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement.

[...] An enthusiasm that is fertile and productive can enrich life and society, just as displacing personal frustrations into venomous tirades about your boyhood hobby can devalue them. Quite liking something is OK. You don’t need the machete or the megaphone.

Candidly, for my part, readers would have always been more than sufficient.

Alan Moore

The complete article can be read HERE.

309 Moore Magic by Massimo Giacon

Art by Massimo Giacon

Above, a fantastic portrait of Moore by the great Massimo Giacon for his 366 project.

 

Read more HERE. 

Alan Moore by Maurizio Lacavalla

Art by Maurizio Lacavalla

Above, an intense and powerful portrait of The Man by Italian artist Maurizio Lacavalla.

 

Lacavalla has a strong, unique style resulting in a mesmerizing black and white art. 

His last graphic novel is an oneiric biography of H.P. Lovecraft (HPL - Una vita di Lovecraft), in collaboration with writer Marco Taddei, published this month in Italy by Edizioni BD. 

Highly recommended (waiting for International editions to come!).

 

For more info about Lacavalla, visit his Instagram, HERE.

O Grande Durante

Art by Lambuja

Above, cover for the Brazilian edition of The Great When, published by Editora Aleph. 

 

As you can see they commissioned a brand new cover to... Brazilian digital artist ‎ Pedro Henrique Ferreira popularly known as Lambuja.

 

For more info about Lambuja: Official site - Instagram - Behance page

Art by Lambuja

 

I Hear A New World

[...] 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.

Source: BleedingCool

Swampy by Aaron Campbell

Art by Aaron Campbell

Above, a gorgeous Swamp Thing commission by the amazing Aaron Campbell.

 

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

Ben Wickey is... a Great Enchanter!

From artist Ben Wickey's Instagram page. You can read it HERE, posted the 16th of October.

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. [...] 

Art by Ben Wickey

Comics in Magic Land

Magic is here!

Below, excerpt from an interview posted on PW some days ago, on the occasion of the upcoming The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic release. 

In this excerpt Moore talks about the comics contained in the book and his final comics work. With a bit of surprise revelation, too. 

Read the complete piece 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."

The interview is available HERE.

A car crash of ideas

From How ‘The Great When’ by Alan Moore Got Made published on Publishers Weekly site.

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 Moore

You can read the complete article HERE.

Alan Moore by Phil Elliott

Art by Phil Elliott

Above, a stunning portrait and memory of Alan Moore by British illustrator, comic book artist and colorist PHIL ELLIOTT.

 

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

Dr. Manhattan by Federico Mele

Art by Federico Mele

Above, a Dr. Manhattan commission by Italian comic book artist, illustrator and storyteller FEDERICO MELE.

See more about the illustration's process HERE.

Visit the artist's Instagram page HERE.

The Book Lovers by Steve Aylett

Below, Alan Moore's words of appreciation for The Book Lovers, Steve Aylett's new book to be released this December. 

"In the whole of language there is nothing like Steve Aylett, and The Book Lovers is his most relentless assault yet on our prissy synapses. Every sentence is a nifty seizure that will slug his reader through the printed page into a better and less reasonable world, a fugue-state heaven of excruciating beauty that spends dazzling insight as though it were chocolate money. Utterly astonishing, and possibly some manner of police procedural. Read this now before it happens." ― Alan Moore, author of  Jerusalem 

For more info about the book, visit the author's site HERE.

All films are haunted

Below, a statement from Moore promoting Last Movies, Stanley Schtinter's new work.

The book seems a really interesting reading: "Last Movies remaps the century of cinema according to the final films watched by some of its cultural icons, giving an audience the opportunity to ‘see what those who see no more last saw’."

All films are haunted, both by the immortal light of the sooner-or-later dead that they curate, and by the filaments of meaning they extrude into unscripted human lives. Last Movies is an unexpectedly revealing catalogue of final interchanges between imminent ghosts and counterpart electric spectres on the screen’s far side.
Profound and riveting, Schtinter’s graveyard perspective offers up a rich and startlingly novel view of cinema, angled through cemetery gates before the closing credits.
A remarkable accomplishment.
--- Alan Moore

More info at the author's site. Buy a copy HERE.

The outrageous edifice of The Great When

Moore speaks about his new book in a short video shared by Bloomsbury on their FB page.

You can watch it HERE.

Alan Moore: For me, when writing The Great When and the subsequent books in The Long London series, the most enjoyable thing has been taking actual history and then managing to fill the cracks in that history with delirious fantasy. So that I hope that the reader will sometimes find it difficult to tell the difference between the two. 

