Was Alan Moore on Oceanic flight 815? It was either him, or someone deliberately meant to look like him (note the rings!). I noticed this guy and commented on him while watching the season premiere (“LA X”), but didn’t think much of it. That is, until I was the above screencap from Bleeding Cool.

What are the chances it was actually him? Well, Moore appeared on The Simpsons and recently name dropped the Sopranos in an interview, so we know he’s not totally adverse to American television.

See also: Alan Moore’s influence on LOST.

So here’s a question/ observation – Ozymandias is based on David Bowie, right?

Maybe slight explanation – after going on a Bob Dylan binge at the end of 2008, and it really threw Watchmen into a new light for me. Watchmen is two creators in dialog with Dylan’s work – it’s as much an element of the piece as the Charlton characters. Aside from being littered with references to Highway 61 Revisited and Bring It All Back Home, the tone of the book owes almost everything to “Desolation Row”, all sickly mocking the apocalypse as it breathes down your neck and nervously cackling as the fires start across the street. Watchmen’s treatment of Dylan’s influence is a lot like the relationship between the Velvet Underground and The Sprawl Trilogy, less an influence but a dialog. So why wouldn’t the villain of the piece be David Bowie?

Read More – Supervillain: Stray Thought

RAB’s comment is key.

(via Blustr)

Interview is here.

Reactions to a few things:

There is a particular line I remember from The Sopranos where I think Tony Soprano says, “There are only two businesses that are recession-proof. There are certain elements of the entertainment industry, and this thing of ours”

I’m surprised that Moore watched the Sopranos, but it further confirms my thesis that television is the new cinema.

Where comics are starting to score heavily is in the documentary approach. People are starting to tell coherent stories that are autobiographical or documentary comics dealing with a particular situation. There has been a heartening surge of those, and they are largely coming from outside the comics industry. The comics industry, meanwhile, seems to be going down the tubes, as far as I can see. And it’s largely their own fault, that they did not embrace change heartily enough, that they didn’t have any new ideas, that they didn’t have a clue.

I think this is a little too pessimistic, but maybe that’s because I live in Portland and when I think of the comics industry I think of Floating World and The Stumptown Comics Festival and stuff. On the other hand, the only ongoing series I’m currently reading is the documentary series Reich.

would like to think that in our present time, not just in comics but in almost every form of the arts, I think that creative expression is within the reach of more people that it ever has been. Now, that is not to say that there are more people with something to say than there ever have been before. But I would like to see a situation where people finally got fed up with celebrity culture. Where people started this great democratic process in the arts where more and more people were just producing individually according to their own wants or needs.

This, on the other hand, is far too optimistic.

On the subject of writing an opera with the Gorillaz (previously mentioned here):

Well, that is a bit premature. We were having talks, but it was much too early to be talking about it. It got onto a website and then it went all over the place and got incredibly inflated. There’s a possibility of us working together on a project, but it wouldn’t be for a long, long time. But they are hopefully going to be doing something for Dodgem Logic’s third issue. And we’ve got some other fine people lined up for the future.

Consider this a correction.

Oh yes, Alan Moore as manga schoolgirl. The images are from a new Alan Moore fan-book manga (dojinshi) by Ryusuke Hamamoto. Best bit? Probably the Alan Moore schoolgirl opening her locker and finding Glycon, the Roman hand puppet god that Moore took as his own personal god following his “coming out” as a magician.

Forbidden Planet: You’ve never seen Alan Moore looking like this before…

More pics here

(via Cat Vincent)

Mustard interviews Alan Moore about his new magazine Dodgem Logic and he reveals that he is doing the libretto for their next opera and they will hopefully be contributing a few pages to the magazine:

Then the issue after that we’ve hopefully got Gorillaz onboard. They came down to Northampton last week because we’re planning for me to do the libretto on their next opera project. Being an opportunist, I of course asked them if they’d be prepared to contribute some pages to Dodgem Logic. Rather than just doing an interview with them, I thought it would be interesting to hand over a few pages for them to curate.

Mustard: Alan Moore talks Dodgem Logic

(via 24 Bit via Joe Matheny)

Update: Moore now says this has been overblown.

Forty years after the uproarious heyday of the alternative press, writer Alan Moore is launching the 21st century’s first underground magazine from his home town of Northampton, a community that is right at the geographical, political and economic heart of the country; one which has half its high street boarded up and is at present dying on its arse, just like everywhere else. [...]

