Alan Moore!

So this is Moore doing a Cthulhu mythos comic story? Sounds awesome.

yuppity yup. They're very well done. I mean, the Courtyard is probably the best Lovecraft-inspired comic ever, and one of the best Lovecraft-style fictions ever by anyone other than Lovecraft.

Who's the artist? I've totally missed this one.

Jacen Burrows, published by Avatar.

Umm... yeah. That's a pretty extreme comic, right there. I think the CoC thing sounds right, although it's more like a Paranoia version. Wow.

Actually, the cultists kind of remind me of the Crossed.

It was bagged "for adults only" at Forbidden Planet! With a LOT of sellotape!

Not 100% sure it's for anyone only.

It was bagged "for adults only" at Forbidden Planet! With a LOT of sellotape!

I love reading comments where the small print says that all characters are over 18.

I mean comics. duh.

Wasn't there some controversy with Lost Girls having graphic depictions of teens having sex with each other, and with adults? I haven't read Neonomicon so I don't know what's in it, but maybe Moore thought he should play it safe this time?

I'd say it was the publisher that put the disclaimer into the small print.

okay, jeez, where to start. i completely missed the courtyard. and i missed issue #1, though i kept bugging the comic shop people to order it. issue two finally arrived last week, and i picked up a copy. holy shit, what a nasty little mindfuck of a comic, especially those last 6 pages. so hideous, and yet so clinical. almost like black comedy, almost like porn, but mostly just hideous. love alan moore as a writer, though i worry he's lost down a paranoid wormhole of literary reference and hermetic magick, a fear this evil little volume does nothing to assuage. dunno that i've felt so completely truncheoned by a funny book in ages. wanna know what happens next, but shit, do i really wanna know?

anyway, some good reading on reading to be had here.

Surprised to see him pop up on the BBC last night talking about Austin Osman Spare.

^ looked like a great exhibition, will try and check it out before it closes.

Before the beard!

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lhd3wg7G8B1qhb67co1_500.jpg

from the A Moment of Moore tumblr.

http://cdn.stereogum.com/files/2009/11/drunkenmonkey-tune-yards-remixed.jpg

^nothing but luv for both these people btw

I really, really need to check out Necronomicon. And I really, really want to do mushrooms with Alan Moore

is that his daughter?

that's tUnE-yArDs

I don't understand. Are you saying she looks like Alan Moore?

in those pictures, yes? are you winding me up?

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y109/fez_/twins.jpg

lol

i love the future

http://data.whicdn.com/images/5537330/30myfb4_large.jpg?1292404553

I was a bit annoyed to find issue 4 of Neonomicon in my local comic store today. When did issue 3 come out?

A month ago maybe? I've been looking forward to seeing what happens in issue 4.

I have thus far been afraid to open the pages of issue 4.

Annoyingly, no where in Dublin seems to have a copy of issue 3. Dublin SuXoR.

And my LCS didn't order enough copies of 4 for me to read it, they're on backorder.

apologies if this has been mentioned (specifically the picture)

http://www.comicscube.com/2010/07/get-off-alan-moores-case.html

has any other major storytelling artist (i phrase it that way to include filmmakers and novelists as well as comics writers) ever committed him or herself so wholly and explicitly to appropriating and reinterpreting the work of others? moore has taken his fascination with pre-existing mythologies, genres, characters and character-types so far that he's created a form/genre that's his and his alone, or so it seems to me.

it makes sense that it would be a comic book writer who carried recombinant literary appropriation to its logical extreme, as comics more than any other storytelling form depend on a stable of pre-existing characters and mythologies that grow by slow accretion at the hand of many different artists. many of the british comics writers who came of age in the 80s were similarly interested in the revisionist excavation of pop culture's past, but no one has taken this approach anywhere near so far as moore.

i'm not sure what to make of it. books like the league of extraordinary gentlemen and lost girls provide a good deal of "where's waldo" style character-spotting fun, and the pastiches and tributes are often quite amusing, but there's a weirdly hermetic quality to it all. moore's world seems composed entirely of references to other things, many of them referential in themselves, and it's all held together with an uneasy and often angry sense of paranoia. i'm intrigued by the depth of detail, but there's very little to his storytelling outside polemical vigor and the pleasure of referentiality itself.

comics more than any other storytelling form

no

really? i admit that i'm talking about superhero comics as though they were the entirety of comicdom, but with that out in the clear, i can't think of any other form/genre that's so indebted to a specific mythology and/or canon. the way oral traditions once passed along myths and folktales is comparable, but what else? film and television occasionally recount the exploits of familiar characters (daniel boone, batman, various historical figures), but for the most part not. these forms are nowhere near so fundamentally based on the telling and retelling of a fixed set of stories concerning a fixed cast of characters.

