NPR N.6: Alan Moore is IN!

Portrait art by Tom Harding

Northampton Poetry Review ISSUE 6: Rejuvenation includes a great interview with Moore (pp. 85-93) mostly focused on his poetry interests, writing and... more!!!

You can find all the info HERE. Pdf of the whole issue is available HERE for downloading.

Northampton Poetry Review returns with the theme of Rejuvenation. We’re rekindling old energies, awakening deep roots, and sustaining ourselves through strange and wearing times—with hope for renewal.

We offer poetry from voices both near and far. And we are honoured to present a deep and wide-ranging conversation with Northampton’s own Alan Moore—a giant, a guru, and a guiding light in these dark and mysterious times.

Below, some selected excerpts from the interview! Highly recommended!

Q&A with Alan Moore
The following is an interview with Alan Moore— Northampton notary, master, magician, guru and guide; a leading luminary and multimedia Renaissance man of our times. Alan generously gave us this interview back in 2022. Due to the buffeting winds of independent publishing, it finds its way to you only now.
He shares his thoughts on a wide array of cultural, political, and creative concerns—and we are truly honoured he took the time.

Alan Moore is a legendary comic book writer, novelist, filmmaker, and boundary-defying artist. Known for seminal works such as Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, his work has shaped the landscape of modern storytelling and continues to be an uncompromising artistic force across a variety of mediums.

Alan Moore: [...] I'm continually drawn back to Blake, Clare, and, with his very recent death, to Brian Catling’s magnificent The Stumbling Block. Also, if I ever again locate my copy, I want very much to re-immerse myself in Mervyn Peake’s The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb, which I remember as having Stanley Holloway rhythms and a marvellous idiosyncratic grandeur. Oh, and Chris Torrance’s The Magic Door always rewards a reopening. [...] 

[...] if it’s an idea, it will most probably emerge at some point as part of a story, whereas if it’s a tenuous soap-bubble impression, and if I can get a few words down before it pops from memory, it will more likely end up as a poem. [...] 

[...] Trying to define one’s own thought processes is always slippery, but it might be as if each project is a separate Memory Theatre in some by-now sprawling and overgrown multiplex.
Many of those theatres I need never visit again, although they still remain standing, obsolete warehouses rusting in some bleak, industrial-estate outpost of my awareness. There are a few abandoned palaces amongst them – works that for various reasons remain uncompleted or will never see daylight, like my John Dee opera or the detailed five season outline for The Show television series – that I find slightly haunting and will more often return to in idle moments. You shouldn’t, however, be misled by this talk of Memory Theatres into thinking my mental processes are anything like neat or orderly. In practice, it feels like some sort of cloud-chamber, and I have no real idea how it works. [...] 

[...] A key difference between prose and poetry lies in the ways that they engagé with time. [...] Poetry can dispense with time altogether, and allow us to see what is left when time is gone. As for the importance of time in my own work, I feel that along with space and consciousness, time is one of the three fundamental elements that a writer has to work with, so I like to get as much fun and meaning out of it as possible. [...] 

[...] I’m sure I’ve been a multiplicity of people in my time, but from my own perspective it feels very much like an unbroken continuity of self. The biggest shift of personality came, probably, with my decision to engagé with magic, back in 1993, but this seemed more like an expanded comprehension and intensification of ideas and processes that were already there than it did a huge psychological change. When I think back to previous incarnations of myself, I find that they’re all still me, only stupider, better looking, and with more intimidating physical energy. [...] 

[...] tend to enjoy works that are a few paces beyond my personal boundaries, that will entail a little bit of personal effort, which will therefore expand those boundaries. I believe that the most affecting kind of art is one where the audience does part of the work, making the experience almost a collaboration between reader and writer. To that end, I try to make my work as understandable as I can, while also subscribing to the idea of literary difficulty, whereby you are prepared to potentially alienate part of your readership in the knowledge that those who remain will have been made to engage with the work on a deeper and hopefully more rewarding level. I always try to pitch my work at a level that won’t be beyond the reach of an averagely intelligent person. [...] 

More info HERE. Pdf of the whole issue available HERE.

