Some social media fun

A couple of fun little things popped up on social media that were worth posting about. First up, Peter Hogan, the Tom Strong writer and friend of Alan Moore, shared a bit on Moore's love of silver age Superman:

Next up, Rick Veitch shared this inked and lettered piece from his Supreme run:

Seriously, Supreme saw three greats at the top of their games: Moore, Veitch and letterer Todd Klein!

Happy AlanMooreVember!

On the art communities on Twitter and other social media networks, there will be month-long challenges with art prompts. Inktober is a big one. This month, an artist has launched a new one: AlanMooreVember!

Here are the art prompts:

There's already bee a lot of fun images, but I wanted to share ones from the prompt of Squeak the Supremouse:

You can check out this post here: https://twitter.com/JeauxJ/status/1457242851020980224 or follow along by searching for the #AlanMooreVember hashtag on Twitter.

 He also pointed me to more of them on Instagram, here: https://www.instagram.com/alanmoorevember/

 

This one is by jayradd123

And this one is by gregory_c_giordano_art (I love the idea of Squeak giving a Playboy interview!).

Rob Liefeld podcasts about Alan Moore's feuds

For the past year or so, Rob Liefeld has been doing a podcast called Robservations. In the most recent episode, Rob discusses Alan Moore's feuds, mostly with DC Comics over Watchmen and ABC.

For the most part, his observations are taken from things he read on the internet and often incomplete stories. But occasionally, he'll talk about his own experiences, which is when the podcast gets interesting.

For this blog, I try to keep things on the topic of Supreme and Awesome, which Rob brought up a number of times:

• Rob talked about Moore coming to work on Violator vs. Badrock (Rob was as shocked as the rest of us when Moore agreed to that one!). 
• He also talked about how Moore demanded to be paid when he turned in a script, by turning in vouchers, and that it wasn't uncommon for Rob to pay out $20,000; $40,000 or $60,000 at a time. (at about 37:55)
• He reiterated that Moore offered up Steve Moore as the continuing writer for Supreme while Alan Moore worked on his ABC line. 
• Rob said there was no truth to rumors that he was shopping Awesome to DC as his funding was drying up (at about 47:38)
  
• The most interesting part for me (even if it doesn't have much to do with Awesome) was when Liefeld said that Jim Lee had invested too much money in his Gen13 film and as a consequence had to sell Wildstorm to DC.

There's not much new here, but Liefeld is a good storyteller. But fair warning, it's advisable not to take everything as pure fact.

Moore's plan for Supreme to meet Miracleman

Rick Veitch has talked about Moore's plan for what a third year for Supreme would have been about. On this page, I said:

Rick Veitch and others have talked about Moore's plans for a third year, with the idea of Supreme exploring inside the supremium meteor. One rumor I heard, which Veitch confirmed, suggested that Supreme would have run into other superman figures from comicdom, perhaps like Moore's own version of Marvelman, etc.

A nice anonymous poster mentioned that Moore spoke about is directly himself.

Moore briefly mentioned in an interview in Kimota! The Miracleman Companion (on page 23), when he was asked if he had any other ideas for Miracleman after #16. He said:

"I did have a vague idea that at one point, I remember talking to Rick Veitch: "Wouldn't it be cool if we maybe did a run of SUPREME where Supreme decides to journey to the absolute limits of reality?" Not just to the end of the universe but the limits of reality to try and find out about the nature of this strange form of reality that his universe existed with these constant revisions and the existence of Supremacy and things like that. And I got some mad idea--I don't know how I would have tied it in--that wouldn't it be cool if Supreme reached some place at the end of the universe and went into this room and there was Miracleman and maybe Rick Veitch's Maximortal and two or three other kinda clones of existing super-heroes, all trying to find the answer to the same problem, "Where are we? What are we?" That was the last time that I actually thought maybe it would be fun to have Miracleman turn up in a story. But that's never going to happen."

