Alan Moore's cane

Few weeks ago DC co-bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran finally revealed their plans for the new DC movies included one focused on The Authority. In his newsletter - Orbital Operations for 5 February 2023, titled Big Sound Authority - Warren Ellis commented the news:

THE AUTHORITY was a comics series I created with and for the artist Bryan Hitch, with colourist Laura DePuy (now Laura Martin) in the late 1990s at DC Wildstorm. It was actually just Wildstorm when we started - I remember Jim Lee and Scott Dunbier gathering us all to dinner in London to explain that Wildstorm was being bought by DC, that doughty pair having just returned from Northampton to explain it all to Alan Moore.

"Alan got out of the cab with a walking stick in his hand, and I swear to god it looked like a cudgel he'd brought to beat us to death with."

Alan Moore, to me later: "Ah, yes.  I affect a cane these days."

(Note: this is the correct English formulation of a sentence that might otherwise read, "I carry a cane as a personal affectation.") - Warren Ellis

 You can subscribe to Orbital Operations HERE.

Qabalah, Mercury, humor and... the bogey-man

Mercury on a bronze coin

Excerpt from an interview published in Wizard magazine n.95 in 1999.

 

[...] So, what do you practice?

Alan Moore: Qabalah is one. It's part of the Western occult tradition. It includes all of the religious systems: Greek, Egyptian, Norse, Christian, it's all there. It's seen as a map of the universe on one level, but it's also seen as a map of you, the individual. I might do a ritual that involves the god Mercury. You can have a dialogue with that energy, that cluster of ideas we label with the name Mercury.

You've had a conversation with the god Mercury.

Maybe. During the experience, you believe you are actually talking to a god. Who's to say if you are, or if you're not? I've tried to keep an open mind about it. I tell myself, "On one level, this is a hallucination. This is an element of my own personality, some subconscious element of myself." On the other hand, I also have to allow that this might be something completely beyond my personality, a higher entity. I mean, if it barks like a go and smells like a god, it's probably a god. [Laughs]

 

[Laughs] At least you have a sense of humor about it.

You have to. Most of this is a lot less dramatic than you'd suppose. It's reading a bunch f books, and every three months or so, doing a working. We'll do a proper ritual working, something peculiar will happen, and then we'll get our strength back in a few months and do it again.

That dispels the image some readers have of you--- that you're some kind of unapproachable "goth genius." I bet they get it from that black-and-white photo of you. You look dangerous.

[Chuckles] Ah, the photo. That's all [photographer] Mitch Jenkins. He always goes for the dark, scary look. I don't know. To me, my life is completely normal. I have no desire to have a dark allure. I have my hair like this because, frankly, I think it looks gorgeous. [Laughs] Those rolling, natural highlights, you know.

But I'm sure that looks dangerous to some people. And from experience, I know if they met me in some foggy circumstance, they'd find me a bit alarming.

You have a great "Alan Moore looks like the bogey-man" story, don't you?

[Laughs] I remember walking through a park here in Northampton --- a park notorious for its muggins and the like --- during a foggy night. I heard some guys coming, probably from the pub or something, and I knew our paths would intersect. They were loud and boisterous. We finally crossed paths in this fog, and they stopped dead in their tracks. I kept walking. Finally one of them gave this nervous laugh.

Did he say anything?

Yeah. He said, [in a fearful voice] "I didn't know what it was."

Humble artisans

Excerpt from the letter column in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen n. 3, June 1999.

[...] The humble artisans who craft our tale each month could scarcely be considered gentlemen. Mr. Moore hails from a family of the lower orders that are monstrously inbred, amongst whom he is chiefly famed for his unique possession of a seventh nipple. Mr. O'Neill, to my certain knowledge, has been more than once convicted as a pickpocket and cosh-boy. To the other sometime inmates of Marshalsea prison, he is known and feared as "Red Kev". Alas, as is so often the case with periodicals of this type, only lower sorts of person are contented with a niche as artist or mere writer, and it is only in the editorial ranks that one is likely to find traces of both breeding and nobility. I'm sure, however, that if our creative team could talk intelligibly without those appalling and impenetrable accents, they would thank you for your generosity; however misplaced it may be.

From Hell oil painting

Art by Eddie Campbell.

