Skull Vision by Michael Ayrton (1943).

The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art: great title for an exhibition, a shame that it’s all the way down in Cornwall at Tate St Ives.

This group exhibition takes its title from the infamous 1962 book by St Ives artist Sven Berlin. It will explore the influence of folklore, mysticism, mythology and the occult on the development of art in Britain. Focusing on works from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day it will consider, in particular, the relationship they have to the landscape and legends of the British Isles. (More.)

Artists featured include Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Ithell Colquhoun, Cecil Collins, John Piper, Leslie Hurry and John Craxton. Among the contemporary artists there are Cerith Wyn Evans, Mark Titchner, Eva Rothschild, Simon Periton, Clare Woods, Steven Claydon, John Stezeker and Derek Jarman. Austin Osman Spare is notable by his absence but then that’s no surprise, the major occult artist of the 20th century never rates more that a passing mention from the art establishment. One nice surprise is seeing Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988) featured in her second major British exhibition this year. (Her work is also present in the Angels of Anarchy exhibition running at the Manchester Art Gallery.) Colquhoun was a contemporary of Spare’s whose work turns up in occult encyclopaedias or overviews of the minor current of British Surrealism but she’s still largely unheard of outside those circles.

The Tate exhibition may be awkward to visit but there’s an illustrated catalogue available featuring contributions from quality writers including Brian Dillon, Philip Hoare, Jon Savage, Jennifer Higgie, Marina Warner, Michael Bracewell, Alun Rowlands and Martin Clark. Michael Bracewell has a piece about the exhibition at Tate Etc while Brian Dillon has an excellent essay in the Guardian connecting John Dee’s mysterious obsidian scrying mirror with some of the works on display.

Untitled by David Noonan (2009).

• Artist of the week: David Noonan
• Ithell Colquhoun at A Journey Round My Skull

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism
• A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N
• In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman

Photography by Steven Klein, styling by Nicola Formichetti.

Not a Tom Waits album, Bondage Machine is the title of a feature in Vogue Hommes Japan which plays with bondage and fetish imagery to striking effect. What’s not to love about a huge skeletal necklace and leather underwear? Fetish gear is the aesthetic dimension of erotica and it’s always nice to see new manifestations of the form even when, as in this case, it’s largely about fashion designers flirting with the edge of acceptability.

Via the essential Homotography.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bad Boy

An obscure occult artist even among catalogues of obscure occult artists, Julien Champagne (also listed as Jean-Julian) is known principally for his associations with the persistently elusive 20th century alchemist Fulcanelli. Champagne provided a frontispiece (below) for Fulcanelli’s examination of architectural symbolism, Le Mystère des Cathédrales (1926), and is continually rumoured to have been Fulcanelli himself. Whatever the solution to that mystery, the alchemist’s book is rather more visible than the artist’s distinctly Symbolist paintings. There’s a French blog devoted to his life and works here but little else around. I wouldn’t mind seeing a decent online gallery of his pictures at some point.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Digital alchemy
• The art of Pamela Colman Smith, 1878–1951
• The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Austin Osman Spare

I’ll be Your Mirror (2005).

Not quite finished with the Moon since it’s visible in the background of Juliet Jacobson’s beautiful drawing, together with some other items of recurrent {feuilleton} concern: masturbating males, peacock feathers and human skulls. Pam at Phantasmaphile has a larger copy of this work while Ms Jacobson’s site has a number of equally luscious pencil drawings.

The Glass Chair.

Today’s glass artists continue to astonish. Andy Paiko’s one-off creation above is a chair whose vitrines contain a rhesus monkey skull, a piece of octopus coral, a murex spiny trumpet shell, the skeleton of a rat, and a mountain lion skull. The piece below contains a 24 carat gold-plated coyote skull with the work as a whole being described by the artist as representing various stages of the alchemical process. Go and feast your eyes on the rest of his creations. Thanks again to Thom for the tip!

Canis Auribus Tenere.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Josiah McElheny
• The art of Angelo Filomeno
• IKO stained glass
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• Glass engines and marble machines
• Wesley Fleming’s glass insects
• The art of Lucio Bubacco
• The glass menagerie

A collection of skeletal carvings from the 17th and 18th century at LUNA Commons.

Update: Well they were there but the database seems to have been rearranged and these photos removed.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Skull cameras
• Walmor Corrêa’s Memento Mori
• The skull beneath the skin
• Vanitas paintings
• Very Hungry God
• History of the skull as symbol

For the Love of Disruptive Strategies and Utopian Visions in Contemporary Art and Culture No.2 by James Cauty.

I usually wouldn’t bother writing about the over-rated and over-valued Damien Hirst—I’ll leave that to heavyweights such as Robert Hughes—but one story this week toasted the cockles of my black and cynical heart. Before we get to that, some context is required.

Hirst unveiled his diamond-coated platinum skull, For the Love of God in June 2007. Later that month, artist John LeKay complained that Hirst swiped the idea from LeKay’s series of crystal skulls made in the early Nineties. Hirst certainly knew LeKay at that time and interviewed him for a gallery catalogue in 1993.

(LeKay) said: “I would like Damien to acknowledge that ‘John really did inspire the skull and influenced my work a lot’. Damien’s very insecure about his originality. He used to say, ‘You’re a better artist than me’.

“He can be affectionate and is fun to be around, but he struggles to come up with ideas. It takes years of work to develop something. My stuff with crystals took a lot of research. You don’t just get there. He’s impatient. He’s a lazy artist.”

This wasn’t the first time Hirst was accused of laziness or even plagiarism. In 2000 he was sued for breach of copyright by Norman Emms after he made Hymn, an over-sized copy of Emms’ model for the Young Scientist Anatomy Set. That dispute was settled out of court only to be followed in 2006 with an accusation of theft by computer artist Robert Dixon who claimed that his geometric model of a flower, True Daisy, had been copied by Hirst for a piece entitled Valium. Judge the similarity for yourself.

Fast forward to December 2008 when a teenage graffiti artist who calls himself Cartrain created a collage which includes a photo of Hirst’s skull. The £200 that sales of this netted him also drew the attention of the Design and Artists Copyright Society and Hirst himself who demanded both the money and the artwork. Cartrain said:

I handed over the artworks to Dacs on the advice of my gallery. I met Christian Zimmermann [from Dacs] who told me Hirst personally ordered action on the matter.

I think this is the point where one has to start using the word hypocrite, don’t you? Others think so too, among them Jimmy Cauty (ex-KLF) and Sex Pistols sleeve designer Jamie Reid whose website Red Rag To A Bull describes itself as “a radical institution dedicated to the pursuit of “FREEDOM, TRUTH and JUSTICE in the art world and BEYOND”. And also overblown statements.” Inspired by Cartrain’s treatment, Cauty and co have been producing their own riffs on Hirst’s skull as a deliberate act of provocation. Cauty says, “Unlike Cartrain and his gallery, we are not intimidated by lawyers and if an injunction is issued, we will simply ignore it on the grounds of freedom of speech.” Reid calls Hirst a “hypocritical and greedy art bully”. There’s some funny stuff on their site, all of which is for sale as limited edition prints.

All of the works below are for sale and once TWENTY MILLION POUNDS has been raised ALL the proceeds will go to make an exact copy of a sculpture known as “For the Love of God”. This will then be sold for FIFTY MILLION POUNDS and the THIRTY MILLION POUND profit will then be used to repay the Street Urchin his 200 quid, help other Street Urchins and also feed starving children in Africa and Sussex.

Hirst will no doubt be grudgingly amused by the attention even if it is for behaving more like a grasping corporation than an artist. He’s also become the subject of another artwork by Eugenio Merino, For the Love of Gold, which depicts the corporate entity inside one of his vitrine tanks shooting himself in the head. All of which is silly and juvenile but then the only response much contemporary art deserves is a silly and juvenile one. People are naturally tempted to wave a red rag in the face of the pompous or the hypocritical. More power to them.

Update: Damien Hirst in vicious feud with teenage artist over a box of pencils

Lux on stage in Glasgow, 1990.

Lux Interior, co-founder of the Cramps and the group’s singer, lyricist, cultural archaeologist and a superb stage performer. Also one of the few people who could successfully enthuse about the delights of female sexuality while wearing nothing more than a pair of high heels and a black G-string.

That exhilarating manifestation of deviant intent and skull-denting impact remains Lux and Ivy’s exclusive domain. Where punk rock was a barrage of refutation that fomented rabid exultation, the Cramps reclaimed the hillbilly power long since flushed down the Mersey. Through a self-stated “disdain for the myth of musical progress,” they melded their mutant propensities to emerge as a guiding voice in the wilderness, a commanding force that redefined the rock & roll spectrum while outgunning almost everyfuckingbody in the game. Jonny Whiteside, LA Weekly.

• The Cramps’ Lux Interior: A life in pictures
• The Cramps on The Tube, 1987: part 1 | part 2 | part 3

Third Eye Camera.

Two camera artworks by Wayne Martin Belger, aka Boy of Blue.

Yama is made from Aluminium, Titanium, Copper, Brass, Bronze Steel, Silver, Gold, Mercury with 4 Sapphires, 3 Rubies (The one at Yama’s third eye was $5000.00), Asian and American Turquoise, Sand, Blood, and 9 Opals inlayed in the Skull. The film loading system is pneumatic. A 300psi air tank in the middle of the camera powers 2 pneumatic pistons to move the film holder forward and lock it into place. The switch to open and close the film chamber is located under the jaw.

Yama (Tibetan Skull Camera).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The skull beneath the skin
• Darwin Day
• Vanitas paintings
• Giant Skeleton and the Chocolate Jesus
• Very Hungry God
• History of the skull as symbol

“Jim Cawthorn and I have been inseparable for over twenty-five years, sometimes to the point where I can’t remember which came first—the drawing or the story. It is his drawings of my characters which remain for me the most accurate, both in detail and in atmosphere. His interpretations in strip form will always be, for me, the best.” Michael Moorcock.

Jim Cawthorn—illustrator, comic artist and fantasy historian—died this week. Cawthorn was the first illustrator employed by Savoy Books and one of the key factors in drawing me to their doors in the early 1980s. His illustrations made their books special and his comics adaptation of Moorcock’s The Jewel in the Skull was a big influence on my early black and white work.

Mike Moorcock, Dave Britton and I seem to be in a minority in regarding Cawthorn as one of the finest fantasy illustrators of his generation. His carefully stipled drawings of the late Fifties and early Sixties are all miniature masterpieces and I don’t care how many artists attempt lavish paintings of Moorcock’s Elric character, for me the definitive representation remains the drawing used on the cover of the first edition of Stormbringer in 1965. Cawthorn was Moorcock’s illustrator of choice for many years and was involved with the Moorcock-edited run of New Worlds right from the start with his cover illustrating Ballard’s Equinox story. He also provided reviews for New Worlds, and his critical faculties were demonstrated to the full in 1987 with Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, an overview of the genre credited to Cawthorn and Moorcock for which Cawthorn himself wrote most of the entries.

I wrote in more detail about Cawthorn’s work for the Savoy site several years ago. For an overview of his career and influences, there’s Dave Britton’s interview from 1979.

Update: some extra pictures added.

Jagreen Lern and Elric (1963).

The Metal Monster (1962).

The Jewel in the Skull (1978).

Moorcock portrait 1: The Apocalyptic (1979).

Moorcock portrait 2: The Aesthetic (1979).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

A juxtaposition of old and new theatre posters in the New York Times caught my eye this week, part of a feature about the current Broadway run of Peter Shaffer’s play. The news there, of course, has been Daniel Radcliffe’s on-stage nudity; understandable, perhaps, but celebrity trivia has overshadowed appraisal of Shaffer’s work as a piece of art.

What struck me seeing these was the two very different approaches to the same design problem. Given the subject matter, using an image of a horse is somewhat unavoidable as well as being immediately attractive since horses nearly always look good. The freight of historical and cultural association they carry is also one of the themes of the play. I really like the spare treatment of Gilbert Lesser’s 1976 poster for the National Theatre (left) and much prefer it to the new version used for the London and New York shows. The Lesser poster has the quality of a puzzle, matching the psychological piecing together of the story and Alan Strang’s accusation that Dysart the psychiatrist is always “playing games”. It also has a sinister quality lacking in the contemporary version; Shaffer’s Equus is an unforgiving god and the black eyes could refer to the blinded horses. The Photoshop horse looks altogether too mundane and is it my imagination or is the horse head misshapen slightly in order to fit the torso?

The poster for Sidney Lumet’s 1977 film version was the work of Bob Peak and his horse is a suitably ferocious presence. His rendering of the figures as primitive shapes swimming in shadow is the kind of thing no Hollywood studio would allow today. The Bob Peak site has several intriguing variations on this design which show how the poster might otherwise have appeared. Peak was particularly good with horses, as his brilliant designs for The Black Stallion show. And Carroll Ballard’s film might be seen as the flip-side of Equus with its tag-line “A boy. A myth. A god.” Or maybe it’s the pre-adolescent version, before the boy’s passion for horses becomes intensified by sex.

The sinister shadow behind all these images is the skull of the horse which the National Theatre poster hints at and whose presence is explicitly evoked in the opening shot of Lumet’s film where we see a knife with a carved handle (above). The ancient icon of a horse skull is the principal element of the Welsh folk figure of the Mari Lwyd, described thus:

The Mari Lwyd consists of a mare’s skull fixed to the end of a wooden pole; white sheets are fastened to the base of the skull, concealing the pole and the person carrying the Mari. The eye sockets are often filled with green bottle-ends, or other coloured material. The lower jaw is sometimes spring-loaded, so that the Mari’s ‘operator’ can snap it at passers-by. Coloured ribbons are usually fixed to the skull and to the reins (if any).

Red Halter by Clive Hicks-Jenkins (2001).

These various themes—horses, their skulls, sexuality, death—find potent expression in the Mari Lwyd series of paintings and drawings by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, a succession of stylised, Picasso-esque figures and the horses they encounter. As in Equus, the horse in Hicks-Jenkins’ work—whether alive or dead—is the connecting bond between the present and an ancient, primal past:

The sexy muscled young man, emerging more and more from the sheet as the series goes on, could be one of the dancers Clive directed. But the menacing horse’s death-head he carries is a powerful metaphor for AIDS. He seems to be offering and taking away at the same time, an alluring invitation and a deadly threat. There is ancient as well as contemporary menace here, too – the severed horse’s head as a sacrificial object from the iron age. The head is also a memento mori.

All of which has served to remind me of a painting of my own which I produced just over ten years ago and which receives its first public showing here.

This was little more than a sketch in acrylics based on the horse in Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare. It too owes a debt to Picasso and there’s something of the Mari Lwyd about it, especially the teeth. I’ve no idea now why I painted this but then art doesn’t always justify its existence with a reason. I never gave this a title at the time. Perhaps Equus would be fitting?

Update: Daniel is very taken with the actor who plays one of the horses.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• Perfume: the art of scent

Venom (2003).

The work of Angelo Filomeno, an Italian artist based in New York, is just the kind of thing I like to see: insects, skulls and bones in a luscious presentation. The sculpture below is made of glass while the flat works are silk embroidery with crystals as part of the decoration. There’s a selection of the latter works here.

Cold (detail) (2007).

Incendiary Lovers (2005).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The skull beneath the skin
• Vanitas paintings
• Giant Skeleton and the Chocolate Jesus
• Very Hungry God
• History of the skull as symbol

Dorian (Richard Winsor) photographed by Bill Cooper.

Matthew Bourne’s new dance version of Dorian Gray opens today at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London, and I’d have been interested in this production even without visions like the ones above and below; the eye candy merely adds an additional frisson and, let’s face it, there’s always been an erotic component to dance and ballet however high-minded the intention. Bourne famously gave the world the a Swan Lake with male swans and in Dorian Gray updates Wilde in a very contemporary manner (following Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation and Duncan Roy’s recent film adaptation) with the gay subtext made an overt text.

Set in the image-obsessed world of contemporary art and politics, Matthew Bourne’s ‘black fairy tale’ tells the story of an exceptionally alluring young man who makes a pact with the devil. Amongst London’s beautiful people, Dorian Gray is the ‘It Boy’ – an icon of beauty and truth in an increasingly ugly world.

The destructive power of beauty, the blind pursuit of pleasure and the darkness and corruption that lie beneath the charming façade; the themes behind Oscar Wilde’s cautionary tale have never been more timely.

Richard Winsor again, photographed by Murdo Macleod.

Dorian Gray continues the gender-reversals with Lord Henry becoming Lady H, while Sybil Vane is transmuted to Cyril. I like the stage design detail where the customary nightclub glitterball becomes a version of Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted human skull, the expensive artworld bauble finding its own level at last as a piece of decoration. Updating stories in this way often provokes a feeling of ambivalence—removing the subtext can have the effect of diluting the tension which lies at the heart of the work—but the continual refashioning of Wilde’s fable has confirmed its status as a contemporary myth, something I’m sure he’d be very pleased about. In that respect, it gives the creator the immortality through art which his creation, in the closing pages of the story, is denied.

• Because Wilde’s worth it | Matthew Bourne discusses the production
• Review in The Independent
• Bill Cooper’s production photos
• Wilde at heart: Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray | Another photo gallery

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Osborne’s Dorian Gray
• Dorian Gray revisited
• The Poet and the Pope
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II

Untitled photo print.

A fantastic exhibition of photographs, drawings and engravings by Raymond Carrance, aka Czanara, opens today at Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art, New York, running until June 21, 2008. For those of us who can’t get to see it there’s a selection of the works on show at their site which immediately increases the web visibility of this artist by several orders of magnitude.

Carrance was a photographer and book illustrator who, working mostly in the 1950’s and 60’s, created a private body of homoerotic dreamscape’s under the pseudonym ‘Czanara’. The exhibit shines new light on Carrance’s art, which is certainly courageous and innovative, especially for its time.

One of the last great unknown erotic artists of the 20th century, his work is somewhat reminiscent of the magic realism style of the painters Paul Cadmus and Jared French, yet done in a photographic medium. Using overlays of abstract graphics over dreamy images of languid young men at play, his work is a meditative pondering of the artist’s psyche. The work is reverential, distinctly European, yet never exploitative.

Carrance, who lived from 1921–1998, was also responsible for illustrating with elaborate etchings and lithographs the works of Jules Renard and Cyrano de Bergerac, as well as an edition of Henry de Montherlant’s 1951 gay classic La Ville dont Le Prince est un Enfant (The Land Whose King is a Child). There will be examples of this riveting work, as well as his compelling drawings, on view as well. Having died with no heirs, his work was sold at auction by the French state, but luckily fell into the hands of a bookseller who we have to thank for it finally seeing the light of day.

Untitled engraving (c. 1950s).

Among the items worthy of note is the above engraving which is another version of the hermaphrodite angel picture I posted in March last year. The other engravings are equally fascinating, looking at times like gay equivalents of Hans Bellmer.

May 4, 1953.

There’s also the drawing above which raises a curious artistic conundrum by being very reminiscent of the work of comic artist Burne Hogarth. A couple of weeks after posting the Czanara angel picture I pointed out the similarity between the film poster for Premonition and one of Hogarth’s panels from Jungle Tales of Tarzan, both of which use the trick of making faces out of tree branches. (I also noted that Dalí was doing similar things before almost everyone else.) Czanara’s 1953 drawing not only contains very Hogarthesque figures but does the same thing with the branches to make a skull face. The curious thing here is that Czanara’s picture predates Hogarth’s Tarzan book by more than twenty years. It’s very unlikely that Hogarth would have seen Czanara’s work; given that Hogarth was made world famous by his Tarzan strips of the 1940s it’s more likely that Czanara knew Hogarth’s work although none of his Sunday strips contained these kind of pictorial tricks and I’ve not seen any example of Hogarth doing this in the 1950s. I also haven’t yet seen the recent book about Czanara so can’t say what light has been shed on his artistic influences. If anyone can solve this mystery (which may simply be coincidence, of course), please leave a note in the comments.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The skull beneath the skin
• A premonition of Premonition
• Czanara’s Hermaphrodite Angel
• The art of Paul Cadmus, 1904–1999

All Is Vanity by Charles Allan Gilbert (1892).

The surreptitious skull is another of those perennial motifs that recur in art from time to time and one which has become especially prevalent since the late 19th century. There seem to be a number of reasons for this, the most obvious being that if you’re going to show how clever you are by hiding one image inside another you may as well make the hidden thing something that everyone recognises. A secondary reason would seem to be the waning power of the vanitas theme. As painting became more pictorially sophisticated it wasn’t enough to simply show a skull and expect people to accept that and a stern moral as the principal content. Hence the development of death as a non-skeletal character in Symbolism and the reduction of skulls in pictures to a kind of playful game.

Holbein’s anamorphic skull in The Ambassadors is probably the grandfather of all the later versions but the more recent popularity of the hidden motif can be traced back to Charles Allan Gilbert whose 1892 picture, All is Vanity, drawn when he was just 18, was sold to Life Publishing in 1902 and subsequently spread all over the world in postcard form. Despite giving birth to a host of imitators, Gilbert’s picture is the one that still inspires artists and photographers up to the present day.

A Pierrot’s Love (uncredited) (1905).

Another very popular version.

La Famille Impériale de Russie; French postcard (1908).

In Voluptate Mors by Salvador Dalí & Philippe Halsman (1951).

Dalí was the master of this kind of pictorial illusion, of course, and worked several of his own variations with skulls. The most famous is the Philippe Halsman photograph which was recapitulated in the poster art for The Silence of the Lambs in 1991 and, more recently, The Descent.

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot (1982).

Gilbert’s picture started to be reproduced as a poster from the Sixties on and eventually began influencing rock album sleeve art. There’s more than enough examples of these, most of them pretty ropey. The Damned used Gilbert’s picture in 1977 while Def Leppard produced their own version for Retro Active in 1993. Far better than the metal attempts was Trevor Brown’s sleeve for Coil’s Hellraiser Themes EP which you can see on his blog page along with some other 20th century examples of the motif.

