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.

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. 

Un Nuovo Mondo

On their Instagram page, Fanucci has announced that they will publish the Italian edition of I hear a new world... in March 2026!!!  

The sequel to The Great When, a dark and haunting journey through the streets of London – real or imagined – from a legend of modern fantasy.

It seems the Italian book will be available before the original English language version scheduled for... May 2026! 

Weird word! 

La voz del fuego by R.M. Guéra

Art by R.M. Guéra

Above, cover illustration drawn by acclaimed Serbian artist R.M. Guéra for the Spanish edition of Voice of the Fire, published by Planeta DeAgostini in 2006.  Watch this video too.

 

The illustration is currently for sale on the CART Gallery website, HERE.

Italian Sussidiario di Magia

Above and below, some pics I took of my Italian copy of the Bumper Book of Magic that I bought few days ago. The book has just been published by Panini Comics. 

It seems they did a good job on it. Viva la Magia!

Polish Illuminations

Above, cover of Iluminacje, the Polish edition of Illuminations published by Echa in 2023.

On the upper side of the image, you can notice that they involved a lot of translators!

 

More info HERE. 

Das Grosse Wenn

Above, cover for the German edition of The Great When to be published by Carcosa this fall.

I confess I find the image quite... mesmerizing. Gut gemacht! 

A Lua e a Serpente: Almanaque de Magia

Devir will publish the Brazilian edition of The Bumper Book of Magic! The book is scheduled to be released in June but pre-order is already available HERE!

The Brazilian edition looks quite special. It will include a separate set of printed sheets to cut-out and assemble the Moon and Serpent Temple (present in the book)! Plus a poster and... three bookmarks (they are a pre-order exclusive).

 

A magia está em todo lugar!

Sussidiario di Magia

Panini Comics has announced that they will publish the Italian edition of The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. The book is scheduled to be released in May 2025.

 

La Magia sta arrivando!

O Grande Durante

Art by Lambuja

Above, cover for the Brazilian edition of The Great When, published by Editora Aleph. 

 

As you can see they commissioned a brand new cover to... Brazilian digital artist ‎ Pedro Henrique Ferreira popularly known as Lambuja.

 

For more info about Lambuja: Official site - Instagram - Behance page

Art by Lambuja

 

Rick Veitch on Alan's brain

Excerpts from the introduction that the great RICK VEITCH wrote for  the Italian edition of Alan Moore's Writing For Comics, published by ProGlo Edizioni (Prospettiva Globale) in 2007. 

Veitch posted the complete text in 2018, on his Facebook page (here).

The Secrets Of Alan’s Brain
by Rick Veitch

[...]

I’m convinced that, after many more creative and productive decades, when Alan finally gives up the flesh and joins the transmigration of souls into idea space, a careful study of his remains will reveal that certain areas of the Moore brain, especially those parts associated with imagination, intuition, memory and language, to be far larger than one might expect in the normal human. Perhaps scientists will discover extra arteries pumping an enhanced blood flow to those cranial regions or some enzyme that promotes rich neuron growth. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they come upon some sort of new and bizarre mutation in the formation of the lobes.
This isn’t as flip as it sounds; at least when talking of a highly developed creative mind like Alan’s. Mozart, thought to have musical and mathematical brain functions that bordered on autism, provided the world with some of the most sublime music ever created. And, after death, Albert Einstein’s brain was doled out in slices to scientists seeking a link between those analytical and intuitive centers that gave us the theory of relativity.

I include Alan in this august group with some degree of certainty based on a couple decades worth of phone conversations.

[...]

Now I’m a writer, too, so I’m familiar with the process most creative people struggle through to get their initial inspirations to a finished state. It usually (often) takes a fair amount of drafting and editing before a good idea is crafted into a solid piece of writing.

Not with Alan. His mind is capable of plucking ideas from the imagination fully formed and realized. Countless times, while kicking around possibilities for a story, he has startled me by saying “I got it” and proceeded to unspool complete scenes, including panel descriptions and finished dialogue. He calls them his “bits” and he appears to use them as the foundation blocks for his scripts. I believe he expects them to be waiting for him, ripening on the tree of knowledge, whenever he is on the creative hunt. Like every other comic book writer in the world, I could only sigh when Alan mentioned in a recent interview that pretty much every comic book script he has written has been a first and only draft.

 

[...]

Rick Veitch
September 2007

Jerusalem in Brazil

It seems that Jerusalem is coming out in Brazil!To be published by Editora Veneta.

 

Pre-ordering will be available HERE pretty soon. Check the page, if interested.

Il Grande Quando and... first reviews

Above, cover of the Italian edition of The Great When, to be published by Fanucci the 25th of October. Basically, it will be released in conjunction with the English ed.

