Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman by The Life and Work of Alan Moore. If you are a fan of comic books, chances are you have heard the name of Alan Moore. His graphic novel (drawn by artist David Gibbons) is widely hailed as one of the greatest comic stories ever written, and is credited along with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns for reinventing comic books in the 1980’s. If you are an avid moviegoer, many of Moore’s works will be familiar to you, even if you do not realize it. In recent years a number of Moore’s works have been adapted to the big screen, most recently for Vendetta . Prior to that movies such as , and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have all been inspired by Moore’s comics. Moore himself has been less than pleased with film adaptations of his work. After The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell came out, Alan Moore declared that he no longer wished to have his name associated with films based on his writing. No work copyrighted solely to him would be available for film adaptations. Works in which copyright was shared (primarily with the artists), Moore would take neither credit nor payment for the work. This arrangement was used successfully with Constantine , although there was some legal difficulty with the most recent picture, . Moore’s Early Life and Work. Alan Moore was born to a working class family in Northhampton, England, on November 18, 1953. His father, Ernest Moore was a brewery worker and his mother, Sylvia Doreen was a printer. Moore continues to live in Northhampton to this day. In 1971 Moore was expelled from a conservative secondary school. Unaccepted by any other school, he suddenly found himself alone, unemployed with an incomplete education and little to no job qualifications. Moore began working on a magazine called Embryo with some of his friends. In 1974 he married his wife, Phyllis Moore. The couple have two children, Amber and Leah. Leah and her husband, , are currently working with Moore on a comic series known as . By 1979 Moore found himself working as a cartoonist for a music magazine called Sounds. Although he would try drawing for a few years, Moore ultimately decided that he lacked great artistic ability and the rest of his career would concentrate solely on the writing of comic books. In the early 1980’s Moore worked on a number of titles, including Doctor Who Weekly , 2000 A.D. , and the British magazine Warrior . It was for Warrior that Moore began two of his most important early works, Marvelman (also known as ) and V for Vendetta . Alan Moore and American Comic Books. Moore’s work for Warrior caught the attention of American publishers, particularly DC Comics. They invited him to write for their lackluster title The Saga of the . Moore reinvented the character and made Swamp Thing one of DC’s most popular characters. This increased popularity would ultimately lead Swamp Thing to appear in his own set of comic book movies later in the 1980’s. Besides Moore’s work on Saga of the Swamp Thing , he wrote one other exceedingly important work for the company. This was Watchmen , his grim and gritty tale of superheroes overcome by the effects of politics in a McCarthyist Cold War era America. Along with Frank Miller’s similarly dark and realistic The Dark Knight Returns , Watchmen is credited with completely remaking the world of comic books. Unlike Saga of the Swamp Thing , the characters in Watchmen were Moore’s own. Moore became upset over the fact that copyright of the work and the characters belonged to DC Comics and not himself. Copyright of Watchmen remains in the hands of DC Comics until the day that it goes out of print, at which time ownership will pass to Alan Moore and , the artist. In over 20 years Watchmen has not once gone out of print. It is one of the most popular comic titles of all time. By the end of the 80’s, Moore was tired of DC Comics and their rights over his work. He was also upset that he was not receiving the royalties he thought he deserved for the work, and decided to leave both DC and mainstream comics. He began working on his own line of independent comic books. Eventually he began working with . Image was started by a number of artists at Marvel Comics, who like Moore were upset by their lack of artistic ownership of their work. While the founders of Image were some of the best artists of the day, many of them lacked in the writing field. The most popular titles to come from Image were and Savage Dragon , the only two of the original Image titles to remain in print to this day. Alan Moore wrote a number of stories for Spawn. He also took the reins of , created by artist Rob Liefield. Moore completely recreated the character, and used the knockoff to give his own nostalgic vision of superheroes in their days. America’s Best Comics. Alan Moore’s most recent work has been published under his own line of comics known as America’s Best Comics (ABC). Begun in the late 1990’s the line brought Moore back into the limelight with some of his most popular and critically hailed work. Titles in the America’s Best Comics line included , The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (turned into the failed film of the same name), , Tomorrow Stories and . Promethea in particular has been widely praised by critics and has won numerous Eisner awards. Although