Alan Moore!

'Perhaps Allan has just knocked out Ralph Malph's teeth for looking at Mina, or just being a twat.'

So, Big Numbers: the "most ambitious comic book of Alan Moore's career," according to a

...slightly rubbish Slate article on Slate. I haven't read it. Did he ever finish it? Should I look out for it?

don't bother.

Loads of potential, but it was still in the setting-up stages so no idea how well it was going to go. There were a couple of bits that were Bojeffries-level funny.

It might have been ambitious, but BIG NUMBERS is the least complete of just about anything he's written that I can think of. An interesting fragment, yes.

Loads of potential, but it was still in the setting-up stages so no idea how well it was going to go. There were a couple of bits that were Bojeffries-level funny.

Exactly so. It doesn't actually get started before it runs out (there are only 2 issues extant, right?)

I want to say there's three, but I only have two of them. Maybe it was that there was a third one completed and then destroyed (as the story goes.)

I thought it was two as well.

If you can find those two issues they are worth getting (great art too) and it's definitely his great unfinished work (and it's not his only unfinished work).

Two were published. I seem to remember that Al Columbia destroyed a bunch of the art he did for #3...?

WmC's recollection matches mine.

Actually, I think all of 3 and significant headway on 4.

Dave Sim would probably try to strike me dead telepathically for saying this, but I wonder if the series might have progressed farther if Moore hadn't been under the pressure of trying to self-publish.

Of course it would have, the completed #3 could have been printed if he hadn't gone bust paying his wife and her girlfriend a wage and office expenses. Or the other publisher hadn't chosen not to, as actually happened (Tundra had taken over by then).

#1 and #2 were done by Sink and Columbia and published. #3 was done by Sink solo and never published (though many pages were later shown unlettered in Submedia and TCJ and another magazine that I forget right now but had a green cover). #4 was completed by Columbia solo and then destroyed.

I bought a copy of the script for #3 from a CBLDF auction a few years ago. It's very good, and very long.

ysi?

otm

Just spent the day knocking up a silly tune sampling a bit of Moore from the Stewart Lee interview:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/mdyqas

oops just posted this on the watchmen thread by mistake

Alan Moore and Pat Mills talking abt the genius of Ken Reid:

http://www.archive.org/details/PanelBordersTheArtOfKenReid

Great examples of Reid's work here:

http://www.comicsuk.co.uk/Interviews/KenReid/KenReidOverview.asp

So LoEG 1910 is pretty underwhelming huh. Barely enough plot to get your teeth into, I'm just hoping it's building up to a pay-off in the second two chapters.

Re-read Halo Jones over the weekend. That's how you do it.

Looking back at Moore's body of work, I've started getting the feeling he's always been more of a concept man and the babies themselves are a little thin and spindly when they finally plop out onto the ground. I'd say From Hell and the Bojeffries stories are tied for his best.

Looking forward to the complete (with new final story) Bojeffries Saga!

What?!?! I missed this news!

Moore mentioned it in a recent interview at Forbidden Planet blog (http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/?p=12835)

Relevant bit reprinted here:

PÓM: And I think the other thing that I know is forthcoming – I believe is forthcoming – is – isn’t there a new Bojeffries Saga story?

AM: Yes, Bojeffries Saga. ... yeah, I have written a final Bojeffries – well, I don’t know if it’s a final – but I’ve written a kind of, it wouldn’t hurt if it was the last one, although maybe me and Steve will want to do some more with them. What we’re going to do is, we’re going to collect up, with Top Shelf, all of the Bojeffries material that’s appeared to date, and we’re going to cap it all off with a twenty-four page story called After They Were Famous, which is the Bojeffries in 2009, existing side-by-side with culture as it is now, as opposed to culture as it was in the eighties and the early nineties, and I think it’s the best Bojeffries thing yet, and

It’s great working with Kevin on the one hand and Steve Parkhouse on the other. They are two of the most British of all of my collaborators, you know, their influence are – I mean, this is not to mock the artists whose influences are more from the other side of the Atlantic, but there’s something very cheering about working with a couple of artists who grew up on the same Beano and Dandy illustrators that I did. You know, the Paddy Brennans and the Ken Reids and the Leo Baxendales, and who kind of worked that into their style.

So, yeah, I mean, I don’t know what the schedule is, I believe that Steve is working away, he said he found the script very challenging, but he thought it was a perfect ending, a perfect contemporary take on the Bojeffries, so that, I think people will enjoy that when it comes out, it’s very funny. It’s also got, they’ll never need to make a movie of the Bojeffries because one of the episodes in this twenty-four page story is coverage of the Bojeffries Movie, which shows a few shots, two scenes, a clip from the Bojeffries Movie, which starred, I think, Meryl Streep as Uncle Raoul, which is probably all you need to know.

It’s pretty good, it’s pretty good, and that’s just one part of this story. There’s a whole Big Brother part to it, and Ginda is a Blair’s Babe, Reth is a Booker Prize-winning author hanging out with Julie Burchill at the Groucho Club, and, yeah, what happened to Baby, and what happened to Jobremus, and what happened to Granddad. It’s pretty good. The entire family is broken up, by the way, when the story starts. They haven’t seen each other for years, which doesn’t sound like the most promising introduction, but it leads to a very, very good story, so I think that everyone’s going to enjoy that.

P; I always loved Bojeffries, I felt they were…

AM: One of my favourite strips, and fantastic to be working on it again. Writing the script it was like I’d written the last one a couple of months before. The characters were just immediately there, and I suspect that Steve is going to find some similar things when he’s drawing it.

Never heard of this Bojeffries thing. Worth picking up? I'm kind of a non-comics fan who loves Moore in general.

It's one of his best series ever, ever ever.

I'd love to read the Bojeffries Saga, but apparently it's only been reprinted once, in 1992, so it's probably impossible to find (in Finland at least).

there's always the internet... oof, not that cheap though:
http://www.alibris.co.uk/booksearch?wquery=bojeffries

Several of them have been reprinted before, eg in Dalgoda (colourised though - but so was the Tundra version. Which stopped me from buying it). Why not just wait for the new edition?

So there's gonna be a new edition?

What we’re going to do is, we’re going to collect up, with Top Shelf, all of the Bojeffries material that’s appeared to date, and we’re going to cap it all off with a twenty-four page story called After They Were Famous

Okay, cool!

Top Shelf is going to get lots and lots of my money. This year it's Eddie Campbell's Alec: The Years Have pants, Jeff Lemire's Complete Essex County and Marshal Law by Mills and O'Neill. Next year is the two volume complete Bacchus and hopefully this Bojeffries collection.

They're reprinting Marshal Law? Cool, I might want to get that.

I thought Marshal Law was owned by Marvel though?

Marshal Law was initially published through Epic, which gave Mills and O'Neill certain rights; that they were then able to take it to several other publishers - Apocalypse, Marvel again and Image all published further adventures - and that they own the copyright says much. They're probably paying a licensing fee to reprint it.

Top Shelf info here:

http://www.topshelfcomix.com/catalog.php?type=2&title=598

I only know Bojeffries from the Dalgoda reprints, always thought they were really funny.

Seriously doing a little Snoopy dance here over a Bojeffries collection.

I've never read any Bojeffries, but the level of enthusiasm here is getting me excited.

It's some funny stuff alright. Probably the funniest thing I've read from the Discliple of Glycon.

I remember thinking Bojeffries was funny enough, but there are other funnier things in the world.

Like "DR & Quinch Go To Hollywood".

PS - I saw Halo Jones at half price books the other night. Should I go back and nab it?

Do it. The only bad point is annoyance that it's only a third complete and will more than likely remain so.

Absolutely, it's one of Moore's best works. It's more of a "episode comic" than a perfectly crafted whole, like Moore's later work, but many of the episodes are brilliant in themselves, and in the end it does also provide a pretty moving story about the protagonist's growth from a naive teen girl to self-respecting adult. (The ending is left a bit open though, as there was supposed to be sequels, but they never happened.)

(x-post)

Halo Jones is brilliant, I recommend it highly. The unfinished thing people talk about is not a problem - it is like the life of someone from before they were famous. In this case, probably the more interesting bits.

The unfinished thing people talk about is not a problem

It does work perfectly well as it stands. I just want more!

Yeah, me too. If Moore is actually finishing this Bojeffries thing he started 25 years ago, then maybe there's hope for those Halo Jones sequels too. Though of course it also depends on whether Ian Gibson is up to do it.

a) Bojeffries isn't one long story, it's short pieces, and he did them as and when for ten years, so doing another new piece for another new compilation is basically standard practice

b) he's had 25 years of saying he will never ever go back to Halo Jones, and this is Alan Moore speaking: how does that translate to "hope"?

Gibson's always said he's up for it, on the other hand.

Gibson actually did do more without Moore, didn't he?

All I know of is this concept pic for book four:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/38/Halo_slave2.jpg

yeah, brainfart, I was thinking of Skizz.

Picked up LoEG 3:1910 yesterday, and really enjoyed it. Always good to see new vintage characters turning up, and Carnacki is one of my favorites.

Years ago, I saw an article by Moore in which he was enthusing about a strip by Cliff Harper in Last Gasp Comix' ANARCHY: 'The Black Freighter', based on a Brecht lyric. This was later referenced in the pirate strip in Watchmen, and the song turns up again here, interwoven with another Brecht lyric 'What Keeps Mankind Alive'. Obviously, the original strip had a big impact on Moore. Harper is still working as an illustrator, and his woodcut-styled images turn up pretty regularly in the Guardian.

. . oh, and Mac the Knife is in there too, of course!

LoEG 3:1910

just got this myself - its awesome! Loved the Threepenny Opera stuff running through it

Dodgem Logic is a bit of a throwback to the 80s fanzine scene, I must say.

The problem with Halo was a creators rights issue, wasn't it? Moore refused to carry on the series until IPC gave him back the rights to all the characters he created for them, which at that time was never going to happen. And I think he has some undisclosed beef with 2000AD's current publishers which means he probably wouldn't be doing anything for them.

I'm sure I remember hearing that Gibson has expressed an interest in carrying on the series on his own? Apparently it was very much a collaboration between the two of them in terms of plotting and story ideas, there's a few interesting tidbits in "Thrill Power Overload" about it.

This Dodgem thing any good Aldo?

And I think he has some undisclosed beef with 2000AD's current publishers which means he probably wouldn't be doing anything for them.

Alan Moore in crazy feud with publisher! Astonishing.

I don't think his feuds w/publishers have been particularly crazy... the America's Best fiasco was amazingly underhanded

We need a "favorite uncompromising bridge-burning comics creator" poll.

The more I think about that, the more I like it. Who has recommendations? Adams, Toth, Sim, Ditko, Moore, Kenneth Smith, Byrne, Macfarlane on my shortlist so far.

Sim? Certainly uncompromising, and he's pissed off a lot of his peers. But he's never had beef with a publisher for obvious reasons.

He's had tons of beef with publishers! He's just never put himself in a position where they could punish him financially for his views.

^^^OTM

Sim beefed with distributors as well

Who has recommendations

Kirby duh

kirby compromised, willingly or otherwise, plenty of times in his career

my nominations - r. crumb (no compromise), wally wood (all bridges incinerated)

Dodgem Logic is endearingly crap btw - feels like it could've come hot off the presses of the Birmingham Arts Lab

oh sorry I misread the poll request as being specifically about artist v. publisher feuds... nevermind!

frank miller, robert williams, john byrne?

Cosign on Dodgem Logic. Has next to nothing to praise it for other than feeling like you should/could have bought it 25 years ago, although the CD is OK and the feature on the Northampton music scene was all right.

I finally read LOEG: 1910, and was a bit underwhelmed by it. Like Chap said upthread, it barely has a plot. The new characters in it seemed interesting enough, but it felt like they'd just been introduced when the story was already over. And if the next volume is gonna take place in 1969, it looks like we ain't gonna see most of them again, except for Mina, Allan, Orlando, and possibly Janni. Speaking of her, while I thought she was cool, the plot device used to make her turn against the world was kinda too obvious and unimaginative. I thought it was sad that the whole book worked better as an introduction of characters we aren't gonna see again than as a proper story with a beginning and an end. I would've wanted to know what happens to Janni after she became the pirate queen; I guess it's still possible we find out in the next book.

Speaking of the characters, I think the original two series benefitted from using characters that are universally recognizable. The characters used here, especially Carnacki and the burglar fellow, were much more obscure, so while Moore did put them to good use, their metafictional resonance was lost on me. Also, while the idea of Orlando is intriguing, I think Moore overdid it. I guess when you're writing an immortal character who's been around for millennia, it's tempting to have him/her been there for every important event in history, but when you think about it, it's a bit ridiculous. It's kinda like those people who "find out" about their previous lives in hypnosis or something, and turns out their previous lives were always princes and princesses and adventurers and so on, never some regular chap who did boring things. So Orlando was mostly just a cipher for superhistorical "been there, done that" attitude, not as interesting as a character as s/he could've been (or as she was in the novel and the movie). But since s/he is quite likely to be around for the following chapters, maybe Moore can build on what we've seen here.

Btw, It was weird to see Moore introduce a conspiracy called "the Invisible College" which will summon a "moonchild" to usher a new aeon. I know these ideas long predate The Invisibles, but it still felt like there was some metafictional commentary towards Morrison in it. Morrison has often referred to Moore's work, but as far as I know Moore has pretty much ignored Morrison, might this be the first time he's acknowledged him?

