[moore] Alan Moore’s Most Controversial Comic Book Stories … Unsurprisingly, this is a long list! … ‘“Saga of the Swamp Thing” was, like pretty much all of DC Comics’ output at the time, approved by the Comics Code Authority. However, that changed with “Saga of the Swamp Thing” #29 (by Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette and John Totleben). The issue included zombies, which were still a “no no” according to the Comics Code, but it also had Abby having sex with her husband, Matt Cable, who was possessed by her uncle Anton Arcane. It was likely way too disturbing for the Comics Code, so DC released the issue without Comics Code approval. Since they knew Moore was going to keep doing these types of stories, DC decided to stop submitting the book for Code approval and then with “Swamp Thing” #31 they began to label the book as “Sophisticated Suspense.”’
[tags: Alan Moore, Comics][permalink][Comments Off on Alan Moore’s Most Controversial Comic Book Stories]
December 19, 2016
[moore] The 21st Century Hasn’t Started Yet: An Interview With Alan Moore … a recent interview in full from the Irish Times … ‘So, with the film work, I am trying to have that same sense of inventive fun in the film medium, and with the case of Jerusalem, trying to bring that to the novel. Yes, I have said that one of the great beauties of comics is that anyone with a pencil and paper can make a comic strip, however, I’d have to say that while that is still true, unadorned English prose seems to be more miraculous still, in that there are no pictures. 26 characters and a peppering of punctuation, and from that you can do anything, you can describe anything in the conceivable universe.’
[tags: Alan Moore][permalink][Comments Off on “I’d say that in cultural terms, the 21st century hasn’t started yet.” — Alan Moore]
[tags: Alan Moore, Comics][permalink][Comments Off on The Final Episode of Alan Moore’s Maxwell the Magic Cat]
November 14, 2016
[comics] Midlands metaphysics … The Financial Times reviews Alan Moore’s Jerusalem … ‘Unquestionably Jerusalem is Moore’s most ambitious statement yet — his War and Peace, his Ulysses. The prose scintillates throughout, a traffic jam of hooting dialect and vernacular trundling nose-to-tail with pantechnicons of pop culture allusion. Exploring a single town’s psychogeography with a passionate forensic intensity, Moore makes the parochial universal, the mundane sublime and the temporal never-ending.’
[tags: Alan Moore, Books][permalink][Comments Off on The Financial Times Reviews Alan Moore’s Jerusalem]
November 1, 2016
[moore] A Working Class Mythology: Alan Moore's Jerusalem Reviewed … ‘Actually, I think there’s every chance that for future generations Moore will be remembered primarily as the author of Jerusalem; as a genuine working-class genius and world-class writer who just happened to get his start in comics because there were no other avenues open to him.’
[tags: Alan Moore, Books][permalink][Comments Off on The Quietus On Alan Moore: “A genuine working-class genius…”]
October 20, 2016
[moore] Alan Moore’s Script for Batman: The Killing Joke … posted complete on Tumblr … ‘WELL, I’VE CHECKED THE LANDING GEAR, FASTENED MY SEATBELT, SWALLOWED MY CIGAR IN A SINGLE GULP AND GROUND MY SCOTCH AND SODA OUT IN THE ASTRAY PROVIDED, SO I SUPPOSE WE’RE ALL SET FOR TAKE OFF. BEFORE WE GO SCREECHING OFF INTO THOSE ANGRY CREATIVE SKIES FROM WHICH WE MAY BOTH WELL RETURN AS BLACKENED CINDERS, I SUPPOSE A FEW PRELIMINARY NOTES ARE IN ORDER, SO SIT BACK WHILE I RUN THROUGH THEM WITH ACCOMPANYING HAND MOVEMENTS FROM OUT CHARMING STEWARDESS IN THE CENTRE AISLE.’
