Alan Moore's topics - tribe.net

Re-reading Promethea

Francis — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:23:31 GMT

I bought the first Promethea collection as a gift for a friend, and it (and finally organizing several boxes of old comics) prompted me to give the series another read. Wow! I remembered the main "up through the Sephiroth" storyline pretty well, but I had forgotten how many other balls Moore was juggling in that series, and how seamlessly it all fit together. Reading it all in a short span is a very different experience from getting one issue a month. Should finish it up tonight, and then, for a change of pace, I'm thinking "Tomorrow Stories".

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Watchmen movie reaction (sort of)

Francis — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:11:11 GMT

Says it all...
http://www.heromachine.com/2009/02/24/random-panel-early-reviews-from-the-watchmen-sneak-preview-audience/

posted in Alan Moore - 4 replies

Okay..I'll ask...

Elemental9 — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:13:22 GMT

Who saw "Watchmen" this weekend?

Who here thought it was a bit disappointing? Who liked it?

Here we go.....

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Top 10: Season Two

Francis — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:38:58 GMT

OK, Mr. Moore's no longer writing this, but still, not a bad continuation. I miss all the little background bits, but I suspect they were more work than they were worth. Is anyone else here reading it? Thoughts?

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Black Dossier

phanfasm — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 03:52:42 GMT

Incredibly, I've utterly missed this trade paperback of new LXG stuff. I'll be picking it up immediately! Anyone read it, impressions?

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. After several delays, the latest installment of Moore's pastiche of public domain literary figures is finally here and it's worth the wait. In 1958, two mysterious figures steal the Black Dossier, a compendium of information and articles relating to the league's most renowned incarnation, the group headed by the intrepid Mina Murray. The theft launches a tense chase as the thieves fight to stay one step ahead of thuggish government agents while reading the contents of the dossier, pieces that shed light on centuries-worth of secret and bizarre intrigues. Moore and O'Neill are in top form, crafting a virtually flawless fusion of prose and visuals that's an overwhelmingly dense and exhaustive nod to pre-existing works in media ranging from literature, legends, television and film, teasing the reader in the know with appearances by Orwellian totalitarianism, Lovecraftian abominations, Jeeves and Wooster, Bulldog Drummond, Ian Fleming's famed double-o operative, lusty Fanny Hill and a host of others, capped with a section requiring 3-D glasses (included). Too loaded with content to be fully absorbed in one reading, this is a challenging, adult volume that's a delight for fans of pop culture and lovers of heroic adventure. (Nov.)

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Neonomicon - New comic book series

phanfasm — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 01:07:52 GMT

Exciting news - Alan has some Lovecraft up his sleeve... Two great tastes that taste great together! Or at least, ichorous.

http://www.comixology.com/sku/NOV083807/

Alan Moore fans, this is the big one, the first all-new Alan Moore horror series in ages is coming, and this is the first look! What is sure to be the most anticipated series of 2009 is finally unveiled in this specially priced book! Neonomicon is the all-new full-color sequel to The Courtyard, and promises to be one of Moore's most discussed works of all time! He takes his re-invention of H.P. Lovecraft's mythos to new levels of madness as investigators look into what happened to legendary FBI man Aldo Sax. The path it leads them down is one of the most intense and disturbing works Moore has ever written. The series itself does not launch until Fall 2009, but this special book offers a look inside the huge amount of material that has already been completed. Featuring completed pages from #1, a look at some of Moore's original script, special design sketches, and an all-new interview with Jacen Burrows, this is far more than just a preview book. It is a glimpse inside the mouth of madness at the hand of the master. Two magical editions are available: the standard cover by series artist Jacen Burrows and also a special Leather cover by Burrows that are also signed by the artist, packaged with a Certificate of Authenticity, and limited to just 3,000 copies!

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NEW ALAN MOORE

sparktrue — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 05:25:55 GMT

Well The Mindscape of Alan Moore is finally coming out on DVD in the US
so my exclusive ownership of a british copy to show my friends is coming to an end...
RUN don't walk to get a copy of this and then show it to all your friends...
it is not just some profile...it is a treatise on the nature of art and magic and it rocks....

in the mean time here is a link to another shorter Moore documentary...

http://io9.com/5046375/alan-moore-explains-why-he-is-the-comic-book-messiah

cheers.
RR

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Interesting "v" video

Francis — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 12:37:05 GMT

I had never heard of "kinetic typography", but it looks really cool. Here's Evie's first encounter with V:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Q0dfrbr10

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Which is better in your opinion?

poseyp — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 17:59:47 GMT

Watchmen
From Hell
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
or
V for Vendetta......GO!

posted in Alan Moore - 23 replies

Watchmen Cast Announced

Arion — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 06:59:20 GMT

Cast for Watchmen announced: http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/images/watchmen.jpg&imgrefurl=http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2007/07/watchmen_fills.html&h=281&w=559&sz=53&hl=en&start=242&tbnid=X7Z_A3Yb_JSrOM:&tbnh=67&tbnw=133&prev=/images%3Fq%3DOzymandias%26start%3D240%26ndsp%3D20%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1B3GGGL_enUS237US237%26sa%3DN

Matthew Goode as Ozymandias? I'm not so sure about that! I'd hoped for Nicholas Cage, actually.

posted in Alan Moore - 3 replies

Watchmen set stills.......

stefographer — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:52:58 GMT

... and comparisons to the comic......

http://www.projectsilence.com/comics/watchmen-movie-to-comic-comparisons/

I will post the full stills here in a sec.....

CANNOT wait....... the movie site is here
http://rss.warnerbros.com/watchmen/2007/07/poster.html

posted in Alan Moore - 7 replies

Alphabets of Desire New Set

sparktrue — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:15:10 GMT

A new set of Alan Moore's Alphabet's of Desire
becomes available today at 1pm EST.

Check it out at KleinLetters.com

They will go fast.
Cheers
RevVRob

posted in Alan Moore - 0 replies

Great interview with Moore about Glycon and foundations of religion.

phanfasm — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 04:54:07 GMT

Moore discusses his unconventional religious beliefs with the comedian Stewart Lee.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cam2kK7J_8k

Actually a lot of great stuff with Alan on YouTube.

Cheers,
Marty

posted in Alan Moore - 0 replies

Promethea Redux

kyooverse — Tue, 15 May 2007 08:53:40 GMT

So, I finished the second book (and am about to start the third) and I must agree with everyone... this book... is AMAZING. The art, the story, the writing -- everything is just SO impressive!

I post this because I may not have rushed to read it were it not for the recommendations of folks in the post about which book was the best -- I have to agree. Top 10 is no where close to this book in scope or execution.

So, what are your thoughts about Tom Strong?

Thanks everyone.

posted in Alan Moore - 5 replies

The Wedding of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbe

phanfasm — Tue, 15 May 2007 05:47:58 GMT

Congratulations to Alan and Melinda. Long life and love to the happy couple!

via Neil Gaiman.

http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2007/05/some-photographs-from-wedding-of.html

posted in Alan Moore - 1 reply

BOG VENUS VERSUS NAZI COCK-RING: Some Thoughts Concerning Pornography

phanfasm — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 22:07:49 GMT

BOG VENUS VERSUS NAZI COCK-RING: Some Thoughts Concerning Pornography
By Alan Moore

Originally published in Arthur Vol. 1, No. 25 (Nov 02006)

Whether we speak personally or Palaeo-anthropologically, it’s fair to say we humans start out fiddling with ourselves. Our improved scan technology reveals that most of us commence a life of self-pollution while in utero, while if we trace our culture back to the first artefacts that showed we had a culture, then we find ourselves confronted by a hubcap-headed humming-top of tits and ass carved lovingly from limestone, excavated from an Aurignacian settlement discovered in a North-East Austrian village known as Willendorf.

The mighty Robert Crumb, back in his awesomely prolific Weirdo days, depicted the creator of the first Venus of Willendorf as Caveman Bob, a neurasthenic outcast with a strong resemblance to Crumb himself, perpetually horny, crouching in his cave and whacking off over the big-butt fetish woman he’d just made: Homo erectus.

Crumb’s point, in all probability, was that while she may well have functioned as a magic icon to induce fertility, and while to modern eyes she stands as an example of the prehistoric genesis of art, Willendorf Venus was an object of arousal in the eyes of her creator, was a piece of stone-age stroke material, primal pornography. He may also have been saying that if we trace culture to its very origins, we find its instigator to be an obsessive smut-hound and compulsive masturbator much like Crumb himself, or me, or you, or any of us if we are to be entirely candid.

Humans, whether individually while in the womb or as a species newly climbed down from the treetops that we’d shared with kissing-cousin Bonobos, discover early on that sexual self-stimulation is a source of great gratification, practically unique in our experience as mammals in that it is easily achievable and, unlike almost every other primitive activity, can be accomplished without risk of being maimed or eaten. Also, it can be acquired completely free of charge, which may well be a factor in society’s subsequent attempts to regulate the sexual imagination, and which is a point to which we’ll be returning later.

This is not to say, of course, that all society is a direct result of chronic Onanism, although I can see how one might come to that conclusion. Rather, it is to suggest that our impulse towards pornography has been with us since thumbs were first opposable, and that back at the outset of our bipedal experiment we saw it as a natural part of life, one of the nicer parts at that, and as a natural subject for our proto-artists.

Lest this be seen as a reinforcement of the view that porn is wholly a Neanderthal pursuit, we should perhaps consider ancient Greece and the erotic friezes that adorned its civic centres; the magnificently sculpted marble figure of the god Pan violating many of our current barnyard statutes and a really slutty nanny-goat in the bargain. Images like these were clearly seen as eminently suitable Grecian street-furniture, depictions of an aspect of mammalian existence that all mammals knew about already and were comfortable regarding, and which no one from the youngest child to the most pious priest needed protecting from. In bygone Greece we see a culture plainly unperturbed by its erotic inclinations, largely saturated by both sexual imagery and sexual narratives. We also see a culture where these attitudes would seem to have worked out quite well, both for the ancient Greeks and for humanity at large. They may well have been hollow-eyed and hairy-palmed erotomaniacs, but on the plus side they invented science, literature, philosophy and, well, civilization, as it turns out.

Sexual openness and cultural progress would seem pretty much to have walked hand in hand throughout the opening chapters of the human story in the West, and it wasn’t until the advent of Christianity, or more specifically of the apostle Paul, that anybody realized we should all be thoroughly ashamed of both our bodies and those processes relating to them. Not until the Emperor Constantine had cut and pasted modern Christianity together from loose scraps of Mithraism and the solar cult of Sol Invictus, adopting the resultant theological collage as the religion of the Roman Empire, did we get to witness the effect of its ideas and doctrines when enacted on a whole society.

If we take a traditional (and predominantly Christian) view of the collapse of Rome, then conventional wisdom tells us that Rome was destroyed by decadence, sunken beneath the rising scum-line of its orgies, of its own sexual permissiveness. The merest skim through Gibbon, on the other hand, will demonstrate that Rome had been a heaving, decadent and orgiastic fleshpot more or less since its inception. It had fornicated its way quite successfully through several centuries without showing any serious signs of harm as a result. Once Constantine had introduced compulsory Christianity to the Empire, though, it barely lasted for another hundred years.

Largely, this was because Rome had relied on foreign troops, on cavalry from Egypt for example, to defend the Empire against the Teutonic hordes surrounding it. Foreign soldiers were originally happy to enlist, since Rome at that point took a pagan and syncretic standpoint that allowed recruits to worship their own gods while they were off in Northern Europe holding back the Huns. Once the Empire had been Christianised, however, that was not an option. Rome’s new Christian leaders had decided it was their way or the stairway, and so consequently, off in distant lands, recruitment figures plummeted. The next thing anybody knew, there were barbarians everywhere: the Huns, the Franks, the Visigoths and worst of all the Goths with their white single contact lenses and Cradle of Filth collections. Rome, effectively, was over bar the shouting.

So, to recap on what we have learned so far: sexually open and progressive cultures such as ancient Greece have given the West almost all of its civilizing aspects, whereas sexually repressive cultures like late Rome have given us the Dark Ages.

Let us fast-forward for almost a thousand years of Saxons, Danes and Vikings ripped on Fly Agaric pillaging and raping their way through some sort of meteoric nuclear winter with brains dripping from their axes, howling about Odin and blood-eagling anybody who chose not to do the same. When lights eventually started to come on again across the western world, we find a Christian church that’s understandably concerned about attracting worshippers onto its rough-hewn pews and which had hit upon the notion of erotic art as one way of accomplishing this end. The spread-legged figure with a splayed vagina found crouched in the masonry of many medieval British churches, misidentified as a Sheelagh-na-gig, as a leftover mother-goddess from some earlier religion, was in fact of purely Christian origin and was originally intended as an image representing Lust. If the folklorists had looked harder then they would have almost certainly found similar depictions of Wrath, Gluttony, Sloth, Avarice and all the other deadly sins, although that petrified and gaping pussy does tend to seize more than its fair share of the attention, which is probably no accident. In churches of that period, displays of pornographic imagery were not at all uncommon, nor were they by any stretch of the imagination unintentional. Pictures of people copulating were a big draw when it came to pulling in the congregations, after all, and were not sinful in themselves if they could be explained away as warnings to the faithful; stern moral instructions to describe the shameful acts that, were they actually committed, would result in certain hellfire and damnation.

What the church had actually accomplished with this crowd-pleasing manoeuvre was a subtle and yet massively important change in the relationship between the population and its sexual imagination. Implicitly, it was acceptable to enjoy sexual imagery as long as you accepted also that such acts were sinful, and felt suitably ashamed and guilty if you were in any way aroused by their depiction. This established the immediate link between perusal of pornography and intense self-loathing or embarrassment, which still obtains today throughout most of the western world.

It wasn’t just the early church, of course, that enjoyed a monopoly on images of naked flesh. Until the nineteenth century, the only way an artist could portray the unclothed body without risk of censure was to set the nudes within a context that was either classical or biblical: Eve and the serpent; Leda and the swan, so long as you can’t actually see it going in. Mind you, that’s not to say that there weren’t always artists who were unafraid of censure, or that the church’s standpoint on the issue was at all times and in all lands universally observed. The flow of English literature since its Saxon beginnings would seem largely unconcerned with sexual propriety. A few of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are indistinguishable from the soft-core sex-romps that swamped English cinemas during the 1970s. Carry On Up The Fourteenth Century. Confessions of a Pardoner. Shakespeare could work encrypted lavatorial filth into descriptions of a lady’s handwriting: ‘Her Cs, her Us ’N’ her Ts, whereby she maketh her great Ps.’ That said, it wasn’t until William Caxton had devised his printing press…for younger readers, just think 15th century internet…that a tradition of pornography as we would understand the term today was able to develop. Just as with the internet, the new technology was put almost immediately to the purpose of disseminating dirty pictures.

Prior to this point, when mass production first became a possibility, erotic culture had existed only in the private realm of artists and collectors, which in public terms is much the same as saying it did not exist at all. The church had never previously adopted a position on pornography, simply because there wasn’t any, and was relatively slow to recognise it when it finally showed up. By William Blake’s day in the last half of the eighteenth century, contemporary London was awash with fuck-books and salacious prints of all varieties, including such essential publications as a best-selling directory of whores that introduced the phrase ‘as lewd as goats and monkeys’ to the English language, meant apparently as a recommendation, as a Regency equivalent to Michelin’s four stars. It’s also worth remembering the late 1700s as the era during which, in France, the Marquis Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade began to use outrageous, violent, scatological and frequently intensely dull pornography for the first time as a blunt instrument for social satire, finding in society’s great squeamishness about its carnal impulses a vulnerable underbelly that was open to attack.

Yet when the 19th century began to seriously get underway, however, amidst European worries with regard to all the revolutions of the previous 50 years coupled with the uncertainty and paranoia typifying the Napoleonic Wars, a more repressive and authoritarian mood prevailed. While there were undeniably innumerable licentious chapbooks circulated all throughout this period, these were already starting to adopt the furtive underground associations, the hunched posture that would stigmatise and lame pornography for the next hundred years or so.

As for open involvement in erotic work by writers, artists or any creators of proven ability, the ground appears to have become a toxic wasteland, poisonous to the reputation and alive with career-pathogens. When William Blake expired in 1827, even though his willingness to embrace sexuality and a broad range of sexually unorthodox ideas was central to his whole philosophy, over-protective devotees persuaded his wife Catherine to purge his work of any overtly erotic art or writings. That Blake had a love and also a facility for pornographic images can still be seen in his surviving marginalia, with doodled youths gobbled by fleshy matrons, but his acolytes had evidently made their minds up that the poet-visionary they were in the process of constructing would be more angelic without genitalia. We can but imagine, wistfully, the masturbatory masterworks incinerated in Blake’s bonfire of profanities…”The Red Dragon Does The Woman Clothed In The Sun”…and it’s better that we don’t torment ourselves with all the other glorious artists whose posthumous conflagrations, real porno for pyros, may have gone completely unrecorded.

