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!