Made of Writing

Excerpt from a 2-part interview published on Flaming Hydra site, under paywall (Part I - Part II). 

Zach Rabiroff: All your novels to date have been concerned to a great extent with a sense of place—with Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem, it was Northampton, which allowed you to draw on personal experience. And now in The Great When you’re dealing with London. 

Alan Moore: I like to think that wherever I’m writing about, and in whatever form, I have always tried to pay attention to place, whether in my comic work or other work. I was quite pleased to get a lot of letters from American readers asking how long I’d lived in Louisiana [after using it as a setting in Swamp Thing]. That was touching. But no, actually it was just all research, and then imagining myself into the place. And of course with things like From Hell, it was immersing myself in London. 

[...] The majority of comics—when I started working in them—were set in America. So it felt quite radical to set some stories in London. When I did Voice of the Fire, that seemed to me to be quite audacious in that it was setting a whole novel in Northampton, which is largely a place that nobody cares about, and that doesn’t even get a mention on the local weather maps. And the same with Jerusalem, where I did it much more intensely. But that doesn’t mean that I exhausted London. The nature of a place like that means that you probably never could exhaust it. It’s infinitely deep with stories. [...]

I was actually going to ask whether you consider writing— artistic creation—itself an act of magic.

It is. I believe that all art and creation is an act of magic, consciously or unconsciously. But I believe that writing, specifically, is the closest to actual magic. If you look at the magic gods of most cultures, they are also gods of language. Hermes is the god of magic, but he's also the god of communication. The Egyptian magic god is also the scribe god, which tends to suggest that there is something, a rather intimate connection, between writing and magic. 

[...] with writing, just writing straight prose, which is all I'm doing now, I think that that has got to be the most elegant form of art. You can do so much with so little. All you've got are 26 characters peppered with punctuation.

You’re summoning reality into being with an incantation, so to speak.

You can create the whole universe from those 26 letters, any conceivable universe. And that is the immense power of writing. In writing Long London, I'm actually building that space. This is something that I learned that you can do. I probably learned it from Mervyn Peake, when I first read the Gormenghast books, and I thought, this is incredible—actually creating an architectural space in my mind. Even at this late age, I remember Gormenghast a lot better than I remember places that I've actually been. Better than places in the real world. 

Magic has got to be the art of causing changes in people's consciousness, including that of the practitioner. And anything that you can do with magic, you can do with writing. [...] You can be anything as a writer. [...]

We can never know another human being; that is the sorry fact of our existence. We can never know anything outside of our own skulls. And so, to a degree, everybody around us, the people that we love the most, are fictions that we have made up. We are fictions that we have made up. I can almost remember making me up when I was about 13 or 14. I can almost remember thinking that this childhood personality I have is going to be no use at all; if I want to have a girlfriend, I better write a new one. [...]

I wish I was made of writing, because then I wouldn't be in such a stage of physical collapse, and I would still be as gorgeous looking as I was 40 years ago instead of just almost as gorgeous looking as I was 40 years ago. If I was made of writing, I would be in perfect condition forever. And also, our fictional characters are going to meet and interact with a lot more people than we are, and for a lot longer time. Our fictions have a great deal of importance, I believe, not just as entertainment, but because they provide part of the infrastructure and armature of our world. 

Jerusalem in Brazil

It seems that Jerusalem is coming out in Brazil!To be published by Editora Veneta.

 

Pre-ordering will be available HERE pretty soon. Check the page, if interested.

German Jerusalem

Cover art by benSwerk

Above the cover for the German edition of Jerusalem to be published by Carcosa this fall. 

Cover art by benSwerk. 

For more info about the artist, visit the official site and Instagram page.

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

The hands of Mansoul by Matt Chu

Art by Matt Chu

Above, a stunning Moore portrait based on his book Jerusalem.  

Amazing art by MATT CHU, a freelance artist and illustrator based in Coventry, UK.

 

For more info about the artist and his awesome work, visit his site: HERE.

On Joe Hill and creating stories

Excerpt from "Mondo Moore: Questions from Hill, Diaz and more", a six-part interview by Zack Smith posted on Newsarama.com in May 2009.

