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| Art by R.M. Guéra |
The illustration is currently for sale on the CART Gallery website, HERE.
Nov 29, 2025
La voz del fuego by R.M. Guéra
Nov 28, 2025
Don’t be silly
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| Cover art by Philip Bond |
You can read it in full at Paul Gravett site, here.
The following editorial was written by Alan Moore and appeared in Escape Magazine #15 (edited by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury) in 1988.
At that time Alan Moore had just set up a publishing company, Mad Love (together with Phyllis Moore and Debbie Delano), and was working on its first release, a 72-page benefit comics-anthology of work donated by the world’s top comic creators entitled AARGH: Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia.
All the profits from AARGH were donated to the Organisation For Lesbian And Gay Action to safeguard the legal rights of Gay people persecuted by Section 28 of the Local Government Act. This was a piece of legislation enacted in 1988 by the Thatcher Government which stated that a local government authority"shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship."
Firstly, forget God. If God exists, it’s unlikely that SpaceTime’s creator worries about our love-lives. A God who’d forego super novas to catch Sol III’s microbes having oral sex is just plain creepy, and has no place in this discussion. Neither do our Jimmy Swaggarts, claiming to represent the deity between visits to the knocking shop. While discussing human desire, let’s ignore superhumans and subhumans.
Secondly, forget ‘unnatural’ sex. Most natural creatures, excluding a few Presbyterian termites, will hump anything within reach if inclined, ignoring gender, species and family relationship. Lacking a hunky tom within pheromone-range, Tabby will back onto your winklepickers without embarrassment. Besides, since when does humanity do things naturally? Camels don’t wear polyester slacks. Amoebas know nothing of Shake’n'Vac. Every other human enterprise flaunts nature, so why is sex special?
Because it’s powerful. Along with death, it’s life’s propelling force. Control sex and death, and controlling populations becomes simple. Death’s easily subjugated: William Burroughs observed that anyone who can lift a frying pan owns death. Similarly, those owning most the pans, troops, tanks or warheads own most the death, and can regulate the supply accordingly. Death’s a pushover, but how do you control desire?
[...]
Sex exceeds politics, right or left (assuming you still differentiate). Mary Whitehouse or Andrea Dworkin may outlaw pornography, but can’t stop people wanting it, regardless of legality. Similarly, Section 28 cannot remove the desire for homosexuality. Consenting sex cannot be prevented. There’s regrettably little evidence that even un-consenting sex can be curtailed by legislation alone. Perhaps desire is better comprehended than contained? Perhaps sexual openness would mean less morbid longings, festering alone in darkness?
Despite a panic-stricken ‘moral’ backlash, we progress slowly towards tolerance, understanding. Our sexual turbulence and shattered preconceptions may resolve themselves into a new approach to sex, more various and humane, accepting different loves and lusts without reshaping them into Meccano for our social scaffolding. Sexual awareness rides an upward exponential curve, uncheckable by politicians, popes, police-chiefs. But what of plague?
Is AIDS sufficient to keep the erotic genie in the bottle? Televised health warnings seem increasingly less anti-disease than anti-sex. A youth writhes, unnerved by the ominous soundtrack, while his fishnetted date lounges invitingly. Rather than donning a condom and squelching deliriously till dawn, it’s implied that he should go home to sleep with hands above blankets
Novelists, who should know better, bemoan the inevitability of less sex in fiction. Surely AIDS isn’t transmitted by smut? The only virus afflicting literature are viral ideas of censorship, spreading through parliament, press, publishers and public, leading art towards the terminal ward. Obviously this over-reaction doesn’t make AIDS less terrifying. Quite simply, it will decimate us. While experts demand less discrimination to facilitate monitoring the virus, our government responds with Section 28. Remember that Britain is relatively enlightened concerning AIDS, and shudder.
So, no more sex? On screen, between soft covers or especially in reality? I don’t believe it. Sex survived horrific syphilis epidemics, aroused blood rushing from the brain, ensuring sex continues whatever the dangers. We’ll die of sex or live with it, but never stop it. Even preventing all physical contact wouldn’t prevent sex, which occurs more in minds than mucous membranes. We think about sex approximately every twenty minutes. Lacking physical contact, we’d just think harder. Thermonuclear war would barely slow sex down. Within billennia, cockroaches would rewrite the Kama Sutra.
