21 March 2025
[comics] Alan Moore’s Five Tips for Would-Be Comics Writers … ‘4. Whatever you might be imagining about a life of writing, it’s not like that.’
6 March 2025
[comics] An Inside Look at the 13 Pre-Flashpoint Eras of Hellblazer … A great, detailed guide to the many different runs on Hellblazer. ‘Garth Ennis – Illustrated by Will Simpson and Steve Dillon, Garth Ennis’ tenure took Moore’s smug bastard, melded him with Delano’s substance-abusing mystic, and added a love for pubs.’
27 February 2025
[gaiman] The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman) … Elizabeth Sandifer does a deep dive into Neil Gaiman, his work, and the allegations of sexual assault and abuse. ‘In one of his few public comments about the influence of Scientology, Gaiman noted that he “grew up in a world in which being a science-fiction writer was a good thing. As far as my parents were concerned, that was an incredibly esteemed profession.” And now, as he swept the genre awards for that field, picking up nominations for practically every Best Novel award there was and winning the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Bram Stoker awards, the engrammatic patterns implicit in the Gaiman family’s vision of being a famous science fiction writer took hold.’
25 February 2025
[comics] Interviewing Alan Moore … A huge collection of scans of Alan Moore interviews over the years with plenty I’ve not seen before. From an early interview in 1981: ‘My greatest personal hope is that someone will revive Marvelman and I’ll get to write it. KIMOTA!!’
24 February 2025
10 February 2025
[comics] Unused cover for The Collected Bojeffries Saga … Really lovely painted cover by Garry Leach.
4 February 2025
[comics] Alan Moore And Chris Claremont Speak Out On Writing (from Speakeasy 054) … A real moment of comic history captured here. Moore has just written Watchmen #1 and the Claremont era of the X-Men is in full swing. Moore: ‘I agree that the establishment of invisible character detail, the stuff that is not on the surface, the stuff that is just subliminal – context – is an important thing. With Watchmen we tried to really go in for that. It’s an extension of the technique that I used in Halo Jones, probably a lot different to the clear establishing that Chris was talking about, in that it’s an extension of the idea of teaching parallel languages by dumping people in a room full of foreigners. Okay, the first time it’s going to be hell and the first time it’s going to be incomprehensible, but eventually your understanding of that world will be much more thorough. It’s a long shot, but I think it’s going to work because we have got a lot of space: we’re working on nine panels of page as opposed to the normal six. That gives you half the book again and you’ve got twenty eight pages so, in effect you’re doing a forty two page book or something, which gives you a lot of information. It’s not a very big story either. It’s a story that I could probably have told in three issues, but were telling it in twelve. It’s not going to be padded, it’s just that having twelve we’ve got room to explore all the characters.’
3 February 2025
[comics] Green Lantern Theory … ‘Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, who coined the term, explained that the Green Lantern theory is “the belief that the president can achieve any political or policy objective if only he tries hard enough or uses the right tactics.” The assumption is that the president is all-powerful, and when he can’t get something done, it’s because he’s not trying hard enough.’
30 January 2025
[batman] The Batbible … A comprehensive guide to Batman’s character, history, and universe, originally written by Dennis O’Neil in 1989 for creators working on DC Batman projects. ‘Batman is a detective, but not of the genteel ilk– no Hercules Poirot or Nero Wolf, but rather a Marlowe or Continental Op times ten. We should achieve a balance between ratiocination and action, neglecting neither, but perhaps emphasizing the latter. Stories should above all, move. Batman should never do something sitting that he can do running or leaping or jumping off a rooftop. Exposition and explanation should always be integrated with action. Talking heads are to be eschewed. Villains should be larger than life, and preferably grotesque. The Joker and Two-Face are perfect examples of Batman bad guys; they wear their villainy on their faces and they represent archetypical traits (Joker: anarchy and chaos: Two Face: the dichotomy between good and evil that exists in most human beings.) And they are both natural antagonists to a hero like the Batman. Keep them in mind when creating new baddies and you won’t go far wrong.’
29 January 2025
[comics] Dave Gibbon’s Early Gigs – Underground Comics 1970-1973 … Go buy a great collection of obscure, early comics from Dave Gibbons.
