Watchmen page zero... in color

In the past days, Dave Gibbons was in Munich as special guest at the local Comic Festival. (19-22 June)

For that occasion, Gibbons drew a brand new Rorschach image (above) printed as special coaster and... colored, for the very first time, that famous Watchmen page zero, available as limited print at the show (see below)!

Wer überwacht die Überwacher?

Brian K. Vaughan's Watchmen birthday card

On the last installment of his excellent Substack newsletter Exploding Giraffe (you can subscribe HERE), dated Monday 17th of March, extraordinary writer Brian K. Vaughan talked about some difficult moments and... an happy ending (sort of). Of interest to Moore's fans.

Brian K. Vaughan: [...] Well, how’s your dystopian 2025 been so far?

Los Angeles obviously endured some horrific wildfires, and though my family and I are completely fine, we’re devastated for our friends who lost everything. [...]

We voluntarily evacuated not long after the ash started raining down, and I left behind just about all of my worldly possessions, so when the flames started approaching our neighborhood, my dear friend/collaborator Jeff Yorkes (and his wife and kids!) raced over to our abandoned place to rescue as much of my obnoxious original comic art collection as they could pry off the walls, including this eerily appropriate recent acquisition: a hand-drawn birthday card by Watchmen co-creator Dave Gibbons [...]

Watchmen Page Zero

Art by Dave Gibbons

The page was included in Watchmen Artifact Edition, published by IDW in 2014. Art by Dave Gibbons. 

 

Project mastermind Scott Dunbier explained that it “was done for DC as a sample of the style the book would be. Note the page number in the bottom right corner.”

 

Amazing artifact! More info HERE.

 

The page appeared for the first time in the extras section of Watchmen limited edition published by Graphitti Designs in 1988. The same extras were included in the Absolute Edition published by DC Comics in 2005. The page was presented with a yellow flat color on each panel. The IDW edition showed the b/w, original art page.

Moore Great Comics

From The Men's Health Comic Book Omnibus article published this June:

Finding a great comic can be tough. So we asked 45 of the most legendary, visionary, and unique creators in the business to make it easier. 

I selected the Moore's entries: we have 3 votes for Watchmen, 2 votes for both From Hell and V for Vendetta. You can read the complete article HERE.

 

Gail Simone
Writer of DC's Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, and Marvel's Deadpool:

From Hell
by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
"To say this is a book about Jack The Ripper is like saying Moby Dick is about a guy who goes fishing. It’s comics wizard Alan Moore’s best, most compelling work, told from multiple points of view and containing worlds in its story of murder, corruption and class. Stunning visuals by Eddie Campbell carry it beyond."

 

Bruno Redondo
Artist of DC's Injustice and Nightwing:

V for Vendetta
by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

"This comic was the first that made me break into tears. It showed me how comics can be powerful, filled with emotions and ideas. Comics can change your mind, and V was this for me. Masterful and brave storytelling."

 

Nicola Scott
Artist of DC's Wonder Woman, Birds of Prey, and Image Comics' Black Magik:

Watchmen

by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

"Because DUH. Infinitely re-readable."

Sina Grace
Writer of DC's Superman: The Harvest of Youth, Self-Obsessed and Not My Bag:

V for Vendetta

by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
"Look, someone else is gonna say Watchmen, but I find myself revisiting V for Vendetta a lot in my life, and every time the graphic novel slaps harder than ever. It’s so much fun to read Alan Moore buildma political and ever-poignant dystopian narrative from the ground up, and the Guy Fawkes design for V makes for one of the most elegant and startling characters in comics history."

Joe Hill
Co-creator of Locke & Key and author of NOS4A2 and The Black Phone:

From Hell
by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
"If the graphic novel form has a Ulysses, this is it. Watchmen made Moore a legend, but From Hell is better, a knotty, salty, grand Guignol that paints the late 19th century so vividly, reading it is practically the same as time-travel."

Axel Alonso
Former editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics and founder and CCO of AWA Studios:

Watchmen
by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
"Easily the most pivotal, influential graphic novel of all time, you see two Maestros of the craft deconstructing the superhero paradigms of the past with an eye fixed firmly on the future."

Mike Deodato, Jr.
Artist of AWA Studios's Bad Mother, The Resistance, Not All Robots, and more:

Watchmen
by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
"My first pick goes to Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, for defining and changing the medium and what comics can achieve. One of the greatest comic books ever made."

The complete article is available HERE.

Comics Are Dying: The Comic

Alan Moore is IN! Check the homage to a classic Watchmen page above!

