Dave Press

“The material is human thoughts and human feelings and human ideas. Everything in our world from the family structure to the neutron bomb has its origins within that area, and anybody who intends to mess around in the mass consciousness for a living ought to be aware of the material he is working with and how it behaves in certain circumstances. To this end, when considering the person who will eventually be reading your comic story, the common denominator which you should be pursuing is not the lowest common denominator of public acceptability, but rather the denominator of basic humanity.”

—	Alan Moore in Chap. 2 of Writing For Comics, “Reaching The Reader: Structure, Pacing, Story Telling.”

2 months ago 13 notes

Neil Gaiman on Alan Moore’s life. Drawn by Mark Buckingham.

(Source: zophop, via momentofmoore)

2 months ago 3,306 notes

“Then, we came to the Red Meat for Shitheads part of the thing, the quote that really lit up the parts of the internet that care about this kinda shit and also generate revenue from getting hits plus have comment sections: the Alan Moore isn’t Nice Enough section. This is the part where Morrison, to the delight of meatheads, bemoans that Alan Moore isn’t nice enough to the comics industry in public, a sentiment expressed for about the 9 billionth time just this year alone. This is not news: fans of industrial comics– a broken septic tank on a good Wednesday– wishes Alan Moore would be its dim-witted cheerleader and regard his failure to do so as a betrayal. Everyone must be thrilled by “the generally improved standard of writing in all comic books” (which is apparently something that happened sometime, maybe in one of the Avengers Versus X-Men spin-offs about Nick Fury’s move-tie-in love baby or whatever, I didn’t read those).”

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A quote from Abhay’s magnificent screed of that whole Morrison v. Moore post, which was pretty much definitely a circle jerk.

My general reaction to the entire post was: “Grow up. Get over it. Don’t you have better things to do?” Of course this was a no. The whole thing made me evaluate why the fuck I wrote forty something pages about someone who is obviously being a child to another person just being Uncle Scrooge. Like: why waste my breath justifying the actions of a fucking toddler?

The best part is this:

And why wouldn’t Moore want to speak well of comics? His relationship with almost all of his former collaborators are in tatters, comic companies that he believes have exploited him are spraying graffiti over his artistic legacy, the mistreatment of the industry’s great artists is the subject of multiple history books at this point, and that industry’s dominant commercial strategy is to find one, single, super-rich, taste-free continuity obsessive who hates women, surround him in the bed he’s confined to, sink their teeth into his femoral artery, and drink deeply. What’s not to love?

Thanks for this, Abhay. You’ve done us a service. To read the entirety of the thing Calamity Jon has posted it.

5 months ago 3 notes

“Of course, it isn’t entirely one-sided. There are alot of things that can be done with a film that can’t be done with a short story or novel. Information can be presented visually in an efficient and measured fashion concerning character and environment that would take a lot of bulky description and exposition to convey with words alone. Also, since our current society has a greater visual orientation than a literary one, a visual flow of narrative gives a much more immediate and involving sensory impact to the work in hand, even though much of the emotional depth and resonance is forfeit in many cases.”

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Alan Moore in Writing for Comics telling us that movies have made our attention spans shorter, and as a result the comics form is richer because of it. This might explain why he his scripts are as long as they are.

In terms of intellectual and emotional effect upon the reader, this seems to represent an edge that comics would do well to exploit. In the end, it is effect which governs the success of an individual piece of artwork or a whole artform, and while abstract critical considerations concerning the inherent quality of a work might give us a few useful handles with which to grasp and appreciate a work more fully, art still succeeds or fails in terms of the actual effect it has upon the individual members of its audience.

What is effect in this context? What governs others in terms of their readership of comics comes through in their interest in the effect that it gives the reader. For the kids in my class when I talk about comics with them, they like it because it’s less actual text they have to read. It doesn’t feel like real literary work. The effect is in visual presentation, but now that they’re reading Zeitoun after AD they find more emotional depth, more character conflict, and a richer conversation in the prose version of a vaguely similar story. This is something I’m kind of sure we can say Moore gets but not totally. In this case, he chases his tail in both of these quotes, he probably understands and would acknowledge the fact that perception affects a reader but he doesn’t really acknowledge it.

7 months ago 2 notes

“Rather than seizing upon the superficial similarities between comics and films or comics and books in the hope that some of the respectability of those media will rub off on us, wouldn’t it be more constructive to focus our attention upon those ideas where comics are special and unique? Rather than dwelling upon film techniques that comics can duplicate, shouldn’t we perhaps consider comic techniques that films can’t duplicate?”

—	Alan Moore, Writing for Comics.

7 months ago 53 notes

“The biggest difficulty in writing about any creative activity, from writing itself to automobile-devouring, is that in most cases the articles or interviews that result seem to be unable to rise above plain technical information and lists of preferred tools. I don’t want to fall into the same rut here by telling you which typewriter I use or what sort of carbon paper I think is best, since this information will not make the slightest difference to how well you write.”

—	Alan Moore in Chapter One of Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics, “The Basic Idea; Thinking About Comics.” (Source: amazon.com)

8 months ago 4 notes

The inside cover by Jacen Burrows to the collection of Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics.

8 months ago 1 note

A fan letter from 15 year-old Warren Ellis in WARRIOR #14 on Alan Moore. How awesome is this? Posted from momentofmoore:

‘ALAN MOORE — DEMI-GOD OR GENIUS?’

Fan Letter From 15yr old Warren Ellis In Warrior #14 (1982).

(I saw this originally on the Glycon Livejournal - a terrific archive of Alan Moore ephemera and out-of-print work.)

9 months ago 28 notes

“We actually had three mail men die.”

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Len Wein on the Nerdist Writer’s Podcast on the physical strain that delivery people went through in carrying Alan Moore’s Watchmen scripts. You should listen to the whole thing because there is a crazy Nixon story in there with Ed Brubaker and Jackson Publick of the Venture Brothers is on it too so why the hell are you still reading this.

10 months ago 5 notes

Annotations to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume III.

There is no one better than Jess Nevins to annotate Moore. A great companion read to go along with the new edition of the book.

10 months ago 0 notes

#alan moore

‘ALAN MOORE — DEMI-GOD OR GENIUS?’

“We actually had three mail men die.”

Annotations to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume III.

Dave Press