Alan Davis 1985: Cap. Britain, Marvelman, The Fury

Above, selected excerpts from an interview with ALAN DAVIS, conducted by Les Chester the 26th of September 1985, published in Amazing Heroes n. 85, December 1985. It's a must-read! 

[...] Amazing Heroes: What is the difference in your approach to Marvelman and Captain Britain?
Davis: Well, I try to get into any character I work on, so that I don't have to resort to stock figures and poses. I feel that if you understand the character, the movement and body language suggest themselves.
Marvelman was meant to be the perfect male, with a godlike presence. So I focused on his grace, and gave him a slightly effeminate face since a male face that is neither rugged nor tough appears more feminine. It also added to the perfect
serenity that a being with so much power might generate. Captain Britain on the other hand is a brawler, he is arrogant in a childish fashion, he is big, bulky and swaggering. Totally without the grace that personifies Marvelman. The process is more complicated and thorough than the simplified version I've described, but that's basically the way I handle it.
It's nothing terribly original; I think a lot of artists must work that way.

[...] AH: How do you feel about the characters D.R. & Quinch?
Davis: I'm very proud and fond of them; they're easy to draw, they look funny no matter what they are doing, and it was fun to see what they could do and how far I could push them.
They had taken me a long time to design, and they evolved, as all characters do, as I familiarized myself with them and learned how to use them to best effect. I also enjoyed the fact that the characters and set-up owed a lot to the film Animal House.
It's one of my all time favorite comedy films.

AH: What was it like working all the time with Alan Moore?
Davis: We had a good working relationship. We exchanged a lot of ideas and it was very fulfilling for me to be able to contribute to stories and not just be the artist on the job. I think it's only natural to have ideas involving the character you spend a lot of time drawing. It was good to be able to get our heads together and plan issues ahead. It was much more involved than just receiving scripts. It was very fulfilling.

AH: How do you rate Alan Moore's talent? 
Davis: As a writer, very highly. Apart from his inventive use of words and dialogue, he can think laterally and see old situations from new angles.

[...] AH: Could you give specific examples of ideas or stories you've contributed to the “Captain Britain" strip?
Davis: The "Captain Britain" story in Daredevils #2 was based on a solution I suggested to Alan [Moore]. The problem was that Alan wanted Brian Braddock to return home to Braddock Manor, but it had been destroyed by S.H.I.E.L.D. bombers in a previous story. My solution was that since the Manor had contained a computer that was capable of creating holograms, it would have projected a decoy image of the Manor that was bombed whilst it concealed the real Manor. Then, when the danger had passed, the Manor would take on the appearance of a bombed-out ruin. .
In contrast to this, my only input to the story in Daredevils #3 prior to the script was to give Betsy purple hair which would be a shock to Brian who had been in other dimensions for a number of years. In that story I made a few post-script changes, which are usually totally visual, window-dressing that have no effect on the story content. I gave Slaymaster a rubber mask disguise instead of a slouch hat and a trench coat, and substituted "The Jazzler," an electrified knitting needle, for the knife that was to have been his assassination tool. Another, less obvious, contribution, was for the story in Mighty World of Marvel #7, "The Candlelight Dialogues.” Alan was having problems trying to come up with a structure to carry the elements of the next storyline. l'd just read Batman #347 and suggested that we use the storytelling device used in "The Shadow of Batman"; that is, eaves-dropping on a conversation that connects the events.
As I've already said, it was exciting, interesting and very fulfilling to be involved in the stories on such a basic level. Alan was always prepared to listen to any ideas, which was refreshing since some writers see artists soley as "laborers" to bring their ideas to life.

AH: Was there any similar input on "Marvelman"?
Davis: Nothing major; "Marvelman" was really Alan's baby, though I did influence general characterization and more specifically, the nature of the alien ship. The only really direct input l supplied was second-hand. That was "Out of the Dark" [Warrior #9] where Marvelman is attacked by the S.A.S. I have a friend who is an ex-Regimental Sergeant Major and l explained the situation in the story to ask his advice on how to handle it realistically. He, incidentally, thought the whole story was absurd and childish; he doesn’t like comics. However, his outline for the troop deployment and battle plan eventually featured in the story.

