Le Phallus phénoménal (1793–1794).

This blurred and discoloured picture arrives following a discussion with Paul Rumsey in the comments for an earlier post about engravings of monstrous whales. The pictures there were by engraver Hieronymus Cock whose surname gives us an additional resonance when discussing Moby Dick and sperm whales. The picture I posted of Jan Saenredam’s stranded whale showed the dead creature’s considerable penis (another engraving does the same) which led Paul to alert me to Dominique Vivant’s mischievous play on these pictures, where the artist exchanges the whale for a Brobdingnagian phallus. Or perhaps it’s merely a Gulliverian phallus and those people are Lilliputians… Whatever the case, I then mentioned to Paul JG Ballard’s story ‘The Drowned Giant’ from Ballard’s Terminal Beach collection which concerns the body of an enormous human found washed on a beach and subject to similar scrutiny by townspeople as in the stranded whale pictures. The body is eventually dissected and sold off. Paul reminded me of the end of the piece where Ballard writes:

As for the immense pizzle, this ends its days in the freak museum of a circus which travels up and down the north-west. This monumental apparatus, stunning in its proportions and sometime potency, occupies a complete booth to itself. The irony is that it is wrongly identified as that of a whale…

…which brings us full circle. Perhaps fittingly, Ballard’s story was published in Playboy magazine in 1965 under the title ‘Souvenir’.

As for Dominique Vivant (1747–1825), aka the Baron de Denon, his prestigious career besides engraving included, among other things, the directorship of the Louvre. We’re told he also wrote an erotic novel, Point de lendemain, and produced a selection of pornographic etchings, of which Le Phallus phénoménal would seem to be a part. Let no one accuse the French of being prudes; the picture above is from a site where you can order framed prints should you have a sudden urge to hang a phenomenal phallus on your wall.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales
• Jan Saenredam’s whale
• The Whale again
• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick
• Phallic bibelots
• Phallic worship
• The art of ejaculation

When Herman Melville complains in chapter 55 of Moby Dick about erroneous representations of whales, this is the kind of thing he had in mind. Among those he takes to task, however, I don’t recall any of them having two blow-holes like the creature above.

The coat of arms of Portugal.

These fanciful beasts are the work of (no sniggering, please) Hieronymus Cock (1510–1570), an Antwerp engraver, and they populate the seas as part of his marvellous map of America created with the assistance of Spanish cartographer Diego Gutiérrez.

Gutiérrez’s magnificent 1562 map of America was not intended to be a scientifically or navigationally exacting document, although it was of large scale and remained the largest map of America for a century. It was, rather, a ceremonial map, a diplomatic map, as identified by the coats of arms proclaiming possession. Through the map, Spain proclaimed to the nations of Western Europe its American territory, clearly outlining its sphere of control, not by degrees, but with the appearance of a very broad line for the Tropic of Cancer clearly drawn on the map.

The map is described in detail here while another part of the Library of Congress Map Collections site has an incredible high-resolution copy which is a delight to pore over. This is a really big image (10492 x 11908 pixels) but the huge size is just what I love to see. You can not only zoom into the myriad details—cannibals cooking a human feast in Brazil—but also admire the precision of the cross-hatching. Less than forty years separate these generic creatures from Jan Saenredam’s far more accurate rendering of a beached sperm whale.

A dolphin (Melville classed dolphins and porpoises as small whales).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jan Saenredam’s whale
• The Whale again
• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

Still reading Moby Dick at a leisurely pace. After finishing Melville’s chapters on the representations of whales I thought I’d see if the pictures he most prefers are online anywhere. A vain search, as it turns out, but I did discover this splendid depiction, Stranded Sperm Whale, by Dutch artist Jan Saenredam (1565–1607).

On 19 December 1601, a sperm whale washed up near Beverwijk. Crowds of people came to see the sight. Among them Jan Saenredam, who made this print. He has depicted himself drawing on the left.

The description continues at the Rijksmuseum site from which this copy originates. Mr Peacay of BibliOdyssey has a very large copy on his Flickr pages which shows more of the fine detail. Melville is highly critical of poor depictions of whales but I suspect he would have liked this one. As well as the local colour and allegorical border elements, Saenredam faithfully renders his dead whale, even leaving space for the drooping scape of cetacean penis. In a similar, if more mundane manner, there’s this engraving by Jacob Matham.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Whale again
• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

Reading Moby Dick at the moment, and thoroughly enjoying it, so I felt the need to look again at Rockwell Kent’s tremendous illustrations. The Rockwell Kent Gallery at the Plattsburgh State Art Museum doesn’t have a complete set of these, unfortunately, but there’s more of them than in the Flickr set I pointed to earlier. The thing to do, of course, is to order an illustrated edition of the book…

Meanwhile, Philip Hoare’s non-fiction account of his whale obsession, Leviathan, or The Whale, is receiving renewed attention now it’s out in paperback. I love this description of a humpback whale “breaching”:

For a split second the animal appeared like some vast and improbable whale-angel against the sky, its huge, gnarled flippers outstretched like wings. Every detail was visible. I saw its great ribbed belly, the rorqual pleats that expand when feeding. I saw the barnacles on its skin, the parasites that hold fast to the animal, making it a travelling colony of its own. Then, as if someone had taken their finger off the pause button, the animal bowed to gravity and fell back into the sea, creating a splash that resounded for miles.

Forgetting that I was surrounded by schoolchildren, I blurted out an inadvertent, “Fuck!” Hardly an erudite response, but I challenge anyone to be indifferent to a close encounter with a whale. I have seen grown men cry at their first sight of a cetacean. They simply exist in another universe; aliens occupying vast oceans of which we have less knowledge than we do of the surface of the moon. To see a whale is a privilege. But it can also become an obsession. This spring, I succeeded in a long-held ambition: to watch right whales from the shore.

Read more of that here.

• More whale art by Ivan Chermayeff and another whale feature at the NYT

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

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.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Buccaneers #1
• Howard Pyle’s pirates
• Druillet meets Hodgson
• Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys
• Davy Jones

From Rockwell Kent’s masterful 1930 edition. Would be nice to point to a complete online set of these illustrations but there doesn’t seem to be one. The black and white pictures are from this Flickr set which has a couple more examples.

