Alan Moore by Pablo Barrios

Art by Pablo Barrios

Above, portrait of The Man from Northampton by Paraguayan artist Pablo Barrios.

 

More info about the artist: Instagram - ArtStation

Brought to Light: Shadowplay performance!

Few days ago, actor James Llewellyn Evans performed an adaptation of Brought To Light: Shadowplay, a political graphic novel published by Eclipse Comics in 1988, co-published with Warner Books for broader distribution in 1989, as well as from Titan Comics. The book was based on research and lawsuits filed by the Christic Institute against the USA concerning CIA covert operations. 

Shadowplay - The Secret team was written by Moore with astounding art by Bill Sienkiewicz.

You can read the book here. 

James Llewellyn Evans contacted me, providing valuable additional information:

Here are two videos of my performance of "Brought to Light: Shadowplay - the secret team" at a basement pub called The Wych. 

Performed under the name "Shadowplay 1989" with the permission of Moore, Sienkiewizc and Gary Lloyd. A "one night only tribute performance" (for the time being) it was attended by about 55 people crammed into a small bar on a Sunday night to see this obscure out-of-print comic book performed in Toronto. 

The first video is a first person POV of the Dress Rehearsal in the empty bar in the middle of the day where you can clearly see all of the props and sight gags right in front of the camera. 

You can watch it HERE

The second is an archival video of the performance itself and the audience response. 

You can watch it HERE

Grazie mille, James! Great work!

Visit the artist Instagram HERE! 

 

More info here too.

A for Alan by Fabio Visintin

Art by Fabio Visintin

Above, a gorgeous and timeless Moore portrait by acclaimed Italian illustrator and comic book artist FABIO VISINTIN. With an obvious homage to... V for Vendetta! 

Grazie mille, Maestro!

 

For more info about the artist, visit his site.

Moore praises Jim Cawthorn

Above, Moore's blurb about the legendary writer and artist James Cawthorn. 

From Elric book published by Titan in 2021.

 

Thanks to Omar Martini for the discovery and pics. 

Lo Spazio Bianco interviews DAVE GIBBONS!

Thanks to our friends at Lo Spazio Bianco, we are proud to present this exclusive interview with the legendary DAVE GIBBONS. 

The Italian version can be read HERE.

Interview and photos by Emilio Cirri – Lo Spazio Bianco.
 

“If superheroes really existed, what would they be like?”

40 years of Watchmen with Dave Gibbons 

At the Munich Comics Festival we sat down with the artist of Watchmen to talk about the influences and legacy of one of the most important works in the history of comics.

Dave Gibbons is a veteran of British and international comics, and his fifty-year career speaks for itself, as do the countless anecdotes collected in Confabulation: An Anecdotal Autobiography, published by Dark Horse in 2023 and a true treasure trove of stories big and small. Over the decades he has left his mark on a vast range of comics, famous and less so, from Green Lantern to Superman, from Judge Dredd to Rogue Trooper and Dan Dare, to the Martha Washington saga with Frank Miller and his Vertigo graphic novel The Originals.
But without a doubt, the work that has carved his name in capital letters into comics history is Watchmen, which turns forty in 2026. Alan Moore’s realistic, deconstructionist approach might never have hit the superhero genre with such explosive force without Gibbons’s pages, where the rhythm of the now-iconic nine-panel grid tells the stories of cynical, disillusioned, violent heroes against the backdrop of a Cold War sliding towards apocalypse. His clean, realistic line, with its attention to detail and to the characters’ acting, set the standard for a generation and changed the way we picture superheroes forever.
 

There was no better way to open our short special on forty years of Watchmen — and, more broadly, on the anniversary of one very specific year, 1986, which turned the international comics scene upside down — than with an interview with Dave Gibbons.

Lo Spazio Bianco: Hi Dave, thank you for your time. I’d like to start at the beginning, before we get to Watchmen and everything else, with your relationship with science fiction. Early in your career you worked a lot on science fiction comics such as Dan Dare and 2000 AD, and over the years you’ve also produced a great deal of material for Doctor Who. Was your passion for the genre already there before you started working on these projects?
Dave Gibbons: I’ve loved science fiction for as long as I can remember. I have drawings I did when I was maybe six, seven, eight years old, full of spacemen and rocket ships. There was one in particular: a Jack Kirby image from a comic called Race for the Moon, showing a man chained to an asteroid floating in space. I remember copying it in art class at school, because it had made such a deep impression on me. The British weekly The Eagle, which starred Dan Dare — another space hero — was also a huge influence. My dad used to buy those comics for me. Later I found out that he’d loved science fiction too, before the war: he’d had some pulp and science fiction magazines that all got thrown out when he went off to fight in the Second World War. I grew up in a little village in the middle of nowhere, but we had a mobile library that came round once a week, and you could borrow books from it. That was another place where I discovered science fiction: whenever I saw a book with a spaceship on the cover, I’d pounce on it. I was reading two or three books a week, and when I found out I could actually order them, I dived right in: I read everything by Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and all those great classic mid-twentieth-century science fiction writers.
I loved the escapism, and that “what if?” quality science fiction has. When I was working on Watchmen, one of the real breakthroughs came when I started thinking of it not as a superhero comic, but as a science fiction comic set in an alternate world.
 

