Rorschach by Eduardo Risso

Art by Eduardo Risso

Above, a fantastic Rorschach commission by acclaimed Argentinian comic book artist and illustrator EDUARDO RISSO! 

 

For more info about the artist: Instagram - Art for sale 

Image Days

Excerpts from an interview focused on the Spawn/WildC.A.T.S. crossover published by Image with art by Scott Clark in January 1996. The interview - which also involved Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee - was included in Overstreet's FAN n.6, released in November 1995. 

Alan Moore: [...] I think I'm in danger of becoming the Image Crossover King! It followed from doing the Badrock/Violator crossover. It was figured that since I had written Spawn, and I had shown that l could handle the WildC.A.T.S in the 30 pages that exist of the 1963 80 Page Giant Annual which is still in limbo and waiting to materialize, that my name was pulled out of the hat on that one. It sounded like a fun idea, and I went for it. I actually wrote it before they asked me to write WildC.A.T.S. In some ways I wish I'd done a few issues of the regular book before doing the crossover, because I would have brought the nuances of the characters out a bit more sharply. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Spawn/WildC.A.T.S crossover, but I hadn't quite gotten the handle on the characters that I have now.
As with all of the Image work, I've been trying to find my way into a milieu which is not entirely second nature to me. When I was writing superhero books before, I was writing for an older audience, a smaller audience. So consequently, I missed out upon some comics development over the past six or seven years, because my interests have been elsewhere.
It‘s quite strange to plunge headlong into this hyper-kinetic “Imageworld," where there’s two or three panels a page, where the pace of the story is an awful lot faster, where there's constant kinetic action.What I want to do, is take that basic formula, which is an unusual one for me, and just add a few elements that make it more like something of mine. lt‘s a delicate piece of cookery, but I’m starting to feel like I'm getting results.

With the plot, I've taken a recurring comic book theme, the idea of the dystopian superhero future.With this one, there’s a future world where Spawn has become awful. This Spawn has killed the demon-god which holds him in thrall in the regular Spawn books, and thus receives unlimited power, rather than the limited power which currently hampers him. As a result of this, he’s become the total ruler of America, which has become a massive feudal state under this omnipotent Spawn. So this is the future that the present day WildC.A.T.S have to go into to help their counter-parts, who are in a pretty sorry state. They live in this literal Hell-on-Earth that America has become. [...] 
They're going to kill Spawn before he can become this demon, the Ipsissimus. The name is one of the magical grades in traditional magic theory, the highest grade of all. So if you become the Ipsissimus, you're just slightly ahead of God. [...]

There’s a journey through this world, and a final confrontation with the Ipsissimus, and a little bit of stuff that ties up the time-paradox threads that run through it. So l hope it's entertaining.

[...] The thing that was the most interesting for me, that l had the most fun with, was playing with possible alternative futures for some of the image characters.We get to see references to image characters and what they are doing in this future that would probably tantalize me if l was thirteen. I've seen stories in the past,"imaginary stories,“ where they'll suddenly refer to some other character. In Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, for example, the sudden appearance of Green Arrow was a real thrill for me. it connected up with childhood memories about the character that put him in a new context. In the course of Spawn/WildC.A.T.S, we get a couple of guest appearances, and walk ons. Gen 13 turn up in the third issue, but they're all very different. It’s all very amusing. There's some of my sense of humor in there which is dark and nasty some of the time.

[...] The artwork that I've seen is absolutely stunning! It's really stylized. It's taken me awhile to become familiar with the Image artist because I have been out of the mainstream for a while, but I'm surprised by the level of quality. The nearest thing that I can remember to it is from the start of my career when I was working for 2000 A.D. and it was a wonderful period where it seemed like every artist they had was a Kevin O’Neill or a Brian Bolland or a Dave Gibbons. As a writer, you felt spoiled. 