Update: A (near) complete set of illustrations!

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previous posts about illustrators.

• Dalí in Wonderland

• The Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest

• Der Orchideengarten illustrated

• Equus and the Executionist

• Mervyn Peake at Maison d’Ailleurs

• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

• The art of Raphaël Freida

• The art of Bertha Lum, 1869–1954

• The art of George Barbier, 1882–1932

• The art of Warwick Goble, 1862–1943

• Steinlen’s cats

• Science fiction and fantasy covers

• Willy Pogàny’s Lohengrin

• Charles Ricketts’ Hero and Leander

• The art of Pamela Colman Smith, 1878–1951

• Der Orchideengarten

• The art of Ed Emshwiller, 1925–1990

• Harry Clarke’s stained glass

• Henry Keen’s Dorian Gray

• Peake’s Pan

• Pite’s West End folly

• Gandharva by Beaver & Krause

• The White Peacock

• Einar Nerman

• More Arabian Nights

• Edward William Lane’s Arabian Nights Entertainments

• John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems

• Butterfly women

• Jugend Magazine

• The art of Maxwell Armfield, 1881–1972

• Buccaneers #1

• The art of Claude Fayette Bragdon, 1866–1946

• The art of Dugald Stewart Walker, 1883–1937

• Jim Cawthorn, 1929–2008

• December and Vernon Hill

• Guy Peellaert, 1934–2008

• Last in Line by Light Syndicate

• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

• Peacocks

• The art of John Hurford

• La belle sans nom

• Alan Aldridge: The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes

• The art of Pierre Clayette, 1930–2005

• Ronald Searle book covers

• Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein

• Aubrey Beardsley’s musical afterlife

• The faces of Parsifal

• Willy Pogàny’s Parsifal

• The art of Mahlon Blaine, 1894–1969

• Pauline Baynes, 1922–2008

• Arthur Zaidenberg’s À Rebours

• San Francisco angels

• Maldoror illustrated

• The monstrous tome

• Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert

• The art of Virginia Frances Sterrett, 1900–1933

• The art of Ian Miller

• Dorothy Lathrop’s Three Mulla-mulgars

• Franklin Booth’s Flying Islands

• The art of Boris Artzybasheff, 1899–1965

• Meggendorfer’s Blatter

• Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal

• Sidney Sime and Lord Dunsany

• Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers

• The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937

• William Heath Robinson’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

• Austin Spare’s Behind the Veil

• Jessie M King’s Grey City of the North

• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring

• The art of Sascha Schneider, 1870–1927

• Dorian Gray revisited

• William Blake in Manchester

• Mervyn Peake in Lilliput

• Beardsley’s Salomé

• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

• Hugh Ferriss and The Metropolis of Tomorrow

• Petrucelli’s Christmas

• The art of Stella Langdale, 1880–1976

• The Age of Enchantment: Beardsley, Dulac and their Contemporaries

• The poster art of Richard Amsel

• Family Dog postcards

• Cain’s son: the incarnations of Grendel

• “Weirdsley Daubery”: Beardsley and Punch

• Winsor McCay’s Hippodrome souvenirs

• The art of Jessie M King, 1875–1949

• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia

• The art of George Sheringham, 1884–1937

• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem

• The art of John Bauer, 1882–1918

• Gods’ Man by Lynd Ward

• The art of Bob Pepper

• Architectural renderings by HW Brewer

• The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949

• Howard Pyle’s pirates

• Rex Whistler revisited

• The art of John Austen, 1886–1948

• The art of Patten Wilson, 1868–1928

• Fantastic art from Pan Books

• The poster art of Bob Peak

• The Illustrators of Alice

• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

• Fantazius Mallare and the Kingdom of Evil

• HP Lovecraft’s favourite artists

• The Decorative Age

• The art of Erik Desmazières

• Images of Nijinsky

• The World in 2030

• Wladyslaw Benda

• The art of Virgil Finlay, 1914–1971

• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

• The art of Rex Whistler, 1905–1944

More archive pages:
• The archive page archive

Previous posts about book covers or cover design.

• Nabokov book covers

• Netherlands decorated books

• March of the Penguins

• Science fiction and fantasy covers

• The art of Ed Emshwiller, 1925–1990

• The King in Yellow

• Samuel Beckett and Russell Mills

• Penguin science fiction

• Ma Petite Ville

• Groovy book covers

• Bugger Boy

• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

• Alan Aldridge: The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes

• Ronald Searle book covers

• The faces of Parsifal

• The monstrous tome

• Reynard the Fox

• The New Love Poetry

• Phallic worship

• The art of Ian Miller

• Recovering Bond

• Old book covers

• Pasticheur’s Addiction

• Arthur Machen book covers

• Repackaging Cormac

• Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers

• The World’s Greatest Detective

• Dorian Gray revisited

• Beardsley’s Salomé

• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

• James Bond postage stamps

• Stevenson and the dynamiters

• Decorated Russian book covers

• Russian book jackets, 1917–1942

• Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal

• Kafka and Kupka

• Philip José Farmer book covers

• Crossed destinies revisted

• Jack Kerouac book covers

• Wanna see something really scary?

• The art of Bob Pepper

• Philip K Dick book covers

• Masonic fonts and the designer’s dark materials

• Boys Own Books

• Penguin designer David Pelham talks

• Fantastic art from Pan Books

• Penguin Surrealism

• Hospital by Toby Litt

• Cormac McCarthy book covers

• Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino

• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

• Thomas Allen’s paperback art

• Perfume: the art of scent

• City of Spades

• DIY aesthetics

• Penguin book covers

• Dorothy Parker

• War of the Worlds book covers

• JG Ballard book covers

• William Burroughs book covers

• Czech book covers

• The Absolute Elsewhere

• The Hetzel editions of Jules Verne

• Gay book covers

More archive pages:
• The archive page archive

Cormac McCarthy’s venomous fiction

Richard B. Woodward
The New York Times, April 19, 1992

“YOU KNOW ABOUT MOJAVE RATTLESNAKES?” Cormac McCarthy asks. The question has come up over lunch in Mesilla, N.M., because the hermitic author, who may be the best unknown novelist in America, wants to steer conversation away from himself, and he seems to think that a story about a recent trip he took near the Texas-Mexico border will offer some camouflage. A writer who renders the brutal actions of men in excruciating detail, seldom applying the anesthetic of psychology, McCarthy would much rather orate than confide. And he is the sort of silver-tongued raconteur who relishes peculiar sidetracks; he leans over his plate and fairly croons the particulars in his soft Tennessee accent.