Exactly. Watchmen is set in an alternate version of our world and asks what would happen if superheroes really existed. At the same time, the story is permeated by a constant sense of impending apocalypse.
The story also asks: if superheroes really existed, what would they be like? They certainly wouldn’t be like Superman or Batman — they’d be something very different. The world would welcome them, but at the same time it would be afraid of them and wouldn’t trust them. So in the end, Watchmen really explores science fiction ideas through the lens of superheroes.

Speaking of superheroes and science fiction, when you broke into the American market you started working on characters like Green Lantern and, over the years, on many of DC’s more cosmic heroes. Was that science fiction connection one of the things that drew you to DC Comics? In your autobiography you also mention that DC was your favourite publisher.
Yes, I loved DC Comics because it felt very clean, very precise and incredibly well crafted. A lot of my favourite American comics were edited by Julius Schwartz, one of DC’s editors, who had previously worked on science fiction pulps. He’d also been the literary agent for well-known science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury and Edmond Hamilton, so there was a strong science fiction sensibility behind a lot of those comics. I was particularly drawn to Green Lantern because, once again, it opened the story up to the whole cosmos. I was fascinated by the idea of an intergalactic police force in which Green Lantern was just one member. There were all these alien beings wearing the same uniform, and I loved the idea that there was this vast civilisation out there, with Earth sitting right on its fringes.
Another big influence on me was a British newspaper strip called Jeff Hawke which, as I understand it, was also very popular in Italy and other European countries. It approached science fiction in a slightly quirky way, with a sense of humour and a touch of the absurd. I found that combination fascinating, and it was certainly one of the things that drew me to the genre.
 

Earlier you mentioned the many influences that helped shape your work. One of the most striking things about your autobiography is the sheer number of names you cite — some very famous, others much less so. I know it’s a tough question, but if you had to pick one major influence from your early years, who or what would it be?
I think there are simply too many influences to single out just one. There’s the DC Comics science fiction tradition, but there’s also what Jack Kirby and Stan Lee were doing at Marvel. Ideas like Galactus, Ego the Living Planet, and the feeling that beyond Earth there was a whole universe of civilisations — those fascinated me. So I really couldn’t point to a single influence: it was a combination of all those things.

Turning to Watchmen, this year marks its fortieth anniversary. Looking at the book today, how has your relationship with it changed? It started out as a self-contained project, but over the years it has taken on a life of its own — not just commercially, but through adaptations, spin-offs, prequels and sequels. What does Watchmen mean to you now, four decades on?
I have to say I’m amazed that, forty years later, it still has the influence and popularity it does. When Alan and I created it, we never imagined it would last this long. We honestly thought we’d do our twelve-issue series, it would come and go, and eventually it would end up in the back-issue bins of comic shops. We had no idea it would have the longevity or the impact it has had. As a creator, it’s incredibly rewarding to see more and more people discovering your work. It’s deeply moving to think that something we made so long ago still matters to so many readers. In fact, it’s been so long that I can almost look at Watchmen as if somebody else had made it, because forty years ago I was a very different person. And that in itself is a mind-boggling thought.
I’m also very glad that a film adaptation eventually came along that was, in my view, a very good film. It wasn’t perfect, but everyone involved gave it their all. The same goes for the animated adaptation: I had a few reservations at first, but I think in the end they did a superb job. Right from the start, Alan and I had always thought an adaptation was possible — we thought that one day there might be films or animated versions of the story.
I’m less keen on the prequels and sequels, because I think Watchmen stands on its own. That’s the story we wanted to tell. If you start filling in too many gaps about what happened before or after, you risk weakening the very thing that made the original work. It’s like explaining a joke: once you’ve explained it, it often loses its punch. That said, I’m not angry or upset about any of it. On the whole, the book has been treated very well. It’s been an extraordinary success, both artistically and commercially. It’s obviously the defining work of my career. I’m sure that when my obituary is written, the word Watchmen will be in the very first paragraph — and honestly, there are far worse things to be remembered for. It has exceeded any expectation I could have had, and I’m simply grateful that, after all these years, people still care.

