Nightjar: Urban approach to the supernatural

Excerpts from an Untold Tales article by Scott Braden published in Overstreet's Fan n.21, March 1997. The piece investigated the Nightjar series, conceived in the 80s by Alan Moore with art by Bryan Talbot for Warrior magazine even if it was never published. 

The original first episode was later on completed by Talbot and published by Avatar in Alan Moore's Yuggoth Cultures n. 1 (of 3) in 2003. 

Alan Moore: It's fair to say that some of the ideas of this very urban approach to the supernatural eventually found their way into other books, as well as in the character of John Constantine-but you have to remember that I created Constantine as an occult wide boy. A spiff. There was something of the used car salesman mixed in with the occultist there, as well as that tricky, untrustworthy kind of intelligence which I found appealing in the character. The central character of Nightjar, on the other hand, was an intelligent woman who sought vengeance and wanted to take back what she thought was rightfully hers. And the series itself was an honest attempt to portray the occult, not as something performed mainly in spandex costumes, but as something which happens on ordinary streets with ordinary people in ordinary clothes.
The premise of the story was that underneath our ordinary, everyday world, there exists this other magical reality where occultists-with seemingly ordinary, everyday lives-vie for power. And the occultists who practice this magic all have odd names connected to birds. That's why the strip was going to be called 'Nightjar'-after the central character's magical name and a bird of prey that comes out at night.
Nightjar was going to be Mirrigan Demdyke. The name 'Demdyke' came from Bryan's suggestion, because this was the name of one of the Pendle Witches who were hung for witchcraft up north in Bryan's part of the country [England]. And Mirrigan was the daughter of Harold Demdyke, a powerful, but obscure occultist who'd been living in absolute anonymity. As the king of all the magicians, which in the story was referred to as 'Emperor of All The Birds,' Harold had taken the ultimate zen step by obtaining power beyond power, while living the life of a common man. And on the very first pages of the series, you'd see that he's killed, and his murderers-the new magical aristocracy-have dissolved his line of hierarchy.
[...] This would then bring her into conflict with a number of sinister occultists, which would've given the reader all of that great 'Doctor Strange,' good versus evil stuff against this gritty, Bryan Talbot-Northern England background.

[...] Do I think the story will ever see print? Probably not. Nightjar was a lot of fun to work on at the time, but over the years, it's lost its magic. Both Bryan and I are too busy with projects of our own now, which was why the story never materialized in the first place [laughter]! But still, the basic story is an idea I've been kicking around in my head ever since then. There's some fragments of it starting to emerge in a proposal that I'm working up for Lenny Henry, who's recently been working with Neil Gaiman on a television series over here. I suggested something to Lenny that would have combined the world of the occult with the urban grimness of a crime drama. I thought that could make for an interesting, explosive combination. There's not much that relates it to Nightjar, but there's still some of the atmosphere of it. So yeah, I'm still looking for a way to put the story to use.

Read also this article by Talbot about Nightjar, HERE.

Yuggoth: unpublished Lovecraftian tales

Art by Enrique Breccia. Not related.

There had been rumors in the past, but few weeks ago the topic resurfaced, on Reddit.
But let us take one thing at a time. 

Moore had already said that, despite his retirement from the world of comics, there could still be some unpublished comics written by him out there.  

Alan Moore, in 2024:  [...] "There may also be other comic book work out there, as yet unpublished, but volume four of The League was my last comic strip work, and was also, I think, a fond and comprehensive farewell to the medium."

In particular, after the conclusion of Providence it was rumored that he had written a sort of epilogue or spin-of linked to the Lovecraft lore. 

Well, as reported on Reddit, in 2024 Garth Ennis admitted  that... it was all true. This happened in a video interview that the acclaimed Northern Irish writer did for Monsters, Madness and Magic channel, posted on Youtube the 14th of November 2024 (watch it around minute 50). 

