why I love The Master...

Captain Airstrip One, Mad Dog #10, 1986

2012-10-29T19:02:21Z

Captain Airstrip One Mad Dog #10 (Oddmags, 1986)

America's Best Comics Promotional Cards 1999

2012-09-27T14:08:54Z

In 1999 America's Best Comics, an imprint of WildStorm Comics specifically set up to feature new comics work by Alan Moore and his collaborators, and which would soon be sold to DC Comics with Moore's knowledge or approval, issued a set of four promotional cards to highlight four of the five original ABC titles. The fifth title, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, alone of the ABC properties, still belonged to Moore and his collaborator, Kevin O'Neill, whereas all the other titles had been sold to the parent company.

#1: Tom Strong - Artwork by Chris Sprouse and Al Gordon

#2: Top 10 - Artwork by Gene Ha

#3: Promethea - Artwork by JH Williams III and Mick Gray

#4: Tomorrow Stories - Artwork by Rick Veitch

As always, these things are copyright to the people they're copyright to, and are reproduced here purely for scholarly purposes. Yer honour.

DC Releases #11 - April 1985

2012-07-31T05:06:19Z

DC Releases #11 - April 1985

Immortal Love by Eddie Enrico and his Hawaiian Hotshots - Kapital Records

2012-07-08T21:54:31Z

Immortal Love b/w Home With You by Eddie Enrico and his Hawaiian Hotshots. Both songs written by A. Moore & T. Perkins.

45rpm 7" single vinyl record #111853, Released in 1955 by Kapital Records, Inc, The Brillcreem Building, 1619 Broadway, New York, NY, USA.

Here's both sides of the single on YouTube. The B-Side starts at 3.15.

A Side - A.111853

Immortal Love
Didn’t get bitten in no Carpathian tower
Or eat the peaches from some heavenly bower
But oh my darling, I’m certain of our
Immortal Love

[Immortal Love, Immortal Love, Immortal Love]

I didn’t walk through no eternal blue flame
There ain’t no painting getting decrepit nowhere
But you and me, dear, I know that we share
Immortal Love

The wandering Jew, and old Melmoth too
Join hands with the gods up above
[Oh baby]
Olympus will ring, as all of them sing the tale of our
Immortal Love

I wasn’t mesmerised the Valdemar way
Ain’t no hypnosis, honey, preventing decay
But we’ve got one thing, whatever they say,
Immortal Love

Ayesha’s the maid who must be obeyed
But he joined[?] along, hand in glove
As troglodytes sway, down Africa way, and pray for our
Immortal Love

You didn’t get born out from the foam on the sea
That Count de St Germain, he ain’t related to me
But with us baby, forever there’ll be
Immortal Love

[Immortal Love, Immortal Love, Immortal Love]
Immortal Love
[Immortal Love, Immortal Love, Immortal Love]
Immortal Love
[Immortal Love, Immortal Love, Immortal Love]
[Immortal Love, Immortal Love, Immortal Love]

B Side - B.111853

Home With You
I used to ride a water spout
Or sail a big balloon
Or climb inside a rocket shell
And shoot it at the moon
Where Selenites had nightclubs
and Baby, pretty soon...

Then me and all the Selenites
decided to stay out all night
To find ourselves a crater bar
And order up a shooting star
But tonight I’m going to stay at home with you

Oh once I played out Venus way
And dig that crazy scene
Where all the girls are beautiful
And all the guys are green
I’d meet the real gone Mekon
And trade jokes with a Treen

And Perelandra came alive
With love in every [cellar dive ?]
We’d all call in at Carson’s Place
The finest inn in outer space
But tonight I’m going to stay at home with you

I’m [due/blue?] on the Red Planet now
I’m boogying on Barsoom
And Malacandra holds no candle
to our cosy room
For all its flying carpets
Its every sonic boom

Now Mars is pink and dreary dust
Where tripods stand around and rust
And for our Martian cavalry
No longer mean a thing to me
So tonight I’m going to stay at home with you

Yes tonight I’m going to stay at home with you

Also, what we do appear to have is a single from one record company, Kapital Records of New York, USA, that has got accidentally put in the sleeve from another company, Troynovantum Records, presumable of Troynovantum, Albion.

===========================================================
The history of this record is quite complex.

The songs were recorded to be included on a 45rpm 7" single vinyl record that was to be included with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier (America's Best Comics/WildStorm/DC Comics, New York, November 2007), but didn't appear with this. It was later to be included with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier - Absolute Edition (America's Best Comics/WildStorm/DC Comics, New York, August 2008), but did not appear with this either, with vague references to copyright being given as the reason for this. As well as this, Black Dossier was not available outside the US, again for alleged - but unclarified - copyright reasons. The fact that this was Alan Moore's last work with DC Comics before abandoning them for good may have had some bearing on this, and it has certainly been speculated that there was an element of spite on DC's side.

In this interview with Bill Baker from March 2007, Moore says,

AM: As one of the little extra giveaways, we've got a book produced by Pornsec, which, in Orwell's book, they're working for the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Propaganda, and they produce these little pornographic comics. And so, one of the giveaways is an eight-page Tijuana Bible, as dreamed up by Orwell's Thought Police. So it's Thought Police pornography. And that is something that will fall into your lap like subscription cards when you open the book.

There is a pair of 3-D goggles that will be included as well, that will be necessary for one section of the book--quite an important section of the book, actually.

And there is a 45 [RPM] vinyl single that is supposedly by a 1950s band on a 1950s American record label, both of which are fictitious, but which are taken from other sources. That's part of the fun of The League, you know? The band is called "Eddie Enrico and His Hawaiian Hotshots," which, I believe, were mentioned very briefly by Thomas Pynchon in his excellent The Crying of Lot 49. But it's double-sided, it's a single with two sides. One side of which is "Immortal Love," and the other side of which is "Home with You," which are kind of League-themed 1950s pop songs.

And so, yeah, there'll be a lot of little extras in this. It's going to be a very handsomely produced volume....

BB: Just out of curiosity, who did the music?

AM: Who did the music? It was me and Tim Perkins, pretending to be a 50s American rock and roll band. I've discovered, at this late stage in my life, that I am, in fact, an Elvis impersonator. But you'll have to wait and listen for yourself, you know? [His voice assumes an Elvis Presley-like drawl] "Uh huh, thank you very much."

So there'll be a lot of little goodies, because me and Kevin like that. We like having lots of nice little things in there. It reminds us of British comics of our youth, where there were always these kind of cheap giveaways included. But we've got some quite expensive giveaways in this one.

BB: And porn, too!

AM: Absolutely. It is 1984 Newspeak totalitarian porn, so it's kind of depressing, but also kind of funny. [Laughter] It's George Orwell's 1984, told as an 8-page tale in a Tijuana Bible pornographic comic strip, which is kind of funny and dreadful at the same time. But that's just a minor bauble to fall into the reader's lap.

In his introduction to Jess Nevins's Impossible Territories: The Unofficial Companion to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - The Black Dossier (MonkeyBrain Books, 2008), Alan Moore says,

I suppose it makes sense that the most unusual collection of the League's adventures thus far should also have had the most unusual path to publication. There was the last-minute interference a week or two before the first edition was due to go to press, which led to the decision not to release the volume in the UK or Canada. Then, surely coincidentally, there was the last minute interference a week or two before the supposedly-complete deluxe edition went to press, which led to the decision not to include the 7-inch vinyl single that was meant to accompany the work, despite the fact that the entire package had been cleared for release by the publisher's extensive legal department some two years previously. Kevin and I imagine that this is probably intended as some form of reprimand or punishment for our having suggested that the mainstream comic industry was no longer sufficiently intelligence, literate, morally hygienic or, indeed, competent to publish anything as apparently demanding as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Well, I guess they sure showed us.

So, anyway, we're sorry about the non-appearance of the single, and we'll do our best to put that right at some point in the future. Actually, I could hum a couple of verses right now, just to give you an idea of what it would have sounded like. Okay. Let me just clear my throat here. Ahuhhm. Ahhuh-Ahuhhm. Right...
Didn't get bitten in no Carpathian tower,
Or eat the peaches from some heavenly bower,
But oh my darling, I'm certain of our Immortal Love.
I wasn't mesmerised the Valdemar way.
Ain't no hypnosis, honey, preventing decay,
But we got one thing, whatever they say: Immortal Love.
The Wandering Jew
And old Melmoth too
Join hands with the Gods up above.
Olympus will ring
As all of them sing
The tale of our Immortal Love...
Anyway, you get the idea. Sorry about that bum note in the chorus, incidentally. I’ll do an overdub and drop it in later.

None the less, the recording had been made, and had originally been meant to be included with Black Dossier, and there are references to it in various places in the book, and later on in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century - 1969 (Top Shelf Productions/Knockabout Comics, July 2011). In the script for Black Dossier there's this description of panels:

PAGE 15/PANEL 5
MINA: Now, where’s that DOSSIER?

PAGE 15/PANEL 6
Change angle. Now dressed in her concealing wrap-around sash-waisted robe, Mina kneels on the bed facing towards its baseboard, full figure to our centre/right of the foreground and facing right. She is reaching down towards the bottom of the bed and pulling the BLACK DOSSIER out of her open handbag. She frowns in mild irritation as a number of small objects fall out of the open dossier and into the handbag as she pulls the dossier up out of the handbag’s depths. I figure that whatever little inclusions and inserts you want to have in this final package, we can establish them as part of the fictional dossier here. Mina frowns as these objects fall from between the pages of the dossier and into or onto her handbag. Looking past her into the near left background we see the blonde man as he stands up at the head of the bed on its far side, turned to face towards us and Mina as he speaks to her. The two tea cups are now standing on the bedside table on his side of the bed. The blonde man here, as he speaks fairly expressionlessly to Mina, is starting to take off his shirt here, revealing a white aertex vest beneath over his tanned, fairly muscular and fairly scar-free chest.

BLONDE MAN: Probably in your bag, where you left it.

MINA: I’ve got it. It’s...

MINA: Oh, that’s a nuisance. Some things tucked inside have fallen out.

One of the inclusions that was meant to be in the book, one of the 'things tucked inside', was this 7" single. This is made clear again in Moore's introductory note to Kevin O'Neill in the script for Black Dossier, where he says,

Here’s the contents page, or at least an attempt at it. I’ve put dates in for everything, but since I can’t find anything to check them against right now they’re probably all over the place like a madwoman’s shit and may contradict dates given in the actual texts themselves, so please check them all out. For example, I can’t even find a copy of Volume 1 so that I can check the date of Memoirs of an English Intelligencer, so please regard all the dates given hereunder as mere provisional approximations.

You’ll also notice that I haven’t included the pornsec Jane eight-pager here, since I figure that like the record and the 3D glasses it’s an extra giveaway designed to simply fall out unexpectedly in the reader’s (probably tumescent) lap. I admit that my thinking on this point is probably drugged and muddled, so if you have strong feelings in the other direction (and I don’t mean like the pudding-eating cowboys in Brokeback Mountain), then please let me know and I’ll write a contents entry for the Jane piece that you can just drop in where appropriate.

As you can see, the 8-page Tijuana Bible, which is bound into the book, was also originally meant to be loose in the book.

There are mentions of the single in various places in Black Dossier: On page 148, in the section called Director's Summary, dated 7.9.'56, where Robert Cherry is reporting to O'Brien on the movements of the Murray team (as they are known to British Intelligence), there is this paragraph:

Whomever the individuals that we have identified as Quatermain and Murray may turn out in actuality to be we do, as indicated previously, have various reports of their activities in the United States across the last ten years. Scant references within the opening chapters of the here appended copy of The Crazy Wide Forever by S. Paradise suggest that during the last year or two the couple (or a pair strikingly like them) were in San Francisco mixing with bohemians and criminals, while elsewhere in this same text it’s implied that our rogue agents were the inspiration for a gramophone recording of the current U.S. type, which similarly is included elsewhere in this dossier but fails to offer any clues to Murray and her partner’s whereabouts, being a rather fanciful, insipid and romantic song of little consequence such as Americans are, one supposes, presently in favour of.

There is also one mention of the record in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 1969, in the first panel on page 32, where we see a radio, with this text issuing from it: '...stay at home with you!’ That was Eddie Enrico and His Hawaiian Hotshots...", although why the DJ would choose to play the B-side of an old record is a question I can't answer.

The name of the band, Eddie Enrico and His Hawaiian Hotshots, is a reference to Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, where a band called Eddie Enrico and His Hong Kong Hotshots turn up on page 78.

The music is written and performed by Tim Perkins, a regular musical partner of Moore's.

The label was designed by Todd Klein, based on initial sketches and instructions from Kevin O'Neill. He told me,

'I don't remember much, it's been years. I probably talked about the label first with Kevin, I might have suggested the Capitol label as a starting point, since they were using the Kapital label name, or Kevin might have already had that in hand. Kevin did the art and sent it to me with a layout, as always, and I designed the type to mimic the label we were looking at.'

Kapital Records label close-up

Capital Records label close-up

The Troynovantum Records sleeve was designed by Julia Scheele under the direction of Gosh! owner Josh Palmano. It is based on the old London Records label:

London Records 7" Single Sleeve

Trotnovantum Records 7" Single Sleeve

The record's number, #111853, is a reference to Alan Moore's date of birth, the 18th of November 1953, if rendered in the american notation - Month, Day, Year, giving 11/18/'53 - as opposed to the arguably more sensible British notation - Day, Month, Year, which would be 18/11/'53.

Up at the top I said that the record was released in 1955. This is based on evidence from the books, as there's no date on the actual record label. In The Crazy Wide Forever, Moore's Kerouac/beat pastiche from Black Dossier, there's this passage:

...Min starts in to hum sum dum and humdrum number cum from off the radio sum croony moony joony freshman mating call what you recall from Summer afore last Immortal Love or some such nuisance nonsense bland and canned out of American Bandstand Land and right away Al’s big knot shoulder muscle slacks relaxes and he settles back there in the driver’s chair cranks down the window lets the wind slick back his hair and dam if he ain’t joining in to sing along with’ Min both grinning now like Dr. Sax ain’t going to doom dam and destructify Dean Moriarty and the hole world both right after these commercials and when I’m impertinent enough to mention all this smoochy stuff Min says how while back she and Al was in New York where Hyman Solomon fuck sea-heart sailors in the washroom at the Port Authority scream ‘feed me I’m a Jew’ at Rabbis and sing holy holy holy William Blake almighty in the beat up negro dawn and Min and Al back then sit talking all one night with would-be Hoagy Carmichael song-writing genuine genie-ass up in sum old cold water tenement next thing you know they’re listening on the radio show by late night firelight glow and Lo it’s their life story bin stole whole and stuck inside a song immortal love immortal love immortal lop op op op op op pom...

The publication date of Sal Paradise's book The Crazy Wide Forever is given as 1957, and the song dates from 'Summer afore last,' so I'm inferring that this means 1955.

The Brillcreem Building, where Kapital Records are based, is based on the Brill Building, which shares the same address at 1619 Broadway in New York, and which is an important location in popular musical history.

Sources for information: Wikipedia's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier page, amongst others, personal correspondence with Todd Klein and others, and much searching about on the Internet.

Glycon Contents List / Index

2012-06-24T18:01:09Z

This is Pádraig Ó Méalóid/slovobooks's Alan Moore obsession journal! It started out as something else, but has become an archive of out-of-print work and general ephemera relating to Alan Moore.

Everything you need to know about Glycon, as written by Steve 'No Relation' Moore for the Fortean Times.

================================================
Index of Contents
================================================
Previously Unseen Work by Alan Moore:

Fossil Angels - Part One - Part Two

Big Numbers #3

================================================
Out Of Print Work by Alan Moore:

St Pancras Panda Back Street Bugle (Pauper Press, 1978-1979)

Scant Applause Frantic Winter Special (Marvel UK, 1979)

Southern Comfort 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 1981 (IPC/Fleetway, August 1981)

Two Pieces BJ and the Bear Annual 1982 (Grandreams, 1981)

Not the World Cup Not the World Cup: The Official Souvenir Brochure (Marvel Comics UK, 1982)

The Bride of Pressbutton Sounds, 25th December 1982

C.B.? - That's a Big Ten-Four Dukes of Hazzard Annual 1983 (Grandreams, 1982)

Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies - The Daredevils #4 - #6 (Marvel UK, April - June 1983)

This is the Place DC Sampler #2 (DC Comics, September 1984), and a related piece from Blue Devil #4, same cover-date

Captain Airstrip One Mad Dog #10 (Oddmags, 1986)

A True Story Myra #8 (Myra Hancock, 1986)

In Pictopia! Anything Goes! #2 (The Comics Journal, August 1986)

Driller Penis Corpsemeat 2 (Sympathetic Press, 1989)

The Bowing Machine RAW Vol. 2 No. 3 (Penguin Books, 1991)

The Murders on the Rue Morgue Negative Burn #13 (Caliber Press, US, July 1994)

Outbreaks of Violets created for the MTV Europe Music Awards 1995

Hungry is the Heart Meatcake #9 (Fantagraphics Books, April 1999)

The Serpent and the Sword Tales of Midnight, Kosovo Refugee Special (Blue Silver Entertainment, October 1999)

Technical Vocabularies - Games for May with Steve Moore (Somnium Press, Mayday 2004)

================================================
Text from Spoken Word Performances and CDs by Alan Moore:

The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels (1996)

The Highbury Working (2000)

Angel Passage (2001)

================================================
Artwork by Alan Moore:

Turvey is Innocent Benefit Poster, August 1986

From Hell Major Arcana Taboo #2 to #4 (SpiderBaby Grafix & Publications, 1989 - 1990)

Bob Wachsman Tummler American Splendor #15 (Harvey Pekar, 1990)

================================================
Articles by Me about Alan Moore and His Work:

Review of The Highbury Working: A Beat Séance The Alien Online (April 2002)

Alan Moore Quits Comics (Again!) The Alien Online (May 2003)

Scenes from the Life of the Master The Alien Online (November 2003)

Review of V for Vendetta Emerald City (April 2006)

Alan Moore’s Songbook Glycon (June 2007)

Alan Moore CD Covers Glycon (October 2008)

Forthcoming Work by Moore for 2009 Glycon (December 2008)

Forthcoming Work by Alan Moore for 2010 Glycon (May 2010)

================================================
Interviews:

Interview Inside Image #2, (Image Comics, April 1993)

================================================
Miscellanea and Oddities:

From the Writers Viewpoint Society of Strip Illustration Newsletter, May 1981

Alan Moore - Demi-God or Genius? A 15-year-old Warren Ellis being effusive in a Letter of Comment to Warrior #14, November 1983

DC Releases #11 (DC Comics, April 1985)

UKCAC '85 poster, 1985

Swamp Thing Death Certificate (DC Comics, 1986)

Covers for Fashion Beast Script by Bill Sienkiewicz, 1988

A Dream of Rorschach The Question #17 (DC Comics, June 1988)

Make your own V for Vendetta Mask, promotional material from Titan Books, 1990

From Hell #1 Press Release (Mad Love, 1991)

Voice of the Fire Chapter Header Illustrations by Cliff Harper (Victor Gollancz, 1996)

Highbury Working poster for original performance, 20 November 1997

The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels Kaos #14, July 22 2002

Outside Mind The Comic Festival Charity Deck of Cards Volume 2, 2003. Art by Gary Spencer Millidge

Heroes & Villains Wordsearch from Puzzle Annual Christmas Special 2007

Watching the Watchmen Promo Brochure (Titan Books, 2008)

Joseph Bazalgette's Bronze Head as mentioned in The Highbury Working: A Beat Séance Track 2: A Skeleton Horse, London, June 2008

================================================
Guest Articles:

The Unpublished Moore by Michael Norwitz

================================================
All contents remain the property of the copyright owners and/or creators, and are only used here for reasons of scholarly research. Honest, guv!

================================================

If you like what I'm doing here, you might consider making a small donation to my PayPal account, through the button below. There's no obligation on anyone, but a run in with Prostate Cancer in 2010 (and again in 2012) cost me a lot of money, and I'm still trying to get back on top of it, so it all helps.

The Murders on the Rue Morgue - Negative Burn #13, July 1994

2012-06-11T20:00:16Z

The Murders on the Rue Morgue from Negative Burn #13 (Caliber Press, US, July 1994)

Text by Alan Moore, illustrated by Neil Gaiman

[This entry is cross-posted here on premorpheus, my Neil Gaiman Out-of-Print and Ephemera LiveJournal.]

Talcum Powder - Dark Star #21, July 1979

2012-05-28T20:27:59Z

Talcum Powder by Curt Vile and Pedro Henry, published in Dark Star #21, July 1979.

A Dream of Rorschach - The Question #17, June 1988

2012-04-25T22:39:28Z

Before 'Before Watchmen' was even though of, DC did once use one of the characters from Watchmen in one of its regular comics. In The Question #17, cover-dated June 1988, Rorschach appears in a very brief dream sequence. The story is called, to avoid any confusion, A Dream of Rorschach. Here's the cover, the title page, and the two pages where Rorschach appears. He's mentioned here and there on a few other pages, and there's an editorial recommendation for Watchmen at the end of the letters' page. Also, note the thanks to Moore and Gibbons on the title page...

Southern Comfort - 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special, 1981

2012-01-28T19:34:47Z

The May 1981 edition of the Society of Strip Illustration Newsletter carried a Q&A feature with several comics writers of the time, including Alan Moore. In May 2007, thanks to David Lloyd, the then editor of the Newsletter, scanning the pages for me, I posted the feature here.

Besides being the place where Alan Moore stated that he wanted to write Marvelman, there was another part of the interview that seemed to present information of a work by Moore that wasn't previously know about.

Q: Are you, on the whole, satisfied with the way artists translate your ideas? If you have any, give examples of good and bad experiences relating to this. (Embarrass the hell out of whoever you like - life is far too serious to be taken seriously...

AM: [ ... ] As far as jobs that have displeased me go then I must reluctantly admit to being less than ecstatic about the way a gent called Walter Howarth handled the story which finally emerged in this year's 2000 AD Summer Special under the title of Southern Comfort. Sure, there were other factors involved and I don't want to be too hard on a guy who obviously has enough problems already. I just thought I'd mention it because it helps to talk about these things, helps us to understand the essential frailty of human existence and to be prepared for the inevitable tragedy that awaits just around the corner.

Q: Name your favourite writing job (series or one-off) and give reasons for choosing it.

AM: My favourite writing job was a story called Southern Change. Steve McManus, in an ingenious attempt to curb the flow of shimmering and lucid metaphor that I use to give the humblest caption box a certain poetry and elan, asked me to do a two-part story without captions. I dunno about anyone else, but I really enjoy tackling structural problems like that. In fact up to a certain point I think that the more severe the restrictions and limitations, then the greater the creative effort needed to overcome them and the better the eventual result. Anyway, in this instance I put a lot of sweat into the writing and to my great delight, at the end I found that I'd engineered a superb Swiss-precision piece of Graphic Narrative, a real Rolls-Royce piece of storytelling. Of course, the eventual result was as chronicled in my answer to question two. I'm sorry to keep going on about it and I'd hate anyone to think I was bitter. After all, into every life a little rain must fall, eh?

