From Before He Was A Wizard...

Found it, in a box in the attic, filled with mid-80s softcore porn mags containing interviews, book or film reviews, or articles, all by me. (When asked why, back then, I would explain that I sold my first article to a "respectable magazine" who paid 80 pounds for it and never printed it, and my second, because the first wouldn't take it, to UK Penthouse, who paid 300 pounds and printed it in the next issue, and really, it was decided for me then.)

I don't like the title, and I do know how to spell Judge Dredd and Roscoe Moscow, but here's a nice pen-portrait of Alan Moore written at the end of 1985, published in the March 1986 issue of Knave, some months before the first issue of Watchmen was published. (I'd read the first three issues by then, in lovely Dave Gibbons photocopies.)

Again, click on the pictures for an oversized, readable version.

Also found in one copy of Knave, and scanned in, a long-lost Alan Moore short story called SAWDUST MEMORIES. But I don't think Alan would want it posted, so I won't.

And now it's found, I'll sign the Knave with the Alan interview in it, and donate it to the CBLDF, and someone else can explain to their loved ones that they bought it for the articles. (A moment of ruefully remembering the teenage heartbreak when I discovered that someone had thrown away the men's magazine -- SWANK -- with the Vaughn Bode/Berni Wrightson Purple Pictorial mermaid two-pager in it that I'd found in a Streatham grotty used bookshop when I was fourteen.)

(Edit to add, here's a lovely recent interview with Alan from Wired.)

Labels: 23 years ago, journalism, why Alan Moore should be made Wizard of England