Alan Moore!

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