[...] AH: What about the Fury [...]?
Davis: The aspects of The Fury I'm most proud of concern its “eyes.” As the series progressed, I refined the external pattern of the sensors so that they became a motif that was instantly recognizable. As another point of interest, I gave the Fury's "view of the world" an indicator of speed and distance, heartbeat and brainwaves, plus infra-red and X-ray vision, so that each character could be registered in an interesting way, usually displaying an aspect of the target's power.
This eventually led to the ruse where Zeitgeist attacked the Fury and didn't register on any level. [...]

San Diego 1985: Kudos to Kandor

Excerpt from Kudos to Kandor, an article by American comic book historian and retailer Bob Beerbohm published in Fanscene n.8 (Summer 2022 edition). 

You can read the complete article downloading the fanzine HERE, page 103-105.

 

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! Great! 

Bob Beerbohm: My one encounter with Alan Moore was in 1985, during his first [and evidently only) San Diego Comic-Con appearance. He came up to me in my booth; first buying copies of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #63 & 69 from me. This led in to he and I having an intense, almost hour long Superman Emergency Squad conversation, replete with the bottled city of Kandor, Brainiac, Nightwing & Flamebird.

This lanky bearded Brit guy walks up to my tables, asking for every appearance of the bottle city of Kandor, Superman Emergency Squad, Nighwing and Flamebird, etc. He was remembering broken images and story lines from when he was a young guy; now seeking the American color versions.

[...] For much of our intense Morl-era geek out, I had no idea who this full guy with on accent was. I am rather glad for that lapse in knowledge at that moment in time, as it enabled me to go one on one, asI would any other 'normal' comic book collector.

[...] I had been a huge fan of WARRIOR published by Dez Skinn, importing from #1 onwards. Each next issue order I was simply doubling in number count. This went on for several issues until I settled in to topping out at 800 an issue. Mark Stichman, myself, plus a slew of regular customers/readers were all talking about why Warrior had gone so, for lack of better term, "hot". The one name which was intersecting every one's wavelengths was some guy named Alan Moore.

After about half an hour it began to dawn on me just who I was evidently doing a two person street fair impromptu comedy act with. There had been much laughter as he and I relived our almost exact same timeline memories of that fun stuff from late 50s through mid 60s. Innocents growing up quick, as realites of the world set in on those of us born 1950-‘I 954, being drafted in the USA.

The UK was beginning to comprehend an end of empire as the USA's took off... Alan and I laughed a lot about, back then, believing that those Weisinger edited "Imaginary" stories were just that. Because all the other issues of Superman's family of titles were of course "Real" !!

We were both being 7 to 9 or so there again, for a short period of time. With me having every issue but one on his want list [plus many others he had no idea then existed]. He also made a solid stab at most of my Bizarro appearances, like Adventure 285-299 (classic!) that I had on hand.

Eventually, we shook hands, then bowed to our ad hoc audience. [...]

The complete article is available HERE, page 103-105.

Moore vs. Claremont

Page from Heroes for Hope. Script: A. Moore. Art: R. Corben.

Selected excerpts from Moore and Claremont speak out on writing, an interview published on Speakeasy n. 54 in 1985.

During the recent visit of the X-Men creative team to the UK, your intrepid reporters from Speakeasy cornered Chris Claremont after his mammoth signing session in Forbidden Planet for an exclusive interview. However, just as he was about to be whisked away in our bullet-proof limousine a familiar, if somewhat sinister figure lurched into view. It was none other than Alan Moore, who had just heard on the phone from the US that he had been voted Second Best Comics Writer in the Comic Buyer's Guide poll. As we rushed to offer our heartiest congratulations, he graciously broke the news to Chris Claremont that he had in fact been voted the First Best Comics Writer in the selfsame poll. Not believing our luck, we also bundled Mr Moore into the back of the limo, took the official Two World's Greatest Comic Book Writers to an exclusive eaterie, and pointed a tape recorder in their general direction. What follows is our transcript of this momentous historic occasion...

WOULD YOU AGREE THAT THE STRUCTURE OF YOUR STORIES IN THE X-MEN, CHRIS, ARE SIMILAR IN FORM TO A SOAP OPERA?

[...]

Alan Moore: I have just started writing the first book that I have ever done that could be remotely construed as a superhero team book. It's got a number of different super heroes in it...

Chris Claremont: The Charlton stuff?

AM: The Watchmen.

CC: What was the Charlton stuff?