Starting the series in 1949 seemed like a good move because at that time London was in pieces, shattered by the events of the previous five or six years by the hail of bombs and V bombs. After which I would imagine that the average Londoner’s sense of reality had been drastically overhauled psychologically and socially. The whole of the city, the whole of the country was in pieces, it was in fragments. It was trying to work out what was going on and what its identity was. It was very unstable. We had questions of whether we should adopt nuclear weapons were starting to arise. We had a rise in what we would today call serial murderers after the Second World War. 

All of these things gave the landscape a very uneasy and shifting uncertain feeling. And upon that landscape in 1949 I thought that that would make a wonderful setting on which to erect the outrageous edifice of The Great When.

Alan Moore and Harry Smith

In 2011 Moore paid homage to American countercultural giant Harry Smith.

Below, excerpts from a review of the event published on BFI site.

[...] The polymath spirit of American countercultural hero Harry Smith – filmmaker, artist, folk-song collector, psychonaut and magician – is hard to pin down, let alone summon in the sedate surroundings of the Barbican’s cinema. Yet writer Alan Moore and artist, critic and musician Edwin Pouncey pay their respects admirably tonight, in an event programmed as part of the Barbican’s Watch Me Move: The Animation Show exhibition, conjuring up a soundtrack of poetic biography and collaged noise to a screening of Smith’s No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic (1957).

 

[...] Moore’s skill as a comics writer fits him well for narrating the moving image. Seated in a conspicuously cosy leather chair (which throws a distracting shadow across the screen), he recounts a subjective version of Smith’s life story, from Portland, Oregon childhood to death at the Chelsea Hotel, in a rhythmic present-tense style. Moore’s eye for everyday, even trashy magic is keen and wry, evoking the occult power of New York City’s streets and peep shows, and journeying with abandon into Smith’s psychic and physical desires. [...]

Read the article HERE. Pics of the event HERE.

Harry Smith's movies: Heaven and Earth Magic - Early Abstractions

 

And... I'd love to read Moore's complete text on Harry Smith and/or watch the whole performance!

The last Beatnik artist

Alan Moore speaks about Savage Pencil to promote his Rated SavX book, released in 2020 by Strange Attractor.

From the most subterranean of underground cartoonists to full-blown daemonic visionary, here we see Savage Pencil’s horrid Lovecraftian metamorphosis in all its sublime and terrifying glory; all its ugly ecstasies. Hilarious, psychedelic, beautiful, deformed – give your nervous system a bracing dip into this lysergic acid-bath of a collection from the last Beatnik artist standing. Unmissable.
 -- Alan Moore

More info here, here, here (interview) and here (a book's review).

A picture from the 80ies (from left to right): Chris Long, SavX, Alan Moore

On dreams, punch-ups, occult artifacts and Steampunk

Below, excerpts from a really entertaining interview printed in 2013 on The Chap magazine, issue 70. If you can, get a copy of the magazine! Highly recommended!

 

The Chap is a British humorous men's lifestyle magazine published quarterly, founded in 1999 by Gustav Temple and Vic Darkwood. 

For more info, visit the magazine's official site (HERE) and check the Wikipedia entry (here)

The Chap: [...] What, if any, are your recurring dreams?
Alan Moore: I remember when I was about five, my mother had taken me to the cinema - this wasn't a dream, this was real - to see a film by the Dead End Kids. And this particular film had them meeting a man in a dark suit and a bowler hat, who introduced himself as Mr. Boob. When he took his bowler hat off, it revealed two horns sticking out his bald head. I assume his name was a pun on Beelzebub or something like that. I was screaming and under the seat. And for about a year, thereafter, I would have serial dreams in which I was haunted by this pair of horns in a bowler hat. [...]

When was the last time you engaged in a genuine punch-up?
Because I was an unusually tall kid, I used to attract a certain amount of bullying, but the pattern was that I would put up with it for a certain amount of time. And then I would completely lose all rational control and go berserk, and I nearly strangled two of my classmates. I was quite a strong child. And I also - this is a creepy admission - used to work out by squeezing a weighing scale until I could exert my body weight with my thumbs. So there is this young strangler in here just trying to get out. That would perhaps be a good title for an autobiography: Strangler in Paradise or something. [...]

Could you disclose to our readers some of your favourite and most interesting occult artifacts?
My most powerful, without a doubt, is the Random House Dictionary of the English language, unabridged. That is the best book anyone will ever read. To understand language is to understand what is hidden, which is to say, the occult. [...]

