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.

V by Nick Derington

Above, a stunning V portrait by the amazing Nick Derington.

"Ideas are bulletproof."

 

Visit the artist's official site HERE. 

Dave McKean: V for Vendetta is the one!

Transcript from a short video in the great Bob Fish presents channel.

You can watch the video HERE.

Bob Fish presents channel HERE. Highly recommended! 

Dave McKean: [V for Vendetta] is the best book that Alan did.

Bob Fish: Better than Watchmen?
 

DMK: I'm not a fan of Watchmen anymore. I was. I loved it...

BF: Because of the superheroes?

DMK: Because of the superheroes. 
Whereas this one... it always seemed like a really strong personal vision, conceived with no pressures on it. It didn't have to use characters from here... 'cos Watchmen started with Charlton characters.

Whereas this is a total from scratch, "I can do anything I want and I feel passionate about this and I need to make this story". That's why I think this one survives. 

Watchmen now feels like the end of an era rather than this that feels much more like the beginning.

David Lloyd really was a terrific for this particular story. Endlessly inventive and beautifully crafted ideas. 

And I think this Alan's work will be the one that will be remembered from this particular era.

V by Jesse Lonergan

Art by Jesse Lonergan

Above, a great V portrait by the amazing American illustrator and comic book artist Jesse Lonergan.

 

For more info about the artist, visit his Website or Instagram page.

V by Andrea Cavaletto

Art by Andrea Cavaletto

Above, a commission portrait of V by Italian comic book artist and writer Andrea Cavaletto. 

 

For more info about Cavaletto, visit his Instagram: HERE.

Mina and V by Mike McKone

Art by Mike McKone

British comic book artist Mike McKone has created 99 brand new, amazing illustrations and he is offering them to fans to buy on his Bigcartel page, here.

mckone.bigcartel.com is open to preview the 99 drop happening 18 August at 3pm EST.

Mina Harker and V are included in this awesome set of portraits! So... carpe diem!

Art by Mike McKone

V by Rise

Art by Rise

Above, a touching V for Vendetta homage by Italian illustrator, comic book artist and muralist RISE. The illustration is included in Francesco Pelosi's essay, Alan Moore: Mappaterra del Mago. Highly recommended!

 

For more info about RISE, visit the artist's Instagram page: HERE.

Moore Great Comics

From The Men's Health Comic Book Omnibus article published this June:

Finding a great comic can be tough. So we asked 45 of the most legendary, visionary, and unique creators in the business to make it easier. 

I selected the Moore's entries: we have 3 votes for Watchmen, 2 votes for both From Hell and V for Vendetta. You can read the complete article HERE.

 

Gail Simone
Writer of DC's Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, and Marvel's Deadpool:

From Hell
by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
"To say this is a book about Jack The Ripper is like saying Moby Dick is about a guy who goes fishing. It’s comics wizard Alan Moore’s best, most compelling work, told from multiple points of view and containing worlds in its story of murder, corruption and class. Stunning visuals by Eddie Campbell carry it beyond."

 

Bruno Redondo
Artist of DC's Injustice and Nightwing:

V for Vendetta
by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

"This comic was the first that made me break into tears. It showed me how comics can be powerful, filled with emotions and ideas. Comics can change your mind, and V was this for me. Masterful and brave storytelling."

 

Nicola Scott
Artist of DC's Wonder Woman, Birds of Prey, and Image Comics' Black Magik:

Watchmen

by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

"Because DUH. Infinitely re-readable."

Sina Grace
Writer of DC's Superman: The Harvest of Youth, Self-Obsessed and Not My Bag:

V for Vendetta

by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
"Look, someone else is gonna say Watchmen, but I find myself revisiting V for Vendetta a lot in my life, and every time the graphic novel slaps harder than ever. It’s so much fun to read Alan Moore buildma political and ever-poignant dystopian narrative from the ground up, and the Guy Fawkes design for V makes for one of the most elegant and startling characters in comics history."