Above, via ComicArtFans, cover for the 1999 collected edition of From Hell. The image was also published in From Hell Companion (page 179), where Campbell remarks that the colors were not reproduced quite correctly in the published book.

Alan Moore on Planetary

Excerpts from Planetary Consciousness, introduction to "Planetary: All Over The World And Other Stories", March 2000, WildStorm Productions.

[...] Warren Ellis and John Cassaday have manufactured an ingenious device by means of which they can exploit the possibilities of our contemporary situation, as described above. The heroes of their tale are neither crime-fighters nor global guardians, but, by some perfect stroke of inspiration, archaeologists. People digging down beneath the surface of the world to learn its past, its secrets and its marvels. In this instance, though, the world that's under excavation is not our immediate sphere, despite the fact that it is almost as familiar. Instead, we dig into a planet that is nothing less than the accumulated landscape of almost a hundred years of fantasy, of comic books. 

[...]

This is an exemplary turn-of-the-century mainstream comic book. During a period when many comics seem to have lapsed into an exhausted mire or else go blundering on ahead without the merest shred of a coherent plan, the work in Planetary has a glow and freshness that is all its own, a signature eruption of the neurons into novel, interesting patterns at the turn of each new page. It is at once concerned with everything that comics were and everything that comics could be, all condensed into a perfect jewelled and fractal snowflake. Read on and enjoy the remarkable comic book product of a remarkable comic book moment. And think Planetary.

    - Alan Moore
    Northampton
    Dec. 14, 1999

Tom Strong by Gianfranco Loriga

Art by Gianfranco Loriga.

Above, a great Kirbesque Tom Strong drawn 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 created in 1999 and it has been "published" in Clark's Bar, a fanzine I collaborated with back in the days.

Neil Gaiman: Moore is "Hairy, like a yeti"

Below an excerpt from The Sandman Companion a book by Hy Bender, published by Vertigo/DC Comics in 1999. The book contains several original interviews with Neil Gaiman about the comic and his career.

MOORE, MCKEAN, AND MAGIC (page 17-18-19)

Hy Bender: During that same period, you became friends with Alan Moore, who - present company excluded - is arguably the finest comics writer in the history of the medium. How did you and Alan first hook up with each other?
Neil Gaiman: When my book Ghostly Beyond Belief which I wrote with Kim Newman was published in 1985, I sent Alan a copy accompanied by a note that basically said, “You’ve given me an enormous amounts of pleasure, I think you’re terrific, and this is something I’ve done. Hope you like it.” Alan called me a week later and went [doing an uncannily accurate impersonation]: “You bastard. I lost an entire afternoon's work reading your book!” [Laughter] From then on, we were phone pals.

HB: You’ve since met Alan many times. How would you describe him?
NG: Hairy, like a yeti. [Laughter] And huge - Alan looms at you, like a lion. But he’s also very gentle; incredibly funny; and utterly brilliant.

HB: I know that Alan is the one who taught you about writing a comics script. Do you recall how that happened?

NG: Oh, certainly. About eight months after we first chatted, I mentioned to Alan that two of his favorite writers, Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell, were going to be at the British Fantasy Convention at Birmingham. As a result of my journalism work, I knew both Clive and Ramsey,so I told Alan, “Come on down; I'll look after you and make sure you don't feel out of place."And he did, and I did, and we had a great time.
Toward the end of the day, we were  about comics, and I said, “I don't understand what a comics script looks like. How do you tell the artist what to draw?" So he showed me a scripts format, step by step, in a sheet of paper: “Put down 'Page 1 panel 1' like this, then describe what happens in the panel then write the name of the first character who talks, then put down his dialogue,» and so on.
After receiving that tutorial, I went home and wrote a short comics script titled “The Day My Pad Went Mad” based on Alan’s wonderful John Constantine character. In retrospect, the story wasn’t very good, and the ending was wrong. But I sent the script to Alan, and he told me, “Yeah, it’s all right. The ending’s a bit off.” And then he actually used a few lines of my story in Swamp Thing 51, "Home Free," which was very encouraging to me.
I next wrote a sixteenth-century Swamp Thing script titled “Jack in the Green” and sent it to Alan. When I asked him if it was okay, he said “Yeah, I would’ve been proud to write that.” That made me very happy.
And then - proving the driven nature of my ambition to begin a fiction career - I wrote absolutely no other scripts. I went, “Okay, now I know how to write a comic book" and left it at that.

