Listening to the news this morning I’ve had this image in my head. It’s a panel from the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons Time Twister “Chrono Cops”.
The Social Democrat Party still exists. That’s something of a surprise.
In 1990 Alan Moore self published two, of a planned twelve, issues of a comic called Big Numbers (wikipedia). It was to be a tale of trouble in a small town, with chaos theory and fractal geometry informing the structure. I bought both issues, I don’t know if I still possess them. The third, and possibly fourth, issues were drawn but never published, but photocopies of the lettered part three did exist.
One lucky Ebayer got a set of the photocopies and has scanned them and poted them to his LiveJournal.
via Forbidden Planet
The Watchmen trailer. By all accounts it’s going to be absolutely faithful to the graphic novel, and watching the trailer I could guess where most of the shots fitted into the comic. And that will be rather spectacular and lovely, but also a bit disappointing. I know there isn’t as massive a history in superhero movies as Moore and Gibbons had to draw from in comics, but there could be room for a film that examined that in its medium the same way they did in theirs.
(A convoluted way of saying yes, of course I’m going to watch it, I just wish they could come up with something a bit more original.)
Both via BoingBoing, two videos to start the week with.
A Gentleman’s Duel is a pretty piece of cgi’d steampunk which sees and Englishman and a Frenchman brawling in their steam powered robots over a lady’s magnificent boobies.
SexTV interviews Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie about Lost Girls (NSFW).
The film adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ major graphic novel, Watchmen (or buy Absolute Watchmen, a hardcover special edition with bonus features such as sketches and script samples), looks like it may be about to happen. The director is Zack Snyder. His remake of Dawn of the Dead was quite good and the trailer for his adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300 (buy the graphic novel) looks gorgeous. I’m not so sure about his involvement with an adaptation of Rainbow Six (buy the book), one of Tom Clancy’s poorest efforts with a moronic anti-environmentalist message and a plot stolen from Moonraker, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.
Who’ll watch the Watchmen? I will, for one.
Technorati tag: Watchmen, Zack Snyder, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Frank Miller
I remember going to the UK Comic Art Convention in 1990 and attending a talk on adult comics where Melinda Gebbie told us about Lost Girls, the erotic graphic novel she was producing with Alan Moore. I even have the first two large format copies of the series, as published by Kitchen Sink, collecting the first six short chapters. Finally, sixteen years later, the collected graphic novel is going to be published by Top Shelf.
The novel is about Alice, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dorothy, from The Wizard of Oz, and Wendy from Peter Pan meeting up in an Austrian hotel in 1913 as adults. Their famous earlier adventures are reinterpreted as tales of their early sexuality. This has been a source of some controversy as Great Ormond Street still holds the rights to Peter Pan in England and has issues with the subject matter.
Lost Girls’ art is watercolour and ink, slightly clumsy and naive looking with rather elongated characters. The heroines are not are not the big titted, long legged secretly subservient amazons of most erotic (and many superhero) comics but moderately caricatured visions of normal body shapes. The sex is the sort that takes place as much in the head as on the page and presented with all the care and creativity you’d expect of Alan Moore. I haven’t read the whole book yet, but I want to. However, I’ll take a stand and say that Omaha the Cat Dancer
Top Shelf have a page dedicated to interviews/ articles about the series, Violet Blue has a few (NSFW) page previews.
Technorati tag: Comic, Erotic Comic, Pornography, Alan Moore, Melinda Gebbie, Lost Girls, Omaha
The Daily Mail(!!??) gets pant-wettingly excited over the idea of V for Vendetta being some sort of anti-Blair allegory. Should someone tell them the original comic was about Alan Moore’s fears of where their beloved Thatcher was taking the country in the eighties?
Technorati tag: Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
I don’t know how far the proposed law against glorifying terrorism will go. Might it catch all sorts of popular culture? All it would take would be a few people saying that V for Vendetta is an allegory of the resistance in Northern Ireland/ Palestine/ Iraq and we could see Alan Moore and David Lloyd, and the Wachowskis now the film’s due out, going to jail. The Wachowskis are repeat offenders, because what else is the Matrix trilogy but a long elegy to the noble sacrifice of “freedom fighters”.
And don’t get me started on Asterix.
Technorati tag: Terrorism, Glorification
Want the perfect library for any occasion? Get a personal book shopper. The article has a number of top ten book suggestions, so here goes-
Microserfs, Douglas Coupland
Out of Control, Kevin Kelly
The Tale of One Bad Rat, Bryan Talbot
Moby Dick, Herman Melville (Okay, I haven’t read this one. It’s on my list of 100 things to do.)
Overlord, Max Hastings
Stupid White Men, Michael Moore
The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller
Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Eight’ll have to do for now, I guess.