Nightjar: Urban approach to the supernatural

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

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

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

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

Read also this article by Talbot about Nightjar, HERE.

Supreme Lettering by Todd Klein

From Supreme n.56. Art by Chris Sprouse.

Above and below,  a selection of  Supreme lettering overlays by the legendary Todd Klein, from the CAF Gallery of Kristof Spaey. Enjoy! 

For more gems visit Spaey's gallery: here!

From Supreme n.49. Art by Mark Pajarillo.

From Supreme n.52A. Art by Jim Mooney.

From Supreme n.53. Art by Chris Sprouse.

Kurtzman, Eisner and American comics

Excerpts from an article titled "The British and Scottish and Irish Invasion" published in Overstreet's FAN n.20, released in February 1997.  

Alan Moore: I guess that I was influenced the most stylistically by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner. […] Those two are right up there at the top. Those are the two main gods in my comic book writers' Pantheon. The stuff I grew up with was the Julie Schwartz era of DC Comics and the Stan Lee, Kirby/Ditko stuff at Marvel and all the other stuff during the 60s. 

[…] I think the main thing that gave me the idea that I could write stories for comics that would interest me was the work that was appearing from Pat Mills and John Wagner in 2000 AD. When it was in its early heyday, you had people like Brian Bolland doing Judge Dredd. Most of the better stories, with a couple of exceptions, seemed to be written either by John Wagner or Pat Mills, or under one of their many aliases. And there was something in them that said that these stories were being written by grown-up people who had a high degree of intelligence and had a high level irony and humor, which attracted me, and I began to think that maybe there was some possible slot for me within the more fruitful kind of ground that comics seemed to be turning into. 

[…] The waters of that particular question have become more murky recently, but if there is some clear feature that separates British comic book writing from American, especially at that time, it might well be the sense of irony, the kind of cynicism that really only comes from being in an empire that is well into its decline. America is headed towards its decline.

Give it another few years, and you'll have that deep-seeded pessimism of the soul. It's sort of a post-empire state that brings this strange, wry melancholia to some of the British work. It has something to do with how the history of a place defines the consciousness of its inhabitants.

[…] In the town that I live in, there are buildings that are a thousand years old. In America it's a completely different dynamic. The difference between Britain and America was once described to me as, in Britain, a hundred miles is a long way, and in America, a hundred years is a long time. When you've been marinating in your own black juices for a couple thousand years, there's a different tone, a different flavor to things.

[…] The opportunities that were presented when I was offered Swamp Thing were really stunning. In Britain, the most that you could hope for was a black and white strip with five pages a week, something like that. Whereas in America, you had the opportunity to write things that seemed of incredibly sprawling length. You could do a story in 24 pages and it would be printed in color! I remember putting some really serious thought into how to revise the story structures I'd been doing because they'd been devised to break down into 5 or 6 page episodes.

[…] I grew up reading American comics. We had very many great British comics at the time, but American comics were something different. They showed me a world that was already fantasy before the superheroes turned up. New York City was a science fiction landscape to me before you even had Superman leaping over the tall buildings. It's a thing where, when I was offered the chance to work at dc, all of the sudden there was the chance to tap back into these comic reading experiences which had been very formative for me.

[…] When I entered the field, certainly in this country, there was no job less glamorous than comic book writer. That wasn't what I got into the field for, though. It was purely because I wanted to write comics. It was only in the kind of explosion that followed that, when it got slightly tarnished for me because it became about other things than writing comics. It became about having a certain position in the industry or reputation, image, things like that. It these things that made me take a more reclusive position in the industry. In fact, the industry itself, I have no interest in. I suppose that might be the sort of position of an embittered, cranky, old guy, but…

Watchmen's legacy and paternity

Sometimes things resurface, especially if we are talking about the World Wide Web. 

So few days ago I discovered an interesting video interview dated 1997 that Moore did - in London, basically in front of the Tower Bridge - for The Anti-Gravity Room, a weekly Canadian television program of the mid-late 1990s. You can watch the video HERE (it also includes short interviews with Art Spiegelman, George Lucas, Frank Miller and the Hernandez Bros.!!!)

The Moore interview starts around minute 2:53 and ends at 6:20. Below, a transcription. Enjoy!

[...] did you and Dave Gibbons have any idea the impact that the Watchmen was going to have?
ALAN MOORE: After three issues in, yes... not to start with... Originally we planned to do just a very clever, exciting superhero book with a few neat twists. Around about the third issue something strange started to happen in the mix, you know... We started to notice that there were interesting layers of storytelling going on between what was happening in the captions, what was happening in the pictures, the dialogues, the little strip about the pirates that was embedded in the overall strip... there was a peculiar kind of interaction going on that I'd never actually seen in comics before. When we realized we were doing it we decided that that was what the comic was about.

