Alan Moore

It's his birthday, Sup Forums.

Let's all love Alan!

Other urls found in this thread:

soundcloud.com/mandrillifesto/alan-moore-joe-brown-mandrillifesto
youtube.com/watch?v=QoABdaomlCE
youtube.com/watch?v=RE47r0ym25Q
youtube.com/watch?v=Os1jPX8v5BI
londonhollywood.wordpress.com/2016/09/22/if-you-read-only-one-alan-moore-jerusalem-interview-make-it-this-one/
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Inb4 people meme on literally one of the greatest comic writers there's ever been (despite a casual rape obsession).

Happy birthday Alan!

Happy birthday big guy.

No joke, looking at the thumbnail I thought it was some kind of ape in a striped jumper.

Anyway, happy birthday Big Beard.

Happy birthday, Alan. You may be a grumpy asshole, but your writing is on a whole other level.

>some kind of ape in a striped jumper
soundcloud.com/mandrillifesto/alan-moore-joe-brown-mandrillifesto

Thanks for all the great stories you've given us, Alan!

If you don't like him as a writer, you don't really like comics.

Seems like a perfect time to watch/listen to this youtube upload of The Birth Caul, matched up with Eddie Campbell's illustrations and the CD soundtrack.
youtube.com/watch?v=QoABdaomlCE
A semi-autobiographical live performance in which Moore traces back his own existence all the way to the womb and the mystery of pre-linguistic consciousness.

No one writes a good fish rape scene like he does.

I miss America's Best Comics

Happy birthday, Alan!

>disregarding peoples opinions the post
all you have to do is mention moore and a few others

The reason I know people don't read Moore's comics is everyone makes a bigger deal about the fishman rape scene than the underage bodyswap one in Providence, which is much more shocking.

Press H to Hooork

Happy Birthday Alan! I know you will almost certainly never read this but thank you for everything nevertheless

I've never understood people who decry Moore for his rape scenes. 1. He seems to have a bigger obsession with sex and sexuality than just pure rape. Open up any Alan Moore comic and characters will end up in a whole range of sexual situations, not just rape.

B. He actually writes rapes pretty fucking well. Like with one or two exceptions he writes rape as the most horrifying, humiliating, dehumanising, violent, vile, disgusting experience imaginable.

Either way Happy fucking Birthday Alan

It's more shocking, but less funny/memey than the gigantic splurts of fish cum

Both fair points and true. The meme is really that rape is just in almost all of his comics.

He isn't that great as a writer (good for the comics and normal for others standards) and I have always hated his polygamous posture that he always tries to push in his stories.

Oh yeah. I get that. I've make loads of jokes about Moore's rape kinks. I dunno, I just remember reading so many shitty sophomoric thinkpieces, around the time Killing Joke was turned into a film. I swear, some of them were so far removed from reality that I'm not even sure that they had ever read the original comic or even seen the fucking film....

Since then I've just started defended Moore's rape policy. I am 100% behind his rape policies. If anything he needs to include more rapes in his work.

>Alan Moore thread
>instantly goes to from 0 to rape
Happy birthday lad.

Happy Birthday Mister Moore, I finished Jerusalem a few weeks ago and it was one of the greatest experiences in reading I've ever had. Also From Hell is my favorite comic.

>polygamous
citation needed

It's also in both of his novels.
Jerusalem is about a huge number of things and jumps all over a gigantic universal timeline, but one of its most elaborate time-jumping plot threads is basically an extended set up for the chapter just before the epilogue where a woman is being brutally raped, but escapes when her rapist is deliberately distracted by a ghost. The rapist dies and his soul is taken to an ethereal tavern where (an earlier chapter implies) he will be face raped by other ghosts, possibly for all eternity.
I picked up his earlier Voice of the Fire recently, which also jumps around in time, and somewhere in the middle that's suddenly got a woman having a vision where she's a man being gang raped to death by Vikings.

