The artist as a young man by Claudio Calia

Art by Claudio Calia

Above, a portrait of The Man from Northampton directly from... the 80ies, by Italian comic book artist and graphic journalist Claudio Calia.  

Calia has published several graphic novels on social and political subjects and has contributed to many indie projects and festivals. 

 

Grazie mille, Claudio!

For more info about the artist, visit his official site: HERE.

Hitchcock's gems

Excerpt from page 50 of Alan Moore's BBC Maestro Course Notes 1.0, "Part Five: A Variety Of Forms - 24. Screen Gems". Full course: HERE!

HITCHCOCK’S GEMS
Alan Moore: Reading François Truffaut’s book about Alfred Hitchcock was a revelation for me. He was explaining how Hitchcock achieved his effects in films like Psycho, shot by shot.

I remember the scene in Psycho where one of the detectives is suspicious there might be something unusual on the upper floor of the Bates Motel. The first shot is the detective looking up the stairwell, low-angled and looking up, which means that what you are looking up at is placed in a position of power, psychologically. In that instance, the audience’s tension increases because the detective is considering going upstairs but we feel the unknown power because of the way the image is set up. When the detective climbs the stairs it switches to an overhead shot, so that the audience is in the position of power but helpless to intervene. Whatever happens you are trapped looking at it from this position. This is the exact point at which the apparently crazy old lady (which we later find to be Norman Bates himself) comes running out of the landing and stabs the detective to death – while we look on, helplessly.

The angle at which you look at something will affect the psychological mood of the shot.
This is something that I’ve learned a great deal about when it came to writing for comics because it uses the same principles.

V by Yildiray Cinar

Art by Yildiray Cinar

Above, a V homage by Turkish comic book artist Yildiray Cinar.

 

For more info about the artist, visit his Twitter account, here.

Mystic Moore by Abhishek Singh

Art by Abhishek Singh

Above, a phenomenal Moore portrait by acclaimed artist Abhishek Singh.

Singh writes: "The mystic scribes like Thoth, Atri, Enki, many others, come into the visceral spirit of this much visceral Moore, a shaman of fables."

 

Abhishek Singh is an Indian creator and storyteller. Spanning fine art exhibitions, comic books, animation and VR films, his work has been exhibited in prestigious places like LACMA, Asia Society, Vermont Museum and Burning Man. His critically acclaimed Krishna: A Journey Within, published by Image in 2012, is the first graphic novel by an Indian-origin writer/artist to be published in the USA. He currently lives and creates between his studios in Brooklyn, New York and Mumbai. For more info visit his official site, HERE.

Iain Sinclair 80

Below, a small excerpt from Alan Moore 1-page contribution to IS 80, a limited-edition signed publication to mark the 80th birthday of legendary writer, film-maker, and walker Iain Sinclair.

The 192 page A4 illustrated publication features over 170 contributors, including Peter Ackroyd, Caroline Bergvall, Keggie Carew, William Gibson, Xiaolu Guo, Philip Hoare, Toby Jones, Stewart Lee, Esther Leslie, Rachel Lichtenstein, Robert Macfarlane, Jonathan Meades, Dave McKean, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore,  J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley and Marina Warner.

 

Unfortunately, the book is currently sold-out. And I sadly confess that I couldn't get a copy. Sigh. Sob. 

Special thanks to friend Omar Martini for sharing the text.

Alan Moore: [...] I met Iain and became entangled in his fascinating human narrative, demoralised to find that he was even better at being a person than he was being an unbeatable writer: generous with his invaluable time, supportive, warm, and always willing to share the astonishing arcane intelligence that flows so freely through his multitude of subterranean channels. Not only a literary example, then: if arguably the best and most bar-raising writer in the English language can be such a lovely individual, what excuse does anybody have for being otherwise?

[...] We are privileged to walk the world while he does. [...]

Alan Moore by Lorenzo Mò

Art by Lorenzo Mò

Above, a great, intense, cartoon Moore by Italian graphic novelist and illustrator LORENZO MÒ.

 

Lorenzo Mò has published two graphic novels for Eris Edizioni, Dogmadrome in 2019 and the recent Omnilith in 2023, mixing a cartoon, pop style with indie vibes. His illustrations and comics have appeared in several magazines, including LÖKzine and linus.  

For more info visit his Instagram, here.

V by Peter Kuper

Art by Peter Kuper

From the sold-out Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book, above a fantastic V by award-winning artist PETER KUPER.

 

For more info about the artist: Official site - Wikipedia

ShieldMaster introduction

ShieldMaster: Blast To The Past. The Kickstarter crowdfunding will end in 7 days. 

Check it HERE.

This comic features a glorious introduction by the icon, Alan Moore. You read that right! The Alan Moore!

Not quite as good as The Watchmen!!

 

Above, cover of Flaming Carrot Comics No. 16, June 1987: 1st appearance of Mystery Men. Created by Bob Burden.

Tolkien, nostalgia, superheroes & material culture

In the past days, on the occasion of the paperback release of Illuminations, Screen Rant published a 2part in-depth interview with Alan Moore. 

You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here. It's a reading that I highly recommend!

Below, some selected excerpts.

From Part 1
Alan Moore: [...] My favorite fantasies are the ones that are unclassifiable. Things like David Lindsay’s The Voyage to Arcturus, or the late Brian Catling’s Vorrh trilogy, which was one of the most original fantasies that I’d ever read, where the authors are coming up with things that aren’t their fantasies. That are things that they have created when not restrained by the rules of naturalistic fiction, not something that Tolkien borrowed from Norse Mythology. Nothing against Tolkien, although he’s not an author that I particularly admire. [...]
I read The Hobbit and thought it was a great children’s book. I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the ‘60s because that was kind of mandatory in the ‘60s. You had to read The Lord of the Rings or you’d have been, I don’t know, thrown out of the counterculture or something like that. I read them and some of my friends, whom I very much admired, said that they had been completely captivated, but it didn’t really relate to me. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just to say that I didn’t particularly respond to it.