AM: That's right. But I am glad that we didn't get the Charlton stuff now because the characters we have come up with are better. With that I found it's coming out like Thomas Pynchon in comics, it's so bloody dense. We've got twenty eight pages in there and Dave's working on a nine panel frame grid, so I've found it quite easy to set it up so that you can get all the characters in there. And also I haven't got Chris's problem in that I have just got to do twelve issues. I don't think that you see a supervillain throughout the entire twelve issues, so it's avoiding a lot of the classic hero/villain formula.

CC: The X-Men Ethiopia book is a nice case in point. Most of the first third of it is basically single character sequences: each of the X-Men as individuals goes through a significant trauma. It isn't until the end that they start acting as a group. In Alan's case he had Magneto. It took me the better part of a month to choreograph it, just because you have to keep track of where everybody's going and what everybody is doing. And depending on how on the ball your artist is, you have to be thinking characterisationally for all six, eight, ten, twelve characters, in terms of how they dress, how they look, what their rooms are like. [...]
One of the things that was so impressive about Alan's Magneto scene was the description of the office, and he lists the three books that Magneto has in the world: Nietzsche's Man and Superman, the other's a book on advanced physics, and the third was Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I thought this is great! Not only is he brilliant and an egotist, but he has a sense of humour.

HOW DID YOU DO THAT?

AM: It was just the spines of the books.

CC: Actually Pychon's the only one that made it onto the panel.

AM: Not to worry. All that stuff is just detail so that other people can get into it. I agree that the establishment of invisible character detail, the stuff that is not on the surface, the stuff that is just subliminal - context - is an important thing. With Watchmen we tried to really go in for that. It's an extension of the technique that I used in Halo Jones, probably a lot different to the clear establishing that Chris was talking about, in that it's an extension of the idea of teaching parallel languages by dumping people in a room full of foreigners. Okay, the first time it's going to be hell and the first time it's going to be incomprehensible, but eventually your understanding of that world will be much more thorough. It's a long shot, but I think it's going to work because we have got a lot of space: we're working on nine panels of page as opposed to the normal six. That gives you half the book again and you've got twenty eight pages so, in effect you're doing a forty two page book or something, which gives you a lot of information. It's not a very big story either. It's a story that I could probably have told in three issues, but were telling it in twelve. It's not going to be padded, it's just that having twelve we've got room to explore all the characters.

YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT THE DETAIL A WRITER OR ARTIST CAN PUT IN OR NOT PUT IN...

[...]

AM: This comes down to one of the big differences between me and Chris, beyond any stylistic differences. It's purely in the way we work, in that Chris writes plots and then writes the dialogue, and I write a full script. I know that Chris has said he would find it very difficult to write a full script...

CC: Just because I'm a lazy sod!

AM: The only difference is that I wouldn't like to do it your way you know because of the amount of control. I write very, very full scripts. For the first episode of The Watchmen, the manuscript was 164, pages but that meant in each panel you've got a lengthy description and I'm describing everything in the panel. There's a scene where a character goes home and finds Rorschach, one of the other characters, waiting for him in his kitchen. It's a conversation and I knew how the character who found Rorschach there would be reacting, but I needed something for Rorschach to do. It's not a big thing, but while he's talking to the other guy Rorschach goes into the kitchen, goes over to the work surface, takes a sugar jar. He's just carrying on talking and in three panels you see him unscrewing the top of the sugar jar, then he just tips out all the sugar cubes while he's still talking to the other guy, and escapes them all into the pocket of his raincoat, and then just carries on talking. There is no more mention of the sugar cubes until about two scenes later, you're in another character's house and Rorschach's turned up there and while he's talking he pulls his mask up over his nose, reaches into his pocket, takes out a sugar cube, unwraps it, puts it in his mouth, pulls down the mask and just stand there going crunch crunch crunch while he's talking, and drops the paper on the floor. Four pages later you see the woman who is in the house frown, and pick up this piece of paper from the floor and dump it in the litter bin. It's an unimportant bit, but it establishes a couple of characters by a bit of business. Again with Watchmen we have to have an advert hoarding in the background. I told Dave (Gibbons) what the product is, we made up a perfume called Nostalgia and we see it on a hoarding in the first issue. In the second issue somebody's got a bottle of Nostalgia on their dressing table and that is the sort of depth and complexity that I find it easy to get doing a full script, which is one of the reasons I wouldn't be at home with a plot. It's a similar thing to what Chris is saying. It's a matter of control, making sure that everything is there for a reason. Nothing that is just "Oh well...". You think what sort of clothes is he wearing - "well it might be this, it might be that, it doesn't matter." If you know the character well enough you know what sort of clothes he is wearing.

