La voz del fuego by R.M. Guéra

Art by R.M. Guéra

Above, cover illustration drawn by acclaimed Serbian artist R.M. Guéra for the Spanish edition of Voice of the Fire, published by Planeta DeAgostini in 2006.  Watch this video too.

 

The illustration is currently for sale on the CART Gallery website, HERE.

Don’t be silly

Cover art by Philip Bond

Excerpt from a fundamental text written by Moore in the 80s. 

You can read it in full at Paul Gravett site, here. 

 

Alan Moore: No More Sex

The following editorial was written by Alan Moore and appeared in Escape Magazine #15 (edited by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury) in 1988.
At that time Alan Moore had just set up a publishing company, Mad Love (together with Phyllis Moore and Debbie Delano), and was working on its first release, a 72-page benefit comics-anthology of work donated by the world’s top comic creators entitled AARGH: Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia.
All the profits from AARGH were donated to the Organisation For Lesbian And Gay Action to safeguard the legal rights of Gay people persecuted by Section 28 of the Local Government Act. This was a piece of legislation enacted in 1988 by the Thatcher Government which stated that a local government authority"shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." 

Firstly, forget God. If God exists, it’s unlikely that SpaceTime’s creator worries about our love-lives. A God who’d forego super novas to catch Sol III’s microbes having oral sex is just plain creepy, and has no place in this discussion. Neither do our Jimmy Swaggarts, claiming to represent the deity between visits to the knocking shop. While discussing human desire, let’s ignore superhumans and subhumans.

Secondly, forget ‘unnatural’ sex. Most natural creatures, excluding a few Presbyterian termites, will hump anything within reach if inclined, ignoring gender, species and family relationship. Lacking a hunky tom within pheromone-range, Tabby will back onto your winklepickers without embarrassment. Besides, since when does humanity do things naturally? Camels don’t wear polyester slacks. Amoebas know nothing of Shake’n'Vac. Every other human enterprise flaunts nature, so why is sex special?

Because it’s powerful. Along with death, it’s life’s propelling force. Control sex and death, and controlling populations becomes simple. Death’s easily subjugated: William Burroughs observed that anyone who can lift a frying pan owns death. Similarly, those owning most the pans, troops, tanks or warheads own most the death, and can regulate the supply accordingly. Death’s a pushover, but how do you control desire?
 

[...]

Sex exceeds politics, right or left (assuming you still differentiate). Mary Whitehouse or Andrea Dworkin may outlaw pornography, but can’t stop people wanting it, regardless of legality. Similarly, Section 28 cannot remove the desire for homosexuality. Consenting sex cannot be prevented. There’s regrettably little evidence that even un-consenting sex can be curtailed by legislation alone. Perhaps desire is better comprehended than contained? Perhaps sexual openness would mean less morbid longings, festering alone in darkness?

Despite a panic-stricken ‘moral’ backlash, we progress slowly towards tolerance, understanding. Our sexual turbulence and shattered preconceptions may resolve themselves into a new approach to sex, more various and humane, accepting different loves and lusts without reshaping them into Meccano for our social scaffolding. Sexual awareness rides an upward exponential curve, uncheckable by politicians, popes, police-chiefs. But what of plague?

Is AIDS sufficient to keep the erotic genie in the bottle? Televised health warnings seem increasingly less anti-disease than anti-sex. A youth writhes, unnerved by the ominous soundtrack, while his fishnetted date lounges invitingly. Rather than donning a condom and squelching deliriously till dawn, it’s implied that he should go home to sleep with hands above blankets

Novelists, who should know better, bemoan the inevitability of less sex in fiction. Surely AIDS isn’t transmitted by smut? The only virus afflicting literature are viral ideas of censorship, spreading through parliament, press, publishers and public, leading art towards the terminal ward. Obviously this over-reaction doesn’t make AIDS less terrifying. Quite simply, it will decimate us. While experts demand less discrimination to facilitate monitoring the virus, our government responds with Section 28. Remember that Britain is relatively enlightened concerning AIDS, and shudder.

