Beautiful like a Cadillac

Excerpt from a short article focused on Moore's then upcoming WildC.A.T.S run and his plans on the series. Published in Hero Illustrated n. 25, 1995. 

Alan Moore: [...] In issue #21 -  which is the first issue that I'll write - the entire issue is dedicated to the putting together of the replacement WildC.A.T.s team, and it's only after that, with issue #22, that we break into 16 pages of the original team in space and then eight pages of the new team back on Earth; but the two stories will run in parallel and will hopefully coincide in, oh, about seven or eight issues time. 
The lineup of the new team is Majestic and Savant, who have both been seen before. There'll be kind of a replacement Grifter in the form of his brother Max Cash who turned up in the Jim Lee/Savage Dragon crossover.
He's a nastier character than his brother. In my script notes, I've said that he shouldn't be quite as corrupt as Harvey Keitel in The Bad Lieutenant, but he's getting there. The code name that he works under is Condition Red, and he'll be getting a new look to go with it.
Then there are two new characters that I've created for the book. One is a genetically engineered character called Tao, which stands for Tactically Augmented Organism. The other character is called Ladytron, which is in fact named after one of my favorite tracks on the first Roxy Music album. 
It seems to be about a woman but you suspect that it's probably about a car, and this character sort of combines some of the best elements of both. It's a female cyborg. with a lot of serious personality problems. She's beautiful like a Cadillac.

Image Days

Excerpts from an interview focused on the Spawn/WildC.A.T.S. crossover published by Image with art by Scott Clark in January 1996. The interview - which also involved Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee - was included in Overstreet's FAN n.6, released in November 1995. 

Alan Moore: [...] I think I'm in danger of becoming the Image Crossover King! It followed from doing the Badrock/Violator crossover. It was figured that since I had written Spawn, and I had shown that l could handle the WildC.A.T.S in the 30 pages that exist of the 1963 80 Page Giant Annual which is still in limbo and waiting to materialize, that my name was pulled out of the hat on that one. It sounded like a fun idea, and I went for it. I actually wrote it before they asked me to write WildC.A.T.S. In some ways I wish I'd done a few issues of the regular book before doing the crossover, because I would have brought the nuances of the characters out a bit more sharply. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Spawn/WildC.A.T.S crossover, but I hadn't quite gotten the handle on the characters that I have now.
As with all of the Image work, I've been trying to find my way into a milieu which is not entirely second nature to me. When I was writing superhero books before, I was writing for an older audience, a smaller audience. So consequently, I missed out upon some comics development over the past six or seven years, because my interests have been elsewhere.
It‘s quite strange to plunge headlong into this hyper-kinetic “Imageworld," where there’s two or three panels a page, where the pace of the story is an awful lot faster, where there's constant kinetic action.What I want to do, is take that basic formula, which is an unusual one for me, and just add a few elements that make it more like something of mine. lt‘s a delicate piece of cookery, but I’m starting to feel like I'm getting results.

With the plot, I've taken a recurring comic book theme, the idea of the dystopian superhero future.With this one, there’s a future world where Spawn has become awful. This Spawn has killed the demon-god which holds him in thrall in the regular Spawn books, and thus receives unlimited power, rather than the limited power which currently hampers him. As a result of this, he’s become the total ruler of America, which has become a massive feudal state under this omnipotent Spawn. So this is the future that the present day WildC.A.T.S have to go into to help their counter-parts, who are in a pretty sorry state. They live in this literal Hell-on-Earth that America has become. [...] 
They're going to kill Spawn before he can become this demon, the Ipsissimus. The name is one of the magical grades in traditional magic theory, the highest grade of all. So if you become the Ipsissimus, you're just slightly ahead of God. [...]

There’s a journey through this world, and a final confrontation with the Ipsissimus, and a little bit of stuff that ties up the time-paradox threads that run through it. So l hope it's entertaining.

[...] The thing that was the most interesting for me, that l had the most fun with, was playing with possible alternative futures for some of the image characters.We get to see references to image characters and what they are doing in this future that would probably tantalize me if l was thirteen. I've seen stories in the past,"imaginary stories,“ where they'll suddenly refer to some other character. In Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, for example, the sudden appearance of Green Arrow was a real thrill for me. it connected up with childhood memories about the character that put him in a new context. In the course of Spawn/WildC.A.T.S, we get a couple of guest appearances, and walk ons. Gen 13 turn up in the third issue, but they're all very different. It’s all very amusing. There's some of my sense of humor in there which is dark and nasty some of the time.

