Don’t be silly

Cover art by Philip Bond

Excerpt from a fundamental text written by Moore in the 80s. 

You can read it in full at Paul Gravett site, here. 

 

Alan Moore: No More Sex

The following editorial was written by Alan Moore and appeared in Escape Magazine #15 (edited by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury) in 1988.
At that time Alan Moore had just set up a publishing company, Mad Love (together with Phyllis Moore and Debbie Delano), and was working on its first release, a 72-page benefit comics-anthology of work donated by the world’s top comic creators entitled AARGH: Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia.
All the profits from AARGH were donated to the Organisation For Lesbian And Gay Action to safeguard the legal rights of Gay people persecuted by Section 28 of the Local Government Act. This was a piece of legislation enacted in 1988 by the Thatcher Government which stated that a local government authority"shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." 

Firstly, forget God. If God exists, it’s unlikely that SpaceTime’s creator worries about our love-lives. A God who’d forego super novas to catch Sol III’s microbes having oral sex is just plain creepy, and has no place in this discussion. Neither do our Jimmy Swaggarts, claiming to represent the deity between visits to the knocking shop. While discussing human desire, let’s ignore superhumans and subhumans.

Secondly, forget ‘unnatural’ sex. Most natural creatures, excluding a few Presbyterian termites, will hump anything within reach if inclined, ignoring gender, species and family relationship. Lacking a hunky tom within pheromone-range, Tabby will back onto your winklepickers without embarrassment. Besides, since when does humanity do things naturally? Camels don’t wear polyester slacks. Amoebas know nothing of Shake’n'Vac. Every other human enterprise flaunts nature, so why is sex special?

Because it’s powerful. Along with death, it’s life’s propelling force. Control sex and death, and controlling populations becomes simple. Death’s easily subjugated: William Burroughs observed that anyone who can lift a frying pan owns death. Similarly, those owning most the pans, troops, tanks or warheads own most the death, and can regulate the supply accordingly. Death’s a pushover, but how do you control desire?
 

[...]

Sex exceeds politics, right or left (assuming you still differentiate). Mary Whitehouse or Andrea Dworkin may outlaw pornography, but can’t stop people wanting it, regardless of legality. Similarly, Section 28 cannot remove the desire for homosexuality. Consenting sex cannot be prevented. There’s regrettably little evidence that even un-consenting sex can be curtailed by legislation alone. Perhaps desire is better comprehended than contained? Perhaps sexual openness would mean less morbid longings, festering alone in darkness?

Despite a panic-stricken ‘moral’ backlash, we progress slowly towards tolerance, understanding. Our sexual turbulence and shattered preconceptions may resolve themselves into a new approach to sex, more various and humane, accepting different loves and lusts without reshaping them into Meccano for our social scaffolding. Sexual awareness rides an upward exponential curve, uncheckable by politicians, popes, police-chiefs. But what of plague?

Is AIDS sufficient to keep the erotic genie in the bottle? Televised health warnings seem increasingly less anti-disease than anti-sex. A youth writhes, unnerved by the ominous soundtrack, while his fishnetted date lounges invitingly. Rather than donning a condom and squelching deliriously till dawn, it’s implied that he should go home to sleep with hands above blankets

Novelists, who should know better, bemoan the inevitability of less sex in fiction. Surely AIDS isn’t transmitted by smut? The only virus afflicting literature are viral ideas of censorship, spreading through parliament, press, publishers and public, leading art towards the terminal ward. Obviously this over-reaction doesn’t make AIDS less terrifying. Quite simply, it will decimate us. While experts demand less discrimination to facilitate monitoring the virus, our government responds with Section 28. Remember that Britain is relatively enlightened concerning AIDS, and shudder.

So, no more sex? On screen, between soft covers or especially in reality? I don’t believe it. Sex survived horrific syphilis epidemics, aroused blood rushing from the brain, ensuring sex continues whatever the dangers. We’ll die of sex or live with it, but never stop it. Even preventing all physical contact wouldn’t prevent sex, which occurs more in minds than mucous membranes. We think about sex approximately every twenty minutes. Lacking physical contact, we’d just think harder. Thermonuclear war would barely slow sex down. Within billennia, cockroaches would rewrite the Kama Sutra.

AIDS may even hasten sexual enlightenment, this sexual crisis mirroring similar crisis in our environment and economies, all forcing a simple, brutal decision: change or die. Change our environmental policies or starve. Change our sexual furtiveness or die, as they say, of ignorance. Up in arms or down in flames, the choice is still ours. Our bodies are ours. No more sex?

