One of my few comic strips that isn’t either a Lovecraft adaptation or part of the Lord Horror mythos is a five-page piece I produced in 2003 for Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman. This was a book compiled by Smoky Man to honour Alan’s 50th birthday, for which my strip was one of many other comics, one-off portraits and contributions by different artists and writers. The book is out of print so Smoky has been posting extracts (with permission) on his blog. My strip may now be seen in full here.
I got the idea for this one from Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1994), a feature-length portrait of the celebrated pianist which evaded the clichés of the biopic by addressing its subject through self-contained sequences in a variety of modes: dramatic reconstruction, interviews with Gould’s friends, documentary material, a spectrographic display from the playback of one of his Bach recordings, even a short piece of animation. My strip is less ambitious but it combines factual trivia about Alan Moore with personal reminiscences plus significant historical details connected with his birth date, 18th November, 1953. It was fun to put together, and a reminder that comic strips can be used for more than just telling stories.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore
• The Blake Video
• The Cardinal and the Corpse
• Mapping the Boroughs
• Art is magic. Magic is art.
• Alan Moore: Storyteller
• Alan Moore: Tisser l’invisible
• Dodgem Logic #4
Just curious – have you and Mr. Moore ever considered collaborating on an original project of some length, involving a kind of narrative structure with illustrations? If not, you ought to …
There have been a number of such plans over the years, most of which have succumbed to various misfortunes. I was going to illustrate the Yuggoth Cultures book but Alan left the MS in a taxi; then we were going to do a multi-part story about Aleister Crowley’s partners (those he called his “Scarlet Women”) but Alan felt unable to finish it after writing the first part. Then there was The Soul which was going to be a comic strip in the Cascade anthology title for America’s Best Comics but that was the one ABC title that never got off the ground.
On the upside, we did do the Moon & Serpent CDs (even though they’re now out of print), and aside from a nagging desire to redo some of the artwork I’m very pleased with the Lovecraftian Kabbalah sequence in my Haunter of the Dark book.