Illuminations: Stories

Product Information

I have had people in the comics industry phone up and express – and these are people who write about or draw these fantastic, invulnerable, fearless characters – and, yes, if you were invulnerable it wouldn’t be quite so difficult to be fearless, would it? But I’ve had them phone me up and sort of say ‘we don’t know how you Brit guys can sleep at night without a gun on the night table.’ To which the answer is ‘we sleep like babies because we’re not surrounded by thousands of jittery, tawed-up Americans.’ And he was saying, ‘yeah, but you could get guns over there, can’t you?’ And I was saying, ‘yeah, you could probably get anything over in anywhere, but we don’t because what would be the point?’ If you’re a criminal and you take guns out for a robbery, that’s going to massively increase your chances of being shot and killed. In fact, with the British police being so unfamiliar with guns, and a bit jittery with them, even if you’re carrying a table leg home from the pub, you’re probably going to get shot by a British police marksman. So, yeah, we don’t do it over here, so we don’t have that constant anxiety that must be at least in the atmosphere over there all the time. I grabbed this from NetGalley mainly for the author (‘Watchmen’ is almost like a master class for adult comic lovers), and partly for the concept. The first story, “A Hypothetical Lizard” mostly met my expectations. From there, it was a slide downhill. The stories were too meandering and verbose to present a submersive experience. There’s probably no better person to write a biography of “TV talking head, pop culture conceptualist, entrepreneur and bullshitter” Tony Wilson than Paul Morley, a man who formed an esoteric writing career in his Manchester orbit. Still, Morley immediately understands the pitfalls of this enterprise: he calls Wilson “beautiful, foolish, dogmatic, charming. Impossible.” This moving portrait of Manchester from the late 1970s onwards is richer, more complicated and thoughtful than mere biography; a history, of sorts, of a city long since passed into memory. I’ve always been fascinated by the underlying paranoia behind the explosion of ghost stories at the end of the 19th century, which overlapped with the height of the empire. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?

Is fantasy becoming more of an imperative now, particularly, as we’re in a time of crisis – both economic and ecological. People are becoming desperate. We’ve got a cost of living crisis that’s engulfed the entire country in Victorian levels of poverty. Might this prompt a new ascendancy of magical thinking? Not that magic is an easy material fix to fill up your smart metre or something like that. But as a way of deciphering the world, particularly when the world is quite grim. I’m a comic book messiah for the 1990s,” a young, but no less bearded Moore once described himself in documentary for ITV, “and having risen from my humble terrace street origins and having survived my tenure as one of the dole queue millions I’ve now become a successful small businessman of no mean repute, and I believe that this is the face of success in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain”. If anything, ‘success’ was an understatement for a man who had essentially re-invented the comic book in just over seven years. Titles like V for Vendetta (1982), Swamp Thing (1983), Watchmen (1986), The Killing Joke (1988) and From Hell (1989) came out in such rapid succession as to suggest some kind of unholy Faustian pact (not entirely off-brand for Moore). When scoffingly asked in an interview, “oh you just write comics?” Moore once replied, “well you wouldn’t have said to Stravinsky that he just did music…” Alan Moore: I read The Hobbit and thought it was a great children’s book. I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the ‘60s because that was kind of mandatory in the ‘60s. You had to read The Lord of the Rings or you’d have been, I don’t know, thrown out of the counterculture or something like that. I read them and some of my friends, whom I very much admired, said that they had been completely captivated, but it didn’t really relate to me. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just to say that I didn’t particularly respond to it. So, when I sat down to write Hypothetical Lizard, yes, it was to some degree restrained by the pre-created world that Emma Bull and Will Shetterly had put together for this anthology, but I wanted to talk about things that were as far away from Conan or The Lord of the Rings as I could possibly get.You know, John Dee, actually – much as I think he is probably the greatest magician in history in terms of his effect on the world – it has to be said that most of that effect was negative. Dee invented the British Empire, which was probably not a good thing. It was John Dee who invented America, in that he came up with a plausible-sounding legend by which Elizabeth could claim that America already belonged to England. He wanted to create a world based upon Christian Kabbalah which had Elizabeth I essentially as a kind of moon queen at the centre of it. No, I don't think that having a court magician would be a good idea at all.

I’m not interested in being part of a religion. Religion is one of our major problems. If you are going to move to a post-growth world. Well, there are a couple of big hurdles in the way. One of them is the resurgence of populist fascism, which still remains to be dealt with. But there is also established religion, which has always been hand in glove with the state. We keep religion around because it’s handy if we want to stir up hatred against another ethnic group. So that we can have a crusade or a war against terror. It’s mainly a political tool to keep people controlled, preying upon their fear of death. Any kind of magic in an advisory capacity to political leaders would be co-opted. The Third Reich had its occult elements and that doesn’t seem to have been an ideal system.