So, no more sex? On screen, between soft covers or especially in reality? I don’t believe it. Sex survived horrific syphilis epidemics, aroused blood rushing from the brain, ensuring sex continues whatever the dangers. We’ll die of sex or live with it, but never stop it. Even preventing all physical contact wouldn’t prevent sex, which occurs more in minds than mucous membranes. We think about sex approximately every twenty minutes. Lacking physical contact, we’d just think harder. Thermonuclear war would barely slow sex down. Within billennia, cockroaches would rewrite the Kama Sutra.

AIDS may even hasten sexual enlightenment, this sexual crisis mirroring similar crisis in our environment and economies, all forcing a simple, brutal decision: change or die. Change our environmental policies or starve. Change our sexual furtiveness or die, as they say, of ignorance. Up in arms or down in flames, the choice is still ours. Our bodies are ours. No more sex?

Don’t be silly.

Bonus text, excerpt from a 2006 interview by (again) focused on Lost Girls.

Back in 1988, in Escape Magazine, you wrote an editorial piece for me entitled No More Sex in which you said, "Consenting sex cannot be prevented and there’s regrettably little evidence that even Un-consenting sex can be curtailed by legislation alone. Perhaps desire is better comprehended than contained? Perhaps sexual openness would mean less morbid longings festering alone in the darkness?"
Alan Moore: That is exactly how I feel today. In the context of that Escape editorial, where we were talking about AIDS, I also probably said that AIDS would probably decimate us before it was done. And the figures suggest that it is well on the way to doing that. One thing that might conceivably be "helpful" in an AIDS epidemic, or pandemic, would be presumably a higher standard of pornography with human values. You cannot get much safer sex than pornography. 

A different history

Excerpt from the introduction to Kings In Disguise re-issued by W. W. Norton in 2006.

I highly recommend the book!

[...] The histories that we were taught in school were gold and ermine histories, the self-penned chronicles of church and state, of kings and generals, of misjudged wars, successful persecutions, hamstrung dynasties, that all too often seemed like a list of mankind's stumbling blocks more than a proud recounting of its progress. When we look back at our culture's high points, at its noblest achievements, we do not in general count coronations, bloody feuds or holy wars amongst that company. The things we generally cherish as a species, unsurprisingly, seem not to be the grand and glorious campaigns that waste us in our thousands, in our millions, but instead the things that make the often-gruelling human trail sweeter: music and art and writing, medicine and learning, and those fruits of science that are not poisonous and do not too severely disadvantage us. [...] When we search for names to make us proud of our humanity and of our heritage, the likelihood is that the name we seize upon will be a person born to modest circumstance.
    The poor, we're told, are always with us, although one would never think so from the reconstructed dramas we call history. History turns the poor into a nameless herd of unpaid and uncredited film-extras with no speaking part, to cannon fodder or to scabby Bastille mobs, to people whose lives came and went and never merited a cameo from Winslett or DiCaprio. To people like our parents or our grandparents or great-grandparents or however far one has to scramble arse-first down the family tree before one reaches hard black dirt. Didn't their lives, their stories, count for anything? Are they to be excluded from the homo sapiens account simply because they were not born into a noble lineage most likely founded upon murder, incest, treachery, decapitation? [...]
    Instead, perhaps we should attempt a different history, a different narrative where even those not blessed by ruthlessly acquisitive blood-genealogies may be included. We should count small human victories as dearly as we count the sinking of armadas, and elect our own dishevelled heroes and aristocrats, our monarchies without a pot to piss in, our own vagrant kings.
    In this astonishing and heartfelt graphic novel, James Vance and Dan Burr have rescued a lost butt-end of discarded history, an edited-out sequence from the Souza pageant of the great American success tale. [...]
    In America, the moment that has come to be iconic as an image of rock-bottom destitution is the Great Depression of the 1930s: sepia lives, dust-saturated, frozen into sepia pictures, newsreel breadlines, but of course that's only half the story. [...] During the Depression, quite a lot of it was going to the entertainment industry, especially those sections of the entertainment industry that dealt in fantasy. [...]
    Kings in Disguise closes the circle, the direct descendant of an industry whose boom years were those times that people were most desperate to escape from into dreams of romance and empowerment, using comic strips to tell a story that portrays the grim realities that underlay the times when comic strips were born.
    James Vance writes with a naturalism, with an honest voice that doesn't wear its research on its sleeve, and with a finely tuned eye for the human nuances on which his story rests. [...] Dan Burr's compelling art, as masterful and unassuming as the best of, for example, Harvey Pekar's worthiest collaborators, is the writing's perfect complement. It has an earthy strength and functionality, just as the writing has, that doesn't leave room for the least manipulative smear of sentiment, but which leaves all the open space for poetry that anyone could wish. [...]