With the guilty and embarrassed tone thus set for the impending reign of Queen Victoria, we find pornography in the condition that has by and large defined it ever since: a wretched ghetto with which no respected artist would desire to be associated, and which therefore rapidly becomes the province of those with no literary or artistic leanings whatsoever. The once rich erotic landscape was effectively deserted by the genuinely talented. It turned eventually into a genre that not only had no standards but also appeared to think it had no need of them, although during Victorian times this total desertification was still some way off into the future, and the cultural libido was still showing healthy spurts of life from time to time.

Indeed, the façade of abstemious morality that came as part of the Victorian packaging appeared to reproduce hothouse conditions in the prurient imagination of the day. Pornography, exemplified by periodicals such as The Pearl, could flourish, albeit only as an underground subculture. This subterranean network, though, extended a considerable way beneath surface society, so that the semi-detached homesteads of Victorian suburbia were dangerously undermined. In those times, long before the advent of the adult video outlet, city businessmen returning homeward for a weekend with their spouse or partner would call in at some backstreet establishment and pick up a gaslight equivalent: just as theatre predates cinema, so too did fully scored dramatic home pornography precede the skin-flick.

Pornographic playlets could be purchased, ranging from two-person dramas through to full ensemble pieces if the neighbours were agreeable. These publications came with sheet-music, so that if one of the participants were musically inclined then he or she could sit at the piano and provide a vigorous accompaniment to whatever activity was taking place upon the hearth-rug or the horsehair sofa. Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous but I was told that by Malcolm McLaren and if you can’t trust Malcolm McLaren then whom can you trust?

The powerful erotic undercurrent that existed in society behind closed doors, however, was in direct opposition to the era’s outward stance on sexual matters, and increasingly pornography was openly deplored as an unpardonable affront to public virtue. One collector of erotica, with many scurrilous unpublished manuscripts by Swinburne, Wilde and other notables, had been warned by his lady wife that, on his death, she was intent upon incinerating the entire obscene collection. Cunningly, the gentleman in question got around this by persuading the British Museum to accept a ‘private case’ containing his salacious valuables, a trick he only managed to pull off by making the safekeeping of his titillating treasures a condition of the Museum also getting all his first editions of Cervantes.

In the middle 19th century, of course, photography became an option for pornographers, though this was a development that introduced a new (and later vastly controversial) element to the erotic, or at least to the moral debate concerning it: these images were not the fruit of an aroused imagination, but were actual people who had lives beyond the photographic cropping of the dirty postcard that contained them. Concern for the model’s moral wellbeing would come to equal or surpass concern for the impressionable members of the public who might be exposed to the material’s depraving influence. Back in those early days, though, when a camera was a relatively rare possession, at least in comparison to the notepad and pencil that one needed for more low-tech smut, the dominant mode of pornography was literary, and saucy snapshots were at first a fairly rarefied minority concern.

The literary mainstream of under-the-counter reading matter during the Victorian period varied widely in palatability, as is to be expected in an outcast and despised field without quality control of any kind. A Sadeian passion for deflowering or else for uncritically depicted rape intruded nastily into some narratives, possibly even into a majority, but it’s important that we do not overlook the socially benevolent material that found its only outlet in this much-loathed form. Sexual etiquette and even to a certain extent sexual politics could not be mentioned or discussed within the confines of Victorian propriety, which meant that only in a field already banished far beyond those confines could such subjects safely be brought up. It’s by no means unusual to find participants in some chapter-length orgy of the period suddenly declaring half-time during which they will discuss such issues as the gentleman’s responsibility to make sure that his female partner has been fully satisfied by their exchange, or the importance of always acceding to the female partner’s wishes even when deranged by passion. These were matters that could not be raised in Home Hints and were certainly not taught at school or by one’s parents. It would seem that the only sexual education being circulated in the 19th century was within publications that were by their very definition deemed obscene.

To illustrate this practice we need look no further than the riotous career of local 19th-century atheist Member of Parliament Charles Bradlaugh, whose indignant statue stands pointing accusingly upon a traffic island on Abington Square here in Northampton. Amidst the stream of principled activities and often controversial incidents that marked the life of this confirmed Old Labour politician is a spell in which Bradlaugh was jailed, along with noted Match-Girl agitator and Theosophist, Miss Annie Besant, for the distribution of ‘obscene material’. This turns out to have been advice on contraception, meant for women of the working classes at a time when getting on a third of them might reasonably expect to die in childbirth. Pretty racy stuff, as you can probably imagine.

This intense and largely indiscriminate repression marking the Victorian era, though it was not unopposed and though in many ways it may have even made the period’s porno more inventively subversive, could be seen as having triumphed in the end. The victory was pyrrhic and short-lived, admittedly, with the excesses of the 20th century poised in the wings and just about to make their lurid entrance, but for those artists caught dabbling in erotic waters when the clampdown came, it must have still seemed a decisive one. While there were obviously a wide variety of complex incidents and issues influencing how affairs progressed around this time, the one event that is most emblematic of this sea-change in the public attitude towards erotica must surely be the trial of Oscar Wilde.

What makes Wilde’s downfall so important is the way in which this marvellously gifted aesthete and writer had become a living symbol of the Decadence, the movement that perfumed practically all of the important art or literature composed between the 1870s and 1890s. The aesthetics of the movement, as defined by early decadent Theophile Gautier, demand that artists should be unafraid to plunder from the opulence of history or legend for their imagery, and equally feel free to borrow from the latest offerings of their culture—from its ‘technical vocabularies.’ Given that the remit of the Decadence was thus intentionally broad, it’s hardly a surprise that the erotic should become a major element informing the whole atmosphere by which the movement was surrounded. For the first time in a century, genuine artists were again engaging openly and meaningfully with sexual expression in their work, and the exquisite peacock display that resulted must have seemed, in sexually colour-blind Victorian eyes, like a red rag to a bull. Even the decorative border lines characterising Art Nouveau were heavy with the curve and sag of breasts or testicles, even upon those relatively rare occasions when there were no breasts or testicles depicted in the actual illustration.

Literature witnessed a plethora of stellar talents more than willing to apply themselves to the erotic, from the rich and sensual undertows found in the work of J.K. Huysmans to the full-blown pornographic writings of Guillaume Apollinaire or Pierre Louÿs. Louÿs presents an interesting case in that here was a writer blessed with independent means whose work received tremendous critical acclaim quite early on in his career, after The Love Song of Bilitis had been published, and yet who found literary fame repulsive and elected to write brilliantly demented hardcore filth for the remainder of his life, safe in the knowledge that it was unpublishable outside the small market in privately printed chapbooks for the connoisseur.

Poetry too was graced during this period with many sublime talents who possessed an ear for the erotic, notably the tragic Ernest Dowson. Dowson, killing himself with his fondness for the green destroyer, absinthe, and besotted with a 15-year-old girl, died much too young in relative obscurity after enriching English phraseology with such well-known expressions as ‘I have been faithful to you, in my fashion’, ‘Days of wine and roses’ and ‘Gone with the wind.’ Yes, that was Dowson.

Within visual media, however, and despite fierce competition from the likes of Alphonse Mucha, it is fragile Aubrey Beardsley who emerges as the poster child for sexual expression in the arts during the Decadence. Dead by the age of 26 from galloping tuberculosis, Beardsley was in both his artistry and in his personal appearance a rare orchid who would not survive the bitter, disapproving moral blizzards of what William Blake had once referred to as ‘the English Winter.’ Although Beardsley’s personal life appears much like Beardsley himself to be asexual (and despite the fact that save for scurrilous suggestions from Frank Harris of a sexual relationship with his beloved sister Mabel Beardsley, there’s no evidence that Aubrey ever physically had intercourse with anyone) the artist’s drawings are alive with sexuality. Perhaps, as with the virgin architect Antonio Gaudí, Beardsley’s one real form of sexual expression is to be found in his sensual and yearning line.

In a career that spanned no more than eight years, Beardsley’s striking style impressed itself upon the public’s consciousness through illustrated works such as Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur or by means of Beardsley’s elegant and sinister submissions to John Lane’s Yellow Book. Although the artist’s name became a byword for peculiarity …‘Awfully Weirdsley’, as one wag rechristened him…the impact of his work with its tumescent dwarves and aching sexuality, was such that it established Beardsley and his swooping line as the defining spirit of the 1890s. The handful of images that he supplied for Wilde’s Salomé are among his very best work, although at the same time these are the few illustrations that undoubtedly contributed the most to Beardsley’s ruin.

When the Wilde trial finally erupted as a national scandal, nobody and nothing ever touched by Oscar’s scented glove was safe. Whilst walking from his doorstep to the waiting coach that would deliver him to court, reporters noticed that Wilde held ‘a yellow book’ tucked underneath his arm. This was most likely J.K. Huysmans’ classic A Rebours, of which the then-current edition sported a bright yellow cover, but unfortunately, in the mounting lynch-mob atmosphere the difference between the indefinite and the definite article was overlooked. ‘A yellow book’ became ‘The Yellow Book’, and in the backlash against Wilde, the single most important literary and artistic publication of the 1890s was stamped brutally out of existence.

Beardsley, having illustrated Wilde’s Salomé, was inextricably connected with the jailed and banished Oscar in the public mind, and was assumed to be a homosexual. Ironically, the artist was not merely not a close friend or associate of Wilde’s, but actively disliked him and would take pains to avoid the portly dandy if he saw him coming. From the viewpoint of the general public, though, this was irrelevant: to have adorned a work by Oscar Wilde was evidently just as bad as having been discovered in flagrante with the poet. Beardsley, horrified by these insinuations, ran into the home of an acquaintance one night, gaunt and haggard and unshaven. Staring through his red-rimmed haunted eyes into a looking glass, the artist asked of no one in particular if the face he was looking at could be that of a sodomite. Blacklisted by all decent publishers and with The Yellow Book now gone, Beardsley was suddenly deprived of both an income and an outlet for his art, while in the midst of an emotional turmoil and declining health. He coughs into his linen handkerchief and stares at the resultant scarlet spatter, poppies standing in the snow.

It is at this point that the cavalry arrives, too late to save the day but just in time for one last doomed, heroic rally: Leonard Smithers, former lawyer turned smut-publisher, one of the true unsung heroes of pornography. His valiant efforts, following the Wilde trial, to find work for Beardsley, Dowson and the rest resulted in his publication of a new decadent periodical called The Savoy, which succeeded and in many ways surpassed the much-missed Yellow Book. For Beardsley, though, while this reprieve from cultural exile was a welcome one, the damage to his confidence and self-esteem had already been done, and this would seem to have had repercussions on the artist’s physical wellbeing, or, specifically, his lungs.
In 1898, with Beardsley on his deathbed, his last wishes were that Mabs, his sister Mabel, should take pains to ‘destroy Lysistrata and all obscene works’. Subsequent publication of the Lysistrata illustrations and of Beardsley’s uncompleted pornographic novel (a retelling of the legend of Venus and Tannhäuser he called Under the Hill) suggest that Mabel Beardsley showed considerably more reluctance to purge the erotic from her brother’s work than Catherine Blake had shown regarding that of her late husband, and for this we should be grateful to her. Thanks to Mabel, several pieces of exquisite work survive that would not otherwise have done. It’s still disheartening, however, to consider Aubrey Beardsley going to his grave unnecessarily ashamed of anything in the slim body of sublime and influential work he gave the world. Like Wilde or Ernest Dowson, Beardsley’s work had only ever enriched human culture with its grace and beauty. Where, in that, was anything to be ashamed of?

The incoming moral weather, though, dictated otherwise. Around the juncture of nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the British Empire was at its uneasy peak, the largest empire that the world had ever known, with subsequently massive cultural influence across the globe, for better, or, more usually, for worse. Despite the bloated self-important arrogance that seemingly accompanies all empires when they’re at the dizzy heights immediately preceding their historically inevitable downfall, Britain was approaching the new century with a whole nest of nagging insecurities: the British Empire was itself falling apart and would be done with by the time that India gained independence during 1947. No one was entirely sure what changes the new century would bring, and no doubt when it came to decadence within the arts, numerous laboured parallels with Ancient Rome were drawn. For whatever reason, the new liberalism in the art and writings of the Decadents was seen as symptomatic of a moral blight, an indicator of decline. Thus, with a fierceness born of fear, the Empire struck back through the Wilde trial and its frightened, cowering aftermath, imposing what amounted to a new Puritanism that would have its impact right across the Western world.

In Germany, as an example, the desire to curb and regulate sexual expression took on trappings that, perhaps predictably, were pseudo-scientific. As with K.M Benkert, who first minted the term ‘homosexuality’ as an expression to be used by doctors or pathologists, so almost any form of socially unseemly sexuality (which is to say practically all of it) was seen as a disease that might one day be cured by science. An ingenious array of ‘medical’ devices was produced, for instance, to protect the vulnerable youngster from unwelcome incidents of bodily arousal such as those, say, which occur to adolescent boys when they’re asleep. While the boy’s hands would obviously be strapped securely to the headboard to prevent deliberate acts of masturbation, this did not prevent him from becoming sexually aroused while sleeping, possibly while dreaming, which was clearly a quite unacceptable state of affairs in century’s-end Germany. To solve this problem somebody devised a ring with sharp spikes set around the inside surface, that could be placed comfortably around a detumescent penis but which would impale it if the organ happened to expand for any reason. Very popular with parents of small boys in early twentieth century Germany and Austria, apparently, this form of Sadeian sexual torture during childhood would produce the famously well-balanced generation of young Übermenschen that counted noted sexual deviant Adolf Hitler in its ranks.

Just to recap, then, sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. Not that I’m trying to load my argument, of course.

While this wave of repression had its victims, it could not prevent the 20th century from happening, nor bringing with it new technologies that would inevitably change all aspects of our lives, including our pornography. Film had arrived in the late 1800s, giving birth immediately to the first pornographic stag reels, but as with the camera that had come before, the sheer expense of the equipment necessary to produce a halfway-competent blue movie made such efforts a minority affair. It was instead from the developments that had been made in William Caxton’s print technology that the next surge of sexually explicit life would come. Newer and cheaper modes of printing such as mimeograph were coming into play, which meant that publishing would soon become a much more democratic process and was no longer solely the province of the wealthy and the cultured.

In the 1930s came the boom in what was known as ‘mushroom’ publishing in Britain, an equivalent to the much larger pulp explosion that was happening in the U.S.A. Although both countries had their rudimentary laws on obscenity in place by this time, in both cases the laws were so ill-defined as to allow a great deal of room for interpretation. Raciness was tolerated up to soft-core levels, although in such foggily-delineated territory it was easy to cross over lines unwittingly and find yourself the focus of a moral panic, such as happened with the ‘spicy’ pulps that came out on that side of the Atlantic, or with the ‘Hank Janssen’ novels published over here. The public’s thirst for pornographic fare was evidently undiminished, but by brute over-reaction and a zero-tolerance policy (such as the prosecution that saw British saucy seaside postcard veteran Donald McGill convicted for his smutty innuendoes), the authorities could just about hold down the tin lid on their quaking, seething pressure-cooker.

This is not to say there weren’t steamy escapes from time to time. The subterranean world of hardcore pornographic publishing had weathered all the ups and downs of the new century, remaining more or less untouched by virtue of its near-invisibility. Other than a smattering of reprints from the previous century and intermittent bursts of low-grade new material, however, there’s not much to recommend the porno output of the 1930s save for the phenomenon of eight-page pamphlets churned out in America during this period and known as ‘Tijuana Bibles’, possibly because it was assumed that sex and anything associated with it started out in Tijuana.

The eight-pagers, crude material crudely produced, are nonetheless a fascinating way-stage in the evolution of both comics and erotica. Though various apocryphal accounts exist of how these books came into being, the most winning and endearing version is the one in which three ladies clandestinely form a partnership to supplement their incomes, with one woman handling the writing, one the drawing, and the third one handling the business/distribution end of the arrangement. Whether this is true or not, the fact remains that in the Tijuana Bibles we can see a socially mischievous spark that would in time provide the basis for a whole American tradition of first-rate inflammatory satire told in comic form.

