Alan Moore Appreciation thread

How is he so good?

Like seriously, sometimes he can get a bit too verbose but most of his stuff is pure gold.

How does he do it?

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He's crazy

Well user, to write characters as deep as Alan Moore you have to think of a man... then you take away all reason, and accountability.

I always have this fear that Alan is actually some strange ass wizard and that he sees all. He is probably lurking on this thread right now as I type this.

when you compare someone with actual intelligence to comic book "writers" it makes them look like geniuses.

He's spelled it out many times, read a lot of shit and not just whatever medium or genre you're involved, learn from them, then rework the lessons to fit whatever medium you're involved in.

Basically just imagine a funnel and bottle in the rain, is the setup likely to collect more substance wide or narrow end up?

Reminder that Alan Moore has stated that he's seen/met a real life John Constantine on two separate occasions.

Wouldn't doubt it. Recently I swear I passed by two characters I've written but I didn't want to make a scene and start following them just to be sure.
It wasn't even just little things either, they were the exact height, build and body language with each other to the characters. Maybe it's all just a wacky coincidence given I've got billions of pairs to work with even with, but the odds of me happening to pass them on my way home still seem chancy.

I finished his Miracleman run and even before Watchmen, he managed to outdo any other colleague in the field.

But that was him writing straight plot. Then later in life he started tying plot to theme to characters to narrative elements to symbolism, which reached its apotheosis with Watchmen and again with Providence.

Maybe those anons going on about following the manga format have something in that we could release some comics in just their inks. I'm not convinced it would affect output speed drastically though.

I am European and can tell you a pure black and white format can work quite well if your penciller and inker know how to use positive and negative space correctly, to compose a shot. This is a challenge, since some artists depend on colorists to differentiate between figures if the lineweight and black/white dispersal is utilized as an afterthought.

But when used properly, you get Miracleman, Dylan Dog, V for Vendetta, Nathan Never, Danijel Žeželj's repertoire, etc.

But colours can make an image that much better. Blacksad, Šejić's Aquaman, Chew, Southern Bastards, comics like these utilize color as more than just something to give the colorist something to do.

But yes, that doesn't mean production speed (or even the pricing) would change.

he uses dude weed lmao

He is what is known qas a Mad Genius. That means that only he knows why he is so good. It's one of those answers that we will never know and would drive us all mad if we found out.

did anyone here read that enormous book

bethlehem i think

how was it

If I got even 10% of his total skill added to my own, I'd gladly go mad from revelation. Provided I could still have the capacity and freedom to make comics.

he koo

Jerusalem, and no.

You mean that Constantine was based on someone he know? Sherlock Homes is based in some real life teacher that was identical to the character in almost every eay

no you didnt read it or no it was bad

Didn't read it. I fon't have the strength of will to spend a year analysing one page to truly understand all the Finnegans-Wake levels of meaning put into it.

No, he literally said that he met Constantine from the books.

He's crazy like that

I am slowly working my way through the first third

it's a lot

>No Homecoming rottentomatoes thread on the first page.
>Instead, an Alan Moore appreciation thread without anybody calling him a hack or a hypocrite.

What a nice way to start off the day!

pretty sure Gaiman has a story about meeting Choronzon, so it's not a Moore-specific lunacy

Give it a while, some wanker will come round soon enough.

Basically, he's an intellectual. Many comic book writers don't understand the value of other media, like movies or books. There's a world of culture out there, and most writers don't care. I don't like everything that Moore writes, but it's clear that the man has a culture.

Yeah, I think that's the biggest problem with people like Johns. You can tell they don't read books.

Genuinely enjoy this more than Watchmen.

The Saga of Swamp-thing is one of those perfect marryings of art and writing in comic books.

Never understood the love for this guy.
I like a couple of his stories, but find most of his stuff overrated as fuck. (Like Watchmen, it's good, but not second coming of Jesus good like some people act.)

What writers would you say are better than Moore?

Read some of his less known work, like from hell or Providence.

As for Watchmen, it was revolutionary when it came out but it isn't anymore

Bendis

I have been looking for new stuff to read, I'll give those a try, but you have to promise me that From Hell is nothing like the movie.

I don't know about better, but I enjoy a lot of writes more than Moore; Hickman, Morrison, Rucka, Claremont, Carey(Lucifer is probably my favorite comic series), Gaiman, and Wolfman.