This is simply one of the most moving and compelling human stories to emerge out of the graphic story medium thus far. [...]

Alan Moore
Northampton, England
July 2005

The Comedian by Stefano Tamiazzo

Art by Stefano Tamiazzo

Above, an intense portrait of The Comedian by Italian acclaimed comic book artist and illustrator STEFANO TAMIAZZO.

 

Illustration included in Watchmen 20 anni dopo, an Italian tribute book to Watchmen published in 2006 by Lavieri.   

More info about the artist here (in Italian) and here (in French).

Jon Osterman by Luca Genovese

Art by Luca Genovese.

Above, a shining portrait of Jon Osterman captured at the moment that marked his entire existence. 

Art by Italian comic book artist LUCA GENOVESE, realized as contribution to Watchmen 20 anni dopo, an Italian tribute book to Watchmen published in 2006 by Lavieri. 

"The Watchmaker chapter is my favorite one... I am a bit of a watchmaker myself so...
I wanted to capture Jon at his last moment as human being, watching time takes apart under a terrible light." - Luca Genovese

Preliminary sketch by Luca Genovese.

Edward Blake by Carmine Di Giandomenico

Art by Carmine Di Giandomenico.

Above, a fantastic Edward Blake portrait, The Comedian, by acclaimed Italian comic book artist CARMINE DI GIANDOMENICO who drew several series for Marvel and DC Comics. 

 

The illustration has been realized as contribution to Watchmen 20 anni dopo, an Italian tribute book to Watchmen published in 2006 by Lavieri. 

"I wanted to draw a perspective cut that seemed like a CCTV frame, a sort of snapshot of the Comedian's private life.
It is a moment of reflection for the character; it's how he sees himself, alone and sad, disguised behind a bold and cynical attitude; he is searching for his own reflection, with the hope of meeting the best image of himself." - Carmine Di Giandomenico

Watchmen: a perfect recap page

By G. Camuncoli (pencils), L. Ruggiero (inks), F. D'Auria & M. Corradini (gray tones & sfx). 

Above, a perfect Watchmen recap page (after Gibbons) in its classic 9-panel grid, with every single panel wisely selected from the original source. By Italians Giuseppe Camuncoli (pencils), Lorenzo Ruggiero (inks), Fabio D'Auria & Mauro Corradini (gray tones & sfx). 

The illustration has been realized as contribution to Watchmen 20 anni dopo, an Italian tribute book to Watchmen published in 2006 by Lavieri.

Giuseppe Camuncoli (pencils). 

, Lorenzo Ruggiero (inks).

Rorschach by Marco Soldi

Art by MARCO SOLDI.

Above, a fantastic illustration by acclaimed Italian comic book artist MARCO SOLDI featuring Rorschach and... a well known Inspector, also, in his legendary trench coat outfit. 

The illustration has been realized as contribution to Watchmen 20 anni dopo, an Italian tribute book to Watchmen published in 2006 by  Lavieri.

"You know, your freezer ambush ploy... I really congratulate you." <3

Watchmen's crime scene by Eduardo Risso

Art by EDUARDO RISSO.

Above, an exceptional illustration by acclaimed Argentinian artist EDUARDO RISSO that captures Watchmen's fundamental crime scene featuring detectives Steven Fine and Joe Bourquin, and dead Edward Blake. The image has been realized as contribution to Watchmen 20 anni dopo, an Italian tribute book to Watchmen published in 2006 by Lavieri.