Newsarama: Our next “bonus round” question comes from Joe Hill, author of Heart-Shaped Box and the comic series Locke & Key.
Alan Moore: Another very, very good author. I read Heart-Shaped Box and thought it was a splendid book. I was very impressed with it.

NRAMA: Joe writes, “In a recent interview on the subject of episodic television, you said writers working on a continuing series ought to have an ending in mind, that they should know what they're building towards.
“With LoEG - or with any of your stories - do you work backward from a known ending then, or do the characters lead you naturally towards a conclusion you didn't expect? To put the question another way: you've sometimes discussed fiction as a form of magic. With that in mind, do you always get the demon you planned to summon, or are there sometimes surprise visitors?”
AM: Well, I think all of that is true. It’s like, yes, I do generally at least have a vague plan before I commence a narrative. Back in the day, when I was starting out, I used to have everything planned out and nailed down. With Swamp Thing, before I started writing every issue, I had an idea of what was going to go on every page and how it would all tie up.

As I did it issue-by-issue, I had an idea of where the overall narrative would be going. I can’t claim to have had the entire Swamp Thing story worked out from issue #1, but I had an interesting idea about redefining the character that I thought could take in into some interesting territory, so I left that fairly loose.

The other books up through Watchmen, From Hell and Lost Girls…I had everything in place, but that still leaves an awful lot that is open to change. Just because you’ve got a rough idea of where the plot’s going, that doesn’t tell you how you’re going to express those ideas, or what you’re going to make of them.

And so, with Lost Girls, I knew from my first conversations with Melinda that it was going to take place in a series of 38-page episodes, and that the plot outline would be building up to these three climaxes at the end of the three books that would end up with the First World War.

But in writing the book, so much rich material starts to emerge, so that as long as you’ve left yourself room to tie it back in, it will probably fit with your original conception of the book. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything where I came up with an ending that I completely hadn’t expected, but there have been plenty of times where I was pleasantly surprised by something that had been there potentially in my approach to the story all along.

There were very, very nice bits in the bit I’m working on now, Jerusalem. There were elements I threw together into the original mix. But the original mix was basically 35 story titles! I’ve got a vague idea of what’s in each chapter, and a vague idea of the order the chapters would be appearing in, and therefore roughly what this vast novel would be about. But it’s only with this current chapter, 25, that I’ve comprehended the entire shape of this enormous thing, I’ve realized the scope of what I’m doing.
That, in itself, has changed the shape of these final 10 chapters. I didn’t know when I started out that I’d be writing a chapter in an approximation of James Joyce’s language, because it’s a story about his daughter. It wasn’t until I was halfway through this chapter that I realized the next chapter would be about the development of economic policy, since Isaac Newton was put in charge of the mint.

I think that the important thing is, in my experience as a writer, I’ve come to recognize a workable skeleton, just by sight. I can see that yeah, this story, it’s got four legs, it can stand up, it can move, it’s articulated in the right way. What the flesh will be like, and the eventual meaning of that flesh will be, that’s a surprise that I probably won’t know until the end. I won’t know what Jerusalem is exactly until I’ve finished the last page and the last revisions.

But it’s a mixture of those things. I do like to have enough of the story worked out so I can trust my abilities as a writer to finish the story in a way that is satisfying to me and the reader. But I do like to leave room open for serendipity, because it happens a lot, and it can be so wonderful. Leave yourself the space for that, but do it within a predetermined structure. It’s the best of both worlds, really. Leave room for nice surprised, but try to get rid of any nasty surprises before you commence the narrative.

Moore on Jerusalem, Eternalism, Anarchy and Herbie!

Below you can read a great interview with Moore conducted by Brazilian writer and editor Raphael Sassaki. The interview was finalized at the end of 2016, translated and published in January 2017 in a reduced version on the online pages of Folha de São Paulo (here).

This is the first time that the original English interview is available in full with the permission of Sassaki. Grazie, Raphael!

The interview has also been included in Italian in Alan Moore: 5 interviste, a small self-published book that I edited few months ago (more info here, if you can read Italian).
Grazie again, Raphael! More info about Raphael Sassaki at his Shivapress.

And... Happy 66th birthday, Mr. Moore! ;)

Raphael Sassaki: How di you come up with the idea of Jerusalem, which tells a story that spreads through 1000 years in Northampton? How was the writing of it?

