Little shots...

*As I know you’ve heard, Alan Moore apparently wants his name taken off all of his comics work that he doesn’t own (er, I’m sure the Magus meant ‘co-own’ or ‘partially own’ since I doubt he has significant enough problems with, say, Eddie Campbell or Kevin O’Neill to remove his names from his books with them). It’s a catchy enough rhetorical position to adopt, and believe me - considering that Moore has already severed ties with the various companies that outright own works with Moore’s name on them, I don’t think he has the political leverage to actually put such a plan into action, and I have to presume he’s aware of that, as honest as his emotions might be (Warren Ellis has some amusing stuff on Moore’s self-awareness over at The Engine). It’s looking very much like a ‘howling into the wilderness’ sort of deal to me.

Still, is he really so quick to philosophically strike his name from, say, Promethea, which is certainly among his more personal works? Or is his passion so intense that he can no longer bear the reality of his (and the artists’) creations belonging to a non-creating body? I’d like to know what the artists on these company-owned books think - the vast majority of Alan Moore’s comics, after all, are not solely Alan Moore’s comics. It’s not like writing a novel, though that seems to be the mindset Moore is currently operating in (not that Moore isn’t a lovely writer of prose novels too - that new one can’t arrive soon enough for me).

Still, my personal favorite Moore tidbit of the week comes from The Independent:

“[Moore's] house is just one of a long brick terrace; inside, it is blue and starry. His bath is on a Hollywood scale: a friend who works in fibre-glass got on the wrong side of the local heavies, and Moore settled his debt and took it out in trade.”

ALAN MOORE: NEIGHBORHOOD FIXER.

Settled that debt with his fists, methinks!

*Beamed Into Space Dept: On a somewhat related note, Lea Hernandez has a nice roundup of reactions to Tokyopop’s ‘MangaPods,’ radio-style dramatizations of various OEL manga titles, produced apparently without consulting the creators of the books adapted, though said parties are credited as 'creators' at the top of each production. Audio-only manga/anime tie-ins are a long-lived tradition in Japan (contrary to Tokyopop’s claim of MangaPods being “the newest idea in manga since Pokopen reverse-engineered the Internet”) and it seems that the company means to test out reactions to such material here. Naturally, both of the recent newspaper-bound OEL titles, Van Von Hunter and Peach Fuzz (hey, anyone remember the last time manga hit the newspaper funny pages to attract the nation's youth: the old Pokemon newspaper strip Viz cooked up, written by future Men of Tomorrow author Gerard Jones with art by Benimaru Itoh?) are fully represented. And don’t just sit there, fans - be sure to make your own and send 'em in! I’d help, but I’m busy producing my audio adaptation of 676 Apparitions of Killoffer.

*The Onion AV Club sees a comics-heavy edition this week, with Night Fisher taking the feature review slot and twelve other books getting short critical blurbs. And while such a set-up does enable a multitude of books to get some face-time, I can’t help but sort of wince at Drawn & Quarterly Showcase Vol. 3, Mome Vol. 2 and Blab! Vol. 16 getting blown through in under 150 words total, the writer summarizing that they “continue to help define the burgeoning art-comics movement, packing their pages with crude doodles, impenetrable design experiments, and the occasional readable story.” Wait, ‘art-comics’ as a movement is still burgeoning? Hasn’t Blab! been utilizing a whole bunch of the same aesthetic-defining contributors for well over half a decade? And weren’t two out of three of the creators in D&Q Showcase Vol. 3 working in largely straightforward sequential narrative styles? I dunno…