The best-remembered of the Tijuana Bibles were the ones which featured well-known characters from daily comic strips, shakily rendered in what were still fair approximations of the styles used by the artists who had worked on the originals. The great appeal of showing thoroughly non-sexual figures such as Blondie, Jiggs or Popeye taking part in pornographic skits lies in the greater contrast, with the sexual content seeming dirtier when in the context of some previously spotless cultural icon. There is also the subversive pleasure that is to be had in puncturing the anodyne and sexless vision of society presented by the Sunday funnies, and it seems entirely likely that when Harvey Kurtzman drafted up the blueprint for his seminal Mad comic in the 1950s, the eight-pagers were an influential part of the satiric mix. Kurtzman’s attack on Archie (which reputedly ensured punitive treatment of the E.C. comics line by a draconian comics code authority presided over by the Archie Comics publishers) presented the allegedly ‘typical teenager’ as a High School protection racketeer, with Betty and Veronica as reefer-smoking jailbait; it was a portrayal that could quite easily have stepped out of an eight-pager, albeit an eight-pager where the flow of sexuality was now only an undercurrent and where the immensely talented Bill Elder did a far superior job of reproducing and subverting the whole Archie style than had the gifted Tijuana amateurs preceding him.

Beside a cast of characters culled from newspaper comic strips, the Tijuana Bible pamphlets also utilised contemporary actresses and actors like Mae West and Laurel & Hardy as their featured players. Interestingly, the 1930s criminal celebrity such as Baby-Face Nelson or John Dillinger had his own sub-genre, playing to the public’s obvious affection for a glamorous crook and also to the aura of near-mythic sexual potency with which such figures were surrounded in the popular imagination. In this combination of a wildly anti-social hero figure with the visceral rush of unbridled pornography, the Tijuana Bibles were prefiguring the comics underground that would erupt, primarily from San Francisco, in another thirty years or so.

Back in the early-middle 20th century, however, the erotic urges in society were finding their most lively manners of expression in burlesque theatre and, a little later, in the ‘nudie-cutie’ movies that burlesque had played its part in giving birth to. Through the 1950s and the 1960s, maverick directors like Russ Meyer almost managed to provide a voice for the unconscious dream-life of America, its libidinous impulses stirred into a demented slapstick of violence and sex that was at once exuberant and infantile, marked by a kind of innocence, at least compared with all the joyless, dead-eyed fare served up for us today. Justly described as a ‘rural Fellini’, Meyer seems to have had a specific private goddess-image that was given generous flesh in his iconic women like Tura Satana or Kitten Natividad. Just as with Robert Crumb a decade later, Meyer’s enshrining of one female body-type appears to hark back to the primal origins of the erotic, to Bog Venus with a shiny leather makeover and captured not in stone but celluloid.

In 1950s culture powerful sexual undertows were evident, sprung up in opposition to the stifling and sexless Eisenhower/McMillan ethos of the times. Writers like Hubert Selby, Jr. and Henry Miller, who’d produced work in the 1930s and the1940s that was banned on publication were beginning to find an appreciative new audience and sometimes even foreign publishers, like the Olympia Press as founded by Maurice Girodias. Hugh Hefner’s Playboy was attempting to establish soft-core porn as an upmarket lifestyle statement, and a new wave of ‘sick’ comedy was coming into being that would find its apogee in the uncensored and occasionally brilliant rants of Lenny Bruce. Meanwhile, in Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad there was a sharp new synthesis of hip and Jewish humour that took sexual references as a standard part of its comedic repertoire, as in the Kurtzman parody of Julius Caesar where a centurion crying “Someone’s comingeth!” is answered by a word balloon from somewhere out of panel reading “Ooh, I’m dyingeth!” Elsewhere new and exciting music spilled out of the radios, black-influenced and sexual with its label ‘Rock and Roll’ simply another euphemism for the sexual act, as ‘Jazz’ itself had been. And most importantly of all, in San Francisco, 1955, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti started publishing as City Lights Books in North Beach, the city’s famously bohemian Italian quarter that had previously been inhabited by anti-Mussolini anarchists. Having heard the young New York poet Allen Ginsberg’s first public performance of his William Blake-inspired work Howl at the Six Gallery in 1955, the impressed Ferlinghetti published it through City Lights Books in November 1956. Despite the minimal attention that the book at first received…hardly surprising for a first work by an unknown author in the pretty much neglected field of poetry…by the June of 1957 a police raid carried out on City Lights Books and a subsequent trial for obscenity pushed Howl and Other Poems to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness. Judge Clayton Horn, surprisingly, ruled that a work could not be deemed obscene if it possessed “the slightest redeeming social significance.”

Judge Horn’s decision meant that City Lights could put out Howl and many other controversial pieces without fear of damaging reprisals from those in authority. Although some writings were still too extreme to publish for a year or two, such as the first ten chapters of The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs that had been turned down by the Chicago Literary Revue, the ruling meant that the Beat writers could now crystallise round Ferlinghetti’s premises at 261 Columbus Avenue and spark off what is possibly the most exciting literary movement of the twentieth century. It also meant that an important legal precedent had been established, granting sexual material immunity from prosecution if it could be shown as socially significant or of artistic merit.

This was the defense successfully adopted some years later in the widely celebrated English court case over D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, during which the prosecuting counsel summarized a still-prevailing attitude towards pornography when he suggested that no decent person would allow their ‘wives or servants’ to read such a work. This one remark, betraying as it did a ludicrously antiquated and Victorian view of social matters, almost certainly convinced the jury to vote on the side of the defence. The point of view behind the prosecution’s statement is that while ‘we’, being white males of a certain age and social standing, are far too evolved to be depraved by such material, its probable effects upon those morally more feeble than ourselves (such as the young, the working classes, foreigners or women) would be ruinous.

While as a work of modern beatnik poetry Howl could be safely overlooked by the majority of average citizens, the Lady Chatterley trial meant that most homes in the western world would come to own a much-thumbed copy of what is in fact a relatively minor work from D.H. Lawrence. Sexual subject matter, in the public’s eye, had become normalised, which would open the floodgates to the rush of sexually suggestive or explicit television programs, movies, books and pop-song lyrics that would help define the 1960s, although obviously such progress did not go entirely unopposed. Books were still banned, films were still censored, and at one of London’s practically-unheard-of exhibitions of erotic art during the ‘60s, doodles by John Lennon were seized by police, along with several Lysistrata prints by poor old Aubrey Beardsley who’d been dead 70 years by then. Organizations such as the Viewers and Listeners Association headed by self-publicising, self-appointed moral guardian Mary Whitehouse would put pressure on the BBC to tone down certain television shows or to remove Scott Walker’s version of the Jacques Brel classic “Jackie” from the radio play-lists lest its references to ‘authentic queers and phoney virgins’ should corrupt the young.

The running battle faced by sexual expression during the ‘permissive ’sixties’ is an indication of how deeply feelings ran upon the issue. Evidently, the same social squeamishness regarding sex that the Marquis De Sade had made his target back in revolutionary France was still a soft spot that those wishing to critique society could do far worse than to attack. The Hippy movement, welling up in the mid-sixties around various reference points including Aubrey Beardsley’s art nouveau extravagances, William Blake and Allen Ginsberg’s howled response to Blake, was quick to seize on sexual rebellion as a favourite mode of confrontation.

This is not to infer that a font of functional hippy-porn did not spring up. It did, although its manifestations were often subterranean to a degree that caused nary a ripple on the surface of of public consciousness. Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts represented Ed Sanders’ “total assault on culture,” something he would later take musical with the Fugs, whose calls for group gropes of every description were greeted with jubilance. Lenore Kandel’s Love Book, a slim volume of erotic poetry, inexplicably prosecuted in San Francisco, seemed almost the last gasp of the new puritans, although they continued to issue intermittant squeaks (before re-emerging with a roar). By the time Essex House began to issue true hippy porn—David Meltzer’s Agency trilogy, Charles Bukowksi’s Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Philip Jose Farmer’s Image of the Beast—the entire concept of porn-as-writing seemed to be a dead letter. This was largely due to the efforts of Barney Rossett and Grove Press at redefining the boundaries of acceptable literature. They went to trial on Chatterley, Tropic Of Cancer and Naked Lunch, winning each case and pushing the frontiers a little further each time. But, indeed, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Nowhere is this counter-cultural assault on sexual conformity better exemplified than in the early comic strips of the extraordinary Robert Crumb, whose pioneering efforts in the underground press turned out work that would prove seminal in every sense. Using a reassuringly familiar and therefore highly subversive style, Crumb gleefully submerged himself in the most flagged-off and restricted waters of the mass unconscious, serving up a vision of America as seen through sexually obsessive eyes, peopled by Snoids and nubile Yetis, with its most forbidden Joe Blow urges dragged out from behind suburbia’s concealing drapes, set down in black and white for everyone to see. That Crumb’s work was received enthusiastically across the social spectrum would suggest that after the initial shock had worn off, many people found it was a vision that they recognised. They knew, in the contemporary phrase, where Crumb was coming from.

While there were obvious precursors for the underground cartoon explosion in Mad comics, in the Tijuana Bibles, and the fanzine press that Crumb had been a part of, it was Crumb who set the bar for the cartoonists who would follow him with the release of Zap #1, peddled from a baby carriage by the artist up and down the freak-encrusted length of Haight Street. Just as with the Sex Pistols almost a decade later, Crumb’s work was the catalyst that launched the equally extreme careers of those who followed him. Crumb’s work in Zap, along with that of gifted cronies such as S. Clay Wilson, Spain or Robert Williams, plus the many undergrounds that Zap inspired, would turn out to be a high tide line in pornography, created cheerfully with an intent that was both social and artistic. (The brilliant underground cartoonist Sharon Rudahl, using the nom de plume Mary Sativa, wrote The Acid Temple Ball, a remarkable novel—published as part of the Olympia Press’s “Traveller’s Companion” series—that lovingly recounted a woman’s sexual experiences while under different combinations of illicit substances.) When the comics undergrounds at last gave up the ghost in the late 1970s, there would be nothing of real energy or spirit that would rise to take their place. Crumb soldiered valiantly on in Weirdo and in other publications, but although his work remained as marvellous as ever (and, in fact, continued to improve and to progress), there was the sense now of a solitary maestro labouring in isolation, rather than that of a figurehead with a whole socio-artistic movement surging up behind him.

By and large, what happened in the 1970s was that the hard-won sexual freedoms of the previous decades, fought for on grounds of ideology, became, predictably, a booming market ripe for exploitation. Obviously encouraged by the growth of sexual expression in the arts during the ’60s, movie-makers in the ’70s decided that the lowly porn film could be wrapped in bigger budgets and improved production values. It could be re-branded, dressed up in a way that would suggest artistic merit, and by this means could become for the first time mass-market cinema. In offerings such as The Devil in Miss Jones, The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Behind the Green Door and a scattering of others, porn directors tried with varying degrees of success to transcend the trashy, dopey limitations of their chosen genre. Smoother camera work and more imaginative sets combined with vestiges of genuine acting talent and at least some semblance of a screenplay to create works that appeared artistic, although only when compared to all the drooling halfwit porn films that had come before.

Even so, the public seemed to like the new availability of porno in the mainstream and responded with enough enthusiasm to allow such movies to proliferate…right up until the point where the real age of Traci Lords came out. Defenses of artistic or social significance were useless when confronted by an actual statutory offence, and with this chink in porno’s arty armour opened up by the authorities the industry seems to have beaten an immediate retreat, with the big-budget porn flick rapidly consigned to history.

Of course, by then the 1980s were just round the corner and the porno movie would be rescued by the massive rise of the home video market, but its emphasis and its agenda would be changed accordingly. Whereas the improved production values of the 1970s had been designed to draw in a crossover mainstream audience to the cinemas, home video viewers were identified, perhaps in part correctly, as a captive and addicted market-base that was entirely undiscriminating in its viewing habits. Subtly yet importantly, the audience’s view of itself also changed. While sitting in a crowded cinema watching pornography amongst a hundred other normal individuals or couples could conceivably be quite a liberating communal experience and an indicator of one’s liberal tolerance and sophistication, watching a porn movie all alone behind closed shutters is a very different matter and invokes a different mindset. The experience is generally furtive, secretive, ashamed. While it might be acceptable to mention at the office the next day that you’d been to the cinema the night before and watched Deep Throat, purely to see what all the fuss was over, naturally, you might think twice before regaling colleagues with the news that you’d stayed home and masturbated over Anal Virgins IV.

Pornography, although more massively distributed than it had ever previously been, was now reduced to a mass market without any standards or criteria, rapidly accumulating an attendant atmosphere of sordidness and shame. Still, just so long as pornographic culture could be kept indoors, a private and addictive and increasingly expensive vice, it remained a very lucrative commodity. As noted earlier, sexual fantasy is something that is free to anyone still in possession of a sexual imagination, but the pornographic video or DVD sells us a lifeless and lacklustre substitute for something we could have created much more satisfyingly ourselves. This, in the eyes of the authorities, must be the perfect situation for pornography: make it available, so that those massive revenues and taxes can start rolling in, but keep it frowned upon and shameful so that you don’t get an Allen Ginsberg turning up and claiming that it’s art, it’s civil liberties, a movement, politics, anything that sounds dangerous.

Of course, both sex and sexual expression are political and always have been, but it wasn’t until the late 1960s and the 1970s that they were widely seen as such. Sprung up from the same ’60s counter-culture that had given rise to Robert Crumb came feminism to provide the artist with his fiercest critics. Feminists took the position on pornography that it exploited and degraded women, which was certainly an argument that it was difficult to disagree with in the light of much of the material that was available around that time. If it had remained just that, an argument put forward as an element in a continuing debate, then it might not have polarised the liberal community to the degree that it unquestionably came to do. Instead of putting ideas forward as a proposition, feminism at the time delivered them as dictums from the moral high ground. And instead of properly considering the issues raised by feminism, liberal men perceived themselves as victims of an unprovoked attack upon their sexuality, responding angrily. Feminist protestors against porn would find themselves uneasy bedfellows with right-wing Christian campaigners, and would also find themselves on the receiving end of an equivalent amount of left-wing ire, some of it justified and some of it unfair.

For one thing, it’s important to distinguish between the objections of the chanting feminists and those of placard-waving Christians, even when they’re part of the same picket line outside an adult video hire emporium. Feminist arguments, even those one may not agree with, are at least constructed on the principles of logic and therefore can be debated, having precepts that are falsifiable, that can be proven or disproved. Religious arguments against pornography, alternately, are based upon the idea of a disapproving super-being, proof of whose existence has thus far eluded us. This is not to say that God does not exist, nor that religious people aren’t entitled to their point of view, but is simply intended to point out that ideas predicated upon a specific deity’s existence are not rational ideas, and therefore have no place in rational discussion. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules. That’s just the way it is, and we’d have to entirely change the meaning of the English language before we could make it otherwise.

Despite the rational basis of the feminist agenda, though, it had been served up, understandably, as confrontation, and high feelings on both sides meant that a sensible debate would never really be a possibility. The already-fragmented left became divided upon grounds of gender with both camps in their entrenched and stalemated positions, men insisting that the issue was completely one of civil liberties, women insisting it was one of sexual politics. Both sides were right, of course, but by then were not speaking to each other so that the debate remained in deadlock.

Attitudes towards pornography had not just brought about a schism in the liberal ranks, though, but had pretty much split feminism itself down the middle. Many women and some men who still believed that women had a way to go before social equality was reached became reluctant to describe themselves as feminists because of the censorious and illiberal connotations that the term had taken on. Rejecting feminism’s dogma on pornography, some women made an effort to reclaim the genre in pro-sexual publications such as On Our Backs, its title borrowed impishly from hard-line feminist mag Off Our Backs. Elsewhere were the first stirrings of the erstwhile network that would later call itself Feminists Against Censorship.

Although it would eventually be these dissenting female voices who’d suggest a possible solution to the unproductive stand-off on the issue of pornography, during the mid-‘90s the arrival of the internet would mean that, once more, any ethical debate upon the subject would be swept to one side, overtaken by events and by the socially transforming onslaught of technology. Just as home video had meant that porno could be privately enjoyed by a much greater segment of the population, the arrival of the internet took all that one stage further. Whereas hiring videos or DVDs might still entail the risk of being caught by an acquaintance scuttling furtively out of a rental outlet, or of having one’s porn-stash discovered by a disapproving spouse, the internet apparently removed that final hurdle. It became clear that a large majority of people weren’t as frightened of pornography as they were scared of being found out.

England, in the 1970s, was racked by strikes which culminated in a national three-day week while shops and businesses were closed by power failures. If the blackouts happened unexpectedly, then stores and supermarkets found that there were sudden bursts of opportunist shop-lifting. Even at the upmarket retail chains like Marks & Spencer, managers discovered that their prim, predominantly middle-class customers weren’t averse to slipping some expensive item deep within their twin-set when the lights were out. Public morality must obviously be seen to be observed in order to retain one’s social standing, but when no one can see anything at all then it’s a different matter.