i admit that i'm talking about superhero comics as though they were the entirety of comicdom,

yes

ok

"but there's very little to his storytelling outside polemical vigor and the pleasure of referentiality itself."

i have to disagree -- there's a pamphlet-length book he wrote a while back on how to write comic books that shows what he's doing is at least interesting on a formal level that has nothing to do with polemics or referentiality. also, the highest selling comics composed of appropriated cultural mashups right now isn't by alan moore -- it's fables, much to the chagrin of my buddy who thinks fables is beneath comparison.

a pamphlet-length book he wrote a while back

a series of articles he wrote for Martin in 1985, you mean. reprinted in AH iirc

yeah, i know that moore isn't a big seller these days. nor am i suggesting that stories based on other stories (mashups, w/e) is new or unique to moore. just impressed by how deeply he's burrowed into it.

i would agree that his narrative construction is formally interesting. my complaint is more that he doesn't seem to be addressing anything outside the small room of his pet obsessions: literary history, conspiracy theories, hermetic magic, cranky politics, etc. this makes his work feel weirdly closed to me, shut off from the world. doesn't help that his characters are so relentlessly two-dimensional and symbolic, their relationships and dialogue so unlike anything i've encountered in life. his stories are like dragnet episodes where joe friday and bill gannon are polysexual, sybaritic magickal adepts who keep stumbling into weird porn conspiracies.

^ some shitty grammar. sub: "...stories based on other stories (mashups, w/e) are new or unique to moore. just impressed by how deeply he's burrowed into this approach."

"his stories are like dragnet episodes where joe friday and bill gannon are polysexual, sybaritic magickal adepts who keep stumbling into weird porn conspiracies."
this sounds awesome!

i don't like a lot of his stuff, but the complaint that alan moore is too focused on writing about the things he wants to write about seems really weird to me, considering how strongly he reacts to outside pressures to do things he doesn't want to do. I do think his stuff is better than fables, though, but that's a series that I would suggest is just as committed to operating in the referential arena as moore, if not more so, if for no other reason than they have more pages and volumes to deal with. also, any given superhero title is by default operating under decades of references and continuity, at least within its own sphere, so at this point it's just part of the game.

literary history, conspiracy theories, hermetic magic, cranky politics, etc.

i don't much like alan moore but that is plainly enough material for any one body of work

well, it's sustained umberto eco pretty well. but i think he does a better job with characters and relationships, has a richer view of life and sense of humor, integrates the political with the personal in interesting ways. doesn't give off quite so intense a "locked in the library of babel" vibe.

re philip nunez: i like moore's stuff a lot more than fables, but the comparison does help shed light on my criticism. it's not that alan moore's interested in whatever. i wish more superhero-oriented writers used the forum to explore things outside the usual good guy/bad guy, tights & powers stuff. i get frustrated with moore because his characters take such a back seat to his more esoteric interests. he just doesn't seem all that interested in people.

bill willingham doesn't exactly write realistic characters and relationships. his view of humanity seems derived from popular media, tending to soap opera complications involving reassuringly familiar types. he sentimentalizes where moore disengages. this probably explains why his work is more popular. i really just have no idea where moore's characters are coming from. they seem like aliens or robots. (note that this applies mostly to the stuff moore has written in the last 5 years or so. in the first moore stories i was exposed to, watchmen and swamp thing, there's a lot more attention to characters and relationships.)

also, i'm phrasing all of this far too strongly, like i've identified the "critical flaw" in moore's work. i don't mean to do that and should write more carefully.

i think alan moore is one of the best and most interesting writers in comics today. there is, however, something about his work that i find rather off-putting, and i'm trying to get at what it might be.

has any other major storytelling artist (i phrase it that way to include filmmakers and novelists as well as comics writers) ever committed him or herself so wholly and explicitly to appropriating and reinterpreting the work of others?

Stanley Kubrick says Hi!

a lot of directors do, really

has moore really done anything all-cylinders-on since 'from hell'

'locked in the library of babel' -- well, after the first couple collections georgie gets about as obsessive a revisitor of past tropes as al does, only it's all islamic mysticism and cowboys

i'm sure there are dozens of ppl from approximately 1961 onwards whose prose careers are mainly scribbling at the edges of pre-existing narratives. kathy acker is sort of close in methodology to moore, but is more interested in junk sculpture than in architecture. (or landscape gardening, if you're more an acker fan than a moore fan.) i don't know. john barth? i feel like on a better day i could come up with a half dozen more relevant names

i think what's offputting about moore's work is that he's had no real call to push himself for fifteen years, tbh

Some wag in the control booth dubbed Alan Moore "Rasputin impersonator" in a recent interview. Such scampery!