Alan Moore by André Toma

Art by André Toma

Above, a great portrait of Alan Moore featuring some other familiar faces too. 

Art by Brazilian-born artist André Toma.

 

For more info about the artist visit his blog or Instagram. 

Nightjar: Urban approach to the supernatural

Excerpts from an Untold Tales article by Scott Braden published in Overstreet's Fan n.21, March 1997. The piece investigated the Nightjar series, conceived in the 80s by Alan Moore with art by Bryan Talbot for Warrior magazine even if it was never published. 

The original first episode was later on completed by Talbot and published by Avatar in Alan Moore's Yuggoth Cultures n. 1 (of 3) in 2003. 

Alan Moore: It's fair to say that some of the ideas of this very urban approach to the supernatural eventually found their way into other books, as well as in the character of John Constantine-but you have to remember that I created Constantine as an occult wide boy. A spiff. There was something of the used car salesman mixed in with the occultist there, as well as that tricky, untrustworthy kind of intelligence which I found appealing in the character. The central character of Nightjar, on the other hand, was an intelligent woman who sought vengeance and wanted to take back what she thought was rightfully hers. And the series itself was an honest attempt to portray the occult, not as something performed mainly in spandex costumes, but as something which happens on ordinary streets with ordinary people in ordinary clothes.
The premise of the story was that underneath our ordinary, everyday world, there exists this other magical reality where occultists-with seemingly ordinary, everyday lives-vie for power. And the occultists who practice this magic all have odd names connected to birds. That's why the strip was going to be called 'Nightjar'-after the central character's magical name and a bird of prey that comes out at night.
Nightjar was going to be Mirrigan Demdyke. The name 'Demdyke' came from Bryan's suggestion, because this was the name of one of the Pendle Witches who were hung for witchcraft up north in Bryan's part of the country [England]. And Mirrigan was the daughter of Harold Demdyke, a powerful, but obscure occultist who'd been living in absolute anonymity. As the king of all the magicians, which in the story was referred to as 'Emperor of All The Birds,' Harold had taken the ultimate zen step by obtaining power beyond power, while living the life of a common man. And on the very first pages of the series, you'd see that he's killed, and his murderers-the new magical aristocracy-have dissolved his line of hierarchy.
[...] This would then bring her into conflict with a number of sinister occultists, which would've given the reader all of that great 'Doctor Strange,' good versus evil stuff against this gritty, Bryan Talbot-Northern England background.

[...] Do I think the story will ever see print? Probably not. Nightjar was a lot of fun to work on at the time, but over the years, it's lost its magic. Both Bryan and I are too busy with projects of our own now, which was why the story never materialized in the first place [laughter]! But still, the basic story is an idea I've been kicking around in my head ever since then. There's some fragments of it starting to emerge in a proposal that I'm working up for Lenny Henry, who's recently been working with Neil Gaiman on a television series over here. I suggested something to Lenny that would have combined the world of the occult with the urban grimness of a crime drama. I thought that could make for an interesting, explosive combination. There's not much that relates it to Nightjar, but there's still some of the atmosphere of it. So yeah, I'm still looking for a way to put the story to use.

Read also this article by Talbot about Nightjar, HERE.

Rorschach by Mike Kaluta

Art by M. Kaluta

Above, a Rorschach illustration penciled by the great Mike Kaluta back in 2002! 

For more info about the piece, visit the Romitaman gallery: here. 

Supreme Lettering by Todd Klein

From Supreme n.56. Art by Chris Sprouse.

Above and below,  a selection of  Supreme lettering overlays by the legendary Todd Klein, from the CAF Gallery of Kristof Spaey. Enjoy! 

For more gems visit Spaey's gallery: here!

From Supreme n.49. Art by Mark Pajarillo.

From Supreme n.52A. Art by Jim Mooney.

From Supreme n.53. Art by Chris Sprouse.

Kurtzman, Eisner and American comics

Excerpts from an article titled "The British and Scottish and Irish Invasion" published in Overstreet's FAN n.20, released in February 1997.  

Alan Moore: I guess that I was influenced the most stylistically by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner. […] Those two are right up there at the top. Those are the two main gods in my comic book writers' Pantheon. The stuff I grew up with was the Julie Schwartz era of DC Comics and the Stan Lee, Kirby/Ditko stuff at Marvel and all the other stuff during the 60s. 