Orlando's history is pretty explictly laid out in the Black Dossier, dunno what yr complaining about there

he's complaining about how Orlando has to make a LOUD WINKING REFERENCE to hir history on every second page of 1910, and how this constitutes 93% of hir dialogue in the issue

Exactly. I haven't read the Black Dossier, so maybe s/he is better fleshed out there, but in 1910 hir character is pretty much "the guy/girl who has been there at every important historical event", and not much else. And I think that's kind of a lazy way to write an immortal character. Compare that to the immortal dude in The Sandman, and you see what I mean: he'd done a few important things too, but you know, mostly just regular, mundane stuff. Of course it's possible Orlando is merely bragging, and s/he hasn't actually done everything s/he claims to have done, but so far the story hasn't given much proof for such an interpretation.

yr otm abt 1910, sadly :(

Kinda wishing Moore'd just show us the stories he's hinted at in the Dossier, etc; the fight against the German League'd be a fantastic comic, prob better than the orig vol 2, and we're not going to see more of it than a fairly plain textual description. And tbh Moore's prose isn't all that great, esp when run down the borders of a comic book.

I think the point Moore is making with Orlando's dialogue is that he/she's an obnoxious self-absorbed braggart. which is a reasonable outgrowth of he/she having been around longer than anyone else - Orlando's got a carefully cultivated sense of superiority and boredome ("yawn, seen it all before"). Kinda like an annoying music hipster who's always talking about how things were so much cooler way back when and all these new bands are just ripping off old bands, etc. Orlando clearly annoys the other Team members, you can see this social dynamic in action.

anyway I don't disagree that this largely felt like a "set-up" story, but it didn't bother me at all.

"Invisible College" is Aleister Crowley and co, yo.

I'm happy to give Moore the benefit of the doubt for the next issue, but this was pretty unmemorable and indulgent.

Morrison didn't make up the term Invisible College ya know

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_College

Orlando annoys them so much they fuck hir

Guys, did you read what I actually wrote:

I know these ideas long predate The Invisibles, but it still felt like there was some metafictional commentary towards Morrison in it.

I'm aware that "Invisible College", "Moonchild", and "a New Aeon" are not concepts Morrison came up with, but since they all are very important in The Invisibles, I felt that Moore mentioning them all within a couple of panels on the first page of 1910 could be a metafictional wink towards Morrison. (Just like Morrison has made metafictional winks towards Moore, even if he's never actually used his name or the names of Moore's works/characters.) Of course it's kinda hard to tell for sure before we find out what kind of a Moonchild the Invisible College in LOEG is summoning, and what kind of a New Aeon they want to bring forth.

I think the point Moore is making with Orlando's dialogue is that he/she's an obnoxious self-absorbed braggart. which is a reasonable outgrowth of he/she having been around longer than anyone else - Orlando's got a carefully cultivated sense of superiority and boredome ("yawn, seen it all before").

This is the impression I got too, but that still doesn't change the fact that,
A) apparently Orlando still has done all those awesome things, i.e. he's not making this shit up, and
B) bragging about his extraordinary adventures is pretty much all s/he does in 1910.

I simply felt this is a kinda too obvious and lazy way to write an immortal character. If you compare Orlando to Hob Gadling in The Sandman, I think Gaiman had a more interesting approach to what being an immortal might be like.

think moore wld be giving morrison a hostile finger rather than a friendly wink (ie they don't really 'get on')

Yeah, that's why I thought it might be interesting to see what kind of a reference to Morrison Moore might make. Morrison has obviously referred Moore's work several times (and not all of those references have been that friendly, see Zatanna #1 for example), but as far as I know this might be the first time Moore acknowledges Morrison.

I really don't think it is even a sideways glance at Morrison. More likely, it is really all about Crowley; the Fall of 1910 was the Rites of Eleusis performances in London.

^^^yes

I simply felt this is a kinda too obvious and lazy way to write an immortal character. If you compare Orlando to Hob Gadling in The Sandman

have you even read Orlando? Moore didn't make up this character.

the biggest problem is that it's BORING, we get the character trait and how it affects the group dynamic from one or two instances, Orlando could have said something else witty or self-obsessed or plot-developing or annoying on the other 61 pages

(I mean, it didn't shit me as much as it does T-dogg, but I totally get where he's coming from)

Anyone have any opinion on Unearthing? (Or know where to purchase the non-multimedia version? Like just the essay or him reading it)

I know it not.

Anyone reading Neonomicon, the sequel to The Courtyard, his Lovecraftian-themed title of some years back? I wuvved the Courtyward, and #1 of the new one seems good too.

The Courtyard was pretty good. I was tempted to get the companion piece - is that any good? I wish I could be bothered to read enough Lovecraft to understand all the references - is there some significance to why he's dismembering the bodies in this way? It's reminiscent of From Hell.

I just finished the Promethea series. Some of the artwork in that is nigh-inconceivable. I just can't fathom some of it. My only gripe is that while it was very pretty, I preferred the Malkuth stuff with the painted doll and Sonny Baskerville etc to the journey through the Immateria.

I saw him read Unearthing, with accompanying Mitch Jenkins slideshow and music by Crook and Flail (aka Fog and Doseone aka Andrew Broder and Adam Drucker), in the tunnels under Waterloo station last Friday. Really captivating, which I might not have expected had I known it's basically a potted biography of a UK comics writer (and his magickal imaginary friend). Would be interesting to see how it stands up outside of that atmospheric setting, if it has the same sense of enchantment.

The prose version of THE COURTYARD is a hundred times better. I'm finding the book a little disappointing, but that might be the art, which is just there or the pricetag.

My only gripe is that while it was very pretty, I preferred the Malkuth stuff with the painted doll and Sonny Baskerville etc to the journey through the Immateria.

Absolutely agree, the first and final Earthbound arcs were excellent. The Immateria stuff was a gorgeous snoozefest mostly.

The prose version of THE COURTYARD is a hundred times better. I'm finding the book a little disappointing, but that might be the art, which is just there or the pricetag.

I used to think the art was only so-so, but it has started to grow on me. I find it appealingly understated. In the second book Burrows does some impressively subtle character stuff with it.

I reckon The Courtyard is better as a comic. Things like the mirrored closing and opening frames work far better in this format than just in prose.

is there some significance to why he's dismembering the bodies in this way?

not really, though the magic of Lovecraft is you can throw pretty much anything in.

I really liked the artwork in the Courtyard - notice the pictures on the wall in the drug dealer's house. And the crepey tree.

WTF - this isn't actually a thing is it?? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDDHHrt6l4w

ah no, it's not - very good though!

You hadn't seen that one before?

no sorry I can't know all the internet all the time.

So I went to Forbidden Planet in NYC today and asked the cute girl with the tight shirt behind the help counter about 'Unearthing' and neither she nor the giantess next to her had any idea about it.

slags!

it's not a direct market "product"

it's on amazon.co.uk

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Unearthing-3CD-VINYL-Various-Artists/dp/B003TOS84E

(could swear it wasn't £100 last week)

see, is £50 here (+£10 shipping)

https://lexrecords.com/shop/pages/view.php?stockcode=LEX090BOX

byrne, liefeld, Watchmen 2

Opinions on some of Moore's novella-comics? Including The Courtyard, Another Suburban Romance, The Killing Joke, Light of Thy Countenance etc...?

Killing Joke is overrated, bit of a one idea comic. Good art though.

I agree with that, though that one idea is pretty interesting.

A Small Killing is pretty interesting, it's Moore doing a French style psychonanalytical art comic. The story kinda tries to be more deep than it actually is (a common thread in Moore's work), but it's well worth reading. The art by Oscar Zarate is very European, and looks great.

Killing Joke is underrated, I think! It's all about the Bolland, who my thirteen-year-old self would probably have married if possible. Perhaps the story would have been better served as a single issue than a "prestige" format thingy.

It's all about the Bolland, who my thirteen-year-old self would probably have married if possible.

Same! I even wrote to him for a school art project and got a very gracious note and a signed Dredd picture, which I have of course lost.

ya i really liked the killing joke, although i'm not that au fait with the batman/joker mythos personally.

It did a lot to create the Batman/Joker two sides of the same coin thing, which is pretty important (cf The Dark Knight).

Moore I've not read:

A Small Killing
Supreme
Wildcats
Lost Girls
Captain Britain

captain britain starts slowly - moore has to kind of clear the decks of all the rubb that went beforehand - but by the time he and davis get into their stride it is really really good - there's a recentish british marvel reprint which collects it all

Opinions on some of Moore's novella-comics? Including The Courtyard, Another Suburban Romance, The Killing Joke, Light of Thy Countenance etc...?

Three of these are not by Alan Moore.

really? how so?

captain britain starts slowly - moore has to kind of clear the decks of all the rubb that went beforehand - but by the time he and davis get into their stride it is really really good - there's a recentish british marvel reprint which collects it all

The Alan Davis art is of course beautiful, but otherwise I thought this was very uneven. (Then again, I've always thought Swamp Thing was uneven too.) Some cool ideas mixed with not-very-innovative cosmic superhero stuff, IMO Moore's early DC work has stood the test of time better when it comes to straight superhero comics. But it's fun to read Captain Britain and see how it anticipates some themes Moore would return to later on; the "fascist Britain" part of course parallels V for Vendetta, and you can even spot a blood-stained smiley in one panel!

AM's Swamp Thing run taken as a whole certainly has its ups and downs, but the American Gothic cycle is amazing. My young mind was blown to smithereens reading it 5 or so years after it first came out. It was the first Moore thing I read, give or take the odd 2000 AD story. Looking back now, the nuts and bolts of the writing can be annoyingly pretentious, but the broader storytelling is untouchable.

Then the siege of Gotham! Incredible. The lost in space stuff that came after that is patchy, yes.

really? how so?

one's a comics adaptation by someone else of a prose short story Moore wrote 20 years before

one's a comics adaptation by someone else of a song Moore wrote 15 years before, previously adapted into comics by yet another someone else ten years before

one's a comics adaptation by someone else of an essay Moore wrote 15 years before

none of them are novellas in any sense, and none have any actual creative involvement by Moore. (and Avatar are lying, thieving pricks who don't deserve your money, but that's not exactly rare in comics.)

Are Miracleman or Top 10 worth a punt?

I've tried (and failed) to read Swamp Thing several times. Perhaps time for another go...

Miracleman is interesting as an early foray into deconstructing the superhero - the central character develops into kind of a proto Doc Manhattan. Top 10 is very slick and funny.

If you didn't get on with ST, you may have issues with MM though. They're written in a similar way, and ST is better.

Top 10 and the spin-off Smax are two of my favorite Moore works. His playful stuff is underrated.

I dunno, obviously I like all that stuff but it can be a bit glib.

Despite being very clever, well crafted etc.

I'll take a little glib over a little pretentious. I loathed Promoethea, for example.

or Promethea, even.

I think Tom Strong is the most underrated of the ABC line, he seemed to have more invested in the characters in that one. And it reminds me of early FF and Tintin, both of which I love.

And when Promethea got the balance of magical didactism and action right, it was spectacular (which sadly it didn't for most of the run).

Tom Strong might be the best balanced of his work in that it isn't too pretentious or too glib. Sadly, I found it a bit too repetitive after the first year, but that first year was ace.

Gosh had copies of Miracleman 14 for £60 last weekend. quite a few others, including the gaiman run, were £30 (i have a spare #14, picked up for £1, woot)

Top Ten was great, promethea i haven't finished (yet). was disappointed when tom strong changed authors. swamp thing's his magnum opus though, imo. #46 was the first thing i bought having read a review in one of the music papers. terrible place to start (middle of both american gothic and crisis crossover)

STRAY COMMENTS:

SEEK SEEK SEEK SEEK OUT Eddie Campbell's adaptations of his performance works, either separately via bin-diving or collected in Disease Of Language. The Birth Caul floors virtually anyone who comes into contact with it, from my experience.

Cap Brit - Lotsa good ideas that deserve a better venue, really - worth reading for Davis, mind you. I keep waiting for someone to bring back The Fury. Morrison weirdly nicks a climactic stray detail about climbing a flaming stairway toward a doorway for The Invisibles.

Promethea - Both extraordinarily impressive and pretty, but not entirely readable, at least if your eyes drift whenever you get the sense that the word magic is about to be spelled with a k.

Swamp Thing Annual #2 - Swampy goes to heaven, hell, and chats with Deadman - may be my favorite single-issue comic ever.

Supreme I happen to think is super-swell. One or two not-so-good issues - something about time travel and the Civil War leaps to mind - and three quarters of the run is drawn by fifteen year-olds (I don't blame you if that's a deal-breaker), but there's a great wealth of fun there, with Moore tossing off ultra-clever pastiches and remixes of Weisinger/Schwartz Superman ideas on every page. It still bugs me that we never got to see The End (here the concept literalized as an actual super-villain) in action.

Birth Caul is great

eh but all his stuff is great imho (varying degrees of course). Agree that his more playful/less serious stuff is often the most fun - Smax miniseries is great for ex, as is his Death of Superman twofer and a bunch of his other early DC work. Never read Captain Britain (dunno if this is even available in the US?), or Supreme (artwork looks terrible)

Promethea gets a lot of hate for its didacticism but I loved getting each issue as it came out. Swamp Thing I also read while it was coming out and had a similar "holy shit" factor to it, just the hopping around from one idea to the next from issue to issue was very exciting.

Never read Captain Britain (dunno if this is even available in the US?)

It is - a little hunting will turn it up. Moore actually writes the intro, which can be summed up as "Man, that Davis can draw, can't he?"

My favorite issue of Promethea is the one with intelligent goop causing catastrophe at a parade, or something. Kinda sad that Promethea never took a metaphysical voyage on an ocean of the Weeping Gorilla's tears.