With all the hoopla and excitement, enthusiasm that went down with that when you look back is it something you're still proud of ? Does it still hold up for you?
Watchmen still holds up for me... I still think Watchmen was a great work. It's not without any flaw, no work is... The hoopla surrounded it has rather blunted some of its appeal for me...to me I'm often reminded of something that David Bowie said when he described himself as the face that had launched a thousand pretensions, you know, and there's some truth about that regarding Watchmen... Watchmen did seem to open the doors for a lot of people who... that grasp the surface of Watchmen, they grasp it got a grittier violence, a more adult approach to sexuality... they probably couldn't grasp exactly how to do some of the clever semiotic stuff that we were doing but they got the sex, the violence, the pretension, the references to popular song lyrics, things like that which all made it very 80s and very modern... and I've seen a lot of retreats of that kind of comic sensibility sense that to me have seemed depressing, pretentious and yet I have to own up to a certain paternity there, you know... the child is ugly but it's probably mine, you know... and that has tended to blunt it a bit...

I wouldn't like to say that Watchmen had a good effect upon comics. I think it was a good comic book but I wouldn't like to say that it had necessarily a good effect upon comics. It might just be doomed us to 10 years of heavy-handed retention...
 

Looking back on Watchmen, is there anything you wish you'd done differently?
No, I think that I'm pretty happy with it as it was. I could have done differently, you know... it was perhaps... not all of it was the book that people wanted to read but all of it was the book that I wanted to
write. 

What I was trying to do in Watchmen was to use a lot of comic book icons in the plot, in the characters but to do something different with them... I think it was perfectly successful at what it did, you know... Yeah I'm happy with it... I'll stand by Watchmen. [...]

 You can watch the video HERE

Supreme Self-gift!

Art by Rick Veitch. Lettering by Todd Klein.

Sometimes you know yourself better than... any other person. At least this is 100% true for me when you are talking about... comics! 

So, after some years and several attempts, I finally bought a page of SUPREME art directly from... supreme Master RICK VEITCH. Needless to say, it's a masterpiece and a real supreme treasure in my small collection! Grazie, Rick, for such a gem!

 

Well, it's a gorgeous page from Supreme with Professor Night (and Twilight the Girl Marvel) 8-page short story, titled "The secret origin of The Professor Night/Supreme Team!" published in Supreme Vol.3, issue n. 52B (Awesome Entertainment), in 1997. 

Lettering by the legendary... Todd Klein, of course!

Art by Rick Veitch. Lettering by Todd Klein.

Isn't it gorgeous? And could you feel those EC vibes?

Awesome Supreme page! Art by Rick Veitch. Lettering by Todd Klein.

Below you can see the printed page (with colours by Donald Skinner).

 

I hope you love it as much as I love it! :)

That Gen-13 script, Brian K Vaughan and Bob Wiacek

DONATE!!!

Did you remember that unpublished Gen-13 script that was auctioned on eBay some time ago?

Well Brian K Vaughan, co-creator of Y The Last Man and Saga, was victorious at a bid of $3433 for the faxed pages. And now he has decided to share it!

Anyway, rather than hoarding this lost treasure in my BKVault, I thought I would share it with those of you who are kind enough to donate ANY AMOUNT to Bob Wiacek's GoFundMe page (link in bio!). Please just forward your donation receipt to this email: ThanksForHelpingBobW at gmail dot com, and my correspondence wiener dog Hamburger K. Vaughan will eventually send you back a private link to a scan of the script for your personal reading pleasure. Thanks so much for whatever you can do to help, and I hope everyone is staying safe and sane out there.

So... DONATE!!!

 

More info: HERE

Gen-13 unpublished script on eBay

Moore's unpublished Gen13 script!

In 1997 Alan Moore started writing a Gen13 story. The script was not completed and the story never published. After 20+ years, Scott Dunbier, who was EIC of Wildstorm, put those faxed pages on eBay, HERE.

First, all money earned from this auction will go directly to Bob Wiacek, long time comic-book inker and all around good guy. Bob has some severe eye issues that preclude him from being able to work. All money earned will go directly to aid Bob.

ALAN MOORE SCRIPT
You are bidding on an UNPUBLISHED Alan Moore script from 1997. Several artists were going to draw different chapters, not sure how many but at least one was intended for Travis Charest. These 28 pages are all that Alan wrote, it is NOT complete and never was (Hence it never being published).

DETAILS:

Gen13 Annual called "THE COMING OF THE COLLECTOR!!"

28 out of 48 pages were written—35 typed pages.
The script was sent (as ALL of Alan's scripts were) via fax. The pages were printed out on plain paper (not thermal fax paper, thank goodness) and are probably the only copies that exist.
 