CC: The conscious decision I made was to sacrifice a measure of that control for the advantage of the artist's contributory creativity. I find when I am working with someone like Frank (Miller) or Walt Simonson or (John) Byrne or Paul Smith or John Bolton, to name just a few, that there is a barrier: their suggestions, their thoughts of pacing. They know better how to visually construct a scene than I do; I know how I want the beginning, the middle and the end to go, but how we get there is mutable. [...] It's sacrificing a measure of control to hopefully gain a measure of creativity. The down side is that you end up sometimes having to write obscenely huge blocks of copy to cover screw ups.

AM: My attitude is the same as Chris's. I value serendipity, and I value the artists input a lot and with every script I have written, I write a full script and than say "Throw it out". That's all that they need, if you say that "Here's my full script; this is everything that I can think of that would look good in here. If you've got a better idea or if one of my ideas is bad and you think that you can do it better, then change it"; which means that all I am doing really is giving them something they can use as a jumping off point. With the Magneto sequence, at the beginning Magneto is looking at his reflection in the Cerebro helmet, and in the last panel you have a corpse looking at their reflection in the old Magneto helmet. That gives the three pages a symmetry that binds it together. If I'd just worked from the plot, it would be unlikely that you would get that. That is the sort of thing that I value, the fact that you can impose a structure and then let the artist... Well, take Steve and John: they come up with some incredible weird shit. It's what I ask for - I might say "Now we want some horrible sort of war fantasy" and make a few suggestions - but they will be putting their own minds into it. I think it's the job of the writer to inspire the artist in one way or another.

[...]

DO YOU THINK THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE WRITER IN THE COMICS FIELD IS UNDERRATED?

CC: Oh I think they are. [...] I think any good artist worth half a damn will tell you this, that we're the ones who start the story. The artist may come in and say "I've got a brilliant idea for a story", but the writer is the one who hammers it into shape. The major flaw I used to find among artists who write was that they would come up with great individual stories, but it would not hold as a series. If you talk to people like Frank and Walter and John and Howard, who are writers, they will more often describe themselves as writers who draw as opposed to artists who write. The misconception is that our job is to put the words on the page, and it isn't. Our job is to tell the story that puts the art on the page. What we're there to do is to give the artist the framework, the images, whatever, that he or she converts into the pictures. Then we take the words to point the pictures in certain directions but it's getting the pictures on the page first that's important and that's where we earn our money. That was always the polarity in Marvel because you were paid $25 for a plot and $480 for a script, and the first thing that Shooter did was to reorient that and establish that we have a plot rate and a script rate, and the plot rate is half the script rate. In my case that's where I do 90% of my work; scripting is easy because for me anyway 90% of the work is about when I write the plot.

AM: Going back to what you were saying about an artist's considerations when it comes to write - this is not a general slur of all artists - but a lot of artists will obviously think in terms of visual considerations because they have got to sit there and draw the book, which is about five times the actual physical labour that me and Chris have put in. So they are going to think "I want something nice to draw". Just as a random example, with Captain Britain when I was working with Alan (Davis), since he has been doing the script before me, we both had lots of input into it. Alan liked the idea of drawing a lot of super hero characters. He liked the idea of bringing in the Special Executive and adding about six more members to them, and he liked the idea of having lots of characters around because it gave him new characters to design, new characters to draw. After a while I found when I was writing it - I wanted to give Alan everything he wanted - but I found that you were eventually getting a script that was swamped in characters, because once you created these characters who look good for their five panel introductory fight scene, they are still hanging around. Unless you are going to have them to just dematerialise then you have got to think of something to do with them, and the more characters you get the more difficult it becomes. I read an interview with Alan where he was saying that he got bored with some of the Captain Britain stories because Captain Britain was becoming a background character, and this is the difference between artists' thinking and writers' thinking. Writers have to think in a tapestry, they have to think "Well okay, I could do this now and it would be really really flash and it will be really good for these three pages, but it would diffuse something I've got coming up in a month's time, something I've got coming up in two months' time, it would spoil this little relationship I've got building there: it's not worth it". You tend to think in the long term, in the overall picture, rather than in terms of what is going to be good for that week's work.