 

You can find all the details on Zoop! Crowdfunding will end in 30 days. 

Comics Are Dying: The Comic
by Louis Southard and Over 100 Artists

A satirical journey through the history of the comic book industry recounted by 100 one-page comics by 1 writer and 100 artists.

A Comic Book About the Comics Industry, By the Comics Industry, For the Comics Industry

Foreword by Mark Waid

TCJ Dave Gibbons

Art by Dave Gibbons from Watchmen n.1

Below, excerpts from an interview with Dave Gibbons published the 15th of January on The Comics Journal site. You can read the complete piece HERE.

DAVE GIBBONS: [...] For instance, my classic collaboration with Alan Moore doing Watchmen and the other things we did - I felt a great connection in that he was an artist. He was a writer who could draw quite good comics. And I was an artist who could write quite good comics. So we were close together in the middle. [...]

Talking about Watchmen's contract: [...] So there was no question of anybody putting pressure on us. It's not even me putting pressure on Alan to sign anything he didn't want. We've all signed bits of paper that we really wish afterwards we hadn't signed. It doesn't necessarily mean that there's any evil intent in it. But what I would say with Alan-- and I think these things go hand in hand. I've become reasonably well-known and famous because of Watchmen. But Alan's talents, and I think Frank Miller's talents, are on a different level than so many of us. What comes along with that degree of talent is a degree of difficulty as well, that people want things from you. That people are continually trying to get you to do things for them. And I think that that can quite often taint things. [...]

[...] Well, clearly Watchmen was the Everest of my experience, really. And I'm perfectly at ease with that. It's been good for me in all kinds of ways, not only in whatever money we've made from it, or whatever fame we've had, but it's opened doors to other things. And I've had adventures that I otherwise wouldn't have had. So I'm long since resigned to the obituary reading “Dave 'Watchmen' Gibbons, dead at the age of 105,” you know, blah, blah, blah. I just feel happy that I've had the life that I wanted when I was 10 years old. There's so many people [who] aspire to do things. Perhaps [that’s] because I had a relatively easy thing to aspire to. I mean, I didn't want to get a Nobel Prize or a Pulitzer or anything like that. I just wanted to sit and draw comics. And that was literally what I wanted to do, just to find enjoyment sitting, drawing, coming up with ideas for comics. So I don't care what they call me or-- you know, “Dave Gibbons: the comic fan who never grew up,” or something like that, I guess would be a fairly accurate thing. But I think I'm going to have to settle for Watchmen.

The complete interview is available HERE.

Jeffrey Lewis and Alan Moore (again)

Art by Jeffrey Lewis

In the past days, I was lucky to exchange some emails with the great NYC comic book artist and musician Jeffrey Lewis. He suggested that it would be better off including all his various Moore-related stuff "in one post, because it's more valuable for people to see it all in one place for discussion, rather than parcelling it out to various posts where people won't see it all at once (which is, essentially, the situation all this material currently exists in, some on my FB, some on my website, etc)." 

So, here I am with this second post that integrates the first one I did (here). I am not sure it is the complete thing but... I tried my best, Jeffrey. ;)

Before starting, I highly recommend Lewis' The Complete FUFF Comix Collection: you can order a copy HERE!

Above, a Watchmen-inspired illustration posted on the 15th of March. Of course it's referred to the terrible, terrible war in Ukraine.

On a lighter note, in 2013 Lewis created the lo-budget biopic The story of Alan Moore (listen and watch here) and that same year, during his UK tour, he met... The Man Himself! Below, some pictures that Lewis sent me to share. Photographs by Heather Wagner.

Alan Moore and Jeffrey Lewis, 2013.

In 2015, Jeffrey Lewis listed his favourite comics for The Quietus: "bizarre autobiographies, superheroes and (SPOILER) a whole lot of Alan Moore". Lewis talked about:

• Watchmen, of course - "[...] it's a work of literature in a way that no other comic has even attempted. It's not even the best of what it does, it's the only thing that has ever tried to combine that kind of narrative richness in the comic book form. [...] I like the fact that it really can't be assimilated into literary culture because it is so lowbrow, and yet it's undeniably of a level of richness to which no other comic has ever come close. [...]" Read the complete piece here.
• V for Vendetta - "[...] nobody could make a list of the ten greatest comics of all time and not include V For Vendetta. Probably half the greatest comics of all time are Alan Moore comics [...]" Read the complete piece here.  
• A small killing - "[...] This is probably the best Alan Moore book, in terms of sheer consistency, because it was written as a piece. [...] It's a paranoid fantasy that keeps revealing different layers of this ad executive's life. It's very sharp, page for page, the way that the story unfolds. There is a sense of revelation and unfolding mystery as you read it. [...]" Read the complete piece here.
• Swamp Thing - "[...] Probably the best artwork in any mainstream comic of all time. Steve Bissette, John Totleben and Rick Veitch did really incredible artwork. And probably the best writing in any mainstream comic of all time. [...]". Read the complete piece here.

