by Alan Moore, with prompts from Bill Baker
Publisher: Airwave
Uncle Alan sets the record straight on whether he's departing the medium altogether (he isn't), why he's withdrawing (well, he isn't really; he's just saying his final "fuck off" to DC, and who can blame him after their consistently shameful treatment of him?), and just how pissed he is at the continuing business practices within the corporate hub of the industry, as well as how disappointed he is at what he perceives as the lack of growth in the medium itself. I'd take issue with him there (though only there), and it's telling that every creator he does cite as accomplished is pushing 45/50 at least. I don't think the great man has access to the best of the new generation of comicbook artists, and if he'd just pop his head round Page 45's door for ten minutes, I think he'd see just how much is being done, and how well it's selling. That'd put a smile on his face.
But yes, he does make the point that so much of the superhero product is just that - "product" from which to make money on a corporate and creative level. Alan details his whole sorry history with DC, from their refusal to change the contract on WATCHMEN once it transpired - against all expectations - that it would be the first trade collection in the US that would actually remain in print (ownership would have reverted to Moore and Gibbons; DC still refuse to upgrade the contract to the level they regularly offer other creators these days), to the pulping of a LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY gentlemen issue for no very good reason at all, their timidity in attempting to get a retraction from V For Vendetta producer Joel Silver when he flat-out lied about Alan being enthusiastic about the Warner Bros. film (Alan had actually told the Wachowski brothers he was interested neither in the film nor in meeting them, as they requested), perhaps because "DC, for an awful long while, have been terrified that Warner Bros. are going to turn the DC offices into a car lot or something".
There's also plenty of information about LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: BLACK DOSSIER, a multimedia affair that will include comics, illustrated prose and indeed a 7" vinyl single supposedly recorded by 1950s band called "Eddie Enrico And His Hawaiian Hotshots" as mentioned in Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying Of Lot 49" (no, I didn't know that) but was of course recorded by Alan and his usual co-conspirator Tim Perkins. What's really getting me all flustered with excitement, however, is Alan's next novel, "Jerusalem". This sounds absolutely epic in scope, and not a little unlike Bryan Talbot's ALICE IN SUNDERLAND in that it appears that so much important history originated from the square mile in which Alan grew up, and, like "Voice Of The Fire" this does appear to concentrate on Northampton, as well as deal in the architecture of time, springing from Alan's firm conviction that not only does everything happen at once, but everything happens forever (you can learn more about that in the interview Eddie Campbell conducted with him for EGOMANIA #2, and which now forms part of their DISEASE OF LANGUAGE hardcover @ £12-99):
"It struck me that, if such a thing was, indeed, the actual truth of our situation, then there's an interesting moral inference that can be drawn from it. And that is that, if every moment of your life is eternal, then live every moment of your life in such a way that you could be happy to live it over and over again eternally. Which doesn't sound like a bad way of living one's life. "Don't do anything that you can't live with forever." And that idea, of every moment in life being eternal, you have to admit that...
"Imagine, the best moments of your life, forever. That is surely eternal reward. And the worst moments of you life, forever, is surely unending damnation. I think that, probably, in this kind of proposed cosmology there is enough heaven and hell to satisfy any rabid, fundamentalist brimstone preacher. Also, it'd be kind of fair, wouldn't it? You'd have judged yourself, in effect, rather than been judged by some remote higher authority."
What did you think of this book?
Have your say at the Line of Fire Forum!