[…] I think the main thing that gave me the idea that I could write stories for comics that would interest me was the work that was appearing from Pat Mills and John Wagner in 2000 AD. When it was in its early heyday, you had people like Brian Bolland doing Judge Dredd. Most of the better stories, with a couple of exceptions, seemed to be written either by John Wagner or Pat Mills, or under one of their many aliases. And there was something in them that said that these stories were being written by grown-up people who had a high degree of intelligence and had a high level irony and humor, which attracted me, and I began to think that maybe there was some possible slot for me within the more fruitful kind of ground that comics seemed to be turning into. 

[…] The waters of that particular question have become more murky recently, but if there is some clear feature that separates British comic book writing from American, especially at that time, it might well be the sense of irony, the kind of cynicism that really only comes from being in an empire that is well into its decline. America is headed towards its decline.

Give it another few years, and you'll have that deep-seeded pessimism of the soul. It's sort of a post-empire state that brings this strange, wry melancholia to some of the British work. It has something to do with how the history of a place defines the consciousness of its inhabitants.

[…] In the town that I live in, there are buildings that are a thousand years old. In America it's a completely different dynamic. The difference between Britain and America was once described to me as, in Britain, a hundred miles is a long way, and in America, a hundred years is a long time. When you've been marinating in your own black juices for a couple thousand years, there's a different tone, a different flavor to things.

[…] The opportunities that were presented when I was offered Swamp Thing were really stunning. In Britain, the most that you could hope for was a black and white strip with five pages a week, something like that. Whereas in America, you had the opportunity to write things that seemed of incredibly sprawling length. You could do a story in 24 pages and it would be printed in color! I remember putting some really serious thought into how to revise the story structures I'd been doing because they'd been devised to break down into 5 or 6 page episodes.

[…] I grew up reading American comics. We had very many great British comics at the time, but American comics were something different. They showed me a world that was already fantasy before the superheroes turned up. New York City was a science fiction landscape to me before you even had Superman leaping over the tall buildings. It's a thing where, when I was offered the chance to work at dc, all of the sudden there was the chance to tap back into these comic reading experiences which had been very formative for me.

[…] When I entered the field, certainly in this country, there was no job less glamorous than comic book writer. That wasn't what I got into the field for, though. It was purely because I wanted to write comics. It was only in the kind of explosion that followed that, when it got slightly tarnished for me because it became about other things than writing comics. It became about having a certain position in the industry or reputation, image, things like that. It these things that made me take a more reclusive position in the industry. In fact, the industry itself, I have no interest in. I suppose that might be the sort of position of an embittered, cranky, old guy, but…

Made of Writing

Excerpt from a 2-part interview published on Flaming Hydra site, under paywall (Part I - Part II). 

Zach Rabiroff: All your novels to date have been concerned to a great extent with a sense of place—with Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem, it was Northampton, which allowed you to draw on personal experience. And now in The Great When you’re dealing with London. 

Alan Moore: I like to think that wherever I’m writing about, and in whatever form, I have always tried to pay attention to place, whether in my comic work or other work. I was quite pleased to get a lot of letters from American readers asking how long I’d lived in Louisiana [after using it as a setting in Swamp Thing]. That was touching. But no, actually it was just all research, and then imagining myself into the place. And of course with things like From Hell, it was immersing myself in London. 

[...] The majority of comics—when I started working in them—were set in America. So it felt quite radical to set some stories in London. When I did Voice of the Fire, that seemed to me to be quite audacious in that it was setting a whole novel in Northampton, which is largely a place that nobody cares about, and that doesn’t even get a mention on the local weather maps. And the same with Jerusalem, where I did it much more intensely. But that doesn’t mean that I exhausted London. The nature of a place like that means that you probably never could exhaust it. It’s infinitely deep with stories. [...]

I was actually going to ask whether you consider writing— artistic creation—itself an act of magic.

It is. I believe that all art and creation is an act of magic, consciously or unconsciously. But I believe that writing, specifically, is the closest to actual magic. If you look at the magic gods of most cultures, they are also gods of language. Hermes is the god of magic, but he's also the god of communication. The Egyptian magic god is also the scribe god, which tends to suggest that there is something, a rather intimate connection, between writing and magic. 

[...] with writing, just writing straight prose, which is all I'm doing now, I think that that has got to be the most elegant form of art. You can do so much with so little. All you've got are 26 characters peppered with punctuation.

You’re summoning reality into being with an incantation, so to speak.