Have you ever experimented with any contemporary fashions? EG Steampunk, Young Fogey, GothLoli etc.
I've got nothing against any of that. Steampunks, sometimes at its more committed end, come up with some really useful ideas. I'm friends with people like Margaret Killjoy, who contributed to Dodgem Logic and also, I believe, actually invented and built a desalination unit (which turns seawater into fresh water). So that's useful. One of my favourite jokes is: "How many Steampunks does it take to change a light bulb? It takes two. One to change the light bulb and one to glue an unnecessary watch part to it." [...]

If you can, find a copy of the magazine. Highly recommended. 

I can hear the grass grow

Excerpt from an interesting analysis by Marc Sobel about I can hear the grass grow, Moore's forgotten strip (or is it a trip?) & adaptation of a song by British band The Move.

Read the complete article HERE. 

Hear the song and watch/read the strip HERE. 

 

The work has been originally published in 1988 in the third issue of  British music magazine, Heartbreak Hotel published by Willyprods. It was also reprinted in George Khoury's The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, published in 2003 by TwoMorrows.

Marc Sobel: "[...] Alan Moore’s ability to probe such deeply spiritual and intellectual concepts, while using the comics medium in a wholly original way, sets this short story apart. As an adaptation, this work of "graphic sound" offers a transcendent depiction of an acid trip, elevating a simple pop song into a pioneering work of imagination. As a comic strip, it shatters the traditional boundaries of print media while pushing the form to its limits. As a work of psychedelic art, it is a masterpiece on par with Huxley’s The Doors of Perception."

Read the complete article HERE. Hear/watch the song/strip HERE.
 

Dennis Knuckleyard in Dream!

An excerpt from an article posted on BleedingCool the 30th of April 2024. 

[...] the protagonist of The Great When was one Dennis Knuckleyard, and [...] Alan Moore came up with the name from a dream diary of his. "The only promising item that they've thrown up so far is an intriguing sounding name: Dennis Knuckleyard. I may find a place to use this in the future, or I may not." But it seems the name was also used as a pseudonym for Moore in a Northampton fanzine called Dream, with a story titled "My Protocol", listed – and then withdrawn – on eBay for £400, described as being "very rare, approx. 50 copies were made and sold mostly at local poetry reading events." Good luck hunting that!

You can read the complete piece HERE. And... let me know if you find a copy of Dream!

a spell of words

Alan Moore talks to The Bookseller on the occasion of the upcoming release of his new fantasy novel, The Great When, the first book in the Long London quintet. Interview conducted by Katie Fraser and posted on the site the 30th of August.

You can read the complete piece HERE.

Moore is “making more of an effort to conjure this spell of words to involve the readers, to make them feel like they are viscerally there, like these things are actually happening to them in a vicarious sense”. But he expects the same effort in return: “I’m depending upon readers to do at least part of the work, because I think that the more work they do, the more they will enjoy it.”

Read the complete piece HERE.

A walk across Northampton

Excerpts from a great video posted some months ago on Youtube by London-based film-maker and writer John Rogers. Rogers walked across Northampton together with acclaimed writer Iain Sinclair and then they visited Alan Moore for a great chat.

Highly recommended!

A fascinating walk exploring elements of the deep history of Northampton with writer Iain Sinclair on the way to a conversation with Alan Moore, author of Jerusalem, The Watchmen, Voice of the Fire, The Great When (Long London Trilogy). Our route takes in St Peter's Church, Gold Street, All Saints Church, the Guildhall, St Andrew's Hospital, and the County Ground. The cast of characters mentioned include John Clare, William Smith, Lucia Joyce, Samuel Becket, John Deakin and more.

Presented as Unearthing Alan Moore at Swedenborg House in Bloomsbury, London.

Alan Moore: [...] The meaning and the poetry of people and places is much more real than the actual substance... I mean if you go to a place and you don't know anything about it... it's just a place, it's not it hasn't got any presence... but if you know all of these little coincidences and things

[...] it's only when you actually scratch the surface of what is popularly known that you discover this kind of seam of fossil material that is full of energy, full of fuel...

[...] I think that the past is ever with us and I think that it just becomes more noticeable when you are approaching the point where you will become the past...

Ian Sinclair: ever with us and ahead of us...
Alan Moore: and ahead of us, yeah...

Watch the complete video, HERE!

Moore by Nabiel Kanan

Art by Nabiel Kanan

Above (scanned from the original art), an spectacular portrait of Moore, "surrounded" by some of his characters, drawn by British artist and illustrator NABIEL KANAN. 

The illustration is included in the sold-out Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book, published in 2003 by Abiogenesis Press.