In the comments on my original post here, an anonymous poster recognised this as referring to Southern Comfort, 2000 A.D. Sci-Fi Special 1981, credited to R.E. Wright as writer, and W. Howarth as artist. S/He went on to say,

Now I have a new question for you. If Moore took the "R.E. Wright" credit because he was unhappy with the art (or editing, possibly), does that mean that this story is also Alan Moore: Easy Kill, 2000 AD #205 (March 1981). Story by "R.E. Wright," art by Garry Leach.

I answered this with the same answer I'd put about the same issue on the Alan Moore Yahoo! Group mailing list, here:

There are three possible explanations that spring to mind: Firstly, the piece is misattributed, and it was actually Pat Mills rather than Alan Moore who said this. Or the story was pulled by the editorial team and rewritten by Mills under the pseudonym RE Wright (rewrite, see?). Alternatively, R.E. Wright could be a house name that authors got to put on their stories if they were unhappy with the artwork, in the same way that film directors use the name Alan Smithee.

The reason I was suggesting it might be regular 2000 AD writer Pat Mills is that the 2000 AD website lists RE Wright as being a pseudonym of his - of course, the same logic might apply there, and R.E. Wright could have been assigned on a story of his that he wasn't happy with.

So, that was that. Except that it wasn't. I started seeing Southern Comfort turning up on bibliographies of Moore's work, both online and in print. On his Wikipedia bibliography, for instance, it's listed along with a piece of text saying credited as "RE-Wright" due to Moore's dissatisfaction with the final story. Somewhere along the line, the name R.E. Wright has become slightly changed to RE-Wright, or other variations thereon, to heighten the possible meaning of the name - folk etymology red in tooth and claw, it seems.

The thing is, what I had speculated on was now being passed around as fact, which I'm not necessarily completely happy with. If nothing else, the story as printed was nowhere near being a superb Swiss-precision piece of Graphic Narrative, a real Rolls-Royce piece of storytelling, but of course that's probably part of the reason that he was unhappy with it. And, of course, it's possible that it actually was rewritten by someone else, as the name R.E. Wright seems to imply.

So, decide for yourself: is this the work of the greatest comics writer of our time? Or is it only partially his, or has the art been changed so much from his original script that it has got lost under there? Here's the story as it appeared...

(Scans courtesy of Darren S, whose excellent A Moment of Moore I commend to you all. The copyright in this story belongs to IPC/Fleetway/Rebellion - strike out as applicable - who I hope understand I'm only borrowing them for scholarly purposes, and no infringement is intended.)

Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies - The Daredevils #4 - #6, April - June 1983

2012-01-08T14:23:20Z

Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies
- An article on Sexism in Comics -
Originally published in The Daredevils #4 - #6 (Marvel UK), April - June 1983.

Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies

by Alan Moore

Originally published in The Daredevils #4 - #6 (Marvel UK, April - June 1983)

PART I

Okay. Seeing as this is such a sticky subject suppose I'd better lay my cards on the table straight away.

I'm a wimpy, indecisive, burned-out woolly-minded liberal old hippy who eats quiche, saves whales, is friendly to the Earth and subscribes to Spare Rib, The Black One-Parent Gay Catholic Gazette, and Animal Welfare Against Nuking the Nazis Quarterly and if anybody wants to make anything of it, then I'll quite cheerfully butt them in the face until their nose is flat enough to rollerskate on.

The reason I'm prepared to make such a candid confession is because I'm pretty sure that after reading the article in hand most of you will be saying pretty much the same things about me anyway and I thought it'd look better if I got in first. And the reason I'm donning my Sou’Wester in preparation for a torrent of abuse is because this feature concerns women, and women don't seem to be a very popular topic nowadays. There are a couple of possible reasons for this sad state of affairs.

The first is that a small but vocal percentage of feminists are quite obviously as mad as snakes and have hopelessly damaged personalities. They pounce with demented glee upon increasingly trivial and unimportant examples of 'sexism', they make outrageously twisted and generalised statements to the Press along the lines of "All men are rapists", and in general make themselves very difficult to like.

The problem arises when these foaming maniacs are presented in the media as being a representative cross section of the women's movement, thus reinforcing the image of feminism that most men are only too eager to accept as the truth: an army of crop-haired Amazon gargoyles who chainsmoke untipped Woodbines, shift cement blocks for a living and have a physique somewhere between that of Popeye and a Commer van.

The other reason is that men, over the last few thousand years, have come to enjoy the perks and privileges that are part and parcel of being born into the male gender and are very reluctant to give them up. Men in general are a pretty insecure bunch and when they start to feel threatened by something they tend to respond by hurling forth salvoes of scorn and contempt, or, failing that, they refuse to take the issue seriously at all.

Even generally broadminded people who believe that the abolition of slavery in America was by and large a good thing seem to get very defensive and hysterical when it's their Sunday Lunch that's being threatened by the Women's Movement. My guess is that if these gentlemen had been Southern Plantation owners they'd have felt the same reluctance in forgoing the pleasures of their Negro house-boy bringing them a Mint Julep on the veranda.

All right. So that's the basic situation, and it's one that is obscured by a lot of bluster, silliness and ratbrainery on both sides. But once you've swept away all the damned lies and statistics, it becomes plain that there really is a serious problem under there somewhere. Women in general are not really getting a fair suck of the sauce-stick, and it's not just in obvious areas like equal pay for equal work and who brings up baby.

These areas are obviously important, but they're all symptoms that spring from a central illness, an illness that affects the way it which we see women and the way we treat them in our largely male-oriented society.

The media presents us with a number of different stereotypes to choose from when forming our ideas of womanhood. There's a wide variety of different designs, and they're all about as palatable as a lobster with skin cancer.

There's the sort of top-heavy pneumatic giggling brain-wipe that Barbara Windsor has made a career out of portraying. There are the masochistic, grovelling sluts that populate the lyrics of heavy metal numbers and aftershave commercials. There are the acid-tongued drudges and tarts-with-a-heart-of-gold served up every week in Coronation Street. There are the helpless, quivering victims that populate films like He Knows You're Alone and Dressed to Kill - creatures that have no other reason for existing other than to be thrown face-first into buzzsaws by transvestite dwarf psychopaths.

I mean, imagine opening The Sun every day and finding page three adorned with a photo of a pouting specimen of masculinity clad only in his Y-fronts. Imagine naked men sprawling sensuously on the bonnets of new model cars at the motor show. Imagine having to listen to some sweaty and repugnant female version of Bernard Manning telling an endless string of Father-in-Law jokes. Sure, it's funny once. Maybe it would be funny twice. But three times? Four times? Five thousand times? Can you imagine having to live with something as insulting as that every day of your life? No wonder so many feminists are cranky.

And comics are, in their way, every bit as guilty as other media in presenting a distorted vision of women to their readers. Maybe more guilty in some respects. After all, comics tend to be aimed predominantly at a young audience, an audience that may very well be going through an impressionable stage of their lives and desperately trying to make sense of the world in which they find themselves.

Very often, since younger school-kids tend to associate only with people of their own gender, they may be well into their teens before they actually get to know and talk to any real women. And by that time the damage has been done.

When I was about seven and first started reading the Superman/DC family of comics, I had no reason to believe that they didn't reflect true life. Okay, so I just about had it figured out that people who tried leaping over tall buildings in single bounds were likely to do a little more than rupture themselves. I mean, I wasn't a complete idiot. But super-heroics aside, I imagined that the way human beings behaved in these strips was probably pretty accurate. And this led me to form a number of interesting, albeit thoroughly deluded conclusions.

Firstly, only men could be heroes. Superman, Batman, Green Arrow ... these were characters that one could admire. The women characters, when they emerged, were very pale and limp carbon copies of their male counterparts... Supergirl, Batwoman, Batgirl, the ludicrous and obscure Miss Arrowette... none of them were in any danger of upstaging the masculine Super-types whose books they infrequently appeared in. You get the impression that as much as anything they were there purely for comic relief.

Miss Arrowette would reduce gangs of criminals to spluttering, coughing helplessness by engulfing them in clouds of talc from her 'Powder-Puff Arrow'. Batgirl would dazzle villains by reflecting the sun's rays from the mirror contained in her Bat-Compact. Supergirl, a being of strength approximate to that of Superman himself and thus able to push planets out of orbit without working up a sweat, would spend her time either frolicking with Supercat or Superhorse, or maybe falling in love with the young men from the bottle city of Kandor who would always turn out to be villains who wanted to use her in order to revenge themselves of Superman.

Somehow she never realised this until it was too late no matter how many times it happened. Not even when all of her Kandorian boyfriends had names like E-Vill and Nars-Tee and the like.

Secondly, women who weren't endowed with special powers of abilities were uniformly spiteful, nosey, treacherous, vain and dippy ... and that was just the nice ones.

Take Lois Lane as a case in point. Here we have a woman who has an unusually responsible job for a member of her sex. She is a newspaper reporter, and had been so since the days when women newspaper reporters were very few and far between. Not only that, she is a star reporter whose byline is known and respected throughout Metropolis, if not the free world in its entirety.

Now, if you think about a character like that realistically, you'd imagine that for a woman to have come so far she'd have to be capable, determined, tough and extremely resilient, wouldn't you? As opposed to being dopey, vain, gossipy, lovesick and accident prone? Sure you would. But the people at DC at the time obviously felt otherwise.

Lois Lane was portrayed as a sort of shallow, brainless Superhero-Groupie who would go to any humiliating lengths to gain Superman's attentions. She was unlucky to the point of being near-suicidal, always managing to fall off window ledges or out of aeroplanes or getting captured by Luthor.

She would pry constantly into the Secret of Superman's true identity, more than once in the hope of blackmailing the man of steel by threatening to reveal his identity if he didn't agree to marry her. She would indulge in vicious and degrading catfights with her equally unlikeable rival, Lana Lang, over which of them had ownership of the kute and kuddly Kryptonian.

She was, in short, a royal pain in the bum, and I used to cheer along with all the other little misogynists when at the end of each story Superman would outwit her by means of his superpowers and basic male superiority, usually managing to publicly humiliate her in the process.

As you see, the general impressions that I formed of women as a species were far from salutary. The only exception to this general rule was that of Wonder Woman, although I didn't really have a lot of time for her either to be honest.

Wonder Woman was at least unique in that she was a character in her own right and not just someone wearing a male superheroes old costume that had been let out a little at the chest. That said, however, you'll notice that Wonder Woman didn't merit the spin-offs afforded to her masculine counterparts.

There was no 'Wonder Boy' turning up complete with tiara, bracelets and lasso to aid her in her fight against crime. There was no pesky male reporter throwing himself off the Empire State Building in the hope that she'd swoop down in her invisible robot plane and rescue him.

Furthermore, even though she was allowed to join the Justice League of America her principal function was to sit quietly in the background at their meetings and take down the minutes as if she'd just arrived from the Temp Bureau. Clearly, she was a second-class super citizen from the word go. Perhaps that's why she used to spend so much time hanging around with her chums, the Holliday Girls, and getting tied up by arch-foe Paula Von Gunter. Who could blame her in the circumstances.

Anyway, so far I've done little more than present a brief outline of the problem and I'm already well over my word-limit for this piece. Next issue I want to look at the issue a bit more specifically and look at women in comics from Keyhole Kate to Elektra. I also want to study the curious trend in preadolescent pornography known in the trade as 'Good Girl Art' and ask the question "Is Dark Phoenix really just Minnie the Minx without her catapult?" Till then, keep those cards and letters pouring in.

PART II

Last issue you were all very patient with me as I outlined in general terms the various abuses that this wonderful funnybook business of ours has heaped upon its female protagonists. This time round I'd like to get into the specifics of the situation. Name names, face facts, shoot from the hip, point fingers and all that kind of stuff. Is that okay with you boys? Good. Then I'll begin.

What I want to try and do is break down into categories the various ways in which women are used as characters throughout the comic book medium as a whole. I suppose that the most obvious category is "Women as Decoration", so that's where we'll kick off.

Nearly every female character in comics, with the possible exceptions of Iron Man's Mrs. Arbrogast and Superboy's Ma Kent has been designed to exploit her pinup potential to the full. They all have long, willowy legs, trim waists and torsos that look as if they've had a pair of Anti-Tank rockets fired through their backs.

Their faces are all, near as dammit, identical. If-one were (for some reason which at the moment escapes me) to shave the heads of The Invisible Girl, Madame Medusa, Crystal, Alicia, The Scarlet Witch and Jane Foster, even their own mothers wouldn't be able to tell them apart.

Then of course there's body language to consider. If a comic book woman were called upon to change a fuse she would do it with her head thrown back, lips slightly parted and with one arm extended in a graceful, delicate curve. I doubt if Supergirl could change Streaky the Supercat's litter tray without looking like something from the Ziegfeld Follies.

Now, at this point some of you might be wondering if there is a commercial reason for this curious state of affairs. There is indeed. A large proportion of comic book readers are around the twelve to thirteen mark and are probably in the throes of the glandular Krakatoa known as puberty. They are starting to notice that the girl who sits across the aisle from them at school, the girl who only last year they referred to as 'Freckles' or 'Hyena Breath', is slowly metamorphosing into a different prospect altogether.

From what I can remember of my own time spent in that frenzied, pimply night-mare-world almost anything is likely to become grist to the mill of the adolescent's deranged fantasies. Me, I was nuts about Hayley Mills. All you twisted little demons out there probably feel the same way about Spiderwoman. (What a terrific character. "Hmmm. Here I am in the middle of a thermo-nuclear firefight with HYDRA. What shall I do? I know! I'll have a shower and run around in a bathrobe for six pages!")

This, in itself, is comparatively silly and harmless. After all, there's nothing wrong with women looking nice, even if this endless succession of impeccable Sindy dolls does become mind-skeweringly dull after a while. No. The really nasty stuff comes when comic book artists, writers, editors and publishers decide to go a little further in catering to adolescent fantasies. When they start dishing up evil, sordid little adult fantasies as suitable fare for the growing minds of healthy boys and girls.

The most popular of these peccadilloes seems to be that murky genre devoted to bondage. Bondage, for those of you still young and innocent enough to think that all grownups are mentally stable, is the art of deriving fun and entertainment from being tied up or from tying up your friends and loved ones. Or, in the case of comics, from looking at badly reproduced pictures of people who are tied up, preferably in unusual and uncomfortable positions. Lord knows why. If this universe were a sane place then there wouldn't be platypus ducks.

I've almost lost count of the number of comic cuties who have been featured in an ongoing gags-and-straps situation over the last couple of years. I remember a particularly charming Michael Fleischer story that appeared in DC's The Brave and The Bold during which the usually quite capable Black Canary spent almost the entire issue tied to a chair wearing only her underwear, while the villain of the piece delivered such memorable and sensitive dialogue as "You squirm so prettily, my dear." The same thing happens to The Dazzler and Red Sonja with a startling regularity. If I were a female comic character, I think I'd be inclined to dress up warm, wear three pullovers at once and never go anywhere without a pair of scissors.

The thing that some of you may find difficult to believe is that if a comic depicts somewhere in its pages a young lady, preferably wearing a torn blouse, or tied up, or wearing a torn blouse and tied up, or fighting with another girl who is also wearing a torn blouse, or tying up another girl with the torn remnants of her blouse, or indeed practically anything that involves blouses, girls, ropes or some combination thereof ... if a comic depicts this then the chances are that it is considerably more valuable. Isn't that odd?

You see, if you scan one of the current American comic book price guides you are likely to find some frighteningly inflated sums being charged for certain issues, along with a brief explanation in brackets as to why that issue should be so horrendously overpriced: It might say (Adams) or (Byrne) if it features a currently popular artist, or it might say (1st. Wolverine) or (1st Elektra) if it features a currently popular character. It might also say (GGA). (GGA) means "Good Girl Art".

Good Girl Art means ropes, blouses, etc. etc. Examples of this category range from the Phantom Lady, who wore very little and got tied up a lot, through Lee Elias' Black Cat, who wore very little and got tied up a lot, up to the Huntress who ditto ditto ditto. These prices are established by the comics dealers, responding in their typically generous and totally non-cynical way to the demands of their largely adolescent audience.

And of course, it doesn't stop with women being tied up. It's much better, after all, if the bound woman is being tortured in some way, like say being thrown against a wall or threatened with a branding iron. This is by no means restricted to western comics like the Dazzler panels reproduced here.

The Japanese, as a particularly good example, have built an entire industry upon the idea of woman-hating taken to horrifyingly physical extremes. British novelist Angela Carter in her current book Nothing Sacred, a collection of vicious, funny and entirely accurate critical writings, describes her culture-shock on coming across some of these little gems of Japanese comic art:

"What is actually going on in these pictures often looks rather odd to me because I cannot read Japanese. When a translation is provided, it usually turns out to be worse than I could have imagined. Why isn't this girl fighting back during a gang rape? Because they forethoughtfully dislocated all her limbs, first. Why is this weeping old lady in bed with this wild-eyed boy? She is his mother; she has given herself to him as rough-and-ready therapy for his persistent.. voyeurism. Can this really, truly, be a closeup of a female orifice? Yes. It can."

And those are comics to be read and enjoyed by children and adults alike. Boy. Those crazy Japanese, huh?

Comic book writers and artists have not been allowed to forget entirely that there is an increasingly vocal women's movement. On the other hand, what they've actually done about it is largely half-hearted and ineffectual if not downright damaging. The best example of this is the type of comic character that started to appear around about 1969-1970: The Liberated Woman.

The way that comic book writers and artists have approached the idea of a liberated woman is probably best summed up by someone like Valkyrie from The Defenders. Basically, what you have is a woman striding around bellowing stridently about feminine superiority and the worthlessness of weak, chauvinistic males while showing lots of bare leg and wearing a couple of goblets on her chest.

Feminism, Marvel-style, is presented as something frighteningly harsh and unattractive. Anybody remember The Femizons from the first issue of Marvel’s 'M for Mature' publication, Savage Tales? An entire society of psychotically militant and violent women with lots of strange lesbian overtones thrown in for good measure. The heroine of the story was the odd-woman-out who harboured secret longings for the days when there were still men to sew and cook for. Lord knows what Stan Lee was getting out of his system when he wrote that one, but I hope he felt okay afterwards.

Of course, we don't do so bad ourselves. Take for example the home-grown rape fantasies that populate our very own Sword-and-Sorcery genre. How many times have you opened a copy of Savage Sword of Conan to find some barbarian forcing a lithe Kothian dancing girl back into the hay, ignoring her feeble half-hearted complaints and taking his cue from the delirious ecstatic look that the artist has drawn onto her face, showing you that she doesn't mind, really. In fact, she likes this sort of treatment. Sure she does. Anyone would enjoy being sexually assaulted by an illiterate muscle-bound oaf who stinks of bear grease. That's most people's idea of a good night out.

The message of this sort of story is that women enjoy rape and that they say "No" when they mean "Yes". When one reads in the papers about some of the astonishing proclamations made by judges presiding over rape cases, one wonders if our entire judicial authorities were not given copies of 'Conan the Rapist' to read during their formative years. The other message contained in this material is that real men are good at drinking, reducing people to dog-food with their broadswords and interfering with tavern wenches.

Strange that Conan's creator, Robert E. Howard, was in reality a rather sad and lonely figure who never managed to sever his intense emotional bond with his mother. When she died he drove out to some waste land and blew his own brains out. Conan and all his other heroes were unashamed escapist fantasies of the way he would have liked to have been.

It is a great pity that he couldn't have diverted his undoubted energies into something a bit more positive and healthy. It's a greater pity that he has doomed the following generations of his fans to endless reruns of his hopelessly insecure dreams of brute sex, white slavery and mindless violence.

For a while there you couldn't open a comic put out by either company without finding some formerly totally spineless example of womanhood like the Invisible Girl ranting about Male Chauvinist pigs, or not wanting to do the washing-up any more.

This was feminism boiled down to its most meaningless level, with dialogue by writers who would not recognise a feminist if they happened to run over one on their way to see Confessions of a Driving Instructor.

At the moment however, America is thrashing in the throes of what is politely termed a 'moral revival', which basically means a return to the values and standards of 1942, with a car in every garage and a tranquilised woman in every kitchen. As a result, you don't find many comic book women shooting off their mouths about feminism these days. Of course, there was poor old Ms. Marvel, but look what happened to her.

First she gets impregnated against her will by her own son, then she loses all her powers, then she gets whisked into outer space with the X-Men only to be impregnated against her will by loathsome horrors that look like something you might find living under HR Giger's sink unit. No, girls. You're far better off staying at home and doing the dusting.

The outlook for women in comics, while it has certainly been worse in the past, is still pretty bleak.

Of course, there are a few bright spots. Some male writers do seem to have at least an elementary grasp of what women are all about and can, on occasion, come up with a convincing and non-offensive character.

Frank Miller's pretty good at this... witness his Elektra character. John Wagner has been consistently fair in his portrayal of women in Judge Dredd. But, on the other hand, Elektra still wears precious little in the way of clothing and the female judges of Mega City one are a leather-fetishists idea of heaven.

I can't think of one male artist or writer that hasn't done something pretty offensive at one time or another. I doubt you'd have to look very far in my own work to find some particularly lurid examples, probably as bad as anything I've described here. We all do it. But just because we all do it doesn't mean it's right.

Of course, a lot of things have happened since Howard's day to alter the way in which men see women and the way in which men see themselves in relation to women. This has had a certain amount of impact upon the comics field.

Next issue, I'm going to conclude this rambling, self-indulgent mess by taking a look at the relatively tiny number of women working in comics, including people like Wendy Pini, Mary Jo Duffy, underground cartoonists like Melinda Gebbie, Fanny Tribble and Aline Kominsky, and just about anybody else I happen to think of between now and then. After that, I promise I'll shut up and you can turn these pages over to centre fold-outs of Dark Phoenix in her Hellfire Club costume. Give 'em what they want, that's my motto.

PART III

Despite my reputation as bringer of smiles and sunshine, it occurs to me that the preceding two instalments of this look at the role of women in comics have been about as cheery and optimistic as the results of the last General Election. So, to end on a high note, I thought that this time round we'd have a look at something a bit more positive: namely, the growing prominence of women actually working within the medium and what effect this is likely to have upon the way in which women are treated in the comics themselves.

Anybodyat all familiar with comics over the last fifteen, twenty years or so will have noticed that up until recently there have been practically no women working in comics as artists or writers. With the exception of the excellent Marie Severin's quirky and highly individual work on Dr Strange and The Submariner, most women are relegated to the position of either letterer or colourist.

Now, both of these professions are highly honourable ones and require a great deal of skill to execute properly. As an example, I could cite the terrific colouring job that Glynis Wein did on both The X Men and [there’s obviously a line missing from the text here.]

