Following on from that signed first edition of Jack Higgins's
The Eagle Has Landed, I thought we could take a look at some of the other signed books I've acquired since
this series of posts ended in September 2011 (although there have been
one or
two – actually make that
three or
four... or even
five – signed editions in the interim). And let's begin with a book in which I myself had a hand, and which has recently been nominated for a
Harvey Award:
Namely,
Alan Moore: Storyteller, by Gary Spencer Millidge, a terrific tome which I edited it in my capacity as managing editor at
Ilex Press in Lewes. I blogged about it
in July of last year when it was published, but later that month we held a signing for the book at
Gosh Comics in London (which moved premises shortly after; it's now on Soho's Berwick Street), attended by both Gary and Alan – and indeed by a few Ilex staffers, myself included. Under those circumstances, it would have been remiss off me not to get a copy signed for myself, which is precisely what I did:
Splendid stuff. As I mentioned above,
Alan Moore: Storyteller was
nominated for a Harvey Award a couple of weeks ago, the winners of said awards to be announced at the Baltimore Comic-Con on 8 September. Previously Ilex
won a Harvey for Helen McCarthy's
The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga, and I reckon we're in with a shout of bagging another one for
Alan Moore: Storyteller – assuming, of course, comics professionals – the ballot is only open to those who work within the comics industry – get off their bums and vote for the damn thing (needless to say, if you're a comics professional, I'd be eternally grateful if you could head to the
Harvey Awards website and vote for the book before the ballot closes on 17 August).
Gary has
blogged about how much it means to him to be nominated, to which I'd add that it means quite a lot to me too, for reasons I outlined in
a post on the Ilex blog last year. I was fairly pleased with what I wrote back then, so, rather than go over the same ground again, I figured I might as well republish that post here on
Existential Ennui, not only for posterity's sake but because it accurately – albeit somewhat prolixly – summarizes the impact Moore and his work has had on my life and, perhaps, gives some small indication of the passion and commitment that went into
Alan Moore: Storyteller (not least from Gary). You can read the piece in full below, and I'll be back in a bit with some
more signed editions – graphic novels, appropriately enough – and a
Westlake Score-and-review...
. . . . . . . . . .
Alan Moore: Storyteller: A Dream of Flying
NB: Originally published on the Ilex Press blog, July 2011.
You might have noticed over the past few months that we’ve been blogging
fairly relentlessly – incessantly, even – about a certain book named
Alan Moore: Storyteller. We’ve posted an
excerpt from fantasy legend Michael Moorcock’s foreword to the book; added a link to the book’s author,
Gary Spencer Millidge’s own thoughts on
Storyteller, and posted
a series of clips of Mr. Millidge in conversation with Ilex’s own Tim Pilcher at May’s Bristol Comic Expo; got very excited about
the internet buzz that’s been building on the book; got even more excited about the
imminent signing session for the book at London’s Gosh! comic shop; and even, courtesy of Ilex’s Vasiliki Machaira, presented a
quite startling art installation created out of proofs of the thing.
And those are just some of the Moore missives we’ve posted in the
run-up to publication this week; take a saunter through the rest of this
blog for further entries.
The reason there’s been so much frantic Alan Moore activity on the Ilex blog is because, quite simply,
Alan Moore: Storyteller
is an extraordinary work, and an important book not just for Ilex but
for the comics field in general. It’s the most comprehensive, most
sumptuously illustrated authorized biography yet published on Alan
Moore’s life and career. You’ll be able to see that for yourselves as it
hits bookshop shelves and online retailers this week – both in
the UK and,
via Rizzoli,
the US
– and I could spend an eternity extolling its virtues, such as the
surprising and intriguing CD of songs and performances by Moore and
friends that accompanies the book; or the never-before-seen, unpublished
V for Vendetta script included as a double-gatefold; or the little-seen, legendary
Big Numbers
chart, which details how that groundbreaking uncompleted series would
have played out over its full twelve issues; or the behind-the-scenes
family snaps and notebooks and sketches that Mr. Moore kindly made
available to Gary; or, indeed, Gary’s words, which, with the aid of
copious quotes from Alan, paint a vivid picture of the man behind such
towering achievements as
Watchmen,
Lost Girls and
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
But rather than do that, to celebrate the publication of
Alan Moore: Storyteller, I thought I’d do something that readers of my personal books blog,
Existential Ennui,
have become more than familiar with; something that I find eminently
easy to do; something, in fact – some would say ad infinitum, perhaps
even ad nauseum – I never seem to tire of doing: I thought I’d talk
about myself.
See, the publication of
Alan Moore: Storyteller is, for me, the
culmination of a decades-long love affair with Alan Moore’s comics.
