Occupy the world of comics!

Above, excerpts from Buster Brown At The barricades: Foment in the funnies and comics as counter-culture, a long essay written by Alan Moore to support the Occupy movement and serialised in the three issues of Occupy Comics, published in 2013 by Black Mask.

Alan Moore: [...] The present generation, those who mostly (although by no means exclusively) make up a large part of the modern protest movements, are the first who've grown up since the comic book upheavals of the 1980s and therefore the first who've grown up in a world where comics were a natural and accepted feature of the cultural landscape. This is perhaps evidenced by their gleeful appropriation of comic book iconography and highly-visible cartoon theatrics. It would seem that there has never been a generation for whom comics as a tool or an effective weapon are more eminently suited, nor a time of social crisis better able to lend comics a true sense of urgency and purpose. Times like these are arguably exactly those which comics were created to engage with.

So, by all means, occupy the world of comics. Occupy the doorsteps and the lobbies of the industry if you've a mind to...certainly the comic industry is as deserving of such treatment as is any other greedy and unscrupulous business concern...although it might be thought that mainstream comics are best left to manage their own imminent destruction, this being the one task which they've demonstrated a real attitude for over the last seven decades. A more positive and useful protest might be to support the families of the true titans of the medium, the cheated giants like Jerry Siegel or Joe Shuster or Jack Kirby or the scores of others that have never received fair remuneration or redress, in their courageous efforts to confront these massive corporate entities with their immense resources and battalions of lawyers. [...]

An even more effective long-term strategy would surely be to occupy the medium itself. The many glories of comic strips past have never been so instantly accessible to the would-be comic creator, giving him or her the means to steep themselves, to educate themselves, in an astonishing array of concepts and techniques, from Little Nemo through to Jimmy Corrigan. Thus armed, with nothing more than a blank page and some variety of drawing implement, dissenting voices can refine and broadcast their ideas more widely and compellingly, while at the same time possibly making their protest into an enduring work of art that can enrich the medium and the broader culture in which it exists. Today's technology has made self-publishing more easily achievable, and in addition there are an increasing range of small and honourable publishers with a more flexible approach to new material, allowing access to new formats and fresh concepts which perhaps have a potential to transform the medium.

[...] If you care about what you are saying, if you seek a more effective way of saying it, then pick up that brush, pencil, pen, that mouse or even that discarded cardboard box out in the alleyway and pour your heart, your mind, your self into as many little panels as it takes to make your statement. You may find it opens up modes of expression and dissent that you have previously not considered or imagined.

You may even find you've got yourself an occupation.

Alan Moore
Northampton,
May-June 2012

Glowing Moore by Renato Quiroga

Art by Renato Quiroga

Above, a radiant Alan Moore portrait by artist Renato Quiroga.

Quiroga is a graphic artist focused on digital color, lettering and editorial design for comic books.

For more info about the artist: Official site - Flickr

The Ballad of Halo Jones stage productions

Flyer for Halo Jones Play, 1988

The Ballad Of Halo Jones has been adapted for the stage on a number of occasions. The first adaptation was performed by In The Red Theatre Company around the UK in 1988, the second one at the Edinburgh Festival in 2001, a third one at the Lass o' Gowrie in Manchester in 2012, then another in Leeds in November of 2012. 

 

You can get essential info HERE and HERE. Additional info here and here. Enjoy!

In The Red Theatre Company stage production programme (page 2)

Storyteller Moore by Alex Maclean

Art by Alex Maclean

Above an inspired portrait of Moore by acclaimed British director and designer Alex Maclean.

“Everybody talks about storytelling these days. Brands have stories and people need to know them, but to what end? Too often the audience is expected to be passive recipients of your latest viral. I’m interested in the lightbulb moment, when something in that narrative clicks. When the audience is inspired or empowered with knowledge or motivation to do something worthwhile. Stories can change behaviour as well as entertain. Alan Moore has been a favourite of mine since I was a teenager, captivated by his visual storytelling.” - Alex Maclean

Read the complete article HERE.

 

For more info about Maclean: website - vimeo page

Wedding ring, sesquipedalian and... Harvey Pekar

Below, transcript excerpts from a video chat that Moore did in 2012 with the contributors of Harvey Pekar statue. The video is available HERE.