[comics] DC in the 80s: An Interview with Rick Veitch … Mark Belkin interviews Rick Veitch about his truncated run on Swamp Thing … ‘So, based on Alan’s scripts, I became more interested in Swamp Thing and regular comic books as well. There was a great potential future for the art form in Alan’s breakthrough and I wanted to learn as much as I could from it. Steve started to draw Anatomy Lesson, but was running up against the deadline and I helped him out with that first issue. I did about a third of the Anatomy Lesson. And then each subsequent issue Steve would call me in when he needed me to help. Then later, when DC needed someone to do a fill in issue to give Steve a breather, I was one of the guys they would call. My involvement was really a secondary career, I had a really great thing going at Marvel, writing and drawing a creator owned series at Epic. So I didn’t think of it as my money-making career, I really wanted to learn more about this… magic… Alan was conjuring.’
[tags: Alan Moore, Comics][permalink][Comments Off on Rick Veitch Interviewed about his Swamp Thing Run]
October 5, 2016
[moore] The Alan Moore Jerusalem tapes, #7: the lost language of Northampton … AM on language and consciousness … ‘It’s this whole thing of perception, and our perception is made of words. Language precedes consciousness, we are told, and also you can see it even in the present day. Say, for example, before we had the word ‘paedophile’. Or before we had that word in common clearly understood usage. Isn’t it funny how all the paedophiles appeared after that word? You’ll sometimes talk to old people, and they’ll say, ‘well, we never had those paedophiles when I was a girl or I was a boy’, and I’m ‘yeah you did, you just didn’t have a word for it’. So it was worse then, because you couldn’t even conceive of them.’
[tags: Alan Moore][permalink][Comments Off on Alan Moore on Language and Consciousness]
It’s a strange experience, walking the streets with this bearded compendium of knowledge. Every corner provokes a reminiscence, such as the graffiti which he recognises as the work of Bill Drummond of art-pop group the KLF, who came round to his house to show him the film of them burning a million pounds. Do they regret it now, I ask?
“It’s not so much that they regret it, but I think it haunts them. I heard a brilliant definition of haunting: ‘That which haunts us is that which we do not or do not completely understand.’ And I thought, that makes sense. Often we don’t understand our own actions. And certainly, if we’d gone to the Isle of Jura and burned a million quid, we would have a lot of questions!”
[comics] A Party in a Lunatic Asylum … Alan Moore Profiled in the New Yorker … ‘He found a seat on a low wall overlooking the River Nene, which plies its milky, reluctant course through the town’s suburbs. The last time Moore had walked this way, the underpass had been littered with hypodermic needles. Today there was nothing but a square of soggy cardboard, apparently used as someone’s groundsheet, and the jacket of the golfing guide “Putting: The Game Within the Game.” Abutting the wall was a jumble of stones—the remains of the world’s first powered cotton-spinning mill with an inanimate energy source, and thus, arguably, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. We were therefore sitting, Moore explained, at the source of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch defined by man’s influence on the environment. It was also the birthplace of capitalism, by Moore’s account. “Adam Smith either visited the place or heard about it,” he said, of the mill, speculating that this might have led the thinker to develop his famous “invisible hand” theory of laissez-faire economics. “Jerusalem” is full of such local arcana; it also demonstrates Moore’s tendency to see deep congruities everywhere’
[tags: Alan Moore][permalink][Comments Off on Alan Moore Profiled in the New Yorker]
September 1, 2016
[moore] Alan Moore and literature’s fascination with the fourth dimension … a look at Alan Moore’s conception of time in Jerusalem and earlier comics … ‘In Jerusalem, Moore makes these mysterious topographies known. Here, the fourth dimension is both temporal and spatial—as much a way of seeing as a thing unseen. Moore’s fourth dimension is both conceptual (i.e., a collapse of temporal moments, like Vonnegut’s “beads on a string” or Dr. Manhattan’s “intricately structured jewel”) as well as a material plane, called Mansoul, invisible to the naked eye, home to all manner of mystical and supernatural creatures. It’s very much the stuff of escapist high fantasy, like a 4-D Narnia. The extra-dimensional level of Jerusalem is place of “twisting crystals” and “ghost-seams” and afterlife academies, where characters use the made-up word “wiz” as linguistic copula that refers to something happening across the caved-in tenses of past, present and future. Back on the solid, three-dimensional footing of Earth, an eccentric artist called Alma Warren attempts to represent this mystical, magical realm, informed by recollections from her brother, who was transported there as a child.’