Like I say, both lettering and colouring are tricky and highly intricate jobs and there are lots of women around doing them very well indeed. But that's not the point.

The point is that all this starts to smack a little of the notion of 'A woman's place’, the idea that women are just naturally more suited for 'pretty' work like colouring or fancy lettering.

Just the same as the notion that women are ‘naturally’ more suited for the feminine tasks such as ironing, dusting and cooking has been exploded by the events of the last ten years, so too are we gradually seeing the elevation of women to more 'responsible' positions within the comics field. But it's a painfully slow process.

While I know of several women editors working within the field and at least one woman writer, as yet I am unaware of any woman artist working full-time within mainstream comics. Now, why should that be?

I suppose that the most obvious answer is that none of these dizzy dames can draw, although even a quick look at some of the artwork currently being done by women outside the comics mainstream shows pretty definitely that this is not the case.

I'll be talking about these women later on in this piece, but just for the moment I want to stick with what's going on in the comics mainstream, starting with women as editors.

We've seen a few of these emerging over the last few years, and, generally, they've been pretty good at what they do. Louise Jones, for example, is currently producing some of the most popular comics that Marvel have on their stands, titles like The X-Men and Ka-Zar.

Over at DC, Laurie Sutton is doing a fine editing job on the Levitz/Giffen Legion of Super Heroes, for my money the most entertaining comic that DC have out at the moment.

Reportedly, Ms Sutton has said that her job is minimal and that basically she just lets Levitz and Giffen do what the hell they like. I tend to think that this is a little self-deprecatory, as the fact that an editor knows when not to interfere does not mean that he or she is not doing their job properly. Quite the reverse. The finished product is all that an editor can be judged on, and by that standard Laurie Sutton is doing just fine.

Her, and Louise Jones and DC supremo Jeanette Kahn, are doing every bit as well as a man would do in their position, maybe a little better in some instances.

But that's all they are doing.

From where I'm standing, it doesn't look as if the fact of women at the editorial helm has made a great deal of difference to the basically male-orientated stuff that actually fills the pages, and perhaps it's naive of me to expect that it would do.

After all, the above-mentioned women are still working within a predominantly masculine world and all of them are presumably answerable to the man above them.

Even Jeanette Kahn, who, while she may be at the top of the tree as far as DC goes, still has the massive weight of Warner Communications hanging above her.

Over at Marvel, where I gather that the Editor-in-Chief does have significantly more freedom from the parent company, the said editor is Jim Shooter, and Jim Shooter is a man. Possibly even two men standing on each other's shoulders.

The point I'm trying to make in my own endearingly clumsy fashion is that women in comics, even women editors and publishers, probably don't get very many chances to make their presence felt in terms of the comic's attitude to women.

I think that it's going to take some massive structural upheavals for that to ever be achieved, and I think that the upheaval is more likely to come from below, from the readers and from the people actually working in a creative capacity on the comic books under discussion.

If, for example, a woman writer was able to make subtle progressions in this area, and if those progressions were met with increasing sales, maybe due to the fact that more girls and women would be buying the comic as a consequence, then I could see the people in charge maybe giving some thought to the issue. Until then, I'm not going to be holding my breath.

For one thing, there aren't that many women writers. There's Tamsyn O’Flynn who did some better-than-average stuff on Lois Lane. There's Laurie Sutton who, before her switch to editorial duties was producing some whimsical and very readable material on the short-lived Adam Strange strip for DC and there's Mary Jo Duffy, probably the most accomplished of the three in terms of actual writing. For those of you not in the know, Ms Duffy was until recently handling the writing on Marvel's Power Man and Iron Fist title, and was responsible for some of the only issues during the entire run of that title that I've found even remotely interesting. Her plots were intriguing, her characters nicely delineated and above all there was a sense of lightness and humour in her writing that came as a breath of fresh air after a stream of writers who seemed intent on portraying Power Man as a Type 'B' comic-book negro: Mean, stupid, jive-talking and socially deprived.

For me, the best thing about her tenure as scriptwriter was that Luke Cage is one of Marvel's most aggressively masculine characters and that under her handling we were able to witness some gentle fun being poked at those attitudes. Sure, it wasn't anything earth-shattering but it was a step in the right direction.

You'll notice I say "was". Mary Jo Duffy has recently either given up or been taken off the book in favour of Denny O’Neill. Why this should be I have no idea, but so much for women writers in comics, eh?

So what does that leave us? Well, rather a lot, actually, once we step outside the confines of the world of mainstream comics and take a look at what else is being done.

The 'Alternative' comics field has been chugging along now for many years in one form or another, but for the purposes of this discussion we'll assume that it really kicked into first gear with the Underground comics movement during the mid-sixties. Now, in those early days, the underground comics scene, while radically different to what the major companies were doing at the time, was still a field largely dominated by men. This showed in the finished product.

Whatever their other merits, I doubt anyone would hold up any of S. Clay Wilson's panoramas of abused and dismembered women as a blow for feminism. Around the early seventies, however, that started to change.

Firstly, there were an increasing number of women becoming involved as writer/artists in the production of underground comics themselves. Women like Trina Robbins, Shary Flenniken and Harvey Kurtzman's daughter Meredith Kurtzman.

Comics produced entirely by women began to appear, ranging from the fairly political Wimmen's Comics through to the more open Wet Satin and Twisted Sisters.

Poor though some of those early efforts are in retrospect, they've opened up a lot of doors and at the present time there seem to be almost as many women working in the undergrounds as men.

There's Melinda Gebbie, who uses her very delicate stippling technique to depict some of the most unnerving and violent psycho-sexual visions one is likely to come across anywhere. There's Diane Noomin, who through her main character, the neurotic and tasteless Di Di Glitz, has explored the American wasteland of suburbia and singles' bars to devastating comic effect.

There's the dreamy surrealism of Mary K. Brown, the stinging urban observation of Mimi Pond, and, in my opinion the best of the bunch, the liberal serving of slapstick and self-hatred served up in the comic work of Aline Kominsky.

Aline Kominsky is the wife of funnybook legend Robert Crumb, although a style more different to Crumb's polished and rubbery cartooning would be difficult to conceive.

Kominsky's work is incredibly murky and crude-looking, but somehow she gets a sense of expression into it that would be lost if she were a more accomplished artist.

Her portrayal of characters and situations is both savage and acute, and she seems to reserve all of her most vicious observations for herself. She portrays herself as a blimp-like hook-nosed acne-sufferer and takes great delight in exaggerating all the negative sides of her character until we are left with a portrait of a vulgar, aggressive and loud-mouthed Jewess known as The Bunch.

You don't come across many people who are prepared to be so unsparingly honest about themselves and when you do it's a real treat, believe me. I'm sure that part of the appeal is the vast sense of relief that she's not turning her nasty and satirical gaze upon you, the reader.

But of course, as with most of the women mentioned above, there's about as much chance of her finding work in the comics mainstream as there is of me winning next year's Miss World contest.

This is less the case with the second category of alternative publishing, what has been termed the ground-level comic. Ground-Level comics are just about sex-free enough to appear on the news-stands without censure, and enjoy the benefits of not being answerable to a higher authority.

The term was coined with the emergence of Mike Friedrich's Now Defunct Star Reach comic line, which, while giving plenty of space to established comic artists like Barry Smith and P. Craig Russell, also made room for talented newcomers like the excellent Lee Marrs.

Marrs is the talent responsible for the semi-autobiographical Pudge, Girl Blimp strip that Star Reach used to publish, along with more serious adventure fare.

This later stuff is, to me, very interesting in that it demonstrates how it is possible to have an exciting storyline without resorting to such popular male obsessions as power-mania and mindless violence in order to spice up the plot.

Another woman in this category, one who has also emerged from what could be called the ground level comic scene, is Wendy Pini. Along with husband Richard, Wendy produces the excellent Elfquest comic which has already run to some thirteen book-length episodes and is probably one of the most confident uses of graphic storytelling produced by people of either gender available at the moment.

I could easily devote an entire article to Wendy Pini, as indeed I could to most of the women above. Suffice to say that it's well worth checking out as lively and entertaining stuff in its own right, as well as being an optimistic glance at what sort of influences might be seen in mainstream comics in the non-too distant future.

Pini and Marrs have both had work published in such largely male-dominated preserves as Epic magazine, and it looked as if, despite the fact that women in general seem to have an approach to art that is vastly different to what we have come to expect from the standard boy's adventure fare, there may be a chance that we will see women gradually infiltrating the comic book business and hopefully enriching it in the process.

You'll notice that most of the people mentioned above are American, so what's the state of women's comics this side of the pond? Well, due to the relative sizes of Britain and America are considerably fewer women working in the medium, but that do tend to compensate in quality for what they lack in numbers.

A good example is Fanny Tribble, who I believe first appeared in the Sour Cream compilations before graduating to her own solo books, Heavy Periods and Funny Trouble, both published by, the feminist-orientated Sheba books.

As with a lot of the women already covered, the emphasis of her cartoons is more upon honesty and directness rather than a preoccupation with detailed inking and flawless anatomy.

Personally, I like Tribble's stuff a lot, largely because she seems to feel confident enough to laugh at the more ludicrous aspects of feminism at the same time as she's laughing at herself and the people around her.

Then there's Posy Simmons, whose work appears regularly in The Guardian. Again, the approach to characterization is both flawless and absorbing, especially in her portrayal of woolly-minded bohemian middle class housewife Wendy Weber.

It's one of those strips that relentlessly lampoons its own audience, and yet does it so well that everyone who reads it, including the real Wendy Webers in her audience, are convinced that she's laughing at somebody else.

Of course, I suppose that the last word in this piece should go to the 'Woman In Comics' who happens to be at the editorial helm of this magazine, the brutal, tough and domineering Ms. Bernie Jaye who I just happen to have with me here in the studio at the moment.

Bernie, as an editor, is there much that you can do about the way women are treated in comics? Particularly as the editor of something like Savage Sword of Conan?

“Well, with Conan it's all reprint material so there's very little you can do to change that. Where I can make my presence felt is when it comes to producing original magazines, in so much as I can choose who's working on it to a certain extent and I needn't commission anybody who I think is going to take a sexist approach.”

Fair enough. But bearing in mind what I said earlier, do you really think that there's much opportunity for a single woman in a male preserve being able to actually make for any major changes? How optimistic are you about the future of women in comics?

“Not very. Not in the immediate future. See, the entire thing is related to the whole social structure, so while it might change eventually it's going to be a pretty slow process. For one thing, women, as a part of society, are just as wrapped up in sexism as anybody else. The difference is that because women are oppressed by sexism they are more likely to want to do something to change the situation. At any one time women know what they want and they know what they're getting. I think that's the area that we need to explore... the gap between what women want and what women get. It's a kind of ‘dissatisfaction gap' and primarily a point of power and change or despair.”

And I think that upon that vaguely sombre note we should wrap up this article. Three issues of guilty male-liberal breast-beating is enough for anybody, right?

If there's anybody out there who has actually managed to wade through all this verbiage and come out the other side with their marbles intact, I'd very much like to hear what you think either for or against. Is there a problem here, or am I exaggerating? Does anything need doing about it and if so what? Write and let me know.

Take six pages explaining exactly why I'm the most boring and arrogant scumbag ever to walk the face of the earth if you must, but write. You, after all, are the reader. You pay the wages. And on the strength of that alone I reckon you've got some say in what sort of attitudes the comic industry is shoving down your throats. Look forward to hearing from you.

St Pancras Panda - Back Street Bugle, 1978-1979

2011-12-17T18:54:28Z

St Pancras Panda ran for eleven episodes in Pauper Press's Back Street Bugle ('Oxford's Other Paper') from issue #6 in February 1978 until issue #25 in March 1979.

#1: The Adventures of St. Pancras Panda
Back Street Bugle #6, February 7-19, 1978

#2: St Pancras Panda - The Story so Far
Back Street Bugle #7, February 21 - March 6, 1978

#3: The Widescreen Adventures of St Pancras Panda
Back Street Bugle #8 March 7-21

#4: The Trial of St Pancras Panda
Back Street Bugle #10, March 21 - April 3, 1978

#5: The Prison Writings of St Pancras Panda
Back Street Bugle #11, April 18 - May 3, 1978

#6: St Pancras Panda Encounters Mental Illness
Back Street Bugle #12, May 4-15, 1978

#7: The Astounding Adventures of St Pancras Panda
Back Street Bugle #14, June 6-19, 1978

#8: St Pancras Panda Gets Right Up.. "The Nose in the Pyramid!"
Back Street Bugle #16, July 4-17, 1978

#9: St Punkras Panda Confronts Apathy in the U.K.
Back Street Bugle #18, August 15 - September 11, 1978

#10: The Electric Kool Aid St Pancras Panda
Back Street Bugle #22, December 1978

#11: St Pancras Panda Gets a Dose O' Dat Old Time Religion
Back Street Bugle #25, March 1979

Technical Vocabularies - Games for May, May 2004

2011-11-04T23:52:40Z

Technical Vocabularies - Games for May
by Alan Moore and Steve Moore
Somnium Press
Mayday 2004

Technical Vocabularies - Games for May is a collection of poems created by Alan Moore and Steve Moore on the 1st of May 2004, and published by Steve Moore's Somnium Press on the same day. It contains four poems, two by each of the authors. In a forthcoming interview with Steve Moore, I asked him about how this came about:

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: Can you tell me something about how Technical Vocabularies came about?

Steve Moore: It was pretty much a spur of the moment thing. Alan was visiting me for the weekend and the Saturday was 1st May 2004, and we just decided we wanted to do something creative. So we decided to produce a booklet of poems in a single day. We decided to use four traditional verse forms ... Alan wrote a pantoum and a sestina, I did a sonnet and a villanelle … which explains the title, ‘Technical Vocabularies’. That’s actually a quotation from Théophile Gautier’s biography of Baudelaire, where he mentions this in a definition of the Decadent writing style. The sub-title ‘Games for May’ comes from a Syd Barrett song and was obviously applicable to the date we were doing this. So we wrote the poems and then I designed and typeset the pages while Alan drew the cover illustration, and we had the whole thing assembled by the evening. It took a bit longer to actually print, of course, and then we had to get together again to sign the copies. So we ended up with a ‘private edition’ of 26 copies to give to our friends, which had silver covers, and a ‘public edition’ of 75 copies with cream covers, which were then sent over to Chris Staros at Top Shelf to market, and they sold out in two hours. We used to do things a bit quicker in those days!

This is posted here with the full permission of both Alan Moore and Steve Moore, to whom I am enormously gratefully for allowing me to do so.

Somnium by Steve Moore

2011-10-12T12:55:32Z

Somnium by Steve Moore

In November Strange Attractor Press, in association with Somnium Press, are publishing Somnium, a novel by Steve Moore, which comes with a long afterword by Alan Moore.

It’s a 288-page A5 hardback, with a cover by John Coulthart and a frontispiece by Steve Moore himself. It will be available in two editions, the standard book at £20, and an edition of 250 numbered books, signed by both Steve and Alan, which will cost £30. And they’re taking orders now, here, which will be shipped in the first week of November. This hardcover, in either edition, is only available from the nice people at Strange Attractor Press, to the very best of my knowledge.

There's a bit more about this further down, but first here's the cover, by the ridiculously talented John Coulthart:-

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Right, that’s the commercial side of this post taken care of. The question is, why am I writing this piece on a blog dedicated to the work of Alan Moore? There are a number of reasons.

First of all, Steve Moore is Alan Moore’s closest friend. They’ve known one another since they met in the early days of British comics’ fandom, back in the 1970s, when Alan was about fourteen, and Steve about seventeen. He’s also said to be the person who taught Alan how to write comics. On top of that, they have also been magical partners for a long time. In both cases, Steve was the Teacher, and Alan the Neophyte. (Here’s the pair of them writing, not entirely seriously, as The Moon and Serpent Grant Egyptian Theatre of Marvels.) If there is one person on this Earth that Alan Moore looks up to, it’s Steve Moore. Which is very nearly a good enough reason for buying this book in itself. If Alan likes it, that’s good enough for me.

Here’s another reason:- For Iain Sinclair’s 2006 anthology London: City of Disappearances, Alan wrote a long piece called Unearthing, which is essentially a psychogeographical biography of Steve, and in it Alan refers to the novel that Steve is writing, which is Somnium. So, you could look at this book as a companion-piece to Unearthing - although more correctly it’s the other way around, I suppose, as a novel trumps an essay. In any case, each one illuminates the other.

Perhaps the most important reason that I think this book deserves to be mentioned, though, is simply for its own sake. Steve Moore has a huge body of work of all kinds behind him, in fields as diverse as comics, Fortean research, and Asian studies. In 1989 I read a two-page article in Atomeka Press’s A1 #2 about Fortean Times which lead me to something that became an important part of my life. Much later, I found out that Steve Moore wrote that article. I’ve read lots of other things I know he wrote, and probably a lot more I don’t even know about. Somnium is said to be his first novel, but that’s not entirely true. He wrote the novelisation of the movie of V for Vendetta, an intriguing piece of work that takes place about half way between the film and the graphic novel (and which I mention in this review of the film version of V, for which I got to do a mini interview with him). If you see it, buy it, and you won’t be disappointed.

Somnium is not the first publication from Somnium Press, either. In 2004 they published Technical Vocabularies: Games for May, a collection of poetry by Alan and Steve, in a very limited edition of 101 signed and numbered copies. I’ve got a copy of it around here somewhere...

So, I’m very keen to get this book. I’ve only the vaguest idea what it’s about – the press release says this:-

A jewelled whirlpool of a tale, Somnium is a richly poetic pagan fantasy, a narrative of shifting levels presented in a dazzling array of styles, ranging from that of the mediæval romance through Elizabethan tragedy to the Gothic novel and the sublime madness of the Decadents.

With its delirious and heartbroken text spiralling out from the classical myth of Endymion and the Greek lunar goddess Selene, Somnium is an extraordinary odyssey through love and loss and lunacy, illuminated by the silvery moonlight of its exquisite language.

... but I don’t think it really matters what it’s about. One way or the other, I things it’s going to be a good book, and an important book.

Fossil Angels - Part 2

2010-10-20T21:09:12Z

Continued from here

Quite apart from all this, there are other sound, compelling reasons why it limits us to think of magic as a science. Firstly and most glaringly, it isn’t. Magic, after it relinquished any and all practical or worldly application following the twilight of the alchemists, can no more be considered as a true science than can, say, psychoanalysis. However much Freud might have wished it otherwise, however he deplored Jung dragging his purported scientific method down into the black and squirming mud of occultism, magic and psychoanalysis cannot, by definition, ever be allowed a place amongst the sciences. Both deal almost entirely with phenomena of consciousness, phenomena that cannot be repeated in laboratory conditions and which thus exist outside the reach of science, concerned only with things that may be measured and observed, proven empirically. Since consciousness itself cannot be shown to provably exist in scientific terms, then our assertions that said consciousness is plagued either by penis envy or by demons of the Qlippoth must remain forever past the boundary limits of what may be ascertained by rational scrutiny. Frankly, it must be said that magic, when considered as a science, rates somewhere just above that of selecting numbers for the lottery by using loved ones’ birthdays.

This would seem to be the crux: magic, if it is a science, clearly isn’t a particularly well-developed one. Where, for example, are the magical equivalents of Einstein’s General or even Special theories of Relativity, let alone that of Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation? Come to that, where are our analogues for laws of gravity, thermodynamics and the rest? Eratosthenes once measured the circumference of the Earth using geometry and shadows. When did we last manage anything as useful or as neat as that? Has there been anything even resembling a general theory since the Emerald Tablet? Once again, perhaps magic’s preoccupation with cause and effect has played a part in this. Our axioms seem mostly on the level of “if we do A then B will happen”. If we say these words or call these names then certain visions will appear to us. As to how they do so, well, who cares? As long as we get a result, the thinking seems to run, why does it matter how this outcome was obtained? If we bang these two flints together for a while they’ll make a spark and set all that dry grass on fire. And have you ever noticed how if you make sure to sacrifice a pig during eclipses, then the sun always returns? Magic is, at best, Palaeolithic science. It really had best put aside that Nobel Prize acceptance speech until it’s shaved its forehead.

Where exactly, one might reasonably enquire, does all this leave us? Having recklessly discarded our time-honoured orders or traditions and torn up our statement of intent; having said that magic should not be Religion and can not be Science, have we taken this Year-Zero Khmer Rouge approach too far, cut our own jugulars with Occam’s razor? Now we’ve pulled down the landmarks and reduced our territory to an undifferentiated wilderness, was this the best time to suggest we also throw away our compass? Now, as night falls on the jungle, we’ve decided we are neither missionaries nor botanists, but what, then, are we? Prey? Brief squeals in pitch dark? If the aims and methods of science or religion are inevitably futile, ultimately mere dead ends, what other role for magic could conceivably exist? And please don’t say it’s anything too difficult, because for all the black robes and the spooky oaths, we tend to frighten easily.

If what we do cannot be properly considered as science or religion, would it be provocative to tender the suggestion that we think of magic as an art? Or even The Art, if you like? It’s not as if the notion were entirely without precedent. It might even be seen as a return to our shamanic origins, when magic was expressed in masques and mimes and marks on walls, the pictograms that gave us written language so that language could in turn allow us consciousness. Music, performance, painting, song, dance, poetry and pantomime could all be easily imagined as having originated in the shaman’s repertoire of mind-transforming magic tricks. Sculpture evolving out of fetish dolls, Willendorf Venus morphing into Henry Moore. Costume design and catwalk fashion, Erte and Yves St. Laurent, arising out of firelit stomps in furs and beads and antlers, throwing shapes designed to startle and arouse. Baroness Thatcher, in her baby-eating prime, suggested that society once more embrace “Victorian values”, an idea that certainly would seem to have caught on within the magical fraternity. This clearly goes nowhere near far enough, however. Let us call instead for a return towards Cro-Magnon values: more creative and robust, with better hair.

Of course, we need not journey so far back into admittedly speculative antiquity for evidence of the uniquely close relationship enjoyed by art and magic. From the cave-wall paintings at Lascaux, on through Greek statuary and friezes to the Flemish masters, on to William Blake, to the Pre-Raphaelites, the Symbolists and the Surrealists, it is only with increasing rarity that we encounter artists of real stature, be they painter, writer or musician, who have not at some point had recourse to occult thinking, whether that be through the agency of their alleged involvement with some occult or Masonic order, as with Mozart, or through some personally cultivated vision, as with Elgar. Opera has its origins, apparently, in alchemy, originated by its early pioneers like Monteverdi as an art-form that included all the other arts within it (music, words, performance, costumes, painted sets) with the intent of passing on alchemical ideas in their most comprehensively artistic and thus most celestial form. Likewise, with the visual arts we need not invoke obvious examples of an occult influence such as Duchamp, Max Ernst or Dali, when there are more surprising names such as Picasso (with his youth spent saturated in hashish and mysticism, with his later work preoccupied with then-occult ideas pertaining to the fourth dimension), or the measured squares and rectangles of Mondrian, created to express the notions woken in him by his study of Theosophy. In fact, the greater part of abstract painting can be traced to famed Blavatsky-booster Annie Besant, and the publication of her theory that the rarefied essential energies of Theosophy’s rays and currents and vibrations could be represented by intuited and formless swirls of colour, an idea that many artists of a fashionably mystic inclination seized on eagerly.

