September 6, 2023
[comics] Tom Tomorrow – The Never Ending Story … File the Dr. Manhattan on Mars meme under things I will never tire of.
September 6, 2023
[comics] Tom Tomorrow – The Never Ending Story … File the Dr. Manhattan on Mars meme under things I will never tire of.
July 27, 2021
[music] How we made Beat Dis by Bomb the Bass … Tim Simenon: ‘I grabbed a smiley face image from Alan Moore’s Watchmen for the sleeve and it transformed into this symbol for acid house which threw me off as it was never my intention. I would always struggle when people said: “You’re acid house.” Bomb the Bass was a lot of different things thrown together at once – there didn’t seem to be a name for that.’
April 8, 2021
[science] Why Physicists Tried to Put a Ferret in a Particle Accelerator … You’ll be glad to hear that Felicia the Ferret’s Intrinsic Field was not removed. ‘Faced with a recalcitrant ferret, the scientists reassigned her to a section of 12-inch-wide tubes in the Meson Lab, a testing facility that was still under construction. “She was taught to scamper through progressively longer tunnels until she was ready to try one of the 300-foot sections that will be joined together to make the Meson Lab’s tubes,” Time noted. After her first run, she emerged “looking a little tired and bemused but otherwise quite healthy,” according to Beck. She’d pulled the string all the way through. As planned, workmen pulled the swab through the tubes. It came out covered with specks of dust and steel.’
June 26, 2020
[space] Happy Little Crater on Mercury … Somewhere else in the solar system for Dr. Manhattan to visit.
March 4, 2020
[lmg] Twenty Years of LinkMachineGo – “I DID IT!”
September 16, 2019
[comics] Tales Of The Black Freighter: Marooned – Reconstructed … Watchmen’s EC comic-within-a-comic recreated using existing panels and word balloons.
August 28, 2019
August 20, 2019
[comics] Watchmen, t-SNE sorted … Every panel in Watchmen sorted by similarity using a machine learning algorithm by Pete Ashton.
November 22, 2018
[watchmen] The Watchmen movie proves you can be faithful to a comic and still miss its whole damn point … The Onion AV Club on the Watchmen movie. ‘From another perspective, the Watchmen movie is also a total debacle, one that fundamentally misunderstands the entire point of the book. To Moore, heroes are either ineffectual and useless, or they’re fearsome fanatics out to destroy lives. The impulses that produces these heroes are bad impulses. They’re about domination. There’s nothing cool about them. And yet Snyder can’t help but make everything look as cool as it possibly can.’
April 10, 2018
[watchmen] Ten Things A Diehard Alan Moore Fan Learned From the New Annotated Watchmen … ‘Kevin O’Neill Art Inspired the Alien Design: This one was pointed out to me my fellow Moore fan, Flavio Pessanha. In the annotations for 8.11.3, Klinger quotes Moore’s script stating that the alien should resemble the progeny of a squid and “a Kevin O’Neill” drawing. Presumably, this might be from O’Neill’s demonic aliens in Nemesis the Warlock, which first appeared in 1980.’
August 10, 2017
[funny] “I am tired of Earth. These people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives…”
July 26, 2017
[moore] “I did it thirty-five minutes ago.”
February 14, 2016
[comics] Watchmen Photomanips for Valentines Day … ‘I thought maybe we could… Um, try some wife-swapping after dinner.’
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…’
May 17, 2015
[funny] Nick Clegg to become masked vigilante ‘the Liberal Democrat’ … senses-shattering news from News Thump …
When asked how he intended to fund the expensive life of a costumed avenger, it was pointed out that Parliamentary expenses are ‘surprisingly flexible’. August 7, 2013
[watchmen] Five More Notes About Before Watchmen … more from Tom Spurgeon on Before Watchmen … ‘I doubt I’ll ever be convinced that Before Watchmen was an awesome project. I don’t think it was evil; I think it was sad. That was a lot of talent aimed at books whose nature allowed only the tiniest chance that remarkable art would result; talent that probably could have gone to bolstering the new superhero comics line or that could have been pushed in the direction of their own, similar achievement. So much of it smacked of parody — they really did a Dollar Bill comic book! With Steve Rude art! — that the whole thing was hard to fathom.’