Alan Moore: Rather than originating from a single idea, Jerusalem is more the convergence of several different impulses and concepts. Foremost amongst these were the growing need to talk about the tiny but historically peculiar district I was raised in, and the simultaneous urge to talk about my family in a way that included both its history and its mythology. This, I soon realised, would require the proposed book to possess an unusually wide register that could encompass often-brutal social realism on the one hand and fantastical experimentalism on the other. In addition to such technical considerations, it occurred to me that the work’s actual scope and substance needed to be radically extended if I was to talk about my family or their environment in a way that was meaningful: I could not talk about that neighbourhood and its inhabitants without discussing poverty, which would demand a similar investigation into wealth, and social history, and economics. I could not mention that materially disadvantaged population without also speaking of their spiritual imaginings and yearnings, which, as it turned out, necessitated an account of the town’s religious development that reached from a pilgrim monk in the 9th century, through John Wycliffe’s radical translation of the bible into English and the subsequent upheaval in both visionary writings and incendiary politics, to the English Civil War and the reforms of Phillip Doddridge that came after. Having raised the issue of a visionary literary tradition I next felt obliged to follow that thread from John Wycliffe to John Bunyan (and his fellow hymn-composers Phillip Doddridge and John Newton) through to William Blake, John Clare and, via the medium of Clare’s non-contemporary asylum-mate Lucia Joyce, her father James Joyce and her unrequited love, the author Samuel Beckett. Blake, a powerful offstage presence throughout the whole novel from its title onwards, prompted an appraisal of Blake’s major influence, Northampton pastor and originator of the Gothic movement in the arts, James Hervey. John Clare and Lucia Joyce, along with Blake himself and members of my family, seemed to imply that madness was a topic that would need addressing. And of course no picture of a neighbourhood could be complete unless the immigrant experience, specifically the black experience, is dealt with, which in turn demands paying attention to the slave trade and its many consequences. The above is by no means a full, inclusive list of everything that went into the making of Jerusalem, but I trust it will at least provide an explanation – what with each new subject raising whole sets of subsidiary subjects to be dealt with – as to why the book needed to be so long.

Jerusalem deals with the idea of eternalism: everything that has happened is happening right now and forever. Could you explain your views on this?

My conception of an eternity that was immediate and present in every instant – a view which I have since learned is known as ‘Eternalism’ – was once more derived from many sources, but a working definition of the idea should most probably begin with Albert Einstein. Einstein stated that we exist in a universe that has at least four spatial dimensions, three of which are the height, depth and breadth of things as we ordinarily perceive them, and the fourth of which, while also a spatial dimension, is perceived by a human observer as the passage of time. The fact that this fourth dimension cannot be meaningfully disentangled from the other three is what leads Einstein to refer to our continuum as ‘spacetime’. This leads logically to the notion of what is called a ‘block universe’, an immense hyper-dimensional solid in which every moment that has ever existed or will ever exist, from the beginning to the end of our universe, is coterminous; a vast snow-globe of being in which nothing moves and nothing changes, forever. Sentient life such as ourselves, embedded in the amber of spacetime, would have to be construed by such a worldview as massively convoluted filaments of perhaps seventy or eighty years in length, winding through this glassy and motionless enormity with a few molecules of slippery and wet genetic material at one end and a handful or so of cremated ashes at the other. It is only the bright bead of our consciousness moving inexorably along the thread of our existence, helplessly from past to future, that provides the mirage of movement and change and transience. A good analogy would be the strip of film comprising an old fashioned movie-reel: the strip of film itself is an unchanging and motionless medium, with its opening scenes and its finale present in the same physical object. Only when the beam of a projector – or in this analogy the light of human consciousness – is passed across the strip of film do we see Charlie Chaplin do his funny walk, and save the girl, and foil the villain. Only then do we perceive events, and continuity, and narrative, and character, and meaning, and morality. And when the film is concluded, of course, it can be watched again. Similarly, I suspect that when our individual four-dimensional threads of existence eventually reach their far end with our physical demise, there is nowhere for our travelling bead of consciousness to go save back to the beginning, with the same thoughts, words and deeds recurring and reiterated endlessly, always seeming like the first time this has happened except, possibly, for those brief, haunting spells of déjà vu. Of course, another good analogy, perhaps more pertinent to Jerusalem itself, would be that of a novel. While it’s being read there is the sense of passing time and characters at many stages of their lives, yet when the book is closed it is a solid block in which events that may be centuries apart in terms of narrative are pressed together with just millimetres separating them, distances no greater than the thickness of a page. As to why I decided to unpack this scientific vision of eternity in a deprived slum neighbourhood, it occurred to me that through this reading of human existence, every place, no matter how mean, is transformed to the eternal, heavenly city. Hence the title.