27 December 2024
[comics] The Story Behind The Hunt – Again … J.M. DeMatteis tells the origin of “Kraven’s Last Hunt”, considered one of the best Spider-man stories. ‘It was a long road from the first glimmer of inspiration, somewhere around 1984 or ‘85, to the final, published work. If it had been up to me—and thank goodness it wasn’t—the original idea would have seen print as, of all things, a Wonder Man mini-series (Simon Williams—defeated in battle by his brother, the Grim Reaper—awakens in a coffin, claws his way out and discovers that he’s been buried alive for months). But the Story knew better. It knew that it needed time to brew in my unconscious and find the proper form. Tom DeFalco—then Marvel’s Executive Editor—agreed. When I pitched him my Wonder Man idea, he promptly rejected it. But there was something in that “return from the grave” concept that wouldn’t let go.’
25 November 2024
[books] ‘We live in a climate of fear’: graphic novelist’s Elon Musk book can’t find UK or US publisher … Darryl Cunningham struggles to find a publisher for his latest book about Elon Musk. ‘He charts the rise of Musk to the “billionaire class” through his various business dealings including acquiring Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, which he renamed X. Cunningham said: “Knowing what I know about the man, my conclusion is that it’s incredible that such a mediocre figure can amass such wealth, but it was ever thus.”’
11 November 2024
[comics] Tegan O’Neill reviews Nemesis the Warlock – The Definitive Edition Vol. 1 … ‘Kevin O’Neill was a distinctive and idiosyncratic presence on the page. His understanding of texture was acute like a nightmare: he was good at drawing flesh and metal both, and he could make both human meat and gleaming machinery seem positively putrid with illness. Nemesis is a tightly drawn strip, and the pictures are unerringly nauseating: vast towers of bone and tendon reaching into the sky, indistinguishable from the metallic armor of the Terminators, refulgent in their carapaces. It’s a universe of vast grotesquerie, from the torture pits in the deeps of the Termight empire to the alien lanes haunted by mature Blitzspears. The British mode of production meant that a single six-page Nemesis strip would have all that magic compressed into a series of half- and third-page splash panels, with heaps of didactic narration to carry the reader along the way. Both Mills and O’Neill get to have their say in the finished product here.’
11 October 2024
[comics] Harvey Kurtzman: Seriously Funny … Drew Friedman fondly reminisces about Harvey Kurtzman. ‘Harvey would slowly unwind, sip beer, and reminisce about Bill Gaines and his days at EC, his continuing dislike of Al Feldstein, Will Elder’s wild practical jokes, his admiration for R. Crumb, his theories about the coke bottle design, current politics (at the time he admired Ronald Reagan) and his assistants at HELP!, Terry Gilliam and Gloria Steinem.’
10 October 2024
[comics] Jack Kirby’s Julius Caesar Costume Designs … Kirby’s designs for a 1969 production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
16 September 2024
[zines] The BugPowder Zine Archive … Pete Ashton is scanning and cataloging his large collection of zines. Here’s a post on the the story of the project and a timeline. … ‘From 1988 to the mid 2000s I amassed a collection of roughly 4,000 self published comics and zines, mostly from the UK small press comics scenes but also from across the world covering all manner of subjects. Most of them are photocopied or printed in very short runs, usually under 100 copies. Many of them are hand-finished with personal touches. During the 1990s I ran a review zine, TRS, and a mail order distro, BugPowder. This meant that on top of the many zines I was buying for myself, hundreds of people sent me unsolicited copies of their zines for review or sale…’
13 September 2024
[comics] Criminal Reading Order, The Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Celebrated Comics … ‘In an interview with Tom Spurgeon at the launch of the series, Brubaker stated “The kinds of stories we’ll be putting all these characters through, though, run the gamut from the heist caper, to the revenge story, to the man on the run story, and even beyond that to the sort of meta-noir innocent man caught in a web of crime story.” That’s exactly what they did. Eighteen years later, we have a collection of books, stories that were not written or published in chronological order, featuring a group of recurring characters whose lives we discover through dark and violent events…’
13 August 2024
[comics] The Funnies Have Gone Down, Down, Down … Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich discuss comics.
BOGDANOVICH: Is there a– I was gonna ask you that– do you think there’s an interesting parallel between movie setups and panels?
WELLES: Yes. I think the panels come out of the movies, and–
BOGDANOVICH: They came out of the movies.
