The Cloak is back!

Australian publisher Comicoz has teased the forthcoming publication of The Collected Cloak by Mike Higgs, introduced by Alan Moore. Comicoz is Nat Karmichael‘s publishing imprint. 
More details & info here, at DownTheTubes site.

Furthermore, directly from Comicoz site, April's entry:

[...] I have spent the past two days trying to find a UK printer for my most recent publication, The Collected Cloak by Mike Higgs. The files are ready to print, even though we have had other difficulties in the process over the past few months. It's been a dog's breakfast trying to get someone from Rebellion -- who say they own the copyright to the property -- to contact me about the works. So much so, I am giving up on them! (Until they get back in touch with me at least..!) Mike has drawn a brand-new pin-up page for the volume, and we are overjoyed with Alan Moore's Introduction. Initially we said we would be happy with a 25-word introduction: but we were give many wonderful pages! (And that is all I am going to say for now!) We're presently looking to lock in a printer (which we hope to do in the next few days) and -- all being well -- we are also hoping to have Diamond UK distribute the book. There's a few ducks to line up first, but (as always) I am ever hopeful that it won't be long before all is ready...! Ryan McDonald-Smith has done an absolutely outstanding job with the design of the book and it would be remiss of me not to mention his contribution here because he just as much a part of this team! [….]

Silent Pictures by Kevin O’Neill

From Gosh! site: 

“One of the finest and most original talents ever to emerge from the comic industry.” – Alan Moore, from his introduction.

Silent Pictures by Kevin O’Neill is the capstone to an extraordinary career in comics – two ferocious new books that flicker through the very dreams of art and imagination. Without words, O’Neill conjures an astonishing pair of feverish stories, brimming with detail on every page, packed with some of the most exciting, twisted artwork ever put to paper. Gorgeously painted in luminous colour, no fan of his work can afford to miss out.

In Feartreland we tag along as the son of Dick Whittington flits through a series of pantomime tableaus, splash pages and tortuous punning images. Crocodiles gambol with giant apes, and genies promise adventures on the high seas. An explosive entertainment, bright and bold as the stage that it draws its inspiration from. Meanwhile, The Balaclava Kid invites us into the dreams of the artist’s youth, as his imagination gives him escape from the bullies of a bombed-out London into a dreamscape built of Wild West iconography and Tex Avery action. Demonic cowboys and infernal machines populate shimmering mesas and haunted mines. An adventure like no other!

Presented as a slipcased set of two luxurious hardback volumes, each with a new introduction by frequent collaborator and friend Alan Moore, a total of 800 copies of this stunning duo of books are available from both Knockabout’s retail website, and Gosh! Comics of London, online and in store, kicking off a year of celebrations for the shop’s 40th anniversary.

This is a fantastic must-have work and a final gift from a legendary creator whose incredible Art will remain forever in the hearts of readers. 

 

More info at DownTheTubes.net, here.

Review at The Comics Journal, here.  

 

Charms and absurdities

From the introduction to Saga Of The Swamp Thing trade paperback, 1987, collecting issues #21-27.

Alan Moore: [...] The very first thing that anyone reading a modern horror comic should understand is that there are great economic advantages in being able to prop up an ailing, poor-selling comic book with an appearance by a successful guest star. Consequently, all the comic book stories produced by any given publisher are likely to take place in the same imaginary universe. This includes the brightly colored costumed adventurers populating their superhero titles, the shambling monstrosities that dominate their horror titles, and the odd grizzled cowpoke who's wandered in from a western title through a convenient time warp. For those more familiar with conventional literature, try to imagine Dr. Frankenstein kidnapping one of the protagonists of Little Women for his medical experiments, only to find himself subject to the scrutiny of a team-up between Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. I'm sure that both the charms and the overwhelming absurdities of this approach will become immediately apparent, and so it is in comic books: Swamp Thing exists in the same universe as Superman, the same world as Batman and Wonder Woman and all the other denizens of the cosmos delineated within the pages of DC Comics' various publications.
 

As I said above, this approach has both its charms and absurdities. The absurdities are obvious: to work properly, horror needs a delicate and carefully sustained atmosphere- one capable of being utterly ruined by the sudden entrance of a man in green tights and an orange cloak, especially if as a character, he's fond of puns. The charms are much harder to find, but once revealed, can actually be rewarding. The continuity-expert's nightmare of a thousand different super-powered characters co-existing in the same continuum can, with the application of a sensitive and sympathetic eye, become a rich and fertile mythic background with fascinating archetypal characters hanging around, waiting to be picked like grapes on the vine. Yes, of course, the whole idea is utterly inane, but to let its predictable inanities blind you to its truly fabulous and breathtaking aspects is to do both oneself and the genre a disservice.
 

