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12 October 2001
 [comics] Excerpts from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen courtesy of Amazon … [via Haddock] Rorschach: ‘Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen it’s true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “Save us!”… and I’ll look down and whisper, “No.” They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father, or President Truman. Decent men who believed in a days work for a days pay. Instead they followed the droppings of lechers and communists and didn’t realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers… and all of a sudden, nobody can think of anything to say.’
10 September 2001
[comics] Don’t Ask the Writer — interview with Alan Moore concentrating on From Hell … ‘The land of suntanned starlets and chiseled action stars would be a strange fit with the 48-year-old Moore, who could be a character out of a Victorian melodrama, with his wild mess of long black hair, beard and ominous voice. “Having a deep voice and kind of being physically imposing, you tend to find that you can talk almost any old rubbish and can make it sound creepy,” he acknowledges.’ [ Related: From Hell Movie Trailer, link via Comic Geek]
9 September 2001
[comics] UltraMoore… tributes to Alan Moore (in Italian and English) from various notable comic creators… Barry Windsor-Smith, Eddie Campbell and Jay Stevens. Windsor-Smith: ‘The intelligence and perspicacity of Alan Moore’s MARVELMAN was responsible for bringing me back into the field of comics. For that, I’m torn between loving and hating him.’ [ Related: Alan Moore Fan Site]
3 September 2001
[comics] Side by side in the fantasy league — Roger Sabin reviews recent comics in the Observer including The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill … ‘The ‘league’ is led by Mina Murray from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and consists of H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quartermain, Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, R.L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde and H.G.Wells’s Invisible Man, all brought together to combat an evil criminal mastermind from the East and his band of ‘sly Chinee’. Thus begins a penny-dreadful adventure that mimics modern superhero team-ups – Moore’s own Watchmen comes to mind – while retaining an all-important sense of humour. This is very postmodern humour, you understand – Quartermain is discovered in an opium den and the Invisible Man is caught hiding in a girls’ school. Yet it never threatens to overwhelm what is essentially a ripping yarn of a rather quaint kind: you feel that Moore and O’Neill really yearn for a bit of old-fashioned romance.’
4 August 2001
[movies] The From Hell Movie Trailer is available at Apple’s Trailer Site. ‘I made it all up, and it all came true anyway. That’s the funny part.’ [requires Quicktime 5, link via WEF]
11 July 2001
[comics] Great interview with Eddie Campbell mainly about the From Hell movie at Ain’t it Cool News… ‘Alan said that, “We all know that serial murderers are not like this. They’re horrible nasty little men with bad hair-cuts!” So with Gull, we’ve created this colossal figure of evil. I hope we haven’t made him attractive. I actually have much admiration for the original Dr. Gull, who was the man who wrote the paper and gave the name to anorexia nervosa. And his name still pops up if you’re reading on thyroid conditions. He wrote the original medical papers on one or two subjects that are still very relevant today.’
3 June 2001
[comics] Alan Moore and Marvel Comics build bridges… Moore’s version and Quesada’s version of what happened… Quesada: ‘I flew over, and took the train to Northampton to meet Alan,” he said. “He lives up to his reputation as the comic book Merlin. He’s a big, tall guy with a beard and a walking staff. We walked through Northampton and he showed me where Princess Di is really buried. She’s not where everyone thinks she is.”‘ [via Seething Hatred]
10 March 2001
 [comics] Eddie Campbell discusses Finishing From Hell…. ‘Eight years! 500 pages. Must be the longest single work Alan’s done on both counts. The astonishing thing is that he had the whole thing planned from the beginning. All the reference photos for the epilogue were shot in 1988. When Alan phoned me to offer me the gig he gave me a rundown of all the chapter titles, including prologue and epilogue. I don’t think he changed any of them as we progressed, although for a brief time ‘Blackmail or Mrs Barrett’ almost became ‘The Harlot’s Curse’. Any extra material that came to mind was fitted within the existing chapters without changing the total pattern, or structure. That word ‘structure’ sums up what Alan does best in all his work. In From Hell the structural idea behind everything is the architecture of time’ [ Related Links: On-Line Preview of From Hell, Buy From Hell]
27 February 2001
[comics] Another long, fascinating Alan Moore interview this time from 1998 which was published in the Idler… ‘I can’t conceive of vapour culture. I might not survive it. But that is where we are heading. I don’t know quite what I mean by my own metaphor, but I have feeling, it may bring in an even greater, faster space of fluid transmission, where no structures, as we used to understand structure, will sustain itself – we will have to come up with new notions of structure where things can change by the moment. I’m talking about physical structures, political structures, I can’t see coherent political structures in the traditional sense lasting beyond the next twenty years, I don’t think that would be possible.’ [via BugPowder]
29 January 2001
[big numbers] Alan Moore: ‘…with the world political situation as it is at the moment the political radical is put in a difficult position because, hum, how do you rebel against chaos? You know, much as political conspiracy theorists would like to think otherwise, the brutal truth of the thing is nobody’s in control, this is a runaway train. Nobody’s in control, there’s not some big conspiracy in control, whether it’s Jewish bankers or nazis or CIA spooks, the simple truth is that the world is a complex storm of mathematics, basically… Very complicated mathematics that is beyond human comprehension.’
