Aug 6, 2025

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". 
 

Jul 30, 2025

Advance quote from deceased Alan Moore

Below, quotes written by Alan Moore for Evie King's Matters of Death and Life to be published next year.
More details HERE. You can learn more about the author here and here
With a prose style that holds your hand and offers inappropriate jokes when you need them, Evie King makes an excellent case for sorting your life out by sorting your death out first. A serious, funny, necessary book for those of us still this side of the daisies.
ALAN MOORE

And in the event that Evie is still publishing after my own death. Speaking as a dead person, can I just say, authoritatively, that Evie King was right about everything and I really wish I'd listened to her? 
Advance quote from deceased Alan Moore
[...] This book gives you everything you need to prepare for your own death, from basic admin to acceptance of the concept itself. It's a practical guide and journal that asks us to confront the questions that many of us are afraid to discuss with our loved ones: What type of funeral do I want? What do I want to happen to my possessions? How do I want to be remembered? Evie, a former stand-up comedian, also explains why death planning is so important, using her extensive expertise as a council funeral officer.

The exercises at the end of each section help you prepare for every mortality eventuality. From ensuring the admin of your life can be packed down quickly and efficiently, to guaranteeing you are given the correct funeral rites, to knowing what we are doing with your Facebook page.

Once completed, it is intended to be stored along with your documents and important paperwork (and/or to trigger you to prepare those important documents and gather said paperwork if you haven't already). There is also a free text blank page after each section for your own notes. Throughout, Evie includes real-life stories to add her winning combination of light-hearted touches and serious lessons as to why this preparation is so vital.

Jul 29, 2025

Spanish Interview

Excerpts from an interview published few weeks ago on Spanish site 20minutos
If you read Spanish, the complete interview is available here.
I asked for the original answers by Moore but I didn't get any feedback, so... maybe, you can try any available translation tool to get an understandable, at least, "English version". ¡Buena suerte!
[...] Su nombre está inevitablemente vinculado al mundo del cómic. ¿Es muy diferente, a nivel creativo, trabajar en un libro que en un cómic?
Alan Moore: Aunque pueda parecer que mi nombre está inextricablemente ligado al sector del cómic, no ha sido por falta de intentos de mi parte, durante muchos años, de desvincularme. He renunciado a todo el trabajo de cómic que no poseo legalmente, es decir, todo aquel que fue publicado por la industria del cómic mainstream, incluyendo Watchmen, V de Vendetta, Halo Jones, toda la línea de cómics A.B.C. salvo La liga de los hombres extraordinarios, y probablemente alrededor del ochenta o noventa por ciento de todo lo que he escrito.

Cuando digo "he renunciado", quiero decir que no conservo copias de ese trabajo, ya no quiero firmarlo, hablar de él, ni siquiera que me lo recuerden particularmente. Aunque el medio de la historieta es algo verdaderamente maravilloso, el sector del cómic —pese a contar con gente muy agradable y muy talentosa trabajando en él— es, cada vez más, un desastre lleno de ineptitud y en descomposición con el que realmente no quiero estar asociado.

Muchos de sus fans probablemente no entienden por qué renuncia a algo así.
Alan Moore: Sí, estoy seguro de que para personas que no han visto cómo les arrebatan cientos de millones en derechos de propiedad intelectual, o no han visto a personajes que una vez les importaron ser parodiados por corporaciones que nunca los comprendieron, esto parecerá una reacción incomprensiblemente airada. He aceptado que la primera línea de mi obituario citará algún título de superhéroes que, por muy bueno o bien intencionado que fuera mi trabajo en él en su momento, ahora desearía no haber hecho nunca.
 [...]

Jul 25, 2025

I did the right thing, didn't I?