As you can see the cover is identical to the original edition with just a supplemental text for the Italian translation of the title. Not a big effort, imho, even if it's possibile this is not the final version. I will investigate.

 

Meanwhile, on the Waterstones' site you can read 3 reviews by people who had the good fortune to get an ARC. I confess I asked for an ARC too but... I received no answer! It's a cruel world, I know!

Some excerpts below:

[...] Moore completists will love it. I found it too fantastical to be effective and too effective to be fantastical. [...]
Two stars out of five

[...] What I love about it is how the Maestro Moore has created a mid-century Britain that feels alive and then peppered it with a technicolour Otherworld, as if The Wizard of Oz were taking place in 1940s London, bookended with spivs and crooks that are equal parts East End and Cthulhu. The cast is stunning, barely dipping into any of them before the book draws to close, hinting at some of the adventures to come. [...]
Five stars out of five

[...] The story is wrapped up nicely but there are plenty of hooks for the series to continue and I certainly look forward to seeing how things pan out and what the motley cast of misfits get up to next.
My only criticism is that the lengthy prologue, which is about the same length as a chapter of the book, felt quite hard to get into. Even re-reading it after finishing the novel I felt that there were sections which I didn’t understand and can only assume that these are preliminary forays into the later books of the series. If the first few pages feel totally incomprehensible don’t give up, the main story is well worth waiting for.
Just as a note of caution - this is definitely a story for adults in language, tone and content.  [...]
Four stars out of five

You can read the reviews HERE.

German Jerusalem

Cover art by benSwerk

Above the cover for the German edition of Jerusalem to be published by Carcosa this fall. 

Cover art by benSwerk. 

For more info about the artist, visit the official site and Instagram page.

Sur écoute avec Alan Moore

Cover for Metal Hurlant n. 10 by Darius BakaArts

The 10th issue of the "new" Metal Hurlant, the seminal French comics magazine, includes an interview with Alan Moore. It has been conducted by writer and pop performer Jean Emmanuel Deluxe in June 2020, during the pandemic, and remained unpublished till now. The issue will be available the 21th of February 2024 but it was premiered during the recent Angoulême festival.

 

More info about Metal Hurlant n.10 here and here.

Moore info about Deluxe here and here.

 

Special thanks to Paul Gravett for the tips! Grazie, Paul!

 

Moore Iluminace by Mikulas Podprocky

Art by Mikulas Podprocky

Above, a great portrait of our Writer from Northampton by Czech artist Mikulas Podprocky.

The image has been used as cover for the Czech edition of Illuminations (Iluminace) published by Argo even if the final printed image seems a bit different, as filtered to feel more "material". I confess I prefer the original one.

More info about the artist at Podprocky Artstation page, here.

Iluminace published by Argo

Italian Illuminations

Italian publisher Fanucci Editore has announced the upcoming publication of Illuminations. The release date is set for the 27th of October 2023. The book is already available for pre-order. 

For more info check the publisher's site and Facebook page.

Encyclopaedia Mooreana

From Chile, a volume that examines the whole work of Moore from his early contributions to obscure fanzines to his well-known comics masterpieces. 

Compiled by Moore's scholar Guillermo Núñez Lara.

Published by Dogitia Editorial. 

You can get all the details HERE, in Spanish.  

Author's Instagram page: here - Publisher's Instagram page: here. 

Optimism vs. pessimism, critics and healthy escapism

The Brazilian edition of Illuminations, published by Aleph in November 2022, includes an exclusive 15-question interview with Alan Moore by Ramon Vitral. You can order the book HERE. 

Below, you can read 3 questions/answers, in their original English form, with the permission of Vitral & the publisher. Mille grazie, Ramon! :)

Ramon Vitral is a journalist who writes mainly about comics; he is about to publish Vitralizado - HQs e o Mundo (“Vitralizado” is the name of Vitral’s blog and “HQs e o Mundo” can be translated as "Comics and the World"), a collection of interviews with comic book authors from Brazil and all over the world including international names such as Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, Emil Ferris, Rutu Modan, Charles Burns, Naoki Urasawa and many others. 

Ramon Vitral’s blog: HERE. You can order Vitralizado HERE.
 

smoky note: Illuminations has been published in Brazil in November 2022, so Vitral’s introduction reflects the political situation of that time. But can we really say things are going better now? 

Anyway, happy reading!