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3 January 2001
[comics] The Mirror of Love — A complete Alan Moore script. He does panel descriptions in caps?! ‘PAGE 1, (PANEL) 1. OKAY, THIS STRIP HAS FIVE PANELS IN EXACTLY THE SAME LAYOUT UPON EACH PAGE: THERE ARE FOUR HORIZONTAL PANELS DOWN THE LEFT HAND SIDE OF EACH PAGE AND A TALL VERTICAL ONE DOWN THE RIGHT. SINCE I’VE HAD TO FIT THE ENTIRE OF KNOWN GAY HISTORY FROM PREHISTORIC TIMES ONWARDS INTO EIGHT PAGES, THERE ARE ABOUT TWO HUNDRED AND TEN WORDS ON EACH PAGE AND SOME RATHER LARGE CAPTIONS. SINCE THERE ARE NO BALLOONS I FIGURE YOU’LL BE ABLE TO LAY OUT THE PANELS TO ACCOMODATE THESE. THE HORIZONTAL PANELS ALL RECOUNT SCENES AND EVENTS FROM GAY HISTORY, WHILE THE VERTICAL PANELS ARE DIFFERENT.’
30 December 2000
[alan moore] Alan Moore on William Blake…. ‘Friday 2 February, 19.30 Tygers of Wrath. A spectacular finale to the exhibition, featuring music played by Alex James (Blur) and Simon Boswell, Jah Wobble, and Billy Bragg, and readings and performances by Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore. This event takes place at the Criterion Theatre, Piccadilly, W1. Tickets: £10 – £20’
21 December 2000
[comics] Alan Moore watches the K Foundation burn a million quid… ‘I think we’re moving towards some sort of paradigm shift, or massive collective mental breakdown some huge step of some kind; a basic change in our thinking. In politics, religions and the various structures we have built up, the world not the planet but the idea of the world we’ve created is likely, at least conceptually, to go up in flames the end of the world figuratively, but not apocalyptically not like a traditional notion of Armageddon. Maybe we’ve always imagined it’s going to collapse I’m not trying to be millennial about this I don’t see ‘the destruction and end of the world’, that chimera that we always seem to dangle over ourselves. Rather around this juncture of history when all of our systems are unstable and teetering towards this point of climax and collapse, we should consider the speed at which our culture is learning.’ [ Related Links: Alan Moore: Magician, The K Foundation: Why We Burnt A Million Pounds]
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26 November 2000
[comics] Eddie Campbell has published the first chapter of From Hell online. ‘Now, meself, I come from a working family. We vote Tory, always have done. The working class don’t WANT a revolution Mr. Lees: they just want more money.’ [via Lukelog]
21 November 2000
[comics] Media Nugget of the Day covers Watchmen. ‘In this bleak vision of America, the influence of costumed crime-fighters has kept Nixon in office, whipped Vietnam into shape easily, and brought the world to the brink of Armageddon. Writer Alan Moore began this novel as a reworking of the Charlton Comics heroes of his childhood, transformed it into an operatic dark-comedy of super-hero archetypes, and ended up with a chilling commentary on cold-war America.’ [Related Links: Alan Moore Fan Site]
18 November 2000
[comics] The full script of Sam Hamm’s Watchmen movie adaptation is online. ‘EXT. LIBERTY ISLAND – THAT MOMENT – DAY — as a LUMINOUS BLUE-SKINNED GIANT, SIXTY FEET TALL, wades through the harbor and steps up onto the island. He stares in dismay at the demolished statue . . . like a modern-day Colossus of Rhodes wondering what the hell happened to his date. Meet the last — and most powerful — member of our happy band: DR. MANHATTAN. Down below, THE COMEDIAN and SILK SPECTRE — battered but intact — are crawling out of the wreckage. The COMEDIAN looks up at the huge blue figure looming over them, and shakes a gnat-sized fist. COMEDIAN: ASSHOLE! WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?!?’ [via Haddock]
11 November 2000