As cheap and beautiful as a heartbreaking teenage prostitute, Dodgem Logic has a cover price of £2.50, with its content similarly tailored to the fiscal toilet-bowl that we are currently engaged in sliding down. Regular columnists provide delicious, inexpensive recipes, wide-ranging medical advice, simple instructions for creating stylish clothing and accessories from next to nothing, guides to growing your own dinner by becoming a guerrilla gardener, and, in the first of Dave (The Self-Sufficient-ish Bible) Hamilton’s environmental columns, a bold experiment in living with no money. The same approach to helping readers deal with socio-economic meltdown and a blitz of repossessions is there in upcoming features on the present-day resurgence of the squatters’ movement, or in our communiqués from the Steampunk/ Post-Civilisation gang on how to start rebuilding culture and society before those things have broken down completely and our children are reduced to battering each other to a bloody pulp with their now-useless X-Boxes in a dispute over the last tub of pot noodles.

Dodgem Logic press release

Also, an expanded and illustrated version of Alan Moore’s history of pornography, originally published in Arthur has been published: 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom.

(via Arthur)

Miracleman/MarvelMan is going to be release by, ironically Marvel Comics. I wrote about the complicated IP mess of MM here (so I need not rewrite it here). The “irony” is “Marvel” legally sued to prevent Alan Moore’s “Marvelman” from being released in the United States because of trademark issues. The result? It was released as “Miracleman” and Moore has never worked for Marvel Comics since (given his godlike status as a comic book author, their BIG loss). Moore sees the comedic irony in Marvel Comics publishing the book and he has no problem with it. Moore won’t take a penny of profits from the reprint, will not let his name be associated with it, and is happy that the bulk of the royalties is going to Marvelman’s original British creator, now in his 90s with a sickly wife.

Positive Liberty: Kimota: The Holy Grail of Comics is Coming

(Thanks Bill!)

The Faust story is a retelling of the Simon Magus story, but instead of being set at the birth of Christianity, this is at the birth of Lutheran Protestantism, nearly fifteen hundred years later. Here we’ve worked out the tangled web of Georgius Sabellicus Faust, the child molester and fountain of necromancy as he styled himself, Johannes Faust, who was the completely blameless doctor of divinity at Heidelberg University, who was known as the demigod of Heidelberg, and we’ve worked out how these two got mixed up together by people who were just confused by all these Fausts and that even Georgius Sabellicus Faust, in the first reference to him, he refers to himself as “Faustus Secundus,” and we were looking at this, and I said, “But that makes ‘Faust Second,’ and this is the first Faust that we’ve ever heard referred to” — he’s refered to by Johannes Trithemius — so we thought, “Who was Faust the first, then?” And Steve looked up in his Latin dictionary, and the word “faustus” means “fortunate, lucky, prosperous, auspicious,” so it would have been a great generic name for a sort of generic folkloric magician, like we might say, “Oh, he was a bit of a Merlin,” and they were saying, “He’s a bit of a Faust, he’s a lucky man,” with an implication that his luck comes from magical means, like Prospero was a good name for a magician. This is a Latin word, that is presumably, there must have been a Faust in folklore before any of these other jokers got in on the act. That’s just in one page of The Book of Magic, because we’re only giving one page to each of the lives of the great enchanters that we’re including. [...]

We also found out that Paracelsus invented modern medicine. This was quite interesting. We found out he was the first person to say that epilepsy was an illness rather than a madness. He was the person who pioneered the use of anesthetics and antibiotics. He was the first person to say that disease originated from outside the body and that illness came from agencies outside the body, which is the beginning of disease theory. He invented homeopathy, and he was a magician.

It points out how much of our culture, all of it, the science, the medicine, the art, has seemingly sprung up from a hardcore magical basis. That most of the people, like Isaac Newton who was an alchemist, who ideas were based on those of John Dee, who was a flat-out necromancer, and even Einstein, his ideas were very much influenced by theosophy, which was the product of the fantastic 19th century fraud, that inspired fraud of Madame Blavatsky. So it’s interesting, much of the culture that surrounds us comes out of magic, pure and simply. That was something I suspected for a long time, but doing the research for this book, that is something which is becoming more and more evident, and we are gathering the evidence for that point of view with every new aspect of it we research.

Previews: Alan Moore interview

You can compare Paracelsus’s Alphabet of the Magi and Dee and Kelley’s Enochian alphabet at Omniglot:

Alphabet of the Magi

Enochian alphabet

I’m intrigued by Moore’s claim about Theosophy influencing Einstein. Anyone know anything about it?

Occulted Watchmen: The True Fate of ‘Hooded Justice’ & ‘Captain Metropolis’ is a paper by James Gifford, originally published in 1999. The paper presents a theory that both Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis did not die (as is alluded to in the supplementary material presented with Watchmen), but are alive and well in 1985, and further that they appear together in a panel in Chapter I: At Midnight, All the Agents.