This script is being sold with Alan Moore's full knowledge and blessing (since it will help Bob). This is truly the ultimate Alan Moore collectible—an unpublished script by arguably the greatest writer in comics history—one-of-a-kind! 

At the moment the current bid is US $3,383.00! Make your best bid! 5 days left!

Constantine says "‘Cheers, man"‘

From Hellblazer n. 120.

Above, page from Hellblazer n. 120, written by Paul Jenkins with art by Sean Phillips, published by Vertigo/DC Comics. It's the 10th year anniversary issue of the series.

Supreme by Gianfranco Loriga

Art by Gianfranco Loriga.

Above, a Kirbesque version of our beloved SUPREME by friend and Italian comics expert Gianfranco Loriga. Gianfranco had a brief career in comics in the 90ies but he preferred to focus on... selling comics & sharing and spreading the love for the medium all around. 

The illustration was "published" in 1997 on the pages of Clark's Bar, a photocopied fanzine I collaborated with back in the days.

DAILY MOORE [23]

Art by Carlos D'Anda.

From: Majestic: The Big Chill.
First edition: in Wildstorm Spotlight n.1, 1997 (Wildstorm/Image Comics).

DAILY MOORE [13]

Art by Rick Veitch.
From: "Storybook Smith, the Literary Lawman"
First edition: in Judgment Day n.3 (1997, Awesome Comics).

DAILY MOORE [12]

Art by Val Semeiks.
From: Itchy Peterson: "Just Born Lucky, I Guess".
First edition: in Nightmare Theater n. 4 (1997, Chaos! Comics).

More info HERE.

Alan Moore on Dracula

Art by Gary Frank.

Excerpt from an interview included in Vampirella/Dracula: The Centennial published in 1997 by Harris. Comics The book contained "The new European", a short comics by Moore, drawn by Gary Frank. Interview by David Bogart, titled "Dracula, graveyard poets, & an interview with Alan Moore".

Bogart: [...] What do you think is the appeal of Dracula or vampires to our culture?
Alan Moore: The appeal of a vampire to our culture is a long and complex one. We can trace the development of not just the vampire, but the whole field of supernatural horror from the "graveyard poets" of the 18th century. They had been celebrating graveyards that had more or less vanished, where the dead only had a temporary residency. In these graveyards, a body would first be buried and then when the flesh was partially decomposed, it was dug up and the bones would be separated.
Around about the 18th century, we seemed to undergo, as a culture, a number of psychological changes in which the evidence of death that filled daily life was "brushed under the carpet"; as a culture, we no longer wanted to have the smell of death around us, we no longer wanted to see corpses or bones; we began to sanitize everything. We no longer felt as comfortable with death as we had been. This is due perhaps to the burgeoning Age of Reason. The assault on traditional notions of God and an afterlife caused people to become less certain of heaven and thus, death was no longer just a mere stepping stone.
However, death IS one of the major parts of human life, and we could not really entirely suppress it. After the graveyard poets came the gothic writers who turned all the trappings of death into a kind of "sugary fantasy" that people could delight in, in the warmth and safety of their own sitting rooms. In a way, it was an attempt to tame death-to remove the real evidence of death in our lives and to substitute a parade of demons and devils and monsters...with which we could enjoy the vicarious pleasure of it. Of that gallery of grotesques, the vampire is obviously one of the most exciting and endearing. The vampire is not only full of the morbid fascination that the dead hold, but it is also incredibly sexual. The idea of transferring bodily fluids, be it blood or any other kind, is a sexual idea. The vampire has been portrayed largely as a sexual figure representing the elements of sex and death, and thus one can understand the appeal of the vampire.

How does your Dracula differ from most interpretations?
In my particular story, Dracula's motivations become cryptic. We're not entirely sure what he is. His motivation in the traditional story is simply to seek fresh blood, but now there are other possible agendas in play. He is a very knowing and aware Dracula-of himself and his fiction. What makes this fresh interpretation so frightening is that we don't know what is going on-he is no longer tamed by the laws and logic we know and understand. My version is aware of those other past portrayals; he is aware of the entire media history of Dracula. My version exists in a world where the Dracula books and movies also exist. In a way, it makes it a stranger concept, because it brings the whole thing into the murky borderlines of fact and fiction. In a way, it gives the basic concept enough of a twist to make it fresh again. The main problem of vampires is that it has become such a repetitive motif, full of clichés such as the red eyes, the fangs, the rubber bat on a string...what I have tried to do is make Dracula very unfamiliar. He's stripped of the gothic castle, and has been based in a disturbingly modern context. The effect I hope, is to refresh the vampire-jaded palette of the reader.