Don’t be silly.

Bonus text, excerpt from a 2006 interview by (again) focused on Lost Girls.

Back in 1988, in Escape Magazine, you wrote an editorial piece for me entitled No More Sex in which you said, "Consenting sex cannot be prevented and there’s regrettably little evidence that even Un-consenting sex can be curtailed by legislation alone. Perhaps desire is better comprehended than contained? Perhaps sexual openness would mean less morbid longings festering alone in the darkness?"
Alan Moore: That is exactly how I feel today. In the context of that Escape editorial, where we were talking about AIDS, I also probably said that AIDS would probably decimate us before it was done. And the figures suggest that it is well on the way to doing that. One thing that might conceivably be "helpful" in an AIDS epidemic, or pandemic, would be presumably a higher standard of pornography with human values. You cannot get much safer sex than pornography. 

On censorship, Rambo and the evils of the world

Below, excerpt from Comics Scene n.7, 1989. 

I think it's a really important piece that resonates even to the present day.

Alan Moore: My feelings upon censorship are that it is wrong, full stop. It is a thing which I utterly oppose. I believe that there is nothing in this world that is unsayable. It is not information which is dangerous; it is the lack of information which is dangerous.
The example that I always cite is still the one which means the most to me. When she was five, my daughter came home from school, asking for some money for a collection. I assumed it was for collie dogs for the blind or something like that, and I gave her some money and asked what it was for. She said it was for a school friend of hers who was in the hospital. I asked what was wrong with him, and apparently, his older brother had gone berserk with a bread knife and killed his mother and then turned upon him. And I stood there with my jaw hanging open down to my chest. This was a five year-old telling me this, and there is no way short of following my daughter around in an armored car or putting her in a bank vault for the remainder of her life that I can protect her from knowing about the sort of stuff that goes down in this world.
Now, the only thing that I can give my children that's going to be of any help to them in life at all is information, to tell them what exists in the world and to give them a concrete text by which they can approach and understand it.
Amber is only just starting to comfortably read, and Leah, the older child, can read almost anything. She has read Watchmen four or five times. she has read Art Spiegelman's Maus. If she comes in and happens to see an underground comic with a bright cover and asks to read it. if there is any, say, ugly or distressing sexual content in it, I'll tell her that there is, that the sex stuff in it isn't meant to be taken literally, and that she might not want to read it.
I'll tell her that if she wants to read it, she can, and that if there's anything in it that bothers or puzzles her, she should come to me and talk about it. I would like to think that l have a relationship with my children within the framework of which l can talk about anything. If that means that my children might eventually come across had pornography or bad material of another nature, then I would prefer to have built up at relationship with them so that they'll have a context in which and by which to lodge that sort of material.
I prefer doing that to getting into the dangerous territory of saying that I wish to suppress this material so that my children can't see it or so somebody else can't see it. Because when you get into that area, you're really starting to head into troubled waters.
I've heard an awful lot of feminists, for example, calling for a ban on pornography because they perceive it as being insulting and degrading in its approach to women. No doubt with a lot of child pornography, that's absolutely true. But you're taking a dangerous step if you go on from there and ban the material because then you are in effect saying that all censorship is right, and you cannot turn around if someone starts to censor you and say, “Hey, look, this isn't fair!"
You must be consistent about it. Feminists who wish to censor pornography should think what it would be like in a fundamentalist society that believed a woman's place was as according to the Bible: under man and in the kitchen.
If the feminist literature was seen to he socially corrosive, then I could imagine that there are several right-wing groups which could make just as persuasive an argument for the banning of all feminist literature as feminists can make for the banning of all pornography.
Now, unless we’re going to have total silence, the only other option is total noise. One of my responsibilities as an artist is to keep the noise level up. If I dislike the Rambo films, then I've got the option of making as much noise as I can in an effort to redress the balance. If the Rambo films are putting over one view of the world, I can use whatever means are upon to me to put forward a countering view of the world. And that is all that I have a moral right to do. I don't have the right to picket Sylvester Stallone films. I don't have the right to try and stop films like Rambo from being made, much as I despise them.
If I were to insist upon that right for my own reasons, then I couldn't expect my own right to free speech to continue being extended to me. 
That, to me, is the essential thing. If there is something you do not like, presumably you can articulate your reasons. If you really believe in what you're saying, presumably you can put as good a case against the values shown in any particular work as that work itself puts for its own values. That is the proper way to do things, not t.o try to get a government body to do your moral policing for you, not to hand responsibility for what you or other people can or cannot read to some outside party and let them make all the decisions. That is very, very dangerous. We already have certain strict information controls within our society. I don't think we realty need to add to them. 

