Alan Moore: an extraordinary gentleman | Novelist, magician and “guru of the graphic novel” Alan Moore talks to Steve Rose about Watchmen, the dark side of Hollywood and the morality of pornography.
Category: {comics}
Comics
DeZ did it first
Rorschach from The Mindscape of Alan Moore.
The hype over the Watchmen film reached critical mass this week and as a consequence there’s been a spike of interest in the two Alan Moore interviews I posted in 2006, with Empire magazine and other movie sites linking here. I won’t bore you with my lack of interest in the film—read the book, it’s a masterpiece—but it’s worth noting that the feature-length DeZ Vylenz documentary, The Mindscape of Alan Moore, dramatised scenes from V for Vendetta and Watchmen back in 2003, long before Hollywood put either of them on screen. The Rorschach scene is especially interesting for having the opening monologue from Watchmen voiced by Alan himself. I’d never thought of Rorschach having such a gravel-throated delivery until I heard this. If Zack Snyder’s version is the same then you know where they swiped it from.
V’s dressing-room from The Mindscape of Alan Moore.
As I’ve mentioned a few times here, The Mindscape of Alan Moore is available on DVD in Europe and the US and includes a bonus disc of interviews with Alan’s collaborators, Dave Gibbons among them. All the packaging and interface was designed by yours truly.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Mindscape of Alan Moore: US edition
• The Demon Regent Asmodeus
• New things for June
• Alan Moore in Arthur magazine
• Watchmen
• Alan Moore interview, 1988
A design for life
A design for life | Jon Savage on the history of the Smiley symbol: Watchmen, Acid House and beyond.
Buccaneers #2
Continuing from yesterday’s post, these nameless characters were sketches for a proposed comic strip that writer Jamie Delano and I were planning in the mid-Nineties. We had a feeling that the long-neglected pirate genre was due for a revival and talked about a revisionist take on buccaneering which would dispense with the Robert Newton antics and steer closer to the brutal reality. Among the touchstones there was On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers, the anarchist pirate community in Cities of the Red Night by William Burroughs and the ferocious scalp-hunters in Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian. There was also talk of throwing some voodoo into the mix, hence the veve tattoos. It wasn’t to be, of course. Little of my work has ever resembled mainstream comics fare and Jamie’s publishers, DC Comics, had already been underwhelmed by the detailed style I was using in the Lovecraft and Lord Horror comics. When I tried presenting them with some trial pages in a more open style I was told that they’d been expecting to see more of my detailed line work…
We had a couple of other characters planned, including a tattooed islander inspired by Queequeg from Moby Dick, but the samples here are the best of the sketches. The shark- or whale-jaw false leg was my own invention and something I’m fairly sure I’ve not seen before. I’ve no idea whether such a thing is workable but it was a nice touch.
Designs on Doctor Dee
Some work news. I finished this CD design last year but, as is often the case with these things, it’s taken a while to make its way into the world. This was the final piece of the Mindscape of Alan Moore project and it’s probably the last thing I’ll do which makes use of the famous Sigillum Dei Aemeth of Doctor John Dee (1527–1608), wax versions of which can be seen in the British Museum. Alan Moore is a great Dee aficionado and since the sigil appears in the DeZ Vylenz documentary it made sense to use it for the DVD package and interface. This led in turn to a new poster design for the film (below) and—eventually—the soundtrack CD. The latter should be shipping shortly from Shadowsnake Films.
Lastly, and also design-related, the New York Times this week had a short piece about designer Barney Bubbles based around Paul Gorman’s Reasons to be Cheerful book. My quote about Barney’s Hawkwind work being “cosmic Art Nouveau” was borrowed from the book’s text and the piece features one of those slideshow selections the NYT does so well. Once again it’s great to see how Paul’s book is stimulating new interest and appraisal of work which was neglected for far too long.
DVD menu.