Watchmen changed the way superhero stories are told in many ways, but I’d like to highlight two. The first is psychological — the depth of the characters. But there’s also a visual side: the aesthetics, the realism of the bodies, the gestures, the expressions and so on. There’s a deep sense of humanity that somehow harks back to what some superheroes were in the beginning — more human than superhuman. How did you approach that side of the work? What was your approach to these characters, and was there one in particular that really stayed with you, one you found yourself empathising with most while you were working on the story?
I think, once again, the question to ask is: if superheroes existed, what would they really be like? And then you can ask: why would anybody want to be a superhero? They might be people like Nite Owl, a rich kid looking for his adrenaline fix, so he spends his money on an owl-shaped ship, a costume, gadgets and all the rest of it, like Batman. Or they might be people like Silk Spectre. It’s a family tradition: her mother was a masked heroine, so she’s supposed to be one too. Or, in the case of Dr. Manhattan, somebody who has the powers of a god but never wanted them in the first place. He isn’t interested in helping humanity or fighting crime; he gets lost in his own thought processes and in his ability to make things manifest. So he’s rather self-absorbed and completely detached from whatever happens to humanity.
When you start exploring characters like that, you give them body and depth, instead of just having them say, “I’m one of the good guys, I’m going to fight crime.” That’s too simplistic. We were after complexity; we wanted to explain the reasons behind what they did. And that also means — going back to what I said about it being a science fiction novel — that you don’t approach it like a regular superhero comic, all big splash pages of musclebound figures leaping over the skyline, but on a much more human level: people in human spaces, interacting in human ways.
And inevitably, when you create characters, you get to know them. The one closest to me is Nite Owl, because as a kid I used to make up my own stories and amateur characters. I had a character called Nite Owl, and I suggested to Alan that a character with that name, with the whole owl theme, could be our Batman stand-in. And he said, “Yes, great. We’ll spell it N-I-T-E O-W-L, the American way.” So he’s a character who’s very close to my heart. I own one of the props from the film, the statue of the original Nite Owl, and I look at it every day and think: isn’t it incredible that this thing I drew when I was fourteen ended up in a movie and was seen by millions of people all over the world? So yes, I can understand why people like Rorschach — even though he’s a terrible person, he knows what he believes in and has an enormous amount of certainty. But for me, it’s still Nite Owl.

I think, looking back, he’s probably someone a lot of people can relate to. He’s more of an everyman who becomes a superhero, but then he gets older and, once his career is over, he puts on a bit of weight, gets a bit of a paunch. I don’t know, maybe it’s also something we can relate to as we grow up: when you’re young you do all sorts of things, and then, as time goes by, you gradually slow down and get older.
Exactly — you stop working out, and obviously you stop fighting crime as well, so he just sits in his basement thinking about the good old days. So there’s that element of nostalgia too.

Another aspect I’d like to talk about, in terms of style and storytelling, is the nine-panel grid. Obviously you didn’t invent it, but since Watchmen it has become more and more common in comics, and for many creators it’s become a homage or a stylistic choice. How did this particular storytelling approach come about? And as far as your style and this structure are concerned, what were its advantages, but also its limitations and challenges for you as an artist?
I wanted Watchmen to look completely different from any other American comic, so that you’d only need to glance at a page to know it was Watchmen. At the time, back in the eighties, there was a lot of what I’d call the movie-poster approach to comic art: a big image of the hero flying across the sky, and then the story told through smaller images, with the aim of making the whole thing work as a poster rather than as part of a story. Since we were going to tell a very complex story, I thought using a nine-panel grid would give it a unique look, unlike anything else on the stands. Alan also realised it would give him a lot of control over the pacing and would draw the reader into the story. The trouble with posters is that you look at them as a picture and then read the story almost as if it were an article. We wanted the story to be the main thing, and the pictures to be almost invisible. You weren’t supposed to think, “Oh, this is a work of art” — you were just supposed to lose yourself in the story. It was also a very common way of making comics, especially in European and British comics.
I think that, together with the colouring, helped give Watchmen its distinctive look. I had very specific ideas about the colour palette I wanted, which was different from the usual American comic book palette. So I spent a lot of time talking with John Higgins, my friend who was the colourist, to get that kind of European comics look and give the book a different flavour.

Exactly. Because your style in general, and Watchmen’s in particular, seems to look more towards the European tradition, including the ligne claire.
I’ve always tried to adapt my drawing style to the comic I’m working on. Watchmen is drawn in a style very close to the clear line, but I’ve done other things, like Martha Washington or Doctor Who, where the compositions are much more explosive. So it’s not that this is my one fixed, unchanging style — it’s just the style I chose for Watchmen.
 

