[comics] The Complete 2000 AD By Alan Moore: Future Shocks & Other Stories … Review of Alan Moore’s early work … ‘“The Reservable Man” is clever, which is more than could be said for other Future Shock stories at time, but “The Time Machine” is genuinely smart. In the difference between these two tales of unusual time lies the whole of The Complete Alan Moore, a writer who could be so in love with the notion of doing something unusual simply for the sake of doing it, and at the same time a man who could actually marry that technical skill with emotional depth that was, and is, rare in his field.’
[moore] Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair in conversation … Go watch Moore and Sinclair discuss the Long London series including many of the non-fictional characters and locations within.
[timeline] Chronology of Everything (almost) … A timeline of the Quality Comics Universe put together by Alan Moore and Steve Moore including Axel Pressbutton, V, Marvelman and the Warpsmiths.
ALTERNATIVE REALITY ONE
1982 – Marvelman not reborn.
1988 – World War III.
1992 – Fascist take-over of Britain, controlled by Fate.
[comics] Tatjana Wood, Award-Winning Comic Book Colorist, Dies at 99 (archive.ph) … NYT Obituary for the long-time DC Comics colourist – worth visiting for the lovely photo of her with the Eisner Hall of Fame trophy. ‘Karen Berger, who edited Swamp Thing, wrote in an email about Ms. Wood: “Her magnificent and evocative palette was a perfect fit — she was an integral part of the magic of that groundbreaking series. She loved coloring ‘Shvampy,’ as she called him in her thick, gravelly German accent.”’
[moore] Alan Moore: ‘There Is Something Dark And Ugly Within The Heart Of Fashion’ … Alan Moore Interview from 2013 on Fashion Beast. ‘I met [Malcolm McClaren]; he gave me a choice of three films to make. The one that immediately appealed to me was ‘Fashion Beast’ a combination of the Beauty and the Beast fable and the strange and tragic story of Christian Dior. Malcolm gave me a couple of books on Dior, a few on fashion, just so I could acquaint myself with that world. He suggested Flashdance and Chinatown as other influences I might look at. It was a bit overwhelming at first, but I began to see what he meant. After that, he pretty much left me to my own devices.’
[moore-monday] 'Putting Descartes Before the Horse' … An interview with Alan Moore by Koom Kankesan. ‘By the time I was twelve, I think I was more interested in my writing as a thing in itself rather than as a way of courting praise and attention, although it’s likely there was a fair degree of overlap in that particular Venn diagram. By then I’d absorbed a large amount of nonsense poetry (which I’d always had an interest in because of all the outrageous things it does with logic and language), ghost stories, science fiction stories, and the other material you might expect from a boy of that age. All of these things would be filleted for the aspects that seemed to me to be of most worth, which would then be assimilated, clumsily and ineffectively, into my own attempts at writing.’
[moore] The Ordering and Reordering of Data (From Hell) … Elizabeth Sandifer does a deep dive into Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell. ‘This, then, is Moore’s real accomplishment with From Hell. Its subject matter may be infinite. So too might its implications. But From Hell itself is finite; it contains five hundred and seventy-five pages, with no more than nine tiny boxes on each one. Moore has taken the infinite scope of Whitechapel and fit it down into the nine panel grid.’
[books] A Walking Tour of “The Great When” … A journey around the locations of Alan Moore’s latest book.‘Throughout the day, I had the audiobook of The Great When queued up so that I could list to each part while I was there. It was pretty surreal and pretty magical. 23,997 steps with 1 degree weather. When I left for the walk snow fell on me. It was amazing.’
[comics] Kevin O’Neill Interviewed in 2010 … Huge interview by Douglas Wolk covering O’Neill’s 40 year career in comics. ‘A few years later I went up to the DC offices in New York — I was curious to see an actual copy of the Comics Code. I’d never actually seen one. I’d asked Archie Goodwin, and he said he’d look around, but he couldn’t find it — which is pretty funny, actually! Eventually, he found a very old one, it had some stuff like “no werewolves, no vampires” etc. They did have a phone number on it for the Code, and I rang them up, and this woman answered — I said I was a British comic-book artist visiting New York, and I’d heard so much about the Comics Code, could I come up and visit the offices? And she said, “There’s nothing to see here” — and hung the phone up!’