Joe Hill
Co-creator of Locke & Key and author of NOS4A2 and The Black Phone:

From Hell
by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
"If the graphic novel form has a Ulysses, this is it. Watchmen made Moore a legend, but From Hell is better, a knotty, salty, grand Guignol that paints the late 19th century so vividly, reading it is practically the same as time-travel."

Axel Alonso
Former editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics and founder and CCO of AWA Studios:

Watchmen
by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
"Easily the most pivotal, influential graphic novel of all time, you see two Maestros of the craft deconstructing the superhero paradigms of the past with an eye fixed firmly on the future."

Mike Deodato, Jr.
Artist of AWA Studios's Bad Mother, The Resistance, Not All Robots, and more:

Watchmen
by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
"My first pick goes to Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, for defining and changing the medium and what comics can achieve. One of the greatest comic books ever made."

The complete article is available HERE.

V for Vendetta special

Below, excerpts from the David Lloyd interview contained in Journey Planet n. 79. 

 

Journey Planet is an acclaimed sci-fi and comics fanzine. Its 79th issue, released this March, is a 92-page special fully focused on V for Vendetta.

You can download for free the complete pdf HERE. Highly recommended!

David Lloyd: [...] When I mentioned taking out thought bubbles and sound effects to Alan, he got on board with it, but what he did in response to that challenge was progressive. He turned thought balloons into captions–the thoughts of the characters into the streaming narrative. And we removed the lines around the captions and balloons, as I said. And the reason I did that is this: when you put lines around them, they’re on a different level, a different plane is created above the object of the art and separate from it. If you take them away, they become integral to the art, to the whole experience of the reading. That’s not some great idea of mine–I saw Alex Toth do it, who’s one of the great creators. When he did that, the art and the script became integrated. There was no separation. They were not on separate planes. When you take away the separation, you have a completely integrated experience. [...]

 

[...] But a lot of people don’t know it was a progression that was urged by an accident. Valerie Page’s appearance was an accident. 

After we revealed the existence of Surridge’s diary, Alan needed to write a lot of exposition in Finch’s meeting with the Leader, and he had no firm thoughts on what art might accompany some of that. So it was in my hands. I thought about it, and figured I’d set it in the Shadow Gallery, and figured it would be a great idea if there was a room in the Shadow Gallery where V might run old movies–or maybe home movies or slideshows of lost relatives, or something similar. One of the things I was concerned about at the time was that V was not seen as having any emotional depth at all. We’d seen him as a murderer with a philosophy, but we didn’t know anything of a backstory. I wanted to show him looking at some images in this private spot that might suggest one. At the time, I knew an actress who’d sent me some stage shots. I asked her if she’d mind if I used them as that anonymous character from V’s history, and she was fine with that. I wanted to show that there was someone who meant something to V. You don’t know why, you don’t know who it is on that screen. We just know he’s watching pictures of a lost love or maybe a lost sister, or whatever. We don’t know. So, I did that. And Alan bounced off that accident amazingly and created Valerie Page which became a central part of the whole story. Now, that was an accident that rachetted up the whole seriousness of the story’s tone. You can put that down to the cultural and social circumstances of the time, too, of course. But that moment illustrates one of the great values of V for Vendetta: that it grew organically and could. Alan could bounce off accidents like that, and create this character from nothing, because when we were first creating the comic, we were doing it in 6- to 8-page episodes per month. Slowly, with time to think. There was no great story arc we had to follow. We weren’t doing it like American comic books. That is the best of V–and we had complete control. And what Alan did with the completion of it all pulled it all together perfectly. [...]

Download the complete pdf HERE!

V by Yildiray Cinar

Art by Yildiray Cinar

Above, a V homage by Turkish comic book artist Yildiray Cinar.

 

For more info about the artist, visit his Twitter account, here.

V by Peter Kuper

Art by Peter Kuper

From the sold-out Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book, above a fantastic V by award-winning artist PETER KUPER.