1997: Word of Moore

Excerpt from an interview pubblished in 1997 on Feature Magazine Volume 3, Number 2.

FEATURE: Where do you see yourself moving as an artist?  What sort of legacy are you trying to build, what kind of body of work are you trying to create?

ALAN MOORE: I've never really thought much of a legacy. I suppose that I don't know, I'm just trusting the process. I look back at the early work that I did. I look at Watchmen, and I must admit I feel a certain amount of unworthy embarrassment.  It's nothing that I should feel, but just the fact that it was a superhero comic. I was trying to say something serious in a fairly lightweight form. Like I say, I wouldn't do that now.  I'm still very proud of Watchmen, but I'm prouder of stuff outside that genre like From Hell, like Lost Girls. There's a progression going on here. It's only a progression of ideas in my head, but they're following a kind of path. I'm on the path, I don't know where it's going, and I don't really have a destination in mind. There's no plan here, there's just a path which I am trying to uncover and interpret as I go along. My works are, I suppose, a series of communiqués from along the trail. My works will tell you more or less where I am at any given point along that trail. What lies further down the road... I mean, my list of things that I'm gonna be doing in the future, I suppose should be considered directions that look to me promising to head out in. I don't know what I'll find when I get there, and I don't know what path will lead from there. I don't know where I'll be going after that.

I have my own sort of preoccupations, they tend to veer towards getting further in to something. When dealing with mainstream comics, I'd perhaps try and look at the politics or the morals that informed the other situations in these books, trying to get under the surface of that. When I'd explored that for a bit, I'd try to get under the surface a bit further still. To talk about politics in a more general sense and just relating them to a funny book world. There's a point where you want to go further still. It's a sort of burrowing, I suppose. That's the best way that I can describe the process. I want to try and penetrate the different layers of meaning that there are in the world as deeply as possible. Whatever tools or whatever avenues seem to be most productive towards that end are the ones that I shall be taking. But this is a very subjective thing. It's a totally unpredictable process inside my head. I shall just have to see where it takes me. I try not to second guess that sort of stuff.

I guess when I finally drop dead over the typewriter, then, and only then, I'll be able to see what body of work I've left behind. I'm sure that eighty percent of it will be crap, but there'll probably be a couple of good things in there that will endure and they'll probably be the last things that I ever thought they'd be.

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.

90s lost project with Rick Veitch

Art by Rick Veitch.

Some months ago Rick Veitch posted on his Facebook page the above picture: "Character design for an Alan Moore project we never got around to doing."

Veitch added: "It was conceived about ten years ago. Mostly as a vehicle to develop ideas Alan was interested in concerning time, space and higher dimensions in a Kirby flavored retro style. I don't think we ever had a title."

Alan Moore, Gianluca Costantini and... the Truth

Art by Gianluca Costantini.

Above, an intense portrait of Alan Moore drawn by Italian comic book artist and graphic journalist GIANLUCA COSTANTINI.
Moore's statement is a quotation from the correspondence published on Cerebus N.219 in 1997.

For more info about Gianluca Costantini, visit his Official page 

Social Networks: Twitter - Facebook Page

Art by Gianluca Costantini.

Supreme letterer Todd Klein

Todd Klein - Supreme N. 56 page 24: lettering by Todd Klein.

Above and below, some examples of the fantastic lettering created by TODD KLEIN for Alan Moore's Supreme run.
Award-winning Todd Klein is unanimously considered one of the best letterers in comics history.

Todd Klein - Supreme N. 56 page 24: lettering by Todd Klein.

The pictures shown here are from Kristof Spaey's CAF page. 

"I really wanted some samples of Todd Klein's hand lettering. He's one of my favorite letterers in comics. [...] Todd still had a small batch of Supreme lettering overlays in his archive and I picked them all up. Great fun to be able to study them up close. Alan Moore's run on Supreme was phenomenal. Serving as an homage to the golden age and Superman specifically but works also as a commentary on the comics medium in general."

More Supreme lettering overlays by Todd Klein are available there.

More about Klein's work on Supreme: here.

Supreme N. 56 page 24 published page. Art by Chris Sprouse.

Alan Moore about Hellboy and Mignola

Art © Mike Mignola.

From the introduction to Hellboy: Wake the Devil. 

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

Judgment Day Omega: script example

Alan Moore is famous for his extremely detailed comics scripts.
In the following you can read the script for a single panel from "Judgment Day Omega" (1997, Awesome Entertainment) drawn by Chris Sprouse (the final panel is shown above). It's a short excerpt but it is a clear example of Moore's writing.

Due to a misunderstanding, Moore indicates in the script the name of Dan Jurgens even if the artist for that sequence was Sprouse (read the editor's note in the page).

So... enjoy!

Published here just as a "comics studies" example.