>a woman is being brutally raped, but escapes when her rapist is deliberately distracted by a ghost. The rapist dies and his soul is taken to an ethereal tavern where (an earlier chapter implies) he will be face raped by other ghosts, possibly for all eternity

I have to read this

here's to another year of your refusal to die, you pompous limey
let's hope it's the last

Sorry I don't have the exact quote right now and I need to go to work, but I remember that I saw a link in a page where someone was reviewing another comic. Looking back then it's clearly obvious that he is a polygamous or tried to be, he has atleast two stories about "superior beings" that discover that the matrimony is a primitive concept and they try to explain it to their wives/partners (of course they have lovers), the superior beings are rejected by them in both stories.

Or better yet: The one time Alan Moore tried his hand at being a musical frontman:
youtube.com/watch?v=RE47r0ym25Q

Who?

Write more Top 10!

re: the rape stuff, he's talked about it in a few interviews. he says that he writes it because it's something that happens too often to ignore (at one point he wonders why nobody accuses him of being obsessed with murder since he writes that a lot too, as does nearly every other writer out there), and he dislikes the position of many writers and editors of simply not going there at all, as if rape didn't exist at all. and in the case of neonomicon, "sure, the rapist was a huge and horrible monster. but then again, isn't it always?"

I would, but I bet he hates birthdays.

Happy birthday big guy, hope you live at least another 10 years or so, so I can get you to read my work once I start writing comics, so you can shit on it. I'll try to get DC to let me write a Promethea series for years after you're dead btw, I know you would never be okay with anyone doing it, so I'll probably only attempt it after you're dead and say I'm trying to honour your legacy or some bullshit like that.

To be honest though, you had a good run man, I used to think you're just popular because plebs like your shit, but after reading your ABC stuff, I actually love you. You might be my third or fourth favourite writer, after Matt Wagner, Peter David, and maybe Paul Jenkins. And I still haven't read From Hell, Necronomicon or Extraordinary Gentlemen, so you might go even higher on that list mate.

Happy birthday you grumpy old fart!

How's top 10? I've only ever read his most famous works.

>he has atleast two stories about "superior beings" that discover that the matrimony is a primitive concept and they try to explain it to their wives/partners (of course they have lovers), the superior beings are rejected by them in both stories.

I remember this from Miracleman. Don't know what else it happens in though.

>How's top 10?
It's pretty good, first 2-3 issues are a bit slow and spends a lot of time just introducing you to the characters and the universe, but it gets better as it goes. The last 3-4 issues are top notch. Smax and 49'ers are both better than the main Top 10 title though. Top 10 is just getting you ready for the greatness of those two.

Miracleman comes to mind but that's a horse of a different color, they literally elevate the human race by using Miraclewoman as a baby farm (her idea) through artificial insemination.
Miracleman never cheats on his wife, she leaves him because she feels so inferior, to the point of describing their relationship as "bestiality"

Top 10 deserves to be one of his more famous ones, it's excellent.

is there moore reading list that doesn't contain overrated books? Sure watchmen is alright, but it's a bit overrated

Swamp Thing, Captain Britain and Miracleman stand up to anything done for ABC. Frankly the only pleb-loved Moore stuff is Watchmen and TKJ. Watchmen is THAT good imo. I don't really get how Moore got a pro pleb reputation.

One of his best. Ha absolutely kills the art. If you have the dosh get the absolute edition it's completely gorgeous.

Top 10
Supreme
Captain Britain
WildCATS
There's also an excellent collection of his odds and ends, single issues, annuals etc.

Future Shocks
D.R. and Quinch
Ballad of Halo Jones
A Small Killing
All of his ABC stuff
Supreme
From Hell

Happy birthday, you lovely old mane of hair.
My only regret is that we'll never see Halo Jones books 4-9.

>retcons your birthday

Watchmen lives up to the hype. ABC comics are incredible. From Hell is a fucking masterpiece. Providence is the best comic I've read in years (though admittedly I haven't been that much into comics since roughly 2012.) He's easy one of my favourite writers in comics.