[...] The nostalgia is never for anything real. Even when we practice it ourselves, and yes, it’s something we all do. We say, ‘aw, wasn’t that nice, that particular television series or that particular brand of...’ There’s nothing wrong with it, to feel nostalgically affectionate for things like that, but it is technically an illness. The first people to be diagnosed with nostalgia – I believe it was somewhere in Germany – there were some people who’d arrived in a village and immediately fallen ill, and there was nothing that seemed to be done for them, until somebody said, ‘they are suffering from nostalgia. Take them back to the places where they came from, and they’ll get better immediately.’ And they did. He was talking about a physical homesickness, but I think nostalgia is a sickness, because those memories – they’re not actually real. We’ve elaborated them, we’ve gilded them, those memories of how wonderful those things are. When I’ve done pastiches of things from the past, which I’ve done quite a bit over my career, I’ve found out that you don’t have to make them as good as the things were originally. You have to make them as good as people remember those things being, which is to say you have to make them better than the original. Because we will burnish things in our memories, and that becomes dangerous when we’re burnishing fairly miserable times into some kind of trouble-free utopia, when in fact it was pretty much the exact opposite. The mythical past that has been taken from people, and that, if they just vote for this person or that person, they will somehow mystically have returned to them. [...]

[...] as I was attempting to say in Watchmen, if these creatures, these superheroes were ever manifested in anything like a real world, the results would be horrifying and grotesque. That was basically the message, at least one of the main messages of Watchmen: that they don’t work in reality! Even in the fake reality that I constructed for them to work in in Watchmen, they don’t work, they mess everything up. [...]

From Part 2

Alan Moore: [...] I am obsessed with rhythm, because it will create a rhythm in the reader’s head. And if that rhythm is smooth, then they will absorb the prose without little stumbles or things like that. It’ll be easier for them. I think that’s perhaps one of the things that – of course the use of language as well, but the rhythm I think is one of the things that gives the poetry some room to breathe.

[...] I’d like maybe a return to some of the older forms of culture, because, just because they have been apparently superseded, that doesn’t mean that they’re banished, or that there’s no point to them anymore. When the camera was invented, all of the painters in Europe didn’t immediately go out and burn their easels and brushes. There is still painting, even if we have a more high-tech way of producing images. And it’s the same with stories and with culture in general, that, yes, the whole world, we are told, is destined to be run completely online. I wasn’t consulted. An awful lot of the people that I know weren’t consulted, obviously, and that really doesn’t work for me. If it works for other people? Fine, although I’m not sure that it does. Given the immense amounts of political instability that have been occasioned by online interference, firms like Cambridge Analytica, and all of these other movers and shakers who have been targeting different voter groups and stuff like that. Who were responsible, it was found out by the electoral commission over here, for completely throwing the results of the EU Referendum in 2016, and who weren’t a million miles away from the people organizing Donald Trump’s campaign a few months later that same year. This online world has got a lot of problems with it, but one of those is that it’s made people think that other forms of expression are kind of old-fashioned.

I’d like to see a return to physical culture. I’d like to see a return to music papers and physical fanzines. I’d like to see – I mean, the hippy culture that I grew out of and the culture that Beat culture turned into was entirely – the actual texture of it, the fabric of it, was hundreds and hundreds of cheaply produced poetry fanzines. Little poetry magazines, which I spent quite a great deal of money on buying in the moment. Things that were originally 50 cents that had got brilliant poems in, by poets who went on to become really famous or really accomplished. These artifacts have got so much of that era in them, and offer so many possibilities. When I was producing things like my crappy school poetry magazine, Embryo, and the Arts Lab magazines, we were doing them all upon a big duplicator where you had to type them onto wax stencil, then put the stencil physically on the drum of the duplicator machine, turn a big handle that would propel single sheets of paper through the drum, which would come out printed on one side. So, it took quite a while to print and staple even 200 copies of a twenty-page poetry magazine, but that physical culture, it was important. And at that time, we would’ve killed to have the possibilities that desktop publishing offers. What kind of Arts Lab could we have made if we’d have had the technology that is around today? What kind of magazines could we have published? What would our music have been like if we’d got that facility for it?

And yet, now that that technology and that capability is within everybody’s grasp, when anybody could produce a magazine much, much better looking, much better presented than anything we did in the Arts Lab on their desktop computer, nobody’s doing it. There aren’t poetry magazines. There probably are, but nowhere near the number that there were. There aren’t fanzines. There aren’t any places where people can try out their work and get themselves published. So, I would say, that an ideal situation for me was, if we took, in some areas, a couple of steps back. Or at least, if part of the culture took a couple of steps back.

[...] So, yeah, a return to some sort of material culture, even if that’s augmented by the technology of present day and the future. I can’t help but feel that a physical culture would be something that I think would be a lot more sustainable. It would probably allow a lot more people the opportunity to see what they could do as an artist, as a writer, as a musician or whatever. I think it would probably be a bit more democratic, and perhaps a bit more enjoyable, but that may be just me.

You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here.

Doppelgänger Moore by Officina Infernale

Art by Officina Infernale

Above, a strongly intense Moore by Italian artist Officina Infernale.

Officinale Infernale is active in the comics field since the 90s, both self-publishing his personal works and collaborating with the most important Italian comics publishers. His most recent work is Glitch, a cyber-punk thriller published by Feltrinelli Comics.