Having read and reread Watchmen, I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to the secondary story, the story within the story: Tales of the Black Freighter. It strikes me more and more because it acts as a counterpoint to the main plot. In a way it explains what’s going on, but through a completely different story and perspective. And the style is closer to the EC comics. How did you work on this part of the book? Was it developed alongside the main story or separately? And how did the idea come about?
When Alan and I were first building the world of Watchmen, I drew up a long list of things I thought could be interesting elements. There were things like, for example, the fact that, since it was an alternate world, there would be different fast-food chains and different fashions. And it also occurred to me that, in a world where costumed heroes really existed, there probably wouldn’t be a market for superhero comics, because they’d seem redundant. But what could have the same kind of appeal, glamour and violence as superhero comics? I thought: maybe pirate comics. They could fill that space. I suggested the idea to Alan, and in the very first issue there’s a street scene with a kid reading a pirate comic. We could have stopped there, but when we talked it over further, Alan said, “You know, we could actually tell that pirate story, reproducing it from the comic.”
At first I wasn’t sure it would work, but he wrote it and it did: as you say, it became an allegory for what was going on, with Ozymandias, of course, clambering over other people’s corpses. And, you know, we could give it a bit of colour, and since the main story had some fairly cerebral elements, it would add that sense of swashbuckling adventure. That’s an example of how collaboration works. I’d had the idea of the pirate comic, but what Alan did with it went far beyond anything I could ever have imagined.
 

If we look at the world around us today, and especially at this particular moment in which we’re having this conversation, there’s once again a feeling of living in the shadow of an apocalypse. What would Watchmen be today? If you thought about creating something similar now, would it still be possible? Could it still be told in the same way?
I think the world has become much more complex, and the stories happening in the real world are more complex too. Back then it was more a case of, “I’ve got a nuclear bomb, you’ve got a nuclear bomb — do you want to fight?” You know, in the end it boiled down to that. I think it would be very hard today to explore a lot of what’s going on in the real world. I think there’s something elemental about what happens in Watchmen, if that’s the right way to put it. We’re on the brink of apocalypse because of the hostility between two superpowers, the United States and Russia — and when we made the book, that was very real. In England there was a television drama called Threads, which showed how fragile society was, and back then we really believed it, emotionally as well. When it comes to society’s modern problems, to do with terrorism and economic conditions, it’s much harder to make them archetypal. So I don’t think Watchmen would work in exactly the same way today, but I’m sure you could tell a story that would have a similar impact. I just don’t know what it would be. Perhaps that’s not a very satisfying answer.

I think Watchmen is still interesting from a historical perspective, too.
Yes, what I’m trying to say is that Watchmen very much belongs to its time. It sat at a very specific point in history, and we captured a lot of what was going on at that moment. When Gorbachev was the leader of Russia, he had a meeting with Ronald Reagan in Reykjavík, Iceland, to talk about weapons and what would happen in the future. And the first thing Ronald Reagan said to Gorbachev was, “Hey, Mikhail, you know what we really need? An invasion from Mars. That would get us working together.” Which is basically what Watchmen is about. I think you can still explore that theme, even though the world has become much more complex than it was in the eighties. Yes — does that make sense?

It’s interesting to take that idea further: how would the creators of Watchmen imagine humanity’s reaction to something like that today? Would it really bring humanity together, or would the reaction be completely different?
One important point is that technology is also very different today. You know, with computing power, artificial intelligence and all these things, there are many ways society could be thrown into chaos, and they’re not limited to nuclear war. And we see it every single day in the news.

Thank you so much for your time, Dave.

 

Interview conducted at the Munich Comics Festival in June 2025.
Many thanks to the organisers for their support.

Sally Jupiter by Barry Kitson

Art by Barry Kitson

Above, a recent A5 piece by British artist Barry Kitson portraying Sally Jupiter. 

Great illo!

 

More info about the artist: Wikipedia - Instagram 

Alan Moore by Pedro Mancini

Art by Pedro Mancini

Above, a great portrait of The Man by Argentinian comic book artist and illustrator Pedro Mancini.

 

For more info about the artist, visit his Instagram or watch this video (in Spanish).  

Sally Jupiter by Brian Stelfreeze

Art by Brian Stelfreeze 

Above, the original Silk Spectre (Sally Jupiter) drawn (wip) by the great Brian Stelfreeze.