His spoken-word performances are amazing, hypnotic and with wonderful writing, and that wonderful voice of his. Then there's this piece I love to bits:

youtube.com/watch?v=Os1jPX8v5BI

But my favourite thing Moore has done is his short story "A Hypothetical Lizard." There is a comic adaptation from Avatar Press, but if you can look up the short story online. It's clever, kinda disturbing, and ultimately heart breaking.

So cheers Alan. Thanks for all the joy and tears your work has brought me over the years.

His short stories are some of his best work actually

How about a quick one? Drawn by the late, great Steve Dillon and published in 2000AD progs 189-190, this is... "Final Solution"!

Happy birthday.

10/10 would get robbed by.

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>sure, the rapist was a huge and horrible monster. but then again, isn't it always?
That's a poor position to take, because it unbalances actual discussion of rape and rapists. Especially because the ever feared rape by some stranger, racially charged or not, is much less common than that by people you know and have a relationship with. Not to mention greyer areas of consent and when someone is not necessarily committing rape as a violent act of crime, but because they are ignorant of any other way to treat a sexual relationship, as rare a case as that may be for any extended period of time. I largely disagree with the idea of demonization and making monsters out of people for this reason in general, because it tends to fuck up actually being able to talk about why something might be wrong or dangerous and why people do it. Dehumanization gets us further from why people do things, not closer.

But on the topic of actual stories and not throwaway lines a crazy old wizard said that one time, there's other narrative considerations. Rape, or anything really, shouldn't be in a story just because "it's a real thing that happens." Lots of real things happen that don't work in every story. I haven't read all of Moore's works, a lot of them just don't gel with me. But I felt the rape in Watchmen worked a lot better in the narrative of it than it worked in League. Or Neonomicon. Neonomicon was pretty silly and a terrible pastiche of lovecraft born mostly from a surface understanding of modern pop culture permutations of it. League was better as an actual work, but I never thought too much of it beyond its concept. Rape's not exactly a throwaway subject in either, but I never felt it really served much purpose other than being a part of their shitty worlds.

Without it, League is just slightly less of a terrible place, and one that's hardly any more real with its fanciful nonsense and fist shaking at modern pop culture than any Superman comic.

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So funny story about Moore: legend says that when he submitted his first Future Shock to 2000AD, then sub-editor Alan Grant (or AALN-1) decided it was good, but too wordy. He decided to trim some of the fat off, which was one of the regular duties of editors back then, but realized he couldn't. Every balloon, sentence and word, down to their punctuation marks, was chosen way too carefully, to the point where changing even one of them risked destroying the script's effect. Grant then called Moore and told him the script was good but he'd only buy it if he could take a page off, IIRC. And Moore did trim it, and Grant did buy it.

Anywho, next year they're putting out a Case Files-style collection of Future Shocks, with all of them in chronological order, including all of Moore's. I'm not saying that'll be a superlative, inaluable tool to any and all aspiring writers, but only because it'd only be stating the obvious.

>Moore will never write for DC again
>Moore will never write New Gods

Life is suffering. Happy Birthday you old wizard

Happy Birthday Mr Moore.

One of my favourite Alan Moore stories:

>Before he became a full-time writer, Moore’s jobs included purveyor of LSD (for which he was expelled from school), slaughterhouse worker, and working for a gas board sub-contractor while the new town of Milton Keynes was being built. Four decades later, this year, he was doing a spoken performance in Milton Keynes, in which he riffed on an article in New Scientist which speculated that because we will soon have quantum supercomputers capable of holding more particles than there are in the entire universe, we will then be able to simulate an entire universe, including all the life forms in it, which will not know they are simulated.

>“And if we’re going to be able to do this,” says Moore, “the odds of this being the first time this has happened are vanishingly small. It is much more likely that we are in a simulation, of a simulation, of a simulation, and so on.”

>The programmer of the game, therefore, will be God. And if he is at all like the humans he has created, the article postulated, he will want to put an avatar of himself in the game.