Imagine for a moment a universe jewelled with alien races ranging from the transcendentally divine to the loathsomely Lovecraftian. Imagine a cosmos where the ancient gods still exist somewhere and where whole dimensions are populated by anthropomorphic funny animals. Where Heaven and Hell are demonstrably real and even accessible, and where angels and demons alike seem to walk the earth with impunity. Imagine a planet where exposure to dangerous radiation granted the gift of super-speed rather than bone cancer, and where the skies were thus filled by flying men and women threatening to blot out the sun. Imagine a place where people were terribly good or terribly bad, with little room for the mediocre in between. No, it certainly wouldn't look very much like the world we live in, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be every bit as glorious, touching, sad, or scary. With this kind of perspective, the appearance in these pages of the Justice League of America or vintage DC super-villain Jason Woodrue should be less unnerving than it might otherwise have been to the uninitiated. [...]

Green Knight Moore

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Alan Moore penned an introduction for the upcoming hardcover edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by John Reppion and MD Penman. 

You can order a copy HERE! Highly recommended! 

Excerpt from an interview published on downthetubes.net:

John Reppion: Yes, we have a truly lovely introduction from Alan. He absolutely loved the zine edition when he read it back in November last year, and had nothing but lovely things to say about it, except for the fact that it was a bit too small… and he lost his copy really quickly. So again, another vote for a larger edition. When we started putting the new edition together, I asked if he’d be interested in doing a little intro, and he was really into it. The intro ended up being about twice as long as we were expecting, but we’re certainly not complaining about that. It’s a wonderful addition to the book. A great way to open it. And, of course, it’s always nice when Alan Moore says nice things about your comic.
[...] 

Has Alan contextualised the material at all or simply talked about why he likes it?
John: Both, really. He’s not a man to do things by half. He really understood what we were trying to do with the book, and we were both delighted with how he’s articulated that in the intro. Full disclosure: Alan is also my father-in-law and every week he reads to his grandkids over the phone. That’s mine and Leah’s kids, and his other daughter, Amber’s son, my nephew. So, Alan is revisiting a few books he hasn’t read in a few decades and some of that has also informed the into. The way Victorian sensibilities about knightliness informed some children’s literature well into the 20th and 21st centuries.

Order a copy HERE!

Alan Moore on Planetary

Excerpts from Planetary Consciousness, introduction to "Planetary: All Over The World And Other Stories", March 2000, WildStorm Productions.

[...] Warren Ellis and John Cassaday have manufactured an ingenious device by means of which they can exploit the possibilities of our contemporary situation, as described above. The heroes of their tale are neither crime-fighters nor global guardians, but, by some perfect stroke of inspiration, archaeologists. People digging down beneath the surface of the world to learn its past, its secrets and its marvels. In this instance, though, the world that's under excavation is not our immediate sphere, despite the fact that it is almost as familiar. Instead, we dig into a planet that is nothing less than the accumulated landscape of almost a hundred years of fantasy, of comic books. 

[...]

This is an exemplary turn-of-the-century mainstream comic book. During a period when many comics seem to have lapsed into an exhausted mire or else go blundering on ahead without the merest shred of a coherent plan, the work in Planetary has a glow and freshness that is all its own, a signature eruption of the neurons into novel, interesting patterns at the turn of each new page. It is at once concerned with everything that comics were and everything that comics could be, all condensed into a perfect jewelled and fractal snowflake. Read on and enjoy the remarkable comic book product of a remarkable comic book moment. And think Planetary.

    - Alan Moore
    Northampton
    Dec. 14, 1999

Moore for Mechanics

Below, the introduction written by Moore for Mechanics n. 1 (October 1985, Fantagraphics Books), written and drawn by JAMIE HERNANDEZ.

Alan Moore: The worst thing about being a mature and discerning comic enthusiast who's fiercely committed to the elevation of aesthetic standards within the medium is that you have to hide all your copies of Herbie and Atomic Mouse when your friends call round. Much as you might be dedicated to sweeping radical change in the field of graphic narrative, there still remains a sloppy and nostalgic longing for the way Lee Elias drew the Black Cat or the precise feel and smell of a Giant-sized Li'l Archie Special, and the difficulty of reconciling a thirst for the magnificent with an appetite for the inane is something that makes hypocrites out of the best of us. We all want progress, but we don't want to watch while the bulldozers of cultural advancement roll forwards over the crushed and bloodied remains of Betty, Veronica, and the Fighting American.

That's why MECHANICS, along with the rest of the work that the Brothers Hernandez have been perpetrating within the pages of LOVE AND ROCKETS, comes as such a bloody RELIEF. There's enough style, content, and persistent narrative ingenuity to satisfy the most wild-eyed and slavering progressive, but somehow it's been accomplished without sacrificing any of the sheer silly-assed vitality that gives the medium so much of its appeal. In MECHANICS, Jaime Hernandez seems to have somehow synthesized a complete and satisfying comic-book world out of all the things that, for whatever reason, he loves about comics.