So it was with the arrival of the internet: in cyberspace, no-one can hear you climax. Since reputedly the greater part of all the traffic on this information super-highway is devoted to the viewing or downloading of pornography, we must assume that the demand for porn is almost universal. Perusing smut would seem to be no longer an activity confined to isolated sexual deviants, but more a pastime human beings simply enjoy when left to their own devices. Also it would seem as if commercial porno has become the undiscussed wallpaper of contemporary society; is so ubiquitous that it’s accepted without question as a fact of life.

Pornography, or what would only recently have been referred to as pornography, is now a part of mainstream culture. Having sexual undertones or even overtones since its inception, pop music during the 1980s first began to consciously adopt overtly pornographic stances with a repertoire of pornographic imagery and reference employed by artists such as Prince, Madonna, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and a parade of others. Where Chuck Berry had been banned for serving up single-entendres on the subject of his ding-a-ling, and Lou Reed got away with Candy Darling giving head in his Walk on the Wild Side solely because British censors didn’t understand the term, the Spice Girls now convey their need to Zig-a-zig-ahh to an audience of ten-year-old girls with complete impunity.
Properly packaged as a taxable commodity, erotic imagery pervades our culture to an extent that would have been previously unimaginable. While pornography employed by individuals for their personal pleasure as an aid to masturbation is still seen as something vaguely shameful, its use in a corporate context, as a means of selling us consumer goods, is smiled on. Advertisers fill our television screens and billboards with it, trying to associate their snack-food, car or line of sweaters with arousal so that they can shift more units. Rock and Pop and Rap promoters drape their artist’s videos and lyrics in it without comment, so that in a climate of increased concern and indeed mounting panic over paedophilia it’s perfectly okay for Britney Spears to posture in a fetishistic schoolgirl outfit of a type that cannot actually have been worn by a schoolgirl any time this century. The word ‘fuck’, once inflammatory when on the lips of Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce or Kenneth Tynan, can be cutely scrambled as the logo for the French Connection clothing line’s United Kingdom franchise. The big difference between our commercial porno-culture and traditional pornography, however, is that while the former is more limited and soft-core than the latter, it’s no longer something sought out by an eager and consenting individual but instead is a feature of society that there is no avoiding, there whether we like it or not. As a culture, we are more intensely sexualised and stimulated than we’ve ever been before, and from the rising rate of sex crime it appears that we’re not dealing with it very well.

Is this because, as Christian moralists and even some unreconstructed feminists might still suggest, pornography corrupts the moral fibre of its victims to the point where fantasies spill over into actual rape or sexual abuse? Probably not, if one considers for a moment just how many people are exposed to pornographic imagery at some point in their lives, and just how tiny a percentage of those people ever have recourse to rape or other sexual crimes. While serial murderers and rapists like Ted Bundy might claim on the eve of execution that it was pornography that gave them the idea for all their crimes and misdemeanours, this ignores the fact that for each psychopath who makes this claim there are a hundred thousand normal people who appear to never have been pushed over the edge into monstrosity by anything they watched or read. Besides, I’ve personally yet to find a pornographic work that features anyone removing all their car’s interior door-handles, or dressing in a plaster-cast to lull their prey into a false sense of security. Perhaps it’s a niche market that I’ve yet to come across, or possibly those ideas came out of the perpetrator’s own psychopathology, not from pornography at all.

Should we decide, then, that there’s no connection between the eroticism saturating western culture and the rising tide of sex crime in that culture? Probably, once more, we shouldn’t, although the connection may not be as simple and direct as we’re expecting. It’s instructive to consider different countries in the light of their reaction to pornography, where it appears as if the problem might not be in our pornography itself so much as in the way we view pornography as a society. In Denmark, Spain and Holland it is possible to find hardcore pornography displayed in almost every family newsagent, such fare having become so commonplace that it is barely noticed. With pornography accepted as a fact of life, the attached sense of shame and guilt we find in the United States and Britain is conspicuously absent. Also notable in the porn-tolerant cultures mentioned up above is the low rate of sex crime, relative to the U.K and U.S.A, that these cultures enjoy, almost as if within such cultures porno is able to function as a social safety valve in a way that English/American society does not allow. Given that the internet is global, it’s not that these places have less or more porn than we do, nor that they’re less sexualized by general culture than ourselves. Could it be, simply, that like Palaeolithic fetish-worshippers or Ancient Greeks, they treat it differently and are affected by it differently in turn?

Consider how we treat pornography, on either side of the Atlantic: living in cultures that have been deliberately sexualized for purposes of commerce, it is not unlikely that some of the population will find themselves over-stimulated and will seek release from this condition, usually by resorting to whatever form of porno is most readily available. Unfortunately, in societies that have followed the early church’s lead by letting people view pornography on the sole understanding that to do so is a sin, such a release will be accompanied almost immediately by a reflex reaction of guilt, shame, embarrassment and maybe even actual self-disgust.

To understand how this conflicted situation could conceivably affect an individual’s hard-wiring, let’s imagine one of B.F. Skinner’s rat experiments, albeit one that’s even more perverse than usual. In our new experiment, the rat is given first his stimulus by means of, say, that schoolgirl promo-piece by Britney Spears we mentioned earlier. Stimulated thus, our rodent is conditioned to respond by pressing on the porno-lever to achieve the requisite reward of sexual release. Once this reward has been acquired, however, our rat will receive a strong electric shock of shame. Reward and punishment, therefore, become perversely linked. The only route to pleasure involves pain, humiliation. Would this treatment, carried out millions of times across whole rodent populations, have a beneficial or a deleterious effect upon their mental health, do you suppose?

With human beings, in the socially constructed Skinner Boxes of our sexuality, it isn’t going too far to suggest that certain individuals are thus deprived of the release they seek, unable to accept the shame and loathing by which it’s accompanied. Extended over an entire society, this means the pressure cooker lid is kept securely on, while the release-valve isn’t functioning the way it does in Holland, Spain or Denmark. Subsequently we are subject to more frequent and disastrous explosions of the sex drive, ugly eruptions into real life by what should have been a harmless fantasy. The outcast status of pornography appears to drive some people into shadowy and claustrophobic isolation where their sexual daydreams can turn into something dark and dangerous that is to nobody’s advantage, neither themselves, their victims, nor society at large. Worse still, in sexually restrictive cultures where pornography is seen as causing sexual crime (rather than as providing an escape-valve that might possibly prevent it) the instinctual response is almost certainly a fresh attempt to bear down on the pressure cooker’s lid.

Where does this leave us, and where does it leave pornography? With each new technological advance since William Caxton it would seem pornography has both proliferated and degraded in its quality. Today’s society, thanks to the internet and other factors, is entirely saturated with erotica of the most basic, rudimentary kind; convict pornography for convict populations shuffling through life’s mess-hall, without any other options than the slop they’re given. Porn is everywhere, just as it was in ancient Greece, but nowhere is it art. Nowhere is it an affirmation of common humanity the way it was in classic culture but instead affirms only our alienation and our distance from each other, and despite its mass availability does not appear to be making us any happier.

Rather than functioning as a release for our quite ordinary sexual imaginings, porn functions as another social tether, as control-leash, lure and lash combined in one, a cattle-prod that looks just like a carrot. Dangling temptingly before us everywhere we look it leads us on. Then, in the guilty aftermath of our indulgences, it converts handily into a rod of shame with which to flog ourselves.

This is especially true of the United States as it negotiates its current Georgian era, although as with the unreasonable influence Victorian England had upon the world back in the nineteenth century, the repercussions of a faith-based presidency in America are felt across the globe. They’re felt in terms of their effect on foreign policy, on the sciences and arts, and on how we think about our sexuality and its entitlements. Soaking in cyber-porn and promo-porn, the sexual heat within society is higher than it’s ever been, the needle on the boiler’s dial tipping alarmingly into the red, yet at this point in history we’re governed by a mindset that is programmed to respond by clamping down on the escape valve, on pornography. Wipe out pornography, the idea seems to be, and we’ll have also somehow wiped out all the urges that first prompted us to sculpt Bog Venus in the first place.

Clearly, the eradication of pornography is never going to happen. Porn’s been with us since our Palaeolithic past and will in every likelihood be with us until we succeed in tidying our species from the planet. ‘No porn’, then, is not a realistic option. I suggest the only choice we genuinely have is between good pornography and bad pornography. This obviously begs a bunch of questions, the first being as to how we differentiate between the two. Just for the purposes of argument let us define ‘good’ porn, like good Judge Clayton Horn, as that which is of noticeable social benefit, with ‘bad’ porn as its opposite, that which is noticeably to our social detriment. Of course, this raises a much bigger question, namely, does ‘good’ porn even exist? If not, could it conceivably exist at some point in the future, and what would it look like if it did?

To answer this, we could do far worse than refer back to those few dissenting female voices that were raised, back when the feminist debate upon pornography was at its hottest and perhaps its most intelligent. Taking some inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir’s influential essay “Must We Burn Sade”?, the wonderful and greatly-missed Angela Carter muses on porn in her book The Sadeian Woman, finally suggesting that there might be some form of pornography yet undiscovered, glorious and liberating, unencumbered by the inequalities of sex and sexuality that dogged it in the past. Even porn’s most uncompromising and vociferous feminist critic, Andrea Dworkin, has conceded that benign pornography might be conceivable, even if she considered such a thing highly unlikely. Given that we don’t want ‘bad pornography’ and can’t have ‘no pornography’, it’s in this mere suggestion of the possibility of ‘good’ pornography that the one ray of light in an intractable debate resides.

The question still remains, however, as to how pornography might have a beneficial influence upon society, exactly? If we can’t imagine such a situation, then how would we recognise it if it should arise? Even if we accept along with Andrea Dworkin, Angela Carter, Kathy Acker and Simone de Beauvoir that our hypothetical ‘good’ porn is possible, that doesn’t help us much unless we have a clear idea of just what good, what benefit, pornography of the right kind might work within our culture.

We’ve observed already that in places such as Denmark, Spain or Holland porn appears to act to some extent as a release valve, venting sexual pressures harmlessly before they can explode in sex crime or abuse. We also noted that this doesn’t seem to work in more restrictive cultures where reflexive guilt and shame seem to attend the very notion of pornography. What if it were possible to bring such a degree of artistry to our pornography that this immediate link between erotica and dire social embarrassment was severed? Might pornography in this way be allowed to function as it does in more enlightened climes, reducing our appalling score of actual men and women scarred and violated, actual children raped and killed and dumped in a canal? Isn’t such a thing at least worth the attempt?

Pornography, if it could be expressed artistically in such a way, might welcome our sexual imagination in from the cold, into the reassuring warmth of socio-political acceptability. The power of art is that it lets us see, in someone else’s work, an idea that we dimly formed but lacked the skill to realise or convey, and in this way makes us feel less alone. Pornography as we conceive of it today, however, does the opposite. It isn’t art, cannot be openly admired or discussed, serves only to convince us of our isolation, to increase our sense that we are in our secret and most intimate desires alone save for the reeking company of other sweaty, masturbating perverts and social inadequates.

If we could redefine erotica, restore it to the venerated place in art that it was once accustomed to, this might defuse a number of our personal and social tensions with regard to sex in much the way it seems to have done at the dawn of western civilization. Realised properly, pornography could offer us a safe arena in which to discuss or air ideas that otherwise would go unspoken and could only stale and fester in our individual dark. Our sexual imagination is and always has been central to our lives, as individuals or as a species, and our culture might be much enriched, or at least more relaxed, if it acknowledged this. There’d be no more divine pornography by any future William Blake incinerated after his demise, no future Aubrey Beardsley on his deathbed, frightened, coughing for his finest work to be destroyed. No frilly decadent or bearded Beat compelled either to cower behind a pseudonym or add to the prolific oeuvre of ‘Anonymous’.

Ennobled thus, pornography could take its place once more as a revered and almost sacred totem in society, could be brought full circle to its origins in the pneumatic pinhead babe of Willendorf. It seems we only have two choices in the way that we regard our own erotic dreams: either we can accept them and restore Bog Venus to her natural and proper place in culture; or we can reject them and attempt to stigmatise them, can attach arousal to so much conditioned shame and guilt and pain that in effect we have contained our sexuality within a spiky 19th century German cock-ring.

In the end, it’s in the hands of individual people, individual artists, writers, film-makers or poets. If they have the nerve to plant their flags in this despised and dangerous terrain despite its uninviting nature, then in time the dismal wilderness might be transformed into a scented garden of enduring value. The erotic might be elevated from her current status as a hooker everyone keeps chained up in their cellar but nobody talks about, unmentionable but available, back to her previous position as a goddess.

We might find she’s changed some since her chunky limestone origins, might find she now resembles something more along the lines depicted in Pornocrates by the magnificent Felicien Rops. This superb work, begun by Rops in the late 1870s, depicts the spirit of pornography herself, a gorgeous woman seen in profile treading carefully from right to left across the image, clad in only boots, gloves, stockings, jewellery and a drifting sash, topped by a Gainsborough hat. Pale flowers are in her hair, and, similarly pale, there is a blindfold tied across her eyes. Held on a ribbon-decorated leash as though it were a well-clipped poodle is a lean young pig that seems to lead the sightless beauty in the manner of a guide-dog. At a pace sedate and dignified, it navigates for its blind mistress what may be only a decorative lower border to the picture but which looks like the embellished stonework of a wall or ledge, along the top of which the elegant embodied spirit of Victorian pornography is guided by a snuffling hog; a swine before The Pearl.

A frieze runs in relief along the wall or border’s topmost edge, depicting effigies of the fine Arts, sat with their parchment, lute or easel and yet hanging down their heads, looking away embarrassed as the goddess of pornography parades there brazenly above them. Similarly, hovering in the air before her as she walks there are three anguished cherubs, tearing at their hair as they berate her lewd display. Behind her blindfold, unaware of how she looks and rightly unconcerned by the controversy she’s causing, utterly unworried by the precipice she steps along, the voluptuous essence of pornography is calm, serene. She trusts her safety to an animal conventionally seen as the epitome of dirtiness and brutish instinct, this despite its widely-mentioned cleanliness and keen intelligence. The goddess walks along her wall, proud and unmindful of the drop to either side, secure in her conviction that she is a thing of loveliness, safe in the knowledge that by following her noble and yet much-despised animal urge she will be led unerringly towards her rightful Queenly destiny.

Shameless and blind to all the outraged posturings occasioned by her presence, Venus promenades along the moral tightrope of her path, walking the pig, sure-footed and invulnerable in her glamour as she wanders, one step at a time, towards the hoped-for glow of a more human and enlightened future.

posted in Alan Moore - 0 replies

Pop culture Moore references

Jeckle — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 02:58:11 GMT

Was listening to Tenacious D's song 'Wonderboy' and was again struck by the name of Wonderboy's nemesis, Young Nastyman. Moore completists will recognize that name from his first (and still amazing) work of superhero deconstruction, Miracleman. I figure it's such a bizarre name that either Jack Black or KG (or both) simply must have read the comic and borrowed the name.

Anyone got any others?

posted in Alan Moore - 0 replies

The Moon and Serpent Bumper Compendium of Magic

phanfasm — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 06:51:16 GMT

Well, friends. I do so hope we survive until this fine publication arrives. Kindly scroll down a ways to see...

http://www.topshelfcomix.com/catalog.php?type=13

Splendid news for boys and girls, and guaranteed salvation for humanity! Messrs. Steve and Alan Moore, current proprietors of the celebrated Moon & Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels (sorcery by appointment since circa 150 AD) are presently engaged in producing a clear and practical grimoire of the occult sciences that offers endless necromantic fun for all the family. Exquisitely illuminated by a host of adepts including Kevin O'Neill, Melinda Gebbie, John Coulthart, José Villarrubia and other stellar talents (to be named shortly), this marvelous and unprecedented tome promises to provide all that the reader could conceivably need in order to commence a fulfilling new career as a diabolist.

Its contents include profusely illustrated instructional essays upon this ancient sect's theories of magic, notably the key dissertation "Adventures in Thinking" which gives reliable advice as to how entry into the world of magic may be readily achieved. Further to this, a number of "Rainy Day" activity pages present lively and entertaining things-to-do once the magical state has been attained, including such popular pastimes as divination, etheric travel and the conjuring of a colourful multitude of sprits, deities, dead people and infernal entities from the pit, all of whom are sure to become your new best friends.