WELLES: Out of the movies, and then have in their turn influenced lesser directors.
BOGDANOVICH: Hmm.
WELLES: But they of course never could have existed without the movies.
6 August 2024
[comics] Wallace Wood’s Official Shit List … File under Ancient Comics Gossip. ‘Rick Stoner, who visited Wood’s home in Derby, Connecticut, on the 14th and 15th of April 1978 then went with him to Niagara Falls on the 16th, would give no clues. “I won’t name any names from this list of about twenty or so,” he wrote in his article Remembering Wally Wood, printed in issue 11 of The Journal of Madness in June 2001, “I’m just glad I wasn’t on that one”. Thankfully for us, Stoner took plenty of photographs of Wood’s home on Saturday the 15th April 1978, some of which were reprinted in that same issue of The Journal of Madness, and one of them features a very clear shot of Wood’s Official Shit List. Twenty-one names of important and well-respected members of the comics industry…’ (reblog)
5 August 2024
[movies] Uzumaki Teaser … Adultswim’s animated version of Junji Ito’s horror manga arriving late September.
22 July 2024
[comics] 10 major cartoon characters entering the public domain between 2024 and 2034 … ‘Popeye the Sailor (2025) – Popeye first appeared in the “Thimble Theatre” newspaper comic strip in 1929. He soon became the strip’s star, and Olive Oyl’s new boyfriend (replacing her previous beau, one “Harold Hamgravy”). Popeye made the leap to animation in 1933.’
10 July 2024
[comics] Batman’s Aff His Nut … Possibly the best Scottish poem about Batman ever written. ‘Mate, I’m worried aboot ye
I know your ma and da died But everybody’s ma and da dies And we’re no aw runnin aboot Hookin muggers and Kickin psychopaths in the baws.” And that was when Batman went “Aye, but do ye ever feel like it? Do you ever look at the world and feel like it?’
5 July 2024
[comics] The Secret Life of Steve Ditko: Spider-Man Co-Creator’s Family Opens Up … Some insight into Steve Ditko’s life from his family. ‘One crispy Christmas during the early 1960s, Mark, only four or five, asked his uncle to sketch him a picture of a gorilla. Using only a pencil, his uncle cast a spell across the paper, and there he was: Konga, in all his glory. “Uncle Steve,” Mark beamed. “You are really good.”’ (archive link)
11 June 2024
[comics] Why is the Sonic comic so controversial? … A really fascinating look at the personalities, controversies and lawsuits around Archie’s long-running Sonic The Hedgehog comic.
5 June 2024
[comics] Greatest Comics Of All Time as Chosen by 45 Writers and Artists… Al Ewing on Dan Clowes Ice Haven: ‘It’s really hard to pick a favorite from Dan Clowes’s work, and I actually like The Death Ray more, but in many ways this is the perfect starting point for a modern Clowes enthusiast-a small town mystery presented as a collection of one-page comic strips. It’s filtered through the various personalities who live there, each with their own voice, which Clowes communicates through shifts in his own style, showing off his absolute mastery of the medium and the comics form. He’s arguably the greatest cartoonist living today, and you owe it to yourself to read his work.’
28 May 2024
[watchmen] On the Cutting Edge of Innovation: This guy Just Found a New Way to Misinterpret ‘Watchmen’ … ‘Roche sat down in a recent interview to explain his journey of bastardizing Moore’s iconic series. “I started off like everyone else,” Roche explained. “I was like, oh, Rorschach freaking rules. He’s just Batman if he was a normal guy. Like, he’s just rational and everything he does makes perfect sense. Why would you cripple a criminal when you can kill his dogs, chop off his arm and burn his house down?” Roche’s shelf is littered with comic books and a weird shrine to Steve Ditko–which he kept trying to avert our gaze from by aggressively coughing.’
8 May 2024
[comics] Every Issue of Alan Moore’s “Swamp Thing” Ranked by How Likely They’ll Get a Conservative Book Ban … ‘Swamp Thing #42 (November 1985): “Strange Fruit” – Swamp Thing burns down a plantation haunted by racist ghosts. – They hate this one. They fucking HATE this one.’
6 May 2024
[comics] Escape Magazine … Escape Magazine, a British comics anthology magazine from the 1980s has been fully scanned and is online at the Internet Archive.