I must confess something: I read Watchmen for the first time not so long time ago. Almost at 20 years of its first publication. I had heard a lot about its story, and I wanted to give me the possibility to be introduced into the world of superheroes starting with that incredible and exciting history. I had been a kind of “superheroes’ culture ignorant” – not by election, just by a lack of opportunity to get those comic books in my hometown when I was younger.

And how big was my surprise… Those were the heroic characters I always wanted to see! Those ones which lived a simple life, like every one of us, and they became heroes just to choose to fight for an ideal, a principle or for someone beloved.

Basically, I could have chosen anyone of them to illustrate in this opportunity, because all and each one of them deserve my great affection, my greater respect and my eternal gratefulness… and so their authors. - Eduardo Risso, 2006.

Bernie and Bernard by David Hitchcock

Art by David Hitchcock.

Above, an intense portrait of Bernie and Bernard at the newsstand, plus a well known shadow. Art by English cartoonist DAVID HITCHCOCK. 

The illustration has been realized as contribution to Watchmen 20 anni dopo, an Italian tribute book to Watchmen published in 2006 by Lavieri.

I felt that the news-vendor was an integral piece to the puzzle that would become Rorschach. - David Hitchcock, 2006.

For more info about David Hitchcock: Blog - Twitter page

Minutemen by Jay Stephens

n cartoonist JAY STEPHENS.

Above, a group portrait of the Minutemen by Canadian amazing comic book artist and animator JAY STEPHENS.

The illustration was part of the homage gallery included in Watchmen 20 anni dopo, an Italian tribute book to Watchmen published in 2006 by Lavieri.

Silk Spectre by Grazia Lobaccaro

Art by GRAZIA LOBACCARO.

Above, an intense and elegant black and white portrait of Sally Jupiter (Silk Spectre) drawn by Italian comic book artist GRAZIA LOBACCARO.

The illustration was part of the homage gallery included in Watchmen 20 anni dopo, an Italian tribute book to Watchmen published in 2006 by Lavieri, all net profits donated to AIMA, the Italian Alzheimer organization.

Captain Metropolis and H.J. by Stefano Raffaele

Art by STEFANO RAFFAELE.

Above, a stunning black and white illustration - featuring Captain Metropolis and Hooded Justice from Watchmen - drawn by internationally acclaimed Italian artist STEFANO RAFFAELE.

The illustration was part of the homage gallery included in Watchmen 20 anni dopo, an Italian tribute book I edited in 2006 in the occasion of Watchmen 20th anniversary. The volume was published by Lavieri with all net profits donated to AIMA, the Italian Alzheimer organization. 
Below, you can see Raffaele's preliminary pencil drawing he did in preparation for the final piece.

Raffaele's latest work is the comics adaptation of The Wandering Earth, the sci-fi novel written by multi-award-winning author Liu Cixin. The adaptation is written by Christophe Bec and published in China by FT Culture and Citic Publishing Group.

For more info about  Raffaele visit his site: HERE.

Grazie, Stefano! 

Art by STEFANO RAFFAELE.

20th Anniversary Watchmen tribute: Crimebusters

Art by  Giuseppe Palumbo.

In 2006 I edited Watchmen 20 anni dopo, an Italian tribute book to Watchmen in the occasion of its 20th anniversary. The volume was published by Lavieri with all net profits donated to AIMA, the Italian Alzheimer organization. 

Basically a collection of 12 essays, the book also contained a 24 illustration gallery: above you can admire a fantastic illustration featuring the Crimebusters drawn by the extraordinary Italian author GIUSEPPE PALUMBO.
The illustration was originally published in black and white lineart: here you can see the version colored by Palumbo himself.

Giuseppe Palumbo is one of the most acclaimed Italian comic book artists and writers.

For more info about  Giuseppe Palumbo visit his site: here.
A short Palumbo bio, in English - even if outdated - can be read on Lambiek Comiclopedia: here.

On movies: From Hell, V, LXG, Watchmen

Excerpt from Eroto-graphic mania interview by Peter Murphy, posted on laurahird.com in 2006.

The complete interview is available HERE.

So did he ever bother going to see the film version [of From Hell]?