Literature, meanwhile, is so intrinsically involved with magic’s very substance that the two may be effectively considered as the same thing. Spells and spelling, Bardic incantations, grimoires, grammars, magic a “disease of language” as Aleister Crowley so insightfully described it. Odin, Thoth and Hermes, magic-gods and scribe-gods. Magic’s terminology, its symbolism, conjuring and evocation, near-identical to that of poetry. In the beginning was the Word. With magic almost wholly a linguistic construct, it would seem unnecessary to recite a role-call of the occult’s many literary practitioners. In writing, as in painting or in music, an intense and intimate connection to the world of magic is both evident and obvious, appears entirely natural. Certainly, the arts have always treated magic with more sympathy and more respect than science (which, historically, has always sought to prove that occultists are fraudulent or else deluded) and religion (which, historically, has always sought to prove that occultists are flammable). While it shares the social standing and widespread respect afforded to the church or the laboratory, art as a field does not seek to exclude, nor is it governed by a doctrine that’s inimical to magic, such as might be said of its two fellow indicators of humanity’s cultural progress. After all, while magic has, in relatively recent times, produced few mighty theologians of much note and even fewer scientists, it has produced a wealth of inspired and inspiring painters, poets and musicians. Maybe we should stick with what we know we’re good at?

The advantages of treating magic as an art seem at first glance to be considerable. For one thing, there are no entrenched and vested interests capable of mounting an objection to magic’s inclusion in the canon, even if they entertained objections in the first place, which is hardly likely. This is patently far from the case with either science or religion, which are by their very natures almost honour-bound to see that magic is reviled and ridiculed, marginalized and left to rust there on history’s scrap-heap with the Flat Earth, water-memory and phlogiston. Art, as a category, represents a fertile and hospitable environment where magic’s energy could be directed to its growth and progress as a field, rather than channelled into futile struggles for acceptance, or burned uselessly away by marking time to the repeated rituals of a previous century. Another benefit, of course, lies in art’s numinosity, its very lack of hard-edged definition and therefore its flexibility. The questions “what exactly are we doing and why are doing it”, questions of ‘method’ and of ‘aim’, take on a different light when asked in terms of art. Art’s only aim can be to lucidly express the human mind and heart and soul in all their countless variations, thus to further human culture’s artful understanding of the universe and of itself, its growth towards the light. Art’s method is whatever can be even distantly imagined. These parameters of purpose and procedure are sufficiently elastic, surely, to allow inclusion of magic’s most radical or most conservative agendas? Vital and progressive occultism, beautifully expressed, that has no obligation to explain or justify itself. Each thought, each line, each image made exquisite for no other purpose than that they be offerings worthy of the gods, of art, of magic itself. The Art for The Art’s sake.

Paradoxically, even those occultists enamoured of a scientific view of magic would have cause for celebration at this shift in emphasis. As argued above, magic can never be a science as science is currently defined, which is to say as being wholly based upon repeatable results within the measurable and material world. However, by confining its pursuits entirely to the world of the material, science automatically disqualifies itself from speaking of the inner, immaterial world that is in fact the greater part of our human experience. Science is perhaps the most effective tool that human consciousness has yet developed with which to explore the outer universe, and yet this polished and sophisticated instrument of scrutiny is hindered by one glaring blind-spot in that it cannot examine consciousness itself. Since the late 1990s the most rapidly expanding field of scientific interest is apparently consciousness studies, with two major schools of thought-on-thought thus far emerging, each contending with the other. One maintains that consciousness is an illusion of biology, mere automatic and behaviourist cerebral processes that are dependent on the squirt of glands, the seep of enzymes. While this does not seem an adequate description of the many wonders to be found within the human mind, its advocates are almost certainly backing a winner, having realised that their blunt, materialistic theory is the only one that stands a chance of proving itself in the terms of blunt material science. In the other camp, described as more transpersonal in their approach, the current reigning theorem is that consciousness is some peculiar ‘stuff’ pervading the known universe, of which each sentient being is a tiny, temporary reservoir. This viewpoint, while it probably elicits greater sympathy from those of occult inclinations, is quite clearly doomed in terms of garnering eventual scientific credibility. Science cannot even properly discuss the personal, so the transpersonal has no chance. These are matters of the inner world, and science cannot go there. This is why it wisely leaves the exploration of mankind’s interior to a sophisticated tool that is specifically developed for that usage, namely art.

If magic were regarded as an art it would have culturally valid access to the infrascape, the endless immaterial territories that are ignored by and invisible to Science, that are to scientific reason inaccessible, and thus comprise magic’s most natural terrain. Turning its efforts to creative exploration of humanity’s interior space might also be of massive human use, might possibly restore to magic all the relevance and purpose, the demonstrable utility that it has lacked so woefully, and for so long. Seen as an art, the field could still produce the reams of speculative theory that it is so fond of (after all, philosophy and rhetoric may be as easily considered arts as sciences), just so long as it were written beautifully or interestingly. While, for example, The Book of the Law may be debatable in value when considered purely as prophetic text describing actual occurrences or states of mind to come, it cannot be denied that it’s a shit-hot piece of writing, which deserves to be revered as such. The point is that if magic were to drop its unfulfilable pretensions as a science and come out of the closet as an art, it would ironically enough obtain the freedom to pursue its scientific aspirations, maybe even sneak up on some unified field theorem of the supernatural, all in terms acceptable to modern culture. Marcel Duchamp’s magnum opus, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, is more likely to be thought of seriously as genuine alchemy than is the work of whichever poor bastard last suggested that there might be something to cold fusion. Art is clearly a more comfortable environment for magic thinking than is science, with a more relaxing decor, and much better-looking furniture.

Even those damaged souls so institutionalised by membership of magic orders that they can’t imagine any kind of lifestyle that does not involve belonging to some secretive, elite cabal need not despair at finding themselves homeless and alone in our proposed new wilderness. Art has no orders, but it does have movements, schools and cliques with all the furtiveness, the snottyness and the elitism that anyone could wish for. Better yet, since differing schools of art are not so energetically competing with each other for the same ground as are magic orders (how can William Holman Hunt, for instance, be said to compete with Miro, or Vermeer?), this should obviate the need for differing schools of occult thought to feud, or snipe, or generally go on like a bunch of sorry Criswell-out-of-Plan 9-looking bitches.

Just as there is no need to entirely do without fraternities, then similarly there is no necessity for those who’ve grown attached to such things to discard their ritual trappings or, indeed, their rituals. The sole requirement is that they approach these matters with a greater creativity, and with a more discerning eye and ear for that which is profound; that which is beautiful, original or powerful. Make wands and seals and lamens fit to stand in exhibitions of outsider art (How hard can that be? Even mental patients qualify), make every ritual a piece of stunning and intense theatre. Whether one considers magic to be art or not, these things should surely scarcely need be said. Who are our private rituals and adornments meant to please, if not the gods? When did they ever give us the impression they’d be pleased by that which was not suitably exquisite or original? Gods, if they’re anything at all, are known to be notoriously partial to creation, and may therefore be presumed to be appreciative of human creativity, the closest thing that we’ve developed to a god-game and our most sublime achievement. To be once more thought of as an art would allow magic to retain all that is best about the field it was, while at the same time offering the opportunity for it to flourish and progress into a future where it might accomplish so much more.

How would this mooted change of premise impact, then, upon our methodology? What shifts of emphasis might be entailed, and could such changes be to the advantage of both magic as a field and us as individuals? If we seriously mean to reinvent the occult as The Art, one basic alteration to our working methods that might yield considerable benefit would be if we resolved to crystallise whatever insights, truths or visions our magical sorties had afforded us into some artefact, something that everybody else could see as well, just for a change. The nature of the artefact, be it a film, a haiku, an expressive pencil-drawing or a lush theatrical extravaganza, is completely unimportant. All that matters is that it be art, and that it remain true to its inspiration. Were it adopted, at a stroke, a relatively minor tweak of process such as this might utterly transform the world of magic. Rather than be personally-motivated, crudely causal workings of both dubious intent and doubtful outcome, hand-job magic ended usually in scant gratification, our transactions with the hidden world would be made procreative, generating issue in the form of tangible results that everyone might judge the worth of for themselves. In purely evangelic terms, as propaganda for a more enlightened magic worldview, art must surely represent our most compelling ‘evidence’ of other states and planes of being. While the thoughts of Austin Spare are undeniably of interest when expressed in written form as theory, it is without doubt his talents as an artist that provide the sense of entities and other worlds actually witnessed and recorded, the immediate authenticity which has bestowed on Spare much of his reputation as a great magician. More importantly, work such as Spare’s provides a window on the occult world, allowing those outside a clearer and perhaps more eloquent expression of what magic is about than any arcane tract, offering them a worthwhile reason to approach the occult in the first place.

In our wilderness scenario for magic, with the fierce and fair Darwinian competition between ideas that’s implied, treating the occult as an art would also lend a means of dealing with (or carrying out) any disputes that might arise. Art has a way of sorting out such squabbles for itself, inarguably, without resorting to lame processes like, for example, violent conflict resolution, litigation, or, much worse, girly democracy. With art, the strongest vision will prevail, even if it takes decades, centuries to do so, as with William Blake. There is no need to even take a vote upon which is the strongest vision: that would be the one just sitting quietly in its undisputed corner of our culture, nonchalantly picking its teeth with the sternums of its rivals. Mozart brings down Salieri, sleeps for two days after feasting, during which time the savannah can relax. Lunging out suddenly from tower-block shadows, J.G. Ballard takes out Kingsley Amis, while Jean Cocteau be all over D.W. Griffiths’ scrawny Imperial Cyclops ass like a motherfucker. An artistic natural selection, bloody-minded but balanced, seems a far more even-handed way of settling affairs than arbitrary and unanswerable rulings handed down by heads of orders, such as Moina Mathers telling Violet Firth her aura lacked the proper symbols.

Also, if the vicious struggle for survival is enacted purely in the terms of whose idea is the most potent and most beautiful in its expression, then bystanders at the cockfight are more likely to end up spattered with gorgeous metaphors than with dripping, still-warm innards. Even our most pointless and incestuous feuds might thereby have a product that enriched the world in some small measure, rather than no outcome save that magic seem still more a bickering and inane children’s playground than everyone thought it was already. Judged on its merits, such a jungle-logic attitude to magic, with its predatory aesthetics and ideas competing in a wilderness that’s fertilised by their exquisite cultural droppings, would appear to offer the occult a win-win situation. How could anyone object, except for those whose ideas might be seen as plump, slow-moving, flightless and a handy source of protein; those well-qualified as primary prey who are perhaps beginning to suspect that this is all a tiger’s argument for open-plan safari parks?

Upon consideration, these last-mentioned doubts and fears, while surely trivial within a context of magic’s well-being as a field, are likely to be the most serious obstacles to any wide acceptance of a primal swampland ethic such as is proposed. However, if we accept that the sole alternatives to jungle are a circus or a zoo, the notion is perhaps more thinkable. And if our precious ideas should be clawed to pieces when they’re scarcely out the nest, then while this is of course distressing, it’s no more of an ordeal than that endured by any spotty schoolboy poet or Sunday painter who exposes their perhaps ungainly effort to another’s scrutiny. Why should fear of ridicule or criticism, fear that the most lowly karaoke drunk is seemingly quite capable of overcoming, trouble occultists who’ve vowed to stand unflinching at the gates of Hell itself? In fact, shouldn’t the overcoming of such simple phobias be a prerequisite for anyone who wants to style his or her self as a magician? If we regarded magic as an art and art as magic, if like ancient shamans we perceived a gift for poetry as magic power, magically bestowed, wouldn’t we finally have some comeback when the ordinary person in the street asked us, quite reasonably, to demonstrate some magic, then, if we think we’re so thaumaturgical?

How empowering it would be for occultists to steadily accumulate, through sheer hard work, genuine magical abilities that can be provably displayed. Talents the ordinarily intelligent and rational person can quite readily accept as being truly magical in origin; readily engage with in a way that current occultism, with its often wilful and unnecessary obscurantism, cannot manage. Urgently expressed and heartfelt though most modern grimoires most assuredly may be, a skim through Borges’ Fictions or a glimpse of Escher or a side or two of Captain Beefheart would be much more likely to persuade the ordinary reader to a magically receptive point of view. If consciousness itself, with its existence in the natural world being beyond the power of science to confirm, is therefore super-natural and occult, surely art is one of the most obvious and spectacular means by which that supernatural realm of mind and soul reveals itself, makes itself manifest upon a gross material plane.

Art’s power is immediate and irrefutable, immense. It shifts the consciousness, noticeably, of both the artist and her audience. It can change men’s lives and thence change history, society itself. It can inspire us unto wonders or else horrors. It can offer supple, young, expanding minds new spaces to inhabit or can offer comfort to the dying. It can make you fall in love, or cut some idol’s reputation into ribbons at a glance and leave them maimed before their worshippers, dead to posterity. It conjures Goya devils and Rosetti angels into visible appearance. It is both the bane and most beloved tool of tyrants. It transforms the world which we inhabit, changes how we see the universe, or those about us, or ourselves. What has been claimed of sorcery that art has not already undeniably achieved? It’s led a billion into light and slain a billion more. If the accretion of occult ability and power is our objective, we could have no more productive, potent means or medium than art whereby this is to be accomplished. Art may not make that whisk-broom come to life and multiply and strut round cleaning up your crib...but nor does magic, for that matter...yet simply dreaming up the image must have surely earned Walt Disney enough money so he could pay somebody to come by and take care of that stuff for him. And still have enough change to get his head put in this massive hieroglyphic-chiselled ice cube somewhere underneath the Magic Kingdom. There, surely to God, is all of the implacable Satanic influence that anybody, sane or otherwise, could ever ask for.

In reclaiming magic as The Art, amok and naked in a Rousseau wilderness devoid of lodges, it is probable that those made most uneasy by the proposition would be those who felt themselves unprivileged by such a move, those who suspected that they had no art to offer which might be sufficient to its task. Such trepidations, while they may be understandable, surely cannot sit well with the heroic, fearless image one imagines many occultists to have confected for themselves; seem somehow craven. Is there truly nothing, neither craft nor art, which they can fashion to an implement of magic? Do they have no talent that may be employed creatively and magically, be it for mathematics, dancing, dreaming, drumming, stand-up comedy, striptease, graffiti, handling snakes, scientific demonstration, cutting perfectly good cows in half or sculpting scarily realistic busts of European monarchy from their own faeces? Or, like, anything? Even if such abilities are not at present plentiful or evident, cannot these timorous souls imagine that by application and some honest labour talents may be first acquired then honed down to a useful edge? Hard work should not be a completely foreign concept to the Magus. This is not even The Great Work that we’re necessarily discussing here, it’s just the Good-But-Not-Great Work. Much more achievable. If that still sounds too difficult and time-consuming, you could always make the acquisition of profound artistic talent and success your heart’s desire and simply spadge over a sigil. Never fails, apparently. So what excuse could anybody have for not embracing art as magic, magic as The Art? If you are truly, for whatever reason, now and for all time incapable of any creativity, then are you sure that magic is the field to which you are most eminently suited? After all, the fast-food chains are always hiring. Ten years and you could be a branch manager.

By understanding art as magic, by conceiving pen or brush as wand, we thus return to the magician his or her original shamanic powers and social import, give back to the occult both a product and a purpose. Who knows? It might turn out that by implementing such a shift we have removed the need for all our personally-motivated causal charms and curses, our hedge-magic. If we were accomplished and prolific in our art, perhaps the gods might be prepared to send substantial weekly postal orders, all without us even asking. In the sex and romance stakes, as artists we’d all make out like Picasso. Women, men and animals would offer themselves naked at our feet, even in Woolworth’s. As for the destruction of our enemies, we simply wouldn’t bother to invite them to our launch-parties and openings, and they’d just die.

This re-imagining of magic as The Art could clearly benefit the occult world in general and the individual magician in particular, but let’s not overlook the fact that it might also benefit the arts. It must be said that modern mainstream culture, for the greater part and from most civilised perspectives, is a Tupperware container full of sick. The artists of the age (admittedly, with a few notable exceptions) seem intent upon reflecting the balloon-like hollowness and consequent obsession with mere surface that we find amongst our era’s governments and leaders. Just a year or two ago, the old Tate Gallery’s Blake retrospective drew from critics sharp comparisons with the Brit-artists currently inhabiting Blake’s Soho stamping ground, observing that the modern crop of tunnel-visionaries pale when held up to Blake’s Lambeth light. The studied and self-conscious ‘craziness’ of Tracey Emin is made tame beside his holy tyger madness, all accomplished within howling-range of Bedlam. Damien Hirst is shocking in a superficial manner, but not shocking to the point where he has loyalty oaths, vigilante lynch-mobs and sedition trials to deal with. Jake and Dinos Chapman’s contributions to Apocalypse (the exhibition, not the situation with Iraq) are not in any sense a revelation. William Blake could pull a far superior apocalypse from The Red Dragon’s sculpted crimson butt without a second thought. The modern art world deals now in high-concept items, much like the related (through Charles Saatchi) field of advertising. It appears to be bereft of vision, or indeed of the capacity for such, and offers little in the way of nourishment to its surrounding culture, which could use a decent and sustaining meal right about now. Couldn’t a reaffirmation of the magical as art provide the inspiration, lend the vision and the substance that are all so manifestly lacking in the world of art today? Wouldn’t such a soul-infusion allow art to live up to its purpose, to its mission, to insist that the interior and subjective human voice be heard in culture, heard in government, heard on the stained Grand Guignol stages of the world? Or should we just sit back and wait for praeter-human intellects from Sirius or Disney’s walking whisk-brooms or the Aeon of Horus to arrive and sort this mess out for us?

A productive union, a synthesis of art and magic propagated in a culture, an environment, a magic landscape lacking temple walls and heirloom furnishings that everyone tripped over anyway. Staged amidst the gemming ferns and purpled steam-heat of a re-established occult biosphere, this passionate conjunction of two human faculties would surely constitute a Chemic Wedding which, if we were lucky and things got completely out of hand at the Chemic Reception, might precipitate a Chemic Orgy, an indecent, riotous explosion of suppressed creative urges, astral couplings of ideas resulting in multiple births of chimerae and radiant monsters. Fierce conceptual centaurs with their legs of perfume and their heads of music. Mermaid notions, flickering silent movies that are architecture from the waist down. Genre sphinxes and style manticores. Unheard of and undreamed mutations, novel art-forms breeding and adapting fast enough to keep up with the world and its momentum, acting more like life-forms, more like fauna, more like flora to proliferate in our projected magic wilderness. The possible release of fusion energy made suddenly available when these two heavy cultural elements, magic and art, are brought into dynamic close proximity might fairy-light our jungle, might even help to illuminate the mainstream social mulch that it, and we, are rooted in.

Nothing prevents us throwing off the callipers and the restraints, the training wheels that have retarded magic’s forward progress for so long that moss obliterates its railway tracks and branch-line sidings both. Nothing can stop us, if we have the will, from redefining magic as an art, as something vital and progressive. Something which in its ability to deal with the interior human world has a demonstrable utility, can be of actual use to ordinary people, with their inner worlds increasingly encroached upon by a tyrannical, colonialist exterior that’s intent on strip-mining them of any dreams or joy or self-determination. If we so resolved we could restore to magic a potential and a potency, a purpose it has barely caught a glimpse of in the last four hundred years. Were we prepared to take on the responsibility for this endeavour then the world might see again the grand and terrible magicians that, outside of bland and inoffensive children’s books or big-screen and obscenely-budgeted extravagances, it has all but managed to forget. It might be argued that at this nerve-wracking juncture of our human situation, magical perspectives are not merely relevant but are an indispensable necessity if we are to survive with minds and personalities intact. By redefining the term magic we could once again confront the world’s iniquities and murk in our preferred, time-honoured method: with a word.

Make the word magic mean something again, something worthy of the name, something which, as a definition of the magical, would have delighted you when you were six; when you were seventy. If we accomplish this, if we can reinvent our scary, wild and fabulous art for these scary, wild and fabulous new times that we are moving through, then we could offer the occult a future far more glorious and brimming with adventure than we ever thought or wished its fabled past had been. Humanity, locked in this penitentiary of a material world that we have been constructing for ourselves for centuries now, has perhaps never needed more the key, the cake-with-file-in, the last-minute pardon from the governor that magic represents. With its nonce-case religions and their jaw-droppingly demented fundamentalists, with its bedroom-farce royalties, and with its demagogues more casually shameless in their vile ambitions than they’ve been in living memory, society at present, whether in the east or west, would seem to lack a spiritual and moral centre, would indeed appear to lack even the flimsiest pretence at such a thing. The science which sustains society, increasingly, at its most far-flung quantum edges finds it must resort to terminology from the kabbala or from Sufi literature to adequately state what it now knows about our cosmic origins. In all its many areas and compartments, all its scattered fields, the world would seem to be practically crying out for the numinous to come and rescue it from this berserk material culture that has all but eaten it entire and shat it through a colander. And where is magic, while all this is going on?

It’s trying to force our boyfriend to come back to us. It’s scraping cash together to fend off the black hole in our plastic, trying to give that prick that our ex-wife ran off with something terminal. It’s making sure that Teen Witch slumber parties go successfully. It’s putting wispy New Age people into contact with their wispy New Age angels, and they’re all, like, “No way”, and the angels are all, like, “Whatever”. It’s attending all of our repeated rituals with the enthusiasm of a patron come to see The Mouse Trap for the seven hundredth time. It spends its weekends trying to read our crappy sigils under their obscuring glaze of jiz, and in retaliation only puts us into contact with outpatient entities, community-care Elohim that rant like wino scientologists and never make a lick of sense. It’s at the trademarks office, registering magic seals. It’s handling an introductions agency that represents our only chance of ever meeting any strange Goth pussy. It’s off getting us a better deal on that new Renault, helping to prolong the wretched life of our incontinent and blind pet spaniel Gandalf, networking like crazy to secure those Harry Potter Hogwart’s Tarot rights. It’s still attempting to sort out the traffic jam resulting from the Aeon of Horus having jack-knifed through the central reservation and into the southbound carriageway, hit head-on by the Aeon of Maat, which spilled its cargo of black feathers onto the hard shoulder. It’s not sure the ketamine was such a good idea. It’s sitting looking nervous on a thousand bookshelves between lifestyle interviews with necrophiles and fashion retrospectives on the Manson family. It’s hanging out at neo-nazi jamborees near Dusseldorf. It’s wondering if it should introduce a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding the 11th Degree. It’s advising Cherie Blair on acupuncture studs, the whole of Islington upon Feng Sui. It’s pierced its cock in an attempt to shock its middle-class Home Counties parents, who’ve been dead for ten years, anyway. It wishes it were David Blaine. It wishes it were Buffy. Or, quite frankly, anyone.

