| Art by Nabiel Kanan |
| Art by Peter Kuper |
| Art by Eduardo Risso |
| Art by Gabriele Dell'Otto |
| Art by Shannon Wheeler |
| Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, 2017 |
Regime change in Whitechapel
Back in the dog days of the last century, before the restaurants in Brick Lane featured celebrity snaps of Prince Charles and a few dejected English cricketers on the piss and somebody in suit and tie who used to read the news (Falklands, Gulf War), a bunch of cultural subversives were gathered to enact, in their own ways, the last rites. The skeletal book-burner John Latham with his mad eyes and posthumous (slow, deadly) voice. Derek Raymond, jaunty, spry, fruity, smart, remembering what it had been like to be Robin Cook - and writing a cod-Bond novel that went so far off the rails that it froze time, a period in the Sixties, and entered all the dictionaries of slang. Poet and performance artist Brian Catling, shaven-headed, cigar-chomping, berobed, returning to scenes of vision and poverty, labours in the ullage cellar of Truman’s Brewery. Alexander Baron, solid but tentative, white raincoat like the negative of a lost life; post-war wanderings through a blasted landscape. And fellow Jewish memory-man, Emanuel Litvinoff, who once discussed alchemical epics with Elias Canetti. A few villains were also present: Tony Lambrianou, chauffeur to the rug-wrapped corpse of Jack the Hat, and the now vanished biblio-maniac Driffield. Then there was Alan Moore.
The excuse was a film for Channel 4, The Cardinal and the Corpse - which suffered from too many cardinals and not enough corpses (the dead wouldn’t lie down). Of all the faces who had to hang around, in Cheshire Street market, in the house with the peeling pink door in Princelet Street (now a regular feature in Dickens heritage romps), in the infamous Carpenters Arms (with its lost apostrophe), only one registered with the citizens, ordinary dishonest folk going about their business. ‘Are you,’ they challenged, not daring to believe it, ‘Alan Moore?’
Alan doesn’t quite believe it himself: that he is on set, grounded in the future of a definitively erased past, space-time anomalies he will activate in his serial composition, From Hell. This grimoire, with its fearsome apparatus of actual and fantastic scholarship, is the ultimate book on the Whitechapel Murders. The endstop. Many, many others, hacks, snoops, chancers, will follow - but they won’t register. Game over. Patricia Cornwell, the latest, richest, and most absurd, brings the weight (humourless, pan-global paranoia) of the CIA, forensic SWAT teams, art dealers, foot-in-the-door men to bear on a series of terrible Victorian crimes. She is the wrong book, straddled across the razor-wire of the genre fence. It’s like Miss Marple hitting Los Angeles to solve a slasher crime, the slaying of James Ellroy’s mother. Wrong game, wrong century.
Not content with world domination, America wants to invade the only thing we have left: the past. They devoured From Hell. They liked it and they bought the company. And made it into a ‘ghetto story.’ With punch, panache, zizz: the stuff they do so well. And with a brutal disregard for history, so that the pain (which burns through those stones still) of the butchering of Marie Jeanette Kelly is demeaned - by a narrative twist, wrong girl, and a happy John Ford ending in a whitewashed cottage in the west of Ireland.
Alan Moore knows that these sentiments can be floated as recalled potentialities, a single flash-frame in a dying consciousness, before the darkness sets in. One bead of bright light before an eternity of stygian black.
Loping down Princelet Street, with a kind of nautical roll, non-metropolitan - backlit Durer hair - Alan stands out; not belonging to these alleys and rat runs, he is visible in ways the other writers are not. The space between what he writes and what he is dissolves. He acts. The rest of them are what they do, talk, words - or quiet moments, caught at a window, of wounded reverie. There is a thing that won’t leave them alone, a vulture on the shoulder. ‘The general contract,’ Derek Raymond called it. Mortality.
Mortality imprints these streets like a miasma. Alan Moore, playing at the ‘discovery’ of a magical primer, plays at being trapped forever in this house, this place. And so it is. The Vessels of Wrath sail through the sky, clouds pierced by the steeple of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church. The extraordinary, hallucinogenic structure that has haunted artists and writers (from Leon Kossoff to Peter Ackroyd) catches Alan’s eye: a stone needle in a pane of dirty glass. The church, with its balanced weight and mass, marries disparate elements: Greek, Roman, Gothic. As Moore will balance the unwieldy mass of dark history, lies, forgeries, echoes of other writers, Blakean epiphany, Crowley ritual.
There are no accidents here. Moore, on the steps of the church, is passing through, gathering what he needs. The rough walkers, the vagrants, the invisibles who challenge him, are there for the duration; no parole. Shifting facades, fresh scams; nothing changes.
Iain Sinclair
| Art by MIKE COLLINS |
INTRODUCTION
God I am so tired of people asking me what is happening with the film version of Watchmen, “When are you going to do it?” “Have you got the money?” “Who’s going to play Rorschach?” “We’ve read that you’ve written a new script.”
No. I don’t have the money, No, I haven’t written a new script. No, I’m not going to do the film. Ever. Now go away and leave me alone!!!