Excerpt from an interview titled "Apocalyptic Thinking", published in Skeleton Crew, November 1990. Interview conducted by Dr Christian Lehmann.
Alan Moore: [...] Well, he’s the other side of the coin from Rorschach, a right winger who has the most integrity in some ways; Veidt is a liberal and, in some ways, is the biggest monster. This was again perhaps trying to counter-balance my own natural prejudices — it would have been to easy to make Rorschach the villain and have this blond liberal superhero save the day. I was trying to use Veidt as an
analogy for arrogant people with good intentions. There are lots of levels of analogy in WATCHMEN, but one of the levels that relate to Adrian Veidt is that we clue the reader in on the very first page, where Rorschach mentions President Truman and later on in Chapter Four where we have a lot of talk about Hiroshima and also in the text feature at the end of the Rorschach issue, where Rorschach says that he thinks Truman was right to drop the bomb on Hiroshima because more people would have died if he hadn’t. Veidt’s argument is an old argument, you can see. That it is all right to commit an atrocity if the end justifies the means. The only difference with Adrian Veidt is that he didn’t do it in some far-off country full of yellow people; he did it in the middle of New York. That's why Americans were so shocked by the ending, because it’s unthinkable. All right, maybe some people do have to die to make the world safe, but not Americans! That's too great a price. Yellow people, yeah; black people, sure; brown people, okay; WEuropeans if we must. But not Americans; Americans’ blood is worth too much. Wog blood is comparatively worthless. Hundreds of wogs can get killed and it doesn’t add up to one drop of American blood. If one American tourist gets killed, they firebomb Tripoli. It's that way of thinking. So by using Adrian Veidt as, you know, almost a model Caesar. An industrial Caesar rather than a military one, but a modern Caesar nonetheless and, like all Caesars he thinks he knows what's best for the world. And if you look at his motives, he’s got a point, his argument is logical; he’s a credible character. But the key to his personality is his arrogance, his egotism — the belief that he is right; that his is the only solution.
 
SC: He says to Dr Manhattan, ‘That was the only way.’
Alan Moore:
That was the only doubt in the entire story. When he says, ‘I did the right thing, didn't I?” That's the only moment where, just for a second, you see something in his eyes where he’s thinking, Christ what have I done? That's his only human moment. All of the characters towards the end have their own human moment. Rorschach’s is when he starts crying. The Comedian, when he starts crying, and when he says, ‘I don't get the joke. I don’t understand it. It’s not funny any more.” And when, for a moment, the enormity of what Veidt has done suddenly comes home to him. Veidt has his doubts. And of course, at the end of the story, it’s all left in doubt. Maybe it was all a massive sacrifice for nothing. [...]

Jul 22, 2025

On Magical Landscapes and The Spirit Guide

The twelfth episode in my series of articles about The Bumper Book is online on the Italian web-magazine (Quasi)
It contains behind the scenes by John Coulthart about Magical Landscapes and The Spirit Guide sections. Read the following to get it all!  
Can you talk about your work for both Magical Landscapes and The Spirit Guide section?
What's about the approach, the process, the main difficulties you had to solve to balance text and image, and your favourite pieces...? Any anecdote or "odd" event while you worked on those illos? Can you share any preliminary or wip material?

John Coulthart: Magical Landscapes was the last part of the book to be completed although I did prepare all the borders early on, and I also fully illustrated the first page so that everyone could see how the section would look when it was finished. I left the section to last because there was so much illustration involved, I wanted to get everything else out of the way before immersing myself in the task.

The Spirit Guide was done earlier than this, and mostly in a collage style since a lot of antique pictorial reference was required: angels, the De Plancy demons, the John Dee "Watchtower" and so on. I thought
using collage might also save me some time but some of the pages took longer than I expected. I have plan illustrations of all the Dee Watchtowers in a booklet about Enochian magic where they're shown as simple line drawings but Alan and Steve wanted the chart to be one of the colour versions which I think were created by The Golden Dawn. All the online copies of these are small things in very over-saturated RGB colours so they're no use for print purposes. The only option was to make my own copy of one of the Watchtowers from scratch. Most of this has been covered over by the text but the whole design came in useful when I had to do the Enochian page for the Magical Landscapes.

Both sections were relatively easy to work on since the appearance and contents of each section was carefully described in the notes. The Magical Landscapes frame is based on an Alphonse Mucha design, the request being for pages that resemble Mucha's early illustrated books where framed illustrations are paired with panels of text. Mucha's books change their frames for each page, something I did consider for my sequence but for this book it seemed a better option to keep the shape of the frame consistent while changing the contents.

