Bone and... Alan Moore

Art by Jeff Smith.

Above, from Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book (2003, Abiogenesis Press, page 55), a gorgeous illustration by internationally acclaimed artist JEFF SMITH featuring his famous Bone cousins.

Visit Jeff Smith's site here.

Angri Alan

Art by Tiziano Angri.

Above, an amazingly powerful portrait of Alan Moore drawn by Italian comics artist and illustrator Tiziano Angri for my personal collection.

More info about Tiziano Angri here and here.

Dr. Manhattan and the Metabaron by Juan Giménez

Above, an awesome illustration by Internationally acclaimed artist Juan Giménez featuring Dr. Manhattan and Othon the Metabaron. It is a commission realized for collector Gerard Nadal.

Moore talks about his... influence upon comics

Photo by José Villarrubia.

Excerpt from an interview conducted by Alan David Doane in 2004. 

The complete interview is available here.

You’re seen by many as a key figure in the history of comics and I’m wondering if you’d talk a little bit about what ways that you saw your career intersecting with, and affecting the course, of the comics industry in the time that you spent in it.
Alan Moore: Well, my original intention was simply to try and scrape a very modest living as a kind of sub-underground cartoonist. I found within a couple of years that I was never going to be able to draw well enough, to my own satisfaction or quickly enough, to be able to carry out a career as an artist. At this point, I decided to maybe try writing, because I thought that I was perhaps I was better at that than I would be at actually drawing the pictures that go with it. So, I launched on a career as a writer and, from the very beginning, I had a couple of simple precepts, if you like…I decided that I was never going to write a story that I, personally, wasn’t interested in. I figured that this would be a helpful dividing line to prevent me from sliding into hack-work, which is always a danger in an industry where the deadlines come fast and furious. So, I kind of developed a method by which I would take…even on promising material, and then make it into something that was fun for me, that was either amusing or intellectually stimulating or, you know, that my use of language or storytelling or something like that…there some element in the story that would provide me with sufficient motivation to do a good job on it.

And by simply following that agenda, I found myself fairly rapidly in demand over here and then I was, swiftly thereafter, head-hunted by DC Comics and asked to write Swamp Thing and I simply carried on doing the same thing that I’d been doing, in that I would try to make whatever I was given interesting from my own point of view, because my feeling is that if I’m not interested in the work, then I can’t expect the reader to be. That just seems to be obvious, that there’s something about the writer’s enthusiasm that communicates to the reader. I think that readers know if a particular piece of writing is being a joyless slog for the writer because that becomes obvious.

So, in order to make these things interesting to me, I found that I was having to radicalize them. I expected this to probably cause more trouble than it did to start with, but I found that the readers were responding to it and so I found that encouraging. So I carried on doing it only moreso and I got a lot of support from Karen Berger and the other people at DC at that time and they seemed to like the fact that the book was gaining in sales figures every month; it seemed to indicate that we were doing something right. So, I was encouraged to push it as far as I wanted and that’s, luckily, the sort of situation that I’ve enjoyed in comics ever since. I think people trust me to know that I’m probably going somewhere that’s at least interesting, you know, it might be a bit mad or disturbing or something like that, but it’ll probably be somewhere interesting. And, if I’m just left to my own devices, I probably won’t scare the horses too much and I’ll probably bring in a good end result.

And, as for how that’s affected comics, I really don’t know. Sometimes, on my darker days, I tend to feel that most of my influence upon comics has been negative, that perhaps people who read the early Swamp Thing or Watchmen or a lot of the work that I was doing in the ’80s, that what they took from it wasn’t its urge to experiment or its urge to stretch the limits of the form and the medium. It seems that perhaps what a lot of them took from it was the violence, a certain kind of intellectual posture…a few other things, and it seemed to condemn comics to a lot of very depressing and grim post-Watchmen comic books. Maybe that’s too bleak, like I say, it depends from day to day, it depends what sort of mood I’m in and you’ve caught me on a tired day today, so, I’m perhaps being a bit pessimistic there.