I've got some of the same feeling working for Image, because there’s such a joy of drawing. It's got a youthful enthusiasm that you can't buy.They're not aimed at me, as an audience.They're not aimed at a 40 year old, quasi-intellectual, they're aimed at a 14 year old male audience, that's fair enough. But they sure do have a lot of energy! It‘s just a matter of channeling that energy into the right kind of vehicles, and that’s what I'm trying to do. [...] 

 

[Talking about writing WildC.A.T.S regular series]It's a great deal of fun, because I got to create a couple of them. It's always more involving to work with your own characters. It's an incredible break between From Hell, and my novel and all of the heavy and serious stuff like that. It's like a sorbet between courses. And a sorbet's not an insubstantial thing. There's an art to it.  

On Machen and Long London

Excerpt from The View from Canons Park: Arthur Machen and the Writing of Long London, a text written by Moore and published in Faunus n. 51 (pp. 13-25).

Alan Moore: [...] Machen’s narratives, especially those courting ecstasy and terror, do not offer anything as simpleminded as escapism, but rather would seem to promote a more perceptive and involved engagement with the mysteries of our mortal condition. Given that, politically, Machen’s position and my own would almost certainly be very different, it is not political but overarching human relevance that I find in his fantasies and, for that matter, in all of the fantasies from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress through to Brian Catling’s Vorrh that I consider to be relevant to their historic moments; that I feel successfully perform fantasy’s one real job, which is to cast light on reality from a projected point outside it. For the genre to achieve this apex would seem to require a burning passion in the fantasist concerned, to demand the conviction and commitment that we find in William Blake, or Rabelais, or in the major works of Arthur Machen.

[...] it must be a fantasy that had some kind of relevance to the contemporary world where, with luck, it is being read. I had decided by then that the story taking shape would need five volumes to tell properly, and that these would be set successively at the ends of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and, after a narrative gap of some twenty years, the 1990s. The sequences, both those set in historic London and its underlying, glorious symbolic counterpart, enable me, I realised, to obliquely speak about our present century by offering an alternate history of the last one; a poetic, metaphorical account of how we got here, making Machen’s secret capital into a place outside of history that lends us a fresh angle from which to observe that history, a view from Canons Park. This, at least, is the hare-brained theory that I’m hoping will sustain both me and this unprecedented venture over these next few slapstick dystopian years. I’m just starting book three as I write this and, at least so far, my bizarre hypothesis seems to be holding up. [...] 

The Great Mystery of Brian Catling

In July, Swan River Press published a collection of Brian Catling's stories entitled A Mystery of Remnant and Other Absences, co-edited by Victor Rees and Iain Sinclair. 

More information about the book can be found HERE. 

 

The book includes three new texts written by Moore in response to 3 photographs of Catling as a young man, all of which are included within the book. 

Check below for one of them! Thanks to Victor Rees for this amazing preview.

 

Moore expressed his admiration for Catling's work in several occasions, they were close friends and kindred spirits. Moore also wrote the introduction of Catling's The Vorrh and defined it "The current century's first landmark work of fantasy". 

 

So... get a copy of A Mystery of Remnant and Other Absences HERE!  

Highly recommended!

Advance quote from deceased Alan Moore

Below, quotes written by Alan Moore for Evie King's Matters of Death and Life to be published next year.

More details HERE. You can learn more about the author here and here. 

With a prose style that holds your hand and offers inappropriate jokes when you need them, Evie King makes an excellent case for sorting your life out by sorting your death out first. A serious, funny, necessary book for those of us still this side of the daisies.

ALAN MOORE

And in the event that Evie is still publishing after my own death. Speaking as a dead person, can I just say, authoritatively, that Evie King was right about everything and I really wish I'd listened to her? 

Advance quote from deceased Alan Moore

[...] This book gives you everything you need to prepare for your own death, from basic admin to acceptance of the concept itself. It's a practical guide and journal that asks us to confront the questions that many of us are afraid to discuss with our loved ones: What type of funeral do I want? What do I want to happen to my possessions? How do I want to be remembered? Evie, a former stand-up comedian, also explains why death planning is so important, using her extensive expertise as a council funeral officer.

