r/AlanMoore

I have been reading the bumper book recently and thought it would be fun to try and make a statue of glycon. I struggled a bit with making the hair look nice, but than again, I've never tried gluing (my own) hair to anything before (lol), so I'm quite happy with how it turned out under the circumstances.

Picture 3 is what the cover of Watchmen 1 looks like reflected on to itself through symmetry. It showcases a nightmarish Klansmen hovered over a depiction of the racially charged “Yellow Peril” propaganda from back in the 1930’s/40’s.

You can see this propaganda in Picture 2, a real classic case. Note that Yellow Creature depicted in picture 2 has the same nose, eyes, and smile of the figure in picture 3.

Now then, I just realized…

This castle in picture 1 CLEARLY has limbs coming through it. I believe this is another visual cue of the “Yellow Peril” creature and its symmetry with picture 3 is fantastic. Larry (nightmarish Klansmen) hovers over the Yellow Peril.

This is also Adrian Veidt’s entire plan but on a cosmic scale. He plans on uniting the Earth through racism and xenophobia, being afraid of the “alien who will completely destroy your known way of life.”

The Alien Monster we see at the end of Watchmen, while not explicitly yellow, also encompasses an Octopus like figure with several limbs.

Ya’ll.

Seriously.

It’s right there.

If not, what are those limbs in Picture 1 supposed to be representing?

I found this old add with an Alan Moore Quote. Thought you might fancy it.

Love Moore, but it's been really cool to watch this character grow without him.

Greetings! Somewhere around my deep dive into magick through the gateways of Fossil Angles and Promethea a deity called me. Lion Headed Serpent began to call for my attention and at first I have discovered that mostly such figure is known as Gnostic Demiurge, which usually described as quite an awful person to deal with. But later on I have found information about “Favorite Chnoubis Ring of Carl Jung” and couldn’t stand to draw parallels with Glycon which also has solar phallic nature as well as Chnoubis which was depicted on countless healing and protection amulets. Later on I had a vision of the Sun in 4D with fourth dimension being time, as a giant serpent with fiery head. In that way I have discovered for myself Chnoubis as a deity of the Creation and of Arts, which is resonant with Glycon’s heritage of the Apollo’s heir. So yeah, what do you think of these serpentine deities and do they speak to you in similar fashion?
All images in this post are my artistic offerings to mentioned above deities.

(reposted with missing image)

The Telegraph Wire was a "give-a-way" that the "Comics & Comix" chain of comic book stores in California used to print in the early 1980's. They only made 24 issues.

“Three issues, maybe four issues of SWAMP THING I’d say are really good. But most of them, of course, I don’t like personally. I mean, I do write an awful lot of rubbish.”

Lost, found, lost again and re-found from this post from eight years ago. Sadly the link is dead.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AlanMoore/comments/8vkreb/the_lost_alan_moore_interview_the_telegraph_wire/

One of things I’ve always liked about Affable Al is his willingness to share what he’s been reading. This one comes from the link in u/Successful-Tie5386 ’s excellent post about Moore’s interview in the Northampton Poetry Journal (link to the journal is in the last link there - well worth downloading, it’s got a very good interview about poetry with Robin Ince in it as well.)

Nice that he gives a Mariana Enriquez’s excellent novel a namecheck as well seeing as she's often spoken of how Alan Moore is one of her big influences. And, of course, Viz... my secret hope is one day Alan contributes something to it which might stand alongside Roger Mellie or Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles.

>17. Do you think poetry still has the power to transform culture or perhaps at least assist in an effective counter culture?

>One of my big delights these days is buying old poetry books and, especially, small press magazines from Kevin Ring at Beat Scene or Will Shutes at Test Centre. I think that one of the things contemporary society is in most urgent need of is a counterculture, and looking through these stab-stapled wonders makes me realise that any counterculture worth its salthas always had poetry at its very core, whether that be the Beat eruption of the American 50s, Jeff Nuttall and company in the English 60s, or John Cooper Clark in safety-pinned 70s.