“Mojave rattlesnakes have a neurotoxic poison, almost like a cobra’s,” he explains, giving a natural-history lesson on the animal’s two color phases and its map of distribution in the West. He had come upon the creature while traveling along an empty road in his 1978 Ford pickup near Big Bend National Park. McCarthy doesn’t write about places he hasn’t visited, and he has made dozens of similar scouting forays to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and across the Rio Grande into Chihuahua, Sonora and Coahuila. The vast blankness of the Southwest desert served as a metaphor for the nihilistic violence in his last novel, Blood Meridian, published in 1985. And this unpopulated, scuffed-up terrain again dominates the background in All the Pretty Horses, which will appear next month from Knopf.

“It’s very interesting to see an animal out in the wild that can kill you graveyard dead,” he says with a smile. “The only thing I had seen that answered that description was a grizzly bear in Alaska. And that’s an odd feeling, because there’s no fence, and you know that after he gets tired of chasing marmots he’s going to move in some other direction, which could be yours.”

Keeping a respectful distance from the rattlesnake, poking it with a stick, he coaxed it into the grass and drove off. Two park rangers he met later that day seemed reluctant to discuss lethal vipers among the backpackers. But another, clearly McCarthy’s kind of man, put the matter in perspective. “We don’t know how dangerous they are,” he said. “We’ve never had anyone bitten. We just assume you wouldn’t survive.”

Finished off with one of his twinkly-eyed laughs, this mealtime anecdote has a more jocular tone than McCarthy’s venomous fiction, but the same elements are there. The tense encounter in a forbidding landscape, the dark humor in the face of facts, the good chance of a painful quietus. Each of his five previous novels has been marked by intense natural observation, a kind of morbid realism. His characters are often outcasts—destitute or criminals, or both. Homeless or squatting in hovels without electricity, they scrape by in the backwoods of East Tennessee or on horseback in the dry, vacant spaces of the desert. Death, which announces itself often, reaches down from the open sky, abruptly, with a slashed throat or a bullet in the face. The abyss opens up at any misstep.

McCarthy appreciates wildness—in animals, landscapes and people—and although he is a well-born, well-spoken, well-read man of 58 years, he has spent most of his adult life outside the ring of the campfire. It would be hard to think of a major American writer who has participated less in literary life. He has never taught or written journalism, given readings, blurbed a book, granted an interview. None of his novels have sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover. For most of his career, he did not even have an agent.

But among a small fraternity of writers and academics, McCarthy has a standing second to none, far out of proportion to his name recognition or sales. A cult figure with a reputation as a writer’s writer, especially in the South and in England, McCarthy has sometimes been compared with Joyce and Faulkner. Saul Bellow, who sat on the committee that in 1981 awarded him a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant, exclaims over his “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.” Says the historian and novelist Shelby Foote: “McCarthy is the one writer younger than myself who has excited me. I told the MacArthur people that he would be honoring them as much as they were honoring him.”

A man’s novelist whose apocalyptic vision rarely focuses on women, McCarthy doesn’t write about sex, love or domestic issues. All the Pretty Horses, an adventure story about a Texas boy who rides off to Mexico with his buddy, is unusually sweet-tempered for him—like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer on horseback. The earnest nature of the young characters and the lean, swift story, reminiscent of early Hemingway, should bring McCarthy a wider audience at the same time it secures his masculine mystique.

But whatever it has lacked in thematic range, McCarthy’s prose restores the terror and grandeur of the physical world with a biblical gravity that can shatter a reader. A page from any of his books—minimally punctuated, without quotation marks, avoiding apostrophes, colons or semicolons—has a stylized spareness that magnifies the force and precision of his words. Unimaginable cruelty and the simplest things, the sound of a tap on a door, exist side by side, as in this typical passage from Blood Meridian on the unmourned death of a pack animal:

The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was.

Rightful heir to the Southern Gothic tradition, McCarthy is a radical conservative who still believes that the novel can, in his words, “encompass all the various disciplines and interests of humanity.” And with his recent forays into the history of the United States and Mexico, he has cut a solitary path into the violent heart of the Old West. There isn’t anyone remotely like him in contemporary American literature.

A COMPACT UNIT, SHY OF 6 feet even in cowboy boots, McCarthy walks with a bounce, like someone who is also a good dancer. Clean-cut and handsome as he grays, he has a Celtic’s blue-green eyes set deep into a high-domed forehead. “He gives an impression of strength and vitality and poetry,” says Bellow, who describes him as “crammed into his own person.”

For such an obstinate loner, McCarthy is an engaging figure, a world-class talker, funny, opinionated, quick to laugh. Unlike his illiterate characters, who tend to be terse and crude, he speaks with an amused, ironic manner. His involved syntax has a relaxed elegance, as if he had easy control over the direction and agreement of his thoughts. Once he had agreed to an interview—after long negotiations with his agent in New York, Amanda Urban of International Creative Management, who promised he wouldn’t have to do another for many years—he seemed happy to entertain company for a few days.

Since 1976 he has lived mainly in El Paso, which sprawls along the concrete-lined Rio Grande, across the border from Juarez, Mexico. A gregarious recluse, McCarthy has lots of friends who know that he likes to be left alone. A few years ago The El Paso Herald-Post held a dinner in his honor. He politely warned them that he wouldn’t attend, and didn’t. The plaque now hangs in the office of his lawyer.