Supreme (artwork looks terrible)

Can't fault you there!

re: Tom Strong - it was fun while it lasted but they don't really bear re-reading. there's not a lot of THERE there, y'know? each story arc revolves around some fairly basic, but fun, concepts and there's not a ton of depth or anything. It's kinda like the 1963! stuff except slightly less fun/ridiculous. Are those 1963 stories collected anywhere? those were awesome

Are those 1963 stories collected anywhere?

No, sadly.

that's a shame! I loved all the pseudo-Stan Lee/"Affable Al" notes and letters pages stuff.

I keep waiting for someone to bring back The Fury.

I think Claremont actually did bring back the Fury, in some X-Men story from a few years back.

The Birth Caul floors virtually anyone who comes into contact with it, from my experience.

Traitorously, I don't <3 the adaptation, but the CD is the absolute best thing Moore has ever done.

Not that I did this, as it would obviously be illegal, but I imagine that you could download all the Miraclemans, turn them into a PDF, and have it printed privately by some place like Lulu.com as a nice big trade paperback (though in black and white, not colour) for about $15. Then, as of course I DID NOT, you could read them and finally enjoy them. You could also do something similar with Morrison's Zenith. Not that I did or would.

The B&W Marvelmans look 1,000,000 times better than the colourised versions, has anyone 5cann3d those (and the first two books of V) yet?

the latter half of the run was originally in color though...? it's only those first, what, six issues or so that were originally b&w, right?

b&W V for Vendetta was pretty stunning too

ah Warrior magazine...

The latest issue of Neonomicon is a bit extreme. I liked it, but I wouldn't want to leave it lying around where Aunt Mildred might chance upon it.

I must be tragically out of the loop because I've never heard of this before. Is it worth picking up? I'd hope for something Future Shock-y, but with more gore.

I like Neonomicon and The Courtyard a lot, but I also love HP Lovecraft related stuff generally.

Need to read it, as I only have the first issue (which was no plain sailing itself).

Those two issues have had me wondering whether Alan Moore has a secret shame as a player of role-playing games. There were bits of them that felt very like Call of Cthulhu sessions, particularly in the second one as the detectives start doing ever more stupid things (and with such hilarious consequences).

So this is Moore doing a Cthulhu mythos comic story? Sounds awesome.

yuppity yup. They're very well done. I mean, the Courtyard is probably the best Lovecraft-inspired comic ever, and one of the best Lovecraft-style fictions ever by anyone other than Lovecraft.

Who's the artist? I've totally missed this one.

Jacen Burrows, published by Avatar.

Umm... yeah. That's a pretty extreme comic, right there. I think the CoC thing sounds right, although it's more like a Paranoia version. Wow.

Actually, the cultists kind of remind me of the Crossed.

It was bagged "for adults only" at Forbidden Planet! With a LOT of sellotape!

Not 100% sure it's for anyone only.

It was bagged "for adults only" at Forbidden Planet! With a LOT of sellotape!

I love reading comments where the small print says that all characters are over 18.

I mean comics. duh.

Wasn't there some controversy with Lost Girls having graphic depictions of teens having sex with each other, and with adults? I haven't read Neonomicon so I don't know what's in it, but maybe Moore thought he should play it safe this time?

I'd say it was the publisher that put the disclaimer into the small print.

okay, jeez, where to start. i completely missed the courtyard. and i missed issue #1, though i kept bugging the comic shop people to order it. issue two finally arrived last week, and i picked up a copy. holy shit, what a nasty little mindfuck of a comic, especially those last 6 pages. so hideous, and yet so clinical. almost like black comedy, almost like porn, but mostly just hideous. love alan moore as a writer, though i worry he's lost down a paranoid wormhole of literary reference and hermetic magick, a fear this evil little volume does nothing to assuage. dunno that i've felt so completely truncheoned by a funny book in ages. wanna know what happens next, but shit, do i really wanna know?

anyway, some good reading on reading to be had here.

Surprised to see him pop up on the BBC last night talking about Austin Osman Spare.

^ looked like a great exhibition, will try and check it out before it closes.

Before the beard!

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lhd3wg7G8B1qhb67co1_500.jpg

from the A Moment of Moore tumblr.

http://cdn.stereogum.com/files/2009/11/drunkenmonkey-tune-yards-remixed.jpg

^nothing but luv for both these people btw

I really, really need to check out Necronomicon. And I really, really want to do mushrooms with Alan Moore

is that his daughter?

that's tUnE-yArDs

I don't understand. Are you saying she looks like Alan Moore?

in those pictures, yes? are you winding me up?

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y109/fez_/twins.jpg

lol

i love the future

http://data.whicdn.com/images/5537330/30myfb4_large.jpg?1292404553

I was a bit annoyed to find issue 4 of Neonomicon in my local comic store today. When did issue 3 come out?

A month ago maybe? I've been looking forward to seeing what happens in issue 4.

I have thus far been afraid to open the pages of issue 4.

Annoyingly, no where in Dublin seems to have a copy of issue 3. Dublin SuXoR.

And my LCS didn't order enough copies of 4 for me to read it, they're on backorder.

apologies if this has been mentioned (specifically the picture)

http://www.comicscube.com/2010/07/get-off-alan-moores-case.html

has any other major storytelling artist (i phrase it that way to include filmmakers and novelists as well as comics writers) ever committed him or herself so wholly and explicitly to appropriating and reinterpreting the work of others? moore has taken his fascination with pre-existing mythologies, genres, characters and character-types so far that he's created a form/genre that's his and his alone, or so it seems to me.

it makes sense that it would be a comic book writer who carried recombinant literary appropriation to its logical extreme, as comics more than any other storytelling form depend on a stable of pre-existing characters and mythologies that grow by slow accretion at the hand of many different artists. many of the british comics writers who came of age in the 80s were similarly interested in the revisionist excavation of pop culture's past, but no one has taken this approach anywhere near so far as moore.

i'm not sure what to make of it. books like the league of extraordinary gentlemen and lost girls provide a good deal of "where's waldo" style character-spotting fun, and the pastiches and tributes are often quite amusing, but there's a weirdly hermetic quality to it all. moore's world seems composed entirely of references to other things, many of them referential in themselves, and it's all held together with an uneasy and often angry sense of paranoia. i'm intrigued by the depth of detail, but there's very little to his storytelling outside polemical vigor and the pleasure of referentiality itself.

comics more than any other storytelling form

no

really? i admit that i'm talking about superhero comics as though they were the entirety of comicdom, but with that out in the clear, i can't think of any other form/genre that's so indebted to a specific mythology and/or canon. the way oral traditions once passed along myths and folktales is comparable, but what else? film and television occasionally recount the exploits of familiar characters (daniel boone, batman, various historical figures), but for the most part not. these forms are nowhere near so fundamentally based on the telling and retelling of a fixed set of stories concerning a fixed cast of characters.

i admit that i'm talking about superhero comics as though they were the entirety of comicdom,

yes

ok

"but there's very little to his storytelling outside polemical vigor and the pleasure of referentiality itself."

i have to disagree -- there's a pamphlet-length book he wrote a while back on how to write comic books that shows what he's doing is at least interesting on a formal level that has nothing to do with polemics or referentiality. also, the highest selling comics composed of appropriated cultural mashups right now isn't by alan moore -- it's fables, much to the chagrin of my buddy who thinks fables is beneath comparison.

a pamphlet-length book he wrote a while back

a series of articles he wrote for Martin in 1985, you mean. reprinted in AH iirc

yeah, i know that moore isn't a big seller these days. nor am i suggesting that stories based on other stories (mashups, w/e) is new or unique to moore. just impressed by how deeply he's burrowed into it.

i would agree that his narrative construction is formally interesting. my complaint is more that he doesn't seem to be addressing anything outside the small room of his pet obsessions: literary history, conspiracy theories, hermetic magic, cranky politics, etc. this makes his work feel weirdly closed to me, shut off from the world. doesn't help that his characters are so relentlessly two-dimensional and symbolic, their relationships and dialogue so unlike anything i've encountered in life. his stories are like dragnet episodes where joe friday and bill gannon are polysexual, sybaritic magickal adepts who keep stumbling into weird porn conspiracies.

^ some shitty grammar. sub: "...stories based on other stories (mashups, w/e) are new or unique to moore. just impressed by how deeply he's burrowed into this approach."

"his stories are like dragnet episodes where joe friday and bill gannon are polysexual, sybaritic magickal adepts who keep stumbling into weird porn conspiracies."
this sounds awesome!

i don't like a lot of his stuff, but the complaint that alan moore is too focused on writing about the things he wants to write about seems really weird to me, considering how strongly he reacts to outside pressures to do things he doesn't want to do. I do think his stuff is better than fables, though, but that's a series that I would suggest is just as committed to operating in the referential arena as moore, if not more so, if for no other reason than they have more pages and volumes to deal with. also, any given superhero title is by default operating under decades of references and continuity, at least within its own sphere, so at this point it's just part of the game.

literary history, conspiracy theories, hermetic magic, cranky politics, etc.

i don't much like alan moore but that is plainly enough material for any one body of work

well, it's sustained umberto eco pretty well. but i think he does a better job with characters and relationships, has a richer view of life and sense of humor, integrates the political with the personal in interesting ways. doesn't give off quite so intense a "locked in the library of babel" vibe.

re philip nunez: i like moore's stuff a lot more than fables, but the comparison does help shed light on my criticism. it's not that alan moore's interested in whatever. i wish more superhero-oriented writers used the forum to explore things outside the usual good guy/bad guy, tights & powers stuff. i get frustrated with moore because his characters take such a back seat to his more esoteric interests. he just doesn't seem all that interested in people.

bill willingham doesn't exactly write realistic characters and relationships. his view of humanity seems derived from popular media, tending to soap opera complications involving reassuringly familiar types. he sentimentalizes where moore disengages. this probably explains why his work is more popular. i really just have no idea where moore's characters are coming from. they seem like aliens or robots. (note that this applies mostly to the stuff moore has written in the last 5 years or so. in the first moore stories i was exposed to, watchmen and swamp thing, there's a lot more attention to characters and relationships.)

also, i'm phrasing all of this far too strongly, like i've identified the "critical flaw" in moore's work. i don't mean to do that and should write more carefully.

i think alan moore is one of the best and most interesting writers in comics today. there is, however, something about his work that i find rather off-putting, and i'm trying to get at what it might be.

has any other major storytelling artist (i phrase it that way to include filmmakers and novelists as well as comics writers) ever committed him or herself so wholly and explicitly to appropriating and reinterpreting the work of others?

Stanley Kubrick says Hi!

a lot of directors do, really

has moore really done anything all-cylinders-on since 'from hell'

'locked in the library of babel' -- well, after the first couple collections georgie gets about as obsessive a revisitor of past tropes as al does, only it's all islamic mysticism and cowboys

i'm sure there are dozens of ppl from approximately 1961 onwards whose prose careers are mainly scribbling at the edges of pre-existing narratives. kathy acker is sort of close in methodology to moore, but is more interested in junk sculpture than in architecture. (or landscape gardening, if you're more an acker fan than a moore fan.) i don't know. john barth? i feel like on a better day i could come up with a half dozen more relevant names

i think what's offputting about moore's work is that he's had no real call to push himself for fifteen years, tbh

Some wag in the control booth dubbed Alan Moore "Rasputin impersonator" in a recent interview. Such scampery!

has moore really done anything all-cylinders-on since 'from hell'

idk what cylinders you're looking for but Promethea, Top Ten, Voice Of The Fire and The Birth Caul? (Most of the CDs are v. good but Birth Caul is the greatest thing he's ever done, maybe)

Stanley Kubrick says Hi!

no, i don't think kubrick's work compares w TLOEG, lost girls and moore's updating of the cthulhu mythos. stuff like promethea and tom strong set the stage for this part of his career, and at that point he was approx as dialed in on excavation and reinterpretation as, like, george lucas and quentin tarantino, but he's gone a hell of a lot deeper since.

voice of the fire is contemporaneous with from hell, promethea and top ten are entertaining enough but minor, birth caul i thought was very impressive when i was fifteen

i'm sure there are dozens of ppl from approximately 1961 onwards whose prose careers are mainly scribbling at the edges of pre-existing narratives. kathy acker is sort of close in methodology to moore, but is more interested in junk sculpture than in architecture. (or landscape gardening, if you're more an acker fan than a moore fan.) i don't know. john barth? i feel like on a better day i could come up with a half dozen more relevant names

lol, i was thinking about acker when i wrote that stuff yesterday, but i don't think her work is all that similar. acker uses existing narratives & characters as a shell from within which to tell personal stories that only occasionally intersect with the "inspirational" text. john barth used beowulf to make grendel in much the same way that angela carter used fairy tales as a genre, but he never committed himself to this approach. it was pretty much a one-off. angela carter is perhaps a competitor to moore, in that she did write quite a few reinvented/deconstructed fairy tales, and those are what she's best known for, but i still want to say there's something different and unique about moore's work. the best comparison i can think of off the top of my head is gregory maguire, author of wicked and its sequels. all of his books have been based on fiction and folktales, and the wicked series plays moore-like spot-the-inspiration games.

what makes moore's work in TLOEG and lost girls different, imo, is that it's not a pastiche of a single work or a generic approach, but of literature itself. it draws in every character, story and cross-connection possible to create this dizzyingly dense landscape of direct reference. and it changes its for from moment to moment to approximate this or that source. tarantino does do something similar, but seems much more limited in his sphere of reference.