>Looked at objectively, it almost seems to me as if a healthy network of small press publications and fanzines is possibly a necessary precursor to any serious counterculture. But I think, perhaps superstitiously, that this has to be a material phenomenon, rather than online or otherwise virtual. I think there has to be a physical scrap of paper as a nucleus or kernel before a counterculture can coagulate about it, which is probably why we haven’t seen one since the early 1990s.

>18. What are you reading at the moment?

>At the moment, it’s mostly reference for my Long London novels – Prince Monolulu’s autobiography I Gotta Horse, James Morton’s Gangland Bosses, David Gascoyne’s Man Is This Meat, Nairn’s London, The Surrender of Silence by by Iain Sinclair, tons of Arthur Machen, and a surprising number of books from the estimable Phil Baker, including his excellent Austin Spare biography and his more recent City of the Beast.

>Other than that, I just finished Steve Paxton’s highly convincing How Capitalism Ends, and before that I very much enjoyed Mariana Enriquez’s supernatural horror/political metaphor, Our Share of Night, and Jessica Gregson’s remarkable After Silence. Coming up next is an unfinished novel by the great Brian Catling, and then the latest illuminating mental walkabout from my mate Robin Ince. Other than Viz, Private Eye, Faunus (the quarterly journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen), New Scientist, and the aforementioned Beat Scene, that’s about it.

When we first meet Adrian Veidt in Watchmen, we can only see a silhouette outline of him while he has his back to us.

This is exactly how we see Veidt in his origin story that he shares with his Vietnamese servants.

I thought that was fun.

But I can’t possibly post a thread without pointing out something most of you will hate.

Note that there is ONE time when we see “Veidt” and he is not in silhouette outline. He is tripping on hashish and envisions himself naked “wading through powdered history.”

The reason that the pattern is broken, and the reason he is not in silhouette outline in this panel…

Is because that’s not Veidt.

It is Rorschach after Doctor Manhattan sends him to Mars at the end of the book.

You see how we get one more silhouette outline of Veidt after the vision?

Again, silhouette is a pattern in the origin that equals Veidt. No silhouette in origin = Not Veidt.

Cheers!

https://archive.ph/5gyIk

Fixed! Sorry for that - the Davies interview is quite good as well.

As some of you know, I’ve decided to reread Watchmen and truly focus on the word usage that Alan Moore applies.

“I see the signs.”

There may even be more that I’m missing on this page or the rest of the book, but today we’ll be focusing on three “signs” (or designs) that have changed in the Watchmen reality found in Picture 1.

First, compare the Fallout Shelter to our real world example seen in Picture 2. Different designs, and it’s interesting that the Civil Defense worker in the comic is mirrored symmetrical to the one in our world. I wonder if Dave Gibbons had actually seen the Picture in Picture 2 because that’s very symmetrical.

Second, “I Love New York.” This design was created by Milton Glaser (that sounds awfully close to Milton Glass, Jon’s boss at Gila Flats, inspired name by Glaser?) but in Watchmen, there are a few things different. The heart symbol is now an Apple. And the “I” has been dropped completely. Almost becoming an authoritative command rather than an individual choice. Or does the Apple mean a different word than love? Unknown.

Third, wow, Milton Glaser again! Milton designed the greatest DC logo of all time. The DC Bullet. In ‘76/77. Yet in alt 1985, DC Comics reprints a popular series from decades earlier, Tales of the Black Freighter, read by Lil Bernie.

Though you can’t tell what the actual logo is on this DC reprint, we can tell it’s not the bullet by the size of the logo and it’s proportion to the Comics Code Authority symbol on the right. You can compare Picture 4 to 5 and 6. This reprint from 1985 is using a pre-1977 logo. So the bullet doesn’t exist.

Anyway, I thought these were interesting. Especially “I Love New York” (a personal decision) to “Love New York” (an authoritarian command).

Cheers!

Just uncovered this gem, and found it pretty interesting.

At the beginning of issue 2, Sally refers to the California town she’s in as “The City of the Dead.” She says this while we are being shown a cemetery back in New York.

Laurie responds as if Sally is speaking figuratively. After all, Sally is in a rest home and she is getting older. Since Laurie believes Sally is speaking figuratively, we the reader also believe it.