We're living in a world where we have a capacity to annihilate the entire population, something we pay our tax dollars and pounds to support. Our own government and those of other countries carry out this lethal, hideous, grotesque ballet, often in secret, to support their interests, involving the deaths of thousands of people and the erasing of square mile upon square mile of property. These things can happen, and somehow, we don't seem to get too excited about the fact that they happen and continue to happen. We don't put a strong effort into actually eradicating some of the looming social evils that are actually destroying people's lives. But censorship... Let somebody show a nipple in the wrong place, let somebody use language that offends good Christian, Presbyterian values, let somebody refer to a sexual act which, though millions of people worldwide might carry it out regularly in the privacy of their own homes, is still not fit to be mentioned, and people will suddenly find the energy to rise up in arms and take up moral cudgels against this atrocity. I find it very suspect that people can get so excited about things so relatively unimportant when they can only respond with apathy to the genuine evils of the world.

The Great Mystery of Brian Catling

In July, Swan River Press published a collection of Brian Catling's stories entitled A Mystery of Remnant and Other Absences, co-edited by Victor Rees and Iain Sinclair. 

More information about the book can be found HERE. 

 

The book includes three new texts written by Moore in response to 3 photographs of Catling as a young man, all of which are included within the book. 

Check below for one of them! Thanks to Victor Rees for this amazing preview.

 

Moore expressed his admiration for Catling's work in several occasions, they were close friends and kindred spirits. Moore also wrote the introduction of Catling's The Vorrh and defined it "The current century's first landmark work of fantasy". 

 

So... get a copy of A Mystery of Remnant and Other Absences HERE!  

Highly recommended!

Radical Antiquity

Above, Moore's endorsement for Christopher B. Zeichmann's Radical Antiquity book, to be published in September by Pluto Press. More details HERE.

When you think of Ancient Greece and Rome, what do you see? The Acropolis and the Colosseum? Perhaps the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and the rule of the Caesars? Or the birth of democracy and the vast reach of an empire? This well-trodden history of great thinkers, military leaders, and early state formation in the classical world enthralls us still, but it tells only half the story…

How democratic was Athenian democracy? How much power did states actually wield beyond their city walls? And who looked upon the systems of domination that prevailed and sought to create something different?

Radical Antiquity takes you on a unique journey in search of anarchy, statelessness, and social experimentation in the Graeco-Roman world. Sweeping across the Mediterranean from the time of the first Olympic Games in 776 BCE until the emergence of Islam in 610 CE, Christopher B. Zeichmann introduces the reader to communities of escaped slaves, pirates, and religious sects—all of whom sought a more egalitarian way of life that avoided the coercion, hierarchy, and exploitation of the state.

This history from below brings the experiences of common and marginal people out of obscurity, and radically expands our understanding of social and political life in the classical world.

Arts Lab and... Ambagious Tactics

Excerpts from an Alan Moore's article celebrating the importance of Arts Lab, published on Big Issue site and printed in the magazine. You can read the complete piece HERE.

This article is taken from the landmark takeover of Big Issue by graffiti writer 10Foot. It can be bought from street vendors across the UK or online through the Big Issue Shop.

Alan Moore: [...] What made this ramshackle institution such a pleasure was that Arts Lab had no hierarchies, no leaders. They were basically a bunch of friends who met up weekly to discuss art projects that the whole group were invited to contribute to, perhaps a magazine, perhaps poetry readings in a pub backroom, perhaps something ambitious and theatrical.

There were no limits save physical or financial possibility, and, without supervision, we could be as intellectual and political or rude and vulgar as we wanted.

[...] In 2015, during a day-long seminar on counterculture and why we now need it more than ever, attendees who wanted to take the ideas we’d been discussing forward were invited to leave contact details and, some weeks thereafter, got together at a local cafe to eventually emerge as the Northampton Arts Lab’s second incarnation, a bit like with Time Lords.

[...] We’ve staged elaborate theatrical productions, published fancy magazines and hardback books and at the moment are producing a commemorative tribute to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s deck of creative art-prompts, Oblique Strategies. [...]