Bryan Talbot’s panel from the first book of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright is less well-known. I’m sure there’s been a lot of this kind of thing in the comics world over the years but Bryan’s version is the only one I have to hand.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm (1991).

And speaking of comics, here’s my own variation in a panel from Reverbstorm #3, drawn in 1991 but not published until 1995.

Hellblazer (unpublished) (1994).

One of the editors at DC Comics liked my Lovecraft and Lord Horror work and asked me to do a tryout for a Hellblazer cover in 1994. I’d only just switched from gouache to painting with acrylics at the time and didn’t feel very confident about using them but also didn’t want to turn the offer down. The painting above was the result and they didn’t like it. I thought I was trying to be clever by doing the skull thing when all they wanted to see was a portrait of John Constantine, not a guy with his face blotted by shadow.

Poison by Dior, photographed by Vincent Peters (2002).

And so to the 21st century and this award-winning ad shot which brings us full circle with a copy of Gilbert’s original picture.

The effect was achieved with skilful lighting, set design and photography rather than post-production trickery, says Peters.

“The image recalls the blending of art and psychology that occurred at the end of the 19th century. I shot it straight, with very little post-production. The trickiest part was getting the composition right – there was only one spot I could take the shot from; an inch to the left or right and the effect would have been spoiled.”

He stresses that the resulting image was “a collaborative effort” and makes special mention of the agency’s creative team. “The agency came to me with the idea and asked me how I would do it. These day it’s rare to be approached for your technical skills. Normally it’s because you can achieve a certain mood. In this case I added the fin de siècle atmosphere.”

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Darwin Day
• Vanitas paintings
• Giant Skeleton and the Chocolate Jesus
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Very Hungry God
• Dalí Atomicus
• History of the skull as symbol

Charles Darwin’s walking stick from the Wellcome Collection.

Happy Darwin Day.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Prince Iskandar’s horoscope
• Vanitas paintings
• Giant Skeleton and the Chocolate Jesus
• Very Hungry God
• History of the skull as symbol

Earth, looking suitably infernal.

Out this evening to the Zion Centre in Hulme to see Seattle drone metal band Earth. I didn’t get to see their performance at the 2005 Arthurfest in Los Angeles but this event made up for that. Support—which we missed due to late arrival—was from Sir Richard Bishop, whose portrait I produced for the last issue of Arthur Magazine.

Earth play that kind of slowed-to-a-crawl metal which has its roots in Black Sabbath (the origin of their name) and Swans. The band have some great album and track titles, among them Thrones and Dominions, Hex (Or Printing in the Infernal Method) and Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine, the latter being borrowed by a drone doom supergroup. Unlike followers Sunn O))), who don robes and fill the stage with fog, the Earth presentation is a minimal one: no vocals, just the music, and no effects, red light only. I’d heard a couple of Earth CDs but what becomes obvious when you see them live is that this kind of music really benefits from loud volume and a good sound system. Both those elements were in place tonight which made for a thoroughly immersive experience.

Earth have a new album out at the end of this month, The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, on the Southern Lord label.

It’s always nice when something you’ve worked on turns up in the post and there’s been a double helping of that this week with the arrival of the Chaoticum CD and the catalogue for the Maison D’Ailleurs exhibition. Since both of these are either partly or wholly connected to HP Lovecraft, their simultaneous arrival is fitting.

The CD is a digipak on textured art paper and another quality production from Horus CyclicDaemon. The exhibition catalogue manifested as a small hardback book which was a pleasant surprise, with the skull maze design blocked in silver on the cover. Each artist is allotted a single page and the book also includes some original fiction based on Lovecraft’s story notes by a number of well-known writers. My picture is rather shrunken the way it’s positioned across the centre of a page (would have been better running vertically) but then it was my decision to make it so wide in the first place.

The Chaoticum CD is limited to 500 copies and can be ordered here. The catalogue is available from Maison D’Ailleurs or the Payot Libraire bookstore for CHF 37.00 + p&p (or 38, depending on which page you look at).

Also arriving this week is my illustration of ex-Sun City Girls guitarist Sir Richard Bishop for an Arthur Magazine interview by Erik Davis. Arthur #27 will be hitting the stands in the US and Canada shortly but for now you can download it in PDF form here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs
• New things for October

The horoscope of Prince Iskandar, grandson of Tamerlane, the Turkman Mongol conqueror, by Imad al-Din Mahmud al-Kashi, showing the positions of the heavens at the moment of Iskandar’s birth on 25th April 1384.

From the Wellcome Trust image collection. Considering the Wellcome Trust’s medical background, there’s a surprising amount of non-scientific material in its image library, not least a collection devoted to Witchcraft. This perhaps reflects the wide-ranging interests of the Trust’s founder, Henry Wellcome. Jay Babcock and I visited the exhibition of artefacts from Wellcome’s vast collection at the British Museum in 2003 and that proved to be a similarly surprising cabinet of curiosities, including sheets of tattooed human skin and Charles Darwin’s skull-headed walking stick. I was sure I had a photograph of the latter but don’t seem able to find it if it’s still around. Never mind, the BBC has a picture, together with other items from the exhibition. Also on display there was a specially-commissioned film from the Brothers Quay which can now be seen in their DVD collection.

Via Boing Boing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Calligraphy by Mouneer Al-Shaárani
• The Brothers Quay on DVD
• The Journal of Ottoman Calligraphy
• Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East
• The Atlas Coelestis of Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr

An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768).

As promised, one of my favourite chiaroscurists. The impression Joseph Wright’s work made on me at the age of 13 was one of many revelations from my first visit to the Tate Gallery. The paintings which struck me most of the older works there were all of the Romantic or late-Romantic era: Turner, Francis Danby, John Martin, Philippe de Loutherbourg and Joseph Wright’s enormous An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, which is now housed in the National Gallery. The National Gallery site has this to say about the picture:

A travelling scientist is shown demonstrating the formation of a vacuum by withdrawing air from a flask containing a white cockatoo, though common birds like sparrows would normally have been used. Air pumps were developed in the 17th century and were relatively familiar by Wright’s day. The artist’s subject is not scientific invention, but a human drama in a night-time setting.

The bird will die if the demonstrator continues to deprive it of oxygen, and Wright leaves us in doubt as to whether or not the cockatoo will be reprieved. The painting reveals a wide range of individual reactions, from the frightened children, through the reflective philosopher, the excited interest of the youth on the left, to the indifferent young lovers concerned only with each other.

The figures are dramatically lit by a single candle, while in the window the moon appears. On the table in front of the candle is a glass containing a skull.

As with many paintings, the online reproductions do little justice to the subtlety of Wright’s rendering of light and shade. This remains his most famous picture although he made another on a similar theme, A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery (below) and, like Godfried Schalcken, he has at least two studies of people viewing statues by candlelight, a common practice at that time for the way the light gave classical sculpture a spurious life. Wright’s painting of The Alchymist is another popular work, turning up frequently in occult encyclopedias. Being a native of Derby he also became (along with de Loutherbourg) one of the first painters to depict the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution whose flaring furnaces provided an ideal subject for dramatists of flame and shadow.

Before leaving the tenebral world, I’ll note that Claire left a message to say that issue 24 of Cabinet Magazine has a feature on shadows in art, symbolism and philosophy.

The Alchymist, In Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers (1771).

A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery (1766).

Academy by Lamplight (1768-69).

Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight (1765).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Chiaroscuro
• Shadows at Compton Verney
• Death from above
• The apocalyptic art of Francis Danby

The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger (1533).

Vanitas by Franciscus Gysbrechts (no date).

Self-portrait With Vanitas Symbols by Giovanni Baglione (no date).

The Nature as a Symbol of Vanitas by Abraham Mignon (1665-1679).

Vanitas Still Life by Jacques de Gheyn the Elder (1603).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Giant Skeleton and the Chocolate Jesus
• Very Hungry God
• History of the skull as symbol

Mid-Sagital Skull Bisection (2007).
Hand casted acrylic resin with vintage watch parts.

Articulated Singer Insect (2005).
Antique mechanical parts and vintage Singer sewing attachment.

Lots of other great creations at the artist’s site. Via Boing Boing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Pierre Matter’s cyborg sculpture
• Insect Lab
• The art of Jessica Joslin

The giant skeleton by Gino De Dominicis is on display in the Palazzo Reale in Milan. More pictures at the Wooster Collective and also here. Via Towleroad.

Cosimo Cavallaro’s My Sweet Lord is due to go on display at Manhattan’s Lab Gallery in New York City on Monday but complaints from the usual suspects are giving the gallery second thoughts. More on that here. It’s okay to make any number of Messiahs from wood, stone, metal or plastic, just don’t dare make a Jesus out of anything edible.

Update: the Lab Gallery showing of the edible Jesus has been cancelled.

Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League, said the work was a direct assault on Christians. “All those involved are lucky that angry Christians don’t react the way extremist Muslims do when they’re offended.”

Don’t be shy Bill, you know you’re itching to bring back the Inquisition. So Christians are angry are they? Isn’t that one of the Seven Deadly Sins? Another complaint was that Jesus is shown naked, something that we see in plenty of paintings depicting him as a child. Oh well, the artist and gallery owners can feel relieved they weren’t stabbed or shot for their pains and the forces of Righteous Wrath can file into church at the weekend to eat the body of Christ. You know, like they do every Sunday.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Very Hungry God
• Gay for God
• History of the skull as symbol

Cadeau Audace by Man Ray (1921).

L’amour fou
Fur teacups, wheelbarrow chairs, lip-shaped sofas … the fashion, furniture and jewellery created by the Surrealists were useless, unique, decadent and, above all, very sexy.

Robert Hughes
The Guardian, Saturday March 24th, 2007

THE VICTORIA AND Albert’s big show for this year, Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, is—well, maybe we don’t much like the word “definitive”. But it’s certainly the first of its kind.

Everyone knows something about surrealism, the most popular art movement of the 20th century. The word has spread so far that people now say “surreal” when all they mean is “odd”, “totally weird” or “unexpected”. No doubt this would give heartburn to André Breton, the pope of the movement nearly a century ago, who took the title from his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had called his play The Breasts of Tiresias, “a surrealist drama”. But too late now. The term is many years out of its box and, through imprecision, has achieved something akin to eternal life. Surrealist painting and film, that is. In fact, some surrealist images have imprinted themselves so deeply and brightly on our ideas of visual imagery that we can’t imagine modern art (or, in fact, the idea of modernity itself) without them.

Think Salvador Dalí and his soft watches in The Persistence of Memory. Think Dalí again, in cahoots with Luis Buñuel, and the cut-throat razor slicing through the girl’s eye, as a sliver of cloud crosses the moon (actually, the eye belongs to a dead cow, but you never think this when you see their now venerable but forever fresh movie An Andalusian Dog, 1929). Think of photographer Man Ray’s fabulous Cadeau Audace (’Risky Present’, 1921), the flatiron to whose sole a row of tacks was soldered, guaranteeing the destruction of any dress it would be used on. Think of Rene Magritte’s The Rape, that hauntingly concise pubic face, with nipples for eyes and the hairy triangle where the mouth should be. Think of the shock, the horniness, the rebellion, the unwavering focus on creative freedom, the obsessive efforts to discover the new in the old by disclosure of the hidden.

But surrealist design? It seems almost a contradiction in terms. “Design” for us is strongly identified with industrial process, with modules, with the rationalisation of process into clear repeatability. To “design” something implies that it can be made not just once, but again and again and again, without loss of quality and intensity, like a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair or the old Parker 51 fountain pen. That an object is “designed” implies, or seems to, that every aspect of it from the first pencil scribble to the finishing touch and on to its intended use by the proposed consumer has been thought about and brought into full consciousness. It would therefore seem so remote from the spirit, the modus operandi, of surrealism as to have nothing to do with it. And to a great extent, it is. Something in surrealism, in the cult of the surrealist object, positively insisted that the thing should not have dwelled in experience before, and yet should be (mysteriously) a real thing in the real world, and preferably an old one (though not an antique). This meant either that it should have lost its context and even, if possible, the memory of that context, so that it appeared to the entranced eye of the spectator as something both filled with the ghosts of prior meanings and yet inexplicably new: an apparition of (urban) magic. It followed that most surrealist objects depended for their poetry on total uselessness. And how do you design something quite useless? You don’t. You create it. Hence the complete opposition between this show and the display of “Modernism” presented at the V&A last year, surveying the track of classical modernist design. Surreal Things is an inspired but logically necessary sequel: the rest of the apple.

Spectre of the Gardenia (1933) by Marcel Jean.

“Classical” modernist design—of furniture, rooms, and things in general—was usually done with one eye on the possibility of serial production. Surrealist design was most emphatically not. Practically everything called surrealist was one-off, even when it didn’t absolutely have to be. I’m not sure the word “design” really applies to some of the objects in the show, such as Marcel Jean’s Spectre of the Gardenia, 1933. This was a fusion of junk-shop resurrections. The head, though hardly recognisable as such, was a plaster cast of the 18th-century French sculptor Houdon’s portrait of the royal mistress, Madame Dubarry. Jean then turned her into a negress by covering the head with glued-on cloth, painted black. The eyelids became small zip-fasteners, opening horizontally to reveal tiny photos (a star, a face) where the pupils might have been. This fetishistic mask would have later echoes, such as the black leather S&M masks produced by the now almost forgotten American sculptor Nancy Grossman, whose work caused a brief sensation in New York in the 1970s. But on “design” as generally understood, such things as Marcel Jean’s head had no effect at all.

When it came to trying to decide the surreality of a thing or an image, the only question was: does this detach itself, stand out, from the world of common things around it? Does its oddity and apartness so distinguish it from the contents of the rest of the world that it promises access to a different sort of reality? Not a matter of newness (for looking new was of slight importance to surrealism), but rather of intensity and strangeness. Some surrealists fantasised about creating a canon of things that could, and just as importantly could not, be called surrealist. Man Ray toyed with the thought that “some kind of stamp or seal” might be invented to distinguish “the poem, the book, the drawing, the canvas, the sculpture, or the new construction” from all other things that were not certifiably surrealist. Naturally, this could not be done. Any effort to establish such copyrights was bound to fail. In fact, the only surrealist object that might, conceivably, have found a market niche for itself was the sofa designed by the English collector Edward James in tandem with Dalí: the justly famous pink sofa in the shape of Mae West’s lips. One could imagine a few takers for that hilariously voluptuous parody-object back in 1938, when the prototype was made, and it seems likely that more people would want one today.

People tended to assume that surrealism was mainly a Franco-Hispanic phenomenon, but nothing is quite so simple. There were English surrealists—indeed, you might say their appearance in the country of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll was ordained by fate. The most spectacular of them was, of course, James. He was one of the great English architectural extravagants, a reborn Walpole whose Strawberry Hill was a house in Sussex named Monkton. This startlingly idiosyncratic home had begun as a shooting lodge designed by Sir Edward Lutyens for James’ father, William, in 1902. By the time James and his Catalan friend Dalí were through with it (not that it was ever “finished”), it had become one of the strangest houses in 20th-century England, its outside covered in purple stucco, with faux-bamboo downpipes and, inside, wall-to-wall carpet woven with the menacing paw-prints of James’s pack of wolfhounds. Mother Nature made her appearance in such forms as a standing lamp made of a python, which James père had shot on one of his African safaris, and a fully grown, stuffed polar bear, which would later be dyed shocking pink and presented to Elsa Schiaparelli; it presided for a time over her Paris showroom, where it must have given her clients a certain frisson.

Where was the dreaming mind, always open to suggestion, to find the strange objects that could find and deserve a place in a surrealist scenario? Where but in the city, that great condenser of memory and experience? Nature was not what surrealism wanted; it wasn’t interested in the delights of the pastoral—in fact, it didn’t think them particularly delightful. It was above all a city affair. Surrealism always had at the back of its mind the definition of beauty-as-incongruity proposed by the crazily eccentric writer Isidore Ducasse, who wrote under the name of the Comte de Lautréamont: “Beautiful,” that worthy said, “as the chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”

Still Life (1933) by Man Ray.

The true surrealist city, the ground of all the movement’s imaginings, was of course Paris, that limitless and incomparable collage of things abutted in all their multitude of undeclared, secret, enigmatic relations. Not for nothing did the surrealist poet Louis Aragon call a book Le Paysan de Paris, implying that he had come to know the million and one images accumulated by the city, and that he tilled and fertilised them laboriously as a farmer works his soil. Paris was still a much stranger place in the 1920s than it could ever be today. Much of the old pre-Haussmann mystery still clung to its intestinal alleys and the glass-roofed arcades, where rejected things shrank from view behind grimy windows and then, scrutinised with a new eye, suddenly burst into a second life. To preserve the shock of that eyeblink transformation—that was the aim of the surrealist thing-maker. The “palette of objects” available to him (or her) was enormously variegated and rich, not least because junk was junk a hundred years ago—not potential “antiques”.

One of the merits of this show is that it’s the first (at any rate, the only one I’ve seen in more than four decades of reviewing) to take serious account of the relations between surrealism and the luxury arts—fashion design, interior decor, sales display, jewellery, and their various impresarios. By shifting the angle of view a little, as this show does, it is possible to see that these activities, if not intrinsically as important to surrealism as the painting or sculpture, certainly made big additions to the movement’s spirit, and that they did so through people not always included among the creators of surrealist work. One was the great designer Jean-Michel Frank, mainly known for his ultra-refined art deco furniture executed in such exotic materials as palisander, zebra wood and ivory inlays, but who turns out to have been, through his friendship with the poet René Crevel, a considerable surrealist “animator” in his own right. Moreover, it wasn’t the designers alone who created the various surrealist “looks”—a large part was played by their often highly receptive and creative clients, such as Charles de Beistegui. Not all of them, however, went along with the designers’ proposals. Who could? Dalí came up with what still sounds like a fairly repellent proposal for an animated armchair—”It will have life. It will breathe. There will be a mechanism which will follow the breathing of the human body.” There is no record that one of these gizmos was ever built—fortunately, perhaps, since one would not wish to be relaxing in it when the machinery went cuckoo, as it surely would have done after a few hours’ use.

Not so many years ago, liaisons between surrealism on one hand, and on the other the rich and chic and the businesses that served them, were almost always held by right-thinking, Marxist-leaning, avant-gardist people to be immoral affairs. They trivialised the very name of the artist. Fashion, particularly Paris couture, was by definition no part of proletarian Utopia; but come the revolution, which was, of course, right round the corner, giraffe-legged socialites from the 16th Arrondissement would not be tittuping about in gauzy taffetas and webs of gilded copper braid of the sort that Schiaparelli sent down her runway in 1949—no, it would be the virtuous austerities of cotton denim for them, and maybe a spanner stuck in the belt for a chic accessory. It didn’t happen like that, of course. Quite the reverse. “I have seen a young woman on the boulevard,” wrote Apollinaire, a poor art critic but a great poet, and one of the hearth-gods of surrealism, “dress in tiny mirrors that are appliquéd to the fabric. In sunlight the effect was dazzling. It was like a walking gold mine. Later it began to rain, and the lady looked like a silver mine … Fashion becomes practical, scorns nothing and ennobles everything. It does for substances what the Romantics did for words.”

Lee Miller photographed by Man Ray.

Fashion was sexy. So was surrealism. They were a natural fit. Nobody ever called cubism sexy, or constructivism, or any of the other movements of the early 20th century except German expressionism, which did have its sexy moments—though not so very many of them. But one of the core beliefs of the surrealists, as set forth by their leader, Andre Breton, was in l’amour fou, obsessional love, the kind of love that deranges the senses and tips those who feel it into a helpless vortex of appetite and feeling. Surrealism had its own cast of star women, seemingly imperishable love objects, all dead now, whose images nevertheless endure thanks to the photos of Man Ray, George Hoyningen-Huene and others. The most beautiful and desirable of them all was a first-rate photographer herself: the blonde American Lee Miller, who lived with Man Ray for a time in Paris and was one of the chief muses of surrealism. Her lips can be seen floating in the sky like some wondrous UFO above the breast-like domes of the Paris Observatory in Man Ray’s painting A l’heure de l’observateur. Sometimes it can be difficult to share the past’s enthusiasm for the sex-bombs of yesteryear, and Mae West, less a sex object than a parody of sexuality, is (at least for me) a case in point. But Miller, one of the most gorgeous American beauties of the 20th or any other century, was a wholly different matter.

When not gazing raptly on such Heloises, the yearning Abelards of surrealism invested a lot of energy in creating all sorts of sexual images, some of which—despite the huge expansion of pornography in modern life—have never been surpassed for conciseness and intensity. The young Jewish artist Meret Oppenheim made several. One was a startling re-use of a pair of white women’s shoes, which, bound tightly together and presented upside-down on a silver platter with paper chef’s frills on the high heels, became a sort of erotic chicken. But the most famous of Oppenheim’s works was Object, 1936, which grew out of an accessory design she had done for that principal patron of surrealist “thing-making”, Elsa Schiaparelli. For the brilliant couturier, Oppenheim had done a gold metal bracelet covered (on the outside) with beaver fur. She wore it to meet Picasso for drinks at the Café de Flore, and Picasso remarked that if you could have a fur bracelet then practically anything else could also be covered with fur, and so transformed. Why not a coffee cup, for instance? So Oppenheim went right ahead, with cup, spoon and saucer, and the result was one of the few really sublime sexual images of the 20th century. It compels you to imagine raising this furry cup, wet with hot fluid, to your lips; it offers no possible meaning other than cunnilingus; it is exquisitely graceful and inescapably direct, both at once, and if ever a single work was enough for one artist’s career, it is Oppenheim’s cup.

Object (1936) by Meret Oppenheim.

