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| Art by Mike McKone |
You can follow McKone on his Twitter, HERE.
Check his original art at TD Art Gallery, HERE.
Jun 22, 2023
Nite Owl by Mike McKone
You can follow McKone on his Twitter, HERE.
Jun 21, 2023
Visionary status, material culture and Youtubers
Excerpts from an interview originally printed in MÜ Magazine n.1, January 2021, conducted by David Erdos. You can read it online HERE.
[...]
DAVID ERDOS: [...] While there are many artists whose Work embodies a visionary status, very makers are as equal or as mythic as the work itself, at least in the minds of others. There’s you, Ballard, Heathcote Williams… How do you define a visionary in the full cultural meaning of that word?
ALAN MOORE: Well, I’d say that with a visionary it’s always got to be personal. It’s got to be a personal vision. I think if you look under visionary in the dictionary you’ll see a picture of William Blake. He’s pretty much the archetypal visionary. As I’ve said elsewhere, human beings don’t come a lot better than Billy Blake. I suppose what this is connected to is finding a way of seeing. There was a performer called Nicholas Curry who worked under the name of Momus. Well, I remember one of his songs; there was a snatch of lyric that stayed with me: ‘I’m in love with everyone who knows its hard to find a way of seeing. Who knows that nevertheless that is the only way to flame into being.’ And I think that this is the important thing: to identify the way in which we see the world. And to then communicate that; to develop the skills that we will need to communicate that: Sing your particular song. Give your particular view of the world. And as far as I can see it, one subjective view of the world is not privileged over another. Everyone’s subjective reality is the entire universe. And they are constructing it entirely within the confines of their mind.
[...]
DAVID ERDOS: [...] Its a common argument in theatre for instance that all you have to do is entertain. I’ve never believed that. I think the theatre has to include that of course but is actually about something else: ideas, exploration, challenge, transformation. And that a play is a list of ever changing or uncharted decisions. It’s why I’m a great Pinterist. In his plays everything is both true and untrue at any given moment and you have to navigate each silence, and each mystification.
ALAN MOORE: Of course I have great respect for Pinter as a dramatist. I am more of a Bertolt Brecht geezer. In that I – I mean, I’ve always liked Brecht, but I’ve only recently realised in fact, how much my own methods were an unconscious approximation. I’d never heard about Brechtian alienation, until I realised it’s what I’ve been doing all my life. The thing about Brecht is that he took hugely difficult moral and political concerns, and he mashed them up with the most appalling and vulgar popular media; sing songs and cabaret..
DAVID ERDOS: Shows about murderers, reprobates, prostitutes, tyrants, capitalists!
ALAN MOORE: There are ways in which almost anything can be communicated, and I think the onus on us is that we can’t continually complain about the public, because they’re only responding to what they’ve been fed, and what they’ve been conditioned to like. We should be able to offer more tempting dishes with our culinary skills, and if we can’t make them irresistible enough, then that really is on us. Certainly, it would help and be encouraging to get more response from the audience out there, but I think its our fault, rather than theirs. Or, rather, that is the best way for us to regard it. That we should buck our ideas up and try a bit harder to captivate people.
[...]
DAVID ERDOS: [...] Do you think then, that it’s about reaching large groups of people anymore, or is that future more about finding widespread and more selective groups? As a way of starting that culture again. Do you think that we need to start that culture again?