‘Opinions about everything, really, but you oughta be careful what you ask, because one thing that’s happened with age is he’s lost his grip on “linear time,” as he puts it. He’ll tell a story, some random thing from 30 or 40 years ago, and the telling, itself, is like brain surgery with chopsticks: effortless, fluent, eloquent, detailed, well-paced. It’s got an arc. Inflections are measured. He remembers every detail. Every bliss and triumph. Every resentment.
Just don’t ask Moore what decade it was. And be ready to step in, too. Folks’ll show up for an interview, ask a question, and if nobody stops him, he’ll just — it’s like a frog across lily pads — start with a word about the weather and then boom. We’re talking about Einstein. Fourth dimension. Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence, which Moore quite likes, though of course, if we’re just playing this out over and over, it means he shall have to endure Margaret Thatcher again.’
[moore] Alan Moore's 5 Essential Tips for Screenwriters … ‘Know Your Ending Before You Begin – This is Moore’s most emphatic piece of advice for television writers, especially. “I knew what the last shot in the last episode of the last season was going to be,” he said about an unproduced series he wrote. “In fact, I’d known that since before I’d started the five short films and the feature film that the television series would have been a continuation of. I knew the ending before I started. And I can’t underline how important this is.” Moore warns against the “shapeless narrative drift” that occurs when writers make things up as they go along, calling it “a terrible experience for both the writer and for the viewer.”‘
[comics] Alan Moore’s Greyshirt “How things work out” with art by Rick Veitch … ‘We’re able to tell, by some quite complicated story gymnastics, quite an interesting little story that is told over nearly sixty years of this building’s life, with characters getting older depending upon which panel and which time period they’re in. There’s something that you couldn’t do in any medium other than comics.’
[comics] The most important British character in US comics … John Constantine is 40. ‘What would Delano, the writer most closely associated with Constantine’s rise, think if he met the character? “My relationship with Constantine is one of both love and hate. I’m grateful for the changes to the course of my life our association enabled, but, undeniably, that debt also engenders some resentment,” he admits. “Constantine is a cranky old bastard, and so am I. We’d probably clash. I imagine any meeting would be affectionate, but we’d soon start to irritate one another.”
[moore] Alan Moore interviewed on art and magic by Roberto Bartual … ‘All of my magical enterprises, though, since the beginning, have been geared towards public revelation, whether as a published piece, a multi-media performance, a film project or a recorded audio work, which I suppose are all different applications or kinds of magic. These days, however, with diminished mobility and a diminishing tolerance for the role of public figure, I am entirely focussed on writing – the first technology, that makes magic and all other technologies possible. This is not to say that I might not do the occasional tarot reading or offer kabbalistic advice to friends and family, but from my point of view, there is nothing in the conceivable universe that cannot be captured and contained by the couple-of-dozen squiggles in the average alphabet.’
[comics] Yuggoth: unpublished Lovecraftian tales … Garth Ennis mentions an unseen anthology series with Alan Moore during a 2024 interview. ‘There’s a series called Yuggoth, and it’s based on the work that Alan did – Providence, Neonomicon, and some of the other Avatar books he did based on his love of H. P. Lovecraft. And Yuggoth was going to be an anthology series. I do hope people see it. Alan wrote the first storyline. Mine would have been the second. You also have Kieron Gillen in there and Si Spurrier. All this is written and drawn.’
[books] Lovecraft was an American William Blake Alan Moore on H.P. Lovecraft. ‘In writing about Lovecraft, as I’m doing at the moment, I want to understand where he was, to become him, as it were. We’re both pulp writers trying to express our vision of the truth. In this current book Yuggoth Cultures, I’m trying to divine that knowledge. You tend to work faster as a pulp writer and you’re absolved of literary obligations and pretensions. Your vision is purer. The obligations of the deadline leave the conscious mind less time to edit the subconscious outpourings and a truer story leaks through, despite what is lost in literary polish.’
[moore] Long London, Magic & the future of Humanity … Recent Alan Moore interview from Smoky Man in Italy. ‘In From Hell we suggested the late Victorian period, 1888, and specifically the Whitechapel murders as, metaphorically, the birth-cries of the 20th century. Meanwhile, in Lost Girls, Melinda and I posited the late Edwardian era, 1913/1914 and the outbreak of the First World War, I think just as legitimately, as the beginning of the modern world. I suppose the ultimate truth is that every decade, every year, potentially every sunrise is the end of one world and the start of a new one, although over the course of the Long London quintet I want to see what happens when that truism comes up against the currently popular adage that the old world refuses to die and so the new world cannot be born.’