On the same page you can read more details about the project:

2025 marks the 50-year anniversary of the first publication of Oblique Strategies cards by Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno. Each card contains a statement which can be used to inspire a creative response to your situation. Northampton Arts Lab decided to mark this anniversary by creating a limited-edition tribute act deck, made up of over 120 different “Ambagious Tactics”. This new deck is edited by Alistair Fruish with specially commissioned contributions from well over 100 different people. Some of these creatives are connected to Eno and Schmidt, and some are folk who regularly used Oblique Strategies, others are members of Arts Labs around the country, and some people were asked for the hell of it. Any money made by this project will be distributed to support worthwhile endeavours.  

If you’re interested in reserving a copy, email us.

Take a look to the picture below!

Fandom has toxified the world

Magic art by Caio Oliveira

Below, excerpt from an article by Alan Moore published on The Guardian the 26th of October. 

Read the complete piece HERE.

[...] I believe that fandom is a wonderful and vital organ of contemporary culture, without which that culture ultimately stagnates, atrophies and dies. At the same time, I’m sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement.

[...] An enthusiasm that is fertile and productive can enrich life and society, just as displacing personal frustrations into venomous tirades about your boyhood hobby can devalue them. Quite liking something is OK. You don’t need the machete or the megaphone.

Candidly, for my part, readers would have always been more than sufficient.

Alan Moore

The complete article can be read HERE.

The Book Lovers by Steve Aylett

Below, Alan Moore's words of appreciation for The Book Lovers, Steve Aylett's new book to be released this December. 

"In the whole of language there is nothing like Steve Aylett, and The Book Lovers is his most relentless assault yet on our prissy synapses. Every sentence is a nifty seizure that will slug his reader through the printed page into a better and less reasonable world, a fugue-state heaven of excruciating beauty that spends dazzling insight as though it were chocolate money. Utterly astonishing, and possibly some manner of police procedural. Read this now before it happens." ― Alan Moore, author of  Jerusalem 

For more info about the book, visit the author's site HERE.

All films are haunted

Below, a statement from Moore promoting Last Movies, Stanley Schtinter's new work.

The book seems a really interesting reading: "Last Movies remaps the century of cinema according to the final films watched by some of its cultural icons, giving an audience the opportunity to ‘see what those who see no more last saw’."

All films are haunted, both by the immortal light of the sooner-or-later dead that they curate, and by the filaments of meaning they extrude into unscripted human lives. Last Movies is an unexpectedly revealing catalogue of final interchanges between imminent ghosts and counterpart electric spectres on the screen’s far side.
Profound and riveting, Schtinter’s graveyard perspective offers up a rich and startlingly novel view of cinema, angled through cemetery gates before the closing credits.
A remarkable accomplishment.
--- Alan Moore

More info at the author's site. Buy a copy HERE.

The last Beatnik artist

Alan Moore speaks about Savage Pencil to promote his Rated SavX book, released in 2020 by Strange Attractor.

From the most subterranean of underground cartoonists to full-blown daemonic visionary, here we see Savage Pencil’s horrid Lovecraftian metamorphosis in all its sublime and terrifying glory; all its ugly ecstasies. Hilarious, psychedelic, beautiful, deformed – give your nervous system a bracing dip into this lysergic acid-bath of a collection from the last Beatnik artist standing. Unmissable.
 -- Alan Moore

More info here, here, here (interview) and here (a book's review).

A picture from the 80ies (from left to right): Chris Long, SavX, Alan Moore

Dennis Knuckleyard in Dream!

An excerpt from an article posted on BleedingCool the 30th of April 2024. 

[...] the protagonist of The Great When was one Dennis Knuckleyard, and [...] Alan Moore came up with the name from a dream diary of his. "The only promising item that they've thrown up so far is an intriguing sounding name: Dennis Knuckleyard. I may find a place to use this in the future, or I may not." But it seems the name was also used as a pseudonym for Moore in a Northampton fanzine called Dream, with a story titled "My Protocol", listed – and then withdrawn – on eBay for £400, described as being "very rare, approx. 50 copies were made and sold mostly at local poetry reading events." Good luck hunting that!

You can read the complete piece HERE. And... let me know if you find a copy of Dream!

The Double Life of Private Strong

Below, a short excerpt from the 1-page intro that Moore wrote for ShieldMaster: Blast To The Past comic book. Get a copy, if you can! More info about the Kickstarter project HERE!