voice of the fire is contemporaneous with from hell

From Hell started in 1988 (and ended 1996), Voice Of The Fire came out 1997

yr thinking of gardner, not barth, but yeah, neither of them committed themselves quite the same way moore did

i don't know - i'm sure someone's written a novel which consists solely of pre-existing fictional characters interacting with each other without explicitly breaking diegesis - the rider there is so that smth like mulligan stew doesn't count

my suspicion is that this relies on something like 'the reification of traditions of popular fiction' (oy) but don't ask me to make that idea work - like, that we now arrive at a place where you can write the league of extraordinary gentlemen says essentially bad things about our culture, in ways that moore may or may not be aware to the extent he is complicit in

xpost how long do you think it takes to write a novel exactly

Birth Caul is the greatest thing he's ever done, maybe

kind of agree with this tbh

yr thinking of gardner, not barth, but yeah, neither of them committed themselves quite the same way moore did

gah, yr right! i don't know how that happened there. stupid brain...

lost in the funhouse is the only barth i've ever read. bogged down in the sot-weed factor, and always meant to read giles goat-boy but never got there.

other artists with a moore-like approach: terry gilliam in time bandits, several of umberto eco's novels.

michael moorcock. and, unfortunately, neil gaiman.

my suspicion is that this relies on something like 'the reification of traditions of popular fiction' (oy) but don't ask me to make that idea work - like, that we now arrive at a place where you can write the league of extraordinary gentlemen says essentially bad things about our culture, in ways that moore may or may not be aware to the extent he is complicit in

that's an interesting idea. do you mean "essentially bad" in the sense that drives simon reynolds' retromania, a frustration with the stagnant and backwards-looking nature of contemporary culture? or bad in that the real is being swallowed by reified ephemera? i suppose the latter complaint is pretty close to my issue w moore: there isn't enough of what i think of as "the real" in there with the cataloging of arcana.

moorcock has largely devoted himself to the exploration of a self-created mythology though, right? the countless books of the "eternal champion cycle" don't reference much outside it, though he has done work with pre-existing stories (behold the man, gloriana...).

gaiman predicts bill willingham and frequently borrows from existing stories, but i think there's a difference between working with the stuff of myths and legends (something that's quite common, really) and the wholesale ransacking of literary history, complete with spot-on artistic and textual copycatting, to which moore seems to have committed himself.

i doubt i'm ever going to read retromania tbh

i don't think 'contemporary culture' is stagnant and backwards-looking, but i think popular fiction largely defined is not in a great place right now -- i don't know. try and imagine loeg '12 with the cast of twilight, harry potter and law and order: svu

-

most (all?) of moorcock's 'eternal champion' stuff has recognisable precursors and ancestors, doc savage or conan or james bond, but i don't know that it does anything ultimately all that interesting with the relation to pre-existing ideas, concepts, characters

i think gaiman is trying to apply moore's method to inappropriate materials maybe? he's definitely not all that interesting

Moorcock ransacks history, not just literary history

(altho he does that too)

i think it's impossible to write a naive story that is 'here is a new idea about a wizard' (or a barbarian, or a vampire, or a detective) *

and there are a couple of versions of the sophisticated take of 'here is a new idea about a wizard' - there's the declaredly self-aware kind, which is what happens with new wave sf in some ways - but see m. john harrison or michael swanwick to follow through on it in fantasy - and the sort of motivated alignment of various elements of pastiche, which is the mainstream of fantasy fiction right now

and i think you need to reach that point for moore's method to look viable - it needs to be impossible to say anything naively 'new' about vampires or gentlemen adventurers for it to seem worthwhile to go back and write a story about mina murray having sex with allen quatermain

in one of the recent loeg stories he introduces the blazing world, which is where all the fictional characters go and cohabit, which is meant to be some kind of utopian place: but really it must be the dullest place imaginable, because in order for it to exist they have to already be past it

-

*i don't know whether or not this is the same thing as it being impossible to write a naive story that says 'here is a new idea about a petit bourgeois family', which is obviously a much older problem

Moorcock ransacks history, not just literary history

agree with this, but in a sense that's true of literature in general. shakespeare did this. historical novelists have always done this. moore's crazy-quilt "gotta catch em all" pastiche is something different, imo.

and i think you need to reach that point for moore's method to look viable - it needs to be impossible to say anything naively 'new' about vampires or gentlemen adventurers for it to seem worthwhile to go back and write a story about mina murray having sex with allen quatermain

this aligns, i think, with reynolds' critique and with complaints about postmodernism in general.

if it were just astory about nina having sex w allan in some steampunk victorian world, it wouldn't be at all remarkable. it's the attempt to pour the entire history of western literature (including film, comics & illustration, folktales and musical theater) through this framework that makes moore's project seem a little different to me. maybe i'm making a mountain of a molehill, i dunno. appropriation is certainly a popular approach to fantasy these days.

i hate to think that i'm agreeing with simon reynolds

agree with this, but in a sense that's true of literature in general.

true I don't think Moorcock is particularly unique in this regard.

I do think the extent to which he has developed his "multiverse" concept is audacious and unusual, it goes a bit farther than most authors' self-contained literary worlds. And it's also a good deal sloppier and more carefree than Moore's uber-referentialism in LOEG. Moorcock has different people pop up here and there and makes very obvious nods/homages/pastiches to various forms and characters but he doesn't overstuff every narrative other people's creations.

Love the caption:

http://desmond.yfrog.com/Himg857/scaled.php?tn=0&server=857&filename=rwojr.jpg&xsize=640&ysize=640

the BBC would never use the term "Mall Santa"

I assuming there should be no need to point out that caption was added later, right?

duh.

Still funny. And accurate.

You'd be surprised how many people seem to think it's genuine, though. Or maybe you wouldn't.

Sadly, not surprised at all.

a lot of people found that fake fox news thing doing the rounds last month genuine

I fell for it too. Guess I underestimated the acidity of BBC control-booth humour.

I finally read Neonomicon, and I have to say, wtf?! Okay, I know it's a horror comic, and I'm not saying - SPOILER ALERT! - rape isn't an issue that can't be dealt with in horror, but I can't figure out any good reason why the series should have such an extended, graphic rape scenes. If Moore just wanted the reader to get what happened to the protagonist, that could've been done in one or two pages, without such attention detail. The only explanation I can think of is that Moore has some kind of a weird rape fetish; the subject does seem to come up often in his comics, though obviously it hasn't been done to this extent before.

I read some analysis online that claimed the whole comic is a meta commentary on how women are treated in American mainstream comics, and this is what justifies the depiction of rape in it. I'm not totally sold on that theory, but even if it were the truth, surely you can get the message across without using what amounts to rape/torture porn. Seriously, after having read Neonomicon, I felt so angry for having paid for this thing that I almost burned the whole comic.

Yeah, my reaction wasn't as extreme as that but I did find it rather nasty without having a particularly interesting story.

In it I noticed that his dialogue is getting pretty lazy these days as well.

What mystifies me the most is, the part in Lost Girls where Wendy faces Captain Hook as he's about to molest here is one of the strongest anti-rape scenes I've ever seen in comics, so I can't for the life of me understand how the same writer could come up with this?

a year or so before it came out, Moore said he couldn't remember much about it because he'd been in such a terrible frame of mind when he'd taken the commission (years earlier even than that) but he thought it was probably very unpleasant and he might not read it himself

That's weird... Weren't Burrows's pages sent to him for his approval before they were printed? Didn't he even want to see what the final product looked like before it was published under his name?

He did it 100% for the paycheck so I'm sure his level of interest was much less than on other projects.

It's funny. "The Courtyard" is a pretty neat little short story. Everything comicswise that's come from it, however, has been...not that great. But even Alan Moore is capable of phoning stuff in, I suppose.

The only explanation I can think of is that Moore has some kind of a weird rape fetish

has Moore ever done a run on a comic that didn't feature a rape scene at some point? serious question.

I mean I love him but I would say yeah dude unequivocally has a rape fetish.

Maybe MIRACLEMAN? It's been a long time, though.

Johnny Bates gets raped by another boy in the orphanage? foster home? wherever it was -- prompts him to turn back into Kid Miracleman.

Is there rape in Tom Strong?

I don't remember one in Supreme either. But it is weird that it's a go-to traumatic trigger for him.

Well, was thinking female rape, but yeah, there's that in...the first or second issue? Slipped my mind.

I think it was #14. During the Totleben run.

Right. It's obviously been so long since I've read those that I should've just kept my yap shut.

Is there rape in Tom Strong?

hmmm good catch. I can't remember one off the top of my head. The whole thing is so lighthearted it's possible he managed to eschew it.

also re: Miracleman - Gargunza rapes/molests the sleeping miracle-woman or whatever iirc (altho I can't remember if this is shown explicitly or just referenced)

but yeah I haven't read those in forever either. I think my brother has the individual issues.

don't remember any rapes in the bojeffries saga

or maxwell the magic cat

or captain britain

or big numbers

yeah, but he never finished that

or warpsmith

or skizz

or halo jones

or top ten

Well there's statutory in Top Ten. And the whole teen sidekick prostitution ring thing.

plus SMAX has rape, and that's kinda Top Ten

so basically all the early British stuff which I've never read and for a long time was unavailable in the US is rape-free. glad we cleared that up

oh right, didn't realise when you said "has Moore ever done a run on a comic that didn't feature a rape scene at some point? serious question" you actually meant "please validate my ignorance"

He's matured into the rape fantasist we all know and love.

lol

Maybe only after he started working in American comics then...

America brings out the rapist in everyone. Just ask Tosh.

Peter Tosh is a rapist?!

"Legalize it"

Peter Tork is a papist!?!

No rape in Killing Joke, just the jolly breaking of a woman's spine.

And of course the rape in LoEG is gay, and the raypee is invisible so it doesn't count.

i thought invisible guy was the perp?

Nah, Mr Hyde totally bum raped the Invisible Man. To death.

yeah but the Invisible Man was the original rapist

yeah, he's raping merrily away in the girls' boarding school

for a long time was unavailable in the US

lol when

in the 80s when I was a kid and couldn't buy them at comic book stores

Mina gets assaulted in the first or second issue of the first series. Or at least threatened to be assaulted by swarthy foreigners.

in the 80s when I was a kid and couldn't buy them at comic book stores

these were out in TPBs from 1986 which iirc was the 80s

No rape in Killing Joke, just the jolly breaking of a woman's spine.

Am I the only one who felt rape was totally implied in that scene, and the only reason Moore didn't explicitly use it was because it was a mainstream DC book and a major character?

Yes, probably.

these were out in TPBs from 1986 which iirc was the 80s

if you're trying to tell me that I saw them in stores when I was a kid you are sadly mistaken

I think I saw some Maxwell the Magic Cat strips reprinted in a Comics Journal interview story once tho

There was some US floppy which was printing Bojeffries as a backup every issue back then. Dalgoda? I also remember being able to get D.R. and Quinch p easily.

Dalgoda yes. I have those - they are good! I was buying pretty much everything with Alan Moore's name on it around that time. If I had seen Halo Jones or Captain Britain TPBs I would have bought them. I did not.

DR and Quinch was reprinted in Warrior... iirc? (along with Miracleman and the OG b&W V for Vendetta)

warpsmith and skizz I don't think I ever even heard of. I just think it's weird to act like these were widely-read/widely available on a par with Swamp Thing/Miracleman/V for Vendetta etc. they strike me as pretty stereotypical insignificant early work

stereotypicalLY

I bought MAXWELL THE MAGIC CAT collections in the mid-80s, but they only showed up in really big comic shops (only saw them in a couple across all of Southern California.) Moore could sell superheroes, but strips were another matter.

When was 2000 A.D. Monthly coming out in the US? I think that's where I read a lot of this stuff.

My LCS in Memphis had Maxwell collections, but I passed on them. I think the only Warpsmith story I've seen was one in the Atomeka anthology A1. (The Bojeffries stories in those were better anyway.)

(warrior #4 story here as jpgs http://thewarriorscomicbookden.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/saga-of-swamp-thing-32-greatest-comic.html plus links to cbr copies of that and the rest, i think)

((not tried links, required sign-up, maybe expired))

wtf def never seen that before!

warrior stuff really wasn't readily available in the US even through the 90's. I mean you COULD find it but it didn't even really trumpet the fact that it was moore and I did hunt it down over the years.

the fact that these comics were or weren't available in america is BESIDE THE POINT. Shakey asked: are there any runs of comics by alan moore w/out rape in them, and i offered a few examples of runs of comics by alan moore w/out rape in them. i'm sure there are others. now i think WmC raises the interesting question of why this troubling repetition of rape as theme and scene - and i agree it exists in many of the examples cited - was far less common during the early part of alan's (mostly british) career. and i'm sure there are many gd answers - the american comics were less stringently edited, over time it became an idee fixee, whatev - that don't involve the merits or o/wise of euro comic distribution in america. that's all.

i managed to acquire some v nice smokeable hemp produce earlier on today which is why i'm up too late discussing this stuff but now i shld go to bed. gnight ilcers.

I guess I'm just as dismissive of that early stuff as Alan is lol, it's a pretty small/largely insignificant part of his ouevre imho, things he did before his true rape-y interests came to the fore haha

anything i havent read is insignificant - Shakey Mo Collir.e

you forgot the all-important 'lol' or 'haha'

if you're trying to tell me that I saw them in stores when I was a kid you are sadly mistaken

lol you have gone from "this never existed" to "ok it existed but it was never available in the US" to "so it existed and was available in the US but I never saw it and therefore you're STILL WRONG and it's NO GOOD ANYWAY I bet"

DR and Quinch was reprinted in Warrior... iirc? (along with Miracleman and the OG b&W V for Vendetta)

you r very i

weren't the earlier strips aimed at a younger market? what was the average age of someone buying 2000ad? warrior?