For many years he had no walls to hang anything on. When he heard the news about his MacArthur, he was living in a motel in Knoxville, Tenn. Such accommodations have been his home so routinely that he has learned to travel with a high-watt light bulb in a lens case to assure better illumination for reading and writing. In 1982 he bought a tiny, whitewashed stone cottage behind a shopping center in El Paso. But he wouldn’t take me inside. Renovation, which began a few years ago, has stopped for lack of funds. “It’s barely habitable,” he says. He cuts his own hair, eats his meals off a hot plate or in cafeterias and does his wash at the Laundromat.

McCarthy estimates that he owns about 7,000 books, nearly all of them in storage lockers. “He has more intellectual interests than anyone I’ve ever met,” says the director Richard Pearce, who tracked down McCarthy in 1974 and remains one of his few “artistic” friends. Pearce asked him to write the screenplay for The Gardener’s Son, a television drama about the murder of a South Carolina mill owner in the 1870’s by a disturbed boy with a wooden leg. In typical McCarthy style, the amputation of the boy’s leg and his slow execution by hanging are the moments from the show that linger in the mind.

McCarthy has never shown interest in a steady job, a trait that seems to have annoyed both his ex-wives. “We lived in total poverty,” says the second, Annie DeLisle, now a restaurateur in Florida. For nearly eight years they lived in a dairy barn outside Knoxville. “We were bathing in the lake,” she says with some nostalgia. “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”

McCarthy would rather talk about rattlesnakes, molecular computers, country music, Wittgenstein—anything—than himself or his books. “Of all the subjects I’m interested in, it would be extremely difficult to find one I wasn’t,” he growls. “Writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list.”

His hostility to the literary world seems both genuine (”teaching writing is a hustle”) and a tactic to screen out distractions. At the MacArthur reunions he spends his time with scientists, like the physicist Murray Gell-Mann and the whale biologist Roger Payne, rather than other writers. One of the few he acknowledges having known at all was the novelist and ecological crusader Edward Abbey. Shortly before Abbey’s death in 1989, they discussed a covert operation to reintroduce the wolf to southern Arizona.

McCarthy’s silence about himself has spawned a host of legends about his background and whereabouts. Esquire magazine recently printed a list of rumors, including one that had him living under an oil derrick. For many years the sum of hard-core information about his early life could be found in an author’s note to his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, published in 1965. It stated that he was born in Rhode Island in 1933; grew up outside Knoxville; attended parochial schools; entered the University of Tennessee, which he dropped out of; joined the Air Force in 1953 for four years; returned to the university, which he dropped out of again, and began to write novels in 1959. Add the publication dates of his books and awards, the marriages and divorces, a son born in 1962 and the move to the Southwest in 1974, and the relevant facts of his biography are complete.

The oldest son of an eminent lawyer, formerly with the Tennessee Valley Authority, McCarthy is Charles Jr., with five brothers and sisters. Cormac, the Gaelic equivalent of Charles, was an old family nickname bestowed on his father by Irish aunts.

It seems to have been a comfortable upbringing that bears no resemblance to the wretched lives of his characters. The large white house of his youth had acreage and woods nearby, and was staffed with maids. “We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks,” he says. What went on in these shacks, and in Knoxville’s nether world, seems to have fueled his imagination more than anything that happened inside his own family. Only his novel Suttree, which has a paralyzing father-son conflict, seems strongly autobiographical.

“I was not what they had in mind,” McCarthy says of childhood discord with his parents. “I felt early on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen. I hated school from the day I set foot in it.” Pressed to explain his sense of alienation, he has an odd moment of heated reflection. “I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies, and I had every hobby there was. There was no hobby I didn’t have, name anything, no matter how esoteric, I had found it and dabbled in it. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home.”

WRITING AND READING seem to be the only interests that the teen-age McCarthy never considered. Not until he was about 23, during his second quarrel with schooling, did he discover literature. To kill the tedium of the Air Force, which sent him to Alaska, he began reading in the barracks. “I read a lot of books very quickly,” he says, vague about his self-administered syllabus.

McCarthy’s style owes much to Faulkner’s—in its recondite vocabulary, punctuation, portentous rhetoric, use of dialect and concrete sense of the world—a debt McCarthy doesn’t dispute. “The ugly fact is books are made out of books,” he says. “The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” His list of those whom he calls the “good writers”—Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner—precludes anyone who doesn’t “deal with issues of life and death.” Proust and Henry James don’t make the cut. “I don’t understand them,” he says. “To me, that’s not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange.”

The Orchard Keeper, however Faulknerian in its themes, characters, language and structure, is no pastiche. The story of a boy and two old men who weave in and out of his young life, it has a gnarliness and a gloom all its own. Set in the hill country of Tennessee, the allusive narrative memorializes, without a trace of sentimentality, a vanishing way of life in the woods. An affection for coon hounds binds the fate of the characters, who wander unaware of any kinship. The boy never learns that a decomposing body he sees in a leafy pit may be his father.

McCarthy began the book in college and finished it in Chicago, where he worked part time in an auto-parts warehouse. “I never had any doubts about my abilities,” he says. “I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.” In 1961 he married Lee Holleman, whom he had met at college; they had a son, Cullen (now an architecture student at Princeton), and quickly divorced, the yet-unpublished writer taking off for Asheville, N.C., and New Orleans. Asked if he had ever paid alimony, McCarthy snorts. “With what?” He recalls his expulsion from a $40-a-month room in the French Quarter for nonpayment of rent.

After three years of writing, he packed off the manuscript to Random House—”it was the only publisher I had heard of.” Eventually it reached the desk of the legendary Albert Erskine, who had been Faulkner’s last editor as well as the sponsor for Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry and The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Erskine recognized McCarthy as a writer of the same caliber and, in the sort of relationship that scarcely exists anymore in American publishing, edited him for the next 20 years. “There is a father-son feeling,” says Erskine, despite the fact, as he sheepishly admits, that “we never sold any of his books.”