“Nah, Melinda (Gebbie) went to see it and said, ‘Not a bad film. She found Johnny Depp’s performance a little bit tepid. She thought if they’d focused more upon Ian Holm it would’ve perhaps been a much better film. Me daughters thought it was okay. Nobody said it was actually a really bad film. Iain Sinclair gave the most succinct summing up of it when he said, ‘It’s not a bad film in it own right, but it does kind of represent this American colonization of the imagination.’ Without having seen it obviously I’m talking through me hat, but that sounds like a likely accurate verdict.

“I was never sure why they actually bothered to buy the rights to ‘From Hell’, because you take away all of the ruminations upon architecture and history and mysticism and all the rest of it, you’re pretty much left with the original story done by Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, all of these people in various productions.” Still, at least ‘From Hell’ and ‘V For Vendetta’, while seriously flawed, were broadly sympathetic to the author’s vision. The way Moore tells it, it could have been much worse.

“I remember when ‘V For Vendetta’ was optioned,” he says. “The story is set in a near future bleak grim Britain, it’s after a limited nuclear war that happened elsewhere in the world, the weather’s been screwed up as a consequence, there’s been breakdowns of society everywhere, and there’s been a fascist takeover in Great Britain, and you’ve got this very romantic anarchist guy fighting against the forces of fascism.

“Now in the first screenplay that I got for ‘V For Vendetta’, because this anarchist dresses up in a Guy Fawkes costume, of course people in America have no idea who Guy Fawkes is, so they were going to change it to Paul Revere, and it wasn’t going to happen in London, ’cos that’s just gonna confuse Americans who can’t remember that there’s more than one country in the world, so perhaps it’s going to be set in New York. And that political stuff about fascism, that doesn’t really play, so we’ll have an America that’s been taken over by the commies. So you’ve got this true American dressed as Paul Revere fighting against the commie takeover.

“Eventually I think they realized that was a stupid idea. So I got the second draft of the script where I think to justify the special effects budget, they decided that having Britain taken over by fascists was just not exciting enough, and they’d used the fact that I mentioned a limited nuclear war to say, ‘Right, there’s mutants everywhere!’ So instead of it being fascist policemen that are patrolling the benighted streets of this enslaved London of the future, it’s half-goat mutant policemen. You’ve got these people that are policemen down to the waist and have goats’ legs. And as I said at the time, if you wanted to do a film about goat policemen, then why the fuck didn’t you just buy the option to Rupert Bear?!!

“But there’s something about the Hollywood thought process that I think will forever elude me. The reason that things are done or not done never seems to have any connection to any sort of reality that I recognize. That’s why I actively dissuade any contact with Hollywood. (Producer) Don Murphy is a nice bloke who phones me up and asks if I’ve got any more projects that could be turned into films, any laundry lists that I might have forgotten about, but I’ve never had any interest in actually writing for Hollywood. I had a brief fling when Malcolm McClaren asked me to a screenplay for one of these film properties that he’d got, and I did that to see if I could write a screenplay and also to hang out with Malcolm McClaren, who’s a great laugh, but that was it really.

“Of course they shot ‘League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ with Sean Connery, and to make it more acceptable to American audiences, which is of course a prime consideration, they had Tom Sawyer as one of the cast, so I imagine there was a completely riveting picket fence painting scene shoehorned into the story at some point.”

There wasn’t, but that didn’t stop Connery from clocking the director – or the film from being an absolute dog. Of course, the Holy Grail of un-filmed Moore stories is ‘Watchmen’, recently included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 greatest novels since 1923, a meta-masterpiece so epic in scale and fiendishly complex in construction, filmmaker Terry Gilliam famously described it as “the ‘War And Peace’ of comic books”. Is it true Moore once convinced Gilliam that Watchmen couldn’t be filmed?