originally penned solely by himself, Moore has brought other writers into the ABC line. (no relation to Alan and a friend of Alan’s in his early years as writer and artist) writes for the anthology series Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales . Alan Moore’s daughter, Leah Moore writes for Albion , a work plotted by Alan Moore. Alan Moore and Film. To this day Moore refuses to have anything to do with any film based on his works. Recently he was engaged in a legal battle over promotion for the film version of V for Vendetta . Producer Joel Silver stated that Moore had talked with the director of the film and said he was very excited about the project, Moore claims he said nothing of the sort and told the director that he wanted nothing to do with the film. Moore asked for a retraction of the statement, which he never received. To date the majority of films based on Moore’s work have not proven to be blockbusters, although some have had their own popularity. The most infamous Moore film is the movie adaptation of Watchmen , which is yet to be made. Talks of creating a movie version have been in the works for years, however no one has ever yet succeeded in bringing the work to the big screen. Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman. Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman is a tribute to comics creator Alan Moore edited by Gary Spencer Millidge and Smoky Man and published by Abiogenesis Press in May 2003. Published to raise awareness and funds for charity, its first printing swiftly sold out, with a second, "corrected" published in November 2003. It was co-published with Black Velvet Editrice of Italy and raised over $36,000 for Alzheimer's charities. As of January, 2007, Abiogenesis Press declared the second printing sold out also, with no plans for a further English printing. [1] Contents. Contents. It contains acknowledgments, academic essays, cartoons and reminiscences by 145 artists and writers. (A complete list can be found on Millidge's website. [2] ) A 12-page comics biography (a "biographic") of Moore by Millidge. A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen drawing by Adam Hughes "Hungry is the Heart" (with Dame Darcy) An interview with Moore conducted by Omar Martini 's reminiscences about his collaborations and fallout with Moore "Correspondence: From Hell" (from Cerebus #217-220) Publication. Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman , by Gary Spencer Millidge and Smoky Man (ed.s), 352pp (Abiogenesis, Dec 2003) ISBN 978-0-946790-06-7. Awards. The book was nominated for the 2003 Bram Stoker Award for Best Non-Fiction. Alan Moore's Hypothetical Lizard. Alan Moore's Hypothetical Lizard is a comic book adaptation of the World Fantasy Award-winning short story "A Hypothetical Lizard", written in 1988 by Alan Moore for the third volume of the Liavek shared world fantasy series. The story was later reprinted in "Words Without Pictures", a 1990 book of prose stories by comics writers edited by Steve Niles, but then went out of print. [ 1 ] In 2004 Avatar Press published the first issue of Alan Moore's Hypothetical Lizard as a comic book adapted by writer Antony Johnston. [ 2 ] The story describes the life of Som-Som , a prostitute in the House Without Clocks - a brothel designed to service rare and exotic tastes. Som- Som has undergone a corpus callosotomy, severing the connection between the two hemispheres of her brain; this, in conjunction with the porcelain mask attached to the right half of her face, and the thick glove on her right hand, destroys the connections between her thoughts and actions. Therefore, she can see and hear, but not speak of or act on, any secrets her wizard clientele may inadvertently reveal in the throes of passion. [ 1 ] Consequently, Som-Som can only watch as her transsexual friend Rawra Chin is slowly destroyed by an abusive relationship. References. Leah Moore John Reppion. Maxwell the Magic Cat Marvelman V for Vendetta Warpsmith The Bojeffries Saga The Ballad of Halo Jones (including Jaspers' Warp ) Doctor Who (including ) D.R. and Quinch Future Shocks. Swamp Thing Watchmen : The Killing Joke "For the Man Who Has Everything" Twilight of the Superheroes V for Vendetta "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore. 1963 Glory Judgment Day Spawn WildC.A.T.S. Spawn/WildC.A.T.S. Supreme . The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen America's Best Promethea Tom Strong Terra Obscura Tomorrow Stories Top Ten Top 10: The Forty- Niners . Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths Neonomicon Fashion Beast. A Small Killing From Hell Lost Girls Dodgem Logic Albion. Alan Moore's Songbook Another Suburban Romance Alan Moore's The Courtyard A Disease of Language Alan Moore's Hypothetical Lizard Alan Moore's Magic Words. Voice of the Fire Alan Moore's Writing for Comics The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. "March of the Sinister Ducks" The Birth Caul The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels Brought to Light Snakes and Ladders The Highbury Working. Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman The Mindscape of Alan Moore The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore "Husbands and Knives" ( The Simpsons episode) Science hero. Help improve this article. About Us Privacy Policy Contact Us. Copyright © World Library Foundation. All rights reserved. eBooks from Project Gutenberg are sponsored by the World Library Foundation, a 501c(4) Member's Support Non-Profit Organization, and is NOT affiliated with any governmental agency or department. Tor.com. Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects. The Great Alan Moore Reread. The Great Alan Moore Reread: Albion. Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve months more than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 62 nd installment. Originally, I had planned to do two weeks of Lost Girls, until I reread Lost Girls and realized that I wasn’t interested in writing about it for two weeks in a row, even if I did allow myself to hit the thesaurus and use lots of synonyms for tedious and pornography. So, instead of that, I have listened to the cries of the Tor.com readership and reached back into the Wildstorm vaults for an Alan Moore-related comic book series from 2005-2006. I’m talking about Albion , a six-issue series in which Alan Moore partnered with Leah Moore (total relation) and her husband John Reppion to tell a Watchmen -esque tale of British comic book heroes in modern day decline. Only, it’s not really like Watchmen at all, once you get past the nine- panel grid on the opening page of Albion #1, and it’s about the rebirth, not the decline, of some of the great British comic book characters of… well…somebody’s youth. Probably not yours. Definitely not mine. Reportedly, the project was mostly motivated by artist Shane Oakley’s interest in reviving the old British characters, as Leah Moore (who is Alan Moore’s daughter, by the way) describes in a 2006 interview with Forbidden Planet: “Shane has such a passion for the comics and the characters. He really got us all excited about it from the start. We certainly wouldn’t have been able put so much into it if he hadn’t given it such a lot of momentum at the outset.” And that was around the time that Leah’s father had begun to distance himself from Wildstorm and DC Comics, getting ready to move The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to Top Shelf and wrapping up his prior commitments. And like the entire genesis of America’s Best Comics, the Albion project was partially motivated by Alan Moore’s desire to ensure that his artistic collaborators didn’t lose out on work that was (even unofficially) promised to them: “We got involved,” says Leah, “simply because Dad was winding up his comic writing, fulfilling all his obligations at ABC etc, and he still wanted Shane to be able to have a crack at the characters. He figured that if he plotted it and we scripted it then it would be the best for everyone.” Here it is, then, the Shane Oakley-inspired, Alan Moore-plotted tale of British children’s comics characters confronting the harsh realities of the 21 st century. Here we have… Albion . Albion #1-6 (Wildstorm/DC Comics, Aug. 2005-Nov. 2006) Albion really is nothing like Watchmen , and it was unfair of me even to mention Moore’s most famous work in the same context of this project, but when Albion was announced, I remember that the general marketing approach was meant to imply that Moore was doing something Watchmen -like with these old, forgotten British characters, even if that’s not what he (or Leah Moore or John Reppion or Shane Oakley) ended up doing at all. Still, that first issue cover has a dismantled right there in the center, and it’s drawn by Watchmen ’s own Dave Gibbons, and it has that austere black border, and…come on! Wildstorm was so obviously trying to say, “hey, kids, this here comic is like Watchmen , and Alan Moore sort of wrote parts of it, kind of.” But after the cover and the initial moments of the first issue, which did have that nine-panel grid on just the opening page, Albion establishes itself as something different. Shane Oakley is not at all like Dave Gibbons, and Leah Moore and John Reppion, even with Alan Moore’s structure underlying their work, are nothing like their dear old dad. I don’t know exactly what it means that this series was plotted by Moore, but based on other Moore plots I have seen—which are usually either lists of events next to page numbers or thumbnail panel-by-panel drawings—I suspect that Albion was not a meticulously designed project hammered out on Moore’s typewriter, then given a sheen of dialogue by his daughter and son-in-law, particularly when Leah Moore says, “The plot is quite elastic, so we can pretty much throw in who we want within reason, and also Shane has been quite busy filling the backgrounds with people who might in a certain light be a character you remember well.” It seems, then, that what Alan Moore provided the project was his name and a general structure of larger events that should occur, while the rest of the creative team filled in the actual storytelling and characterizations. That may seem obvious. Moore was, after all, credited with just the plot, but he’s the first credit on the cover of each issue, which makes him appear to play a significant role, when it looks like what he did was little more than provide some basic ideas and maybe an outline of a scene or two. Maybe even not that much. Even for a structuralist like Moore, the plot is not what matters most. Imagine Watchmen with the same basic plot found in that series— retired superheroes start getting murdered and the remaining heroes uncover a mysterious conspiracy that