An Audience with Alan Moore

It can be a dangerous thing, meeting your heroes. Too often, they fail to live up to your expectations. This wasn’t the case on Saturday.

I’m pleased to say that Alan Moore is one of the most charming and generous people I’ve met.

Roisin has just told Alan that he’s looking dapper.

I’d read on the website Bleeding Cool that Moore was speaking at the Northampton Guildhall for the charity Fight for Sight. I was worried that it’d be sold out but luckily I was able to secure two tickets. On Saturday morning, Roisin and I set off on the train! I was ridiculously excited about meeting one of my writing heroes and, if I’m honest, a little scared…

We had some time to explore Northampton when we got there. I was really taken with St. Pauls, an old Norman church as distinctive as Moore himself:

We had time for a quick lunch in the cafe of the very impressive All Saints church in Northampton’s main square. While we there, a few people came in clutching Alan Moore books and just outside the Guildhall, we saw a five year old boy skipping along holding V for Vendetta and Watchmen to his chest!

A quick cup of coffee and some soup!

We collected our tickets from the Guildhall, then had a quick browse around an antiques market where I considered buying a walking cane. After a while, I decided that this was a bit too close to dressing up as Moore! The room in the Guildhall was beautiful, decorated with paintings of significant kings and statesmen in Northampton’s history and stained glass roundels.

We managed to get seats in the front row. Happily, it was quite a small crowd, making the event pleasingly intimate. Moore strode down the aisle, a slight cocky jaunt to his gait and a smile on his lips. After observing that he knew the acoustics of the room were weird from going to gigs there, he joked that there was a confused man in the back row who’d come expecting to see Alan Rickman.

Moore launched into an unscripted and frequently hilarious history of Northampton. Characterizing it as invisible to the media, he detailed the town’s history of political dissent and many of the fascinating figures it had produced (he named Charles Bradlaugh as a personal inspiration). Along the way, Moore conjured some typically outrageous images: blowing up a busload of nuns, angels playing billiards, and the Quaker Oats man nakedly, violently overthrowing the government.

There’s an angel with a billiard cue atop the Guildhall…

Moore paused about an hour into his talk to read Partners in Knitting, a short story about the burning of two Northampton witches, from his book Voice of the Fire. I’d never seen Moore perform and I was mightily impressed. His deep rumbling voice gave a reading that was both dramatic and heartfelt.

In the second half of the talk, Moore concentrated on the decline of the Boroughs, the area of Northampton in which he was born. He explained the way in which his underground magazine Dodgem Logic was attempting to contribute to the community. Moore’s passion for the people of Northampton was (in Roisin’s words) endearing and infectious, and he concluded by reading a poem in their honour, written in “heroic couplets.”

The question and answer session afterwards was a real highlight. Moore proved generous and thoughtful with his responses. He was eloquent on his disillusionment with the comics industry, funny when discussing Ace the Bat Hound (who wears a mask so the other dogs won’t know his identity) and vituperative regarding the dead friends cheated out of creator’s rights by DC and Marvel. He also discussed a new multimedia project which I’m going to blog about tomorrow (same Bat-time, same Bat-channel)!

I was so proud when Roisin put up her hand and asked whether Moore would consider writing vignettes of Northampton a la Harvey Pekar. He was clearly pleased to be given the opportunity to speak of his old friend and described his favourite Pekar strip Making Lemonade (you can read Moore’s obituary of Pekar here). After digressing with a tale of Northampton character (star of Time Bandits and bastard son of the Shah of Iran) Jack Purvis, Moore suggested to Roisin that his difference to Pekar was as much one of geography as of personal style. While Pekar found wonder in his quotidian existence in Cleveland, Moore searched for normality in the weirdness of Northampton!

Moore’s favourite Harvey Pekar strip

Afterwards, we queued to have some stuff signed. It was lovely to see Moore insisting that the five year old I’d spotted earlier be at the front of the queue. He was clearly very pleased to see someone so young at the talk – and what a brilliant experience for that child! As my long-suffering friends know, I’ve already got a Moore-Bolland signed The Killing Joke (99p in a charity shop!), so I thought I’d bring some more unusual stuff. So now I’ve got signed copies of The Spirit: The New Adventures #1, Miracleman #15, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century and Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics!

Art by John Totleben

Me and Roisin chatted with Moore for about five minutes about Northampton and independent publishing, then he was gracious enough to pose for a photo. It was nice that he put his arm around my shoulder and shook my hand as we left, saying how much he’d enjoyed meeting us. I walked away feeling utterly elated and inspired.

What a day. Thank you Alan – you truly are an extraordinary gentleman!

Pekar and POW!

There’s an interesting piece on the New York Times website about Harvey Pekar’s legacy (read here), which raises the question of his posthumous work. It seems there are a number of books to come, stories which Pekar had written and sent out to his illustrators. It’s especially upsetting to read of conflict between Joyce Brabner (Pekar’s wife) and artist Tara Seibel, which may scotch plans to release strips from The Pekar Project.