For years McCarthy seems to have subsisted on awards money he earned for The Orchard Keeper—including grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the William Faulkner Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Some of these funds went toward a trip to Europe in 1967, where he met DeLisle, an English pop singer, who became his second wife. They settled for many months on the island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean, where he wrote Outer Dark, published in 1968, a twisted Nativity story about a girl’s search for her baby, the product of incest with her brother. At the end of their independent wanderings through the rural South the brother witnesses, in one of McCarthy’s most appalling scenes, the death of his child at the hands of three mysterious killers around a campfire: “Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat’s eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child’s throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly.”

Child of God, published in 1973 after he and DeLisle returned to Tennessee, tested new extremes. The main character, Lester Ballard—a mass murderer and necrophiliac—lives with his victims in a series of underground caves. He is based on newspaper reports of such a figure in Sevier County, Tenn. Somehow, McCarthy finds compassion for and humor in Ballard, while never asking the reader to forgive his crimes. No social or psychological theory is offered that might explain him away.

In a long review of the book in The New Yorker, Robert Coles called McCarthy a “novelist of religious feeling,” comparing him with the Greek dramatists and medieval moralists. And in a prescient observation he noted the novelist’s “stubborn refusal to bend his writing to the literary and intellectual demands of our era,” calling him a writer “whose fate is to be relatively unknown and often misinterpreted.”

“MOST OF MY FRIENDS FROM those days are dead,” McCarthy says. We are sitting in a bar in Juarez, discussing Suttree, his longest, funniest book, a celebration of the crazies and ne’er-do-wells he knew in Knoxville’s dirty bars and poolrooms. McCarthy doesn’t drink anymore—he quit 16 years ago in El Paso, with one of his young girlfriends—and Suttree reads like a farewell to that life. “The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking,” he says. “If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it’s drinking.”

Written over about 20 years and published in 1979, Suttree has a sensitive and mature protagonist, unlike any other in McCarthy’s work, who ekes out a living on a houseboat, fishing in the polluted city river, in defiance of his stern, successful father. A literary conceit—part Stephen Daedalus, part Prince Hal—he is also McCarthy, the willful outcast. Many of the brawlers and drunkards in the book are his former real-life companions. “I was always attracted to people who enjoyed a perilous life style,” he says. Residents of the city are said to compete to find themselves in the text, which has displaced A Death in the Family by James Agee as Knoxville’s novel.

McCarthy began Blood Meridian after he had moved to the Southwest, without DeLisle. “He always thought he would write the great American western,” says a still-smarting DeLisle, who typed Suttree for him—”twice, all 800 pages.” Against all odds, they remain friends. If Suttree strives to be Ulysses, Blood Meridian has distinct echoes of Moby Dick, McCarthy’s favorite book. A mad hairless giant named Judge Holden makes florid speeches not unlike Captain Ahab’s. Based on historical events in the Southwest in 1849-50 (McCarthy learned Spanish to research it), the book follows the life of a mythic character called “the kid” as he rides around with John Glanton, who was the leader of a ferocious gang of scalp hunters. The collision between the inflated prose of the 19th-century novel and nasty reality gives Blood Meridian its strange, hellish character. It may be the bloodiest book since The Iliad.

“I’ve always been interested in the Southwest,” McCarthy says blandly. “There isn’t a place in the world you can go where they don’t know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West.”

More profoundly, the book explores the nature of evil and the allure of violence. Page after page, it presents the regular, and often senseless, slaughter that went on among white, Hispanic and Indian groups. There are no heroes in this vision of the American frontier.

“There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy says philosophically. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

This tooth-and-claw view of reality would seem not to accept the largesse of philanthropies. Then again, McCarthy is no typical reactionary. Like Flannery O’Conner, he sides with the misfits and anachronisms of modern life against “progress.” His play, The Stonemason, written a few years ago and scheduled to be performed this fall at the Arena Stage in Washington, is based on a Southern black family he worked with for many months. The breakdown of the family in the play mirrors the recent disappearance of stoneworking as a craft.

“Stacking up stone is the oldest trade there is,” he says, sipping a Coke. “Not even prostitution can come close to its antiquity. It’s older than anything, older than fire. And in the last 50 years, with hydraulic cement, it’s vanishing. I find that rather interesting.”

BY COMPARISON WITH the sonority and carnage of Blood Meridian, the world of All the Pretty Horses is less risky—repressed but sane. The main character, a teen-ager named John Grady Cole, leaves his home in West Texas in 1949 after the death of his grandfather and during his parents’ divorce, convincing his friend Lacey Rawlins they should ride off to Mexico.

Dialogue rather than description predominates, and the comical exchanges between the young men have a bleak music, as though their words had been whittled down by the wind off the desert:

They rode. You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins. About what? I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease. Sometimes. If you’re someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you’d be ill at ease. Should be anyways. Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasn’t supposed to be and didnt know it? What the hell’s wrong with you? I dont know. Nothin. I believe I’ll sing. He did.

A linear tale of boyish episodes—they meet vaqueros, are joined by a hapless companion, break horses on a hacienda and are thrown in jail—the book has a sustained innocence and a lucidity new in McCarthy’s work. There is even a budding love story.

“You haven’t come to the end yet,” says McCarthy, when asked about the low body count. “This may be nothing but a snare and a delusion to draw you in, thinking that all will be well.”

The book is, in fact, the first volume of a trilogy; the third part has existed for more than 10 years as a screenplay. He and Richard Pearce have come close to making the film—Sean Penn was interested—but producers always became skittish about the plot, which has as its central relationship John Grady Cole’s love for a teen-age Mexican prostitute.

Knopf is revving up the publicity engines for a campaign that they hope will bring McCarthy his overdue recognition. Vintage will reissue Suttree and Blood Meridian next month, and the rest of his work shortly thereafter. McCarthy, however, won’t be making the book-signing circuit. During my visit he was at work in the mornings on Volume 2 of the trilogy, which will require another extended trip through Mexico.

“The great thing about Cormac is that he’s in no rush,” Pearce says. “He is absolutely at peace with his own rhythms and has complete confidence in his own powers.”

In a pool hall one afternoon, a loud and youthful establishment in one of El Paso’s ubiquitous malls, McCarthy ignores the video games and rock-and-roll and patiently runs out the table. A skillful player, he was a member of a team at this place, an incongruous setting for a man of his conservative demeanor. But more than one of his friends describes McCarthy as a “chameleon, able to adjust easily to any surroundings and company because he seems so secure in what he will and will not do.”