The demographic of 2000AD at that time(early eighties) was boys aged 8 - 14, I think? I couldn't say the exact age range for Warrior, but it was definitely aimed at a much older, "mature" audience. I guess if they were hoping to appeal to readers that grew up with the original Marvelman, that would put it at mid-twenties to thirties? Maybe.

this has gone oddly like that ilm thread where someone asked for a top 100 songs about rape

lol you have gone from "this never existed" to "ok it existed but it was never available in the US" to "so it existed and was available in the US but I never saw it and therefore you're STILL WRONG and it's NO GOOD ANYWAY I bet"

I love this ILX tactic where posters misrepresent what was actually said to score points CLASSIC

Ward is OTM that the availability of this stuff is largely irrelevant, my only point in this thread derail was that Moore's non-rapey material predates his prominence - why that is is a more interesting question but who cares about that let's play collection-stack-measuring internet pedant instead

my suspicion is that this relies on something like 'the reification of traditions of popular fiction' (oy) but don't ask me to make that idea work - like, that we now arrive at a place where you can write the league of extraordinary gentlemen says essentially bad things about our culture, in ways that moore may or may not be aware to the extent he is complicit in

-

try and imagine loeg '12 with the cast of twilight, harry potter and law and order: svu

-

hey i was almost right!

anyway, it's funny that the last part of century came out the same week as 50 shades of grey became the best selling commercial object ever, because there is absolutely nothing that separates them

Ouch.

cranky mo collier

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/olympics-fourth-place-medal/mary-poppins-fight-voldemort-olympic-opening-ceremony-170354031--oly.html

Can I hear you say WTFUCKINGF?

Do we get the penis ray gun too?

One can only hope.

Speaking of which, was there any literary significance behind the penis ray gun or was it just a cheaply crowbarred dick joke on the part of Moore?

Can't say I enjoyed 2009 very much at all. I couldn't even be arsed to read Minions on the Moon. Is it worthwhile? Considering how much I <3 the first two books, the rapid decline of this series has been more disappointing than I can put into words.

I'm not sure what the joke in that joke would be, but I would be surprised if there wasn't a magical sausagefest somewhere with strong views on the cock as a magic wand.

From Jess Nevins' site:

Greg Daly writes, “The 'penis as wand' gag here is something implied throughout the Harry Potter books. The Hogwarts stories can be understood as a magical rather than a sexual coming of age -- it seems that sex is wholly sublimated as magic in the books. All teachers are celibate, with one teacher's lycanthropy standing in as a surrogate homosexuality, with closed-minded parents fearing that exposure to him will somehow harm their children. More broadly, male students are expected to excell in Defence Against the Dark Arts, where the wand is the primary tool, while female ones tend to do best in Potions, reliant most heavily on the cauldron; the sexual symbolism of wands and cauldrons is fairly clear. In the final Potter book, Rowling repeatedly uses phallic language when describing the use of Potter's wand, and it's significant that for a significant part of the book he's rendered impotent when his wand is broken. In other words, this isn't just a cheap and puerile joke. It might be that too, of course...”

Greg Arnott writes, “you may find it useful to look into Crowley's symbolism of the wand to clarify the death of Alan Quatermain by Harry Potter's cock. Particularly Chapter VI of Book 4: Book 2: Magic, "The Wand". Its a tricky chapter for an aspiring magician who goes around talking about "constructing a baculum" without knowing what the word means in the non-esoteric sense. “

From the Mindless Ones:

Amy: Finally Alan has Harry put away that bloody wand and reached for the real source of all that expelliarmussing. It’s juvenile, Harry’s juvenile, but it also speaks to a character who’s disenchanted with all he’s been through, all the whomping whufflepuffing, an angry kid who’s seen through his conditioning and decided to cut through the shit and get real (Grr! Potter ain’t for kids anymore!). Pissing on Quatermain is also a disdainful act and a macho one (“My fiction’s bigger than yours!”) and I have nothing against Moore going with this. People’s weird relationship with sex and with their own private parts is something barely in evidence at all in not just comics but most fiction. I can easily imagine a character with Harry’s powers doing what he does here. Why not? Last week someone probably far less fucked up than Harry smeared their poo all over our work toilet wall…. I think some people read this sort of thing and all they see is Moore going for shock value, and he is, but he’s also touching on something very real – violent people often have violent, or at least quite odd, sexualities…. But more to the point, we all have sexualities and Moore wants to talk about that! Thinking about it now, it’s probably one of the reasons why Moore’s comics seem hung up on rape, because it’s just another facet of the extreme violence that suffuses adventure stories, only one that’s normally shied away from.

Adam: Suffuses adventure stories and reality.

Andrew: You read that as urinating? I thought he was “sacrificing a male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence”, as it were…

Masturbation seems to have been the key to magic in the view of both Spare and Crowley. Crowley talked of the highest awakening being caused by sacrificing a child — “the sacrifice of oneself spiritually. And the intelligence and innocence of that male child are the perfect understanding of the Magician, his one aim, without lust of result. And male he must be, because what he sacrifices is not the material blood, but his creative power.”

(By sacrificing a child he meant sacrificing the possibility of a child, by ejaculating somewhere other than inside the vagina of a fertile woman).

Spare, meanwhile, believed that sigils should be charged at the moment of orgasm. Is Potter here inadvertantly turning Quartermain into something more powerful when he kills him, by concentrating on him as he ejaculates? It’d explain Quartermain’s ghostly presence at the end (Aslan Quartermain…)

(On a more prosaic note, Quartermain here looks exactly like he’s been shot by a Dalek).

Amy: The electric drip as Harry shakes his dick off!

“….Fucking repulsive piece of mekrob…”

I didn’t know this, I thought mekrob was Urdu for shit or something, but actually this cuss word (which kinda does mean shit) was first popularised by one E. Cartman of South Park, Colorado and it refers to his most hated food stuff.

Anyway, all this dragon slaying is a much better outlet for Orlando’s periodic bouts of psychopathy than the indiscriminate slaughter of fellow servicemen and civilians. Just keep them adventuring…. This ties in with what Allan was saying earlier in the book about the adventuring fucking them all up. Once you’ve tasted that high, the day to day must seem pretty flat.

gotta agree this is the weakest one yet. felt really perfunctory

awesome 1985 interview/promo re: Swamp Thing w/Len Wein, Alan, and Karen Berger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJlZUpgXQJI&feature=related

(note that everybody thinks they're working on a horror comic fwiw)

http://slovobooks.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/last-alan-moore-interview/

damn, he went in

That was really hilarious, especially when he got to his gigantic Grant Morrison boner

culminating with this

As already stated, any publishers, friends, artistic collaborators or other close associates of Grant Morrison or Laura Sneddon should not approach me in future. Further to this, any periodicals or institutions which publish or have published interviews with Grant Morrison should similarly not attempt to contact me. To be brutally honest, I’d prefer it if, as with the Before Watchmen re-creators, their associates and their readers, admirers of Grant Morrison’s work would please stop reading mine, as I don’t think it fair that my respect and affection for my own readership should be compromised in any way by people that I largely believe to be shallow and undiscriminating.

He sounds like a very bitter and boring person. I guess he's earned it though.

The Moore/Morrison feud is Kaufman/Lawler-esque in its OTT-ness.

I am a terrible comics fan because I either had no idea or had completely forgotten about it (though tbh I rarely pay any attention to what comics creators say about each other)

whole thing was pretty lol but man yeah his bitterness/vitriol is very OTT

otoh I have no idea what works Morrison is supposed to have ripped off of Moore - the Invisibles? Animal Man? Batman Inc.? idgi

remember 50% of it is ripped off from Michael Moorcock

this older article gives Morrison's side of things (as told to the infamous Laura Sneddon)
http://comicsbeat.com/the-strange-case-of-grant-morrison-and-alan-moore-as-told-by-grant-morrison/

I get that Moorcock was pissed (and considered suing?) over the Gideon Stargrave thing but even that was just a minor part of the Invisibles. idk everything seems so blown out of proportion.

I wish both those guys would take this to the astral plane Ditko-Dr. Strange style and duke it out up there psychedelically rather than insisting we all listen to this bitchiness. I used to love reading Moore interviews but that may be the last one I can deal with.

rather than insisting we all listen to this bitchiness

c'mon this is hilarious though

feel like morrison has been waiting to straight up cast moore as a batman villain, surprised that hasn't happened yet

xp yeah it is so OTT it can be funny. I liked how Morrison turned it around by coming up with ways Moore could have ripped HIM off.
I guess Moore means so much to me that it's painful watching him
- insist that everything that happened in comics over past 30 years directly derives from him
- continue to be completely blind to the fact that practically everything he does is a very clever revision of some past property
- every day add to his enemies list of people he will no longer talk to (I think at this point it's down to Kev O'Neill and his wife who he'll speak with)
- ride the high high horse of him being some infinite paragon of virtue in a fallen world surrounded by thieves and liars

feel like morrison has been waiting to straight up cast moore as a batman villain, surprised that hasn't happened yet

Seven Soldiers was nine years ago man!

continue to be completely blind to the fact that practically everything he does is a very clever revision of some past property

yeah this is pretty weird. made weirder when he complains about the comics industry endlessly recycling stuff.

V for Vendetta the lone(?) exception

There was a bunch of stuff in the early days (Bojeffries, D.R. & Quinch, etc) but not much the last 25 years.

was excited to get back my issues of Dalgoda recently, cuz they had Bojeffries in the back. many lolz.

Top Shelf is reissuing the Complete Bojeffries Saga next month.

From Hell remains my favorite Moore.

This new 'interview' was worth it for the a+ burn when he says (I'm paraphrasing) that grant was four or five years younger than him "at the time" but that the age gap has mysteriously grown larger since then.

Yes lots of it comes from moorcock anyway but surely even more from Ballard!

yeah this is pretty weird. made weirder when he complains about the comics industry endlessly recycling stuff.

See? He of all people should be charitable even when he suspects that something's gone beyond 'influenced by' to 'derivative of'. And besides in comics everything IS derivative of everything else, it's how the industry survived. And to top it off in some cases the properties Moore revised were themselves copies of copies of copies.

If you get a chance read the Twilight proposal though, it's pretty prescient and I'm sure a bunch of that was remembered and used. If I was a DC editor at the time I know I would have taken a lot of it on board.

So he wants it both ways: to be seen as the man who *really* provided all the ideas for other people's current success, AND he also wants to wash his hands of the industry, and say he's grown out of it, the industry as it stands is for the mentally challenged or arrested or whatever. He could just say 'godspeed, enjoy building on my past success, I've moved on, have fun' he's determined to demand even more recognition ... from people he despises? I dunno.

Never meet yr idols, I guess!

i honestly never read 7 soldiers. should i?

if you like Morrison doing complicated and thrill-powered superheroes and having Alan Moore joeks

but not much the last 25 years.

Big Numbers, The Birth Caul, Voice Of The Fire, The Moon And Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre Of Marvels, Act Of Faith, A Small Killing, Dodgem Logic, Top Ten, The Highbury Working, Astounding Weird Penises, Madame October, Promethea, Jimmy's End, Snakes & Ladders, Candid Chit-Chats With Cartoon Kit-Cats [ok yeah but it includes one of his own], Unearthing, This Is Information, Outbreaks Of Violets, Angel Passage, Unearthing, p much every poem I can think of except for The Mirror Of Love (which was '88, so all minor ones, but still), From Hell...

i honestly never read 7 soldiers. should i?

YES

I knew pretty much nothing about the DC continuity he was playing with and I thought the whole thing was wonderful

From Hell is derivative as fuck (as historical fiction is, by definition), and half of those are adaptations he made from other works of his or that he didn't have much to do with (Eddie did a lot of heavy lifting). I did overlook Promethea and Top 10, which was in error. Still, no matter how you parse it, the vast majority of pages he's produced have been derivative of other people's work.

i haven't heard of like 90% of that list

I don't know how much exposure Moore had had to Charles Addams' cartoons and the Addams Family/Munsters shows, but even Bojeffries seems derivative to me. Hilarious and an improvement in some ways, but still derivative.

Astounding Weird Penises

uh.jpg

I'm assuming that's either the worst or best thing he's ever written.

iirc it's his tumblr

Bojeffries allegedly quite similar to Henry Kuttner's 'Hogben' short stories, tho' I've never read the latter

in comics everything IS derivative of everything else

Not sure why this is more true of comics than any other form, and am v. sure it's not entirely accurate, either.

i should t0rrent 7 soldiers sometime... unless someone here has a cbr/cbz they'd like to hook a fella up with?

I like 7 Soldiers a lot altho there is some typical Gmoz inscrutability/handwaviness of various details

Not sure why this is more true of comics than any other form, and am v. sure it's not entirely accurate, either.

Yeah what I was thinking of there is the tendency of companies to imitate and knock off each others' characters - constantly vying for market share with similar offerings based on what whoever's currently on top is doing. The recent book on Marvel history does a great job of highlighting this.

I mean you could say sure every industry does this - electronics, automobiles, processed food, whatever - but even if it's a commonplace it should still be kept in mind, I think

Should also be kept in mind that the American superhero comic book does not equal the whole of comics

Fair point - thinking of the big stuff here

Just found the Killing Joke script - fantastic stuff tho man, he seriously needed a new printer or typewriter or something

Read the end just to see if there were any hints about the recent interpretation that Batman kills the Joker at the end. I don't get that here, but that last scene with the joke is still pretty chilling in script form.

And dear god his typewriter was awful, thank god for PCs and word processors

that could well be a 15th-generation photocopy, or a carbon.


