Top 10 sketches by Gene Ha

Art by Gene Ha.

Above and below you can admire two wonderful copic marker sketch commissions of Top Ten characters (Toybox and Smax) by the incredible GENE HA done for Dutch Comic Con in Utrecht, Netherlands.

Art by Gene Ha.

Alan Moore by Fabio Abbreccia

Art by Fabio Abbreccia.

Above, a stunning portrait of Alan Moore by Italian artist FABIO ABBRECCIA.

More info about Abbreccia here and here. His Facebook page here.

Alan Moore: The Birth Caul photos

Above and below, 2 (of 4) photos from The Birth Caul (A Shamanism of Childhood), a spoken word performance which was staged at the Old County Court in Newcastle upon Tyne on 18 November 1995 with music by David J and Tim Perkins.

I found the photos on Locus+ site: you can find all of them HERE.

Moore 65 and... little gifts from Sardinia

Art by Manuelle Mureddu.

Best wishes to the Bearded Bard of Northampton!!! :)

And... little gifts from my Sardinian friends and talented artists: above, a iconic portrait by Manuelle Mureddu and, below, a red sketch by Nicola Testoni. Thanks to Manuelle and Nicola.

Again... TANTI AUGURI, Alan! :)

Art by Nicola Testoni.

Alan Moore on Twin Peaks season 3

Excerpt from an interview published in August on PaleyMatters.org, HERE.

Alan Moore: Yes, I was a huge admirer of the first two seasons of Twin Peaks. I greatly enjoyed season two’s closing episode, and subsequently arrived at an interpretation of Fire, Walk With Me that, to me, was satisfying and answered all of my really important questions about the series. At the end of last year I watched the box-set of season three, and without wishing to denigrate all of the perfectly legitimate reasons why people loved that (presumably) final season, I’d have to say that with the exception of a few arresting images and atmospheres, I kind of wish I hadn’t bothered. Elements that I either hadn’t noticed or which hadn’t especially bothered me the first time, like the fact that the titular town is presumably twinned with Midsomer in that both have tons of bizarre murders and absolutely no black people, seemed a lot more intrusive in season three.

Another thing that stood out was Lynch’s customary Bizarro-Republican stance, whereby the intrusive supernatural evil in his stories always seems to be firmly rooted in the underclass. Structurally, it also seemed that there was rather a lot of irrelevant padding, notably the slapstick “Dougie Jones” digression, which didn’t seem to have anything atmospherically or thematically to connect it to the main narrative in any meaningful way.

Overall it seemed to me, as a large amount of Lynch’s later work does, to be relying on disconnected set-pieces and ultimately not saying very much. This may, of course, be a fault with me rather than with David Lynch, but while some of the most arresting and affecting moments in Lynch’s work have seemed to be plucked straight from the director’s subconscious mind and dreamlife, the ones that have best worked for me are those moments that, while dreamlike, work within the context of the overall narrative: for me, the dead man who is still standing upright in Blue Velvet or the whole of Henry’s collapsing and hallucinating mental landscape in Eraserhead work perfectly within their contexts, while a golden Laura-Palmer-infused egg sent from another dimension to what is apparently a nuclear test-site, which then hatches into a sort of insect-frog hybrid that subsequently crawls into the mouth of a sleeping young girl who, unless I missed something, is never seen or referred to again, really doesn’t, at least for me. If everything is weird, then, relatively speaking, nothing is weird. All of this is, of course, entirely subjective, and it may well be that the season three of Twin Peaks that I watched was significantly worse than the one everybody else was witness to.

The complete interview is available HERE.

Alan Moore by J.D. Thompson

Art by J.D. Thompson.

Above, a strong pencil drawing portrait of Alan Moore by artist J.D. Thompson.
More details HERE.

Master of Reality by Nicola Testoni

Master of Reality, exclusive print by Nicola Testoni. Info: contact the artist.

Painter and sculptor NICOLA TESTONI, who illustrated the Italian edition of The Mindscape of Alan Moore, has created an extra portrait of Alan Moore (above): titled Master of Reality, it's available as a limited edition print directly from the artist. 

You can contact him HERE: he will add a touch of colour and sign it.

Alan Moore on The Prisoner

The Prisoner

Excerpt from Part one of the interview published on Paley Matters in August: Moore talks about The Prisoner and its huge impact on him and his work.

The complete interview is available here. Part 2, here. 