Back to Watchmen, which is a fundamental influence: Jeffrey Lewis wrote his college thesis on Watchmen and since the end of the '00s he gave lectures dedicated to Moore & Gibbons' masterpiece.

"I'll just be talking about things that I've found in the book and my theories on what they mean, hopefully sufficiently backed up by evidence from the book so that people don't just think I'm crazy. I'll be projecting slides of certain panels that I refer to, but just using projections when it's necessary to point out certain details or certain panels or compare certain panels. Mostly I'll just be talking. I suppose I'll do a Q&A session after the talk. It's definitely for people who have read Watchmen, probably boring (and definitely a "spoiler") for those who haven't." More details here, dated 2019.

 

In 2010, he drew a whole Watchmen page homage for his sketchbook, featuring ROM, his favourite character, a recurrent appearance in Lewis' works. See below.

Art by Jeffrey Lewis

In 2015 Lewis was interviewed by The Comics Journal. The introduction said: "For 18 years, he has been sporadically working on a book about Watchmen." In March 2017 Lewis wrote on his Facebook page: "After a mere 20 years of re-re-re-editing this I'm just about getting ready to draw a book-cover for it and call it done (I hope)." See picture below.

Art by Jeffrey Lewis

Then Revelations in the wink of an eye has been self-published by Lewis in very few copies, afaik, and it's currently sold out. Read more here and here.

 

Last but not least, in December 2021, on his Facebook page, he shared some gems from his "autograph collection (circa 1990s)!" And... ta-da, Gibbons and that bloody smiley badge!

 

Jeffrey Lewis' links:

www.TheJeffreyLewisSite.com

@JeffreyLewisBand (Instagram)

Facebook.com/JeffreyLewisBand

Anecdotical Gibbons

Dark Horse Books has announced Dave Gibbons' Confabulation: An Anecdotal Autobiography. The hardcover will be released in October.

Presented alphabetically, with informally written anecdotes that can be read from cover-to-cover or simply dipped into, Gibbons reveals unseen comics’ pitches, life as the first Comics Laureate, adventures in advertising and album cover design, and his journey from fanzine artist to infiltrating DC Comics in the 1970s. This book covers everything from his work on Doctor Who and meeting Tom Baker to his induction into the Eisner Hall of Fame. Gibbons also discusses, for the first time anywhere, the end of his relationship with fellow Watchmen co-creator Alan Moore. Packed with over 300 iconic, rarely seen, and unpublished art pieces and photographs, Confabulation: An Anecdotal Autobiography not only entertains, but peels back the layers of a fascinating career in comics.

Source: The Beat

Now we are all in Guernica

Tom Brevoort posted on Twitter the script that Moore wrote for his contribution to Heroes, a book published by Marvel Comics paying tribute to those who attempted to save lives on 9-11. See below.

The published art was by Dave Gibbons even if it's interesting to notice that the page wasn't written by Moore for Gibbons but for any artist who might be assigned.

 

More info here and here. 

Lost CD-ROM project

Excerpt from an interview by Jay Babcock published in Sci-Fi Universe, 1996:

[...] Moore is also looking ahead to reuniting with Dave Gibbons, his partner on the landmark Watchmen project, for a proposed CD-ROM project based on all-new material.

"The CD-ROMs out there now are impressive in their own sort of way," says Moore. "Myst [for example] is good, but the imagery has a kind of airbrushed blandness to it. The Residents' CD-ROM is brilliant--they strike me as artists who are heading in the right direction.

"But what impresses me more is the stuff that's not being done. There's not been any real attempt to make use of the hallucinatory possibilities of computer art. You think: 'What would Magritte have done, or Escher have done--what would an artist have done rather than designers or illustrators? What would people with some real soul and passion have done?'

"To me, the CD-ROM, or 'virtual reality,' is just a gross physical representation of something we've had all along. A book is virtual reality, music is virtual reality. It's just that with electronic virtual reality you're more immediately wrapped up in it--you don't have to use your imagination so much.