From Hell is derivative as fuck (as historical fiction is, by definition)

ehh, I don't know that "doing lots of deliberate research on a subject" is on the same level as "filing the serial numbers off Plastic Man."

and half of those are adaptations he made from other works of his or that he didn't have much to do with

uh?

Big Numbers - conceived, written, designed and published by Moore / painted by Sienkiewicz

The Birth Caul - conceived, written and performed by Moore / music written with and performed by Perkins and J (even the CD of this one is off the desk from the performance). unless you're saying that because it's autobiographical he's being derivative of his life?

Voice Of The Fire - 100% solo by Moore, including devising an entire grammar for one chapter. 2 chapters based on real ppl iirc but again I'd call that more like "research" than "derivative" (plus one autobio sequence)

The Moon And Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre Of Marvels - conceived by Moore and J, written and performed by Moore, music written and performed by Perkins and J

Act Of Faith - written by Moore, directed by Jenkins

A Small Killing - written by Moore, painted by Zarate. again, you have to posit that the (very slight!) autobiographical elements are derivative to make this stick

Dodgem Logic - conceived and funded and published and co-edited by and written for by Moore. yeah, lots of other contributors were in it, but many if not most were directly commissioned by him.

The Highbury Working - conceived, written and performed by Moore / music written with and recorded by Perkins.

Astounding Weird Penises - written and drawn by Moore. homage elements to both undergrounds and 50s horror comics, but it's not trading on either wholesale

Madame October - no publishing credits or other detail on the CD, but it's at the very least sung by Moore, and Tom Hall's the only other credited person

Jimmy's End - written (and funded iirc?) by Moore, directed by Jenkins

Snakes & Ladders - conceived, written and performed by Moore / music written with and recorded by Perkins.

Candid Chit-Chats With Cartoon Kit-Cats - as I noted, includes parodies of existing characters, but since he also includes Maxwell, give him a partial pass? co-drawn and (at least co-)written by Moore, co-drawn by Gebbie. can't remember if the lettering looks like hers or his, or a mix.

Unearthing - uh even if you are arguing that he didn't have much to do with the adaptation, he still wrote the entirety of the original text as published. biographical though if you're arguing that.

This Is Information - is commentary on real actual events in the real world, but I think it's cheap to call that derivative. do you have specific things to call out as bring ripped off in this? (written by Moore, drawn by Gebbie, probably coloured by someone else, idrc)

Outbreaks Of Violets - the text is all by Moore, and as far as anyone seems to know he suggested or requested or gave directions for the pictures too? I don't actually have a copy obv.

Angel Passage - conceived, written and performed by Moore / music written with and recorded by Perkins.

if you think any of the poems are rip-offs or adaptations of his own work, you'll have to list them specifically - I've only been home for three days and might not get my stuff out of storage for years if I can get away with it. (I left the Moore CDs in shelves at home, hence checking on Mme Oct.)

{ah I've looked down and seen how crooked the alignment gets on some Killing Joke pages, nvm)

All I was saying was that many of those works were conceived and realized as non-comics, and that the adaptations were more on his collaborators like Eddie Campbell than on him.

But thanks for the breakdowns of what each work is - many I've never heard of let alone seen.

FYI, y'all, Marvel is finally kicking off the reprints of Moore's Marvel/Miracleman starting today.

but they can't mention Moore's name for some reason?

He asked them not to.

Yup. That old crank!

"The Original Writer"

I hope Marvel has come up with a pseudonymous writer credit that makes Moore regret being such a grump. Gumdrop McSprinkletits or somesuch.

nah it's what I said

All I was saying was that many of those works were conceived and realized as non-comics, and that the adaptations were more on his collaborators like Eddie Campbell than on him.

But thanks for the breakdowns of what each work is - many I've never heard of let alone seen.

"I've never heard of this, but it's totally derivative!"

Everything I listed was an original work from the last 25 years, not an adaptation of an earlier thing btw.

Not all of them were originally comics! That's what I've been saying. Don't be thick.

And they represent a minor percentage of his comic output over those years.

But whatever, you win.

Welcome home, by the way. Hope your months abroad were as truly wonderful as they seemed from here. An amazing thing to witness from afar.

I’m not sure derivative-ness is a problem with Moore – that presupposes a work that’s reverential (e.g. Top 10) can’t also be highly original (Top 10 again).

I think it’s only his very recent work that’s been actually derivative (e.g. LOEG after the second miniseries, the gross Cthulu stuff) in the sense that they’re clearly inferior retreads of his own work.

Also he’s suffering from the Dave Sim problem, where Alan Moore the fiction writer and Alan Moore the grumbly twat in interviews get more and more similar.

I wasn't saying that the ones that weren't originally comics were ever not comics! Part of my point is that plenty of his output, often the stuff he is most serious about, has been in prose and performance and film and other work. (Some of the prose that I didn't list mines Lovecraft, but I've not read that because zzzz.)

[& cheers, yeah, it was indeed great!]

hope Marvel has come up with a pseudonymous writer credit that makes Moore regret being such a grump

yeah, how dare a freelance writer not give a shit about Disney profits

unpaid freelance writer

so Marvel actually got the rights back after all huh. man I haven't read all those in at least 15 years (my brother has the copies we bought as teenagers)

I dont know how all this stuff works out but some people have said that the Marvelman creator (I think he is dead, so maybe his family then) would be profitting from this; some people thought leaving his name on it would benefit the family more because of better sales from Moore's name.

pinning that on moore is some bullshit imo

first i've heard of that theory. how many of these MM fans really care about Mick Anglo?

afaik the Anglo estate are only getting royalties at all because Alan Moore gave over his share of the pie to them, so fuck 'some people'

I've just heard about that Mick Anglo thing, I really dont know about the specifics of who gets paid for what; so I dont have a stance on the matter, I just wanted to bring up that aspect.

I havent read a whole load of Alan Moore. I am fond of him but not enough to label myself a fan. But it does bother me the way people seem to attack him. I've often been tempted to defend him but since I'm not familiar with enough of his work and cant be bothered getting into these big arguments I tend to let it go and remind myself that people are constantly saying unfair things everywhere on the internet and I need to focus on my priorities instead.

I think for whatever reason (perhaps his outsider appearance, the occultist stuff and his status in comics that has expanded into a status within literature in general) people really have it in for him and it seems like this dislike overwhelms a lot of the attempts at critiquing him. Although I mostly agree with him, there are complaints that could be made.

I dont know why people have such trouble with the idea of him using rape as a major recurring element. Would he get away with this if he was a woman with more overt feminist leanings?
Is this the same as people who didnt like the violence in 12 Years A slave or very realistic war films? Because in that article above there was someone's lousy argument that his work doesnt need to reflect how horrible the real world is.

I think it's totally reasonable to criticize how well he pulls off the depiction of rape; some people will admit that dealing with rape on a regular basis is risky for anyone and you will never please everyone with how responsibly (or irresponsibly) you depict it.
I've seen lengthy arguments disagreeing on those depictions based on some ambiguous or subtle scenes. Which I always think should bring up the question of how the artist delivers the scenes. It is true that Moore writes extremely specific scripts, but given that people argue over nuances of the scenes, the artist should carry a lot of the repsponsibility too. But gung ho Moore haters never bring up the artist, which leads me to believe that this is usually more about bringing down a big guy than it is about people who really care about the way rape is depicted. I've seen similar arguments about G RR Martin.
I think if Moore and Martin werent so famous, the venom wouldnt be so strong, regardless of how large the audience was.

Tuomas- I know that it was more than a year ago you said it, but do you really believe rape shouldnt be depicted in horror stories? Because I'd say the opposite.
I've seen feminists say Polanski's Repulsion is an ideal example, which is remarkable considering Polanski's crimes and that he hates feminists.

you think rape should always be depicted in horror stories?

Sorry! Not always...
Just that it seems a good mode in which to treat a horrific subject matter. Perhaps some people think horror is just for shallow amusement and titilation; but there is no reason it should inherently trivialise any serious issue.

i am a big fan of Moore, but frankly his depictions of rape and general abuse of women... lacks nuance, to put it kindly, compared to the overall quality of his work. his artists are usually good; it's not just one thing, and it happens so often (The Killing Joke, Watchmen, Miracleman, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, and so on and so on etc.) that you know he's ultimately responsible. the fact they he did a fairy tale "kiddie porn" thing with his future wife probably doesn't help this image.

Would you say the way he done it was clumsy and failed or more sinister than that?

I would say that it's a dramatic trope he leans on quite a bit (sort of like how Spike Lee always seems to require that someone die towards the end of a film) and that it's worth remarking upon. It's not that he handles it badly or is insensitive about it, I think that it's a narrative crutch he falls back on when he wants to emphasize just how horrible a character/humanity/the universe is

I can just picture him thinking "hmmm, need something traumatic here, what would be really appalling - OH I KNOW"

I feel like it goes beyond that, like I believe he has serious thoughts about rape and sexual violence. but it feels like his really mishandles the topic in the way he inserts it into his stories, in some cases as Shakey describes as overt SHOCKING evil, while in others it just feels.. off? LOEG in particular had a lot of these moments. Not actually related, but look at that Golleywog... his taste often becomes very questionable

Tuomas- I know that it was more than a year ago you said it, but do you really believe rape shouldnt be depicted in horror stories? Because I'd say the opposite.
I've seen feminists say Polanski's Repulsion is an ideal example, which is remarkable considering Polanski's crimes and that he hates feminists.

There are different ways to depict rape... Of course it can be depicted horror, as in any genre (except maybe comedy), but you have to very careful in how you do it, because unlike most other things shown in horror, rape and its threat is something that affects a large number of people in real life, so it's delicate subject to a lot of the readers. (And yeah, there are people who get horribly killed by psychos in real life too, but their number is much much lower than that of rape victims.) Also, because of the sexual aspect, making you rape scenes overtly long and explicit can make it feel like there's a titillation factor involved.

The rape scenes in Neonomicon goes on for several pages, way longer than would be necessary to depict what is going on an how horrible it is to the protagonist. They're also very graphic and detailed, which, again, feels unnecessary to me. I'm not saying Moore and Burrows actually get off on depicting rape, but it's certainly possible to get that impression, given the amount of loving detail they put into those scenes. Because of that I found the whole comic utterly disgusting. Yeah, the rape is important to the overall plot, I'm not saying it should've been omitted (though I didn't find the overall plot that impressive either, it's basically a Lovecraftian version of Rosemary's Baby), but Moore and Burrows could've shown a lot more discretion in depicting it.

the fact they he did a fairy tale "kiddie porn" thing with his future wife probably doesn't help this image.

Lost Girls is actually one of most obviously feminist comics by Moore, possibly because of Gebbie's involvement. There's a particularly powerful scene where one of the protagonists stands up to her would-be molester; if only his other works would deal with the subject in similar ways, I'd have no problem with them.

i'm curious about it, but don't want it on record that i've bought it / taken it out from the library in case the government comes after me
comics porn is a good thing IMO, but the underage/legal issues involved with that book were particularly unfortunate

The underage bit are only on a couple of pages, and they mostly just involve teens and preteens having consensual sex with each other. Yeah, sure, they're kinda dodgy, and could've been left out, but in this case it definitely seems Moore and Gebbie simply wanted to say that kids can be and are interested in sexual things, and it's okay for them to explore sexuality with each other. The powerful scene I mentioned above involves a much older guy trying to have his way with a teen girl, and it's very clearly stated this is not okay, and that it is totally different from those earlier scenes where the same girl had sex with other teenagers.

M. Rougeur, the hotel manager, fucks a 13-year-old chambermaid in Lost Girls.

I was in Waterstones last week and Lost Girls was displayed unsealed, very very prominently in the shop next to several Hobbit and other Tolkien things; in that way where it suggests the shop really wants you to see it. I was really surprised.
I was also surprised when I looked at Dave McKean's recent porn book, also unsealed and the stuff inside is surprisingly hardcore. I'm not sure if things are changing or if the staff really doesnt know what is inside these books. Because there are still plenty of parents who view the comics section as a childrens section that should be free of that content (Or that those books shouldnt be so easy to pick up).

they have lost girls at my local library and it's shelved with the regular graphic novels, the majority of which are mainstream books that get browsed by younger readers.

Anyone buy the latest Nemo spin-off? Looks like this one is all the German expressionist film characters like Caligari, Metropolis, Mabuse, etc. I love that stuff, but after the mediocre Cthulhu one I'd really only be getting it for O'Neill's take on those creations. Maybe I'll grab it on sale sometime.

It's $3.99 on Comixology if you read digital

Slightly baffling local hissy fit!

http://www.northampton-news-hp.co.uk/News/Northampton-News/Alan-Moore-tells-Northamptonshire-County-Council-I-will-never-trust-you-again-20140424083019.htm

heart is in the right place but he's being a little naive here

Why is this a 'hissy fit'? Think he's perfectly entitled to withdraw his services (presumably given for free) if he thinks the powers-that-be are acting like dicks.

man, tom strong is so so great. so fun and inventive and light in the best possible way. it should get more respect.