 

There's a sense that the world inhabited by Maggie and her friends exists in the backstreets of the regular funnybook universe. You know that if you took the crosstown bus from Barrio Hoppers 13 you'd find Riverdale High School, sheltering out in the more sedate residential districts uptown. You know that somewhere far away there's a Metropolis where the super-people are punching each other through buildings, even though the sound of conflict seldom filters down to street level. All the familiar icons dotting the comics landscape are filtered through a unique and lucid personal vision, providing a rich, evocative backdrop for the meticulously observed and vividly human characters to perform against, and the mix is as perfect as it is consistent.

 

Relentlessly charming despite its hard cutting edge, MECHANICS is a comic strip for the future with a keen grasp of what was valuable about the strips of the past. If there's a more exhilarating or compelling book on the market at the moment, I haven't heard about it.

H.P. Lovecraft: foresightful thinker

The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Stories

Above a small excerpt from the 7-page preface, dated 4 October 2016, written by Alan Moore for H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Stories published by The Folio Society.

[...] The hindsight of almost a hundred years exposes H.P. Lovecraft as one of the twentieth century's most radical experimental writers despite the cobwebbed traditionalist disguise, as well as one of its most staggeringly original and worryingly foresightful thinkers. The infectious swoon of his delirious prose and his hallucinatory ideas evoke in the susceptible an escalating ecstasy of trepidation, like some legendarily unbalancing variety of absinthe that cannot be reproduced and isn't manufactured any more. [Alan Moore]

The Call of Cthulhu: a new preface by Alan Moore

Art by Dan Hillier.

Alan Moore wrote a new preface for H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Stories published by The Folio Society and available as both standard and limited edition with amazing illustrations by Dan Hillier.

Art by Dan Hillier.

"In a brilliant new preface, written for The Folio Society, author Alan Moore traces his own – and the literary canon’s – troubled relationship with ‘Providence’s paranoiac prophet’ and unearths a writer ‘more subtly insidious and more magnificently visionary… than the one that you remember or anticipate’. [...] 

Moore finds Lovecraft at once at odds with and integral to the time in which he lived: ‘the improbable embodiment of an estranged world in transition’. Yet, despite his prejudices and parochialisms, he ‘possessed a voice and a perspective both unique in modern literature’." 

You can buy these awesome books here and here.

Art by Dan Hillier.

Alan Moore and Malcolm McLaren

Excerpt from the introduction written by Moore (dated "Northampton, June 14th, 2013") for the Fashion Beast collected edition published by Avatar Press.

Alan Moore: [...] While I confess that I had no ambitions or genuine creative interest in the world of cinema, I had always idly wondered what it would be like to write within that form. More persuasively, I was keen to meet and if possible work with Malcolm McLaren, to my mind one of the most effervescent pop-culture intellects of the twentieth century. Thus it was that a week or so later I found myself rendezvousing with this self-consciously Mephistophelean figure in the lobby of the London hotel he was staying at. Arriving a few minutes early, I walked in on the last few shots of a photo-session for the avowedly sensationalistic Sun. A cheerily salacious newspaper photographer was coaxing Malcolm into a variety of poses to accompany a feature on the previous day’s multi-million pound court settlement with members of the Sex Pistols. “Fantastic. That’s fantastic. Now, can you turn your pockets inside-out and look miserable? Lovely.” Always with a touch of the uproarious English pantomime tradition in his carefully composed patchwork persona... perhaps Aladdin’s uncle proffering new lamps for old... Malcolm was gleefully playing along with this, although not for a moment could anyone have the impression that, in this encounter with the tabloid press, he was the one being manipulated.
When the photographer was gone we talked, and I was able to gain an impression of him in repose, between performances as the public Malcolm McLaren, the knowingly Dickensian loveable-villain cartoon that he himself had engineered for popular consumption. At least as tall as I am and considerably better-dressed, he had a bird-like quality... most probably the magpie mentioned earlier, but certainly some manner of ingenious corvid... and when standing he resembled nothing more than an anthropomorphic candle, with that orange blaze of cerebral combustion rising from the human wax. [...]

Alan Moore about Hellboy and Mignola

Art © Mike Mignola.

From the introduction to Hellboy: Wake the Devil. 

"Hellboy is a gem, one of considerable size and a surprising luster.  While it is obviously a gem that has been mined from that immeasurably rich seam first excavated by the late Jack Kirby, it is in the skillful cutting and the setting of the stone that we can see Mignola’s sharp contemporary sensibilities at work.” [Alan Moore]