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25 February 2025
[comics] Interviewing Alan Moore … A huge collection of scans of Alan Moore interviews over the years with plenty I’ve not seen before. From an early interview in 1981: ‘My greatest personal hope is that someone will revive Marvelman and I’ll get to write it. KIMOTA!!’
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4 February 2025
[comics] Alan Moore And Chris Claremont Speak Out On Writing (from Speakeasy 054) … A real moment of comic history captured here. Moore has just written Watchmen #1 and the Claremont era of the X-Men is in full swing. Moore: ‘I agree that the establishment of invisible character detail, the stuff that is not on the surface, the stuff that is just subliminal – context – is an important thing. With Watchmen we tried to really go in for that. It’s an extension of the technique that I used in Halo Jones, probably a lot different to the clear establishing that Chris was talking about, in that it’s an extension of the idea of teaching parallel languages by dumping people in a room full of foreigners. Okay, the first time it’s going to be hell and the first time it’s going to be incomprehensible, but eventually your understanding of that world will be much more thorough. It’s a long shot, but I think it’s going to work because we have got a lot of space: we’re working on nine panels of page as opposed to the normal six. That gives you half the book again and you’ve got twenty eight pages so, in effect you’re doing a forty two page book or something, which gives you a lot of information. It’s not a very big story either. It’s a story that I could probably have told in three issues, but were telling it in twelve. It’s not going to be padded, it’s just that having twelve we’ve got room to explore all the characters.’
[moore] Unearthing’s Shooters Hill Walk … Instructions to follow the Shooter’s Hill Walk as described by Alan Moore in Unearthing. ‘Continuing south on Shrewsbury Lane, look right/west down Occupation Lane for a good view of central London. There are quite a few fairly similar views throughout Shooters Hill – including, as the Unearthing notes, from Steve Moore’s second story back window. For this walk, the Occupation Lane view was about the best version.’
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28 May 2024
[watchmen] On the Cutting Edge of Innovation: This guy Just Found a New Way to Misinterpret ‘Watchmen’ … ‘Roche sat down in a recent interview to explain his journey of bastardizing Moore’s iconic series. “I started off like everyone else,” Roche explained. “I was like, oh, Rorschach freaking rules. He’s just Batman if he was a normal guy. Like, he’s just rational and everything he does makes perfect sense. Why would you cripple a criminal when you can kill his dogs, chop off his arm and burn his house down?” Roche’s shelf is littered with comic books and a weird shrine to Steve Ditko–which he kept trying to avert our gaze from by aggressively coughing.’
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21 February 2024
[comics] Moon and Serpent Rising… John Couthart delivers some insider information on the long-awaited The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic written by Alan and Steve Moore. ‘The Bumper Book may superficially resemble a children’s annual but this isn’t a book for children. The essays include discussion of the use of drugs and sex in magic, and there’s a lot of nudity (also a fair amount of sex) in the illustrations. The book is a serious study, but not, I hope, a boring one. Several of the features are presented in comic form, with eight of the pages being among the last works of the late Kevin O’Neill. Ben Wickey has done a fantastic job for the fifty pages of Old Moores’ Lives of the Great Enchanters which runs throughout the book and covers the entire history of Western magical thought from the Stone Age to the present day.’
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1 February 2024
[comics] Miracleman: The Marvel Age. … Mike Sterling on Gaiman & Buckingham’s Miracleman. ‘This whole hoohar is written by Moore and Gaiman, absolute giants in the field. But it feels like Miracleman’s time in the sun is pretty much done. It was huge when that first Eclipse Comics issue was released in 1985, when Alan Moore had just become a red hot commodity in American comics. And it continued to sell very well as the series continued to push the boundaries of just what a superhero comic was, through Moore’s 16 issues and Gaiman’s following work. But that 30 year gap. That ain’t nuthin’…’
[comics] “I’ve Had The Life That I Wanted When I Was 10 Years Old”: A Conversation with Dave Gibbons … Gibbon’s discusses his autobiography and much more. ‘I probably won’t say too much about it other than what is public knowledge, that there’s been talk of a Rogue Trooper movie. And again, I think there are so many characters in 2000 AD that would make wonderful big screen stories. I did actually as recently as last week get a little glimpse behind the curtains of that. And I’m very excited by what I saw there. So I’m very happy, because I like the people who are doing it. And I think they’re approaching it the right way.’
