 |
| Art by Das Pastoras |
The poster features several comics character... included a gorgeous version of Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach, Nite Owl and The Comedian plus... a giant squid! Well, it's El Mercado del Calvario so...
May 23, 2022
Das Pastoras and... Watchmen!
May 20, 2022
Alan Moore by JR Gibson
 |
| Art by JR Gibson |
Above, a powerful portrait of The Writer from Northampton by British illustrator and designer JR Gibson.
May 19, 2022
Ian Gibson on Moore and Halo Jones
The complete interview is available HERE.
Paul N Neal: [...] how did Halo Jones first originate? Did you have much story input into it?Ian Gibson: After a signing session at Forbidden Planet, Steve MacManus came up to me and said: “You’ve just done a long stint on Dredd and an even longer stint on Robohunter. Is there anything you’d like to do next?” [...] I told Steve: “I want to work with Alan on a girl’s story.” So, he introduced me to the hairy one and I told Alan: “I want a story without thought bubbles or explanatory captions, as I never see signposts proclaiming ‘Little did he know’ or shit like that. I wanted the story to be experienced by the reader the way we go through our daily lives – we figure it out as we go. Alan said fine and he went away, coming back six months later saying: ‘We have a winner! Girls, Rockets and Monsters!” Sadly, I had to put him right on a few things, but I’m sure you’ll ask what those were.Paul: Ian, you dangled a carrot there. What were the things you managed to correct Alan Moore on?Ian: His first plotline had Halo out in space on some asteroid discovering a mysterious ship. I asked him what her motivation was, and he said “Escape”. So, I said “Well then, we have to show what she’s escaping from, and the best way to show what a world is like is to go shopping in it. If Tesco has been firebombed, Sainsburys has a hostage situation etc, then you have to plan your shopping expedition like a military campaign.” Then he suggested the story was set on a floating island called the hoop which was powered by Manhattan. I said, “Don’t be silly. If this is an island out in the ocean it would be used as a wave/energy producer that supplies Manhattan. Not the other way around.” I sent him sketches of how the Hoop would look and the fact that it would need to open to allow mega waves to pass through without it busting apart, which he managed to incorporate into the story. It was just simple stuff like that.Paul: Would it be fair to say your career has been marked by working mostly with the incredible John Wagner and Alan Moore? I’m told their scripts vary in detail and style a lot. Is that true and can you compare them at all? As an artist, which of the two approaches do you find more rewarding?Ian: My preference has always been John. He’s a great writer with a wonderful sense of humour. He doesn’t waste pages of picture descriptions that he knows I’m going to ignore, whereas Alan runs off at the typewriter.
The complete interview is available HERE.
May 17, 2022
Alan Moore by Daniela Hyde
She writes: "Alan Moore" (2021) - Ink on watercolour paper and digital colouring. Personal project.
In the image composition I wanted to include the caduceus, a symbol of wisdom and immortality linked to the god Mercury in Greek mythology. This element is also present in Moore's comic series Promethea.
Furthermore, the similarity with the iconographic representations of the main divinity in Norse and Germanic mythology Odin (god of wisdom and poetic inspiration, as well as god of war) is something I did wilfully.
Gold and purple - the colours I used - recall the mysticism which characterizes and pervades Moore's works."
In the image composition I wanted to include the caduceus, a symbol of wisdom and immortality linked to the god Mercury in Greek mythology. This element is also present in Moore's comic series Promethea.
Furthermore, the similarity with the iconographic representations of the main divinity in Norse and Germanic mythology Odin (god of wisdom and poetic inspiration, as well as god of war) is something I did wilfully.
Gold and purple - the colours I used - recall the mysticism which characterizes and pervades Moore's works."
May 16, 2022
Lovecraft, misprision and hypernovel
Alan Moore: [...] I recently came across ‘misprision’, an academic term that – if I’ve got it right – means a wilful misunderstanding where you know that a certain idea is not correct but you use it anyway because it opens up creative possibilities. When I was preparing my H. P. Lovecraft opus, Providence, I was reading an awful lot of Lovecraft criticism including the so-called ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ that had been an invention of later writers and that Lovecraft himself would not have recognised.
One psychologist, Dirk Mosig, suggested that all of Lovecraft’s stories were intended as episodes of some gigantic hypernovel, that he was creating a new form of the novel that comprised these 30 or 40 fragmentary stories.