You have interesting ideas about the relationship between magic and works of art. What’s the role of the artist-magician in our society? How do you practice magic?

In my understanding of magic, it is inextricably bound up with the development of modern consciousness some 70,000 years ago during the cognitive revolution. This leap in human awareness is traditionally believed to be dependent on our developing use of language. Since language is itself based upon the principle of representation – of this mark or this sound representing that object or animal – then we have the essential basis of art preceding language, which itself precedes consciousness. The relatively sudden advent of that consciousness with all of its attendant unfamiliar phenomena would, I suggest, leave early humans with no other recourse that to regard the sum total of this new inner life, this new experience, as magic. This enables us to identify magic as a phenomenon inextricably bound up with language, art and consciousness as if they were indeed but facets of the same thing, and to provide a new definition of magic as “Any purposeful engagement with the phenomena and possibilities of consciousness.” This construction is deliberately broad, in order to include all of those areas that I believe to be part of magic’s original remit, which is to say science, medicine, astronomy, the visual and literary arts, performance, music, mathematics, access to an inner world, political advice passed from the shaman or shamanka to the tribal chieftain, and the pursuit of a vital and integrating shared ecstasy. All of these things and many more appear to have their origins in shamanism, its performance and its practice as an all-inclusive one-stop model of existence. It’s my thesis that across the centuries, commencing with our earliest urban settlements, magic has had its various parts and functions hived off or else subcontracted out to artists, writers, musicians, priests, and viziers. With the Renaissance and the rise of science and medicine from pre-existing alchemy and folk-healing traditions, magic lost two of its remaining applications, and then with Freud’s advent of psychoanalysis around the early 20th century even magic’s access to the inner world was compromised. In short, I see almost the entirety of the modern culture surrounding us as being the dismembered body of magic. This seems to me to be in accordance with the alchemical formula of solvé et coagula where solvé represents reductionism – taking a thing apart into its components to see how it works, or the process of analysis – while coagula represents holism, or putting the disassembled parts back together in a hopefully improved or at least better-understood form, which is the process of synthesis. Simply put, I see task and indeed the responsibility of modern magicians/artists to be the reassembly of the fractured world, the fractured worldviews and the fractured psychologies that presently surround us. As for how I practice magic, while there may still be the occasional ceremonial ritual if required, at this stage of my development I practice magic by being aware of the magical dimension of everything I do. In fact, I’m doing it right now.

What’s the difference in the processes of writing novels and writing comics?

The most obvious difference is that in a prose novel, you neither have nor should require an illustrator. What this means is that all of those lengthy paragraphs of scene and character description, which would previously have been seen by only the book’s artist, must now be brushed up considerably from their original stark functionality and embedded smoothly in the narrative itself. This in turn changes a lot of things. For instance, in a comic book you have the power to misdirect or to subliminally inform your reader by burying a salient visual detail in the background of a panel, whereas prose lacks that capacity and will demand new strategies to accomplish those things. On the other hand, with prose there are perhaps even greater opportunities for misdirection or subliminal manipulation in that by choosing what to mention or describe you effectively limit your audience’s ability to see what is going on, nudging the reader into false assumptions that can be satisfyingly exposed and resolved at the point of the author’s choosing. Also, in prose you can make what is unseen as important as what is visible. The author H.P. Lovecraft’s tales exploit this by heightening the reader’s unease with entities that are almost impossible to describe or visualise, whereas in comic strip adaptations of Lovecraft, unless ingenious evasions are made, we have what was meant to be indescribable pinned down to one concrete, visible and thus eminently describable form. Both media have their differing abilities, but if I had to choose which one was the more elegant I’d have to come down on the side of prose, whereby with a couple of dozen characters and a peppering of punctuation marks, it is possible to delineate the whole of our conceptual universe in its entirety.