[comics] Comics Not Just For Kids Anymore, Reports 85,000th Mainstream News Story … BANG! POW! ZAP! … ‘The incredibly perceptive and original article also specifically mentioned the work of writer Alan Moore, an obscure reference point that has only been used in every single article like this ever written.’
[tags: Alan Moore, Comics][permalink][Comments Off on For the 85,000 time… BANG! POW! ZAP! Comics Not Just For Kids Anymore.]
July 26, 2016
[moore] Creating Jerusalem: Alan Moore on the most important book he has written … Moore interviewed about his new novel called Jerusalem… ‘When we talk about history we talk about the history of church of state and maybe a dozen families. What about the rest of us? Weren’t we doing anything while all that was going on, or were we minor players in their drama? This is insisting that everybody has their own drama and mythology and story, and it is also insisting that if eternalism is a real thing that changes everything. It makes everywhere the eternal city, it makes everywhere Jerusalem and perhaps particularly the poorest meanest basest places.’
[comics] Ask the Artist Interview with Providence’s Jacen Burrows … discussing Providence and collaborating with Alan Moore … ‘I think Alan might even have said that one of the issues (#7 perhaps) was the longest he’d written for a single issue but I may be remembering that wrong. I’ve said before that Providence was like doing a graduate thesis, with all of the reading, research and actual drawing work. It has certainly been the hardest and longest project I’ve ever attempted. But I wanted to do it right and be as true to his vision as possible. I’ve tried to do every camera angle as described, every expression, every location. If he put it in the script, I tried to put it on the page.’
[comics] Interview With Providence Letterer Kurt Hathaway … a great interview and especially fascinating on the details around the lettering of Robert Black’s Commonplace book at the back of the comic … ‘Once I heard I had to do it by hand, it made sense to keep it typeset, and simply print it out at roughly twice the printed size, plop some tracing paper over it—and hand-letter on the tracing paper with the typeset text visible underneath. In this way, my hand-lettering would fill the same space as the typeset version—just in my handwriting. So it still came in at 14 pages. When I’m done—it takes me about 3 weeks to do the backmatter material—I scan it, fix any mistakes in Photoshop and make sure that Avatar gets it in enough time to work their graphic magic.’
[tags: Alan Moore, Comics][permalink][Comments Off on Providence Letterer Kurt Hathaway Interviewed]
June 14, 2016
[comics] Providence Ghoul Photoshoot Interview with Susanna Peretz… Peretz is the creator of the Ghoul masks used in a photo in Providence #7 … ‘The products and materials alone came to around two thousand pounds [nearly $3,000 U.S.]. On top of that you have to consider two months work to produce the pieces, studio costs, assistant’s fees, actor’s fees, location hire, camera, lighting… It all adds up but it is this attention to detail and realism that sets Alan’s work apart.’
[tags: Alan Moore, Comics][permalink][Comments Off on Susanna Peretz Interview – SFX creator for Providence’s Ghoul Photo Panel]
June 6, 2016
[comics] A New Theory on Providence’s Ending … where is Alan Moore heading with Providence? … ‘The monsters do not need to be made real. The monsters of Providence ARE real already. What they actually want is nearly the opposite. The Apocalypse sought by the monsters is similar to the one Moore initially seemed to be setting up in Promethea. The monsters are preparing to REMOVE themselves from reality, where they are (despite their best efforts) mortal and vulnerable, instead ascending to the immortal state of dreams and fictions.’
[books] H. P. Lovecraft in 1919 … What was H. P. Lovecraft up to in 1919? … ‘Much of what we know of Lovecraft for this year comes from his amateur publications and his few surviving letters—only a handful have survived from this period—but it was a quietly formative year in his life. The discovery of Lord Dunsany gave shape to his experiments in fiction, and he began to find his own voice and preferred style, while the hospitalization of his mother gave him an unexpected freedom, living alone for the first time.’