22 April 2024
16 April 2024
[comics] Go look at Tom the Dancing Bug’s Trump Illustrated Bible … ‘Jubilate as he preaches to the prostitutes!’
12 April 2024
[comics] Aard Labour: Conclusion | Epilogue … Tom Ewing’s reread and analysis of Cerebus concludes.
One thing that does happen when your comic is full of dissemblers and layers of meaning and contradictory versions of reality, and when you go on for 300 issues, is that you’ll have produced a text with enormous discursive potential. Whether that discussion is worthwhile is another matter. I had no idea, starting this project, that it would end up at 60,000 words long. I still feel like there’s more to say, but also that there’s no real way of reaching a conclusion about this extraordinary, accursed, vivid folly of a comic.
I’ve loved writing about it, I’ve often loved reading it, but I feel shocked that I did write to this extent. I think I like the work more than I did going in, but the artist even less. At one point I planned in this final post to try and work out who the best comparison to Dave Sim might be – Ditko? Morrissey? Lovecraft? Rowling? Kanye? In the end it doesn’t matter: what he shares with them all is that initial fascination and horror turns to exhaustion in the end.
8 April 2024
[comics] This is Fine …
2 April 2024
[comics] Aard Labour 0: There Are Three Aardvarks … Tom Ewing is working on a spot-on analysis of all the books of Cerebus … ‘Melmoth is the moment where Sim sets out to demonstrate – to his own liking, if not the market’s – that “a 300 issue comic about a talking aardvark” really can include absolutely anything he wants it to. He proved the point: Melmoth is one of the high watermarks of Cerebus. Even if nobody in 1992 understood what “Cerebus can include anything Dave Sim wants” might really entail.’
18 March 2024
[books] How Michael Met Neil… How Michael Sheen Met Neil Gaiman. ‘When I went to drama school, there was a guy called Gary Turner in my year. And within the first few weeks, we were doing something, having a drink or whatever. And he said to me, “Do you read comic books?” And I said, “No.” I mean, this is … what … ’88? ’88, ’89.’
15 March 2024
[comics] Heckblazer … The indignity of being John Constantine.
6 March 2024
[comics] The Art and History of Lettering Comics … Todd Klein has released for free online his authorative book on lettering in comics.
27 February 2024
[batman] The Adventures of Unicorn Man Can Only Be Read By Diehard Comic Fans … Diesel Sweeties on Batman.
21 February 2024
[comics] Moon and Serpent Rising… John Couthart delivers some insider information on the long-awaited The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic written by Alan and Steve Moore. ‘The Bumper Book may superficially resemble a children’s annual but this isn’t a book for children. The essays include discussion of the use of drugs and sex in magic, and there’s a lot of nudity (also a fair amount of sex) in the illustrations. The book is a serious study, but not, I hope, a boring one. Several of the features are presented in comic form, with eight of the pages being among the last works of the late Kevin O’Neill. Ben Wickey has done a fantastic job for the fifty pages of Old Moores’ Lives of the Great Enchanters which runs throughout the book and covers the entire history of Western magical thought from the Stone Age to the present day.’
5 February 2024
[comics] Fast Fiction Info Sheets … An archive of A4 pamphlets distributed in the 1980s promoting British small-press comics.
1 February 2024
[comics] Miracleman: The Marvel Age. … Mike Sterling on Gaiman & Buckingham’s Miracleman. ‘This whole hoohar is written by Moore and Gaiman, absolute giants in the field. But it feels like Miracleman’s time in the sun is pretty much done. It was huge when that first Eclipse Comics issue was released in 1985, when Alan Moore had just become a red hot commodity in American comics. And it continued to sell very well as the series continued to push the boundaries of just what a superhero comic was, through Moore’s 16 issues and Gaiman’s following work. But that 30 year gap. That ain’t nuthin’…’
16 January 2024
[comics] “I’ve Had The Life That I Wanted When I Was 10 Years Old”: A Conversation with Dave Gibbons … Gibbon’s discusses his autobiography and much more. ‘I probably won’t say too much about it other than what is public knowledge, that there’s been talk of a Rogue Trooper movie. And again, I think there are so many characters in 2000 AD that would make wonderful big screen stories. I did actually as recently as last week get a little glimpse behind the curtains of that. And I’m very excited by what I saw there. So I’m very happy, because I like the people who are doing it. And I think they’re approaching it the right way.’