February 4, 2013
[watchmen] Rorschach’s Father: The Lost Tapes … previously little seen Alan Moore interview from 1987 on Watchmen … ‘The Nazis weren’t villains but ordinary human beings who did terrible things. Heroes are usually people who, if you happened to be on the opposite side of any battle, would be famous monsters. It is all totally subjective. There aren’t any pure heroes; there aren’t any pure villains; there’s just people. But people like there to be heroes and villains, because if we can say “That person is a monster”, it makes us feel better or not so bad. Or it makes it not our responsibility. Mrs Thatcher isn’t a monster, sh’es just a fairly nondescript intellect, but she’s a greedy and an ambitious woman. It’s too bad that she’s Prime Minister. I mean, if she’d have stayed in her greengrocery business, probably not many peuple would have shopped there an awful lot, but it wouldn’t have done anv great harm. But a lot of the left wing in Britain like to portray Mrs Thatcher as a monster.’
November 14, 2012
[space] Happy Little Crater on Mercury … Another smiley face crater for Dr Manhattan to visit in our Solar System.
August 31, 2012
[comics] Thirteen Comics Purchases You Can Make For The Same Price As Buying Before Watchmen As Serial Comics … some interesting ideas for new comics to explore from Tom Spurgeon … ‘I’m hoping to engage a broader point about what comics cost and what is presented to us as something to buy. $145 at the comics shop is what one of the major players in the market is telling me is a worthwhile way to spend my money. Here are 13 other pretty casually gathered-together options for that same outlay.’
June 8, 2012
[comics] A Portal to Another Dimension: Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and Neil Gaiman … the Watchmen Panel at UKCAC ’86 – moderated by Neil Gaiman … ‘I think that because there’ve been a lot of fascist overtones in Marvelman [Miracleman] people assumed that the superheroes had taken over. There aren’t really any fascist superheroes in Watchmen. Rorschach’s not a fascist; he’s a nutcase. The Comedian’s not a fascist’ he’s a psychopath. Dr. Manhattan’s not a fascist; he’s a space cadet. They’re not fascists. They’re not in control of their world. Dr. Manhattan’s not even in control of the world — he doesn’t care about the world.’
May 8, 2012
[comics] Before Watchmen, Nineteen Eighties Style … Bleeding Cool covers DC Comics first (failed) attempt at Watchmen II … ‘[A well placed DC source] confirms another anonymous ex-DC source that it was planned for Andy Helfer to write The Comedian and Michael Fleisher would be offered Rorschach.’
February 15, 2012
[watchmen] Twenty-One Not Exactly Original Notes On More Watchmen, Written At A Slight Remove … by Tom Spurgeon …
Ten days or so past the official announcement, I’m thinking More Watchmen may be best understood as a blow to comics’ dignity. It’s product, not art. It’s a limited, small series of ideas derived from a bigger, grander one. It’s sad. One thing that Watchmen did a quarter century ago was to underline certain values of craft and intent and creative freedom that have helped to yield enough equivalent expressions — to my mind even grander expressions — that we may now see this follow-up project for what it is: nothing special. February 3, 2012
[watchmen] Revisiting Alan Moore’s Official “Watchmen” Prequel … fascinating look at a role playing prequel to Watchmen from 1987 which had advice and input from Moore & Dave Gibbons …
“Shortly after I picked up the Watchmen assignment I called Alan in Northampton,” says Winninger. “He was unbelievably nice and excited about the project. During that first call he spent almost two hours telling me exactly what was about to happen in the next nine issues of the comic, down to the level of individual panels and page layouts.” Winninger adds, “I still remember him saying ‘Right, issue 12. We open with six pages of corpses.’ I spoke with him several times thereafter to bounce my ideas for the adventure off of him, to clarify details to get his approval on the manuscripts and such.” And, as Winninger points out, Dave Gibbons provided original cover art for the Mayfair “Watchmen” books and added new interior art as well. February 1, 2012
[comics] The New York Times: DC Comics Plans Prequels to Watchmen Series …
Mr. Moore, who has disassociated himself from DC Comics and the industry at large, called the new venture “completely shameless.” January 11, 2012
[watchmen] Doomsday Clock moves one minute closer to midnight … ‘The Doomsday Clock, a symbolic gauge of nuclear danger, has moved one minute closer to midnight because of “inadequate progress” on nuclear and climate issues. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) announced the move – to five minutes before midnight – on Tuesday.’
January 9, 2012
[comics] Were Rorschach’s Speech Patterns Based On Herbie, the Fat Fury? … ‘When discussing Rorschach, [Alan Moore] shared that the tone of his diary was inspired by the letters Son Of Sam David Berkowitz sent to the news papers, and (confirming my own theory) that his speech patterns were based on Herbie the Fat Fury.’