The romantic sexuality of surrealism expressed itself most frequently in one of its key images, the fashion dummy—not a statue, not a person, but a curiously haunting thing that carried reminiscences of high art—Giorgio de Chirico, whose piazzas and slanting shadows were haunted by these ambiguous manikins, was another of surrealism’s adopted ancestors. The use of mannequins covered a lot of territory, and a startling variety of moods. Sometimes they could be replaced by human models, particularly when some transgressive point needed to be made; the artist Oscar Dominguez installed one of these girls, passively reclining like some inordinately pretty creature who was nevertheless doomed to be rejected and thrown out, lying in a wooden wheelbarrow, which, in deference to her chic, was comfortably padded and lined with purple satin. But this use of the live human body favoured incongruities. One was a fashion shot for Harper’s Bazaar, in 1939, by Hoyningen-Huene, which showed a slender, beautiful model posed in front of Max Ernst’s The Fireside Angel. The creature one saw looming over her was one of Ernst’s most diabolic inventions—a ravening foretaste of nazism, a monster whose body is twisted into the unmistakable form of a hackenkreuz, or swastika, and not by any means (or so one might have thought) the sort of image that would make the magazine’s readers think “couture”. It was, however, the inanimate model—its status shifted towards that of a mere doll—that contained the most sinister possibilities of debasement and disturbance. The maestro here was Hans Bellmer, a somewhat bizarre sexual obsessive who loved mulling over themes of child rape, dismemberment, and general sexual nastiness behind the psychic woodpile.

Doll (1936) by Hans Bellmer.

Like Oskar Kokoschka before him, Bellmer made himself a human-sized doll. Unlike Kokoschka’s rag-and-stuffing effigy of Alma Mahler, however, Belmer’s doll represented not a grown-up woman but a prepubescent child. It did not commemorate anyone in particular, at least nobody whose name we know, but it was filled with the most intense significance for him. Jointed, modular, endowed with intricately modeled, hairless genitals, Mary Jane shoes and more than the ordinary number of limbs, capable of being twisted into all manner of postures and configurations, it was (literally) a parent’s nightmare and a sadist’s dream. Bellmer would set it up in various places, mostly threatening ones—corners of a wood, dark patches of grass. Then he would take photos of it. The images were apt to look like police evidence shots of crime scenes: plain, frank, not arty, not cleaned up. They spoke of dislocation, torment, violation and abandonment. This was, by the standards of the day, fairly sinister stuff, and its suggestion was far stronger than what it actually represented.

Surrealism itself was divided on the issue of what relation, if any, it should have to commerce. It was all very well to say, as some did, that the movement was born of a marriage of Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxist critiques of capitalism; certainly there had been a long flirtation with Trotsky on the part of some surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s, and others—including, disgracefully, Aragon in his over-the-top hymn of hate “The Red Front”—became outright Stalinists. But artists have to earn a living. In 1926, both Max Ernst and Joan Miró did backdrop designs for a production of Romeo and Juliet, by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. This earned them furious denunciations from Breton, Aragon and Picasso. “The moment you see a cheque you collaborate with reactionary White Russians! So much for that famous rigor of yours!” But such expostulations were not, in the end, terribly convincing. Most of the surrealists, including Breton, made their living by dealing, “art advising”, involvement in photography, advertising and the fashion industry. Indeed, without the patronage of fashion, it is hard to see how surrealism would have made its way in Paris at all.

Dalí, in particular, received a lot of flak for his relations with the rich. But he never made any pretence about this, unlike Picasso, whose communist sympathies were mostly wind. “Picasso is a genius!” Dalí would later exclaim. “Me too! Picasso is a Spaniard! Me too! Picasso is a communist! Me neither!”

At least old Avida Dollars (Breton’s clever anagrammatic nickname for him) tried to deceive no one, but his attitudes to filthy lucre were still misunderstood, sometimes willfully. Why would Dalí have turned to designing jewellery in the 1950s, collaborating with such jewellers as Fulco di Verdura and the Argentinian Carlos Alemany? Because, the received wisdom went, he was under the thumb of his mercenary harpy of a wife, Gala, whose demands for cash were so unrelenting and, in the end, so debilitating; because he had run out of ideas, and so was compelled to repeat his old ones (which were cliches by now, anyway) in different and grander materials than mere oil paint; and so on.

There was some truth to this. Gala was indeed a bullying ogress; practically nothing in the last half-century of Dalí’s painting life compares to the achievements of his genius up to, say, 1930, and the worst of late Dalí is unredeemable garbage. And yet, there was still some fire behind the moustache, and it flared up in such Dalí-designed jewels as the 1949 brooch in the form of a woman’s mouth made of pavé rubies, the lips slightly parted to reveal two rows of pearl teeth; or, better yet, the astonishing starfish he made in 1950 for a mid-western multimillionairess, an ultra-toy with five articulated arms made of rubies, diamonds, pearls, emeralds and gold, which has some claim to be the most impressive luxury object made in the 20th century. (You could bend its arms any way you liked, and they would stay in place; the catalog includes a photo of its owner, one Rebecca Harkness of Minnesota, wearing it on her breast, clinging there like a parasite for plutocrats, as if in possession of its host.)

But the most impressive jewel in the show is not by Dalí or any other “name” surrealist artist. It was designed and made by the Paris firm of Maison Boivin, through whose portals there strode one day in 1938 a rootin’-tootin’ Texas lady bearing the skull of a longhorn ox, picked up on her ranch. This, she declared, was to be the model for a brooch. And so Boivin made it: pavé diamonds all over, a wreath of emerald leaves cascading from one eye socket, a purple sapphire ribbon, polished gold horns. The whole thing more than four inches high. Just the objet to wear behind the wheel of your solid-gold Cadillac, with a couple of granite-jawed Texas Rangers riding shotgun. “Private collection”, the catalog says chastely. No bloody wonder.

One thing’s for sure: 50 years from now, nobody is going to be comparably impressed by the mingy, dispiriting trinkets cranked out by Tiffany with the names of Frank Gehry and Paloma Picasso on them. Not that anyone could be today, come to that. One of the effects of this show is to make you realise how sharply the very idea of decadence itself has decayed since the end of surréalisme au service de la luxe. The pressure of style has gone out of it, deflating it, leaving it somehow formless, gross and squishy, like so much of our sad and brutishly noisy culture.

• Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design is at the V&A, London SW7, from March 29 to July 22. Details: 0870 906 3883.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealist Revolution
• Surrealist Women
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Surrealist cartomancy

Subodh Gupta’s giant skull constructed from Indian cooking utensils.
From an exhibition at the Eglise Saint-Bernard, Paris, October 2006.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• History of the skull as symbol

Left: Handprint (1964).

Bull’s-Eyes and Body Parts:
It’s Theater, From Jasper Johns
By HOLLAND COTTER
New York Times, February 2, 2007

WASHINGTON — Art and crass are all but inseparable. So it’s no surprise to find an exhibition that brings together a record number of Jasper Johns’s famous target paintings being bankrolled by Target. You pass the corporate bull’s-eye logo, small but vivid, on a wall on your way into “Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965” here at the National Gallery of Art.

Mr. Johns’s targets, endlessly reproduced in the half century since he painted the earliest of them, have themselves become a form of advertising, a logo for American postwar art. Through sheer omnipresence they’ve become nearly invisible. What could change that now?

The answer: Seeing them live. The 15 “Target” paintings installed in the show’s first gallery look every bit as radical and mysterious as they surely did in New York in the 1950s, when, simply by existing, they closed the door on one kind of art, Abstract Expressionism, and opened a door on many, many others.

The National Gallery show, organized by the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Jeffrey Weiss, has mysteries of its own. It isn’t a survey of the decade 1955-65, but a selection of 90 Johns works from that time organized by visual theme: targets, “devices,” words and the human body. Other motifs at least as important to that phase of his career, like flags, numbers and maps, are nowhere in evidence. Nor can the connective “allegory” proposed by the exhibition title be readily discerned. No matter.

Walk in the door, and you’re hooked. Try to move through the show in a hurry, and you can’t. The work is too strong, too unusual. It keeps stopping you, here, then here, then here. Mr. Johns, you suddenly remember, doesn’t just create visual objects, he creates situations, events. Each painting is a mini-theater, with farce and tragedy silently acted out and the audience invited to participate.

Initially Mr. Johns wanted the participation to be physical. “Target With Plaster Casts” (1955) is a painting surmounted by a row of wooden niches holding casts of body parts: a hand, a foot, a penis, a breast. And each niche has a little flip-up door, designed to be opened and closed by viewers, to give them a different, more intimate art experience than usual. Of course, if you reach for them now, in a museum, you risk arrest. So the real message, which Mr. Johns must have anticipated, is: Touch, but don’t touch.

His art is built on such ambiguities. Most of his very early paintings, done in a thick encaustic medium that makes them look molded instead of brushed, feel like sculptures. Many of those done a bit later in oils have three-dimensional objects attached to their surfaces so that, like furniture, they carve out sculptural space.

Dada, cerebral and vacant, was a big influence on Mr. Johns. His group of paintings made up of the stenciled names of colors — red, yellow, blue — was inspired in part by Marcel Duchamp’s use of language as art. Duchampian too are the so-called “devices” paintings, which have rotatable wooden discs, with squeegeelike arms for smoothing arcs of paint, affixed to their surfaces.

One assumes that Mr. Johns was declaring his complete dissociation from gestural abstraction, with its fetishized brushstroke, its existentialist soul, its emotional acting out. But then you arrive at a word-painting like “False Start” (1959), which explodes with hysterical brushwork. Or “Device Circle” (1959), on which the attached wheel looks gloomily derelict, like a one-handed clock. Or “Painting Bitten by a Man” (1961), which has a mouthful of wax encaustic gnawed out of its center, leaving a mark like a frozen scream or guffaw.

What’s the story? Is he mocking expressive painting or declaring it compatible with Dada’s cerebral conceits? Is he exposing a reserve of hidden passion beneath Duchamp’s dandyish, bone-dry wit?

In 1962 Mr. Johns made a group of prints by pressing his face and hands, covered with baby oil, onto large sheets of paper. The resulting images suggest a person swimming up from beneath an opaque surface that he is unable to push through. Over the next two years he finished two paintings and a drawing that referred to Hart Crane, the American poet who jumped off a ship in midsea and drowned.

The larger of the paintings, “Diver,” is very large and holds a compendium of motifs from earlier work: stenciled words, turbulent brushwork and a rainbow-colored target. At the center, two long wooden arms, ending in palms-open hands, reach upward.

If the painting theatrically approximates the psychic splintering that drove Crane to suicide, the related charcoal drawing, also called “Diver,” suggests the aftermath of his leap. Here the arms have hands at both ends. They point both downward and upward, with the descending hands meeting to form the shape of a skull in a subaqueous twilight.

It is in these theme-gathering works that a narrative, or “allegory,” comes together, though how to interpret it is hard to say. Countless glosses have been applied to Mr. Johns’s art, which is always assumed to be thick with coded meanings. Critics and scholars have scrutinized the art he has looked at, the writers he has read, the thinkers he has thought about.

Others have parsed his life. The artist Robert Morris, in a powerful catalog essay, links the themes of targets, flags and maps to Mr. Johns’s stint in the Army from 1951 to 1953. The art historians Kenneth E. Silver and Jonathan Katz have noted the dark, personal turn in his art after he and his lover, Robert Rauschenberg, split up in 1961. Their relationship seems to have shaped the careers of both men. It lives on in an art-world game that pits them against each other in a who’s-greater competition, though they are very different kinds of artists.

And what kind of artist is Mr. Johns? Various labels have been advanced: post-Dada, proto-Pop. I would call him a metaphysical artist, in the way that the 17th-century English poet John Donne is a metaphysical poet. Like Donne’s poetry, Mr. Johns’s art is equally about body and mind, sensuality and reflection. It is unmystical, unromantic, unnostalgic but obsessed with transcendence and the reality of loss.

Despite the difference in medium, the languages of Donne and Mr. Johns share many features: deliberate awkwardness, ungraceful beauty, a virtuosity so extreme that it turns weird. Their work can be startlingly, even embarrassingly candid, but is more often self-protectively opaque. Metaphor, rather than statement or confession, is their method. Some people find Donne manipulatively difficult and withholding. They might feel the same about Mr. Johns.

Finally, both metaphysicians appeared when a culture was on the cusp of change. And they were prepared to engage with that change, boldly, anxiously, in long careers that were electrifying early but are of profound interest all the way through. Mr. Johns’s career is of course still very much in progress, and I look forward to each future phase. I know of no major postwar American male artist whose work more completely approaches the condition of poetry, that reads as richly as it looks. To me it always feels new.

“Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965” continues through April 29 at the National Gallery of Art, East Building, Constitution Avenue between Third and Ninth Streets, Washington; (202) 737-4215, nga.gov.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Michael Petry’s flag
• Dada at MOMA

Fantazius Mallare by Wallace Smith (1922).

Ben Hecht (1894–1964) is remembered today as a notable Hollywood screenwriter. He won the first screenplay Oscar for Underworld in 1927, wrote the great screwball comedies Nothing Sacred and His Girl Friday (based on his play with Charles MacArthur, The Front Page), and worked with directors such as Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, among others. His work as a novelist is inevitably overshadowed by these achievements, not least the two curious books he wrote when he was in his twenties, one of which ended up being prosecuted for obscenity.

A novel of decadence and mystic existentialism, Fantazius Mallare is a story of a mad recluse—a genius sculptor and painter who is at war with reason. Rather than commit suicide, his doting madness dictates that he must revolt against all evidence of life that exists outside himself. He destroys all of his work and then seeks out a woman who will devote herself to his Omnipotence. What follows is a glorious trek into a horrifying enlightening insanity.

Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath was first published in 1922 in a limited run intended for private distribution, most of which ended up being seized and destroyed by the authorities. The book is generally described as being a decadent work after the manner of Joris-Karl Huysmans‘ À rebours although this is a lazy comparison. Huysmans’ Des Esseintes is far more effete than the morose Fantazius Mallare, his exploits more cerebral. Huysmans’ prose is also more considered:

It was obvious that the decadence of this family had followed an unvarying course. The effemination of the males had continued with quickened tempo. As if to conclude the work of long years, the Des Esseintes had intermarried for two centuries, using up, in such consanguineous unions, such strength as remained.

There was only one living scion of this family which had once been so numerous that it had occupied all the territories of the Ile-de-France and La Brie. The Duc Jean was a slender, nervous young man of thirty, with hollow cheeks, cold, steel-blue eyes, a straight, thin nose and delicate hands.

Hecht meanwhile begins like this:

Fantazius Mallare considered himself mad because he was unable to behold in the meaningless gesturings of time, space and evolution a dramatic little pantomime adroitly centered about the routine of his existence. He was a silent looking man with black hair and an aquiline nose. His eyes were lifeless because they paid no homage to the world outside him.

When he was thirty-five years old he lived alone high above a busy part of the town. He was a recluse. His black hair that fell in a slant across his forehead and the rigidity of his eyes gave him the appearance of a somnambulist. He found life unnecessary and submitted to it without curiosity.

What follows is a work of vigorous grotesquerie and misanthropy that might almost seem parodic if the sincerity of the author’s cynicism wasn’t so evident. Before heading for Hollywood, Hecht worked as a journalist in Chicago and his eye for hypocrisy gave him much to be cynical about. Des Esseintes collects works of art to assuage his weariness with the world; Fantazius Mallare has no time for such preciousness:

Rising from his chair Mallare attacked, one by one, the canvases and statues. Goliath watched him in silence as he moved from pedestal to pedestal from which, like a company of inert monsters, arose figures in clay and bronze. The first of them was a man four feet in height but massive-seeming beyond its dimensions. Mallare had entitled it “The Lover.”

Its legs were planted obliquely on the pedestal top, their ligaments wrenched into bizarre muscular patterns. Its body rose in an anatomical spiral. From its flattened pelvis that seemed like some evil bat stretched in flight, protruded a huge phallus. The head of the phallus was enlivened with the face of a saint. The eyes of this face were raised in pensive adoration. At the lower end of the phallus, the testicles were fashioned in the form of a short-necked pendulum arrested at the height of its swing. The hands of the figure clutched talon-like at the face and the head was thrown back, as if broken at the neck. Its features were obliterated by the hands except for the mouth which was flung open in a skull-like laugh.

Hecht’s book was illustrated by Wallace Smith (1888–1937) whose careful delineations seem to owe something to Harry Clarke. Smith didn’t spare the salacious details and artist and writer ended up being fined $1000 each when the books were seized. Book fanzine It Goes on the Shelf throws some interesting light on this incident in a review of a Hecht biography:

…my interest in Hecht is mostly that he wrote a book, Fantazius Mallare, illustrated by Wallace Smith. Smith was said by Ronald Clyne to have gone to jail for the Mallare artwork, but apparently this was an exaggeration—he and Hecht were, however, fined $1000 each for “obscenity”; and $1000 was quite a lot of money in 1924. The particular points I was curious about were where the rest of the Wallace Smith artwork is?he could hardly have developed that style in the handful of drawings that have been published; and what happened to the copies of Fantazius Mallare seized by the US government?the book did not seem to be as scarce as would have been expected if they had seized even half of the 2000-copy edition. MacAdams was able to answer this last question to some extent—after the obscenity conviction, the publisher made another 2000 copies and sold them ‘under the counter’. However, MacAdams and I discovered that we both have copies of the original numbered edition, and that mine is #587 while his is #1900 and something—so what did the goverment seize?

It should be noted that Hecht and Smith went to a great deal of trouble to have themselves convicted of obscenity. They had wanted to create a test case of the federal obscenity law and have a show trial in order to turn public opinion against it by ridicule. Hecht also intended to enter a million-dollar civil suit for defamation of character against John Sumner and his infamous Society for the Suppression of Vice if Sumner attacked his book. The famous Clarence Darrow was to have been their attorney. The plan was to send review copies of Fantazius Mallare to all of the literary lights of the time, and then have Darrow call these people as expert witnesses at the trial. Alas, the scheme foundered on the unforeseen pusillanimity of the literary establishment—only HL Mencken agreed to appear as a witness. In the end there was no trial because Hecht and Smith endered a plea of nolo contendere.

Their treatment failed to impress DH Lawrence. In a review for Berkeley’s The Laughing Horse he wrote:

These drawings are so completely without irony, so crass, so strained, so would-be. There’s nothing in it but the author’s attempt to be startling…. The word penis or testicle or vagina doesn’t shock me. Why should it? Surely I am enough a man to be able to be able to think of my own organs with calm, even with indifference. It isn’t the names of things that bother me; nor even ideas about them. I don’t keep my passions, or reactions, or even sensations IN MY HEAD. They stay down where they belong….

…all these fingerings and naughty words and shocking little drawings only reveal the state of mind of a man who has NEVER had any sincere, vital experience in sex…. If Fantazius wasn’t a frightened masturbator he knows that sex contact with another individual meant a whole meeting, a contact between two natures, a grim recontre, half battle and half delight, always, and a sense of renewal and deeper being afterwards….The great gods pulse in the dark, and enter you as darkness through the lower gates. Not through the head.

Fantazius Mallare seems to me such a poor, impoverished, self-conscious specimen.

According to The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural Smith largely abandoned drawing after this episode, following Hecht to Hollywood where he became a minor screenwriter and novelist. Hecht was undeterred and wrote a sequel which appeared in 1924, The Kingdom of Evil: A Continuation of the Journal of Fantazius Mallare, like its predecesor also produced in a limited run.

The Kingdom of Evil continues the journal of the mad recluse Mallare, who has decided to live beyond reality, now an empty, repugnant memory. It is Mallare’s desire to find a world in which he belongs, and out of his madness he creates the monstrous Kingdom of hallucination: “Luminous and strange, its roofs careening like wing-stretched bats it lay encircled by hills—a Satanic toy, a thing of unearthly marvels. Its painted streets beckoned to Mallare. Its demons, horrors and lusts waited for him…”

The lusts aren’t so lavishly depicted this time, Hecht no doubt wanting to avoid another $1000 fine. This is a shame as the second book is longer but less interesting despite flights of fancy such as the following, which reads like a description of some of the horrors seen in Harry Clarke’s Faust illustrations:

Julian turned away quickly. But he remained without moving. Around us in every direction were dreadful, nauseating figures; two-headed things with faces drooping at the ends of wilted stalks; creatures with boneless limbs and bodies like pouches; creatures with swollen and pendulous heads riveting them to the earth; animate snail-like masses of flesh, hair-matted and mucous-covered; thick, serpentlike bodies that struggled to stand erect; half-formed heads that raised themselves above appalling disfigurements. I could not believe them alive at first and thought they must be matter that had erupted fungus fashion out of the earth. But staring I detected amid these obscene and tumorous shapes, horrifying human fragments—the arm of a man, the perfect breasts of a woman; human eyes staring out of putrescent and formless growths, human lips red and grimacing in swollen smiles. Around us they crept, emitting sounds, clawing at the air with fingers and stumps?a convulsive debris of faces, limbs and fetal distortions moving like foul bags of life.

Julian fled. I stood unable to move until one of them, tall as a man, its bulbous head rising out of a discolored sack of flesh, turned its face toward me. For the moment I looked at it a horror contracted my skin. I saw stamped upon this hideous growth and half-hidden by a cowl of skin a face I knew-a face with melancholy eyes and wide brooding mouth; a man’s face, perfect and thinking, its hair falling in a black slant across its brow.

“My face!” I screamed.

The artist engaged to try and match the prose was Anthony Angarola, a poor substitute for Smith despite the lasting praise of HP Lovecraft (see this earlier post). Angarola’s work resembles an imitator of S Clay Wilson pastiching Harry Clarke, if such a thing is possible, and it’s likely that it was this book that gave Lovecraft a good look at Angarola’s work. HPL would have baulked at the sexual content of Fantazius Mallare had he seen it.