15 January 2024
[comics] The Mercy Giants – ‘We Think So Loud’ … Today I learned that artist and co-founder of Deadline Brett Ewins released an 12″ Acid House Single in 1988. ‘There’s very little about it on the web but I love these musical comic crossovers (the Madness off-shoot ‘Mutants of Mega City One’ is another) even if the sounds often play second fiddle to the artwork.’
11 January 2024
[books] Neonomicon – Moore, Alan, & Jacen Burrows – 2011 … And people say I’m hard to shop for… ‘£1,750.00’
9 January 2024
[comics] Comics Kayfabe: Alan Moore’s LOST Swamp Thing Comic! … A deep dive into a Superman/Swamp Thing team-up Moore did with Rick Veitch and Al Williamson.
4 January 2024
[comics] Junji Ito’s Horrifying Uzumaki Artwork is Highlighted in Adult Swim Series Trailer … Junji Ito’s spiral manga will be releases an an anime in 2024. ‘The new trailer uploaded on Adult Swim’s YouTube channel offers a glimpse into the terrifying world of ‘Kurouzu-cho’ crafted by the original artist. The trailer begins with Shuichi Saito telling his girlfriend Kirie Goshima about the strange events happening in the town and asking her to leave Kurouzu-cho with him. “Don’t you feel any of it? The stream has been full of whirlpools lately. It’s even the wind. Whirlwinds have been popping up nonstop lately. I think it’s because of this town that my dad’s been getting strange,” says Shuichi. He also shares his worries about his father’s odd actions, as he becomes fixated on spirals and locks himself in his study, surrounded by objects with spirals.’
2 January 2024
[comics] Wyrd Britain: Moorcock and Moore in conversation … ‘This video shows Michael Moorcock and Alan Moore engaged in a wide and free roaming conversation about Moorcock’s life and work that takes in his post-war childhood, his editorship of ‘New Worlds’, modernism and the modern author, Jerry Cornelius, being left wing in Texas and of course, due to the occasion, Colonel Pyat and the holocaust.’
28 December 2023
[comics] Jeffrey Lewis tells the story of Alan Moore …
21 December 2023
[comics] Ian Gibson, 1946-2023 … Comic artist Ian Gibson’s obituary from the Comics Journal. ‘Always an independent-minded artist, which got him into hot water with more than one publisher, Gibson treated Moore’s scripts with much less reverence than one is used to see, as detailed in Thrill-Power Overload: “I had already got into the habit of deconstructing a script and putting it back together in a way that would be visually more effective. I tended to take Alan’s verbose ramblings with a pinch of salt and do it my own way!” Originally planned for nine ‘books,’ only three were completed before Moore cut ties with 2000 AD over royalty and ownership disputes, never to return. It is a testimony to the sheer quality of these stories that the magazine, even when bought out by video game company Rebellion, resisted the temptation to continue Halo Jones with other creators.’
15 December 2023
[comics] Popverse’s best comics of 2023… Some interesting comics in this “Best of” list. ‘If comics could have a ‘great American novelist’ like a Cormac McCarthy, we have that in Emily Carroll. Her 2023 one-shot A Guest in the House paints in broad strokes, being simultaneously deep while also airy – letting me (and you hopefully), find the story for yourself. While some might categorize this as horror, it’s a broader story about the human condition that a label of just ‘horror’ would be limiting.’
14 December 2023
[comics] Born on the Bayou: An Inside Look at the 13 Pre-Flashpoint Eras of Swamp Thing … A great guide to the many different series of Swamp Thing. ‘In a single chapter, writer Alan Moore un-did all that had come before. Readers had followed Alec’s journey for a dozen years, yet Moore-with artists Stephen R. Bissette, John Totleben, Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala-revealed that Alec could never regain his humanity (Edward’s genius notwithstanding), because he’d never had it to begin with. Alec had been dead since day one, and the creature with his memories was a plant that thought itself a man. That revolutionary change carried Swamp Thing to the stars, introduced occultist John Constantine, and culminated in the game-changing reveal of the Parliament of Trees, providing Swamp Thing with a vast elemental lineage that included the original House of Secrets story.’