January 4, 2012
[comics] Abhay Khosla tries to predict the Watchmen 2 Announcement …
Allusion to Alan Moore’s prickly relationship with the company— Moore is “unavailable” for comment at time of press and/or declines to comment. Maybe, maybe he says something pithy like “All of those characters are already dead to me. I’m busy writing a 10,000 page poem about a molehill’s evolution over 20,000 years. But why doesn’t anyone working in comics have their own ideas, I wonder?” (Jason Aaron tells him to fuck himself again 4 months later, then goes back to architect-ing X-Men vs. The Hulk crossovers). November 2, 2011
[comics] A STRONGER LOVING WORLD .. the Moment Of Moore I’ve been waiting most of the year to post! ‘Midnight, November Second.’
April 21, 2010
[comics] Watching the Watchman – St Albans comics legend Dave Gibbons interviewed … ‘I bumped into a friend of mine called Mick McMahon, who lived in Colney Heath, at the station at St Albans and he had this artwork under his arm. It turned out to be the first Judge Dredd job, and he said it was this new comic being done at IPC called 2000AD…’
December 22, 2009
[comics] Mike Sterling On Watchmen: ‘…there’s a part of me that wishes the Watchmen film had been an enormous hit, enough so that a sequel would have been inevitable, and that even possibly new comic book follow-ups and tie-ins would have been published. Because really, the fanguish that would have caused would have been epically awesome.’
August 14, 2009
[comics] Watchmen’s Dave Gibbons on graphic art, computers and the dreaded Comic Sans … ‘There are people who specialise in lettering, and I’ve had my hand lettering made into a digital font. I picked up a copy of the Dandy the other week, and I was amazed to see that it was completely lettered in my hand-lettering font. It was quite a thrill, really, having been a Dandy reader years and years ago.’
March 22, 2009
[comics] Advice Rorschach Says… ‘American Love – Like Coke In Green Glass Bottles… They Don’t Make It Anymore.’ (more…)
March 19, 2009
[comics] Just Imagine… Social Media’s Watchmen … a twitter from Ozymandias via BeaucoupKevin.
March 18, 2009
[watchmen] Charlie Brooker On Watchmen: ‘Fun as a massive great spectacle, but it surely can’t make any sense whatsoever to anyone who hasn’t read the comic; it was a bit like watching an impressive animated version of a collection of snatched memories of what the comic was like, if you see what I mean.’
March 9, 2009
[comics] Tom Spurgeon Reviews Watchmen … ‘Unless you were playing book bingo, there was little that was transcendent or particularly memorable about any of the moments from movie. I’m having a hard time latching onto anything a mere 10 hours after sitting in the theater watching it, a single moment like that weird shimmy that Heath Ledger did in the nurse’s outfit in Dark Knight or Robert Downey relishing a hamburger while announcing a major life decision in Iron Man or Clark Kent getting out of his own head for a moment by racing a train in Superman.’
March 7, 2009
[comics] Watchmen Links on LMG — just a reminder that I’ve posted a ton of links to interesting Watchmen stuff on the internet in the past. I recommend: A PDF of a few Pages Alan Moore’s Script for the comic, Something Awful Photoshops Watchmen and A Reconstruction of the Tales of the Black Freighter Comic. Finally, if you haven’t already – go and buy the comic book. You won’t regret it.
March 6, 2009
[comics] Who Makes The Watchmen? … A illustrated guide to the tortured history of the production of the Watchmen movie … ‘Hurm. Snyder and Tse seem to have faithful adaptation. Minus the squid. But keeping the violence. Fine with me.’
[comics] Review of the Watchmen Movie by Pádraig Ó Méalóid … a real Alan Moore fan reviews Watchmen … ‘There is a scene in the film where Doctor Manhattan is being interviewed in a television studio, just before he abruptly leaves the Earth to go to Mars. He describes something – I don’t recall what at this point – as being as useful as a photograph of Oxygen would be to a drowning man. And this is actually the most apt description I can think of for this film: It looks a lot like the original Watchmen book, but has none of its grace, or beauty, or subtlety, or sinuously beautiful timing.’
March 5, 2009
[comics] rorschachsdiary … if Rorschach had a blog it would be on Livejournal… ”yet another example of government oppression: hear scans_daily down for good. irritated; will not have to pay money to find out how the black freighter spin-off turns out. expect veidt behind it…” [via jzw]
March 3, 2009
[comics] Alan Moore, the man with a graphic vision … the Observer profiles Alan Moore …‘As novelist and Watchmen fan Susanna Clarke puts it: “He took something very American – the superhero comic – reinvented it [more than once] and sold it back to them.” And, one might add, didn’t even want to keep the profit he made on the deal.’
March 2, 2009
[comics] Legendary Comics Writer Alan Moore on Superheroes, The League, and Making Magic … ‘I had DC buying the company I had just signed contracts with, which is flattering in one way and very creepy in another. It’s like being stalked by a very rich demented girlfriend who can just buy your entire street in order to be close to you.’
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