As an added bonus, Kimota featured a Miracleman commission by artist Supreme Chris Sprouse, to help you imagine the crossover idea:

So, no, it's never going to happen, but it is a fun idea. And if there's a message to Supreme, it's that anything that can be imagined exists in Idea Space. So keep imagining!
 

The "fixed" Checker trade paperback

Hey everyone. It's been some time since I posted. I'll still post whenever I have anything to talk about, but there's not much new to say. Currently, I've started a Facebook group and we're working to annotate the later issues of Supreme. If you'd like to help, let me know and I'll send you an invite to the group.

Anyway, let's talk Checker today. 

After Awesome published Supreme: The Return #6 and it was clear there weren't going to be any more issues coming out, Liefeld sold the reprint rights to a group called Checker, which handled old newspaper reprints. I talked about it at length, here.

The reprints were terrible, especially for Story of the Year. They scanned actual comics and did very little cleanup. As Chris Sprouse said, you could see the words from the other side of the page in their scans.

Checker apologized and said they would fix the problems when they published The Return TPB and ran off a new version of Story of the Year. 

I never followed up to compare the two until a friend explained how to spot the differences. Here are some ways to spot the differences:

 

On the left is the original 2002 reprint and on the right is the fixed 2003 version. 

 

The spine is the easiest way to tell the difference. The old Checker logo is on the left and the newer one is on the right. 

 

Notice that Checker had decided to highlight Chris Sprouse over  Joe Bennett from the old one to the new one, despite Bennett doing a lot more work on the stories in this book. In between the two, Tom Strong had become a hit and Checker wanted to emphasize that the Moore and Sprouse team had started on Supreme.

 

 

The back has a few other clues about which is which. Left is the older one and the newer one is at right.

 

 

 

On the older one, Checker had Swamp Thing coming out from Marvel. 

 

 

 

They fixed Swamp Thing for the newer one.

 

 

Joe Bennett got a bio on the back of the old one.

 

 

Bennett was replaced by Sprouse on the new one.

 

 

The older one was printed in Korea.

 

 

The newer one was printed in China.

 

 

 

It might be hard to tell from these images but the art is lighter and has more scanning fragments in the older ones (left). The blacks are deeper and the colors brighter in the newer one (right).

 

 

Older version with more fragments.

 

 

Newer version that is darker and cleaner.

 

 

Old at left. New at right.

 

 

You can see the words coming through the old one.

 

 

You can still see the words in the new one, but it is cleaner and less obvious. It might also be the thin paper.

 

 

The ending is a little different. The old one has an ad for a Clive Barker book.

 

 

The new one has an ad for Checker's Supreme: The Return trade.

 

Frankly, you're better off getting the floppies, as they're still the best version of Supreme out there. But if you're going to get a trade of Story of the Year, look for the newer one.

 

Halo Jones in color

In 2018, 2000AD put out colored versions of Halo Jones books 1, 2 and 3. I quite liked it in color, but as there still hasn't been a plan to put them out in a single volume, I made my own:

New In Pictopia edition available

A new (if overpriced) version of In Pictopia is coming out soon. 

This legendary short story (the comic is only 13 pages) saw Moore mixing characters from all kinds of genres of comics in an apocalyptic take on how superheroes (the grim and gritty kind) were shoving other, more interesting comics out of the market. Unfortunately, it seems Moore has taken his name off this book, too. 

 If you've never read it, you can read it here (https://forgottenawesome.blogspot.com/.../in-pictopia.html) or pre-order the book below: https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/in-pictopia

Supreme, Outbreaks of Violets and Bon Jovi

Okay, today I'm putting on my tinfoil hat and making some wild connections. Want to come along for the ride?

In the early 1990s, Alan Moore had been doing personal and creative work far from the mainstream, including From Hell, Lost Girls, A Small Killing, his spoken word pieces, and Outbreaks of Violets. 

 

Outbreaks of Violets was created for the 1995 MTv Europe Music Awards, which decided to theme their awards around the concept of comics. They approached him about doing something along the theme, "Random acts of kindness." He wrote a storyline for 24 postcards and the producers found 24 renowned European artists and cartoonists to bring each one to life.