The Magician is present

Above and below, the awesome art that I received from the extraordinary BEN WICKEY: that brand new Alan Moore portrait and the Moores from The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic!

I am speechless. Grazie mille, Ben!

Moore, Swamp Thing and Abby by Raulo Caceres

Sketch art by Raulo Caceres

Above, a great portrait sketch of The Man fused with Swamp Thing and Abby by Spanish artist Raulo Caceres (from Mario B.'s amazing CAF Gallery).

 

Caceres illustrated some special, limited covers for Providence (check it here).

For more about the artist, visit his web site, here.

Promethea by Colleen Doran

Art by C. Doran

Above, a fantastic and graceful Promethea commission by the amazing Colleen Doran.

 

For more info about the artist, visit her official site: HERE.

Hitchcock's gems

Excerpt from page 50 of Alan Moore's BBC Maestro Course Notes 1.0, "Part Five: A Variety Of Forms - 24. Screen Gems". Full course: HERE!

HITCHCOCK’S GEMS
Alan Moore: Reading François Truffaut’s book about Alfred Hitchcock was a revelation for me. He was explaining how Hitchcock achieved his effects in films like Psycho, shot by shot.

I remember the scene in Psycho where one of the detectives is suspicious there might be something unusual on the upper floor of the Bates Motel. The first shot is the detective looking up the stairwell, low-angled and looking up, which means that what you are looking up at is placed in a position of power, psychologically. In that instance, the audience’s tension increases because the detective is considering going upstairs but we feel the unknown power because of the way the image is set up. When the detective climbs the stairs it switches to an overhead shot, so that the audience is in the position of power but helpless to intervene. Whatever happens you are trapped looking at it from this position. This is the exact point at which the apparently crazy old lady (which we later find to be Norman Bates himself) comes running out of the landing and stabs the detective to death – while we look on, helplessly.

The angle at which you look at something will affect the psychological mood of the shot.
This is something that I’ve learned a great deal about when it came to writing for comics because it uses the same principles.

Alan Moore by Yuri Shvetsov

Art by Yuri Shvetsov

Above, an intense portrait of Alan Moore, from the 1980s, by Ukrainian cartoonist and comic book artist Yuri Shvetsov.

 

For more info about the artist, visit the ArtStation page HERE.

International Illuminations

Above, cover for Iluminações, the Brazilian edition of Illuminations, published by Editora Aleph in November 2022. Editor: Tiago Lyra; translator to Portuguese: Adriano Scandolara; cover artist: Pedro Inoue. More info at the publisher's site: HERE.

Below, cover for Iluminaciones, the Spanish edition of Illuminations, to be published by Nocturna Ediciones in April. Translator to Spanish: Juan Trejo.

More info at the publisher's site: HERE.

Alan Moore by Nina Helene Hirten

Art by Nina Helene Hirten

Above, a great sketch portrait of our favourite Bearded One by American multi-media artist Nina Helene Hirten. More details here.

So I caved and got that BBC Maestro Alan Moore lecture because growing up I easily would’ve told you that my favourite graphic novels were written by him. The series was indeed fantastic and I love his philosophical approach to writing- however I couldn’t get over the fact that he is the most wizard-like entity alive on the planet today so of course I had to do a portrait in the style of my favourite 90s comics. - Nina Helene Hirten

For more info about the artist, visit her official site HERE.

Alan Moore by Catriel Tallarico

Art by Catriel Tallarico

Above, a mesmerising pencil portrait (with a touch of digital) of Alan Moore by Argentinian artist Catriel Tallarico.

For more info and news about the artist: Blog - Instagram - Gallery  

Note: This is the 1000th post on this blog! Let me celebrate a bit! Grazie a tutti!

Miracleman by Ian Churchill

Art by Ian Churchill

Above, a picture posted by British artist Ian Churchill on his FB page, the 1st of February.

Churchill writes: "I re-read my old copies of Miracleman over Christmas to refresh my memory before reading the long awaited new stories by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham. Marvel have never asked me to do a Miracleman variant cover (and I'm a big Miracleman fan!)- So, I decided to draw one for fun over the festive period."

For more about the artist, visit his site HERE.