In order to alleviate any gloom brought on by reading the above, here’s a marvellous poster for the first (yes, there were two!) Sherlock vs. Jack the Ripper movie A Study in Terror (1965). I particularly like that “Elementary, my dear Watson” gets its own speech bubble after the onomatopoeic punch-up noises!

BIFF! CRUNCH!

Alan Moore remembers Harvey Pekar

Dodgem Logic have posted a lovely Pekar tribute by Alan Moore. Heaven only knows why, but The Washington Post commissioned the piece from Moore and then never used it. Do go and read it here.

Art by Alan Moore

Drawing Harvey’s Head

This is the third in my series celebrating Harvey Pekar. You can read previous entries here and here.

Harvey Pekar couldn’t draw. He would plan out his comics with stick men, allowing his artists to interpret his life as they saw fit. In previous entries, I’ve featured images of Harvey drawn by some of his regular collaborators: Robert Crumb, Greg Budgett & Gary Dumm, Gerry Shamway and Sue Cavey. In this post, I wanted to feature the work of some of Harvey’s more recent artists.

Art by Chris Samnee

Art by Richard Corben

Art by Zachary Baldus

Art by Josh Neufeld

Art by Gilbert Hernandez

Art by Ty Templeton

All selections from DC Vertigo’s Another Day, currently only a fiver here!

“Here’s our man…”

This is the second in my series of posts about Harvey Pekar. You can read the first one here.

Why read about the life of a Cleveland file clerk? Why follow his melancholy tales of queuing at the supermarket, fixing the car or visiting the doctor? Simple. It was all about Harvey’s voice.

Art by R. Crumb

Pekar’s typical mode is reminiscence. He’s often in his stories twice, as both protagonist and narrator. Working over the events of his past, he gleans significance in small moments. Which is not to say that this retrospective voice is always calm or considered…

Art by Greg Budgett & Gary Dumm

That look off-frame and the “Uh, am I still on?” help to undercut Pekar’s anger. Although he frequently lectures us as readers, he’s always aware that his outrage is funny.

The direct address of Harvey’s narration, the look out from the comic book frame into the reader’s eyes, is one of the reasons reading American Splendor seems so personal. We are invited to see the world as Harvey does, described in working-class demotic, sprinkled with jazz slang.

Look back at my example above. In the penultimate frame, Pekar freezes. It’s a moment of dead air, as he pauses for breath, thinking. It’s as though he’s broadcasting live.

Here’s another example, from The Young Crumb Story. Harvey pauses, as though improvising (look out for my posts on Pekar’s jazz criticism later this week!). Here, his hesitations lead on to embarrassment and then relief:

Art by R. Crumb

The door appears behind Pekar as though willed into being. What is that limbo space that Pekar-as-narrator occupies? Dolly Clackett suggested to me that it’s reminiscent of a TV studio’s blankness, which fits my narrator-as-lecturer analogy. In this space between story and strip, Pekar mediates action.

Sometimes, we even find ourselves literally inside Pekar’s head:

Art by Gerry Shamway

Pekar’s mode of narration, those moments in which he speaks out to us, are essential to the flavour of his comics. Admittedly, focusing on this framing device risks misrepresenting the stories, which usually centre upon his interaction and communication with the people of Cleveland. But it seemed important to me that I begin this series on American Splendor with thoughts about the interiority of Harvey Pekar.

Here’s our man…

Art by S. Cavey

Radio silence

Hello everyone!

Just wanted to apologize for not blogging at the end of this week. I’m attending a conference which is taking up all my free time. I’ll be back next week, blogging in the run up to the broadcast of Sherlock on 25th July.

Until then, here’s Harvey. Have a good weekend!

Pekar's PC, art by R. Crumb

From off the streets of Cleveland comes…

Harvey Pekar, author of the underground comic American Splendor, died on Monday.

Many of his obituarists have expressed a feeling of personal loss. Little wonder; Pekar’s autobiographical tales of life as a Cleveland file-clerk vividly portrayed the petty frustrations and small triumphs which punctuate our lives.

What’s extraordinary is that Pekar self-financed the annual publication of this uncommercial proposition on his government wage, supplemented by money he made through music journalism. And all this at a time when most adult Americans would have sniffed at the thought of reading a comic book.

Robert Crumb, Pekar’s long-time friend and collaborator, once wrote, “Yeah, Harvey is an ego-maniac; a classic case… A driven, compulsive, mad Jew… Watching him eat – he eats faster than anyone I’ve ever seen, shovelling it in as if somebody had a gun at his head and was threatening to kill him if he didn’t get it all down in ten seconds. It’s something to see. But how else could he have gotten all those comics published, with almost no money… only an ego-maniac would persist in the face of such odds.”

How I Quit Collecting Records And Put Out A Comic Book With The Money I Saved

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be blogging a good bit about Pekar and the range and effect of his work. So keep your peepers peeled for posts on Pekar’s first-person voice, on his other life as a prolific jazz critic, on his adversarial appearances on Late Night with David Letterman, as well as a review of the movie of American Splendor.

Harvey Pekar 1939-2010