This nightmare began back in 1988 or 89 when Joel Silver, the producer of Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, The Matrix, suggested that we make a film of the Watchmen. “The what?” I said. He thrust a fat hardback comic book in my hand and said read. I read. I loved.
But, how to make a film of a masterpiece? Always a problem. So far, no one has made a good version of War and Peace, and to me Watchmen is the W and P of comics…sorry, graphic novels.
I sat down with Charles McKeown, my writing partner on Baron Munchausen and Brazil, to squeeze out a script. Time passed. Frustration increased. How do you condense this monster book into a 2 - 2 1/2 hour film? What goes? What stays? Therein lies the problem.
I talked to Alan Moore. He didn’t know how to do it. He seemed relieved that I had taken on the responsibility of fucking up his work rather than leaving it to him. I suggested perhaps a 5 part mini series would be better. I still believe that.
With every bit of narrative tightening, we were losing character detail…and without their neuroses and complex relationships the characters were becoming more like normal run-of-the-mill-quirky-super-heroes. There wasn’t time to tell all their stories. The Comedian was reduced to someone who dies at the beginning. That’s all, just a convenient corpse to kick off the action. None of this was satisfying to me. I wasn’t happy with our results.
By now, actors were fluttering around Watchmen like crazed moths beating at a dirty street lamp. Robin Williams was keen to play Rorschach. Was that Richard Gere knocking on the door? The pressure on me was building. Thank god, Joel solved the problem. He failed to convince the studios to hand over enough money to make the film. Brilliant! I was saved! And, perhaps, Watchmen as well!
Certain works should be left alone…in their original form. Everything does not have to become a movie. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was always best in it’s original manifestation… a radio show.
So, forget about the movie. Let your imagination animate the characters. Do your own sound effects. Your own camera moves. Dave Gibbons’ artwork is perfect. From my first reading of Watchmen, it felt like a movie. Why does have to be a movie?
Think of what will have to be lost. Is it worth it?
Terry Gilliam
p.s. Happy 50th Birthday, Alan
ALAN MOORE: I KNEW HIM WHEN…by Mike Collins
In the early 80s I met Alan Moore. He was as grand and imposing as anyone I’ve ever encountered. The beard, the hair, the manner: a showman in essence, an entertainer with more than the vaguest hint of menace. He was waxing eloquent about his first proper series for 2000AD - Skizz - and how several elements he’d included mirrored actions in ET (the movie it was to ‘echo’ in the grand 2000 tradition) even though he hadn’t seen it while writing. He was witty and self-deprecating and I was going to have to tell him that I was working with him. I feared for my life.
At the time, I was scuttering at the edges of comics, trying to snatch scraps of work. Links with the Society of Strip Illustration led to odd jobs, the latest of which was to work on a semi-animated movie called ‘Ragnarok’. Designed by my pal Bryan Talbot, it was to be written by Alan.
At this point, I had encountered Alan’s name in 2000AD Future Shocks, in the astonishingly re-invigorated Captain Britain and of course, in Warrior. The chance of working with him was daunting - he had become a legend overnight so it seemed. I met him at a London Comics Con (at some hotel, somewhere—all I remember is the hair-raising and life threatening journey on the back of a motorbike to get there) where he surprised me by knowing who I was and what I’d done in fanzines. Mine’n’Mark Farmer’s strip ‘Moonstone’ was reaching a conclusion, and I’d written myself into a corner. Alan asked how it’d be resolved; I said I dunno... any ideas? To my amazement he offered to write the final episode, wrapping up my over-complicated alternate reality/time travel paradox epic, which he did beautifully in four pages.
Pleased with the result (and from the work Mark and I did on Ragnarok, I hope) he recommended us to Bernie Jaye at Marvel UK. He’d sent in a parody strip of Frank Miller’s Daredevil run, and attached our names to the script. After a bit of reluctance, she took us on board. From then on, we were comics professionals.
Thanks to Alan’s good graces, we’d gotten through the comics Catch-22: ‘No one will hire you until someone hires you.’ I imagine this book is full of artist and writers who speak well of Alan and how he helped along their careers. It’s not too extreme to say that without Alan, UK and US comics would look different today. He championed people he thought needed the break and - as one of them - I’m eternally grateful to him.
Happy 50th!
Mike Collins
| Art by John Coulthart |
| Art by Sam Kieth |
| Art by Adam Hughes |
| Art by André Carrilho. |
1986: The Mother of All Years
Click, bang, do you remember? Nineteen eighty fuckin' six, man. There's only twenty-six letters to mix and match to describe the psychic impact that series, that shake-up of the comics genre that tore down some tired, sorry ass approaches to the art form had on us fans and practitioners. What started out as a revamping of old school Charlton heroes turned into something that has rippled across the years and decades to where we are now.
Damn. And what helped spur this creation, what allowed his genie out of the keyboard, was because of some jive copyright entanglements. All because the suits upstairs didn't want no, you know, street-edge shit, no characters with flaws and depth and contradictory emotions being imposed and messing up their gaudy do-gooders.
So they let him retool and refit.