“Everything’s interesting,” McCarthy says. “I don’t think I’ve been bored in 50 years. I’ve forgotten what it was like.”

He bangs away in his stone house or in motels on an Olivetti manual. “It’s a messy business,” he says about his novel-building. “You wind up with shoe boxes of scrap paper.” He likes computers. “But not to write on.” That’s about all he will discuss about his process of writing. Who types his final drafts now he doesn’t say.

Having saved enough money to leave El Paso, McCarthy may take off again soon, probably for several years in Spain. His son, with whom he has lately re-established a strong bond, is to be married there this year. “Three moves is as good as a fire,” he says in praise of homelessness.

The psychic cost of such an independent life, to himself and others, is tough to gauge. Aware that gifted American writers don’t have to endure the kind of neglect and hardship that have been his, McCarthy has chosen to be hardheaded about the terms of his success. As he commemorates what is passing from memory—the lore, people and language of a pre-modern age—he seems immensely proud to be the kind of writer who has almost ceased to exist.

Originally published in Strange Things Are Happening, vol. 1, no. 2, May/June 1988. Note: “Vincent Eno” was Richard Norris, later one half of dance/ambient outfit The Grid with Dave Ball. See also the Watchmen round table discussion on this site.

Vincent Eno and El Csawza meet
comics megastar ALAN MOORE

Amidst smouldering heaps of superlatives flung in the direction of the comic genre of late, one name stands head and shoulders above the crowd: ALAN MOORE. But don’t just trust the gushing blurbs on the back of Moore’s works (’Alan Moore has reinvented the comic book genre’ and so on), take it from your pals at Strange Things – Alan Moore is beezer!

With Watchmen the comic book format legitimately became what the media manipulators were attempting to tell us all about – the graphic novel. Watchmen is a work to be read and re-read, loved and cherished. Poetry, Cinema, narrative, music… they’re all here. The advent of such a work is as exciting in literary terms as the publication of the earliest novels, and you’d better believe it. Because within the next two years, the work of Alan Moore and his contemporaries is going to eclipse Watchmen and zoom into overdrive. As Alan says, ‘the next two years are going to be good for comics.’ Some understatement.

Turning into the first true comic megastar wasn’t an easy ride for Alan.

‘After school I did a variety of awful horrifying jobs,’ he recalls. ‘They look great on the dust jacket of your first novel, but were shit to actually live through! I started off by working at the skin division of the local Co-operative society. We’d go to work at seven thirty in the morning, drag these blood-sodden sheepskins out of vats of cold water and urine, chop off extraneous testicles or hooves and throw them at each other in this concentration camp gaiety we’d established to cope with the grimness of our surroundings. People there were splattered with this chemical for removing wool from hide, these blue marks all over them.

‘Then I climbed up the social ladder and became a toilet cleaner for a hotel. After that I went through a number of grindingly tedious office jobs; finally I had to make the jump into writing because we’d got a kid on the way and if I’d waited until after the baby was born I’d never have had the nerve. I decided that life being as short as it is, and as far as I know us getting only one crack at it, it just seemed important that I shouldn’t spend any of it doing something I didn’t want to do.’

So from scribbling as a Sounds cartoonist under the pen name Curt Vile and penning Maxwell the Magic Cat for his local newspaper, Alan got his teeth into Future Shocks for 2000 AD and a series of contributions for Dr. Who Weekly. Then along came Marvelman, V For Vendetta, Swamp Thing (with Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala) and Halo Jones. But it was with his collaboration with Dave Gibbons, the mighty Watchmen, that Alan’s status reached stellar proportions. Here Moore aimed optimistically high, attempting to create ‘a superhero Moby Dick; something that had that sort of weight, that sort of density.’ Quite some proposition you’d think, but Alan likes a good challenge:

‘Obviously I’m taking big risks, like being a white heterosexual writer writing about gay people, black people and women. It would be really arrogant to claim that by writing about women I know what it’s like to be one, but you have to at least think about them more – you have to try and think your way inside them and that can only be a good thing – it gives you an appreciation of the other person’s opinion, even if you’ve only imagined it very clumsily.’

But how do you get into the frame of mind to write such portrayals?

‘I try to approach character writing as an actor would. They’re perhaps not very formed to start with but they slowly congeal… I didn’t know Rorschach was going to die at the end of Watchmen until issue four – that was the only major detail that I hadn’t sorted out right from the beginning. As I thought about it, I realised there was no way that he would compromise, and if he wasn’t going to compromise then he was going to die! When I got into the Rorschach issue I knew a lot about the character’s surface mannerisms, but I didn’t know what was inside him until I started to dig.’

And what about the characterisation of the more, um, extra-terrestrial beings present? How can you even begin to conjure up a being like Dr. Manhattan?

‘With Dr. Manhattan we were thinking about the implications of a nuclear superhero’, explains Alan. ‘All the nuclear superheroes that existed in comics previously have been ones who, by the great gift of radioactivity, suddenly find themselves not with leukaemia or some form of tumour, but with miraculous powers. Other than shooting bolts out of their hands willy-nilly, there were never any of the implications of nuclear science and particularly quantum science – they’re not considered. We’re now forty years post-Einstein and it’s time we tried to confront some of the things Einstein said. On a quantum level, as I understand it, reality does not work! Things can be in two places at once; they can move from point A to point B without passing through the distance that separates those points… and this is what Dr. Manhattan does. Time, in a post-Einsteinian universe, cannot be regarded in the same way: from what Einstein says, it is possible that the future and past must exist now, for what “now” means. Someone existing in a quantum universe would not see time broken up in the linear way we see it. We tried to think what it would be like to somebody to whom the theory of relativity was what he had for breakfast, more or less… if you could see that different aspect of things then it would change you. You would not be able to feel the same way about the importance of human affairs. I didn’t want to do a Mr. Spock, I didn’t want to do somebody who was just emotionless – he has got emotions of a sort he’s growing away from them. He has girlfriends; I should imagine that’s just human habit. But at the end of Watchmen he decides he’s just going to go into space, forever. Perhaps he’ll make some people, but basically he doesn’t want anything more to do with humans… in a lifespan that may span billennia he’s only gone a couple of steps. He’s growing away from humanity gradually. It’s not a cold unemotional thing, it’s just different; a different way of seeing the universe.