You can create the whole universe from those 26 letters, any conceivable universe. And that is the immense power of writing. In writing Long London, I'm actually building that space. This is something that I learned that you can do. I probably learned it from Mervyn Peake, when I first read the Gormenghast books, and I thought, this is incredible—actually creating an architectural space in my mind. Even at this late age, I remember Gormenghast a lot better than I remember places that I've actually been. Better than places in the real world. 

Magic has got to be the art of causing changes in people's consciousness, including that of the practitioner. And anything that you can do with magic, you can do with writing. [...] You can be anything as a writer. [...]

We can never know another human being; that is the sorry fact of our existence. We can never know anything outside of our own skulls. And so, to a degree, everybody around us, the people that we love the most, are fictions that we have made up. We are fictions that we have made up. I can almost remember making me up when I was about 13 or 14. I can almost remember thinking that this childhood personality I have is going to be no use at all; if I want to have a girlfriend, I better write a new one. [...]

I wish I was made of writing, because then I wouldn't be in such a stage of physical collapse, and I would still be as gorgeous looking as I was 40 years ago instead of just almost as gorgeous looking as I was 40 years ago. If I was made of writing, I would be in perfect condition forever. And also, our fictional characters are going to meet and interact with a lot more people than we are, and for a lot longer time. Our fictions have a great deal of importance, I believe, not just as entertainment, but because they provide part of the infrastructure and armature of our world. 

Watchmen by Alain Mauricet

Art by Alain Mauricet

Above, a Watchmen homage by Belgian comic book artist Alain Mauricet.

 

For more info about the artist: Official site - Instagram

Dr. Spock, Gorbachev and Reagan

Above, a hilarious ad promoting the collected ed of Q.R and Quinch. 80s were funny times, weren't they? Enjoy!

Rorschach by Eduardo Risso

Art by Eduardo Risso

Above, a fantastic Rorschach commission by acclaimed Argentinian comic book artist and illustrator EDUARDO RISSO! 

 

For more info about the artist: Instagram - Art for sale 

Image Days

Excerpts from an interview focused on the Spawn/WildC.A.T.S. crossover published by Image with art by Scott Clark in January 1996. The interview - which also involved Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee - was included in Overstreet's FAN n.6, released in November 1995. 

Alan Moore: [...] I think I'm in danger of becoming the Image Crossover King! It followed from doing the Badrock/Violator crossover. It was figured that since I had written Spawn, and I had shown that l could handle the WildC.A.T.S in the 30 pages that exist of the 1963 80 Page Giant Annual which is still in limbo and waiting to materialize, that my name was pulled out of the hat on that one. It sounded like a fun idea, and I went for it. I actually wrote it before they asked me to write WildC.A.T.S. In some ways I wish I'd done a few issues of the regular book before doing the crossover, because I would have brought the nuances of the characters out a bit more sharply. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Spawn/WildC.A.T.S crossover, but I hadn't quite gotten the handle on the characters that I have now.
As with all of the Image work, I've been trying to find my way into a milieu which is not entirely second nature to me. When I was writing superhero books before, I was writing for an older audience, a smaller audience. So consequently, I missed out upon some comics development over the past six or seven years, because my interests have been elsewhere.
It‘s quite strange to plunge headlong into this hyper-kinetic “Imageworld," where there’s two or three panels a page, where the pace of the story is an awful lot faster, where there's constant kinetic action.What I want to do, is take that basic formula, which is an unusual one for me, and just add a few elements that make it more like something of mine. lt‘s a delicate piece of cookery, but I’m starting to feel like I'm getting results.

With the plot, I've taken a recurring comic book theme, the idea of the dystopian superhero future.With this one, there’s a future world where Spawn has become awful. This Spawn has killed the demon-god which holds him in thrall in the regular Spawn books, and thus receives unlimited power, rather than the limited power which currently hampers him. As a result of this, he’s become the total ruler of America, which has become a massive feudal state under this omnipotent Spawn. So this is the future that the present day WildC.A.T.S have to go into to help their counter-parts, who are in a pretty sorry state. They live in this literal Hell-on-Earth that America has become. [...] 
They're going to kill Spawn before he can become this demon, the Ipsissimus. The name is one of the magical grades in traditional magic theory, the highest grade of all. So if you become the Ipsissimus, you're just slightly ahead of God. [...]