The world hadn’t heard the last of the misanthrope, however, as he returned in a bizarre film adaptation, The Scoundrel, in 1935, giving Noël Coward his first starring role:

This odd morality play is set in the hellish environment of a decadent and pseudo-intellectual NYC publishing house, and is written and directed by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. It was inspired by Hecht’s earlier novel, Fantazius Mallare. This unique fantasy film sets an acerbic atmosphere of backbiting and meaningless existence for literary types. The film’s climax leaves the realistic publishing world and enters a metaphorical world of spiritual values. Unfortunately this stagy but cleverly sophisticated story turns into a pretentious mess. However, the film was able to collect an Oscar for Best Original Story.

Both books are out of print at present but you can read Fantazius Mallare online here. Kingdom of Evil is harder to find but the pair have been reprinted often enough so there are plenty of secondhand copies around.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Cormac McCarthy’s vision of a post-apocalyptic America in The Road is terrifying, but also beautiful and tender, says Alan Warner.

Saturday, November 4, 2006
The Guardian

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
256pp, Picador, £16.99

Shorn of history and context, Cormac McCarthy’s other nine novels could be cast as rungs, with The Road as a pinnacle. This is a very great novel, but one that needs a context in both the past and in so-called post-9/11 America.

We can divide the contemporary American novel into two traditions, or two social classes. The Tough Guy tradition comes up from Fenimore Cooper, with a touch of Poe, through Melville, Faulkner and Hemingway. The Savant tradition comes from Hawthorne, especially through Henry James, Edith Wharton and Scott Fitzgerald. You could argue that the latter is liberal, east coast/New York, while the Tough Guys are gothic, reactionary, nihilistic, openly religious, southern or fundamentally rural.

The Savants’ blood line (curiously unrepresentative of Americans generally) has gained undoubted ascendancy in the literary firmament of the US. Upper middle class, urban and cosmopolitan, they or their own species review themselves. The current Tough Guys are a murder of great, hopelessly masculine, undomesticated writers, whose critical reputations have been and still are today cruelly divergent, adrift and largely unrewarded compared to the contemporary Savant school. In literature as in American life, success must be total and contrasted “failure” fatally dispiriting.

But in both content and technical riches, the Tough Guys are the true legislators of tortured American souls. They could include novelists Thomas McGuane, William Gaddis, Barry Hannah, Leon Rooke, Harry Crews, Jim Harrison, Mark Richard, James Welch and Denis Johnson. Cormac McCarthy is granddaddy to them all. New York critics may prefer their perfidy to be ignored, comforting themselves with the superlatives for All the Pretty Horses, but we should remember that the history of Cormac McCarthy and his achievement is not an American dream but near on 30 years of neglect for a writer who, since The Orchard Keeper in 1965, produced only masterworks in elegant succession. Now he has given us his great American nightmare.

The Road is a novel of transforming power and formal risk. Abandoning gruff but profound male camaraderie, McCarthy instead sounds the limits of imaginable love and despair between a diligent father and his timid young son, “each other’s world entire”. The initial experience of the novel is sobering and oppressive, its final effect is emotionally shattering.

America – and presumably the world – has suffered an apocalypse the nature of which is unclear and, faced with such loss, irrelevant. The centre of the world is sickened. Earthquakes shunt, fire storms smear a “cauterised terrain”, the ash-filled air requires slipshod veils to cover the mouth. Nature revolts. The ruined world is long plundered, with canned food and good shoes the ultimate aspiration. Almost all have plunged into complete Conradian savagery: murdering convoys of road agents, marauders and “bloodcults” plunder these wastes. Most have resorted to cannibalism. One passing brigade is fearfully glimpsed: “Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. The phalanx following carried spears or lances … and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each.” Despite this soul desert, the end of God and ethics, the father still defines and endangers himself by trying to instil moral values in his son, by refusing to abandon all belief.

All of this is utterly convincing and physically chilling. The father is coughing blood, which forces him and his son, “in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find their keep”, on to the treacherous road southward, towards a sea and – possibly – survivable, milder winters. They push their salvage in a shopping cart, wryly fitted with a motorcycle mirror to keep sentinel over that road behind. The father has a pistol, with two bullets only. He faces the nadir of human and parental existence; his wife, the boy’s mother, has already committed suicide. If caught, the multifarious reavers will obviously rape his son, then slaughter and eat them both. He plans to shoot his son – though he questions his ability to do so – if they are caught. Occasionally, between nightmares, the father seeks refuge in dangerously needy and exquisite recollections of our lost world.

They move south through nuclear grey winter, “like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world”, sleeping badly beneath filthy tarpaulin, setting hidden campfires, exploring ruined houses, scavenging shrivelled apples. We feel and pity their starving dereliction as, despite the profound challenge to the imaginative contemporary novelist, McCarthy completely achieves this physical and metaphysical hell for us. “The world shrinking down to a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colours. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true.”

Such a scenario allows McCarthy finally to foreground only the very basics of physical human survival and the intimate evocation of a destroyed landscape drawn with such precision and beauty. He makes us ache with nostalgia for restored normality. The Road also encapsulates the usual cold violence, the biblical tincture of male masochism, of wounds and rites of passage. His central character can adopt a universal belligerence and misanthropy. In this damnation, rightly so, everyone, finally, is the enemy. He tells his son: “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed by God to do that … We are the good guys.” The other uncomfortable, tellingly national moment comes when the father salvages perhaps the last can of Coke in the world. This is truly an American apocalypse.

The vulnerable cultural references for this daring scenario obviously come from science fiction. But what propels The Road far beyond its progenitors are the diverted poetic heights of McCarthy’s late-English prose; the simple declamation and plainsong of his rendered dialect, as perfect as early Hemingway; and the adamantine surety and utter aptness of every chiselled description. As has been said before, McCarthy is worthy of his biblical themes, and with some deeply nuanced paragraphs retriggering verbs and nouns that are surprising and delightful to the ear, Shakespeare is evoked. The way McCarthy sails close to the prose of late Beckett is also remarkable; the novel proceeds in Beckett-like, varied paragraphs. They are unlikely relatives, these two artists in old age, cornered by bleak experience and the rich limits of an English pulverised down through despair to a pleasingly wry perfection. “He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms out-held for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle.”

Set piece after set piece, you will read on, absolutely convinced, thrilled, mesmerised with disgust and the fascinating novelty of it all: breathtakingly lucky escapes; a complete train, abandoned and alone on an embankment; a sudden liberating, joyous discovery or a cellar of incarcerated amputees being slowly eaten. And everywhere the mummified dead, “shrivelled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth”.

All the modern novel can do is done here. After the great historical fictions of the American west, Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy, The Road is no artistic pinnacle for McCarthy but instead a masterly reclamation of those midnight-black, gothic worlds of Outer Dark (1968) and the similarly terrifying but beautiful Child of God (1973). How will this vital novel be positioned in today’s America by Savants, Tough Guys or worse? Could its nightmare vistas reinforce those in the US who are determined to manipulate its people into believing that terror came into being only in 2001? This text, in its fragility, exists uneasily within such ill times. It’s perverse that the scorched earth which The Road depicts often brings to mind those real apocalypses of southern Iraq beneath black oil smoke, or New Orleans – vistas not unconnected with the contemporary American regime.

One night, when the father thinks that he and his son will starve to death, he weeps, not about the obvious but about beauty and goodness, “things he’d no longer any way to think about”. Camus wrote that the world is ugly and cruel, but it is only by adding to that ugliness and cruelty that we sin most gravely. The Road affirms belief in the tender pricelessness of the here and now. In creating an exquisite nightmare, it does not add to the cruelty and ugliness of our times; it warns us now how much we have to lose. It makes the novels of the contemporary Savants seem infantile and horribly over-rated. Beauty and goodness are here aplenty and we should think about them. While we can.

• Alan Warner’s latest novel is The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven (Cape)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cormac McCarthy’s venomous fiction

This year sees the 20th anniversary of the publication of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. This landmark comic book, one of the few to deserve the designation “graphic novel”, remains a particular favourite of mine, and one that still excites today for its consummate command of the comics medium. The following is a very long round table discussion with Watchmen’s creators from issue 100 of Fantasy Advertiser, first published in March 1988. It’s surprising that this doesn’t seem to have been posted anywhere else on the web as it’s an excellent discussion into some of the details of this great book.

Spoiler warning: this piece discusses in depth just about every revelation in the story so you’d be advised to skip it if you haven’t read the book.

MARTIN SKIDMORE: Alright, let’s have a starting point… just what is it about Watchmen that distinguishes it from other…
STEVE WHITAKER: Cream cheeses?
MS: …superhero comics on the market?
DAVE GIBBONS: Is this in the form of direct questions to us, or…
FIONA JEROME: No, we’re all gonna talk.
DG: Well, I’ll have a schnoozle then…
SW: The thing that I think distinguishes Watchmen from other comics is that the series holds together more like a novel. Your climax isn’t in the last 3 panels in Watchmen 12. There are long quiet tracts with exciting bits or…moderately exciting bits (LAUGHTER) In terms of Jack Kirby Wham! Smash! Pow! it’s all very quiet. There’s a lot of suffering but…
MS: …it’s all emotional rather than physical suffering.
ALAN MOORE: It’s a difficult question for me and Dave to answer, probably one that you could answer better, but if I had to say anything then it’s the degree of structure that me and Dave have applied to it—I can’t think of many examples of that degree of structure, that degree of layering.
FJ: I was going to say: especially visually you don’t get such a use of motif certainly not in American comics.
MS: Doug Moench has used it occasionally.
FJ: But not with the same complexity and not filling-in with written structure as well.
PETER HOGAN: The thing is: you’re given a world. The characters, alright, they’re based on the Charlton Characters but they’re new as of page 1. Even so, they’re characters with a history that comes out over the course of the thing… Their world has a history… it has a cohesion to it.
SW: Something that quite interests me now we’re talking about structure and stuff, is the symmetry—there is a real symmetry to Watchmen and the way the characters are set up.
DG: Two arms… two legs. (LAUGHTER)
MS: Perhaps the Comedian and Rorschach…
SW: I was thinking more of Osterman and Ozymandias.
MS: That’s right—the intellectual and physical, chaos and law…
AM: It’s difficult pinning down what’s symmetrical to what—I mean to me, at least to some extent, there’s an equally good case for contrasting Nite Owl and Rorschach.

FJ: Yah?
AM: Episode 6 was about the most depressing of the whole series; Episode 7 was probably the most uplifting. So there is a symmetry in the series but…
MS: I was looking at it in a moral sense I mentioned Dr Manhattan and Ozymandias specifically as reflecting the law and chaos… Oz wanted to establish a benevolent dictatorship, albeit a behind-the-scenes one—whereas Dr M goes on about randomness creating beauty, creating life and so forth. There’s a contrast there, and it’s the same sort of contrast that I mentioned as being between the Comedian and Rorschach, it’s a moral one—someone who’ll do anything for the government as opposed to someone who has strong morals, even it they are mad ones.
AM: I think it’s difficult finding what is symmetrical with what because if you take it from a moral attitude you could probably strike certain parallels but from another angle you’ll get a completely different set of answers.
FJ: You can make groupings. You can make endless groupings…
DG: It’s almost like reading your horoscopes in the paper—even when they get the predictions in the wrong order, you can still find something that applies to you. Because we’ve had 12 issues to do it, we’ve been able to explore so many different facets of the characters and their motivation that I’m sure you could find patterns even where none were specifically intended.
SW: But the patterns are one of the things that fascinate me about… sorry, Peter.
PH: I was just going to say that I thought one of the biggest clashes—right at the end—was between Ozymandias and Rorschach. The thing about Ozymandias is the fanatical gleam in the eye, his plan for humanity…
SW: What, where he says that he has just saved humankind, they are the good guys… and Rorschach doesn’t agree with him?
PH: But Rorschach is the man of honour and repeats—virtually repeats—that line from issue 1: ‘No compromise’.
FJ: Looking back at Ozymandias making this decision “I will kill so many million people to save the world” one thing that struck me is that when Dr Manhattan teleports the people away from the riot and kills 2 of them he says that’s okay because many more people would have died, and Rorschach, in his essay…
AM: About Truman.
FJ: Yes—about Hiroshima—says “I’m glad they dropped bombs on Hiroshima because lots more people would have been killed”.
AM: Yes, more people would have died.
FJ: So although they’re diametrically opposed in one way, they’ve all made this same statement, they’ve all made this same decision… but only Ozymandias has followed it through.
AM: The thing with Rorschach was intentional. He mentions President Truman on the first page of Watchmen and there is that brief essay which ends up saying “I think President Truman was right to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and that’s all I have to say about my parents”, and so, you know… that was a pretty common thought, that Truman was right to drop the bomb for that reason. Rorschach is—at least at that point in his life, where he still believes in God…
SW: He’s living very emotionally.
FJ: And he still believes in Daddy being an aide to President Truman and… a fantasy life.
AM: But at the end of the book, Ozymandias—who does this awful thing to New York… which is really, by extension, no more horrible than Hiroshima—you’ve got that parallel there.
FJ: It’s only the degree that differs, it’s not the act—because they’ve already done it.
SW: But in Watchmen 2 you learn… you really learn to hate the Comedian. I mean—shooting a pregnant woman, such a callous murder—and in No 11, which corresponds symmetrically, you learn to hate Ozymandias completely. Things like him sitting on his parents grave.
DG: Callous.
SW: A perfect depiction of how completely aloof he is, because he really does believe that he’s above it.
DG: Yes, but was dropping an A-bomb on Hiroshima a callous thing or was it a calculating thing—there is a difference?
FJ: They’re both callous and calculating.
SW: Surely the difference is that Hiroshima really happened and you’re making a metaphorical statement about it.
DG: Yeah, and the thing that Rorschach won’t stomach is that this is being done secretly, that a large section of New York is being wiped out—even in the face of Armageddon he wants to know the truth.
PH: The thing with Rorschach’s involvement with the New Frontiersman is he’s into conspiracy theories anyway but the diary is his way of getting the truth across.
SW: I’d really like to know why Osterman lies… well, he doesn’t exactly lie, he withholds the truth about Rorschach from Veidt.
AM: He doesn’t mention it.
SW: Veidt says something like “What about Rorschach?” and Osterman says “I doubt if he’ll reach civilisation”. He doesn’t say “Don’t worry, I’ve just blasted him to atoms”…it comes across as a mercy killing.
AM: It’s almost a mercy killing. When I was writing that bit where Veidt and Osterman sort of confront each other at the end and have that conversation, Dr Manhattan put it that way because, I would imagine that he realised that put otherwise it could possibly make things worse for Dan and Laurie: they’ve already got the death of an entire city to carry round with them in their heads and never tell anyone about for the rest of their lives. It was a small act of mercy so they could believe that Rorschach had just wandered out alone and died.
DG: Although I think that Veldt would have calculated the probability… and, really, there was nowhere else for Rorschach to go.
SW: He knows he’s going to die.
DG: In that situation he could only die.
SW: I know we’re given ample demonstration of what a psycho and what a sociopath he is, but this almost makes him the hero of the story.
AM: We tried to make it so that all of them are the heroes. Like, Rorschach is, definitely, in that he never steps out of character—apart from that moment when you see him cry and he says “Go on—do it!”
SW: The thing that reinforces that is that with Dan and Laurie you’ve had most of their motivations and their life histories explained to you but, next to Rorschach, they look like they’re made of cardboard.
AM: But next to Rorschach anybody would. We would. Because he’s so intense … The thing is: at one level Veidt is the hero of Watchman. You can’t take that away from him. On another level, Dan and Laurie are because they are the only human characters in it.
SW: Apart from the human cast, who you just get rid of in No 11.
PH: That’s another thing about Dr Manhattan blowing away Rorschach—he looks at death differently.
AM: He’s always been removed from humanity but, especially since leaving Earth and going to Mars, he’s just completely gone, especially that line about “I’ll go and create some human life”.
DG: The people who have the situation summed up at the very end—namely Ozymandias, Rorschach and Dr Manhattan—all know that something like the scene in the snow was going to happen. So the death scene was something both Osterman and Rorschach knew they were going to have to play out. Rorschach is just saying “You’ve got to do it so just do it!”
AM: He knows in issue 8. “I don’t expect to come back; I feel cold tonight”.
SW: He finishes his diary.
AM: Yeah, that’s it. This is probably going to be quite difficult, you know. There are so many layers and focusing on one element… I mean, good luck… carry on.
SW: The idea of doing a round table like this is that, with you here, we might get rid of a few Watchmen fallacies.
AM: That’s cool—it’s just that when you’ve got the whole tapestry it’s difficult to isolate one thread.

POLITICS

MS: One of the things I was interested in—getting on to the politics of it—was that you’ve said the hero is Ozymandias, who saves the world and sets it onto a new course—a very positive one from what we see in the concluding pages. Now, he’s doing that through a benevolent dictatorship. It probably doesn’t seem so but he’s manipulating, controlling the whole world.
SW: With his role model revealed as Alexander the Great…
MS: So he’s achieved what he wanted to. But in another way the hero—the one who refuses to compromise—is Rorschach. They’re the two clearest cases—far clearer than Dr Manhattan, say. Now, to me, from whet I know of your politics that’s pretty contrary to your own ideas, Alan.
AM: Yes, but I’d be a pretty poor writer if all the characters that I did reflected my own politics. All the characters in Watchmen have a bit of me in them. I mean, Dr Manhattan has, Rorschach has and Veidt has .. … Probably Dan and Laurie as well, to a degree. Amongst the many other things I was trying to say in Watchmen was just that in this world we live in, with all its disparate characters and ambitions there are probably no two people who want the same thing. The world doesn’t work like that anyway. If there’s a central line in Watchmen it’s “Who makes the world?” Then again, that’s just my opinion. I’m sure other readers can find lines that are more meaningful to them, to me that’s the core of it: you’ve got all these vast powers—and Rorschach is a vast power in his own way just as Veidt is a vast financial power and Osterman’s a vast physical power. You’ve got ordinary people just muddling along, you’ve got people who don’t know what the fuck’s happening which is, like, most of humanity. You’ve got the Nixons and all this sort of stuff but… Who makes the world? Is the world really under the control of its most powerful people or are they just part of the design, the same as the rest?
DG: Referring to what Martin just said there’s also the question of what is a hero? You know, in their own way, almost anyone’s actions could be interpreted as heroic.
SW: Even the Comedian.
DG: You like them, even when you completely disagree with their stance.

SEQUELS

SW: The Comedian’s is probably the one story begging to be told.
AM: The only possible spin-off we’re thinking of is—maybe in four or five years time, ownership position permitting—we might do a Minutemen book. There would be no sequel.
SW: The story I’m thinking of fits the gap between the end of the Minutemen at the beginning of the 50s and the Comedian’s career—with Ozymandias’ interruption of that…
AM: Hooded Justice.
DG: I think that’s one of the things that adds to the book. When you think of people you know, there are certain areas of their lives you know a lot about and there are other areas you know nothing about—you get years and years where you don’t know what happened to them. At one point that Comedian storyline was suggested to us by DC, to fill in the mosaic and define things. All it would do be to destroy the reality and dilute the whole thing. I think if you read the book closely and you’re fairly intelligent, you can fill in that kind of thing… just as any work of art—a painting, a drawing or any written form of art—leaves a lot to your imagination anyway.
SW: Perhaps it is to the credit of the series that I’ve become particularly interested in one or two characters. I like what you were saying about James M. Cain earlier, Dave—I have a similar fondness for Raymond Chandler which has advanced to the point where I want to read biographies and correspondence.
AM: You just want a little more of him.
SW: All we read here is a series of events around these characters stretching over 12 weeks—something else that I thought was quite neat.
DG: Now I didn’t know that.
SW: Well, it it ends on December 28th it’s 12 weeks.
AM: I’m not surprised.
DG: That’s amazing because the story dictated how much time things took.
AM: Just before we get off the subject of serialisations, continuations end sequels: when I set out to do Watchmen, and I imagine that Dave felt the same way—that we didn’t want to give people what they wanted, we set out to give them what they needed… and the same applies to sequels they may want sequels really badly…
FJ: …but they don’t need them. Sequels are the bane of comic books.
AM: Watchmen is a novel, it’s there and it’s got a beginning, a middle and an end… complete. Frank Herbert managed to turn Dune into a Perry Rhodan for the ’80s with all those sequels. It was a wonderful book to start with that was unreadable by the time it was finished.
DG: It should be very clear in your mind who’s in charge of any artistic endeavour. Obviously, Alan and I could make ourselves a fortune on Watchmen 2 next year. I just can’t think of any reason to do it other than the obvious monetary ones. Minutemen appeals because it’s a different era and a different story.
SW: Lesbian and Homosexual relationships and costumed kinks in a 40s environment…
ALL: Hmmmmmm…

