Illuminations, Long London 1: books are coming...

Details are emerging regarding Moore's upcoming books: Illuminations and Long London (book 1), both to be published by Bloomsbury

The first-ever short story collection from the beloved creator of Watchmen and numerous other classics, a beguiling series of tales on the revealing power of magic and imagination.

 

Illuminations is an astonishing, rich and broad collection of short stories, each featuring some kind of illumination or realization. From ghosts and otherworldly creatures to the four horsemen of the apocalypse to the Boltzmann brains fashioning the universe at the big bang, Alan Moore's Illuminations is a series of beguiling and elegantly crafted tales that reveal the full power of imagination and magic.

Bloomsbury Publishing - Publication date: 6 September 2022

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From the beloved creator of Watchmen and numerous other classics, the Long London series is a tour-de-force that tells the story of the timeless shadow city full of magic and memory somewhere beyond the "real London."

Long London is a series about "a sometimes-accessible shadow city that is beyond time." This is a hugely inventive, atmospheric, mythical world of murder, magic and madness. It is a quintet of novels that sweeps across the 20th century, starting in the shell-shocked and unravelled London of 1949, and following the populations of writers, criminals, artists, and magicians through that familiar city and a version of London just beyond our knowledge.

Bloomsbury Publishing - Publication date: 2 April 2024

Convention Tension

Excerpt from an article by artist Don Simpson included in the new In Pictopia edition, recently published by Fantagraphics.

[..] That's scripts, plural, because I also kept a copy of “Convention Tension” in the same envelope. The latter is a plot synopsis by The Author originally intended to have been illustrated by Gary Kwapisz but had been pitched to me for a later issue of Anything Goes. “Convention Tension” obviously was never realized, although I still have the plot and the envelope. But not the script to “In Pictopia.”

Brief side note: “Convention Tension” involved an apocalyptic comic book convention that, if anything, would have formed a counterpart to “In Pictopia.” If “In Pictopia” concerned an allegorical city of comic strip and comic book characters, “Convention Tension" was a bleak comedy about the current industry of characters driven by ruthless ambition, petty grievances, and life-long grudges. One of the main characters is named Byron Starkwinter, a writer who achieves fame with his creation “Mookie the Worm,” but because of incessant fan adulation and no small amount of psychoactive chemicals, eventually becomes unhinged and unable to separate fantasy from reality. [..]

You can order your copy of In Pictopia, HERE!

Alan Moore by Steve Poulacheris

Art by Steve Poulacheris

Above a vibrant portrait of The Man from Northampton by the mysterious illustrator Steve Poulacheris, from Vanilla Comics Magazine, here.

The Bojeffries go to France

Cover art by Laurent Lefeuvre

Above a gorgeous cover (paying homage to Watchmen, too) by extraordinary artist LAURENT LEFEUVRE for the upcoming French edition of The Bojeffries Saga, the unforgotten and unforgettable series created by Moore and Steve Parkhouse. 

The book will be published by Komics Initiative and crowdfunded via Ulule (I am sure it will be a success!).

More info and details at Lefeuvre's site, HERE.

Preliminary sketch by Laurent Lefeuvre

Alan Moore by Enrico Ariis

Art by Enrico Ariis

Above an interesting portrait of young Moore by illustrator Enrico Ariis. From Vanilla Comics Magazine, here.

 

More info about the artist: Website - Instagram

How to disappear completely

Excerpt from an interview published in 2008 on Entertainment Weekly site, here.

Entertainment Weekly: San Diego Comic-Con is approaching. Have you ever attended it?

Alan Moore: No…well, I mean, I stopped going in the late ’80s. I just thought, I don’t really want to do this anymore, and I don’t really see why I am doing it. I did find it a bit overwhelming and creepy.

EW: Well, you’re a god there.

AM: And this is the last way that I want to be treated. The reason that I live in Northampton is because everyone here is kind of used to me. I mean, yeah, I do get a gratifying smattering of people coming up to me in the street and thanking me for me work, and shaking me hand and just wanting to wish me well.

EW: Although if you shaved your beard and cut your hair — no one would recognize you!

AM: No one would recognize me.

EW: Would you ever do that?

AM: No, just the laziness that has enabled my beard to get to this length is not a habit that I’m going to shake now.

EW: But it would be your greatest act of magic: ”Where did Alan Moore go!?”

AM: Well, I saw the possibility, of course. I’ve always got this option. So should I need to disappear, then, if you see a sort of bald guy with a really bad shaving rash going around somewhere, then that will probably be me, yeah.

The complete interview is available here.

Stella Sapiente Master by Jacen Burrows

Art by Jacen Burrows

Above an amazing and hieratic portrait of Alan Moore by JACEN BURROWS, the great artist behind The Courtyard, Neonomicon and Providence books. 

I am really pleased by this piece! Grazie, Jacen!