    "[What's] on my left hand?" [...] the one on my left hand is my, my lovely wedding ring, that I designed myself on the back of a receipt. I'd originally asked for one big vulgar opal that I could show off to everybody but they could only get me two tear-shaped ones and then they couldn't figure out how to work them into a coherent design so I did the... the caduceus there.

    "What's my current favourite word?" Sesquipedalian, because it's one of those few words which refers to itself. What it actually means is having a fondness for obscure and difficult words. So, sesquipedalian, that's my, my word for today.

[...]    "You said that the work of Harvey Pekar was very important for you, but it looks very different from your work, so he talks about his life while your stories are about heroes, magic, historical characters. What is the link between you and Pekar's work?" 

Well there's a few incredibly strong links. Um... for one thing, Harvey Pekar is one of the very very few blue collar talents in the comic book field. Um, this is not to say that, er, people from the middle classes don't do wonderful comics, of course they do; but my own personal background is very much rooted in the English working classes, and something about Harvey's perspective always rang so true to me; er, that the sincerity, the honesty of it, the, the crystalline honesty of it that was as clear as water - that, these were all things that impressed me immensely, that he was able to talk about working class life with such a lucid voice. And, the other thing, um, would be Harvey's attachment to the location in which he lived; his love of Cleveland, for the ground upon which he was standing, which could be anywhere. It could be Northampton, it could be the places that, that you all live. We should value the, the humble streets and boulevards an' houses that surround us. They won't be there forever, and they have incredible histories tied into them. Um, we should value them, we should protect them, and we should celebrate them in the way that, that Harvey did - just the ordinary human lives that are going on in these places. I think that, for my part I want to celebrate the same things as Harvey, but Harvey's voice was not mine. Um, we've got distinctive voices, and for my part I would rather do something like Jerusalem, where there is an incredible amount of autobiographical stuff in it; although I'm dressed up so that nobody re-recognises me. This is an old trick of mine as anybody who read Big Numbers would be painfully aware. You know, I like to appear in drag, um, so as not to disrupt the narrative, but, yeah, so there's, there's autobiographical stuff about me, about my family, and about the - more importantly about the history of the neighbourhood in which I grew up. Um, it's expressed in terms of fiction. It's got all of the, the usual extravagant fictional devices that people might have come to expect of me so it's got a few monsters 'n' things like that in - no superheroes or at least not yet. I'm a few chapters away from the end so I suppose anything could happen, but, yeah, it's, it's that level that I connected with Harvey upon the most, that his... love and tender observations of ordinary human life, as it is lived for by far the, the largest section of the population, and for the, the town, the environment around him. That is the level on which Harvey's work probably spoke to me most profoundly.

The video is available HERE. 

More info HERE, HERE and HERE.

Cthulu rules

Art by Kevin O'Neill.

Above, an Alan Moore "Cthulu" sketch portrait by Kevin O'Neill. From Central Comics Paris' Instagram page.

Alan Moore by Doogie Horner

Art by Doogie Horner.

Above, an intense portrait sketch of Alan Moore by comedian, writer and artist Doogie Horner.
More info about him here.

1986 Jon Haward's homage to Alan Moore

Art by Jon Haward.

Excerpt from Jon Haward's blog (posted the 15th of March 2012).  

"Another retro blog going back to 1986 when I was a fresh faced fanboy aged 21, still learning the craft of drawing and writing comic strips.
It's no secret to those who know me I'm a huge Alan Moore fan have been since his work for Warrior and 2000AD.
These scans are from colour photocopies that are 26 years old so the colour has faded and Alan's skin has turned yellow! [...]"

 

Jon Haward is a British comics artist. He has illustrated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Judge Dredd, Sinister Dexter and Biker Mice from Mars, among others. [Wikipedia]

The complete 4 page strip can be seen here.

The Decline of English Murder

"And English murder. It’s all over the place."
 

A song written and sung by Alan Moore. Music by Joe Brown.

More info here.

Alan Moore intro for The Vorrh novel

Excerpt from Alan Moore introduction for The Vorrh, a novel by English artist Brian Catling.

The complete introduction can be read here. You can also listen it directly from Moore's voice, here.