 

For more info about the artist: Profile - Lambiek

Magic Moore by Francesca Ciregia

Art by Francesca Ciregia

Above, a stunning, intense, magical black and white portrait of Alan Moore by Italian comic book artist and illustrator FRANCESCA CIREGIA who regularly collaborates with Bonelli Editore and Image Comics. I really love it! Grazie, Francesca!

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

Watchmen Page Zero

Art by Dave Gibbons

The page was included in Watchmen Artifact Edition, published by IDW in 2014. Art by Dave Gibbons. 

 

Project mastermind Scott Dunbier explained that it “was done for DC as a sample of the style the book would be. Note the page number in the bottom right corner.”

 

Amazing artifact! More info HERE.

 

The page appeared for the first time in the extras section of Watchmen limited edition published by Graphitti Designs in 1988. The same extras were included in the Absolute Edition published by DC Comics in 2005. The page was presented with a yellow flat color on each panel. The IDW edition showed the b/w, original art page.

On Mary Shelley, Iain Sinclair, Moorcock and more...

Below, excepts from a great interview published in 2004 on Salon.com. 

It's titled The man who invented the future and conducted by Scott Scott Thill. 

I highly recommend it! There is also an extremely interesting section focused on the political situation of the time.

Scott Thill: [...] my contention in this article is that it's pretty much undisputed that you're the heavyweight champion of comics, but that you should also be considered among the world's literary greats, up there with Pynchon and DeLillo, because of what you do with language and narrative.
Alan Moore: Well, thank you. That is praise indeed. I'm a huge Thomas Pynchon fan. But, I don't know, it's nothing that I'm really that bothered about. Over here, the literary establishment is still running, as back in the days of Jane Austen, on the novel of manners, which she more or less invented. And, of course, they're about the social intricacies of the middle class, who were also the only people at the time who could read or afford to buy the books. They were also the people who made up the book critics. And I think that, around this time, critics were so delighted by this new form of literature mirroring their own social interactions that they decided that not only was this true literature, but this was the only thing really that could be considered true literature. So all genre fiction, anything that really wasn't a novel of manners in one form or another, was excluded from that definition.

Do you still find that to be the case?
I recently saw a program about the history of the novel on TV over here -- it was a short series and it was ridiculous. I predicted before the thing was actually shown that there would be nobody representing any form of genre fiction whatsoever -- and I was, for the most part, right. They managed to get through the 18th and 19th centuries without a mention of, say, the gothic novel. Fair enough, perhaps the gothic novels weren't as extraordinary as literature, but they also didn't mention Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," which is an incredibly important book for all sorts of reasons. But I guess it has become what they would term genre fiction, so it is amongst the literary damned. My only mistake was that I said I didn't think there would be a mention of H.G. Wells, but my girlfriend told me they did mention "The History of Mr. Polly," which is one of the few works by Wells that I have not been able to get through. To completely ignore "The War of the Worlds," "The Time Machine," "The Invisible Man" and all his other work shows you the way that the literary critical establishment tends to regard even people in so-called lower literary genres. So if you are working in comics, which is considered a whole lower medium, well, let's just say that I'm not anticipating being given the Booker Prize anytime soon -- and I'm immensely glad of that.

You're not too worried about mainstream appreciation.
 

No, I think that the real life in any culture happens on the margins. I'd agree with what the brilliant, divine, wonderful Angela Carter said about Booker Prize-winners; I believe she referred to them as shortlist victims, which I think pretty well sums it up. The most interesting writers are the ones that are seldom going to get anywhere within shouting distance of a literary prize because they are considered too vulgar. Take Michael Moorcock, for example, who wrote the wonderful "Mother London," one of the most astonishing London novels ever written -- and there have been a great many astonishing London novels. "Mother London" is a tour de force; it is the best thing he's ever written, but there is no chance of Moorcock ever being given literary respectability because he has dabbled in ignored, disregarded and, some would argue, frankly juvenile comics or fantasy.

Are there other authors you feel are devalued because of the nature of their work?
 

Sure, people like Iain Sinclair, who is I think perhaps one of the best writers of the English language who is currently alive and working. His books are not an easy read. They're very dense with a lot of information on a single page. Culture today predisposes us to receive our information predigested and prepackaged, and most, as a rule, tend to shy away from anything which hasn't been simplified to the level where anyone could understand it. That is not the job of an artist or a creator, yet all too often in the mainstream you'll find that is what people are doing in order to remain popular. They know their audience, and they know if they push the right buttons in the right order that they can create another bestseller or whatever. I'm very content with this kind of strange, underground ghetto that I've been shunted into. It's a wonderful place and you meet a much nicer class of people. [...]

You can read the complete interview HERE.