More info about Burrows: Wikipedia page - Twitter

Not Even Legend short story

An Alan Moore new short story titled Not Even Legend is included in Uncertainties volume V published by Swan River Press in March. More info HERE.

Uncertainties is an anthology series — featuring authors from Canada, America, the United Kingdom, and the island of Ireland — each exploring the concept of increasingly fragmented senses of reality. These types of short stories were termed “strange tales” by Robert Aickman, called “tales of the unexpected” by Roald Dahl, and known to Shakespeare’s ill-fated Prince Mamillius as “winter’s tales”. But these are no mere ghost stories. These tales of the uncanny grapple with existential epiphanies of the modern day, when otherwise familiar landscapes become sinister and something decidedly less than certain . . . 

Visit the publisher's site to order a copy: HERE.

Moore statue in progress

Art by Maria Brinet

Portrait of Alan Moore. Technique: clay. Artist: Maria Brinet.

 

More info here, here and here.

An experience with a demonic creature

Asmodeus as in Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal. Art by Louis Le Breton.

Excerpt from an excellent interview published in Arthur N. 4/May 2003.

The whole piece is available online HERE.

Alan Moore: [...] I also had an experience with a demonic creature that told me that its name was Asmoday. Which is Asmodeus. And when I actually was allowed to see what the creature looked like, or what it was prepared to show me, it was this latticework…if you imagine a spider, and then imagine multiple images of that spider, that are kind of linked together–multiple images at different scales, that are all linked together–it’s as if this thing is moving through a different sort of time. You know Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase”? Where you can see all the different stages of the movement at once. So if you imagine that you’ve got this spider, that it was moving around, but it was coming from background to foreground, what you’d get is sort of several spiders, if you like, showing the different stages of its movement.

Now if you imagine all of those arranged into a kind of shimmering lattice that was turning itself inside out as I spoke to it, and I was talking to my partner at the time and sort of saying, This thing’s showing us it’s got an extra dimension I haven’t got, and it’s trying to tell me that it’s good at mathematics. [laughter] It’s vain. There’s something fourth-dimensional about this. This is all stuff I was actually saying at the time, while I was having the experience, which was pretty extreme.

Anyway. Over the next couple of weeks I started researching Asmodeus and found out that actually, yeah, he’s the demon of mathematics. [chuckles] Also there is a thing which apparently, traditionally he is able to offer one, and this is called the Asmodeus flight. This is where the demon will pick you up, carry you into the air, into the sky, and you can look down and you can see all of the houses as if their roofs had been removed, so you can see what’s going on inside them. Now that is not a description of being carried through the air. That’s not being moved into a higher physical space. That’s what things would look like if you’d been moved into a higher mathematical space. If you were actually in the fourth dimension, or if your perceptions were in the fourth dimension, looking down at the third dimension, you wouldn’t see places as if the roofs of the houses had been removed, you’d see around the roofs of the houses. [chuckles] In the same way that if you imagine a race of completely two-dimensional creatures living on a sheet of paper, if you draw a square and then put one of those two-dimensional creatures inside it, they are COMPLETELY enclosed, because every direction in their two dimensions is shut off to them. If you then as a three dimension creature were to reach down and pick up this two-dimensional speck because you can see through the roof, which is a dimension that he hasn’t got. So, if you’re a fourth dimensional creature looking at the third dimension, you would be able to see around the walls of a sealed room. This was interesting, because it kind of confirms the fourth dimensional aspect of Asmodeus.

I did a picture, as best I could, of what I’d seen. I did that about a month after I’d had this experience. Dave Gibbons, who’s a very down-to-earth, practical man, had come up to visit me. He’d seen the Asmodeus picture that I’ve got up on an altar kind of shrine type thing, and he phoned me up a couple of weeks later, saying that he’d just got this book called Four-Space which is a book about the fourth dimension in mathematics. This is not a mystical or occult book, this is hard maths. Very hard maths a lot of it, certainly beyond me. But at the end of the book, the guy who’s put it together gets a little bit playful and just decides to have a little bit of fun with speculation, because whereas all of the book has been hard mathematical facts, in the last chapter he lets himself be a little bit speculative and he sorta says, “Alright, if there was such a thing as fourth-dimensional life, how would this appear to us? Well my best guess is that it would appear as a kind of multiple images of itself at different scales arranged in a shimmering latticework.” And Dave said that he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, because he’d seen the Asmodeus picture, which is pretty much exactly that! [...]

32 Short Lucubrations by John Coulthart

Art by John Coulthart

In the following, the amazing and revealing 5-page story (click on the images and enlarge) created by the amazing British artist and designer JOHN COULTHART for the Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book (Abiogenesis Press) to celebrate Moore's 50th birthday in 2003.

 

For more info about the artist, visit his blog HERE where you can also find several entries related to Moore.

 

Posted on this blog with the author's permission. Grazie, John!

Art by John Coulthart