AIDS may even hasten sexual enlightenment, this sexual crisis mirroring similar crisis in our environment and economies, all forcing a simple, brutal decision: change or die. Change our environmental policies or starve. Change our sexual furtiveness or die, as they say, of ignorance. Up in arms or down in flames, the choice is still ours. Our bodies are ours. No more sex?
Don’t be silly.
Bonus text, excerpt from a 2006 interview by (again) focused on Lost Girls.
Back in 1988, in Escape Magazine, you wrote an editorial piece for me entitled No More Sex in which you said, "Consenting sex cannot be prevented and there’s regrettably little evidence that even Un-consenting sex can be curtailed by legislation alone. Perhaps desire is better comprehended than contained? Perhaps sexual openness would mean less morbid longings festering alone in the darkness?"
Alan Moore: That is exactly how I feel today. In the context of that Escape editorial, where we were talking about AIDS, I also probably said that AIDS would probably decimate us before it was done. And the figures suggest that it is well on the way to doing that. One thing that might conceivably be "helpful" in an AIDS epidemic, or pandemic, would be presumably a higher standard of pornography with human values. You cannot get much safer sex than pornography.
Nov 27, 2025
Caparezza's Orbit Orbit
The graphic novel, available as both hardcover and softcover, written by Caparezza (his debut as comic writer), is drawn by an incredible ensemble of well-known artists: Sergio Gerasi, Riccardo Torti, Nicola Mari, Marco Nizzoli, Renato Riccio, Stefano Tamiazzo, La Came, Yi Yang and Matteo De Longis (cover).
The story features Caparezza as a cosmonaut who embarks on an interstellar journey in search of creative inspiration after a period of isolation. The antagonist is a character named Darktar, clearly inspired by DC Comics' Darkseid.
Caparezza has always been a comic book fan and the album, Orbit Orbit, is crammed with comic book references, including Swamp Thing and Watchmen.
Track 4: Darktar
«Nella palude come Swamp Thing»
Track 12 – Pathosfera
«Sono quello freddo della ganga, Dottor Manhattan»
Track 12 – Pathosfera
«Sono quello freddo della ganga, Dottor Manhattan»
The key track of the album is titled A Comic Book Saved My Life. 'Nuff said!
Nov 18, 2025
Alan Moore 72 by Massimo Giacon
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| Art by Massimo Giacon |
For more information about the artist, visit his website & his Instagram page.
Alan Moore 72 by Onofrio Catacchio
Above, another brand new portrait gift... by ONOFRIO CATACCHIO, Italian acclaimed comic book artist and illustrator, who has generously contributed (again) to this little celebration!
Big Italian hugs, Bearded One! And... grazie ancora, Onofrio!
Alan Moore 72 by Guido Masala
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Alan! AUGURONI!
Above, a fantastic portrait drawn for the occasion by the great GUIDO MASALA, a well-known Italian comic book artist and illustrator currently at work on Bonelli Editore's icon Tex Willer. Grazie mille, Guido!
Nov 8, 2025
Business of education and the perfect art form
We were in the midst of the Watchmen phenomenon, of course!
[...] Back in Northampton the career of the Watchmen maker has followed a curious parallel lo Dr Manhattan’s - a junior lab technician who accidentally steps into an Intrinsic Field Generator, to be instantly transformed to a superman. Beginning his literary life - according to his biography - at the Co-op Hide and Skin division hacking up sheep carcasses, Alan Moore is now all too accustomed to badgering journalists (to whom he is very polite) and TV teams. They come, lured by his six foot, hair-filled features and his unique literary offering to the comic book audience - a moral interpretation of their world. However, fame has effected little change on his outlook.