(this is unrelated to the news item above)

it totally rules! i wandered away when Moore stopped writing them though

ya i never read that far

Yeah for the first two books Tom Strong is p much my ideal of a super/pure fun/smart comic. Top 10 is up there, too. And Promethea ws great for his esoteric side, esp the final vols tying up the wandering plod it'd become, ie. basically the boring "erotic" stuff he's focused on since kinda sucks

I discovered the existence/amazingness of the ABC stuff (incl League of Gentlemen, which I bought/loved first of all) cos it ws all fairly new/ongoing just as i got back into comics in my late 20s, so it still seems weird to me his work ws so recently a+ and now such a chore

i love top 10 too. and league is one of my favourites (at least the first two TPs). he just is an unapproachable god of comixdom when he's at his best. i don't think anyone compares.

what i love about tom strong is that it's really really smart, "compressed" in the classic ILC sense, but done with such a light touch, never feels at all heavy-handed or serious, and that may be my favourite combo of qualities in art

agree that the initial spate of ABC stuff is all great (I am also fond of a bunch of stuff in the Tomorrow Stories, Jack B. Quick etc.). It is refreshing how simple and straightforward Tom Tomorrow is, there's really not a ton of dialogue or exposition, everything is very compact.

http://electricomics.net/

Electricomics will be a 32-page showcase with four very different original titles:

Big Nemo – set in the 1930s, Alan Moore revisits Winsor McCay’s most popular hero

Cabaret Amygdala – modernist horror from writer Peter Hogan (Terra Obscura)

Red Horse – on the anniversary of the beginning of World War One, Garth Ennis (Preacher, The Boys) and Danish artist Peter Snejbjerg (World War X) take us back to the trenches

Sway – a slick new time travel science fiction story from Leah Moore and John Reppion (Sherlock Holmes – The Liverpool Demon, 2000 AD)

hate ennis but the rest sound at least intriguing

More playing with other people's toys. Oh joy.

With no artist attached. To three out of four titles. This is... not a good way to launch?

More playing with other people's toys. Oh joy.

haha yeah I thought this too. Is the character of Little Nemo public domain yet?

xp the "big nemo" thing especially feels particularly well minded in moore's work already... and how do you improve on Veitch's take quite frankly?

nemo's been public domain for a long time:
https://archive.org/details/LittleNemo1905-1914ByWinsorMccay

u+k link there btw as that contains hi-res scans of ten years of the strip for free download

whoah! I have some of the big Fantagraphics reprints just love 'em - wish I could read them to my daughter but I'm a little hesitant to explain the Imp.

those nemo reprints were among the first written words i ever read (which led to me saying "oh!" a lot in kindergarten). it took me until high school to realize that flip or the imp were human at all. all the "jungle imp" stuff felt like an imaginary race of nonhumans, which of course they were... the imp doesn't code as 'black' to me in the slightest... it was ebony from the spirit that left me genuinely confused. You're the parent but I don't know that you need to unpack the historicity of everything in a comic strip for a kid up front, just be prepared to have the conversation.

haha yeah the Spirit is another one I've avoided cuz of Ebony, who, obviously as a talking character codes way more obviously as black. The Imp is a greyer area until you sit him next to other images of blackface etc.

OBVIOUSLY

moore can play with other peoples' toys all he wants if it turns out as good as the original leagues

does he still have the right to get mad at other people for playing with his toys tho

But it's been 15 years since the original League, and it's been downhill ever since.

does he still have the right to get mad at other people for playing with his toys tho

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, May 28, 2014 5:23 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dont care

how are the miracleman reprints?

i've been reading my old copies and the art is great but the colouring is dreadful. often out of register, sometimes entire panels are just a single colour.

http://miraclemen.info/2013/12/10/recoloring-comparison/

I'm against colourising and computer re-lettering, but the Marvel reprints are hideous rip-offs on almost every level, being something like $5 for 16 pages

i got the first collection from the library. the color is decent but it's years since i read the originals so i have no comparison. i didn't see anything wrong with that aspect if the book. the lettering was also redone (by computer) and doesn't always look so good though it remains consistant throughout (iirc there may have been multiple letters originally?). ultimately i would not be happy paying money for this because the production/design of the book is ugly and padded out with not-very-interesting original art scans and sketches. maybe i'm spoiled by the quality of fantagraphics/d&q books - the only marvels i normally ever bother with are essentials reprints - but for an archival project of such a prestigious series this is very poor to my eyes.

yeah, the original lettering varied in quality a lot. i heard they're gonna do a complete collection in oversized hardcover later anyway?

xp multiple *letterers* originally.

I'd say overall everything in this book - art/lettering/coloring - varied really widely over Moore's run, ranging from the horribly shitty to the stunningly awesome. Really it's only the latter Bissette/Totleben stuff that looked really great in the original print run. Not bothering with any reprints, still have my old issues, which are fine.

it was totleben alone on that stuff.

ah right

the lettering in the old versions is kinda patchy, not least where they scratch out marvelman and squeeze miracleman in it's place.

so is everybody SUPEREXCITED about even more Lovecraft nonsense? no? yeah me neither.

referring to: http://www.avatarpress.com/2015/02/alan-moores-providence-revealed/

Really it's only the latter Bissette/Totleben stuff that looked really great in the original print run.

Wrong: the Leach looked great and the Davis looked v good in the original print run; both of them looked kinda shitty in the Eclipse versions

sorry I wasn't clear, I was referring to the Eclipse versions (I don't have any issues of Warrior, my brother took those)

Eh, I'll give Providence a try.

Only read the first issue of Neonomicon and it kind of freaked me out, so I guess as horror it was kind of working.

It certainly had an effectively oppressive atmosphere, still not sure I'd call it 'good'.

his most carefully considered work in decades

Invoking a comparison it to a prior literary masterpiece is not something to be handled lightly, but in scope, importance and execution: Providence is the Watchmen of horror.

Moore has designed every cover, every single page, and every nuance of this work to create his most fully-realized vision to date.

kinda feel like they're setting me up for disappointment here tbh

After having to suffer through the horribly indulgent, needlessly long and graphic rape scene in Neonomicon, I don't think I want to read any Moore/Burrows collaboration ever again.

Feel like the QI Klaxon should be going off and RAPE flashing on the screen behind Tuomas' head right now.

Moore really needs to get over his Lovecraft fixation. I get it already.

Happy to wait and see on this one. If anything I'm curious to see Moore back on monthly comics for the first time since, what, the end of Promethea?

I do pretty much hate the Avatar/Burrows aesthetic, though, from colouring to subject matter to draftmanship... the depressing focus on brutalised female bodies (with porn star tits, natch). Even the glossy printing paper they use is kind of icky to touch.

Yeah, non of the Avatar art ever works for me, which is a shame because some of their slightly older titles had promising elements.

Why did Moore say he would refuse the Angouleme award?

http://www.avatarpress.com/2012/04/alan-moore-accepts-first-ever-gn-bram-stoker-award-for-neonomicon/

All I could find was his funny Bram Stoker award speech but it doesn't really clear much up.

Starting to think the problem is that Moore thinks he's William Blake, when he's really just ("just") a really good comics writer

I read half of A Small Killing and I just couldn't be bothered any further, the main character was so dull and irritating, which I'm sure was intentional but I just couldn't. Zarate's art is interesting because it looks similar to a lot of old art depicting city night life, like Lautrec, Edward Hopper, George Grosz, Otto Dix and others I've forgot. It's not quite at that level though but there are interesting effects in there.

I remember liking ASK a lot when I read it, but that was like 20 years ago, so I'm not sure if I'd have the same opinion anymore. In any case, it's definitely a case of great art elevating the script; after all these years I still have a vivid memory of the scene where the protagonist opens the [SPOILER], it's quite unforgettable.

http://www.mustardweb.org/alanmoore/

Why did Moore say he would refuse the Angouleme award?

I believe it's because when you win, you're obligated to 'run' the next one, so he'd be ... doing con-related things

So Otomo is going to take care of the next convention? I can't see him being expected to do much.

Specialist round on tonight's Mastermind. Only one question wasn't incredibly easy.

I missed four? The cat one, the Simpsons one, the acting (?!) one, something about the CIA.

The acting one was the only one I didn't know.

Simpsons one was really a Simpsons question rather than an Alan Moore one.

just checked against the 2010 round on youtube, got one wrong

Just came across a great trivia question, maybe some of you might get the correct answer: when has Alan Moore written an X-Men comic?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_for_Hope

Correct!

Probably also the only time Stephen King and George R. R. Martin have written X-Men?

in one book? yeah that sounds likely.

I can't bear to look at that photo in the first post, his beard just looks so unhygienic :(

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-09/29/electricomics-alan-moore-interview

electricomics kinda sucks by the way. adds a new and totally unnecessary complication to reading a book.

i am interested in the comics and open source aspects of this (although i'm unsure as to what it actually is...). but then they go and make it ipad-only which seems at odds with the second bit.

It's pretty ropey, looks like the web circa 1998. Thrillbent (which I subscribed to for a while, then got bored) doing a much better job. But it's kind of a "be number one in a field of none" opportunity.

Coleen

McKay

in fairness to wired, those appear to be consistent errors on Moore's part
though maybe you should edit the email responses you get prior to publishing? just a thought.

As Moore doesn't use email, it's unlikely to be his error, and Coleen is not consistent even in the same paragraph.

in the questions it's listed as Colleen and McCay. Anyway, somebody fucked up.

He just joined Goodreads last month and he has answered 75 questions and set his goodreads challenge to finish one book.

So, 'Jerusalem' - anyone up for it?

Half-tempted, but I already have several huuuuge novels I bought and have not yet tackled, so it might have to wait.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat, kind of overwhelmed at the moment. Grr, I pre-ordered it, but doesn't look like it's coming today - Amazon say they're 'still trying to obtain' it (I had some vouchers to use).

Oh! It's out today. I haven't read anything massive this year and I like a good reading challenge, so quite possibly. Could pick it up at lunch.

dowd, it looks like Amazon have made the first few chapters available to compensate for delays

I've heard its really brilliant from one reader.

dowd, it looks like Amazon have made the first few chapters available to compensate for delays

Thanks for the tip! I'm really more of a physical reader, though.

Dont kindle previews equal 10% of the book? So thats at least 100+pages

Eesh, based on the first couple pages, the writing is... not good.

Or, let's say, not my thing.

But...crosswords!

I loved Voice of the Fire, so I should be more psyched for this than I am. but then I really loved the comics work he was doing then, and have not LOVED a comic of his in a while, so there is that.

Reminds me a bit of the Morrissey book - i.e. unedited and a little incoherent

Obviously anyone reading a 1000+ page book by Late Period Alan Moore will expect to have some *work* cut out for them (in fact, I'm sure that's part of the appeal) but the sentences read very un-special - there's a lot of overdescription like he's still writing for an artist, and a lot of unedited pluperfects

This is based on a single ten minute squiz on Amazon, though, so do ignore me.

Almost twice as long War and Peace. Holy fucking shit

Moore is great but I expect most of this to be typing and not writing

Yeah I will never get round to reading this, if someone could summarise it on this thread that would be great.

I was in Gosh Comics on Friday and the staff were packaging up copies of the book into what looked like* custom cardboard sleeves and writing addresses for EG Portugal on them.

*but I can well believe you can get them in all sizes.

The staff did not look, at that point, like Alan Moore fans.

I loved Voice of the Fire, so I should be more psyched for this than I am. but then I really loved the comics work he was doing then, and have not LOVED a comic of his in a while, so there is that.

this is pretty much where i'm at - huge moore fan up until the early-mid 2000s, thought voice of the fire was really great, but i've long since stopped paying close attention to his work. i'd like to give jerusalem a try but i dunno if i've got the enthusiasm and/or stamina required to make it through a thousand pages from a writer who i suspect may have passed his peak, or at least sharpened his talents/obsessions to so fine a point that it'll only cut it with a very specific group of readers.

maybe once the reviews are in i'll rethink...

haven't read past the title yet but...

http://www.vulture.com/2016/09/alan-moore-jerusalem-comics-writer.html

Moore brings up the amount of sexual violence in Jerusalem, which won't exactly silence his "rape in every book" critics.

Anyway, I'm at pretty much in the same place as everyone else. Although I'm quite enjoying Providence it does seem to be a bit of an exercise in Mooresplaining and, as somebody said ^^^^ his desire these days seems to be to write things that require annotation and which he seems to want to do himself. Has anybody seen him and Jess Nevins in the same room together?

I thought Voice Of The Fire was great but the comics have become less essential with each passing commission (Crossed +100 turned out to be something Moore only seemed to be interested in the semiotics of, for example, as outside of setting up their language it really was nothing and I really couldn't care less about Cinema Purgatorio).

Having said that, I thought the Jimmy's End films were fun and Frank & Nick Make You Sick maybe shows where he should be focusing his attention?

49ers and the 2nd LOEG series are the last Moore things I can remember enjoying. Dodgem Logic was fun, not really a comic though.

Enjoyed Providence to start with, but I got bored reading the diary entries and gave up.

"His new book, Jerusalem, written over ten years, is a nearly 1,300-page attempt to encompass theories of space-time, hallucinogenic children’s adventure, thinly fictionalized personal biography, the surprisingly epic history of the downtrodden Northampton neighborhood in which he grew up, and, well, just about everything else."

nope nope nope

Why is that less appealing than his other work? I'm more likely to read this than most of his other work.

His other work is shorter and has pictures.

I find some of his comics a bit difficult to read because they're overstuffed, but when it's just text I think I can do it. But mostly I'm just not into most of his visual collaborators. More than anything I've enjoyed his essays, poems and interviews.

I do like that the paperback version of Jerusalem is 3 volumes in a box: breaking down a massive book like that makes it more aesthetically pleasing and also easier to actually read (and tackling only on 400p book at a time makes it seem more do-able, too).

The cover art is surprisingly not good, though: it looks like one of the Usborne puzzle books I was obsessed with as a child in the 1980s.

http://www.comicsbeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/jerusalem_moore.jpg

His style isn't really translating to colour, there.