[...]

AM: I like to brutalise the readers emotionally as much as possible, because so much culture is deadening, so much culture has no emotional impact. Culture is more to do with avoiding emotional impact - muzak culture, where all of the emotional high peaks have been edited out. If I was going to do anything in comics, I would like to think that I was going to do something that was going to upset people in one way or another.

CC: Make them think. A friend of mine in Michigan sent me the xeroxes of Alan's run on Captain Britain. I read it in one sitting, and I said to myself "Shit, I created this little book?" It bore no resemblance, but what was flattering was that Alan built on the stuff that I set up. [...]

AM: With the Captain Britain stuff, when I read it through - I mean, after you left the book there was there was an awful lot of, I mean really...

CC: Well, when I was on the book it wasn't all that great.

AM: You were limited to start with because you had got a cross between Spider-Man and Captain America in Britain, but when I went through it I felt that my job is to accept that all this is real on some level, and that all this happened - much as I wish most of it hadn't - and try and come up with some overstructure that will accomodate all that, while emphasizing the better elements.

CC: When I got to the end my first reaction was "Wow!" this is like a great roller coaster ride, this is neat! [...] To me, the way to do it is through the emotional context: I was caring about Brian and Betsy and, Christ!, even Saturnyne and the Crazy Gang I felt so bad when they all got chewed up. And when this little tadpole got himself incinerated right off the bat. Actually, I felt sorry for the Fury - aww, poor little unstoppable killing machine!

AM: What can you do if you're an unstoppable killing machine? You're not going to have many options, are you?

CC: But it was challenging, it was exciting. Ronin was, almost. Eisner, if you want to go back to basics.

AM: Love and Rockets - good emotional character stuff there.

CC: And a woman who is getting fat.

AM: That's good

CC: The reason I love Love and Rockets is because Maggie is getting fat. I am doing it with a boy: Sunspot is becoming a chocoholic, he's going to gain weight, but that's a boy. Boys's get fat. Karma got fat, but it was a joke.

AM: It's not taboo to have an ugly boy in comics. It's not taboo to have a less than physically perfect boy. To have an ugly girl that is sympathetic is a move that I'm waiting for. With Captain Britain, it was mainly Alan (Davis), but when he made Cobweb really, really ugly and really, really interesting and nice, I thought that was great. That Megan character - I must admit the latest ones that I've seen she is made a lot more attractive, and I think that's a shame. From my point of view, the more ugly, sympathetic people in comics the more that we can get away from this perfect ideal of blemishless, acne-free teens, the better.

[...]

1984 Journey to US

Excerpt from An impossibly rich celebrity's guide, a piece written by Moore chronicling his journey to New York in 1984. Published in Escape n. 6, 1985.

31st August, Friday
In the morning I meet Frank Miller and we call up at the Marvel offices, a curious place. The people seem friendly enough, but the atmosphere is very different to the informal cheeriness of DC. The centre of the floor is given over to drawing boards and labouring artisans, while the offices leading off from the main area are apparently the kind that you knock and wait at the door of, before entering. This is probably simple company bias on my part, but with Marvel I did get the impression of a company who make the trains run on time. I don't seem to have an awful lot to say to Marvel and they don't seem to have much to say to me.
Afterwards, me and Frank call in at a bar and down some sandwiches and beer. Talking to him, I feel a strong affinity of approach; he tells me about his forthcoming Batman series for DC, his face contorting into the different emotions of his characters as he describes them. This is something I do myself, and it comes from a near-unbalanced degree of involvement. Frank tells me that Howard Chaykin's approach is totally different. Howard is very cool and calculating in his construction, or at least that's how it looks to me. Frank, on the other hand, has a more personal and idiosyncratic touch. Out in the street, I notice a smouldering manhole cover reminiscent of those which populate the New York of Miller's Daredevil. I point it out to Frank and tell him I thought he'd made them up. We say goodbye and I head back to the hotel to meet Karen and the Limo to take me back to Kennedy airport. We stand outside for half an hour but it doesn't arrive. Eventually, Karen has to flag down one of the killer yellow cabs. The driver is a young Hispanic guy with dripping black ringlets in the style of Michael Jackson. He says 'I'll have him at the airport twenty five minutes guaranteed, I like to move, I don't wanna wait around, you know what I mean?' SLAM! The cab takes off on two wheels and I'm splattered against its rear upholstery by the sudden G-force. Outside, the New York landscape flashes by at an oddly tilted angle. Twenty-five minutes later we screech to a halt outside the British Airways terminal. 'Course my best time is twenty minutes!'
I catch my plane. Later I look out of the window, down upon New York and it looks like either a gigantic bird-eating spider fashioned in fairy lights or a luminous man with antlers. Dinner is served. I drink a Scotch and half a bottle of wine and then fall asleep. I awake hours later, just as we approach Heathrow. We land and I make my way through customs and find Jamie Delano waiting to take me home. He asks what America was like and all I can think to tell him about is a bumper sticker that Steve Bissette saw bearing the legend 'I swerve for hallucinations'. I am utterly blank. I've left my heart in San Francisco, my tie pin in the hotel and my brains all over the back seat of a yellow cab at Kennedy airport. As of this writing, my heart has turned up in the mail and I think I can buy a tie pin just like the old one. Why are there no major comic companies in Bali? 

