Veitch on The One, Marvelman, Greyshirt & Moore

Page from The One by Rick Veitch.

Excerpt from an interview with the great Rick Veitch posted on Vulture the 28th of February 2018. Veitch talks about the new edition of his amazing The One series published for the first time in colour by IDW.

The complete interview is available here.

[...] If I recall correctly, you had already read some of Alan Moore’s Marvelman at that point, right? It deals with similar concepts.
Rick Veitch: Right. Marvelman had appeared and had been like a lightning bolt to all of us who were in comics, working in superheroes at the time. [Moore] really was sort of like the Big Bang of the modern superhero — and I should include his artist with him, Garry Leach. They succeeded in — just like the Rolling Stones succeeded in taking old blues music and repackaging it for an American audience, Alan and Garry and the other artists on Marvelman succeeded in doing that. A lot of people recognized it, but didn’t quite know how to make that work. I was probably one of the first, I think, to try to take that inspiration into my own work, and again, try to push the superhero thing in a whole new direction. When I was a kid in art school, at the Kubert School in the ’70s, we would sit around, and we would go, “These superheroes, they’re so infantile. If someone just approached them with the depth of a modern science-fiction novel, like Isaac Asimov or Stanislaw Lem, one of those guys, it could be really amazing.” I think Alan and his partners were the ones that first pulled it off, with Marvelman.

[...] Have you stayed in touch with Alan Moore at all?
Rick Veitch: Oh yeah, yeah. We talk all the time. It’s been fantastic working with him. It’s been sad seeing some of the shit he’s had to deal with, because of his stardom. He’s a lovely guy. He’s always amazing. I’m quite fortunate to have worked with him.

DC just introduced two America’s Best Comics characters into their mainstream universe: Tom Strong and Promethea. Will yours and Alan’s character, Greyshirt, do that anytime soon? Or is he safe from the corporate clutches?
Rick Veitch: I don’t think it’s safe. I think all of them might get inhaled, but I have to go back and revisit the contracts and talk to DC’s legal about what it all means. I’m not sure yet. I haven’t really dug into it. I doubt Greyshirt is one of the first ones they want to get in there, because I think Tom Strong and Promethea were the star characters. I hope they don’t, I really do. I think it’s not good, how they have treated Alan and his creations. I wish, especially … Actually, I probably shouldn’t say anything. Other than to say, I wish they’d leave Alan alone and let him be creative.

[The complete interview is available here.]

Alan Moore by Robert Hack

Art by Robert Hack.

Above a shamanic portrait of Alan Moore by comic book artist and illustrator Robert Hack.

More info about Hack at his website (here) and Twitter page (here).

Moore on artists, books, music, movies and TV shows

Excerpt from an interview published on Inside The Rift the 8th of January 2018. 

Full interview available HERE.

Prox: Are there any artists, books, movies/TV shows or music you’d like to recommend to the readers?

Alan Moore: I hardly ever watch movies or television, but I very much enjoy the work of Andrew Kötting (Swandown, By Ourselves), Ben Wheatley (Free Fire, High-Rise, A Field in England), and the increasingly rare outings of Chris Petit (Radio On, The Falconer). On TV I really liked the two seasons of Utopia, am always delighted when Stewart Lee gets a new series of his Comedy Vehicle, and continue to be very impressed by the writing of Vince Gilligan on Better Call Saul. The contemporary art world I know almost nothing of, but Jimmy Cauty’s dioramas of urban collapse and a coup d’état Police force are sobering and wonderful in equal measure. Books make up the greater part of my relatively few leisure activities: I would heartily recommend Iain Sinclair’s The Last London, and I’m eagerly anticipating both the follow-up to Michael Moorcock’s Whispering Swarm – one of the best things he’s ever done – and the final volume of Brian Catling’s hallucinatory Vorrh trilogy. I’ve also recently enjoyed a beautiful and compelling account of rearing a goshawk, Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, which turned up in the mail from an unknown benefactor, and am currently engrossed in Jane Jacobs’ masterful contrarian view of urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Oh, and anybody out there who has not yet absorbed Jarett Kobek’s i hate the internet should do so immediately if they hope to ever understand our current ridiculous historical predicament.

Musically, I remain an ardent admirer of Brian Eno – his version of the Velvet Underground’s I’m Set Free on The Ship is tremendous – although I’ve also rather taken to the Sleaford Mods. And you should watch out for a young rapper/performance poet operating under the handle of Testament. I had the good fortune to be sharing a bill with him some months ago, and his reinterpretation of William Blake’s poem London was nothing short of transporting.

[Full interview available HERE.]

Alan Moore by Stephen Green

Art by Stephen Green.

Above a portrait of Moore by comic book artist Stephen Green.