Also contained within this extravagant compendium of thaumaturgic lore is a history of magic from the last ice-age to the present day, told in a series of easy-to-absorb pictorial biographies of fifty great enchanters and complemented by a variety of picture stories depicting events ranging from the Paleolithic origins of art, magic, language and consciousness to the rib-tickling comedy exploits of Moon & Serpent founder Alexander the False Prophet ("He's fun, he's fake, he's got a talking snake!").

In addition to these manifold delights, the adventurous reader will also discover a series of helpful travel guides to mind-wrenching alien dimensions that are within comfortable walking distance, as well as profiles of the many quaint local inhabitants that one might bump into at these exotic resorts. A full range of entertainments will be provided, encompassing such diverse novelties and pursuits as a lavishly decorated decadent pulp tale of occult adventure recounted in the serial form, a full set of this sinister and deathless cult's never-before-seen Tarot cards, a fold-out Kabalistic board game in which the first player to achieve enlightenment wins providing he or she doesn't make a big deal about it, and even a pop-up Theatre of Marvels that serves as both a Renaissance memory theatre and a handy portable shrine for today's multi-tasking magician on the move.

Completing this almost unimaginable treasure-trove are a matching pair of lengthy theses revealing the ultimate meaning of both the Moon and the Serpent in a manner that makes transparent the much obscured secret of magic, happiness, sex, creativity and the known Universe, while at the same time explaining why these lunar and ophidian symbols feature so prominently in the order's peculiar name. (Manufacturer's disclaimer: this edition does not, however, reveal why the titular cabal of magicians consider themselves to be either grand or Egyptian. Let the buyer beware.)

A colossal and audacious publishing triumph of three hundred and twenty pages, beautifully produced in the finest tradition of educational literature for young people, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic will transform your lives, your reality, and any spare lead that you happen to have laying around into the purest and most radiant gold.

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

Cover design by John Coulthart.

A 2009 RELEASE!
ISBN 978-1-60309-001-8

posted in Alan Moore - 2 replies

V for values

chycho — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:22:48 GMT

"Net neutrality is currently the hot topic, but the fight to save the net is doomed unless we address the root causes." The following three videos from a six part series "not only highlight the problem but also offer a practical solution to our values dilemma." This video series is brought to you by www.saveourvalues.org ... Unfortunately parts four to six have not been posted yet so we will have to wait:

Part1: It Begins (7:18)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_3UrLkTHC8

Part 2: Freedom Under Siege (8:36)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoGCAqZTHy8

Part 3: Our Greatest Discovery (7:46)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH4aceaFnd4

posted in Alan Moore - 0 replies

Salon: Lost Girls

DevastatorJr — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 21:43:39 GMT

"Lost Girls"
Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's shocking X-rated masterpiece takes three childhood heroines and plunges them into sex-soaked adulthood.

By Douglas Wolk
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/08/30/moore/print.html

Aug. 30, 2006 | "Tell me a story," a young girl asks at the beginning of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's dizzying graphic novel "Lost Girls." We can't see her; all we can see, for the entire first chapter, is a mirror with an ornate carved frame, and whatever happens to be reflected in it. On the first page, that's a wealthy woman's bedroom in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1913. "Oh, I don't know any stories," the older woman says. "Your little white breasts, they're so lovely. They'll never be as beautiful once you're grown. Will you touch them for me?" All we can see of the woman is her leg, stretched out as she masturbates.

To put it bluntly, the scene is totally creepy; naturally, it's also more complicated than it looks. As it turns out, the woman is Lady Alice Fairchild, a drug-befogged upper-class Englishwoman in her 60s, and she's just talking to herself. The girl is her reflection in the mirror -- or, rather, the lost self Alice imagines on the other side of the mirror. Alice has extensive experience with imagination and mirrors; you've probably already encountered her younger self, the protagonist of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass."

The themes of "Lost Girls" are all right there on the first page: storytelling as a way of making sense of the transformations that sex brings about, children's sexuality and its adult exploiters, and an almost Modernist formalism -- the idea that working within interesting and rigorously defined structures, no matter how outré they are, will yield worthwhile results. (We get the very strong impression that this is what Lady Fairchild always does to get off.)

Moore and Gebbie began working on "Lost Girls" in 1990, when Moore had already written graphic novels like "Watchmen" and "V for Vendetta" but wasn't yet as famous as he's become. (The first six chapters were serialized in the early '90s; the rest has never been seen before, and the project itself has practically reached the age of consent.) The finished version is an exquisite physical object: a $75, slipcased set of three oversize hardcover volumes, reproducing Gebbie's mixed-media artwork in luminous color. (Its publisher, Top Shelf, sold the first 500 copies at July's Comic-Con International; it will be nationally distributed in September.) Moore has been telling interviewers that the point of "Lost Girls" was to make dignified pornography, rather than "erotica" -- to produce something that was beautiful and well-wrought, and also overtly, unblushingly about what happens behind bedroom doors.

Another way of putting it is that it's a really advanced version of slash fiction, a sort of "I Am Curiouser and Curiouser." In short order, Alice finds herself at a hotel on the Austrian border, the Himmelgarten, where she becomes entangled, figuratively and literally, with beleaguered English hausfrau Wendy Potter and Midwestern farm girl Dorothy "Dottie" Gale, late of, respectively, "Peter Pan" and "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." All three women have stories of their own, though: They've built grand metaphors -- pornographic-utopian worldviews, really -- around their adolescent sexual experiences. Naturally, those worldviews look very much like Wonderland and Neverland and Oz, right down to the styles of those books' original illustrations, except that everybody's doing everybody else -- boys with girls, boys with boys, girls with girls, and a few other permutations. (Toto is virtually the only character from the source books who escapes with his innocence intact.)

It's a brilliant move: Moore and Gebbie have found a consistent, elaborate metaphor of sexual discovery in three books whose authors didn't put it there, or at least probably didn't deliberately put it there. Alice, for instance, tells the story of how her adult identity, and her fetish, began to form: As a girl, while being molested by an older friend of her family -- he had white hair and a pocket watch and spectacles and he was known as "Bunny" (of course he's the White Rabbit) -- she saw her reflection in a looking glass. That child, she imagined in that charged, hazy moment, was not just her older self but her true love, forever young and innocent. (And the suggestion is that she's attracted to actual younger women -- maybe children, maybe not -- because they remind her of that reflection.)

Moore has very often contextualized his comics within some kind of tradition, and "Lost Girls" devises, from a few scraps and hints, the idea of a legacy of pornographic fine art from the prewar era. In every room of the Himmelgarten, instead of a Bible, there's a white book of erotic tales and illustrations by famous decadent fin-du-siècle types like Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley (all, of course, pastiched by Moore and Gebbie). Gebbie's artwork is partly inspired by that era's artists even outside the pastiches -- her shapes and tones owe more to the ways early 20th century painters, especially Matisse, abstracted the human body than to the way most cartoonists do. She designs and decorates virtually every page with allusions to Art Nouveau; few comics artists care so much about wallpaper. Gebbie sometimes succumbs to the froufrou soft-focus eroticism of a David Hamilton photograph or an old "Emmanuelle" movie, but most of the time she avoids the clichés of both coy pastel "erotica" and clinical, sodium-lighted hardcore, and her sense of color and shade is unparalleled in comics.

So "Lost Girls" is shocking, it's lovely, it's ambitious, it's grandly clever -- but is it any good? Yes: It's very, very good, if flawed. Parts of it are some of the most extraordinary stuff Alan Moore has ever written; parts of it made me want to tear my own eyes out. (Some of them are the same parts.) Moore loads every line with thematic weight until it groans, his idea of what an American farm girl talks like is ridiculous, and the timeline is a mess: A few weeks' worth of events are spread out over a year, just so the narrative can encompass the May 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps," the June 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and the subsequent outbreak of the Great War. Still, even some of Moore's stylistic tics work to his advantage here, like the elevated language he resorts to whenever he's got a point to make, with its da-dum da-dum iambic meter and lofty, elaborate diction ("An unseen hand undid my blouse, then moved inside and I sank gratefully into a fauve delirium; the drugging cherry warmth of her").

There's a lot of that high rhetoric here, because Moore's got an epistemological ax to grind. He wants to make very sure we get the difference between representation and reality, since he knows perfectly well that, as protectively fond as he is of Dorothy, Wendy and Alice, a lot of people are going to be extraordinarily unhappy about his setting them up with strap-ons and opium pipes. In one later scene, the Himmelgarten's unctuous manager Monsieur Rougeur explains that the fictions in the hotel's White Book "are uncontaminated by effect and consequence. Why, they are almost innocent. I, of course, am real, and since Helena, who I just fucked, is only thirteen, I am very guilty. Ah well, it cannot be helped." He's in the background of a sequence of panels as he delivers his monologue; the foreground is a series of close-up penetration shots, and the top half of the page is a scene of pedophilic incest, lovingly rendered in the style of the Marquis Franz von Bayros, with text pastiching Pierre Louÿs.

All of this is terribly uncomfortable to read; it's meant to be, obviously, because the argument is no fun if it's too easy. "Lost Girls" flirts openly with the idea of adults having sex with children, in everything from the premise of the book to its key sequences to Rougeur's coy admission of guilt as protestation of innocence. If there's a single sexual taboo that still pushes everyone's buttons, it's pedophilia. But one of the strongest effects art can have is a sort of inductive shock -- carrying you along someplace you don't want to go -- and as Moore and Gebbie underscore at every turn, no matter what their characters claim, what "Lost Girls" is showing isn't real. It's imaginary scenarios involving imaginary characters famous for their imaginations. The children's books about them haven't been violated; they're safe on the nursery bookshelf.

For that matter, if Moore and Gebbie have no time for prudes -- Wendy's husband, Harold Potter (whose name appeared in "Lost Girls'" early chapters long before J.K. Rowling finished her first book), a stuffy, frigid sort, is humiliated in a handful of rather-too-nasty, farcical scenes -- they've really got it in for adult molesters of children. Without giving anything away, a pivotal moment of each girl's story comes when the great and terrible authority figures who've taken advantage of their nascent sexuality are revealed as the tiny men behind the curtain they are.

Moore has always been a formalist, from the clockwork structure of "Watchmen" to the Kabbala-map organization of "Promethea," but the structure of "Lost Girls" takes his formalism to the point of fetishism. (At least it's formally appropriate.) Each volume is named after a line from one of the source books, and contains 10 chapters, two of them devoted specifically to Wendy, two to Dorothy, two to Alice, and two including excerpts from the White Book. Each chapter has its own title and title page; each chapter in the second and third volumes in which one of the women tells her story includes one wordless full-page image directly inspired by a scene from that girl's original book.

More or less every other page in Vol. 1 has some kind of sexual content; that's ramped up to every page in Vol. 2, and practically every panel in Vol. 3 is flat-out hardcore. But by that final volume, the former child stars are fucking against the apocalypse. The war ("that which is most great, which is most terrible") is about to break out, the soldiers are off to the front, and there's nothing left for the hotel's remaining residents to do but lock the doors and screw themselves insensible until they have to run away.

The third volume is the roughest in more than explicitness: The characters enter the sort of pornotopian frenzy they've always imagined, and discover that coming back out of the sexual Wonderland is difficult and painful. The final sex scene is curiously feeble -- and it's followed not with any kind of afterglow, but with a sorrowful awakening into the world outside the boudoir, as the flames rise across Europe. Whatever awful realities come out of sex, Moore suggests, are a thousand times less awful than the violence that its energy can be perverted into.

The curious -- or curiousest -- thing about "Lost Girls" is that while it's enormously powerful and gorgeously executed, it's not actually all that sexy, or likely to inspire many fantasies on its own. The kind of release it offers is a fetishist's release: the sense that a ritual has been completed precisely. If it fails as smut, though, it's a victory as art, which is not a bad condolence prize. Like any number of boundary-pushing, button-pushing works before it, it may well require some kind of scandal, or at least a high-placed moralist's denunciation, to find the audience it deserves. It's spoiling for a fight, and it's worth fighting for.
-- By Douglas Wolk

posted in Alan Moore - 10 replies

“V” Meets The Secret Service

chycho — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 19:51:43 GMT

Compliments from the politics forum

http://www.givemeliberty.org/RTP2/UPDATES/Update2006-11-11.htm

:-)

posted in Alan Moore - 4 replies

The Mindscape of Alan Moore

jamess — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 00:27:43 GMT

Does anyone know if/when this film is coming out? It looks really good, but there's no news on the filmmaker's website. I think it showed at comic conventions and that's about it. Not much news about it that I can find.

posted in Alan Moore - 1 reply

The Mind of Alan Moore Trailer

chycho — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 20:35:11 GMT

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4734174571562369481&q=alan+moore

looks cool :-)

posted in Alan Moore - 1 reply

V is back in numbers :-))) ... plus "Coming: 1,000 “Vs” in DC"

chycho — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 06:49:49 GMT

“V” Makes A Mark In DC
http://www.givemeliberty.org/RTP2/UPDATES/Update2006-11-18.htm

November 18, 2006

“V” Makes A Mark In DC

Worldwide Interest in RTP Stirred

It’s working.

We are making good use of the powerful concept of en masse activist resistance used in the movie, “V for Vendetta.”

“V” is helping us as we build support for the unalienable Right to a Response from Government to our Petitions for Redress of Grievances regarding the Government’s violation of the war powers, tax, privacy and money clauses of the Constitution.

“V” is helping us as we educate the public about the First Amendment’s guarantee of our Right to Petition Government for Redress of Grievances.

On November 6, 2006, a lone man in a “V” mask and clothing visited security checkpoints at the White House, the main Treasury Building, the Department of Justice and the Capitol, to deliver a letter and the Petitions for Redress. A short videotape of the encounters has made its way around the Internet, including links from sites such as MySpace.com.

The letter informed the leaders of the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government that up to 100 people in “V” masks and clothing would gather in silent vigil at those locations on November 14th to await a response to the Petitions for Redress.

True to his word, at 11:00 A.M. on Tuesday, November 14, 2006, nearly 100 men and women in “V” masks and clothing could be seen walking along different streets in downtown Washington, DC, all heading to Lafayette Park across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.

By high noon, the “Vs” were facing the White House, in formation. Some were holding a 40-foot by 25-foot banner that read, “Dear Government…No Answers, No Taxes.” Four were holding smaller signs that read “Obey The Constitution – The Right To Petition.”

They waited about one hour for a representative of President Bush to approach them with some response to the Petitions.

As has been his wont, the President did not respond.

However, photographers, reporters, and tourists responded well to the rich imagery provided by the WTP demonstration. The appearance of dozens of “Vs” delivering such a message was attention getting to say the least.

There was a sidewalk press conference with one “V” who had a red rose protruding from his hatband. No tourist with a camera could resist stopping to photograph the scene, whether he or she was alone or part of the very large group of high school students that was on its way to a tour of the White House.

The “Vs” on the outside edges of the formation distributed hundreds of We The People Foundation brochures to anyone requesting one. The supply was nearly depleted by the time the formation moved on to the next location.

After the silent vigil in front of the White House, the “Vs” broke ranks and reformed, with banner and signs, a few hundred feet down Pennsylvania Avenue, directly facing the main Treasury Building where they waited a half hour for a representative of Treasury Secretary Paulson to respond to the Petitions for Redress -- especially the Petition regarding the privately owned Federal Reserve System and the violations of the money clauses of the Constitution.

As has been its custom, Treasury did not respond.

The number of photographers and reporters declined at this point, but the interest among the picture-taking tourists did not.

The “Vs” then marched down 15th Street and Constitution Avenue to the Department of Justice, where they waited for a half hour, with banner and signs for the Attorney General to respond to the Petitions for Redress.

As has been its tradition, the Department of Justice did not respond.

Interestingly, one professional photographer for the “Foreign Press Photo Service” took dozens of carefully crafted pictures while the “Vs” were waiting outside the DOJ building.

The “Vs” then marched to the Reflecting Pool and faced the Capitol as they waited for representatives of the House Speaker and Senate Majority Leader to respond to the Petitions for Redress.

Habituated, Congress did not respond.

Knowledge About Our Cause Is Spreading

It is too soon to know the full extent of the public’s information and awareness about the DC event. Here is what we know so far.

We received an email from a reporter who works for Brazil’s newspaper website http://www.estadao.com.br.
He is writing an article and wanted us to answer a few of his questions.

We received an email from the Director of the movie, “V for Vendetta.” He was aware of our events and said he wanted to send a few words of encouragement and was happy that “V” had made it into the popular vernacular. He closed with the words, “Fight The Power.”

An article will appear in Monday’s issue of “TaxNotes,” which is America’s leading tax news and research magazine.

We received word from a man who stated that while was passing through an airport Tuesday, he saw live television images of the “Vs” across from the White House.