We could, if we desired it, have things otherwise. Rather than magic that’s in thrall to a fondly imagined golden past, or else to some luridly-fantasized Elder God theme-park affair of a future, we could try instead a magic adequate and relevant to its own extraordinary times. We could, were we to so decide, ensure that current occultism be remembered in the history of magic as a fanfare peak rather than as a fading sigh; as an embarrassed, dying mumble; not even a whimper. We could make this parched terrain a teeming paradise, a tropic where each thought might blossom into art. Under the altar lies the studio, the beach. We could insist upon it, were we truly what we say we are. We could achieve it not by scrawling sigils but by crafting stories, paintings, symphonies. We could allow our art to spread its holy psychedelic scarab wings across society once more, perhaps in doing so allow some light or grace to fall upon that pained, benighted organism. We could be made afresh in our fresh undergrowth, stand reinvented at a true dawn of our Craft within a morning world, our paint still wet, just-hatched and gummy-eyed in Eden. Newborn in Creation.

Alan Moore
Northampton
31st December, 2002.

Fossil Angels - Part 1

2010-10-20T21:05:40Z

Fossil Angels was written by Alan Moore in December 2002, and was to appear in KAOS #15. KAOS #15 never actually appeared, and the piece has been without a home since then. (More information about KAOS and why this wasn't published there in this article on Bleeding Cool.) I was lucky enough to be given a number of Alan Moore’s scripts by Alan himself a few years ago, and this was amongst them. I asked if I could publish it and, when another publication which it was slated to appear in folded, Alan told me I was free to go ahead. So, I am very proud to be allowed to present this piece here on Glycon for its first publication anywhere. It is in two parts, with a link to the second part at the end of this page. This is, and remains, the sole property and copyright of its creator, Alan Moore.

FOSSIL ANGELS

Regard the world of magic. A scattering of occult orders which, when not attempting to disprove each other’s provenance, are either cryogenically suspended in their ritual rut, their game of Aiwaz Says, or else seem lost in some Dungeons & Dragons sprawl of channelled spam, off mapping some unfalsifiable and thus completely valueless new universe before they’ve demonstrated that they have so much as a black-lacquered fingernail’s grip on the old one. Self-consciously weird transmissions from Tourette’s-afflicted entities, from glossolalic Hammer horrors. Fritzed-out scrying bowls somehow receiving trailers from the Sci-Fi channel. Far too many secret chiefs, and, for that matter, far too many secret indians.

Beyond this, past the creaking gates of the illustrious societies, dilapidated fifty-year-old follies where they start out with the plans for a celestial palace but inevitably end up with the Bates Motel, outside this there extends the mob. The psyche pikeys. Incoherent roar of our hermetic home-crowd, the Akashic anoraks, the would-be wiccans and Temple uv Psychic Forty-Somethings queuing up with pre-teens for the latest franchised fairyland, realm of the irretrievably hobbituated. Pottersville.

Exactly how does this confirm an aeon of Horus, aeon of anything except more Skinner-box consumerism, gangster statecraft, mind-to-the-grindstone materialism? Is what seems almost universal knee-jerk acquiescence to conservative ideals truly a sign of rampant Theleme? Is Cthulhu coming back, like, anytime soon, or are the barbarous curses from the outer dark those of Illuminists trying to find their arses with a flashlight? Has contemporary western occultism accomplished anything that is measurable outside the séance parlour? Is magic of any definable use to the human race other than offering an opportunity for dressing up? Tantric tarts and vicars at Thelemic theme nights. Pentagrams In Their Eyes. “Tonight, Matthew, I will be the Logos of the Aeon.” Has magic demonstrated a purpose, justified its existence in the way that art or science or agriculture justify their own? In short, does anyone have the first clue what we are doing, or precisely why we’re doing it?

Certainly, magic has not always been so seemingly divorced from all immediate human function. Its Palaeolithic origins in shamanism surely represented, at that time, the only human means of mediation with a largely hostile universe upon which we as yet exerted very little understanding or control. Within such circumstances it is easy to conceive of magic as originally representing a one-stop reality, a worldview in which all the other strands of our existence...hunting, procreation, dealing with the elements or cave-wall painting...were subsumed. A science of everything, its relevance to ordinary mammalian concerns both obvious and undeniable.

This role, that of an all-inclusive “natural philosophy”, obtained throughout the rise of classical civilization and could still be seen, albeit in more furtive fashion, as late as the 16th century, when the occult and mundane sciences were not yet so distinguishable as they are today. It would be surprising, for example, if John Dee did not allow his knowledge of astrology to colour his invaluable contributions to the art of navigation, or vice-versa. Not until the Age of Reason gradually prevented our belief in and thus contact with the gods that had sustained our predecessors did our fledgling sense of rationality identify the supernatural as a mere vestigial organ in the human corpus, obsolete and possibly diseased, best excised quickly.

Science, grown out of magic, magic’s gifted, pushy offspring, its most practical and thus materially profitable application, very soon decided that the ritual and symbolic lumber of its alchemic parent-culture was redundant, an encumbrance and an embarrassment. Puffed up in its new white lab coat, ballpoints worn like medals at the breast, science came to be ashamed in case its mates (history, geography, P.E) caught it out shopping with its mum, with all her mumbling and chanting. Her third nipple. Best that she be nutted off to some secure facility, some Fraggle Rock for elderly and distressed paradigms.

The rift this caused within the human family of ideas seemed irrevocable, with two parts of what had once been one organism sundered by reductionism, one inclusive “science of everything” become two separate ways of seeing, each apparently in bitter, vicious opposition to the other. Science, in the process of this acrimonious divorce, might possibly be said to have lost contact with its ethical component, with the moral basis necessary to prevent it breeding monsters. Magic, on the other hand, lost all demonstrable utility and purpose, as with many parents once the kid’s grown up and gone. How do you fill the void? The answer, whether we are talking about magic or of mundane, moping mums and dads with empty nests, is, in all likelihood, “with ritual and nostalgia”.

The magical resurgence of the nineteenth century, with its retrospective and essentially romantic nature, would seem to have been blessed with both these factors in abundance. Whilst it’s difficult to overstate the contributions made to magic as a field by, say, Eliphas Levi or the various magicians of the Golden Dawn, it’s just as hard to argue that these contributions were not overwhelmingly synthetic, in that they aspired to craft a synthesis of previously existing lore, to formalise the variegated wisdoms of the ancients.

It does not belittle this considerable accomplishment if we observe that magic, during those decades, was lacking in the purposeful immediacy, the pioneering rush characterising, for example, Dee and Kelly’s work. In their development of the Enochian system, late Renaissance magic would seem typified as urgently creative and experimental, forward-looking. In comparison, the nineteenth century occultists seem almost to have shifted magic into a revered past tense, made it a rope-railed museum exhibit, an archive, with themselves as sole curators.

All the robes and the regalia, with their whiff of the historical re-enactment crowd, a seraphic Sealed Knot Society, only with fractionally less silly-looking gear. The worryingly right-wing consensus values and the number of concussed and stumbling casualties, upon the other hand, would probably have been identical. The rites of the exalted magic orders and the homicidal beered-up maulings of the Cromwell tribute-bands are also similar in that both gain in poignancy by being juxtaposed against the grim, relentless forward trundle of industrial reality. Beautifully painted wands, obsessively authentic pikes, held up against the bleak advance of chimney-stacks. How much of this might be most accurately described as compensatory fantasies of the machine age? Role-playing games which only serve to underline the brutal fact that these activities no longer have contemporary human relevance. A wistful recreation of long-gone erotic moments by the impotent.

Another clear distinction between the magicians of the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries lies in their relation to the fiction of their day. The brethren of the early Golden Dawn would seem to be inspired more by the sheer romance of magic than by any other aspect, with S.L McGregor Mathers lured into the craft by his desire to live out Bulwer-Lytton’s fantasy Zanoni. Encouraged Moina to refer to him as “Zan”, allegedly. Woodford and Westcott, on the other hand, anxious to be within an order that had even more paraphernalia than Rosicrucian Masonry, somehow acquire a contact in the fabled (literally) ranks of the Geltische Dammerung, which means something like “golden tea-time”. They are handed their diplomas from Narnia, straight out the back of the wardrobe. Or there’s Alex Crowley, tiresomely attempting to persuade his school-chums to refer to him as Shelley’s Alastor, like some self-conscious Goth from Nottingham called Dave insisting that his vampire name is Armand. Or, a short while later, there’s all of the ancient witch-cults, all the blood-line covens springing up like children of the dragon’s teeth wherever Gerald Gardner’s writings were available. The occultists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all seemed to want to be Aladdin’s uncle in some never-ending pantomime. To live the dream.

John Dee, conversely, was perhaps more wilfully awake than any other person of his day. More focussed and more purposeful. He did not need to search for antecedents in the fictions and mythologies available to him, because John Dee was in no sense pretending, was not playing games. He inspired, rather than was inspired by, the great magic fictions of his times. Shakespeare’s Prospero. Marlow’s Faust. Ben Johnson’s piss-taking The Alchemist. Dee’s magic was a living and progressive force, entirely of its moment, rather than some stuffed and extinct specimen, no longer extant save in histories or fairytales. His was a fresh, rip-roaring chapter, written entirely in the present tense, of the ongoing magical adventure. By comparison, the occultists that followed some three centuries down the line were an elaborate appendix, or perhaps a bibliography, after the fact. A preservation league, lip-synching dead men’s rituals. Cover versions. Sorcerous karaoke. Magic, having given up or had usurped its social function, having lost its raison d’etre, its crowd-pulling star turn, found itself with just the empty theatre, the mysterious curtains. Dusty hampers of forgotten frocks, unfathomable props from cancelled dramas. Lacking a defined role, grown uncertain of its motivations, magic seems to have had no recourse save sticking doggedly to the established script, enshrining each last cough and gesture, the by-now hollow performance freeze-dried, shrink-wrapped; artfully repackaging itself for English Heritage.

How unfortunate, then, that it was this moment in the history of magic, with content and function lost beneath an over-detailed ritual veneer, all mouth and trousers, which the later orders chose to crystallize about. Without a readily apparent aim or mission, no marketable commodity, the nineteenth century occultist would seem instead to lavish an inordinate amount of his attention on the fancy wrapping paper. Possibly unable to conceive of any group not structured in the hierarchical manner of the lodges that they were accustomed to, Mathers and Westcott dutifully imported all the old Masonic heirlooms when it came to furnishing their fledgling order. All the outfits, grades and implements. The mindset of a secret and elite society. Crowley, of course, took all this heavy and expensive-looking luggage with him when he jumped ship to create his O.T.O, and all orders since then, even purportedly iconoclastic enterprises such as, say, the I.O.T, would seem to have eventually adopted the same High Victorian template. Trappings of sufficient drama, theories intricate enough to draw attention from what the uncharitable might perceive as lack of any practical result, any effect upon the human situation.

The fourteenth (and perhaps final?) issue of the estimable Joel Biroco’s KAOS magazine featured a reproduction of a painting, a surprisingly affecting and hauntingly beautiful work from the brush of Marjorie Cameron, scary redhead, Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell’s housemate, putative Scarlet Woman, top Thelemic totty. Almost as intriguing as the work itself, however, is the title: Fossil Angel, with its contradictory conjurings of something marvellous, ineffable and transitory combined with that which is by definition dead, inert and petrified. Is there a metaphor available to us in this, both sobering and instructive? Could not all magical orders, with their doctrines and their dogmas, be interpreted as the unmoving calcified remains of something once intangible and full of grace, alive and mutable? As energies, as inspirations and ideas that danced from mind to mind, evolving as they went until at last the limestone drip of ritual and repetition froze them in their tracks, stopped them forever halfway through some reaching, uncompleted gesture? Trilobite illuminations. Fossil angels.

Something inchoate and ethereal once alighted briefly, skipping like a stone across the surface of our culture, leaving its faint, tenuous impression in the human clay, a footprint that we cast in concrete and apparently remain content to genuflect before for decades, centuries, millennia. Recite the soothing and familiar lullabies or incantations word for word, then carefully restage the old, beloved dramas, and perhaps something will happen, like it did before. Stick cotton-reels and tinfoil on that cardboard box, make it look vaguely like a radio and then maybe John Frumm, he come, bring helicopters back? The occult order, having made a fetish out of pageants that passed by or were rained off some half-a-century ago, sits like Miss Haversham and wonders if the beetles in the wedding cake in any way confirm Liber Al vel Legis.

Once again, none of this is intended to deny the contribution that the various orders and their works have made to magic as a field, but merely to observe that this admittedly considerable contribution is of, largely, a custodial nature in its preservation of past lore and ritual, or else that its elegant synthesis of disparate teachings is its principal (perhaps only) achievement. Beyond such accomplishments, however, the abiding legacy of nineteenth century occult culture would seem mostly antithetical to the continued health, proliferation and ongoing viability of magic, which, as a technology, has surely long outgrown its ornate late-Victorian vase and is in dire need of transplanting. All of the faux-Masonic furniture and scaffolding imported by Westcott and Mathers, basically for want of being able to imagine any other valid structure, is, by our own period, become a limitation and impediment to magic’s furtherance. Leftover hoodwinks, too-tight ceremonial sashes that constrain all growth, restrict all thought, limit the ways in which we conceive of or can conceive of magic. Mimicking the constructs of the past, thinking in terms that are today not necessarily applicable – perhaps they never really were – seems to have rendered modern occultism utterly incapable of visualizing any different method by which it might organise itself; unable to imagine any progress, any evolution, any future, which is probably a sure-fire means of guaranteeing that it doesn’t have one.

If the Golden Dawn is often held up as a paragon, a radiant exemplar of the perfect and successful order, this is almost certainly because its ranks included many well-known writers of proven ability and worth whose membership loaned the society more credibility than it would ever, by return, afford to them. The luminous John Coulthart has suggested that the Golden Dawn might be most charitably regarded as a literary society, where slumming scribes searched for a magic that they might have found demonstrable and evident, already there alive and functioning in their own work, were they not blinded by the glare of all that ceremony, all of that fantastic kit. One author who quite clearly contributed more that was of real magical value to the world through his own fiction than through any operations at the lodge was Arthur Machen. While admitting to his great delight at all the mystery and marvel of the order’s secret ceremonies, Machen felt compelled to add when writing of the Golden Dawn in his autobiography, Things Near and Far, that “as for anything vital in the secret order, for anything that mattered two straws to any reasonable being, there was nothing in it, and less than nothing...the society as a society was pure foolishness concerned with impotent and imbecile Abracadabras. It knew nothing whatever about anything and concealed the fact under an impressive ritual and a sonorous phraseology.” Astutely, Machen notes the seemingly inverse relationship between genuine content and baroque, elaborate form characterizing orders of this nature, a critique as relevant today as it was then, in 1923.

The territory of magic, largely abandoned as too hazardous since Dee and Kelly’s period, was staked out and reclaimed (when that was safe to do) by nineteenth century occult enthusiasts, by middle-class suburbanites who turned the sere, neglected turf into a series of exquisitely appointed ornamental gardens. Decorative features, statues and pagodas of great intricacy, were contrived in imitation of some over-actively imagined priesthood past. Terminal gods among the neat beds of azaleas.

The problem is that gardeners sometimes quarrel. Boundary disputes. Tenant vendettas and evictions, moonlight flits. Once-enviable properties are boarded up, are often squatted by new problem families, new cabals. Hang on to the old nameplate, keep the same address but let the place go, and allow its grounds to fall into a state of disrepair. Slugs in the moly, bindweed spreading out amongst twenty-two-petal roses. By the nineteen-nineties, magic’s landscape garden was a poorly maintained sprawl of tired, low-yield allotments with bad drainage, paintwork peeling on the cod-Egyptian summer houses, now become mere sheds where paranoid Home Counties vigilantes sat awake all night, nursing their shotguns and expecting teenage vandals. There’s no produce that’s worth mentioning. The flowers are without perfume and no longer manage to enchant. Y’know, it were all fancy lamens and Enochian chess round here once, and now look at it. The straggly hedgerows with their Goetic topiary as parched as tinder, dry rot in that Rosicrucian-look gazebo’s listing timbers. What this place could do with is a good insurance fire.

No, seriously. Scorched earth. It has a lot to recommend it. Think how it would look when all the robes and banners caught. Might even take out that whole Mind, Body, and Spirit eyesore if the wind were in the right direction. Loss of life and livelihood would of course be inevitable, some collateral damage in the business sector, but it sure would be real pretty. Temple beams collapsing in a gout of sparks. “Forget me! Save the cipher manuscripts!” Amongst the countless Gnostic Masses, oaths and calls and banishings, whatever caused them to forget one lousy fire drill? Nobody’s quite certain how they should evacuate the inner plane, don’t even know how many might still be in there. Finally there emerge heart-wrenching tales of individual bravery. “H-He went back in to rescue the LAM drawing, and we couldn’t stop him.” Afterwards, a time for tears, for counselling. Bury the dead, appoint successors. Crack open the seal on Hymenaeus Gamma. Cast a rueful eye across our blackened acres. Take it one day at a time, sweet Jesus. Blow our noses, pull ourselves together. Somehow we’ll get through.

What then? Scorched earth, of course, is rich in nitrates and provides a basis for slash-and-burn agriculture. In charred dirt, the green shoots of recovery. Life boils up indiscriminately, churning from black soil. We could give all of these once-stately lawns and terraces back to the wilderness. Why not? Think of it as astral environmentalism, the reclaiming of a psychic greenbelt from beneath the cracked Victorian occult paving-slabs, as an encouragement to increased metaphysical biodiversity. Considered as an organizing principle for magic work, the complex and self-generating fractal structure of a jungle would seem every bit as viable as all the spurious imposed chessboard order of a tiled lodge floor; would seem, in fact, considerably more natural and vital. After all, the traffic of ideas that is the essence and lifeblood of magic is more usually transacted these days by bush telegraph of one kind or another, rather than as ritual secrets solemnly attained after long years of cramming, Hogwarts’ CSEs. Hasn’t this rainforest mode of interacting been, in fact, the default setting of practical western occultism for some time now? Why not come out and admit it, bulldoze all these lean-to clubhouses that are no longer any use nor ornament, embrace the logic of lianas? Dynamite the dams, ride out the flood, allow new life to flourish in the previously moribund endangered habitats.

In occult culture’s terms, new life equates to new ideas. Fresh-hatched and wriggling, possibly poisonous conceptual pollywogs, these brightly-coloured pests must be coaxed into our new immaterial eco-system if it is to flourish and remain in health. Let us attract the small ideas that flutter, neon-bright but frail, and the much tougher, more resilient big ideas that eat them. If we’re fortunate, the feeding frenzy might draw the attention of huge raptor paradigms that trample everything and shake the earth. Ferocious notions, from the most bacterially tiny to the staggeringly big and ugly, all locked into an unsupervised glorious and bloody struggle for survival, a spectacular Darwinian clusterfuck.

Lame doctrines find themselves unable to outrun the sleek and toothy killer argument. Mastodon dogmas, elderly and slipping down the food-chain, buckling and collapsing under their own weight to make a meal for carrion memorabilia salesmen, somewhere for that droning buzz of chat-room flies to lay their eggs. Memetic truffles grown up from a mulch of decomposing Aeons. Vivid revelations sprung like London Rocket from the wild, untended bombsite sprawl. Panic Arcadia, horny, murderous and teeming. Supernatural selection. The strongest, best-adapted theorems are allowed to thrive and propagate, the weak are sushi. Surely this is hardcore Theleme in action, as well as representing a productive and authentic old-skool Chaos that should warm the heart of any Thanateroid. From such vigorous application of the evolutionary process, it is difficult to see how magic as a field of knowledge could do otherwise than benefit.

For one thing, by accepting a less cultivated, less refined milieu where competition might be fierce and noisy, magic would be doing no more than exposing itself to the same conditions that pertain to its more socially-accepted kinfolk, science and art. Put forward a new theory to explain the universe’s missing mass, submit some difficult conceptual installation for the Turner Prize and be in no doubt that your offering will be subjected to the most intensive scrutiny, much of it hostile and originating from some rival camp. Each particle of thought that played a role in the construction of your statement will be disassembled and examined. Only if no flaw is found will your work be received into the cultural canon. In all likelihood, sooner or later your pet project, your pet theory will end up as scattered down and claret decorating the stained walls of these old, merciless public arenas. This is how it should be. Your ideas are possibly turned into road-kill but the field itself is strengthened and improved by this incessant testing. It progresses and mutates. If our objective truly is advancement of the magic worldview (rather than advancement of ourselves as its instructors), how could anyone object to such a process?

Unless, of course, advancement of this nature is not truly our objective, which returns us to our opening questions: what exactly are we doing and why are we doing it? No doubt some of us are engaged in the legitimate pursuit of understanding, but this begs the question as to why. Do we intend to use this information in some manner, or was it accumulated solely for its own sake, for our private satisfaction? Did we wish, perhaps, to be thought wise, or to enhance lacklustre personalities with hints of secret knowledge? Was it rank we sought, some standing that might be achieved more readily by a pursuit like occultism where there are, conveniently, no measurable standards that we might be judged by? Or did we align ourselves with Crowley’s definition of the magic arts as bringing about change according to one’s will, which is to say achieving some measure of power over reality?

This last would, at a guess, provide the motive that is currently most popular. The rise of Chaos magic in the 1980s centred on a raft of campaign promises, most notable amongst these the delivery of a results-based magic system that was practical and user-friendly. Austin Spare’s unique and highly personal development of sigil magic, we were told, could be adapted to near-universal application, would provide a simple, sure-fire means by which the heart’s desire of anyone could be both easily and instantly accomplished. Putting to one side the question “Is this true?” (and the attendant query “If it is, then why are all its advocates still holding down a day-job, in a world grown surely further from the heart’s desire of anyone with every passing week?”), we should perhaps ask whether the pursuit of this pragmatic, causal attitude to occult work is actually a worthy use of magic.

If we’re honest, most of causal sorcery as it is practiced probably is done so in the hope of realizing some desired change in our gross, material circumstances. In real terms, this probably involves requests for money (even Dee and Kelly weren’t above tapping the angels for a fiver every now and then), requests for some form of emotional or sexual gratification, or perhaps on some occasions a request that those we feel have slighted or offended us be punished. In these instances, even in a less cynical scenario where the purpose of the magic is to, say, assist a friend in their recovery from illness, might we not accomplish our objectives far more certainly and honestly by simply taking care of these things on a non-divine material plane?