Before your first well read stories you published fanzines, worked cleaning toilets and in tannery, sold LSD and had a job a office for a subcontractor of a gas board. Do you miss being young and anonymous? How were those times?

While I greatly enjoyed being young, with all the energy and physical capability that youth implies, I am also greatly enjoying being old and having access to all of the different energies, and to all of the emotional and intellectual capability that age implies. As for anonymity, that’s perhaps a more difficult question to answer honestly. Yes, sometimes I do find myself wishing that I could just go about my business in Northampton without attracting so much attention, but on the other hand that attention, here in my home town, is generally well-intentioned, low key, respectful, and seems as uncomfortable with the idea of celebrity as am I myself. Celebrity on a larger scale is something that I don’t want anything to do with, and nine times out of ten can successfully ignore or refuse to engage with. Of course, my only reason for pursuing the work that I do is the hope that my work, and therefore my ideas, can reach and affect as wide an audience as is humanly possible. Logically, I have to accept that this also means that my name and my reputation will be reaching a similarly-sized audience, and that there is a certain contradiction in wanting one of these outcomes without being prepared to accept the other. Thus the best course of action seems to be to try to minimise the impact of my personal celebrity as much as possible – for my own good, and for the good of everyone involved – while making the most of the potential audience to which this celebrity grants me access. Most of the time, I feel I do a pretty decent job of handling this, but that is probably a matter that other people can judge more accurately than I can.

What have led you to create V for Vendetta? What were the influences and ideas passing in your mind at that time?

I’m afraid that for a few years now, I have felt that since I am apparently not allowed to own the work that I created in the same manner that an author in a more grown-up and worthwhile field might expect to do, and since my protests at having my work stolen from me are interpreted by a surely young-at-heart and non-unionised audience as evidence of my “grouchiness” and “cantankerousness”, then the only active position that is left to me is to disown the works in question. I no longer own copies of these books and, other than the earnest creative work that I put into them at the time, my only associations with these works are broken friendships, perfectly ordinary corporate betrayals and wasted effort. Given that I will certainly never be reading any of these works again and that I have no wish to see them or even to think of them, it follows that I don’t wish to discuss them, sign copies of them or, indeed, have anything to do with them. As I would hope should be obvious, to separate emotionally from work that you were previously very proud of is quite a painful experience and is not undertaken lightly. However, having to answer questions about my opinions regarding DC Comics latest imbecilic use of my characters or stories would be much more harrowing. And, of course, it’s not as if I don’t have plenty of current work to be getting on with.

What was the impact of popular heroes comic books in our culture? Why are people fascinated by alternative realities?

I think the impact of superheroes on popular culture is both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying. While these characters were originally perfectly suited to stimulating the imaginations of their twelve or thirteen year-old audience, today’s franchised übermenschen, aimed at a supposedly adult audience, seem to be serving some kind of different function, and fulfilling different needs. Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods, or (b) the relatively reassuring 20th century. The continuing popularity of these movies to me suggests some kind of deliberate, self-imposed state of emotional arrest, combined with an numbing condition of cultural stasis that can be witnessed in comics, movies, popular music and, indeed, right across the cultural spectrum. The superheroes themselves – largely written and drawn by creators who have never stood up for their own rights against the companies that employ them, much less the rights of a Jack Kirby or Jerry Siegel or Joe Schuster – would seem to be largely employed as cowardice compensators, perhaps a bit like the handgun on the nightstand. I would also remark that save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race. In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.

You have desconstructed an entire genre and exerted major influence in the adult comic books after the publication of Watchmen. How do you see it’s lasting impact on comics?

Again, see my answer to question six. Frankly, I don’t think about comics that much, I don’t think of Watchmen at all, and the lasting impact of one upon the other is really no longer my concern.

You have been in and out of the comic big publishers all your life. How do you feel about the industry at this point?

I’d imagine that after these last three questions, my feelings (such as they are) about the comics industry at this point would be fairly obvious. Other than finishing my commitments to those publishers such as Knockabout, Avatar and Top Shelf who have always treated me well, I don’t want anything to do with the comic industry in future. I still respect and love the comic medium and may very well work in the medium at some future point, but I genuinely want to put my connections with a comic industry that appears to me to be hopelessly dysfunctional far, far behind me.