ALAN MOORE: Hmmn. Well, I myself would like to see a material culture. This might be because of my own prejudices. But I think you’ve got to have material culture before you can have material counter-culture. I think the idea of magazines is a great one. Maybe this is never coming back, but it struck me recently that the way that I and many of the people I knew managed to find ourselves in our current positions, or got to the point that we wanted to get to in life; a lot of the ways we used, are simply not there anymore. I was asked to do an intro for a very very good biography of Malcolm Mclaren that came out recently, and it occurred to me while I was reading it, that there was a particular scaffolding that enabled us to climb into those positions. It was Art Schools, Arts Labs, in my own case, to start with; the underground press, which then vanished, or at least the national underground press did. By which time there were poetry magazines, and they endured while there was the brilliant poetry boom of the sixties and seventies. Then there were regional alternative papers… then there were regional newspapers, whether they were alternative or not..there was the music press, which was one the ways I got into being an artist and writer. But all of the ways, all of the steps, all of the handholds that got me to where I am don’t exist anymore. And I am suspicious of the fact that the modern handhold are all owned by some tech company or other. I mean, I was talking to my grandson, one of my grandchildren, and he was talking about how at the moment he’s looking forward to becoming a Youtuber! I mean, he’s ten, you know..but then my daughter Amber who was in the background chipped in and said that maybe having your own Youtube channel was like having your own fanzine! And when I was talking to Jarett Kobek the other night he was talking about how he had started a book about Youtubers, and the tragic stories of a number of them, as he was saying that for a lot of these kids, unless they become one of the successful Youtubers, all they’re going to be or have are all of the disadvantages of being well known and none of the advantages. I mean, a lot of them – and I wasn’t talking about this to my grandson – but a lot of them have suicided. And Jared said, and this is very unlike him, that he gave up writing the book because it was just too depressing. He couldn’t actually face doing it anymore as it was making him feel terrible about humanity. So, yes, I’ve got my reservations about all the modern media. I would probably greatly prefer a return to material media, because I think when you’ve not got that physical artefact the atmosphere behind a counter-culture suffers. It’s an intangible and ephemeral feeling that needs something physical to actually coalesce around. There’s a number of problems that I have with virtual online culture. I can’t really comment on it much because I’m not part of it. But I’m not part of it for a reason. So, I really applaud any attempt to do print media, because I think people want them. It’s like vinyl albums…
DAVID ERDOS: The future is still in the past!
ALAN MOORE: Yes, I think it is. And we should also not assume that every new thing is progress. It might just be a new thing! It doesn’t mean that it’s better than what came before.
[...]
The complete interview is available HERE.
Jun 17, 2023
Watchmen by Carlos Dearmas
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| Art by Carlos Dearmas |
For more info about the artist:
Instagram - Blog - Facebook - GalleryJun 6, 2023
Leah Moore... draws Alan!
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| Art by Leah Moore |
She wrote: "Managed to draw dad while i was down in Northampton. ❤"
Well done, Leah! :)
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| Art by Leah Moore |
May 25, 2023
Alan Moore by Fred Hembeck
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| Art by Fred Hembeck |
Above, Moore portrait by American cartoonist and comic book artist Fred Hembeck drawn with, of course... curlicues at his knees!
Unfortunately "International mailings have been suspended for the time being."
May 20, 2023
Promethea by Bill Sienkiewicz
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| Art by Bill Sienkiewicz |
May 14, 2023
John Constantine by Matt Seneca
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| Art by Matt Seneca |
Published on his Instagram page: "HELLBLAZER! One of my top 3 comic book characters with Cyclops and
Valentina. Reading all 300 issues of John Constantine’s chain smoking
occult adventures a couple years ago was a high like no other-
Hellblazer comics scratch an itch that, for me, never goes away."
May 13, 2023
Swampy by Dan McDaid
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| Art by Dan McDaid |
Grazie mille, Dan!
May 12, 2023
On Alejandro Jodorowsky
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| Jodorowsky photographed by Grant Delin |
Alejandro Jodorowsky, if I may presume to have correctly understood his intentions, is an authentic creator who has always understood that magic is greatly reduced without art, but that art is precisely nothing without magic. His inspirational work has always provided a dazzling example of genuine vision coupled with the enormous human strength necessary to realise that vision in this sometimes difficult world of material form and materialist agendas. His example is a blazing beacon to anyone aspiring to work in the medium of cinema; a searing admonishment to remain true to their own unique voice, and eye, and mind; true to the golden information that is pouring through them.
I could list his films with their enduring images, their haunting atmospheres that linger in the heart long after the concluding credits, but if I am honest it was Jodorowsky’s luminous account of his encounter with surrealist goddess Leonora Carrington that most impressed me with the exalted humanity and compassion of the man, and with the heartfelt lucidity of his style, as clear as rain. Anything, any radiant morsel from this artist and magician’s table, is a thing to be treasured in our culture forever, and to contribute in any way to the realising of yet another fugue-state masterpiece could only be the most tremendous honour. -- Alan Moore
May 9, 2023
Bissette: Swamp Thing, Roeg and... a perfect synthesis
Stephen R. Bissette:[...] I alone couldn't have done what we did on Swamp Thing. None of us who were part of that unique team could have done it alone (although Rick Veitch came damned close to doing so, didn’t he, when he was writing and penciling his run on the title?). We, meaning Alan Moore, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, and everybody else that was part of that - Len Wein our first editor, Karen Berger our second editor; John Costanza lettered the book, Tatjana Wood was our colorist. That kind of chemistry yields work that, when it's really humming, is better than the work any of us could do individually. Having experienced that myself, I really believe that.
