Moorcock/Moore/Sinclair

It seems that perhaps my three favourite living authors were sitting around together chewing the fat for an adoring public at the British Library last night. Jeez, they could've let me know; I was just hanging around the house.

Anyway, highly entertaining notes on proceedings here.

Michael Moorcock claiming his imitators (whoever they might be) are "spoon-feeding [his] work to the masses, spreading borrowed ideas in sanitised form" seems pretty rich coming from the guy who clogs up British charity shops to this day with about eight billion '70s Elric paperbacks, but no matter, it's all good stuff, and I think these fellows are each possessed of a body of work that gives 'em a free pass as regards being a tad self-regarding at times.

Iain Sinclair asks Michael Moorcock “Did you just meet in a pub, kind of reimage the cosmos as a hobby?”

Michael Moorcock says “Yeah, I suppose so.”

Michael Moorcock is very deadpan.

[Insert bad "Who watches the Watchmen? - nobody if they can help it" type joke here]

As the final nail in a pretty damn secure, lead-lined critical coffin, Jessica Hopper tells me everything I need to know about the Watchmen movie in one convenient paragraph.

I remember years ago reading an interview with Alan Moore in which he talked about how he found overblown, poorly thought out Hollywood blockbusters to be actively offensive, saying something to the effect of; if I write a shitty comic, ok it wastes some paper, but I'm not throwing away $150,000,000 that could be used for the betterment of mankind on realising some teenage videogamer's wank fantasy.

So quite what karmic/magickal evils the poor guy must have wrought in a past life in order to see ALL of his major writerly works transformed into a series of movies so point-missingly crippled at birth that they alone could stand as a pretty thorough A, B, C of everything that's wrong with the past two decades of Hollywood cinema, I can scarcely imagine.

Seriously: all we need now is M. Night Whatshisname doing an Americanised 'Voice of the Fire' in small town Ohio and Ridley Scott's idiot cousin making his directoral debut dragging that woman in the leather from the Underworld movies through the mill as Halo Jones, and that's Moore's whole life's work, shot in the belly and left for dead.

I guess he must at least be enjoying the royalties, extra sales, publicity, suits reading "V For Vendetta" on the tube etc, and can rest safe in the knowledge that he still has a pretty huge cadre of longtime fans who are able to appreciate his work on it's own merit, but still, it must hurt.

And, word to wise: if I were an evil, scheming studio mogul who was gonna set out to desecrate the work of one cantankerous cult author, I probably wouldn't pick a guy who looks like this, carries a big stick everywhere and practices ceremonial magic:


I've seen "Theatre of Blood". I know what's coming down.

"I mean, let's face it, Jimmy. You're no Sidney Riley."

This will be old news to any comics fans in the audience, but last week I finally found the time to catch up with Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s most recent League of Extraordinary Gentlemen collaboration, The Black Dossier, which was recently published in paperback.

And I thoroughly enjoyed it too, I must say. Quite a different proposition from the two previous LOEG mini-series, it takes Moore’s penchant for multi-layered cultural cross-referencing to new heights, creating a book that works less as a conventional action/adventure yarn, and more simply as an obsessive matrix of imaginary interchanges between the whole spectrum of popular fiction up to the year 1958, as relatively short comics sections are used to string together a collection of lovingly realised alternate world literary pastiches and artefacts, covering everything from a fragment of a lost Shakespeare folio to an extract from Sal Paradyse’s groundbreaking beatnik novel “The Crazy, Wide Forever”.

So thick and fast is this manic referencing that the initial feeling of stupidity at not being able to pick up the origin of each passing character and location is swiftly put aside as you realise that scarcely anyone is liable to be well-read enough to grasp the whole lot (this list, though incomplete, proves helpful), and when, say, Wilhelmina Murray and Allan Quatermain pay a visit to the Birmingham Space Centre in their flight from a British Intelligence team that includes both 'Bulldog' Drummond and Emma Peel, you find yourself less concerned with whether they make it out alive, and more with whether or not Moore will manage to cram in a reference to Professor Quatermass and his Rocket Group (shockingly, he doesn’t, but here’s hoping the League get to make a visit to Hob’s Lane in some of the new escapades promised later this year).

Needless to say, in Moore’s capable hands, the whole thing is a cornucopia of wonders for any fan of weird fiction and popular culture, and highlights for me included some of Oliver Haddo’s occult musings, composed during his solitary retirement in Hastings, the epic, 3000+ year biography of the immortal Orlando, and Bertie Wooster getting into a tight spot with the Great Old Ones in “What Ho, Gods of the Abyss?”

Best thing of all though? – the well-deserved treatment dished out to a certain English spy who we’ll know simply as “Jimmy”:



(If you’re planning to pick up a copy of The Black Dossier, why not give Amazon the heave-ho, and help Page 45 or Gosh stay healthy?)