Swamp Thing is objectively his best book and I can't take you seriously if you think otherwise. Promethea and Watchmen have better art though.

well From Hell the comic is actually good, for one thing

Didn't that happen to Grant Morrison too?

Is this the Hypercrisis?

Oh, definitely nothing like the movie.

The book is more like a bad trip than anything else, but in a good way.

When was the last time Moore was good? Some time in the 80s right?
Neonomicon was a waste of paper and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen wasn't as good as its trash movie. What happened to Moore? Where did the magic go?

Neonomicon was trash, but Providence was fantastic.

So the last time he was good was 2017.

Yeah, he said he might Superman one time.

Providence nibba.

Literally the only author to get Lovecraft right (other than nigger hater himself ofc)

Providence actually good or is it meme good? I do like Moore's swamp thing, Watchmen, For the man who has Everything. I've just lost hope.

what kind of good is it? Compare it to something?

Actually good.

I'd say it reminded me of from hell, especially with Moore capturing the spirit of the period and the main character's arc, and as I said the only author I've read that actually managed to capture that Lovecraftian feel

It's like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but since it's not trying to be an adventure story and only focuses on the works/mythos of one writer it comes across as very focused and tactful.

It's also like Supreme, in that Moore is reconstructing Lovecraft's cliches and genre conventions like that series did to Silver Age Superman.

Jacen Burrows' art also rises a level above his usual stuff and really helps to counterpoint a lot of the narrative beats.

I hated League, but the best part was the references and tie-ins to all the universes and literature rather than the adventure, so this is a neat sorta description. I may have to look into Providence, thanks Sup Forums

Well, we couldn't disagree more about writers, I see. The only ones I've read stuffed I really liked were Gaiman and Rucka. The rest are serviceable at best.

Pretty much this.

One could argue that Moore didn't reinvent the wheel in comics, but he's one of the very few writers that consistently consumed and analyzed the good stuff from other forms of media.

A lot of writers (and even a lot of artists) can seemingly get into this "comics only; regular pleb shit otherwise, just for fun" kind of mentality. And while it's not awful or anything, it just doesn't give you a better command of the medium as an artform. Akira Kurosawa had roughly the same mentality when it came to filmmaking, too.

>Some time in the 80s right?

>From Hell
>Promethea
>Top 10
>Tom Strong
>League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen

All these were post-80s, man. I wish that "he hasn't been good/relevant since the 80s" would fucking stop.

>Carey
>serviceable at best
get some taste

Carey is the only one I haven't read (or at least, I don't remember having done so) from that bunch. I should've pointed that out.

It's really, really good. Best work since from hell IMO.

Only bad thing I can think of is that the twist is obvious as fuck if you have half a brain and skimmed through Lovecraft's wikipedia page

When are they going to do a absolute edition for tom strong.
Also that promethea omnibus with the fold out pages. Hope they didn't just give up on it.

He is crazy, but he has a working system for being crazy.

You also need to understand the greater picture, how things relate to eachother and how to express it. Otherwise you're just sitting on a lot of information that's useless to you.

Morrison and another comic book author were outside of a con somewhere talking about their platonic ideal of Superman. All of a sudden some guy cosplaying Superman walks by and they see he's really fucking nailing it, down to the S-curl hair and everything. They stopped him and talked to him awhile about what he thought Superman would do in different situation. The guy apparently answered each one of their questions as sincerely and honestly as he could and Morrison and the other author were awestruck. I don't recall if Morrison said he was on any drugs at the time. I want to say he wasn't.

He talks about the story in his autobiography "Supergods." What I took away from the story is that even if the Superman cosplayer wasn't a literal tulpa conjured from Morrison's mind via chaos magic, the cosplayer was tuned into a very specific vibe about who and what Superman was and was able to broadcast that vibe to other people, even super critical ones like Morrison.

I think that what Hypercrisis really is. Not the DC universe becoming its own specific place within our universe but the DC universe colonizing IRL people with its values.

I am not a huge fan of his work. He is a bit full of himself and borders on being a pretentious dick to his fans. Also insults the medium that garnered him so much money. The Moorefaggots are ten times worse though. They are as bad as DonnieDarkofaggots who try to rationalize shit that is not even there to seem better than others, when in reality they come off as children who did not get hugged who now need to feel superior than others due to lack of a social life. Having said that his work on Miracleman and Swamp Thing are amazing.