“Well, I don’t know if I convinced him. I mean, we went to dinner and he asked me how I would go about making ‘Watchmen’ into a film, and I told him if anybody had bothered asking me earlier, I would have said, ‘I wouldn’t.’ Because I’d written ‘Watchmen’ to exploit aspects of comic book storytelling that couldn’t be duplicated by any other medium, to try and show off what comics are capable of. Which I think we kind of succeeded in doing. That was the last time I actually saw Terry – Terry as I call him, did you notice I just slipped that in there? Tel! – and I heard later that he seemed to have come to similar conclusions, that he wasn’t sure you could actually make a film of ‘Watchmen’ without taking out all the things that made the book work in the first place.

“But on the other hand, I do hear that at the end of every second or third Terry Gilliam interview he’ll sometimes have these little wistful moments where he’ll say that maybe his next film will be ‘Watchmen’, because he’s always felt sorry that he didn’t add that to his list of accomplishments.

“But I’m a great believer in the theory that the more work the audience has to actually do, the more they enjoy it ’cos the more they’ve invested. Cinema tends to be an immersive experience that just kind of rolls over the audience like a wave and they sit there and take it. That’s not to say that there can’t be good cinema, but for me there’s not much to beat a good book where you’re having to do all the work yourself. That’s my idea of interactive entertainment.”

The complete interview is available HERE.

MUSIC & DRUGS

Cover for Promethea n. 32. Art by J.H. Williams III.

Excerpt form "An afternoon with Alan Moore", an interview by Alex Musson & Andrew O'Neill published in Mustard (Vol. one) n.6, 2006.

WRITING: MUSIC & DRUGS

MUSTARD: What music do you listen to whilst writing?

ALAN: I don't listen to anything much any more because I'm deaf in one ear. If I'm talking to people I can't have any background music because all the top and bottom drops out and there's just this fuzzy middle. And if I'm working I don't listen to music either. There's been a kind of progressive breakdown in my relationship with music; I used to be able to listen to it all the time when I was doing cartooning, back in the late 70s. and that was fine because you use your hands when you're inking, so your brain can be off doing something else, like listening to the radio.

Then, when I started writing, I tried listening to music, but if it had any words they got in the way of the words I was trying to write. So I started listening to purely instrumental pieces and that was fine until the rhythm of it started interfering with the rhythm of what I was trying to write. Then I started in with ambient music, and that was great for a couple of months - I'd got the house flooded with Harold Budd, Eno and all the rest - but then the ambience on the record was starting to interfere with the ambience of the stuff that I was writing. So morgue-like silence is my preferred medium at the moment.

MUSTARD: What effect have drugs had on your writing?

ALAN: I started smoking dope around the age of fifteen and acid around sixteen. Had a biiig year of taking acid a couple of times each week. I'd done about a hundred trips, and this was when acid was acid, like me tell you - this was five hundred mikes, a thousand mikes a tab. I've never really taken acid since, I've confined myself to an enormous amount of hash, which I do twenty-four seven. It doesn't really turn me into a shambling, drug-sodden pothead, either. I use it to work and always have done, it gives me kind of an edge.

There was a physicist who was accepting the Noble Prize for Physics - I think it was for molecular biology, some years ago. During his acceptance speech he gave thanks to mum and dad, and all the rest, but also said: "I feel that I should mention the enormous contribution that psilocybin has made to my research. I'd be sitting down there on molecules, watching the particles go by and understanding the way that they fitted together. And psilocybin gave me that ability." I've also heard another scientist comment that "caffeine science is very different from marijuana science".

So, yeah, I still take mushrooms. I haven't done so for a couple of years now, and always as part of a magic ritual these days - I don't take anything purely for entertainment's sake, which I think is perhaps my saving grace. There've been cultures since the dawn of civilization that have had drugs as a central part. We are certainly not the first culture to use drugs, but we may well be one of the first to have a drug problem. I tend to think that this is because there is a place for drugs in society, but it's a shamanic space that we don't really have anymore.

Robert Graves noted that a lot of cultures' names for mushrooms are 'snots' or 'shits', things like that. And he says that it's like telling a child 'kaka - poison', sort of dirty, because actually the mushroom is taboo, which is not the same as just being dirty. Taboo is, yes, profane but it's also sacred. It's because the mushrooms were sacred at one point, which meant you weren't supposed to eat them unless you were properly initiated in a tradition; you'd done your Eleusinian Mysteries or whatever. And that is part of the problem: in our current society, the only context we have to take drugs in is a leisure context. Which a lot of the time is disastrous.