The work plays off our cynical expectations about the world and shows us how doing things a little different could have produced the best world. It's funny and wonderful.

In 1995, Moore was doing work on Spawn to raise funds, since his personal and creative work didn't pay very well. Spawn led to WildCATS and in 1996 to Supreme. Sometime in late 1996 or, more likely 1997, Moore wrote the script for Supreme #56, which featured the Ivory Icon's roster of rogues escaping his Hell of Mirrors and messing about in our world. The Televillain invades the Friends TV show. Korgo knocks out Bill Clinton and takes over the presidency with Hillary Clinton, and Optilux goes to a Bon Jovi concert and turns a few hundred audience members into light beings.

"Optilux has transformed about 200 members of a Bon Jovi audience into coherent light," Moore said in an interview. "Then he's captured them in the prism-world of Amalynth, and nobody cares."

 

It always struck me as odd that Moore chose Bon Jovi. Bon Jovi wasn't very popular in America at the time and seemed an odd fit with the Friends show, which was one of the top rated shows on TV. Looking at the band's Wikipedia page, their 1995 album "These Days" is described as "
a bigger success in Europe than in the United States." It wouldn't be until 2000 when they released the single "It's My Life" that Bon Jovi would see an upswing in popularity.

Maybe that's the joke and why no one cared in Supreme. But here's my tinfoil hat connection.

At that 1995 MTv Europe awards, Bon Jovi won "best rock" band over much more popular (in the U.S.) bands, such as Green Day, Oasis and Offspring. You can see them winning in this Youtube clip:

If you look closely at about 1:10, you'll see several copies of Alan Moore's Outbreaks of Violets on the floor (Thanks Flavio for pointing out this video). So maybe Moore was influenced by the awards to think Bon Jovi were more popular than they were at the time and decided to include them in Supreme? Maybe this was his way of paying them back for leaving his comic on the floor in that video clip? Maybe I'm making something out of nothing? (Yes, most likely that last one.) But I thought it a fun connection.

Apocalypse Then: The Gen 13 annual script

Hey everyone, I have something special for you today. I've read Alan Moore's unfinished script for the Gen 13 annual a couple of times and wanted to talk about it in depth.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, here are the background details. In the beginning of 1998, Alan Moore was writing Supreme, Youngblood and Glory for Awesome (and had written proposals for a couple other series). One of Rob Liefeld's investors in Awesome suddenly pulled out of the company and it was quickly out of funding. Liefeld laid everyone off and Alan Moore was suddenly looking for work.

The conventional wisdom had been that he was hired to do ABC for Jim Lee's Wildstorm and Moore jumped right into it. But Scott Dunbier, the editor at Wildstorm at the time, recently posted on his social media account that Moore was hired first to do an annual for the teenage-superhero comic, Gen 13. 

 

This is everyone's idea of an Alan Moore comic, right?

Moore wrote it for several artists, including Jim Lee and Travis Charest. For some reason, he only got through 28 of the 48 pages of the script and it was never finished.

Fast forward to present time and Scott auctioned off what was likely the only copy of the script for charity. 

 

Brian K. Vaughan bought the script and gave a scan of the script to anyone who donated to the charity.

The details for donating are here. I'd ask you to donate before reading on.

I can wait.

La de dah

What?

You donated already?

Okay then.

If you haven't read the script, its a pastiche of teenage superheroes from comics history. The Gen 13 kids are sitting around when a package shows up that is pretty obviously an alien comic book. When The teens touch it, they get sucked into the comic.

 

The first part, intended for Jim Lee to illustrate, was a take on the classic Lee/Kirby X-Men. The Gen 13 teens take the place of the classic members of the X-Men and become the "Gen Men." They complain about being persecuted by normal people who don't understand them. They're plagued by a villain with the power of "animal magnetism." A group of giant robots called the "Juvenihillators" come to exterminate them. It's funny and cheeky in the best way.

But then the teens get sucked into a second situation. This one was a send-up of the "late eighties-early nineties superhero armageddon." I'll talk more about this one in a minute.