More info regarding Stephen Green HERE.

Hypernaut commands... Rise & Shine!

Hypernaut © and ™ Stephen R. Bissette.

Above  an awesome Hypernaut sketch - from 1963 miniseries - drawn by the great Stephen R. Bissette! Thank you, Steve, for your magic!

Hypernaut © and ™ Stephen R. Bissette, by contractual arrangement with the original co-creator. Artwork ©2017 Stephen R. Bissette, posted here with permission.

Jim Baikie and Alan Moore

Art by Jim Baikie.

Above, the illustration drawn by Scottish comic creator JIM BAIKIE as contribution to Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman (2003, Abiogenesis Press).

Jim Baikie passed away the 29th of December 2017: this post is a little tribute to the man and his art. You can read more about Baikie and his work here. 

Baikie collaborated with Moore on Skizz and First American.

"I’ve worked with some of the comics industry’s finest writers, and I have good things to say about all of them, but the sheer amount of extra effort Alan puts into communicating with the artist makes his scripts a joy; each one reads like a fraternal letter rather than workaday instruction for stage-dressing. Alan is writing one more instalment of ‘First American,’ and I know I’ll be laughing like a hyena as soon as the first closely typed page emerges upside down from my fax machine." [Jim Baikie, Alan Moore: Portrait, 2003].

UPDATE - Jim Baikie: An Appreciation by Alan Moore: HERE.

Medical advice for Dean Martin

Dean Martin

A short poetry that Moore read during his performance at "Future Exiles Return to a Last London" event in September 2017. It's a funny piece - Moore has a great sense of humour - with an obvious reference to a famous song by Dean Martin. "I thought it up while I was walking towards the stage at the last Arts Lab poetry reading that we did in Northampton.", said Moore. After that he continued with "older works" reading an intense poetry he wrote dedicated to William Blake, titled "Experience". The complete performance is available HERE, in video.

Medical advice for Dean Martin

by Alan Moore

When the moon hits your eye

like a big pizza pie

that's actually... synaesthesia!

Watch the video HERE.

Alan Moore by MagisterLudi

Art by MagisterLudi.

Above, "Unearthing Moore" by MagisterLudi. More info about the artist here.

Alan Moore by John Bolton

Art by John Bolton.

Above, Alan Moore's portrait by John Bolton. 

The illustration was printed in Words Without Pictures, 1990, a prose anthology which included Moore's The Hypothetical Lizard.

Dreadful Beauty: Alan Moore on Jacen Burrows

Art by Jacen Burrows.

Excerpt from the intro written by Alan Moore for Dreadful Beauty: The art of Providence (Avatar Press, 2017).

"[...] Jacen Burrows is, in simple terms, the finest stylist to emerge from American comics in the 2lst century. His art, combining a realistic grasp of space, form and anatomy with the more usually humorous cartoon delivery and precision of the European ligne clair school, achieves a kind of perfect balance that is almost archetypal; makes the style appear somehow familiar despite its bold originality, as if it’s always been there. And indeed, if it had always been there -- if Jacen Burrows, born fifty years earlier, had been amongst the ranks of brilliant individualists that formed the classic E.C. Comics line-up, say-- it wouldn’t have seemed out of place. The artwork and the atmospheres it conjures have a timelessness, a blindingly apparent mastery that would distinguish them in any era. Burrows’ work, eschewing half-tones, hatching and all other modelling or shading styles as if they were a kind of visual noise, emerges as pure signal, albeit a signal lent immense intensity and power by the extraordinary weight of information and exquisite detail it is carrying. His almost forensic line, impeccably controlled, refuses any ambiguity and in this way conveys a sense that what is seen upon the page, no matter how alarming or impossible, has a verisimilitude that borders on the photographic. It might be thought to embody the exacting realism that’s required in presentations of the weird or the fantastical as posited by Lovecraft’s rigorous aesthetic, and as such made Jacen the only conceivable delineator for an opus as demanding and definitive as Providence would prove to be. [...]

Out from the Underground

Alan Moore, Out from the Underground
Cartooning, Performance, and Dissent
by Maggie Gray

"This book explores Alan Moore’s career as a cartoonist, as shaped by his transdisciplinary practice as a poet, illustrator, musician and playwright as well as his involvement in the Northampton Arts Lab and the hippie counterculture in which it took place. It traces Moore’s trajectory out from the underground comix scene of the 1970s and into a commercial music press rocked by the arrival of punk. In doing so it uncovers how performance has shaped Moore’s approach to comics and their political potential. Drawing on the work of Bertolt Brecht, who similarly fused political dissent with experimental popular art, this book considers what looking strangely at Alan Moore as cartoonist tells us about comics, their visual and material form, and the performance and politics of their reading and making."