alan moore – Moe Lane

In the Mail: Alan Moore’s PROVIDENCE.

Legendary. The first edition: almost impossible to find, even in digital form. By all accounts, keep out of the reach of children.

You can pick up the softcover Alan Moore / Jacen Burrows PROVIDENCE now, obviously. And they straightened out the digital option. But this is from the Indegogo and I don’t know how much the hardcover version is really worth. I suspect it’s going to be ‘a lot.’ Oh, well, I’m sure my kids will be happy to sell it for a tidy sum, after I’m gone. After they read it, and cringe: one last mortification for them, from beyond the grave…

Book of the Week: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Tempest.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Tempest is Alan Moore’s and Kevin O’Neill’s final foray into the world of the League, and I somehow missed it when it came out. Well, actually, there was a pandemic. It’s kind of understandable, really.

PS: How is it? Ummm… very strange? As one might expect, really.

Alan Moore’s PROVIDENCE Compendium to be reissued (already got mine).

(Via Facebook) Come, I will conceal nothing from you: I did not rush here to reveal the news that Alan Moore is rereleasing his epic PROVIDENCE Lovecraftian comic series. Nope. First I went and pre-ordered a copy, because the Damned Thing sells at mildly obscene prices and I suspect they’re gonna sell out this print run pretty fast. But, now that I’ve confirmed that I pre-ordered it, I can safely let everybody else know.

Sorry not-sorry about that.

In the Mail: “Nemo: Heart of Ice”

I’ve been having some problems with Alan Moore’s later League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novels – nobody seems to have the nerve to tell the man when he’s not being up to snuff – but fortunately Nemo: Heart of Ice wasn’t half bad. Alan Moore-style demented versions of the heroes of the electric pulp genre go to 1920s Antarctica to chase down the daughter of Captain Nemo, and everybody discovers… precisely what you’d expect from that time period and that locale, assuming of course that you are familiar with the most important horror writer of the Twentieth Century.

Which you probably are, at least a little, because you read this site. Anyway, aside from a deliberately-strange (but reasonably so) bit in the middle it’s pretty straightforward and worth picking up, methinks. Or at least read.

Hey, New League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s coming out!

It’s coming out either this week or July 10th, depending on who you believe. Looking forward to it, in my usual raised-eyebrow way. It’s promising to be… very Alan Moore-y, apparently.

Well, Mr. Moore has his little ways, he does, he does.

Via Nodwick.

DC to release Watchmen prequels!

(H/T: Pejman Yousefzadeh) They’re calling it “Before Watchmen,” and DC is very eager and honored to have the opportunity to further milk the classic, beloved brand further. Yup: classic. It’s a quarter-century old, you know… and yes, that mean’s that you’re old, too! If it makes you feel any better, well, so am I.

What? Did they ask Alan Moore? Why, of course they didn’t: they have his signature on the original contract from lo, so many years ago, and that’s pretty much all that they need. My sympathies are, by the way, muted: nobody forced Moore to sign those contracts, and DC is paying royalties on use of the characters that he and his associates created, and frankly Moore’s schtick of awesome crankiness about this sort of thing can get a little too self-consciously… dramatic. Yes, Hollywood takes art and makes it commercial. That’s what Hollywood does, folks. People with a problem with that shouldn’t sell them art.

Book of the week, plus upcoming books.

And so we remove The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and replace it with the John Adams biography. But I also want to note that the following three books will be coming out very soon:

…and I’m looking forward to all three.

Not Watching the Watchmen over on RedState.

Warner Todd Huston, my colleague over at RedState, has written something on Alan Moore‘s Watchmen comic series: the fact that it’s titled “Unheroic Superheroes, Watch out for the Watchmen” suggests that he’s not likely to be going to go see the film, to put it mildly (he’s gone into more detail here, although I haven’t read it yet). Continue reading Not Watching the Watchmen over on RedState.