For the third and final pastiche, the teens take over the place of a Marv Wolfman/George Perez Teen Titans type of team called "Thirteen Titans." The teens fight off a group of alien women while coming to terms with their teenage emotions. It's very funny stuff. But then it ends with no conclusion.

Eventually an alien called The Collector was supposed to come along and I assume the Gen 13 teens were supposed to break free of this cosmic comic and everything would be fine. In a silly way, I hope Moore was planning on doing a pastiche of Rob Liefeld's Youngblood.

The srcipt feels very similar to what Moore was doing with Youngblood at the time. If you consider the many different alternate timeline versions of the Youngblood characters in issue 6, where they represent the 1960s, a post-apocalyptic 1980s and a utopian future, you can see that the style and tone are similar. This annual feels more tongue-in-cheek, though, perhaps because Moore wasn't trying to build the series along, as he was with Youngblood.

And that would be that. A trifle that Moore did before moving on to ABC and doing much better work. But there's more to this script, at least from my perspective. So, let's dig into that second part.

He titled this section, "Another Doomsday, Another Dollar" for reasons that will become obvious.

Moore wrote that the section was recreating well-know dark futures, "whether we're talking about Watchmen, Dark Knight, recent Marvel series like 'Ruins' or recent D.C. series like 'Kingdom Come.'" But the twist was that the apocalypse was one that had destroyed the comic industry, or as Moore puts it in the script, "the rubble of comic book culture."

 

In the first splash page, the characters Burnout and Freefall find themselves in a destroyed city with the remnants of the Daily Planet building, the Fantastic Four's Baxter Building and other notable landmarks. In the rubble are Captain America's shield, Superman's cape, Grifter's mask and a smashed Bat-Signal.

In the dialogue on that page, Moore had Burnout say, "Our UNIVERSE and whatever unimaginable industry SUSTAINS it seem to be COLLAPSING into a state of continual APOCALYPSE. It's like ARMAGEDDON is all we have LEFT!"

The two characters find it ironic that they're the ones who survived. As Burnout says, "I guess we were the YOUNGEST, last of our generation before the days of the GREAT CANCELLATION descended upon us."

They set off on a quest to try to reverse this plight. There's a legend of a secret society called "The Plot" with a machine that can handle any eventuality. But to get there, they need to get through the "Bankrupt Zone" and the "Mountains of Sale."

The Bankrupt Zone finds them climbing over "the logos and mastheads of vanished comic book companies," such as Valiant Comics. And then Moore suggests including the Eclipse logo in there, too.

"It's a wasteland where the survivors snipe at each other," Burnout says.

Grunge turns up, but his name is now Grudge and he appears to be made of junk. He says that in order to protect "the whole business" he absorbed the criticism and the losses. But it was too much and now he's going to absorb Burnout and Freefall into the junkyard, too.

They manage to escape, but find themselves in the "Valley of abandoned ploys." It's a desert filled with "strange and twinkling green spectres" as it is filled with prismatic chrome foil and holograms of "generic super-hero type figures" and other early 1990s cover enhancements.

"I hope we don't meet any marauding multiple variants..." Freefall says. 

And then they run into Fairchild, who is completely nude. "I became Barechild during the nudity fad...mostly it's quiet, although you still get the occasional smut-glutton sniffing around..." she says.

Then two "mutated fanboys, grown to enormous size" with a checklist and an Overstreet Guide look Barechild over. "They're a couple of the last remaining rogue SPECULATORS!" she yells.

Freefall and Burnout escape to a mountain of avant garde collage of newspapers, advertisements and other pop-culture ephemera. It's the Mountains of Sale. As they climb, they complain about how modern and bizarre it is. "Bizarre to the point of PSYCHOSIS, I'm afraid," Burnout says. "The DIZZY HEIGHTS are now an ASYLUM for deconstructed VINTAGE characters and the occassional disturbed LONER." He remarks that one of their friends got "revised as a psychedelic native American SHAMAN called 'BRAINSHAKER'... The last time I saw her she was talking gibberish about how her SEXUALITY was related to SUPER-STRING THEORY."