If anyone learns of additional media coverage, please let us know.

Coming: 1,000 “Vs” in DC

Plans are now underway for a GiveMeLiberty 2007 Conference. Most likely it will take place in DC on a Thursday, Friday and Saturday. On one of those days we hope to assemble 1,000 “V” demonstrators on the street in support of our Right to Petition the Government for Redress of constitutional torts, including our Right to a Response and our Right of Enforcement if Government does not respond to our proper, constitutionally based Petitions for Redress.

We hope to convince those who were responsible for the making of the movie, “V for Vendetta” to help us obtain, hopefully by donation, the 1,000 “V” costumes needed for this next WTP event. If this happens, we would then give one to every person who attends GML 2007.

More to come.

posted in Alan Moore - 0 replies

possibly the weirdest news item about AM that could ever be

RAB — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 03:25:35 GMT

I won't tell you. You wouldn't believe me. Just see it for yourself.

http://www.northantsnews.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=317&ArticleID=1865011

posted in Alan Moore - 2 replies

The Alan Moore interview - The Beat

chycho — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 02:26:42 GMT

http://www.comicon.com/thebeat/2006/03/a_for_alan_pt_1_the_alan_moore.html

I hope I’m not double posting but here it is anyway :-)

A FOR ALAN, Pt. 1: The Alan Moore interview

Voiceofthefire[On November 1, 2005, I interviewed Alan Moore for GIANT Magazine. Although the finished piece was only 300 words long, I ended up talking to Moore for nearly an hour, and he went on at some length about his difficulties with DC Comics and the American Entertainment Industry, in general. A short version of the interview was published in Publisher Weekly Comics Week on November 8, 2005. I'd always meant to get the whole thing cleaned up and edited down, and with V FOR VENDETTA opening this weekend, it seemed like as good a time as any.

In talking to Moore – who is just as fascinating and voluble as you've heard – it becomes clear that the situation with his work at DC and in Hollywood causes him a lot of very real pain. As you can see from the transcript, you can disagree with some of his actions, but not with the real passion and love of comics that motivates them.

Since this interview was conducted, V FOR VENDETTA has indeed had Moore's name taken off the credits. The last I heard, his demand to have his name taken off the books he doesn't own still stood. Perhaps a follow up call is in order.

Despite Moore's unhappiness, he does manage to talk about V FOR VENDETTA, a work of which he is justly very proud. So with no further ado, ladies and gentlemen, Alan Moore.

]

The Beat: Can you in any way encapsulate the political climate that gave rise to V for Vendetta?

Alan Moore: At the time when I wrote it, it was of course for an English alternative comic magazine around about 1981. Margaret Thatcher had been in power for two or three years. She was facing the first crisis of her, by then, very unpopular government. There were riots all over Britain in places that hadn't seen riots for hundreds of years. There were fascists groups, the National Front, the British National party, who were flexing their muscles and sort of trying to make political capital out of what were fairly depressed and jobless times. It seemed to me that with the kind of Reagan/Thatcher axis that existed across the Atlantic, it looked like Western society was taking somewhat a turn for the worse. There were ugly fascist stains starting to reassert themselves that we might have thought had been eradicated back in the '30s. But they were reasserting themselves with a different spin. They were talking less about annihilating whichever minority they happened to find disfavor with and talking more about free market forces and market choice and all of these other kind of glib terms, which tended to have the same results as an awful lot of the kind of Fascist causes back in the 1930s but with a bit more spin put upon them The friendly face of fascism.

So V for Vendetta originally came out of the fact I'd been asked to write a strip for David Lloyd to illustrate. We'd originally been talking about doing a 1930's noir strip and Dave had bolted that because I think he'd had enough of digging out '30's reference. We thought maybe we could get the same effect by rather than setting it in the near past, to set it in the near future. So it all evolved from several different sources, but it was playing into the fact that over here in England we've got quite a good tradition of villains and sociopaths as heroes. Like Robin Hood, Guy Fawkes and all the rest of them. And in our fiction, in British children's comics, there were as many sociopathic villains who'd got their own comic strips as there were heroes. Possibly more. The British have always had sympathy with a dashing villain.

Vforvendetta306So I decided to use this to political effect by coming up with a projected Fascist state in the near future and setting an anarchist against that. As far I'm concerned, the two poles of politics were not Left Wing or Right Wing. In fact they're just two ways of ordering an industrial society and we're fast moving beyond the industrial societies of the 19th and 20th centuries. It seemed to me the two more absolute extremes were anarchy and fascism. This was one of the things I objected to in the recent film, where it seems to be, from the script that I read, sort of recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism. There wasn't a mention of anarchy as far as I could see. The fascism had been completely defanged. I mean, I think that any references to racial purity had been excised, whereas actually, fascists are quite big on racial purity.

The Beat: Yeah, it does seem to be a common element.

Moore: It does seem to rather be a badge they wear. Whereas, what I was trying to do was take these two extremes of the human political spectrum and set them against each other in a kind of little moral drama, just to see what works and what happened. I tried to be as fair about it as possible. I mean, yes, politically I'm an anarchist; at the same time I didn't want to stick to just moral blacks and whites. I wanted a number of the fascists I portrayed to be real rounded characters. They've got reasons for what they do. They're not necessarily cartoon Nazis. Some of them believe in what they do, some don't believe in it but are doing it any way for practical reasons. As for the central character of the anarchist, V himself, he is for the first two or three episodes cheerfully going around murdering people, and the audience is loving it. They are really keyed into this traditional drama of a romantic anarchist who is going around murdering all the Nazi bad guys.

At which point I decided that that wasn't what I wanted to say. I actually don't think it's right to kill people. So I made it very, very morally ambiguous. And the central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think, and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history. I was very pleased with how it came together. And it was a book that was very, very close to my heart.

The Beat: And you are still happy with it?

Moore: Well, this is a bit more complex, Heidi. A couple of weeks ago I did ask DC Comics to take my name off the book. This was after a long, long string of gradually worsening relationships which had been kind of obliviously ignored by DC comics. It's got to the point where I've become very, very distanced emotionally from a lot of the work which I don't own. It's a kind of feeling that sort of…if I don't actually have the moral right to declare myself the author of the work, does that not mean that I should have the moral right to declare myself not the author of the work?

V for Vendetta was about something that was very important to me. It was a book that I was very pleased that David Lloyd and I owned. And I never wanted to be in a position where I didn't own it. We were misled, I think is the probably the gentlest way of putting it, and ended up signing V for Vendetta away more or less in perpetuity.

FilesThe Beat: So near and yet so far…[laughs]

Moore: Yeah. At that point I kind of cut off contact with DC Comics and never wanted to work with them again.

The Beat: You're talking about back in the '80s?

Moore: Right. It was when I realized that in fact Watchmen and V for Vendetta had been taken from me. And I though, all right, fair enough. I was fooled once, and I decided I didn't want to work for DC Comics again or indeed for any of the big American comic companies. And this went fine for a number of years until DC evidentially thought it would be a good idea to force me back into the fold, when they purchased Wildstorm. I had already signed contract and would go back upon my word with people I'd made promises to. So I stuck with it for six years. I was assured at the beginning that DC wouldn't be interfering. This turned out not to be the case, but I stuck with it for as long as I told my collaborators that I would be sticking with it. Which was longer than I'd wanted to, but it took longer than I'd expected.

But I stuck it out and I did the best work that I possibly could. In the midst of all this, this ridiculous thing with V for Vendetta film came up. All of this nonsense could have been stopped at any point if—when I had said, look I want my name taken off the films and all the money distributed to the artists—if they hadn't said, Okay, well, you'll just have to sign some things then to give your money to Dave Lloyd. When in fact what they should have said was "--and we're not going to bother doing anything to take your name off the film."

The Beat: Your name is on [the] League of Extraordinary Gentlemen [film], right?

Moore: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was the reason why I decided to take my name off all subsequent films.

The Beat: Well…[General laughter] I think anyone might have done that! But go on…

Moore: Yeah, a lot of things which had to do with League made me decide I really wanted nothing to do with the American film industry in any shape or form. Which is why I asked DC if I could possibly have my name taken off the films and the money redistributed. This went fine with the Constantine film. This was because my name was never going to go on the Constantine film in the first place. Because that had gone so well, I distributed the money amongst the other artists my name hadn’t been on the film and I was completely happy. I assumed when DC then sent me paperwork so I could sign my money over to David Lloyd on the V for Vendetta film this was going to go fine.

It didn't. I had an American producer actually lying about my involvement in the film, which made me look like a liar. When I said I'm not taking any money from these films and I'm not interested in them, he makes a statement that's completely dishonest and was saying the complete opposite. So I felt I had to at that point exercise my right to completely sever myself from DC Comics if, assuming that they weren't able to just get a simple retraction, nothing humiliating, just a simple retraction apology and clarification that would have said we regret that due to a misunderstanding blah blah blah. That would have been all.

DC told me they were really trying hard to get that, I kind of got the idea that in fact probably they were just hoping if they stalled for long enough it would all blow over and there wouldn't be anything I was able to do about it. After a few weeks it turned out they hadn't been trying to get any apology or retraction or at least not very hard. They certainly weren't able to offer one that was anything like what I'd asked for. At this point, I said that's it I'm not working for DC again and also I still want my name off this film, if they don't take my name off this film, I will be taking my name off the books, because it means that much to me to sever my connection with this whole painful business.

The Beat: But, Alan, isn't that throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

Comicad V For VendettaMoore: Well, I don't own the baby anymore, Heidi! The baby is one I put a great deal of love into, a great deal of passion and then during a drunken night it turned out that I'd sold it to the gypsies and they had turned out my baby into a life of prostitution. Occasionally they would send me increasingly glossy and well-produced pictures of my child as she now was, and they would very, very kindly send me a cut of the earnings. This may sound melodramatic, but I've been writing for 25 years and I think that the passion with which I write is probably evident—it's not faked. I really do feel intensely passionate about nearly everything I write. Obviously, it's going to vary, but I try to be passionate about everything I write. In some cases I succeed. V for Vendetta was one of those cases. It's that—I mean for 20 years since then, it's been a kind of a dull ache that the regular paychecks of our cut of the money don't really do an awful lot to assuage.

[Eventually] I said, look, if this would help, a simple solution would be, alright, if they are assuming my name's going on the film, then I don't want my name on the books, and I will sign off all the income from them. If they're thinking otherwise, if they'd just given me a small signed piece of paper assuring me my name's not going on this film. If they can get me that, before I see any books coming out with my name on them, that from my point of view DC are sort of producing dishonestly, then that would be all right.

Months passed. This piece of paper never arrived, but a big box of V FOR VENDETTA books did, that I specifically asked not to see, and which when I opened them had got on the front a big red sticker saying now a major motion picture. On the back it had kind of a half baked jingle from the film worked into the ad copy prominently, and it had also—

I have to say, the editorial standards in the comic industry these days are nothing that any proper editor would ever recognize as such. Most of these people—I mean, I wanted to be a writer or an artist ever since I was a child. I know most of the people in this industry, they wanted to be artists or writers since they were children. I don't know anybody who wanted to be an editor as a child. Or don't know anyone who honed their editorship skills and then got a job. All I mainly know is people who have got perhaps no marketable talent and who sort of drifted into the industry and found themselves in editor jobs. This is perhaps a bit of a slur on editors in general and there are some very good ones. But I hadn't even take the cling film of that V for Vendetta book and on the back cover in bold type, it's got the catchy phrase, "Have a pleasant…" [The copy has since been corrected to say "Have a pleasant evening."] I mean it's…it seems to me, I'm perhaps overstating, that nobody's even looked at this book at any stage during it's production.

The Beat: Hm, I just happened to get that book myself and took off the shrink-wrap, and now I'm looking at it. "Have a pleasant"…

Moore: Well, I think this is my basic message to the American industry at this moment. [general laughter] "Have a pleasant."

And so where I'm at, at the moment, it was heartbreak. When I got that package of books I took them straight out to the garage and threw them straight into a skid. I didn't even want to recycle them. That night at 4 in the morning I woke up and I had black thunder rolling in my heart. I could not sleep, I was just lying there thinking well, they're just going to ignore everything I say. It’s not my book. It's their book, but the only reason they've my name on that book is it sells more copies, and it gives them a certain amount of integrity and credibility that I don't think they would otherwise have had.

I'm perhaps overstating my case here a bit, but I think I lent an awful lot of literary and intellectual credibility to the American comics business and to the comics business in general when I entered it. I don't feel the same way about comics any more, I really don’t. I never loved the comic industry. I used to love the comics medium. I still do love the comics medium in its pure platonic, essential form, but the comics medium as it stands seems to me to have been allowed to become a cucumber patch for producing new movie franchise.

The Beat: I know what you're saying, but there is an awful lot of stuff coming out that's good.

Moore: There is some fantastic stuff but it is marginalized. The only things I ever get asked about are generally related to superhero films, and even some of the other stuff in the medium at the moment. I don't know, it's probably just my tastes. But one end of it seems adolescent in its brutality and in its inexperienced adolescent approach to violence and sex. And at the other end, at the more supposedly intellectual end I see an awful lot of angst, and adolescent breast-beating. This is not a complete blanket condemnation by any means, there's people like Joe Sacco, other people who do wonderful work that is not mainly concerned with them, and their fears of mortality or whatever it is. Or feelings of emptiness. This is not really what I wanted for the comics medium. That's fair enough. There's no reason why it should be the kind of medium that I wanted. But at the same time—I don't know. I think that my, kind of, contempt for the way that the major companies have handled things since their inception, they've only ever changed when there've been absolutely forced to at gunpoint. Otherwise the industry for all of the great claims it makes for itself these days—we're kind of post modern, we're hip, you know, we're sort of a major star accessory—the industry still seems to be based upon a gangster ethic that was around when it was founded. It's been modified slightly to sort of super times. But it's nothing I'm happy with.

The way that I've left it is, all right DC can take my name off V for Vendetta and stop paying me the money. And if that doesn't happen, take my name off all of the books and stop paying me the money. So no telling where this one could run to. I mean, believe me, I would be completely happy if my name came off everything I do not own.

The Beat: I know I'm not going to change your mind, but let me play devil's advocate. I certainly understand you reviling and castigating the sheer idiocy of things like the League film, but at the same time, the people who do understand what you're trying to get at are not going to be dissuaded just by the fact that Joel Silver has made V a liberal!

Moore: I know that. This started out with me being really upset with the way that the American film industry seemed to be treating me, not just on League but on V, but then it started to spread to the point where it's more the American Entertainment Industry that I've got a grudge against. When I originally allowed myself to work for DC again because I'd sign contracts with ABC, I said to Scott and Jim Lee, you know this is probably going to be very explosive, you might end up regretting this. I will do what I've said I'm going to do I'll work and produce these books to the best of my ability. And if DC leaves me alone we shouldn't have any problems, but be advised I am doing this against my will and I know that I am very volatile, especially with regard to this particular issue. But I was assured it was okay to go ahead. But I had warned everybody.

Now this stuff has brought up the whole original [reason why] I didn't want to work with DC in the first place. But it's brought it up more painfully and it's made it completely clear that actually I don't think DC Comics gives a shit about the comics industry or the comics medium except as an adjunct to Hollywood. I really don't.

The Beat: But do you honestly think Paul Levitz or Scott Dunbier or Jim Lee have any influence whatsoever on Joel Silver?

MooreMoore: The thing is, Paul Levitz, Scott Dunbier and Jim Lee, I've got no axe to grind against them at all. Paul Levitz may not have any influence upon Joel Silver, but wouldn't it have been better for Paul Levitz to think about that before his company cheated me out of the ownership of my work and then peddled it to another part of their parent company? This wouldn't have arisen if they hadn't done this initial unfair act and despite the fact they've been given several opportunities to put it straight and logical reasons to do so when in fact it would have made them more money. Can you imagine how nicely this could have gone? It could have gone swimmingly.

[In the second part of our epic, which will be posted tomorrow, Moore has more very pointed things to say about the American comics industry, and even talks about his upcoming novel and V FOR VENDETTA.]

posted in Alan Moore - 0 replies

New Onion Interview

DevastatorJr — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 14:43:56 GMT

Interview: Alan Moore

Comics legend Alan Moore talks about how his pornography might help society, and how he doesn't want Hollywood's dirty, dirty money.

by Noel Murray Cinema

Reviewed by Noel Murray
August 2nd, 2006

Alan Moore, the author of Watchmen, V For Vendetta, and From Hell, now returns with Lost Girls, a three-volume hardcover graphic novel produced in collaboration with Melinda Gebbie, who began this project 16 years ago as Moore's artist-for-hire, and finished it as his fiancée. Lost Girls teams up three icons of children's literature—Alice from Alice In Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan, and Dorothy from The Wizard Of Oz—and re-tells their stories with the fantasy elements stripped away, replaced by real-world sexual experiences. Unsurprisingly, the book has stirred some controversy. Fans of the original characters have attacked Moore for turning them into porn stars, the owners of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan copyright have been contemplating a lawsuit, and some have questioned the way Lost Girls features young teenagers and pre-teens engaged in sexual activity, frequently with family members. Meanwhile, Moore has also been in the comics-news headlines this year for refusing to accept any money for the movie version of V For Vendetta, furthering his reputation as a prickly iconoclast. Reached by phone in his Northampton, England home, Moore genially explained himself to The A.V. Club.