I mean, I’d like to think that if I’ve shown anything, it’s that comics are the medium of almost inexhaustible possibilities, that there have been…there are great comics yet to be written. There are things to be done with this medium that have not been done, that people maybe haven’t even dreamed about trying. And, if I’ve had any benign influence upon comics, I would hope that it would be along those lines; that anything is possible if you approach the material in the right way. You can do some extraordinary things with a mixture of words and pictures. It’s just a matter of being diligent enough and perceptive enough and working hard enough, continually honing your talent until it’s sharp enough to do the job that you require. I hope that if I had any sort of benign legacy at all, that that would be it, but I don’t know, I think that my legacy, some days, like I say, I think that my legacy is more likely to be a lot of humourless snarling, sarcastic psychopaths, but that’s just on my black days, pay me no mind.

[the complete interview is available here]

Constantine by Camuncoli and Palmiotti

Art by G. Camuncoli (pencils) and J. Palmiotti (inks)

Above, an amazing illustration featuring our beloved classic John Constantine by Giuseppe Camuncoli (pencils) and Jimmy Palmiotti (inks) from the sold-out Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book (2003, Abiogenesis Press), page 253.

You can find Camuncoli's entry on The Comic Book Database here.

Visit Palmiotti's blog here.

Alan Moore talks about Crossed +100

Art by Gabriel Andrade.

Excerpt from an interview published on BleedingCool site (here) 

How did you come up with the “future” of Crossed and extrapolate what things would be like 100 years after the outbreak?
Alan Moore:  To start with, it would make a huge impact if all human industry were to stop dead in 2008. I’ve tried to think all this through. I’ve tried to come up with an estimate of around 7 billion people on the planet, and I followed Garth’s estimate in one of his “Fatal Englishman” stories, where he outlined the numbers that had been infected and the numbers that had survived, and extrapolated that across the planet. There would be a massive depopulation and a lot people would just be killed. The majority of survivors would be infected and there would be just tiny groups of uninfected human beings, however, given time, those trends would start to reverse.

The main thing is that the Crossed are extraordinarily stupid. And do not have any survival instincts. Humans do have survival instincts, and those who have survived might have done so because they’ve gotten to a place of relative safety, somewhere that can be defended, somewhere that was isolated enough not to be a problem. They would have presumably gotten better at surviving if they’ve managed to survive. The Crossed, on the other hand, would start dying off in extraordinary numbers. Mind you, there are extraordinary numbers of them, so that wouldn’t be as much of a consolation for the human survivors for a considerable time. But the first bad winter would kill an awful lot of the Crossed who hadn’t already died from starvation, stupidity, or their own colleagues.
[...]
 

the problem with the Crossed, they can’t really have children. They are not going to survive. We allowed that there might be a tiny, tiny percentage that might select for not killing their own children. That you might get small, isolated outposts of inbred Crossed, that this was a possibility. But the others would be dying off in extraordinary numbers. And we worked out that certain tipping points would come.

There’d be a time when the population of humans was starting to expand, the population of Crossed was receding dramatically, and also that a lot of the Crossed children that somehow managed to survive—if it happened in 2008—are going to be by 2060 relatively old Crossed. And they are not going to have been looking after themselves. So they are going to be easier to deal with, they are going to be less numerous, and I can see that from around that time, that you are going to start to get humans being able to have relatively defended settlements and would possibly start concerted efforts to “clean” various cities of what remaining Crossed there were.

Now there are still not many remaining people, and they are scattered in settlements across the world. But this was the basic premise. Vegetation would have altered. Most cities, as far as I understand it, would have been colonized by Buddleia, within 4 or 5 years. That would colonize most of our urban centers, and that brings in the butterflies, and most of the insects, which brings in the birds, which brings in other predators. And with the species that had escaped from botanical gardens and zoos, a lot of our western cities would be pretty tropical.

The complete interview can be read here.

More detail about the series: here.

Art by Gabriel Andrade.

Moore's Crossed +100

The 15th of September Bleeding Cool announced a new miniseries written by Moore to be published by Avatar Press. The first issue will be on the shelves in Dicember.

Moore will play in the horrorific universe of Crossed, created by Garth Ennis, with art provided by Brazilian artist Gabriel Andrade. 

"[...] Moore has created an entirely new world and a hundred years of “missing” history to explore the future of the Crossed outbreak, what will happen to the Crossed themselves over such a long period of time, and what fate awaits humanity after losing the basic elements of modern civilization. 