[comics] The 13 Most Interesting Time Travel Stories in Comics … a varied collection of comics to track down … ‘Three years before they would create 1986’s Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons were honing their comic-creating skills by producing short stories for 2000 A.D. magazine. In one of the magazine’s recurring features called Time Twisters, they published a five-page story called Chronocops! that is considered one of Moore’s best early works, and one that would hint at the complex narrative skills he would demonstrate later in his career…’
[tags: Alan Moore, Comics][permalink][Comments Off on List of Interesting Time Travel Stories in Comics]
April 7, 2016
[moore] Other Moore’s Laws … What if Alan Moore, Roger Moore and Michael Moore had their own laws?
[moore] What Next For Providence? … Where is Alan Moore heading with Providence? … ‘Issues #5 and #6 are almost a two part story, where Black visits a city which is a major nexus of Lovecraft’s work, and intersects with several different stories, and many characters who act towards Black in an openly malevolent manner. I predict that #11 and #12 will be set in Providence, RI, and will feature Black’s inevitable doom after similarly intersecting with multiple stories and characters. “The Haunter of the Dark” has to appear. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward seems extremely likely’
[comics] From the Bayou to London: A Conversation with Artist John Totleben … interview with the legendary comic artist … ‘I think younger readers probably have already been exposed to those influences in other comics, so when they look at Miracleman it probably doesn’t seem like a bigger deal back in 1988 or whatever. They don’t get the full effect of that. It’s kind of similar to rock music where someone listens to Jimi Hendrix nowadays; they may not get the full effect of the intensity he really got across back then because all those influences have been absorbed into the culture of rock guitar techniques and so on. The full effect just can’t be felt. That’s what’s it’s like with Miracleman. You had to have been there.’
[comics] ‘Has The Human Centipede Taught Us Nothing?’ Alan Moore Answers Questions About Cinema Purgatorio For Bleeding Cool … a Q&A regarding the new black and white anthology comic Moore is launching on Kickstarter … ‘ I’m aware that a large majority of the current comic book audience are pathologically averse to anthologies, and you can certainly see their point. After all, when has anything memorable in the comic book medium ever emerged from an anthology? Except, obviously, Action Comics. Oh, and Detective Comics. And Sensation Comics and All Star and Adventure Comics. And Will Eisner’s work. And Jack Cole’s. And Mad and the entire E.C. line. And Amazing Adult Fantasy. And Tales of Suspense. And Strange Tales. And Journey into Mystery. And Creepy, and Eerie. And Zap. And the rest of the Undergrounds. And Comics Arcade. And 2000AD. And Warrior. And Viz. And almost all English and European comics. And almost all American comics, even single-character titles, until the 1960s. But other than that, what has the comic book anthology, or the Roman Empire for that matter, ever done for us?’
[moore] Alan Moore has wrote his first tweet on Twitter…‘This is Life Eternal, right here. Be fulfilled, be happy, be kind, be in love, and never do anything that you can’t live with forever.’
[tags: Alan Moore][permalink][Comments Off on Alan Moore Wrote His First Tweet…]
November 13, 2015
[alanmoore] Alan Moore donates £10,000 to help friend bring his African wife to the UK … File under: Greatest Living Englishman … ‘Since Moore’s donation was made public, Cousins’s case has spread across the web, with a series of small donations made to a crowdfunding page set up by his son. “If it’s a good enough argument for Alan Moore, it’s good enough for me,” wrote one anonymous donor on the page.’
[comics] Moorecraftian Timeline … a timeline for the H.P. Lovecraft inspired comics from Alan Moore and Jaycen Burrows … ‘1914-1918 – World War I, known to the Parish of Saint Jude in Salem, Massachusetts as “The Great Dry Cull.”’
[tags: Alan Moore, Comics][permalink][Comments Off on Annotations for Moore & Burrows’ Providence #4]
August 17, 2015
[comics] Did Watchmen Steal From The Outer Limits, Or From Jack Kirby? … a look at the influences on the ending of Watchmen … ‘While I agree that the ending is one of Watchmen‘s weakest points, it’s not because I think it wasn’t original enough. We are, after all, talking about a story filled with thinly disguised reworkings of old Charlton characters (not to mention that Swamp Thing — the Len Wein-created character that he and Alan Moore first worked together on — is awfully similar to ’40s characters It and The Heap). The problem with the ending is how naive it is to think that a single large attack could result in lasting world peace…’
[moore] Alan Moore’s Speech at Austerity and Advice Conference in Hull … a bit of history, Northampton, politics and austerity from a recent speech by Alan Moore … ‘Imagine if Jeremy Corbyn looked liked this… I think we’d all be a little bit more anxious wouldn’t we?’