Something I noticed when I was about sixteen was the difference between drawings inspired by LSD and drawings attempted while under the effects of LSD.

With an awful lot of those Promethea issues, especially that kabbalistic run, I was doing magical rituals that often - not always, but often - involved drugs, in order to put myself in those spaces so I could write about them. I think it was issue 23 - the one that was the second sphere of the Kabbalah, the grey, sort of pearly place - I'd had Steve Moore up, we'd had this incredible magical experience, then he went back to town. I was still sitting down here buzzing with the mushrooms, and I suddenly thought, right, Promethea: I know exactly how I'm going to do this next issue that I'm gonna start tomorrow, I know that the series is going to last until issue 32, because 32 is a good number - this has just been revealed to me. I know that the last issue is going to be some kind of incredibly weird comic book that somehow unfolds into a marvellous psychedelic poster, and great, well that's the rest of Promethea sorted out, so I'll go to bed now.

The next day I laid out the entirety of that issue in four hours, every page. It just came in this incredible burst of energy. It took me fifteen hours to write, layout, dialogue and type that entire issue. And then two years later I finally I got around to Promethea #32 with the giant poster thing.

So, yeah, those are instances where I didn't try writing anything in the surge of the drug rush, but the next day I'd got all the information there. It's important to have a channel, I think. If I was just taking this stuff purely for entertainment, then I wouldn't have anything to do with that energy. And it is an energy, and I can direct it, I can ground it in this huge variety of works that I'm doing at any one time. And it works great for me; I think that I've probably been more creative - my output's certainly been higher - since I formally took up magic. And that was one of the big proving points of it: I'd said to people, if I become less productive or if the work turns to shit, then pull me out, because I might not know. But that hasn't happened, in fact generally quite the opposite.

Mushrooms are the only psychedelic drugs that I take, and I don't take them very often. But I would trust them. Once you've done them a few of times it's very easy to feel a sense of entity. You can feel that there is a characteristic in this level of consciousness which almost seems... playful? Or aware, or sometimes a bit spooky. I know that is probably something which I am imposing, or that other people have imposed upon the experience, but you get the impression that they're probably called magic mushrooms for a reason. And given that these have been the shamanic drug of preference since Neolithic times, Paleolithic times, then we've got quite a good history of a relationship with mushrooms that goes back quite a long way, and they seem to treat us alright.

MUSTARD: Have you ever considered a work detailing your insights into drug use?

ALAN: Well, probably not, because I actually tend to think of drugs as an implement and a tool, rather than a thing that is interesting in itself. Now, I know that there are some fantastic things about drugs and drugs culture. Mike Jay wrote a wonderful book called Emperors of Dreams, all about the British involvement with drugs, from Sir Humphrey Davy, who did all sorts of experiments with Nitrous Oxide, saw visions and started a religious movement, with Coleridge and all that lot roped in - fascinating. Drugs have played a huge part in my life and there's plenty of things that I'm interested in writing about while on drugs, but I'm not quite so interested in writings about drugs.

At the Patti Smith gig, which I keep mentioning because I'm so inordinately proud of it. How cool is that? Patti Smith, I got to hug Patti Smith! Jason Spaceman was there, a local lad made good, from Rugby. I've met Jason and I really like him, he's great and he's a fantastic musician, and I'm reminded of that wonderful song title, back from his Spacemen 3 days: Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To. Which is a pretty good description of my working methods. I'm kind of taking drugs to write comics to take drugs to. Most of the psychedelia, I want it to be there on the page in the writing. I want my work to be acting like a drug as near as I can manage. I'd like to think that if you put the words in the right order with the pictures you can probably create a psychedelic state, you can create a fugue state.

This is why, with my performances, I very much prefer to have a dense monologue going on: complicated music at the same time as, maybe, a film show, a fire breather, a beautiful ballet dancer, so that you're overloading the audience. This is the same technique that people have used since time immemorial, that the Catholic Church has used since its inception; the stained glass window light show, incense, incantations, sonorous music, beautiful architecture - trying to push people into this peak aesthetic experience, which I think is very close to the psychedelic state, which is very close to the magical state.