I went into Swamp Thing having experienced that kind of synergy with one of my oldest friends in the comic book field, Rick Veitch. Rick and I really did some work together that we're both still proud of.
[...]Len Wein called us and said, "You're going to be working with a new writer and it's somebody you've never heard of." And I said, "Who is it?" He said, "Alan Moore." I said, "Alan Moore! We love his work." Len thought I was bullshiting him. I said, "No, no, no. We've been reading Warrior since the first issue." We had been buying the UK black & white comic magazine Warrior from Heroes World, ironically enough - Ivan Snyder’s Heroes World New Jersey comic shop, the same mini-distributor Marvel later went exclusive with. The Heroes World comic shop in New Jersey carried Warrior, and we'd been reading "V for Vendetta" and "Marvelman" right from the first issue. We knew what Alan had been doing and we were psyched.And this is what you can't explain, Jason. This is pre-internet. This is before we could have afforded a phone call to each other. We all wrote letters to each other, John Totleben, me, Alan Moore. All three of us. Our letters crossed in the mail. Alan wanted to do with the character exactly what John and I wanted to do with the character. What we wanted to do with the character, John had been pitching to Len via Tom Yeates, and Len had said, "No, no, no, no. Too radical." The whole idea of Swamp Thing not being a man inside, that he was this plant. That's what John said that the character should be, should run with.Len had turned it down as an idea. For some reason, now that Alan was onboard, Len was open to it. Does that mean Len had let go of the character he had co-created to the point where he could do that, or because Alan so excited him as a writer that Len would trust him? I don't know, but we all wanted to do the same thing.Furthermore-- Rick Veitch could talk to you about this. From the time Rick and I met, one of the things Rick said always captivated him is, I remember every movie I've seen. And this is pre-video era, so you would see a movie once or twice and you would try to remember it frame-by-frame, if you were crazy like me, because you might never see that film again in your life. And I was trying to make that kind of kinetic imagery and storytelling happen in my comics work, the aspects of cinema that I knew would and could work in comics, but I didn't have the writing skill to do it.The filmmaker by name, and I've named him before in interviews, was Nicolas Roeg, co-director of Performance, director of Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth. It turned out that Alan Moore loved Nicolas Roeg's work. In our first couple of letters, we found we were on the same page, that Roeg was a common reference point: something we could work from to forge a different way of doing comics.If you go back and read "The Anatomy Lesson"—that first story that the team of us worked on together (all of us, because as I’ve repeatedly stated, Rick helped me on the pencils), so it was the four of us—it's structured like a Nicolas Roeg film, right? Nicolas Roeg approached storytelling like a mosaic, and you can move the tiles around. I always like to describe it as when Roeg’s approach to cinema is really working, you can tell the story from both ends to the middle—to the heart of the story—and you make the fireworks detonate in the reader's head. That's what Alan could do. He could already do it. Alan was scripting everything Rick Veitch and I had been talking about doing for years. We wish we could do this. Here's this script from this guy in England none of us have met, “The Anatomy Lesson”, and he aced it. And he fucking did it in what, 22 pages.So right from that point, we all knew we're onto something, like, this is working. Alan would get fired up seeing my pencils. And what was happening, Jason, because there was no internet, is, we were moving all this stuff through the mail. I would photocopy in triplicate every pencil page I sent out to DC, and I would send a package to John Totleben and a package to Alan Moore and keep a set for myself. And Alan was seeing the pencils within a week to 10 days of when Len Wein and then Karen Berger had them. That was back when the US-to-UK/UK-to-US mail was functional and dependable.Alan would get excited by what I was doing with the pencils, and then we would all see what John had done with the inks, and it would set fireworks off, and we were all pushing each other to go further. For a time, it was just a perfect synthesis.
You can read the complete piece HERE.
Apr 26, 2023
Monumental Moore by Eduardo Risso
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| Art by Eduardo Riss |
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