Mike Perkins and... looking back at D.R. and Quinch

Art by Alan Davis

Excerpt from an article published on How To Love Comics site. The complete article HERE.

[...] D.R. and Quinch are the ultimate teenage delinquents. A pair of friends who first burst through the pages of 2000 AD in a one-off Time Twister as penned by Alan Moore and Alan Davis way, way back in 1983’s Prog #317. Clearly popular, it wasn’t too long until the pair were upgraded into their own strip, starting with Prog #350. Two characters based loosely on National Lampoon’s hyperbolic and destructive O.C. and Stiggs (a reference lost on most UK readers in the ‘80s, including myself) with a hint of ‘50s rock and roll sensibilities too. The pair only appeared in a few short stories. However, their star burnt brightly and are still fondly remembered to this day as one of the all-time classic strips to appear in 2000 AD.

[...] UK based artist on DC Comics’ Swamp Thing, Mike Perkins, shared his memories of the strip [...]

    “I think from the outset in their Time Twister the massive attraction of D.R. and Quinch for me, apart from the magnificently wonderful artwork of Alan Davis, was the, seemingly, 1000 different ideas Alan Moore would stuff into each page. There’s enough within those initial 6 pages to spark, at least, another 25 stories….and that was it.  No more.  Just that one-shot. Or so I thought. And then…and then…along came the series! Slightly more cartoony from an illustration point of view but the depth of whimsy – pushing itself into slight political leanings and, eventually, satire of the entire movie business was just mind blowing. Brilliant, brilliant work that encourages re-read after re-read.” [...]

Swamp Thing by Rick Veitch

Art by Rick Veitch

Above and below, amazing Swamp Thing commissions - featuring John Constantine and Abigail too - by the great Rick Veitch. The first one (above) has been created for a Heroes Initiative Benefict Auction, the other one (below) is a variation on it.

 

Stunning Things!

Art by Rick Veitch

Levitation, Leary, Popes and Potpourri

Selected excerpts from an interview published on LA Public Library. You can read the complete piece HERE.

[...] LAPL: What was your process for putting together this collection? How did you decide which of your stories would be included?
Alan Moore: My first step in assembling the collection was to gather my published short-form works together and then exclude the pieces that didn’t seem to fit or had been made widely available elsewhere. With this accomplished, I estimated that it would require four new stories to complete a reasonably-sized volume, and very soon thereafter decided on what those stories should be about. They were all completed in a rush of excited energy during the early months of 2021, and for my money, they represent my most accomplished short-story work to date, even if What We Can Know About Thunderman turned out to be a short story that was strenuously trying to turn itself into something else entirely.

You’ve done a lot of different types of work (graphic novels, novels, and short stories, to name a few). Is there a format that you prefer over the others?
[...] if pressed to name the medium I most admire, it would be unadorned prose or poetry, simply because writing is our first technology—the technology that makes all other technologies possible—and is still our most powerful, most elegant, and most efficient: with a mere couple of dozen characters and a peppering of punctuation, we can convincingly conjure absolutely anything in the conceivable universe. Also, writing is the form which forces the reader to do at least half of the work, in imagining the landscapes or conjuring the characters’ appearance and the sound of their voices, and I believe that the art we find most affecting is the art that we put this personal effort into engaging with, rather than art which washes over its viewer and makes them, sometimes, into mere passive recipients.

Is there something you haven’t done yet but are hoping to have the opportunity to try?
Perhaps levitation, but beyond that, I can’t really think of anything. [...]

What’s currently on your nightstand?
Since I don’t read in bed, what’s on my night table at the moment is an ashtray supported by two metal frogs that is currently full of loose pocket change; a bag of Rowntree’s fruit pastilles; a bulging and battered cardboard folder containing the original draft of the forthcoming Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic; a copy of Steve Moore’s work of classical scholarship Selene; a notebook that represents an abandoned attempt to write down my dreams; a couple of copies of Weird Tales with lovely Margaret Brundage covers; and paperback copies of Nik Cohn’s Arfur and Dee Brown’s The American West where I have no idea how they ended up there.