 

For more info about the artist: Wikipedia - Instagram - Facebook Fan Page

Nite Owl by Michael Golden

Art by Michael Golden

Above, a stunning commission portrait of our beloved Nite Owl II by the legendary Michael Golden.

Enjoy! 

Spanish Magical Mistery Moore by Sergio Bleda

Art by Sergio Bleda

Above, original double cover artwork by Sergio Bleda for Magical Mistery Moore published in Spain by Sulaco Ediciones in 2000. 

Source: CAF Gallery.

Silk Spectre II by Brian Stelfreeze

Art by Brian Stelfreeze

Above and below (making-of), Silk Spectre (Laurie Juspeczyk) portrait by the amazing Brian Stelfreeze realized during Heroes Con 2026.

 

For more info about the artist: Wikipedia - Instagram - Facebook Fan Page

Art by Brian Stelfreeze

Dr. Manhattan by Pasquale Qualano

Art by Pasquale Qualano

Above, a cool Dr. Manhattan by Italian artist Pasquale Qualano.

 

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

Swamp Thing by Carlos Dearmas

Art by Carlos Dearmas

Above, a stellar Swamp Thing commission piece by the extraordinary CARLOS DEARMAS.

Pure magic! 

 

For more info about the artist: Instagram - Facebook

The Comedian by Andrew Robinson

Art by by Andrew Robinson

Below, a pencil commission portrait of The Comedian by Andrew Robinson! Great one!

On becoming a full-time novelist and having fun

Below, selected excerpts from an interview published on Inverse.com. 

You can find the complete piece HERE. 

Alan Moore: [...] I started out as a poet, songwriter, and cartoonist before eventually finding that I could make a living as a comic writer. But all the way through that, I’ve been doing other things — recording five or six pretty decent albums, doing a film and a couple of novels, things like that. So, the transition [to becoming a full-time novelist] has been great. I find that I can finally focus upon what I love doing most without all of the distractions of a toxic workplace.

Alan Moore: [...] Characters [in Long London series] like the artist Austin Osman Spare; characters like the racing tipster Prince Monolulu or the king of the Bohemians, Ironfoot Jack; all of the criminal figures, the gangster Jack Spot, Peter Rachman, the Kray twins; marginal figures like the recording genius Joe Meek. And I thought, yes, I really want to talk about these people. I want to give them a second twirl upon the stage because I think that they’ve been forgotten and I don’t think they should have been. I think that they had significance that far outweighed their financial circumstances, and so I needed a narrative that could fit those people into it and could also actually say something about London and could say something about the times that London has been through and how all of that relates to our present moment. Because as with all fantasy and science fiction authors, we might set things upon a distant planet in a far-off nebula or set them in the remote past or the future, but we’re always talking about the present and the here and now.

Alan Moore: [...] I am concentrating entirely upon these Long London novels. I'm doing a couple of little other things that don't really involve me. I think that I will perhaps be doing a print version of the [BBC] Maestro series, which will be very different because I'm going to have to revise most of it.

Largely, I am just focusing upon getting [Long London finished]. This is the first book contract that I've ever had, and so I'm taking it seriously. And I am not taking on work that might detract from getting these books finished. So at the moment I'm doing 500 words a day, which seems to be about right for me, because they're very well chosen words so they take a little time to put in place. But I'm right at the end of [third book in the series] Blow Away Dandelion, in August 1969 precisely. The Troubles are just beginning, with all sorts of things happening in 1969 in August.

So, yeah, I'm very excited about what I'm doing at the moment, and I'm kind of looking forward to, apprehensively, the next book, which is called In England’s Dreaming, which will be set in the 1970s, so it will perhaps be a bit more punk-inflected. And then there's the big finale, which is set in the 1990s after a 20-year gap. For reasons that will become apparent, there isn't Dennis' adventures in the 1980s. We just pick him up again in 1999. So, that's what I've got in front of me, and I'm enjoying it. I think it's coming on rather well. I've just written some very, very good sequences. I'm having immense fun with them and I just hope that perhaps the readers might do too. 

Read the complete interview HERE! 

Meeting Melinda Gebbie

A gorgeous Melinda Gebbie portrait by Joe Brown

Below, selected excerpts from an article by Alistair Fruish who "spent a delightful day with Melinda looking at her work through the decades."

Posted on The Quietus. Read the complete piece HERE. 

 

Melinda Gebbie & Alan Moore –  ‘La Toile’ (2003)

An anthology featuring the Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie Cobweb tale, previously banned by DC Comics from the ABC/Wildstorm anthology Tomorrow Stories. Here it is published in its original form, but due to DC’s copyright, her character has been re-titled ‘La Toile’ (Frenchnfor “The Web”).  