Easily the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy and ranking amongst the best pieces ever written in that genre, with The Vorrh we are presented with a sprawling immaterial organism which leaves the reader filthy with its seeds and spores, encouraging new growth and threatening a great reforesting of the imagination.

Comedies of manners set in mews and crescents that have lost their meaning, auto-heroising romps through sloppy pseudo-medieval fens, our writings are increasingly outgunned by our experience and are too narrow to describe, contain, or even name our current circumstance. In the original-growth arbours of The Vorrh, new routes are posited and new agendas are implicit in the sinister viridian dapple. As the greyed-out urban street-grid of our ideologies and ways of thinking falls inevitably into disrepair and disappearance, Catling’s stupefying work provides both viable alternatives and meaningful escape into its tropic possibilities.

It offers us a welcome to the wilderness.

[Alan Moore]

The complete introduction: here. 

Directly from Moore's voice: here.

Victorian pornography vs. contemporary pornography

Excerpt from Moore's Murder & Prostitution in 19th Century London contained in A Steampunk’s Guide to Sex published by Combustion Books in 2012. 

Another thing that I enjoy about Victorian pornography is that it is very different from contemporary pornography. In contemporary pornography, all of the women are conveniently bisexual and all of the men are relentlessly heterosexual. Because that’s the way that modern men like it. That wasn’t true in Victorian pornography. All of the characters seem to be sexually ambivalent. There was not a male heterosexual template that was being used in the same way that there is today. It was a lot more fluid. Considering what a hidebound society Victorian society actually was, in its dream life, it was a lot more of a fluid proposition. Sexual identities could flow and change. [Alan Moore]

A Steampunk’s Guide to Sex 

by Professor Calamity, Alan Moore, Luna Celeste, & others (2012, Combustion Books)

contains three articles by Moore:
Gay New York (pp. 19-21)
Lost Girls & Pornography (pp. 37-42)
Murder & Prostitution in 19th Century London (pp. 63-68)

Watchmen in Matt Madden's history of American comics

Above, excerpt from A history of American comic books in six panels by Matt Madden.

panel 4: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen (this panel is copied pretty directly from a Vietnam flashback in the book)

The complete strip can be read here.

Is Moore planning to take over the world?

Frank Metterton in Jimmy's End

In all honesty, how much of what you write now is part of some über-large magical ritual for you to take over the world? With your beard? You could do it you know.
Alan Moore: Of course I’m not attempting to take over the world. What a grotesque concept. On the other hand, in Jimmy’s End and its projected sequel The Show we do present the story of a bearded Northampton-based occultist, performer and writer who is attempting to subjugate the globe by first colonising its imagination, but that obviously only has a coincidental relationship with any real circumstances or people. I mean, the very idea. Do I look like the sort of person who might do something like that? [Read the complete interview HERE]

Also watch this video!

Grant Morrison and a storytelling technique of Watchmen

A page from Pax Americana. Story: Grant Morrison. Art: Frank Quitely.

Grant Morrison about Pax Americana (art by Frank Quitely), part of his Multiversity project for DC Comics, yet to be published.

"We’re taking the characters and applying it back to Watchmen and seeing what we could get. Nobody has really used those Alan Moore tricks in 25 years so it seemed right to take that very tight, controlled, self-reflecting storytelling and seeing if we can do something new with it.[...] It’s not trying to be Watchmen, it’s more of an echo of a storytelling technique of Watchmen." [from The Hollywood Reporter, September 2012]

A page from Pax Americana. Story: Grant Morrison. Art: Frank Quitely.

Gentlemen in the dark

Art by Matteo Scalera

Above an intense League of Extraordinary Gentlemen portrait drawn by Italian comic book artist Matteo Scalera.

For more info about Matteo Scalera visit his blog.

Moore Movies

Mitch Jenkins e Alan Moore sul set di Jimmy's End.

We talked about it some months ago and last November 2012 they were officially released: Act's of Faith and Jimmy's End, the first two shorts in a noirish film series realized by Alan Moore in collaboration with photographer Mitch Jenkins (they previously worked together on the Unearthing project).

Official website: www.jimmysend.com

"[...] The series, comprising five shorts leading up to a feature-length, also entitled The Show, marks Moore’s first writing specifically done for the screen and is set in their mutual hometown, Northampton, exploring the locality’s seedier underbelly.