If, for instance, it is money we require then why not emulate the true example set by Austin Spare (almost unique amongst magicians in that he apparently saw using magic to attract mere wealth as an anathema) regarding such concerns? If we want money, then why don’t we magically get off of our fat arses, magically perform some work for once in our sedentary magic lives, and see if the requested coins don’t magically turn up some time thereafter in our bank accounts? If it’s the affections of some unrequited love-object that we are seeking, the solution is more simple still: slip roofies in her Babycham, then rape her. After all, the moral wretchedness of what you’ve done will be no worse, and at the very least you won’t have dragged the transcendental into things by asking that the spirits hold her down for you. Or if there’s someone whom you genuinely feel to be deserving of some awful retribution then put down that lesser clavicle of Solomon and get straight on the dog and bone to Frankie Razors or Big Stan. The hired goon represents the ethical decision of choice when compared with using fallen angels for one’s dirty work (this is assuming that just going round to the guy’s house oneself, or maybe even, you know, getting over it and moving on, are not viable options). Even the sick friend example cited earlier: just go and visit them. Support them with your time, your love, your money or your conversation. Christ, send them a card with a sad-looking cartoon bunny on the front. You’ll both feel better for it. Purposive and causal magic would too often seem to be about achieving some quite ordinary end without doing the ordinary work associated with it. We might well do better to affirm, with Crowley, that our best and purest actions are those carried out “without lust of result”.

Perhaps his other famous maxim, where he advocates that we seek “the aim of religion” utilising “the method of science”, however well intentioned, might have led the magical community (such as it is) into these fundamental errors. After all, religion’s aim, if we examine the word’s Latin origins in religare (a root shared with other words like ‘ligament’ and ‘ligature’), would seem to imply that it’s best if everyone is “bound in one belief”. This impulse to evangelism and conversion must, in any real-world application, reach a point where those bound by one ligament come up against those tied together by another. At this point, inevitably and historically, both factions will pursue their programmed urge to bind the other in their one and only true belief. So then we massacre the taigs, the prods, the goys, the yids, the kuffirs and the ragheads. And when this historically and inevitably doesn’t work, we sit and think about things for a century or two, we leave a decent interval, and then we do it all again, same as before. The aim of religion, while clearly benign, would seem to be off by a mile or two, thrown by the recoil. The target, the thing they were aiming for, stands there unscathed, and the only things hit are Omagh or Kabul, Hebron, Gaza, Manhattan, Baghdad, Kashmir, Deansgate, and so on, and so on, and so on, forever.

The notion of binding together that lies at the etymological root of religion is also, revealingly, found in the symbolic cluster of bound sticks, the fasces, that gives us the later term fascism. Fascism, based upon mystical concepts such as blood and ‘volk’, is more properly seen as religion than as a political stance, politics being based upon some form of reason, however misguided and brutal. The shared idea of being bound in one faith, one belief; that in unity (thus, unavoidably, in uniformity) there lies strength, would seem antithetical to magic, which, if anything, is surely personal, subjective and pertaining to the individual, to the responsibility for every sentient creature to reach its own understanding of and thus make its own peace with God, the universe and everything. So, if religion can be said to find a close political equivalent in fascism, might magic not be said to have more natural sympathy with anarchy, fascism’s opposite (deriving from an-archon or “no leader”)? Which of course returns us to the burned-down temples, dispossessed and homeless order heads, the scorched earth and the naturally anarchic wilderness approach to magic, as suggested earlier.

The other half of Crowley’s maxim, wherein he promotes the methodology of science would also seem to have its flaws, again, however well intentioned. Being based upon material results, science is perhaps the model that has led the magic arts into their causal cul-de-sac, described above. Further to this, if we accept the ways of science as a procedural ideal to which our magic workings might aspire, aren’t we in danger of also adopting a materialist and scientific mindset with regard to the quite different forces that preoccupy the occultist? A scientist who works with electricity, as an example, will quite justifiably regard the energy as value-neutral, mindless power that can as easily be used to run a hospital, or warm a lava-lamp, or fry a black guy with a mental age of nine in Texas. Magic on the other hand, from personal experience, does not seem to be neutral in its moral nature, nor does it seem mindless. On the contrary, it would seem, as a medium, to be aware and actively intelligent, alive rather than live in the third rail sense. Unlike electricity, there is the intimation of a complex personality with almost-human traits, such as, for instance, an apparent sense of humour. Just as well, perhaps, when one considers the parade of prancing ninnies that the field has entertained and tolerated down the centuries. Magic, in short, does not seem to be there merely to power up sigils that are astral versions of the labour saving gadget or appliance. Unlike electricity, it might be thought to have its own agenda.

Continued here

Bob Wachsman Tummler - American Splendor #15, 1990

2010-07-14T14:52:25Z

Alan Moore drew this one page piece, written by Harvey Pekar, which appeared on the inside front cover of American Splendor #15 in 1990.

(The image is actually slightly tilted, but that's how it's printed on the page, rather than being the fault of my scanning.)

Harvey Pekar October 8, 1939 – July 12, 2010
We shall not see his likes again

The Serpent and the Sword - Tales of Midnight, October 1999

2010-06-12T20:45:05Z

The Serpent and the Sword from Tales of Midnight, Kosovo Refugee Special, Galaxion '99 Convention pre-launch edition (Blue Silver Entertainment, October 1999). I am immensely grateful to Kumar Sivasubramanian, who I know through the Alan Moore Yahoo! Group mailing list, for scanning these pages from his copy of this exceedingly comic, to allow me to show them here. There was to have been a regular edition of this comic, but the pre-launch edition at Galaxion '99, which was held in London's Olympia Exhibition Centre over the weekend of Sunday 3rd and Monday 4th October, 1999, is apparently the only edition that actually got released.

Forthcoming Work by Alan Moore for 2010 (and Beyond...)

2010-05-04T16:21:02Z

There are a number of Alan Moore books due in 2010. Quite a few of them are reprints of one sort or another, but there is some new material due to appear as well. Here’s an approximately chronological overview – based on dates retrieved from various sources – of what you can expect to see this coming year, as well as further into the future. And, once again, there’s a little speculation at the end about some not-yet-officially-announced projects, just to make it all a little more interesting! This post is more-or-less a follow up to this post a year ago. This piece also includes information on works based on previous work by Moore, such as Tom Strong and the Robots Of Doom, and on related works, such as Kimota! The Miracleman Companion.

And of course Dodgem Logic is ongoing, so it would be tedious to put an entry for it in for every month. And you should all be buying it, anyway.

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2010

January
The Neonomicon Hornbook Avatar Comics (January 2010)

Script by Alan Moore, Art by Jacen Burrows

The entry for this January last year said, “A 16-page preview mini-comic featuring pages from Neonomicon, a four-issue series which is due be released in the autumn of 2009. It contains some script pages, some concept art, and a few lettered pages. Also, amazingly, comes in a limited variant signed edition with a leather cover. More about this work further down...”

If you change 2009 to 2010, this is also correct for this year! This has been mooted for several years now, with jacen first mentioning in on his LiveJournal in November 2006 in this post, claiming it will be “the most talked about indie of 2007 once people learn more about it”. In fairness to Jacen Burrows, he’s a busy artist, and I’d rather he took his time and did it right than rush the work. Certainly from what I’ve seen here, it’s going to be well worth the wait, when the series proper starts in August 2010.

Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Volume 2 DC Comics (January 2010)

More information here, where it says, “It's another incredible collection of classic tales of the Corps from the pages of Green Lantern #168, 169, 171-173, 177, 179-183, 185, 187-190 and Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual #1, and featuring the work of Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and many others!”

When it says, “featuring the work of Alan Moore”, it seems to me that the only work of his that’s actually in this volume is the six-page Mogo Doesn’t Socialise (Green Lantern #188, May 1985). There are at least two other collections that feature this story: DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore* (DC Comics, 2006) contains Mogo Doesn’t Socialise, Tygers (Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual #2, 1986) and In Blackest Night (Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual #3, 1987), as does the earlier version of this collection, Across The Universe: The DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore* (DC Comics, 2003). There’s also Green Lantern: In Brightest Day* (DC Comics, 2008). which features Mogo Doesn’t Socialise and Tygers. Presumably at some point there will be at least one further retrospective volume of Tales of the Green Lantern Corps, allowing DC to reprint In Blackest Night, which is after all the title of their big DC Universe-wide crossover event for 2009 and 2010, and possibly beyond; and Tygers, which is apparently the origin of the current crossover storyline, according to this Wikipedia page.

April
Tom Strong: Deluxe Edition Volume 2 DC/WildStorm (April 2010)

Reprints Tom Strong issues 13-24. More information here.

June
Tom Strong and the Robots Of Doom #1 DC/WildStorm (June 2010)

Written by Peter Hogan, Art and cover by Chris Sprouse & Karl Story. More information here.

Marvelman Classic Primer #1, Marvel Comics (June 2010)

Not strictly related to Moore’s work, of course, but worth a mention none the less. The blurb about it on Marvel website here carefully avoids mentioning Moore or Miracleman, but apparently can’t help poking a little fun at Todd McFarlane’s shenanigans when it says, “But now, miracle of miracles, Marvel has stepped up to the plate”

An attempt on Marvel’s part to bring potential buyers up to speed on what Marvelman is all about, and to try to show them why they should care about it. Contains interviews with Mick Anglo, Neil Gaiman and others, apparently. This will be followed in July by Marvelman Family's Finest #1 (of 6) (here), reprinting Marvelman stories from the 1950s in a 40-page black & white comic, and by Marvelman Classic Vol. 1 (here), a 160-page black & white hardcover priced at $34.00, reprinting material from Marvelman 25 – 34, published in 1954. Both of these are of these are due in July.

Marvelman ran for nine years at fifty two weekly issues a year, so if Marvel is intending to publish the entire run at ten issues per volume, even if you discount the last three years of its run, which was mostly reprints, it’s going to end up running up to about thirty volumes, with the same again for the material that ran in Young Marvelman, making a total of, oh, about $2,500 to buy the lot. Just doin’ the maths, folks...

July
Tom Strong and the Robots Of Doom #2 DC/WildStorm (July 2010)

Written by Peter Hogan, Art and cover by Chris Sprouse & Karl Story. More information here.

Unearthing Lex Records (July 2010)

Unearthing is the title of a forty-five page piece by Moore in the Iain Sinclair-edited London: City of Disappearances (Hamish Hamilton, London, 2006), which is all about his closest friend, Steve Moore. Originally this was to have been adapted into a fumetti-style photo-illustrated hardcover novel by photographer Mitch Jenkins, and apparently this is still to be published by Top Shelf Comics at some point in the reasonably near future. There are some photographs from the work in progress here.

In the meantime, however, another version of this has been produced. According to this post on the Lex Records website, there will be a spoken-word version of the story available in July 2010, with accompanying music by musicians including Adam Drukker & Andy Broder (aka. Crook & Flail), Mike Patton, Stuart Braithwaite, Zach Hill, and Justin Broadrick. (I’m afraid I have no idea who any of these are, but I’m sure some of you out there do!) There is a super-deluxe version of this available which includes:

2 x 180g vinyl LP audiobook with soundtrack
1 x 180g vinyl - soundtrack instrumental
1 x deluxe photo print portrait of Alan Moore by Mitch Jenkins
1 x Dot-matrix printed transcript of Unearthing
1 x Unearthing poster by Mitch Jenkins
CD1. audiobook with soundtrack
CD2. soundtrack instrumental

You can pre-order a copy here. I have.

August
Neonomicon #1, Avatar Comics (August 2010)

Wraparound cover for issue one

More information both here and here. I imagine that we’ll see various versions of the collected edition of this soon after the fourth and final issue appears in November.

This is what I wrote about this last year: A mini-series featuring four oversized issues with art by Jacen Burrows, and more or less a sequel to The Courtyard. Notably, this is actually scripted by Moore himself, rather than being an adaptation of a prose work by someone else, as is usually the case with Avatar productions bearing his name.

I had the opportunity to ask Moore about this when I interviewed him in March 2008, and this is what he said, “I wrote a thing which – I don’t know how good it is –I was trying my best, but it was at a time when I was poisonously angry, and that may have coloured the work. It was a HP Lovecraft – my basic thinking was – all right, they asked me to do something that was in a a horror vein, they asked me, and I said, well, I had some vague ideas about a continuation of that Courtyard story that I originally wrote for a HP Lovecraft prose anthology… And I said I’d thought of a vague continuation of that, and they said, “Great, why don’t you do that, do it with Jacen Burrows,” who’s a great artist, so I wrote this four-part story, which is really horrible. It’s a modern Lovecraft story, but I was thinking, well, let’s put the racism in, and let’s put the, misogyny in, and let’s put the – where in the past we talked about Nameless Rites, let’s name them, and let’s see what happens.

And so it’s a very unpleasant story, it’s very weird, I’ve not looked at it since, and I’ve not, I don’t know if they’re even, if Avatar is still doing it, I’m not really in touch with them. Your guess is as good as mine, and even whether it’d be that good when it comes, I don’t know. I’m sure Jacen will have done a great job, I’m just not sure I did the writing well. And it might have been a bit dark, you know. I might have been going through a bit of a dark spell, which, sometimes it colours the writing and whether it’ll ever come out I really don’t know, but that’s be something to - it was called, what was it called? I can’t even remember the title! I know it’d got four parts, and it was, no, it completely fails me. I have no idea.”

Kimota! The Miracleman Companion: The Definitive Edition TwoMorrows Publishing (August 2010)

An updated and expanded hardcover edition of George Khoury’s excellent book on the story of Marvelman/Miracleman. New interviews include Neil Gaiman, Dez Skinn, and others.

September
Neonomicon #2, Avatar Comics (September 2010)

Absolute Promethea Volume 2, DC/WildStorm (September 2010)

According to this, “The second slipcased, oversized collection of Alan Moore's occult masterpiece is here, collecting Promethea #13-23. As a bonus, this volume includes an extensive gallery of sketches, developmental art and more.”

October
Neonomicon #3, Avatar Comics (October 2010)

Tales of the Uncanny: N-Man & Friends: A Naut Comics History Volume 1 (AboutComics/SpiderBaby Comix)

Sturdy Steve Bissette is returning to some of the characters he co-created for the 1963 universe, and now exclusively owns the rights to, starting with this. More information on Steve's blog.

November
Neonomicon #4, Avatar Comics (November 2010)

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Future Releases

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2011

Alan Moore Biographical Book by Gary Spencer Millidge (Ilex Press (UK) / Rizzoli (US), Spring 2011)

Due Spring 2011. 320pp full colour, 8"x11" hardcover with CD.

I have no more information about this for the moment, not even a proper title, but Gary Spencer Millidge knows what he’s doing, and it’s going to be a good book. I've contributed some illustrations from my own collection to this, and I know Gary is speaking to some other Moore collectors. I have attempted to draw him out on the contents of the CD, but he refuses to play!

The Bojeffries Saga Top Shelf / Knockabout

Last year, I said, “First of all, there’s a new 24-page Bojeffries Saga story, called After They Were Famous, finished and in the hands of Steve Parkhouse, which will be included in a forthcoming complete Bojeffries Saga. No publisher mentioned as yet, but you’re reasonably safe to assume that Knockabout in the UK and Top Shelf in the US would be good bets. This would now seem to be the case. I’m particularly looking forward to this, as the Bojeffries are one of my favourite of Moore’s creations, and the only work of his from the Warrior days which remains his own property. So, I was absolutely delighted when I saw that Top Shelf were supposed to be publishing this volume in December of 2010. However, the page (here) now says that it’s to be “A 2011 Release!”

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 3, Part 2 - Century: 1968 (Paint It Black) Top Shelf / Knockabout

This was previously due in September 2009 & October 2010. Now also to be to be “A 2011 Release!” Expect it when you see it.

Fashion Beast Avatar Comics

According to this piece on Bleeding Cool, dated the 11th of April 2010. “… next year Avatar Press, publishers of the Bleeding Cool website, will publish a 250 page graphic novel based on that original Alan Moore screenplay and McLaren’s original story. Adapted for comics by Antony Johnston, it will be drawn by Facundo Percio. This project has been in the works for many years, after Avatar’s William Christensen first met Malcolm McLaren in 2003, with the blessing of both McLaren and Moore.”

When I interviewed Alan in March 2009, I asked him about Fashion Beast:

PÓM: Every so often I hear rumours that Avatar are going to do something with your Fashion Beast script.

AM: Well, that has been an ongoing project for a long while. I know that I put, that Malcolm McLaren and the Avatar people are in touch, and I said it was alright by me if they wanted to turn it, I mean, Anthony Johnston always does a great job of the adaptations, so, yeah, I’m sure if anybody can turn it into a comic, then it’d be him. So, I mean, it’s certainly the only way it’s ever going to see the light of day. So, yeah, but as to when and where, don’t know.

Alan Moore: Conversations University of Mississippi Press (Fall 2011/Spring 2012)

Edited by Eric Berlatsky, a collection of interviews with Alan Moore by various people, quite possibly including myself...

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2012

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 3, Part 3 - Century: 2008 Top Shelf/Knockabout

More details here.

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2013

The Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic Top Shelf/Knockabout

Cover design by John Coulthart

A 320-Page Super-Deluxe Hardcover, co-written by Alan Moore and Steve Moore, and illustrated by various luminaries from the comic book field. More information here.

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At an Indeterminate Point in the Future...

Jerusalem Top Shelf (201?)
Alan Moore’s vast sprawling novel all about Northampton. Every time I ask him about it, it’s two years from being finished.

The Book of Pleasure – Self Love by Austin Osman Spare
Moore has written an introduction for a new edition of this. I have no other information beyond that, I’m afraid.

Melinda Gebbie is supposed to be doing a comic book adaptation of the spoken word CD Angel Passage, akin to the two adaptation Eddie Campbell has done, of The Birth Caul and Snakes and Ladders, but hasn't actually started work on it yet, to the best of my knowledge.

Similarly, there is some mention of Jose Villarrubia working on an adaptation of all of or part of one of Moore's spoken word works, but no further news on that otherwise.

And of course there's that opera about John Dee that Moore is writing the libretto for.

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Rumour Has It...

As far as I know the extended re-issue of the CD version of Brought to Light, originally due in 2009, is still theoretically on the cards.

The person who was working on a biography of Moore has just taken it up again, after being diverted by other projects. Perhaps I’ll have more news on this next year...

There's a lot more information about unfinished or never-started project by Moore to be found in The Unpublished Moore by Michael Norwitz, also on this blog.

The Unpublished Moore

2010-04-21T19:04:10Z

THE UNPUBLISHED MOORE
(incorporating THE UNFINISHED MOORE)

by

Michael Norwitz

with ongoing amendments by

Michael Norwitz, Pádraig Ó Méalóid,

And many others

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With apologies to the bearded magus, as every comic writer on the face of the planet has an equally long or longer list of such; Moore's fans are just obsessive enough to track all of them (although several have been generated by the disintegration of the ABC line and by Rob Liefeld's business practices).

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[Comments are attributed to their authors, except where they are anonymous, in which case they're given as Anon.]

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4D War
Status: Unfinished Comic Strip

Marvel UK Doctor Who series drawn by David Lloyd which was originally intended to be longer series.

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1963 Annual
Status: Unpublished Comic Annual

Possible script from Moore in existence, not to appear largely due to ill-will among the creators.

Anon says: I think this might be another partially completed script, Moore might have gotten about half way into it. Actually, here's the answer online:

Rick Veitch: 1963 was Alan's reaction to how insane and awful superhero comics became in the early '90s. He told me he felt somehow responsible by letting the cat out of the bag with Watchmen and wanted to completely reverse course and get back to that 'state of grace' that superheroes existed in during the Silver Age. The point of the series was to be demonstrated in the 80 Page Annual when the sweet and simple 1963 characters battle the pumped and vicious Image superheroes (the basic concept was later lifted for Kingdom Come). 1963 failed because the Annual was never completed. Alan began the script, finishing the first 24 pages, but Jim Lee never started the art. Steve Bissette also pulled out while I was drawing Book 6 and since he was scheduled to handle the production on that issue everything then fell into my lap and it just wasn't possible at that late date to reboot the Annual. In the years following I've tried to organize a number of publishing deals, some of which were built around a new approach to finishing the project. But so far I've never been able to put all the pieces together.

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A Grammar
Status: Unpublished Novel

Announced second prose novel. Probably abandoned.

When I interviewed Moore in 2008, I asked him about this:-

PÓM: There was to be another novel, wasn’t there? A Grammar?

AM: Now that fell by the wayside because, it was after I had finished Voice of the Fire. The only reason I did Voice of the Fire with Gollancz was because I liked Faith Brooker. She was a great editor, she was really nice, she looked after all the people who were working for her, and she was treated abominably, and so when Gollancz asked me if I wanted to carry on writing A Grammar I said, “Well actually I was really only doing it for Faith, and she’s not working for you any more, so, nah...” and to tell the truth, I hadn’t really got very far with the concept. It was because Faith wanted another book quickly, I think it would have helped her situation, that I’d come up with it at all, and once Faith was out of the picture I really didn’t feel like making that kind of investment.

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ABC A-Z
Status: Unfinished Comic Series

Additional material not written by Alan Moore but likely Steve Moore and Peter Hogan. Probably scripts exist, though unlikely to ever see the light of day after all this time.

I interviewed Peter Hogan in 2010, and asked him about the likelihood of this being finished:

PÓM: While I have you, do you know what happened to the ABC A-Z series, which only ran to four of the six issues it was supposed to be?

PH: The first I knew that there was anything wrong was after they made a printing error in the Terra Obscura issue, leaving the text off one page. So, I said I hoped this would get put right for the trade collection, and was told there wasn’t going to be one, and that not only that, but the series wasn’t going to be completed. Low sales was the reason given.

The only thing of mine that didn’t appear was the Smax entry, and that was easily the weakest one I did. I’m actually more annoyed that we didn’t get to see Steve Moore’s take on Promethea, which was probably well worth seeing.

When the series was first mooted it struck me as a bizarre title to publish unless they were planning to do an ABC relaunch after Alan finished up, in which case it made perfect sense. So I assumed that was what was going to happen, but as time went on and nothing was said, it became clear that was the end of it all. Alan had never had any problems with the thing continuing after he left – though I think Wildstorm accepted there was no point doing more Promethea without him – so … I don’t know. Maybe things changed somewhere along the line.

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Ace of Shades
Status: Unpublished Comic Strip

This was the original working title for what would eventually become V for Vendetta.

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Angel Passage
Status: Unpublished Comic Book

Melinda Gebbie is supposed to be doing a comic book adaptation of the spoken word CD Angel Passage, akin to the two adaptation Eddie Campbell has done, of The Birth Caul and Snakes and Ladders, but hasn't actually started work on it yet, to the best of my knowledge. This may never actually happen.

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The Badlander
Status: Unpublished Comic Strip

Intended for 2000 AD, never published for unknown reasons, to be drawn by Mike Collins, five pages scripted for which a section of the first page was reproduced in The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. There it will remain, although there's no reason the 2000 AD-intrinsic material couldn't be edited out, probably.