But Sally is being quite literal.

Colma, California started off as a Necropolis. Apparently San Francisco and other neighboring towns needed a place to put their dead and Colma became the chosen one. San Fran and other places started even transferring their dead to Colma. I’m simplifying this, if you want the exact history, Google’s got you covered!

It is known as “The City of the Dead”, or “The City of the Silent”, or “The City of Lost Souls”.

It’s crazy that, if you were to Google “what town is the fictional Nepenthe Gardens located in Watchmen”, Google will not tell you a town. Because the surface reading doesn’t give it to you.

If you want to know where Sally is, then you have to actually work for it.

Which goes for the majority of the plot and character motivations in Watchmen.

It’s also interesting that Laurie doesn’t take Sally at her word, and because Laurie doesn’t, we don’t. But we’re wrong. We’ve been cleverly manipulated by Alan Moore here.

Anyway…

Now you know where Sally lives! You’re welcome.

Why is the pattern the same?

If this pattern, circle within circle with black dots flying around, indicates teleportation, then why is the same pattern used for “killing” ?

If this pattern was used in issue 3 for teleportation, then shouldn’t we assume that all future uses of the pattern also indicate teleportation?

If not…why?

This has probably been posted before but it still makes me laugh all these years later

https://youtu.be/5gu-uhudZS4?is=4v-Ma4uWxChtXdz4

Hey friends!

Originally I was going to do this all in one BUT there’s just so much information to cover and so many photos to share that it would be impossible to cover in one post. Physically impossible as Reddit posts don’t allow more than 20 photos.

If you want the whole thing in one, it’s on BlueSky. Simply look up “Jon didn’t kill Rorschach” in search and there you go.

For Part 1, we’re going to cover something that’s not even in the BlueSky post.

Let’s look at the page in Picture 1.

Rorschach tried to leave. Jon tells him “You know I can’t let you do that.”

Seems pretty straightforward, Jon won’t allow Rorschach to spoil Veidt’s plan.

Or is it straightforward?

I call your attention to a round table chat in 1988 with Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and others. AM and DG are Moore and Gibbons respectively.

First, I’d like to point out that Alan Moore refuses to call what happened to Rorschach a “mercy killing.” He says it’s almost one. He says it IS a mercy to Dan and Laurie to never find out what happened to Rorschach, but that doesn’t mean Jon killed Rorschach. I’d imagine Dan would feel just as terrible if he learned that Rorschach was transformed into a state of particles and sent to Mars to kick rocks. It’s very important that Moore refuses to concede to it being a killing.

Second, and MORE IMPORTANT…

What is Dave Gibbons saying?

“Veidt does the calculations. There’s nowhere for Rorschach to go. In that situation he could only die.”

So.

If Jon DOES NOT stop Rorschach from leaving, then Rorschach could ONLY die in that situation.

Think. He’s in the Alaskan wilderness. He doesn’t have the keys to the Owlship. Dan even suggests to Walter that he bring a coat with him before they venture but Rorschach doesn’t bring one.

If Jon DOES NOT stop Rorschach from leaving, then Rorschach will die. One of the co-creators of Watchmen, Dave Gibbons, literally tells you so and the other creator, Alan Moore, doesn’t contradict this.

So.

With that in mind, reread picture 1.

“You know I can’t let you do that.”

Jon knows Rorschach will die if he leaves, as Gibbons tells us. And as Jon tells Rorschach, “you know I can’t let you [die].”

This also makes sense thematically why?

Because just in issue 9, Jon learned that every single life is a thermodynamic miracle.

He was so moved upon learning that, and you the reader believes his very next action to be exploding someone into bits of blood and guts?

No. Jon will never take another life. And as he tells Rorschach, he won’t allow life to be snuffed out if he can prevent it.

“You know I can’t let you do that.” Of course not, Rorschach’s life is a thermodynamic miracle.

For anyone who responds, what is your take on Dave Gibbons’ comments here?

Gibbons says that had Rorschach been allowed to leave, his only option was death. And Jon prevented it.