[tags: Alan Moore, Politics][permalink][Comments Off on Alan Moore’s Speech at the Austerity & Advice Conference]
May 31, 2015
[comics] Annotations for Providence #1 … notes on Alan Moore and Jaycen Burrow’s latest comic … ‘Page 17, Panel 3: “The Repairer of Reputations” in The King in Yellow is set in an alternate future New York in the 1920s, which featured legalized suicide chambers and a concluded European war with an American victory; this further reinforces the layered fictionality of Providence, where the reality of the comic book is not our reality, nor even Lovecraft’s.’
[moore] Huge Alan Moore interview from Mustard comedy magazine … Alan shares another theory on who Jack the Ripper might be: ‘In our local paper there was a report about a man called Mallard who believed that Jack the Ripper was a member of his family from the Doddridge Church area of Northampton. His somewhat slender grounds for this theory were that a father in the family had committed suicide and one of the sons then moved down to London and was working in a slaughterhouse in the Whitechapel area during the time of the murders. Not the most convincing theory, but I was quite taken with this story because my mother’s maiden name was Mallard and her family lived around the Doddridge Church area. So in answer to Matt’s question, I’d say that after all of my researches, it turns out that Jack the Ripper was probably my granddad. It’s funny how these things work out, but what can you do?’
[tags: Alan Moore, Comics][permalink][Comments Off on Alan Moore’s other theory about the Identity of Jack the Ripper]
February 6, 2015
[comics] The Quotable Alan Moore … a collection of Alan Moore quotes … ‘Eventually you’ll use everything. You usually put them in some kind of code unless you’re doing a straightforward biography. There’s things I did like ‘A Small Killing’. The central event in that was a boy burying some bugs in a bottle. I did that when I was 8 or 9 and it haunted me. In ‘Big Numbers’ the writer was me, not exactly, but there was enough experience. I borrowed voraciously from my friends lives, sometimes that can feel a bit dodgy. These people, they’re your friends and they’ll pour out details of their lives and part of your brain is this cold vampiric thing writing it all down to use later. I can’t help it I’m a writer.’
[moore] Twenty-two comic books Alan Moore was looking forward to in 1988 Part 1 | Part 2
[tags: Alan Moore, Comics][permalink][Comments Off on Twenty Two Comic Books Alan Moore Was Looking Forward To In 1988]
January 17, 2015
[moore] Poet has first book published thanks to old school pal Alan Moore … ‘The book includes a seven page foreword by Alan in which he says Dominic’s “words speak of an almost-gone emotional reality, a since subsided proletarian warmth, an honesty entirely unafraid of sentiment, a great clarity of the heart.” In Spring Lane School there is a noticeboard displaying laminated pictures of Alan and Dominic to encourage the pupils which they are both very proud to feature on.’
[comics] Alan Moore’s Southern Comfort … Pádraig Ó Méalóid post scans of an obscure early Alan Moore comic for 2000AD and explores if it was rewritten … ‘So, decide for yourself: is this the work of the greatest comics writer of our time? Or is it only partially his, or has the art been changed so much from his original script that it has got lost under there?’
[comics] The Secret History of John Constantine … a look at the past and future of John Constantine … ‘Bissette claims he asked Moore to let him create a character that looked like Sting. The series’ editor, Karen Berger, told me it was Totleben, who had been wowed by Sting’s portrayal of a possibly demonic con-man in the 1982 film Brimstone and Treacle. Moore told The Comics Journal that he granted the artists’ wishes just for the hell of it. And so a nameless Sting-esque character popped up in a crowd shot in Swamp Thing No. 25. That could’ve been the end of it. But Moore saw the potential for “something more than that.” Moore had been mentally toying with the traditions of English mysticism (though he was still a few years away from identifying as a practitioner of magic). But he was also fascinated by cartoonist Eddie Campbell’s character Dapper John, an archetypal English “wide boy” — a man who takes unreasonable chances and gets by through resourcefulness and smooth talk. He decided to do something previously undone: craft a wide-boy mage.’