Monsters, Madness and Magic: [...] Have you and Alan had a chance to work together previously? I probably just slipped my mind if you guys had...
Garth Ennis: Well not not directly but Alan wrote a series of Crossed which was that horror story that I created some 10 or 15 years ago. Alan did a sort of a 100 years in the future version of that... and it was very gratifying that he would be interested enough to do that... 

Someday, you might see a series from Avatar, the publisher who sadly semi imploded and seem to have ceased publishing. But there's a series called Yuggoth, and it's based on the work that Alan did - Providence, Neonomicon, and some of the other Avatar books he did based on his love of H. P. Lovecraft.

And Yuggoth was going to be an anthology series. I do hope people see it. Alan wrote the first storyline.

Mine would have been the second. You also have Kieron Gillen in there and Si Spurrier. All this is written and drawn.

I do hope Avatar will publish it one day because it's tremendous stuff. And it was lovely to be able to play in the extremely dark and unpleasant universe that Alan had been able to access through his interest in the lore of Cthulhu and H. P. Lovecraft and so on." 

Later on, on Bluesky, Kieron Gillen confirmed the thing, sort of: 

Kieron Gillen: "My stuff isn't complete, it should be stressed - it only exists in script. [...] I don’t want to reveal stuff that Garth hasn’t - but I believe all the other stuff is, and more."

So, I tried to contact someone at Avatar to get some feedback: no answer.

Then I started thinking about the possibile artists involved in the project. And I remembered that years ago there were rumors about Gabriel Andrade, who worked with Moore on Crossed +100.  

So I contacted him and... 

Andrade replied: "Yeah! I was part of this work!

The story is a prequel that reveals much of the lives of dark characters who appear in Neonomicon and Providence, showing their experiences with the occult and ancient magic. I did the art for two entire arcs of 6 issues both. The first, written by Alan Moore and the other by another author, who I can't reveal. They are incredible stories.

Unfortunately I have no idea if this will ever be published."

What else to say... we need those stories published... the sooner the better!!!

Maybe we could put a dark spell on that! :D 

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.

Poetry, films, money and imagination

Excerpt from an interview published in The 100 Greatest Graphic Novels of All Time magazine, printed in 2016. 

Alan Moore: [...] I’d really like to write an enormous poem. Something with clout. On the scale of TS Eliot’s Waste Land, only probably nowhere near as good. I’d like to give it a try.
And I might even play around with film. On an amateurish level and it wouldn’t see the light of day, and it wouldn’t be treated as a commercial project. It would just be me having fun, playing in a new playpen, with a camera and some friends. Most of my favourite films look like they cost ten quid to make.

Alan Moore’s movies… now that would be something.
Alan Moore: I believe there’s a straightforward inverse equation that applies not just to films but lots of areas, and that is the inverse relationship of money and imagination. If you haven’t got any money then you’re going to have to use an incredible amount of imagination. Whereas if you’ve got tons of money, you’re not going to have to use any....

Moore and Veitch's lost SUPERVERSE project

Art by Rick Veitch

Some time ago, I wrote about a lost Moore and Veitch's project... 

In the past days more details and character sketches have been revealed by Veitch himself on his Facebook page: they clarify a bit the situation but, at the same time, "invalidate" part of the previous info I had. In any case, it's something that will remain unrealized. But... who knows?

Rick Veitch: "[...] It was a giant project called "Superverse" that included knock-offs of every superhero ever made. Sort of like "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" but with long underwear guys.  

[It was] probably 8 or 9 years ago. [...] post ABC and integrated with THE SHOW, the film Alan and Mitch Jenkins were trying to finance. Alan's idea was to create products that would be in the movie but also exist in the real world.

[...] There was no written outline. Everything done over the phone so I've forgotten many of the story details. There were a bunch of character sketches though.
[...] It was a many worlds story. With a very young brother and sister split up and living in different universes as Thunderman and Thundergirl each unaware of the other until...

Art by Rick Veitch. First shown in 2017.

Art by Rick Veitch

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.