The complete article can be read HERE.

Kirby & Moore by... Tom Scioli

Art by TOM SCIOLI.

Above a panel from TOM SCIOLI's Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics (page 183).

The reference is obvious: the legendary meeting between Moore and The King at San Diego Con in 1985 as captured in Jackie Estrada's epic photograph.

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.

Superman Goes to Hell

Excerpt from The Art of Neil Gaiman by Hayley Campbell, page 70-71. 

Buy it: it's a great book!

At that same convention [The British Fantasy Convention, 1985] Gaiman met Diana Wynne Jones, who was guest of honor at what was the first convention she had ever attended. Neil kept her company while she stood nervously at the bar, and downstairs Moore was reading Jones's The Ogre Downstairs to his daughters, Amber and Leah, as their bedtime book. With the kids safely asleep he'd come back out and talk about comics. "I remember the stuff that he was telling me about that hadn't come put yet. He was telling me about the last Superman story ("Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?"), which hadn't yet come out. And he was telling me about a thing he did that never came out, which was Bernie Wrightson and him collaborating on "Superman Goes to Hell" and Lex Luthor going to rescue him.

DAILY MOORE [14]

Art by Garry Leach.
From: Miracleman n. 1.
First edition: 1985, Eclipse Comics

More info HERE.

DAILY MOORE [7]

Art by Jim Baikie.
From: Vigilante n. 18.
First edition: 1985, DC Comics.

On Bissette, Totleben and Swamp Thing

Original art by S. Bissette and J. Totleben from Saga of the Swamp Thing n.22, page 11 (DC, 1984).

Excerpt from "SOPHISTICATED SCRIPTWRITING Part.3", an interview by Paul Duncan from Arken Sword n.13/14 (double issue), May 1985.