[...] The artwork that I've seen is absolutely stunning! It's really stylized. It's taken me awhile to become familiar with the Image artist because I have been out of the mainstream for a while, but I'm surprised by the level of quality. The nearest thing that I can remember to it is from the start of my career when I was working for 2000 A.D. and it was a wonderful period where it seemed like every artist they had was a Kevin O’Neill or a Brian Bolland or a Dave Gibbons. As a writer, you felt spoiled. 

I've got some of the same feeling working for Image, because there’s such a joy of drawing. It's got a youthful enthusiasm that you can't buy.They're not aimed at me, as an audience.They're not aimed at a 40 year old, quasi-intellectual, they're aimed at a 14 year old male audience, that's fair enough. But they sure do have a lot of energy! It‘s just a matter of channeling that energy into the right kind of vehicles, and that’s what I'm trying to do. [...] 

 

[Talking about writing WildC.A.T.S regular series]It's a great deal of fun, because I got to create a couple of them. It's always more involving to work with your own characters. It's an incredible break between From Hell, and my novel and all of the heavy and serious stuff like that. It's like a sorbet between courses. And a sorbet's not an insubstantial thing. There's an art to it.  

Lovecraft was an American William Blake

H.P. Lovecraft

Excerpt from a great interview printed on RAPID EYE n.3, published in 1995 by Creation Books. 

Notes: Yuggoth Cultures was never published. You can read more about it HERE.

The interview happened few months after Moore's 40th birthday, the 18th of November 1993: in that occasion Moore declared himself a "magician"!

MOON AND SERPENT
The World Of Alan Moore
D M Mitchell

[...] Alan is currently working on two book projects; one, a novel entitled Voice Of The Fire (to be published by Gollancz), is a very personal history, in 12 chapters, of Britain. The other, Yuggoth Cultures (to be published by Creation Books), is a lateral examination of the life and works of H P Lovecraft, with whom Alan has recently become intrigued. [...]

Alan Moore still lives in his birthplace, Northampton, and it was there in February 1994, in the informal setting of a local pub, that the following conversation took place. [...]

RE: [...] you've recently become interested in HPL's work in a way different to that in which you previously saw it?

Alan Moore: I've been interested in Lovecraft since I was thirteen, but I have recently seen him in a different light. It started out as an adolescent love of the man and his works, but as my critical faculties developed, I realised that he was not a very good writer in the technical sense. He used an archaic style when it was unnecessary. He made his work deliberately ponderous. What I feel now is that his ability as a writer is unimportant. The man was a visionary - a prophet. He was an American William Blake.
There was something leaking through - intimations of the future seeped through into his unbearably sensitive mind - a mind so transfixed by the terrors of the world that everything frightened him. The cold frightened him, the future frightened him, history frightened him - he became an unbearably sensitive barometer to all the things that are coming. 

I believe that in his story The Shadow Over Innsmouth, with its mentions of swastikas, concentration camps for the genetically degenerate and so on, he gives us an accurate prediction of the Nazi holocaust. In his descriptions of Azathoth he seems to have been talking about Hiroshima and the conceptual horror which followed. 

I no longer judge writers by their worldly, artistic abilities. | judge them by the energies that they seem to evoke by occult, unconscious means, irrespective of their actual, artistic talent.
 

RE: He was a direct ancestor of people like Burroughs.
 

AM: His work has that same channelled, mediumistic feel, although his writing was nowhere near as technically accomplished as Burroughs, nor was he as successful. He never had a novel published during his lifetime.
 

RE: Mainly due to his own snobbishness.

 
AM: He was holding back. I| get a sense of him almost deliberately thwarting his own progress, as if afraid of where he might be headed.
 

RE: His best work was published posthumously. If he'd lived longer he might have matured, yet he insisted on doing those often terrible revisions of other writers’ works.
 

AM: He was trapped in his own little hell, yet he was sensitive in a way most people in America were not. Fear stripped his nervous system down to a raw, twitching cluster of painfully acute antennae.
 

RE: He was certainly an outsider to the American Dream. He wasn't carried along by the vision of optimism which we now know never came true. In that way he prefigured the beats and hippies.
 

AM: I believe he was a power-point — a prophet.
In writing about Lovecraft, as I'm doing at the moment, I want to understand where he was, to become him, as it were. We're both pulp writers trying to express our vision of the truth. In this current book Yuggoth Cultures, I'm trying to divine that knowledge. You tend to work faster as a pulp writer and you're absolved of literary obligations and pretensions. Your vision is purer.
The obligations of the deadline leave the conscious mind less time to edit the subconscious outpourings and a truer story leaks through, despite what is lost in literary polish. I try not to make those decisions of preference any more, concerning what is literary and what is not.
A friend of mine tells me about his work as a nascent lama. One of the exercises they do consists of giving you a rose and a freshly laid dog-turd. The idea is to meditate on both until you realise that both are as beautiful - both are expressions of reality and reality is beautiful.
They bring you wine and vinegar and you taste both with the aim of realising that both are as palatable and when they've taken you through the course of opposites — shit and roses, wine and vinegar - they ask you to consider good and evil and see them with a new mind. That, for me, sounds like sanity. [...]