 

For more info about the artist: Official site - Wikipedia

Eternity for V

Page from Eternity vol.1. Art by Sergio Gerasi

Above, a page from the first volume of Eternity, a new intriguing deluxe series created by writer Alessandro Bilotta and published in Italy by Sergio Bonelli  Editore; volume one, titled La morte di un dandy (Death of a dandy), has been drawn by the great Sergio Gerasi.

The series - set in a strange, alternative Rome where futuristic technologies coexist with a sort of pervasive nostalgia for the '60ies - follows the adventures of tabloid journalist Alcide Santacroce (above, enjoying an animated party!).

You can read a review here (in Italian).

The Magus and his Tarot cards by Carlos Dearmas

Art by Carlos Dearmas

Above a stunning portrait of Alan Moore by phenomenal Argentinian illustrator and comic book artist CARLOS DEARMAS. 

Moore is showing in his hands some special Tarot cards: 

Tarot XI – LA FORCE, featuring Silk Spectre and Bubastis (from Watchmen)

Tarot VIIII – L’HERMITE, featuring Swamp Thing

Tarot XIIII, featuring V (from V for Vendetta)
Tarot VIII – LA JUSTICE, featuring Promethea
Tarot XVII – LE TOILLE, featuring Marvelman
LE MAT, featuring The Joker

It's really an amazing piece of art! Grazie mille, Carlos.

 

For more info about the artist: 

Instagram - Blog - Facebook - Gallery

V by Daniel Warren Johnson

Art by Daniel Warren Johnson

Above, a superb V drawn by the phenomenal Chicago-based comic book writer, artist and illustrator DANIEL WARREN JOHNSON.

For more info about the artist and his work, visit his site: HERE.

V by Eduardo Risso

Art by Eduardo Risso

Above, a recent commission piece by the extraordinary Eduardo Risso featuring V!

If you are interested in Risso's art check HERE!

V by Matías Bergara

Art by Matías Bergara

Above, a great V homage by acclaimed Uruguayan comic book artist Matías Bergara who worked - and continues to collaborate - with the most important US publishing houses.

"Remember, remember the fifth of November!"

More info about Bergara: HERE and HERE.

V by Giovanni Timpano

Art by GIOVANNI TIMPANO.

Above, a stunning panoramic commission featuring V drawn by Italian comic book artist GIOVANNI TIMPANO. Timpano is the artist and co-creator of Image acclaimed series Eclipse.

For more info about Timpano, visit his site: HERE.

V by Roger Cruz

Art by Roger Cruz.

Above, a fighting V by Brazilian comic book artist Roger Cruz.

More info about Cruz at his official website and on Deviantart - Blogspot - Instagram

On movies: From Hell, V, LXG, Watchmen

Excerpt from Eroto-graphic mania interview by Peter Murphy, posted on laurahird.com in 2006.

The complete interview is available HERE.

So did he ever bother going to see the film version [of From Hell]?

“Nah, Melinda (Gebbie) went to see it and said, ‘Not a bad film. She found Johnny Depp’s performance a little bit tepid. She thought if they’d focused more upon Ian Holm it would’ve perhaps been a much better film. Me daughters thought it was okay. Nobody said it was actually a really bad film. Iain Sinclair gave the most succinct summing up of it when he said, ‘It’s not a bad film in it own right, but it does kind of represent this American colonization of the imagination.’ Without having seen it obviously I’m talking through me hat, but that sounds like a likely accurate verdict.

“I was never sure why they actually bothered to buy the rights to ‘From Hell’, because you take away all of the ruminations upon architecture and history and mysticism and all the rest of it, you’re pretty much left with the original story done by Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, all of these people in various productions.” Still, at least ‘From Hell’ and ‘V For Vendetta’, while seriously flawed, were broadly sympathetic to the author’s vision. The way Moore tells it, it could have been much worse.

“I remember when ‘V For Vendetta’ was optioned,” he says. “The story is set in a near future bleak grim Britain, it’s after a limited nuclear war that happened elsewhere in the world, the weather’s been screwed up as a consequence, there’s been breakdowns of society everywhere, and there’s been a fascist takeover in Great Britain, and you’ve got this very romantic anarchist guy fighting against the forces of fascism.