‘Which is part of what Watchmen is about. We tried to set up four or five radically opposing ways of seeing the world and let the readers figure it out for themselves; let them make a moral decision for once in their miserable lives! Too many writers go for that “baby bird” moralising, where your audience just sits there with their beaks open and you just cram regurgitated morals down their throat. Heroes don’t work that way anymore… although I think Frank Miller would disagree with me on that. What we wanted to do was show all of these people, warts and all. Show that even the worst of them had something going for them, and even the best of them had their flaws.’

Influential in the formation of this approach to the moral nature of Alan’s characters was the work of William Burroughs.

‘I’d say Burroughs is one of my main influences’, he says. ‘Not the cut-up stuff, but his thinking about the way that the word and the image are used to control, and their possible more subversive effect. I’m surprised Burroughs didn’t do more comic strips himself. To the best of my knowledge he’s only done one, for a magazine called Cyclops, a British underground magazine that came out in 1969. It only lasted four issues; Burroughs and I believe an artist called Malcolm MacNeill did a strip called The Unspeakable Mr.Hart. I always thought that comics would be a perfect medium for Burroughs. With Watchmen I was trying to put some of his ideas into practice; the idea of repeated symbols that would become laden with meaning. You could almost play them like music. You’d have these things like musical themes that would occur throughout the work.’

In a similar fashion, Watchmen is brimming with a cinematic vision which, in the right hands, could translate to the big screen. With the success of Robocop and the forthcoming release of Judge Dredd, 20th Century Fox have optioned Watchmen for a future film project. Alan’s feelings about this are mixed:

‘The screenplay is being written by Sam Ham… he’s a good writer, but if they do make the film there’s no way of guaranteeing it will be good. If it ever comes out there’ll be a shit load of merchandise; watches, badges, Rorschach Action Men – wind them up and they’ll break all the fingers on your Transformers! Dr. Manhattan dolls that give you cancer… ‘

Another film project on the cards is Alan’s screenplay for Malcolm McLaren’s Fashion Beast. What was McLaren like to work with?

‘A good laugh… I found him a really interesting and amusing guy who’s got a shitload of incredibly wild ideas. I’m never sure whether they are brilliant ideas or whether his genius is in making everybody else believe them to be brilliant ideas. He gets results.’

So what kind of tomfoolery is Fashion Beast?

‘It’s loosely based upon the life of Christian Dior, mixed with the fable of Beauty and the Beast. Dior was an unusual character who lived a very strange life.’

Did the restrictions of scriptwriting hinder your creativity?

‘I was trying to please everybody with that script: Malcolm wanted the film to have the depth of Chinatown mixed with the vitality of Flashdance… I don’t know if it will ever get made. The last I heard they were casting. I don’t know whether I did a very good job.’

But surely movies and comics could be the perfect match? Alan isn’t so sure:

‘The relationship between films and comics has been overemphasised to a degree. If you understand cinematic techniques then you’ll be able to write better, more gripping comics than someone who doesn’t, but if cinematic technique is seen as the be all and end all of what comics can aspire to, then at the very best comics are always going to be a poor relation to the cinema. What I’d like to explore is the areas that comics succeed in where no other media is capable of operating. Like in Watchmen, all that subliminal shit we were getting into the backgrounds. You are trapped in the running time of a film – you go in, you sit down, they’ve got two hours and you’re dragged through at their pace. With a comic you can stare at the page for as long as you want and check back to see if this line of dialogue really does echo something four pages earlier, whether this picture is really the same as that one, and wonder if there is some connection there.

‘Watchmen was designed to be read four or five times; there’s stuff in there Dave had put in that even I only noticed on the sixth or seventh read. And there are things that turned up in there by accident… the little plugs on the spark hydrants, if you turn them upside down, you discover a little smiley face. Watchmen was a stream of weird shit and coincidence from beginning to end. Bizarre things kept hitting us in the face and they were perfect for us. Like looking through NASA photos of Mars and finding a smiley face up there.’

Ah yes, the smiley face. Hijacked by Bomb The Bass and destined to adorn a million bootleg T-Shirts this summer, this charming early seventies throwback stares out at you throughout the Watchmen saga.

Where did it originate, Alan?

‘From behavioural psychology tests. They tried to find the simplest abstraction that would make a baby smile. Eventually they got it down to a circle, two dots and a little arc. In some ways that’s a symbol of complete innocence. Putting a blood splash over the eye changes its meaning… it made a pretty good image for a first issue cover. It was Dave’s idea…, we fucked around with ideas for the covers; we knew we wanted to do something radical, but it was Dave who said we should have real close ups, make them so tight, just one tiny detail… and not have anything human on any of them at all. That was perfect.’

What wasn’t so perfect was the comic industry. Although Alan received praise for Watchmen, somehow, in grand comic industry tradition, he was being taken to the proverbial cleaners.

‘We got eight per cent between us for Watchmen. That eight per cent bought this house, the car, the worthless broken-down CD player in the corner and all the rest of it. For a while you’re dazzled by this shower of money you find yourself in… you think ‘this is wonderful, I’ve got more money than I’ve ever had in my life! What kind people they are to give us all these royalty cheques.’ And then you think hang on, eight per cent from a hundred per cent leaves ninety two per cent. And that, as far as we can see, DC have taken as payment for editing mistakes into Watchmen and getting it to the printer on time. In one instance they cut up balloons, leaving a word out so it no longer makes any sense. I don’t want to get into an embittered rant, but we’re barely getting anything from the merchandising. What we do get is a fraction.’

Not only that, but the comic giants attempted to introduce a rating system which would practically enforce censorship on the genre. Alan and Frank Miller told them where to go… and when DC’s two biggest writers, responsible for half of the company’s income, say ‘No’, the big white chiefs take notice. So you could say Alan wasn’t too happy about his position.