DR MANHATTAN

PH: One of the key things about Watchmen is that the sexuality of all the characters is at least touched on… and the Comedian is a father… but what the hell is Osterman’s sexuality like?
SW: Self-worship?
MS: Years ago, Alan, I remember you saying that sexuality is a big part of a character and you should at least know what it is. You don’t necessarily have to have it in the story. With Osterman there’s not much of it there.
SW: An interesting point—So Dr Manhattan is, I presume, deliberately left as this blank slate, this “what the devil is he going to do next” type of character. There’s no mention of his mother but he seems to have these really strange relationships with women—with Laurie and with Janey Slater. I was convinced that when he was with Laurie on Mars and he was saying, “I can see the future… sort-of, and I’m killing somebody” that he was lying to her about not being able to tell who it was—the reason being that he could see himself murdering her. She—his last link with humanity, his emotional link with his past.
AM: Well, that was to some degree deliberate: we wanted people to think that—or that it was probably going to be Dan or Veidt. The only person we didn’t want them to think of was Rorschach.
SW: I’d worked out that Ozymandias was too obvious..
MS: The typical superhero confrontation…
SW: Dr Manhattan seems, when he becomes ‘recorporated’ in the last issue, subtlely altered—he refers to ‘Osterman’ as somebody else. I looked to see if he still had the little circle on his forehead or if something else like that eye make-up had changed. I feel he should’ve looked different.
FJ: Well, he’s not—he says “If that didn’t kill Osterman…” as though the previous Dr Manhattan was somehow Osterman. “and it won’t kill me this time.”
DG: That didn’t kill Osterman—it happened when he was dissolved.
AM: Osterman died in ‘59.
SW: But his emotional attachment to people like Janey Slater…
DG: That’s just him trying to be normal—despite the fact that he’s no longer a human being.
SW: But his blitheness left him open to people like the Comedian and Ozymandias sussing him out, well-and-truly. It’s quite a weakness when he thinks of himself as a god.
DG: I don’t think he does.
AM: To have the concept of ‘god’ you have to be a human being in that when you are a god, the word ‘god’ vanishes.
FJ: He’s more like the Watcher or something—there to observe what interests him.
AM: He’s just Dr Manhattan, and he’s the only one in the universe and there are no rules.
MS: There’s an idea for a sequel: in issue 12, the process that made Dr Manhattan seems to be applied to Bubastis.
AM: Bubastis the Super Cat, Dr Manhattan’s Cat—Bubastis.
DG: Cats haven’t got enough self-awareness to become…
FJ: It is a genetically engineered cat.
MS: The Krypto of the 90s, I thought.
DG: I suppose we could’ve done The Fly and had Dr Manhattan come back with big, long, pointed pink ears!
ALL: Laughter
AM: As far as Dr Manhattan’s character goes—when he becomes Dr Manhattan, his personality is that of Jon Osterman put through a very traumatic experience… but still that of Osterman, just about.
SW: A Jon Osterman with totally new perceptions.
AM: Yes, that and he’s still got an awful lot of reflexive, habitual needs.
SW: It’s a personality, isn’t it?
FJ: But does his continual failure to have a human relationship drive him sway from keeping those human habits?
AM: I would think drive would be too strong a word. He gradually gets bored with it.
DG: It’s unappealing and unsatisfying.
FJ: Nowhere near as much fun as a few atoms.
AM: By the time Dr Manhattan is a million years old, or a thousand years old, or even a hundred he will be almost unrecognisable—but this is his infancy and you still see him doing things like… he pushes a door open in No 11.
MS: In No 12 he walks from the pool to Ozymandias.
AM: Right! There’s no need. You see, sometimes a certain lack of consistency seems more realistic. I just wanted him to seem so completely spaced out that we wouldn’t be able to tell just how spaced he was. If he was simply spaced out, he would have just left Earth in 1959 and he wouldn’t have let the army push him around.
SW: Something that caught my attention was your use of Kurt Vonnegut’s Serial Time with relation to Dr Manhattan.
AM: Cat’s Cradle…
DG: Sirens of Titan…
SW: More Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse 5—the idea of a man who doesn’t have to lead his life in a punctual way, as Vonnegut puts it. What strikes me is that Vonnegut knew that Serial Time couldn’t work—it would drive anyone bananas, basically—but if you use it in a comical way, a satyrical, self-mocking way—which is Vonnegut’s speciality—then it’ll work really well. Someone as screwed up as Osterman would probably use Serial Time to go straight back to the womb—and for some reason Dr Manhattan’s portrayal of a mother figure. You see what I mean about using Serial Time as a serious property?
PH: I get the feeling that Dr Manhattan is just pretty bemused. He knows what the future’s going to be…
SW: Well…
PH: Well, he has an awareness of it.
SW: All he knows is his own experiences all he knows is what his future’s going to be.
AM: Anybody here ever had a lucid dream? if you have a lucid dream, and you’re good at it, you can do whatever you want to do in that dream. You’re Dr Manhattan, basically, because you control the substance of reality—but you find yourself surrounded by dream characters. You do what you want but you don’t do anything to offend them out of basic politeness.
DG: Perhaps a better word than bemused would be distracted.
MS: He wants firm ideas of what he’s got to do—it people say “Go to Vietnam” or whatever…
DG: That’s an interesting thing…
MS: He’s got no motivation at all. He needs to be told.
DG: Here, we’ve got a man who’s been gifted—if indeed, he has been gifted with all these powers and abilities but who is not really Grade ‘A’ superhero material. He’s not a very strong character and he has no clear idea of what to do.
MS: He’s naive and simple.
DG: He’s very intellectually dependant.
FJ: That’s right, has father says ‘You’re not going to be a clockmaker, you’re going to be a scientist’—and he is. He’s very manipulable.
AM: Anything, just for a quiet life that’s Dr Manhattan’s point of view.
SW: If you look at it from a philosophical point of view that’s very…
AM: Zen…
SW: Well, it’s Tao.
AM: It’s a sort of still point where you no longer care about any other things.

PHILOSOPHY

SW: I’d like to think of Dr Manhattan like that but I don’t think he’s that profound—Well… not yet. One of the things I have written down here is a point—about the 2 big philosophical moments in Watchmen: they’re at the ends of Nos 6 and 9. Basically you’ve got Rorschach’s treatise on…
AM: All humanity is shit.
SW: Yeah, it’s just a mad planet, there’s no god and we all just have to survive… the reason I’m Rorschach is that I decided to do things this way and that decision empowers me to do anything—That comes out really powerfully and forcefully and that’s why No 6 is so fucking depressing you know, you’re looking at that last panel and there’s nothing else, it’s all black and ooooh shiiit.
MS: The bit that got me was the psychiatrist saying that, at the end of the day, it’s just black and white dots, it doesn’t mean anything. Because as a symbol of the universe it’s just empty, meaningless blackness.
SW: “Some pretty-flowers”.
DG: On one level you could say we’re talking about the whole of Watchmen like that—as a Rorschach inkblot.
SW: The other philosophical section consists of Dr Manhattan allowing Laurie to convince him that it is worth giving a damn about Earth again. When I finished No 9 I found myself thinking ‘I don’t believe him, I’m not convinced’. I thought he was either lying to her or letting himself believe in this—you know, all that stuff about thermodynamics.
MS: He knew he was going to believe.
FJ: He has a different perception, because in 12 he cares about life, then he looks at the globe and says “I think I’ll go and create some life somewhere else”. So he doesn’t care about humanity as life on Earth, he cares about life in general.
AM: He cares about the abstract.
PH: Well, that’s the Comedian’s line in the Vietnam sequence… You could have done any of these things to stop me shooting this woman and you didn’t. You don’t care
FJ: He does care about life, but not life as we automatically think of it.
DG: He doesn’t care about life emotionally, he cares about it scientifically.
AM: In his discussion with Laurie, at no point at the end does he say that he cares emotionally about it, it’s just more interesting than he thought it was.
SW: He just can’t involve himself, whereas Rorschach…
FJ: But we’ve got no evidence he ever could involve himself.
SW: Rorschach more or less comes to the same conclusion, “Tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, from then on you can do anything, the world is yours, if you like.
DG: I think what he’s doing in No 9 is kind of letting Laurie be his remote conscience.
AM: In some ways.
DG: She’s running through it and he thinks “Yeah, that’s right.”
MS: Well, he lets just about anybody do that. He’s already seen this in the future and so he doesn’t resist it. Anyway, it suits him.
SW: In many ways the worry is that she isn’t even paying attention to him, she’s having one of the most traumatic experiences of her whole life.
MS: In No 12 when he says “I’m off to another galaxy where I can create” that’s the first time he seems to make any decision for himself.
FJ: It’s almost not a decision anyway. It’s like being slowly and cautiously elbowed out of their lives.
AM: It is a decision of sorts, but is a Dr Manhattan decision in that it’s a decision to walk away from the whole situation, you know.
DG: If he was to stay around on Earth he’s going to run up against some big decisions.
FJ: …and some big moral problems, but he just shunts himself off.

NUDITY

SW: Dave, did you actually decide on the gradual nakedness of Dr Manhattan from the beginning with his silly little suit and a thumbed-nose to the Captain Atom costume right the way through to him being completely in the buff.
DG: It’s just a symbol of him gradually disassociating himself from what humanity considers to be needful.
SW: But the most curious thing about it is that there’s no body language to go with it. He doesn’t use his nakedness at all.
AM: Well, if you’re going to have a naked character in a comic book he’s almost by definition got to be the least sexual. What I remember—and this all gets very blurred when you’re talking about 2 years ago—the thing I remember is that Dave drew a naked figure of Dr Manhattan just to show his physique, and I looked at it and thought that would be pretty rad—let’s just not put any clothes on it. Me and Dave agreed but we didn’t know if we’d get away with it, and Dave said, look if we make it very hairless, take away all the human references for sex, like hair…
FJ: Make the genitals that little symbol.
AM: Like Michelangelo’s David.
DG: And, indeed, I’ve got a plaster cast of Michelangelo’s David on my windowsill.
AM: And working that out, we thought it would show the gradual disassociation of Dr Manhattan: first he’s willing to put on the full uniform, but he doesn’t like the helmet; then later on he just has the leotard thing; then just for the sake of decency he’ll wear him little G-string; and then fuck it, why bother, I’m Dr Manhattan, I can walk around how I like.
SW: But then there is a lot of body language in other figures you draw.
DG: Oh sure, body language is a way of showing emotion and it’s crucial that he doesn’t show emotion. But the thing about showing him naked was that point when most people first saw him, I don’t think they realised he was naked because we deliberately did it in a completely non-sexual, lonely, distant…
MS: You didn’t show him genitals, either.
DG: No, but it’s a question of where and when you show his genitals.
MS: Basically we’re used to seeing people in skin-tight costumes anyway, so it wouldn’t immediately register.
DG: What we didn’t want to do was another Burne Hogarth Tarzan as a boy…
AM: Here’s another branch!
DG: The point at which we do show them is critical. There’s the scene—I think it’s in No 3—where he’s in bed with Laurie and we didn’t show them there purposely because it would not have been allowed.
AM: Not in a sexual context.
DG: When you did see them he was wandering through a red barn in the desert, or something.
MS: And by that time you don’t notice it, I remember thinking, “Aren’t they tiny? if I were the most powerful man in the world…”
SW: He doesn’t care about that.
DG: That’s not the problem, really.
FJ: There’s no point in the male display aspect of it all, so he doesn’t bother.
DG: But you can see that the next stage of him evolution is becoming an asexual being who doesn’t display characteristics of either.
SW: I was surprised that he didn’t change when he recorporated himself. Maybe that was just too messy to do in the last 14 pages or so.
DG: You’d have thought it had much more significance than it did.
SW: There is a strange sort of feudal system in Watchmen where you have Ozy who thinks he’s a god, and Dr Manhattan who, to all intents and purposes, is—Than you’ve got the people in the costumes who’ve set themselves up as vigilantes, as superheroes, and then you’ve got your crude mechanicals, your human cast. And underneath that you’ve also got the people in Tales of The Black Freighter who are even more…
DG: Subhuman.
SW: Did you find you had to separate the way they related to each other? I find the way the news-vendor and the kid—the two Bernards relate to each other, and the taxi driver and all that lot, they’re far more physical, they’re living in a real world where far more things happen to them, whereas these superheroes have formal relationships where they stand around and talk to each other.
DG: But how do you think people relate to one another as Oscar ceremonies, or at Joan Collins’ parties?
AM: With the human characters I wanted to show that all the way through the entire series human life is going on with all of its petty entanglements and minor difficulties and big difficulties and all the rest of it.
DG: Thirst.
AM: Thirst, yeah—and sort of…
SW: Ha ha.
FJ: Do you want to switch the tape off, Dave?

COLOURING

AM: What Nixon does and what Dr Manhattan does and what Veidt does—it affects the people on the street corner but only peripherally, indirectly… And yet, in some ways, those people on the street corner, it’s their story. They’re the people we’re concerned about.
SW: All the way through it you’re waiting to hear the tale of the Black Freighter even though you even get told the ending before the ending in one of your appendixes. I remember turning round to someone and saying “But I know the ending, it’s in No 9″, and What? Hey! you know, he’s being destroyed by himself.
MS: Can someone tell me the function of that in the story?
DG: Allegory.
SW: It’s another level of reality to remind you that this is a comic.
AM: Well, no, it’s not actually to remind you that this is a comic. Someone did an interview with me recently and said, “This seems to be referential, you know, wake up, this is a comic.”
FJ: Steve and I both noticed that as the comic progresses you’re getting the same kind of strong line colouring that you get in the Black Freighter story.
SW: It might just be John’s disgust with the way that DC has this separated.
FJ: Early on, you don’t get these very extreme colours next to each other.
SW: Straight lines like this, where no attempt is made for the colour to follow the shape and form.
AM: Good grief.
DG: Uhh well, that is just one of the penalties of doing something like this.
FJ: There’s not any effort to follow contour.
AM: Well, that would probably be the separator.
FJ: Shit, we thought it was some meaningful thing.
DG: There’s a whole team of ladies who separate theme books on piece work.
SW: I’ve separated comics, I know what it’s like.
DG: No matter how thoroughly Alan and I set something out, no matter how profoundly you analyse it, along the line there is that slippage.
SW: It’s so sad to know that John can produce something like this on the cover, and that for just a few more bucks they could get John to hand colour it. His colouring is so good.
DG: It’s a case of “If I knew then what I know now”. Once the first issue of Watchmen came out there would have been no doubt.
SW: Is there no chance of a collection being done like that—a delux Watchmen?
DG: Then they’d have to completely re-colour the whole thing. Personally I would rather have had the book separated as it was but printed on newsprint or Mando paper, because I think that would have softened it.
FJ: Then those extremes of colour wouldn’t have come up.
SW: The nice thing about that would be that the screen wouldn’t have been so fine and consequently the colour wouldn’t have been as flat. With a coarser screen you get more activated colour… you see the dots, it enlivens the image.
DG: If you look at something like Barry Smith’s Machine Man, which was printed on newsprint, it was great because there were no edges to the colour, they all just blended into each other.
SW: Well to some extent that was because the separators just didn’t know what to do with his colour roughs.
DG: Baxter paper with hand separated colour is the worst compromise. On the other hand there is something essentially ‘comic book’ about it, a refusal to go into subtlety, which I like about it, and there are things that I purposely didn’t do with the colouring, like have colour holds where you get an image printed in a different colour, but I purposely didn’t do that wanted to say that this is a comic book, there are lines round things, then they are coloured in.
SW: I wondered about that in things like the Black Freighter pages, which are printed in the same way, and are drawn in more or less the same style, where John goes for traffic-light colours.
AM: John deliberately went for garish colours.
SW: But by the end of it you’re getting these colours in the rest of the strip…
AM: It wasn’t deliberate.
SW: It becomes less and less realistic.
DG: I don’t think so, although in the particularly dramatic bits—say the attempted rape scene in issue 2 or the fight that Dan and Laurie have in issue 3 John purposely ups the colour temperatures.
AM: Dave and I presumed his logic with issue 12 was just to make the whole thing more exciting. In No 6 you can see something that John did.
SW: His secret plan.
AM: Yeah, Dave said that John had this secret plan: starts off quite sunny and then gradually over the course of the issue it gets darker and darker and gloomier and more dismal… it’s subtle stuff.
SW: He uses all those coloured greys you can get in that process, that he wouldn’t have got in a newsprint process.
DG: Well, I’ve said this before—John has put effort into this above and beyond the call of duty as a colourist.
SW: It’s such an important part of the comic, I think.

PIRATES

AM: What you were saying about the pirate story in general—like why it was there… Well it was there because it provides
another layer that you can use to bounce off meanings against each other. That’s one thing. It’s also that various elements in the pirate story relate, or seem to relate, to what’s happening in that issue. When Rorschach is in jail there’s a bit in the pirate story with someone talking about the dead shark… its snarl no longer convincing
PH: You get some nice irony coming in there.
AM: And there’s Dr Manhattan’s isolation in No 3, him going to Mars, in exile, is like the exile of the mariner, but when you get right to the end of the story, in No 12 is becomes very clear that the story was about Veidt all the time, that the mariner is Veidt. Just that bit where he says at the end, “I know people think me callous, but I’ve made myself feel every death; by day I imagine endless faces, by night I dream about swimming towards a… Well, I won’t tell you, it’s not significant. What is significant is that I know I’ve struggled across the backs of murdered innocents to save humanity.”
FJ: That’s literally what the mad man, or the not-so-mad man on the raft has done, isn’t it?
DG: Also we didn’t put it in for self-referential purposes, but it does acknowledge the presence of comics in peoples’ lives and what the kid on the corner is doing is exactly what you’re doing, he is trying to read his comic while people are talking to him, and that’s a form of withdrawal from the world, a form of looking for something else.
FJ: There seems to me to be a very well thought-out concept of what the reader of this book is going to be, what kind of person, what kind of reactions they’re going to have—which Steve and I were talking about earlier. The thing with Dan being the equivalent of the professional comics virgin, who replaces sex and human interaction with his birds—he goes out to play in his costume. It’s the same sort of behaviour you get with fans who replace a real life with comic books and fantasy.
PH: And Laurie plays along with that. That’s obviously their only means of social intercourse.
DG: I don’t think the kid who’s reading the comic on the corner is what you’d call m comics fan, actually.
MS: He’s like I was when I was 8. I’d buy a comic, a Marvel comic because I thought the cover looked nice, and I’d get home and read it, and I’d feel cheated, because it was a continued story.
DG: I think this is a key to the lad’s character—when the news-vendor gives him the comic he doesn’t immediately put it into a Mylar bag, he rolls it up and sticks it in his back pocket. Some day all comics will be treated this way. (Chorus of agreement).
AM: You know, that’s the thing, there is that degree of self-referential world-within-world, but with the pirate story… Pirates were Dave’s idea, we just said ‘What comics would they read in this world?” and Dave said, “What about pirates?”
FJ: Why wouldn’t they have superhero comics?
AM: Because they’ve got the real ones.
FJ: But when the West was still going they were producing a hell of a lot of pulp material about real cowboys.
SW: (Returning with drinks): That’s yours, I think.
FJ:I don’t see why—thanks—superheroes couldn’t continue to exist.
AM: These days I don’t know—The Human Fly didn’t last very long, Steve.
SW: Didn’t they find that he’d broken his leg doing a stunt or something?
DG: I think if there were real superheroes in the world—not fantasy but real costumed characters—you’d immediately see the fallacy of it.
AM: And also people actually liked the cowboys, whereas…
FJ:—people don’t really like the heroes in Watchmen, do they?
MS: The real superheroes who exist in your world aren’t called superheroes. The only one with any superpowers is Dr Manhattan, and he doesn’t act a great deal like Superman, so as you say, the fallacy…
FJ: They’re all incredibly screwed up by trying to be masked adventurers.
SW: You’ve still got people like Giant Haystacks and Geoff Capes, who people think of as strong men.
MS: Hulk Hogan, the champion wrestler, has his own cartoon series in America.
FJ: The Hulkster.
AM: The problem would still be, if you went thoroughly into the Watchmen there would probably be one company that does superheroes—they just don’t sell very well.
DG: They’d probably be like Archie.
AM: Whereas the piracy thing—we chose piracy purely at random but after thinking about it it turned out to be a really good choice, because the world of the pirate stories is a very amoral world.
DG: Just to blow my own trumpet, I didn’t make that suggestion completely at random, I knew they’d be full of colour and adventure and colour and that’s something I like to see in comics.
SW: Was it serendipity that you had Joe Orlando there who had actually worked on pirate comics?
DG: I suppose it was.
AM: Everything was serendipity.