They reach the top of the mountains, "the SALE'S PEAK" and two "Retro-Racketeers" with pink-colored goggles and rays are revising Burnout into something "more like something from an issue of some early silver age comic book. ... into a character that looks like its drawn by Jack Kirby."

They make their way to the Plot's secret hideout where they find a machine called "the Plot Device" that can save the universe. They just need to switch it to "ALL A DREAM" or "IMAGINARY STORY" or "MAKE IT DIDN'T HAPPEN."

Freefall remarks, "I suppose that's part of the FUN with these 'Alternate Future'-type situations: seeing everyone DESTROYED or grotesquely ALTERED..."

They activate the machine to escape the "ongoing INFINITE CRISIS!"

And that's the end of the section, but there's no escape from what Moore was trying to say in a cheeky way. In the real world, this wasn't an alternate future that we could just make it didn't happen. In 1998, Moore had seen companies that he had worked for fall away into bankruptcy. Awesome had just collapsed, but so had Eclipse, where he had worked on Miracleman. Marvel and DC had seen dwindling sales and pretty soon Jim Lee was going to sell his company to DC, rumor claims so that he didn't have to see his staff lose their jobs.

And Moore lays the blame for this squarely on the 1990s trends. The cover enhancements, variant covers and nudie covers created a generation of kids who thought they were going to get rich collecting comics. And of course, then it all collapsed.

As Moore had Burnout say, "I'm afraid our universe lost THE PLOT some time ago."

But Moore tears apart the trends that had been successful up until 1998, those on "Sale's peak" of psychopaths and deconstructed vintage characters. It's hard not to see him criticizing the effects of Watchmen and Batman: The Killing Joke here, as he had been doing for several years and prominently in Judgment Day for Awesome. 

But even his Awesome work is not spared. His revision of Supreme into a silver-age pastiche of Superman gets called retro-racketeering. 

It's tough to say if there is a positive future in all of this, or if it's just a criticism...Moore as the anarchist, tearing down with no organized path forward. But if there is, maybe it's Moore taking stock of what he had been through and to put what he had done with Awesome behind him. He moved away from the retro-racketeering, as he called it, that he had done so effectively with Supreme.

We know that Moore created an ABC universe, drawing on vintage ideas and characters, but finding new and fun ways to use them. He avoided most of the approaches he described as being part of comics' ruin. As he has said elsewhere, he created ABC to do fun stories. I think that was the long-lost plot he was attempting to have these last, youngest superheroes attempt to find.

Anyway, let me know if you think I'm way off base or if there's really something here? And what did you think of the rest of the script?

Brian K. Vaughan is giving away Alan Moore's Gen13 script

A while back, Scott Dunbier auctioned off Alan Moore's partial script for a Gen13 annual, which Moore did immediately after the implosion at Awesome, to support Bob Wiacek. The script is a tongue in cheek Teen Titans-like story about the state of the comics industry at the time and sounds like a reaction to what happened at Awesome.

Anyway, Brian K. Vaughan won the auction and has turned it into a fundraiser, giving the script away to anyone who donates to the charity:

To get the script, go to this go fund me page: https://gofund.me/e2230840

Make a donation in any amount and send the receipt to: Thanksforhelpingbobw at gmail dot com.

I've made my donation and can't wait to give the script a read!

h 

Makehttps://gofund.me/e2230840https://gofund.me/e2230840

https://gofund.me/e2230840 

Brian Bolland on Alan Moore and the Killing Joke

Brian Bolland posted this post about The Killing Joke, the brutal Batman story that helped turn Moore away from working for DC and was his last gritty superhero story before ultimately coming back to work on Superheroes in a more nostalgic and optimistic way. It's definitely worth a read:

Killing Joke. My final word (for now).