>“Now he wouldn’t go for something really obvious, like President of the United States,” explains Moore. “Yet he still probably would want to make himself a special person. So what [the article] was saying is, the best thing to do is to suck up to celebrities because they might be God.”

>I interject that I’ve found my story headline: “‘Kim Kardashian is God,’ says Alan Moore!” But he has something better in mind.

>“Obviously,” he continues, “you wouldn’t want to suck up to just any celebrity. So what I said was, if I was you, people of Milton Keynes, I would go for a celebrity who sounded, and perhaps looked,” here he strokes his own huge grey beard meaningfully, “the way you might imagine the creator of the universe to look!

I haven't read Moore's Cap Britain yet (I read Claremont's and was gonna read Moore's but it slipped my mind and I'm only now realizing this), but I liked Tom Strong and Promethea more than Miracleman and Swamp Thing, though they were all pretty great. Watchmen and Killing Joke are Moore's weakest works and I seriously do not understand how they're the most popular ones.

>“But I said even that’s not enough, because that could have you worshipping pretty much any tramp; so I said, you have to ask yourself, does the person who I’m looking at appear to have physically created the environment around me? And I said, in your case, people of Milton Keynes…” He raises his eyebrows meaningfully, and gestures towards himself.

>“So, yeah,” he deadpans. “I am still worshipped as a God by the primitive and superstitious people of Milton Keynes.”
londonhollywood.wordpress.com/2016/09/22/if-you-read-only-one-alan-moore-jerusalem-interview-make-it-this-one/

Respect your fucking authorities, Mephisto.

I don't realy get how someone could find Watchmen weak. I can see how you're burned out on it's discussion but it's a ridiculously well made comic with a great plot, great characters and amazing art. It's a damn sight better than LEG, Tomorrow Stories and WildCATS. I think we frequently get into splitting hairs territory with Moore, but Watchmen shouldn't be in his lower tier.

Because Watchmen doesn't have issues upon issues of Dr Manhattan fighting aliens or Rorschach fighting Nazi women to hide two dimensional characters.

I never liked his Promethea. It had potential but was full of info dump.

Yea the art and story are good, but it gets pretty word.

can someone give me a quick rundown on this guy?

Happy birthday you mad bastard

Honestly, even Moore's early future shocks are pretty great. He was depressingly good from the start. Happy Birthday you horny old snake priest, you.

Do you have a link to the short story for "A Hypothetical Lizard"? I can't seem to find it. Every search just brings up the comic.

Watchmen, The professor Manhattan. He is married but he got a young lover and he don't understand what is wrong with that because he is superior.

Happy Birthday you wondrous weirdo.

No, that's not true, he cheats her during an scene that's because he don't want go with him because Miracleman claims that they have evolve and left behind the idea of the matrimony, now they believe in the free love and we can see a little girl four years old that is having (she is super mature because she is something like Miracleman) relationships with someone. Miracleman can't understand why her wife would deny this kind of life, a reflection of the same Moore because he favors the poligamy, surely his wife left him too.

Neil Gaiman loves Alan Moore.

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Sorry, but it's "Hooooooord", not "hooooooooork".
I don't like being predantic, but there are some things people should really take the care to get right

Not actually Alan Moore, but looks like him

something goes wrong with my brain, every time I look at that guy's head

>I seriously do not understand how they're the most popular ones
Superheroes

no

The main problem with Watchmen I have is that it feels like Moore had this great story to tell, but he wasn't allowed to tell it in the way he wanted to tell it, and he just had to give in and tell it the way editorial would let him do. It's apparent, at least to me, that Moore had to cram his story into 12 issues when he wanted more, most probably because editorial didn't think an ongoing with "parody-characters" wouldn't sell enough to have it going 40+ issues. My guess is that Moore was planning to tell the complete history of the characters, in a non-linear ongoing series, where each issue would have 3-4 different stories it focused on from different points in time starring different characters. Sorta like how Tom Strong issues are structured. The fact that each issue had additional prose material that he used to expand the story is evidence of this too, he already had a shit ton of stories from the past of these characters that he wanted to tell slowly, but he couldn't so he found additional ways to do it. And from the way most scenes are set, you can clearly see that some scenes had to get shortened or compressed to fit, even though the pacing of it would've worked a lot better in a completely different page division and layout. Even the way the last 2-3 issues are so much more fucking decompressed and focused on one thing, are indications that the issues before weren't made the way Moore had wanted deep down. The pacing and compression of the story changes erratically not only from issue to issue but even in the same issue, between the story parts it focuses on. (Continuation to this explanation coming, couldn't fit it in one post.)