As for what’s in my pile of things to read at present, that would be the trove of Beat Generation items that I recently purchased from Beat Scene’s estimable editor and publisher, Kevin Ring. There’s a Ballantine paperback of Kerouac’s Dr. Sax, collections of the poetry of Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, a critical study of Richard Brautigan, Neal Cassady’s influential The Joan Anderson Letter, a collection of interviews called The Sullen Art that features an interview with the immaculate Gilbert Sorrentino, and a 1962 copy of Yugen magazine from LeRoi Jones and Hettie Cohen.

Can you name your top five favorite or most influential authors?
I always have trouble with questions like this, because I don’t tend to think in terms of lists or favourites, and don’t really organise things I enjoy into a top ten. So, for what it’s worth, at this particular moment in time, I’ll say William Burroughs, Angela Carter, Iain Sinclair, Samuel Delaney and Michael Moorcock, although ask me in ten minutes time and it could be a different list altogether. I’m probably influenced in one way or another by every book I’ve ever read, good and bad alike. [...]

Is there a book you've faked reading?
No. I have a morbid fear of being the person who maintains that their favourite part of Harper Lee’s book was when they finally killed that bloody irritating mockingbird. [...]

Is there a book that changed your life?
Thinking about it, if I hadn’t been quite so enthusiastic about the (retrospectively dubious) ideas in Timothy Leary’s Politics of Ecstasy—the Paladin paperback edition with the exquisite Martin Sharp cover—then I probably wouldn’t have been expelled from school for dealing LSD, wouldn’t have been forced back onto my own resources, and very possibly would never have ended up as a writer. Admittedly, it’s perhaps not the most heart-warming or inspiring way for a book to change one’s life, but looking back I’m very grateful that it did, even if many of Leary’s central tenets turned out, in my adult opinion, to be nonsense. [...]

What is your idea of THE perfect day (where you could go anywhere/meet with anyone)?
A day spent somewhere comfortable and out of the public eye—like, say, my home in Northampton—in the company of my wife, our daughters, our grandchildren, our family, and our incredible friends would, for me, be a perfect one. I get far too few of them. [...]

What are you working on now?
At the moment I’m largely involved with interviews and publicity work around the publication of Illuminations, but once that’s concluded I’m desperate to get back to work on the first of my Long London quintet of novels, which is titled The Great When, and I’m currently paused at the beginning of chapter four, which is called "Popes and Potpourri". It’s a lot of fun, or it will be when I can return to it, with as exotic a cast of characters—most of them real—as anything I’ve ever written.

The complete interview is available HERE.

Alan Moore by MD Penman

Art by Mark Penman. Words by Moore.

Above, a great Alan Moore portrait drawn by UK based freelance illustrator and comic book artist Mark Penman. The image enriches the introduction that Moore wrote (above, you can read the final lines too) for Penman's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight written by John Reppion.  

 

You can order a copy HERE! Highly recommended!

La Mappaterra del Mago

La Mappaterra by Pelosi & Frongia

Italian musician, actor, comic book author and scholar Francesco Pelosi is writing a series of articles focused on Moore's works: he is tracing a map and he named it la Mappaterra del Mago... The Magician's Map-Land. I am really proud to call Francesco... a friend!

Below, I translated - with a little help from another friend of mine, the extraordinary Omar Martini - a short excerpt from one of Pelosi's articles which includes the map drawn by Francesco Pelosi & Francesco “Checco” Frongia.

You can read the complete set HERE. Of course they are in Italian.

From the corner where we are now, from the special and elevated point of view of Citadel Supreme, we can finally see the whole Map-Land: it spreads beneath us but, on a closer look, also above and all around us.
At the centre there is From Hell’s black city [...]. Watching it from here, you can notice that it is wrapped in the flames of the Voice of Fire and that there is a Hole at its centre: there is the same Hole also up here, in the Citadel Supreme, because the two cities are equal and opposite, one black and rooted to the earth, the other gold and floating. However, when they are watched from above, from a place outside the Map-Land, they occupy exactly the same space - the only difference is that to access Citadel Supreme you have to go through the door/outpost called 1963.