Melinda: ‘La Toile’ investigates the scientist and magician who invented solid rocket fuel, Jack Parsons. This rather metaphysical tale of magical doings,  involved spells, and a scandalous blow-up between Jack Parsons, his wife Betty, and her abandonment of Jack for one L. Ron Hubbard. This image is the most complicated page I’ve ever asked a colourist to do and they came through beautifully on it.

Melinda Gebbie & Alan Moore – ‘Lady of Lavender Lane’ (2023) 

Melinda: This is the latest piece published, created with my husband, although it was made some time ago, long before Roe vs Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court.  It appears in Greatest Fits as well. It’s a paean in song to the neighbourhood abortionist, the Lady of Lavender Lane. Some US citizens may remember with a wistful sigh, the days when a woman had a right to decide if, when, and how many children she wanted, and with whom.   

The complete article is available HERE.  

Rorschach is watching you!

 

Above, a fantastic Rorschach portrait (pencils) drawn by DAVE GIBBONS for an Australian collector in 2009. Sure, I am jealous! 

Below,  the inked version realised by Gibbons on a blueline copy in 2013.

John Coulthart interview!

Below, selected excerpts from a great interview with the legendary JOHN COULTHART, posted on Retrofuturista.com few days ago. 

You can read the complete piece HERE. Highly recommended!

[...] You have a lifelong creative relationship with Alan Moore and have illustrated multiple works with him. How did he influence the way you physically construct layouts and book covers? Can you share an anecdote about a collaborative creative process that produced unexpected and surprising results?
John Coulthart: I don’t think Alan has influenced any of my approach to book design or cover design but I find his philosophical attitude very appealing, especially his insistence that art is magic. I started to think about this more seriously after some long conversations we had in the 1990s.

The only things that are surprising about any of the projects we’ve worked on have been odd coincidences that continued to surface over the years. Most of these are too slight to be worth recounting but in the mid-90s there was a striking one that occurred when we were working on a project (subsequently cancelled) about Aleister Crowley. Part of the brief required me to draw a room infested with insects, and it was while doing this that my bathroom was inundated for an afternoon with honey bees. I think a new colony had just hatched somewhere and got into the room through a crack in the wall. I wouldn’t say the Crowley project prompted the invasion but it certainly seemed that way at the time.

Working on “The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic” required translating decades of Alan Moore and Steve Moore’s dense, practical, and philosophical ideas about magic into a physical, visual artifact. What were some of the most challenging abstract concepts you had to render as a concrete graphic layout?
I didn’t find any of the occult material difficult to deal with since it was all very familiar, and the descriptions of the required artwork were very clear. One reason I’ve been involved with the Moon and Serpent productions is because of my long-standing interest in occult matters. The biggest challenge with the book was getting all the material into a presentable shape. I was given a folder filled with old Word documents, some of which were unfinished drafts, together with a table of contents that was out of date as a result of decisions to drop parts of the book as it had been planned originally. I was having to work with all this as a designer, typesetter and illustrator which is uncommon for a book of such size and complexity. I didn’t mind having to juggle so many tasks but doing so meant that it took me about three years to get everything finished. [...] 

Read the complete interview HERE! 

Watchmen 40th anniversary: German celebration

Reddition n. 83 celebrates Watchmen 40th anniversary with a collection of essays and an exclusive interview with Dave Gibbons. Published by Edition Alfons. German language.

 

More details here. 

 

https://www.reddition.de/reddition-magazin/reddition83 

On creating, Long London tv series & Dennis' fate

Below, selected excerpts from an interview published last week on Syfi.com.

The complete interview is available HERE.  

Alan Moore: [...] I experience my own creative processes as being something like a particle collider, where thousands of half-baked, half-finished or entirely forgotten concepts whiz around invisibly at unsafe speeds until, inevitably, one unworkable idea will smash into another, quite by chance, and in the often-beautiful ensuing mess of particle decay trajectories is sometimes to be found a stage performance, poem, film, or series of peculiar urban fantasies. [...]

By the 1950s and I Hear a New World, we can see London, and to a degree the world, attempting to update itself by dressing up in noisy, flashy, hard-edged Brutalist modernity, with genuine innovators like Joe Meek attempting to invoke the new world by imagining its music and, in doing so, making the technical advances which that new world would depend on. [...]

Over this last couple of decades, the emergence of the long form, high quality television series has made lots of things seem suddenly more possible, and when asked if I might consider making the Long London books available as possible film properties, my answer was a cautious yes. [...] To this end, when I was approached by Playground, the production company behind the marvelous adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, I gladly acquiesced. I know enough about the world of television and its uncertainties to manage my expectations, but I’m optimistic and, whatever its eventual fate, confident that my work is in the very best of hands. So, fingers crossed. [...]