Moore is a master at telling more and more of a certain story with less art and narration done, thanks to the way he can make both not only accompany eachother but also help strengthen one another. His comics can be read a lot faster than those of people like O'neill or Wein, but not Watchmen, because he had to compress it a lot more than what he was comfortable with. Aside from the last few, every issue of Watchmen feels like 3-4 issues crammed up into one, even how much dialogue and narration there are on every panel, speaks to this. Also the strict use of the super tight nine panel grid, feels a lot unlike Moore at first when compared to his unusual page layouts where he sometimes even just puts in decorative stuff on the pages just to keep the pacing of it better. Moore has no other work where a 9 panel page has more bubbles than 3 times the panel number. To tell the story he wanted to, he had to let go of a lot of aesthetic choices he would've made. In his other work, he usually keeps the art fluid, it flows with his writing, but not in watchmen. In watchmen it feels like every piece of writing there is, was supposed to be accompanied by a lot more art than what we're getting in that one panel.

Tom Strong is cooler than Batman
thank you Mr Moore and happy birthday

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Amazing.
Sauce?

I think you're absolutely wrong, on a LOT of points. The choice of the nine panel format is too rigid to not be conscious, and the story is too tightly spun to give any indication of more. Obviously, editorial meddled because it's what editorial does (literally), but I think he told the story he wanted to tell.

Happy Birthday, Mr.Moore, here's to many more.

>It's apparent, at least to me, that Moore had to cram his story into 12 issues when he wanted more
Given the theme, the 12 issues to me are representative of the 12 hours on the clock not 24 hours in the day, the hours on the face of a clock.. Something Johns is even attempting to imitate just to show.
>The fact that each issue had additional prose material that he used to expand the story is evidence of this too
Not necessarily, that back material was just part of the framework for the characters, there's a similar sort of thing done in Supreme where we're informed there's mounds of stories to tell about each person and period, but only a few are mentioned and shown for the sake of their context to present matters.
Moore just has a very robust imagination he will illustrate a portion of if pertinent, but I doubt even he intends to sprawl out the entirety of everything he imagines about a character. It would serve little.

Besides a prime example where it would be a disservice is with Veidt, hearing his side of things in summary, ambiguity and his perspective makes it all the more mysterious even as he's detailing the case, like whether his animosity with the Comedian was purely coincidental as he tries to present it or whether the vendetta was brewed from clashing egos. If Moore showed us every element it would lose its effect, throughout Watchmen he even at times pointedly has panels repeating events from the same or similar angle but different context instead of constantly introducing entirely new information, so it's clear he had a tight direction planned for how much the reader should be shown.

>Robbed by reception
That's some welcome!

i know it's moore's birthday but reminder 50% of Watchmen's greatness is Gibbons

never read moore's stuff. what's a good place to start?

>I see weedy, puny, helpless robot innocent bystanders! Ha, ha, ha! It's brilliant!
The absolute mad man!

>18th of November
Is Alan Moore really Mickey Mouse?

Alan Moore is truly a genius.

Someone needs to put him DOWN. He's been around for FAR too long.

>Protip: Fire, bullets, clubs, poison, strangulation, drowning, and knives all have no effect on him.

You fucking idiot, that's Weird Al.

Fish rape is so far out it's hilarious. The Providence body swap is just intensely disturbing and endlessly depressing.

Watchman

Future shocks and his comics for DC are really good.