"In many ways I see myself in the business of education, there's a huge, hungry audience out there — particularly kids — looking for knowledge that the education system just isn’t providing. Children are maturing faster now because they have to, it's a survival trait in this day and age. I think that parents will soon stop looking misty and forlorn saying ‘Oh they grow up so fast these days’ and accept we're heading into the most rapidly transforming period in human history. Industrial society is now on the way out and something new is coming in. We must have the mental apparatus to deal with it."
After some brief forays into the media apparatus, including Fashion Beast, a screenplay for Malcolm McLaren, Moore now seems fully redeemed to the comic strip as his genre. There is talk of more novels.
"The comic seems to me the perfect art form for the Eighties. It's a very small package, and information tends to come in smaller and smaller packages these days. Comics combine the best of novels and films in that they have an engaging, involving visual track, but are capable of greater density than a film. A complex film may require several viewings to pick up all the details, but a comic is in the hands of the audience: you can enjoy it at your own speed." [...]
Nov 7, 2025
D.R. & Quinch by Simon Davis
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| Art by Simon Davis |
Above a sketch portrait of our favourite alien delinquents by the amazing painter and comic book artist Simon Davis realized during Lawless Comic Con in 2024.
For more about the artist: 2000AD page - Facebook
Nov 4, 2025
On Fashion Beast, deities for the 80s and celebrity
Alan Moore: [...] I did write a screenplay recently [Fashion Beast]. It was an enjoyable enough experience but I didn’t get anywhere near the same control in working in the movie industry that I do producing comics. Control is the most important thing, so I think the prospect of any films in the near future is a slight one. But that's not to say that I mightn’t mess around in various media.
[...] I don't know if it will ever be made. Hollywood, to some degree, is like a Bermuda triangle for screenplays — a lot of them go in and are never seen again. I don’t know what the odds are of any film being made. The Watchmen film might be made or might not. The same goes for Fashion Beast.
The idea, as presented to me by Malcolm MacLaren, was to do a reworking of the Beauty and the Beast fable but to tie it in with the life-story of the designer Christian Dior and to come up with something aimed at a very young teenage audience. Malcom said he wanted the film to have the depth, power and dark resonance of a film like Chinatown and the youth appeal of a film like Flashdance.
I don’t know whether the thing fell through or not. It's something I did for the artistic experience of writing a film, to see what it was like, and I was satisfied, I got out of it what I wanted and I was paid really handsomely.
[...] you mentioned how interested you are in mythology, but in Superman, Batman and the Swamp Thing you've taken individual mythologies and twisted them around; and with the Watchmen you did this to the whole superhero genre. Why?
Alan Moore: Because the old ones don't work anymore, because mythology, as a pure thing in itself, is powerful nd potent—but not as much as it was. We can imagine the power that those myths had when they were more current and contemporary.
Doctor Manhattan [from the Watchmen series] is an attempt to portray a quantum god in much the same way that Swamp Thing was an attempt at portraying an environmental god. They owe a lot of their aura, if you like, to the gods and legends that I read about as a child.
At the same time they're expressed in a way which is wholly modern. Before the atom was split you could not have had a quantum god; quantum thinking is a modern phenomenon. In the last book of Miracleman I explored that very thoroughly, in that we have a super-heroine who is taking on the role of a modern Aphrodite. She runs a cable porn network. As devotional objects she distributes pornographic videos of herself and Miracleman. She has a computer network which is basically a global lonely hearts network which works at 100 percent efficiency and, basically, she’s trying to heal the sexual and emotional problems of the entire planet.
It's deities for the Eighties, and if you're working in the superhero genre, it’s important to remember that the actual root of the superhero stories is in mythology.
[...] I don’t think there's any need for me to be a big celebrity. I think the only real need for me is to be a better writer and I don’t see that the two things are connected in any way. So I'm much happier sitting behind a typewriter than sitting in front of a set of lights in some studio. I've got a blissful home life with a wonderful family, I've got my work which is a tremendous source of pleasure and I've got friends, so I don't really need to be on the Jonathan Ross show.
Nov 1, 2025
Italian Sussidiario di Magia
Above and below, some pics I took of my Italian copy of the Bumper Book of Magic that I bought few days ago. The book has just been published by Panini Comics.
It seems they did a good job on it. Viva la Magia!
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