"It strikes me that the only thing you can't do to someone who is in your virtual reality is to touch them. So therefore, most people have the illusion that they are completely safe in a virtual reality-- without stopping to think that most of the things that affect us most in life are not physical events. Most of them are events that occur within our heads, because of our experiences. Therefore, I think that with the right way of thinking about these things you could make a CD-ROM experience that could be quite genuinely moving, genuinely powerful, genuinely affecting.

"We want to do something as far above most CD-ROM experiences as Watchmen was above most superhero comics. Whether we'll achieve that, I don't know, but that's what we're aiming for."

And then, in a mock-spooky voice, Moore confides, "And I wouldn't be surprised if what we do is very spooky." 

The complete article can be read HERE.

Tom Strong sketch by Dave Gibbons

Above, a quick pen sketch of Tom Strong by Dave Gibbons realized in 2002 during Bristol Comic Festival.

Discarded Watchmen page

Today, during the Comic Art Live weekend, BritComicsArt.com sold a very special piece of (unfinished) original art and comics history: 

"Rare unpublished Watchmen page of Dr Manhattan on Mars. Drawn for the series in 1986 but discarded when Dave [Gibbons] decided to change the layout. A historical glimpse into the creative process." 

Above, the unpublished page (it's page 28, the final one from issue n.4, "Watchmaker"): panel 3 and 4 are not present and caption boxes in panel 1 and 2 are differently positioned respect to the final printed page (below). 

 

I have no details about the final selling price.

Nite Owl commission by Dave Gibbons

Art by DAVE GIBBONS.

Above, a dynamic Golden Age Nite Owl commission drawn by DAVE GIBBONS.

More info HERE.

Lost CD game with Dave Gibbons

Art by DAVE GIBBONS.

Excerpt from an interview with DAVE GIBBONS that I did in collaboration with my friend Antonio Solinas in 2007. Originally printed in Italy on Lezioni di Fumetto: Dave Gibbons (October 2008, Coniglio Editore). The complete interview is available HERE.

Some years ago, maybe it was Bristol Con 2002, you told me about a huge project you were developing with Alan Moore. Any chances that it could materialize, or would you say it is a lost project?
Dave Gibbons: Alan and I have always enjoyed collaborating and I think we both have done some of our best works when we have collaborated. The thing we did talk about for a little while, and this was a while ago, this was in the late 90’s, was the idea of doing something on a kind of a CD game, a computer game… to use their abilities to weave complex worlds and try new kind of storytelling techniques, where there were alternate storylines. We kicked the idea around for a while and put some thought into it but I think what we eventually realized was that we were getting into something that would probably be as fraught with problems as, say, doing a movie, and also into something that we didn’t completely understand or hadn’t completely grown up with.
Computer games nowadays are as big business as movies and therefore there are huge amounts of money involved, which means that the are huge amounts of people that want protect investments and want to maximise profits, so I think we would actually find ourselves in a situation of really just doing some kind of treatment or outline for a movie and then having it taken completely out of our hands. Also, as I said, there was a certain lack of experience in the medium. I mean, I know people in the game industry, and they have the same kind of passion and encyclopaedic knowledge of computer games that us comics fans have of comics. Certainly, I watched my son play computer games, I have dabbled myself, but I am not an expert: I would not know what a state-of-the-art computer game is.
So that faded away, and obviously Alan has got projects that he is working on and he is very enthusiastic about. As you might know, he is writing a novel called Jerusalem at the moment, which sounds fantastic, and I wouldn’t want to take him away from that, even if he wanted to be taken away from it [laughs].
So, we have no plans to do anything in the future but, who knows, when the stars are in the right position, something could happen.

The complete interview is available HERE.

DAILY MOORE [29]

Art by Dave Gibbons.

From: Superman Annual n. 11 (For The Man Who Has Everything).
First edition: 1985, DC Comics.

DAILY MOORE [18]

Art by Dave Gibbons.

Colors by John Higgins.
From: Watchmen n. 1.
First edition: 1986, DC Comics.

DAILY MOORE [16]

Art by Dave Gibbons.
From: Tom Strong n. 6.
First edition: 2000, America's Best Comics.

Writing Watchmen in 1985!

Excerpt from comic book store zine Telegraph Wire which included a long interview from SDCC 1985 with... Alan Moore! The complete interview is available HERE.

Alan Moore: [...] WATCHMEN is my first project to actually use what I’ve learned. WATCHMEN is very, very structured. It’s twelve issues long.

I know exactly what the image in the last panel is going to be. I can see it as a whole from beginning to end. I’m really pleased with the way it’s working.

