Watchmen and... a bird table

"This is the Hugo Award that Alan Moore and I won for Watchmen. Alan, I believe, took his and put it in the garden upside down and used as a bird table." [Dave Gibbons]

The guiding intelligence of Alan Moore

Art by Nick Perks, colours by Derek Langille.

Above a great meeting of supermen by Nick Perks (art) and Derek Langille (colours).

A different version of the same image is available here.

no Big Ben

Art by Alan Davis.

From Alan Davis's website.

"The initial sketch for this Marvelman cover was a little too woolly and vague so Big Ben wasn't recognised during the approval process. Clearly visible in the final pencils I discovered  there were legal issues preventing Big Ben appearing so he had to be removed. Rather than  erasing the figure and risking damaging the page  surface I drew the correction on a separate patch which I inserted after Mark had inked both parts." [Alan Davis]

The whole cover process - rough, pencils, inks (by Mark Farmer) and modified part - can be seen here.

The final illustration has been used as cover for Miracleman N. 4 (Marvel Comics).

Robo-dick

Art by Johnny Ryan.

Above, a funny commission drawn by American alternative comics creator Johnny Ryan, from Bryan G.'s CAF gallery.

Alan Moore by Kathryn Rathke

Art by Kathryn Rathke.

Above, a gorgeous portrait of Alan Moore drawn by artist Kathryn Rathke.

I found this illustration in an Intelligent Life article, here.

For more info about Kathryn Rathke visit her website: here.

skimpy script

Swampmen cover by Frank Cho.

Excerpt from the interview included in COMIC BOOK CREATOR #6 presents SWAMPMEN: MUCK-MONSTERS AND THEIR MAKERS (page 135, Twomorrows, 2014).
The interview was conducted by Jon B. Cooke & George Khoury in May 2002. 

I know that I've been notorious or famous for doing those very long scripts. When I went back to look at the first "Marvelman" script, I was shocked. How did I ever get away with this skimpy script? These descriptions are barely a paragraph long! Some of the panel descriptions are a few lines. These days, say Promethea, that's going to be a 48 pages of type for a 24-page comic, and there have been some like the Moebius strip page in Promethea #15 where the script was 10 pages of manuscript describing it, because it was very complex. I can imagine that my scripts were a lot longer than what DC was used to. [Alan Moore]

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.

From Hell by Massimo Semerano

Art by Massimo Semerano.

Above, from Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book (2003, Abiogenesis Press, page 71), a creepy illustration by Italian artist MASSIMO SEMERANO paying homage to Moore and Campbell's masterpiece From Hell.

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.

Starry Wisdow: Alan Moore, John Coulthart and HPL

Yuggoth Cultures (1994) by John Coulthart.

Excerpts from a really interesting post published by John Coulthart on his site.

[...] "Yuggoth Cultures" would have been an earlier collection of Lovecraftian fiction and non-fiction that Alan Moore had begun writing for Creation in 1993. Alan’s idea was to take Lovecraft’s "Fungi from Yuggoth" sonnet sequence as the basis for a collection that would explore Lovecraft’s fictional world and also draw together a variety of figures from the same era: fellow writers, occultists like Aleister Crowley and Austin Spare, and Harry Houdini for whom Lovecraft ghost-wrote "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" in 1924. Unfortunately the stars were not right on this occasion; Alan took the sole copy of the half-written manuscript to London in order to read selections at an event in Soho but left the papers in a cab. Some pieces survived, having been copied and stored elsewhere—"The Courtyard" in "The Starry Wisdom" is one of these—and there was talk for a while of the lost pieces being rewritten but enthusiasm for the project flagged.

Cover sketch by Alan Moore.

This is Alan’s sketch for the cover, the idea being to have a Lovecraft head made of fungal growths rather like an Arcimboldo painting. The head would be sprouting tendrils whose loops would contain pictures of some of the people featured in the book. Alan’s quick sketch is actually a better approximation of Lovecraft’s strange features than my painted version which isn’t narrow enough. For the record (and because people always ask), the other people on the cover are Alan himself, Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley, Harry Houdini, Robert E Howard (not Al Capone as people often think) and Clark Ashton Smith. 

[...]

The complete article can be read here.

Alan Moore sketch by Sean Phillips

Art by Sean Phillips (from Comic Art Fans).

Above, a portrait sketch of Alan Moore drawn by Sean Phillips on a Fatale's volume.