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The Ballad of Halo Jones
Status: Unfinished Comic Series

The starship has sailed on this one.

I interviewed Moore in early 2011, and he told me how The Ballad of Halo Jones would probably have ended:-

PÓM: I have to say, I was rereading the three volumes of The Ballad of Halo Jones recently, and of all the things that you haven’t finished, I really lament not being able to see what happens in the other six books of Halo Jones. Did you have an idea where it was all going?

AM: Well, I’d got the idea that she’d go through fabulous adventures, the next adventure would have probably been when she was a female space pirate with Sally Quasar, who was somebody that I’d mentioned, and I would have been basically going through all the decades of her life, with her getting older in each one, because I liked the idea, at the time, of having a strip in 2000 AD with a seventy- or eighty-year-old woman as the title character.

It would have ended up with Halo Jones upon some planet that is right at the absolute edge of the universe where, beyond that, beyond some sort of spectacular lightshow, there is no space, no time, and it would have ended up with Halo Jones – all the rest of the people on this planetoid because, actually, time is not passing; you could stay there forever, potentially - and what would have happened is that Halo Jones, after spending some time with the rest of the immortals, would have tottered across the landing field, got into her spacecraft, and flown into the psychedelic lightshow, to finally get out. And that would have been the ending. So, you’ve saved me a lot of writing, and you a lot of unnecessary worrying.

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Batman/Judge Dredd
Status: Unpublished Comic Strip

Shelved due to lack of cooperation by IPC, to be drawn by Brian Bolland. 8 pages scripted.

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Big Numbers
Status: Unfinished Comic Series

Scripted to the fifth issue.

I interviewed Moore in 2008, and I asked him about Big Numbers:-

PÓM: Is anything ever going to happen with Big Numbers?

AM: No. I tried, and I tried, and I tried. The initial comic collapsed, then we tried to get a replacement artist in, and he fled screaming into the night, and then I was working with a guy who was suggesting it as a television programme of twelve hour long episodes, something like Our Friends in the North, maybe, but with more fractal mathematics. There were some people working on a screenplay for that, a teleplay or whatever they call it, but that didn’t really happen, so that time it was three strikes and you’re out. I really wouldn’t be able to summon the energy to finish Big Numbers, although in some ways, a lot of the stuff that I was thinking about with Big Numbers is going to be completely applicable to Jerusalem. Not in the same sense, not the same characters, not the same story, but some of the same spirit. So, I think that Big Numbers is probably going to by Edwin Drood, but everyone should probably have at least one.

Big Numbers was to be a 12-issue series, but only two of these issues were published. In January 2009 I bought a photocopy of a completed Big Numbers #3. In January 2011 I posted this piece by Bill Sienkiewicz about his response to that issue appearing.

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Bizarro
Status: Unpublished Comic Series

According to Alan Moore, from Amazing Heroes #58:

Me and Kevin O'Neill would really love to do a Bizarro mini-series, examining this whole Bizarro world. I mean, it's square. How do the physics work on a world like that? What about the people who live on the corners? If you look at the pictures of the Bizarro world, there are continents that fold around the corners, so presumably you must have people living at right angles to each other. I just want to see Kevin draw it. I'm sure he'd be up to it.

And we're going to have the Solid Zone, instead of the Phantom Zone, which is a gigantic block of concrete, and every so often Bizarro Superman will go up and tap on it and say "Am you all right in there, Solid Zone criminals?" And they'd say, "We am fine, Bizarro." And we're going to have the Bizarro Bottle City of Kandor, which is about six times as big as the actual planet, and has to stood [sic] upon some vast constructed platform that reaches into space. And we thought about having a Bizarro Earth-2 which exists in exactly the same continuum as Bizarro Earth-1, and is just another square Earth balanced on the corner of Bizarro Earth so that the inhabitants of these worlds can wave to each other across the gap.

According to Kevin O'Neill, talking to The Comics Journal:

Me and Alan [Moore] were going to do a Bizarro series many years ago for DC — that’s one of several things we almost did together. We were talking about the Bizarros, and it was all ready to go for Julius Schwartz, when John Byrne was brought in and revamped Superman. So that went right out the window.

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The Bojeffries Saga
Status: Unpublished Collection

A collection of all the Bojeffries stories to date, as well as a new story called After They Were Famous. To be published by Top Shelf at some point in the future.

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Brought to Light
Status: Unpublished Musical Project

As far as I know Gary Lloyd's extended re-issue of the CD version of Brought to Light, originally due in 2009, is still theoretically on the cards.

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California Girls
Status: Unpublished Comic Strip

According to Trina Robbins, Moore told her that he wanted to write a story for her comic California Girls.

She also said that he was drunk at the time, and in an exceedingly good mood, and telling nearly everyone who passed by that he wanted to work with them. I doubt he remembered any of it the next day.

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Captain Britain
Status: Unpublished Comic Strip

Moore had planned to do a three-part horror story early during his tenure on the Captain Britain, featuring Old Sarah Mumford, but Alan Davis steered him towards sci-fi instead. Probably exists only in the form of a brief summary in a letter written to the artist; I don't even want to speculate about the likelihood of there being a complete script for this out there, as it would only make my head explode.

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Captain Britain
Status: Unpublished Comic Strip

Plotline involving Arcade, and appearances by Moira McTaggart, Jamie Madrox and even Havok & Polaris. Just as well.

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Captain Empire / Captain Albion
Status: Unpublished Comic Strip

Followups to Captain Airstrip-One. The latter mainly at the urging of the late Steve Whitaker, who was enchanted with the character. Probably only ever existed as a brief whim of Moore's.

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Car Ads of the Future
Status: Unpublished Musical Project

Andrew Phillip Smith says: What about Car Ads of the Future, a song collection in collaboration with Tim Perkins? I recall that Alan wasn't going to sing it. Tim Perkins has a track Where Does a Car Go When It Dies? on his website which might belong to that project.

The singer, Andrea Svajcsik, who did the fire breathing in the Angel Passage
performance,abandoned the project. In the interview with Eddie Campbell included in A Disease of Language Moore menioned that Perkins had been auditioning for another singer, but the project seems to have been abandoned permanently.

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CD-ROM Game
Status: Unpublished Computer Game

kevindh says: There was some sort of CD-ROM game that he was helping a friend (Dave Gibbons, maybe?) to design in the '90s, but which was never completed.

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Cerebus #301
Status: Unpublished Comic

I believe a full script exists for this one (which involved Cerebus being summoned during a seance in the modern day), but it was intended to be a Moore/Bisette/Veitch project, and is unlikely to appear now due to ill-will among the creators.

gavlees adds: Bisette's side of the story is that he did an interview with The Comics Journal where he mentioned money and business affairs that involved Moore. Apparently Moore was sent the transcript to approve and didn't say a word, then after publication phoned Bisette to say, "Right, Steve, we're finished."

Bob adds: To whatever extent it was seriously considered (I'm not sure it got as far as an actual script) wouldn't it have been Moore/Bissette/Totleben?

cunning_magee adds: From what I remember, the Zombie Cerebus story was slated to appear in Sim's anthology title about the Aardvark's childhood and earlier years (and of which only one issue ever came out). It was initially planned to be a regular series with collaborations between Sim and other writers/artists, and short Cerebus stories entirely produced by other creators. "After 300" was going to be the title of Moore's contribution, and I think it was only going to be a short story, not a full length issue. If a full script really exists, I find it difficult to believe they couldn't have just gotten Totleben to do the art all by himself, or simply have handed it over to another artist. Hell, Sim could have done the honours. He and Moore and still buddies, right?

Anon adds: From Note from the President in Cerebus #79

"I had a chance to meet Alan Moore, Steve Bissette and John Totleben.... responding to the suggestion of R.A. Jones in a Cerebus Jam review encouraging me to surrender more creative control on the CJ stories, I asked the Unholy Three if they could be interested in doing their own Cerebus story...Steve tells me Alan is still a little bit leery about it....The initial idea for the story is "After Issue Three Hundred" wherein Cerebus is conjured back from the dead and....

Aw, c'mon Alan, you HAVE to."

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Challengers of the Unknown
Status: Unpublished Comic Series/Whim

This may have gotten as far as a formal proposal to DC, but I believe it was just a whim.

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Comet Rangers
Status: Unpublished Graphic Novel

Sci-fi graphic novel to be illustrated by Jim Lee. Possibly script exists, though unlikely to ever see the light of day due to Lee's current commitments.

Anon says: I think I recall Moore saying in an interview that he started on the first page or two, but didn't have time to keep writing it for the time being. I doubt he finished.

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Convention Tension
Status: Unpublished Comic Strip

A short strip set at a comic convention.

cunning_magee says: Some years back, Kim Thompson mentioned on The Comic Journal's online forum that Moore had submitted a lengthy outline for Convention Tension, i.e.the first installment of the never-produced anthology series for Fantagraphics. Thompson said it was (A) really funny, and (B) probably still tucked away somewhere in their files. I'd love to read it.

[See also the listing for Fantagraphics Anthology]

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Cthulhu Calendar
Status: Unpublished

kevindh says: There was a Cthulhu calendar he did with John Couthart. It was solicited but I don't think it was ever published.

Michael Norwitz says: I believe this had come out but as part of a book. [Possibly in John Coulthart's HP Lovecraft's The Haunter of the Dark and Other Grostesque Visions?]

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Demon
Status: Unpublished Comic Series/Whim

This miniseries may have gotten as far as a formal proposal to DC, but I believe it was just a whim.

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Disco Cabala
Status: Unpublished Musical Project

A musical project with Tim Perkins, I believe. Moore mentioned it in an interview in The Idler in 1998:

"But with the Qabalah we are working through numerous different exercises and the information we are getting from these we are channelling into this project we are doing at the moment, the Disco Qabalah, where we are trying to translate these different states as described in the Qabalah into dance tracks. Because there has always been a dance element in my mysticism. We just think 'why not'. Music is imposing a state of consciousness by its very nature. If what this Tree of life is is a hierarchy of different states of consciousness, would it be possible to simulate and stimulate those states of consciousness in the listener by producing the right sorts of music. Is it possible? We don't know, but we're working on it."

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Dodgem Logic, take two
Status: Unpublished Comic

According to Kevin O'Neill, talking to The Comics Journal:

... and a book for Mike Gold way, way back at the beginning — I should’ve mentioned this — for First Comics, when Mike Gold was first writing about 2000 AD, he approached us — I was going to do the front half of the book, it was going to be two different strips like the old Tales of Suspense or something.

Mike McMahon was going to draw the second story, both of them were going to be written by Alan, and it was called Dodgem Logic. But Mike Gold said — we had a letter from him saying as a fan, he’s saying yes, but as an editor with financial responsibilities he sadly had to say no. So that never happened — it was never reactivated, that one. [snip] I had a story where — you were condemned to hell if you’d had your tonsils removed, so it was as arbitrary as that. I just wanted to do a story set in hell. There were extra feature things, there would’ve been a contemporary story, and — it’s like what Alan was doing in Supreme, where you had these 1960s versions of the characters and stuff like that, but way before that. It was interesting, but they couldn’t really see a market for it.

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Dodgem Logic, take three
Status: Unpublished Comic

Would have included a story calledConvention Tension and a biography of Aubrey Beardsley; I remember reading about a third story but was unable to locate details. Moore has rejected ever publishing the comics convention satire, seeing it as outdated, and the other stories are probably (sadly) abandoned.

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Fashion Beast
Status: Unpublished Graphic Novel

According to Bleeding Cool: Next year [2011] Avatar Press, publishers of the Bleeding Cool website, will publish a 250-page graphic novel based on that original Alan Moore screenplay and McLaren’s original story. Adapted for comics by Antony Johnston, it will be drawn by Facundo Percio. This project has been in the works for many years, after Avatar’s William Christensen first met Malcolm McLaren in 2003, with the blessing of both McLaren and Moore.”

When I interviewed Moore in 2009, I asked him about this:

PÓM: Every so often I hear rumours that Avatar are going to do something with your Fashion Beast script.

AM: Well, that has been an ongoing project for a long while. I know that I put, that Malcolm McLaren and the Avatar people are in touch, and I said it was alright by me if they wanted to turn it, I mean, Anthony Johnston always does a great job of the adaptations, so, yeah, I’m sure if anybody can turn it into a comic, then it’d be him. So, I mean, it’s certainly the only way it’s ever going to see the light of day. So, yeah, but as to when and where, don’t know.

Fashion Beast is an unshot 1985 screenplay by Moore, based on an idea by the late Malcolm McLaren and others. Loosely based on Jean Cocteau’s version of 'Beauty and the Beast' and the life of fashion designer Christian Dior.

There has as yet been no announcement from Avatar Press about this.

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Fossil Angels
Status: Unpublished Article

An article for Joel Biroco's now defunct KAOS magazine, this was to appear in #15, which was never published. With Alan Moore's permission, this is now available on this site, here.

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Future American
Status: Unpublished Comic Strip

Actual title unknown, this was Moore's original title for the First American strip, which it may have been recycled as.

According to Kevin O'Neill:

There was another one we were going to do many years ago — Titan Books were thinking of doing a comic anthology, and they had a lot of people connected and circling it: it was Alan, they asked Dave Gibbons, Mike McMahon, Brian Bolland, Frank Miller, those people — and that foundered. Me and Alan were going to do a kind of Fighting American-type strip.

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Glory
Status: Unfinished Comic Series

Likely scripts exist in Rob Liefeld's filing cabinet.

Anon says: I think Avatar solicited a 4 issue miniseries, 1 and 2 came out, presumably 2 more were written.

[Also see the entry on Warchild]

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Immortal Love
Status: Unpublished 7" Single

This 45rpm 7" single was to have been included with Absolute edition of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier.

In an interview with Bill Baker, Moore said:

AM: And there is a 45 [RPM] vinyl single that is supposedly by a 1950s band on a 1950s American record label, both of which are fictitious, but which are taken from other sources. That's part of the fun of The League, you know? The band is called Eddie Enrico and His Hawaiian Hotshots, which, I believe, were mentioned very briefly by Thomas Pynchon in his excellent The Crying of Lot 49. But it's double-sided, it's a single with two sides. One side of which is Immortal Love, and the other side of which is Home with You, which are kind of League-themed 1950s pop songs.

And so, yeah, there'll be a lot of little extras in this. It's going to be a very handsomely produced volume....

BB: Just out of curiosity, who did the music?

AM: Who did the music? It was me and Tim Perkins, pretending to be a 50s American rock and roll band. I've discovered, at this late stage in my life, that I am, in fact, an Elvis impersonator. But you'll have to wait and listen for yourself, you know? [His voice assumes an Elvis Presley-like drawl] "Uh huh, thank you very much."

[DC got cold feet, though, and pulled the plug for undisclosed legal reasons, and this never actually appeared. However, it is still possible that this may turn up somewhere else in the future.]

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Jerusalem
Status: Unpublished Novel

A novel set in Northampton, currently being written. Will probably be published by Top Shelf.

KA Laity says: Jerusalem is another geographically focused narrative, centering on an even smaller slice of Northampton.

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John Dee Opera
Status: Unpublished Opera

This was originally written at the request of Damon Albarn, who wanted to do something similar to their Monkey stage show, and asked Alan if he could write something for them. He suggested an opera based on the life of Queen Elizabeth the First's court magician, John Dee. Later on, Moore withdrew from the project, and his work on the project was published in Strange Attractor Journal Four in 2011, which is available here.

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Judge Dredd story
Status: Unpublished Comic Strip

The Nightmare on Floor Eighteen, a Judge Dredd story written by Moore purely as a writing sample to 2000 AD editor Alan Grant (who rejected it). I don't even know whether Moore knew how he intended to finish it off. The script for part one appeared in The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore.

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Limbo
Status: Unpublished Comic Strip

Intended for Tomorrow Stories, with art by Shane Oakley. Unlikely to appear, but one never knows. Some info on Oakley's website, here.

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Lois Lane
Status: Unpublished Comic Series

cunning_magee says: One of the DC projects not mentioned so far is a 2-issue Lois Lane miniseries Moore intended on doing. I remember seeing it mentioned in the old Amazing Heroes fanzine put out by Fantagraphics. It got the chop when Byrne was given the go-ahead to reboot the Superman franchise, and all other versions of Supes (and his supporting cast, obviously) were rendered null and void.

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Lux Brevis
Status: Unpublished Comic Strip

Intended for a Tim Truman-edited horror anthology for First Comics which never came to fruition. It was to have been six eight-page episodes, To be drawn by John Totleben. Pencils for first installment appeared in Kimota!, and a script was written for the second episode. Unlikely to appear, but one never knows.

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Martian Manhunter
Status: Unpublished Comic Series/Whim

This may have gotten as far as a formal proposal to DC, but I believe it was just a whim.

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Marvelman
Status: Unpublished Graphic Novel

"Plus we've had the outlines written for three complete forty-page epics, featuring Marvelman, V and Pressbutton," Dez Skinn in Warrior #8. Proposals buried in a box in Dez's basement. I can't even contemplate what this would consist of, unless it was to be a compressed version of Book Three.

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Minutemen
Status: Unpublished Comic Series

Prequel to Watchmen. Possibly got as far as a formal proposal.

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Mr Monster/Swamp Thing Crossover
Status: Unpublished Comic Story

According to Michael T Gilbert, he and Moore were going to do a Mr. Monster/Swamp Thing crossover, which failed to happen due to Moore falling out with DC. This was originally published in Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman (Abiogenesis Press, 2003), and reproduced on this blog.

"Meanwhile, Alan and I worked out a deal with DC and Eclipse to produce a Mr. Monster/Swamp Thing crossover. This was possibly the first such agreement between a mainstream publisher and one of the small independents. Unfortunately, just as we finished plotting the story (a romp through the horror worlds of various old comic book companies), DC and Alan suffered a rancorous divorce and the project was scrapped."

Comics Scene Special #1 (Starlog Group Inc, USA, 1987)

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The Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic
Status: Unpublished Grimoire

A 320-page hardcover book about magic, co-written by Alan Moore and Steve Moore, and illustrated by various luminaries from the comic book field, including Rick Veitch and Melinda Gebbie. Still being written.

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Once There Were Daemons
Status: Unfinished Comic Strip

Started in the fanzine Embryo #5 in November 1971,when Moore was eighteenteen, it's completely unfair to him that someone has dug them up and put them on the web (here). I once suggested to William Christensen of Avatar Press that he have the episodes redrawn and completed by Antony Johnson, but not very seriously.

Notable for having an alien race called the Qys, who would later play a major part in Moore's revival of the British superhero Marvelman in the 1980s.

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Pearl of the Deep
Status: Unpublished Comic Strip

Intended for Tomorrow Stories. Unlikely to appear, but one never knows.

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The Soul
Status: Unpublished Comic Strip

This was a strip that was to appear in Tomorrow Stories, but is now going to be in The Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.

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The Spectre
Status: Unpublished Comic Series

According to Kevin O'Neill, talking to The Comics Journal:

And before [the Bizarro series] we [O'Neill and Alan Moore] were doing the Spectre, and that didn’t happen.

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Supreme
Status: Unfinished Comic Series

Likely scripts exist in Rob Liefeld's filing cabinet.

Anon says: Likely only one script written but not produced, year Three was probably plotted.

(It's discussed here in Lying in the Gutters, without any real conclusion being reached.)

Anon says: There was supposed to be a team-up between Alan Moore and Alex Ross.

Year 1999: "In an interview with Newsarama, Rob Liefeld recently revealed Alan Moore (Swamp Thing, Watchmen, ABC Comics) and Alex Ross (Marvels, Earth X) are developing a Supreme project together for Liefeld's Awesome Entertainment under the working title of Supreme WW Infinity."

"Alan Moore and Alex Ross are secretly working for Awesome on a project that will be called Supreme: WW Infinity. Moore's share of this project is limited because he has his hands full with his America's Best Comics, so it can be said that most credit should go toward Ross. Ross has said that it will come sooner than next year."

This sounds like there may have been some loose affiliation with Awesome after Alan Moore started work upon the ABC line.

[Also see the entry on Warchild]

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Swamp Thing/Mr Monster Crossover
Status: Unpublished Comic Story

See: Mr Monster/Swamp Thing Crossover

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Tommy Tomorrow
Status: Unpublished Comic Strip/Whim

To be drawn by Dave Gibbons. I believe only existed as a whim. Gibbons once told me at a con that they liked the fact that he wore short pants, and that may have been all that prompted the idea.

rab62 adds: Sometime around 1989 or thereabouts, I pitched a Tommy Tomorrow revamp to DC without success. I mentioned this to a fellow named Dave Elliott (then of A1, more recently late of Radical Comics) and his reply was "You know why Tommy Tomorrow sucks? Because he rides through space in his short pants." I thought that was a great response at the time, but now I wonder if this wasn't some kind of running in-joke or other inside reference.

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Tomorrow Stories
Status: Unpublished Comic Strips

Various stories were to have appeared in Tomorrow Stories, including: The Soul, Pearl of the Deep, and Limbo (with Shane Oakley).

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Top Ten: Season Three
Status: Unpublished Comic Series

It's possible Moore's ideas for this were used by the artists in ongoing Top Ten projects, though the degree to which that is the case has never been made explicit.

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Twilight of the Superheroes
Status: Unpublished Cimic Series

A DC Comics crossover maxi-series proposal by Moore that was eventually leaked.

You can read Moore's original proposal here. A more general discussion about it can be found on the relevant Wikipedia page.

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Unearthing
Status: Unpublished Photographic Project

Besides the piece in Iain Sinclair's London: City of Disappearances (Hamish Hamilton, London, 2006), and the spoken-word recording of this, Unearthing is also the title of a fumetti-style photo-illustrated hardcover novel by photographer Mitch Jenkins, and apparently this is still to be published by Top Shelf Comics at some point in the reasonably near future.

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V for Vendetta
Status: Unpublished Graphic Novel

"Plus we've had the outlines written for three complete forty-page epics, featuring Marvelman, V and Pressbutton," Dez Skinn in Warrior #8.

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Warchild
Status: Unpublished Graphic Novel

A script for a Tarantino-inspired graphic novel exists in Rob Liefeld's filing cabinet, and may appear one day if anyone deigns to purchase it from him.

In this interview with Rob Liefeld, it says:

Liefeld goes on to describe a comic book pitched to him by Moore that he still owns the rights to, entitled Warchild. Written shortly after Moore saw Pulp Fiction for the first time, it's a knights-of-the-round-table concept set in a Tarantino-esque inner city gangland setting.

“I have him on tape for 4 hours just talking about it; it’s my most cherished possession.

“You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Alan describe the heroes – this is in the near future – getting trapped in an amusement park in Compton, where one of the rides you go on is a drive-by shooting.

“A couple of the artists I gave it to handed it back. The first ten pages is some of the most difficult, visually, it’s hard to crack. We’ll probably publish it in script form. I can’t crack this, life’s too short.