Could you tell a very strange thing that happened to you?

Well, my younger brother once choked on a cough-sweet and went without breathing for between five and ten minutes with no obvious ill effects, but that’s something that I unpack more fully in Jerusalem. Other than that, I remember swimming in one of the deep-gouged and diamond-clear streams of Glen Nevis, back in the early 1970s. Electing to climb out of the stream up a twelve-foot rock-face, halfway up I discovered a jutting stone ledge, only a few inches across, upon which was resting a small pile of hair-clippings, the hair being fine, blonde and definitely human. It looked like it might have been that of a child. That was a thing which, for want of any likely or even conceivable explanation, I categorised as strange. Eerie, even.

What’s anarchy for you? What are your political beliefs?

Anarchy, meaning simply ‘no leaders’, to me implies a situation in which everyone must take responsibility for their own actions and, therefore, serve as their own leaders. In such a state, inter-individual cooperation is the most successful and thus the default form of interaction. This is why our species, for the hundreds of thousands of years that constituted its hunter/gatherer stage, was non-hierarchical, and why the greatest social sin in those earliest proto-societies was the attempt to claim greater status than anyone else, this being punishable by ridicule and, when ridicule proved insufficient, by banishment. This is apparently still the tradition amongst some of world’s aboriginal people up to the present day. It is currently thought that those earliest communities somehow realised that status would create divisions that would ultimately destabilise the entire culture. For me, anarchy suggests that to become fully realised as human beings we must each make our own individual peace with the universe and stand as women or men, naked and denuded of status, at the heart of a stupefying and starry existence which surely makes all such status less than meaningless. Anarchy was the political position that Charles Darwin came to believe the most rational and humane, and as defined above is a pretty exact representation of my own political beliefs.

What are your favourite ever comic books/strips?

There is an endless amount of wonderful material in the comic medium, but if I had to boil it down to single comic strip work for which I retain the most affection, it would have to be Richard E. Hughes and Ogden Whitney’s sublime Herbie, originally published by the American Comic Group (ACG) during the 1960s. This is not, of course, to diminish the medium’s many other great accomplishments, from Lynd Ward and Winsor McCay to Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner to Garth Ennis and Kieron Gillen, but simply to say that for pure comic book delight that never seems to age, my money is on Herbie. Who appears both in the narrative and on the cover of Jerusalem.

Italian edition of Jerusalem... in November

Rizzoli Lizard is going to release the Italian edition of Alan Moore's Jerusalem this 9th of November.

It's a huge hard-cover book, 1540 pages. Translated by Massimo Gardella.

Pictures are from Rizzoli Lizard Facebook page, here.

Jerusalem French Special Collector's Edition

Jerusalem French Special Collector's Edition.

French publisher Inculte has produced a very limited (200 copies) French edition of Jerusalem. It includes a special black cover with box featuring Charles Burns' portrait of Alan Moore from The Believer magazine, a signed ex-libris of the original cover drawn by Alan Moore and a special limited edition tote bag.
You can order it only online from Inculte site: HERE.

Jerusalem regular French ed. is available here.

Dans la tête d'Alan Moore

Alan Moore

An awesome video interview with Alan Moore has been posted on the European Culture Channel ARTE.

The 8-part video interview is available HERE.

Essential Alan Moore interview about Jerusalem (and more)

Alan Moore. Photo by Dominic Wells.

Excerpts from the excellent interview conducted by Dominic Wells. You can read it HERE.

 

[1986]

Alan Moore: “It’s about time people stopped debating whether comics are art [...] and just get on with making good art.”

[2002]

Alan Moore: “This planet has a physical geography with which we have already familiarised ourselves [...] But since the dawn of the first stories, there is a fictional geography, where the gods and demons live. We have created this big imaginary planet that is a counterpart to our own; and in some cases these places are more familiar to us than the real ones.”

[afternoon of July 9, 2016]

Talking about Jerusalem.  

Alan Moore: “Nearly everything is historical fact. [...] I’d take all the angels and demons with a pinch of salt. A lot of it is actually 100 per cent materially true, but I think all of it is emotionally true. And also we are not just our bricks and mortar, we are not just our flesh and blood, we are not just our material components. Everything in our world has got an imaginary component. As individuals, we’re always telling people the legend of us. The same goes for our houses, our streets, our towns, our country – there is a huge imaginary component to human life and if in the interests of scientific realism you ignore that, you are not describing reality.”

