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

Dragged screaming from the vaults...

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