“There’s standing atop a building, looking in through the window at a certain angle, while the person is sitting doing their hair looking at themselves in the mirror...and the panel descriptions, you go, how do I shoot this? I could shoot it with a camera, but like all the storyboards? It’s just very difficult.”

Anon says: From this interview:-

Michael David Thomas: How many scripts do you have left that are unpublished by him [Alan Moore]?

Rob Liefeld: Let's see... 4 more Youngbloods, 4 more Glory, 4 more of Warchild (each issue was 48 pages), 3 more Supremes. About 15.

The Warchilds are substantially fatter. I'd said, 15 at least. It's nice material.

I feel confident that the stuff I have in the drawer will only appreciate in value in terms of all these guys are more desirable or have more of a voice than they did a few years back. Again, that's one of the reasons I wanted to take a time out before I send all of this stuff into this insanity, which was the comics industry. You got the printer taking a large chunk. Diamond's taking their chunk and you're not getting as much market penetration as you should. Before I put any of it out there, I wanted to rethink the strategy.

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Youngblood
Status: Unfinished Comic Series

It's likely that scripts exist in Rob Liefeld's filing cabinet.

Anon says: Issue 4's script was leaked on the internet. I believe summaries for issues 5-7 or so were also leaked, so presumably the scripts were written as well.

(You can see the script here.)

There's some pages from Moore's Awesome Universe Handbook here, which include his future plans for Youngblood.

[Also see the entry on Warchild]

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Yuggoth Cultures
Status: Unpublished Book

This was to have been published by Creation Books, and is listed with an ISBN number in the booklet for the Hexentexts CD. Apparently most of it got lost in the back of a taxi way back when, and only fragments remained, which formed the basis for the Avatar Comics project of the same name.

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Xenon
Status: Nonexistant Novel

The title of a book seen in the Sandman's Library of Dream poster by Todd Klein.

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[This is hopefully going to be an ongoing piece, similar to Jess Nevins’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen annotations, and comments and additions are welcome. I’ll add in the amendations to the main article on an occasional basis, and as time allows.

Updated on the 27th of April 2011. Updates taken from liveJournal comments, Yahoo! Group mails, interviews, and private correspondence. Many of the comments are anonymous, so I can't credit their writers, unfortunately. PÓM]

Hungry is the Heart – Meatcake #9, April 1999

2009-11-15T10:25:31Z

This twelve-page strip, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dame Darcy, originally appeared in Dame Darcy’s Meatcake #9 (Fantagraphics Books, April 1999). The strip was subsequently included in Dame Darcy's Meatcake Compilation, now out of print. Legend has it that Moore gave Dame Darcy the script in exchange for two of her handmade dolls for his two daughters.

From Kaos #14: The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels

2009-07-17T10:34:10Z

The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels

by Alan Moore & Steve Moore

Dear Joel - You asked us for information concerning the Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels. As we've pointed out, one problem with this is that the Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels doesn't actually exist in the conventional sense; or if it does, we don't belong to it. Further to this, as far as we can deduce, the magical system evolved by this legendary and, in fact, mythical order is entirely based upon telling horrendous lies, both for shamanic and entertainment purposes. The following description of the order's origins is therefore, of necessity, a flimsy tissue of falsehood and delusion. All of the following names and facts, including those of Lucian of Samosata, AM Harmon, 1925, and the Harvard University Press, we made up about ten minutes ago, secure in the knowledge that none of your morbidly obese Lara Croft jack-off readership will ever bother to get up from their food-stained sofas and check this out.

According to the works of Lucian (Volume 4, translated by A M Harmon, Harvard University Press, 1925), the hero of our tale is a gentleman known as Alexander the False Prophet, a terrible name to go into business under. Alexander was born at the beginning of the 2nd century AD, in Abonoteichus, on the southern coast of the Black Sea (now Inebolu, in Turkey). By his teenage years, Alexander had developed into a strikingly beautiful young man, and, not coincidentally, a rent-boy. In this capacity he swiftly attracted the attention of a local quack-doctor and hermetic huckster with a nice line in philtres and incantations who claimed to be a student of Apollonius of Tyana but, like everyone else in this history, was probably lying. Living with this Black Sea Barnum over the next few years, Alexander underwent a crash course in 2nd century chicanery, so that upon the death of his mentor (and the passing of both his boyish charms and his hustler career) the young man had a ready-made new line of business to move into.

Around this time, by now in his early 20s, Alexander fell in with a reputedly abominable Byzantine choral lyricist named Cocconas, which means "nut". Like a late Roman Hope and Crosby in The Road to Ephesus, this pair travelled the region for a considerable period purveying quackery and sorcery and, as Lucian remarks, "trimming the fatheads". ("Trim the fatheads" has, of course, become one of the principal commandments and guiding aphorisms of the present-day Moon & Serpent movement. As a result of following this simple and lucid instruction, we're raking it in. You can't say that about The Book of the Law.) After a couple of decades of such activities, the duo washed up in the province of Bithynia where they were taken under the wing, if not the duvet, of "a rich Macedonian woman, past her prime but still eager to be charming". It may be that she was herself charmed by the charismatic Alexander, who at this point seemingly possessed an almost Rasputin-like sexual gravitas and allure. Tall, fair-skinned and godlike, he had glowing eyes and what sound very much like hair-extensions; a crusty from The Village of the Damned.

Lining their pockets at the woman's expense, Alexander and Cocconas accompanied their patroness upon her return trip home to Pella, ancient capital of Macedonia. Perhaps she'd tired of them, or perhaps, having maxed out her credit-cards, they'd tired of her. Whatever the event, a new scam was required.

As it happened, Pella, in this period, was pretty much Snake City. Around 500 years before, our Alexander's psychopathic and more-famous namesake had been born there, reputedly the offspring of his mom, Olympias, and either Zeus in the form of a snake, or a snake with a smooth line in date-rape patter. Subsequently, these ophidians became the pet of choice in Pella. Tame and sweet, they played with children, slept with women and, allegedly, "took milk from the breast just like babies". No pap without a python, no boob without a boa. Inspired by the compliance and manageability of these impressive reptiles, Alexander and Cocconas purchased an unusually striking specimen for a few coppers (probably not their own) and took it on with them to Chalcedon.

In Chalcedon they forged bronze tablets which proclaimed that soon Asclepius, snake-friendly god of healing, would take up his residence in Abonoteichus. Furtively buried then miraculously discovered in the temple of Apollo, this early, innovative ad-campaign worked well enough to prompt the founding of a temple in Abonoteichus ready for the god's arrival and laid the groundwork for the serpent-sting to follow. Leaving Cocconas in Chalcedon to work his jingle-writer's magic on some hot new oracles, our hero-turned-snake-smuggler took off for Abonoteichus, his squirming cargo covertly in tow. Cocconas, sadly (or conveniently), did not survive to reap the benefits of his and Alexander's scheme, expiring not long after from a viper bite. Or something.

Snappily-dressed in white and purple tunic with a white cloak at the shoulder, hair in fetching ringlets, Alexander seized the crowd's attention with a nicely judged attack of rabies, chewing soapwort till the epileptic foam ran down his chin (a mark of class in ancient Greece). During this stage of his career, our boy had cleverly rebranded himself as direct descendant of the gods. As Alexander told it, he was son to Podaleirius, and thus the grandson of Asclepius, great-grandson of Apollo, great-great-grandson of almighty Zeus himself Oh, and he was descended from Perseus on his mother's side as well. While all the locals must have been aware that Alexander was the offspring of obscure and humble folk, their faith in oracles convinced them that here in their sight was: "a scion of Perseus, dear unto Phoebus; this is divine Alexander, who shareth the blood of the Healer". Presumably the oracle in question represented one of Cocconas's better days. Certainly, along with all the frothing-at-the-mouth, this lurid genealogy helped to establish Alexander in Abonoteichan gossip-columns and society pages as a person to watch out for, one way or another. In the small hours of the night preceding Alexander's master-stroke, he crept out and concealed a blown goose-egg containing a small newborn serpent in a puddle at the temple that had been erected in the fuss that followed the "discovery" of Cocconas's tablets back in Chalcedon. It was here on the next day that he performed his finely choreographed miracle. Naked save a loin-cloth, Alexander ran into the market-place, thrashing his lengthy locks about like a devotee of Cybele, or perhaps the drummer out of Motorhead. Working the crowd with glossolalic babble and with mentions of Apollo and Asclepius, he led them to the temple, whereupon he reached into the water and retrieved his previously planted egg, to gasps of great amazement from the multitude. Cracking it with his thumbnail he allowed the concealed snake to wind into his palm, at which the gathered throng went nuts and cheered and did a Mexican Wave, welcoming the deity. Pleased with his work our man went home, taking his sacred maggot with him.

Alexander let the city have a day or two to simmer. From the neighbouring provinces a horde of theological away-supporters flooded into Abonoteichus, while from the prophet's den a trickle of stage-managed leaks revealed the serpent to have grown to a prodigious size, evolved a semi-human head and mastered Greek. Finally, in darkened chambers Alexander's squamous god was ceremoniously revealed: its massive length was coiled about its self-appointed high priest's body as he sat upon a couch there in the gloom, inviting the spectators to lay hands upon its coils and satisfy themselves that it was real. The snake's neck seemed to vanish under Alexander's arm, where next appeared, hung down over his shoulder, its extraordinary head. This was a masterpiece of both conception and construction. Made of linen, the false head bore a resemblance to a dog or sheep, the lengthy muzzle both concealing and facilitating an ingenious mechanism that would make the creature's jaws appear to move while a black tongue controlled by horse-hairs flickered in and out. Unlike the serpents of the natural world this monster's eyes were hidden by inscrutable and sleepy lids, perhaps to dodge the problem of realistic eyeballs in an age where glass had only limited availability. The crowning glory was its hair, long golden tresses spilling down, conveniently masking the ambiguous point at which this ersatz cranium joined with the real snake, drowsing head tucked under Alexander's arm. The dim light in the room no doubt greatly improved this curious illusion, possibly abetted by whatever other ritualistic showman's tricks the seasoned conman had decided to employ in order to enhance the sheer disorienting weirdness of the atmosphere.

The audience, having run their fingertips across the warm dry scales and watched the coiled length shift and move, were by this time assured of the god's authenticity. The prophet Alexander was now, as they say, ready to rock. To a hushed auditorium the creature swayed mesmerically, then, opening its artificial lips, it spoke:

"Glycon am I, the grandson of Zeus, bright beacon to mortals!"

This celestial Charlie McCarthy act, predictably, brought the house down. Alexander had established himself with one swift, ingenious sleight-of-hand as the Grand Poobah of a cult that would propel him into a position of enormous influence extending from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, and which would survive him by a century.

So, after that it was down to business, with Alexander's Rag-time Oracle and Patent-Medicine Show. No, he wasn't selling Snake-oil (that would have been uncouth); Alexander's cure-all was an ointment of bear's grease. He swore by it. So do we (in fact, we're often heard to exclaim: "Oh, bear's grease!"). And as for the oracles ...

Well, working on the notion that things must be better the more they cost, Alexander (or Al, as we like to think of him, especially when we think of other lying books that have the same word in their titles) naturally charged four times as much as any other oracle centre in the vicinity. And the fatheads bought it, big-time. Some oracles were given vocally, by Glycon himself; others were given overnight, after Al had had the chance to "steam open the envelopes" containing the questions; some were given to no one in particular, answering questions that had never been asked (always a marvellous trick if you can get away with it). And some were in "Scythian". Now, Alexander couldn't speak Scythian any more than we can, but that was okay. No one else in Abonoteichus could speak it either, so when folks heard Al babbling "foreign", they were mightily impressed. Yes sir.

So that's how the serpent fits into things. Now for the Moon.

Possessing the only incarnated god extant within the western world, Al's notoriety rapidly spread across the empire, ultimately reaching Rome itself. This prompted large amounts of Rome's god-hungry citizenry to decamp en masse for Abonoteichus and stage a beatific toga-party. Foremost in their ranks was one P Mummius Sisenna Rutilianus, sometime consul, sometime governor, all-round prestigious and rich geezer. It would seem Rutilianus, even for those theomanic times, was more than usually godstruck and would pause to worship and commune with any wreath-adorned or oil-anointed wayside stone that he might chance to come across. If his religious fervour could be roused by any greasy rock then we can but imagine what he'd make of a giant talking human-headed snake with hair.

We can also imagine just what Alexander made of our Rutilianus. No doubt drachma-signs were flashing in his eyes when first the full potential of Rutilianus's extraordinary gullibility occurred to him. "Hey, if you like my human-headed snake, I've got this bridge you might be interested in." The bridge in question led from earth to heaven in the person of an alleged daughter sired by Alexander on the Moon-goddess Selene (who'd apparently been overcome with lust for Alexander while he slept one night). Where this "daughter" may have been produced from, we can only speculate. It is, however, a safe bet that no such speculations long absorbed Rutilianus. As a credulous sexagenarian he was clearly tickled pink by both his young wife and the prospect of a goddess as his mother-in-law. Why, he'd practically be one of the celestial family, almost a god himself. The greasy rocks would come and worship him instead.

Rutilianus was, before long, made the governor of Asia. Being Alexander's son-in-law, Rutilianus could extend the influence of Alexander's cult throughout the empire, introducing Glycon into high society. Meanwhile, back home in Abonoteichus, a full-blown Moon-and-Serpent ceremonial mystery theatre was about to make its debut.

Lucian describes it as a three-day ceremony with priestly offices and torchlight rallies, annually held, in perpetuity. The first day was a recap ("Previously, on Moon & Serpent..."), running through the whole soap-opera genealogy from Zeus down to Asclepius, passing through Leto and Apollo and Coronis, for the benefit of viewers who tuned in late. The second day presented a retelling of the origins of Glycon (a diminutive of glycus, meaning "sweet", thus "Sweety"), where the god presumably starred as himself. ("I just got in from Olympus. Boy, is my belly sore. No but seriously. Anybody in from Ephesus ...?")

The final day commenced with Alexander tastefully presenting a depiction of his mother being shagged by Podaleirius, then built up to a rousing climax when the audience was treated to a tableau which showed Alexander and Selene engaged in conceiving the wife of Rutilianus: "the torch-bearer and hierophant was our Endymion, Alexander. While he lay in full view, pretending to be asleep, there came down to him from the roof, as if from heaven, not Selene but Rutilia, a very pretty woman, married to one of the emperor's stewards. She was genuinely in love with Alexander and he with her; and before the eyes of her worthless husband there were kisses and embraces in public. If the torches had not been numerous, perhaps the thing would have been carried even further."

This enthralling blend of mystery religion and Raymond Revue-Bar did marvellously well for a contemporary cult. Marcus Aurelius himself sought out the snake-god's prophecy concerning his then-current war in Germany against the Marcomanni and the Quadi. While Alexander drank a glass of water, Glycon recited the alphabet and then advised the emperor to dump two live lions and a load of perfume in the Danube, so that a victory would be secured. Yeah, right. When 20,000 Romans died as a result of this disastrous advice, our boy Al cited the Delphic Defence, claiming a victory had been secured by somebody.

Despite a prophecy that he'd die struck by lightning at age one hundred and fifty, Alexander was brown bread before his seventieth birthday. Nasty business. One leg mortified, groin full of maggots. Al had always claimed to have a gold thigh like Pythagoras, so maybe it was metal fatigue. His cult, however, did survive for roughly one hundred and fifty years before being struck by the lightning of the Christian anti-Pagan pogroms during the 4th century. C'est la vie. Che sera sera. Hasta la vista.

Time passed.

The current order of Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels was inaugurated following a chance event in early 1994. While browsing at a Farringdon Road bookstall, folded in a Look-In annual from the early 1970s, we found a letter from Frau Anna Sprengel. Honestly, I ask you, what are the chances of that? In the letter, Annie (as she insists we call her) states that all her earlier letters were, as she puts it, "eine vind-up. Who says ve Germans haf no sense of humour?" Revealing that the one true mystic order of the ages is in fact the aforementioned Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, she then authorised us to found lodges throughout the western world, to dress up in fancy frocks like girls, and to take everybody's money. We admit that various other occult orders and authorities have cast aspersions on the authenticity of our Frau Sprengel letter, but fuck'em.

As for the teachings of our order, they are simple and direct:

1. Fuck'em.

2. Trim the fatheads.

3. We understand the Moon to be Selene, and to be the cabalistic Yesod, and thus the entirety of dream, romance and the human imagination.

4. We understand the Serpent to be Glycon, to be the bronze serpent on the cabalistic tree, and as an icon of the twisting double-helix DNA, thus the entirety of life itself and human flesh.

5. We understand that in the interplay of these two deities, reprised in atu-21 of the Thoth tarot, is originated the whole Theatre of Marvels, which is to say the Universe.

6. Everyone must believe every single word that we say, even if it's all like The Book of the Law, and about pushing cripples downstairs.

7. Everything is true, nothing is permitted.

8. Will from Pop Idols shall be the whole of the law.

Summary

Glycon was made up by Alexander. Given that Lucian is a notorious liar and author of A True Story, which is full of egregious falsehoods, it is almost certain that Alexander was made up by Lucian. Having confessed ourselves to dishonesty in our opening paragraphs, we may as well confess that we made up Lucian. You, Joel, are widely recognised as the least reliable occult source since Sooty, and your readers will surely by now have realised that you yourself are making us up. I mean, what are the chances of you knowing two high-powered comic-book professionals like us? As if Your readers may next realise, upon fruitlessly scanning the birth records for anyone who has ever had "Biro Company" for a surname, that you are entirely an invention of theirs, a hate-figure with which they externalise their own self-loathing. It will take your readership only one small step to comprehend that they, as creations of the DNA, have been made up by Glycon, who, historically, speak with forked tongue.

As to your enquiry with regard to our initiation rituals and grades, there are no initiation rituals, or if there are they are so impossibly demanding that no one has ever completed them, or would wish to. We'd certainly never put ourselves through anything like that, and thus do not actually belong to the Order, which isn't taking on new members anyway. Conspiratorial affiliations with other secret societies include the Process Church of the Final Judgement, and the I-Spy Club (whose Chief I-Spy, presiding over long car journeys, is one of our secret chiefs. "It does not matter if Chief I-Spy exists, simply that the universe behaves as if Chief I-Spy exists.").

As for grades, we follow the example of Pete Carroll's Illuminates of Thanateros by eschewing pretentious grades and self-aggrandizing titles, nobly demonstrating that despite all appearances to the contrary, we are in fact ordinary common-as-muck people like you and everybody else.

Love and Judge Dredd are the law, Love and Judge Dredd under will.

Yours cordially,

Alan Moore
Exquisite Basilisk of the Pittering Mansions, Lord High Skeletor, Made Man and Capo (33rd Degree Sicilian Rite) (and could I make clear for the record that the 33rd Degree Sicilian Rite HAS NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH HOMOSEXUALITY), Arkela and senior wand-monitor.

Steve Moore
Grandiloquent Tusker, Euphonious Squid of the Humming Enchymoma, Commissioner of Martian Affairs, Madame Guillotine and junior hornswoggler.

(This article originally appeared in Kaos #14 on July 22, 2002, which is available online here.)

Big Numbers #3

2009-03-26T15:15:38Z

In January 2009 I bought an eBay item listed as BIG NUMBERS #1 & 2 + RARE UNPUBLISHED XEROX Alan Moore, which had this as the item information:

Offering the first issues of BIG NUMBERS, the aborted comic book series from the early 1990s written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Bill Sinkiewicz about the impact of the construction of a huge mall has on Northampton, England. Issues 1 and 2 were 10-in-by-10-in columes published under Moore's Mad Love imprint. Intriguing character studies and beautiful painted black-and-white art with one panel in issue 2 with color. (The plan had been that an increasing number of panels would have color, until the final issue was all in color.)

The REAL draw here for Alan Moore completists is a set of black-and-white Xeroxes of the unpublished THIRD issue of BIG NUMBERS, with art by Al Columbia, Sinkiewicz's assistant, who had been scheduled to take over the project. These might possibly be first-generation copies; more likely, they are second- or third-generation, but the art is very crisp and clear, and the story is easily read. This is a MUST for Moore fans.

BIG NUMBERS 1 and 2 have some creasing but otherwise would be considered at least fine. The edges of the Xeroxed issue have creasing and a couple of tears (NONE of which affect the art), and the first page has discoloration and dust.

I decided that it was at least worth investigating, and bought the item for $49.99, and was also the only bidder. If the worst came to the worst, I thought, it would at least be an interesting thing to have, whatever it turned out to be. I honestly didn't believe that I had that easily bought a copy of something that, to the best of my knowledge, simply didn't exist. But this is exactly what it is. I decided to ask the seller for a bit more information about this, and this is what I got back:-

"A number of years ago, I was a member of the CompuServe comic books forum, and I communicated with a number of professionals... One of those professionals was a friend of a friend of Alan Moore, and she had the photocopy of issue #3. She made copies for a few people, and I was lucky enough to be one." He later said, "I hope you'll forgive me, but I'd rather keep my source confidential... Anyway, the story I heard was that Al Columbia completed this issue, had it sent off for lettering and then went a little crazy and refused to release the art for publication ... In any event, this art did exist long enough for it to be photocopied."

To help protect the innocent, I'm not going to mention the seller's name!

In any case, everything I know leads me to believe that this is a copy of the unpublished third issue of Big Numbers, and I genuinely didn't believe it existed, and certainly never expected to actually see a copy, led alone own one. Even Alan Moore doesn't have a copy, to the very best of my knowledge, which in this case is considerable, as I decided to specifically ask his permission before I posted this here. He is happy for it to be made available to the world, so here it is.

A few notes: Firstly, at least some of this art looks like Bill Sienkiewicz's, but some of it doesn't, which is presumably Al Columbia's. A few of the pages are a bit askew, which is how I got them, but I've left them as they are, only trimming my scans up to where I felt the page images were, but otherwise leaving them as the were on the pages I have. It certainly looks as if these are not first-generation photocopies, so the images are not as crisp and sharp as they could be, but they're probably the best we're going to get to see, except for the unlettered art for some of these pages that was in SubMedia #1.

Interview from Inside Image #2, April 1993

2009-03-03T16:50:27Z

An interview about 1963 with Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and Rick Veitch from Inside Image #2 (Image Comics, April 1993).

Swamp Thing Death Certificate, 1986

2009-02-18T22:57:14Z

A promotional giveaway from 1986, to commemorate the death of Swamp Thing in Swamp Thing #53. If you look at the information on Swamp Roots under 'October 20th, 1985,' you'll see a mention of this, as well as a brief synopsis of the issue it related to.

Not the World Cup Special 1982

2009-02-12T21:58:04Z

A three-page story from Not the World Cup: The Official Souvenir Brochure, Marvel Comics UK, 1982, with art by Barrie Mitchell.

As you can perhaps see, sports was not a topic that Moore was a natural at...

I am again indebted to Kumar Sivasubramanian for supplying me with the images for this from his vast and enviable collection of Mooreana. Thanks, Kumar.