So that's what I'm trying to do in my work. While I'm interested in drugs and I've got tons of books about the history of drug taking and things like that, it would probably seem to me a bit precious. I mean, I'm so obviously drugged out of my mind that I don't need to lay it on any thicker. I'll probably leave that to other people.

[...]

MUSTARD: Are you still using drugs in your work?

ALAN: I haven't done any of the hard-core ritual stuff for some years now. I had one experience early on with my magic stuff where just for a few seconds I was a boy of about 17 and I was dying in a trench just outside Ypres. It was the small hours of the morning - that grey bit just before dawn when the birds are singing. And I was laying on my left side up against the side of the trench. The reason for that was because my right foot was infected with maggots. It didn't hurt, but it itched. Unbelievably. And there were other kids, teenagers, slumped up against the other side of the trench and some of them were asleep, I knew, and some of them weren't. And I'd never had sex with a woman in my life. The woman I had the closest relationship with emotionally was my sister - and I don't really have a sister. But I was missing her profoundly and I was wishing I could see her one more time.

Me and Melinda were doing the working together, both on drugs. She'd seen me lay back and close my eyes and had noticed that my eye sockets were full of cobwebs and I'd got blood and worms in my hair. And she thought, 'Eurgh that's horrible. I wonder if I should wake him up and tell him? No, I don't want to impose my bad vision'. At that point I sat up, said 'Jesus Christ!' and burst into tears. I'm normally not terribly emotional, but I couldn't get myself under control for about three quarters of an hour. I couldn't stop crying, because I'd just suddenly realised that the First World War had happened. And my immediate feeling was, 'Was that me? Was that a previous life I'd had like Shirley MacLaine tells us and all the rest?' And then I thought no, I'm not convinced of that. The feeling that I have is more, 'Was everybody everybody?' which again ties back to 'everybody's sat here before me'. Is there some huge commonality? Are we all the same person? Is this all God talking to itself?

Alan Moore by Robert Hack

Art by Robert Hack.

Above a shamanic portrait of Alan Moore by comic book artist and illustrator Robert Hack.

More info about Hack at his website (here) and Twitter page (here).

Lost Alan Moore interview in Full Bleed Vol.1

Full Bleed Vol.1 cover art by Cassey Kuo.

Full Bleed Vol.1 - a brand-new quarterly, hand-crafted print-only 200-page hardcover 'magazine' from IDW Publishing - will include a lost interview to Alan Moore conducted by Gavin Edwards and originally intended for Rolling Stone back in 2006. Below you can read a small excerpt.

The magazine estimated delivery time is December 2017.

For more information check the Kickstarter page, here. 

GAVIN EDWARDS: Do you remember your first trip to London?

ALAN MOORE: I think so. It was in a hired mini-bus with my uncle and my parents and my cousins and my brother. It was in the very early '60s and there were milk bars everywhere, which we thought terribly exotic.

GE: I've heard of milk bars, but I've never seen one outside of A Clockwork Orange. Did they literally serve milk, or were they ice-cream shops?

AM: I'm not even sure. I think it was a kind of café with coffee, tea, and milk. It seems strange looking back now—they can't have served just milk. It was very bohemian in London in the '60s. I presume they just didn't serve alcohol and there was presumably a pretty fast trade in pep pills going on instead. I remember going to the London Zoo and finding that a bit unnerving—I didn't like seeing animals in cages—except when there was an elephant that evacuated its bowels all over one of its keepers spectacularly. I shall never forget that. That was when I was six or seven. I didn't go to London again until I was a teenager and starting to get involved with the early part of comics fandom. I could never live there—it's a bit of a nightmare—but it's a fascinating city. I still go down about once a month.

Miracleman by Simon Bisley

Art by Simon Bisley.

Above, a Miracleman convention sketch by the legendary Simon Bisley.

Tom Strong by Dave Johnson

Art by Dave Johnson.

Above a fine Tom Strong sketch by Dave Johnson.