Magical 71 by Francesco Frongia

Art by Francesco Frongia

Above, a blazing, magic portrait of The Wizard of Northampton by friend FRANCESCO FRONGIA. It's also a belated birthday gift of sort: notice the number 71 as the magical spell in the illustration!

Francesco Frongia is an Italian illustrator and graphic novelist, founder of the comics collective Mammaiuto. He also draw the cover for Franceso Pelosi's Alan Moore: La Mappaterra del Mago.

For more information about Frongia visit his Instagram HERE. Grazie mille Checco! :) 

From The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, page 26:

[...] since the disc or coin is sometimes called a pantacle or pentacle, you might decide to furnish your design with a five-pointed star. In this case it’s important to remember what the symbol means, namely that when the star has one point uppermost, presiding over the four points below, this stands for the supremacy of the so-called ‘fifth element’, the element of Spirit, over the four worldly elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth. (A pentacle turned upside-down just means the opposite, with Spirit downcast and neglected, dominated by material concerns. This is not to claim that such a symbol can’t be said to be Satanic when inverted in this way, but simply that it is no more Satanic than the ordinary world about us, where material concerns predominate at the expense of soul and spirit.) [...]

La Mappaterra del Mago... THE BOOK!

Cover art by Francesco Frongia

My dear friend, musician, comic book author and scholar Francesco Pelosi did it! 

He revised, expanded and collected the Mappaterra series of essays he wrote for the online magazine Quasi (in Italian, of course), and they will be printed in book form! In this volume (as he did in the articles) Pelosi traces a map of Moore's work, investigating his stories under the lens of Eternalism, spacetime theory, magic and the power of imagination. You can still read the complete series HERE. I think they could disappear from the Web sooner or later (paper rules!), so... hurry up!

 

The 268-page book will be released on the 30th of April, published by Odoya. It's highly recommended, especially if you can read Italian! ;)

With a fantastic cover by Francesco Frongia, the volume is enriched with amazing illustrations by Italian artists (in order of appearance) Alessandro Aroffu, La Came, Alpraz, Christian Galli, Claudio Calia, David Bacter, Francesco Frongia, Polsino, Emme, Chiara Raimondi, Lorenzo Palloni, Alessio Ravazzani, Titta D’Onofrio, Federica Ferraro, Sara Vincenzi, Officina Infernale, and Rise. 

Afterword by Paolo Interdonato and a foreword by... yours truly! Grazie mille, Francesco!

Please note that Pelosi contributed to the Alan Moore: Portraits with a "remixed" essay from the Mappaterra series. So, you can read it there in English! No excuses!

Again, I highly recommend Pelosi's book: it's an amazing reading!

Sketching Moore by Francesco Frongia

Art by Francesco Frongia

Above, a preliminary layout for an unpublished illustration by Italian artist and friend Francesco Frongia. It's unfinished but... I love to share it! You know... Moore is never enough! Grazie, Checco!

 

Frongia is an appreciated Italian comic book artist, illustrator and graphic novelist; he is also the co-founder of the Italian acclaimed comics collective Mammaiuto.

La Mappaterra del Mago

La Mappaterra by Pelosi & Frongia

Italian musician, actor, comic book author and scholar Francesco Pelosi is writing a series of articles focused on Moore's works: he is tracing a map and he named it la Mappaterra del Mago... The Magician's Map-Land. I am really proud to call Francesco... a friend!

Below, I translated - with a little help from another friend of mine, the extraordinary Omar Martini - a short excerpt from one of Pelosi's articles which includes the map drawn by Francesco Pelosi & Francesco “Checco” Frongia.

You can read the complete set HERE. Of course they are in Italian.

From the corner where we are now, from the special and elevated point of view of Citadel Supreme, we can finally see the whole Map-Land: it spreads beneath us but, on a closer look, also above and all around us.
At the centre there is From Hell’s black city [...]. Watching it from here, you can notice that it is wrapped in the flames of the Voice of Fire and that there is a Hole at its centre: there is the same Hole also up here, in the Citadel Supreme, because the two cities are equal and opposite, one black and rooted to the earth, the other gold and floating. However, when they are watched from above, from a place outside the Map-Land, they occupy exactly the same space - the only difference is that to access Citadel Supreme you have to go through the door/outpost called 1963.

Around the city of From Hell, there is an area of barren and even darker countryside, with an unusual circular shape. If we could look at the Map-Land from below, we would see that those dark lands are nothing more than the foundations of Providence/Neonomicon, an upside-down city, whose roofs and buildings, like rotting and incomprehensible roots, plunge directly into the ground.
The dark circle of Providence is defined by a series of streets that form the sides of two equilateral triangles, crossing themselves to outline a six-pointed star.
One of the points, the one looking at the Map-Land from above, seems to point to the sky or the West: it is the place where the city of Promethea lies. On the other hand, on the opposite point which seems to indicate the ground or the East, lies the city of Tom Strong.

From here, heading south, we find the townlet of A Small Killing […], then the Top 10 metropolis and going westwards, just before arriving at Promethea, the Lost Girls hotel. Following this path, we can see that the outermost part of the Map-Land is circular and all the towns in this area are connected to each other by roads and, in the same way, each town is connected to the centre of From Hell.
Then, moving from Promethea and heading north, we find the old and crumbling city of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the five districts of Tomorrow Stories (which include the village of Jack B. Quick, the swamp of Splash Brannigan, the film-set city of First American and U.S. Agent and the metropolis of Indigo, also known, depending on which side you access it from, as Greyshirt or The Cobweb). Finally, closing the circle to the east, we arrive at the small town of Mirror of love […] and again at Tom Strong.

However, the most interesting thing you may notice from this high angle concerns the shape of the land. The Map-Land, as it has developed until now, looks like a two-dimensional rectangle. If you look at it closely, you can see four dotted lines rising perpendicularly towards the sky from the vertex of the rectangle corners, each touching the vertex of another dotted rectangle that closes the airspace as if it were a box. The Magician's Map-Land is therefore both a two-dimensional rectangle and a 3D rectangular parallelepiped. Ultimately - and how could it be otherwise - we find ourselves inside a Block-Universe/Idea-Space.
The name of this all-encompassing place is Jerusalem. 

Francesco Pelosi

Alan Moore portrait by Francesco Frongia

Art by Francesco Frongia.

Above, an intense portrait of Alan Moore (with a bit of V embedded in) drawn by Italian comics artist Francesco Frongia (founder of the comics collective Mammaiuto) for my collection. 

For more information about Francesco Frongia visit his blog (here).