Much has been said about the Killing Joke, Alan Moore, Brian Bolland and John Higgins’ slim graphic novel about Batman and the Joker. It’s an item of great significance to me for a number of positive and negative reasons. I want to make this my definitive and comprehensive take on the Killing Joke. Much of this you may already have read and I apologise for repeating myself. Revelations about my personal pride in the work and the personal wounds it has inflicted in me may be something new to you. 

In about 1985 I’d returned from a lengthy trip abroad and I rang up Dick Giordano to ask him what I could do next for DC Comics. The trip abroad had been paid for, in part, by a bonus from DC of $10,000 thanks to the success of Camelot 3000. In answer to my question Dick said “You can do anything you want, Brian”. 

Skipping back a few years to 1977 - Dave Gibbons, Mick McMahon, Kevin O’Neil and I and a number of other artists had been in at the beginning of the UK’s newly launched 2000AD. We were a closely knit bunch of young artists. We met annually at the recently established Forbidden Planet shop in London to sign for 2000AD fans and monthly in local pubs for drinks and pizzas. We were mainly artists but soon joining that group was hairy Midlander (you could tell from his accent) Alan Moore. Pat Mills and John Wagner’s stories for Judge Dredd were outstanding and made that character rightly popular. Alan Moore’s writing, however, was in a league of its own. Literate, ingenious, irreverent, moving and funny. His “Time Twisters” with Dave Gibbons. “DR & Quinch” with Alan Davis. “The Bojeffries Saga” with Steve Parkhouse. His darker political magnum opus “V For Vendetta” with David Lloyd. All signals that here was a writer of some standing. The guys at Forbidden Planet had formed a publishing group called Titan Books. There were plans afoot to team up Alan and me to draw an alternative take on the American Superhero trope called “Rocket Redglare”. There were even discussions between IPC, publishers of 2000AD, and DC Comics about a “Batman vs Judge Dredd” one-off. I’d already started drawing a few things for DC at the time so contact had been made with the other side of the Pond. Neither projects came to anything. It’s understood that IPC, who published 2000AD weekly, were unimpressed by the poor sales of DC’s Batman at the time.

Dave Gibbons had been a close friend and mentor to me since I started in 1975 on Powerman. Alan became my friend soon after as a result of the various events and conventions we jointly attended. At a con in the French alpine town of Grenoble (I have an amusing story to tell of that day which I’ll save for another time), also attended by Sergio Aragones, David Mazucchelli and Will Eisner, I sat for a long long time with Alan as he told me the plot of a story he was writing about Jack the Ripper. In London we chortled with delight as he played us his 45rpm record “the Sinister Ducks”. I remember him saying to me “You can’t have too many friends, Brian.”

In the mid 80s, during various pub get-togethers, Dave Gibbons revealed pages and plot points that he and Alan were working on for a new maxi-series for DC called Watchmen. Dave’s enthusiasm was infectious. We could tell it was going to be brilliant.

Back to 1985. Dick Giordano said to me “you can do anything you want to, Brian”. Frank Miller had recently redefined the look and format of a comic with his “Ronin” and redefined Batman with “Dark Knight”. Alan had finished writing Watchmen. I said to Dick “I’d like to do a Batman graphic novel and I’d like Alan Moore to write it”. Dick said “Okay”. Alan was asked and seemed happy to come onboard. He rang me and asked me what I had in mind. I said I’d like it to be primarily about the Joker with Batman as more of a background character. Len Wein would be the editor and we were all set to go.

During that period, my wife Rachel and I, were in New York and we met Frank Miller and Lynn Varley for a Japanese meal. I’d known Frank since my earliest visits to DC in 1979. When he visited me in London I took him on nocturnal walks around the bowels of East London, Ripper territory. Now - in New York he suggested a new Batman book from me might not be a good idea because, thanks to his Dark Knight, the character was a bit over-saturated. But, too late. It was already in production.

In London Alan rang me and said he’d reached a dark patch in the writing of Killing Joke. He thought he had to have the Joker do something REALLY bad to take him beyond his clownish comedic persona. He wanted to seriously injure Barbara Gordon, Batgirl. He’d asked Len Wein. It’s in print somewhere so I can repeat here what were Len’s words as repeated to me by Alan. “Cripple the bitch!”