“The comics medium is perfect. It is sublime. The comics industry is a dysfunctional hellhole. So why did I want to return to it in this story? Like you say, it’s exorcism. As one of the characters finds in ‘Thunderman’ it’s one thing to quit comics, but quitting comics is a different thing to being able to stop thinking about them. Writing this got an awful lot out of my system. It said a lot of the things that I’d always wanted to say but I’d never really had the right context to say them in.”
[comics] After nearly 30 years, there’s finally a new issue of Miracleman by Neil Gaiman … ‘I’m a recent convert to the church of Miracleman, and even I felt those decades of anticipation building up as I opened up the latest issue of the story. I’m excited to see what comes next, and how this 30-year-old story ends up picking up in medea res. The layers of meta-text in this continuing story make for an incredible retrospective on the entire history of the superhero genre.’
[moore] Fantasy Must Be Sharper: An Interview With Alan Moore … ‘Davey Jones is a genius. I’ve only ever had brief contact with him, back in the 80s when he was working with an anarchist concern called, I think, Blast and I was briefly in touch with them and then I noticed his work coming out in Viz where he’s the author of so many of my favourite strips. I’m genuinely impressed that there’s such an incredible standard of craftsmanship throughout Viz, blinding cartoonists, writers, and creators on that book. I must admit that the only problem I have with Jones’ work – and it’s not any fault of his, it’s purely me – it’s Tin Ribs; the ghastly physical torture that is visited on Mr Snodgrass. Every issue he’s having slices of his skin ripped off [laughs] it’s a bit rich even for my blood!’
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26 October 2022
[comics] Marvel’s Miracleman Omnibus shows how Alan Moore paved the road to Watchmen… Slate on Marvel’s reprint of a full collection of Miracleman along with a look at it’s impact. ‘It’s remarkable how powerful the book remains in spite of its occasional unevenness. Moore is easily the medium’s most important just-writer (as opposed to writers who draw their own scripts, which Moore does very rarely), having demonstrated a complete grasp of its intricacies and potential almost from the beginning of his career. He is, in some sense, a composer, and the people working in comics who can match that formidable perfection are cartoonists themselves-no other writer really comes close.’
[moore] Watchmen author Alan Moore: ‘I’m definitely done with comics’… … Another interview with Alan Moore in the Guardian and here is a review of Illuminations – his new collection of short stories. ‘He shuns new tech to the extent that we speak down a landline, so I can’t see the lavishly bearded face from which his gentle Northampton burr issues. “When the internet first became a thing,” he says, “I made the decision that this doesn’t sound like anything that I need. I had a feeling that there might be another shoe to drop – and regarding this technology, as it turned out, there was an Imelda Marcos wardrobe full of shoes to drop. I felt that if society was going to morph into a massive social experiment, then it might be a good idea if there was somebody outside the petri dish.” He makes do, instead, with an internet-savvy assistant: “He can bring me pornography, cute pictures of cats and abusive messages from people.”’
[moore] Discover Alan Moore’s Surprising First Published Superman Stories … A look at some long-forgotten UK published stories from Alan Moore. ‘That second Superheroes Annual in 1983…There was a two-page text piece by Alan Moore, with illustrations by the brilliant Bryan Talbot. The story was titled “Protected Species,” and it was about an alien who traveled the universe collected endangered species from lost planets that he would then bring to his bosses who would keep the survivors on a sort of zoo…’
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[moore] Alan Moore On ‘From Hell’ – Interviewed In 2002 … Future biographers of Moore, please take note of this quote: ‘I do get some funny phone calls. Nicolas Cage phoned me up a few times because he likes my stuff. He seems nice enough, but he phoned me once to ask for advice on his love life. It must be a lonely existence being a film star…’
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18 January 2022
[moore] Alan Moore’s Top Five: Mystics and Magicians … ‘Austin Osman Spare: He knew and possibly shagged Aleister Crowley, but regarded Crowley as “an Italian ponce out of work” and utterly rejected Crowley’s lore-bound and formal magical system. Spare was approached sometime in the 1930s by Adolf Hitler with a request that he paint the occult-obsessed fuehrer’s portrait, which he declined, replying “if you, sir, are the superman, then I am proud to remain an ape.” When Spare and his Brixton studio were later bombed during the Blitz, Spare suffered some kind of stroke and was left paralysed down his right side, including his drawing hand, but, being Spare, he simply taught himself to draw with his left hand…’
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29 December 2021
[comics] Roscoe Moscow: Who Killed Rock’n’Roll? Parts: 1-10 | 11-20 | 21-30 | 31-40 | 41-50 |51-60 … Early Alan Moore strip from 1979-80 published originally in Sounds.
