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| Art by Fred Hembeck |
Above, Moore portrait by American cartoonist and comic book artist Fred Hembeck drawn with, of course... curlicues at his knees!
Unfortunately "International mailings have been suspended for the time being."
May 25, 2023
May 20, 2023
Promethea by Bill Sienkiewicz
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| Art by Bill Sienkiewicz |
May 14, 2023
John Constantine by Matt Seneca
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| Art by Matt Seneca |
Published on his Instagram page: "HELLBLAZER! One of my top 3 comic book characters with Cyclops and
Valentina. Reading all 300 issues of John Constantine’s chain smoking
occult adventures a couple years ago was a high like no other-
Hellblazer comics scratch an itch that, for me, never goes away."
May 13, 2023
Swampy by Dan McDaid
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| Art by Dan McDaid |
Grazie mille, Dan!
May 12, 2023
On Alejandro Jodorowsky
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| Jodorowsky photographed by Grant Delin |
Alejandro Jodorowsky, if I may presume to have correctly understood his intentions, is an authentic creator who has always understood that magic is greatly reduced without art, but that art is precisely nothing without magic. His inspirational work has always provided a dazzling example of genuine vision coupled with the enormous human strength necessary to realise that vision in this sometimes difficult world of material form and materialist agendas. His example is a blazing beacon to anyone aspiring to work in the medium of cinema; a searing admonishment to remain true to their own unique voice, and eye, and mind; true to the golden information that is pouring through them.
I could list his films with their enduring images, their haunting atmospheres that linger in the heart long after the concluding credits, but if I am honest it was Jodorowsky’s luminous account of his encounter with surrealist goddess Leonora Carrington that most impressed me with the exalted humanity and compassion of the man, and with the heartfelt lucidity of his style, as clear as rain. Anything, any radiant morsel from this artist and magician’s table, is a thing to be treasured in our culture forever, and to contribute in any way to the realising of yet another fugue-state masterpiece could only be the most tremendous honour. -- Alan Moore
May 9, 2023
Bissette: Swamp Thing, Roeg and... a perfect synthesis
Stephen R. Bissette:[...] I alone couldn't have done what we did on Swamp Thing. None of us who were part of that unique team could have done it alone (although Rick Veitch came damned close to doing so, didn’t he, when he was writing and penciling his run on the title?). We, meaning Alan Moore, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, and everybody else that was part of that - Len Wein our first editor, Karen Berger our second editor; John Costanza lettered the book, Tatjana Wood was our colorist. That kind of chemistry yields work that, when it's really humming, is better than the work any of us could do individually. Having experienced that myself, I really believe that.
I went into Swamp Thing having experienced that kind of synergy with one of my oldest friends in the comic book field, Rick Veitch. Rick and I really did some work together that we're both still proud of.
[...]Len Wein called us and said, "You're going to be working with a new writer and it's somebody you've never heard of." And I said, "Who is it?" He said, "Alan Moore." I said, "Alan Moore! We love his work." Len thought I was bullshiting him. I said, "No, no, no. We've been reading Warrior since the first issue." We had been buying the UK black & white comic magazine Warrior from Heroes World, ironically enough - Ivan Snyder’s Heroes World New Jersey comic shop, the same mini-distributor Marvel later went exclusive with. The Heroes World comic shop in New Jersey carried Warrior, and we'd been reading "V for Vendetta" and "Marvelman" right from the first issue. We knew what Alan had been doing and we were psyched.And this is what you can't explain, Jason. This is pre-internet. This is before we could have afforded a phone call to each other. We all wrote letters to each other, John Totleben, me, Alan Moore. All three of us. Our letters crossed in the mail. Alan wanted to do with the character exactly what John and I wanted to do with the character. What we wanted to do with the character, John had been pitching to Len via Tom Yeates, and Len had said, "No, no, no, no. Too radical." The whole idea of Swamp Thing not being a man inside, that he was this plant. That's what John said that the character should be, should run with.Len had turned it down as an idea. For some reason, now that Alan was onboard, Len was open to it. Does that mean Len had let go of the character he had co-created to the point where he could do that, or because Alan so excited him as a writer that Len would trust him? I don't know, but we all wanted to do the same thing.Furthermore-- Rick Veitch could talk to you about this. From the time Rick and I met, one of the things Rick said always captivated him is, I remember every movie I've seen. And this is pre-video era, so you would see a movie once or twice and you would try to remember it frame-by-frame, if you were crazy like me, because you might never see that film again in your life. And I was trying to make that kind of kinetic imagery and storytelling happen in my comics work, the aspects of cinema that I knew would and could work in comics, but I didn't have the writing skill to do it.The filmmaker by name, and I've named him before in interviews, was Nicolas Roeg, co-director of Performance, director of Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth. It turned out that Alan Moore loved Nicolas Roeg's work. In our first couple of letters, we found we were on the same page, that Roeg was a common reference point: something we could work from to forge a different way of doing comics.If you go back and read "The Anatomy Lesson"—that first story that the team of us worked on together (all of us, because as I’ve repeatedly stated, Rick helped me on the pencils), so it was the four of us—it's structured like a Nicolas Roeg film, right? Nicolas Roeg approached storytelling like a mosaic, and you can move the tiles around. I always like to describe it as when Roeg’s approach to cinema is really working, you can tell the story from both ends to the middle—to the heart of the story—and you make the fireworks detonate in the reader's head. That's what Alan could do. He could already do it. Alan was scripting everything Rick Veitch and I had been talking about doing for years. We wish we could do this. Here's this script from this guy in England none of us have met, “The Anatomy Lesson”, and he aced it. And he fucking did it in what, 22 pages.So right from that point, we all knew we're onto something, like, this is working. Alan would get fired up seeing my pencils. And what was happening, Jason, because there was no internet, is, we were moving all this stuff through the mail. I would photocopy in triplicate every pencil page I sent out to DC, and I would send a package to John Totleben and a package to Alan Moore and keep a set for myself. And Alan was seeing the pencils within a week to 10 days of when Len Wein and then Karen Berger had them. That was back when the US-to-UK/UK-to-US mail was functional and dependable.Alan would get excited by what I was doing with the pencils, and then we would all see what John had done with the inks, and it would set fireworks off, and we were all pushing each other to go further. For a time, it was just a perfect synthesis.
