Alan Moore: the wonderful wizard of… Northampton
| Alan in the Telegraph.
Tag: Alan Moore
Philip José Farmer book covers
top left: artist unknown (1969); top right: Patrick Woodroffe (1975)
bottom left: Peter Elson (1988); bottom right: artist unknown (1995)
The Men with snakes post at the weekend finished on a note of Freudian melodrama with a picture of Doc Savage battling a giant python. Lester Dent’s brazen hero has appeared a number of times in the work of Philip José Farmer, a writer who’s spent much of his career laying bare the psychosexual forces which give us stories of pulp heroes struggling with (among other things) enormous snakes.
Farmer is famous—notorious, even—for being the first writer to place sex centre stage in science fiction with his story of a human/alien encounter, The Lovers, in 1952. While subsequent writers have broadened the field in their own way, Farmer is somewhat unique in being equally adept at writing solidly successful sf adventure such as the World of Tiers or Riverworld books, yet with a mischievous and intellectual facility that could be upsetting to what used to be a very conservative sf establishment. Farmer was writing about sex at a time when few genre writers wanted to deal with the subject. He also loves pulp fiction in all its manifestations yet isn’t afraid of examining its characters with the objectivity of an anthropologist. Both these impulses came together (so to speak) in the late Sixties with the outrageous pulp pornography of Image of the Beast and A Feast Unknown. More about these in a minute.
Farmer has a particular enthusiasm for Tarzan and Doc Savage and eventually wrote “official biographies” of the pair with Tarzan Alive (1972) and the splendidly-titled Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973). These books saw the beginning of his Wold Newton Universe which sought to connect all the heroes and villains of the late 19th and early 20th century into a vast, incestuous family tree, a scheme which predates similar exercises such as Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by three decades or more. His versatility and delight in pastiche was demonstrated in Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod (1968) which rewrote Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan in the style of William Burroughs. There aren’t many writers with a full-enough appreciation of both these authors to pull off such a challenge.
Original Essex House editions, 1968 & 1969. Artist/designer unknown although the cover of Blown is based on Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man by Salvador Dalí.
Image of the Beast (1968), its sequel, Blown (1969), and A Feast Unknown (1969) were all written for sf-porn publisher Essex House, an opportunity which unleashed Farmer’s already fertile imagination. These took a while to be reprinted but are now considered among his best works; they’re certainly favourites of mine and I love the simple graphics of the original covers, such a change from the usual airbrushed sf fare. I produced a cover illustration for the Creation Books edition of Image/Blown in 2001 which, while okay, I now feel could have been better. A Feast Unknown is Farmer’s most gloriously excessive novel, and still surprises when read today. Illustrator Patrick Woodroffe, who painted the cover for the first UK printing, thought the book “dangerous” and complained in his Mythopoeikon collection that there was little he could safely illustrate. The story has a thinly-disguised Tarzan (Lord Grandrith) and Doc Savage (Doc Caliban) set against each other by a group of mysterious immortals. The pair discover that violence gives them erections and killing provokes an orgasm, the cue for a couple of hundred pages of eye-popping, ball-busting mayhem. It’s ironic that during the Seventies when general readers were looking for racy thrills in books by Harold Robbins or Jackie Collins, the real hardcore stuff was over on the science fiction shelves with Farmer’s work, Ballard’s Crash, Samuel Delany’s Equinox, aka The Tides of Lust, Charles Platt’s The Gas, and others.
Farmer wrote two equally crazy sequels to Feast in 1970, Lord of the Trees and The Mad Goblin but unfortunately stripped out the excesses of the former book. I’ve always been disappointed by this and continue to hope that one day the original versions of the sequels will see print. Science fiction may have calmed down a bit (or grown conservative again) since the Seventies but Farmer’s work still exerts an influence. His unveiling of the weird psychosis at the heart of pulp fiction certainly affected the approach I took with the Lord Horror series Reverbstorm, created with David Britton in the 1990s, a series I’ve referred to more than once as a psychopathology of heroic fantasy.
The covers above all come from the official PJF website which also includes my Image/Blown cover design. (And where they also spell my name wrong.)
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Men with snakes
• The book covers archive
New things for August
A couple of things worth noting this month. I’d already done a poster design for The Mindscape of Alan Moore but Dez asked for some variations. This one uses the John Dee pentacle which was featured throughout the DVD package and interface design. Alan has referred to Dee and his works on many occasions, and the pentacle is seen briefly in the film, so it was a good touchstone especially since Dee’s interests were as wide-ranging as Alan’s. I prefer this design, to be honest, the original one looks too busy now.
Then there’s this sneak preview detail from a very large picture I was asked to produce for an exhibition opening in October. This is Lovecraft-related (no surprise there) which is all I’ll divulge at the moment. Rest assured that all will be revealed in a month or so.
Another lazy meme post
Yes, I know it’s simply promotion for a movie you’ve already heard more than enough about…so sue me.
This actually came out looking more accurate than I expected since some smart Flash programming allows for a fair amount of variation. And having a monotonous wardrobe probably helps in my case. In fact the Simpsonizer on the Simpsons movie site makes you realise how much variety there is in the Simpsons character palette even though it follows the relatively narrow range of Matt Groening’s cartoon style. My only gripe was being limited to t-shirt wear since I rarely show off my skinny arms. I also pushed the hair back a bit in Photoshop.
Alan Moore is due to appear in the TV show in October along with Art Spiegelman and Dan Clowes. We don’t know yet how they’ve drawn the Magus of Northampton but people have been speculating.
The Demon Regent Asmodeus
The Demon Regent Asmodeus (2006).
Alan Moore readers have finally discovered my little easter egg on the Mindscape of Alan Moore DVD so I can now talk about the creation of this miniature work. Director Dez Vylenz and I thought it would be nice to have a hidden extra somewhere on the main disc and this was the result.
Glykon and Asmodeus by Alan Moore (1994).
I’d always liked the Asmodeus section that Alan reads on the first Moon & Serpent CD and had the idea for some kind of animation based around the reading using his 1994 portrait of Asmodeus for the visuals. I used Apple’s Motion application for the animation of the DVD menus and it was this application that also animated the three-minute film. Alan’s picture was the sole source for all the visuals even though for most of the running time these are a kaleidoscopic mesh of circles and hexagons. The reading (with sound effects by Tim Perkins) works symmetrically, building to a central point then reversing itself so that the words from the first half are read in reverse order. I followed this scheme with the animation; the film begins in abstraction, evolves into the Asmodeus portrait then devolves back into abstraction. There’s also a symmetrical split to the visuals which are matched along a vertical axis in the centre of the screen. I had James Whitney’s Lapis in mind when creating these circular patterns although Whitney’s forty-year-old film remains abstract throughout. Whitney’s film was also done the hard way, one frame at a time, without the luxury of computer filters.
The Mindscape of Alan Moore is available via mail order from Shadowsnake Films.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alan Moore in Arthur magazine
• Of Moons and Serpents
• Lapis by James Whitney