DAILY MOORE [4]

Art by Dave Johnson & Kevin Nowlan with John Nyberg.
From: WildC.A.T.s n. 25.
First edition: 1995, Image Comics.

A message From Hell

Art by Eddie Campbell.

Excerpts from an unaired episode of Clive Barker's A-Z Of Horror, 1995. Text published in edited form in Clive Barker's A-Z Of Horror, 1997. The video is available HERE on YouTube.

MOORE: What From Hell can tell us about our own lives, is that those same ancient destructive forces, that same misogyny, that same darkness, is still with us, and for all of our veneer of technology, we've not managed to banish those shadows even slightly.

[...] As the century draws to its end, we find that our entire culture seems to be boiling and bubbling an' erupting into strange new forms. I think that it is the job of artists to help us to understand the new shapes that our world is blossoming into.

Alan Moore: The Birth Caul photos

Above and below, 2 (of 4) photos from The Birth Caul (A Shamanism of Childhood), a spoken word performance which was staged at the Old County Court in Newcastle upon Tyne on 18 November 1995 with music by David J and Tim Perkins.

I found the photos on Locus+ site: you can find all of them HERE.

Sam Kieth, Alan Moore and... The Maxx

From The Maxx minicomics included as exclusive supplement to Wizard magazine n. 51, 1995.

When I called Alan Moore to help kick off this new story line in Maxx, to say I was nervous is putting it mildly. But I wanted the chance to work with him even more than I was intimidated. I asked him if he'd gotten the comics I sent, and he politely assured me he'd gotten through all 16 issues, and that he really enjoyed them. I was trying to think of what I could possibly do to get him to consent to do this one issue – beg/plead/manipulate – but he said, “Sure”. He said that a lot of issues of The Maxx are paralleling things he's interested in his own life right now. We talked about our interest in Aleister Crowley and the English tradition of ceremonial magick, Carlos Castaneda, spirit animals and Jung.

I told him my concern about being too specific in The Maxx, about how I wanted to let people read what they wanted to into it, instead of getting caught up in dogma. It's eerie to meet somebody who has so completely and thoroughly studied the same subjects and interests I have.

So, I said, trying to sound casual but curious as hell, “What happens? Who is Sara ten years from now?” There was a pause and I felt my blood run cold. In his deep voice, Alan said “Something has happened; something's gone wrong on the Outback. It's building, and may or may not be bad, sort of like the REM song, “It's the end ofthe world as we know it, and I fell fine.”

Then he mentioned a dream he had in which tiny dolls were eating the landscape, and I flashed on the exploding fairies I had envisioned in Sara's Outback. As the conversation came to a close, we both agreed that the future was gonna be a lot worse and uglier, both in the book and in the real world, but leaving me with an odd sense that, somehow, that's OK. [Sam Kieth]

The Maxx is a series created by Sam Kieth and originally published in the 90ies by Image Comics.

Moore is credited for the dialogues in The Maxx n.21.

Warchild and... Farmageddon!

Above, an advertisement, dated 1995, promoting a Warchild miniseries (for Rob Liefeld's Maximum Press company) which was never published.

An interview - posted on OC Weekly which is not available any more on the Web - revealed some details:

Liefeld goes on to describe a comic book pitched to him by Moore that he still owns the rights to, entitled Warchild. Written shortly after Moore saw Pulp Fiction for the first time, it's a knights-of-the-round-table concept set in a Tarantino-esque inner city gangland setting.
 

"I have him on tape for 4 hours just talking about it; it’s my most cherished possession.

You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Alan describe the heroes – this is in the near future – getting trapped in an amusement park in Compton, where one of the rides you go on is a drive-by shooting.
 

A couple of the artists I gave it to handed it back. The first ten pages is some of the most difficult, visually, it’s hard to crack. We’ll probably publish it in script form. I can’t crack this, life’s too short.
 

There’s standing atop a building, looking in through the window at a certain angle, while the person is sitting doing their hair looking at themselves in the mirror...and the panel descriptions, you go, how do I shoot this? I could shoot it with a camera, but like all the storyboards? It’s just very difficult."

More information about Moore's unpublished works can be read here.