There’s a journey through this world, and a final confrontation with the Ipsissimus, and a little bit of stuff that ties up the time-paradox threads that run through it. So l hope it's entertaining.

[...] The thing that was the most interesting for me, that l had the most fun with, was playing with possible alternative futures for some of the image characters.We get to see references to image characters and what they are doing in this future that would probably tantalize me if l was thirteen. I've seen stories in the past,"imaginary stories,“ where they'll suddenly refer to some other character. In Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, for example, the sudden appearance of Green Arrow was a real thrill for me. it connected up with childhood memories about the character that put him in a new context. In the course of Spawn/WildC.A.T.S, we get a couple of guest appearances, and walk ons. Gen 13 turn up in the third issue, but they're all very different. It’s all very amusing. There's some of my sense of humor in there which is dark and nasty some of the time.

[...] The artwork that I've seen is absolutely stunning! It's really stylized. It's taken me awhile to become familiar with the Image artist because I have been out of the mainstream for a while, but I'm surprised by the level of quality. The nearest thing that I can remember to it is from the start of my career when I was working for 2000 A.D. and it was a wonderful period where it seemed like every artist they had was a Kevin O’Neill or a Brian Bolland or a Dave Gibbons. As a writer, you felt spoiled. 

I've got some of the same feeling working for Image, because there’s such a joy of drawing. It's got a youthful enthusiasm that you can't buy.They're not aimed at me, as an audience.They're not aimed at a 40 year old, quasi-intellectual, they're aimed at a 14 year old male audience, that's fair enough. But they sure do have a lot of energy! It‘s just a matter of channeling that energy into the right kind of vehicles, and that’s what I'm trying to do. [...] 

 

[Talking about writing WildC.A.T.S regular series]It's a great deal of fun, because I got to create a couple of them. It's always more involving to work with your own characters. It's an incredible break between From Hell, and my novel and all of the heavy and serious stuff like that. It's like a sorbet between courses. And a sorbet's not an insubstantial thing. There's an art to it.  

On Machen and Long London

Excerpt from The View from Canons Park: Arthur Machen and the Writing of Long London, a text written by Moore and published in Faunus n. 51 (pp. 13-25).

Alan Moore: [...] Machen’s narratives, especially those courting ecstasy and terror, do not offer anything as simpleminded as escapism, but rather would seem to promote a more perceptive and involved engagement with the mysteries of our mortal condition. Given that, politically, Machen’s position and my own would almost certainly be very different, it is not political but overarching human relevance that I find in his fantasies and, for that matter, in all of the fantasies from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress through to Brian Catling’s Vorrh that I consider to be relevant to their historic moments; that I feel successfully perform fantasy’s one real job, which is to cast light on reality from a projected point outside it. For the genre to achieve this apex would seem to require a burning passion in the fantasist concerned, to demand the conviction and commitment that we find in William Blake, or Rabelais, or in the major works of Arthur Machen.

[...] it must be a fantasy that had some kind of relevance to the contemporary world where, with luck, it is being read. I had decided by then that the story taking shape would need five volumes to tell properly, and that these would be set successively at the ends of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and, after a narrative gap of some twenty years, the 1990s. The sequences, both those set in historic London and its underlying, glorious symbolic counterpart, enable me, I realised, to obliquely speak about our present century by offering an alternate history of the last one; a poetic, metaphorical account of how we got here, making Machen’s secret capital into a place outside of history that lends us a fresh angle from which to observe that history, a view from Canons Park. This, at least, is the hare-brained theory that I’m hoping will sustain both me and this unprecedented venture over these next few slapstick dystopian years. I’m just starting book three as I write this and, at least so far, my bizarre hypothesis seems to be holding up. [...] 

The Great Mystery of Brian Catling

In July, Swan River Press published a collection of Brian Catling's stories entitled A Mystery of Remnant and Other Absences, co-edited by Victor Rees and Iain Sinclair. 

More information about the book can be found HERE. 

 

The book includes three new texts written by Moore in response to 3 photographs of Catling as a young man, all of which are included within the book. 

Check below for one of them! Thanks to Victor Rees for this amazing preview.

 

Moore expressed his admiration for Catling's work in several occasions, they were close friends and kindred spirits. Moore also wrote the introduction of Catling's The Vorrh and defined it "The current century's first landmark work of fantasy". 

 

So... get a copy of A Mystery of Remnant and Other Absences HERE!  

Highly recommended!