TL;DR: He is alright though his personality is revolting. Swamp Thing and Miracleman were awesome. The majority of his fans are fucking socially inept assholes.

>being a pretentious dick to his fans
he's very polite from what I've seen
he only goes off when people bother him with stuff he's explained dozens of times before

>being a pretentious dick to his fans. Also insults the medium that garnered him so much money.

t. never actually listened to or watched Moore in person but only read headlines

Moore is pretty damn far from pretentious or mean to his fans. Most of his "comics suck lmao" stuff is actually him speaking rather carelessly, not expressing an utterly serious opinion. He knows that most of the people who follow him like his comics the most.

>Also insults the medium
The only people that insult the medium are the ones that pitch their stuff as "x movie meets x movie" and the ones that unironcially try to push the idea that all comics are superheroes.

>borders on being a pretentious dick to his fans
He's never been an asshole to his fans, and always speaks kindly to them. It's only with annoying ones that he lets the venom fly.
>insults the medium
? Are you confusing him shitting on superhero comics with him shitting on the entirety of comics? You realize there's more to comics than DC and Marvel right?

On that note, the reason he hates DC is because they screwed him over with Watchmen out of a lot of money. Thus I understand why his venom extends to those writers who sell themselves to DC as well.

>did not get hugged who now need to feel superior than others due to lack of a social life
>The majority of his fans are fucking socially inept assholes.

lmao did a moorefag steal your girlfriend or something?

>The majority of his fans are fucking socially inept assholes.

You're only half right. The socially inept assholes were the ones who acted like they were taking a stand against Before Watchmen by boycotting creators instead of DC. And I doubt that's the majority.

Majestic: The Big Chill is better than Supreme: Story of the Year and any of his other Superman stories

fight me

>Rucka
>Wolfman
wtf

Put audiences aside. Are you saying that all the mental energy that writers, creators, and thinkers are putting into this stuff is totally bogus?
I am really in a bad mood about superheroes. I’m not the best person to ask about this. What are these movies doing other than entertaining us with stories and characters that were meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of 50 years ago? Are we supposed to somehow embody these characters? That’s ridiculous. They are not characters that can possibly exist in the real world. Yes, I did Watchmen. Yes, I did Marvelman. These are two big seminal superhero works, I guess. But remember: Both of them are critical of the idea of superheroes. They weren’t meant to be a reinvigoration of the genre.

Everybody learned the wrong lessons from your superheroes? This could be the plot of a comic-book story about you.
The superheroes of my youth had dogs that dressed in capes and masks! It’s obvious they stand for nothing other than the power of the imagination. I tend to see a lot of these current figures as the focus of a kind of unhealthy escapism.
vulture.com/2016/09/alan-moore-jerusalem-comics-writer.html

>did not get hugged who now need to feel superior than others due to lack of a social life
>The majority of his fans are fucking socially inept assholes.
I think what's most puzzling is he lambastes an invisible target group with all these projected flaws and shortcomings, but doesn't recognize the irony of the sort of character who would demonstrate such needlessly spiteful vitriol towards a man he's never encountered.

I wonder what leads to this sort of behavior. It can't just be general ignorance, there must be some conditions that result in seething ire for something and someone barely known.

And you were right

>The majority of his fans are fucking socially inept assholes.
If we're generalizing, wouldn't this apply to superhero fans as a whole?

Morrison apparently believes (but I can't find the source I remember reading it from) that injuring King Mob in The Invisibles gave himself a collapsed lung because he had modeled the character after himself.

He never insults the medium -- his work alone should show nothing but tremendous respect for it -- but he does insult the 'industry' -- which is nothing compared to the many, many ways the industry has insulted him.

He's been insulting to those who deserve it the corporate publishers as well as hypocrite creators who pay lip-service to their 'respect' for his work, while wringing his most throwaway ideas from thirty years ago dry, without ever acknowledgng let alone trying to properly make amends for the needless business weaselries done to him and other creators (he's also spoken up about Kirby, Ditko, et al.)

He more or less carelessly said something about nothing, or not much, good going on in the medium at the time of that particular interview, maybe not much good for a long time, and several writers (who weren't necessarily terrible) got needlessly and self-servingly up in arms about it.