[...] Crossed: +100 features characters in a specific enclave of survivors, many of whom have never actually seen an infected Crossed individual and are seeking to build a future for themselves upon the ruins of the past. The natural world has returned to human cities in force, and humans are resorting to reclaiming basic technological advancements. Central to the narrative is Future Taylor, a female archivist intrigued by science fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries, and her struggling team of reclamation workers. When they encounter a small group of Crossed, they are troubled by the implications of proliferation from the violent and infected beings, and set out to uncover the mystery of why Crossed seem to be increasing and behaving unusually in the region. Is there really any hope for rebuilding human culture, or will the Crossed epidemic finally stamp out human evolution through the last of the straggling survivors?

Alan Moore explains the appeal of the series to him as a writer:

What kind of human future would there be at all? Would humans all be gone? Once I started thinking about this, and I checked all this with Garth, and he thought that it was logical, it seems pretty sound. So, that’s been part of the thrill of it. I think people think of Crossed as a horror story, and I can see why. It is extremely horrible. But actually I’ve always had my problems with genre, and I am coming to the conclusion that genre has really only ever been a convenience.
Now, looking at Crossed, I was actually thinking that this, for my purposes, is a horror story, but it’s also a science fiction story. I was thinking that Crossed is actually a science fiction story that has got a really, really high horror quotient. So that was the way that I started approaching it. I was treated Crossed as a “What if?” story, which is the premise of most science fiction.

Not only has Alan Moore full-scripted this contained arc of Crossed, but he has also designed every single cover of the series personally, in multiple formats. [...]

[...] more information on a special “sampler” publication that will precede the series’ arrival in shops and include exclusive artwork, notes from Alan Moore, and a first look at the series."

The complete article can be read on BleedingCool site, here.

Jerusalem is... finished!

From the official Facebook page for Alan Moore (here), administrated by Moore's daughter Leah Moore. The annoucement is dated the 9th of September.

The book will be published by Knockabout who co-publish all of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen books;  Knockabout is also managing the foreign publishing rights.

Alan Moore portrait by Francesco Frongia

Art by Francesco Frongia.

Above, an intense portrait of Alan Moore (with a bit of V embedded in) drawn by Italian comics artist Francesco Frongia (founder of the comics collective Mammaiuto) for my collection. 

For more information about Francesco Frongia visit his blog (here).

Lovecraft's entities and... psychogeography

The new annotated H.P. Lovecraft. Introduction by Alan Moore.

Excerpt from All About Alienation: Alan Moore On Lovecraft And Providence, an interview by Nick Talbot published in August on The Quietus website. 

"He was doing his writing where he loved the New England landscape around him, he loved its history, he loved the way it looked, he loved everything about it. In that sense he was a very provincial person. He found his stay in New York unendurably horrific. But at the same time he was keeping up with the science of the day. And he understood the implications of that science; he understood the implications of relativity; he understood the implications of the quantum physicists; perhaps only dimly, but he understood how this decentralised our view of ourselves; it was no longer a view of the universe where we had some kind of special importance. It was this vast, unimaginably vast expanse of randomly scattered stars, in which we are the tiniest speck, in a remote corner of a relatively unimportant galaxy; one amongst hundreds of thousands, and it was that alienation that he was trying to embody in his Nyarlathoteps and his Yog-Sothoths. 

[...] the anthropocentric view of the world – he saw that that was all gone. And I think tellingly he said that his entities should not be seen as evil. He said things like 'good' 'evil' 'love' 'hate' – these are all human concepts that mean nothing to the vast infinities. But as a person he loved the world around him. And he found great meaning in it and great warmth. As an intellect he understood that that area around him was just part of a gigantic chaotic meaningless random universe. And I think that in his stories of transcoding horrors manifesting in New England settings he was trying to bridge the gap between the personal, intimate human world as we know it and the vast, inhuman cosmos as we know it. Yet that's not psychogeography but its not a million miles away from it." [Alan Moore]

Moore's characters by Kresimir Biuk

Art by Kresimir Biuk.

Above, an illustration by Croatian artist Kresimir Biuk published in Alan Moore: Ritratto di uno Straordinario Gentleman (2003, Black Velvet Editrice, page 56), the Italian edition of the Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book.

The image is contained only in the Italian edition.

Kresimir Biuk's blog: here.