The exercises at the end of each section help you prepare for every mortality eventuality. From ensuring the admin of your life can be packed down quickly and efficiently, to guaranteeing you are given the correct funeral rites, to knowing what we are doing with your Facebook page.

Once completed, it is intended to be stored along with your documents and important paperwork (and/or to trigger you to prepare those important documents and gather said paperwork if you haven't already). There is also a free text blank page after each section for your own notes. Throughout, Evie includes real-life stories to add her winning combination of light-hearted touches and serious lessons as to why this preparation is so vital.

Spanish Interview

Excerpts from an interview published few weeks ago on Spanish site 20minutos. 

If you read Spanish, the complete interview is available here.

I asked for the original answers by Moore but I didn't get any feedback, so... maybe, you can try any available translation tool to get an understandable, at least, "English version". ¡Buena suerte!

[...] Su nombre está inevitablemente vinculado al mundo del cómic. ¿Es muy diferente, a nivel creativo, trabajar en un libro que en un cómic?
Alan Moore: Aunque pueda parecer que mi nombre está inextricablemente ligado al sector del cómic, no ha sido por falta de intentos de mi parte, durante muchos años, de desvincularme. He renunciado a todo el trabajo de cómic que no poseo legalmente, es decir, todo aquel que fue publicado por la industria del cómic mainstream, incluyendo Watchmen, V de Vendetta, Halo Jones, toda la línea de cómics A.B.C. salvo La liga de los hombres extraordinarios, y probablemente alrededor del ochenta o noventa por ciento de todo lo que he escrito.

Cuando digo "he renunciado", quiero decir que no conservo copias de ese trabajo, ya no quiero firmarlo, hablar de él, ni siquiera que me lo recuerden particularmente. Aunque el medio de la historieta es algo verdaderamente maravilloso, el sector del cómic —pese a contar con gente muy agradable y muy talentosa trabajando en él— es, cada vez más, un desastre lleno de ineptitud y en descomposición con el que realmente no quiero estar asociado.

Muchos de sus fans probablemente no entienden por qué renuncia a algo así.
Alan Moore: Sí, estoy seguro de que para personas que no han visto cómo les arrebatan cientos de millones en derechos de propiedad intelectual, o no han visto a personajes que una vez les importaron ser parodiados por corporaciones que nunca los comprendieron, esto parecerá una reacción incomprensiblemente airada. He aceptado que la primera línea de mi obituario citará algún título de superhéroes que, por muy bueno o bien intencionado que fuera mi trabajo en él en su momento, ahora desearía no haber hecho nunca. [...]

I did the right thing, didn't I?

Excerpt from an interview titled "Apocalyptic Thinking", published in Skeleton Crew, November 1990. Interview conducted by Dr Christian Lehmann.

Alan Moore: [...] Well, he’s the other side of the coin from Rorschach, a right winger who has the most integrity in some ways; Veidt is a liberal and, in some ways, is the biggest monster. This was again perhaps trying to counter-balance my own natural prejudices — it would have been to easy to make Rorschach the villain and have this blond liberal superhero save the day. I was trying to use Veidt as an
analogy for arrogant people with good intentions. There are lots of levels of analogy in WATCHMEN, but one of the levels that relate to Adrian Veidt is that we clue the reader in on the very first page, where Rorschach mentions President Truman and later on in Chapter Four where we have a lot of talk about Hiroshima and also in the text feature at the end of the Rorschach issue, where Rorschach says that he thinks Truman was right to drop the bomb on Hiroshima because more people would have died if he hadn’t. Veidt’s argument is an old argument, you can see. That it is all right to commit an atrocity if the end justifies the means. The only difference with Adrian Veidt is that he didn’t do it in some far-off country full of yellow people; he did it in the middle of New York. That's why Americans were so shocked by the ending, because it’s unthinkable. All right, maybe some people do have to die to make the world safe, but not Americans! That's too great a price. Yellow people, yeah; black people, sure; brown people, okay; WEuropeans if we must. But not Americans; Americans’ blood is worth too much. Wog blood is comparatively worthless. Hundreds of wogs can get killed and it doesn’t add up to one drop of American blood. If one American tourist gets killed, they firebomb Tripoli. It's that way of thinking. So by using Adrian Veidt as, you know, almost a model Caesar. An industrial Caesar rather than a military one, but a modern Caesar nonetheless and, like all Caesars he thinks he knows what's best for the world. And if you look at his motives, he’s got a point, his argument is logical; he’s a credible character. But the key to his personality is his arrogance, his egotism — the belief that he is right; that his is the only solution.