The A.V. Club: Given the pre-release controversy about Lost Girls, are you anxious about the response it's going to receive when it finally comes out?

Alan Moore: Well, Melinda and I have had 16 years to talk about this, and I think our position is pretty solid. If we're serious about this stuff, and we are, we have to be prepared to defend it. One of the reasons we started this was because we were sick of the approach to sex in the culture. It seemed to us unhealthy, unproductive, and unbeautiful. In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing. But if you're using sex to sell sneakers, then you're not just selling sneakers, you're selling sex as well, and you're contributing to the sexual temperature of society. You're going to get people who, unsurprisingly, become overheated in that kind of sexual environment, and if they attempt to assuage their desires by resorting to the widely available medium of pornography, they're going to have their moment of gratification, and then they're going to have a much longer period of self-loathing, disgust, shame and embarrassment. It's almost like a kind of a reverse Skinner-box experiment, where once the rat has pushed the lever and successfully received the food, then he gets the electric shock.

I think if you were to sever that connection between arousal and shame, you might actually come up with something liberating and socially useful. It might be healthier for us, and lead to a situation such as they enjoy in Holland, Denmark, or Spain, where they have pornography all over the place—quite hardcore pornography—but they do not have anywhere the incidence of sex crimes. Particularly not the sex crimes against children that we suffer from in Britain, and that I believe you suffer from in the United States. It seems at least potentially that pornography might be providing an essential pressure valve in those countries, which we do not have access to here. Rather than being able to have a healthy relationship with our own sexual imagination, we're driven into some dark corners by shame and embarrassment and guilt, and those dark corners breed all sorts of monsters. Things that cross the line between the kind of pornography Melinda and I are doing, which only occurs in the realm of the mind, to the very unpleasant things that can occur in real life.

AVC: After immersing yourself in erotica for 16 years, are you sick of sex?

AM: No, no. It's only during this last year that Melinda and I have been living together all the time. Normally we'd spend two or three days out of every week in each other's company, but we've only been living together for these last 18 months. We're hopefully going to get married later this year, if we can get the paperwork sorted out. I'd recommend to anybody working on their relationship that they should try embarking on a 16-year elaborate pornography together. I think they'll find it works wonders.

Melinda's and my relationship made Lost Girls a very different and much richer book then if Melinda and I hadn't been in a relationship. We were approaching the work with such diligence, and approaching our actual relationship with a great deal of diligence as well. It was a happy synthesis that the two tended to work well with each other. Because in order to do something like Lost Girls, from the word "go," you've really got to be completely frank with each other. That's the way that we started our relationship, a condition some relationships never arrive at. And I would say at the end of this 16-year run, I'm still every bit as interested in sex, and every bit as interested in the erotic in art. But I would probably never again attempt to create another work like Lost Girls. I think in the future, I'd prefer to take what I've learned from Lost Girls and follow that back into my other work. To include sex scenes alongside the adventure scenes and everyday-life scenes, as if they were all part of the same thing. Which of course they are. Sex is not discrete from the rest of our existence. We tend to have our sex scenes in uncomfortably close proximity to our everyday-life scenes, and our scenes of despair and torment.

AVC: How did Melinda Gebbie get involved with Lost Girls originally?

AM: I'd been an admirer of Melinda's work since the underground days, in the early '70s, when she was working with people like S. Clay Wilson and Spain Rodriguez and Robert Crumb. I think Neil Gaiman was instrumental in getting in touch with her and telling her what I wanted. She and I started talking about how we felt about erotica, pornography, and the comics medium. It was a subject we didn't think had been treated in the way we'd like to see it treated. Then I mentioned an idea I'd had, a kind of half-assed connection between flying in Peter Pan and Freud's comment that dreams of flying are sexual. I thought there might be something I could do with that, but I couldn't come up with anything beyond a smutty parody of Peter Pan. Then Melinda mentioned that in her earlier strips, she'd enjoyed working with stories that had three women. So these two ideas kind of collided, and I thought if Wendy from Peter Pan were one of three women, who would the other two be? Alice and Dorothy sprung to mind immediately. The story kind of suggested itself from there, in an excited rush of conversation.

The way that we worked on Lost Girls was actually different than the way I've worked on any other comic I've done. I'm known for turning out book-sized scripts with detailed written descriptions of each panel and all the dialogue and captions and sound effects. But Melinda had never worked with a scriptwriter before, so she looked at these enormous scripts I'd written for the first four or five episodes, and I think it crushed her spirit. She wasn't comfortable, and she suggested that maybe I could do thumbnails, which is something I haven't really done for other artists because I'm so lousy at drawing thumbnails. I have to write pages of explanation to tell them that this little blob down in the right-hand corner is actually the leading character's head and shoulders. But Melinda, since she was living up here, I could talk her through all the breakdowns. She'd take my rough thumbnails and a pep talk and would go and turn out these lovely pages. Then I would do the dialoguing after the artwork was done, so that I could have a look at the expression that Melinda brought to the work. I could fine-tune the dialogue for the images so everything was much more synchronized. Lost Girls probably marks the closest that I've worked with an artist on a comic, perhaps unsurprisingly. With the nature of the material, it more or less demands an intimate relationship between the creators. Not just intimate in the usual physical sense, but also intimate in a mental and creative sense.

AVC: Lost Girls resembles your other work in that it follows a very formal structure. There are eight pages per chapter, the chapters seem to be grouped in threes, and there are three books of 10 chapters each.

AM: A lot of the structure of Lost Girls grew out of its inception. I was originally invited to submit an eight-page story for a proposed erotic anthology that was going to be coming out over here in England. I quickly realized it was going to take more than just eight pages, but even though Melinda and I conceived of Lost Girls as a 240-page graphic novel, we decided we'd better break it down into units that could be serialized.

Also, I'd found in some of my earlier work that in an extended story, you can keep it tighter if you're doing it in six- or eight-page units. You have to craft each little piece as a unit in itself, with some kind of a beginning, middle and a ending, and an overall theme. That seemed a way of keeping Melinda and myself tight while we were working through this fairly sprawling narrative. The structure of three books seemed convenient, because that's a pretty good structure for almost anything. And we'd already had a look at a timeline of the period we were talking about, and realized that [Igor Stravinsky's ballet] The Rite Of Spring debuted in 1913, and we figured that would be a great place to end the first book. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand happened a year later, which concludes the second book. And the outbreak of World War I was the climax of the piece.

AVC: By the time you get to the third book of Lost Girls, it's almost cover-to-cover explicit sex, but the third book is also where you push furthest into moral grey areas, with the pairings of children and adults. Was that intentional, making the material that would be the most potentially arousing also the material that would be most likely to make readers flinch?

AM: The reason that stuff mostly occurs in the third book is because we wanted to build slowly throughout the course of the narrative, and avoid what happens with a lot of pornography, where they start off at full strength and continue at full strength until the full-strength ending. Which is a bit exhausting. We wanted to build to a climax, because if ever a genre should build to a climax, it should be pornography.

The thing about the underage characters… It all gets a bit silly when you're talking about characters that are made up. Alice In Wonderland is like 150, well past the age of consent. And we have a culture over here—and I'm sure in America as well—where we go in for an awful lot of pedophilic titillation, in magazines like Barely Legal, where we're told that these women are over 18, but just look young. But then we were told that about Traci Lords, weren't we? And anyway, it doesn't really matter that much, does it? The intent is still the same. Look at Britney Spears and her sexy schoolgirl imitation. What is that actually saying, and how many apparently normal men is it saying it to? We are sexualizing our children at an increasingly young age. Exposure to The Spice Girls seems to have doomed us to a Western world where every 10-year-old wants a belly-button ring and a "Porn Star" T-shirt. And we just think it's cute! "Ah, look at them! They're acting like little whores!"

It's an obvious, weird part of our sexual makeup, but one that we'd rather do anything than talk about. We have to put our hands up and admit to our complicity in the sexual problems we have. As for incest, yes, in real life, incest is very, very, very seldom an idyllic thing. It's much more often a monstrous thing that destroys people's lives. However, we're not talking about real life. We are talking about the human sexual imagination. Sigmund Freud, frankly, I've not got a great deal of time for, because I think he was a child-fixated cokehead, to be perfectly honest. But his is still the prevalent paradigm in our attitude to sexuality. And Freud said that all sexual desire was sublimated incest. I don't agree with that for a moment, but it does suggest that incest is one of the big players in the theater of our desires. So that has to be referred to.

We felt we had to explore even the problematic areas of pornography, because they're a big part of pornography. We didn't want to be accused of turning out something arty that claims to be pornography but isn't. We felt that if we were going to do this thing, we were going to have to do it properly. We wanted it to be as pornographic as possible, and as artistic as possible. We wanted it to be a pornography that would include even the more extreme pornographies. All right, we chickened out with the Marquis De Sade to a degree. I don't think you can do anything that examines the field of pornography without referencing De Sade, because De Sade was the first person to use pornography for anything other than simple arousal. He was the first person to use it almost as a kind of social weapon. And I believe he was, in many respects, a profoundly moral man. However, his books are incredibly boring. I don't think that he himself got past the 15th day of Sodom. He gave up out of sheer ennui.

There's not a lot of scatology in Lost Girls, because… well, to say that it wasn't anything that appealed to us is not to put it exactly correctly. Because there's lots of things in Lost Girls that don't appeal personally to me or Melinda. But there were things that we had to find some way of getting interested in, in order to make them arousing. We had to be, to some degree, aroused ourselves, or it wasn't going to be interesting to the readers. But things like scatology were a bit beyond the pale, and we just couldn't find a way that we could get even vaguely interested in it. Sorry, all you scat fans out there.

Inevitably, there will be people, I'm sure, who will be offended by one thing or another, but we really couldn't pay any attention to that. This has taken us 16 years. We didn't know it was going to come out in 2006, in the middle of George Bush's second administration, with the world plunged more thoroughly into war then it's been in a couple of decades. It could just have easily come out nine years ago, when Clinton was in office, and it might've seemed irrelevant, and not particularly shocking in a time of [Andres Serrano's photograph] "Piss Christ." And if we'd done this 40 years ago, there would've been people asking us if we hadn't gone a bit far by portraying homosexuality.

We're working for, hopefully, something human and timeless, like I think our sexual imagination has proved to be thus far. It's been with us since [the ancient erotic statue] The Venus Of Willendorf, and will certainly be with us until we've managed to eradicate ourselves from this planet. We wanted to speak to that quality, that timeless eternal human interest in sex. We wanted to apply art to that. We had to be as comprehensive as possible. We tried to be encyclopedic without making too big of a deal about it.

AVC: The incest scenes in Lost Girls are reminiscent of two things: Victorian erotica, which frequently has cousins discovering each other's bodies and then moving on to their brothers and sisters and so on, and R. Crumb's story "Joe Blow." Were those similarities intentional?

AM: Both played a considerable part in Lost Girls, though probably the Victorian erotica played a bigger part than the estimable Robert Crumb. I looked at a relatively small amount of contemporary erotica and found that it didn't really appeal. None of the filmed or photographic material did anything for me, because there's such a lot of emotional human baggage that comes with anything that involves real models, real actors. You're too aware that this is somebody real, and that they might not have actually wanted to do this for a living. There's an air of disappointment or sadness that hangs over the material. So I tended to gravitate toward literary and artistic pornography of the Victorian and Edwardian period, simply because it's a lot better. It was a kind of golden age of porn. There were some very cruel and unpleasant pieces of writing, but at the same time, there were some surprisingly liberal and progressive pieces as well. The stories all seemed to take place in a kind of porno-topia, where characters in the middle of an orgy would be likely to deliver a lecture on sexual etiquette, about considering the feelings of one's partner, and how gentlemen should always defer to ladies. A lot of surprisingly enlightened views for this notorious and repressed Victorian period.

Now, Robert Crumb was an influence in a different way. Crumb was an influence simply because in my eyes and in Melinda's eyes, he's an impassable giant in the field of erotica. I mean, he was doing this 40 years ago. He just didn't care. And he's one of the few people of his era that has progressed throughout his lengthy career. Last year, we had a Crumb exhibition over here in England, and one Britain's leading liberal newspapers, The Guardian, devoted a big feature to it in its supplement every day for a whole week, and included reproductions of sections of "Joe Blow." And this is a national newspaper. So I wonder if we're doing anything that shocking in Lost Girls, when Crumb set the benchmark 40 years ago. If you're going to be dealing with erotica, you want to do it as frankly and directly and full-on as the way Crumb handled it.

AVC: Like a lot of your work, Lost Girls contains a lot of layers, in that it's about pornography, children's stories, and the loss of innocence that accompanies wartime. Would it be accurate to say that there's also some commentary about class privilege as well, since these women really only get to enjoy their sexual adventures because they have the money to do so?

AM: Certainly. All three characters are from different class backgrounds. You've got Alice, who is a very disenchanted member of the English upper class. You've got Wendy, who is very much a part of the hidebound and repressed English middle-class. And you've got Dorothy, who's from a rural blue-collar background. It's probably not one of the overwhelming themes in the book. It probably takes second place to the war and things like that. But at the same time, it is an important theme, particularly in the Wendy chapter. In J.M. Barrie's original book, you get the sense of class difference between very prim and proper Wendy and the rascally Lost Boys, who are rough and wild and essentially working-class. We come to the same end of our narrative as Barrie did, with Wendy grown up and married and with a child. And shutting the nursery window, so that none of the influences that came into her bedroom window and took her off into the night can ever do the same to her son. She's shutting the window against sex and shadows and the working class.

AVC: Speaking of Peter Pan, what's the status of the Great Ormond Street Hospital's copyright complaints?

AM: I don't know how much of a fuss that actually is. They expressed some concerns, but I'm not entirely sure why. There's always a chance that I might have something wrong, but if I understand it correctly, Barrie gifted them with royalties to the stage performances of Peter Pan, and I believe different circumstances apply to the book, which is already in the public domain in America, and will be in the public domain in England by next year. I personally have never seen the play Peter Pan, or read it. I did go over the book extensively when we were putting Lost Girls together. I tend to think this is a bit of a storm in a teacup. Not to condescend or overlook Great Ormond Street Hospital, and I mean, me and Melinda and [Top Shelf publisher] Chris Staros have got no problems with giving them a royalty or something. It's a children's hospital, you know? Who's going to say no? But I think they seem to be making a bit more of it than I'd expected from people who've been gifted by a fantasy writer. It seemed a bit odd that they should take on so vociferously. Especially when we actually never used the words "Peter Pan" or "Captain Hook" or even "Wendy Darling" anywhere in the book. Obviously, it's based upon those characters. But it's just as obviously not the same Peter Pan and Wendy Darling that J.M. Barrie wrote about. And as far as I know, Great Ormond Street had not seen any of Lost Girls or read any of it when they decided it wasn't the kind the thing they wished to be associated with.

AVC: Between the Great Ormond Street trouble and the possibility of obscenity statutes in the U.S. being violated, are you worried about bankrupting Top Shelf?

AM: I'm incredibly proud of the way Chris is standing behind this book. Chris knew what the book was when he decided to do it, and we've been completely honest about what this book contains during the whole 16 years we've been working upon it. Of course we don't want anybody to be disadvantaged or bankrupted by this book. At the same time, what are our alternatives? If you're living in a politically repressive time where you have this seemingly fundamentalist-directed agenda percolating down not only through America but through all of those countries who are fortunate enough be in the shadow of America, you've really got no option other than to make your statement as you see fit, or shut up. We are prepared, if there's trouble, to stand in our corner and fight. I have heard of comic shops being raided for things like posters of Wonder Woman. The officer involved thought it looked pretty pornographic to him. There isn't any way you can defend yourself against this kind of irrationality. The only thing you can do is publish and be prepared for the consequences.