[...] When I was six or seven years old and becoming rapidly addicted to the American comic-books that would sporadically find their way across the Atlantic as ballast on cargo-ships, it was always, I later realised, this pair's work [Joe Simon and Jack Kirby] that made the deepest and most lasting impression. So electrified was I by my first glimpse of The Double Life of Private Strong, with its hero leaping towards us in a manner that elegantly avoids the hail of machine-gun bullets he is diving into, that I persuaded my mother to make me a vague simulation of the character's stars-and-stripes vest, and immediately commenced my superhero career. It lasted less than a week, but this was in no way the fault of the costume. Luckily, I wasn't fired on by a machine-gun during those few days. [...]

Alan Moore
Northampton
September 9th, 2023

Iain Sinclair 80

Below, a small excerpt from Alan Moore 1-page contribution to IS 80, a limited-edition signed publication to mark the 80th birthday of legendary writer, film-maker, and walker Iain Sinclair.

The 192 page A4 illustrated publication features over 170 contributors, including Peter Ackroyd, Caroline Bergvall, Keggie Carew, William Gibson, Xiaolu Guo, Philip Hoare, Toby Jones, Stewart Lee, Esther Leslie, Rachel Lichtenstein, Robert Macfarlane, Jonathan Meades, Dave McKean, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore,  J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley and Marina Warner.

 

Unfortunately, the book is currently sold-out. And I sadly confess that I couldn't get a copy. Sigh. Sob. 

Special thanks to friend Omar Martini for sharing the text.

Alan Moore: [...] I met Iain and became entangled in his fascinating human narrative, demoralised to find that he was even better at being a person than he was being an unbeatable writer: generous with his invaluable time, supportive, warm, and always willing to share the astonishing arcane intelligence that flows so freely through his multitude of subterranean channels. Not only a literary example, then: if arguably the best and most bar-raising writer in the English language can be such a lovely individual, what excuse does anybody have for being otherwise?

[...] We are privileged to walk the world while he does. [...]

It's time for... The Great When

In the past weeks, details have been revealed regarding The Great When, the planned name for Alan Moore's first of a series of five fantasy novels, collectively known as Long London. The book in scheduled for September 2024 release.

Dennis Knuckleyard is a hapless eighteen-year-old who works and lives in a second-hand bookstore in 1949 London. Aspiring writer though he is, his life feels quite uneventful. But one day his boss and landlord, Coffin Ada, sends him to retrieve some rare books from a strange and paranoid dealer. When he retrieves the books, he discovers that one of them, A London Walk by Rev. Thomas Hampole, does not exist: It is a fictitious book that appears in a real novel by another author. If both Hampole and the book are made up, how did it come to be physically in Dennis's hands? Coffin Ada tells him they come from the other London, the Great When, a version of the city that is beyond time, in which every aspect of its history from its origin to its demise is somehow made manifest. There epochs blend and realities and unrealities blur and concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous and terrible beings. And Coffin Ada tells Dennis, if he does not return the book to this other London, he will be killed.

So begins Dennis' adventure in Long London. To return the otherworldly book, he must dive deep into the city's occult underbelly, meeting an eccentric cast of sorcerers and gangsters, including Grace Shilling, a sex worker who agrees to help Dennis with the caveat that she will stab him if he makes any advances; Prince Monolulu, an infamous horse race tipster who claims to be an Abyssinian Prince; and Jack Spot, a ruthless mob boss looking to cement his status on top of the city's underworld. But upon entering The Great When, Dennis finds himself at the center of an explosive series of events, one that may have altered and endangered both Londons for good.

Mystical, magnificently written, and hilarious, The Great When is Moore's most imaginative work yet. It is the unforgettable introduction to the brilliant, staggering, consciousness-altering world of Long London.

More info here and here.

Eulogy for Kevin O'Neill

Art by Kevin O'Neill

Above excerpts from a moving eulogy that Moore wrote in memory of Kevin O'Neill. 

It was shared by Scott Dunbier on his Facebook page. 

[...] What made him unique amongst his generation of comic creators was the breadth of his influences and experience. While most of his contemporaries were modelling their styles solely upon the incoming wave of great American talent, Kevin was assimilating the angular transatlantic elegance of, say, Spiderman creator Steve Ditko, without abandoning his love for the manic cartoon grotesquery of England’s Ken Reid. The result was an astonishingly flexible ability to shift from the bold designs of the Edwardian illustrators he had a passion for, to the deranged absurdities of the British children’s fare that he’d been absorbed in since infancy.

Nobody drew like Kevin O’Neill. As a result of one of our more innocuous collaborations, Kevin received the supreme compliment of having his entire artistic style – whether he was drawing a table-leg or a baby carriage – ruled unacceptable by the American industry’s then-extant Comics Code Authority. [...]