I can promise readers that my reluctant protagonist [Dennis Knuckleyard], despite his clear lack of enthusiasm for my plotting abilities, will be allowed a happy ending. He probably doesn’t deserve it, given his rather lackluster and timorous performance, but he’ll get it because that’s the kind of generous-spirited author and employer of imaginary people that I am. 

Read the whole interview HERE! 

The Cloak is back!

Australian publisher Comicoz has teased the forthcoming publication of The Collected Cloak by Mike Higgs, introduced by Alan Moore. Comicoz is Nat Karmichael‘s publishing imprint. 
More details & info here, at DownTheTubes site.

Furthermore, directly from Comicoz site, April's entry:

[...] I have spent the past two days trying to find a UK printer for my most recent publication, The Collected Cloak by Mike Higgs. The files are ready to print, even though we have had other difficulties in the process over the past few months. It's been a dog's breakfast trying to get someone from Rebellion -- who say they own the copyright to the property -- to contact me about the works. So much so, I am giving up on them! (Until they get back in touch with me at least..!) Mike has drawn a brand-new pin-up page for the volume, and we are overjoyed with Alan Moore's Introduction. Initially we said we would be happy with a 25-word introduction: but we were give many wonderful pages! (And that is all I am going to say for now!) We're presently looking to lock in a printer (which we hope to do in the next few days) and -- all being well -- we are also hoping to have Diamond UK distribute the book. There's a few ducks to line up first, but (as always) I am ever hopeful that it won't be long before all is ready...! Ryan McDonald-Smith has done an absolutely outstanding job with the design of the book and it would be remiss of me not to mention his contribution here because he just as much a part of this team! [….]

Long London, Magic, comics and dystopias

Art by Carlos Dearmas

Excerpt from an interview published on the Observer the 1st of May. 

You can read the complete piece HERE. 

What is the idea behind Long London?
Alan Moore: I had an urge to investigate shadowy London, the horse tipsters, gangsters, record producers and other lowlife characters. I’ve created a narrative that could include them, which collides happily with the idea of another London hidden behind our own. There’s a wonderful short story called N by Arthur Machen that suggested our London was a flimsy curtain hung before a blazing, eternal paradisal London.

A sort of Platonic shadow of London?
Exactly. It starts in 1949, when London had been physically and psychologically reduced to rubble. I was born in 1953, and it took me decades to realise that the adults I was growing up among were suffering from PTSD. [...]

You are ‘divorced’ from your earlier works like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, but they are powerfully predictive, rather than histories.
They were never meant to be predictive. Friends want me to write something nice. Why do I have to keep doing these terrible dystopian stories that then actually happen? [...]

You have become a magician, and not the rabbit-out-of-a-hat kind. Do some ideas have magical properties?

When I became a magician at the age of 40, I took it very seriously, and it has transformed my life. There’s no difference between magic and creativity. One part of magic is changing the consciousness of other people. Writing has always been the best way of doing that. [...] I think a lot of us have forgotten what art is for. It’s an engine of human progress. Art and culture stay with us. It’s the wars we’re ashamed of.

The complete interview is available HERE.

Un Nuovo Mondo (bis)

Fanucci will publish the Italian edition of I Hear a New World at the end of May, basically at the same time as the English-language edition. 

The Italian edition had previously been announced for March, as a sort of... world premiere! 

Non ci si può più fidare. You can't trust anyone any more (maybe March/May... that was a typo! Maybe...)

But that's not all. 

To my great disappointment, the Italian edition won't feature Nico Delort's stunning cover illustration (which was in their March announcement), but a "variation", certainly a bland one, imho (to use a mild adjective), attributed (I quote the internal credits) to "© Darren Hendley - stock.adobe.com (elaborazione)".
I suspect it's a matter of economic optimization dynamics. Nuff said!

Male molto male. 

 

You can find all the info: here. 

NPR N.6: Alan Moore is IN!

Portrait art by Tom Harding

Northampton Poetry Review ISSUE 6: Rejuvenation includes a great interview with Moore (pp. 85-93) mostly focused on his poetry interests, writing and... more!!!

You can find all the info HERE. Pdf of the whole issue is available HERE for downloading.

Northampton Poetry Review returns with the theme of Rejuvenation. We’re rekindling old energies, awakening deep roots, and sustaining ourselves through strange and wearing times—with hope for renewal.

We offer poetry from voices both near and far. And we are honoured to present a deep and wide-ranging conversation with Northampton’s own Alan Moore—a giant, a guru, and a guiding light in these dark and mysterious times.