Over here we have the Today program, a radio program, and they were the ones who first informed me of the Great Ormond Street story. They aired the subject of Lost Girls a couple weeks ago, and the first question the interviewer asked me, with a microphone practically halfway down my throat, was, "If even one child is harmed as a result of Lost Girls, how would you feel?" I wish I'd said, "If even one Ministry Of Defense covert weapons expert was found dead in the woods as a result of being outed by the Today program, how would you feel?" But instead I said I'd feel very surprised, because as far as I'm aware, attacks upon children are generally predicated upon the psychopathology of the individual involved rather than upon expensive, over-wordy literary pornography. Then, at the end of the program, when they were handing back to the main news desk, the woman turned to the sports presenter and said, "I bet you'll be ordering your copy," and the sports presenter said, "I bet you'll be ordering yours first." They were having a bit of a smutty snigger. Which is a healthy reaction, I think.

You know, most of the supposed underage sex in Lost Girls, it has to be said, is occurring between sexually active teenagers. There's no more underage sex in Lost Girls than is probably occurring in this block at the moment. I think the first time I had sex, I was 17, and I was embarrassed because I was a late starter. So something sexually questionable might happen to an imaginary character that looks too young by our current standards… though not by the standards that we held 100 years ago, when the age of consent in Britain was 12, and working-class teenagers were married with children. But because these characters appear to transgress upon our current arbitrary line of when it's permissible to have a sexual identity, are people really going to be that upset? When there are children right now being blown to pieces, often at our behest or in our name?

AVC: If there do end up being any legal repercussions from Lost Girls, will you regret not holding on to that V For Vendetta movie money, to help pay any bills?

AM: No, no. I've not regretted that for a moment. Yes, it led to a year of completely unnecessary trouble which led to me more or less severing myself from the American comics industry, apart from the increasingly slender thread that is Chris Staros. Because he has lost a lot of weight recently. But no, no. It's been so liberating. I've never really cared that much about money. I've got enough to live on. And it's not like I live in a fancy house, it's not like I own a car, and it's not like I ever go on holiday. For this past 18 months, I've been blissfully involved with writing my next novel, Jerusalem, which will probably take me another couple of years to finish and edit. It's going to be over a half-million words, probably about 1,500 pages or something. As big as a book can be, if not bigger. I've not got a deal for this book, nor am I seeking one. I haven't gotten an advance for it. I haven't earned any money for the past 18 months. I haven't done any paying work. But I'm not greatly inconvenienced. There's royalties still coming in.

The only thing that was important to me was that I completely sever my connections with Hollywood. I just wanted to get my work back to reality, which I found very difficult to do working with the movie or comic-book end of the American entertainment industry. When Jerusalem is finished in a couple of years, I'll think about how I want to publish it. I'm sure I won't be short of people offering to do it for me. But I will have written it exactly as I want to write it. I won't have anybody telling me to make it a bit shorter, make it a bit less obscure. It will be exactly the book I wanted to write. At the moment, that kind of freedom is most important for me.

You know, when I started Lost Girls, I had just walked away from an awful lot of money. I've been done with DC Comics since 1989, and I wouldn't have found myself working for them again if they hadn't gone to the extraordinary lengths of buying a company I'd just signed a contract with. Back then, I turned down an awful lot of security and money to work upon Lost Girls, From Hell, my first novel, and other things that weren't really commercial propositions. So money hasn't stopped me from doing Lost Girls. It's just taken a bit of time. We had two or three publishers go out of business, not entirely because of Lost Girls, but because of the market. These last several years, I've been paying Melinda, so she didn't have to do anything else. Because I was very committed to this book.

We both felt it was important for this book to come out. I don't think I'll ever personally break even on Lost Girls. But it remains one of the works I'm most proud of. It's not about the money. It's about the accomplishment. I'm a very smug show-off at heart. I'm altogether too pleased with myself. The big boost for me is to be able to turn out something that I think is pretty marvelous, like Lost Girls. I'm not in it for money, I'm just in it for the glory. Me and Melinda think that Lost Girls is pretty glorious.

http://www.avclub.com/content/

posted in Alan Moore - 1 reply

To V or not to V?

Francis — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 14:43:36 GMT

I'm torn about seeing "V for Vendetta". On the one hand, I think any support for an Alan Moore-based film will encourage more of them. On the other, I know that Mr. Moore was so displeased with the changes made to his story that he has pulled his name from the project. While I also think they wimped out by replacing ultra-Thatcherism with Nazism, I think it may have been necessary to get the film made at all post-9/11.
As to whether it will be any good, I thought that "From Hell" and "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" weren't bad as films, they just had no connection to the Moore works from which they were supposedly adapted. (One of my favorite movie commentaries was for a soft-core costume epic called "Young Lady Chatterly". It read simply, "Character names by D.H. Lawrence.")
So what does the tribe think? Are you going to see the movie or not?

posted in Alan Moore - 22 replies

V original manuscript on eBay

raymassie — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 16:56:33 GMT

http://cgi.ebay.com/Genuine-original-Alan-Moore-V-for-Vendetta-manuscripts_W0QQitemZ7599372455QQcategoryZ18833QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

posted in Alan Moore - 0 replies

Wired News review of V

raymassie — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 06:45:46 GMT

**CAUTION**
some of this might be considered Spoilage:
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,70424-0.html?tw=rss.index

posted in Alan Moore - 0 replies

V on HuffPo

raymassie — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 01:32:23 GMT

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-kornbluth/v-for-vendetta-before-yo_b_16923.html

posted in Alan Moore - 1 reply

anybody know what happened to 'the hypothetical lizard'?

cubix — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 20:08:33 GMT

i got the first 2 and then they just disappeared, i mighta missed them on the shelves but noone i speak to at the comic shops here in Van knows what's up....

posted in Alan Moore - 1 reply

Free Alan Moore

MChristian — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 23:20:18 GMT

From a great Alan Moore store, a bunch of free Alan stuff:

http://fourcolorheroes.home.insightbb.com/free.html

posted in Alan Moore - 3 replies

V

demonica — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 05:05:11 GMT

I finally saw the trailer for the film. Yuck! It looks horrible--you'd think I would learn not to get my hopes up, but, well, a girl can dream. Just thinking about how bad it looked makes me feel all anxious. Ridiculous casting, as well.

Am I wrong here? Would love that to be the case.

posted in Alan Moore - 7 replies

Promethea article on Salon.com

Jeckle — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 23:14:04 GMT

Pretty good article.

http://salon.com/books/review/2005/07/01/promethea/index.html

posted in Alan Moore - 0 replies

Excellent article investingating Moore's relationship with licensing

phanfasm — Thu, 26 May 2005 01:07:21 GMT

An excellently researched article bringing folks up to speed on various aspects of the comics and film optioning and how Alan has negociated those troubled waters.

And the first I've heard of a followup to Voice of the Fire... Jerusalem!

-marty

posted in Alan Moore - 2 replies

Promethia Finale!!!

DevastatorJr — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 15:22:07 GMT

Did I miss the last issue, or has it just been a really long time? Gah! Help!

posted in Alan Moore - 7 replies

for your viewing pleasure

chiv — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 15:19:45 GMT

a few pages from the upcoming Top Ten Hardcover "49ers"

http://www.dccomics.com/media/excerpts/3041_x.pdf

it's a prequel, the dept before the current characters, when Neopolilis was still being built

posted in Alan Moore - 1 reply

Uh oh...

TimX — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 23:36:01 GMT

http://www.watchmenmovie.com

posted in Alan Moore - 0 replies

Remember, remember the 5th of november...

TimX — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 06:03:43 GMT

http://www.cinecon.com/news.php?id=0501055

posted in Alan Moore - 16 replies

Alan Moore's Voice

phanfasm — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 20:38:18 GMT

If you never have heard him speak, it's quite an amazing experience... here's a link to an NPR interview with Alan.

http://www.npr.org/display_pages/features/feature_1311408.html

marty

posted in Alan Moore - 1 reply

Keanu as Constantine - a washing of the hands

phanfasm — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 20:32:17 GMT

Just spotted this bit of news on Ain't it cool... Moore has issued the smackdown to the Hellblazer movie team:

----
After reviewing the script and casting of HELLBLAZER, Comic Kingpin Alan Moore has done the unthinkable. He's washed his hand of the entire debacle. That's right- he's instructed DC to NOT credit him as the creator of the character. And putting his money where his mouth is, he has instructed that the royalties that he was splitting with his co-creators goes EXCLUSIVELY to the artists, Veitch and Bissette.

Often we hear about an artist upset that his creation has been butchered but this is the first I can recall where the creator asked that both name and money be rejected. Moore is apparently so upset at the desecration done to Constantine by Producer Lauren Shuler Donner that he is stating that he will never support a film project based on his work again. DC Toady Paul Levitz is running around trying to get Moore to change his position, but Levitz is the one who had 30,000 copies of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen #5 pulped. The bad PR this move could create in the geek community is of grave concern to Warners and DC.
----

I think the most interesting thing is that the corporate players here are concerned about what the geek community thinks about the situation. The most effective and powerful word of mouth for films based on 'genre' properties is us, and they know it. Could this be the end of Constantine? Hopefully so. But could this be the herald of respect for sequential graphic stories? That would be totally cool.

posted in Alan Moore - 3 replies

V, V, Very good news

Dr. Ivo — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 20:17:47 GMT

(well, it was news to me)

The Wachowski Brothers are making a movie out of "V for Vendetta", one of Alan Moore's masterpieces and one I actually rate higher than "Watchmen". AND they've cast Natalie Portman.

This is a good thing.

Filming starts later this year.

posted in Alan Moore - 7 replies

Moore on BBC radio

phanfasm — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 22:24:01 GMT

Looks like Moore will be interviewed on the BBC 4 radio series Chain Reaction next week:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/chainreaction.shtml

Next week at this time:

Chain Reaction

Thu 27 Jan, 18:30 - 19:00 30 mins

Series in which public figures choose others to interview. Comedian Stuart Lee asks comic book writer Alan Moore about Batman, Jack the Ripper and having his comics turned into films. Then News.

I imagine he might have some chice words to say about the Vendetta flick, etc.

Can't wait!

-marty

posted in Alan Moore - 3 replies

promethea

Thu, 01 Apr 2004 06:16:15 GMT

just saw your tribe listed. been reading the collected promethea volumes--really impressed with the artwork and moore's use of tarot and kabbalah imagery. never thought comix could be like this....for that matter from hell was an interesting read too.

not as impressed with the watchmen. does moore have any other comics that are heavy on the mysticism without the superheroes in tights element?

posted in Alan Moore - 12 replies

Hypothetical Lizard

phanfasm — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 22:03:19 GMT

Anybody know anything about this new series coming out?

http://store1.yimg.com/I/comicfusion_1810_42784287

marty

posted in Alan Moore - 3 replies

Aronofsky off Watchmen film

Charlotte — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 10:55:52 GMT

http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=18745

I wonder who'll fill the shoes...hmmm

posted in Alan Moore - 11 replies

Watchmen script review

phanfasm — Tue, 05 Oct 2004 23:42:48 GMT

Some spoilers for those that haven't read the comics... but if you haven't read Watchmen, whatever are you doing here?

http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/545/545644p1.html?fromint=1

Very positive overall... but since Watchmen isn't on the radar of attached director Aronofsky's next projects, who knows if it'll go anywhere.

-marty

posted in Alan Moore - 1 reply

Albion

phanfasm — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 22:13:15 GMT

Yet more new work - all based around Warner Bros. aquiring British Publisher IBC.

I'm really curious as to what he's going to do with this license, since I've never even heard of Albion and heroes like The Steel Claw, the Spider, Doctor Sin, and Tim Kelly. Silver-age British heroes that never made it to the states, yet beloved by those across the pond.

Anyone have insight into those characters or what Moore might do with 'em?

marty

posted in Alan Moore - 4 replies

Who Watches the Watchmen?

TimX — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 17:07:34 GMT

Apparently Jude Law does...

Empire sat down with Law recently to talk Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow.
During our chat, Law revealed that he used to be an avid comics collector — which is a surprise, given that Law is good-looking, slim and has a girlfriend. "I still go to comic shops, Forbidden Planet and look through back issues of the ones I love," he told Empire. "I was a big fan of Johnny Nemo and Strange Days, Parallax, you know those? But I haven't gotten into anything recently, not like I did with From Hell and Watchmen."

With that in mind, we mentioned that Law — with his dashing good looks, blond hair and movie star charisma — would be perfect for the role of Adrian Veidtaka Ozymandias, a former superhero and the smartest (and richest) man in the world, who becomes a key player in Watchmen's twisting plot. So we told him that there was a movie on the way, directed by Aronofsky.

"Darren Aronofsky? I'm on the phone NOW!" said Law, clearly excited. "Adrian Veidt, King of Kings!" And then, as if to show off his Watchmen fanboy credentials, he whispered conspiratorially. "I'm tattooed with Rorschach, did you know that?"

http://www.empireonline.co.uk/site/news/newsstory.asp?news_id=16087

posted in Alan Moore - 4 replies

eddie campbell, too?

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 00:40:38 GMT

do you like eddie campbell, too?

well join the eddie campbell tribe,
http://eddiecampbell.tribe.net -

-it needs a boost!!

posted in Alan Moore - 1 reply

Watchmen Film Producer =

phanfasm — Sun, 11 Apr 2004 00:15:32 GMT

Looks like the same guy who produced Hellboy will be doing Watchmen:

Watchmen Film Producer Revealed
Chicago Sun Times, Comics Book Resources
April 5, 2004

While discussing his recent film "Hellboy", producer Llyod Levin revealed to The Chicago Sun-Times that he would be producing the Watchmen film. "We're going to do 'The Watchmen,' stated Levin. "It's about a group of superheroes who reunite to figure out who is trying to kill them off. It's really a unique story because it deals with the spiritual aspect of being a superhero."

I was happy with Hellboy (felt it was about 70% there in terms of translating what was great about the comic to the big screen), but Watchmen could be really, really bad as a film really, really easily. Here's hoping it ain't.

posted in Alan Moore - 19 replies

Brought To Light and The Birth Caul audio

stanleylieber — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 21:26:40 GMT

I have all of the Moore/Perkins/etc. CDs except these two. Who has them?

posted in Alan Moore - 2 replies

A british view

Hanif — Mon, 24 May 2004 16:40:20 GMT

At Last! a tribe that really appreciates greatness! Alan moore is king! I have read his stuff since days of old when he wote for 2000AD. When moore wrote SWAMP THING he turned it from crap into a mythical poem and my fave comic. V FOR VANDETTA is still my all time fav book and it still moves me to this day and I always pray my England never becomes like that. you should all check out old issues of WARRIOR magazine if you can track it down in the states as he wrote V, BEAUJEFFRIES, AXEL PRESSBUTTON which all appeared in there. Moore lives in Northhampton which is near my city or Birmingham. I did think the second series of L.O.E.G was quite weak sadly. Hanif

posted in Alan Moore - 2 replies

That Watchmen Picture in the Tribe gallery...

TimX — Fri, 16 Apr 2004 23:47:05 GMT

Who posted that?

I've never seen that pic before? That version of Rorschach looks crazy!

posted in Alan Moore - 1 reply

Most beloved Character?

phanfasm — Sat, 03 Apr 2004 05:06:30 GMT

Hi everybody! Thanks for joining the tribe!

I'm curious as to which character y'all feel moved/inspired/blew your mind the most from Moore's stories. I'll start...

While the journey that Promethea has been undergoing has moved me deeply over the last few years, I have to reach back to a younger, smoother time when my brain was less jaded and more hopped up on superhero standbys. In this era, I was a big ol X-men fan (this is 'round when Storm had a mowhawk) and had vowed to never read a DC comic. *eye roll*

Something about John Totelben's artwork made me pick up an issue of Swamp Thing right when Moore was really pulling out the horror stops in 'Anatomy Lesson' (Swamp Thing #21) where he rewrites the face of 50 years of comics in 36 pages. I was hooked and got every dang issue from then on to the end of his run on the title. I branched into other graphic novel formats and novels as a result of that one issue too, as I explored the British work he'd done in The Ballad of Halo Jones and D.R. and Quinch. But the mix cosmic horror and profound moments of emotion that Moore wrote into those Swamp Thing comics set the bar for my evaluation of comics forever after.

I look forward to hearing from all y'all!

posted in Alan Moore - 2 replies

Alan Moore = Brilliant Inspired Funny Cosmic... etc.

phanfasm — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 23:50:45 GMT

I've been inspired constantly for about 15 years by this incredible artist. Lots of secrets to the universe are revealed in beauty and truth in every single one of his efforts, from writing, to comics, to performance art, to music, and so on. Let's not just slavishly worship the man - perhaps accounts of inspiration triggered by contacting the Moore MemeSphere are in order? Please Do!

posted in Alan Moore - 0 replies