Who Watches the Watchmen was the gag, baby, the grand guffaw writ large across our collective minds when we couldn't wait, after being teased by those come-on ads, to read each successive issue of that mother of all story arcs.
But unlike say Orson Wells – and even he had more than one hand of Three Card Monty to dazzle the suckers – this dude this book is honoring has stepped up time and again and delivered. It's like Kobe hitting those threes 12 times in one game or the first time you got a peek of some hottie's panties when she crossed her legs and she winked at you. JAYZUS.
It stays with you, know what I'm sayin'?
It's as if the Comedian, that gloating, Hoyo de Monterrey smoking, Lee Harvey Oswald lone gunman nutbag on steroids and crank was still firing those nitro velocity rounds of his from that high window; causing dissension and distraction not in the social order, but in the over-ripe corpus delicti of the comics industry. Only those bullets don't sing death. They zing tracers of energy coursing through that body to resuscitate and educate us that indeed, this fumetti, this thing of ours has merit, has something to offer in the way of its unique storytelling methods.
Watchmen brought me and so many others back to these four-color fables when many of us figured we'd outgrown them what with mortgages, car payments, and crowns on our teeth.
The stories of wonder and woe he's presented in fare like Swamp-Thing, V, Green Lantern, Supreme, Top Ten and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen keeps me addicted -- keeps me wanting more badder than an alkie lining up in the morning outside the corner liquor store to bum change for his short dog of Old Smuggler.
But his stuff doesn't leave me with a hang over. His stuff makes me jealous and envious as a writer...and as an aficionado, all you can do is admire his skill that he's always honing, not content to do the same trick over and over but challenging himself to tell the best yarn he can again and again.
I wish Mr. Moore well on reaching his half-century mark. And here's hoping the next fifty -- and that doesn't seem so preposterous given one is to understand he's been dipping into some sort of study of magiks - has him crafting tales that pleasure and bother the reader.
See? The Owl was wrong, it isn't all crap. It's all good, baby.
Gary Phillips
Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
Moore Music Magicby TIM PERKINS
Having collaborated musically with Alan for the past 10 yeas now, I’d like to take this opportunity to comment on Al’s involvement in that particular facet of the Arts, and the wider implications thereof.
I still have fond memories of Al kicking the ass out of some flimsy Tannoy speakers with an impassioned rendition of “Willy the Pimp” by Frank Zappa. One microphone and two jack leads were casualties in this onslaught of song (Al never wore slippers in my cellar), and Captain Beefheart grew another dimension to his already finely cultivated beard.
Alan’s singing days seem to be pretty much over now, but my good God! What a fine voice he possessed, combining the grittiness of Tom Waits, the mystique of Leonard Cohen and the dentistry of Shane Pogue, all neatly hemmed in by Northamptonian regional synthesis.
Our first sonic expedition together (along with David J) was the “Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels” in 1996. The work is bookended by two songs with contrasting vocal styles ranging from cosmic carousel barker (“Hair of the Snake That Bit Me”) to ethereal Blakeian charm (“A Town of Lights”). Since then, each successive album has posed different challenges and dimensions of thought. Certain methods have been strongly favoured however, and crop up throughout.
‘Air sculpture’ and ‘psycho-geography’ when applied to the studio, were two of many ways we could approach music and spoken- word, by treating sounds in terms of physical shape and design, of mood and colour. Off-the-wall concepts to get your fat arse down the brain-gym.
We loved to play with time, the bonding of past and future into one glorious present… there is only one moment… which is why Samuel Coleridge and Joe Meek are presently sharing an opium laced Knickerbocker Glory at the Gunners’ gig down at PO-NA-NA’s. Woooaaah!
‘Multiple sensory overload’ is another lunar-serpentine trait, the epitome of which was achieved, I think, at the ‘Tygers of Wrath’ event at the Purcell Room, Feb. 2001. Our piece, “Angel Passage” ended with a climactic fusion of music, dialogue, film and live pyrotechnics.
Creaming aside, I have admit this ain’t exactly a new trick. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin held a similar ethos for the performance of his works. Scriabin used visual backdrops and perfumed auditoriums and sought joy through the senses… (or the Yellow Pages if it happened to be more convenient at the time).
We are merely applying it in our own way and according to experience which is relevant to us. Sure, the old masters did it all before, but then they didn’t have Line 6 digital amp systems or Leffe Blonde, so… fuck ‘em (Rule no. 1).
If psychedelia is ‘soul revealment,’ then Mr. Moore is in the thick of it, clawing ever deep into a customised sensory deprivation tank of his own choosing.
Take it to the bridge.
Sweet Soul Music.
Simply put, Alan Moore is the best writer American comic books have had since Harvey Kurtzman—and since, in my opinion, Harvey was the best writer comics have ever seen, that’s high praise. --- Howard Chaykin
Page from American Flagg! n. 21. Pencils by Larry Stroman, inks by Don Lomax.
| Art by Daniel Krall. |
| Art by MARK BUCKINGHAM. |
| Art by Carla Speed McNeil. |
| Art by Carla Speed McNeil. |