From September 1986 TIME OUT. I was a very proud 25-year-old journalist, because this was the first big article on comics to be published in the UK, in a "real" magazine. It's hard to communicate, in this golden age of geeks, how hard this was to make happen, or how important it was for a number of things, including morale. (They prepared a Dave Gibbons
Watchmen cover, and, at the last moment, didn't use it and went with Michael Clark instead.)There are goofs in there (it wasn't Walter Hill, it was Joel Silver, and once again, Spiderman not Spider-Man; and I'm not convinced that the summaries of the recommended comics on the last page are all my writing -- they may have been trimmed or rewritten) but I was happy, and thought it deserved to be dragged from the vaults.
Click on each page to make it readable.
(The follow up to it was a huge article on comics commissioned by the Sunday Times Magazine, for which I interviewed everyone, got original Brian Bolland art, and which was rejected by the editor when I sent it in because, he explained "it lacked balance". I asked what kind of balance he needed. There was a pause. "Well, these comics..." he said. And then blurted out, "You seem to think they're a good thing.")
Right. Now we're looking for the Alan Moore interview from Knave. It's somewhere in the attic.
Labels:
23 years ago,
journalism,
Watchmen