Below, some selected excerpts from the interview! Highly recommended!

Q&A with Alan Moore
The following is an interview with Alan Moore— Northampton notary, master, magician, guru and guide; a leading luminary and multimedia Renaissance man of our times. Alan generously gave us this interview back in 2022. Due to the buffeting winds of independent publishing, it finds its way to you only now.
He shares his thoughts on a wide array of cultural, political, and creative concerns—and we are truly honoured he took the time.

Alan Moore is a legendary comic book writer, novelist, filmmaker, and boundary-defying artist. Known for seminal works such as Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, his work has shaped the landscape of modern storytelling and continues to be an uncompromising artistic force across a variety of mediums.

Alan Moore: [...] I'm continually drawn back to Blake, Clare, and, with his very recent death, to Brian Catling’s magnificent The Stumbling Block. Also, if I ever again locate my copy, I want very much to re-immerse myself in Mervyn Peake’s The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb, which I remember as having Stanley Holloway rhythms and a marvellous idiosyncratic grandeur. Oh, and Chris Torrance’s The Magic Door always rewards a reopening. [...] 

[...] if it’s an idea, it will most probably emerge at some point as part of a story, whereas if it’s a tenuous soap-bubble impression, and if I can get a few words down before it pops from memory, it will more likely end up as a poem. [...] 

[...] Trying to define one’s own thought processes is always slippery, but it might be as if each project is a separate Memory Theatre in some by-now sprawling and overgrown multiplex.
Many of those theatres I need never visit again, although they still remain standing, obsolete warehouses rusting in some bleak, industrial-estate outpost of my awareness. There are a few abandoned palaces amongst them – works that for various reasons remain uncompleted or will never see daylight, like my John Dee opera or the detailed five season outline for The Show television series – that I find slightly haunting and will more often return to in idle moments. You shouldn’t, however, be misled by this talk of Memory Theatres into thinking my mental processes are anything like neat or orderly. In practice, it feels like some sort of cloud-chamber, and I have no real idea how it works. [...] 

[...] A key difference between prose and poetry lies in the ways that they engagé with time. [...] Poetry can dispense with time altogether, and allow us to see what is left when time is gone. As for the importance of time in my own work, I feel that along with space and consciousness, time is one of the three fundamental elements that a writer has to work with, so I like to get as much fun and meaning out of it as possible. [...] 

[...] I’m sure I’ve been a multiplicity of people in my time, but from my own perspective it feels very much like an unbroken continuity of self. The biggest shift of personality came, probably, with my decision to engagé with magic, back in 1993, but this seemed more like an expanded comprehension and intensification of ideas and processes that were already there than it did a huge psychological change. When I think back to previous incarnations of myself, I find that they’re all still me, only stupider, better looking, and with more intimidating physical energy. [...] 

[...] tend to enjoy works that are a few paces beyond my personal boundaries, that will entail a little bit of personal effort, which will therefore expand those boundaries. I believe that the most affecting kind of art is one where the audience does part of the work, making the experience almost a collaboration between reader and writer. To that end, I try to make my work as understandable as I can, while also subscribing to the idea of literary difficulty, whereby you are prepared to potentially alienate part of your readership in the knowledge that those who remain will have been made to engage with the work on a deeper and hopefully more rewarding level. I always try to pitch my work at a level that won’t be beyond the reach of an averagely intelligent person. [...] 

More info HERE. Pdf of the whole issue available HERE.

Joe Quesada and Watchmen

In his interesting investigation on The Invisible Language of Visual Storytelling, Part 11, Joe Quesada talks about "Reveal" and... Watchmen! 

You can read the whole thing HERE. 

I highly recommend reading Quesada's Substack! 

[...] Nothing Changed. Everything Did.

Before the reveal, the audience is assembling pieces.

After the reveal, everything organizes.

Cause and effect become clear.

And the audience feels the shift immediately.

Watchmen might be the clearest example of this in comics.

Throughout the story, every piece is already in place.

Ozymandias’ intelligence.
His resources.
His obsession with saving the world.
The missing scientists.

It’s all there.

You just haven’t connected it yet.

Then Ozymandias begins to fill in the gaps. 

You’re still processing what he’s saying.

Trying to understand the scope.
Still catching up.

Then comes the line that changes everything.  

“I did it thirty-five minutes ago.”

No buildup.
No countdown.
No chance to stop it.

The event is already over.

And suddenly it’s undeniable.

The plan. The scale.
Then the inevitability.

You weren’t waiting for it to happen.

You were already too late. [...] 

Read the complete piece HERE.