Working with him was an honour, a pleasure, and an education. His knowledge of the culture we were mining was easily as extensive as my own, and in most instances was marvellously complementary. [...]

Not only a working relationship, the connection with Kevin was one of the most important friendships of my life. As well as being one of the medium’s most individual and exciting draftsmen, he was also exceptional in being one of the very few working-class creators working in a trashy, gutter art-form that was originally intended only for the poor and supposedly illiterate, since become a gentrified middle-class district with graphic novels in the stead of studio loft-apartments. Of all my mainstream collaborators, Kevin was the only one who stood solidly beside me in our difficulties with the comic-book publishing industry, and whose commitment was always to the work, like my own, rather than to the financial inducements and bullying of the companies; the manufacturers.

He was also one of the warmest, funniest, most erudite and most courageous people that I’ve ever met. [...] I am going to miss him like I’d miss sunsets.

In the words of English music-hall legend Max Miller, ‘Take a good look, missus. You’ll never see another one.’

Alan Moore,

Northampton,

November 9th, 2022

Read also HERE and here.

Kevin O'Neill Forever!

Source: Alan Moore Official FB page

A message to the Brazilian People

Below, a text piece published yesterday on the Alan Moore Facebook page. 

It has been confirmed as authentic by Moore's daughter Leah. 

Published here with the sole intention of sharing the message. The text is (c) Alan Moore.

Dearest Brazil,

We are fast running out of last chances to save the planet and its peoples. Our world is changing, faster than it’s ever changed before, and forcing us to adapt more quickly if we are to survive. From hunter-gatherer society to agriculture, from agriculture to industry, from industry to whatever is taking shape now – this new condition that we do not as yet have a name for – humanity has seen these kinds of monumental shift before, although not often. These transitions are not caused by political forces but by the unstoppable tidal movements of history and technology, which is a tide that we can either steer our vessels to take advantage of, or we can be washed away by. The Earth is turning, turning of necessity into a new place, and we can only turn with it or else lose the biosphere that sustains us forever. Most people, I believe, know this in their hearts and feel it in their stomachs.

And yet, over this past five or so years, we have seen across the globe a ferocious resurgence of exactly the political and economic ideas that led us into this clearly disastrous situation in the first place. The unconcealed aggression of this extreme right advance seems to me so forceful, and yet so disconnected from any reality, that it can only be born of desperation; the hysterical fear felt by those most invested in the power structures of the old world, who know the new world can, ultimately, have no place for them. Afraid for their very existence, for the existence of the worldview from which they benefit, they have crowded the world stage over this last half-decade with increasingly loud, overblown and blustering pantomime characters, for whom no course of action is too corrupt or inhuman, and no line of reasoning too blatantly absurd.

Unashamedly monstrous, these have persecuted racial and religious minorities, or their native peoples, or the poor, or women, or people of different sexualities, or all of the above. During the still-evolving pandemic they put their political posturing and their financial doctrines before the safety of their populations, presiding over hundreds of thousands of potentially unnecessary deaths; hundreds of thousands of devastated families, devastated communities. With their nations on fire, or flooded, or parched by drought, they insisted that climate change was a leftist hoax to inconvenience industry, and branded environmental or social protestors as terrorists. Adopting the fascist circus-act style of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, we have had the dangerous insurrectionary theatrics of Donald Trump in North America, and the ruinous indignities of Boris Johnson and his understudies in the (at present) United Kingdom. And, of course, Brazil has had Jair Bolsonaro. 

Although we in the Global North obviously contribute much more than our fair share of horrifying political figures to the world’s situation, I don’t know anybody with an ounce of conscience and compassion who isn’t appalled by what Bolsonaro, riding into office on Trump’s bow-wave, has done to your huge and beautiful country, along with what he continues to do to our relatively small and somehow-still-beautiful planet. We’ve watched despairingly while, singing from the same hymn-book as his North American inspiration, Bolsonaro has railed against Brazil’s indigenous people, its homosexuals and the rights of its women to safe abortions, fuelling an uncontrolled bonfire of hatred as a distraction from his social and economic agendas, while simultaneously flooding your culture with guns. We’ve seen him attempt to swagger his way through the pandemic by spouting his anti-vaccination idiocy, and we’ve seen Brazil’s increasing acreage of hastily-prepared graveyards; those pigeonhole grids in grey soil with here and there dead flowers or painted markers as a drip of colour.