Alan had also provided small thumbnail sketches for each of the Magical Landscapes pages so one of the challenges was trying to stay as close as possible the guidelines. This worked well for most of the pages with the exception of Geburah where the sketched design had two narrow text panels running down the page with the figure between them. I tried several variations for this but in all of them the columns of text were crowding the figure who required space for her outstretched arms. The solution was to follow the form of the previous page, which also makes for a satisfying double-page layout, with two multi-armed figures facing each other. I also changed the Daath text panel from a rectangle to a  circle since the text refers to Daath having pi as its numeral on the Tree of Life. Readers of Alan's other books may note that some of the imagery in the first eleven pages matches the symbolism that appears in the journey up the Tree of Life in Promethea. I don't think this was deliberate, more a result of the way that Alan imagines these spheres.
The biggest challenge was the request for the Fairyland page to be as crowded as one of Joseph Noel Patton's paintings which show hundreds of fairies and other creatures of all sizes and shapes gathered together in woodland scenes. My scene is crowded but seems less so when you look at Patton's paintings, each of which must have taken him about a year at least to create. I'm still pleased with the way my scene turned out, however. There's a tiny reference to Richard Dadd's fairyland in the figures from The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke. And I put an old view of Northampton in the background of the alchemy picture on the opposite page. This picture is based on the plates from the Splendor Solis series, many of which have little landscape scenes in their backgrounds.
Since I was doing the same here I   thought I might as well use something relevant. I don't think I have any specific favourites but I like the way these pages look together, one of them visually noisy and detailed while the other is very calm and ordered.

The Enochian page presented another challenge since the description required a perspective view of one of Dee's Watchtowers, showing how the grid is formed by an arrangement of coloured pyramids with flat tops.
This was another reason for drawing out one of the Watchtowers for the Spirit Guide page; doing so gave me an accurate plan of the whole design in print-ready colours and with all the required Enochian symbols in place. This was done with vector graphics in Illustrator before being placed into the layered page. I use Illustrator all the time for design work, and usually find it easier and quicker when creating anything involving bold shapes or geometric constructions.
 
[Regarding wip material] I've included extracts from the work-in-progress files for the Enochian pages. I'm usually reluctant to share sketches for the reasons that David Bowie once gave: sharing early stages of something has a tendency to change the reception of the final work, whatever it may be. But these drafts are more like diagrams, and they already exist outside the work as a whole. [See below!]

Jul 21, 2025

The psychedelic experience

Excerpt from a recent interview posted by Spanish writer Roberto Bartual on his Substack.
You can read the complete piece HERE. Highly recommended! 
Do you think the psychedelic experience can help us understand language?
Alan Moore: I think that the psychedelic experience can help us to understand a great number of things, language included. Around thirty years ago, when Steve Moore and I were investigating the eighth kabbalistic sphere, Hod – the Mercurial sphere of intellect, science, magic and language, where all form is said to originate – I had what seemed to be an encounter with the god Hermes. During the ritual, I was under the influence of psilocybin and Steve wasn’t, acting more as a recorder and observer. I reported to Steve that I was seeing floating globules of a silvery and reflective semi-liquid substance, that I felt to be the ethereal material that abstract and insubstantial beings such as gods clothed themselves in so that we could perceive them. I tentatively suggested that this substance might be called ‘ideoplasm’, and then realised moments later that this was an unnecessary coinage, in that what I was looking at was simply a symbolic representation of language itself. Language is the reflective and liquid substance that the gods dress themselves in to reveal themselves to us. I further realised that this is true of us ourselves and of everything in our material universe. If we do not have a word and thus a concept for an object or phenomenon, then we simply cannot perceive it and are not conscious of it. I understood why modern linguistic theory insists that language precedes consciousness, and further realised why Hod, sphere of language, was where all form originated. So, yes, I think the psychedelic experience can help us understand language. 