[comics] Bugpower provides a link to a fantastic in-depth interview with Alan Moore. ‘Like, I’d have sworn that my interest in Jack the Ripper started in 1988 but then when my mum died and we went through her house, we found a big suitcase in which there was a load of old books and comics and things that I’d had when I was a kid, including two or three centrefolds from The Sunday Mirror, which were dealing with Jack the Ripper and I’d obviously clipped them for some reason. I didn’t remember doing it but obviously I’d had an interest in Jack the Ripper from the age of about twelve or thirteen. So I guess that these kind of themes, these ideas, they probably run all the way through our lives like a kind of developing music, that the basic kind of chord patterns are there right from the beginning, probably, but they just become more elaborate, or more penetrating or more deeper.’
31 October 2000
[comics] Warren Ellis reports that Australian Customs haved banned the import of From Hell. ‘Where does this leave Eddie? Attempting to use due process to convince Australian Customs – and, presumably, the OFLC — to unban one of the most acclaimed works in the medium, translated into six languages (Eddie mentioned this, and got the response “I don’t care what goes on in the rest of the world, this is Australia.”). Will they be reasonable? Evidently one Michael Dean, writer for The Comics Journal, has already been on the phone to Australian Customs. I’ll give Eddie Campbell the last word. “The Customs Chappie said that if Mr Dean quoted him in print that I would find no good will there from here on.”‘ [ Related Links: TCJ on the story, Eddie Campbell Comics, Alan Moore Fan Site]
30 September 2000
[comics] The Twilight Gallery — Alan Moore’s epic Twilight of the Superheroes is brought to life as various comics artists take a passage from the proposal and sketch it out… John Totleben: ‘Y’know, when I started doing [the Doll Man sketch] I realized that what Alan was probably after was something like The Fly (the one with Jeff Goldblum). Around the time the Twilight proposal was being conceived, I had a conversation with Alan about that movie. He liked it quite a bit, but was especially amused by the part where Brundlefly was interviewing himself and talking about how he’d like to become an insect-politician. Somehow, I think that must have worked its way into his design for the Doll Man character, either intentionally or subconciously. I just played off of that’ [Related Link: Earlier Post On LMG]
28 September 2000
[random link dump] These links have been sitting around waiting for something to tag them to which never came along: Old Salon interview with Jay McInerney, Slashdot review of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, Comics worth Reading and finally, Alan Moore — famous vegetarian!
21 September 2000
[comics] Alan Moore and Dave Sim discuss Life, Magic, Religion, Comics and pretty much everything in between… [Click the four links for different parts of the conversation] ‘As so, too, From Hell: the Whitechapel murders took place over a finite period of time and claimed a finite number of victims. Looked at in terms of the area of information covered, this appears at first glance to be a containable task with clearly defined limits. The problem is all in the surface detail. As more detail becomes apparent with closer and closer examination, so too does the “surface” of the narrative become more crinkly, prickly, and fractal. The perimeter of the story starts to extend towards infinity.’ [ Related Link: The Alan Moore Magic Site]
19 August 2000
 [[comics] Fandom reports that there is no sign of any detente between Alan Moore and DC Comics in the light of a 15th Anniversary edition of Watchmen. ‘”Regarding the Watchmen products, any renewed relationship with DC is not anything that people should be placing any hope in at all,” Moore told Newsarama. “I can tell you that right now, I’m having nothing to do with the Watchmen project – I completely disown it. I’m not at all interested if there are any more toys or anything at all comes out, and I shall not be cooperating with the project in any way.’