 

SC: He says to Dr Manhattan, ‘That was the only way.’
Alan Moore: That was the only doubt in the entire story. When he says, ‘I did the right thing, didn't I?” That's the only moment where, just for a second, you see something in his eyes where he’s thinking, Christ what have I done? That's his only human moment. All of the characters towards the end have their own human moment. Rorschach’s is when he starts crying. The Comedian, when he starts crying, and when he says, ‘I don't get the joke. I don’t understand it. It’s not funny any more.” And when, for a moment, the enormity of what Veidt has done suddenly comes home to him. Veidt has his doubts. And of course, at the end of the story, it’s all left in doubt. Maybe it was all a massive sacrifice for nothing. [...]

On Magical Landscapes and The Spirit Guide

The twelfth episode in my series of articles about The Bumper Book is online on the Italian web-magazine (Quasi). 

It contains behind the scenes by John Coulthart about Magical Landscapes and The Spirit Guide sections. Read the following to get it all!  

Can you talk about your work for both Magical Landscapes and The Spirit Guide section?
What's about the approach, the process, the main difficulties you had to solve to balance text and image, and your favourite pieces...? Any anecdote or "odd" event while you worked on those illos? Can you share any preliminary or wip material?
John Coulthart: Magical Landscapes was the last part of the book to be completed although I did prepare all the borders early on, and I also fully illustrated the first page so that everyone could see how the section would look when it was finished. I left the section to last because there was so much illustration involved, I wanted to get everything else out of the way before immersing myself in the task.

The Spirit Guide was done earlier than this, and mostly in a collage style since a lot of antique pictorial reference was required: angels, the De Plancy demons, the John Dee "Watchtower" and so on. I thought
using collage might also save me some time but some of the pages took longer than I expected. I have plan illustrations of all the Dee Watchtowers in a booklet about Enochian magic where they're shown as simple line drawings but Alan and Steve wanted the chart to be one of the colour versions which I think were created by The Golden Dawn. All the online copies of these are small things in very over-saturated RGB colours so they're no use for print purposes. The only option was to make my own copy of one of the Watchtowers from scratch. Most of this has been covered over by the text but the whole design came in useful when I had to do the Enochian page for the Magical Landscapes.

Both sections were relatively easy to work on since the appearance and contents of each section was carefully described in the notes. The Magical Landscapes frame is based on an Alphonse Mucha design, the request being for pages that resemble Mucha's early illustrated books where framed illustrations are paired with panels of text. Mucha's books change their frames for each page, something I did consider for my sequence but for this book it seemed a better option to keep the shape of the frame consistent while changing the contents.

Alan had also provided small thumbnail sketches for each of the Magical Landscapes pages so one of the challenges was trying to stay as close as possible the guidelines. This worked well for most of the pages with the exception of Geburah where the sketched design had two narrow text panels running down the page with the figure between them. I tried several variations for this but in all of them the columns of text were crowding the figure who required space for her outstretched arms. The solution was to follow the form of the previous page, which also makes for a satisfying double-page layout, with two multi-armed figures facing each other. I also changed the Daath text panel from a rectangle to a  circle since the text refers to Daath having pi as its numeral on the Tree of Life. Readers of Alan's other books may note that some of the imagery in the first eleven pages matches the symbolism that appears in the journey up the Tree of Life in Promethea. I don't think this was deliberate, more a result of the way that Alan imagines these spheres.