Jul 18, 2025

Rowan's assignment

Excerpt from a 2020 interview with Alan Moore, originally published in French (read HERE) and  reprinted in English in Metal Hurlant n. 1 (2025), recently released (read HERE and check HERE). 
What are your artistic projects for the future?
Alan Moore: Well, I’ve written a couple of short stories that I thought were interesting, and I believe that the illustrative component of The Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic inches towards completion.
My main focus at the moment is the forthcoming feature film The Show, directed by my Northampton counter-cultural affiliate Mitch Jenkins, which will be released whenever it becomes possible to release films again. As for what I’m working on right now this afternoon, that would be the second episode of a thus-far-imaginary five season television series that is also, lazily, titled The Show
And I’ve been given an assignment by my second-eldest grandson, Rowan, to present him with a story that is four words in length, so we’ll see how that goes.
I confess that I would like to know those four words and whether Rowan liked them or not. :)

Jul 17, 2025

Dr. Manhattan by Richard Pace

Art by Richard Pace
Above, a brilliant Dr. Manhattan by Canadian comic book artist and illustrator RICHARD PACE.
 
For more info about the artist: InstagramPatreon

Jul 16, 2025

Alan Moore by Manu Gutiérrez

Art by Gutiérrez
Above, an amazing portrait of our Bearded Magus by Spanish artist Manu Gutiérrez.
The image has been used as cover for Roberto Bartual's Alan Moore: Al otro lado del velo published in 2024 by Ediciones Marmotilla. Check the following images. 
Furthermore, below you can admire some of the sketches that Gutiérrez drew for some lucky fan. Enjoy!
For more info about the artist: Official site - Instagram 
Art by Gutiérrez

Jul 15, 2025

Knuckle rings

Art by LRNZ
Below, final question from a fantastic interview included in the great Arthur No. 4 (May 2003). You can read the complete interview HERE
So, Alan, now to the really important question. What on earth are those knuckle rings? 
Alan Moore: My girlfriend Melinda Gebbie got me a wonderful piece of jointed finger armor. It looked wonderful, but completely stupid on its own. It looked like I'd damaged my finger and I'd got some sort of prosthesis. So I had to fill up the other fingers. It became an obsession. It's probably the Gothic flourish of a man in later life. You get to a certain age in life and you find that it pays to draw attention away from your face. [laughs] They look pretty good, and also, nobody messes with you. Not that they did anyway. My hands are registered weapons. They do weigh quite a bit, all that metal-I think it's slowly making my arms longer. [chuckles]
So, picture if you will: The cobbled back alleys of Northampton, as twilight settles, imagine me loping along the alleyways, my knuckles scraping against the cobbles and sending up bright,shearing swathes of sparks. A chilling image... 
 
All Arthur magazine issues are currently available HERE in pdf forms
So... download them all! There is a lot of Moore in:
An interview with shamanic psychonaut/journalist DANIEL PINCHBECK, author of the just-released Breaking Open the Head. Artwork by Alan Moore.
 
ALAN MOORE gives Arthur a historical-theoretical-autobiographical earful on the subject of magic and art. Extra-long feature convo with Jay Babcock, with a portrait by John Coulthart and photos by Jose Villarrubia. Check out that finger armor! 
 
ALAN MOORE comments on what the US and UK governments have been up to lately
 
Kristine McKenna interviews BRIAN ENO on the eve of the release of his first solo album featuring vocals in decades. Illustration by John Coulthart. Plus, a celebration of the great domed one by Alan Moore
 
 “Bog Venus vs. Nazi Cock-Ring: Some Thoughts Concerning Pornography” by Alan Moore: a landmark eight-page essay/manifesto, with illustrations 
 
How (and why) to lucid dream — a conversation with cartoonist RICK VEITCH by Jay Babcock. Plus “Cartographer of the American Dreamtime,” an appreciation of Rick Veitch and his work by Alan Moore

Jul 14, 2025

Promethea by Colleen Doran

Art by C. Doran
Above, a fantastic and graceful Promethea commission by the amazing Colleen Doran.
 
For more info about the artist, visit her official siteHERE.