5 Tips for would-be comics writers

Alan Moore, 2012. Photo (C) Isabelle Adam. Creative Commons License.

Below a small article published in 1999 on the pages of Comic Buyer's Guide, reprinted in 2003 in The Extraordinary Works Of Alan Moore.

ALAN MOORE'S FIVE TIPS FOR WOULD-BE COMICS WRITERS

1. Don't.

2. No, really don't.

3. DEFINITELY don't—I mean it.

4. Whatever you might be imagining about a life of writing, it's not like that.

5. OK, if you're going to anyway, if you're going to be a writer of any quality, you will have to commit yourself to writing— which is something that, when you're young and idealistic, sounds incredibly easy to do, but you should commit yourself to writing almost as if you were some ancient Greek or Egyptian committing yourself to a god.

If you do right by the god, then the god may, at some point in the future, reward you. But if you slack off and don't do right by your talent or your god, then you are heading for a world of immense and unimaginable pain. If you have a gift that you choose to pursue, then you have to pursue it seriously. Don't be half-assed about it, but realize what that commitment means.

Committing yourself to writing will mean, to a certain extent, your writing will become the most important part of your life—and that's a big thing to say. It can have a distancing effect upon other relationships. It can be sometimes quite a solitary life. If you're committed to your writing, you're going to spend most of your life indoors in a silent, empty room, concentrating on a pen and a piece of paper or their equivalent. Be prepared to take it seriously and be prepared to follow where it takes you, even if that takes you to some very strange places.

This is by no means the most glamorous profession.

Don't say that I didn't warn you.

Alan Moore

DAILY MOORE [28]

 

Art by JH Williams III.

Inks by Mick Gray.
From: Promethea n. 1.
First edition: 1999, America's Best Comics.

DAILY MOORE [19]

Art by Kevin O'Neill.
From: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol.1 n. 1.
First edition: 1999, America's Best Comics.

DAILY MOORE [15]

Art by Gene Ha & Zander Cannon.
From: Top 10 n. 1.
First edition: 1999, America's Best Comics.

Vital stats on Alan Moore 1999

Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore at Cheltenham Science Festival in 2011.

From Wizard Wildstorm special, 1999, "Vital stats on Alan Moore" box at page 54.

OCCUPATION: Comic book writer
BORN: Nov. 18, 1953 in Northampton, England
BASE OF OPERATION: Northampton, England

Frame from Insignificance.

FAVORITE MOVIE: "Insignificance", directed by Nicholas Roeg. "It's based on some tenuous real-life connections between famous people: Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio and Joseph McCarthy. Apparently, Monroe once said the person she'd most want to sleep was Einstein. Of course, DiMaggio was married to Monroe. McCarthy apparently had a sexual fixation with Monroe, and he also investigated Einstein at one point. These are the real-life connections. What the director did was imagine that they all meet one night at a hotel. There are all these coincidences that bring them all together. It's wonderful."
FAVORITE AUTHOR: Iain Sinclair [*]. "He's probably my biggest influence at the moment, and has been for a couple of years. There is stuff he can do in writing that I've never seen anybody attempt before."

Harvey Kurtzman's cover for Mad N. 1, 1952.

FAVORITE COMIC: Mad Comics. "Nothing has been able to touch that in terms of originality, experiment, sheer quality and the cleverness of the writing and the drawing."
MOTTO HE LIVES BY: "Keep in the dry place, and stay away from children."
HIS TAKE ON PEOPLE SEEING HIM AS A COMIC BOOK LEGEND: "I'm not one. People like to build up these big, imaginary pantomime figures in their heads. I say, 'Why not?' It's fun for them. It just doesn't have much to do with me."

[*] In the actual box the name is misspelled as "Ian Sinclaire".

ABC house ad art by Gene Ha

Art by Gene Ha.

Above, America's Best Comics house ad, dated 1999. Gorgeous art by Gene Ha, featuring Promethea, Tom Strong, Greyshirt and Toybox (from Top Ten).