Alan Moore: [...] one of the things I learned was that one should preferably craft narratives that move towards a satisfying and meaningful conclusion. Another thing I learned was that it was possible to write stories that affected the audience on other levels than just the simple resolution of their plot elements; that there were levels of symbolism and association and self-reflexivity which could be built into a narrative that would enable the viewer or reader to enjoy the experience in a more intense and multileveled way. Perhaps most importantly, it taught me that a creator should never be afraid to pitch their work high, without worrying about it going over the heads of the audience: in my experience, work that the audience already understands and is comfortable with will not teach them anything, and thus deprives them of that thrill-of-the-new that is, for me, the central pleasure and purpose of all art. I believe that art only happens at the interface of the artist and the audience, which is to say the work itself, and I further believe that if they don’t have to do any of that work, if they don’t have to stretch themselves a little in order to metabolise what they’re reading or watching, then the audience will not find the work as enjoyable as they might have done. So, The Prisoner taught me not to condescend to my audience or assume that they were any less intelligent than I was. It taught me to dare to be difficult, and eventually led me to a position where I feel that the most precious thing about art is its difficulty, and that difficulty’s overcoming.

[...] While all my work probably has the influence of The Prisoner in it somewhere, this would be entirely in how the story is told, rather than in its content or thematic elements. Practically every intelligent or informed person during that decade would have been expressing opinions about technology and nursing nuclear anxieties that were identical to McGoohan’s, and given that the 1980s were an even more perilous stretch of the Cold War than the 1960s had been, then it seemed an appropriate issue to make a part of Watchmen. I can’t think of any direct or indirect influence beyond that."

The complete Part 1 is available here. Part 2, here.

Halo Jones in colour

Halo Jones: Alan Moore (writer), Ian Gibson (artist), Barbara Nosenzo (colorist).

Excerpt from an article published in 2000 AD site, here.

2018 sees a 2000 AD classic remastered and in colour for the very first time.

[...] Originally published in black and white, the re-releases will feature extensively remastered artwork and, for the very first time, will be published in colour. Italian newcomer Barbara Nosenzo is responsible for bringing colour to the world of Halo Jones. [...] 

Barbara Nosenzo: Halo is a perfect example of black & white balance, and I constantly felt the responsibility of adding colours where there was no need for them!
[...] While reading the books for the first time, I started imagining atmospheres and details, and tried to put those on paper. I used some covers as reference, and then I worked on my own palette to bring Halo's world to life. I focused on creating colors for atmosphere, and I decided with my editor (Matt Smith) to choose different background tones for each book, to help define the three different stages of Halo's life (the Hoop, the Clara Pandy and the War).

Book one has a green, dirty background color to give you a feeling of uselessness and deterioration, that perfectly matches life on Hoop. Book two has a pale yellow tone, because its Clara Pandy time, apparently an age of luxury surrounding Halo. And finally, red tones for book three because it's all about the war. To obtain these effects, I used background layers, with a wrinkled paper texture turned in three different colours, each one for the specific book I was working on.

I think that colour is like soundtrack in a movie: it should enhance the feelings and underline particular moments. That's how I tried to use my palette, often using weird colours to define feelings (blue for sadness, green or purple for fear.)

The complete article is available here.

Dark King Moore by Paolo Massagli

Art by Paolo Massagli.

Above, a powerful, dark Alan Moore portrait - with a bit of HPL in - by Italian artist PAOLO MASSAGLI. 

Paolo Massagli is known for his indie works which combines horror with sensuality; his most recent comics have been published by Hollow Press (here).

Melinda Gebbie's memoirs

From left to right: Lucia Joyce, Melinda Gebbie and Alan Moore. Art by Melinda Gebbie.

Excerpt from The NeneQuirer interview with Melinda Gebbie. 

The complete article is available here.

Melinda Gebbie: "I started writing a diary in my twenties. I thought if I write about my life it will get more interesting. And it did. [...]

This has been a very long project. I transcribed everything by hand then realised that was stupid but I always had something against typing so I couldn’t make myself type. I had four different typists. It’s been edited by a really hot pro, Donna Bond, she did a spiffing job. [...]

There was 1300 pages of pure transcription, I whacked off (edited away) 800 of them. The format I think is going to be two books of about 300 pages each. The first one will be about my life in San Francisco until I left it in 1984 and the next will be about the weird land of England up until Alan and I met and started working together.

[...] The book is the main thing. If you live with a champion swimmer and every day you go out to the paddling pool and try to get a little better at frog kicking… I can only get with my own language if I am isolated from the undertow of a certain culturally-valuable husband. It’s not his fault but still…"

The complete article is available here. 

Melinda Gebbie's site, HERE.