RIP the photo that launched this thread

AM recently read Infinite Jest:

"After thinking about this long and hard, the last truly great book I read would have to be “Infinite Jest,” by David Foster Wallace. Yeah, sorry. This was my first exposure to Wallace’s work, only a month or two ago, and I don’t think there’s anything about the novel that doesn’t impress me: its stream of satirical invention, with conventional dating gone in favor of a subsidized calendar and the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment; its mandarin prose that perfectly conjures the trancelike drift of a modern consciousness overwhelmed by detail; and its breathtaking risks with structure, so that the whole experience seems to pivot upon a climactic resolving chapter — either right at the end of the narrative or right at the beginning — which does not actually exist and which therefore requires the reader to create it herself, from slender inference. I think the moment I probably fell in love with Wallace as a writer was the point where I realized that I was actually meant to be irritated by all of the occasionally crucial footnotes. An author after my own heart, and a genuine modern American diamond in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover and Gilbert Sorrentino."

Revised delivery date from amazon? Sep 29th to Oct 30th. Serves me right for using my vouchers - should have tried a mor direct route.

you can still order copies from third-party sellers on amazon, which is what i did last night just hours after saying that i'd probably wait for a bit :(

i just got a notification it's been dispatched, so they must still have some stock left

The pub I drink in has a waterstones a couple of doors down, said they can get it for me tomorrow.

Although it'll probably be about £8 more expensive than the price amazon offered for goods they don't have.

byres rd?

Nah, in St Andrews (used to live just off byres rd though - above missing records)

I've seriously slacked as a reader of Important Fiction in recent years but Moore OTM about IJ. Still the most impressive novel I've ever read.

I think, unless I read lots of gushingly rave reviews of this thing, that I will allow From Hell to continue its tenure as my massive Moore magnum opus of choice.

thx dowd your mention of missing records on byres road has sent me into a bittersweet reverie of glasgow records stores now long-gone

xp i always thought moore would make a great critic - he's usually got at least one sharp observation in every interview i've ever read with him, no matter how sour his mood is otherwise.

Where is that Infinite Jest review from? A shame he hasn't kept going on Goodreads, perhaps he was inundated with too many questions.

I often find it kind of weird how many of us are from around Glasgow. Ahhh, I remember the days when there was 6 or 7 comic shops. I think it's just down to 2 now.

If you're feeling like blaming Belle and Sebastian...

i can think of three comic shops - four if you count the mouldering remains of future shock on woodlands road, which has been closed for years but still has a full stock trapped inside and slowly yellowing from the sunlight

That's weird, surely someone's supposed to clear all that out?

itisamystery.gif

i vaguely recall hearing that the guy that ran it died? not that that would explain why it's stood empty but packed full of books and comics for years. maybe we should take this to the try glasgow more thread and appeal for help there...

Yes, mad owner of Future Shock died, and judging by the way he organised his shop I'm guessing that his affairs won't totally in order when he relocated to the astral plane.

Belle and Sebastian have nothing to do with me living in Glasgow.

Cool, so if you guys could just give me the address of this abandoned comic store real quick, I'll coincidentally be stopping by Glasgow with my cat burglar outfit and a crowbar pretty soon.

Watch out, if you bump into anything you might be killed by a falling pile of hardcover collections.

I fondly remember reaching into a dark space between comic stacks to see what I'd find and pulling out a Corben book.

There were lots of clippings and notices on his shop window singing the praises of nuclear power.

yeah, he was, um, a character. i eventually stopped going in there because i couldn't stand the feeling of being watched while i dug through piles of stuff any longer. it was like walking into an episode of hoarders

that said, I do have fond memories of living a block up the road from future shock when i first moved to glasgow back in 2001 and managing to excavate the first 15 or so issues of priest's black panther run, among other things, from amongst the detritus

I may have told this when he died, but once he started talking to me about something, talked on for a minute maybe, we were both smiling then suddenly he stopped with a serious look on his face and went away. I felt too awkward to ask him why he stopped.

Bah, now waterstones are saying they don't have it in their warehouse, but they can get it from another warehouse. Hate this book now.

Oh, and amazon keeps including it in my recommendations. YOU DON'T HAVE ANY!

through an accident of over-enthusiastic online ordering, i've ended up with two hardback copies - if you're still having trouble i could always pass one on to you instead of sending on back

Cheers, but it's okay. I'll grump my way to a copy eventually.

good luck!

Finally got a copy. It's the 3-volume one, don't know if I feel anything particular about that.

having faced down the possibility of starting work on reading the 1300-page hardback this weekend and deciding i couldn't face the physical challenge of holding it i think you might have made the better choice tbh

Cinema Purgatorio whimpered out of existence this week. A couple of decent stories but inessential.

kickstarter to buy BG a belated lectern he can also post from

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156713539045823

Been keeping this under my hat for a while but now it's official.. My first presenting spot for BBC6 Music is airing on Friday 4th Oct, 7pm - 9pm. It's an interview with Alan Moore, the planet's leading graphic novelist. Two hours of Alan's favourite music and some extraordinarily tall tales in the Iggy Pop slot. I first interviewed Alan more than three decades ago for Strange Things Are Happening magazine. I met him again a couple of years ago, and he remembered the interview and the psych records I was reissuing at the time with great fondness. I mentioned this on facebook, and the post was spotted a certain BBC6 Music presenter, who thought it would be a good idea for a show. So here we are. Many thanks Lauren, much appreciated! Turn on, tune in.. it's not often you hear The Residents on the radio! :) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0008yp0

something profundly unsettling about the sight of alan moore in a sky-blue jumper tbh

The Lion, The Witch and His Wardrobe

https://deadline.com/2020/10/alan-moore-rare-interview-watchmen-creator-the-show-superhero-movies-blighted-culture-1234594526/

(is it me or does that interview end abruptly?)

I'm not in the mood for long tv shows anymore but I'm looking forward to the film at least.

A short story anthology next year, and a five-volume fantasy series starting 2024, that will move from the “shell-shocked and unravelled” London of 1949 to “a version of London just beyond our knowledge”, encompassing murder, magic and madness.

Speaking about his book deal, Moore said that he was at a moment in his career when he was “bursting with fiction, bursting with prose”.

“I couldn’t be happier with the new home that I’ve found at Bloomsbury: a near-legendary independent publisher with a spectacular list and a fierce commitment to expanding the empire of the word,” said Moore. “I have a feeling this will be a very productive partnership.”

lol so weird reading a fawning Alan Moore quote on a publisher

All words no pictures for all that?

I'll draw you some to go along with the books as they are released.

the 1000 page thing scares me to the point where i haven't read it but these look interesting

Reading through his Swamp Thing run at the moment. Just got into Constantine and the American Gothic storyline. Some of these issues are so good, I don't know what to do with it. I expect it to go downhill eventually, but the highs of Rites of Spring (psychedelic yam sex) and Love and Death (first issue without comics code stamp) are amazing. I had a copy of Love and Death when I was 8 years old, rereading it now I'm amazed at how much went totally over my head.

Would like a collection of short stories but I'm sure the fantasy series will be cool.

daniel: cool, please draw me at least one picture for every twenty words and arrange them sequentially and bind it. then scan it. thanks in advance.

(my first swamp thing was the American Gothic / Crisis Crossover episode #46 and was such a mess. but didn't stop me buying all the others)

the 1000 page thing scares me to the point where i haven't read it but these look interesting

Have had it lying around for years, think I'll make it my last pre-vaccine doorstop (I usually read on public transport so used this time to tackle some bigger works).

it (Jerusalem) is also available as a 3x400 page box. but these days i find a kobo is much friendlier and would be perfect for this, as long as there's nothing tricky happening with the formatting.

I keep trying and giving up Swamp Thing. So many words! One day. Same trouble with Miracleman.

There was certainly a period mid 80s to mid 90s when 'mature' comics were ridiculously wordy.

yer Don McGregors and Claremonts in the '70s and early '80s had set the bar for turgidity in colour comics pretty high already. most of the people copying Moore were still slightly above that level of readability.

Pre-Moore Swamps was just as verbose but not nearly as good. I started from the beginning and when I got to the Moore years it was a quantum leap in quality. Just about every issue would refer to a “ MUCK ENCRUSTED MOCKERY OF A MAN!!!”

Pretty sure the first time I read Moore's Swampy in my early teens I skimmed over most of the verbose captions and still enjoyed the story fine.

I must admit I generally enjoy Claremont's over-writing. I find it just kind of pops in spite of itself

Ugh. American Gothic storyline ended kinda lame. WAR IN HEAVEN OCCURS but doesn't really amount to much.

Just about every issue would refer to a “ MUCK ENCRUSTED MOCKERY OF A MAN!!!”

― Cow_Art, Wednesday, May 5, 2021 11:27 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah I hate this. I've read quite a few comics that did this kind of thing. Even Leiji Matsumoto's Esmeraldas does stuff like this.

I do sometimes get the impression that even a lot of the writers who grew up on comics back then and even loved them maybe didn't have the same level of personal investment and pride in what they written as is normal today. There's a certain laziness to a lot of that 70s stuff that makes me think they really didn't give a shit sometimes.

They must've been working to pretty tight deadlines on several books, no?

Yeah and I'm sure most prolific mainstream comic writers get jobs they really don't want but I still think today there's probably a bit more will to try and make everything good.

In the even earlier days there were more people who just saw it as a job.

also they were writing for children, who weren't expected to read every issue

https://www.marvel.com/articles/comics/miracleman-omnibus-collection-announcement

i wonder if he'll take his name off this?

anyway, contains:

* Material from Warrior (1982) 1-18, 20-21
* Miracleman (1985) 1, 3, 6-16
* Marvelman Special (1984) 1
* Material from A1 (1989) 1
* All-New Miracleman Annual (2014) 1

the floppies i have are probably 1985 series, so what's the warrior stuff? and i know some of the 1985 was reprints for various reasons, but i didn't think it was 3 whole issues.

ok, 1985 1-5 were themselves reprints of the 1982 warrior stuff, with some new bits.

he already took his name off it eight years ago

His name isn't mentioned in that promo piece!

i did notice his name wasn't on the covers, but figured they weren't final

i saw it here https://gizmodo.com/alan-moores-legendary-miracleman-run-is-getting-an-omni-1848292736 which is all about the AM connection

His name is on the privately printed omnibus I had made for myself, since I could never get this stuff any other way, so there, Alan.

It was (in this instance) specifically Marvel’s involvement that made him withhold his name and redirect any royalties, so I think you’re good.

(Marvel’s solution remains hilarious, and will presumably be retained in this edition.)

the recolouring is still the pits, though

I was quietly hoping James' bootleg was made from Warrior scans.

It is, I found high quality scans of all the original publications and used those.

https://www.bbcmaestro.com/coming_soon/alan-moore/storytelling

I got illuminations today: therein is What can we know of Thunderman, and if it is his umpteenth exercise wherein he renames characters so as to make whatever points he wishes…well, there can never be enough such exercises, for me at least.

This time, it's just prose, and this time, it's 100% a "fuck you, every one of you in this business has always sucked and shame on me for not saying so in the 80s and 90s" whereas 1963 and Supreme he was very much accessing his long ago affection for the source material. But this thing drips with disdain for the fans turned pro that he made seem so pitifully parochial 40 years ago (he is brutal in belittling every single thing about them), like the affable al columns from 1963 but coming out of 15 years in which he believes (and so do I) that super hero content has had a hideously bad effect on culture worldwide. It's almost as if he now thinks that all the naysayers, from Wertham down to the teachers saying "you should read real literature" to the bullies who laughed at nerds clutching their precious comics featuring kiddie characters, calling them stupid and immature, were right.

I'm only 30 pages in, but can only put it down to write these words. Everyone who used to frequent ILC during its most active time in 2006-2008 should pick this up post haste.

Sounds about as entertaining as jabbing yourself in the eye with a fork.

Did you like In Pictopia, 1963, or Supreme, jimbeaux?

To be perfectly honest, I haven't read any Alan Moore since about 1991. I was reacting to veronica moser's description of Moore's latest book, which sounds from that summary like a miserable exercise.

I did like Warren Ellis's reworking of "Supreme," and admired much of Ellis's work before he was revealed to be a very problematic person.

There is an omnibus collection of "Miracleman" coming soon that looks to be worth the investment.

sounds great veronica, will pick up once it hits softcover

Jerusalem was a ton of fun

I liked 1963 and Supreme, and agree with Jimbeaux.

I agree with Daniel_Rf it sounds fun

I've seen a bunch of talk about how unfair he's been to a bunch of his collaborators and speculation about how well he understood his contracts but is this prose story supposed to be taken as seriously as people seem to be taking it?

If anyone wants to watch a low-bandwidth Zoom conversation with Alan Moore from the WI book festival...
https://www.crowdcast.io/wisconsinbookfestival

just finished Thunderman today. imo its tone is at times bewildering (american characters consistently speak in british english idiom, for example), but the ending is very, very strong.

I am re-reading my checker trades of the Supreme run; I know that they are widely disliked, lousy reproduction, liefeld licensed the material to the Checker goofballs so that they could establish their company, which they did not succeed in doing, but they are fine for me, as I wasn't fuckin' with comics in the late 90s and didn't know about this shit until 2003 when the trades were published…

and yet I have a recollection seeing a Professor Night solo story, not the one with Supreme in which he and Prof (and Dax and Jack a Dandy) switch M.O.s… this would be a solo Prof Night/Twilight story, drawn by Veitch obviously in the style of Bill Finger/Dick Sprang… I cannot find any citation to this story in any references, particularly my copy of Khoury's extraordinary works of Alan moore reference…anyone know about this? did I dream this? and was there any other Supreme/Weisinger era pastiche material that was published during the Image/Maximum/Awesome run that didn't make it into the Checker trades?