We’ve also looked on while he responded to the prospect of new international environmental laws by simply speeding up his suicidal destruction of the rainforest, choking our communal atmosphere with burning jungle, displacing or dispatching people who had lived in these regions for generations, and seemingly colluding with or turning a blind eye to the murder of journalists investigating this brutal ethnic cleansing. A respected British science magazine that I subscribe to, New Scientist, has recently described Brazil’s imminent elections as a potentially crucial point of no return in our species’ life-or-death battle with the climate catastrophe we ourselves have engineered. Simply put, Jair Bolsonaro can continue, profitably, to please the corporate interests that support him, or our grandchildren can eat and breathe. It’s one or the other.

As an anarchist, there are very few political leaders that I could completely tolerate, much less endorse, but from all that I have heard or read about him, Luiz da Silva, Lula, seems to be one such rare individual. His policies appear to be fair, humane and practical, and, as I understand it, he has promised to reverse many of Bolsonaro’s most disastrous decisions. Repairing the damage of these last five years would surely not be easy or without cost, and da Silva would be inheriting a badly disfigured political landscape. At the very least, however, from this distance he at least has the look of a candidate who acknowledges that mankind is going through one of its infrequent seismic transformations, and realises that we must change how we live, if we are to live at all. He seems a politician committed to the future, with its hard work and its just and wonderful possibilities, rather than the flailing and destructive death-throes of an unsustainable past.

Brazil’s forthcoming election is, I’m told, balanced on something of a knife edge and, as discussed above, the whole world is riding on it. If you have ever enjoyed any of my work, or have felt any sympathy with its humanitarian leanings, then please go out and vote for a future that is fit for human beings, for a world that is more than the golden latrine of its corporations and their puppets.

Let’s put the iniquities of the last five, or perhaps the last five hundred years, behind us.

With love, and trust, 

Your friend,

Alan Moore   x 

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!

The street where He grew up

Excerpt from an article published on Northampton Chronicle & Echo: Alan Moore shares memories of the house he grew up in... 17 St Andrew’s Road, Northampton.

The complete text is available here.

Alan Moore: "[...] There we were, unknowingly: my family; Fred and Ada Goodman with their irritating dog; a convicted fraudster from four doors down and all the rest – in dirty heaven without even being dead."

Duplicator Days: zines, Steve Moore and Dane Jerrus

Excerpt from Duplicator Days, an article written by Moore celebrating the glory days of UK fanzine scene and the key role of his friend Steve Moore, published in 2018 in Fanscene n.1. You can read the complete article downloading the fanzine HERE, page 6-8.

 

You can enjoy the whole Fanscene archive HERE. 

Also check the amazing project by editor David Hathaway-Price HERE: a digital repository of the Comics Fanzines published in the UK! Fantastico!

Alan Moore: I sometimes think that fanzines, blotchy and haphazard and ephemeral, are no less than the distilled breath of their various moments. All the memory-prompts and tangles of association that we have embedded in these frail, stab-stapled publications make them into crumbling paper repositories for fleeting and elusive atmospherics from a time when we were at our most enthusiastic; when we were indelibly imprinting all our strongest recollections. [...]

With the proviso that much of this brief essay may be entirely a product of my own disintegrating memory, I recall that it was here that I first learned of the existence of Frank Dobson’s Fantasy Advertiser, Tony Roche's Heroes Unlimited and Steve Moore’s KA-POW, and dutifully sent off postal orders for the requisite amounts. At this time I was setting out to walk the mile or two to school each day before the first post had arrived, and can remember the excitement on returning home if there was a manila envelope addressed to me, propped up behind the recycled brass shell-case ornament from World War I that stood upon the mantelpiece above the hearth. [...]

For my part, l was perhaps most struck by the last-minute inclusion of a Ken Simpson page illustrating a quartet of obscure British comic characters from the l940s or l950s. Amongst these was the memorably-named Dane Jerrus, who by a remote coincidence I'd just referred to in my script for issue three of the last volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It isn't an earth-shattering unlikelihood as coincidences go, but I was personally pleased by this absurd connection between my oldest friend's first work in the comic field and my own last work in that medium. And it is perhaps reassuring that even after almost fifty years, the basic materials that we are working with are still unchanged, even if the way in which we work with them has changed almost beyond recognition.

Without this tattered remnant, electronically resurrected, we would all, I think, be living in a very different cultural environment. Long may it abide, along with the memories of those times and people that it represents.