The first time I heard about virtual reality, I said somewhat cynically, ‘Oh, yeah, like there’s another kind…’ because we already have a virtual reality, it’s just that our headset is our head. We don’t experience reality directly, it’s compiled somewhere on the loom of our consciousness from the sensory expressions that we receive. And we do that moment by moment. So it’s not that big a leap between reality as we experience it and virtual reality. Would it be possible Reading these, one is put in mind of William Blake, who in his later years produced one, occasionally two final copies of each of his great prophetic works, painting them with a new level of richness and detail compared to his earlier executions. That Blake described his self-invented medium as illuminated printing is surely not a coincidence, especially from a man whose previous book shared a title with Blake’s magnum opus.

That is a very true statement. We need to move beyond capitalism. We need to move urgently beyond growth and our obsession with growth, because that is a fantasy and it always has been. We do not live in a world of infinite resources, so infinite growth is clearly not possible. It’s becoming very urgent. We don't have to be ruled by GDP. There are other ways that progress can be measured: the wellbeing of a country, for example. Like saying Romeo and Juliet warns against immoderate eros or Fight Club censures masculinity, this clever argument only persuades if the best way to read a work of art is to discard its dominant affect as so much tinsel and regard its overt rhetorical self-justification as its sole legitimate meaning. But as I hope I have shown exhaustively in my past writings on Moore, his greatest graphic novels in and out of the superhero genre can hardly get their narratives started without Moore’s investiture of generative man-gods, fascist perverts, and misogynist murderers with visionary authority, no matter what bien-pensant self-congratulation he blathers to the credulous readers of the Guardian . In the course of pursuing an only superficial anti-fascist polemic, Moore’s superheroes are more fascist than anything you’d have found in the same period in the average Marvel or DC Comic.Ings, Simon (October 8, 2022). "Alan Moore's new book and more — science fiction for October 2022". The Sunday Times. ISSN 0140-0460. You’ve long been associated with magic and the occult. Can you talk to me about how that is part of your life?

Moore’s ability to take common, reality-based fears and turn them into something disconcerting is one of my favorite talents of his. For real though, what’s scarier than something that could happen? Ghosts, aliens, and unknowns? Something about these subjects gets me a little more on the edge of my seat than the definite non-realities of zombies, vampires, etc. And, boy, does he craft them well. The idea of a VR future is, at the moment, quite a frightening and disturbing one. And we’re going to be in the hands of big tech companies who simply want all of your data so that they can sell it. But that is not to say that there won’t be possibilities in the idea of virtual reality. Technology is pretty much neutral, it depends on how we use it. You say that in the short story 'Illuminations' too: that there’s a relationship between nostalgia and fascism. Alternate chapters explore fictionalised versions of key moments in the history of the comics industry, such as one scene in which publisher Jim Laws (Moore’s stand-in for EC Comics editor and publisher William Maxwell Gaines) testifies at the 1954 Senate subcommittee hearings into juvenile delinquency. Another scene, set in 1960, suggests that “Satanic” Sam Blatz (Moore’s satirical version of Stan Lee) received covert instructions from the CIA to mobilise superhero comics in service of pro-American, pro-corporate cold war propaganda. Alan Moore has a way of weaving medical horrors grounded in Sci-Fi into everyday life in a way that is disturbing and completely unforgettable.Steve said once you’ve got your god, it’s not a bad idea to do a graven image. That was what he’d done with Selene. Since Steve’s death, we’ve got his graven image of Selene. The following review will be posted on GateCrashers a week before release date. Link will be updated upon publication: A novel has a completely different character. You have to think, "Well, I'm probably going to be writing this for years." It's more of an edifice. But short stories have got a real energy to them, because you're not investing years of your time. I mean, 'Thunder Man' was an odd story. I'd been trying to write something like that for a couple of years, and I'd even made a start on a story, but I threw it all out because it hadn't got any real life to it. I realised that this was because I was setting it in England, where I had my first experiences of the comics industry. But I kind of realised that no, England is not where the comics industry is really happening. You've got to go to the source. At the same time, that was the only way to cut out the poison. I don't have a copy of any of those works. I'll never be looking at them again. And even thinking about them, all I've got is memories of having my intellectual property rights stolen and then when I complained about that, being typified as a crazy angry guy; "Alan Moore says 'get off my lawn.'" And yes, alright, I was quite cross, but I don't think without reason and also to suggest that I'm angry about everything is an evasion. It's a means of going, "Oh well, if he's angry about everything then we don't have to worry about what he says about the way that people are treated in the comics industry, he's just angry about everything."