‘I’ve been content to work under those conditions for years – because those are the conditions that prevail and you have to go with them to get into the industry. I’ve now broken through to the real world of publishing and I can now see what it is I’ve been swimming through for the past five or six years. It certainly isn’t lavender water.’

And now Alan’s obligations to the major comics barons are complete, with the forthcoming V For Vendetta and Marvelman publications, he’s set up his own publishing company with his closest allies. Here he can tackle those subjects closest to his heart. Such as Clause 28, the frighteningly repressive bill concerning the supposed ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local councils.

‘The big chill is coming down for sure,’ says Alan. ‘All that bad science fiction and all those paranoid hippy prophesies about the way the country was going… as it turns out they were true! Outside my door the other day was one of those ‘Dark Riders Of Mordor’ policemen those with the visor and the cloak the horse wears a visor too. One of these horses was shouldering a couple of kids up against the garage door. Just football fans on the way down to the match. We ran outside to get a photo of it and one of those vans with the rotating video cameras came by. The police stated in the paper ‘We are looking forward to this match so we can try out our new crowd control methods.’ It was obvious looking at it that it wasn’t designed just to handle football fans. You don’t put that much money into stopping trouble erupting at games between Northampton and Sunderland! Sure enough, two weeks later at the Clause 28 rally the police had them out again. They turned up and arrested girls for kissing and for holding placards, saying they were offensive weapons.’

Not a big fan of the police then?

‘The police in this country are out of control. In my untrained opinion James Anderton is psychotic… he is talking to God! Of course God talks to me quite often, he goes for people with beards – me, James Anderton, Peter Sutcliffe, Charles Manson, Ayatollah Khomeni… it’s like one of those chat lines where people can talk together. We often get into conversations, me and Jim, the Ayatollah, Charlie and Peter… The guy is tolerated! This is the guy who in ?79 was meeting in secret with the leader of the National Front. He’s also the guy who in 1980 said that he thought the role of the police in the eighties was less to do with the prevention of crime and more to do with the prevention of political offences. The police force are a law unto themselves.

‘At the moment, it seems to me that the gays are the first group to get it in a big way – Clause 28. Ostensibly it is to stop books that treat homosexuality as acceptable from being available in schools – but gay pubs, gay clubs, gay switchboards are all licensed by the council. They will not be allowed to fund any of those. That’s what it’s really about: everything will be wiped out overnight. And protest marches, they’re granted by local authorities it’s frightening. It’s all based upon prejudice and gibberish. They still think of AIDS as ‘the gay plague’ – they are going to find out about that soon enough. Anderton has said homosexuality should be a crime and that ‘they are swimming around in a cesspit of their own filth’ and Margaret Thatcher has sanctioned him. The Labour party have voted with the Conservatives on this bill because they’re scared of appearing in The Sun as a ‘poofters’ party. It’s the ‘queers’ today, the niggers’ tomorrow; she’s had one or two good goes at the Trade Unions and then of course there’s the poor. Always the poor. It worries the shit out of me.’

But Alan doesn’t just worry about these outrageous affronts – here’s an artist who’s taking positive steps to do something about it. His newly-formed publishing company, Mad Love Publishing, is taking it’s first steps towards confronting the issue. Mad Love will publish AARGH! which stands for Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia and will bring together a stunning list of comic talent to comment on the deplorable clause. Anyone who is anyone in the comic world is involved – Alan, Dave Sim, Rick Veitch, Frank Miller, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegleman. Hunt Emerson, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez… the list goes on. Titan are distributing the work for nothing, and all money will go to OLGA, the anti-clause group. Positive!

Another Mad Love project is set to be Alan’s true follow up to Watchmen. Forget all the hype about The Killing Joke, just wait until The Mandlebrot Set is unleashed. A forthcoming twelve-issue series dealing with ’shopping malls, mathematics, history and skateboards’, The Mandlebrot Set starts from the premise that nothing is more fantastic than real life. Jumping from the 11th century to the 1940s, this work will astound us all. Alan’s already written a 21-page synopsis that doesn’t even mention the characters or plot! The work is a collaboration with Wild Bill Sienkeiwicz and is fairly shopping-orientated. Let’s go shopping!

‘Roughly, the situation is this; you’ve got a small English community, somewhere like Corby, somewhere where there used to be industry and has now been gutted. There’s a small patch of land that has been earmarked for nursing homes or a child care centre, but some American business people step in and say ‘We would like to build the first American-style shopping mall in the British Isles.’ It’ll be great for the locals because they’ll all have lots of work and so, in the spirit of free enterprise, it is done. The whole book is going to be about nothing more exciting than the building and accomplishment of the shopping mall – but the shopping mall is such a powerful symbol of the shit that is coming down.’

Also on the cards is possibly the most important work, in political and global terms, that Alan’s undertaken yet. Brought To Light, a joint project between Alan and Bill alongside Joyce Brabner (Real War Stories) and Tom Yeats, is going to blow the roof off American political culture for years to come. No joke. It’s a work that has been commissioned by the voluntary American pressure group The Christic Institute, a forceful body of people based in Washington who are sussed enough to realise the power of the comic medium. The Institute has initiated many triumphant political investigations in the past – from bringing damages against the Ku Klux Klan after the Greensburg shootings to exposing the Contra link six months before the rest of the world got hold of it. But this undertaking is bigger than all that – Oliver North and chums are just the tip of the iceberg. Brought To Light (subtitled ‘Flashpoint and Shadowplay’) is to be published by Eclipse and Warner Books; Joyce and Tom handle the ‘Flashpoint’ section, whilst Alan and Bill sink their teeth into ‘Shadowplay’: the true history of the CIA and a Palestinian/CIA linked group called ‘The Secret Team’. From Cuba to Miami, through fixed Australian elections, CIA funding in Central America and New York cocaine rackets, this work will cause ripples so big they’d be a surfers paradise. I’m not saying anything more, neither’s Alan, but, as he says, the next couple of years are looking good for comics…….

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• Strange Things Are Happening, 1988-1990
• Watchmen round table discussion