Check David Hathaway-Price's project HERE

John Martin, JMW Turner and... Antenociticus

Excerpt from a spoken word performance piece, entitled Simultaneous conjugation of four spirits in a room, with music by Stephen O'Malley performed live at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle on 13th March 2010.

For the opening of the exhibition Turner versus Martin at the Laing Art Gallery, AV Festival 10 asked Moore and musician Stephen O'Malley (Sunn O))), KTL, Gravetemple) to create something together. Alan Moore wrote and performed a new text in the gallery responding to the energy of the two paintings: John Martin's The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1852) and JMW Turner's Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812) from the Tate Collection. 

Stephen O'Malley created a new accompanying ambient soundscape, sonically melting in the radiance of the paintings.  

The complete performance is available HERE. 

JMW Turner's Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps

Alan Moore: [...] This is as far north as the Romans ever got, with their Mediterranean tans, thin tunics and short skirts, freezing their arses off at Wallsend, Segedunum, thus commencing a tradition. The precarious margin of their territory scares them, alien and elemental, liminal and filled with unknown hazard, too close to the Arctic for their skimpily dressed gods to follow and watch over them. They need a local hand to mediate between them and a savage landscape, and, at the wall's other end in Benwell, Condericum, they erect their temple to a borrowed native deity, Antenociticus, god of the antler-fringed brow and therefore a horned one, a Cernunnos. [...] Called the greatest and the best, Antenociticus is clearly on a par with Jupiter, the wielder of the lightning whose dominion extended turned to all things, to the storm, an' avalanche, an' hunted boar, god of a hostile universe that lay beyond their world's Hyperborean rim, upon whose whim survival rested. Beautifully fashioned in the Celtic style, his psychopathic pin-prick eyes are merciless, omnipotent, mad with divinity, a Pagan gaze that promises the end of cities, a condition that seems far away back in the tumult of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when modern industry still gurgles in its infancy, in its gun-metal cot, or at least, further than it seems today. [...]
Though painted forty years apart by men of widely different temperament and age and style, both Turner's Hannibal and Martin's Sodom and Gomorrah possess many similarities, and have the stamp of catastrophic times upon them. Turner's piece is executed during 1812, while John Martin is hanging his first painting, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, in the Royal Academy. Just a year previously Napoleon has tried to invade Italy across the Alps, Hannibal style, defeated by the stark realities of weather and terrain. Turner conceives a warning, a reminder of the shattering and gigantic forces of the Earth that wait to wipe away our kingdoms, our republics, our delirious ambitions, a tribunal that brooks no appeal. He steals a murderous Yorkshire sky from over Farnley Hall in Otley, revels in the drama of the Northern Lights. John Martin's levelling of the Cities of the Plain, painted in 1852 with Martin in his early sixties, has the same regional atmospherics, has the furnace glow of his Newcastle youth deployed to similar ends. It shares with Turner's painting an enormity of scale and moment, tiny Bruegel figures only there to illustrate the vastness of destruction that surrounds them, the futility and insignificance of human grandeurs faced with natural disaster, faced with carpet bombing from the angels. Both works have the same intention, a critique of overreaching national arrogance couched in a language that is classical or biblical. Most strikingly they share a composition: rocky terrain in the lower foreground, rising on the right, where miniaturist figures cower, Lot and his daughters, Hannibal's doomed soldiers. Over all this in the upper background's whirl and spectacle, Martin and Turner both depict the same annihilating vortex, one with flame and one with smoke. Some say the world will end in fire, some in ice, but both functions in the debate agree that it will end. Rome's wall, Napoleon's, Gomorrah, the industry warmed world that we inhabit, straining at the end of their respective tethers, facing the same whirlpool of demise. This is a terror of the world's edge. It's the vertigo of an accelerated culture. Out beyond the lights of every city, every town and every century, this is the abyss that abides. These lethal vortices are each ellipses, one that sears and one that freezes. At the Roman garrisons hunching against the rain in Westgate Road beside Hadrian's Wall, these are the terminal configurations of civilisation's margins, other forces outside that must be appeased. In 2010 at this unique convergence, hanging side by side together the twin maelstroms of extinction can't help but suggest an optical arrangement. These storm sockets, cauled with hail and magma and eradication. We stand at the precipice of ourselves and look down into the gaze that has not blinked or wavered since before we were, and would not notice if we were no longer. At these snowblind precincts of our empire, at this limit of our possibilities, we stare into the cold eyes of Antenociticus.

John Martin's The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah

Extra info here. 

The complete performance is available HERE.