Discussing V for Vendetta mask adopted by both the Occupy and Anonymous movements. 

Alan Moore: “I’m glad that they’ve got it, although – they didn’t get it from the comic, did they? They got it from the film, which I have never seen and which, from a position of complete ignorance, I am willing to describe as a total rat’s abortion. But I’m glad it’s been of use to these protestors, because generally I really admire what they do.”

[6pm, July 9, 2016]

Alan Moore: "[Jerusalem] is dedicated to Audrey. The whole book was an attempt… an attempt to rescue her? A particularly futile and belated attempt, but the best I could do. The only way that I could rescue her was in a fiction.”

The complete interview can be can read HERE.

Remarkably happy

Excerpt from an article by Nat Segnit published on the The New Yorker website the 8th of September 2016.

[...] A few weeks after our meeting, I asked Moore whether his own mental health had ever been a concern. “It probably should have been, but it hasn’t,” he said. “I am remarkably happy in my life. I don’t seem to have many of the conflicts that my ostensibly more normal and sane acquaintances seem to have. I’ve never been tempted by the idea of analysis or therapy.” [...]

The complete piece is available HERE.

Moore confirms his retirement from comics

Excerpt from an article published the 8th of September on The Guardian.

[...]  At a press conference in London for his latest work, Jerusalem [... ] Moore said he had “about 250 pages of comics left in me”.
[...] "There are a couple of issues of an Avatar [Press] book that I am doing at the moment, part of the HP Lovecraft work I’ve been working on recently. Me and Kevin will be finishing Cinema Purgatorio and we’ve got about one more book, a final book of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to complete. After that, although I may do the odd little comics piece at some point in the future, I am pretty much done with comics.”

[...] “I think I have done enough for comics. I’ve done all that I can. I think if I were to continue to work in comics, inevitably the ideas would suffer, inevitably you’d start to see me retread old ground and I think both you and I probably deserve something better than that.”

The complete article is available here.

Jerusalem slipcase edition

Above and below, preview pictures of the dummy for the three-volumes-in-a-slipcase edition of Alan Moore's Jerusalem.
Jerusalem will be published this September by Knockabout.

 

 

Jerusalem first review

Excerpt from Kirkus review posted online June 22nd, 2016.

"Mind-meld James Michener, Charles Dickens, and Stephen King and you'll approach the territory the endlessly inventive Moore stakes out in his most magnum of magna opera.

[...] Magisterial: an epic that outdoes Danielewski, Vollmann, Stephenson, and other worldbuilders in vision and depth."

The complete review is available here.

Jerusalem audiobook by Simon Vance

Award-winning audiobook narrator and actor  SIMON VANCE is working on Jerusalem audiobook. So in the past days he flew to Northampton to meet Alan Moore and talk with him about the book and all its secrets.

Vance also posted some videos about his Northampton's journey on his Vimeo channel:

Prologue - Chapter One - Chapter Two - Chapter Three - Epilogue

Simon Vance's Facebook page here. 

Personally I can't wait to read the book and... listen to the audiobook too!

Jerusalem is coming!

Jerusalem cover art by Alan Moore.

Above, from Knockabout Twitter account: Alan Moore's cover drawing for JERUSALEM in preparation.

I can't wait to hold the book in my hands!

Jerusalem's blurb

Photo by Mitch Jenkins.

Excerpt from Alan Moore's blurb for his upcoming novel Jerusalem to be published in September. You can read the complete text here.

[...] An opulent mythology for those without a pot to piss in, through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth and poverty; of Africa, and hymns, and our threadbare millennium. They discuss English as a visionary language from John Bunyan to James Joyce, hold forth on the illusion of mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon the meanest slum as Blake’s eternal holy city. Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its scope, this is the tale of everything, told from a vanished gutter. [Alan Moore]

Jerusalem is... finished!

From the official Facebook page for Alan Moore (here), administrated by Moore's daughter Leah Moore. The annoucement is dated the 9th of September.

The book will be published by Knockabout who co-publish all of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen books;  Knockabout is also managing the foreign publishing rights.