puts the entire world in jeopardy —done by a dozen other comic book writers. It’s not too dissimilar to what we have already with Before Watchmen , I suppose, and that shows how everything that matters is in the how of the telling, not in what is being told. So Albion is barely an Alan Moore comic, by any standard that means anything, but its premise isn’t necessarily an uninteresting one. It’s an exploration of the forgotten heroes (and villains) of British comics, and it takes that idea and literalizes it. These characters have been forgotten by the world, but why? And what has happened to them? Our guides through this strange world of forgotten heroes that few of us outside of middle-aged British readers would recognize anyway comes in the form of the precocious Penny and the, um, relatively dull Danny. Penny is the daughter of Eric Dolmann, who you may remember from “The House of Dolmann” a comic that ran in from 1966 to 1973. But let’s be honest, you’re not likely to remember that, or have ever heard of it, which is fine. Albion still makes sense without knowing all of these British comics that Moore and Moore and Reppion and Oakley are so eager to resurrect. And the guy’s name is Dolmann, so you can probably guess that he was a kind of “doll man,” but not a miniature Chucky kind of knife-wielding crazed type, more of a toy man who had an army of animatronics his daughter inherited. Yes, this may have been the inspiration for Top 10 ’s Robin “Toybox” Slinger, now that I think about it. But it doesn’t help to think about Top 10 when you’re reading Albion , because Top 10 is overstuffed with engaging characters and thrilling events and odd occurrences and Albion is really not. It’s mostly just a whole lot of this: oh, these forgotten British characters are all locked up in an asylum because the government couldn’t handle their weirdness, and so Penny and Danny—who is really just a straight man for Penny, and a guy who gets to ask questions that leads to exposition from whomever they meet—try to find out where they all are and then bad stuff happens and the story is kind of derailed when each British comic book character of the past needs to do something that shows off who they once were even though it’s basically impossible to care because it’s all a mess of angular artwork and chiseled shadows and statements like “$%& off, you wanker” and “How ‘bout I smack you in your ugly mouth, Dr. Spock?” It’s not all bad, though. The Spider, the “King of Crooks” gets a few moments where he’s shown to be immensely threatening like a coiled cobra with a plan. And Charlie Peace, time-travelling Victorian man-of-ill-gotten-gains gets to be all gruff and unlikeable before he reveals his true identity and then is the gruff but cool master of telling it like it is. And I suppose if you really did grow up with these characters, there’s an extra dimension that I can’t appreciate at all because I have absolutely no nostalgia for anyone on any of the pages of this comic book. They might as well all be brand new characters as far as I’m concerned. (Except for Robot Archie, who played a pivotal role in Grant Morrison’s Zenith epic from 1980s 2000 A.D. magazine and thus has a place in my heart forever.) So this sort-of Alan Moore comic gains nothing by his near-absence, and even if there is a kernel of a decent story beneath its ham-fisted dialogue and cameos-that-appeal-to-a-tiny-segment-of-the-readership, it’s just not a very good comic overall. As a final thought, let me explain the central problem of Albion as symbolized by that now-tired cliché of the flashback scenes drawn in the style of the old comics from which the characters originated: it doesn’t even commit to that approach. Albion dips its toes in pastiche a few times, but it pulls back too quickly, rushing on to other, louder matters. Instead of embracing what it is—a superhero mystery story wallowing in cheap nostalgia—it tries to cram in more characters and more conflicts that don’t matter one bit in the end. It’s cluttered and unpleasant and whatever Alan Moore provided underneath its shell is lost under the veneer of trying-really-hard-and-failing. That’s Albion , and if you’re doing your play-at-home-version of The Great Alan Moore Reread you can feel free to skip it entirely and not feel the least bit guilty. Unless you are a 52-year-old British reader who likes sloppy, choppy versions of other, better comics, in which case, Albion might be just about perfect. NEXT TIME : In Cthulhu we trust, or so says Alan Moore in Neonomicon . Leah Moore. Leah Moore (born 4 February 1978) is an English comic book writer. She is the daughter of Alan Moore and Phyllis Moore, and is married to John Reppion. She has worked with both Alan and John on the comic Albion . She has also written for other comics and publications including Tom Strong and The End Is Nigh . Leah and John have co-writing credits on Wild Girl , a six-part limited series for WildStorm. In 2006 they signed an initial twelve issue contract with , [1] for whom they produced an intercompany crossover with artist Stephen Segovia, Witchblade : "Shades of Gray", co-published with Top Cow, [2] amongst other things. The duo also contributed to Dark Horse's The Dark Horse Book of Monsters , the first issue of Th3rd World Studios' Space Doubles . [3] [4] and Tori Amos' Comic Book Tattoo (with artist Pia Guerra) amongst others.