Watchmen Wiki: The Fate of Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis

(via Lupa)

This is a pretty good list:

From Hell

Or Else

Sleeper

The Invisibles

100%

American Flagg

The Dark Knight Returns

Miracleman

DC: The New Frontier

Full Story: io9

Off the top of my head, I’d add Stray Bullets.

What would you add?

(via The Agitator)

So, those were the agendas that we were following then. We thought it would be a great idea if comics could be recognized as the wonderful medium that we secretly knew them to be. And when I say “we,” I’m talking about the 50 actual people who turned up at those early conventions, which was pretty much the sum total of everybody in this country who’d ever heard of American comics. But back then our agenda was this progressive notion that, wouldn’t it be terrific if people were to get involved with comics who could make them more adult, more grown up, to show the kind of themes they were capable of handling? So this was the agenda that, 20 years later, I was still following toward the end of my first DC run. [...]

When I was working upon the ABC books, I wanted to show different ways that mainstream comics could viably have gone, that they didn’t have to follow Watchmen and the other 1980s books down this relentlessly dark route. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I’m not a particularly dark individual. I have my moments, it’s true, but I do have a sense of humor. With the ABC books I was trying to do comics that would have perhaps appealed to an intelligent 13-year-old, such as I’d been, and would still satisfy the contemporary readership of 40-year-old men who probably should know better. But I wanted to sort of do comics that would be accessible to a much wider range of people, and would still be intelligent even if they were primarily children’s adventure stories, such as the Tom Strong books.

Full Story: Wired

Plus:

Wired interview with Dave Gibbons

Wired interview with Zack Snyder

Disinfo podcast interview with Alan Moore

(via Mechangel)

Top Shelf is proud to announce the all-new installment in the breathtaking series by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill! In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Vol III): Century #1 (“1910″), our familiar cast of Victorian literary characters enters the brave new world of the 20th century!

CHAPTER ONE is set against a backdrop of London, 1910, twelve years after the failed Martian invasion and nine years since England put a man upon the moon. In the bowels of the British Museum, Carnacki the ghost-finder is plagued by visions of a shadowy occult order who are attempting to create something called a Moonchild, while on London’s dockside the most notorious serial murderer of the previous century has returned to carry on his grisly trade. Working for Mycroft Holmes’ British Intelligence alongside a rejuvenated Allan Quatermain, the reformed thief Anthony Raffles and the eternal warrior Orlando, Miss Murray is drawn into a brutal opera acted out upon the waterfront by players that include the furiously angry Pirate Jenny and the charismatic butcher known as Mac the Knife. This one is not to be missed!

This book will be the first of three deluxe, 80-page, full-color, perfect-bound graphic novellas, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Kevin O’Neill — with lettering by Todd Klein, and colors by Ben Dimagmaliw. Each self-contained narrative takes place in three distinct eras, building to an apocalyptic conclusion occurring in our own twenty-first century. — 6 5/8″ x 10 1/8″

From: Top Shelf

(via Arthur)

We would talk at great length every time Alan started to script an issue, he’d run by how he thought it might be broken down, then I’d give him my suggestions on that, and then based on the various thing we were talking about – we would both go off into reminiscences, and speculations about how we came through music to comics to childhood experiences to vague feelings about things – somehow we’d come back to the topic of Watchmen again, and this stuff, largely contextual and largely sort of, er, mood as much as anything, would find its way into the finished comic book. We just talked and talked a lot, and then Alan typed and typed a lot and I drew and drew a lot. And then John Higgins – I shouldn’t leave him out – he coloured and coloured a lot, and I very much would talk things through with him, and then just leave him to his own devices. I think good collaborations are like that; you have to trust what the other guy’s going to do, have him put into it, stir the pot, throw in what you’ve got and leave it alone.

Full Story: The Quietus

Plus: New Dave Gibbons art on Ain’t It Cool

Screen caps and summary of Alan Moore’s appearance on the Simpsons

(via Robot Wisdom)

The usual shit talking about Hollywood plus an update on his current projects, including:

There’s also a huge sort of reference book of magic that he is toiling on with contributions from notable artists and writing peers. It delves into Kabbalah, astral projection, seance, tarot, practical applications of magic and deep research into the origins of magic history, such as the true beginnings of the Faust tales. Talking about the book, the skeptical shaman of comics sounded positively giddy, especially for a parchment wizard trapped in a crass digital age.

“Magic is a state of mind. It is often portrayed as very black and gothic and that is because certain practitioners played that up for a sense of power and prestige. That is a disservice. Magic is very colorful. Of this, I am sure.”