2 August 2000
[comics] upcomingmovies and comics2film cover Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell. ‘Inspired by “Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution” by the late Stephen Knight, “From Hell” suggests that Prince Albert “Eddy” Victor had fathered an illegitimate child, and when four Whitechapel prostitutes attempted to exploit this information, they were executed (the fifth victim was allegedly a case of mistaken identity). Complicit parties include Scotland Yard, the Freemasons and Victoria herself, while such London notables as Oscar Wilde and John “Elephant Man” Merrick make cameo appearances.’
31 July 2000
[comics] Alan Moore interview in The Independent. ‘I was glad to have been forewarned as to his appearance. Draped in black, well over six feet tall, with feral eyes, unfashionably and unfeasibly long hair and beard, and fingers aswarm with silver scorpion rings, Moore looks like the kind of man who might have been thrown out of Black Sabbath for being too weird.’ [via C-Log]
25 June 2000
[reading] Buy this comic: From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. Here’s a review from Salon. ‘As ambitious and affecting as anything ever rendered in pictures and word balloons, “From Hell” combines an intricate mystery, insightful social criticism and unflinching brutality capable of unnerving the most desensitized pop audience. It’s publication as a book promises to give it a new lease on life. That’s what happened with Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-Prize winning “Maus,” which was originally published in installments in the arty comic “Raw.” “From Hell” is the only graphic novel since “Maus” to rival its ambition and historical depth.’
3 June 2000
[comics] Alan Moore discusses the plot to the unfinished Big Numbers. [ Part One] [ Part Two]
1 June 2000
[comics] newsUnlimited talks to Alan Moore. “‘I can remember the exact panel during the writing of From Hell when I became interested in magic,’ he says. ‘Gull says that one place that gods inarguably exist is in the human mind. I wrote that sentence, and noticed the word ‘inarguable’, which is quite a big word, and that was the beginning of the end. I thought, ‘I can’t see why that isn’t true. And if it is true, then I’m probably going to have to change the whole of my life to fit around it.'”
29 May 2000
[comics] Alan Moore in Love. “Oh, Darling? I know it’s difficult for you! It’s difficult for ME, as well! I mean, you ARE married, and English, and you have two lovely daughters my age, and you seem to think you can levitate, and you’re always talking about your birth caul, and you haven’t had a haircut since Elvis was popular, and you produce a ten page book of footnotes after every date, and I have so little to offer a man like you?!” [via Adventures At 50 Feet]
28 May 2000
[comics] Alan Moore asks “What is reality?“
1 May 2000
[comics] Comicon reports Alan Moore is to change his name to “Alan Marvel-Vagina!” [second story on that page]
29 April 2000
[comics] DC Comics ordered the complete print run of Alan Moore’s League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen #5 destroyed because the reproduction of a Victorian age advertisement contains the phrases “Marvel Douche Company” and “vaginal”. Moore comments: ‘My parents raised me as a gentleman and everyone at Marvel should rest assured that I would never make reference to any person there as a “douchebag”.’
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18 April 2000
[comics] Alan’s Moore’s Twilight of the Superheroes can still be found on the web — if you know where to look. . ‘We have a powerful and intense sequence where Superman manages to smash his way through a lot of the alien forces single-handed while being ring-whipped by the Lanterns, only to finally be beaten to death in single combat by the massive and frighteningly powerful Sodal Yat.’
10 April 2000
[ WE] New column from Warren Ellis. He recommends you go read Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I agree… one of the best comics ever…
15 March 2000
Has anybody ever seen Rasputin and Alan Moore in the same room? Inquiring minds want to know…
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