So far, two films have been delivered: the first, Act's of Faith, follows Faith Harrington (Siobhan Hewlett), a single nymphomaniac living on her own who pursues increasingly insidious ways to fulfil her addiction. The second has James Mitchum (Darrell D'Silva) making his way into the bowls of St James End Working Men’s Club's neo noir-tinged crypt of debauchery and hedonism."

From The Quietus interview with Mitch Jenkins: here.

Other references:
Alan Moore about the making-of Jimmy's End: HERE.

Alan Moore about the importance of Art

Moore portrait by the Northampton artist Lee Burrows

Excerpt from an interview conducted by D M Mitchell for Paraphilia Magazine. It can be downloaded from Issuu.com (here).

Do you think art/literature etc still has a voice that can make any difference? Can it even be heard nowadays?
Of course art and literature make a difference. Increasingly, in a world dominated by booming governmental and corporate pronouncements, individual human voices are about the only things that can make a difference. Just using it as an example that‘s readily to hand, for whatever reason movements like Occupy or Anonymous have adopted the V for Vendetta mask and basic ethos it would still appear that they have taken some slight inspiration from the original work. And of course, there are the differences that art and literature have made which are only apparent in what we can‘t see: how much easier would it have been to totalitarian state in this country had Orwell and Huxley not written 1984 or Brave New World? I think the crucial point in your question is whether art and literate can still be heard in the clamour of contemporary society, or at least whether they can be heard clearly and free from distortion. The problem, it seems to me, lies in our modern construction of art being simply a category of entertainment. Classified thus, it‘s inevitable that almost all commercially successful art (and these days, if we speak of success, it is generally in a commercial sense) will be managed by an entertainment industry. The clue here is in the word "industry", in that such an enterprise will always place commercial considerations first and will in time condition the people hoping to work in such a field to do the same. What is the point, after all, of creating something exquisite and perfectly expressive of one‘s inmost feelings if there is no way of displaying one‘s creation to an audience of any kind? I see this attitude as being profoundly toxic, and deplore its apparent easy acceptance throughout today‘s supposedly creative community. In my own Blake, Bunyan and John Clare informed opinion, if you are lucky enough to have acquired artistic abilities then expressing them lucidly and eloquently without compromise is not your career, it is your job and your responsibility. If you are an artist, of whatever variety, I suggest that you are more likely to find satisfaction and meaning in your life by remaining loyal to yourself and to the integrity of your creation, rather than by pimping your muse to the first wealthy-looking customer to stroll along the boulevard. Art and literature can make an enormous difference, but only if they are genuinely art and literature as opposed to corporate-approved fanfares that only add to the already deafening level of cultural noise.

The complete interview is downloadable from Issuu.com (here).
By D M Mitchell for Paraphilia Magazine

Swamp Thing meets Constantine

Art by Dean Beattie.

A nice illustration featuring Swamp Thing and Constantine by Dean Beattie.

Kevin O'Neill talks about The League and Moore

Art by Kevin O'Neill. Text by Alan Moore. From Century: 2009.

"We've been friends since the 1970s I guess, I've known Alan a long time. The way we work is much more casual now, at the beginning Alan had a synopsis and an outline for the first series and he sent it to me. And the story we were just about the start grew out of the conversations on a period I would have liked to draw, or characters we would have liked to do. Sometimes I mention things to him, like the Golliwog that is in 'Black Dossier', a black character, and it came out of a casual conversation years earlier. We just found this character very interesting, it's a racist image nowadays in Britain, a racial stereotype. Originally though it was a hugely popular Victorian children's character. We had this black character but he wasn't meant to be a black man, so we brought the character back and treated him the way he used to be treated, an heroic character. That was interesting, and the great thing about it is that we could jump into any type of story we wanted to do, using the characters that we thought of, and that's satisfying." [Kevin O'Neill]

Excerpt from an interview published on Italian website Comicus. 

Interview originally conducted during Lucca Comics & Games 2012.

The complete version can be read HERE.

he says... 59!

photo © Mitch Jenkins

Today Alan Moore has turned 59 years old! 

So... happy birthday, Magus!

And I was wondering that... more than 10 years passed from my initial idea that became the Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman. Tempus fugit!