Paul Duncan: Steve Bissette and John Totleben draw Swamp Thing from your scripts. Do you get much cross-pollination of ideas from them since they live a couple of thousand miles away?
Alan Moore: Steve and John are some of the nicest and most straightforward people that I've ever worked with. Unlikely as it sounds, they are a lot closer, as people, to the sort of person that I am than a number of artists over here. We all clicked together on the book straight away, and since then we've been throwing ideas backwards and forwards with wild abandon, the end result being what you see in Swamp Thing each month. A good example of how this curious and haphazard process actually works would be the way by which we arrived at the two-part underwater vampire story that's coming up in Swamp Thing issues 38 and 39. John Totleben had an urge to draw some sort of primeval water-deity, and he mentioned it to me in a letter. I'd already been thinking along the lines of doing an underwater vampire story, and it struck me that there may be a way in which the two could combine effectively to make one really good story. We tossed this idea back and forth between the three of us in the various multi-page letters that we write from time to time, and finally got to thrash the whole thing out in full while sitting out in the woods of Vermont during my visit over there last year. Steve, a soul finely attuned to all the most slimy and repulsive aspects of nature, suggested that the underwater vampires should spawn like salmon, laying lots of eggs. I suggested that, like real salmon, they should start to rot and fall apart immediately after spawning. Between the three of us, using the Hypothesis that Richard Matheson gave for a scientific explanation of vampirism in 'I am Legend' as our starting point, we worked out exactly how this could be explained in credible terms. Then, somebody suggested that the spawning vampires would lay hundreds of eggs, although we really only wanted one creature in our story. Steve, bless his badly disturbed soul, came up with the concept of the hundreds of tiny little hatchings, once birthed, all starting to eat each other in a terrible demonstration of the principle of survival of the fittest, until only one was left; a huge and bloated thing that incorporated John's original design for his underwater horror-elemental and which had a valid reason for being in the story.
Once all the basic information concerning this foul and unnatural reproductive cycle had been finalised between us it only remained for us to work it all into some sort of coherent story that involved Swamp Thing and which had some sort of point to it other than just scaring our audience shitless with a string of unspeakable ideas and disturbing concepts. Another good example would be the werewolf story that is featured in issue 40. This grew out of a comment that Steve made to me about the way that in Jamaica there still exists a strong taboo amongst Rastafarian men against the idea of having contact with a woman while she is menstruating. This inspired an exchange of information between us on the subject, both of us raking up lots of other tribal traditions that suggested the same sort of idea: i.e., that a menstruating woman is the receptacle for a terrible and destructive form of magic, and that she should be isolated completely from any contact with the community during that time of the month. This finally led to me realising that there might be some mileage in considering the possible connection between the menstrual cycle of women and the lunar cycle of the werewolf. Once I'd mentioned this idea, lots of people started slinging in associated concepts. Nancy, Steve's wife, told me some stories about the adolescent women that she works with at the school for autistic children, including one about how she'd been ferociously attacked by a snarling naked woman who's period seemed to have triggered an unusually violent fit of aggression. Cindy, Rick Veitch's girlfriend, chimed in by sending me a book about ancient women's mysteries that included a vast amount upon the menstrual taboos practised by various old tribes, and which I was able to refer to extensively in coming up with the story. As I see it, it's my job as writer to sit back and absorb everything that's thrown at me and then try to rationalise it into a coherent story that will make it's point in the most direct and powerful way. If that material is something that the artists have suggested to me then it means there's more chance that my story will be something they're interested in drawing, thus turning in a more inspired job as a result.
To answer your question, I love working with Steve and John on the book, and I'm really happy at the way in which we've sorted out a nice, easy-going way of assimilating all our ideas on the book so that we get a good end result without any unnecessary ego clashes or crap of that nature. Two thousand miles away isn't that great a distance since the introduction of an efficient postal service and the telephone, and while it would be nice to actually see the pair of them in the flesh a bit more often, just because we like each other as friends, this doesn't present any problems in getting the work done to our satisfaction.

Monster by Alan Moore

Art by  ALAN MOORE.

Above, monster illustration (circa 1985), drawn by Moore and inscribed to Joe Orlando.

Yes... He can draw! More details HERE.

Moore in the Eighties

From left to right: Ian Gibson and Alan Moore (November 1986).

Above, from The Forbidden Planet Archive, a fantastic photo of Alan Moore with Ian Gibson, dated 1986.

This year Forbidden Planet celebrates its 40th anniversary. The original Forbidden Planet opened at 23 Denmark Street, (the famous ‘Tin Pan Alley’) in the heart of London's West End on July 22nd 1978.

You can enjoy the complete FB archive HERE. Eighties archive: here.

• 2000AD The 1983 Judge Dredd Annual signing, 21 August 1982

• 2000AD The 1985 Judge Dredd Annual signing, 18 August 1985

• 2000AD Mega-signing, 16 August 1986

• Alan Moore and Ian Gibson signing Halo Jones Book 3, 22 November 1986

• Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons signing Watchmen, 24 October 1987

• Heartbreak Hotel signing, 16 April 1988

• Moore & Bolland signing Killing Joke, 21 May 1988

• Aargh! signing, 15 October 1988

Search for Moore, here.

2000AD Mega-signing.

Writing Watchmen in 1985!

Excerpt from comic book store zine Telegraph Wire which included a long interview from SDCC 1985 with... Alan Moore! The complete interview is available HERE.

Alan Moore: [...] WATCHMEN is my first project to actually use what I’ve learned. WATCHMEN is very, very structured. It’s twelve issues long.

I know exactly what the image in the last panel is going to be. I can see it as a whole from beginning to end. I’m really pleased with the way it’s working.

I’ve been working closely with Dave Gibbons on the project. Dave’s putting so much into it. It’s not just the writing; we’re coming together on a level of pure story-telling. I mean, the way Dave’s drawing things affects the way I’m writing it. The way he’s laying out pages is affecting the way I’m writing it.