Full Story: LA Times

(via Tomorrow Museum)

(via Arthur)

“This week’s Watchmen festival is finally wrapping up for me. I’m done. How much Watchmen can one guy take? Upon arriving, I thought this was a Comic Book Festival, but I was sadly mistaken. This was an awesome Watchmen commercial that I actually got to walk around in. How exciting is that? As soon as I got off the train, I saw every person on the street was carrying a big Watchmen bag. They had Watchmen posters, and Watchmen toys and photos with their favorite Watchmen characters. Not everyone who wanted to see the Watchmen panel were able to get it, but the creators of the movie and the entire cast were there. And they talked about the movie!!!!

I found all the money the studio spent promoting Watchmen at Comic Con to be ridiculous. These are nerds. It is like trying to sell guns to the NRA. You know how the studio could market The Watchmen to nerds? Go to a remote town in Alaska and find a nerd. Then just walk up to him and whisper, ‘There’s going to be a Watchmen movie.’ At that point, every nerd in the world will know. They have some sort of communication device.”- Fear The Reaper’s feedback on Comic Con via Suicide Girls

Now we know one of the reasons why Moore wanted nothing to do with the movie. Here’s an excellent interview with him from Entertainment Weekly:

“About two years ago, Warner Bros. announced that 300 director Zack Snyder would be adapting that gold standard of comics, Watchmen, into a feature film. The response was nothing short of orgiastic – from just about everyone except Watchmen’s own scribe, Alan Moore, who remains ambivalent about all the hoopla. The 54-year-old writer and co-creator of such seminal and erudite works as From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (both of which were adapted into eagerly anticipated movies that failed to match the quality of Moore’s source material) has a tangled history with the entertainment business. Even in a time when comics creators are more influential than ever (heck, The Spirit producers even gave comics great Frank Miller the helm), Moore simply wants to be left alone.”

(via Entertainment Weekly)

It’s like when you’ve got people like Angela Carter who, in her book The Sadeian Women, she admitted that there was the possibility she could imagine a form of pornography that was benign, that was imaginative, was beautiful, and which didn’t have the problems that she saw in a lot of other pornography. I think even Andrea Dworkin said the same thing. She said it a bit more grudgingly, but she said that conceivably there was, there could be, a benign form of pornography but she didn’t personally believe that it would ever happen. So that’s what we’ve tried to do. We’ve tried to say, yes, good pornography can exist, and I think that possibly the fact that we called it pornography wrong-footed a lot of the people who, if we’d have come out and said, ‘well, this is a work of art,’ they would have probably all said, ‘no it’s not, it’s pornography.’ So because we’re saying, ‘this is pornography,’ they’re saying, ‘no it’s not, it’s art,’ and people don’t realise quite what they’ve said.

Interview Part 1 Interview Part 2 (Probably not safe for work)

(via Tomorrow Museum)

More Info: Watchmen YouTube channel

“As Zack Snyder states on the official blog – here we are, one year from the theatrical release of Watchmen on March 6th, 2009. To ease the pain of waiting another 12 months to finally see the film, Snyder has released complete costumed photos of five of the main characters: The Comedian, Nite Owl, Ozymandias, Rorschach, and Silk Spectre. These may be the most downright incredible photos I’ve seen in the last six months from any comic book movie. It’s time to begin the 12 month process of showing you how amazing Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is actually going to be!”

(via First Showing)

“We’re thrilled to have interviewed Alan Moore – creator of benchmark comics Watchmen and V For Vendetta and longtime WORD hero – in FACE TIME this month. Alan is one of the planet’s great conversationalists and we could fit only a part of our 90 minute discussion in the magazine. So, in the spirit of the Extended Deluxe Double CD edition, here’s some more of Mr Moore discussing his new work of “literary pornography” Lost Girls, his century-spanning supersaga The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen… and why Heroes is rubbish.”

(via The Word)

Full Strip: Something Positive.

(via Grimnir).

“20th Century Fox has initiated a legal battle against Warner Bros. over the rights to develop, produce and distribute a film based on the graphic novel “Watchmen.” On Friday, the studio sued Warners, claiming it holds the exclusive copyrights and contract rights to “Watchmen.” Warners plans to release next year a big-screen version of the popular comic book written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. The cast includes Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup, Patrick Wilson, Carla Gugino and Malin Akerman. It is the studio’s policy to not comment on pending litigation.

But Fox seeks to enjoin Warners from going forward with the project, saying in the lawsuit that it seeks to “restrain (Warner Bros. Pictures) from taking actions that violate Fox’s copyrights and which stand to forever impair Fox’s rights to control the distribution and development of this unique work.” Fox claims that between 1986 and 1990, it acquired all movie rights to the 12-issue DC Comics series and screenplays by Charles McKeown and Sam Hamm. In 1991, Fox assigned some rights via a quitclaim to Largo International with the understanding that the studio held exclusive rights to distribute the first motion picture based on “Watchmen,” according to the lawsuit.”

(via The Hollywood Reporter)