The biggest challenge was the request for the Fairyland page to be as crowded as one of Joseph Noel Patton's paintings which show hundreds of fairies and other creatures of all sizes and shapes gathered together in woodland scenes. My scene is crowded but seems less so when you look at Patton's paintings, each of which must have taken him about a year at least to create. I'm still pleased with the way my scene turned out, however. There's a tiny reference to Richard Dadd's fairyland in the figures from The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke. And I put an old view of Northampton in the background of the alchemy picture on the opposite page. This picture is based on the plates from the Splendor Solis series, many of which have little landscape scenes in their backgrounds.
Since I was doing the same here I   thought I might as well use something relevant. I don't think I have any specific favourites but I like the way these pages look together, one of them visually noisy and detailed while the other is very calm and ordered.

The Enochian page presented another challenge since the description required a perspective view of one of Dee's Watchtowers, showing how the grid is formed by an arrangement of coloured pyramids with flat tops.
This was another reason for drawing out one of the Watchtowers for the Spirit Guide page; doing so gave me an accurate plan of the whole design in print-ready colours and with all the required Enochian symbols in place. This was done with vector graphics in Illustrator before being placed into the layered page. I use Illustrator all the time for design work, and usually find it easier and quicker when creating anything involving bold shapes or geometric constructions.

 

[Regarding wip material] I've included extracts from the work-in-progress files for the Enochian pages. I'm usually reluctant to share sketches for the reasons that David Bowie once gave: sharing early stages of something has a tendency to change the reception of the final work, whatever it may be. But these drafts are more like diagrams, and they already exist outside the work as a whole. [See below!]

The psychedelic experience

Excerpt from a recent interview posted by Spanish writer Roberto Bartual on his Substack.

You can read the complete piece HERE. Highly recommended! 

Do you think the psychedelic experience can help us understand language?
Alan Moore: I think that the psychedelic experience can help us to understand a great number of things, language included. Around thirty years ago, when Steve Moore and I were investigating the eighth kabbalistic sphere, Hod – the Mercurial sphere of intellect, science, magic and language, where all form is said to originate – I had what seemed to be an encounter with the god Hermes. During the ritual, I was under the influence of psilocybin and Steve wasn’t, acting more as a recorder and observer. I reported to Steve that I was seeing floating globules of a silvery and reflective semi-liquid substance, that I felt to be the ethereal material that abstract and insubstantial beings such as gods clothed themselves in so that we could perceive them. I tentatively suggested that this substance might be called ‘ideoplasm’, and then realised moments later that this was an unnecessary coinage, in that what I was looking at was simply a symbolic representation of language itself. Language is the reflective and liquid substance that the gods dress themselves in to reveal themselves to us. I further realised that this is true of us ourselves and of everything in our material universe. If we do not have a word and thus a concept for an object or phenomenon, then we simply cannot perceive it and are not conscious of it. I understood why modern linguistic theory insists that language precedes consciousness, and further realised why Hod, sphere of language, was where all form originated. So, yes, I think the psychedelic experience can help us understand language. 

Rowan's assignment

Excerpt from a 2020 interview with Alan Moore, originally published in French (read HERE) and  reprinted in English in Metal Hurlant n. 1 (2025), recently released (read HERE and check HERE). 

What are your artistic projects for the future?
Alan Moore: Well, I’ve written a couple of short stories that I thought were interesting, and I believe that the illustrative component of The Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic inches towards completion.

My main focus at the moment is the forthcoming feature film The Show, directed by my Northampton counter-cultural affiliate Mitch Jenkins, which will be released whenever it becomes possible to release films again. As for what I’m working on right now this afternoon, that would be the second episode of a thus-far-imaginary five season television series that is also, lazily, titled The Show. 

And I’ve been given an assignment by my second-eldest grandson, Rowan, to present him with a story that is four words in length, so we’ll see how that goes.

I confess that I would like to know those four words and whether Rowan liked them or not. :)

Dr. Manhattan by Richard Pace

Art by Richard Pace

Above, a brilliant Dr. Manhattan by Canadian comic book artist and illustrator RICHARD PACE.

 

For more info about the artist: Instagram - Patreon