Alan Moore: ‘…if we have any optimism in [Watchmen] it’ll be valid optimism because it won’t simply be based on ignoring the nasty facts of life. To me, just in that last panel, in Godfrey’s last line “I leave it entirely in your hands” – that’s talking to the reader as well… I leave it entirely in your hands, how do we sort out this Gordian Knot? If the question is who makes the world? then if there’s an answer it is that everybody does. Yeah, there’s people that seem to be in more immediate power than others but really the world is an elaborate series of accidents, coincidences and unbelievable synchronicities that people appear to be in control of but… well, think about the events in your own life, the things that have made really dramatic changes in you can be traced back to deciding to pick up a ballpoint pen or not pick it up.’

‘Fat is the bane of flushers’ lives. Millions of litres, from half-eaten breakfast dishes, chip-laden frying pans or fast-food joints, are tipped into sinks each day. Eventually they find their way into the sewers. They represent the effluence of affluence. They are the graffiti that the contemporary leisurepolis scrawls on subterranean environments. Thirty years ago the Thames, unloved and abandoned, created few problems for flushers; now, the river’s banks are congested with clubs, boozy eateries and art-complex gallery cafés, all of them disgorging fat.

I wade through some of it at Victoria Embankment. It is at once crunchy and spongy, like putrid bran. Brown and white and grey: a pigeon-shit potage sprinkled with an extra top layer of mop heads and tampons. Flushers tell stories of accidentally getting a gobful of the sewer flies that feed on the fat or of metal grating giving way so that they fall into eight-feet-deep fat-quicksands; the mouthfuls of the stuff they swallow leave their guts raw and hollering for months on end.

But it’s the bouquet that makes their flesh crawl: “You smell it initially. You breathe it all day long. You pass wind and what comes out is the smell of the fat. You can go home and shower as much you like – even with washing-up liquid – but at the end of the day you’re still farting the smell of rancid fat. My wife’ll say: ‘Oh, I see you’ve been sorting fat problems out?'”‘

Five suggested Flickr tags

1. “Rows Of Seated White Men Typing At Conferences”
2. “My Underlit Dessert With One Bite Missing”
3. “My Defenseless Child In A Funny Shirt I Made Him Wear”
4. “Attractive Man In His Twenties Playing An Electric Guitar”
5. “The Photo From This ‘Impromptu’ Self Portrait Series That Suggests I Don’t Have A Dewlap”

‘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.’

‘In 1940, some of the German commanders who were overseeing the push into France began to receive seemingly random reports of soldiers having been killed with broad-head arrows or hacked with a English Claymore. Effective enough weapons it would seem, but archaic even in that day and age. They likely could have guessed the bowman was an English soldier, but they couldn’t have appreciated these as the calling card of the rabid eccentric, Captain Jack Churchill.’

‘Commando training ended with an attack on Nord Fiord, Norway. While the two companies he commanded advanced on their target, Jack stood in the lead craft, and played on his pipes “The March of the Cameron Men”. His report at mission’s end was simply: “Maaloy battery and island captured. Casualties slight. Demolitions in progress. Churchill.”‘

‘In 1944 Jack’s luck and tenacity took a slip when he was ordered into an impossible situation. Most of his squad was killed, and Jack was taken captive. After being hauled to Berlin for questioning, he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was meant to stay until war’s end. He might have done so, but one night the power went out, and Jack was prepared: he had a rusty can and some onions. It was all that he needed. In the darkness he just walked away and made his escape.’

‘He became so good with the bow that he shot for Britain at the world championships in Oslo in 1939. By then, however, the long ugly shadows of war were stretching across Europe. As the German Army smashed into Poland, Churchill returned to the British Army and the Manchester Regiment, and was shipped off to France. “I was,” he said later, “back in my red coat; the country having got into a jam in my absence.”

One of his brother officers, an old friend, saw him about that time chugging across the Flanders plain on a small motorcycle, his bow tied to the frame, arrows sticking out of one of the panniers on the back, a German officer’s cap hanging on the headlight. “Ah!” said Churchill, spotting his friend, “Hullo Clark! Got anything to drink?” Once Churchill had dismounted, his friend noticed dried blood smeared across one ear and asked Churchill about the injury. German machine gun, said Churchill casually. His men had shouted at him to run but, he said, he was simply too tired.

In later years, Churchill served as an instructor at the land-air warfare school in Australia, where he became a passionate devotee of the surfboard. Back in England, he was the first man to ride the Severn River’s five-foot tidal bore and designed his own board.’

1. Naked Jungle .. Cheggers Plays Cock – NSFW Picture.
2. Minipops .. Pan’s People for Paedophiles.
3. Triangle .. 80’s Glamour on a North Sea Ferry.
4. Quickfire Balls .. Bingo On TV.
5. Annie’s Bar .. Seems totally unmemorable rather than awful. YMMV.
6. Wright Here, Wright Now .. I suspect the compiler of this list supports Spurs.
7. Love Thy Neighbour .. Racist 70’s Sitcom.
8. Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends .. Is this really that awful?
9. Through The Keyhole .. LLoyd Grossman is immensely annoying.
10. A Year In Provence .. The BBC and John Thaw don’t mix?

‘I want to see a Batman that combines the cynic, the scholar, the daredevil, the businessman, the superhero, the wit, the lateral thinker , the aristocrat. He terrifies the guilty but he has great compassion for the weak and the downtrodden and will lay his life on the line for anybody who’s in trouble. He’s a master of yoga and meditation who has as much control over his body and his feelings as any human. He has a wider range of experiences than most people will dream of in ten lifetimes. This is not a one-note character! So, while I won’t pretend we all live on Sunnybrook Farm, I don’t think its appropriate – particularly in trying times – to present our fictional heroes as unsmiling vengeance machines. I’d rather Batman embodied the best that secular humanism has to offer – a sour-faced, sexually-repressed, humorless, uptight, angry, and all-round grim ‘n’ gritty Batman would be more likely to join the Taliban surely?’

‘These 9/11 truth campaigners merely add a supposedly scientific gloss to already existing conspiracy theories, trying to make the ridiculous seem respectable. In the process, they actually do a disservice to “historical truth”. History gets reduced to a mysterious force beyond our control, and politics – real politics – is imagined to be the preserve of unknown, faceless puppet-masters whom we can never hope to influence. And the rest of us are reduced to the status of helpless spectators, searching amid the rubble of 9/11 and the aftermath of 7/7 for signs of truth and meaning.’