It's likely that Moore hasn't been reading much of what's been out there, so his blanket dismissal was probably unfair to some extent -- but his bigger point about DC's hype about 'Before Watchmen' being made by 'the industry's greatest talents' actually a sign that those talents can't be that great if they haven't created their OWN works as impactful as Watchmen was, of course, dead-on at the time he said it, before the books came out -- and doubly so afterward, in which there wasn't even the smallest fragment of thought put into those books as was put into the originals.

His points about the paralyzing nostalgia and lack of innovation involved in the continuing obsession with super-heroes created for children of almost a hundred years ago aren't wrong -- and I enjoy super-hero comics and movies -- but of course fans wildly over-react to it.

Sympathetic magic, eh?
That'll do you in.

Y'know what? He's 100% right.

It's somehow become in, become trendy, to be eternally juvenile. You've got people aged 30 pissing themselves in abject joy over the new Marvel film or whatever and it's just so fucking embarrassing. I understand watching these films as a bit of mindless fun on the side, no different than smoking weed or drinking, but then you've got people whose entire life revolves around burly men in capes meant to entertain kids. And then you've got all the mainstream media supporting this shit, because of course they do, they make a pretty penny out of these retards with all that shitty nerd merch and what not, and any issue raised with this inevitable gets countered with "well you're just bitter" as if that somehow answers the problem at hand, as seen with critics of Moore.

Sorry for rant, but just had to get this off of my chest.

Of course it's "trendy". It's been forced down on us by media since about 30 years ago, at least. Before that, they knew that you could only sell worthless shiny stuff to children, and to do that, you had to go through the parents who were the ones with the money. But if you turn the parents into children, you don't need a middle man anymore. Why do you think it's getting more and more rare to see entertainment that is actually meant for children and not full of winks and stuff directily aimed at the parents?
The most obnoxious case of this, for me, was the Lego film. Even when it was obviously meant as a commercial from the get go, the movie itself was a children's fantasy movie about animated toys, which is completely crushed by an ending twist aimed at parents.
I went to watch it with my nephew and he said he liked it until that point, because he wanted the legos to be alive, but at the end it was just some kid playing with them.

Yeah, it's like we're watching the entropy of dignity through infantilism.

>Sorry for rant, but just had to get this off of my chest.
you don't need to feel sorry.
I agree with him, too.
also the unhealthy escapism and pandering of audio visual adaptations of nerd stuff to the masses is something that is happening in the nerd/geek ertertainment media as a whole.
the moment you start absorbing more culture and get diference references you start to dislike modern anime, cartoons, capeshit, lightnovels, games, etc..
not saying that there wasn't bad things in the past. but that we always reaching a new low.
we are only going deeper in the amount of bad content being considered good.

I just recently read through V for Vendetta again, years after my first reading in high school, and I have to be honest, it had only a modicum of nuance at the best of times. It just came off as aping a ton of Huxley. The art was compelling to a certain degree but everything about the writing was an asinine political screed.

I am sure I'm going to catch a lot of flak for that. I enjoyed League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,Swamp Thing, and to a lesser extent Watchmen, but I hated Neonomicon V for Vendetta, Miracleman, and Hellblazer. Maybe I just think he's a bad writer.

I used to think this up until I ended up realizing most of the people I've seen online making a show of how they're not infantile like the general audience... end up acting infantile in a different way.

Again, that does not answer the problem.

>hey some people were railing against the growing infantilism of society but then I realized they were infantile as well so everything's peachy! Can't wait for Infinity War™

That's just pure ad hominem, bugman

love your assessment. so sick of the sycophant "cool nerds" and nerd media with superhero t shirts and funko dolls, praising everything.
like guys - we all like nerdy shit but you do a disservice to the various genres and mediums by not elevating your taste. shills will gripe all day about company war BS and never have heard/read of - oh i dunno - a drawn and quarterly book or even Alan Moore's non-superhero shit. this thread and the discussion it has brought forth has pleased me greatly.
I love superheroes but relegating a truly dynamic medium (which i think comics is) to ONE genre breaks my heart. nice to see some other anons dont need their funny books to have brightly colored tights

nah, V for Vendetta is one of his weaker works

also he never actually wrote Hellblazer, just created Constantine

Almost everything that ever walked out of drawn and quarterly is trash though

>Which is that everything that can happen has already happened?
>Yes.