You can read the complete piece HERE.
Apr 26, 2023
Monumental Moore by Eduardo Risso
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| Art by Eduardo Riss |
Apr 24, 2023
David Foster Wallace, genres and... proprioception
You can read the complete piece HERE.
What’s the last great book you read?
Alan Moore: After thinking about this long and hard, the last truly great book I read would have to be “Infinite Jest,” by David Foster Wallace. Yeah, sorry. This was my first exposure to Wallace’s work, only a month or two ago, and I don’t think there’s anything about the novel that doesn’t impress me: its stream of satirical invention, with conventional dating gone in favor of a subsidized calendar and the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment; its mandarin prose that perfectly conjures the trancelike drift of a modern consciousness overwhelmed by detail; and its breathtaking risks with structure, so that the whole experience seems to pivot upon a climactic resolving chapter — either right at the end of the narrative or right at the beginning — which does not actually exist and which therefore requires the reader to create it herself, from slender inference. I think the moment I probably fell in love with Wallace as a writer was the point where I realized that I was actually meant to be irritated by all of the occasionally crucial footnotes. [...]
What genres do you prefer? And which do you avoid?
To be honest, having worked in genre for so long, I’m happiest when I’m outside it altogether, or perhaps more accurately, when I can conjure multiple genres all at once, in accordance with my theory (now available, I believe, as a greeting card and fridge magnet) that human life as we experience it is a simultaneous multiplicity of genres. I put it much more elegantly on the magnet. With that said, of course, there are considerable pleasures to be found in genre, foremost among which is that of either violating or transcending it, assuming there’s a difference, and using it to talk about something else entirely. Some subversions, paradoxically, can even seem to reinvigorate the stale conventions that they’d set out to subvert or satirize. All genres, given enough ingenuity, can be adapted to this strategy, and the sole genre or subgenre that I personally am pathologically averse to would be that pertaining to the superhero, but apparently that’s just me.
[...]
How do you organize your books?
Huh. Yes, I suppose I could organize my books, couldn’t I? That might actually work a lot better than my current method, which is to tell myself that I know roughly where all my books are according to a kind of literary form of proprioception; a psychic gift which, glaringly, I don’t possess.
[...]
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
That would be the second unabridged edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, one of the first of many marvelous gifts from my wife, Melinda. Aleister Crowley once stated that the most important grimoire, or book of magical instruction, that anyone could ever conceivably own would be an etymological dictionary, and in my opinion he was exactly right. I keep it right here by my desk, and just 10 minutes ago it confirmed for me that I had the spelling of “proprioception” right all along, even though my spell-checker had raised a crinkly red eyebrow. Quite seriously, this is the one book in my collection that I’d save in the event of a fire. [...]
The complete interview: HERE.
Apr 21, 2023
Amy Winehouse read... Moore!
This unique lot groups almost 230 books [...] from the library of legendary singer and songwriter Amy Winehouse, a collection that offers an intimate narrative of her life and career through her personal reading — from her school days through her rise to fame and career. [...]
The collection includes Moore's Watchmen and V for Vendetta and... much more.
All the details HERE, including the complete list of the books by category.
Apr 20, 2023
Alan Moore presents... Brian Eno!
Alan Moore: Welcome everybody. My name's Alan Moore. I'm a comic writer and warlock, and I'm lucky enough to be interviewing somebody that I've admired for far too long... Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno was born in Woodbridge, Suffolk in May 1948. Pronouncing his own name gave him the breath control that he would later employ to such startling effect upon his 1975 recording Miss Shapiro. Sprung from a long line of postmen, he received a 1960's education, experimenting with a tape recorder as his primary instrument, the young artist moved to London during 1969, before bumping into a former acquaintance named Andy Mackay, somewhere along the Northern Line. Joining Roxy Music, the new band with whom Mackay was currently engaged in playing saxophone, Eno burst upon public awareness as the central pillar of the decadent, inventive, glam rock period of British pop. Setting his stall out as a non-musician, he abruptly parted company with Roxy Music to produce a string of stunning and extremely influential solo albums, casually inventing ambient music, and the trend for sampling along the way, he has worked on pivotal productions with artists who range from Devo, David Bowie, Robert Wyatt and the new wave scene, to Pavarotti and U2. One of our modern fin de siecle most extraordinary minds, his interest gleefully embracing perfume, science, futurology and ladies bottoms. I am delighted to introduce... Brian Eno. [Audience applause]
You can listen the complete audio interview HERE.
Transcript is available HERE.
Apr 16, 2023
Alan Moore by Eduardo Risso
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| Art by Eduardo Risso |
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