THE CROSSROADS

DG: You can actually see—Alan could probably describe this better than me but it wasn’t until he actually started writing issue 3 that the pirate thing became such a big element. If you look at issue 1 you’ll see when the two detectives walk out of Blake’s apartment building there is almost the embryo of the situation at the end. There is a news-stand with a kid sitting reading a pirate comic and that was done before.
SW: That’s a bit of a glitch isn’t it? Because that building isn’t on the crossroads.
DG: It was never supposed to be on that crossroads.
AM: It was a different news-stand.
SW: I always make that mistake.
DG: It was never intended to be the same place. That would really be one coincidence too far.
FJ: From the point of view of having one coincidence too far—you’ve got this very well-orchestrated universe of the crossroads where you have so much coincidence in that everybody’s there…
SW: It’s the centre stage, isn’t it?
MS: I was very fond of Bernard. I liked him and all his opinions on the world.
AM: And also he, Bernard the Elder, is in some ways everyman, because he’s a complete prat and doesn’t know what’s going on.
FJ: He changes his mind from one minute to another.
PH: Depending on what’s in the paper.
DG: Someone was saying earlier about Glenda Slag. You can always look at two sides of a problem and make something out of both.
AM: He is like a lot of people, he is a function of the news.
MS: He just regurgitates.
AM: And thinks that’s an opinion. As the series goes on you start to see—he becomes a character that when you get through all the bullshit you just see this lonely little man.
SW: Yeah, I liked Bernard.
SW: That last gesture of…
AM: …Trying to get between the kid and the explosion…
SW: …making that the drip on the side of the vivarium and the badge, and the character is really nice, it’s a poetic statement about how important he is to the texture of it.
PH: It’s a cool, it’s a major cool.
DG: That corner and its inhabitants meant as much to us as any of the individual characters because, in a way, that is the ordinary person.
FJ: And it’s a representation of the human world, isn’t it?
SW: The News of the World—”All human life is here!”
AM: If superheroes and supervillains, as they do in comics, confine themselves to the same battles then there’s no problem. It’s like the police never worry about the underworld shoving each other until somebody gets hurt. The thing with the human characters was: “Shit, hang on a minute, these are the ones it’s all happening to, they’re the civilians, the ones who really pay for all this.”
SW (Opening a copy of No 12): In No 12 you’ve got a body count…
FJ: It’s the curtain call.
SW: You’ve got the watchseller, who’s a really nice, quiet little joke all the way through. You never see him.
DG: He is the Watchman.
SW: You’ve got the two cops on page 4, Steve Fine and whatshisame.
FJ: The one who never says much.
SW: You’ve got Joey and Aline, Dr Long and him wife…
FJ: And that recurring graffiti shadow of lovers.
SW: …You’ve got the two Promethian Cab men and this mysterious figure with the newspaper over his face.
AM: That’s Steve Fine, the other ‘tec.
SW: No, that’s Steve Fine there, surely?
AM & DG: No, no, that’s just the guy who in No 11 was coming out.
SW: You know I’ve wondered just what the devil that guy was doing there, why that body had to be there with the gun in the shoulder holster.
FJ: We’ve had mystic significances for this guy. Steve and I thought that was Steve Fine there.
DG: No, no, no, that’s someone who’s just come out of the Gunga Diner. In fact, Laurie refers to him, saying “All these people just went out for a takeout Tandoori.”
SW: I thought he was a symbolic figure of the Comedian.
FJ: Fallen on the pavement.
SW: …And she takes the gun from her father, and that you put it in as another bit of ironic poetry.
DG: If you refer back to issue 11 he’s just run around the front of the car and, as the disaster happened, that’s where he would be.
AM: Issue 11 was perfectly choreographed.
FJ: You got the action figures out end played around with them.
AM: Dave at one point nearly built a 3D model of the crossroads.
FJ: I can understand that it would be very, very useful.
SW: Well, this is a 360° pen, isn’t it?
DG: Yeah.
SW: From the centre of the crossroads.
AM: You pull back from there to the centre of the crossroads then you turn round very slowly. The one spot that you never see is where Jon and Laurie are standing.
DG: I didn’t actually make a model of it, although when we first conceived it I did draw a streetmap.
AM: Well, we checked it up on a map of New York.
FJ: It’s really there?
DG: It’s a feasible corner—I’ve got a map at home.
SW: I noticed you put Forbidden Planet N.Y. in there at one stage—where they’re selling all the pirate comics.
AM & DG: No, that’s Treasure Island.
DG: Which would, if you had pirate comics, be FP. At home I’ve got this brilliant map they do which is an isometric projection of New York, so not only is it a street map but it’s all the buildings standing up and it’s got all the post boxes and the trees.
AM: It’s lovely, it’s a work of art you can wander round New York in your head.
DG: It’s about this big but… you know the joke about New York people look at it and say “When’s it going to be finished?” It’s the same with this map, it’s never actually finished because as fast as they put buildings in it, other ones are torn down. There are places in it where there’s just a site with a crane or something.
MS: Oh, I’d love a copy of that.
DG: This corner which we chose… well we haven’t thought out the precise route, say, from Dan Dreiberg’s house up to Hollis Mason’s house…
SW: But it’s pretty close, isn’t it?
AM: But we’ve at least got an idea of whether it’s east or west.
SW: So you just run down the road with a bunch of knot-tops and then go down this alleyway and it’s there.
AM: But there might be a few streets inbetween that we didn’t show.
FJ: So don’t go looking, Steve, when you visit New York.
DG: But that corner, l’m sure that at some time I’ve been to New York I must have walked past that corner. In fact, what I’d really like to do, the next time I go, is actually walk to that junction and see what’s there. On the isometric map there is a fairly new high rise building which could be the Institute for Extra Terrestrials, another building which looks like a cinema to me because it’s got a curved front, and there are some other, lower buildings.
SW: And a fast food chain, perhaps?
DG: That intersection is feasible, right down to the way that the sun rises. This isn’t just down to me. Alan obviously made specific provision for this in his script. The sun actually does rise in the east end sets in the west, and if you look at the thing, if it’s afternoon the shadows are going this way and in the mornings the shadows are going the other way.
SW: Just like when you’re reading a novel, you appreciate when someone actually goes into detail in an elegant way. There are some very elegant things in both the writing and the art. You’ve got things like that lovely tunnel through the comic in No 4 where you actually see the viewpoint from the news-stand with Dan and Laurie across the road end then something like eleven pages later you see Dan and Laurie talking to each other with the news-stand in the background… In No 11 it’s really important that you observe the goings-on at the news-stand and as you’re reading it you realise that each time you jump back to Earth and the crossroads …
FJ: … you’re moving in time.
SW: Right! But you don’t go beck to the same moment as before you jump back a few seconds.
AM: That’s right.
SW: You see Mrs Long approach the news-stand and say ‘My husband is a man of colour’ and then the next time you read it she’s still walking towards it. Time is being played with. Very unlike No 2, 11’s symmetrical twin, where you get a simple flashback situation.
DG: It’s difficult to set these things up initially, but it’s amazing the amount of pleasure it gives you when it’s there, and it must be so for Alan writing it—he can clearly visualise the scene because he knows how far it is from here to there, and where everything is.
AM: What we were saying about structure earlier on… there’s all the clever metaphysical structure of Watchmen and all the little threads and chords and notes running through it, but the big thing is that chronologically it works. It’s timed exactly; we know when everything happened. There was a cockup where I think we gave 2 dates for the Silk Spectre’s birthday, that’s the only one. I think we give ‘49 and ‘50 as the date of her birth. We can correct that in the book. And geographically it works.
MS: I’ve noticed this every step of the way: You actually know what a building looks like…
AM: There are not infinite doors to every room.
SW: The Avenger’s mansion or the Batcave how many entrances are there to that damned cave?
AM: That’s it.
MS: I remember in the articles you wrote for FA on comics scripting, you were talking about the Superman annual and getting (I think from you, Dave) a map of the Fortress of Solitude so that you knew where everything was.
AM: Works perfectly.
DG: It’s a strange thing as well, that a lot of writers find that having good reference helps them to write well. That’s the thing—you actually get things that write and draw themselves because this is happening here, looking that way, so this is what you must see.
SW: Something like two thirds of the action happens on that crossroads, so your reference is mostly ready-made. Once you’ve got that down pat and you’ve done your umpteen camera angles at the end you get your last pan round the crossroads and then on the last page, a final visit where it’s Borscht ‘n’ Burgers instead of Gunga Diner—a sort of symbolic East/West thing.
DG: And doesn’t it look a lonely news-stand then, with nobody about.
SW: Well, it is just after Christmas, not many people working.
AM: It’s also just after half the city’s been wiped out; perhaps you missed that.
SW: Yuh. I forgot that ‘cus I was too busy reading the comic and getting upset about the characters.
DG: Gee, where is everybody? Oh, it must be New Year!
SW: Well, that’s more or less what I thought, because it’s very sudden, going from November 2nd to Christmas Day, to just after Christmas Day. The last thing you’re thinking is New York was wiped out a month-and-half ago. You’ve just seen Dan and Laurie arrive at her mother’s place and say “We’re still around but it’s a secret”, and then you get your minor denouement when you see Rorschach’s diary and everything.

SUPERHEROES

MS: Well, Dan knows he’s wanted from the fire rescue.
SW: Is that it?
MS: Well, I presumed that’s the reason.
AM: He’s still wanted for all sorts of shit—busting Rorschach out of prison for one thing.
FJ: He’s not actually wanted for the fire, you can’t actually arrest someone for saving lives.
MS: What I mean is after that they know who he is.
DG: But, as he says earlier on, he’s got alternative identities.
AM: Yeah, he would do because he’s a consummate comic book superhero.
FJ: He’s studied it, it’s an art, isn’t it?
PH: But he’s go the kit.
SW: Rather than Batman he’s like Mr Terrific, isn’t he?
FJ: Well, he is Batman, isn’t he?
SW: No, he’s Mr Terrific, he’s the bored millionaire who things “Ah, it’d be rather fun to be a superhero”.
PH: You forget he’s got all those dumb 1950s Batman-style costumes—he’s got racks of them.
MS: He’s got his utility belt.
PH: The exoskeleton, the underwater suit…
DG: He says, well, I’ve got my secret hideout and I’ve got me Owl Ship, and I’ve got me utility belt and I’ve got me alternative costumes. Now what shall I do next? I know, a few more secret identities, just in case…
FJ: That lovely bit where Laurie says “What’s in the pouch, then?” and he lists some ridiculous things.
MS: Scout knife, contraceptives…
FJ: No no no, just the usual stuff, the smoke bombs, the pocket laser and so on.
SW: “Something genuinely useful, perhaps, Dan?”
AM: And the exoskeleton where he says I tried it and it broke my arm. You know, in Batman it always works but old Dan Dreiberg he makes one and assumes it’ll work.
SW: I think that when Frank Miller did his second stay on Daredevil he established the superhero as the ultimate paranoid like making Daredevil have a nervous breakdown basically.
MS: Gives you good reasons for it, though.
SW: But, basically, he just couldn’t trust anyone in the end so he went bananas… in a way that’s the sort of nutcase who sets up secret identities and has a warehouse downtown out of which his Owl Ship can ascend.
DG: He’s not paranoid—I think he’s an obsessive hobbyist, he’s a comics fan, a fanboy.
FJ: He’s very, very down-to-earth, in many ways.
DG: He’s what you would be if you were a superhero, Steve.
SW: It’s true, it’s true. I’ve got the gut to prove it.
AM: Well that’s it. If I was going to be a hero, he’s the one to identify with.
FJ: You’d do it sensibly, wouldn’t you.
AM: No, I probably wouldn’t. If I was going to be a hero, the reason I’d want to be one is probably as a response to the comics I read as a kid, and I would feel that I had to have a utility belt.
DG: Yeah, I mean, you don’t find a lot of fun in hanging around the dustbins in a shabby mac, which is what the real vigilante does all the time. You’d want the glitz. Well, that’s what the fanboy or enthusiast version of a hero is.
SW: That’s one of the clear statements that comes out of Watchmen: the one person you get right inside of is Rorschach, and you realise that it’s not a nice world and he is not a nice person as a result of it, none of them are. They’re all compromisers in one way or another.
DG: That’s right.
FJ: They’re all screwed-up by being superheroes.
SW: They’re all completely screwed-up by the fact that normal people cannot be super unless they are physically super.
AM: And the ordinary people are screwed-up by being ordinary as well.
SW: Oh yes.
AM: There’s just different levels of being screwed-up.
FJ: The people who put on costumes to avoid the normal screw-ups are taking on a whole new set.
DG: Ah, Sir, so you want to be screwed-up. Don you want the ordinary, delux, or the super?
MS: About Nite Owl being a fanboy superhero. I’ve heard people say that Watchmen is a fanboy comic, that it comes from the old discussion that arises where the comic reader grows up he or she starts asking “Well, what if superheroes were real?” and that’s what you’ve done.
AM: What, you mean that because Watchmen upsets the traditions of superheroes then it’s obvious that we’re “into” those traditions?
MS: No, no, it’s because it’s the sort of thing that fans discuss—the sexuality of superheroes, that sort of thing.
SW: That whole thing of “Is the Vision ‘endowed’ or not?”
AM: That could have been an accusation we’d have been open to if Watchmen had been solely about superheroes.
MS: I’m not sure it’s an accusation either, because both of you are old comics fans. You’ve taken the unrealistic conventions and thrown them off.
AM: When we started off we wanted to do a really ace superhero comic, that was all.
DG: And to touch all the bases and make the most of them that we could.
AM: We got into issue 1 and we started to realise… I think it was when Dave suggested the 9 panel grid and that element of formality crept in that we started to realise just what we could do. I also realised that having Dave as an artist suddenly freed me. I could take advantage of all the subliminal possibilities of comics—I couldn’t have done this with Steve Bissette. Steve Bissette is a wonderful artist but there isn’t that degree of control and precision that Dave’s got.
DG: I think the thing that did me was when I stopped thinking of it as a superhero comic and started thinking of it as a Science Fiction comic.
AM: Yeah, it suddenly comes.
DG: That gave me a completely different outlook on it. It was a story based on hypothetical situations in which some of the characters effected the dress of others.
MS: So you get the preconceptions inherent in the costume.
DG: Obviously both Alan and I are very attracted by the glamour of superheroes. One of my favourite things that I ever did was the Superman Annual—a fanboy’s dream come true: it was a great story, it was Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Robin, and it was edited by Julie Schwartz; and I think Alan probably felt this as well, having aspired to do that kind of comic for a long time. Having done it and got it out of your system, you think “Is that all there is?”

INFLUENCES

SW: I think what’s lovely is that it originates from the opportunity of DC buying all the Charlton heroes. You have a whole universe that hasn’t really been taken advantage of, because Charlton lasted 2 years, maximum, under Giordano—I mean the real Charlton, not, like Son of Vulcan.
AM: Son of Vulcan was the real CharIton.
DG: To me, the real Charlton was Ditko’s original Captain Atom in gold chainmail.
SW: Yes, I agree, and now DC have decided to completely ignore that, and so there’s something completely wonderful about the way you’ve transformed your original plan…
DG: I think the thing about the Charlton heroes was that they were always second raters, quite honestly.
SW: Self-professed.
DG: And they were very derivative. What we found when we came to do them in Watchmen was “Hey, what we’ve got is the archetypal characters! We’ve got a niche for all our ideas about superheroes!” To my way of thinking, once they’ve been integrated into DC they’re just another bunch of superheroes, who more or less duplicate a whole line of existing ones.
SW: They are DC’s attempt at a New Universe, aren’t they?
DG: Well, I would call it a few new faces.
SW: … almost uniformly they smell—I mean, doing that to Captain Atom, doing that to Peacemaker. I mean writing Blue Beetle as Spiderman meets Tony Stark.
AM: The irony of it is, when they said we don’t want you to do the Charlton characters it was because they could see what a radical interpretation we were going to put on them—which would spoil them. I think that the problem that we have post-Watchmen is that we now have a Peacemaker with a lot of facial hair, who’s a really nasty sort of gung-ho character. We’ve got The Question who is leading a fairly seedy existence in the world of real crime and horror. We’ve got Dr… uh… Captain Atom, sorry, who is sort of all blue—I don’t want this to come over as saying to all the writers of those series “You’ve ripped us off,” but it’s ironic. I don’t think those characters would have been quite the same if it hadn’t been for Watchmen.
DG: The most blatant rip off I’ve seen of Watchmen is on the splash page of the latest Superpowers Series, No 2. There’s Darkseid in an alley, and at the end of the alley you can see the same scene that you see at the end of the alley in the Rorschach promo poster.
AM: There’s a Gunga Diner there?
DG: There’s a Gunga Diner and the Chrysler building, and there’s the dome, and I take that as a great tribute.
SW: I must say, I remember seeing that cover of Blue Beetle where there’s presidential posters all over saying “Heroes get stuffed!”, there’s Blue Beetle walking away, and it’s very “Spiderman No More”, hunched shoulders, all that, and you think “What have you been reading?” I know what they’ve been reading! And ironically, these are the characters they were based on.
AM: Something that just flashed into my mind—Does Watchmen rely on superhero reference points? Is it a fanboy comic? Well, obviously to some degree our use of the superhero in that story comes from a couple of points: it was done for a medium that is superhero-dominated, and where people aren’t really interested in proposals that aren’t superhero-orientated. That’s obvious. The logical stuff.
MS: …that people buying comics are only familiar with superhero stuff, and that’s what they want.
AM: We’d got this situation, and originally we intended it to be a very superior superhero book, but by the time we were into it—issue 3 say—it became clear to us that we could have done it without superheroes. The elements that we started to play up then were ones that were nothing to do with superheroics. The superheroes become icons, symbols of power…
SW: Watchmen grew organically, then?
AM: Certainly.
SW: There were changes of direction?

