Big Numbers: Sienkiewicz and Moore

Art by Bill Sienkiewicz

Excerpts from BIG NUMBERS: The Mathematics of Mankind included in Speakeasy magazine, issue n. 108 published in April 1990. 

Alan Moore: "What I want to do now is - well, it’s a trend you can see in V and in Watchmen and in Swamp Thing and in Miracleman, you can see it in all of them, there’s a trend towards a gradual fascination with people on street corners. It’s very often the ordinary people who come to fascinate me more than the people in the costumes, which must be very obvious to people. It might be seen as an annoying indulgence ore terribly boring, but it’s what I’m fascinated by, and that is the way my work will probably take me in the future. Not in a Harvey Pekar, Eddie Campbell sense - much as I love those people’s work I don’t think I could do that, I don’t think my life is interesting enough to do that with."

 

[...] "I feel I need a louder and clearer voice, and I think that one thing which would make it clearer is to tear away from the tissues of fantasy and mystery and imagination that I tend to plant my work in. I don’t want to do dull comics, I want to show how fabulous and weird and exciting the real world is without distortion, without giving anyone psionic powers and mutant abilities." [...] 

Bill Sienkiewicz: "I suppose in some ways, it’s much more classic in its approach. Alan and I were just talking about the fact that it’s much more reminiscent of something like Gasoline Alley or Krazy Kat than anything in the superhero genre at all. In that respect, I suppose it’s going back to the basics of the medium, with the new math of the future, and coupled with things that have been done recently in terms of things like Watchmen and Elektra and other books like that. It’s more subversive, I suppose, it’s destroying from within, you know, by wearing a suit and tie, destroying the establishment from within. But that’s not really our intention, our intention is to do something that’s really accessible to everyone.

Alan was telling me that he was showing it to his mother and some of her friends, and people who are not familiar with the vernacular or the mechanics of reading current comics, and they found that they really enjoyed it, and Alan said they laughed in all the right places, and had the response to warrant it feeling like it’s something that is not going to be just simply a book for the comic readers, the people who know the language and the vocabulary, but for a bigger, wider audience, not specifically for comics, but for comics as a valid medium, separate and apart from what we in the field, readers and professionals, know it as." [...]