“Now in the first screenplay that I got for ‘V For Vendetta’, because this anarchist dresses up in a Guy Fawkes costume, of course people in America have no idea who Guy Fawkes is, so they were going to change it to Paul Revere, and it wasn’t going to happen in London, ’cos that’s just gonna confuse Americans who can’t remember that there’s more than one country in the world, so perhaps it’s going to be set in New York. And that political stuff about fascism, that doesn’t really play, so we’ll have an America that’s been taken over by the commies. So you’ve got this true American dressed as Paul Revere fighting against the commie takeover.

“Eventually I think they realized that was a stupid idea. So I got the second draft of the script where I think to justify the special effects budget, they decided that having Britain taken over by fascists was just not exciting enough, and they’d used the fact that I mentioned a limited nuclear war to say, ‘Right, there’s mutants everywhere!’ So instead of it being fascist policemen that are patrolling the benighted streets of this enslaved London of the future, it’s half-goat mutant policemen. You’ve got these people that are policemen down to the waist and have goats’ legs. And as I said at the time, if you wanted to do a film about goat policemen, then why the fuck didn’t you just buy the option to Rupert Bear?!!

“But there’s something about the Hollywood thought process that I think will forever elude me. The reason that things are done or not done never seems to have any connection to any sort of reality that I recognize. That’s why I actively dissuade any contact with Hollywood. (Producer) Don Murphy is a nice bloke who phones me up and asks if I’ve got any more projects that could be turned into films, any laundry lists that I might have forgotten about, but I’ve never had any interest in actually writing for Hollywood. I had a brief fling when Malcolm McClaren asked me to a screenplay for one of these film properties that he’d got, and I did that to see if I could write a screenplay and also to hang out with Malcolm McClaren, who’s a great laugh, but that was it really.

“Of course they shot ‘League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ with Sean Connery, and to make it more acceptable to American audiences, which is of course a prime consideration, they had Tom Sawyer as one of the cast, so I imagine there was a completely riveting picket fence painting scene shoehorned into the story at some point.”

There wasn’t, but that didn’t stop Connery from clocking the director – or the film from being an absolute dog. Of course, the Holy Grail of un-filmed Moore stories is ‘Watchmen’, recently included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 greatest novels since 1923, a meta-masterpiece so epic in scale and fiendishly complex in construction, filmmaker Terry Gilliam famously described it as “the ‘War And Peace’ of comic books”. Is it true Moore once convinced Gilliam that Watchmen couldn’t be filmed?

“Well, I don’t know if I convinced him. I mean, we went to dinner and he asked me how I would go about making ‘Watchmen’ into a film, and I told him if anybody had bothered asking me earlier, I would have said, ‘I wouldn’t.’ Because I’d written ‘Watchmen’ to exploit aspects of comic book storytelling that couldn’t be duplicated by any other medium, to try and show off what comics are capable of. Which I think we kind of succeeded in doing. That was the last time I actually saw Terry – Terry as I call him, did you notice I just slipped that in there? Tel! – and I heard later that he seemed to have come to similar conclusions, that he wasn’t sure you could actually make a film of ‘Watchmen’ without taking out all the things that made the book work in the first place.

“But on the other hand, I do hear that at the end of every second or third Terry Gilliam interview he’ll sometimes have these little wistful moments where he’ll say that maybe his next film will be ‘Watchmen’, because he’s always felt sorry that he didn’t add that to his list of accomplishments.

“But I’m a great believer in the theory that the more work the audience has to actually do, the more they enjoy it ’cos the more they’ve invested. Cinema tends to be an immersive experience that just kind of rolls over the audience like a wave and they sit there and take it. That’s not to say that there can’t be good cinema, but for me there’s not much to beat a good book where you’re having to do all the work yourself. That’s my idea of interactive entertainment.”

The complete interview is available HERE.

DAILY MOORE [6]

Art by David Lloyd.
Color artist: David Lloyd, Siobhan Dodd.
From: V for Vendetta n. 1.
First edition: 1988, DC Comics.