SERENDIPITY

AM: Not many, not many. Once issue 3 was in the bag we knew it all. I think there were a lot of elements of serendipity and that’s a whole article in itself. This was the magic of Watchmen. In terms of what we felt we were doing, in that occasionally you’ll be doing something and by accident you hit it right every time that’s a really wonderful feeling. With Watchmen all of these little coincidences started to creep in.
SW: I remember you mentioning the same about V for Vendetta at one stage—you were talking about the V obsession about things that are 5 and V and all of a sudden that started influencing the strip.
AM: Watchmen was very much the same.
DG: And once you start to impose a structure you get things that slot in.
SW: I suspect this is probably the strength of Watchmen itself—there’s that symmetrical skeleton.
FJ: That formal concern with things.
DG: The keyword is structure.
SW: You can’t quite say if you look at panel one—well, you can say if you look at panel the first and panel the last, that you’ve got the same thing, but there are some isolated examples. Here’s an example in No 11 where the first panel is a blank panel of snow, and if you look at the last page of No 2 you’ve got a blank panel on the other side, which is the red of the funeral roses and you think that’s really clever that.
DG: That’s serendipity. Until it, I didn’t…
SW: I don’t believe you, David.
DG: It’s true, it’s true!
MS: I believe you.
AM: There’s more incredible things then that in there, the one that really stunned me—this was after issues of things that stunned me—was in No 9. I found it very, very difficult to believe that there’s actually a crater up on Mars that’s got a smiley face on it, but there is, and it’s on the Argyre Planitia.
PH: That wasn’t deliberate? Or did you just discover…?
SW: You mean there really is on on Mars?
AM: Yes.
MS: That’s astonishing.
FJ: Alan, are all the companies real that Adrian Veidt sets up?
AM: No, they’re not real companies.
MS: I thought you were about to say…
FJ: There is a Pyramid Deliveries…
AM: Is there really, shit.
MS: I hope you don’t get a lawsuit.
AM: I didn’t know. Like all the way through there have been these astonishing things, like the first time it happened was probably in no 3 or 4 where—yeah, No 4 there’s the scene where Dr Manhattan goes to Mars. Where’s the panel where he’s just walking. That one! My panel description for that was we’re looking down upon a crater. Don’t make it an EC crater. Let’s have it a real flat, boring landscape.
DG: ‘Cos Mars is really boring.
AM: Looking down, a little blue man walking across a big pink crater, big pink sort of sand clouds. And what happened was Dave found a book of Mars end said that he’d found a reference shot of a crater that was exactly as I described. I said “Oh great”. “And,” he said, “the caption at the bottom says: “This is the so-and-so crater near the Nodus Gordii Mountains on Mars”. I thought, “I didn’t know there were any Nodus Gordii Mts on Mars”—especially since we’d already set up, quite coincidentally, the Gordian Knot Lock Company.
SW: All part of your ‘Classical World’ reference that you met up as a clue that it’s Ozymandias behind it all.
DG: And indeed it might even be that the motto on the side of the Gordian Knot van could serve as the epitaph for the whole series: “Let’s see them undo this sucker”.
FJ: I never noticed that.
AM: I decided to call it the Gordian Knot Company. I thought, we’ve got a company here, let’s give them a name, let’s make it real; we’ll call them the Gordian Knot Lock Company: They’ll Never Untie This Sucker, etc. That’ll be a good gag. Then suddenly when Dave mentioned these Nodus Gordii Mountains and I thought “This is more important than I thought, I’m being given a message here”.
FJ: Extraterrestrials or something.
SW: “Arthur Koestler is sending me messages from the spirit world.”
MS: Do you think it’s possible that this universe, our galaxy, is the one that’s created by Dr Manhattan in Watchmen 12? It’s got to be, hasn’t it?
AM: Who knows? But once we knew that there was something really important about the Gordian Knot, we thought “Well, this whole book is about somebody’s response to the nuclear problem…”
FJ: Which is a Gordian Knot.
AM: Dave reminded me who it was who cut the Gordian Knot.
SW: I wondered if you’d read those three Mary Renault books about Alexander.
AM: No, I’ve not read them.
MS: You were buying one or two of them when I was last up here, Steve.
SW: Yes, well I bought them because I’m interested in mythology. I bought the Theseus trilogy bit by bit, and the bloke in the shop said “Yea, there’s one about Alexander; you can’t get it all, though.” And I thought “Hang on, he must have read that—that’s where he’s got all this…”
DG: We know enough about Alexander to make the connection between the Gordian Knot…
FJ: So initially you didn’t think “We’ll make him want to be Alexander The Great”. That just came up as you were going along?
AM: Because it seemed obvious, once we’d got an Alexander connection, and Veidt and Alexander is the perfect connection…
SW: I remember in No 2, you see the panel where the Comedian has set fire to the map, and it flicks back to the graveyard, and it’s the end of Ozymandias’ flashback. Capt Metropolis is saying “Somebody’s got to save the world”, and you get a poignant Ozymandias looking at the burnt map and you think, “That is him, that’s the man who killed the Comedian.” But I needed a motive, and maybe it’s because you hadn’t given him a motive at that stage…
AM: He did have motive for doing it by then, but we hadn’t got the Alexander connection.
SW: So, like, sexual jealousy and Hooded Justice and all that had been established?
AM: The thing with Veidt was we knew who he was, we knew what sort of person he was.
DG: Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt
SW: I can do it, I must do it, I will do it.
AM: We knew what he was going to do, and we knew his motivation for doing it: he’s the cleverest men in the world. He doesn’t want the world to die, or he will be the cleverest man on a cinder. It was only when we suddenly found the historical model that we realised this guy is really into Alexander! Why is this guy really into Alexander? Because he’s the only person he could identify with. Picture Julius Caesar bursting into tears at the age of 32.. .”What’s the matter, Caesar?” they ask, end he says, “By this age, Alexander ruled the world!” Those people, all of them, would identify with Alexander as the one who’d done it first.
SW: But that whole connection with Rameses II and working that all out backwards from the poem, I gradually picked all that up—he’s not quite literally and in a facile way simply modelling himself on Rameses II, because posterity has proved Rameses a failure.
FJ: That’s what puzzled me. I was terribly terribly worried about this character because I thought “Why would this man who is the cleverest man in the world, called Ozymandias, when everyone knows the name from Shelley’s poem—not from the connection with Rameses II. I was worrying myself thinking out his reasons for naming himself after this antique failure.
SW: Especially since it’s probably the very first poem quoted in comics, that Roy Thomas Avengers (No 57).
DG: Well, of course, that where Alan learnt English Literature. Even in itself that became serendipity, because in the piece in issue 10 where Dan penetrates the security of Ozymandias’ computer—which was necessarily simplified.
SW: Yeeaah.
DG: Lots of people said it would be a lot more complicated, well—yeah it would but you’ve got to make it obvious for people. But it’s the fact that that issue is called ‘Two Riders Were Approaching’ and it’s Rameses II. If you put the two figures on the end of it that is the rider, the rider that it’s necessary to do.
AM: Oh, there’s a lot of clever stuff like that.
DG: We’ve been through the bit about the coincidence of issue 5 .. … there’s the scene where the ageing hippy has killed his children because he doesn’t want them to find out about nuclear war.
SW: Terrifying stuff.
DG: Yeah, and Alan suggested that he had some old 60s decor and posters, and I thought, well, he needs a Grateful Dead poster because
AM: They’re dead.
DG: And they should be grateful. So I got my copy of The Album Cover Album and I looked up Grateful Dead.
FJ: You mean you haven’t got the records!
DG: I certainly haven’t. I’ve got a lot of Stax and I’ve got a lot of Motown.
AM: I haven’t even got one of their albums.
DG: It’s an album, the particular reference they’ve got, called Aoxomoxoa, which is as symmetrical word.
SW: A palindrome.
AM: A symmetrical picture which has got skull and cross bones like the pirate flag.
SW: Has it got the pyramid and the eye?
DG: No, but it’s got hands with eggs, at the beginning of the book Rorschach breaks an egg. On the opposite page there’s another album cover, also by Rick Griffin, Tales of the Rum Runners, which is the club in No 5, and that’s the reason why there’s a skull and cross bones. But as far as the smiley face of Mars is concerned—I thought I’d better get some more reference because what I wanted to do was to make it real Mars. All that Mars really is is a selection of infinitely graded rubble ranging from sand up to boulders as big as the Queen Mary. So I got this book out—and you can get it out of your local library—called The Travellers’ Guide to the Solar System.
SW: It’s really beautiful, that book.
DG: And in there, there is a NASA photograph of a smiley face on Mars.
AM: When we saw that we thought, “Christ, this is where Jon is, this is where Laurie’s going to be in No 9″. We nearly didn’t use it because we thought nobody would believe it—they’ll think this is a really stupid contrivance.
DG: Then, of course, it occurs to me perhaps because my brain is getting loosened to the point where I can make these connections—that in fact that smiley face is the result of a cosmic coincidence. That was formed by two meteorites hitting it almost exactly at the same point. In other words, there was a crater there with a wall and another meteorite of almost the same size demolished almost all of the crater wall. So you ended up with a new crater with a small remnant of the old one, with the two meteorites lying side by side, which makes the smiley face. Some day Alan and I are going to visit it.
AM: And we were thinking about Jon’s citadel being pink, so if it crashes near one of the boulders then the rubble will fall in a pink spray across that left eye of the face. Half way through, Kate noticed the plugs on the spark hydrant she said “Do you know that was a smiley face?” And Dave had drawn it about 30 times by then, and it wasn’t until the last issue that he managed to make it obvious.
DG: Unfortunately a bit of red covers it up.
SW: Oh yeah.
AM: But they’ve been on there since issue 3, those plugs.
DG: As I think of it, after the death of Rorschach, looking into the tunnel there is another smiley face with a bloodstain. It’s the kind of thing I’ve tried not to contrive too much, but like Alan was saying earlier it’s like striking a series of chords.
SW: In No 6, Rorschach walks into the kidnappers’ hideout, and the feeling you’re getting from the writing—we’re talking about the hairs on the back of his neck standing up from the atmosphere, and there’s things like this boiler which has got a face on it, and this cushion that’s got a horrible ripped face on it, and stuff like that… I just can’t be certain that you didn’t draw it deliberately.
DG: I’m almost certain that I didn’t.
SW: Have a look, all the cushions seem to be pulling faces.
DG: And that’s a cyclopean face, that’s the bastard at the end.
MS: Ha ha ha! This is ridiculous.
SW: Well, all the cushions have got faces. It’s real paranoia, I love that.
DG: Well, there are some conscious bits in it, but that I must say in all humility was a…
AM: Happenstance.
FJ: Total fluke.
SW: Well, maybe I spotted it because I follow Nexus, because they’ve got lots of people with one eye.
PH: I assume this one was deliberate, the splashed Buddha, and it also relates to the end when Moloch gets shot in the forehead he’s got that little Buddha beauty mole, just as Rorschach says “Can you provide any illumination” and you suddenly see his with the red light of the sign flashing on behind his so you’ve got the illumination and you’ve got the little mark of the Buddha on his forehead… only it’s a bullet hole. There are just so many of these things it becomes completely meaningless like real life.
DG: You begin to wonder, I mean we used to have these extensive phone calls and discuss the latest set of coincidences and we began to think: Are we just imagining all these coincidences?
PH: He’s real Illuminati stuff.
DG: Yeah, and the eye and the pyramid that’s part of Veidt’s costume.
PH: Talking about coincidences and apparent contrivances, one thing I found a bit awkward about number 12—losing a couple of days for Jon and Laurie when they arrive—that seems like a contrivance.
AM: Um—no there is no telling how long Jon and Laurie are upon Mars. If you work it out from their dialogue they might have been there half an hour, on the other hand they’ve been all the way around the planet.
MS: It seemed to me it might have been several hours.
AM: The thing that struck me is—I suppose it is a contrivance that they ended up at that street-corner at that time, but it’s no more a contrivance than those other people ending up there. I mean, we’ve already got the thing about the tachyons.
SW: This seems a bit convenient, though, like ‘comicbookese’, with tachyons going back in time.
MS: They do, they do, that’s scientific fact.
AM: It’s like all those bastards talking about the Free Lunch Drive at the end of Halo Jones, that was a bit of a contrivance, wasn’t it? Well, there actually is a current scientific theory which says that the entire universe was created from nothing more than the interaction of subatomic particles. I read up on this stuff, you know. The thing with the tachyons… if I was Adrian Veidt and I actually wanted some sort of defence against Dr Manhattan, what would I do? Obviously, the big advantage he’s got over anyone else is that he knows what’s going to happen. Is there any way of fucking that up for him? So you research Quantum Physics and there are particles that go back in time: tachyons. And all particles contain coded information, so if you wanted to jam someone who had that degree of prescience…
SW: It’s more subjective prescience, isn’t it? He can only see into the future that…
AM: … he’s in, yeah. So that would screw up everything for him. When he and Laurie left Mars they might have ended up on Earth a month before they left or ten years later. He just got lost.
DG: In one of the possible alternative Watchmens we did discuss this briefly. Since teleportation makes Laurie sick they might actually have caught a ride back to Earth or cause a large meteorite to physically traverse the distance to Earth and then step off. It actually fits in with ‘Two Riders Were Approaching’, but in the end we decided it didn’t work. It was better to have them arrive at that street-corner, like, by fate, just like all those other people. It’s not terribly significant for the story that they arrive there.
SW: Just this sad compulsion (of Laurie’s) to put things in her carrier bag.
AM: Just a gun.
SW: There’s quite a lot of stuff in that carrier bag, isn’t there?
AM: No, she only puts in the gun. She’s… how are they going to protect themselves in a world where this can happen? She bumps into something, looks down and…
SW: She’s thinking “I’m the daughter of the Comedian, I’m the daughter of the Comedian”.
DG: Suppose you’ve just had a round trip to Mars, you’ve been to a pink castle, you then save the world by your ability to reason, and then you come back to Earth and it’s utter carnage, what would you do?
AM: And you only see her do that in the background. You see her looking at the gun, Jon’s talking in the foreground, she’s bending down, picking something up and you can’t see what it is and put it into her bag. It’s only the gun she puts into her bag, that’s all.
MS: Another thing I found something of a contrivance is, well, Adrian Veidt is a perfect physical specimen and all, but him catching a bullet?
AM: I believe it’s possible.
SW: I believe that’s Thunderbolt.
AM: That thing about catching the bullet… we do nothing there that we haven’t done in No 5. I mean we see it in slow-motion, and he’s picking up the ashtray while the other guy is pointing a gun at him and while bringing it up to hit the guy he makes sure it converges to the exact point where the bullet is going to hit him. And he does all this in 2 seconds.
MS: I suppose we’re used to seeing Batman do that kind of thing—blocking a bullet with an ashtray.
DG: Veidt catches it in No 12 and he’s glad because it’s like a party trick that came off, and the fact of the matter is he’s wearing metallic armour anyway, so it he hadn’t caught it…
FJ: He’s showing off.
MS: I can’t remember what it’s called, but there’s a standard move in Oriental martial arts when an arrow is shot at your chest, instead of taking it in the cheat you put up your arm, sacrifice an arm. He puts his hands up like that, so there’s a safety valve there even if that doesn’t work.
AM: I believe it is possible. I wouldn’t want to try it, but I believe it’s possible if you are a perfect physical specimen whose mind and body are totally one, it’s possible.
SW: What about the amount of blood one blood blister in the palm can produce.
FJ: The hands do have a dense net of blood vessels. Also you hands bleed incredibly quickly.
SW: I know. Cutting the end off a finger, it’s like a water pistol.
AM: And a moving bullet is extremely hot, so it would probably burn the tissue.
SW: That’s what I thought, a moving bullet, blood blister, BANG, you know.
AM: But Rorschach has followed him a certain part of the way, you can see that: the “The End of the World…” man follows him down the street. Anyway, that’s the sort of thing Rorschach would do. He doesn’t think about dying in the fridge, it’s just a great way to make an entrance, frighten the shit out of people.
SW: Especially with Moloch, he has no compunction about screwing the hell out of
AM: Kids, don’t try this at home. Not without parental permission.
FJ: I notice there wasn’t a parental warning on the front of the comic.
MS: Like all those people trying to fly.
SW: Don’t jump out of window like Rorschach did ’cause you won’t just break your ankle.
AM: Don’t try to teleport yourself to Mars.
FJ: Don’t hide in the fridge.
SW: Are people going to be found dead in fridges because of Watchmen.
FJ: “I can’t wait to surprise my mum”, yeah.
DG: You know, when Rorschach appears out of that fridge…
SW: It is one of the most supremely-timed pieces.
AM: It’s also so… so mental. We thought “We got to have Rorschach make an entrance, what would be an incredibly stupid thing to do?”
SW: Only Rorschach is mad enough to wait in a fridge on the off-chance that this man’s coming back that evening.

ARTISTIC STYLE

MS: I was sitting next to you, Dave, at last year’s Comic Con, and you were chatting with Frank Miller about panel grids—with Dark Knight coming out at 16 panels per page, rather than your 9, but using the same basic principles of regular page layouts. You’ve both come on to it completely independently and realised it had certain advantages.
DG: It does put a very strict graphic control on the page.
AM: It’s interesting that the most experimental work in mainstream comics is being done from a very static standpoint, whereas in the 60s…
FJ: Jack Kirby double-page spreads, collages…
AM: We’ve calmed down, we’ve tried decaffeinated coffee.
SW: You actually needed that skeleton to hang the whole series onto, didn’t you. The 9 panel Ditkoesgue grid is very reminiscent of action scenes in early Spiderman, Blue Beetle, etc.
DG: Oh sure, I’ve brought out my early Ditko issues of Spiderman and that’s the closest previous thing to Watchmen.
SW: Kirby was never particularly interested in things like the 9 panel layout.
DG: What it actually does—and I have no idea if Ditko consciously did this, although people always thought Spiderman was a very involved kind of comic—is that the regular tempo or look of the book makes you go into the story, it makes you forget about the page and go straight…
FJ: And any alteration in the tempo like the first page of No 12 is so much more stimulating because it is so different.
MS: If you change everything at once, people will think “What’s going on?” But if you stick to the formal 9 panel grid…
DG: And I think it also helps in the writing if there are no captions, nothing artificial, so that you get the idea “This isn’t being written, this isn’t being just drawn, this is happening”, and the more attention you draw to the graphic aspects of the page, the less you get involved in the actual story content. Now we have comics in all kinds of sizes, all kinds of formats, one of the dreariest thoughts is that everyone in the next few years is going to be drawing in a 9 panel grid.
MS: Or 16 panels. That’s another thing I wanted to mention: the influence Watchmen will have. Because you’ve already had a certain influence on comics, particularly…
Alan. And Watchmen has had a lot of attention, selling very well, what do you think is going to happen now?
AM: I think it’s not too presumptuous to talk about post-Watchmen comics—Think of superhero group books…
DG: …just look at Justice League No 1, it that isn’t a Watchmen…
AM: It’s a very good book. I don’t know if it would have happened in quite the same way without Watchmen and Miracle Man and…
SW: It’s certainly a splendid book, I don’t know why it’s a splendid book, since the two people working on it are two of the people I respect least in the industry at the moment.
AM: I think there will be post-Watchmen comics, probably some good ones, like the thing from Dark Horse The American: a superhero who has been a patriotic symbol for the government since the ’40s, but there’s something very strange about the way he works: he keeps getting killed, or reported killed, and then he turns up again and calls a press conference. It’s a beautiful strip and it’s got that Watchmen flavour. I will say this: I’ll bet my arse that within 6 months or a year, everyone will be sick to the back teeth of realistic superheroes.
DG: It does seem to be ‘de rigueur’ that superheroes are gloomy and introspective. You get something like Captain Marvel, which to me is the ultimate Good Fun superhero. DC revive it and it’s gloomy, miserable, inappropriate…I’d like to do a Captain Marvel who would be an adventurous, colourful, magical character.
SW: I’d like you to do Captain Marvel! The thing that strikes me about your style on Watchmen is it’s not the Neal Adams, ultra-realistic, “Let’s make the hatching even finer than it was before” approach. It’s the Steve Ditko school, the Wally Wood school that takes the world and interprets it in your style. You reinvent reality and because you reinvent all, or most, of it, the illusion of reality is reinforced. It’s all down to the person who’s reading it now—it’s suspension of disbelief and with no clever little photographic tricks and the like—it isn’t full of Bill Sienkewicz’s tricks… With Sienkewicz you’re very aware of whatever medium he’s using for however many panels… but quite often there are little realistic highlights that refer to photography. With your stuff, Dave, we know where we are—you don’t go beyond a certain gap in the feathering, your line quality is strictly limited. It all looks like it’s drawn by the same person.
DG: I think it’s a question of translating reality into a code… and you get that code as expressive as you can. No matter what anybody does it’s still lines on a piece of paper—the ultimate paradox of drawing, anyway, is that nothing in reality has got a line around it. When you draw an outline you are saying straight away that “This is not real, this is my view”.
SW: Nothing in reality is two dimensional, is it?
DG: As far as being an artist—I’ve never wanted to be an ‘artist’. I just want to tell stories with pictures and so I want to draw to the level where I can put my thoughts about stories, about dramatic situations into a sort of shorthand. A code that will strike a consistently responsive chord in the viewer and that’s as far as the drawing itself concerns me
I’m much more involved in the mood than the actual physical means of conveying it.
MS: That’s what makes a comic artist.
SW: Presumably this gives you a guide to where you place the text and the dialogue, Alan. Or does it work in a straight “I write it, you draw it,” type way.
MS: Another thing that clearly differs from the other comics is that you knew just what you were going to get there. It wasn’t like when you were writing Swamp Thing—with different artists all the time—here you knew exactly what you’d get…
AM: Well if you look at my rough, scribbled page layouts that I do for my own satisfaction, I think you’d be able to draw a very straight line between them and Dave’s thumbnails, his pencils and his inks. Obviously the realisation of a lot of the scenes exceeded my expectations since I couldn’t imagine them with that degree of clarity but it was still pretty much what we planned to put there. Having a 9 panel grid structure gave me… instead of what, with Steve Bissette and John Totleben, is a matter of leaving whole pages to them… with Watchmen I knew which were the double-sized panels so I could actually give Dave a composition that actually worked well with a double-sized panel. I knew the layout of each page exactly.
SW: So you knew exactly where a caption, word balloon etc. would appear?
MS: You’ve got your own rhythm as well.
AM: Yeah well, for example, in No 5 you may have noticed that the symmetry extends to the page layouts.
SW: The central splash on page 14 and 15… the first and last panels—the whole issue’s layouts are mirrored down that fold in page 14/15—like a Rorschach ink blot. And in No 9 you get this tremendous bit of timing—and it’s not often you can praise timing in comics—but it’s obvious that you know where Dave’s layouts are going…
AM: Not precisely where it was going to be…
SW: But this works so well—where he’s talking about chaotic terrain… that great yawning gap and the feeling of the huge scale of the canyon they’re flying over, which—because there’s no speech until the return to the coda at the bottom of the page times your feeling that important emptiness there perfectly. If I were writing Watchmen I would’ve titled the chapter that: Chaotic Terrain.
DG: There you go—another phrase thrown up by a reference book.
AM: I always know which is going to be the last word balloon in the panel, obviously and I knew that was going to be a big panel and so I used the impact of a small cluster of words in a big space to get that chime there.
DG: One of the worst banes of a comic artist is working with a writer who doesn’t think through what he’s asking you to draw. Alan thinks his content through always very carefully, whether they’re on a 9 panel grid or not. When you get a script you’re in no doubt as to what he’s got in mind. Some people have said to me “Isn’t that a bit restrictive having Alan describe all this stuff and its 9 panels per page”. Well, it isn’t really—I find it immensely rewarding.
MS: I’ve heard artists say they just couldn’t work with him.
SW: It must be a challenge to a craftsman, I would’ve thought.
DG: The only thing that matters to me about doing a comic strip—and I imagine it’s the same for Alan—is that as it is a collaboration, for it to be a good one you’ve got to forget your ego and if a thing’s goons work for the good of the book—do it, even if it isn’t to your taste. I know Alan’s made compromises and I have as well. I don’t mind having a tight script for that reason.
AM: It’s like when we didn’t know what to do for the cover of No 11 and we thought “Know it opens with snow, know it ends with a flash” and I suddenly thought: Whiteness. And then Dave said “What if we do the entire cover white?”—”Brilliant that’s what it’s got to be, no one’s ever done a completely white cover before someone’s gotta do it, it might as well be us.” Then Dave got sort of…
DG: Well, I didn’t think they’d let us do it, so I spoke to Jeanette Kahn and I spoke to Dick Giordano as well, and they said “We don’t like it particularly we don’t think it’ll make any difference to the sales so if you want to do it..” But what I then felt was that now we’d been given the freedom of the shop… I didn’t then think it was the best cover—I’m still a bit ambivalent about it…
AM: At the time we were discussing this I said, “I’m really into just the concept of a white cover—it’s so pure”, and Dave was saying “Yeah, but a little element of colour would emphasise the whiteness,” so Dave suggested just the butterfly laying in the snow.
SW: You don’t mean a completely white, I presume there’d still be a logo…
DG: The original idea for the cover was to have a butterfly in the snow but it wasn’t possible to construct the story that way.
MS: I think what you got came out as a very attractive cover.
FJ: It’s a brilliant idea.
SW: Yes, that really is very, very strong linking the drip on the vivarium with the kid and the news-vendor…
DG: Well that didn’t happen until I came to draw the last page and I though “Yeah, I can manipulate that to work that way.”
AM: I mean, I didn’t say in the script: make the news-vendor and the kid into the droplet but when Dave was drawing it… I didn’t know that would be possible until then. There were some things I asked Dave to do “if it were possible.”
SW: What about that tunnel through the comic in No 3?
DG: That was specified in the script.
AM: There were some things we put in Watchmen where we thought: that’ll be cool when the readers notice it.
FJ: …If they do…
DG: But, as you say, that is what gives me satisfaction from a craftsmanship level because you really do have to be able to draw things in three dimensions to be able to do that.
SW: That’s what I meant about the sequences in No 11 when you see time jump back a little each time so that you see someone get across the road then you see them start to cross. You realise that what you’re experiencing are filmic comics, camera angles. I can imagine Alan’s script for these pages, and they’ll read like a film script complete with camera angles and frames… I know there’s more too it than that…
AM: You’re near enough, Steve.
SW: But the thrill is that the process is that naked to the reader. It’s like reading a novel and realising you know how it’s been written—something that doesn’t happen very often. You’re constantly reminded that this is put together by two people—unlike a novel.
PH: One thing I liked was the look of the alternative reality—the fact that you’ve got this… Dan Dare vision of 1986, with electric cars and airships and the rest but it still looks like modern streets and grubby reality.
FJ: Wonderful touches like Dr Manhattan appearing on television in an old-fashioned, double-breasted suit and suddenly you notice that everybody wears double-breasted suits.
DG: Well Alan’s forte was the sociological and philosophical ramifications whereas I really enjoyed exploiting the technological and stylistic elements. I think a very early note of mine suggested that, to make things look a bit different, why not double-breasted suits?
FJ: That’s dodging the usual problem with futuristic societies where they all just get put into mini skirts, plastic dresses etc
MS: What they do is, if they don’t take the shiny, metallic uniform things than they take the most ‘modern’ bit of subculture fashion like, may, punk…
FJ: And give everyone a mohican.
DG: We didn’t try to make it ultra modern or futuristic.
FJ: Yes, because it’s only really 2 years back in our time.
PH: One of the touches I liked was the top-knot thing which was simultaneously like something out of a 1950s’ Philip K Dick novel and it’s the kind of thing you can see out in the street just by looking out of the window.
DG: Strangely enough, people have said that it’s quite an un-American thing—you know, gangs of people, identified by the style of their clothes.
AM: One of the things I was most pleased with with relation to the knot-tops was when we finally see Alma… and she is, like, a Zandra Rhodes knot-top. You can see that the style has started to filter out into the general public.
DG: And when you see Laurie, at the end, she’s got those little bootees on—like you see Alma wearing. Only Alma’s are black leather whereas Laurie’s are sort-of pastelly.
FJ: Kitsch.
MS: This is astonishing all this—the way it’s so coherent.
DG: When DC said to us supposing we get some other people to continue Watchmen…
FJ: How the hell do you continue it?
AM: We stopped them from doing it.
DG: But what I’m trying to say is I really believe that Alan and I doing it is intrinsic to its success. Watchmen is really hard work—I know we’re sitting here smiling now but it’s not just been arbitrary, it’s not just drawing or writing whatever comes into your head.
FJ: I was talking to somebody at the mart about Watchman and asked them what they thought of No 12. They said: it went off exactly am I expected it to—not much happened. Well, of course not that much happened, it’s not meant to be a bloodbath.., it seems to me that you’ve get this lovely, ironic ending and although the whole end isn’t there the conclusions are all mapped out for you—you know what’s going to happen in 20 or 30 years.
DG: The sort of idea DC had was to have a Nite Owl/Rorschach team and show more of the Comedian in Vietnam.
FJ: What, a sort of ‘Randall and Hopkirk, Deceased’?
DG: Yeah! And as ‘The ‘Nam’ is going down really big they were thinking seriously about a Comedian war comic.
AM: Can I take up this thing about “not much happened” which is a criticism which I’m not very used to. There’s a review in Amazing Heroes by Gerard Jones, who is a very good reviewer, and he says: well, we’ve got to No 5 and not much has happened. Of course, looking at it in terms of conventional comics there’s only been about two weeks passed and a few incidents… what he forgot was that in those five issues we’ve more-or-less covered an entire forty-year continuity so it has been covered in flashback…