While H. P. Lovecraft had not meant anything like that, with the concept of ‘misprision’ in my mind, I thought, ‘But what if he had?’
And so I began building that hypernovel and so came the plot structure for Providence. [...]
May 15, 2022
Movies, books and... Raymond Chandler
The complete piece is available HERE.
Matthew De Abaitua: Prospective TV and film projects are always so up in the air.
Alan Moore: It’s barely even up in the air, it’s in some vapourous netherdimension from which it may coalesce into something as sturdy as a soap bubble: the From Hell film is going to go into production in April, May, June – I understand Sean Connery has been signed for it, Hughes brothers to direct, it sounds like it might happen. But I’ve seen two of my books, V for Vendetta and Watchmen go through various stages of Hollywood optimism. But I’ve not been that interested. I mean, it was nice to meet Terry Gilliam, the first thing he said to me over lunch was “Well, how would you turn Watchmen into a film?” and I said, “Well to be honest Terry, I wouldn’t.” So we went on to talk about other things and just had a great lunch. But Big Numbers could work, it was always more like a TV series than a comic book anyway. All the visual elements, the backgrounds were photo-referenced, it might have been a lot easier if we had just filmed it to begin with. But Hollywood, television and film is not my prime area of interest. Because I would never have any control, working in those areas. It’s nice to get the money from a Hollywood project, but whatever they do with it, it would be their piece of work, and not mine. Someone said to Raymond Chandler, ‘how do you feel about Hollywood ruining all your books’ and he took them into his study, pointed to the shelves containing ‘Farewell My Lovely’ and all the rest of them and said, ‘there they are, they’re alright, they’re not ruined.’
Read the complete interview, HERE.
May 14, 2022
Alan Moore by Diego Mora G.
 |
| Art by Diego Mora G. |
Above, an interesting purple portrait of the Bearded One by Chilean artist Diego Mora G.
More about the artist HERE.
May 13, 2022
Illuminations contents
Above and below, pictures from a proof copy shared on Instagram by Kenny Chan, here.
The contents list reveals the title of the 9 short stories included in:
- Hypotethical Lizard
- Not Even Legend
- Location, Location, Location
- Cold Reading
- The Improbably Complex High-Energy State
- Illuminations
- What We Can Know About Thunderman
- American Light: An Appreciation
- And, at the Last, Just to Be Done with Silence
The book, published by Bloomsbury, will be available in hardback, eBook and audiobook on 11 October 2022.
May 7, 2022
Alan Moore by Clément Dengremont
 |
| Art by Clément Dengremont |
May 6, 2022
The Sound of Silence
 |
| Alan Moore reveals you the secrets of writing: HERE! |
Alan Moore: [...] the life of a writer can be a very solitary thing. Unlike some writers, I cannot go and sit in a coffee shop to create. I need complete silence and no interruptions, which leads to a condition of pretty much permanent isolation. In fact, when lockdown started, I thought that if the virus was created in a lab, it would have been by a writer. Lockdown is normal for writers like me.
Never seeing your friends, never going out, hearing from people over the phone intermittently, being in a room on your own in complete silence – this is our existence.
[...] I used to enjoy listening to music when I was a cartoonist but that’s a different thing entirely. Cartooning can be done by some sort of vestigial brain that you have in your wrists. I used to listen to the John Peel show and it wouldn’t affect my cartooning at all. Once you start writing, that all changes.
I realised that I couldn’t listen to anything with lyrics because it would interfere with the words that I was trying to write. I moved on to purely instrumental pieces but was halfway through an album by John McLaughlin when the music was interfering with the rhythms that I was trying to write in. Listening to ambient music lasted a couple of months before I realised that was affecting the atmospheres I was creating. Some of my comic strips from that period feature huge captions focused on the way things sound, all because I was listening to a lot of Brian Eno and Harold Budd.
Eventually I gave in to the silence.
May 5, 2022
On The Tale of One Bad Rat
"... an ingenious, intertextual narrative that interweaves the charming, whimsical, and above all, the English vision of Beatrix Potter with a vision of England as it has become; the soft juxtaposed with the savage; Peter Rabbit lost in Cardboard City. Thoroughly excellent."Alan Moore - Author of Watchmen
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)