It’s a fascination that began nearly thirty years ago, in March 1982,
when, without any kind of fanfare, a comics magazine called
Warrior appeared in British newsagents. I can still recall the exact newsagent in which I purchased that first issue of
Warrior:
it was on Elmers End Road in Beckenham, south London; I think it’s
still there – the newsagent, I mean, not the single copy of
Warrior
#1 that was sitting on its magazine racks; I bought that. With so many
milestones in the comics medium since then – a good number penned by Mr.
Moore himself – it’s easy to forget how revolutionary that first
black-and-white issue of
Warrior seemed. But revolutionary it
was: an anthology comics title in the best tradition of British comics
publishing, but quite unlike any seen before.
The garish cover of
Warrior #1 was exciting enough. Drawn by
Steve Dillon, it featured a cyborg with what looked like a meat cleaver
on one arm; an incredibly sexy woman wielding a gigantic futuristic
rifle; and a sidebar promising a sword-brandishing priest, a bizarre Guy
Fawkes lookalike and a silhouetted superhero. Under that cover I was
soon thrilling to the adventures of
Axel Pressbutton and
Laser Eraser,
Father Shandor, Demon Stalker and Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s peerless
V for Vendetta.
I’d never seen anything like these comics tales, and was shaken to my
twelve-year-old core by the mature, complex writing and artwork on
display.
But the story that really blew my tiny young mind was the lead one, a
short tale entitled “A Dream of Flying”. Written by Moore and
illustrated by Garry Leach, in just eight pages it detailed the rebirth
of a superhero of whom I’d never even heard. In the story, a tired,
middle-aged newspaper journalist, Mike Moran, plagued by headaches and
by unlikely dreams of being a super-powered hero, goes to cover the
opening of a nuclear power plant in the Lake District. The event is
hijacked by terrorists, and in the midst of the ensuing chaos Moran
remembers a word he’s been trying to recall, a word that, for some
reason, holds a strange significance for him. Uttering the word –
“kimota” – he’s transformed in a blinding flash of light and a crack of
thunder into a young, muscled man possessed of incredible abilities and
dressed in a form-hugging costume. Besting the terrorists with a clap of
his hands, he bursts through the roof of the facility and rockets into
space, shouting out his now-remembered name: “I’m Marvelman… I’m back!”
What was remarkable about this story was how
real it all
seemed. To a twelve-year-old kid raised on the larger-than-life,
bombastic adventures of Spider-Man, Moore’s naturalistic dialogue and
poetic captions and Leach’s meticulous, wonderfully
authentic artwork were a revelation. Prior to reading that first instalment of
Marvelman – eventually published in colour as
Miracleman in the States – the edgiest comics I’d come across were those contained in the weekly sci-fi anthology
2000 AD. Indeed, I’d doubtless already read some of Moore’s other work in that title, without his name having properly registered.
But “A Dream of Flying” was something else. The first page of the story,
showing the terrorists driving towards the nuclear plant in a lorry,
remains for me the single page that paved the way to discovering a more
grown-up, more nuanced style of comics storytelling. Essentially, all
that first page of “A Dream of Flying” is is two blokes bantering in the
cab of a truck. But more than the visual spectacle that followed, more
than the bullets bouncing off Marvelman’s raised hand, moreso even than
the image of him circling the Earth at the close of the episode, for me
that one page opened up the possibilites of the comics form: just two
men, talking rubbish, the one a bit alarmed by the other, in a manner
that was all the more astonishing for how low key and…
ordinary it was.
Alan Moore would go on to craft infinitely more elegant stretches of
dialogue, countless sentences and scenes that, examined with an older,
more critical eye, far surpass the nascent, occasionally awkward
stylings of his debut episode of
Marvelman. But “A Dream of
Flying” – and particularly that first page – will always be special to
me. Despite the fact that it was a story about a superhero, it was my
gateway to comics that
weren’t about superheroes – comics like
Fast Fiction, or
Escape, or
Eightball, or such future Moore masterpieces as
Swamp Thing and
From Hell
– and a doorway to the names behind those comics, to creators who had
little to do with the superhero genre: Eddie Campbell, Dan Clowes,
Chris Ware;
hundreds of others. It was the story that would, in time, lead to me
working in the comics and graphic novels industry myself – first at
Titan Books, now at Ilex – and then eventually, inexorably, to my
editing
Alan Moore: Storyteller, a book of which I am immensely proud.
Whether
Alan Moore: Storyteller would have appeared if I hadn’t come to work at Ilex, I really couldn’t say. (Yeah, OK
Tim: it probably
would
have.) But what I can say for certain is that without Alan Moore and
Garry Leach’s “A Dream of Flying”, I wouldn’t have ended up editing
Alan Moore: Storyteller. And so in a way – at least for me – a near-thirty year circle is now…
…complete.