VIOLENCE

MS: But where were the fight scenes?
AM: Okay, so not much goes on in Watchmen 12… compared to what?—a major character dies, half of New York has been wiped out, Dr Manhattan leaves Earth forever…
FJ: It’s like in 11 you have the superhero battle and it’s with a fork and a dinner plate… and that’s it,
PH: I found Watchman 12 really satisfying because it did bring all the threads together. 11 I found really breathless because you were getting through so much in that one issue but 12 was everything I could’ve hoped it would be.
AM: Once you step outside a comic book’s frame of reference you realise that no matter how much action you put in a comic unless it’s labelled ‘action’ in the way that all comic action usually is—people will just not notice it.
SW: All violence does for a comic, legitimately, in my opinion, is to speed up the tempo.
MS: The Kirby stuff: all these people being smashed through walls and being hit for miles—you just take no notice these days. However…
AM: The finger-breaking scene in the first issue.
MS: Exactly what I was going to mention.
AM: In that scene we gave the key to the way we were going to approach violence in Watchmen—You just think of any fight between the Batman and the Joker when they’re all going at it for 5 pages .. … there must be at least, logically, a couple of fingers broken.
MS: I’ve been punched in the face once in my whole life.., and it hurt for days.
DG: I went and punched a friend of mine on the shoulder—saying ‘wotcher’—and I broke my finger.
SW: Rorschach has a split lip for days in prison…
AM: What we were saying was, in this first issue, other than the flashback of the Comedian going out of the window, the only piece of violence that occurs is when Rorschach moves someone’s little finger from there… to there. That is much more violent, frightening and disturbing than 20 people going through walls.
DG: I think it’s a question of contrast. If you look at Kirby what you’ve got is a violent, active panorama with quiet accents. What we’ve got with Watchmen is a quiet panorama with very sudden, sharp, violent accents. I think the thing to avoid in any endeavour is “middleness”.
SW: That’s why, despite Jolly Jack’s fights being a bit hokey and hyperbolic, his stuff is pure comics because he really understands the dynamics of the medium and he can handle quiet moments and stillness with tremendous sensitivity.
AM: With Jack it’s a matter of creating, rather than learning the rules.
MS: I was on Radio Bristol recently in a discussion where comics came up—and most people think that’s what they’re about. In superhero stories people are smashed all over the place and nobody ever gets hurt. That gives a very bad impression to people: violence looks fun because Spiderman’s beating someone up.
FJ: It’s the Tom and Jerry thing, isn’t it?
PH: I think ‘Destroy’ said it all. New York gets levelled—and what a good job nobody got hurt!
AM: The violence in Watchmen happens in very short bursts. If you’ve ever been in a fight you’ll know how difficult it is to sustain a fight for more than 30 seconds… literally. I bet that most of the fights that I’ve been in have consisted of 30 seconds of people going “CRRB” (mimes fight), and then being pulled off.
FJ: Yes, one of the most shocking moments for me was Dan suddenly going mad when he hears about Hollis’ death.
DG: Of course another thing you’ll know if you’ve been in a fight is: you don’t wisecrack whilst you’re doing it.
AM: Yeah, but Dan—in that situation—he acts like a real prat, he starts threatening to blow up the whole neighbourhood and the only reason Rorschach stops him is “Not in front of civilians”.
SW: But as you say in the appendix to No 1: Make sure you get the sympathy of your readership—everybody likes Hollis, he’s a nice old bloke. Hence Dan’s reaction. Speaking of Hollis, I remember thinking that the inscription on his statue looked a bit odd… because you could also read it as ‘INGRATITUDE’, one word—so to see Derf shove the statue in his face was a horrifying and sad end for him.
MS: I thought the saddest moment in the whole series was when Hollis says: I’m going back to car mechanics and Osterman says electric cars are coming.
AM: Just the look on his face.
FJ: Yeah, “I’ll be seeing you…”
DG: I trust you noticed that the car outside his garage, when he gets murdered, is an internal combustion engine. In fact we were going to make more of it than that, weren’t we? We were going to have someone with a car.
AM: We were going to have someone spraying a car, doing a paint-job but… that was out of character for him.

WATCHMEN: THE MOVIE

DG: Have you heard that there’s a Watchmen film? But my view is that Watchmen is an ensemble piece where there isn’t any one leading character…
SW: On the way up here I was saying that I don’t see Watchmen as a film as much as a stage play in acts.
DG: We saw it as a 13-part TV series.
SW: But the crossroads is a perfect stage.
AM: The problem with taking Watchmen to another medium is that we deliberately set out to establish—hard—some territory for comics. We tried to exploit the things in comics that cannot be done in any other medium. I mean, if they do a film of Watchmen you couldn’t have the pirate stuff in it. You couldn’t have the background details because they’d flash by so quickly there’d be no chance to recognise or compare them.
SW: What about an animation of the pirate comic?
AM: Well, they’d actually have to show still panels.
DG: That would get thrown out, though. I mean, who wants allegory?
MS: This goes back again to your article on comics scripting where you list all the unique properties of comics rather than letting them be compared unfavourably with cinema.
AM: Watchmen is, to some degree, the perfect example of the theories I was formulating there, in fact.
I spoke to Sam Ham—he comes from Virginia, he’s one of the Virginia Hams—and he’s written the Batman screenplay which I’m sure you might criticise here and there but I would say that from a comic fan’s point of view you couldn’t ask for a better one. We’ve both read it and we’re both satisfied. Anyway, Sam came up to see me because he’s been asked to do the Watchmen screenplay. He said he wanted to do it. His reasoning was that he didn’t want to do Watchmen because it wouldn’t matter much whether he wrote it or not, since it’ll be rewritten at various points, the director will change bits, the cast will change bits so that any lines that eventually appear on the screen that are in any way similar to my script will be pure coincidence. In other words: if someone’s gonna fuck up Watchmen, he’d rather it wasn’t him. Still, his reason for doing Watchmen was that if someone’s gonna fuck it up he’d rather it was someone who cared about it. He said, “I realise I’m defeated before I start so I’ve got to take a Samurai attitude to it: that I’m already dead, so I’ll discharge myself with honour.” I couldn’t ask for a better attitude.
SW: He sounds like a good salesman, apart from anything else, but the other thing about Watchmen is that it’s episodic. As you said, on the telly it would work better.
AM: In a perfect world I’d rather see it as a comic. This insistence that if something is a success in one medium then it can automatically be translated to another and still be a success…
SW: What’s so objectionable is the way this approach looks down on the comic medium. They think that a film version would reach a wider audience. But as you pointed out in the article Alan, the thing that is different about comics is that there is no movement and there’s no sound. The whole point is that it really is an act of will to continue believing that one panel follows another.
AM: If I may… if I might just drop a tidbit in… they asked someone if he’d be prepared to play Dr Manhattan Arnold Schwarzenegger.
(HOWLS OF DISAPPROVAL)
AM: Apparently they said to him: Arnold, would you be prepared to shave your head and paint yourself blue for a film? and he said sure, if it makes sense. Actually, I’d never seen any Schwarzenegger films before I watched Terminator last night… and I watched very carefully and realised he could do it! But will anybody believe that Arnold Schwarzenegger can actually understand the theory of relativity? He’s got a degree, he’s got a German accent which I hadn’t imagined Osterman having but… his father’s German.
DG: I think it’s a case where a certain amount of woodenness would actually enhance the performance.
AM: My suggestion was for Dr Manhattan to be played by a computer graphic—which I think would work.
DG: I think, however, that Joel Silver, the producer of the film, wants to see Arnold Schwarzenegger in everything. You know—Arnold Schwarzenegger is Sgt Rock.
MS: Any sign of a director?
AM: I don’t know—they asked me for suggestions but…
PH: It was rumoured to be Walter Hill and I thought Streets of Fire, yeah!
AM: Can I just say that the reason that everybody is saying Walter Hill is the director is lazy journalism. I originally said, in an interview, that I wasn’t too clear about it but I gathered it was being directed by someone to do with 48 Hours and the person who wrote that article assumed I meant Walter Hill. I issued a correction saying: no, it’s Joel Silver and Larry Gordon but everybody has taken that interview as their reference. There was a thing in Photoplay the other day saying there’s a new film being brought out by Walter Hill called Watchmen, but the name that everyone’s really looking for is Alan Moore. Poor old bastard Walter Hill—he’s being unfavourably compared to me when he’s got nothing to do with the picture.
SW: Are you gonna get any input as story-boarder Dave?
DG: I don’t know—it’s even problematic how much input Alan’s gonna get. However, from what Joel Silver said, if it is made, it’ll be made at Elstree which is just down the road—so I shall certainly be making a nuisance of myself on the set.
SW: Have you done any story-boarding before?
DG: No, but it’s a thing I’d like to do and what people I know who’ve done story-boarding have said to me is how comprehensively drawn comics are compared to what they do in films. So it would do me good to do a load of pictures that have a lot of emotion in them without having to do a lot of the finishing that’s necessary in a comic. So I’d like to do that, but I don’t think I want to sit and draw storyboards of something I’ve already done for a year and anyway—if they stay faithful to the book the drawing is so comprehensively worked out that they shouldn’t need storyboards.
SW: Has anyone ever compared your art to Botticelli? That’s what some of the drawing reminded me of—particularly Dr Manhattan when you look closely at the hatching, the actual inking technique, then it works in a different way to the old classical law of only drawing an actual line where two planes overlap.
DG: Well there are some influences in there… Moebius… and Heath Robinson. One of the best things that ever happened to me at school was when they gave a Latin reader that was illustrated by Heath Robinson and that really opened my eyes. The kind of line that Moebius uses, which is different from that of Jean Giraud (the two are one and the same man) is a line which detaches the artist from the art. Because you draw in a simple, almost dead-weight outline you de-emphasise the artist’s involvement with it—you lose the character of the artist and emphasise the character of what’s being drawn. As far as technique’s concerned, the way I drew Watchmen was I used quite a stiff pen so that there wouldn’t be a lot of modulation in the line or much evidence of me being there. But that was the kind of thing I was doing on Rogue Trooper anyway. As we all know, American superheroes are supposed to be drawn with nice springy brushes. Dr Manhattan is faintly translucent though—so no shadows fall on his body, it just appears darker where certain planes are at an angle to the viewer.
SW: Perfect for the ‘drawn for colour’ style of artwork, I would’ve thought.
DG: It’s also a question of drawing for the printing process which means, luckily, with Baxter books, that black really does print black.
AM: Towards the end, when you knew what John was capable of, you started leaving large amounts for him to do. Like the cover of No 9. All Dave drew on that was a bottle—the background was all John’s.
SW: Talking about great colouring, I think that sequence with the light going on and off as the Comedian spills his guts to Moloch in No 2. Accentuated by the 9 panel grid which turns the spread into a chequerboard of nights and days. The only stuff I’ve seen which comes near it is the colour in the monthly Spirit comic Kitchen Sink did.
PH: Right!
DG: I think in the space of those twelve issues you saw John progress from, say, the first couple of issues because it wasn’t until probably No 3 that he saw how issue one looked. He began feeling his way, then became comfortable with it and then with issue 12 he got really…
SW: It’s audacious.
DG: Yes, and if John had been timid, that would’ve blown it. It was nice to know that after we’d done our bit that we could look forward to his colour work…
AM: Another layer of artistry.
MS: And there are so very few comics that do use it as artistry.
SW: There are exceptions: Richmond Lewis’ colours on Batman and The Shadow… The Shadow is almost held together by her colouring.
DG: When you open a comic, you look at the colouring, then you look at the drawing then you read the words.
SW: It seems strange that publishers haven’t made this connection for themselves yet. Without a good colourist on Watchmen it could have fallen flat on its face.
AM: I’d say, it could have been an afterthought. Now, are there any direct questions you have, given that we’ve got about ten minutes before we have to go.
FJ: Yes. With Watchmen and Dark Knight coming out as two big graphic novels this year I find that in Dark Knight Frank Miller seems to come to the conclusion that come Armageddon first everyone fights with each other but then they work together and they save themselves… whereas in Watchmen when the chips are down it begins with everyone trying to help and then they all get involved in a fight before realising there’s nothing they can do and become this unit of caring humanity just before they’re blown up. Was that at all deliberate?
AM: Well, it wasn’t deliberately playing off of Frank. I just think that perhaps he’s more optimistic about human nature than I am.
SW: I think the fact that the people at the intersection got killed was really irrelevant to what they were doing there. I mean, they were killed in their finest hour, where a lot of the characters were trying to stop the fighting.
FJ: But they all ended up being involved in the fight.
AM: It was a human mess.
DG: Yes, but I don’t consider Watchmen to be a pessimistic book—on the contrary, it’s very positive about the human condition.
AM: I believe that with Watchmen, if we’ve achieved anything in terms of the moral aspect of it, I don’t believe that optimism is possible without looking very long and very hard at the worst possible case. I felt that after issue 6—that’s the bottom line, you can’t say much worse than that. So if we have any optimism in the series it’ll be valid optimism because it won’t simply be based on ignoring the nasty facts of life. To me, just in that last panel, in Godfrey’s last line “I leave it entirely in your hands”—that’s talking to the reader as well… I leave it entirely in your hands, how do we sort out this Gordian Knot? If the question is who makes the world? then if there’s an answer it is that everybody does. Yeah, there’s people that seem to be in more immediate power than others but really the world is an elaborate series of accidents, coincidences and unbelievable synchronicities that people appear to be in control of but… well, think about the events in your own life, the things that have made really dramatic changes in you can be traced back to deciding to pick up a ballpoint pen or not pick it up.
DG: And who looked one of the most frightened and powerless people in Watchmen? It was President Nixon in the bunker. I think on a human level, the people at the intersection… there’s a fair degree of altruism and heroism.
AM: Malcolm Long’s a hero.
DG: And even Steve Fine tries to break up the fight.
SW: I remember you saying at one of the Watchmen panels that there were a lot of red herrings in the Watchmen continuity. Even so, I became quite involved with the two Bernards and Steve Fine’s little soliloquies here and there…
PH: That’s great because it brings you back to the human dimension of the Hiroshima question, namely: these are the people you would be sacrificing.
AM: One influence on the writing of the end of No 11 came from my seeing Stomu Yamash’ta and the Red Buddha Theatre doing something called A Day in the life of Hiroshima.
SW: That must’ve been a while ago, blimey.
AM: Well, he was good, old Stomu… or Stom, as I call him. But he did this act and it begins with an empty stage… then a little boy comes out and sits down and starts to fish and then… stops. Then someone else comes out—she’s got a little mask on to show she’s a secretary. She sits down and mimes typing and then she stops. Then there’s all these others coming out—there are two lesbians, there’s somebody on their way to work, there’s a fish-seller, there are two honeymooners coming out onto a balcony… stretching and then turning to each other and kissing and the girl’s leg goes up at the back and they freeze. Then all of a sudden this white light begins to build behind the stage. They’ve got fans back there so the curtains start to blow. And they’ve just got a bank of Kleig lights or something and everyone in the audience can’t see a thing—there’s just white light. The music builds up… and there’s just these frozen silhouettes of people against the light. An’ I thought… Wow!
SW: Like at the start of Insignificance where you witness a neutron bomb’s effect on Marilyn Monroe and then the film is shot backwards and you get your typical movie happy ending with her saying ‘bye’.
AM: Yeah and just that freeze on the hand…anyway, I’m sorry we have to shoot off like this…
PH/FJ/SW/MS: Thank you, thanks for coming.

As mentioned earlier, I designed the jacket for this excellent biography of Donald Cammell some time ago. The book is reviewed in today’s (London) Times by Barry Miles.

Quite a performance
review by Barry Miles

DONALD CAMMELL: A Life on the Wild Side
by Rebecca and Sam Umland
FAB Press, £24.95 hardback, £16.95 paperback; 304pp

THERE IS A PERSISTENT rumour that after shooting himself in the head the filmmaker Donald Cammell lived on in a delirious, euphoric state for 45 minutes. The story is that he asked his wife China to place a mirror so that he could watch himself die and said: “Do you see the picture of Borges”? This is a reference to the death scene in Performance, his best known film, when the gangster Chas (played by James Fox) shoots the rock star Turner (played by Mick Jagger).

In a profoundly shocking sequence, the camera follows the bullet into his brain, only to find there a photograph of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges who is much quoted in the film. This is but one of the many myths surrounding Cammell that these authors debunk — he died the instant the .38 bullet entered his skull.

Performance, filmed in 1968 but not released until 1970, is his masterpiece: the original sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll movie.

He wrote the screenplay and co-directed with Nicolas Roeg, who was brought in to look after the cinematography, leaving Cammell free to deal with the actors and the partly improvised storyline. It has become a cult classic, the subject of two books, scores of essays, a poster magazine and a novelisation. Many now regard it as the greatest British film yet made.

Another myth claimed Cammell as the notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley’s godson. He was not, but Crowley was a family friend and did bounce the young Cammell on his knee. Cammell, born in 1934, was a member of the shipbuilding family. His father was editor of The Connoisseur and Donald was raised in an atmosphere of bourgeois bohemianism. He was sent, at the age of 8 to the Catholic Abbey School at Fort Augustus, where his “hysterical reaction” was so extreme that his parents had to withdraw him after two terms. The authors argue convincingly that Cammell’s later self-destructive behaviour was shaped by sexual abuse at school.

He attended art college, then studied with the painter Pietro Annigoni. As the authors put it: “It goes without saying that he was attractive, talented, charming and charismatic.”

He developed a clientele among the Chelsea set and gained a reputation as a ladies’ man, seducing many of his sitters, disrupting marriages and having affairs with well-known actresses. In 1954 he renounced portraiture and enrolled in the Royal Academy School.

Such abrupt life-changes became a feature of his life. They were often caused by days of bleak depression—the family had a history of manic depression—when he brooded about suicide and death. Almost always they were ill-advised and self- destructive, particularly during his career as a film-maker. He sabotaged so many projects that he completed only four films in his life.

While at the RA he married the Greek actress Maria Andipa, but as his favourite sexual relationship was a ménage à trois with a few male friends, it was a rocky ride, and ended in October 1959 when Maria had a baby.

Emotionally immature, he could not handle the responsibility, walked out the day after she came home from hospital and rejected all efforts by his son to see him.

His unorthodox views on sexuality and heavy drug use marked him as a precursor of the hippie movement. His friend David Litvinoff said that “by 1960 Donald had tried every drug and every known combination of drugs known to man”.

From 1960–67 he lived in Paris with the model Deborah Roberts. He became one of the beautiful people, flitting from Paris to London and Rome in his sports car, but the black moods and talk of suicide were ever present, like the underlying menace throughout Performance.

Cammell drifted into film-making, first as an actor, then a screenwriter. Performance was the first film he directed. It has a multitude of influences, from Joseph Losey’s 1963 film The Servant, which made James Fox a star, to John Boorman’s Point Blank, which he insisted that the whole cast and crew see. He claimed the film-maker Kenneth Anger as “the major influence at the time I made Performance“, much of which is “directly attributable to him”.

The final edit was based to an extent on the random cutting-up in Antony Balch and William Burroughs’s 1962 film The Cut Ups. Although credited entirely to Cammell, Performance’s screenplay was written on the beach at St Tropez by Cammell, Roberts and Anita Pallenberg. (At one point, a gust of wind blew the whole script into the sea and Anita had to iron each page to dry it out.) Collaboration was a strong part of the Sixties ethos and was Cammell’s favoured method of working; it was a way of avoiding his self-destructive tendency to sabotage whatever he was doing.

Even so he managed to delay the film for a year by being obdurate with Warner Brothers about editing: they wanted another Hard Day’s Night, with Jagger appearing early on. In Cammell’s version, he did not appear for an hour. The solution was to create Cammell’s signature style: Performance became a montage of rapid intercuts and flashbacks, a kaleidoscope of images, the precursor of today’ s rock videos.

Cammell was invited to Hollywood but nothing he did later could match the artistic and critical success of Performance and, still gripped by black depressions, he killed himself in 1996 at the age of 62.

A heavily illustrated labour of love, this book is in great need of an editor, but it goes a long way towards explaining Cammell’s tortured genius.