[comics] Alan Moore Talks About His Influence Upon Comics … ‘I mean, I’d like to think that if I’ve shown anything, it’s that comics are the medium of almost inexhaustible possibilities, that there have been…there are great comics yet to be written. There are things to be done with this medium that have not been done, that people maybe haven’t even dreamed about trying. And, if I’ve had any benign influence upon comics, I would hope that it would be along those lines; that anything is possible if you approach the material in the right way. You can do some extraordinary things with a mixture of words and pictures. It’s just a matter of being diligent enough and perceptive enough and working hard enough, continually honing your talent until it’s sharp enough to do the job that you require. I hope that if I had any sort of benign legacy at all, that that would be it, but I don’t know, I think that my legacy, some days, like I say, I think that my legacy is more likely to be a lot of humourless snarling, sarcastic psychopaths, but that’s just on my black days, pay me no mind.’
[books] All About Alienation… Alan Moore discusses H. P. Lovecraft … ‘What Lovecraft seems to be doing in works like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is attempting to embed the cosmic in the regional. He was doing his writing where he loved the New England landscape around him, he loved its history, he loved the way it looked, he loved everything about it. In that sense he was a very provincial person. He found his stay in New York unendurably horrific. But at the same time he was keeping up with the science of the day. And he understood the implications of that science; he understood the implications of relativity; he understood the implications of the quantum physicists; perhaps only dimly, but he understood how this decentralised our view of ourselves; it was no longer a view of the universe where we had some kind of special importance. It was this vast, unimaginably vast expanse of randomly scattered stars, in which we are the tiniest speck, in a remote corner of a relatively unimportant galaxy; one amongst hundreds of thousands, and it was that alienation that he was trying to embody in his Nyarlathoteps and his Yog-Sothoths.’
[comics] Alan Moore Early Career Timeline … … ‘Swamp Thing 24 – Roots (February 1984) … Monster (Scream #1 – March 1984) Boy buries his father, then goes to investigate the mysterious locked door upstairs which his father was killed going up to. Story ends with a to-be-continued, and was picked up by John Wagner – was about a deformed man living in the attic who was gentle but usually homicidal, apparently.’
[comics] Alan Moore’s Lost Comic Miracleman Has Returned … ‘A Dream of Flying is lovely, but the truly jaw-dropping stuff is just a few months away. You’ll get to see “Scenes From the Nativity,” in which Moran’s wife gives birth to a superpowered infant in an infamously (and, in its way, beautifully) graphic manner. You’ll experience the astounding conclusion of Moore’s run: a city-demolishing fight between Miracleman and Johnny Bates that will turn your stomach and expand your mind, followed by an issue in which Miracleman assumes his rightful role as a god and creates a worldwide quasi-socialist utopia. You’ll delight in Gaiman’s series of short stories about life in that utopia — one of which is a gorgeous little tale narrated by an undead Andy Warhol. You’ll read about modern myths and see better worlds. And soon, God (Miracleman?) willing, you’ll find out how it was all supposed to conclude. ‘
[tags: Alan Moore, Comics][permalink][Comments Off on A Profile Of Alan Moore’s Lost Comic Miracleman]
June 10, 2014
[comics] “A Funny Kind Of Relationship” … Alan Moore On Iain Sinclair … ‘So Iain had a profound effect upon my writing style, it’s probably more evident to me than to other people. It was more the fact that after reading Iain’s work I felt that I had to man up, I had to shift things up a gear, because knowing that prose of that quality was possible, unless you tried to address that, any other response is like, cowardice, or defeat, surrender… It was like when I read Burroughs as a teenager. It made me realise that prose was capable of doing certain other things than things that I had previously attributed to it. Later on I found that Iain’s kind of literary genealogy is not a million miles away from my own, its just that his has got a much finer eye attached to it and a much greater body of knowledge, but I think we were both inspired by the energy of the Beat writers and the culture that spread out from them.’