Ramon Vitral: We are living in very strange times all over the world, but Brazil is going through an extraordinarily catastrophic period. We have a far-right president, a man who has repeatedly expressed (and acted on) his authoritarian and anti-democratic views. It seems to me that the situation in the UK is not as catastrophic, but you are still living in the aftermath of Brexit and Boris Johnson's period as prime minister. I say this to express how the publication of your new book and the opportunity to talk to you are a breath of fresh air amidst all this obscurantism.

Here are my questions:
The word “Illuminations” sounds extremely pertinent in this dark period we are experiencing. Is there any light that allows you to feel some optimism about the future of humanity?
Alan Moore: Optimism, whether justified or not, is the only functional position, and pessimism, no matter how well-founded, is almost always useless; a surrender to circumstances that makes those circumstances all but inevitable. On nearly every front – the continuing destruction of our environment; the obvious intent of the world’s billionaires to hoover up everyone else’s money; the intrusion of surveillance culture into every human life on the planet; the destabilisation of consensus reality beneath a landslide of ludicrous bullshit; the rise of something that isn’t even fascism; the mass desire to escape into fantasy, or Second Life, or the Metaverse, as if that was existentially possible – our species’ situation appears hopelessly terminal. My own optimism, such as it is, is born of my perception that human development may be following the alchemical formula of solve et coagula, where solve is the process of analysis, of taking something apart to its smallest component in order to fully understand the whole, and coagula is the process of synthesis, of putting the components back together into an improved form. It is my hope that the fragmentation that we see almost everywhere in society is the last, necessary stage of solve, of the dismantling of the old world, in order for coagula to begin with its building of the new. It may be a fragile hope, but it is the one source of illumination that I can discern in this otherwise pestilential moral blackout.

Ramon Vitral: Literature, science fiction, comics and other art forms are often spoken of as part of the “entertainment industry.” What is your opinion of this co-option of artists and their works by an industry?
Alan Moore: If art is not on some level entertaining then it will have great difficulty in conveying its message to all but a tiny audience. On the other hand, if it is only empty entertainment then it loses all its power and meaning as art, making the enterprise pointless save for commercial purposes. What I propose is art powerful enough to shake the city walls, and popular enough to engage with a multitude. I hope that my work is sufficiently entertaining for the reader to absorb its content, but I have never seen myself as an entertainer. Fortunately, my critics assure me that I need have no worries on that score.

Ramon Vitral: You have already classified superhero comics as “unhealthy escapism.” Why do you consider them “unhealthy escapism”? And what do you consider to be “healthy escapism”?
Alan Moore: I think that in the 1980s people were declaring that comics had grown up, when actually they’d just met the emotional age of the audience coming in the opposite direction. At their very outset, with Siegel and Schuster’s Superman, superheroes were much-needed Depression-era fantasies of working-class empowerment, by working-class creators in what was then a working-class medium intended for working-class readers. Now, comics are priced and packaged pretty much exclusively by and for middle-aged and middle-class hobbyists, and therefore serve as empowerment fantasies for the already-empowered. I think that their protracted existence into the present day is part of a panicked reaction against the world’s mounting complexity: people become scared and anxious, understandably, when faced with a world too complicated to be understood or controlled. When the narrative of modern life becomes too complex to be endured, perhaps many people feel the compulsion to retreat to a simpler narrative which, though it may be delusional nonsense, they can at least understand. The conspiracy-theory jamboree of the Trump years provides a perfect example. The QAnon concept of subterranean Democrat paedophile demons feasting on the adrenal glands of children poses a ridiculous, simplistic and non-existent comic-book threat, which can only be averted by an equally ridiculous, simplistic and non-existent comic-book hero, namely ‘The Donald’. Superheroes in their current incarnation, children’s stories that are seemingly the only narratives that today’s reluctant adults are prepared to engage with, have played a major role in the infantilization of western culture during this last decade, which I would argue has contributed greatly to the rise of populist fascism during the same period. Since-disowned works such as Marvelman and Watchmen weren’t intended as a revitalisation of this flagging genre so much as a satire and a criticism of it. The superhero today can only be an invulnerable compensatory figure for a nation afraid to sleep without a handgun on the night-table, or a proudly-brandished embodiment of American exceptionalism. I presume they will only finally die or fall out of favour when the psychological need for them dies, which, given the current state of culture and society, may be some time. 

You can order Vitralizado HERE

International Illuminations

Above, cover for Iluminações, the Brazilian edition of Illuminations, published by Editora Aleph in November 2022. Editor: Tiago Lyra; translator to Portuguese: Adriano Scandolara; cover artist: Pedro Inoue. More info at the publisher's site: HERE.

Below, cover for Iluminaciones, the Spanish edition of Illuminations, to be published by Nocturna Ediciones in April. Translator to Spanish: Juan Trejo.

More info at the publisher's site: HERE.