>So we’ve already had this conversation?
>It’s probably more accurate to say we’re always having this conversation. We relive it over and over again, and it’s always the same.

>Then let me retroactively and preemptively apologize for that.
>It does feel like the conversation’s gone on a bit, doesn’t it?

I really don't give a shit. I rarely watch superhero films when they're released, much less MCU films as it is. So clearly I'm not your fucking boogeyman as much as you need someone to fight and blame things on.

All 10+ years of using the internet taught me is that the people trying to make a show of how much more mature they are than the general audience are the ones I'd have to be wary of.

He's bloody brilliant! Thank you Alan Moore for giving u some really challenging, if not totally bonkers, comics.

I just want to shout out to his Tom Strong and Promethea runs. Those were fun stories and i enjoyed them completely!

Wary of what? That they're going to blow your bubble?

It is the common plebs who support the greatest monsters. Remember that.

>Wary of what? That they're going to blow your bubble?

They inevitably burst their own bubbles.

But what is that to you?

true. but it is easy to tell over reacting manchildren to people who knows the problem and that it affects both sides. you have to dislike both. not act almighty and say that people who criticise the problem are just as bad and just accept things as they are and ignore. you come off as someone who just loves a social hug bubble. like the fake centrists in a political discussion.

He was abducted by aliens who took him to the 5th dimension and alpha centauri too.
He's also an occultist like moore

>you come off as someone who just loves a social hug bubble. like the fake centrists in a political discussion.

Big talk coming from someone who lives in a political bubble.

>not act almighty and say that people who criticise the problem are just as bad and just accept things as they are and ignore.

Yeah, let's act almighty and say that the people who like pleb things are the problem instead.

A tragedy.

Eh, I'm dubious about Morrison's cred as an "occultist".

It seems to me that he says these things just to mystify his background, and all these dips into chaos magick and what not seem to be for the same purpose. As Moore himself pointed out, what kind of occultist allows himself to be knighted?

Moore, on the other hand, seems to have genuinely lived through some kind of vision quest as he himself has said, and all the stuff he does fits into his writings and thoughts (the concept of making something real by writing of it, thereby transporting it into the material world, as he does with Glycon)

If you don't see why infatilism becoming mainstream is a problem, then you are part of the problem, bugman.

You may not like those who are against it, and you may be right about them being just as infantile in some other way, but surely that is a problem that can be solved in turn once this one is?

/x/'s /omg/ thread regulars don't seem to have the highest of opinions of him.
I remember Ape of Thoth saying
>Grant is a gateway drug. Good place to start. Awful place to end.

>Big talk coming from someone who lives in a political bubble.
I don't. I already got in trouble in a school for saying that there was no good politician.t only the one who cater our needs at time of election and that 90% of them lie. and the kids should apply that to adults in general
>Yeah, let's act almighty and say that the people who like pleb things are the problem instead.
I never said you can't like plebs things. but that more you study and learns about different culture and diferent characters, you start to dislike how much the rise of escapism and spoiled attitude hurts society. meanwhile you come off as someone who gets butthurted when people critizes the medium you like and loves to play the smart idiot

Those of you who are weary of infantile interests and pure escapism: Is it because of the massive audience and influence?

Yes, basically. There's nothing wrong with enjoying childish things every now and again, but there is when it's not even for kids anymore and entirely for immature adults and the wider culture treats it like it's the modern day bible.

Every day some normie will say to me "did you hear they made captain america a nazi?!" and I have to explain to them that comic books are a complete joke that 20K people actually buy and they'll retcon it within the year when another writer takes over and they need another shocking storyline.

>school for saying that there was no good politician.t only the one who cater our needs at time of election and that 90% of them lie. and the kids should apply that to adults in general
Not that user, just came to fluff you up and say someone might think and try to hand wave this by saying it's obvious knowledge and stating it doesn't make you or anything better, but don't swallow the dispirits.

Step one to developing some sense is using your nose to suss the bullshit and you might not be on your way to any ascension from that alone but you're at the very least headed to the exit in disgust from the nonsense most people complacently spend lives walking in circles around.

In fact Moore in an interview posted above was just talking about how politics should consider a return to Athenian format to avoid the hamster wheel we're running ragged.

Has Alan Moore ever written something without rape in it?

Tom strong