Finally in London the finished script arrived. I was somewhat disappointed. As an artist you want to draw iconic moments. Pay homage in some way to the character of old. Where was Dick Sprang’s giant typewriter? I was worried by the three bug-eyed dwarves. I thought It perhaps offensive to persons of limited height. I thought setting part of the story in a funfair was a bit obvious. And - I was upset by the harm that came to Barbara and concerned by the implied nudity. As the artist I’ve never considered it my place to tell a writer what to write, especially a writer (and friend) who I admired as much as Alan. As an artist, if a scene has to be violent, I will make it so. Also I would never have chosen to suggest an origin story of the Joker. There were moments in the story, though, that I thought might be iconic and sections that were well up to Alan’s best.

Len Wein was no longer the editor of Killing Joke. That role was passed on to Denny O’Neil who, I believe, was the head Batman editor. I didn’t know Denny and I only recall one brief phone call with him. As far as I knew DC had forgotten about the Killing Joke. I worked away at it between 1986-88 along with covers for Titan’s Dredd reprints and other things. During that time I was hearing rumours that all was not well between Alan Moore and DC. Something to do with their agreement over Watchmen. I’m sketchy on the details and it’s best to investigate the matter elsewhere. I thought it possible that matters came to a head while Alan was writing Killing Joke - specifically round about the time he was harming Barbara Gordon. Maybe that was the reason for his phone call. Maybe he was on the verge of ditching Killing Joke and DC at that point. But that’s just speculation.

By 1988 My artwork was nearing completion and suddenly the book was scheduled. Back then colour was applied using the “blue line” process. I was too slow at that so John Higgins was asked to provide the colour. (There are more stories here which I’ll leave for another occasion. Including, in a book whose page composition consisted only of horizontals and verticals, Richard Brunning’s decision to tilt the logo diagonally).

For me the Killing Joke represented the perfect alignment of the planets. I had the opportunity to bring together characters, that I grew up with, that I loved, that were high profile and possibly the best and hottest writer of the moment. I knew this would be a career peak for me. Fortunately Killing Joke proved popular and has remained in print since its first appearance. Alan’s work has been celebrated in literary circles. Watchmen, I believe, is studied in schools. Alan’s rift with DC has widened into a rift with the whole superhero genre and comics as a whole - and, as far as I can tell with anyone he previously knew in that field. I rang him years ago, before I knew of the rift, and said I’d like to do something new with him, something good “...that would make a lot of money!” (I do this for a living after all.) since then I’ve had no contact with my old friend. Occasionally I see him on TV or hear him on the radio.

Killing Joke was meant to be the high watermark of my career. I knew I wasn’t capable of doing anything better. I was recently reading an article in the Guardian newspaper entitled “The Killing Joke at 30. What is the legacy of Alan Moore’s shocking Batman story?” (Not a recent article then?). “A 46 page psychological slug-fest.” It goes on to say “As Moore doesn’t speak about The Killing Joke (or any of his DC work) any more, and Wein died last year, it’s perhaps a piece of comics apocrypha we can analyse however we want”. It, however, quotes Alan thus: “I thought it was far too violent and sexualised a treatment for a simplistic comic book character like Batman and a regrettable misstep on my part”. KJ is sited by other sources as a high profile example of the routine ill-treatment of women in comics for entertainment and its a good thing if that can be rectified in the future.

At no point in the Guardian article is the name of the artist mentioned. People who use the medium of the written word to express themselves have no ability or interest in talking about line-thickness, negative space, light and shade or the influence of artists of the past. It’s “Alan Moore’s shocking Batman book”. A low point in his career. Not a particularly good story. A miss-step for him. A thing he’d prefer not to talk about. If an artist has done his job properly he or she will have conveyed the story well enough that he or she will not even be noticed. In that I have to feel some satisfaction.

Apart from my various pleasures and pride and my disappointments and regrets in The Killing Joke I regret the loss of a friend - and an extremely entertaining and talented one.