I’ve been working closely with Dave Gibbons on the project. Dave’s putting so much into it. It’s not just the writing; we’re coming together on a level of pure story-telling. I mean, the way Dave’s drawing things affects the way I’m writing it. The way he’s laying out pages is affecting the way I’m writing it.

It’s a really amazing experience. I’m enjoying it immensely. [...]

We’re trying to step back from the superhero a little bit; we want to take a fresh look at the idea of being a superhero. Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel brought out SUPERMAN in 1939. There were no other superheroes and I think that for us today, it’s very difficult to imagine what the impact of that character was; since Superman in comics, the sky is full of flying men. It’s not quite the same. The whole superhero idea has grown up with cliches around it and that has smothered it in a way. You can no longer see the woods for the trees.

What me and Dave have tried to do with WATCHMEN is to somehow get back to that point where we stepped away from the conventional idea of superheroes. I wanted to do something that used the superhero in a very, very different way to the way it’s been used before: psychologically.

One of the main things is to see what effect a superhero would have upon the world. In the DC and Marvel universes, they don’t have any effect. They’re all extraordinary beings, but the world they live in is very much the same as ours.

In WATCHMEN, we try to think it through politically and socially. We’ve got a character called Mr. Manhattan who is the only actual superhero in the book.

He’s the only actual one with powers. He emerges about 1965 and from that point on, the world is different forever. Since he’s strongly aligned to the American military, obviously, he’s like a step beyond the neutron bomb. Instantly, the balance of world power changes.

I think if the American government had found a superhero, they would have been a little bit more adventuresome in their foreign policy whereas the Russians would most certainly have been a little more timid.

In the world we’re dealing with, America won the Vietnamese war. The Russians have not invaded Afghanistan. Basically, they’re in the Kremlin under the table with their fingers in their ears. They’re terrified and the only option that they have left is mutually assured destruction. Their backs are against the wall.

You’ve reached a point where the doomsday clock is seconds away from midnight. It’s closer to disaster than our own world is. That is one of the main themes of the book: it’s this paranoid, frightening world that’s just getting closer and closer to Armageddon.

And it’s all because of this one superhero.

There are other costumed heroes in the book, but most of them are retired because I don’t think that the American legal system, or any legal system, would support superheroes. It would just cause so many problems. If you allow one guy in a mask to go around beating people up, anyone in a mask can beat people up. It just wouldn’t work. So most of the superheroes have been forced into retirement – apart from those who are valuable to the military, which includes Dr. Manhattan. That is where it all begins.

There’s a lot of different threads in it. One of the things that ties the entire story together is a murder mystery that runs all the way through the plot.

I can’t tell you an awful lot without giving away the plot.

We’ve got some interesting characters. There’s Rorschach who’s a really psychotic vigilante. Whereas in most comic books the psychopath will get angry, a real psychopath doesn’t get angry. A psychopath will break your arm and smile… or never react at all. [...]

The complete interview is available HERE.

The Comedian and... Groucho Marx

Groucho Marx.

Excerpt from an interview with Dave Gibbons published the 15th of June on Entertainment Weekly.

Dave Gibbons: The one thing we knew about the character of the Comedian was he couldn’t look like the Joker. He couldn’t look like a deranged clown. So I thought, “Who else would be a comedian? Who could I think of?” The one that leaped to mind was Groucho Marx because he had the mustache and the cigar and the kind of slicked back hair. So he was very much a toughened-up version of Groucho Marx, which was what I had in mind. 

The complete interview is available here.

Gibbons: "Alan is like Mozart, Frank is Miles."

Watchmen N.1, page 8. Art by Dave Gibbons.

Excerpt from an interview published on 13thDimension.com.

Dave Gibbons: [...] I’ve always thought of Alan as being like a Mozart. He hears the whole symphony in his head and he writes out all the parts and the artist or the orchestra is the interpreter of that and actually kind of realizes those notes and those marks and those suggestions and those chords, whereas Frank is more like a jazz virtuoso, a Miles Davis or something. He’ll take a basic theme and then run with it and, you know, change things on the fly. We hardly changed anything when we were doing Watchmen. I would talk to Alan about what we were going to do, Alan would write the words, I would draw the panels and that was kind of done. With Frank, again, we would talk but then based on what I gave back to him, he would put new ideas in or change things around or… It was much more free form and organic and I enjoyed both approaches. The most important thing is to work with a writer who’s prepared to put as much effort into it as I’m prepared to put and certainly that’s one of the things that distinguishes Alan and Frank, their absolute dedication to what they do. That, to me, is the most important thing, As for the actual circumstances and the actual details of how you perform it, that’s not so important.