scans_daily

"I was a big fan of the group The The at the time who did a track called ‘The Fifty-First State’ but I could be lying here because quite a bit of the original set-up for ‘New Statesman’ came from Steve MacManus. This was also during the Thatcher/Reagan years, remember – when the UK really was becoming "America’s poodle" – so all those undercurrents were bubbling away at the time. Like films or novels, you have to look at a story in a social context. The concern about genetics though was definitely mine. Ever since hearing about DNA I’ve always realised that mastering gene manipulation would alter our entire species (and every other species too) and that was an area that fit in nicely with the whole superhuman angle."

- John Smith

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laughing_tree

So I decided to do two or three things with that initial idea of the "Fighting American." Yes, he's a patriotic character, he's satirical, but it's going to be at least as much the satire of Harvey Kurtzman as it was of Simon and Kirby. Because, actually, Kurtzman's satire was sharper and funnier. So combining those elements, and also bringing it up to date so that it's not turned against the Red paranoia of the '50s, but against contemporary phenomena, like The Jerry Springer Show, reality television, etc. -- Alan Moore

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laughing_tree

The main thing I wanted to do was not pastiche or do a homage to The Spirit but to do a homage to the spirit of The Spirit, if you like. The very best thing about Eisner's Spirit was the incredible experimentation, the constant attempts at new storytelling techniques. -- Alan Moore

It's just a pity that those old "Phantom Lady" stories, other than the fact that she's got such wonderful cleavage, there was nothing else to recommend those stories at all; they weren't at all interesting. So with "Cobweb," what I decided to do was to take this kitsch, camp, '50s glamorous crime-fighter character, like the Blonde Phantom or the Black Cat or the Phantom Lady, any of those, and to use it playfully, so that we could do whatever we wanted, where we could jump around and show, I dunno, a five-year-old Li'l Cobweb if we wanted to. -- Alan Moore

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laughing_tree

It was taking comic book characters I thought were exceptional and stood out from the herd. I suppose Plastic Man, Fighting American the Spirit... they all stand out in some way from the average super-hero. Those strips have intelligence, a sense of humor, a sense of personal style. -- Alan Moore

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laughing_tree

Some modern science is so bizarre they are almost like a Lewis Carroll logic children have. It didn't seem like a huge step to have this ten-year-old boy with all of the mad, ludicrous ideas that ten-year-old boys have, but to actually make it so that, yes, in terms of science as we now understand it, as it turns out, he's absolutely right and is just a complete genius. -- Alan Moore

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laughing_tree

To some degree, I tend to think most super-heroes, at their essence, if you boiled them down, are only a name and a chest emblem. You think about that with, say, Batman. There is no resemblance at all between the avenging Batman originally created in the late '30s to the smiling, avuncular Batman of the '50s, to Neal Adams' taut/tense/grim/gritty Batman of the '70s, or to Frank Miller's Dark Knight in the '80s. These are not the same person. The only thing continuous is the name and chest emblem. And that, to me, is part of the appeal of the character. I mean, who cares about continuity, really? I thought it would be interesting with Cobweb that, yes, we know she's got a sidekick and has a cobweb design on her belt. Given that, we can do whatever we want with the character. -- Alan Moore

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laughing_tree

I didn't start Vertigo. I did Swamp Thing and I think Vertigo was an attempt to build off that. When I wrote Swamp Thing, I was just approaching a DC horror book in a certain way because I thought that would be interesting. It was just me and my pre-occupations about sex, politics, environmentalism, and all the rest. There's no reason why they should take my pre-occupations and make them into a line of books written by other people. -- Alan Moore

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laughing_tree

I decided, "Yeah, all right, we're going to do a Plastic Man-type character, only make him liquid instead of plastic." We'll also mix Kurtzman satire with Jack Cole in the same way we mixed Simon and Kirby with Kurtzman on the "First American." There was also an attempt to allude to the Max Fleischer animation of the '20s and '30s, the weird early ones, like Koko and Out of the Inkwell, because they had very fluid shapes. -- Alan Moore