It’s a really amazing experience. I’m enjoying it immensely. [...]

We’re trying to step back from the superhero a little bit; we want to take a fresh look at the idea of being a superhero. Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel brought out SUPERMAN in 1939. There were no other superheroes and I think that for us today, it’s very difficult to imagine what the impact of that character was; since Superman in comics, the sky is full of flying men. It’s not quite the same. The whole superhero idea has grown up with cliches around it and that has smothered it in a way. You can no longer see the woods for the trees.

What me and Dave have tried to do with WATCHMEN is to somehow get back to that point where we stepped away from the conventional idea of superheroes. I wanted to do something that used the superhero in a very, very different way to the way it’s been used before: psychologically.

One of the main things is to see what effect a superhero would have upon the world. In the DC and Marvel universes, they don’t have any effect. They’re all extraordinary beings, but the world they live in is very much the same as ours.

In WATCHMEN, we try to think it through politically and socially. We’ve got a character called Mr. Manhattan who is the only actual superhero in the book.

He’s the only actual one with powers. He emerges about 1965 and from that point on, the world is different forever. Since he’s strongly aligned to the American military, obviously, he’s like a step beyond the neutron bomb. Instantly, the balance of world power changes.

I think if the American government had found a superhero, they would have been a little bit more adventuresome in their foreign policy whereas the Russians would most certainly have been a little more timid.

In the world we’re dealing with, America won the Vietnamese war. The Russians have not invaded Afghanistan. Basically, they’re in the Kremlin under the table with their fingers in their ears. They’re terrified and the only option that they have left is mutually assured destruction. Their backs are against the wall.

You’ve reached a point where the doomsday clock is seconds away from midnight. It’s closer to disaster than our own world is. That is one of the main themes of the book: it’s this paranoid, frightening world that’s just getting closer and closer to Armageddon.

And it’s all because of this one superhero.

There are other costumed heroes in the book, but most of them are retired because I don’t think that the American legal system, or any legal system, would support superheroes. It would just cause so many problems. If you allow one guy in a mask to go around beating people up, anyone in a mask can beat people up. It just wouldn’t work. So most of the superheroes have been forced into retirement – apart from those who are valuable to the military, which includes Dr. Manhattan. That is where it all begins.

There’s a lot of different threads in it. One of the things that ties the entire story together is a murder mystery that runs all the way through the plot.

I can’t tell you an awful lot without giving away the plot.

We’ve got some interesting characters. There’s Rorschach who’s a really psychotic vigilante. Whereas in most comic books the psychopath will get angry, a real psychopath doesn’t get angry. A psychopath will break your arm and smile… or never react at all. [...]

The complete interview is available HERE.

San Diego 1985: an embarrassing afternoon

From American Comic Book Chronicles Facebook page.

Entry dated 1 August 2015:

"August 1-4, 1985: There were giants in those days. Fifteen years after the San Diego Comic-Con was founded, the legends that shaped the comic book industry mingled with the up-and-comers who were reshaping the present. For many, the highlight of that year’s show was its first annual Kirby Awards, honoring the best of 1984 and named in honor of pioneer and hit-maker Jack Kirby. The beloved comics icon was present to announce each winner, frequently sharing the stage with Alan Moore, whose Swamp Thing—in collaboration with Stephen Bissette and John Totleben—was the overwhelming favorite of the night. In his first—and, as it turned out, only—U.S. convention appearance, Moore was captured on stage alongside Kirby in a famous photograph by Jackie Estrada.

Sponsored and promoted by Fantagraphics’ Amazing Heroes, the nominees were chosen strictly by people already in the industry. Of the 238 ballots that determined the winners, 98 came from comic book creators, editors, and publishers while 140 comics retailers and distributor personnel accounted for the rest. Regrettably, the Kirby Awards were discontinued after the 1987 ceremony when a dispute over ownership of the awards resulted in two new awards: the Eisners (named after Will Eisner and overseen by former Kirby Awards manager Dave Olbrich) and the Harveys (named after Harvey Kurtzman and overseen by Fantagraphics)."

Moore won as "Best Writer". While accepting the award he said: "This is probably one of the most embarrassing afternoons of my life." [from The Comics Buyer’s Guide N. 615].

From The Comics Buyer’s Guide N. 615.

Alan Moore and his first wife Phyllis in a photograph from The Comics Buyer’s Guide N. 616.