Around the city of From Hell, there is an area of barren and even darker countryside, with an unusual circular shape. If we could look at the Map-Land from below, we would see that those dark lands are nothing more than the foundations of Providence/Neonomicon, an upside-down city, whose roofs and buildings, like rotting and incomprehensible roots, plunge directly into the ground.
The dark circle of Providence is defined by a series of streets that form the sides of two equilateral triangles, crossing themselves to outline a six-pointed star.
One of the points, the one looking at the Map-Land from above, seems to point to the sky or the West: it is the place where the city of Promethea lies. On the other hand, on the opposite point which seems to indicate the ground or the East, lies the city of Tom Strong.

From here, heading south, we find the townlet of A Small Killing […], then the Top 10 metropolis and going westwards, just before arriving at Promethea, the Lost Girls hotel. Following this path, we can see that the outermost part of the Map-Land is circular and all the towns in this area are connected to each other by roads and, in the same way, each town is connected to the centre of From Hell.
Then, moving from Promethea and heading north, we find the old and crumbling city of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the five districts of Tomorrow Stories (which include the village of Jack B. Quick, the swamp of Splash Brannigan, the film-set city of First American and U.S. Agent and the metropolis of Indigo, also known, depending on which side you access it from, as Greyshirt or The Cobweb). Finally, closing the circle to the east, we arrive at the small town of Mirror of love […] and again at Tom Strong.

However, the most interesting thing you may notice from this high angle concerns the shape of the land. The Map-Land, as it has developed until now, looks like a two-dimensional rectangle. If you look at it closely, you can see four dotted lines rising perpendicularly towards the sky from the vertex of the rectangle corners, each touching the vertex of another dotted rectangle that closes the airspace as if it were a box. The Magician's Map-Land is therefore both a two-dimensional rectangle and a 3D rectangular parallelepiped. Ultimately - and how could it be otherwise - we find ourselves inside a Block-Universe/Idea-Space.
The name of this all-encompassing place is Jerusalem. 

Francesco Pelosi

100 Comics qui ont marqué l’histoire!

Art by Laurent Lefeuvre

Above, cover for the French book 100 Comics qui ont marqué l’histoire! published by Ynnis Editions.
The book is an essay presenting a selection of 100 comics (la bande-dessinée anglo-saxonne) from 1966 up to 2022.

Cover art by French comic book artist and illustrator Laurent Lefeuvre. On the upper side of the illustration you can identify the blue legs of Doc Manhattan and... a V mask.

Art by Laurent Lefeuvre

Dreaming Moore and... Elvis

Some days ago, acclaimed British comic book artist and creator Liam Sharp posted the following text on his Facebook page (you can read it here):

I dreamt that Alan Moore lived on the moon, and used a space ship/throne, given to him by Elvis, in the shape of an E.P belt buckle, to fly back to earth, where he embarked on a comic odyssey from Clapham to Northampton, meeting Dave Gibbons and others along the way… - Liam Sharp

For more news about Liam Sharp: Official site

Many years ago a friend confessed to me that she dreamed that Alan Moore and Melinda were the owners of a pastry shop and while selling sweets they also provided love advice to the clients.

Dreaming is a strange land, you know!

The Queen, Thunderman and Long London

Excerpt from a great interview by Séamas O'Reilly published on his site few days ago.

You can read the complete piece HERE.

[...] This interview took place on 14th September. As it was six days after the Queen’s death, I began by offering what little consolation I could to one of Her Majesty’s most doting subjects.

As we speak, we’re all in mourning here in Walthamstow. How are you finding yourself in these sad times?

Alan Moore: I’m taking each day as it comes. Being familiar with this country for nearly 69 years now, I have been avoiding any contact with the media or the world since we got the sad news. I figure that give it another a month and it might have died down to a manageable level.

There seems to be a fear within the media that they’re going to get leapt on by a public clamour which does not really appear to exist

I notice that most of my comedian friends are apparently only commenting within a fairly exclusive site where they can avoid getting piled upon by, what have been referred to as, flag-shaggers. I’ve seen there’s been a couple of nice comments. My friend Barney Farmer had noticed that a lot of food banks had been closed for the queen’s funeral, which is of course what she would have wanted. Barney posted a picture of the Swedish Chef from the Muppets giving one of his signature kisses. These are certainly eventful times. [...]

might the passing of the Queen mark a psychic shift in how people relate to that institution? That her being replaced by a King who enjoys a slightly less worshipful reverence, might make some of the arguments against the wider institution break through?