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laughing_tree

We couldn't do an episode of "Jack B. Quick" in every issue of Tomorrow Stories, as it takes Kevin [Nowlan] a long time to complete one -- and, I've got to say, it takes me a long time to write them, because you have to get yourself into a certain mind set to write "Jack B. Quick." So Scott [Dunbier] suggested Hilary Barta as somebody who could do a strip to alternate with Kevin. This brought me to another of my favorite super-heroes -- along with the Fighting American and The Spirit -- who is, of course, Plastic Man. -- Alan Moore

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laughing_tree

With Cobweb, I've always thought characters like the Phantom Lady, the "glamour heroines," who really have no purpose other than to stand around in a skimpy costume looking glamorous. That was the reason why everybody bought those books. But at the same time... maybe because it was sort of a sexist '50s thing that has vanished with modern sensibilities, I miss that relatively innocent camp glamour girl of the '50s. Especially when you compare that kind of Vargas figure, with the sort of c*m-spattered porn starlet we have today. I thought that there was a charming innocence in it. - Alan Moore

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laughing_tree

Another one of my favorite archetypal comic characters is Fighting American. It's one of my favorite pieces of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's work, and one aspect I like is that it clearly started out as a serious patriotic strip with its first issue. Then, I presume because it was published during the McCarthy era, Simon and Kirby were at least smart enough to realize you couldn't really take this kind of stuff seriously, so they changed their character from a Red-baiting, serious, patriotic hero to this incredible satire upon the whole idea, with these ludicrous Communist villains like Hotsky Trotsky and Poison Ivan. I was thinking, "Yeah, that's really good. The idea of a patriotic super-hero who is a satire on issues that were contemporary at that time." -- Alan Moore

Trigger warning: rape

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laughing_tree

I decided to take that boy inventor character, last seen messing around with '50s and '60s science, and bring him up to date, at least scientifically. Still keep him in this rural, Kansas, timeless, bygone American period. But this kind of science he's talking about, it's this ridiculous quantum science we have today. -- Alan Moore

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laughing_tree

As regards nostalgia in general terms, according to a recent issue of New Scientist, a little of it can be good for us, psychologically and neurologically. It was, however, initially diagnosed as a potentially fatal illness, something elegantly demonstrated by the South Park clip that John Higgs showed everyone at the recent Hexagram 23 event, with the ’Memberberries, or the Private Eye cover around eighteen months ago, with a UKIP candidate standing by a UKIP-decorated taxi cab, the driver of which is asking “Where to, guv?” and the candidate is replying “The 1950s, and step on it”. -- Alan Moore

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laughing_tree

I used to love Kellogg's Variety Packs when I was a kid, because you could have Cocoa Puffs one morning and Sugar pops the next. There was variety. I like variety. In some of the old comics, you'd get two stories, four stories, eight stories, all of different sorts and different lengths between the covers. You got a sense of having had a full meal, a full five-course dinner or something. That was something I wanted to try and instill into Tomorrow Stories. -- Alan Moore

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lordultimus

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history79

Warning for implied Rape and Child Abuse

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history79

Warning for Child Abuse

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arbre_rieur.insanejournal.com

And here's the second half of the mini-series that introduced Moore's new Deathblow to the Wildstorm universe.

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arbre_rieur.insanejournal.com

In the previous entries, about works like Violator Vs. Badrock and Spawn: Blood Feud, a lot of people were saying, "Well yeah, it's bad, but look at the quality of character he was saddled with!" In this mini-series though, he doesn't have that excuse. There was a previous character named Deathblow, Michael Cray; he died in Wildstorm's "Fire Fom Heaven" event (also written by Moore and also quite awful).

Here, in this three-part mini-series, Moore was tasked with creating a brand new Deathblow from scratch. The sky was the limit... so how the heck did we end up with this?

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Entries tagged with creator: jim baikie

New Statesmen - Prologue

Tomorrow Stories Special #2 [series finale]

Tomorrow Stories #12

Tomorrow Stories #11

Tomorrow Stories #10

Tomorrow Stories #9

Tomorrow Stories #8

Tomorrow Stories #7

Tomorrow Stories #6

Tomorrow Stories #5

Tomorrow Stories #4

Tomorrow Stories #3

Tomorrow Stories #2

Tomorrow Stories #1

Supreme: The Return #3

Vigilante #18

Vigilante #17

When Alan Moore was crap (Deathblow: Byblows, Part 2)

When Alan Moore was crap (Deathblow: Byblows, Part 1)

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