That had occurred to me. That this might be the beginning of the end of the Royal Family, which perhaps wouldn’t be before time. It’s about how relevant the Royal Family are to our current state of affairs. I tend to consider that, with or without a monarchy, this country will probably carry on as the conservative/fascist utopia that it has been for a long while.

I’m not sure how much, at least in the 21st century, that was dependent on the Royal Family. It would be a step in the right direction though, if only that. 

[...]

So maybe you can assuage my embarrassment and talk a little about how you assembled such a big, complete world for [What We Can Know About Thunderman]?

Well, it came from a strange place, it came from something I think I have one of the characters in there expressing, which is that leaving comics is one thing — and I’d done that, which seemed like a massive relief — but stopping thinking about comics is another. Especially when you’ve been working at them for forty years, which is a fairly long career by anyone’s standards. So, I tend to find these annoying, often negative, thoughts about comics swirling up in my mind when I didn’t want them there.

And there was also an image that came with them, it was something to do with, I dunno, old copies of Superboy or something like that. Some kind of Curt Swan scene with someone walking across one of those generic midwestern landscapes that used to appear in Superboy and adventure comics. And, coming the other way, there was somebody who was one of the original Legion of Superheroes in their original, twelve-year-old-kid incarnations. And I’d got no idea what this meant but there was a sort of obsessive quality about it.

So, when I was putting together the proposal for Illuminations I thought this would be a good place to actually exorcise some of that stuff as some form of art rather than some angry mutterings in the bath.

[...]

Will there be more of these short stories, is there a drawer full of these or you can return to the unwieldy space operas?

I’m probably not going to return to the space operas anytime soon but, for the time being, what I am committed to is a quintet of books I promised, which is the Long London series. I’m about halfway through the first one, which is entitled, at least at the moment, The Great When. I’m having enormous fun with them, when I get the chance to write them, which is one of the reasons why I’m finding the publicity circuit a bit of a pressure, because I’m just aching to get back to where I left Long London.

The first book is all set in 1949 with London pretty much destroyed, in pieces, and the national psychology in a similar state. Everybody important in magic has just died. Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Arthur Machen, Harry Price, Uncle Tom Cobbley, so there’s a gaping hole in English magic and English psychology.

It’s nice to get back into London again, it’s a city that have always enjoyed fictionally. I haven’t been down there for years but to get back into that fictional territory where there are all these figures from the different periods that I’ll be setting the various books in. I suppose those figures are the reason why I wanted to write the book. There’s something in those kinds of liminal characters and their histories and how they all interwove.

I’m talking about people like Prince Monolulu, the imaginary African, who was probably the most famous black man in Britain in his time. He was a racing tipster and he was acting the exotic very skillfully to work his audience.

People like Iron Foot Jack, the King of the Bohemians, with his huge built-up shoe. Austin Osman Spare figures quite prominently, and odd figures like John Gawsworth who was Arthur Machen’s biographer and publisher. Arthur Machen’s a big off stage presence, having died a couple of years before. It’s taking off from some ideas of Arthur Machen’s, along with the way that they overlapped with other bits of London lore and legendary London figures.  

 The complete interview is available HERE.

Moore 69: a gift from Gianluigi Concas

Art by Gianluigi Concas

Let's keep celebrating today Moore's 69th birthday! So, above a spectacular portrait of The Man by Italian water-colorist and designer Gianluigi Concas. 

Again... Happy birthday, Alan! A Chent'annos!

For news about the artist, visit his Instagram page: HERE.

Moore 69: a gift from Zander Cannon

Art by Zander Cannon

Today is Moore's 69th birthday! So, above a phenomenal portrait of The Bearded Man from Northampton by the great comic book artist and creator Zander Cannon. 

 

Grazie, Zander for such a great homage! And... Happy birthday, Alan!

For news about the artist, visit his Instagram page: HERE.